I fought. I died.
I rewound.
Again.
And again.
And again.
I lost count of how many times I had seen my own death.
Two years of training hadn't been enough. Even with all my experience, all my time-skipping, I was too weak.
The monster before me—a behemoth of obsidian flesh and jagged bone—didn't even acknowledge my attacks. My blade barely scratched its hide. My spear shattered on impact. My fists? Completely useless.
And when it finally struck back, I watched myself die in ways too gruesome to describe.
I rewound. Further.
I tried again.
I rewound.
Again.
And again.
At first, I repeated the same day for months. Then for years.
The sunrise became my enemy. Every time it came, it erased all my effort, all my pain, all my progress.
My body reset, returning to the same weak form I started with.
No matter how much I trained, my strength never carried over.
It was maddening.
No matter how much I pushed myself, no matter how many millions of times I swung my sword, no matter how perfectly I honed my technique—I was still human.
Still weak.
Still nothing.
It was hell.
And in that bottomless pit of despair, something inside me snapped.
The Awakening Beyond Time
I don't know when it happened.
Maybe it was in my thousandth failure. Maybe my ten-thousandth death.
Maybe it was in the moment I realized I would never escape this cycle.
I was screaming. Crying. Begging.
"I need more time."
I clutched my head, my fingers digging into my skull. My breath came in ragged gasps, my vision blurring.
"I need more time."
I fell to my knees.
"I need more—"
The world stopped.
Not slowed. Not skipped. Stopped.
The wind froze mid-motion. The dust and debris hung in the air, unmoving. The fires burning in the distance flickered once—and then froze like paintings in the sky.
And then I heard it.
A voice—no, not a voice.
A thought.
A realization.
"You have all the time you need."
And suddenly—
I could feel everything.
Time wasn't slipping through my fingers anymore. It wasn't something I could only skip forward or rewind.
I had caught it.
And in that instant—
I stopped time for one hundred years.
A Century of Training in a Frozen World
At first, I thought I had lost my mind.
But the world around me was still frozen. The sunrise never came. My body didn't reset.
For the first time, my progress stayed.
And so, I trained.
I trained harder than any human in history.
For a hundred years, I honed my body—building strength, endurance, and skill beyond what was humanly possible.
Every muscle was sculpted to perfection. Every motion was refined to absolute mastery.
I lifted the fallen steel beams of collapsed buildings, pushing my limits until my body obeyed my will, not its weaknesses.
I sharpened my instincts—hunting the frozen monsters, memorizing their weak points, anticipating their every move before they even made them.
I mastered every weapon—not just in theory, but in execution. Sword, spear, dagger, bow, axe—I mastered them all.
And when weapons were no longer enough, I honed my bare hands, turning myself into a weapon greater than any blade.
I fought invisible battles, perfecting every strike, every dodge, every counter.
Until finally—
I didn't need to think.
My body moved on its own, every action instinctual, every movement flawless.
I had become something else entirely.
Not a human. Not a warrior.
A force of nature.
And when I was ready—
I let time flow again.
The Battle Rewritten
The monster moved.
No—it tried to move.
My bare fist struck its chest.
A single blow.
A perfect, calculated strike—delivered with a hundred years of mastery behind it.
The monster's entire body cracked.
A tremor ran through its form, its obsidian hide splintering like glass.
Its glowing eyes widened—not in anger, but in something else.
Fear.
It had never felt pain before.
And now it knew—
It was going to die.
I stepped forward, driving my fist deeper—shattering it from the inside out.
The monster collapsed, lifeless, broken, utterly defeated.
I exhaled.
For the first time since the Gates opened—
I wasn't running.
I wasn't weak.
I was ready.
Before it could even blink, before it could even register that time had resumed, I was already in front of it.