Chương 47: 46: The Eleven Abominations II

/// Clock swept an arm. The battlefield convulsed. Invisible telekinetic force detonated outward with a deafening KRAAAOOM, turning mountains inside out and hurling debris for miles. The landscape folded beneath raw force alone. A Talon burst through the chaos. Its shoulder unfolded into a sleek launcher. The projectile struck Clock square in the chest. The impact carried the weight of a mountain.

It blossomed into a contained nuclear detonation, vaporizing everything nearby and flattening the earth into incandescent glass. BOOOOOOOM. Transport absorbed it. Clock didn't even blink. Then he frowned. Two shimmering metallic discs snapped onto his shoulders with sharp metallic CLACKS. They hummed, disrupting Transport in microscopic bursts. Every few milliseconds the law flickered as reality refused to obey before snapping back into place. Clock reached for them. Nothing.

The devices were saturated with so much Apis that even his telekinesis slid harmlessly over their surfaces. Ten seconds. The Gloom would crush them eventually. Until then... He was only mostly invincible. A silver pellet shrieked toward his face at relativistic speed. Transport flickered. Clock tilted his head. SHHK. The projectile kissed his cheek, opening a thin line of blood. It hadn't pierced through overwhelming force.

It simply softened whatever it touched, reducing flesh to something a feather could cut before passing cleanly through. Clock followed its path. Half a mile away, an Operative calmly lowered a weapon that resembled a railgun disguised as a slingshot. Clock launched with a straight punch, tearing through hills and ridges as the terrain exploded around him. The Operative dissolved. A hologram. The ground beneath him flashed. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.

Incendiary mines erupted in rapid succession, each releasing compressed stellar fire. The inferno swallowed him whole. He ignored it. Clock spun. CLAAANG! A blade the size of a bus screamed past his throat. Another Talon. Clock caught the flat against his forearm, redirected it with a tight boxing parry, then flowed into a judo tai sabaki, slipping outside its line. His elbow crashed into the Talon's jaw before unwinding into a fluid Changquan combination. The Talon gave ground.

Apis dispersed most of the punishment. The blade came again. Its sword refused conventional rhythm, flowing through impossible angles and broken tempos. Every swing became another, folding back upon itself in bizarre, unorthodox patterns that denied prediction. Clock abandoned empty-hand exchanges. His guitar flashed into his grip. CLANG! Steel met enchanted wood as he parried, countered, and redirected, the instrument becoming a staff, shield, and club in one seamless flow. The Talon suddenly spun. BOOM!

A side kick detonated into Clock's chest, sending him skidding backward through the air. He caught the extended leg and smiled.

"Got you." He began to hurl the Talon. A fingertip unfolded. A needle-thin beam lanced toward Clock's forehead. Impossibly precise. Timed for the exact instant Transport stuttered. It sought only one target. The nerve responsible for voluntary movement. Clock released the leg. SHHHK! The beam skimmed past his face before drilling through the mountain range behind him, punching clean through peak after peak until the distant horizon glowed white-hot. He retaliated instantly, twisting into a crushing roundhouse.

CLAAANG! The Talon intercepted with its blade. It vibrated at a maddening frequency. The instant they touched, Clock's leg went numb. Only for a few seconds. Long enough. The two separated, drifting across the battlefield as dust and shattered stone rained between them. Clock flexed his useless leg, waiting for sensation to return. A quiet chuckle escaped him.

"You're skilled." The Talon inclined its head.

"So are you." A faint mechanical hum escaped its helmet.

"It would be disappointing if you weren't." They clashed again. Clock remained airborne, weaving effortlessly around retaliatory swings while nearly invisible threads of Gloom spread beneath the battlefield. They infiltrated. Gadget requests stalled. Talon predictions desynchronized. Across impossible distances, the Magpie logistics network slowed by less than an attosecond. That was enough. The Talon's visor froze. Prediction failed. Clock was already there. His hand hovered a metre above its chest.

