The moment Jin's fingers reached toward me, everything slowed.
Not in a poetic, cinematic kind of way. I mean real slowdown.
Frames started dropping. My vision stuttered. The world skipped like an old disc.
And then, everything rewound.
For two seconds, we went backward. Jin's hand retracted. The palace fire unstretched. The monk's glitch scars reversed themselves into clean skin. The chanting reversed into silence.
SYSTEM NOTIFICATION:
INTERFACE REWIND ACTIVATED
BY: LEANDRO COSTA - Inventory Hacker
COST: 1x Divine Relic of Time (now replaced with rubber chicken)
"LEO!" I shouted. "YOU GLORIOUS, STUPID CHAOS LIZARD!"
Flash.
World snapped back to now.
Jin blinked, suddenly unsure of what he'd just seen.
I felt my link to Vanya snap. Like a plug being yanked out of a socket mid-update.
And suddenly, Inventory Hacker was online.
"Sup, bugs," said a voice behind me, Brazilian smooth and grinning chaos.
I turned, and there was Leo, wearing a silver mask and one sleeve torn, juggling three pixelated pineapples that definitely weren't pineapples.
"What did you just do?" I asked, heart pounding.
He smirked. "Swapped the Emperor's Fate Timer Relic for a carnival egg."
"You WHAT?!"
"I had, like, two seconds. You're welcome."
SYSTEM LOG
ITEM SWAP SUCCESSFUL
[Divine Chrono Bell] → [Plastic Toy from Rio Carnival]
Emperor Jin has lost 12 seconds of temporal awareness
You have gained: 'Tactical Confusion'
Vanya pinged back into the interface, screaming, "WHAT HAPPENED?! Why did everything reset?!"
"I stole time," Leo said casually. "Kind of my thing."
"Leo," she said flatly, "we're debugging a broken sovereign with unstable personality files. This is not Mardi Gras."
"No," he said, grinning wide, "but it is fun."
Jin staggered slightly, his poetic aura flickering. "What... was I saying?"
"Nothing important!" I called out. "Probably just gas."
He frowned. His eyes locked onto Leo next.
A new error floated above his head:
TARGET IDENTIFIED:
LEANDRO COSTA - CLASS: INVENTORY HACKER
DANGER LEVEL: CHAOTIC NEUTRAL
CURRENT STATUS: ARMED WITH JOKES
"I see you too," Jin said, eyes narrowing.
Leo waved. "And I'm flattered. Can we not fight today? I'm fresh out of apocalypse coupons."
But Jin wasn't laughing.
He was scanning us.
Something behind his eyes had shifted again.
That layer of static? It was thicker now.
Like... a second mind pressing against his skin.
Whispers. Snippets of our names. Even our voices.
He wasn't just glitching anymore.
He was indexing us.
"Kade," Leo said suddenly. "You need to bail."
"Why?"
"Because I think Jin just downloaded a piece of you."
WARNING: PARTIAL MIND PRINT DETECTED
FILE NAME: KADE.MERCER.BAK
LOCATION: JIN'S CORE
STATUS: ACTIVE
NOTE: You've been cloned. Badly.
"Oh hell," I muttered. "He's making backups."
"Yup. And guess what happens when corrupted backups start thinking for themselves?"
"I don't know, Leo. You tell me, you're the one who gave a tyrant a rubber chicken instead of a holy relic!"
Jin's voice rose again, this time deeper.
"I know you now," he said. "One of you dances with inventories. One whispers broken code. The other... hides like a ghost."
He pointed directly at my chest.
"You're the Override."
And then, in my voice again:
"I'm not a bug. I'm a feature."
"THAT'S MY LINE!" I yelled.
"Yours? It's mine now," he said calmly.
He raised his hand, and suddenly, I felt it.
The copy. Inside him.
Thinking.
Pinging me.
Wanting control.
A corrupted version of me.
Some part of my thoughts, already running inside him.
"Kade," Vanya snapped, "you have to disconnect. Hard pull. Now."
"I can't!" I said. "If I yank out now, he'll trace the root, he'll find the rest of the team!"
"Then we fry his signal," Leo muttered.
"How?!"
He grinned again. "Easy. We steal it."
INITIATING: INVENTORY SWAP – TARGET: SYSTEM TRACE ROOT
ATTEMPTING...
ATTEMPTING...
ACCESS GRANTED.
YOU HAVE OBTAINED: 'Kade Mercer – Shadow Thought Clone'
ITEM DESCRIPTION: Like Kade, but angrier and with worse hair.
Suddenly I felt lighter.
Like someone had unplugged the screaming inside my head.
Leo stumbled back, his bag now glitching at the seams.
"I got him!" he shouted. "I captured your clone."
"You put my brain... in a bag?!"
"Don't be dramatic. It's safe. Probably."
But Jin wasn't done.
He stood taller, shadows writhing behind him like living fractals.
His pupils went binary again.
And then he whispered something low. Quiet.
"Run command: Mirror.exe"
And then, He split.
Like a system mirage, a perfect copy of himself peeled off.
Except its skin was too smooth. Its eyes too sharp.
And its voice?
"My name," it said, "is Kade Sovereign."
Leo paled.
"Kade."
"Yeah?"
"I think your backup just declared war on your actual self."
I looked up at the clone, my own face, my voice, but with the power of a god behind it, and I muttered:
"Okay. Yeah. That's a problem."