Redo: Infinite Ammo in the Apocalypse

"Oh, FUCK! I died again."

At this point, dying was nothing new. I'd done it enough times that I should have been used to it. The way you get used to a bad commute, or a recurring nightmare. Something you dread but don't fear anymore, because fear requires uncertainty, and I had none left.

But this one hurt more than the others.

Not just the physical part, though that was bad enough. It was everything else. The context. The weight of what I was leaving behind when the darkness took me.

The sky above what used to be San Francisco burned deep red. Not sunset red or fire red, something worse. The kind of red that looks like the world itself has been cut open and left to bleed out slowly. It had looked like that for years now, the sky in the west.

The tear sites did something to the atmosphere around them, warped the light in ways that no one had ever properly explained. After a while, you stopped looking up as you got used to it.

The towers and high-rises that still stood leaned on each other like they were exhausted. Most of the skyline was gone, collapsed in the first months, or brought down deliberately to block Chitter movement, or slowly consumed by the hive growth that crept up through the foundations of anything that stayed still long enough.

The streets below were a maze of broken concrete and rubble and the dark, pulsing organic material the Chitters left behind when they built.

Smoke moved through it all in slow, heavy drifts. And underneath the smoke, the sound.

That sound.

Ten years and it still hit something primal in the back of my skull every time. A chittering, clicking, layered noise that no human throat could make, rising and falling in patterns that almost sounded like language.

Maybe it was. We'd never been able to figure that part out. It came from everywhere at once when there were enough of them, bouncing off the rubble until you couldn't locate it, couldn't tell where the next one was coming from.

The sound that had ended the world.

The Chitters.

I was on my knees in the middle of what had been an intersection, my rifle shaking in my hands.

My arms were giving out. I could feel it, that specific trembling that means the muscles have been pushed past the point where they work properly and are now just trying to hold on through sheer stubbornness. I'd been fighting for six days straight. Maybe seven. I'd stopped counting.

Around me were the bodies of my subordinates. Seven people in total. We'd gone into the sector with nine, lost two in the first engagement near the old stadium, and spent the rest of the run fighting our way toward an objective that had stopped mattering about an hour ago when we'd realized we weren't getting back out.

I knew all of their names. I'd fought with most of them across multiple loops, not that they knew that, not that they remembered anything from timelines they'd never lived in. But I did. I always did. And I'd watched every one of them go down in the last thirty minutes, one after another, and there had been nothing I could do except keep fighting and keep moving and try not to think about it until later.

There wasn't going to be a later. I understood that now.

The creature in front of me had stopped moving.

That was the first thing that told me this was different. Chitters never stopped their onslaught. They hit you and they kept hitting, relentless, the smaller ones in waves and the larger ones with a kind of terrible focused intent. But this one had gone still. It was observing me.

I had never seen anything like it. And I had seen a lot.

It was built like every nightmare I'd ever had about this war made solid. Its body was massive, the kind of size that stopped looking like an animal and started looking like a structure. A thing you walked around, not past.

Heavy armor plating covered everything, layered and dark, the same material as a standard Chitter but denser, like it had been growing that armor for years instead of months. Its limbs were thick and jointed in an unsettling way, built for power rather than speed.

And its claws, they were dug into the concrete of the intersection like the road was soft clay, leaving deep gouges where it had shifted its weight.

It had six eyes. Not the usual four of an Alpha. Six, arranged in two rows, all of them glowing, not the flat amber I was used to, but something colder. Almost white.

They were looking at me with something I could only describe as intelligence.

Not animal intelligence. Something more human-like than that.

An Alpha, also known as Apex Predator. But not the kind I'd fought before. The smaller Alpha variants led the swarms, coordinating the Hive Tacticians and Siege Brutes, directing pressure, managing numbers. They were dangerous because of what they controlled, not because of what they were.

This was not that.

This was something I didn't have a name for yet.

Behind it, dozens of Chitters moved through the rubble in slow, patient circles, not attacking. Like they'd been told to wait, and they were doing exactly that.

I spat blood onto the cracked road.

Tasted like copper and dust. My ribs were cracked on the left side, at least two, maybe three, from where a Runner had hit me twenty minutes ago. Breathing hurt in a way that meant something was pressing where it shouldn't. My left leg was taking weight but not well.

"Figures," I said.

My voice came out steady, which surprised me a little. I didn't feel steady at all.

