Boss Level

Roy Pulver is a retired Delta Force soldier   currently going through the one hundred  thirty-nine version of this very same day.   He is stuck in a time loop that resets every time  he dies, and he has gone through it so many times,   he has already learned the day's pattern  by heart. Every morning at seven am,   a man breaks into his apartment and tries to  kill him and the woman he slept with, then   a helicopter with a gunman appears outside his  window and shoots his apartment until explodes.   Roy knows exactly where and how to move to  avoid all this, and jumps off the window to   land on a truck filled with sand, which he had  missed twenty-two times before he started to   get it right. Then he hijacks a car and drives  to escape two more assassins in a minivan - Roy   does not know their names, so he calls them Pam  and Esmerelda. These women chase him and shoot   at him throughout the city, but Roy knows how to  escape them as long as he does not get distracted   and remembers to dodge the bus. Since this time he  does not, the day resets and restarts again. Only   little details change during each loop, totally  dependant on what Roy decides or forgets to do.   Besides the guy at his apartment, the helicopter  and Pam, there are other assassins like Guan-yin,   who usually kills him with a sword; Kaboom,  a short man that plans a bomb on him;   Smiley, who likes to kill him by impaling him with  a lance and tying him to the back of his trunk;   the German twins; and a guy that looks a  lot like him so he calls him Roy Number Two.   Sometimes he manages to kill some of them, but in  the end, it does not matter, the others find him   and kill him anyway. Roy thinks the one with  the answers to explain what is going on is   his ex-wife, but when he calls her office, the  one to pick up the phone is her boss, Colonel   Clive Ventor, who tells him she has died in an  accident, but Roy believes he has killed her.   Sadly though, he never manages to live long enough  to find out why. On the days he manages to escape   the bus and Pam, Roy makes it to Jake's diner,  where he must hurry to take a seat at the bar or   the last spot will be taken by Dai Feng, a world  champion swordmaster that Jake has a crush on.   Roy proceeds to get deeply drunk while  listening to the man sitting next to him,   Dave, talk about internal security and  conspiracy theories. At twelve forty-seven,   the assassins always find him and kill him  right there in the middle of the diner,   which means Roy has never made it even a minute  past this point. If he does not come to the diner,   then he just gets killed earlier: he has already  tried as many alternate roads as possible.   As he is shot once again by every single one  of the assassins, Roy remembers the day before   the time-loop started. He is visiting his ex-wife  Jemma Wells at her workplace, Dynow Laboratories,   after she left him a message asking him to come  over because her company is hiring. However, she   does not seem too interested in her resumé or to  reconnect after not seeing each other in a while,   she just starts taking Roy's measurements and  a sample of his hair, which draws blood when   she pulls it. While Ventor and his bodyguard Brett  watch them through the security cameras, Roy asks   Jemma about this weird machine she is working on,  which she claims can unmake all time and space,   and even destroy the planet if used improperly.  Roy also brings up the matter of their son,   who does not know he is his father, he just  thinks Roy's a family friend. Begging to be heard,   Roy tells Jemma he can accept having lost her when  he chose work over her, but he deserves a chance   to be in his son's life. Their talk is suddenly  interrupted by Brett, who reminds Jemma this is   a restricted area, but Jemma says she has got  a special agreement with Ventor. When Roy tries   to give him his resumé, Brett says they are not  hiring, which means Jemma lied, but she sends him   away before he could say more. Before Roy leaves  the building, Jemma tells him she has sent him a   birthday present that is incredibly important for  him to open and that he should remember "Osiris".   Meanwhile, Ventor does not like the fact Roy has  seen and learned things about his experiments,   so he orders Brett to deal with him by hiring  random assets instead of trained soldiers so   nobody can track the assassins back to them. Then  he asks Jemma to come to his office and scolds her   for having broken security protocols by inviting  Roy over. When night falls, Roy goes to a bar   and picks up a woman called Alice, who works as a  dental hygienist. She is just one more woman in a   long line of conquests, and the bartender points  out Roy will never be happy with these one-night   stands because he never stops thinking about his  ex-wife. While Alice is in the bathroom, he gets   a call from Jemma, telling him she is about to  do something drastic and she needs his help,   but Ventor cuts off their line before she can  say more. Roy could tell Jemma sounded upset,   but he still chooses to go back to his place  with Alice instead of trying to reach her again.   