The Bastion's Laziest Speedster
By @john1208
The opening ceremony of the Darvaza Bastion went exactly as I planned: I tripped, spilled initiation wine all over the prodigy senior Kamran, and let him publicly humiliate me. Being the academy's trash-tier Gale-Walker is the perfect cover for a regressor trying to prevent his little sister Mitra from dying in a catastrophic Qaf-Breach. Hiding my Mythic-grade time manipulation is easy: I just freeze time, casually walk to my destination, and unfreeze. Everyone thinks I'm incredibly fast and mysteriously out of breath. Kamran loves bullying freshmen, utterly unaware I spend my frozen time rearranging his dorm furniture by exactly one inch so he continuously stubs his toes. My peaceful, petty revenge is threatened when Soraya, a ridiculously observant senior scholar-fighter, decides my 'speed' defies physics and starts investigating me. But everything derails when Kamran corners my best friend Javad in the courtyard and draws his blade. My temper snaps. The falling rain freezes mid-air, and my temporal aura violently leaks out, crushing the arrogant prodigy to his knees. Will the Bastion realize their biggest joke is their deadliest weapon, and can I uncover the true traitor lurking in my friend group before history repeats itself?
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Unpausing the Serpent Spire
By @john1208
My morning started like any other - until I went to brush my teeth and stared into the reflection of Niran, the Naga-Spire Institute's most despised coward. A bureaucratic error in the time-stream had swapped my soul into this slacker's body, exactly five years before the corrupted deity Kalagya turns my beloved Mali into a weeping stone statue. Being painfully shy in a notoriously hated body is a nightmare. Worse, to hide my veteran Chronomancer class, I have to pretend to be a 'speedster.' I literally just pause time, casually stroll past my enemies, and unpause. Easy, right? Wrong. Because Arthit, an arrogant jerk who thinks he is the sole time-traveler, won't stop bullying my friends to rewrite history in his favor. When Arthit pushes me too far during a public spar, I finally snap. With a heavy sigh, I take off the temporal suppression ring weighing down my finger. Will the academy survive a 'speedster' who suddenly freezes time itself to deliver a very overdue slap?
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