Ten years of this. Ten years of fighting this war across however many loops, in however many bodies, losing and dying and coming back and losing again. I had watched entire countries fall. I had watched people I cared about die in ways I couldn't prevent no matter how many times I went back. I had spent years learning how to hurt the Chitters, and the Chitters had spent years learning how to evolve past whatever I'd figured out.

It was a race I was losing. Had always been losing.

And this was how it ended. Again.

The Alpha moved.

It covered the distance between us in a step, and that step shook the ground in a way I felt in my knees. Its six eyes never blinked.

I raised my Aether-powered Rifle and fired anyway.

Bang.

Bang.

Bang.

The rounds hit the armor plating on its head and flattened. I could see them, the impacts, the small bright marks where the bullets struck, and the thing didn't even turn its head. It didn't flinch or slow down.

Of course it didn't.

I'd known when I raised the rifle that it wasn't going to work. I knew the rules better than anyone. Once Chitters crossed a certain threshold, once they reached the higher stages, the ones that came after months and years of the invasion rather than the first wave, standard weapons, including nuclear weapons, stopped having any real effect.

The deadliest of bullets could find the gaps in the plating if you were precise and lucky, but this thing's plating had no gaps I could see.

What could actually hurt it was enhanced weaponry. Aether-powered attacks from a high cultivation stage. The kind of thing that only became available after you'd leveled up enough, after the system had evolved you enough to the Alpha Stage.

A few people I'd known across various loops had reached that point. They had become genuinely dangerous to things at this tier.

I was not one of them. Though, not in this loop. I had fallen short of advancing to the Alpha Stage, settling in the peak of the Nano-Vanguard Stage.

I'd been caught in a bad stretch. Burned through most of my resources in the first four hours of the mission and hadn't had time to recover. The version of me that woke up after this reset would have to start building again from whatever point I landed. Assuming I landed somewhere useful.

The Alpha reached me.

It didn't roar. It just raised one claw, almost lazily, like the motion cost it nothing, and drove it forward.

The impact was enormous. It punched through my chest and kept going and I felt all of it for exactly one second before my nervous system decided it was done processing.

The world went quiet.

Cold, spreading outward from the center, fast.

I looked down. I don't know why. You always look.

I laughed. It was small and wet with blood and not much.

"Guess that's... number one hundred," I said.

Give or take. I'd lost exact count somewhere in year six.

My vision went at the edges first, then in from all sides, and then—

Nothingness.

That was the part that was always hard to describe. Death had a texture to it, by this point. A soundless, musical rhythm. The darkness that followed impact was always the same — total, heavy, no sound and no sensation and no time. Just an absence that lasted for however long it lasted.

And then the pull.

Usually it was gentle. A slow drift back into awareness, like being pulled gradually from deep water toward light. My mind would settle somewhere earlier in the timeline, a few days, sometimes a week, and I'd wake up in whatever place my body had been at that point, with all my memories intact and my surroundings reset to wherever I'd landed.

This was not that.

This felt like being grabbed. And not gently, there was nothing gentle about it.

Something took hold of the part of me that persisted through the resets, the part that carried the memories and the knowledge and the accumulated weight of every loop, and it pulled. Hard. Like whatever mechanism had been doing this for ten years had suddenly decided to stop being subtle.

The memories came with it. They didn't drift past the way they usually did, those quiet flashes of earlier moments that I saw during the transition, like my brain cycling through files. These hit all at once, layered on top of each other, too fast and too many.

Cities falling. Not just the ones I'd seen in the last few loops, all of them, every city I'd watched go down across ten years, stacked together and playing simultaneously.

The hives. Those massive alien structures that grew up through the ruins, pulsing and dark, the Chitters' version of infrastructure. I'd blown up four of them in total across various loops, always at enormous cost, always too little too late.

The Titans. I hadn't thought about the Titans in a while. The mind protects itself. They came in year four, the first time. Things that made the Alpha I'd just died to look small. They were city-sized. Moving through the remains of the eastern seaboard like the buildings were tall grass. I had never found a way to stop one. No one had.

All of it at once, every worst moment of ten years, compressed into what felt like no time at all and also an eternity.

My mind fizzled like static.

Or maybe it didn't, maybe that was just the sensation of too much information moving through too small a space.

And then, without warning, without transition—

I woke up.