Hours of Eternity

Opening Monologue:

Ninety-nine deaths.
Ninety-nine loops of ten minutes each—each one a cage, each one a crucible.

His fingers curled tighter around the edge of the counter. The familiar chill of the laminate surface dug into his skin, grounding him in a place he had died more times than he could count.

But this time…
This time was different.

When death took him for the hundredth time, the void didn’t pull him back into the same claustrophobic script. No fluorescent buzz. No 11:33 PM on the clock. No breathless countdown to violence.

Instead, he woke up ten hours earlier.

1:33 PM.

Broad daylight. A sunlit living room. The scent of instant noodles and dust motes drifting like lazy ghosts through the stale air.

A dry, rattling laugh clawed up his throat.
Was this mercy? Was this mockery?

Ten hours.
Not ten minutes.

He had asked for a chance to win.

He knew what was coming. The faces. The boots. The silence before the slaughter. He had memorized the pattern of his own dying like a song.

The hundredth death had been different, though.
He hadn’t waited.
He’d fought.
He’d killed.
And rather than run, rather than explain, rather than give them a reason to ruin what little he had left—
He had ended it on his own terms.

A gun in his mouth. A squeeze. Darkness.

But then—
Sunlight.

The sound of a fan lazily whirring above.

His sister’s voice, light and untouched by horror, filtered in from the bedroom.
“Big brother? You okay? You’re just… staring.”

He turned, slowly.

There she was.

Alive. Unscarred. Still whole.

And for a moment, he couldn’t breathe.

This time, he could change that.

This time, she wouldn’t cry over a body that vanished into time.

He stood up, hands trembling—not with fear, but with purpose.
He had ten hours.

He could warn the police.
He could disappear.
He could find the people who kept resetting the world around him and end it before it began.

Or—

A darker thought stirred.

He could hunt them.

Someone had built this cage.
Someone had chosen him as the rat.

And now the rat had teeth.

He looked down at his shaking hands, at the trembling light painting the floor.

“Let’s see who’s watching,” he whispered.

Then louder:
“Let’s see what breaks first.”

This humble one, Lonely Eternal, walks a new path.
And this time, he’s not walking alone.