THE WALK OF THE DAMNED
The Cryptic Vault hissed as I sealed the heavy iron door, leaving my 'child' the primary Tesla Resonator humming in the deep, resonant darkness. Inside that room, the air was a flat, perfect 22°C, stabilized by the core's entropy-nullification field. It was a pocket of the future hidden in a basement.
But the "human" element of the Vault was far less futuristic.
Before I could reach the exit, I had to navigate the obstacle course of my squad. Albie and Dominic were passed out on the ragged leather sofa directly in front of the Tesla Core, their faces illuminated by the rhythmic violet pulse of the machine. Albie was snoring in a frequency that almost matched the resonator's hum, while Dominic had a half-eaten kebab resting precariously on his chest. In the corner, Dexter was hunched over a laptop, his eyes bloodshot, fully immersed in a high-speed data-mining session powered by our pirated grid.
"Oi, move it," I rasped, my voice cracking as I stepped over a tangle of charging cables.
"In a minute, Mason... the ping is literally zero," Dexter muttered without looking up. "I'm downloading the entire Library of Congress. It'll be done in ten seconds."
Near the back, there was a small queue forming in front of the Vault's single, leaky bathroom. Ramona was tapping her foot impatiently while someone likely Albie's latest 'borrowed' tech-assistant was taking an eternity inside. The smell of cheap coffee, ozone, and unwashed physics students was a heady mix.
"Don't fall over on your way out, boss," Ramona called out, eyeing my trembling knees. "You look like you're made of glass today."
"I am glass, Ramona. Very expensive, very fragile glass," I managed to retort before finally pushing through the exit.
As I stepped out, the London humidity hit me like a wet sack of coal. I leaned against the damp brickwork of the corridor, my body paying the heavy tax of six hours of precision engineering. My legs felt like overcooked spaghetti, and my lungs were whistling a tune that sounded suspiciously like a funeral dirge. I was running on about 0.5% battery and a very desperate prayer.
I tapped the screen of the smartwatch on my wrist. To any student passing by, it looked like a £15 knock-off from a Camden market stall plastic, clunky, and utterly rubbish. In reality, it was a Frankenstein's monster. I'd gutted the internals of a cheap tracker and replaced them with a custom-etched motherboard and a copper-zinc receiver I'd hand-wound to a specific, forbidden frequency.
"Mason," a voice crackled in my earpiece, sharp as a guillotine and dripping with Victorian disdain. "Are we truly walking? On foot? Like common street urchins? I thought you claimed to be a pioneer of the new age, yet you move with the grace of a dying mule."
"It's called 'stealth,' Eliza," I muttered, adjusting my glasses. They looked like standard Ray-Ban Meta glasses sleek, black, and innocent. But as I tapped the frame, the lenses flickered, overlaying the world with a translucent gold HUD. "Hard to be the secret architect of a universe if I'm rolling around in a gold-plated carriage. Besides, I need the 'Fragile Student' look. It's the ultimate camouflage. No one suspects the kid who looks like he's losing a fight with gravity."
Eliza's avatar shimmered into the corner of my vision, rendered perfectly by the AR lenses. She was sitting on the edge of my digital HUD as if it were a velvet chaise longue, looking down her nose at my pathetic walking speed.
"Physical camouflage? Is that what we're calling 'being a weakling' these days?" She sighed, the sound of digital static imitating a posh huff. "I remember men who built empires with their bare hands while suffering from actual consumption. You can barely hold a soldering iron without trembling. And this... this 'bauble' on your wrist. It's an insult to craftsmanship."
"This 'bauble' is currently locking onto a sub-space signal from the Vault's resonator," I grunted, forcing my legs to move toward the main campus building. Every step sent a jolt of phantom pain up my spine. "I've established a locked-frequency bridge. As long as I'm within range of the school's grid, this watch pulls wireless energy directly from the Tesla core. It's parasitic charging, Eliza. Wherever I go, I have the Vault's power in my pocket. Infinite juice. No wires, no plugs just pure Aetheric resonance."
"A thief of the airwaves," Eliza mused, her eyes narrowing as she scanned the data streams. She didn't know I was using frequency-hopping algorithms from a thousand years of trial and error. To her, I was just a 'lunatic' who happened to be right. "But I suppose I must credit your... 'unstable' mind. This smartwatch is actually boosting the local Wi-Fi signal through me. It's like drinking fine wine after a century of thirst."
