David swept through the military base a second time, slower now, eyes sharper, no longer blinded by the excitement of anti-tank missiles. He checked doors he had ignored before, traced corridors that had felt unimportant. And then he stopped.

  A reinforced door. Too reinforced.

  “Seriously?” he muttered. “How did I miss this?”

  A command bunker. Hidden in plain sight. He shook his head. He already knew the answer—he’d been drunk on Javelins, dazzled by firepower, thinking small instead of thinking final.

  Inside, the air was stale and heavy, the kind that hadn’t moved in decades. Thick cables ran along the walls like petrified veins. At the center sat a computer that looked ancient even by US military standards—bulky and beige. The kind of machine that expected respect.

  And beside it—manuals. Real ones. Thick binders and yellowed tomes stacked with almost religious care.

  David let out a slow breath.

  “So this is it,” he said quietly. “You wanted meaning? Congratulations.”

  He dragged a chair over, sat down, and started reading.

  Page after page. Launch protocols. Fail-safes. Authorization trees that assumed a world still full of people. Diagrams drawn by engineers who never imagined a shrinking dome or a looping survivor. His eyes burned, his head ached—but he didn’t stop.

  The dome loomed close outside the base. Too close.

  David knew the rule by heart now: every death, the boundary crept inward. If he failed again—if the timing slipped—the System might simply take the missile. Rewrite reality. Lock it away as an unreachable object.

  He didn’t have that luxury.

  So he read faster. Memorized. Cross-referenced. Committed everything to memory.

  The missile turned out to be solid-fuel, which was a small mercy. David doubted he could have refueled a real liquid-fueled rocket even with magic and stubbornness combined. This one, at least, was already loaded—sealed, inert, waiting.

  Trajectory correction was another matter.

  The guidance system belonged to another era. The computer looked ancient, beige casing, physical switches, and a monochrome display that hummed faintly when powered on. By modern standards it had the raw processing power of a pocket calculator—if that. Almost every meaningful calculation had to be done manually, written down, double-checked, and only then typed into the console line by painstaking line.

  David rubbed his eyes and exhaled slowly.

  “Of course it can’t be easy,” he muttered.

  The system still contained several preloaded retaliation programs—cold-war ghosts aimed at coordinates that once belonged to enemy superpowers. Russia. China. Names that felt almost fictional now, relics from a world that had ended for him dozens of deaths ago.

  That wasn’t his target.

  His target was the opposite edge of the dome.

  The farthest possible point.

  He flipped through yellowed manuals, some half-disintegrating at the edges, translating dense technical language into something workable. Angles. Burn time. Atmospheric assumptions that no longer quite applied. The dome complicated everything—it was very small for a rocket.

  Still, math was math.

  He wrote a crude program on his modern laptop, tested it, watched it fail. Adjusted values. Tried again. Another failure. A third. A fourth.

  Hours passed.

  Eventually, the project was finished, and after several test runs in the simulated world he entered it into that ancient computer.

  David leaned back in the chair, staring at the final plotted arc on the dim screen. The missile wouldn’t be flying toward nations or cities or history.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  It would fly straight into the wall of his prison.

  “Well,” he said quietly, a crooked smile forming, “it’s not aimed at the communists… but it should reach.”

  David drove off to prepare the place where it would eventually land.

  That place turned out to be inside the city.

  His house wasn’t at the very center—it lay closer to the military base—and because of that, the shrinking edge of the dome had already bitten into the city from the opposite side. Streets he remembered as safe routes were now half-consumed by the invisible boundary.

  “Well,” David muttered, staring out the windshield, “guess this is where it ends.”

  He walked the area slowly, committing distances to memory. The missile would need time to fly. Not a lot of time, but enough for a monster to run away from where it would spawn. Which meant the boss had to be kept here as long as possible—long enough for the warhead to arrive—but not trapped.

  That was the tricky part.

  If the monster got stuck, the System would interfere again. Teleport it. Reset the board. Cheat.

