I Was Summoned and Gained the Ability to Travel Back in Time

Wyatt Booth is twenty-four years old, three weeks into his first ranger posting, and mid-sentence about elk corridors when the world drops out from under him. One moment he's standing on a trail at Cascade Ridge State Park. The next, he and forty-six high school students are inside a stone summoning chamber that smells of incense and something medical, and a priestess named Vael Orenthas is already smiling at them like she's been expecting them for years. The cheerful efficiency of what follows is the first thing that bothers Wyatt. The second is the word his assessment produces: RESET.

When he describes what the ability actually does, the room changes in under three seconds. He gets stabbed before he finishes his sentence. He returns to the moment of arrival with the wound gone and every second of what just happened sitting intact in his memory, and spends thirty seconds absolutely still while he figures out what kind of problem he is now holding. The answer he settles on is simple: lie. His ability becomes Danger Sense, a story that is just plausible enough to survive the scrutiny of a bureaucratic institution that has been summoning heroes for decades and knows exactly what useful looks like.

Surviving inside the Veldrath Sanctum turns out to be a different kind of challenge than anything Wyatt trained for. The people around him are not exactly enemies and not exactly allies, and the information he starts accumulating, one looped conversation at a time, begins painting a picture of an institution that has been quietly deciding which summoned heroes live long enough to matter. Wyatt is calm, he reads people well, and he is very good at playing useful without being threatening. All three of those things are about to stop being enough.

A story about a young man who can rewind time, has no intention of being anyone's weapon, and is discovering that the most dangerous conversations are the ones he cannot reset his way out of.