"For you..." Reality bent. Reverse Blast no longer tripled every metre. For this attack, it multiplied without limit. THOOOOOM. More force than a star could ever release erupted through a space no larger than a dinner plate. The Talon simply ceased to exist. Absence beneath impossible pressure. Yet even in death, its final contingency activated.... A collar hidden beneath Clock's neck discharged impossible currents, forcing every fragment of that overwhelming force directly into his nervous system.

At the same instant, his hands were ripped together. CLACK! Cuffs unfolded from empty air and snapped shut around both wrists. Hukan. Indestructible. Clock's eyes widened. He hadn't even felt them being placed. Then the electricity hit. Every nerve ignited. White-blue arcs exploded across his body, flash-melting the grey glass beneath him. The battlefield liquefied in a hundred-meter radius, bubbling into incandescent rivers before cooling into warped black crystal as his body locked rigid. He should have died.

The Gloom rewound him. Burned nerves became whole before the scream finished tearing from his throat. His gaze dropped to the cuffs. Seamless black Hukan restraints encircled both wrists. He pulled once. Nothing. They didn't so much as tremble. There was no time to waste. Without the slightest hesitation, he dislocated both thumbs. Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. CRACK. CRACK.

Ignoring the agony, he forced his mangled hands through the impossibly narrow cuffs, skin splitting as bone scraped against unyielding metal, then tore them free. The empty Hukan restraints clattered onto the glass. The Gloom surged through him. POP. POP. Bone slid smoothly back into place. Flesh knitted shut. His thumbs relocated as though they had never left their sockets. Clock rolled one shoulder, then the other. The two shimmering Apis discs clinging to him shrieked.

Cracks raced across their surfaces as relentless Gloom pressure overwhelmed their circuitry. They sparked violently, flickering in and out of reality before bursting apart in showers of molten fragments. Transport settled. Whole again.

"One down." His violet eyes swept across the battlefield.

"More to go." — Within moments, vaporized Talons lay scattered as heaps of shimmering feathered slag. Dead Operatives were little more than crimson stains across the gray dust. The Abominations possessed greater power. The Operatives were far more dangerous. Their Apis systems housed predictive engines capable of simulating countless futures. A prolonged fight wasn't a test of power. It was a race to quantify him, model him, and find the one countermeasure hidden among billions of possibilities.

Failing that, they'd engineer a mutual kill so precise it erased both sides from causality's ledger. Clock refused to give them time. Telekinetic shockwaves thundered across the battlefield. Reverse Blast spheres bloomed like violet flowers. Contradictions, feints, and impossible attack patterns flooded the battlefield, aimed not at their bodies but their predictive cores. He wanted their simulations drowning in noise before they could lock onto a usable pattern.

He wove through the Abominations' assaults with effortless precision. Gurtu's continent-breaking mace descended. Clock tilted sideways and drifted past it by inches. Malakhi's frost lances crossed through the air. He folded backward, rotating smoothly between them without breaking momentum. The Twin Razors lunged from opposite directions. Clock rolled through open sky, slipping between converging blades as though gravity itself had forgotten him. Rhizome's pollen storms spread around him.

He corkscrewed upward through gaps that shouldn't have existed. Every movement flowed into the next in smooth, relentless motion. He ignored Kael's beams that froze atomic motion into diamond and slipped past the Warpfluff's spatial crushers. They were thunder. He was lightning hunting the conductor. The true battle was silent. Digital. Against the Operatives. Against the countdowns in their HUDs measuring the seconds until his defeat.

"We are the conclusion at the end of your story," Silas rasped from the battlefield's edge.

"Your Gloom is a paragraph. We are the full stop." Iriz flashed, her mirrored form reflecting his posture perfectly.

"A false prince playing at king. This arena is not your throne. It is your coffin. We are the nails." The assault intensified.

"You dragged eleven eternities into your sandbox!" Gurtu thundered, his mace descending with continent-breaking force.

"Arrogance. Now face them!" — The Talons and Operatives watched, Apis cores measuring the psychological assault. Standard Syndicate doctrine: crush the body, then crush the story the victim tells about itself. Clock, a white-and-black blur, heard none of it. A telekinetic strike cratered Gurtu ten miles east. A Reverse Blast sent Silas twenty miles west. Kael vanished over the horizon behind a guided punch. Clock became a cue ball breaking formation, isolating targets, denying coordination, denying mass.

