Lightning_speed

His lungs burned. Every breath felt like inhaling fire because his body was processing oxygen faster than the air could settle. His vision began to blur at the edges, a sign that his "speed-well" was running dry.

Kaelen leaned his head back and closed his eyes. To the world, the disaster had lasted twelve seconds. To him, he had lived an entire afternoon in the blink of an eye. He stayed still, waiting for the rest of the world to finally catch up. lightning_speed

He moved before his brain could even process the fear. He sprinted toward the impact zone, his sneakers smoking against the pavement from the sheer friction of his velocity. He didn't have the strength to stop the ship, but he had the time to change the outcome. His lungs burned

Kaelen lived in a world where time was the only currency that mattered. In the city of Orizon, citizens were biologically tethered to the Chronos-Grid, a system that tracked every heartbeat and every second spent. Most people moved at a standard human pace, but the "Glitch-Born" were different. Kaelen was one of them. Kaelen leaned his head back and closed his eyes

One Tuesday, the Grid hummed with a frantic, rhythmic pulse—the signal for a Terminal Event. A massive cargo freighter, hovering miles above the city, had suffered a stabilizer collapse. In real-time, the ship began its descent, a metal mountain falling toward the glass spires of the residential district. To the people below, it was a sudden shadow and a roar. To Kaelen, it was a giant moving through molasses.

The government called it Accelerated Perception. Kaelen called it lightning speed.