The Reborn Soldier's Revenge

The War Started Two Months Early

The warehouse exploded behind them. Ethan ran without looking back, the ground shaking beneath his boots as flames tore through the building and metal rained into the surrounding structures.

"RUN!" Marcus's voice thundered behind him.

Six people followed him toward the parking lot, Diana, Gideon, Toby, Dominic, Rebecca, all of them strangers who had already died once, all of them dragged back into a war that wasn't supposed to start for another sixty days.

Ethan reached his car and threw the door open. "Everyone, get in!"

Gideon stopped dead. "You're kidding. That's a five-seater."

There were seven of them. Nobody spoke until another explosion lit up the distance, heat rolling across the lot.

"Maybe we discuss seating later," Toby said.

"Get in!"

Marcus took the passenger seat, Diana and Rebecca squeezed into the back, Dominic folded himself into the trunk with a grunt that suggested it wasn't built for a man his size. Gideon looked at Toby. "You. Roof."

"Why me?"

"You're the smallest."

Toby opened his mouth, closed it, looked at Ethan for backup and got none. "Roof," Ethan said, already starting the engine. Toby cursed his way onto the roof, Gideon climbing up beside him, and the car took off, tires screaming.

The city ahead burned. Ethan's hands tightened on the wheel. This wasn't supposed to happen yet. He'd known when the first attacks would land, which cities would fall, where the safe zones would open, when the system would activate. He'd built his whole plan around having sixty days to prepare.

Now his memories were becoming useless.

"How far?" Marcus asked.

"Forty minutes. To my base." Ethan didn't wait for the next question. "No, it's not ready."

Nobody spoke. The fortress wasn't finished, the water systems still half installed, the food incomplete, the weapons still in transit. He'd planned for sixty days and gotten none of them.

A system screen floated in front of his vision.

[GLOBAL WAR SYSTEM ACTIVATED.] [PHASE ONE: SURVIVAL.] [WORLD POPULATION: 8,019,000,000.] [ACTIVE PLAYERS: 7,842,115.] [SURVIVAL RATE: UNKNOWN.]

Players. Millions of them. He didn't know who counted and who didn't, and his previous life had never given him the answer, too busy just staying alive to ask.

"Ethan." Marcus pointed ahead. "Stop."

He hit the brakes hard enough to skid, throwing everyone forward, nearly pitching Toby off the roof. A military convoy blocked the highway ahead, except it wasn't a convoy anymore, just wreckage, dead soldiers, some of the bodies still burning.

Diana covered her mouth. "Oh my God."

A low mechanical drone came from above, and Ethan's stomach dropped before he even looked up. Three robotic aircraft, wings like enormous metal birds, red eyes glowing, missile launchers slung beneath their bodies. The same machines that had leveled the city in his old life.

[ENEMY UNIT DETECTED.] [TYPE: HUNTER DRONE.] [LEVEL: 15.] [THREAT LEVEL: HIGH.]

Level fifteen, on day one. In his old life these things hadn't shown up until day seven. The timeline had shifted again.

"What do we do," Marcus asked.

"We run." Ethan's weapons weren't strong enough yet, and he knew it.

The first missile came down before Gideon could argue. "DOWN!" Everyone hit the dirt as the highway exploded, the shockwave throwing Ethan into the ground, pain lancing through his shoulder. A second missile threw Marcus into a wrecked car, blood streaking down his forehead.

"I'm fine," Marcus said. He wasn't.

Ethan's system flashed a warning, and his blood ran cold reading it. [PRIMARY TARGET IDENTIFIED.] [TARGET: ETHAN VANCE.]

A laser found his chest a half second later. He threw himself sideways as it scorched the dirt where he'd been standing.

"Everyone back in the car!"

Gideon wanted to fight. Ethan wouldn't let him. "You can't kill them. Not yet." Three more drones dropped out of the clouds while he said it, and the choice made itself.

"Drive!"

The car screamed down the highway, swerving between explosions, the speedometer climbing past eighty as Gideon shouted for more speed Ethan didn't have. A missile locked on, and Ethan spun the wheel hard into a maneuver he'd learned in another war, another life, never once behind the wheel of a civilian car. The missile passed over them and detonated somewhere behind, and for a moment nobody breathed.

"THAT WAS INSANE," Toby yelled from the roof.

"Get off my roof."

"I'm trying!"

The drones didn't follow. For now.

