The WyrmKin's claw pierced through his chest.

  Jonah felt the pressure first, an impossible force concentrated into a single point, then the wet heat as scales sharper than reinforced magical steel punched through ribs and sternum. Blood filled his mouth, not the coppery tang from a bitten tongue, but the deep, wrong taste of internal hemorrhaging.

  His mana reserves showed empty once more. Had been for the last fourteen minutes of fighting.

  He had used every last drop, yet it accomplished nothing.

  Jonah looked up into the predator slits the WyrmKin called eyes, unable to voice his regret or anger.

  "You all were arrogant," it hissed in garbled Common Tower. "Rash to face us when you are so weak and pathetic."

  He could have shouted and raged at it, but he didn't.

  His thoughts remained locked onto his brothers and sisters.

  Humanity relied on his shoulders.

  "Retreat," he whispered. The word bubbling past torn lung tissue.

  The command array he'd maintained across the battlefield flickered and then died as the last bits of external mana from his barrier spell vanished, leaving him truly without the divine energy affected by his will. Twenty thousand human fighters, the last real strength humanity possessed, lost his tactical overlay in an instant. That was the final step as they lost this event war.

  The WyrmKin, barely a juvenile by its species' standards, lifted him off the ground. Jonah's feet dangled. His staff clattered against stone.

  I should've known. The thought arrived with perfect clarity. The Zha'thik never colonized for a good reason... They showed up only to exterminate.

  Level 33 had fallen in six days. Humanity had celebrated, drunk on victory, convinced their momentum was unstoppable. Jonah had stood in the command center and watched people dance, accepted their praise, and believed, just for a moment, that his calculations were flawless.

  Three hours into Level 34, half their forces were corpses.

  The WyrmKin's second claw found his stomach. Casual, almost exploratory. Finding the right angles to pull him apart.

  Sarish's voice crackled through the failing mana-link within his mind, too weak to send any messages without mana within his core. "Jonah! The barrier..."

  Static consumed the rest. The barrier he'd designed to hold their fallback position was probably already broken. Sarish had never been strong enough to maintain his enchantments without his active support. Smart, yes, a brilliant tactical mind, but her mana manipulation was fifth-tier at best, and this fight demanded ninth.

  I should've trained her better.

  The regret tasted worse than the blood.

  His vision fragmented. The obsidian sky of Level 34 strobed between black and a grey that matched the wyrm's scales. Somewhere below, Ivan was screaming orders.

  Ivan, who'd followed him through thirty-three levels, who'd believed every plan Jonah laid out.

  I should've told him the higher we climbed, the worse the odds became.

  But he hadn't. Because admitting uncertainty would've broken morale, and broken morale would've killed them floors ago.

  The WyrmKin pulled its claws in opposite directions.

  Jonah's last thought before the darkness claimed him wasn't about humanity's extinction. Not about the faces of everyone he'd led to slaughter.

  It was simpler than that.

  I wasn't strong enough. I was never enough.

  Jonah's hand snapped up, fingers already calling upon his mana and activating his most powerful attack spell: Flames of the Mad Titan.

  Nothing respond.

  No mana answered his call. The familiar reservoir that had sat in his chest for decades, vast, deep, and precisely controlled, was gone. Not empty, but gone, like reaching for a limb and finding only air.

  His lungs seized.

  He gasped, the sound raw and undignified, and his eyes snapped open to white ceiling tiles and fluorescent lighting.

  Not obsidian sky. Not the charnel field of Level 34.

  Jonah lurched upright. His body responded wrong, too light, too quick, joints moving without the grinding ache of old combat injuries. His hands came up, smooth, lacking burn scars from that disastrous expedition into the Flame Wastes on Level 19 and the missing fingertip from the Frost Giant encounter on Level 28.

  His bed. His apartment. The same water stain on the ceiling he'd stared at for three years before the System arrived.

  Before it arrived...?

  Those thoughts crashed into him like a hammer blow to the base of his skull.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  Jonah threw himself toward his desk, knocking over the chair in his haste. His laptop sat closed, the same model he'd owned when,

  The date in the corner of the screen read April 14th, 2025.

  The System initialized on April 15th at 6:47 AM Eastern Standard Time. He'd been standing in his kitchen, about to burn toast, when the blue screens had appeared.

  Forty-nine years ago.

  No, not ago, but ahead.

  His breath came in short, sharp bursts. His medical training, the rudimentary field medicine he'd picked up on Level 7, cataloged the symptoms automatically: hyperventilation, shock, and signs of a growing migraine. Possible psychotic break.

  Except psychotic breaks didn't explain the knowledge sitting in his skull. They didn't explain how he could still feel the phantom weight of his staff, the one he'd commissioned from the Titanforged on Level 22. They didn't explain why he could list every major item location through Level 33, every hidden dungeon, every skill shard worth claiming.

  They didn't explain why he remembered dying.

  The WyrmKin's claw punching through his chest. The taste of blood. Sarish's voice cutting out. Ivan's screaming. His last thoughts.

  I wasn't strong enough.

  Jonah's hands were shaking. He pressed them flat against the desk, felt the cheap laminate under his palms, so different from the enchanted workbenches he'd used in the Tower, and forced his breathing to slow down.

  He needed facts to keep his head level.

  Fact one: He possessed memories spanning forty-nine years that hadn't happened yet.