He weaponized distance. They were pieces on an endless board. He was the player moving too fast to see. He gave them no time. Punches landed without sound, only consequences. Each impact carved miles-long scars into the grey earth as dead dust rose like forgotten memories. He fought with The Geometry of Checkmate, a seamless fusion of Capoeira deception, Liuhebafa spirals, boxing brutality, Changquan sweeps, and Judo leverage. Violence reduced to perfect positioning. One Talon finally achieved a scan. SCANNING…

BIOLOGICAL BASELINE: UNBOUND. Primary physicality fully augmented by Gloom. Current speed: 0. 9c sustained. TELEKINETIC STRENGTH: PLANETARY CLASS. DEFENCE: TRANSPORT. COUNTER: NONE FOUND. HIDDEN POTENTIAL: 85. 3%. WARNING: SUBJECT OPERATING FAR BELOW CAPACITY. This was not his full strength. Clock disappeared. Reappeared miles away. A fist wrapped in dense violet telekinetic fire struck a chitinous abomination. His Gloom, deeper and more ordered than Butter's chaos, compressed force into a pinhead.

And drilled straight through conceptual armor.... It was then he felt it. A recursive pain bloomed behind his sternum. Malakhi had teleported a conceptual seed directly into his chest, bypassing durability and ignoring Transport, a heart-bomb waiting to unfold his organs from within. Clock had already seen it. Three seconds earlier he'd read the wraith's intent. He let the seed pulse once, twice, feigning ignorance. As Malakhi's lipless mouth curled into a smile, he folded the space around his heart.

For a single quantum instant, it occupied a marble-sized pocket dimension. The curse bloomed into nothing. To everyone watching, it looked as though the attack had simply failed. Then Rhizome exhaled. A cloud of glittering cognitive pollen flooded the space Clock inhaled. Living algorithms invaded his body, trying to rewrite him. Bone to wood. Blood to sap. Memory to rings of grief. Become a tree. Be still. Be silent. His vision blurred, bark creeping across his fingertips as four Abominations attacked at once.

Gurtu's mace fell from above. The Twin Razors cut in from either side. Ouro surged from the dust, chains singing around his ankles. Then his Gloom answered. MY BODY. MY SPACE. MY STORY. The spores screamed into ash. The bark shattered. In the same motion, Clock ripped the guitar from his back. PING. A single perfect note erupted from the violet strings. Eight miles of dead desert flash-vitrified into a mirror of glass. Lesser targets vaporized.

Hardier ones remained standing, bodies shredded by the conceptual force of disruption itself. Only two emerged untouched, the Twin Razors. They hadn't endured the wave. They had cut through the disruption itself. Before the glass settled, they were already moving, slicing away the space between them and Clock. He shot skyward, launching Reverse Blast spheres along their path. Meaningless. They erased the distance. An instant later they stood beside him, blades humming an inch from his face.

Clock unleashed a hemispheric burst of telekinetic force powerful enough to crater a mountain range. They cut through it. The wave split cleanly around their blades as their swords swung for his throat. — Clock abandoned physical defense. Instead, he hurled a psychic shockwave into their minds, a tsunami of alien consciousness meant to short-circuit their neural pathways. They rejected it instantly. Their minds were as sharp as their blades, honed to a singular purpose that admitted no intrusion.

A millisecond was enough. He couldn't strike them directly. Their bladed aura reduced anything that touched it to ribbons, regardless of durability or Gloom. To punch them was to be cut by the act itself. So he punched the space between them. His fist, wrapped in condensed Gloom, struck reality itself. The impact became a concussive command of pure away, engulfing both through the medium around them rather than their bodies. THOOM.

They were hurled backward like dolls, perfect forms crumpling beneath overwhelming translation instead of force. Both crashed into Gurtu's still-smoldering frame in a tangle of blades and volcanic stone. Clock didn't pursue. He rocketed skyward, putting miles between them as his mind recalibrated.... Silas and Rhizome had fled almost immediately. They split from the Choir, crossing thousands of miles through Clock's false world. Alone, each could birth armies. Together, they became an extinction event.

