Chapter 1: The Price of Survival
The wind at forty stories tasted of rust, ambition, and the cloying sweetness of Marcus Thorne's cologne.
Leo Vance stood on the exposed concrete floor of the half-finished Titan Tower, a cheap hard hat on his head and a tablet clutched in his hand. Below him, the city sprawled like a circuit board he was dying to redesign. Wasted energy, inefficient systems, flawed designs—it was an offense to logic itself.
A shadow fell over him. "Leo, my boy! Admiring my view?"
Leo didn't turn. He knew that voice, that smug tone that always sounded like it was closing a deal. "Just verifying the tensile strength calculations for the western truss, Marcus."
Marcus Thorne, his boss, clapped him on the shoulder. The gesture was a practiced display of ownership, a reminder of who signed the paychecks. "That's my detail man! That truss was a stroke of genius, wasn't it?"
Leo's jaw tightened. His genius. A design born from three sleepless nights, a design Marcus had initially called "needlessly complex" before presenting it as his own.
"My simulations showed a vulnerability under high wind conditions," Leo said, his voice flat, devoid of the emotion churning in his gut. "Like today."
Marcus's smile didn't waver, but his eyes went cold. It was a look Leo knew well—the look of a predator who's just been told its meal might have a spine. "Your simulations are cautious, Leo. That's why you're a technician, and I'm the visionary." He leaned in, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "You're a great CAD monkey. The best. But leave the big picture to me."
Humiliation, hot and familiar, coiled in Leo's stomach. CAD monkey.
He looked past Marcus's perfectly tailored suit to the western truss. His design. A silent, steel testament to his skill, and a monument to Marcus's theft. But as he stared, a deep, primal wrongness emanated from it. It was more than a feeling; it was a subtle vibration he could feel through the soles of his boots, a low hum of physics being stretched to their breaking point.
He had warned him. In emails. In memos. In a formal report Marcus had "accidentally" deleted from the server.
No one had listened.
Then came the sound.
It wasn't a bang. It was worse. It was a groan. A deep, resonant, and utterly sickening sound, like a giant moaning in its sleep. It was the sound of thousands of tons of steel and concrete surrendering to gravity.
The floor beneath their feet shuddered violently.
A hairline crack shot across the concrete like a bolt of black lightning, racing from the base of the truss directly towards a group of investors Marcus had been schmoozing.
Shouts erupted. The investors, moments ago looking placid and powerful, were now a scrambling mess of flailing limbs and panicked faces.
Marcus froze, his charismatic mask shattering into pure, naked terror. "What... what was that?"
But Leo knew. His eyes were already locked on the western truss. He watched in horrifying slow motion as a single, critical bolt—a model he had specifically flagged as substandard—sheared in half with a deafening CRACK.
A cascade reaction began, metal shrieking as it twisted, rivets popping like gunfire. The elegant design, his design, was coming apart.
"GET BACK!" Leo roared, shoving Marcus and anyone else within reach towards the central elevator core, the most reinforced part of the structure.
Chaos. The world dissolved into a nightmare of noise and motion.
Then, with a final, soul-shaking tear, a forty-foot-long I-beam—the main support girder connected to the failing truss—snapped free from its mooring.
It hung in the air for a fraction of a second, a dark monolith against the grey sky, before it began to fall.
Directly towards him.
Leo's mind went blank. There was no time to run, no time to think. This was it. A fitting end. Crushed by the very flaw he had tried to prevent. The ultimate, final "I told you so," delivered to an audience of one.
He braced for the impact.
And the world went silent.
The roar of collapsing metal, the screams, the whipping wind—all of it vanished into an impossible, profound silence. The plummeting I-beam, a harbinger of his immediate death, was frozen in the air less than twenty feet above him. Dust motes hung suspended like stars in a dead galaxy.
A pane of crystalline blue light, more solid and real than the world around it, materialized before his eyes. Words began to type themselves across it in a clean, sans-serif font.
[System Notification: Catastrophic Environmental Threat Detected.]
[Analyzing Subject Lifesign...]
[Subject deemed... architecturally significant.]
[Initializing Emergency Protocol: The Tycoon System.]
[Welcome, User Leo Vance. The world is a draft. It is time to make your edits.]
Leo stared, his mind refusing to process the impossible sight. A system? Was this the final, desperate firing of a dying brain?
[Threat Analysis Complete: Falling I-Beam (Carbon Steel, 18.2 Tons).]
[Estimated Time to Impact: 0.07 seconds.]
[Current User Survival Probability: 0%.]
His heart hammered against his ribs. 0.07 seconds. Not enough time to breathe, let alone think.
[First Foundational Choice:]
[You possess a baseline of Conceptual Energy. You may now perform your first Edit.]
Two options appeared below, each glowing with an ominous, predatory light.
> Option 1: Edit Self. Apply [Concept: Structural Reinforcement] to User's skeletal structure. Survive impact.
> Cost: 95% of Total Lifespan.
> Option 2: Edit Object. Apply [Concept: Deconstruction] to Falling I-Beam. Disassemble object into component molecules.
> Cost: 99% of available Conceptual Energy. Execution Time: 10 seconds.
Leo's blood ran cold. The options were a cruel, sadistic joke.
One would let him live, but as what? An old man in a 28-year-old's body? It was a slow death sentence.
The other was instant. Ten seconds of execution time when he had less than a tenth of one. It was a mathematical impossibility. A lie.
Both were death. One was just gift-wrapped differently.
He was a technician, a problem-solver. There was always another way, a hidden angle, a flaw in the design. He scanned the screen frantically, his mind racing faster than it ever had, trying to find a loophole, a footnote, anything.
His eyes caught a third line, greyed out and inert, a ghost on the screen.
> Option 3: ??? [Prerequisites Not Met]
The System was taunting him. Showing him a door but hiding the key. He was trapped. Given a god's power with no way to use it.
The silent countdown, 0.07 seconds, echoed in the dead space of his mind like a ticking clock, each phantom tick a step closer to annihilation.
He was going to die.
Unless…
An idea, insane and desperate, sparked in the darkness. The options were flawed. Option 1 destroyed his future. Option 2 was too slow. But what if… what if he didn't use them to solve the problem? What if he used them to change the problem?
He focused all his intent, not on himself, not on the beam, but on the world around him.
"System," he whispered, his voice a raw nerve. "Edit Time. Apply [Concept: Temporal Deceleration] to the immediate environment."
The screen flickered, a tremor of surprise running through the crystalline text.
[Command Conflict. Temporal edits are a Tier-5 function. User is Tier-0.]
[However... analyzing user-proposed solution...]
[Creative application of available assets detected. User is attempting to leverage the 'Execution Time' of Option 2 as a functional asset to create a localized time dilation effect.]
[Logic is... sound. But reckless.]
[Executing this action will expend all Conceptual Energy and place the User in a state of 'Energy Debt', with unknown physiological consequences. Your body may fail. Your mind may collapse. This action is irreversible.]
[Proceed? Y/N]
Leo stared at the warning. Annihilation in 0.07 seconds, or a gamble that could erase him from existence in a different way. It wasn't a choice between life and death. It was a choice between two different methods of execution.
He was a numbers guy. And right now, a 0% chance of survival was facing off against a chance that was, at the very least, greater than zero.
His will, a phantom finger in this frozen world, moved towards the 'Y'.