[RATING MA 15+]
The temporal field screamed like the death of universes.
Light bent around Sekitanki in impossible geometries—colors that had no names, wavelengths the human eye shouldn't perceive. The machine shuddered, chitin housing cracking under forces it was never meant to contain. Thirty seconds until critical mass. Thirty seconds until he punched through 359 million years or died trying.
Then the ground shook. Not the trembling of small predators. Not even the rhythmic impact of the arthropleura's passage. This was tectonic—something so massive that its movement registered as a seismic event. Through the warping light of the temporal field, Sekitanki saw it emerge from the swamp.
The scorpion was ancient. Not prehistoric—that was everything here—but ancient even by Carboniferous standards. Its exoskeleton was scarred and pitted. Each claw was large enough to crush trees. The tail rose like a crane, stinger dripping venom that hissed where it hit vegetation.
A colony leader. The thing other scorpions feared. The apex of apex predators. And the temporal distortion had attracted it like blood in water. Twenty-five seconds.
The scorpion moved with terrible purpose, cutting through the forest toward the impossible energy signature that violated natural law. Its compound eyes fixed on Sekitanki—or on the machine—or on the wound he was tearing in reality itself.
"No," Sekitanki whispered. "Not now. Not when I'm this close." But the universe had never cared about his timelines.
The scorpion's tail whipped forward. The stinger punched through the temporal field's edge—reality warped around it, space-time trying to reject the intrusion. The creature shrieked as temporal energy seared its exoskeleton, but it didn't retreat.
It attacked. Twenty seconds. Sekitanki grabbed his weapons—scorpion-stinger spear, chitin blade—and stepped out of the field's protective bubble. The moment he crossed the threshold, the temporal distortion released him like a drowning human breaking surface. Air rushed back. Sound returned. The normal flow of time reasserted itself with physical force.
The scorpion was already moving. No time for strategy. No room for genius. Just combat distilled to its purest form: kill or be killed. The claw came at him like a falling building. Sekitanki rolled under it, came up stabbing with the spear. The point scraped across armor, finding no purchase. The creature's tail whipped around—he barely dove clear, felt wind from its passage.
Fifteen seconds.
Behind him, the machine's hum ascended into registers that made his bones vibrate. The temporal field was destabilizing without him inside it. Too much energy, not enough mass to anchor the distortion. It would tear itself apart or punch through randomly, flinging him to an unknown era.
Or it would explode and kill everything within a kilometer. The scorpion lunged. Its mandibles spread wide enough to swallow him whole. Sekitanki didn't dodge. He jumped—planted his foot on the creature's lower mandible and used it as a springboard, launching himself upward. The chitin blade came around in an arc that his grandfather would have recognized, would have called perfect, and drove into the scorpion's eye.
The creature's shriek shattered the night.
It reared back, thrashing, and Sekitanki went with it—still gripping the blade embedded in that massive eye, riding the movement like a surfer on a wave of pure violence. His left arm screamed in protest. His broken ribs ground against each other. Every injury from three weeks of survival protested simultaneously.
He held on anyway. Ten seconds. The scorpion slammed itself against trees, trying to dislodge him. Wood splintered. Ancient ferns crashed down. Sekitanki's grip weakened—his hand slipped. He fell, hit the ground hard enough to drive air from his lungs. The scorpion loomed above him, one eye ruined, the other fixed on him with murderous intent. The tail rose, positioning for the killing strike. Seven seconds.
Sekitanki's body refused to move. Three weeks of accumulated damage finally demanding payment. His legs wouldn't respond. His arms barely twitched. He could only watch as the stinger descended.
Is this how it ends? After everything? After surviving the impossible?
His mother's face surfaced in memory. Not disappointed. Not proud. Just... loving. The way she'd looked at him when he was five, before genius made him special, when he was just her child.
I wanted to tell you I'm sorry. I wanted to try again. The stinger struck—and missed. Because Sekitanki wasn't there anymore.
The temporal field had expanded, reaching critical instability, and pulled him back into its center through sheer quantum attraction. One moment he was about to die. The next he was inside the field's protective bubble, space-time warping around him, the scorpion's stinger frozen mid-strike in the distorted boundary between moments.
Three seconds. The machine was tearing itself apart. Chitin housing cracked in spiderweb patterns. The quantum oscillator howled. The temporal core's containment field flickered dangerously.
