Prologue: Playing Life on Cheat Mode
Have you ever played a game with the cheats on? If you have, you already know how it goes. It's a blast at first—then the more you play, the more the fun just drains away.
That's my life. I played through it with a cheat key.
You can instantly kill any target you desire.
Say the word, and they die. If it's alive, nothing is exempt. No exceptions.
Thanks to that, I reached the top faster than anyone. One word solved everything—which, looking back, was only natural.
…So of course it was boring.
That didn't make me invincible, though. My ability, at the end of the day, only kills people. I can't flatten a mountain or grow back a severed arm the way other Hunters can.
…Which is precisely why something like this is possible.
"If I fall from here, I'll die, right?"
Horns blared up from the street far below. I stood at the edge of a high-rise, looking down at a sea of cars, each one smaller than an ant. Just looking was enough to make my head spin. Yeah—if I fell from here, I'd die.
Somewhere in that crowd was the one who'd brought me to this. I searched for him.
"Status window."
A faint hologram shimmered into view. Amid the clutter of a complicated status screen, I fixed my eyes on a single entry.
◈ You may regress to the past — once, and only once.
I reached into empty air. A pocket watch that hadn't been there a second ago settled into my palm—an antique thing, the kind you'd expect to find in some medieval drawing room.
I closed my fingers around it and threw myself into the sky.
The world smeared past me like a watercolor left in the rain, the stretch of it telling me exactly how fast I was falling.
Would this even work? I had no idea. It was written on the status window, sure—but a trait that sends you back in time? I'd never heard of anything like it. Hard to believe, honestly.
So the choice was God's to make.
Before I hit the ground, I smashed the pocket watch.
Crack!