As I reached the campus courtyard, the AR glasses began to highlight the world in a wash of data. I could see the Wi-Fi signals of every smartphone, the hidden power lines humming beneath the pavement, and the faint, golden pulse of the Tesla signal keeping my watch and Eliza alive.
"Don't get too comfortable," I cautioned, my heart hammering against my ribs. "I'm using the glasses as the primary signal wave for your manifestation. If the battery on these dies which it won't, thanks to the watch you're stuck back in the Vault's server until I get back. And I've got a three-hour lecture on 'Applied Thermodynamics' that I can't miss."
"Applied Thermodynamics? How quaint," Eliza snorted, her image fading until she was just a whisper in my ear. "I lived through the age of steam, Mason. I am thermodynamics. Now, do try to survive the walk to the elevator. It would be dreadfully embarrassing to be haunted by a ghost who died of sheer exhaustion before lunch."
I wiped the sweat from my brow, adjusted my 'cheap' glasses, and prepared to play the role of the century. I looked like a fragile, delusional student a 'chunibyo' kid who thought his junk-tech made him a superhero.
But as I stepped into the lift, the smartwatch hummed, the Tesla signal turned a deep, satisfied green, and the entire University's network flickered for a fraction of a second.
"Just watch, Eliza," I thought, leaning against the lift wall. "The match is damp, but the fuse is already burning."
THE FAUSTIAN HANDSHAKE
Date: 14th July 2026
Location: Lecture Hall 304 / Main Corridor, London Metropolitan University
Time: 09:15 PM BST
I had underestimated the sheer, soul-crushing distance between the Vault and the lecture hall. In my previous loops the ones where I actually had a budget and a functioning nervous system I'd usually bypass this mundane torture with a high-tier teleportation glitch or a simple spatial jump. But today, I was a mortal. A mortal who had pulled an all-nighter building a pirate god-system and whose only 'perk' was a spine that felt like it was made of dry crackers and bad intentions.
My vision blurred at the edges as I navigated the corridors. Every breath was a tactical struggle, my shriveled lungs protesting the very concept of oxygen. To the world, I was just another student running late for a 9:00 AM. To me, this hallway felt like a trek across a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
"Mason, darling, you've stopped moving. Are we waiting for a bus, or have you finally decided to join the choir invisible?" Eliza's voice hummed in my ear, crisp and utterly unsympathetic. "The janitor only just mopped the floors. To die now would be a grave breach of etiquette."
"Etiquette... can... bugger off," I managed to choke out, clutching a cold radiator for support.
A girl walked past me, waving a hand with a concerned look. "Hey, Mason! You okay? You look worse than after that pub crawl last Friday."
I blinked at her. I had no idea who she was. Was she in my course? A childhood friend? To me, "last Friday" was about seven hundred years ago. I'd seen empires rise and fall; I'd seen London burn under a sky of falling stars. The names and faces of my 2026 peers had been overwritten by centuries of trauma and complex equations.
"Last... Friday?" I rasped, my voice sounding like sandpaper. "Who... are you?"
The girl's face fell into a look of pure confusion. "It's Sarah, Mason. We've sat next to each other in Lab for two years? Are you actually mental?"
"Ah. Right. Sarah. Of course," I lied, my 'Chunibyo' mask sliding back into place. "Forgive me. My mind was currently navigating the eleven dimensions of M-Theory. Names are... lower-frequency data. Irrelevant to the Great Work."
She backed away slowly, looking at me like I was a ticking bomb.
"Mason," Eliza whispered, her AR avatar flickering into view with an expression of genuine perplexity. "You've spent two years in this institution, yet you don't recognize the girl who shares your workbench? Your memory is a shambles. How can you calculate the entropy of a closed system but forget the face of a human being you saw seventy-two hours ago?"
"Different... storage... partitions," I muttered, forcing my feet to move.
Eliza didn't know. She couldn't. She thought I was just a scatterbrained genius, a 'Chunibyo' kid who lived too much in his own head. She didn't know that for me, this university was a ghost of a ghost. I had left this campus centuries ago. Returning to it now was like trying to remember the plot of a book I'd read once in a previous life.
I tapped the side of my cheap smartwatch, activating the 'Neural Pulse' command. A faint, golden ripple shimmered across the cracked screen. Back in the Vault, the Tesla Core acknowledged the handshake. Suddenly, I felt a sharp, electric tingle zip through my calves and lower back.
It wasn't a heal I didn't have those stats yet but it was a forced electron recovery. The Tesla signal was stimulating the ATP production in my muscle cells, manually flushing out the lactic acid. It felt like being poked with a thousand tiny needles, but the agonizing 'dead-weight' feeling in my legs began to lift.