Silas seeded forests of living black timber while Rhizome blanketed the land in impossible spores. Roots entwined with fungal webs, flesh merged with bark, and pollen rewrote anything it touched. Clock found them before they finished. Even so, thousands already stood. Raw, starving biology wrapped in terrifying hides. They emerged from geothermal mists like living mountains shrugging off sleep.

Hulking beasts the size of foundries, their muscles were slabs of basalt and gristle beneath dense pelts of fiery russet, bruised indigo, and sickly moss green streaked with metallic brass veins. Steam rolled from their backs in ghostly waves. Their wedge-shaped heads sat flush against armored shoulders. Cavernous jaws bristled with spiraled brass tusks and fossilized bone, green saliva hissing wherever it struck the iron plain. Every breath vented sulfurous steam. Their eyes burned with a single instinct. Lunge.

Tear. Consume. Above the endless tide floated Clock, perfectly still. A single point of calm violating an entire world of chaos.... Silas barked a laugh from somewhere beyond the steaming ridges.

"You're too slow, little god!" Rhizome's voice followed from another direction, carried on drifting spores.

"Come find us." The pair slipped away again, already miles farther, laughing as they went to raise another army. High above, a Talon watched in silence, its optics tracking every movement. Its HUD filled with cold white glyphs. PSYCHIC INTERCEPT. TARGETS: 8, 442. SUBJECT READ HOSTILE INTENT BEFORE CONSCIOUS ACTION. A violet heat haze rippled from Clock. TEMPORAL FIELD: "SYRUP." TIME RATE: 1/10, 000. The world slowed to a crawl. Roars hung motionless. Spittle floated like beads of glass.

Lunges became continental shifts. Clock raised a hand. TELEKINETIC LOCK: INTERNAL ORGANS. Nothing happened. Then he closed his fist. FIELD RELEASED. Time snapped back. The result was anatomy betraying itself. All 8, 442 beasts completed their charges while their hearts, lungs, stomachs, and every vital organ remained fixed in space beneath an absolute telekinetic law. Bodies tore themselves apart. Ribcages burst outward. Arteries stretched to cable thickness before snapping like collapsing bridges.

Blood and viscera erupted skyward in one synchronized crimson bloom. The plain became a sea of gore in less than a second. Before the first corpse struck the ground, Clock was already a mile overhead. A sphere of violet light, no larger than a grapefruit, drifted from his palm. It fell for two seconds. It touched the center of the crimson plain. The HUD collapsed into a single value climbing exponentially, tripling with every meter of expansion. Then came white. A perfect sphere of light swallowed the battlefield.

Blood, flesh, corpses, even the air itself were erased from existence beneath its expanding brilliance. When the light faded, nothing remained except a flawless plain of glowing glass stretching to the horizon. The army had been erased from the equation. The Talon hovered motionless. Its analytical core produced one final conclusion. CONCLUSION: SUBJECT'S ANTI-ARMY PROTOCOL IS BIOLOGY DEPENDENT. CURRENT HOSTILES ARE CONCEPTUAL AND INORGANIC. PROTOCOL INEFFECTIVE.

That was Clock without restraint, when the target fit his design parameters. He cannot do that here. We have no organs to hold. We are ideas and nightmares, not flesh. A psychic icepick drilled into its mind. A presence. The scent of ozone and cosmic dust. A subsonic hum tuned to the exact frequency of its own systems. The feeling of being solved. Clock was coming. For it. The observer. The data rat. Its HUD overrode every process. INCOMING TARGET. TRAJECTORY LOCKED. PROTOCOL: DODGE RIGHT. IMMEDIATE.

The Talon obeyed without hesitation. An orange implosion grenade dropped from its grasp as it lunged right. Then it abandoned the sky altogether. Dream Walk. Its mind seized upon a single thought. I am beside that hill. Reality accepted the idea. One instant it occupied the air thousands of feet above the battlefield. The next, it stood miles away at the foot of a lonely hill, the space between simply... omitted.

It looked back toward the violet streak racing through the heavens and allowed itself the smallest measure of satisfaction. Prediction remains possible.