Loop #89,110 – 6:00 a.m. – Eron's Apartment
The alarm rang.
The sun filtered through the blinds.
The city hummed, just like every other morning.
But today, it felt off.
Eron sat up, not in his usual calm. His eyes flicked across the room—instinctively. A tingle of unease rippled down his spine.
The moment replayed in his head again:
> "We're more alike than you think… Gavric."
That wasn't just a threat.
It was an acknowledgment.
He stepped into his morning routine like a soldier preparing for war. No wasted motion. Brushed teeth. Tactical clothes. Concealed weapon. Burner phone. Micro-listening device. A mental map of all twenty-nine people he needed to intercept today.
But first—he needed to know one thing.
Was she still here?
---
6:45 a.m. – Subway Terminal 9
Eron boarded the 6:45 train precisely 30 seconds before departure.
He'd narrowed down possible points of anomaly. If she remembered the loop, her patterns would stand out—deviate from the civilian routine.
He scanned faces, posture, reactions.
Most people moved like clockwork. Rushed, tired, distracted.
But one girl in the back corner of the third coach… sat still.
Reading a book she didn't flip.
Eyes scanning the crowd instead of the page.
A subtle earpiece buried in her hair.
There.
He didn't approach. Not yet. He stood, five rows away, watching her reflection in the window instead of her directly.
A test.
---
6:55 a.m. – Just Before Station Exit
Eron pressed the emergency alarm and slipped through the doors as passengers groaned and filed off the train.
The girl hesitated.
Then she stood.
And walked—not toward the exit.
She walked after him.
Bingo.
---
7:10 a.m. – East Plaza Alley
He let her tail him for fifteen minutes. Subtle shifts, roundabout paths. She mirrored his pace, adjusted for cover, changed gait twice.
She was trained.
He stepped into a dead-end alley and waited.
Thirty seconds later, she turned the corner behind him.
"Morning," he said without facing her. "Nice weather for a second loop, isn't it?"
Silence.
Then the faint click of a safety being disengaged.
"I don't want to kill you," she said, "but I don't trust you either."
Eron smiled, not turning around. "That makes two of us."
7:11 a.m. – East Plaza Alley
"I don't want to kill you," she repeated. "But I will if I have to."
Eron slowly turned to face her.
She was younger than he expected—maybe early twenties. Calm, precise grip on the silenced pistol. Tactical boots, dark jeans, hoodie. Eyes sharper than most field operatives he had interrogated across 89,000 loops.
He raised both hands slightly.
"I'm not here to fight," Eron said. "I'm here to talk."
She didn't lower the gun.
"You've been resetting," he said softly. "Haven't you?"
Her expression didn't change.
"That's how you knew my name. Gavric doesn't exist in this world. Only in the loop."
The girl didn't reply. But her trigger finger relaxed just enough.
"I've been at this for a very long time," Eron said. "Tens of thousands of resets. You're… new to it."
"Three years," she finally said.
That stopped him cold.
Three years?
That meant… over 1,000 loops.
Not just a fluke. Not just a one-off. She was a second player in this game—one he hadn't accounted for.
---
7:15 a.m. – Same Alley, Shift in Tone
"What's your name?" he asked.
She hesitated. "Talia."
Real name or not—it didn't matter. He could work with it.
"Why follow me, Talia? If you've been looping for three years, you could've stayed hidden forever. Why now?"
Her eyes darkened. "Because you're disrupting the balance. Helix is collapsing from the inside, and it's not supposed to."
He stepped closer. "Supposed to?"
"There's a reason we're looping," she said. "You think it's about survival. Or power. But it's a test."
Eron frowned. "Test? By who?"
But she shook her head. "I don't know. I only know what I was told."
"Told by…?"
But before she could answer, a distant siren wailed. Helix agents. A patrol car sped past the alley.
They both instinctively took a step back, out of sight.
"You're not the only one watching Helix," she said quietly. "But you're the only one trying to control it."
Eron narrowed his eyes. "You think I'm the villain."
"I think you're dangerous."
He smiled faintly. "I am."
---
7:20 a.m. – The Proposal
"What if we work together?" Eron said.
She raised a brow. "Why would I ever trust you?"
"You don't have to," he replied. "You just have to be smart enough to realize I've already done the impossible. I've climbed from dead-end office boy to the inner core of the world's most powerful organization using nothing but time… and lies."
"And I'm the only one who's seen through it," she said.
He nodded. "Which makes you the only one worth talking to."
She stared at him, calculating.
Seconds ticked by.
