Chapter 158: Back To That Key Moment ③

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Chapter 158: Back To That Key Moment ③

Rhine woke from sleep clutching his throbbing forehead, feeling as though he had suffered through a terrible hangover. But he never drank before a mission.

A mission?

Rhine’s previously hazy eyes suddenly sharpened. His gaze swept rapidly around the room as a strange feeling rose inside him. This was still his room, yet somehow everything felt wrong.

He rose slowly from the bed and walked into the bathroom. As he looked at himself in the mirror, that strange feeling returned. The man reflected there wore only a pair of sleep pants, his upper body bare and powerfully muscled, his physique at the very peak of masculine strength. His youthful face carried the hard, austere edge of a soldier.

After showering, Rhine walked naked back into the bedroom and activated the home AI on the wall. He was about to order someone to bring him breakfast when his finger stopped in midair.

Strange. Who exactly had he been planning to call for food? Didn’t he normally eat at the officers’ mess?

Rhine checked the time.

Nine in the morning.

Nine? He should have been training at this hour. Why had he still been asleep in his room?

Something was wrong. Everything was wrong. His routine had always been extremely regular: he normally woke at five, and by nine he would already have completed his first round of training. Even the way he had gotten out of bed just now had been strangely unhurried, completely unlike his usual crisp efficiency.

Rhine rubbed between his brows. He could not shake the feeling that he had forgotten something extraordinarily important.

At that moment, his communicator rang. It was his adjutant.

【Sir, General Quake and the others are waiting for your answer.】

“What answer?” Rhine asked instinctively.

【…Regarding the assignment to lead the upcoming redeployment, are you willing to accept the appointment, Sir?】

Rhine’s mind raced, and a place name suddenly flashed through it:

Keso River.

His answer came almost as a reflex. “I won’t participate in this mission.”

His adjutant was clearly surprised and confirmed the answer once more before ending the call.

Rhine frowned irritably. Why had he rejected it without even thinking? Did some part of his subconscious believe something was wrong with that mission?

Rhine looked around his room once more. An inexplicable sense of having returned from another lifetime washed over him. His heart felt hollow, as though some crucial piece of his memory had been lost.

After putting on his uniform, Rhine left the room and headed toward his private training room with an expressionless face.

Just then, a commotion broke out in the distance. Rhine stopped. A faint trace of pheromones drifted toward him from that direction—the pheromones of an Omega in heat.

Rhine’s gaze sharpened. They were currently stationed at an urban staging camp, where discipline was not quite as strict as at a formal military base, but Omegas were still prohibited from entering a camp populated entirely by Alphas.

When Rhine reached the center of the disturbance, he indeed found an Omega lying in the open. The dense pheromones pouring from his body had aroused every soldier around him. If they had not undergone extensive training for situations like this, someone would probably have lost control and rushed at him already.

Rhine activated his communicator and summoned several Beta disciplinary officers. “Put that Omega in solitary confinement for three days. Give him nothing but water.”

One Beta hesitated. “Sir, isn’t that punishment too severe? That Omega is currently in heat. Locking him directly into solitary confinement could drive him insane, and he isn’t even a member of our unit.”

“If he enters my territory, then he follows my rules.” Seeing that they still had not moved, Rhine asked coldly, “Any other questions?”

The Betas shuddered and immediately obeyed.

One of them whispered to his companion, “Don’t you think the Major General is a little terrifying today?”

The other nodded repeatedly. “Exactly. The way he talks, the way he looks at people—it makes my skin crawl. And did you notice? He wasn’t affected by the Omega’s pheromones at all.”

They instinctively glanced toward Rhine in the distance. His expression had not changed in the slightest. He looked at the Omega as though looking at an inanimate object, with a coldness that seemed utterly indifferent to everything.

If the old Rhine had resembled a gleaming blade with its edge fully exposed, the man he was now resembled a languid yet dangerous king among beasts.

That very evening, Rhine was invited by his superiors to “have tea” and ordered to release the Omega he had placed in confinement.

“He entered a military camp without authorization and caused disorder among the soldiers. Under military regulations, three days in confinement is already the lightest punishment available.” Rhine looked at the officer before him, and information about the man’s family background and future career suddenly surfaced in his mind on its own.

His future career? Rhine was shaken, though nothing showed on his face. He shifted his gaze toward the others. Information about them appeared one after another in his mind as well, as though he had already witnessed their futures.

When Rhine’s eyes landed on the middle-aged man sitting in one corner, a violent surge of anger and hatred suddenly erupted inside him.

