Chapter Four: On Map One, the Future Kills the Future

He heard Throne breach a door, a sniper round strike a rail, and his own command to rotate left. Every sound came with an opposite future layered beneath it. Throne was manufacturing false echoes. They canceled reloads, faked ability activations, and ran behind cover solely to provoke rotations. Lin Mo called three players upstairs in round one. Zhou Yan breached—and found one decoy. The real four-man unit took the beacon through the canal in seventeen seconds. In round two, Lin Mo warned Tang Ye of an approaching sniper shot. Tang ducked beneath a bullet that never came and lowered his head into another firing lane. “They know,” Tang Ye said over his death screen. “They know what you hear.”