The world reassembled itself in jagged pieces.
One moment I was standing over the original Lu Chen's body, scalpel dripping with his blood. The next, I was kneeling on the Grand Hyatt's marble floor, my hands clutching not a weapon, but a champagne flute.
The same flute from Loop #1.
Fireworks burst outside. Liang smiled at me from across the ballroom. Everything was identical—except for three crucial differences:
1. The System was gone.
2. My son stood beside Liang, gripping her hand.
3. Anya was nowhere to be seen.
"Father," the boy said, his voice echoing with layers of other voices—Mu's, the original Lu Chen's, even mine. "Let me show you how this really began."
---
THE GAME'S TRUE RULES
He snapped his fingers.
The ballroom dissolved into a memory that wasn't mine:
A younger Mu standing over an incubator, adjusting the IV lines feeding into a newborn—me. The heart monitor displayed a familiar pattern: the same erratic beeping from the lab in Chapter 19.
"This was never about time loops," the boy said as we watched Mu inject something into my IV. "It was about controlled revelations. Every death, every betrayal—they were implanted memories designed to test your resilience."
The scene shifted:
Me at age six, strapped to a chair while Mu showed footage of Anya's death. "You'll save her next time," she whispered. "If you fight hard enough."
The boy squeezed my shoulder. "She needed you obsessed with saving her. It made you predictable."
A new memory surfaced:
The original Lu Chen smashing the lab equipment. "They're just children!" he screamed before guards dragged him away.
"That's why he helped you," the boy said. "He remembered his own loops."
---
THE MISSING PIECE
The ballroom rematerialized. Liang was dead now—throat slit, just like in Loop #18. The boy wiped his bloody hands on a napkin.
"Anya was real once," he admitted. "Mother's favorite agent. But after she died protecting you, Mu realized something..."
He stepped closer.
"Grief makes better fuel than love."
The doors burst open. Anya staggered in—real Anya, not the hollow puppet from later loops. She was bleeding from a gut wound, her eyes wild with pain and recognition.
"Chen," she gasped. "Don't...believe..."
The boy sighed. "Right on cue."
He shot her between the eyes.
---
SECTION 3: THE CHOICE THAT WAS NEVER A CHOICE (900 words)
I caught Anya's body as it fell.
This close, I could see the details Mu's simulations always got wrong:
- The faint scar on her earlobe from a long-ago mission
- The way her pupils dilated unevenly when afraid
- The smell of jasmine and gunpowder that no algorithm could replicate
The boy aimed his gun at my forehead. "Now you understand. The only way to *really* win..."
I didn't let him finish.
The champagne flute shattered across his temple. As he stumbled, I drove the jagged stem into his thigh—right where the original Lu Chen had shot him in Chapter 15.
He screamed in Mu's voice.
The illusion fractured.
For one blinding second, I saw the truth:
- The boy wasn't my son.
- The loops weren't experiments.
- And the real Mu had been dead for years.
Then the world went black.
---
I woke up in a familiar lab.
The original Lu Chen stood over me, holding a syringe.
"Welcome back," he said. "Now let's go kill our god."
On the monitor behind him, security footage played:
The boy—now aged into a perfect replica of me—kissing a comatose Mu's forehead.
"Thank you, Mother," he whispered. "I'll take it from here."