---
I. The Void
I opened my eyes slowly—too slowly, like peeling dried glue from skin.
Darkness.
Not the comforting dark of a lab at midnight, or even the choking black of the time machine’s vortex. This was *nothingness*. No ground. No sky. Just me, tumbling endlessly, limbs flopping like a broken marionette.
What—?
I twisted mid-air, forcing my legs downward through sheer will. Better. At least now I wasn’t falling upside down like some slaughtered animal.
The last thing I remembered was Karen’s hologram flickering in Hana’s lab. The numbers. The warnings. Then—
Gravity shifted.
My descent slowed, then stopped altogether. I floated there, suspended, heart pounding loud enough to echo in this soundless hell.
Then the void answered.
---
II. The Walls of Memory
Two walls erupted from the darkness—infinite, towering.
Left side: My life. Bright. Warm. Strings of silver light connecting each memory like constellations.
- Mom kissing my scraped knee when I was six.
- Shizumori laughing hysterically as I shocked myself on a loose wire.
- Hana’s hands wrapping bandages around my burns.
Right side: Me. But not me.
Same face. Same voice. But—
- Me standing in a lavish bedroom, watching blood drip from my fingers onto a sleeping man’s face.
- Me methodically cleaning a knife while a woman sobbed at my feet, begging for her children.
- Me smiling at my reflection, whispering: "They’ll never touch her again."
The strings here weren’t silver. They were black, barbed, stitching the memories together like crude surgical wire.
I reached out—
---
III. The Flood
The walls crashed together.
Memories detonated in my skull—blurry, fragmented—except one.
I didn’t arrive on March 2nd, 2025.
I came earlier.
A week earlier.
The bruises. The burns. The ache in my ribs.
Not from time travel.
From fighting- no, hunting.
The images came sharp as knife points:
- Me kicking down a door, the smell of expensive cologne and gun oil.
- A man screaming as I showed him photos of his grandchildren. "Recognize them? They’ll work for Prometheus one day."
- My hands around a woman’s throat, her nails scraping my arms as I whispered: "Your son will help torture my mother."
And the worst part?
I remembered enjoying it.
---
IV. The Lie
The void spat me back into silence.
The walls were gone. The strings were gone.
Only the truth remained:
I’d been here before.
I’d killed before.
And someone had made me forget.
The darkness trembled.
Somewhere in the abyss, something that wore my face smiled.
---
V. The Return
I blinked—
—and the void was gone.
The sterile white lights of Hana’s lab burned my eyes. The smell of antiseptic and coffee. The hum of computers. My fingers dug into the arms of the chair I was sitting in, as if I needed to convince myself it was real.
What the hell was that?
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
Hana’s voice cut through the fog:
"I contacted her, just like you asked."
I looked up. She was scrolling through a tablet, the list of scientists we needed to protect glowing on the screen.
"What?" My throat felt raw.
Hana glanced at me, then frowned. "The plastic surgeon? My friend? You were very insistent about it earlier."
A cold drip slid down my spine. "I… didn’t ask you that."
I wasn't even here, I didn't even talk to granny just now, so who did ?
Now her frown deepened. She stepped closer, studying my face. Then, oddly relieved:
"Oh. Your eyes are back to normal. Good. I was worried for a second."
"What are you talking about?"
She didn’t answer. Just pressed a hand to my forehead. "You’re burning up. Go rest. We’ll talk later."
I wanted to argue. To demand answers. But the weight of the memories—*the killings*—sagged my bones. I nodded.
"Karen," I said, placing the AI on the table. "Listen to every command Granny Hana and Grandpa Ren give you. No exceptions."
Karen’s hologram flickered in acknowledgment.
---
VI. The Nightmare’s Edge
My room was too quiet.
I lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling, but all I saw were the walls from the void—the other me, the blood, the things I’d done and forgotten.
The sheets stuck to my sweat-drenched skin. Every time I closed my eyes:
- A man’s choked scream.
