The cellar was dark, smelling of damp earth and old cardboard, but it was safe from the flames.

Klaus led her to the small, ground-level egress window at the back of the foundation.

’Here... it’s here.’

His mother kicked the glass out, hoisted him through the opening, and quickly climbed out after him.

They spilled out onto the cool, damp grass of the backyard.

The night air hit Klaus’s lungs like ice water. He collapsed onto his back, coughing violently, hacking up the black soot he had inhaled.

Behind them, the house was a towering inferno, flames licking high into the night sky, illuminating the neighborhood in a hellish orange glow.

Sirens wailed in the far distance, drawing closer.

His mother scrambled across the grass on her hands and knees. She threw her arms around Klaus, pulling his small body tight against her chest and she buried her face in his hair, sobbing uncontrollably.

"You did it," she cried, rocking him back and forth on the lawn. "You saved us, my brave boy. You saved us. Thank you. Thank you so much..."

She pulled back just enough to look at his soot-stained face. She raised her trembling hand and gently, lovingly patted the top of his head.

The physical touch was a catalyst.

An overwhelming wave of pure euphoria violently exploded in Klaus’s chest.

It was a rush of relief so potent it felt like a heavy drug flooding his nervous system.

He had fixed it... The agonizing, rotting guilt that had plagued his entire life was instantly erased.

The crushing burden of his mother’s death was gone. His family was whole as he had used his second chance perfectly.

Klaus closed his eyes, leaning into her embrace, a genuine, tearful smile spreading across his young face.

Before he could even fully process the overwhelming joy, the world warped.

The transition wasn’t a sudden violent crash.

The cool grass and the roaring flames simply melted away like hot wax, seamlessly replaced by a completely new set of sensory inputs.

The smell of smoke vanished.

The air was suddenly thick with the chemical odor of motor oil, gasoline, and cheap burnt coffee.

The hum of a busted radio playing classic rock filtered through the ambient noise.

Klaus opened his eyes.

He was standing on a stained concrete floor.

He wasn’t five years old anymore... His perspective had shifted upward and he looked down at his hands; they were larger and rougher as well.

He was in his early teens.

He recognized the environment instantly.

It was a small, rundown, two-bay mechanic shop. The walls were lined with pegboards covered in greasy tools, and a massive rolling red toolbox sat in the corner.

Suspended high in the air on a heavy hydraulic lift was a rusted, beat-up sedan.

Standing directly underneath the suspended car, holding a heavy wrench, was a man.

He was broad-shouldered, wearing a pair of dark blue coveralls completely stained with black grease.

His face was lined with exhaustion, a smudge of oil resting on his cheek, but his eyes were kind.

It was his father...

Klaus didn’t question the sudden jump in time.

To his regressor mindset, the universe was simply fast-forwarding him to the next pivotal tragedy he needed to correct.

He was being allowed to patch the holes in his broken timeline one by one.

In the original timeline, his father had died right here in this garage. A faulty fuel line on a suspended car had leaked. A single, errant spark from a welding torch had ignited the fumes.

The resulting explosion had leveled the entire building, killing his father instantly and throwing Klaus into isolation.

Klaus stood near the open garage door. He looked at his father and he looked at the suspended sedan.

He saw the slow, steady drip of clear liquid falling from the undercarriage, pooling near a running space heater on the concrete floor.

The spark was seconds away.

Klaus didn’t hesitate. The desperate, drug-like need to fix his broken life completely overrode any instinct for self-preservation.

"Dad!" Klaus screamed, his teenage voice cracking.

He sprinted forward.

He didn’t try to warn him or explain the danger.

He crossed the greasy concrete floor in three massive strides, grabbed the heavy fabric of his father’s coveralls, and hauled him backward with the frantic hysterical strength of a terrified son.

"Whoa, Klaus! What are you doing—" his father started to ask, stumbling backward as he dropped his wrench with a loud clatter.

Klaus didn’t answer.

He wrapped his arms around his father’s waist and tackled him horizontally, physically dragging the larger man out of the open bay doors and onto the hard asphalt of the parking lot outside.

They hit the ground hard, tumbling over the pavement.

A fraction of a second later, the fumes ignited.

KRA-KOOM!

The explosion was deafening.

It wasn’t a cinematic fireball; it was a detonation instead.

