Note: if time travel stories interest you, there's an awesome story with basically the same premise as this called "Changing History" with Adamus as the main character. It's great, I recommend it!
I'm not a psychopath. I'm an opportunist. My survival is more important to me than anything. At least, it was. Before I saw how the Mogadorians treated the humans. How they killed them. And the last of my species that were murdered.
How I stood by. How I helped the Mogadorians plan their deaths. My hatred of Nine. My murder of Eight. Their conquest of the world. I used to believe that there was only power, and those too weak to wield it. But touring the world, seeing how they were treated humans, beat them down, day after day, changed me. Shame festered in my soul.
It makes my penthouse seem fake. Every day, I'm reminded that everything I have is built on the deaths of my species and countless other deaths when I feel the eight scars on my leg.
And then I watched Setrakus Ra murder a mother and her child who dared to make noise during a speech. He didn't even do it himself, he ordered a faceless lackey. And they did it without questioning.
It made me sick.
Something needed to change. But I'm not strong enough to take on Setrakus Ra and the warships and all of them. Their systems are too strong, too widespread, too rooted. Only Pittacus Lore would have a chance.
And Pittacus Lore died eight years ago.
The entity must have sensed the change in me. It gave me the legacy I needed. I tested it first, snapping forward a few seconds, back a few seconds. Then minutes. Hours.
The snap I'm going to do now will be thousands of times further than I've tried. I'm going back 14 years, to when it all started. 2004. I could die from the effort. But it needed to be done.
I didn't use any of my legacies for a full week before. Consuming proteins, sleeping ten hours a night. Saving the energy.
The day of my trip, I entered the Mogadorian database and copied down all the information they had about the garde. Locations, dates, deaths, suspected sightings, and then suspicious scout disappearances. Practically everything the Mogs had about the nine. My searches and database history are saved. That's why I couldn't do this earlier.
I can't afford mistakes. The nine are each strong, ten times stronger than a regular garde from Lorien was, but together, they would be unstoppable. If I fail to stop even one of their deaths, the likelihood of them succeeding drops drastically.
And then there's Ella. The heir, the princess of Mogadore and Earth. Time and Setrakus Ra have turned her into a monster. Like I was. The earliest information they had about her was that she was seen at the Dulce base attack.
Certain things that I can't plan for. Only hope to change and figure out along the way.
My own life doesn't matter. The Nine do. Five in the past might as well be a completely different person than I am. If I succeed, they'll all be different than how they were.
The man didn't bother to exit the database. He sat on a chair a few feet away and closed his eyes, clenched his fists. Gathering focus and energy as boots stormed up the stairwell.
As the door splintered inward, the man flashed his eyes open. Eye contact was made for a split second. The man vanished.
And everything changed.