Quake, Lieutenant General. Several years from now, he would be sentenced to thirty years in prison for selling state secrets and corruption. Less than a year after his imprisonment, he would die unexpectedly at the hands of another inmate.

And the man who would send him to prison and secretly arrange that death was Rhine Lancelot himself.

Strangely, however, Rhine could not remember why he hated the man so much.

If the future he had “foreseen” was real, Rhine knew he would still make exactly the same choice. His hatred for Quake had already seeped into his bones. It would end only with death.

“Understood.” Rhine interrupted one superior’s endless lecture and rose. “I’ll have him sent back tomorrow. If there are no further orders, please excuse me.”

Rhine waited three seconds. When no one responded, he took their silence as consent, turned, and left the conference room, leaving behind a roomful of astonished officers.

Rhine had always been stern, but he had also been rigidly disciplined and rarely showed disrespect toward his superiors. Interrupting one of them mid-sentence and simply walking out was something he had never done before. Yet since he had already agreed to release the Omega, no one seemed able to think of a reason to stop him. What none of them realized was that they had instinctively developed a strange fear of defying the Rhine standing before them. Even his unauthorized departure somehow did not strike them as particularly disrespectful…

Rhine finally understood what was wrong.

He possessed memories that should not exist.

The only thing he could not determine was whether he was seeing the future or repeating a life he had already lived.

He was more inclined toward the latter. The overnight transformation in his personality and behavior was the clearest evidence. If he were merely seeing the future, those changes should belong to his future self—not the man he was now.

So he had been reborn?

Rhine searched his memories carefully, but no matter how hard he tried, he could not remember how he had died. Although he possessed many memories of the “future,” most were fragmented and incomplete. He did not understand why he had refused the redeployment mission, could not remember why he hated Quake, and had no idea what had caused his personality to change so drastically.

And what important thing had he lost?

If everything had begun again, could he recover whatever had once been taken from him?

Rhine closed his eyes and allowed himself to sink into a lonely, silent sleep.

……

…

Shang Ke opened his eyes, first confirmed his surroundings, then checked the date.

Huh? If he remembered correctly, by this point today, he and Rhine’s unit should already have been on their way to carry out the mission. Why was he still inside the camp lounge?

Shang Ke got up and looked outside, confirming his judgment once more.

Had the mission been postponed?

By the next day, there was still no sign that Rhine intended to depart. Even stranger, the man had not come to see Shang Ke even once.

Before this, Rhine had practically made a point of appearing beside him every day and loved teasing him with pheromones.

Had something gone wrong with this return? Shang Ke decided to find Rhine and see what was happening.

As he left the room, Shang Ke happened to see two Betas supporting an Omega outside. Looking more closely, he discovered it was someone familiar—the original Filmore’s former crush, Ryan.

As Shang Ke remembered it, Ryan had shown interest in Filmore while remaining entangled with Zeka. He was the type who liked keeping his options open and constantly wavered when it came to relationships.

But Shang Ke certainly did not remember Rhine ever throwing Ryan into solitary confinement and leaving him looking this miserable.

“F-Filmore.” Ryan’s face was flushed unnaturally when he saw Shang Ke. He pleaded, “I feel awful. Can you take me home?”

Shang Ke gave him an apologetic look. “Sorry. Your pheromones might make me lose control. It wouldn’t be appropriate if I ended up doing something that offended you.”

Ryan desperately wanted to tell him that he would not mind being “offended” in the slightest!

Wearing an expression that said there was simply nothing he could do, Shang Ke watched the disappointed Ryan leave before continuing toward Rhine’s training room.

He found the room empty, however. Rhine was not at the camp today. Shang Ke therefore requested leave from his superior as well and decided to visit his Omega father, Jiva. Filmore’s father might have been something of a scumbag, but his gentle Omega father had always treated him well.

……

…

Rhine left the reception hall with a cold expression. He had just discovered yet another strange thing: he had lost all interest in Omegas. He had always exercised considerable restraint before, but enticing Omega pheromones had still affected him. Yet after encountering several Omegas in succession at the reception, his emotions remained as still as stagnant water.

More than that, his perception of color seemed strangely weakened. Much of the world had faded into pale shades of gray and white. If he had not known this was a gathering of high-ranking figures, he might almost have mistaken it for a funeral. In his “future” memories, in fact, most of the people attending this reception really would be dead within several years or a decade—and many would die directly or indirectly because of him.

Rhine knew that he liked power, but he had never been so obsessed with it that he would abandon all reason. Without some external catalyst, there was no way he should have become so ruthless.

So what exactly had happened to him?

Rhine felt as though he were drifting alone across an endless sea, rising and sinking without knowing where he belonged, completely lost in this hollow world…

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