- The slick warmth of blood between my fingers.
- The rightness I’d felt in those moments.
I turned onto my side, gripping the pillow like it could strangle the memories.
Sleep came anyway.
And with it—
—the nightmare began.
---
VII. The Nightmare Unfolds
I watched from above as I stepped out of the time machine's afterglow.
No, Not me. Not really.
This version of Shinra Nishi didn't stumble. Didn't gasp at the unfamiliar skyline. As his boots hit the cracked pavement of February 23rd, 2025, he simply inhaled—deep, measured—as if tasting the timeline itself.
"Decades early, Interesting" he mused, looking at a news paper on the ground. Then running a thumb along the spine of our notebook. "Perfect."
Where I had panicked, he smiled.
Where I hesitated, he moved with the certainty of a scalpel slicing flesh.
---
VIII. The Surgeon's Work
First Cut: The Yamazaki Estate
He entered through the nursery window.
The child's parents woke to find him sitting at the foot of their bed, our notebook open to a dog-eared page. "Kaito Yamazaki," he read aloud.
"Your son. In 2053, he'll invent the neural clamps that keep test subjects conscious during vivisection."
The father lunged.
A single precise strike to the trachea. As the man choked, "The Reflection" turned to the mother.
"Look at the photo. Recognize his smile? He'll use it while explaining how long a person can survive without skin."
The scalpel flashed.
Second Incision: The Wei Apartment
The pregnant woman backed into a corner, hands protectively cradling her stomach.
"I'll disappear tonight! He'll never know this child!"
"But he will." The Reflection tapped our notebook.
I wanted to scream, I wanted him to stop, but i couldnt. There was nothing I could do. I was just reliving memories, I was nothing but a ghost in this world.
The reflection pointing the knife now to her chin, said:
"And your daughter will calculate exactly how much pain a human body can endure before the mind shatters. Shall I demonstrate her work?"
Her screams lasted precisely 37 seconds.
---
IX. The Anesthesia
By dawn on February 28th, the Reflection paused outside a boarded-up clinic.
His hands—*my hands*—shook slightly as he prepared the syringe. "You're fighting too hard now," he murmured to himself. To me.
The needle slid into our jugular with practiced ease.
"Sleep," he whispered as the world dissolved into static. "And forget your weakness."
---
X. The Patient Awakens
I woke screaming.
Not metaphorically. My throat tore raw with it.
The bedroom door burst open—Hana, wild-eyed, a medkit in hand. But all I could see were the phantom bloodstains on my fingers.
The truth coiled in my gut like a parasite:
The Reflection wasn't some fractured piece of me.
He was the masterpiece.
And I was just the sedative.
XI. The Weight of the Knife
The memory hit me like a bullet to the spine.
The woman’s stomach. The way the blade parted skin like wet paper. The sound she made—not a scream, but a choked, animal noise, like her lungs had forgotten how to work.
And the other me had watched. Had smiled.
Now, staring at Granny Hana’s face—her wide, worried eyes, the way her hands hovered like she wanted to fix me—I realized:
I did that.
MY hands did that.
Bile surged up my throat. I gagged, fingers clawing at my own neck like I could rip the memories out through my skin. My lungs burned. The room tilted.
Hana rushed forward. "Shinra—!"
"P-please…" I choked out, stumbling back until my shoulders hit the wall.
"Don’t… don’t touch me."
I slid to the floor, gasping. Every breath felt like glass in my chest.
Hana froze, her face crumbling. "Shinra, you’re scaring me. Let me—"
"I’ll stain you," I whispered.
Because that’s what I was now.
A walking crime scene.
Nothing more than a sick murderer who would kill a pregnant woman to achieve my twisted sense of justice.
I was no hero, I wasn't the one who would save the world. I'm nothing but a killer.
My hands are stained with the blood of innocent lives, I was walking over corpses of people that did nothing wrong...
END OF CHAPTER 8
To be continued.