While Roy and Alice have fun together, Jemma puts  Roy's hair and blood in a tube that she inserts   inside the machine she has been working on. Seeing  this on the security cameras, Ventor decides she   has gone rogue and sends Brett after her. This  was the last normal day Roy got to live before   the loop started. But now that he has revisited  his memory of his conversation with Jemma,   he realizes he has never checked the birthday  present she has sent her, so he finally opens the   package and finds a book titled "Iset and Osiris"  with a note from Jemma on the back cover that says   time waits for no man. He is so distracted by the  book that he forgets about taking the right steps   to avoid the assassins. He dies two more times  before he manages to escape with the book thanks   to finding a button on the car he always hijacks  that he has never noticed before. After pressing   it, the car starts going much faster, causing Roy  to miss the exit that takes him to Jake's diner.   Instead, he ends up at the Underground Atlanta  mall, where he sits down to read the book Jemma   left him. He does not understand what the story  of Iset and Osiris has to do with anything,   but he interrupts his reading when he sees his  son Joe buying something from an older kid.   When he realizes that he is the only family he has  left now that Jemma is dead, he follows Joe into   an arcade where they hold esports tournaments.  Every time he walks near a screen, he causes them   to glitch, but Roy does not notice this, he just  approaches Joe and scolds him for ditching school.   He also asks him what he bought, but Joe shows  him they are just cards, not any kind of illegal   substance. Then Roy invites him to lunch, and as  soon as they leave the building, he notices it is   twelve fifty, the longest he has ever lived since  the loops started. As he analyses what he has   done differently, he finally realizes they must  have put a tracker on him, and the metal walls   of the diner and the underground location of the  shopping mall have kept him safe. At that moment,   the assassins arrive and shoot Roy as he grabs Joe  and puts himself between the bullets and his son,   dying as he tells him he is his father. When  the day restarts once again, he asks the man   that has broken into his apartment about the  tracker, but he will not tell him where it is.   Moments later, Roy arrives at the diner and goes  straight to the bathroom so he can closely inspect   his body, going as far as putting fingers up his  own rear, but he still does not find the tracker.   Remembering Dave knows all about this stuff,  he asks him where he would hide a tracker,   and Dave suggests the teeth. This brings back  a memory to Roy: Alice, the dental hygienist,   putting him to sleep on a dentist chair while  Brett watches them - she had been part of their   trap all along. After getting more alcohol and  pliers from Jake, Roy goes to the bathroom with   Dave and starts removing his teeth until he  finds the tracker, only to be killed a second   later by Roy Number Two. When the day restarts,  he interrogates Alice, who tells him she had been   paid by Brett to implant the tracker before she  leaves. Roy follows the usual routine until he   makes it to Jake's diner, where he removes the  tooth with the tracker and then takes it to an   abandoned building to use it as a trap. His plan  works and Pam shows up, but she refuses to say   who hired her, so he kills her with her own gun,  which used to belong to a certain Geman dictator.   Roy knows Jemma has put him in this for a reason,  but since he can not go far back enough to save   her, everything is meaningless. The only thing  he has left is revenge, so Roy has fun with   his newfound tracker-less freedom and kills all  the assassins that have been chasing him. Using   the phone he stole from Kaboom, he talks to Brett  and promises he will find him and Ventor as well.   Roy drives to the laboratories and tries to smash  the door open with the car, but he just crashes   and is shot by Brett afterward. A series of loops  start then where Roy keeps trying different plans   to sneak into Dynow, like sending his car with  bombs and pretending to be Roy Number Two.   Stealing his ID does allow him to get inside,  but once again, it takes him a few tries until   he manages to learn all the tricks to avoid the  guards and security cameras. When he finally   manages to find a way to sneak some weapons with  him, the guards are not a problem anymore, but his   next obstacle is Guan-yin, whose sword fighting  skills are too good for him to stop her with   mere wallets. Sometimes, he does not die quickly  enough from the sword wounds and Ventor finds him,   giving the same long, dense speech about his  plans to reset history before killing him.   It is during one of these speeches that Roy learns  the name of the project is the "Osiris Spindle",   and he realizes two things: Ventor does not  know it is working, and Jemma has put him in   it on purpose so he could become Osiris and  stop Ventor and his plans. Feeling empowered   after learning Jemma still believed in him, Roy  starts a new series of loops with a new plan.   