Chương 48: 47: The Eleven Abominations III

A heartbeat later, Clock tore through the space the Talon had occupied. WHOOOOM! The orange sphere activated. Space folded inward. A gravity snare clawed at the pocket dimension, crushing everything toward a single impossible point. Clock's violet eyes flared. His telekinesis narrowed from a tidal wave into a scalpel, slipped into the device's impossible geometry, and crushed the mechanism sustaining it. The pull died with a wet pop. But he had already seen the real play. The Talon had been buying time.

A second device rested in its hand. Silver. Already active. A shriek like a dying star ripped across the arena. Soul static. A frequency tuned to desynchronize Gloom itself. Clock growled as the world lurched around him. With a thought, the emitter crumpled into scrap. That had been a distraction, but for what? He spun around. Ankou was already there. The Void Maw drifted toward him, reality peeling away around its silhouette. It completed its arrival, a zone of nonexistence dilating like a pupil.

One touch and he would unhappen.

"Death comes," it whispered. Clock glanced at it.

"Death goes." He blasted himself backward, shattering the glass plain beneath him. Violet fire engulfed his raised hand as he forced his Gloom to imitate the premise before him, burning enormous reserves to learn erasure itself.

"King's Gambit." A technique that forged a construct carrying an opponent's exact ability in exchange for Gloom. The greater the power, the greater the cost. From the violet blaze leapt a cougar woven from negative light and hungry silence. It met Ankou head-on. Two voids collided in perfect, soundless negation. They dragged one another into a spiraling knot of mutual erasure, canceling each other out for one precious heartbeat. Clock never watched. His attention had already returned to the Talon.

Then Clock smiled. He amplified. Inside the Talon's fractured awareness, its HUD screamed. WARNING: TELEKINETIC REPOSITION DETECTED. FORCE: 150 TRILLION NEWTONS. DISPERSAL PROTOCOL: ACTIVE. Clock already knew. Physical force meant little against the triangular prism cores. They dispersed impacts with terrifying efficiency. Even a strike capable of shattering continents became harmless dream mist, translated away before it could truly land.

If brute force failed, the Talon's predictive systems already had a counter prepared, or it simply escaped through Dream Walk. So Clock sent neither. His punch never traveled. Space folded. The distance between his fist and the Talon's chest simply stopped existing, causality skipping a heartbeat. More importantly, he had wrapped his fist in structured Gloom during the fold, warping the air, space, and conceptual fabric between them into a predatory silence that swallowed vibration, light, and consequence.

The strike arrived as an argument, a needlepoint of violet certainty. VWHUMP. It collided with the Talon's Apis field, a defense woven from rewritable dream logic. For a microsecond, it held. Dispersal protocols activated, translating impossible force into harmless fiction. But this was no longer force alone. It was a counterargument. A single, structured word written in Clock's signature. But. The suit tried to dream it away. The argument bit back. LAW ENGAGED: FORCE TRANSLATION ACTIVE. The glyph flickered.

Stuttered. The system was failing to agree on the language of the attack. Kinetic translation choked, then vomited power back through the suit in cascading failures. The Talon glitched. Its body flickered across ten overlapping states of disintegration, a machine ghost dying through parallel possibilities. Yet it had been built for one purpose. Close the kill. That was why it neither dodged nor fled despite the warning. From its picosecond perspective, it had time to choose. It chose offense.

A final protocol ignited. [SHROUD PUNCH PROTOCOL: ACTIVATED.] The Talon inverted its failing dispersal matrix, creating a gravity well of simultaneous push and pull that locked Clock inside contradictory vectors. Its HUD bled corrupted glyphs. TARGET DURABILITY: UNQUANTIFIABLE. FORCE REQUIRED: UNDEFINED. DELIVERING MAXIMUM OUTPUT. The punch landed before it was thrown. Reality looked away. Physics became optional.

Sacrificing its prism core, the Talon forced the strike into a bubble where cause and effect held no authority. BLAAAAM. The rupture struck Clock's jaw with enough force to fold gas giants into diamonds, tear continents free, or silence a star. Compressed into a fist-sized point, it would have punched through virtually anything. Clock's durability answered differently. Structured Gloom flowed through every cell, insisting his existence remained valid.