Marcus finally asked how Ethan had known to avoid the missile, and Ethan gave him the only honest answer he had. "I've fought them before. In another life. Enough times to know."

Marcus didn't push further, but Ethan knew what he was thinking. Everyone in this car had come back from the dead. Ethan was the only one who still believed he knew what came next, and that belief was getting thinner by the mile.

The desert swallowed the burning city behind them, and for a few minutes it looked like they might actually make it. Then the system flashed a warning.

[UNAUTHORIZED PLAYER DETECTED.] [DISTANCE: 2.3 MILES.]

Ethan slowed the car. "Someone's following us."

They stopped in open desert, nothing around for miles, until an engine grew louder and a vehicle came into view, moving fast and direct, kicking up a tail of dust visible from a mile off. A man stepped out with both hands raised, unhurried, like a man who'd done this exact thing before and knew exactly how it would go.

"Don't shoot."

Ethan recognized him from a life he'd never actually lived alongside him in. Jax. A name whispered among the most dangerous players in the war he remembered, a fighter, a hacker, once an Aegis operative.

"Give me a reason," Gideon said, weapon raised.

"Because I know what Aegis is planning. I used to work for them."

Marcus's weapon came up too. "Used to."

"You need to listen," Jax said, eyes on Ethan alone. "The war wasn't supposed to start today. Someone moved the schedule." He pointed at Ethan. "You. You're the reason it started early."

Ethan felt the ground drop out from under him a second time, worse than the drones had managed.

"Every time someone comes back," Jax said, "the timeline shifts. That's the only thing that explains any of this." He looked around at the others, each of them returned at a different point, each carrying a version of a future that no longer matched. "Aegis is testing what happens when people with knowledge of the future get placed inside a controlled environment."

"The war," Ethan said slowly.

"The system. The monsters. Created. The weapons, designed. The enemy, controlled." Jax's voice had gone flat. "You're not fighting an apocalypse. You're fighting a test."

The ground shook before Ethan could answer, a wall of dust rising in the distance.

"Too late," Jax said. "They've started Phase One."

A machine emerged from the dust unlike anything Ethan had faced before, four mechanical legs, heavy armor, a cannon mounted across its back.

[BOSS UNIT DETECTED.] [NAME: WARLORD.] [LEVEL: 35.]

Level thirty five, on day one. Impossible.

"This isn't the war you remember," Jax said, as the cannon rose and Ethan screamed for everyone to run.

The blast swallowed the desert in fire, and the last thing Ethan saw before the darkness took him was a message glowing blue against the black.

[PHASE ONE COMPLETE.] [SUBJECT ETHAN VANCE: SURVIVAL CONFIRMED.] [BEGINNING PHASE TWO.] [PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: BREAK ETHAN VANCE.]

He woke to someone screaming his name. Diana knelt over him, Marcus driving, Gideon bloody, Toby unconscious, Dominic cradling his own shoulder, Rebecca silent in the corner.

Jax was gone.

"Where is he," Ethan demanded.

"He disappeared," Marcus said. "During the explosion."

Ethan stared at the burning desert through the window, Jax's words still echoing. Not an apocalypse. A test. They wanted to see how far he could be pushed, and they'd just found the fastest way to do it: strip away his preparation, his advantage, his foreknowledge, then throw him into the fire and watch what was left standing.

"How long to the base," he asked.

"Ten minutes."

"Good." He looked through the windshield, eyes cold. "Because we're going home, and then we're going to war."

Far beneath the desert, inside a hidden facility, Dr. Alistair Thorne watched the whole scene unfold across a wall of screens. Jax stood beside her, alive, unmarked.

"Did he believe you?"

"Mostly."

"Good." She studied Ethan's face on the largest screen. "Let's see how the second version performs." A new countdown appeared: PHASE TWO, 59:47:21. "Make sure Rebecca is ready."

"She is."

"And Ethan?"

Jax hesitated. "He doesn't trust anyone."

Thorne smiled. "That's exactly why Rebecca will work."

On the screen, Ethan's image faded, replaced by a new file.

[SUBJECT: REBECCA.] [STATUS: ACTIVE.] [LOYALTY: 97%.] [PRIMARY MISSION: GAIN ETHAN'S TRUST.]

The experiment had officially begun, and Ethan Vance had no idea the woman sitting silently beside him was already part of the plan. In the darkness of the moving car, Rebecca stared out at the passing desert with an expression nobody bothered to read, and somewhere behind her calm face a countdown of her own had already started ticking.