The shockwave blew the heavy glass windows of the garage outward in a lethal shower of shrapnel.

A wave of blistering, searing heat washed over Klaus’s back, singeing the hair on his arms.

The hydraulic lift inside failed catastrophically.

The heavy sedan crashed down onto the concrete floor, instantly engulfed in a towering inferno that rapidly consumed the entire mechanic shop.

The building groaned and buckled as the metal roof caving in on itself.

Klaus lay on the asphalt, his ears ringing loudly, shielding his head from the falling debris.

Slowly, the ringing faded, replaced by the crackling of the massive fire and the distant wail of approaching sirens.

Klaus pushed himself up onto his elbows.

His father was sitting on the asphalt a few feet away. The older man was staring wide-eyed at the burning ruins of his livelihood.

The color had completely drained from his grease-stained face... He realized exactly how close he had just come to being a charred corpse buried under tons of burning metal.

His father slowly turned his head, looking at his teenage son. His mouth trembled uncontrollably.

Tears welled up in his tired eyes, cutting clean tracks down his soot-covered cheeks.

He didn’t care about the garage... He didn’t care about the money... He crawled across the rough asphalt and wrapped his thick strong arms tightly around Klaus, burying his face in his son’s shoulder.

"My God," his father sobbed. "You saved me. I was right under it. Klaus... you saved my life."

He pulled back, gripping Klaus’s shoulders. He looked at his son with overwhelming pride and gratitude.

He reached up and firmly patted the back of Klaus’s head.

The emotional reward hit Klaus again, stacking exponentially on top of the euphoria from saving his mother.

It was a blinding suffocating rush of pure psychological fulfillment.

He was fixing everything... He was patching the massive, bleeding holes in his soul.

The trauma that had defined him was being completely unwritten.

He was going to have a normal life... He was going to have a family...

As the sirens drew closer, the world warped for the third time.

The heat of the burning garage and the smell of gasoline faded, replaced by a crisp cool autumn breeze.

The rough asphalt turned into smooth concrete.

Klaus was standing on a quiet suburban sidewalk. The sky above was a dull overcast gray that was threatening rain.

Brown and orange leaves drifted lazily across the street.

He looked down at his hands. He was older again. He was eighteen, dressed in his dark, slightly oversized high school uniform.

He had a heavy backpack slung over one shoulder and he was walking home toward his apartment but he wasn’t alone.

Walking right beside him, her arm looped tightly and possessively through his, was a girl.

She had straight, dark hair that fell past her shoulders and striking, intensely focused brown eyes.

She wore the same school uniform, but hers was neat and perfectly pressed and she smelled of vanilla.

It was Melanie.

In his original timeline, Melanie had been his high school girlfriend. She was the only person who had paid any attention to him after he withdrew into himself following the deaths of his parents but her attention hadn’t been healthy.

She was dangerously obsessive. She had stalked him for months. She knew his daily routine, she knew his favorite foods, and, most terrifyingly, she knew exactly what had happened to his parents...

She had used that tragedy to wedge herself into his life, positioning herself as the only person who could truly understand his pain.

The young woman was currently leaning heavily against his side, practically pressing her entire body weight into him as they walked down the quiet sidewalk.

"You’re so quiet today, Klaus," Melanie murmured.

She tilted her head, hovering her lips just inches from his ear. "Are you thinking about them again? You don’t need to be sad. I told you, I’m right here. I’m always going to be right here. I’ll take care of you forever."

Her breath tickled his neck.

It was an invasive proximity that he usually tolerated because it was the only human contact he had.

Klaus’s heart began to beat faster. The physical sensation of dread started to creep through his veins, warring with the lingering euphoria of the previous saves.

He knew exactly what day this was... He knew exactly what street corner they were approaching...

This was his third, and final regret.

In the original timeline, Melanie’s constant hovering teasing had finally grated on his nerves. As they approached the intersection, she had leaned in to kiss his cheek.

Annoyed and wanting some personal space, Klaus had playfully, thoughtlessly swatted his hand at her face to push her away.

The slight shove had caused her to stumble backward. She had stepped off the curb and onto the asphalt.

She hadn’t even had time to scream.

A speeding car, running a red light, had struck her at sixty miles an hour.

Her death had been the final straw. It was the moment Klaus had completely broken.

