Time slipped by Stanley.

He couldn’t tell if seconds had passed or minutes. All he knew was that by the time he had run up to Nova, she was dead without a shadow of a doubt.

Killed by none other than her brother.

The smell of burnt flesh filled Stanley’s nose before his eyes could even see Nova.

Her face was distorted by the lightning, skin bubbling in places and then charring. Her body was a shrunken husk as if all water inside her had been boiled away. Streaks of lightning scar left through her body where the clothes had been burned away, or plastered onto her skin by burning.

The metal that she had on her was glowing red still, burning deeper into her body.

Garren’s deep and hoarse gasps for breath seemed distant to Stanley’s ears. Stanley didn’t have half a mind to turn toward him at the moment. His own pain flaring in his arm and back seemed distant at the moment.

The only thing that filled him was the sorrow at seeing the girl dead. And yet he couldn’t even weep. He just held her, as he had held the other girl who killed herself right in front of him.

Why did everyone die around him?

A distant thought sprinkled into Stanley’s brain.

Turn back time. Make everything that had happened so that it never had. Turn back time to before she was dead. Before she confronted her brother. Before she had even come here.

Turn back time.

And yet, he couldn’t.

That power was not yet his own. It was something that activated on its own. It was something that activated every time he died.

Should he die?

Should he try killing himself for it to work?

The calmness of his own mind surprised him. A friend had died right in front of him, and he was calmly thinking through things. How could someone be this calm after someone died?

How many deaths did someone have to see before they were no longer affected by it? Had he been through that many deaths already?

Death.

He should die, shouldn’t he? Dying would turn back time, and everything would be alright. He just had to die.

’But I can’t kill myself,’ Stanley thought to himself. ’I can’t kill myself.’

He didn’t know the trigger to turn back time, so he couldn’t be sure if suicide would activate it. It had to be death at someone else’s hands.

Even then, should he die? What if death wasn’t it? What if he didn’t turn back time, and this was only a waste?

He didn’t want to die. He couldn’t leave it to chance.

A memory of a black-haired girl flashed through his head and anger filled the empty void that formed inside him.

He had someone to kill. Well, he had one more person to kill now.

As if coming out of a trance, he immediately turned around and watched the stunned Garren in the distance look at his sister. The sudden movement caught his eyes and the man started at Stanley.

Fear crept into his eyes as he watched Stanley stand.

"You will die today."

Stanley ignored the pain in his body and rushed forward.

As soon as he did that, Garren rushed too, but not toward him. Instead, he staggered toward a pile of burning debris and quickly found what he had been looking for.

A wire lay there and Garren grabbed onto the metal threads that came out of its end. Stanley was still on his way, but in a flash, Garren disappeared.

Stanley had to stop himself. Where had Garren disappeared to?

He looked around, unable to find him. He hadn’t disappeared to somewhere in the room.

’The wire,’ he thought. The last time he had done this, he had disappeared from the basement, all the way here. If he had gone back then...

’The underground parking lot,’ Stanley thought and started walking away. Pain jolted his body with each step, but he couldn’t stop.

He only slowed a little right in front of Nova to look at her one last time. He took a deep breath, the burning flesh hard to ignore, but he did. And he made a promise.

"I will avenge you."

And he walked away.

He ran outside the plaza, peering out into the open sky. The city was still loud and noisy, and Stanley couldn’t tell how much of that was just an everyday thing to the city, and how much of that was Vera’s work at warning the people into fleeing.

He hoped they were fleeing. 𝐟𝗿𝐞𝚎𝚠𝐞𝚋𝕟𝐨𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝕔𝕠𝚖

Gathering up his thoughts again, he ran toward the underground parking lot, only to find it empty. Lights flickered in the ceiling, and the dead lay where they were, but there was no other sou—

A hoarse grunt caught Stanley’s ears. It was faint, but he could hear it.

He quickly followed the sound and arrived next to one of the cars, only to see another horrifying scene.

Fred lay in a heap next to the car. The dent on the car told him that he had been thrown there and then rebounded down.

Stanley quickly went down to check on his vitals, only to find him near death. His body gave the sickly burnt scent that Nova’s did.

"Fred!" Stanley shouted, grabbing the man slowly. But even at just that, the man screamed in pain.

Stanley flinched, but he didn’t know what to do.

"Fred," he said softly, his eyes darting around to search for something to do. He was hurt everywhere, burned everywhere from lightning.

Garren had been here moments ago, and now he was gone once more.

Stanley wanted to go kill him, but he needed to save Fred first. "I need to get you to a doctor," he quickly said, looking at the cars. One of them should have—

"The... bomb..." Fred spoke.

"What?" Stanley turned around, realizing what had been said. He quickly spun and looked at the bomb.

There was an hour and 31 minutes before it exploded.

The number flipped. 1 hour and 30 minutes.

The number flipped again.

"Oh god!" Stanley realized what was happening.

There was only 1 minute and 29 seconds before the bomb went off.