[RATING MA 15+]
The centipede rose from the rubble like a god of broken things.
Its body was a ruin—sections of armor cracked, ichor leaking from a dozen wounds, one mandible hanging at an unnatural angle where Sekitanki's improvised weapon had done its work. But it was alive. Still moving. Still hunting. Still refusing to die. Sekitanki understood that feeling deep.
They faced each other across the collapsed chamber—two survivors who'd pushed beyond their limits, beyond pain, beyond reason. The centipede's remaining good eye fixed on him with something that might have been recognition. Or hunger. Or the simple acknowledgment that one of them had to end here.
"You and me both," Sekitanki whispered.
His body was a symphony of agony. Broken ribs grinding with each breath. Shoulder screaming from being reset. His right arm barely functional. Three weeks of accumulated damage compressed into a frame that should have surrendered days ago.
But surrender required accepting defeat. And he'd forgotten how to do that. The centipede's antennae twitched—scenting the air, calculating trajectories. Its hundreds of legs shifted position, preparing to lunge. The damaged mandible clicked uselessly, but the good one opened wide enough to crush his skull.
Time slowed to honey.
Sekitanki's mind—that quantum-physics-calculating, problem-solving engine that had won him every award that didn't matter—finally found its purpose. Not solving equations. Not chasing empty genius.
But reading the enemy. He saw the pattern in how the centipede distributed weight across its segments. Saw which legs favored compensation for the wounds. Saw the fractional delay between the antennae sensing and the body responding.
Saw the opening. There. The third segment from the head. Where I stabbed it before. The chitin is weakest there. His grandfather's voice, memory arriving with crystal clarity: Victory is not about being stronger. It's about understanding where your opponent is already defeated and simply helping them realize it.
The centipede lunged. Sekitanki moved.
Not away—through. He dove under the snapping mandible, rolling across peat that tore new wounds in his back, coming up inside the creature's killing zone. His left hand—his only reliable hand—found the weakened segment and drove fingers into the gap.
The centipede shrieked. Its body convulsed. Legs thrashed in every direction.
Sekitanki held on. Used the creature's own momentum against it. Felt chitin crack further under his grip. Felt something break. And felt something solid. Metallic. Wrong for this time period.
The oscillator. Pure adrenaline gave him strength he didn't possess. He ripped the gap wider—tearing chitin with his bare hands, feeling it shred his palms to ribbons—and reached inside the living creature.
The centipede went berserk. Its body coiled, trying to crush him against itself. Mandibles snapped at empty air. Legs raked across his back, tearing fabric and skin. They rolled together through the clearing, a grotesque dance of mutual destruction.
Sekitanki's fingers closed around the oscillator. Pulled. Pulled. It came free in an explosion of ichor and tissue—a cylinder of brushed metal and quantum circuitry, impossibly intact, covered in digestive fluids but whole.
He clutched it to his stomach and rolled away as the centipede's death throes intensified. The creature's movements became spastic. Random. Its body segments no longer coordinated, just individual pieces of a machine shutting down one component at a time.
Sekitanki crawled backward, leaving a trail of blood, watching the apex predator that had destroyed his machine finally succumb to accumulated damage. It took three minutes for the centipede to die.
Three minutes of thrashing. Of mandibles clicking slower and slower. Of that mechanical shriek fading to a whimper to silence. When it finally went still, Sekitanki lay beside it in the mud, oscillator gripped in his destroyed hands, and felt tears cut clean lines through the filth on his face.
Not tears of sadness. Not even relief.
Just... release. The physical manifestation of everything he'd held inside for three weeks. For seventeen years before that. All the pain and loneliness and desperate survival compressing into salt water that meant he was still human enough to cry.
"I did it," he whispered to the corpse. To the forest. To the universe that had tried so hard to kill him. "I actually did it." The forest didn't care. Just kept being ancient and green and utterly indifferent. But Sekitanki cared.
For the first time in his empty life, he cared about something enough to fight a prehistoric monster for it.
That had to mean something. The journey back to his shelter took until sunset. Every step was negotiation between will and flesh. His body wanted to shut down—had earned the right to shut down—but Sekitanki forced it forward through sheer stubborn refusal.
The oscillator was intact. The temporal core was intact. He had both critical components now. Which meant rebuilding was possible. Which meant going home was possible.
Which meant he needed to survive long enough to make it happen.
The shelter appeared through evening mist like a mirage. Three weeks ago it had been crude sticks and desperation. Now it looked like sanctuary—reinforced walls, weapon cache, the crude tools he'd crafted from impossible materials.