He blamed himself entirely. If he hadn’t pushed her, she would have lived. The guilt had driven him into absolute isolation, locking himself in his room, playing video games until his heart eventually gave out.

"I love you so much, Klaus," Melanie whispered, her fingers trailing lightly down his arm. "Do you love me?"

They were approaching the curb and the crosswalk light was red.

In the distance, the rising roar of a speeding car engine began to build.

It sounded like the soundtrack to a horror movie, growing louder and more menacing with every passing second.

Klaus’s breathing grew shallow as his adrenaline spiked. This was it... The final piece of the puzzle!

Melanie leaned forward, her lips puckering slightly, aiming for his cheek as they reached the edge of the sidewalk.

The roar of the car engine reached a deafening crescendo.

Klaus didn’t swat her away and he didn’t push her.

He turned his entire body toward her.

He wrapped both of his arms around her waist and pulled her violently forward, crushing her against his chest in a tight uncompromising hug.

He pulled her entirely onto the safety of the concrete sidewalk, wrapping his body around hers as a human shield.

"I love you too..." Klaus whispered fiercely into her hair.

VROOOOOOM!

A massive dark sedan blew through the red light at terrifying speed. The vehicle whizzed past them with the tires screeching loudly as it hit a puddle near the curb, splashing dirty rainwater across Klaus’s calves.

The car missed them completely, disappearing down the street.

Klaus stood on the sidewalk, holding Melanie tightly against his chest. His heart was hammering.

He had done it... He had saved her... He had fixed the final fatal mistake of his life.

His mother was alive...

His father was alive...

His girlfriend was alive...

The trifecta of his trauma was completely erased.

But as Klaus held her in the quiet evening air, something felt wrong.

A sudden jarring feeling violently struck his brain. It felt like a physical spike being driven between his eyes.

He felt the soft fabric of her uniform against his hands. He smelled the vanilla perfume... It was perfect... It was flawless...

Melanie had just whispered.

’Are you thinking about them again? You don’t need to be sad.’

She was talking about his dead parents... She was using his grief to bind him to her...

But... if he had saved his mother in the fire, and he had saved his father from the explosion... then his parents weren’t dead.

He would have never been a lonely broken teenager. He would have never been desperate enough to tolerate Melanie’s obsessive stalking.

This moment on the sidewalk, this specific dynamic between them, could not logically exist in a timeline where his parents survived.

The regression was fake.

The universe hadn’t given him a second chance. It had just stitched his greatest regrets together sequentially into a highlight reel, completely failing to account for the butterfly effect of his own actions.

Klaus’s dark eyes widened.

The comforting warmth in his chest instantly turned into freezing terrifying ice.

"That’s what happened..." Klaus muttered.

He staggered backward, violently breaking the hug. He clutched the sides of his head as a blinding migraine split his skull.

The perfect illusion of the street began to flicker and crack like a corrupted digital screen with the edges of reality tearing away to reveal the blinding white void beneath.

He wasn’t on Earth... He was a regression protagonist in a fake world...

His mind was violently splitting in two.

The intoxicating addictive warmth of the regression... the euphoria of saving his mother from the fire and pulling his father from the explosion clashed.

The timeline was a paradox...

"Ahhh... Gah!" Klaus grunted, squeezing his eyes shut as the agonizing pain tore through his nervous system.

He was breathing heavily, his lungs pulling in shallow ragged gasps of the air.

The street around him began to flicker... The edges of the suburban houses wavered, briefly exposing a terrifying blinding whiteness beneath the textures of the world.

He heard the soft scuff of school shoes on the concrete.

Melanie walked over to him.

She didn’t look concerned by his sudden agonizing collapse. She didn’t ask if he needed a doctor, or if his head was okay.

She crouched down next to him with her knees resting on the sidewalk.

The sweet, loving, obsessive demeanor she had worn just seconds ago melted away.

The transition wasn’t an explosion of malice... it was a chilling drop in humanity.

Her face went entirely slack, her expression becoming profoundly cold and ancient.

She reached out, her perfectly manicured hand brushing against his cheek... Her fingers were no longer warm.

They felt like carved marble, sapping the heat directly from his skin.

"Are you really enjoying it in this world?" Melanie asked.

Her voice had changed.

The pitch was the same, but the feeling behind it was entirely different.

It carried a heavy feeling as if a thousand voices were speaking the exact same words in perfect overlapping synchronization.

