2026-06-22 12:43:13The last thing I felt was the sting of cold spit on my face and the sound of my own ribs snapping like dry twigs. It hurts like a bitch. I remember the smell most, that nasty metallic stank or old blood and wet rot. Then there was Anna. My “loving” girlfriend. I can still see her face, all sweaty and pale, as she shoved me backward into the dark.
“Sorry, Mateo! Better you than me!” She snapped and ran away.
That cunt. After ten years of me paying her bills and kissing her ass while being her bodyguard in disguise as boyfriend, she used me as a shield to get away from a pack of shamblers. She didn't even look back. She just bolted, leaving me to get ripped apart while she ran for her life.
Then, everything went black. I thought I was dead. I should have been dead.
Gasp!
I sat up so fast my head spun. I wasn't on the cold, dirty pavement. I was in bed. The sheets were clean, and the room smelled like those vanilla candles I always buy.
I looked around, my heart hammering against my chest like a trapped bird. The sun was peeking through the blinds, hitting the messy pile of clothes on the floor. On the nightstand, my phone buzzed.
8:12 AM.
I stared at the dates. Tuesday. My brain felt like it was melting. This was Day Zero. The day the world went to crap. In exactly nine hours, that purple “Black Must” would roll into the city and turn everyone into a “Standardized Hive”.
“Babe? You okay? You're making weird-ass noises over there.”
I froze. That voice. I wanted to puke just hearing it.
Anna walked out of the bathroom, running a towel over her head. She looked so…normal. No scars, no blood. Just the same arrogant, “pretty girl” face I’d been swallowing sandpaper.
“Well, get over it. We're supposed to meet folks for brunch at ten, and you know my mom's a total psycho about being late.” She didn't even look at me. She was too busy checking herself out in the mirror, fixing her hair like she was some kind of movie star.
I looked at my hands. They were shaking, but it wasn't fear anymore. It was pure, unfiltered rage. I remembered the way her hands felt when they pushed me. I remembered the sound of her sneakers hitting the pavement as she ran away.
“Mateo? Hello? Earth to Mateo?” Anna turned around looking annoyed. “Did you iron my gray slacks or what? I can't go to brunch looking like a hobo because you decided to sleep in.”
I looked at her, really looked at her. I saw the “Narcissistic Parasite” she really was. In my first life, I would've jumped up, apologized, and ironed those stupid pants.
Not today.
“Iron ‘em yourself, Anna,” I said. I kept my voice low and cold.
Anna's jaw dropped. “What did you just say?”
“I said I'm not your damn maid. And I'm definitely not going to brunch with your fake-ass parents.”
I got out of bed, my legs feeling like jelly but my head clearer than it had ever been. I grabbed my big camping backpack from the closet and started throwing stuff in. I didn't have much time. Nine hours is nothing when you're trying to prepare for an apocalypse.
“Are you having a mid-life crisis or something?” Anna laughed, that annoying chuckle. “Look, if this is about me missing dinner last night, get over it, I'm gonna be a doctor, Mateo. I have real pressure.”
I stopped and walked right up to her. I'm way taller than her, when I looked her in the eye she actually stepped back.
“In nine hours, Anna, nobody's gonna give a damn about your medical degree,” I whispered. “And honestly? Nobody's gonna give a damn about you.”
I reached past her and grabbed her wallet off the dresser.
“Hey! Give that back!”
“No, this is the money I gave you for your ‘textbooks’ that you actually spent on hair and makeup,” I said, flipping it open. I took the credit cards and every single twenty-dollar bill inside. “Think of it as a jerk tax for the last ten years.”
“Mateo, I'm not kidding! Put that back or I'm calling the cops!”
I didn't even blink. I grabbed a heavy glass award from the desk and I slammed it into the wall mounted mirror. The glass exploded. Shards flew everywhere, and Anna screamed like a little girl, tripping over her own feet.
“Don't follow me,” I told her, my heart finally finding a steady beat. “If I see you again today, I'm not gonna aim for the mirror. I'll aim for your teeth.”
I walked out of the apartment and slammed the door. I was halfway down the stairs when a sharp ping echoed right inside my brain.
A glowing blue screen popped up right in front of my eyes.
[Eros- Survival System Initializing…]
[User: Mateo Ambrose]
[Status: Reborn (Cycle 2)] [Mutation Level: 0.01% (Latent)] [Welcome back, Subject 001. The countdown has begun.]I stared at the screen, my mouth hanging open. I wasn't just lucky. I had accidentally bound a high level AI meant for the “Architects” of the new world.
I looked at the timer on the edge of the screen.
