She had always been a soldier... even before she ever touched a weapon.
Alexia wasn't born for war, but the world gave her no choice. At five years old, she was clutching a stuffed doll in the corner of her home when the sky exploded in a flash of blue. The first rift had opened above the Silas-9 settlement. There was no time to run. Screams, ruptures, then silence. Her parents vanished in a blink—no bodies, no goodbyes. Just nothingness.
From that day on, Alexia became a number in the system. No time to cry. No one to hear her even if she did. Inside the Coalition's training facilities, she was sculpted into something beyond human—into a tool. At ten, she was outperforming full cadets in simulated missions. At twelve, she joined her first reconnaissance squad. By fifteen, she was the sole survivor of a failed border operation. And at twenty-three, she stood at the core of Project Nexus—the only scientific endeavor that dared to challenge time and space.
But nothing prepared her for this.
---
When she opened her eyes, the ground was solid beneath her, and the ceiling above looked familiar... but wrong. She sat up slowly, her head spinning, heart pounding. She was inside the Nexus Lab—or a version of it. No fire. No sirens. No shattered equipment. Just silence.
Too silent.
She walked carefully through the corridor, her green eyes scanning every shadow, every terminal, every sign. Her chestnut hair, once tightly tied, now hung loosely and scattered across her shoulders.
A flickering console caught her attention. She stepped closer.
Date: August 26, 2491
Her breath caught.
That date… the day before the first rift tears open the sky. The beginning of everything.
"Impossible," she muttered.
But she didn't need anyone to confirm it. She knew. She had studied this moment in countless reports, simulations, and archives. She knew the exact hour the sky would split, the name of the first city to fall, the scientist who would die screaming as the breach devoured the lab.
And now, she was here. Alone.
---
She moved through the lab with cautious determination. Were there others? Did the Nexus device throw her back alone—or had it scattered her team across space and time?
The comms room was partially functional. Dusty old terminals blinked in protest as she powered one up. Static. Distorted signals. No response.
Her mind raced.
"This isn't the Nexus facility I knew." The structure was similar, but the layout and equipment were older, rougher. A prototype, maybe? That meant this wasn't just the past… it was the early past.
She had gone further than she realized.
She stepped toward a window. The sky outside was pristine. Blue. Peaceful. She hadn't seen a sky like that in over a decade. It didn't soothe her—it haunted her.
She sat against the wall, drawing her knees in.
In less than 24 hours, the sky would split. The first creature would emerge. Soldiers would panic. Governments would scramble and fail. Millions would die, and the world would fracture before coming together under a regime far more controlling than it ever admitted.
Alexia remembered all of it.
And she alone carried that knowledge.
---
From her inner pocket, she pulled out a slim data chip. It contained tactical records, experimental technologies, rift patterns—information that wouldn't exist for another century.
She stared at it.
"If I use this now… everything could change."
But change came with a cost.
Could she trust herself to rewrite history? Could she find allies in a world that hadn't yet seen the horrors she knew? Would one step now echo into disaster—or salvation?
No answers. Only weight.
But she wasn't that little girl anymore.
---
She stood, brushing the dust from her palms.
"If I'm a tool," she whispered, "then I choose how I'm used."
Her gaze returned to the final active screen before it dimmed completely.
The countdown to catastrophe had begun.