James walked into the sunlit kitchen, then froze in his tracks. Five hundred long, agonizing years had passed since he last stood in this room, yet here he was—hurled backward through time to a past that felt like an ancient dream. It was surreal, almost unbearable, to stand there suppressing his shock while weighed down by half a millennium of memories.

Nolan leaned casually against the counter, chatting and laughing with Debbie. James swallowed hard, his breath catching in his throat. Seeing his father so disarmingly young was jarring, but seeing his mother alive and smiling as she poured coffee sent a sharp pang through his chest. Nolan’s face was relaxed, his skin smooth and entirely unmarked by the jagged, ruinous scars from the upcoming war. The horrific battles, the betrayals, and the tragic collapse of their family had not happened yet. To his parents, it was just a quiet Tuesday morning.

“Back in Black,” James whispered under his breath, forcing his voice to remain steady.

Nolan turned at the sound, his eyes brightening instantly with paternal warmth. “James!”

James offered a practiced, easy smile, hiding the ancient warrior lurking behind his eyes. He played the part of the dutiful son, but deep in the quiet recesses of his mind, the dreadful truth remained constant: he knew the monster waiting just beneath the surface of his father’s peaceful persona, and the clock was already ticking.

The rest of the morning blurred into a bizarre, waking dream. Returning to school was perhaps the most deeply surreal experience James had endured since stepping back through the corridor of time. It had been four hundred and fifty years since he last sat in a classroom, yet here he was, crammed into a cramped wooden desk, surrounded by the smell of floor wax and stale ink. He sat quietly, taking diligent notes and listening to the teacher, but his mind kept wandering to his classmates. It was thoroughly odd, watching these students he hadn’t seen in hundreds of years. By the time he had finally returned to this point in time, not even their great-grandchildren would be alive.

To the teacher, it was an ordinary lesson; to James, it was an almost absurd exercise in triviality. He was listening to fundamental concepts he had mastered before whole civilizations had fallen to ash, sitting alongside children whose entire lineage would vanish like a whisper in the wind.

When lunchtime arrived, the mundane rhythm of the school day attempted to assert itself once more. A local bully, puffed up with adolescent arrogance, approached James in the courtyard, intent on starting a fight. The boy hurled insult after insult, trying to provoke a reaction. James merely looked through him. The hostility, the posturing, the utter pettiness of it all felt impossibly distant. What did the squabbles of brief, ephemeral mortals matter to someone who had lived through centuries of slaughter, war, and cosmic isolation? Without uttering a single word, James turned away from the noise, found a quiet bench beneath the shade of an oak tree, and calmly went back to finishing his schoolwork.

Then, the air pressure dropped.

A silent, oppressive heaviness settled over the courtyard, an instinctual signal that made every nerve in James’s body flare to life. The message had been received.

Descending through the atmosphere with absolute, calculated grace, the giant descended. Conquest lowered himself toward the earth, his colossal frame cutting through the sky before settling heavily onto the ground. Seeing him alive was just as jarring, just as profoundly surreal, as seeing his father alive in the kitchen hours earlier.

Looking at the massive warrior, James vividly remembered the brutal battle they had fought the first time around. He recalled the absolute beating Conquest had handed him, breaking his body to an almost literal inch of his life. But more than the agony, James remembered the decisive climax: the desperate moment he had wrapped his arms around Conquest’s thick throat and simply squeezed with everything he had left. A phantom wave of grim satisfaction washed over him as he recalled watching the tyrant’s eyes bulge during his final, violent death throes. Now, that same monster stood before him, unbroken and completely unaware.

James closed his notebook, capped his pen, and stood up to face him.

“Hello,” James said, his voice entirely devoid of fear.

Conquest narrowed his single, battle-hardened eye, studying the youth before him with a mixture of amusement and subtle scrutiny. “What do you want, boy?”

James offered a cold, knowing smile, looking the conqueror dead in the eye. “Send a message to Thragg. I wish to discuss terms.”

The massive warrior paused, the sheer audacity of the demand hanging in the air between them. “Terms?” Conquest rumbled, his voice like grinding stone.

James didn’t flinch. “Do you need me to write that down?”

A cruel, broad grin split Conquest’s scarred face. Without another word, he pushed off from the earth, the sheer force of his launch shattering the ground beneath his boots as he shot upward into the sky, leaving James standing alone in the sudden silence of the wind.

When the final bell rang, James opted to walk home rather than catch the bus or fly. Flight was out of the question—taking to the skies ran the immediate risk of someone spotting him, particularly his father, whose watchful eyes were always sweeping the skyline. So, James took the slow route, his sneakers hitting the pavement in a rhythm that felt maddeningly slow.

He arrived home, drained by the sheer psychological weight of acting like a normal teenager, and let out a long sigh. The remainder of the afternoon drifted by in mundane routine. He completed his assigned chores around the house, chuckling bitterly to himself at the absurdity of it; by the time he had reached five hundred years of age in his previous timeline, he had an entire vassal planet dedicated solely to managing his personal upkeep. Now, he was taking out the trash.

Dinner time arrived, and the three of them sat down at the dining table. James picked at his food, his dark eyes fixed entirely on his father. He studied the subtle tension in Nolan’s jaw, the calculated stillness in his frame. Sensing the heavy gaze, Nolan looked up from his plate.

“What’s on your mind?” Nolan asked, his tone casual, yet laced with an underlying authority.

James set his fork down with deliberate slowness. “I know what you’re planning to do.”