  No, the boss had to move. Be busy. Be angry. But still contained.

  David rubbed his chin, eyes drifting across the skyline—and then stopping.

  A construction site.

  Exposed concrete skeletons. Steel frameworks. Half-finished buildings frozen mid-gesture. Open pits. Cranes. Rebar. Temporary supports. Loose materials stacked everywhere.

  He smiled faintly.

  “I can work with that.”

  David hauled steel beams out of the construction site as if they weighed nothing. With a thought, guided by his [Law of Steel], they rose into the air and slid into place, one after another, forming the rough outline of a cage. Not elegant. Not subtle. Just dense, brutal geometry meant to delay something that should not be delayed.

  He adjusted the last beam with a flick of his wrist, squinting, then nodded to himself. Close enough.

  “All right,” he muttered.

  He raised his hand. Mana surged.

  A blinding bolt of lightning tore free from his fingertip, slamming into the steel framework. The impact rang like a struck bell, metal screaming as arcs of electricity crawled along the seams. The beams glowed white-hot at their edges, fusing together where they touched. The air filled with the sharp smell of ozone and burning dust.

  David held it for a few seconds longer than was comfortable.

  Then he stopped.

  He lifted the visor of his welding mask and blew gently on his finger, which was faintly smoking.

  “Ah. Yeah. That stings.”

  He flexed his hand, satisfied, and looked over the welded monstrosity. Solid. Crude. Effective.

  “Who even needs a plasma cutter?” David laughed.

  He turned and jabbed a finger toward a robot trudging past, its arms full of glowing monster crystals meant for recharging.

  “Right?”

  The robot, of course, said nothing. It just kept walking.

  After the first “test cube”, David summoned his robots and automated what he could.

  Robots hauled new beams from the construction site without complaint, their routes optimized, their movements precise. He barely had to look at them anymore. He just stood there, correcting angles with a thought, pulling steel into place with the Law, welding it shut with lightning when alignment finally felt right.

  A few days later, he stopped.

  David stood beside the finished structure and tilted his head back.

  It was enormous.

  A pyramid made of square frames—cubes connected to cubes, layer upon layer, rising and spreading until it consumed nearly half a city block in both height and width.

  Up close, it felt like a monument.

  Or a trap.

  The whole thing reminded him of a child’s jungle gym—something meant to climb, to explore—only scaled up to a size that made the comparison unsettling. This wasn’t built for play. It was built for a monster to get stuck and waste time.

  David exhaled slowly.

  “Yeah,” he muttered. “You’ll hate this.”

  The robots continued their work around him, unaware. The city remained silent. And somewhere far away, a rocket was already waiting for its moment.

  The trap was finished. The rocket was ready. All that remained was the waiting.

  David stood beside the metal lattice he had built, its shadow stretching long across the empty street. The city around him hummed quietly—robots walking their routes, he didn't bother to turn off their “gathering” routine and they kept delivering him steel beams.

  He turned to one of the robots that was nearby. It stood there, motionless, its metal hands still faintly scratched from loading and unloading beams into a truck.

  “What do you think is waiting for me out there?” David asked softly.

  He hadn’t programmed the robots for real conversations. Still, they knew when they were being addressed. The robot’s head twitched a fraction.

  “Beep.”

  David let out a short, dry breath. “Yeah… maybe you’re right. I’m alone anyway.”

  “Beep.”

  He leaned back against the cold steel of the structure. “Maybe I’ll be able to bring them back. The system resurrects me every time, doesn’t it? So maybe—”

  “Beep.”

  His voice dropped. “Or maybe the moment I finally kill the boss, it’ll just kill me for real.”

  “Beep.”

  David stared up at the artificial sky beyond the dome, its color frozen in an imitation of late afternoon. A thin smile crossed his face—tired, uncertain, but genuine.

  “Yeah,” he said quietly. “Time will tell… time will tell.”