08:42:15
Previous Chapter
Latest Chapter
00198
Jaxen had been a lone wolf once, before any of this, before Mateo, before the devastating grief of six dead soldiers had taught him exactly how little he trusted anyone to stand beside him without eventually costing him something unbearable.[Bond Status: Jaxen — PERMANENT][Operator Note: He Used To Think This Was A Weakness. Watch Him Now.]He sat on the workshop steps that evening, tools set aside, watching the last light fade over a settlement he’d helped rebuild with his own hands, and let himself trace the whole strange, impossible distance between who he used to be and whoever he’d actually become.He remembered the man who’d led strike teams with cold, efficient precision, who’d kept everyone at exactly the distance necessary to function without feeling, who’d buried his grief for Thorne’s betrayal so deep he’d nearly forgotten it was grief at all instead of just a permanent, low simmer of purpose. That man had believed, with absolute certainty, that attachment was simply anot
00197
Mateo’s mornings now started with a status readout and ended with a supply manifest, and somewhere in between those two unremarkable brackets of his day sat an entire life he’d once believed, with absolute certainty, he would never live long enough to have.[Integration: 91%][Status: Stable, Sustained][Operator Note: Good Morning. Nothing’s Wrong. You Can Just Get Up.]He read that readout every morning now purely out of habit, the old instinct of a body still half expecting catastrophe, and every morning it told him the same quiet, unremarkable truth. He got up slowly, careful not to wake Jaxen, and made his way down to the kitchens where Priya had taken over breakfast preparation with the same fierce, practical competence she’d once brought to defending the eastern wall.“Morning, Emperor,” she said, deadpan, sliding a plate across the counter.“You’re never going to let that title go, are you.”“Not until you earn a cooler one. Try harder.”He ate standing up, the way he always h
00196
It arrived as a single line in Ruby’s routine network diagnostics, easy to miss, the kind of anomaly that would have slipped past anyone not deliberately checking every surviving thread of the old system out of sheer, habitual thoroughness.Most mornings now, her diagnostics turned up nothing at all worth mentioning, the global network settling steadily into its new, decentralized shape, communities reporting in with the ordinary business of rebuilding rather than emergency. That particular, mundane quiet had become its own kind of comfort over the last several months, the slow, unremarkable proof that the worst really was behind them. This single anomaly didn’t fit that comfortable pattern, and that alone was enough to make Ruby pause over it longer than she might have a year earlier, back when anomalies were simply background noise to an endless, ongoing crisis.[Global Relay Network: Routine Diagnostic][Anomaly Detected: Unregistered Signal Origin][Operator Note: This Shouldn’t B
00195
Ruby had been cataloguing the Institute’s growing archive for months, old research salvaged from a dozen facilities, most of it mundane, technical, the quiet bureaucratic residue of an organization that had run for decades without ever imagining it would eventually be forced to answer for itself. It was Thorne who finally found the document that mattered, tucked into a box of Ashcroft’s earliest personal effects that nobody had bothered examining closely until now.[Document Recovered: Research Proposal, Pre-Collapse][Author: Dr. Helena Marsh][Classification: Original Program Foundation]“You need to see this,” Thorne said, bringing it directly to Mateo instead of filtering it through any formal channel, that familiar urgency of a man who understood exactly how much weight this discovery actually carried. “I found Ashcroft’s personal files. Buried deep, the kind of thing she clearly never expected anyone to actually read. This is where it all started. Not with her. With someone else
00194
Mateo visited the spot where Anna had died about once a month now, a quiet clearing not far from where the original siege had raged, marked only by a small, weathered stone that Jaxen had helped him carve the first week after the war ended.[Location: Memorial Site, Unofficial][Operator Note: Some Things Don’t Need A Readout]He sat down in the grass, the same spot he always chose, and let the silence settle around him the way it always did on these visits, no urgency pulling him elsewhere, no crisis demanding his attention, just the quiet, deliberate act of remembering someone who had shaped the entire trajectory of his life without ever getting the chance to see what came after.“I found something out about the Quorum,” he said out loud, the habit he’d developed over these visits, talking to a stone that couldn’t answer but somehow still felt like the right audience for everything he needed to say. “Fourteen facilities. You weren’t an isolated horror, Anna. You were one piece of so
00193
The gathering had started as a council dinner and quietly, somewhere around the second course, stopped being anything resembling formal business at all.[Council Session: Adjourned][Current Activity: Dinner. Just Dinner. Let Them Have This.]Mateo sat at the head of a long table that had been dragged out into the courtyard specifically because nobody wanted to be confined to the war room for something that had, against every early expectation of this war, actually turned into a celebration. Lanterns hung between the apple trees Jaxen had transplanted here from the orchard, their light soft and warm against the gathering dusk.“To Wren,” Rourke said, raising his cup, “for somehow turning two separate settlements into one functioning community without anyone actually murdering each other over jurisdiction disputes.”“That compliment undersells how close we came, twice,” Wren said, though she was smiling, something looser and warmer in her expression than the careful diplomatic composur
You may also like
Game of the Destiny
Yahya_I25.4K viewsI AM DESTINY'S MISTAKE
Dere_Isaac19.2K viewsSoul Avatar
Japhel16.8K viewsThe God of War Calen Storm
Cindy Chen35.6K viewsThe nobody who became the sovereign
PD's pen47 viewsPart to the power of the universe
Cryptic223 viewsDevouring the Demon King's Mana
Adewale 164 viewsImmortal Among Mortals
Aisyah A44 views