It's not going to work. The mass calculations are wrong. The power output is—two seconds. But Sekitanki had stopped caring about calculations. Stopped caring about certainty. Three weeks of survival had taught him that impossible just meant "hasn't happened yet."
He pressed his hand against the temporal core and willed it to work. One second. The scorpion broke through the field's boundary. Claws reaching. Tail striking. Mandibles spreading for the final kill.
Sekitanki met its eyes—those alien compound eyes that held no mercy, no understanding, just the simple mathematics of predation—and smiled. "See you never," he said. Zero. Reality shattered.
The transition was nothing like the first journey. Then, it had been controlled. Clinical. A smooth passage through temporal layers like diving through water. This was violent.
Sekitanki felt himself torn apart across dimensions—not metaphorically, but actually disassembled at the quantum level. Every flesh separated through visions. Every bond broken. He experienced his own death and reassembly simultaneously. All through vision.
He saw time laid out like a landscape. Saw the Carboniferous falling away behind him. Saw eras flash past like frames in a film—but the sequence was wrong, scrambled, temporal coordinates corrupted by the machine's incomplete construction.
The scorpion, caught in the field's edge, screamed across dimensions as it was erased from causality. And Sekitanki fell through the cracks in reality, tumbling toward an unknown when. Then—soft.
That was his first thought. Everything was soft. He was lying on something that yielded beneath his weight. Not mud. Not peat. Something woven. Fabric? Sekitanki opened his eyes.
A ceiling. Wooden beams. Paper screens filtering gentle sunlight. The smell of incense and tatami mats. Sounds of distant conversation in Japanese—proper Japanese, not the desperate monologues of his isolation.
Home. I'm home.
He tried to sit up. His body responded—painlessly. His right arm moved without the grinding agony. His ribs didn't protest. He looked down at his hands.
Clean. Unmarred. No scars from three weeks of survival. "You're awake." His mother stood in the doorway, wearing the blue apron she always wore when cooking. Smiling that gentle smile that had defined his childhood.
"Mom?" His voice breaking. "How—when did I—"
"You've been asleep for three days." She knelt beside his futon, placing a cool hand on his forehead. "The doctors said it was exhaustion. That you'd pushed yourself too hard with the experiment."
"The experiment?" Sekitanki's mind spun. "The Carboniferous. The time machine. I was there for weeks. I fought—" "Hankō." Her voice was patient. Kind. "You had a nightmare. A very vivid nightmare brought on by stress and lack of sleep. The experiment failed. The machine never activated. You collapsed in the lab and we brought you home."
"No. No, that's not—" He looked at his hands again. Turned them over. No calluses. No scars from chitin blades and scorpion claws. "I killed a centipede. I cauterized my own arm. I survived—"
"A fever dream." His mother squeezed his hand. "Your mind under incredible stress, imagining worst-case scenarios. But you're safe now. You're home." Home.
The word should have brought relief. Instead, something cold settled in Sekitanki's heart. He looked around the room—his childhood bedroom. Everything exactly as he remembered. The posters of scientists on the walls. The bookshelf overflowing with physics texts. The window overlooking the garden where cherry blossoms bloomed.
Wait. "What month is it?" he asked. "April. Why?" April. Cherry blossom season. But when he'd left for the experiment, it had been October. Six months forward? His mother stood. "I'll make you some breakfast. Miso soup and rice, your favorite. Your father will be so relieved you're awake."
She left, sliding the shoji screen closed behind her. Sekitanki lay there, staring at the ceiling, and felt wrongness creep across his skin like insects. Breakfast was perfect.
Too perfect. The miso soup was exactly the right temperature. The rice had precisely the texture he preferred. His father sat across from him, reading the newspaper, occasionally smiling in exactly the way Sekitanki remembered. "Feeling better, son?" his father asked. "I... yes. Better." "Good. Dr. Yamamoto called this morning. She said the Institute is eager to have you back once you've recovered. They're impressed by your dedication, even if the experiment didn't work out."
The experiment didn't work. But he'd felt it work. Felt reality tear. Felt himself scattered across time. "Can I see the lab?" Sekitanki asked. "The machine?" His parents exchanged a look. Something passed between them—concern? Worry? "Of course," his mother said. "After you eat. You need your strength."
He ate mechanically, tasting nothing. The food was perfect. Everything was perfect. His parents were perfect versions of themselves—kind, understanding, exactly what he'd always wanted them to be.
Exactly what I wanted. The thought arrived like ice water. This wasn't memory. It was wish fulfillment. Idealization. His mother had never been this patient. His father had always carried disappointment in his eyes, even when he smiled.