"Oh? Using the Aether to jumpstart your pathetic biology?" Eliza mused, her AR avatar leaning against the corner of my vision as I regained my stride. "I suppose that's one way to compensate for your lack of basic constitution. A parasitic battery for a parasitic boy."
"It's not parasitic, Eliza. It's... optimized resource management," I rasped, finally straightening my back. I still looked like a walking corpse, but at least I wasn't a crawling one.
I reached the door of Room 304. This was the territory of Professor Vincy.
In this 2026 timeline, before the loops blurred everything, I was known for being the 'Dosen-Killer.' Most professors at London Met hated me. I was the student who cornered them after lectures with 'forbidden' questions theoretical anomalies that made their standard textbooks look like children's bedtime stories. Most of them would see me coming and suddenly remember an urgent meeting in another building.
But Vincy was different.
Professor Vincy was a man who lived for the 'Dangerous Equation.' He didn't run. He leaned in. He was the kind of academic who would rather burn the building down than ignore a mathematical inconsistency. He answered my questions with riddles that felt like intellectual landmines, testing whether I was a true genius or just a well-read lunatic. I liked him, despite the fact that he was probably the only person on campus capable of spotting the 'glitch' in my reality.
I pushed the door open. The lecture hall was half-full, the air thick with the smell of cheap coffee and the low hum of student chatter.
"Ah, Mr. Pryce," a gravelly voice cut through the noise. Professor Vincy stood at the podium, adjusting his spectacles. He looked like he was carved out of old oak and stubbornness. "You look particularly... deceased today. Did you spend the night fighting demons, or was it merely the Wi-Fi again?"
A few students snickered. I just gave a tired, cryptic half-smile, my AR glasses already scanning the chalkboard. Vincy had written a derivation of the Third Law of Thermodynamics, but he'd left a deliberate error in the entropy coefficient. A trap. A test for anyone actually paying attention.
"Neither, Professor," I said, sliding into my usual seat. I looked at the guy sitting next to me. I had no idea what his name was. I just nodded like we were old friends. "I was just recalculating the frequency of the firmament. It's noisier than I expected."
Vincy's eyes sharpened behind his lenses. He didn't dismiss it as 'Chunibyo' nonsense like the others. He paused, his chalk hovering over the board. "The firmament? A bold term for a physics student. Be careful, Mason. If you listen to the noise for too long, the math starts to talk back. And usually, it's not saying things you want to hear."
"I like it when the math talks back," I whispered, leaning my head on my hand. My body was still screaming, but the Tesla hum in my watch kept me tethered. "It's the only thing in this school that doesn't lie."
Eliza chuckled in my ear, her digital presence shimmering with amusement. "He likes you, Mason. In the way a butcher likes a particularly interesting piece of meat. Do try not to get 'carved' before the mid-terms. It would be a waste of all that pirated electricity."
I opened my notebook, my hands finally steady as the electron recovery hit 100%. The lecture began, but I wasn't listening to the basics of thermal dynamics. I was watching the way Vincy's eyes moved across the room, sensing the weight of the air. He knew something was shifting. He could feel the localized distortion of the Tesla signal I was trailing behind me like a scent.
The game was on. My body was at a pathetic 0.7 Vitality, but my mind was at 999. And in this room, that was the only stats that mattered.
REBUILDING ON A SCRAPS
Date: 14th July 2026
Location: Lecture Hall 304 / Main Corridor, London Metropolitan University
Time: 12:15 PM BST
The lecture ended not with a bell, but with the collective, exhausted sigh of sixty students who had just had their brains tenderized by Vincy's thermodynamics. Usually, when a lecture concludes, the 'keener' students swarm the professor like flies on a rib-eye, desperate for extra credit or to clarify why their math didn't match the board.
But with Professor Vincy, the opposite happened. The students avoided the podium as if it were a radioactive spill. Vincy didn't give answers; he gave riddles that triggered existential crises and literal nightmares. To talk to him was to invite a psychological 'troll' session that could last hours.
I, however, was the anomaly. In my past 'student' life, I was the only one who approached him with questions that were equally lethal. But today, as I watched him pack his worn leather bag, I hesitated.
I didn't actually have any questions. Not about the curriculum, anyway. I'd known the answers to everything he'd said today since Loop 4. If I approached him with my usual 'curiosity,' a man as sharp as Vincy would smell the performance. He'd know I was faking the struggle.