Finally, she lowered her weapon.
"For now," she said.
7:30 a.m. – Rooftop above East Plaza
They sat opposite each other on the gravel-strewn rooftop, backs to the rising sun. The city's buzz was muted this high up, a temporary escape from the world that never remembered.
Talia passed him a protein bar without a word.
Eron accepted it. No thanks—just mutual understanding. Loopwalkers, both. Survivors of too many yesterdays.
"How did you find me?" he asked mid-bite.
"I started noticing patterns," Talia replied. "Changes in Helix structure, internal rotations, rogue terminations. All too surgical, too precise. But they reset every day. Which meant one of us was manipulating from the inside."
"And it led you to me?"
"No," she said. "You made it too easy. You became too perfect."
Eron smirked.
"Helix agents don't move like you unless they've failed a thousand times. Civilians don't carry themselves like chess masters unless they've played a lifetime's worth of games. You slipped up, Gavric."
That name again—one Eron only used in shadow operations. She had been watching.
---
7:45 a.m. – Tactical Sync
He took out a folded sheet from his coat pocket. It was a scribbled map of Helix's internal hierarchy—names, corridors, guard rotations, and choke points.
"I need to reach Level 7 access. That means bypassing surveillance in Tower 3, replacing Director Carver's ID, and gaining a shadow slot on the Ascension list."
Talia's eyes narrowed. "You've tried it before."
"Dozens of times," Eron admitted. "Always caught on Step 9: biometric scan on the elevator to the core archive."
"Because you're using Carver's print," she said.
He looked at her. "How do you know that?"
Talia shrugged. "Because I've broken in twice."
She stood and paced the roof edge.
"You're brute-forcing your way through every layer," she said. "That's messy. But it works… slowly."
"And your way?"
"I identify the keystones. People who change the path."
She leaned over the map, circled three names he hadn't paid attention to.
"Forget Carver. Watch these three. If you move them, the system reroutes. You don't have to break in—you redirect the flow."
Eron stared at her. In all his years, he'd never seen that angle.
A new player meant new tactics. He suddenly realized something powerful—
For the first time in 89,110 loops, he wasn't alone.
---
8:00 a.m. – Pact of the Loop
She held out her hand. "This doesn't mean I trust you."
He took it anyway. "Good. You shouldn't."
"But if we're going to tear Helix down," she said, "we'll need more than memories."
"We'll need each other."
Their handshake sealed more than an alliance.
It sparked a war Helix wouldn't see coming.
8:20 a.m. – Underground Metro Tunnel, Line 6 (Abandoned)
With the pact made, Eron led Talia through a rusted maintenance tunnel—one of his oldest secrets. Here, under the skin of the city, he had stored the pieces of himself time could not erase: backup files, rewritten dossiers, disguises, and data caches. Each item represented an identity he had worn and shed across thousands of loops.
Talia knelt beside a storage crate, flipping open the latch. Inside: notebooks filled with code, blueprints, and names.
"You built this?" she asked, scanning the pages.
"I built several," he said. "This one's for Helix manipulation. The others are for if this loop ever ends… and the world keeps turning."
Talia stopped flipping. "You believe it can end?"
"I believe," Eron said, crouching beside her, "that something is watching. And one day, it'll blink."
---
8:40 a.m. – Flashback Within the Loop
Talia stared at a yellowed page. A drawing—simple, sketched with charcoal. A girl standing in front of a burning building.
"This… is you?"
Eron nodded.
"It was the first time I burned the Helix Records Hub," he said. "I thought if I destroyed their data, I'd break the loop. But when I woke up… everything was still there."
"You died in the fire?"
"No," he whispered. "I jumped before it collapsed."
She looked at him. "Why?"
He paused, then answered with rare honesty.
"Because I was scared."
She didn't speak. Didn't mock. Just nodded once.
"You're not that man anymore," she said.
"No," he agreed. "Now I'm the man who lit that fire 428 more times… and learned to walk through it."
---
9:00 a.m. – New Plans, New Threats
On a worn-out whiteboard, Eron began drawing a new infiltration path using Talia's keystone method. With her insights, old roadblocks dissolved into manageable pivots. It was like playing chess with a twin strategist—one who had learned different lessons from the same battlefield.
Suddenly, a soft chime rang from Talia's watch. She paled.
"What is it?" he asked.
"We've got 60 minutes left until reset," she said. "And there's something I haven't told you."
Eron turned toward her.
"Someone else is starting to remember."
She looked at him, dead serious.
"I think a third loopwalker just woke up."