The next morning, I woke up with a dull pain in my stomach.
For a few seconds, I stared at the ceiling and wondered if I had somehow dreamed about yesterday’s fight.
Then I tried to sit up, and the pain immediately reminded me that it had actually happened.
“Definitely not a dream.”
I rubbed my stomach and slowly got out of bed.
The bruise on my shoulder wasn’t much better, and there was still some swelling on my cheek where Dante’s fist had nearly connected.
I stood in front of the mirror and examined myself.
I looked terrible.
Not terrible enough to frighten anyone, but definitely bad enough that my mother would notice.
I grabbed my school uniform and started getting dressed, already trying to think of an explanation.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have a particularly convincing one.
When I entered the kitchen, my mother was already preparing breakfast.
She glanced at me and immediately stopped what she was doing.
“Rafael.”
I froze.
“Yes, Ma?”
“What happened to your face?”
I touched my cheek.
“This?”
She nodded and then looked at my shoulder.
“And that?”
I looked down.
That one was harder to explain.
“I fell.”
“You fell?”
“Yes.”
“Twice?”
I looked at her.
She looked at me.
I had forgotten how terrifying mothers could be when they already knew you were lying.
“I…
fell twice.”
My mother sighed and returned to preparing breakfast.
“You’re becoming more troublesome now that you’ve started getting lucky.”
I almost laughed, but I wisely kept quiet.
Luckily, she didn’t push the matter any further.
I ate breakfast, thanked her, and left for school with the uncomfortable feeling that I hadn’t fooled her at all.
The moment I stepped onto campus, I knew something had changed.
People were looking at me.
Not everyone, and not openly, but enough that I noticed.
A few students whispered to one another as I passed, while others glanced at my bruised cheek before quickly looking away.
At first, I thought they were talking about my fight with Dante.
Then I saw Niel standing outside our classroom.
He had a bruise on his cheek.
I stopped walking.
“What happened to you?”
Niel touched his cheek and shrugged.
“Nothing.”
I stared at him.
He looked away.
“Niel.”
“Seriously, it’s nothing.”
I walked closer.
“Who did that?”
He hesitated before lowering his voice.
“Dante’s friends.”
My expression hardened.
“What happened?”
“They came by yesterday after class.
They asked me if I was your friend.”
I already knew where this was going.
“And?”
“I said yes.”
He shrugged as though it wasn’t important.
“Then they told me to stay away from you.”
“Did they hit you?”
“No.
They just pushed me around a little.”
I looked at the bruise again.
“That doesn’t look like a little.”
Niel gave me a crooked smile.
“I’ve gotten worse bruises playing basketball.”
I didn’t smile back.
He was trying to make me feel better, but I knew what was really happening.
This wasn’t about Dante wanting to beat me anymore.
He was trying to isolate me.
We entered the classroom together, but the atmosphere felt different from yesterday.
Some of our classmates were quieter than usual, and a few avoided making eye contact with me.
Word traveled quickly in school, especially when someone with Dante’s reputation was involved.
I tried to ignore it.
The morning passed normally enough.
Math, science, English, and the usual lessons filled the hours, and I answered questions when the teachers called on me.
The material was painfully easy for someone who had already spent an entire lifetime studying science and engineering, but I forced myself to pay attention.
My mind kept returning to Dante.
He wasn’t trying to beat me.
He was trying to make everyone around me afraid of getting involved.
During the war, I had learned that the strongest enemies weren’t always the ones carrying the biggest weapons.
Sometimes the more effective strategy was to attack supply lines, communication, and the people supporting the front.
Cut those connections, and eventually the soldier at the front became isolated.
Dante was doing something similar, just on a much smaller scale.
At lunchtime, I went to Edmund’s classroom.
He still hadn’t returned to school because of the chickenpox, so I wanted to speak with his teacher and make sure she knew that he was still recovering.
When I entered the classroom, several students looked toward me.
I walked to the teacher’s desk and gave her the latest update about Edmund.
“He’s feeling better now,” I explained.
“But Mom wants him to stay home until the remaining marks have faded.”
His teacher nodded.
“That’s fine.
Tell him not to worry about the lessons.
I’ll give him the assignments when he returns.”
