A blaring, electronic screech tore through the silence.
Joon-Ho jolted upright, a gasp ripping from his throat. His hand shot out, not for a weapon, but towards the source of the horrible noise. His fingers fumbled, slapping against smooth plastic until they hit a button. The alarm died, leaving a ringing quiet that felt louder than the battle he'd just left.
Battle?
He wasn't in the Demon King's core chamber. He wasn't on cold, crumbling obsidian.
He was in a bed. A narrow, lumpy single bed. Sunlight, harsh and unfiltered, streamed through a window to his left, painting bright rectangles on a scuffed wooden floor. It illuminated a small, messy room. Clothes were piled on a cheap plastic chair. Textbooks with cracked spines were stacked haphazardly on a tiny desk. The air smelled faintly of dust, instant noodles, and the stale, papery scent of old notes.
His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic, panicked drumbeat. He looked down at his hands, the ones that had just been holding Final Dawn.
They were smooth. Pale. Unmarked.
No calluses from a decade of gripping a sword hilt. No thin, white scars from monster claws or glancing blows. No ingrained stain of blood and grime. They were the soft, unused hands of a student.
What…?
His breath came in short, sharp pants. He pushed the thin blanket off—a plain blue comforter, pilled from too many washes. He was wearing a faded gray t-shirt and loose cotton shorts. He swung his legs over the side of the bed, his bare feet hitting the cool linoleum. The feeling was absurdly vivid, shockingly normal.
He stood up, his legs feeling strangely weak. Not the bone-deep exhaustion of mana depletion, but a genuine, untrained physical weakness. He felt… light. Insubstantial. Wrong.
His eyes swept the room. It was familiar in a way that scraped at the inside of his skull. The poster for a movie that had come out years ago. The small, clunky desktop computer monitor. The half-empty cup of water on the desk with a faded logo from his university.
No. This is… this is my old dorm room.
The thought was impossible. It was a memory, a place he hadn't seen in ten years, since the world changed and dorm rooms became luxury compared to fortified bunkers and guild halls.
A soft buzz vibrated on the desk. He flinched, his body reacting to an unexpected sound like it was a threat. He took two shaky steps and picked up the phone. It was an older model, with a small screen and a physical home button. A notification glowed on the display.
"Good morning! Don't forget your 9 AM Sociology of Media lecture, Joon-Ho! - Yuna"
The name was a physical punch to his gut.
Yuna.
The memory flooded back, not as a thought, but as a full-sensory assault. The cold pain in his back. The crystalline dagger. Her empty eyes. The sound of his pendant cracking.
He stumbled, bracing himself against the desk. The betrayal was so fresh, so visceral, it felt like the wound was still there, bleeding. He clawed at the front of his t-shirt, pulling the collar down to look at his chest, to find the pendant.
It was gone. Of course it was gone. It had shattered.
But his skin was unmarked. No scar. No wound. Just smooth, unbroken flesh where a Psionic Shiv had pierced him through.
A rising tide of panic, cold and nauseating, began to drown the confusion. He lurched towards the small mirror hanging on the back of the door. He needed to see. He needed to understand.
A face stared back at him.
It was his face. But not.
The man in the mirror was younger. So much younger. The harsh lines of a decade of constant warfare and leadership were gone. The permanent shadow of stress and grief under his eyes was absent. His jaw was softer, his cheeks held a slight roundness of youth not yet carved away by hardship. His hair was darker, longer, and messy from sleep, not cropped short for practicality under a helmet.
This was the face of Kim Joon-Ho, the 22-year-old university student. The boy who worried about grades and part-time jobs and what to say to his pretty girlfriend.
The face of the man who had died in a dungeon core chamber ten years in the future stared back, filled with a terror the boy had never known.
"No," he whispered to the reflection, his voice sounding too high, too unused. "This isn't real. This is a dream. A death-dream."
He pinched the skin on his arm, hard. The pain was sharp, immediate. He slapped his own cheek. The sting bloomed, real and present. He turned on the tap in the small sink and shoved his hands under the cold water. The shock of it, the feel of the liquid, the sound of it hitting the porcelain basin—it was all overwhelmingly, undeniably real.
