Return of the Destroyers: And the Coming of Their Makers
I came back from the future with an advantage and one thing nobody would consider a plan.
The advantage is that I know what is coming. The game that took over every VR system on the planet, the tower that rose from it, the floors nobody reached, the things that happened to the people who tried. I watched all of it once already. I died inside it. And then something, or someone, sent me back three years before any of it began and gave me no instructions of what I should do useful with the time.
Here is what I have decided to do with the time.
Take everything.
Not in the way people mean when they say it as ambition. In the specific, literal sense. The knowledge the floors are holding. The answers waiting at the end of something nobody in my original timeline survived long enough to reach, not even me.
They sent me back to save humanity. I am unconvinced of that role.
What I will do instead is let the world become what it was always going to become, move through it faster and further than anyone who does not carry four years of future memory could manage, and see what is waiting at the end of all of it with my own eyes.
My name is Harlan Halad. I am a demon by species, a returned man by circumstance, and a greedy bastard by nature.
The game called Lahtan Grandol will begin.