And the scars. Where were his scars? Sekitanki excused himself, went to the to the mirror, locked the door. Unmarked skin. No burns from cauterization. No claw marks. No evidence of three weeks surviving the impossible. Not even the permanent scar from his final battle against the beast that destroyed the time machine. The first time he had arrived in the Coniferous Period, that went down from eyes to his neck.
He looked in the mirror. His face was wrong—too young, too soft, like he'd aged backward. No weathering from Carboniferous sun. No haunted look in eyes that had seen prehistoric death. This isn't real.
The room tilted. Walls breathed. His reflection smiled at him with teeth that belonged to something else. Temporal distortion. Neural feedback. The machine's instability is creating psychic echoes. I'm experiencing what I want to experience while my actual body—where was his actual body? Panic spiked. He gripped the sink, felt it dissolve under his fingers like smoke, reformed solid again. I'm still in transit. Caught between moments. The machine's improvised construction created errors in the temporal navigation system. I'm dreaming this while consciousness tries to maintain coherence across the jump.
But if he was dreaming... Where would he wake up? The dream began to fracture. His mother's face flickered—one moment young, the next aged, the next belonging to Dr. Yamamoto, then to the hallucinations from his fever. His father spoke with his grandfather's voice: You're not home, son. You're lost in the space between.
The house walls became transparent. Through them, Sekitanki saw: The Carboniferous forest. The Tokyo Institute. And something else—rice paddies stretching toward mountains. Wooden buildings with curved roofs. The sound of steel on steel.
Another time. I'm heading for another time. He tried to force himself awake. Concentrated on the sensation of his real body—broken ribs, scarred hands, the weight of survival in every movement.
The dream fought back. His mother grabbed his arm: "Don't leave again. Stay. Be happy here." But her grip was cold. Lifeless. A neural pattern's approximation of comfort.
"You're not real," he whispered. "None of this is real." "Does that matter?" she asked. "Here you're loved. Here you're whole. Here you never have to face what comes next." "What comes next?"
The dream shattered like glass. Sekitanki woke screaming. The landing was brutal—his broken body reassembling mid-fall, three meters above ground, crashing down onto something that felt like wood.
Pain. Real pain. Every injury from the Carboniferous returning in a symphony of agony that meant he was alive and present and somewhere actual. He gasped, vision clearing, trying to process—wooden floor. A raised platform of some kind. Polished wood beneath him. The smell of cedar and human habitation—not the chemical smell of the Institute, but organic, lived-in. Human habitation.
That thought crystallized everything. Humans meant civilization. Civilization meant—voices. Shouting in Japanese. But the dialect was wrong—archaic, formal, barely comprehensible.
Sekitanki forced his head up and saw: People in armor. Not modern armor. Samurai armor—lamellar plates of leather and metal, face masks with demonic expressions, swords drawn and reflecting morning light.
Behind them: a compound of wooden buildings with curved tile roofs. Rice fields in the distance. Mountains rising against a sky that was the right color—Earth's sky, not the green-tinted Carboniferous atmosphere.
One of the samurai stepped forward, sword pointed at Sekitanki's throat, and spoke in classical Japanese: "Identify yourself, demon. How did you appear in Lord Hōjō's compound?"
Hōjō. The name triggered memory from history classes he'd half-ignored in pursuit of physics. Hōjō clan. Regents of the Kamakura Shogunate. The realization hit like a physical blow.
He hadn't returned to his time. The improvised machine, built from prehistoric materials without proper temporal calibration, had thrown him to the wrong era. He was in feudal Japan.
The Kamakura Period. Seven hundred years before his era. Sekitanki looked at the samurai surrounding him—swords raised, faces hard with suspicion and fear—and felt laughter bubble up despite everything. Despite the pain. Despite the impossible situation.
He'd survived the Carboniferous Period only to land in an era where humans would kill him for looking foreign, for appearing from nowhere, for existing wrong.
"Well," he croaked in modern Japanese they probably couldn't understand, "at least these predators I can talk to." The samurai's expressions suggested they found his words less than reassuring. One raised his sword for a killing blow.
And Sekitanki—survivor, genius, impossibility that refused to die—forced his broken body to move one more time. Because survival was all he knew how to do.
TO BE CONTINUED... [SEASON 2: "SAMURAI STEEL"] The kid who conquered prehistory must now survive an era of honor, blood, and human violence—where the monsters wear his own face.