He was here. In his past. In his body from ten years ago.
The scope of the impossibility threatened to shut his mind down. He had died. He had felt his life end. And then… the pendant. The shattering. The warmth.
Time? His mind, the strategic, analytical mind of an S-Rank Hunter, began to claw through the panic, seeking logic where there was none. Soul… displacement? A chrono-artifact? The heirloom…
He had never known what the pendant was. His parents had died in an early dungeon break, leaving him only that. He'd worn it as a memento. A piece of them. Had it been… something else? Something that activated upon his death?
He grabbed the phone again, his fingers trembling. He ignored Yuna's text—the casual, caring message from a woman who hadn't yet become a monster—and opened the calendar.
The date glowed on the screen.
October 18th.
He knew this date. It was etched into the memory of every human being on the planet in his original timeline.
October 18th. The day the world ended and began.
The day the System arrived.
His breath hitched. A strange, hysterical laugh bubbled in his throat but died before it could escape. He had died on the cusp of victory, betrayed, and had woken up on the cusp of hell, ten years earlier.
He looked at the time on the phone: 8:07 AM.
He knew, with the absolute certainty of lived experience, what happened on October 18th at 10:17 AM.
The Sociology of Media lecture didn't matter. Yuna's text didn't matter. Nothing in this fragile, normal world mattered.
In a little over two hours, the sky would flash violet. Blue screens would appear before every person on Earth. Panic would erupt. Monsters would soon follow. The weak would die first. Society would shatter in a single morning.
And he was here. Not as the seasoned S-Rank Hunter, the leader of Aethelgard, but as a weak, pre-awakened college student with soft hands and a body that had never thrown a punch in anger.
The cold panic solidified into a different emotion. A familiar one. It was the ice that had filled his veins in the quiet moments before a raid, the hyper-focused calm that descended when survival was the only goal.
He was not the boy in the mirror. Not anymore. That boy had died ten years from now, betrayed and left in the dark. The man looking out from those young eyes was a ghost. A revenant. A soul stuffed back into its original, fragile casing, carrying the memories of a future that was now a warning.
He had nothing. No power. No allies he could trust. No guild. No weapon but a plastic alarm clock and a half-empty cup of water.
But he had something no one else on the planet had.
He had knowledge.
He knew what was coming. He knew the timeline of the initial breaks, the patterns of the early dungeons, the mistakes people would make, the hidden opportunities in the chaos. He knew who would rise to power, and who would fall. He knew about betrayals that were still years away from being conceived.
And he knew, with a chilling clarity, that the woman who had just texted him a sweet reminder would one day push a dagger into his kidney for a chance at a throne.
The ice in his veins spread. The fear was still there, a trapped bird fluttering in his chest, but it was caged by a colder, harder resolve.
He looked away from the mirror. He looked around the dorm room, this tiny snapshot of a dead past. His eyes were no longer the confused eyes of a student. They were the eyes of a soldier who had seen the end of the world, and had been given a chance, however impossible, to see its beginning again.
He had two hours.
Two hours before the world changed forever.
He took a deep, slow breath, forcing his racing heart to settle. The first mission was always reconnaissance. Assessment of resources. Understanding the terrain.
The terrain was his university campus. His resources were his own frail body and the clothes on his back.
And the relentless, unforgiving knowledge of everything that was about to go wrong.
He moved to the small closet, his movements deliberate now, shedding the last of his disorientation. He pulled on a pair of jeans, a plain hoodie, and worn sneakers. The normalcy of the actions felt surreal.
As he tied his laces, the face of the younger Joon-Ho in the mirror was gone, replaced by the grim visage of a man preparing for war. A war that no one else knew was coming.
He pocketed his phone, his keys, and the little money he had in a worn wallet. He didn't look back at the room.
He opened the door and stepped out into the quiet hallway of the dormitory, the sounds of other students just waking up, the smell of toast from a common kitchen, the echo of a distant laugh.
He walked into the past, carrying the weight of the future on his shoulders. Every step towards the campus outside was a step towards 10:17 AM.
To be continued...