  Fact two: Those memories were precise. Not dream-logic vague, but crystal clear. He could recite the skill description for Mana Reinforcement III word-for-word and draw a map to the hidden cache on Level 4 that contained a Perfect Clarity shard. More importantly, he had memorized every single spell matrix that he had stowed away within the system as skills.

  Fact three: His body was twenty-six again—uninjured and untrained, but young and unscarred by many wars. The decade of combat conditioning was gone, replaced with the soft muscles of someone whose primary exercise was walking to the corner store.

  Fact four: He had roughly sixteen hours before the System arrived.

  The shaking in his hands stopped as calm settled over him.

  Jonah had somehow survived a regression. The phenomenon wasn't theoretical; he'd found references to Temporal Fae on Level 31 who supposedly possessed the capability. But the mana cost would've been astronomical, and the documentation had suggested it required willing participation from the target and the sacrifice of nearly a dozen of the Temporal Fae for it to happen.

  It should have been impossible, unless...

  Someone or something had sent him back.

  Why? Why would someone do this?

  That question could wait.

  Humanity had climbed to Level 33 before the Zha'thik exterminated them. In the grand scope of the Tower, 441 levels, according to the System documentation he'd uncovered on Level 29, they'd barely scratched the surface. Other races, the ones who'd been at this for centuries, had reached heights humanity couldn't imagine.

  The Titanforged, who'd helped him craft his staff, were on Level 87. The Void Striders were past Level 200. And somewhere, at the top, the Celestials supposedly stood.

  Humanity's best had gotten them to 33.

  Jonah had been humanity's best.

  Which meant humanity's best wasn't good enough.

  The regrets surfaced all at once, a cascade that threatened to drag him under: Sarish, who'd deserved better training; Ivan, who'd deserved honesty; the other mages in his academy, all the students he'd accepted because they showed promise but not potential; the fighters he'd equipped with good gear instead of perfect gear because he'd been conserving resources for higher levels.

  Every choice made with humanity's limitations in mind. Every decision that assumed human meant a ceiling on capability.

  I should've–

  No.

  Jonah's jaw clenched.

  He was done with "should've." The regrets could fuel him or drown him, and he'd already died once. He wouldn't make that mistake twice.

  Resolution crystallized in his mind, sharp and clear as a properly cut mana crystal.

  He needed to be the greatest archmage to ever touch mana. Not the greatest human mage; there were species in the Tower that could conceptualize magic in ways humanity's neurology couldn't quite grasp. The Void Striders wove spells through dimensions humans couldn't perceive without extensive augmentation. The Celestials supposedly manipulated fundamental forces directly.

  But Jonah had human determination, human creativity, and human stubbornness. Plus knowledge of thirty-three levels worth of hidden treasures, skill shards, and magical techniques. He knew where the good stuff was hidden, knew which early choices led to dead ends, knew which power systems scaled and which plateaued.

  The Tower rewarded preparation and punished ignorance. Jonah wouldn't be ignorant this time.

  Second resolution: no regrets. He'd train who needed training, tell the truths that needed telling, and make the hard calls early instead of letting problems fester. Sarish would get proper instruction from day one. Ivan would understand the real odds. Everyone would know what they were walking into.

  All of his rivals would be brought to heel before the first and second Human War against one another.

  Some would be brought into the fold before they lost their way, while others would be killed before they got too close.

  Third resolution: no repeated mistakes. He'd identified his weaknesses over forty-nine years of climbing. Insufficient mana capacity would be fixed. Poor close-quarters combat ability would be addressed. Limited equipment in early levels because he'd been too cautious wouldn't happen this time.

  His previous life had made him humanity's champion.

  This life would make him something more.

  Jonah stood. His apartment was small, cluttered with the detritus of a life that would never happen: books he'd never finish, plans for a career that would evaporate when the System arrived, and a half-packed gym bag because he'd kept meaning to start working out.

  He grabbed the bag and dumped out the contents.

  First priority: physical conditioning. His old body had been enhanced through years of System-granted stats and magical augmentation. This one was baseline human. Sixteen hours wouldn't build muscle, but it would start waking up neural pathways. He needed his body to remember how to move, even if the strength wasn't there yet.

  Second priority: mental preparation. He needed to review everything he knew about the initial System integration. The tutorial phase lasted seventy-two hours. Humanity got dropped into a starter zone with basic monsters and a simple objective: survive and claim a settlement stone. Most people panicked. Jonah had barely survived his first encounter with a goblin.

  Not this time!

  Third priority was positioning. The System would initialize globally, but people would appear in tutorial zones based on geographic location. Jonah knew which zones had the best hidden caches nearby. He needed to be in the right place when it started. It also had a certain person he recalled coming out from it instead of the bubble he found himself in.

  A swordsman of legend that died glory hunting instead of standing beside humanity.

  He changed into athletic clothes, laced up running shoes. His muscles would hate him tomorrow, but tomorrow he'd have System assistance. Today he had to rely on baseline capability.

  The apartment door closed behind him. Dawn was breaking over the city, painting everything in shades of orange and gold. Somewhere out there, millions of people were waking up to their last normal day, going to jobs that wouldn't matter, and worrying about problems that would vanish.

  Jonah started running.

  His breathing turned ragged within two blocks. His legs burned by block five. The route he'd planned, a seven-mile loop that would end at a specific warehouse district, stretched ahead like torture. The very edges of the next bubble instead of the one he had been stuck in previously.

  He kept going.

  Because in sixteen hours, the world would end.

  And in sixteen hours, his real work would begin.