It sounded entirely wrong coming from the mouth of a high school girl.

Klaus opened his eyes. He looked at her through the blurry, tear-filled haze of his migraine.

"This... this world?" Klaus asked, his teenage voice trembling with confusion and rising terror.

Melanie nodded slowly, her dark brown eyes staring straight through him.

"Yes, Klaus. This world," she said smoothly, her lips curving into a chilling, perfectly symmetrical smile. "Think about what you have accomplished today... You saved your mother from the ashes... You pulled your father from the blast... You shielded the girl who loves you from the crushing weight of the tires..."

She leaned in closer.

"These were your three greatest regrets," she whispered. "The festering wounds that ruined your life and you have now flawlessly fixed them all. The pain is gone. The trauma is erased. Your family is whole, and you will never have to be alone again."

She tilted her head, her gaze pinning him to the concrete.

"Aren’t you satisfied?" she asked.

The question hung in the glitching air.

High School Klaus... the younger Regret-driven avatar experiencing the simulation stopped fighting the migraine.

The agonizing pain in his brain began to smooth over, forcefully sedated by the temptation of her words.

He looked at the quiet street.

He thought about the tearful, loving hug his mother had given him on the front lawn... He remembered the fierce pride shining in his father’s eyes outside the burning mechanic shop...

He wanted it.

He wanted it so badly it felt like his heart was bleeding... He didn’t want to think about the glitches... He didn’t want to think about the logical paradox... He just wanted to go home and eat dinner with his family...

Tranced and completely overwhelmed by the lure of the illusion, High School Klaus let his hands fall away from his head.

"Yes," High School Klaus whispered. "Yes, I am."

The smile on Melanie’s face widened, stretching just a fraction too far past the limits of human anatomy.

Suddenly, her dark brown irises and pupils dissolved.

Her eyes turned completely, blindingly white, glowing with a dense, terrifying, luminescent power that illuminated the shadows of her face.

The ambient sound of the city... the distant sound of traffic, the rustling of the frozen leaves, the chirping of unseen birds died instantly.

An oppressive vacuum of silence swallowed the street.

"Wouldn’t you like to make this your permanent li—"

RIIIIIP!

The Second King’s hypnotic offer was violently interrupted.

The sound wasn’t a roar or an explosion... It sounded exactly like a massive sheet of thick canvas being torn entirely in half by a pair of invisible, gargantuan hands.

Directly behind the kneeling figure of Melanie, the very fabric of the suburban street violently tore open.

A jagged vertical fissure of pure, swirling darkness ripped through the sky, the sidewalk, and the air itself...

A figure violently forced its way through the tear.

It was Klaus but it wasn’t the naive, seventeen-year-old high school student kneeling on the concrete.

It was the Older Klaus... The Real Klaus...

He looked exactly as he had when he breached the blinding white doors at the top of the Endless Tower.

He was wearing his dark heavy combat trousers and his dark shirt.

Spatters of dried crimson blood from the massacred noble camp still stained his sleeves.

His sword was gripped tightly in his right hand as the knuckles turned white from the strain.

He had been trapped...

The exact millisecond he crossed the threshold of the boss room, his consciousness had been violently severed from his physical body.

The Second King’s trap hadn’t just put him to sleep; it had forcefully split his psyche.

The Trial had taken his innocence, his regrets, and his desperate longing for a normal life back then, and forged it into the younger avatar currently kneeling on the sidewalk.

It had forced the Real Klaus into the role of a powerless, spectral passenger.

He had been a ghost in his own mind.

He had been forced to watch, screaming in a silent void, as his younger self relived the horrors of the burning house and the exploding garage.

He had watched the simulation pump his avatar full of joy, slowly sedating the host into compliance.

He had slammed his spectral fists against the glass of the simulation for what felt like agonizing, endless hours, pouring every single ounce of his willpower...

And he had finally broken through.

The Real Klaus stepped fully onto the concrete sidewalk with the jagged tear in reality sealing shut behind him.

He didn’t look at the sky, and he didn’t look at the quiet suburban houses.

His furious, dark eyes locked entirely onto the glowing white eyes of the entity wearing his dead girlfriend’s face.

"Choke him out and kill that bastard!" the Real Klaus roared.

He pointed his iron sword directly at her throat. "That isn’t Melanie! It’s a parasite! It’s the former Soul King!"