INFINITE REWIND: THE APEX HUNTER CHRONICLES: VOLUME 3 - LAYERS

Infinite Rewind: The Apex Hunter Chronicles, Book 3Ethan Cross thought the Fractures were chaos. He was wrong. Someone designed them - and he was built to survive them.A tip from Division Zero's intelligence channel pulls Ethan and the mysterious Caspian Rowe into the Remnants, an underground network that has spent decades compiling evidence the World Hunter Council has buried: the System predates the Fracturing by centuries, and the mechanic forcing every Awakened human back into danger every 72 hours isn't a survival feature. It's a pressure test.Certain Hunters weren't chosen at random. They were selected - tuned to specific limits the System wants pushed.Ethan is one of them.While he wrestles with what that means, Lyra - the E-rank healer growing steadier by the day at his side - starts noticing what everyone else has missed. Ethan flinches before things happen. He deflects every time she asks why. The weight of the secret he's carrying is starting to show.Then a Black-class Fracture tears open above Montreal - the first S-rank event in North America in two years - and Caspian hands Ethan a lead no S-rank team has: an Echo Room buried on the seventh floor, holding proof of where the System actually came from. Division Zero isn't remotely ready for a Fracture this size. They go anyway.What Ethan finds inside doesn't just answer questions. It shows him a version of himself who already died asking them - eight hundred years ago, in a Fracture that looks exactly like this one.He walks out with a data crystal holding System architecture code no one was ever meant to see. Someone tried to crack it once before, decades ago, and failed.The failed attempt is timestamped. The user ID on it belongs to a name Ethan already knows too well.