After going through the usual routine up to  removing the tracker at the diner's bathroom,   he approaches Dai Feng and asks her for sword  lessons, and she accepts to teach him because   she finds him intriguing. He trains with her  through a good amount of loops until he is good   enough to beat her, and after thanking her for her  lessons, he sneaks into Dynow again. This time,   he fights against Guan-yin with a sword instead  of guns and easily stops all her moves. After   teasing her a bit by cutting off her ponytail,  he stabs her with her own sword. Brett and Ventor   arrive then, but Brett dies quickly when Roy  stabs him on the forehead with the sword.   He and Ventor begin to fistfight, and when Ventor  tries to grab a gun, Roy recovers his sword and   nails Ventor's hand to the floor as he explains  nobody should play god and rewrite history,   the past should be left as it is so we can learn  from it. Ventor thinks those are big words coming   from an absent father and implies Joe may be in  danger, which enrages Roy. After killing Ventor,   he gets back in his car and rushes to the mall,  where he finds out he is too late: his son is   dead, and this probably has already happened many  times during all the loops he has been through.   While he struggles against the police that  does not let him come closer to see Joe's body,   a bright light appears on the horizon: it is the  end of the world, just like Jemma had warned him.   Roy comes to the conclusion Jemma is dead because  he left her and never called her back when she   asked for his help, and now their son is involved  in this too. If the world is going to end anyway,   there is no point in doing anything, so Roy begins  to spend the next few loops in an apathetic state,   allowing the assassins to kill him over and  over. One morning, however, the violence finally   makes him snap out of it and he decides to take  advantage of all the time he now has in his hands.   He returns to the mall and picks up Joe to spend  the day together, playing video games and having   lunch - he does this every loop until the end of  the world takes them and resets the day yet again.   He wants to tell Joe he is his father, but he  is too afraid to do it. During loop two hundred   forty-nine, Roy brings up the subject of Jemma's  work, and Joe reveals he talked to her early in   the morning after she did not return home. This  shocks Roy, who always thought she was killed   during the night, so now he starts a new plan to  see if he can save her. After resetting the day,   he sneaks back into the laboratories and shoots  Ventor and Brett while demanding answers.   Brett confesses they had been trying to  find out what she did to the Osiris Spindle,   because it seems she sabotaged it and now they  can not control the chain reaction she started.   Ventor realizes Roy is able to sneak in because  the Spindle is working, which means Jemma made   him the missing mass. When looking at the security  cameras, Roy finds out the exact time of Jemma's   death: fourteen minutes after he wakes up.  After shooting himself to restart the day,   Roy decides to try to save Jemma even if he  only has fourteen minutes to do it. As always,   he kills the first assassin, but afterward, he  makes the routine different by jumping directly   from the window and into the helicopter. The  gunman is kicked off before Roy threatens the   pilot with a gun, ordering him to take him to  Dynow as fast as possible. Once he arrives,   he takes the gunman's machinegun with him as he  sneaks inside the building and uses it to kill all   the assassins that are waiting together outside  the door. From the pile of bodies, he takes a gun   and Guan-yin's sword, and he shoots every guard on  his way until he makes it to Jemma's laboratory,   where she is being attacked by Brett. Roy does  not hesitate to kill both him and Ventor in   seconds before reuniting with Jemma, who asks him  how many tries it took him to get her. He lies   and says it was only one, but Jemma sees the  truth when he begins telling her all the things   he has learned about Joe after promising her he  is safe and no assassins are going after their   kid. Jemma explains that there is no stopping  the Spindle, only restarting it. She made the   missing mass inside the machine match Roy's  DNA specifically, so if he enters the Spindle,   the day should reset for the last time and  time would go back to normal, but she is not   one hundred percent sure of that - all this is  just a theory since this is the first time she   managed to make the machine work and it was all  done in a hurry to stop Ventor. If time resumes   and Roy dies, he will be gone for real, but he  thinks he has learned enough information to save   both Jemma and Joe without much trouble. So after  kissing Jemma, Roy enters the Osiris Spindle,   and waits for the machine to use him to  hopefully restart the day for the last time.