Home, his mind supplied. This nightmare became home. He collapsed inside and let unconsciousness take him, oscillator clutched to himself like a child holding a beloved toy.
The next seven days were a fever dream of construction.
Sekitanki worked with the focus of someone who'd learned that stopping meant dying. His hands—shredded from reaching inside the centipede—could barely grip tools, so he improvised. Used his teeth. Used his elbows. Used whatever body part could still function.
The temporal core and quantum oscillator formed the heart of his rebuilt machine. Around them, he constructed housing from centipede chitin—the strongest material available, shaped with stone tools and sealed with plant resins that hardened like primitive epoxy.
The emitter array he rebuilt using the wasp stinger as a focusing element, its hollow core perfect for channeling tachyon particles. Insulation came from layered arthropod armor. Wiring from plant fibers treated with conductive minerals he'd found in stream sediment.
It was insane. A hybrid of quantum physics and Stone Age engineering. Technology that shouldn't exist grafted onto materials from an era before technology could exist.
But it took shape. Slowly. Impossibly. Actually took shape. His mind worked in patterns he'd forgotten—not the creative leaps that had won awards, but the methodical problem-solving of basic physics. Every calculation done in his head because paper hadn't been invented yet. Every measurement estimated because precision tools didn't exist.
Genius applied to survival instead of empty achievement.
This is what I was supposed to be doing all along, he realized on the fifth day of reconstruction. Not chasing validation. Not filling the void with awards. But using my mind for something that actually mattered.
His grandfather appeared that evening—hallucination or ghost or memory made solid in the failing light. "You've changed," the old gramps said, sitting beside the half-built machine.
"I've been eaten by giant bugs. Change feels inevitable." "Not your body. Your spirit. You're not empty anymore." Sekitanki looked at his ruined hands, at the weapon scars covering his arms, at the machine taking shape through sheer desperation.
"I'm still empty," he said quietly. "I just learned to carry it better."
"No." His grandfather shook his head. "Empty vessels don't fight centipedes for quantum oscillators. Empty vessels don't rebuild time machines from bug parts and stubbornness."
"Then what am I?" "Full. Of rage and pain and stubborn love for the people you left behind. That's not emptiness. That's just being human." The hallucination faded, but the words remained. On the twenty-eighth day, the machine was complete.
Sekitanki stood back and observed his work with the critical eye of someone who'd staked everything on impossible engineering. It looked nothing like the original—a grotesque hybrid of modern physics and prehistoric biology, chitin and circuitry, desperation made manifest.
But the mathematics checked out. The quantum resonance patterns were stable. The temporal field generator—crude as it was—should theoretically produce enough distortion to punch through spacetime. Should theoretically.
Two words that contained the difference between going home and dying in a catastrophic explosion. He had no way to test it. No instruments to verify the calculations. Just his mind and three weeks of survival that had taught him to trust his instincts even when logic screamed otherwise.
Do I actually want to go back? The question surfaced unbidden. Because going back meant facing everything he'd run from. His mother's disappointment. His father's quiet sadness. The life of empty genius that had driven him to this desperate escape.
But staying meant dying. Eventually. Some predator would be faster or smarter or just luckier. The forest would win. And he had things to say. To his mother. To his father. To everyone who'd tried to love him while he was too empty to love back.
I want to try again. As someone different. Someone who understands what matters. That settled it. Sekitanki spent the rest of the day preparing. Gathered what weapons he could carry—scorpion stingers, chitin blades, the bone tools that had kept him alive. Not because he could take them with him—the temporal field wouldn't accommodate extra mass—but because he needed to know he'd tried to bring proof.
Proof that he'd survived the impossible. Proof that the empty prodigy had become something else entirely. As sunset painted the Carboniferous sky in alien colors, Sekitanki activated the machine.
The quantum oscillator hummed to life—a sound like reality holding its breath. The temporal core began cycling, building charge, accumulating the precise energy needed to tear a hole through 359 million years.
Around him, the forest reacted. Every creature within hearing distance fell silent or fled. Even the insects' eternal chittering stopped. As if the world itself recognized something wrong was happening. Something that violated the natural order.
Sekitanki stood in the center of the temporal field as it built, feeling space-time begin to warp, and thought of his mother's kitchen. Of miso soup and morning sunlight. Of the life he'd thrown away in pursuit of genius that had never filled the void.
I'm coming home, he thought. Changed. Broken. But finally understanding what home means.
The machine's hum became a scream. Reality began to fracture. Light and time and space compressing into a single point of absolute possibility. And then—something massive moved in the darkness beyond his shelter.
TO BE CONTINUED... [FINAL EPISODE: "Return or Extinction"]