“I will. New chapters come out on g.com first.
Thank you, Ma’am.”
I turned around to leave, but before I reached the door, I heard a familiar voice.
“Rafael.”
I looked over.
Rosalie was sitting at her desk.
She smiled when our eyes met, and I immediately noticed that her expression changed when she saw the bruise on my cheek.
“What happened?”
I instinctively touched my face.
“Nothing serious.”
She frowned slightly.
“That doesn’t look like nothing.”
“I fell.”
Her eyes narrowed.
“Again?”
I almost laughed.
Apparently, my excuse wasn’t very convincing.
“Something like that.”
Rosalie continued looking at me for a moment before giving me a small, doubtful smile.
“You should be more careful.”
“I’ll try.”
She hesitated before asking, “Are we still walking home together today?”
I had been expecting the question, so I smiled.
“Of course.”
Rosalie looked down at her desk.
“Actually…
I don’t think I can today.”
I blinked.
“Oh.”
“My parents are picking me up after school.
We have somewhere to go.”
There was a hint of disappointment in her voice, which made me feel a little better.
“That’s okay.
Maybe tomorrow.”
She smiled.
“Tomorrow.”
“It’s a promise?”
She nodded.
“It’s a promise.”
I smiled back.
“Then I’ll see you later.”
“See you.”
I left the classroom, but I couldn’t help smiling as I walked down the hallway.
It was such a small conversation.
Still, I couldn’t help appreciating how different things were becoming.
In my first life, moments like that had slipped past me because I was too afraid to reach for them.
Now, even something as simple as Rosalie telling me she would see me tomorrow felt important.
I continued toward the courtyard, unaware that her absence after class would soon become very important.
When classes ended, I found Niel waiting near the school gate.
“Are you going home?”
“Yeah.”
We started walking together.
We hadn’t gone very far when a motorcycle passed close to us, forcing Niel to step aside.
I watched it disappear down the road before noticing two boys standing near a sari-sari store.
One of them was Dante’s friend.
He looked directly at me.
I pretended not to notice.
Niel wasn’t fooled.
“Those guys again.”
“Keep walking.”
We continued down the road without looking back.
Neither of us spoke for a while, until Niel finally broke the silence.
“Are you in trouble?”
I glanced at him.
“What makes you say that?”
“You’ve been acting different.”
He wasn’t wrong.
I had been trying to act like an ordinary teenager, but that was becoming increasingly difficult.
I had lived an entire lifetime.
I knew things that nobody else could possibly know, and my decisions were already changing events that I remembered happening differently.
“I’ll handle it,” I said.
Niel shook his head.
“You always say that.”
I smiled faintly.
“Because I usually can.”
He laughed.
“That’s exactly what I’m talking about.”
For a moment, everything felt normal again.
Then I noticed someone across the street.
Dante.
He was standing with several boys, but he wasn’t looking at me.
He was looking at Niel.
My smile disappeared.
“Niel.”
“Yeah?”
“Go home.”
He looked at me in confusion.
“What?”
“Just go.”
Something in my voice must have convinced him because he nodded and continued walking.
I waited until he had put some distance between us before looking back toward Dante.
Dante was still standing there.
He didn’t approach.
He didn’t need to.
The message was obvious.
I turned around and started walking home, but my thoughts were already racing.
I could defend myself.
That wasn’t the problem.
I had spent years learning how to survive, and even in this fourteen-year-old body, I still possessed the experience that had kept me alive through the war.
The problem was that I couldn’t protect everyone at once.
But what happened if he went after Niel again?
What if he targeted Edmund when my brother returned to school?
What about Lucy and Lecia?
What if someone followed my sisters while they were walking home?
And then there was Rosalie.
That thought bothered me more than the others.
I remembered the first time I lost her.
I remembered how easily I had convinced myself that staying away from her was the right thing to do because I was poor, because I wasn’t good enough, because there would always be some better time to tell her how I felt.
There hadn’t been.
I had spent decades carrying that regret.
Now I had finally found her again, and because I had changed one small part of my past, someone else was already being dragged into the consequences.
I stopped walking and looked down at my hands.
They were the hands of a fourteen-year-old.
