Chapter 1
smoke drifted across a broken battlefield.
Tariq Solas knelt in the ruin of what was once a city — now just charred concrete and twisted steel. The sky above him bled red lightning through the cracks in reality. The Red Star Godking lay dying at his feet, its colossal form flickering in and out of existence as its dimension core unraveled.
His own dimension had fallen, but he saved six others... nothing was left for him in this world now.
Nothing but betrayal.
Tariq staggered backward, blood dripping from his fingers, the Voidlink System flickering wildly in his mind. He didn't need to turn to know they were behind him — the ones he had called allies, brothers, comrades.
He could smell the change in the air, the shift in their composure, the pressure in their stares as they gripped their weapons
"After all I have done for you all," he said hoarsely, voice heavy with disbelief. "AFTER EVERYTHING I HAVE BEEN THROUGH?!"
"You are too dangerous, Tariq," said Arienne, the Stormblade of the Yellow Star. Her face was hidden behind a cracked helm. "You know too much. Grow too fast. And you have so much reasons to succumb to the darkness.We can't trust you not to become what we just destroyed."
Kain was next — the dark mage from the Black Star. "It's nothing personal. But someone will have to clean up the mess you made in my dimension and your death will help with morale."
The other four uttered a few words but he was too battered to focus on them.
He turned. Six of them stood there, soaked in blood and glory. They looked at him not with grief or gratitude, but calculation.
"hah, You're all afraid of me," he said, voice calm. "You always were, huh?."
Then the blades came.
His last thought, as the world faded to black, wasn't anger.
It was peace, finally it was all coming to an end and one way or the other, his suffering ends now….
[nuh-uh, that's not how this story ends]
[SYSTEM CRITICAL ERROR…]
[LINK TO HOST IS FADING…]
[PROBLEM DETECTED…DEATH]
[ACTIVATING ANTI-DEATH PROTOCOLS…]
[PATCH 22:ANSCENSION….LOCKED]
[]PATCH 37:ALL HEAL…INEFFECTIVE]
[PATCH 73:IMMORTAL GOD BOND….UNAVAILABLE]
[PATCH 99:GOD BOND TEMPORAL DISTORTION…UNAUTHORIZED]
[hah~, you better grovel on your feet and thank me later , Tariq…system override, grant authorization..]
[PATCH 99:GOD BOND TEMPORAL DISTORTION…ACTIVATING]
[VOIDLINK OVERRIDE: ACTIVATED]
[UNIVERSAL PARADOX LOCK DISENGAGED]
[TEMPORAL RESET: INITIATING...]
[ALRIGHT~ here we go again]
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[TEMPORAL RESET SUCCESSFUL]
He awoke gasping, like a man breaking the surface after drowning in eternity.
Air tore into his lungs, raw and freezing. He choked, rolled onto his side, and vomited bile onto cracked concrete. The sky above was a dull grey. No blood-red lightning, no collapsed dimensions. Just a junkyard — piles of rusted metal, shattered glass, forgotten machines.
Tariq blinked.
His hands were small. Slim. Unscarred.
He stared, heart thundering.
He was young again.
No pain in his joints. No Voidfire rot eating away at his veins. No scars from dungeon poison or voidblade duels.
The familiar cold hum of the Voidlink System shivered behind his eyes.
And then—
[VOIDLINK SYSTEM:ONLINE]
Welcome back, Host.
Regression complete.
Lvl:0
STR: F
AGI: F
DEX: F
VE: -
999+ Skill Access: Locked. Memory Core: Fragmented
A familiar voice followed — dry, glitchy, sarcastic.
[Tariq Solas. Nineteen. Alive. Again. Because clearly, dying wasn't humiliating enough the first time]
Tariq exhaled sharply, eyes wide. "Void…? You're still with me."
[Like mold….. Or trauma, depends]
He laughed, but it was hollow. Trembling.
"you should have let me die" Tariq uttered under his breathe.
[and what fun would that have been for ME?]
"hah~?" Tariq sighed as he looked around.
"This… this is before the gates. Before Earth fell."
[Two days before the first Blue Star rift opens. Three days before the human death toll breaks a hundred thousand. You have 52 hours and 11 minutes until history repeats itself.]
"Unless I change it."
[Unless you survive it.]
He stood slowly, muscles aching from disuse. His surroundings clicked into place — this junkyard, he remembered now. This was where the first aberrant spawned. The start of it all.
And now he was back.
Two days to prepare.
Two days to rewrite fate.
His breath fogged in the air.
"Open my first skill," he said.
[The system's Memory Core is damaged from the temporal distortion. You'll have to earn your skills back the hard way, boy.]
"Then give me anything. A blade. A buff. I need to be able to fight."
[...Fine]
The voice sighed.
[FORCE UNLOCKED SKILL: PEAK (F)]
Get a glimpse of a small piece of the target's information
[FORCE UNLOCKED SKILL: VOID ENERGY (F)]
Lets one use the skills of the voidlink system-cannot use skills that require other kinds of energies.