"Mason," Eliza's voice drifted through the earpiece, her tone laced with predatory curiosity. "You're staring. It's making the Professor look like he's about to reach for a silver stake. Are we going to engage, or are you just admiring the way he fails to iron his shirts?"
"I need a reaction, Eliza," I whispered, shifting my weight. My legs, though bolstered by the Tesla recovery, still felt like they belonged to a 90-year-old. "I need to know if his mind is ready for the 'Forbidden' stuff. Not the textbook rubbish. The real thing."
I walked down the tiered steps, my cheap sneakers squeaking against the linoleum. Vincy looked up, his eyes narrowing behind thick frames.
"Mr. Pryce. Still alive, I see. I assume you're here to tell me that my derivation of entropy was 'cute' but fundamentally flawed?"
"Actually, Professor, I was thinking about invisible resources," I said, leaning against the edge of his desk mostly because I needed the support. "Energy that can be captured but passes through objects. A parasitic pull that doesn't just take power, but hijacks the data and hidden information within the wave. Making it ours."
Vincy stopped moving. The room felt suddenly colder, or perhaps it was just the Tesla signal reacting to the tension.
"Theft of the Aether," Vincy murmured, his voice dropping an octave. "That's not physics, Mason. That's alchemy. Or treason. If you could bridge the gap between energy transmission and data encryption in a non-visible spectrum... you wouldn't be a student. You'd be a god. Or a corpse."
"My Tesla project," I continued, ignoring the warning. "The one everyone calls 'junk' in the Vault. It's going to reach that point. It's not a failure anymore, Professor. It's just... hungry."
Vincy stared at me for a long beat, his expression unreadable. For a second, I thought he might call security. Instead, he gave a dry, raspy chuckle. "Hunger is dangerous, Mr. Pryce. Be careful what you feed that machine. If it starts eating information it wasn't meant to have, the people who 'own' that information will come looking for the bill."
"I'll be sure to keep the receipts," I replied, a cold smirk touching my lips.
I turned and walked out before he could ask for details. I had the validation I needed. Vincy wasn't just a teacher; he was a gatekeeper who knew the fence was broken.
But as I reached the corridor, reality hit me in the face specifically, my bank balance. I checked my phone. It was a sea of red numbers.
"Mason," Eliza chimed in, her avatar appearing as a tiny, judgmental icon on my HUD. "While your intellectual posturing was quite entertaining, we have a slight 'material' problem. The Tesla Core needs three more high-grade capacitors and a liquid-nitrogen cooling loop. Unless you plan to pay for them with 'vibes' and 'future-knowledge,' we are effectively bankrupt."
"Bloody hell," I hissed, rubbing my temples. "I need cash. A lot of it. And fast."
In my usual loops, I'd just wait for the 2036 crash and raid the ruins. Or I'd use a lottery number. But this was 2026. This was the one timeline where I hadn't memorized the winning balls because I was too busy dying in a bunker. My future-knowledge was top-tier in physics, but rubbish for gambling.
"Maybe you could sell your body to science?" Eliza suggested helpfully. "Though, given your current Vitality, you'd probably only get the price of a pint of milk and a packet of crisps."
"Shut it, Eliza."
I looked out the window at the rainy London street. If I couldn't win the lottery, I'd have to create one.
"There's only one way," I muttered, my mind racing through the schematics I'd memorized from the 'Great Collapse' of 2036. "I need to sell some 'junk.' Things that are considered scrap in the future but would be 'Black-Market Gold' in 2026. I have the blueprints for a localized signal-dampener that could shut down a city block. Or a battery cell that lasts ten years on a single charge."
"Selling 2036 'trash' as 2026 'treasures'?" Eliza's voice took on a gleeful, wicked edge. "Oh, Mason. That's not just brilliant. That's 'Hot Money.' The kind that gets people killed."
"In London? People get killed for a 'dodgy' look in Brixton," I grunted, pushing off the wall. "If I want to build a system that saves the world, I'm going to have to get my hands very, very dirty."
I headed for the exit, my weak heart fluttering with a mix of exhaustion and adrenaline. The 'Fragile Genius' was about to become the 'Underground Merchant.'
[SYSTEM LOG: TRANSACTION PROTOCOL INITIATED]
[OBJECTIVE: LIQUIDATE FUTURE-TECH SCRAP]
[TARGET: LONDON UNDERGROUND BLACK MARKET]
[MASON STATUS: POOR, TIRED, BUT DANGEROUS]
"Let's go, Eliza. We have some 'trash' to pitch."