Small.
Untrained.
Weak compared with the body I had possessed at the end of my first life.
My mind still carried everything.
My knowledge, my memories, my experience, and the countless things I had learned during the war were still inside me.
But none of those things could stop a knife from reaching someone standing ten meters away.
That realization bothered me more than the fight itself.
During my first life, I had believed knowledge was enough.
If I knew enough, I could solve any problem.
If I worked hard enough, I could build anything.
If I became strong enough, I could protect the people around me.
The war had eventually taught me otherwise.
There were always things you couldn’t reach in time.
There was always someone standing outside your field of vision, and there would always be people you couldn’t save.
I had promised myself that this life would be different.
But what I was doing now was still relying on the same tools I had possessed before: knowledge, money, planning, and technology.
They were useful, but they weren’t enough.
I needed something more.
As I continued walking, an old memory surfaced.
It had been buried beneath years of research, battles, and technological development, but my HEMS brought it back with perfect clarity.
It was from the period when humanity first began studying the alien artifacts.
Back then, we didn’t understand what the invaders were doing.
Their technology was so far beyond ours that we initially assumed everything they did was simply an advanced form of science.
Then we witnessed something that technology alone couldn’t explain.
They could create fire without fuel.
They could move objects without touching them.
They could generate barriers capable of stopping weapons and strengthen their bodies beyond normal biological limits.
We called it magic because we didn’t have a better word.
Eventually, we discovered the truth.
It wasn’t technology.
Not entirely.
It was something much more fundamental.
Aether.
Aether existed everywhere.
It wasn’t limited to Earth or even our solar system.
It permeated the universe itself, and the alien races had evolved with the ability to manipulate it.
Their bodies possessed something humans didn’t.
An Aether Core.
I remembered the first time I examined one.
The strange biological structure was buried deep within the creature’s body, circulating Aether through its system and allowing it to manipulate Mana naturally.
Humans were different.
We were born without Aether Cores.
That was why we couldn’t use magic.
At least, that was what humanity originally believed.
Eventually, our researchers discovered another possibility.
Runes.
The word surfaced in my mind with perfect clarity.
Runes were artificial instructions that could manipulate Aether without requiring an Aether Core.
Humanity had discovered them by studying alien artifacts, and once we understood the underlying principles, we were able to reproduce some of their effects ourselves.
But there was a limitation.
Runes needed energy.
Some simple runes could draw upon ambient Aether, but stronger effects required a concentrated power source.
The more powerful the rune, the more energy it needed.
That was where Mana Crystals came in.
I slowed down as another memory surfaced.
The discovery had happened much later in my first life, after countless experiments with alien artifacts and recovered materials.
The first Mana Crystals humanity studied weren’t alien at all.
They had been on Earth the entire time.
Diamonds.
I stopped walking.
Of course.
I’d forgotten because by the end of my first life, the knowledge had become common among researchers.
Diamonds weren’t simply gemstones.
Their highly ordered crystalline structure allowed them to absorb, store, and release Aether efficiently.
The larger the diamond, the greater its total capacity.
The purer and denser its crystalline structure, the more efficiently it could store and release Mana.
The problem was obvious.
Diamonds were expensive.
I rubbed my forehead.
After everything I’d survived, after fighting an alien civilization and learning how to manipulate an energy that existed throughout the universe, my immediate problem was that the magical battery I needed was a gemstone people wore on their fingers.
I almost laughed.
Then I realized something even more important.
I knew how to make runes.
I knew how Mana worked.
And I knew that humanity would eventually discover all of this anyway.
The difference was that I had discovered it nearly a decade earlier.
If I could obtain a diamond and recreate even one basic rune, I might be able to build something capable of protecting the people around me.
I didn’t need a weapon powerful enough to fight aliens.
Not yet.
Right now, I needed something much simpler: something that could stop Dante from hurting my friends and family and give me an advantage without exposing what I knew about the future.
I continued walking home with a plan slowly forming in my head.
The first problem was obvious.
I needed a diamond.
The second problem was even more obvious.
I was fourteen years old, and I didn’t have enough money to casually buy one.
Fortunately, I already knew how to solve the problem.
I just needed money.
A lot of it.