[FORCE UNLOCKED SKILL: VOID TRACE (E)]
Temporally transform your body into an intangible astral form-no physical damage cannot be received.
Tariq closed his eyes, letting the energy of the void ripple through him. It wasn't much — a scrap of what he once wielded — but it was a start.
[Your body's at 3% of its peak performance] Void said dryly. [If a goblin sneezes on you right now, you're dead.]
"well Then I won't let it sneeze."
A pause.
Then:
[You've changed, Tariq]
"I died, Void. Of course I changed."
He looked toward the sky. It was faint, but there — barely visible in the clouds — pulsed a soft blue light.
The Blue Star.
The weakest of the Godkings. The one that ruined Earth.
The first he would kill…again.
Two Hours Later….
The abandoned subway beneath the junkyard was quiet. Too quiet.
Tariq moved through the tunnels like a ghost, memories half-whispered guiding his steps. In his last life, this was the spot of the first few anomalies — a rat. Twisted by dungeon energy. Seemingly harmless.
Until it infected an entire borough in less than a day.
He crouched behind a rusted pillar, holding a fireman axe with both hands.
Footsteps echoed.
No — not footsteps. Skittering.
The creature emerged from the shadows — malformed, bloated, pulsing with blue light. Its eyes glowed like dying embers, and its tail split into spines.
"Just like before," Tariq whispered.
[Skill: PEAK]
Target: Blue Spawn RAT
Threat Level: E.
The rat's body spasmed, twitching unnaturally, and its spiny tail scraped the concrete with a sickening screech. This was no ordinary mutated creature — it was a herald. A glitch in the world. The kind of aberration that only came when reality was about to bleed.
Tariq gripped the axe tighter, his pulse matching the creature's pulsating glow.
He thought about using VOID TRACE right at that moment but….
He couldn't waste it now. Not on a single rat. Not when this fight was about precision.
He waited, knees bent, watching as the Blue Spawn Rat sniffed the air. It turned slowly toward him—those glowing ember-eyes locking onto his form.
And it charged.
Fast.
Much faster than he had remembered it to be.
Tariq rolled sideways, narrowly avoiding the lunge. The beast slammed into the pillar behind him, shattering the rusted metal and showering the ground with sparks. Before it could recover, he surged forward, swinging the axe down toward its exposed spine.
CLANG.
The blade bounced off its glowing hide, sending a jolt up his arms.
[uhh, need I remind you that only is your void energy low as fuck, that is an ORDINARY axe and you have no strength augmenting skill!]
"I know!" Tariq hissed, stumbling backward.
The rat screeched again—louder this time. A ripple of mana vibrated through the tunnel. Tariq felt it in his teeth.
[Skill: PEAK — Active]
Target Condition: "Agitated. Preparing to Multiply. Countdown: 27 seconds."
"Multiply?!" he shouted. "Oh, hell no."
[You remember how this thing split last time,right? Took an entire strike team and a napalm drone to clean up some locations.]
"Yeah, and I almost died in one of those locations..," he snapped back.
No more delays.
Tariq focused, calling on the only offensive trick he had left.
[Activating: VOID ENERGY (F)]
His body hummed as tendrils of shimmering, black-purple energy coiled around his limbs. The Voidlink System surged through him — like old muscle memory reawakening from slumber.
The skill, Void energy, had two effects, at rank (F) the second effect would not be displayed but that didn't mean it isn't accessible.
With his over thirty years of experience, Tariq skillfully manipulated the little amount of void energy he had within him and coated the fireman axe with it.
With a growl, he lunged forward again.
This time, he didn't aim for brute force.
He slid beneath the rat's swiping claws, twisted, and jammed the axe into its mouth as it snapped at him. The rat thrashed, shrieking — until Tariq channeled Void Energy directly through the axe's metal shaft.
The effect was immediate.
The creature's eyes bulged. Its body convulsed. A bright light burst from its mouth and eyes as its core overloaded.
BOOM.
The explosion wasn't massive, but it was enough to hurl Tariq backward into the wall, knocking the breath out of him.
He groaned, lying on the ground for a few seconds as system alerts scrolled past his vision.
[Blue Spawn Rat defeated.]
[New Energy Type Absorbed: Blue Core Residue.]
[Blue core residue has been converted to Void Energy]
LVL: 1 (New!)
VE: F (New!)
Tariq coughed and sat up, hands shaking slightly.
[Congratulations. You killed a rat. Let's throw a party!.]
"I'll take that sarcasm as a compliment," he muttered.
[Enjoy the moment. It's the last time you'll have such the advantage.]
Tariq looked down at the black ichor staining his hands and smiled grimly.
"One step at a time."
The air was different now — heavier. Something in the world had noticed the fight. A ripple had begun. The timeline was no longer following its original path.
And he had forced it to change.
He stood and stared into the tunnel ahead.
This was just the beginning.