He pushed deeper. The Strafgericht ’s defenses were a maze of lasers and chaff. Each death—and there were many—was a lesson. A missile up the tailpipe? Rewind. A collision with debris? Rewind. A second too slow on the trigger? Rewind.
“Bonto,” crackled the voice of his handler, the scarred engineer Aka. “The NSP is live. But listen to me. The more you rewind, the more the memory fragments. You’ll start to forget why you’re fighting. Use it sine mora . Without hesitation. Without delay .” sine mora nsp
“Bonto,” Koldy’s voice was a grandfather clock’s chime. “You’ve used the NSP 147 times. Do you know what that means? You have lived 147 extra deaths. And each time, you have forgotten a little more of the love that made you angry. You are no longer a father. You are a loop . A broken gear.” He pushed deeper
Bonto’s mouth moved. “There was once a pilot,” he whispered. “And he learned that time is not a river. It is a cage.” A missile up the tailpipe
The inner hangar of the Strafgericht opened like a steel jaw. And there he was. Colonel Koldy, the architect of the chrono-dilation. Sitting in a custom-built mech shaped like a ticking pocket watch, each hand a plasma blade.
The NSP core, dying, gave one last pulse. But it didn’t rewind six seconds. It rewound six years .
Now, Bonto flew a stolen Grainer into the maw of the Dynasty’s capital ship, the Strafgericht . The NSP—the Narrative Shift Protocol—hummed in his ship’s core. The rebels had stolen it from the Empire. It allowed a pilot to rewind local time by up to 6.2 seconds. A heartbeat. An eternity.