MTLNOVEL Chapter 348: The Time Has Come 2
In a city far from where anything recent mattered—one of those places where the buildings stood older than memory and most streets hadn't changed in a hundred years—a man stood quietly at the front door of a public library.
It was evening, just after the last orange light had faded from the sky, and the streets outside were empty.
The man didn't speak. He didn't glance around. He simply reached out, as he had done every day for three decades, and locked the heavy wooden doors.
Thirty years.
That's how long he'd worked there.
The records said so.
The staff calendar had his name on every yearly list, every event poster, every birthday card pinned to the back room corkboard.
But no one noticed he hadn't changed in all that time.
Not a wrinkle.
Not a grey hair.
He looked the same now as he did on his first day.
Most people didn't think twice about it. They just assumed he aged well, or maybe figured he was the son of someone who looked just like him.
The kind of quiet thing people dismiss without digging. That was how it was supposed to be.
That was why he was still here.
The man stood still in the fading light for a moment, then reached up to the side of his neck.
His fingers touched the skin just above the collar of his sweater, where an old symbol had been marked long ago—a brand—long since faded.
Until now.
It burned.
Not hot like fire.
But deep. Slow. The kind of heat that came from something older than fire. A memory waking up.
His face didn't change.
He didn't wince.
He lowered his hand, turned, and walked away from the main floor, past the aisles, past the archives, and down the narrow staircase that most people thought led to an old boiler room.
It didn't.
The stairwell ended at a plain wall.
But he pressed his hand against a certain spot—an uneven stone hidden near the base—and the wall shifted. Not dramatically. Just enough to let him through.
Inside was a hidden room.
No lights. Just darkness that clung to the air like dust.
He didn't turn on anything. He didn't need to.
He knew exactly where everything was.
In that room were all the things he had locked away, including his dark, tailored uniform, marked with the same symbol now glowing on his neck.
His weapons, old blades from before the Fall. And tucked in the far corner, sealed tight inside a black case, were his memories—the parts of himself he'd buried.
He didn't open the box gently.
He just took what he needed.
And as soon as his fingers touched the cold hilt of one of the blades, it all came back.
Not slowly. Not in pieces.
But all at once.
The training.
The orders.
The purpose.
He didn't pause to reflect or mourn what was lost. He changed quickly, precisely. Like muscle memory had taken over.
When he was done, he left through the back tunnel that led to the city's edge—quiet and calm, as if this had always been the plan.
He didn't look back.
He didn't need to.
—
A young girl sat alone in a field of flowers on an island deep in the southern sea, so far from civilization that not even satellite maps bothered to name it.
The sky above her was clear. No planes. No signals. Just a wide expanse of blue that stretched forever.
The flowers around her were a strange kind of violet—too pale to be natural, but too soft to seem artificial. They swayed in the breeze, though the girl herself did not move.
She looked like a child.
No older than ten.
Barefoot. Skin pale. Hair unbrushed. Her white dress hung loose around her knees, swaying just a little in the wind.
She didn't smile.
She didn't frown.
She just sat there, eyes dull, face unreadable, as if she hadn't felt anything in a very long time.
Then the signal came.
She blinked once. Tilted her head slightly to the left, as if listening to something only she could hear.
A black cat padded out from the tall grass and rubbed against her ankle. Its tail curled once. It purred.
She didn't respond.
She didn't even look down.
She just stood up.
The flowers around her barely shifted. Her feet didn't disturb the ground.
She turned slowly toward the ocean.
And walked.
The beach was quiet. The sand is soft. The waves are calm.
But as soon as her feet touched the edge of the water, something changed.
The sea didn't soak her toes.
It parted.
The tide drew back, not in fear, but in reverence.
And she kept walking forward, step after step, until the water was no longer visible.
Until she was gone.
—
Elsewhere, in places that most people had forgotten or never known about to begin with, two more began to stir.
One awoke in a monastery hidden high in the mountains, where no satellite ever passed and no hiker ever reached. It didn't show up on records, maps, or even rumors. It wasn't there to be found.
The other opened their eyes inside a ruined spacecraft buried deep under rubble, beneath what had once been a battlefield and now looked like any other forgotten wasteland.
The ship had been written off decades ago. Everyone believed it had been destroyed. But not everything lost is truly gone.
Each of them was different. They had nothing in common—no face, no history, no shared blood.
And yet, they had been chosen together. Not for how strong they were. Not for their fame or power.
They had been chosen because no one would notice them.
And when the god gave the order, they didn't ask why.
They didn't hesitate.
They simply moved.
—
Far to the north, in the frozen cathedral buried beneath the Antarctic ice, the man with the stitched chest worked in silence.
He moved slowly, carefully, like someone rebuilding something sacred.
He lit the old fire pits by hand.
He drew the runes on the stone floor, one at a time, following patterns that hadn't been traced in over a century.