I Came Back Two Years Before the End of the World. The First Thing I Did Was Wake My Brother.

The hands in front of him were not the hands he had died with. The hands he had died with had been thirty-two. Calloused. Missing the third joint of the left ring finger from a tier-three lizard-bite in year seven. The hands in front of him were unscarred. The ring finger was whole. Cole Marks sat on the edge of a cheap mattress in the bedroom he had not slept in for seventeen years and looked at his hands for a long count. Then he stood up. He dressed. He went downstairs. His father was at the kitchen table eating cereal. Alive. His father, who had died on day fourteen of the dark age from an infected wound that wouldn't have been infected if the antibiotics hadn't run out. Cole poured coffee. He sat across from him. He said: Have a good one, Dad. His father left for work. Cole sat in the kitchen for ten minutes. He looked at the coffee maker his mother had bought so she could drink coffee with him when he turned eighteen. She had not lived to see it. He looked at the clock. Six-forty-three. Tuesday morning. October. He said, quietly, to the empty kitchen: All right. He had seventeen years of memory. He had the exact date the sky would crack. He had the casualty patterns, the warlord emergence timeline, the infrastructure collapse sequence. He had — from dying in a burning parking garage at thirty-two with his brother's hands around him — the precise knowledge of every decision that had produced the worst outcome. He had two years. He went upstairs to wake his brother. First things first. #Transmigration #PostApocalyptic #SecondChance #TimeLoop #ApocalypsePrep #SystemApocalypse #SurvivalFiction #ModernFantasy #ProgressionFantasy #DarkAge #ColeMarks #SamMarks #TheWorkContinues #BeforeTheCrack #ApostleClass #TheNetwork #TwoYears #FoundFamily #BrothersFirst #TheMathHeld #WebNovel #LightNovel #RoyalRoad #ScribbleHub #PostApocFiction #ApocalypseWebNovel #SurvivalWebNovel #EmotionalWebNovel #HealingStory #FoundFamilyFic #BrotherlyLove #FamilyFirst #QuietStrength #StrategicMC #EarnedHappiness #SlowBurnHealing #GriefAndRebuild #NotAHeroABuilder #ContinentalScale #TheWorkNeverEnds