When the Shroud Punch declared, You cease, his Gloom replied, I disagree. Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. For a Planck instant they argued. The Gloom lost. Then negotiated. Total erasure became catastrophic displacement. The cost of the Talon's sacrifice hit him all at once. Clock's violet eyes widened for the barest fraction as Transport abandoned him, the Prism Core having paid too great a price to let the law persist. The punch landed in full.

Clock blasted backward through fractured spacetime, carving a scar of inverted light as he was hurled over a hundred miles despite the realm's crushing gravity. On Earth, the same blow would have launched him beyond the Solar System before he could even think. Here, the false world held him just enough for his telekinesis to flare violet, slowing his impossible flight before he finally slammed into the distant plain. He rose slowly as smoke curled from his jacket and reality ionized around him.

Rolling his jaw with a sharp CRUNCH, he spat. Dark, shimmering blood struck the glass and blossomed into a tiny galaxy of impossible stars. Clock frowned. That punch... Talons were strong. This had been something else. First came the pull, an inescapable collapse into the strike. Then the rules protecting the space around it were quietly stripped away. Finally, the punch landed. It wasn't merely powerful. It was impossible. Even he couldn't have delivered that much force with such absolute precision.

Surviving it had cost an alarming amount of Gloom, not just because the blow was strong, but because it had been an ending punch. Had his reserves been any lower, it wouldn't have mattered if his body were as durable as a compressed universe. The strike would've pierced him like a white-hot needle through hardened wax. A new ability... His eyes narrowed. He would have to be more careful.... The Talon was already gone. Reality had collected its price. OBJECTIVE COMPLETE.

The final glyph lingered for a heartbeat before dissolving into ash. A cold, precise wrongness bloomed in Clock's abdomen. He looked down. A sleek grey blade protruded from below his sternum. Hukan. He had never perceived it. The Talon hadn't simply died in the backlash. As its final sacrifice, it had ridden the Shroud Punch's transport distortion to deliver one perfect parting strike. His durability was monstrous, layered beneath telekinetic reinforcement, but Hukan was monomolecular and indestructible.

It didn't cut flesh. It parted the space between atoms, slipping through every defense like a ghost through a wall. Only now did the delayed violation register. With an irritated snarl, Clock wrapped the hilt in violet telekinesis and pulled. The blade slid free with a wet whisper. His body moved to regenerate. He stopped it. Instead, muscles locked around the wound while telekinetic pressure erupted from within, blasting a spray of dark, shimmering blood into the air. There.

Suspended in the cosmic crimson floated an iridescent silver sheen, mercury lit from within. It hissed against reality, burning tiny shrieking holes through space itself. Poison, for existence. A metaphysical acid designed to unravel the structural law of his being. It had bypassed pain entirely because pain was never its purpose. If he'd healed immediately, he would've sealed it inside himself. A rat in the walls of his soul. He watched the silver venom dissolve into the air. The Talon was gone.

Yet its final move had come dangerously close. His eyes hardened. Sacrificial chess. The Syndicate played to win. There was no time to think. They were already upon him.... In the sliver of stillness after he grasped the game, the air turned sweet and heavy. Rhizome had waited for this exact moment. Respect demanded observation. Observation required stillness. And stillness was fertile ground. She exhaled.

Glittering pollen drifted around Clock, not settling on his skin but accepted by reality as though it had always been there. He breathed once, and his lungs became an archive. The first wave offered peace. Your fatigue is valid. Lay down your burden. Phantom logic soothed his Gloom. Why fight? The chessboard was infinite. Why not become a spectator in his own story? A perfect vision formed. Himself as a marble monument in a silent grove, chess pieces forever frozen around him. For an instant, it sounded reasonable.

The second wave began rewriting. Butter's laughing face became a reminder of failure instead of love. The Shroud Punch became proof the universe had corrected an error. You are the error. The deepest spores reached beyond memory and into the Gloom itself. You are a lonely island. We are the continent. Stop defending the shore. Grey-green lichen crept across his neck. His violet eyes dimmed. His raised fist slowly lowered. This was how you won the game. You didn't take the king.

You convinced him he'd always been a pawn. Then the attack faltered. The fresh, screaming void where Butter's bond had been refused the illusion. It wasn't an old memory to reinterpret. It was an amputation. The contradiction split Rhizome's perfect garden. Clock seized the fracture. He spoke with the taste of his own severed soul.

"MY SISTER... IS NOT... A THEME." The words became a psychic scalpel. His Gloom imploded inward, burning infected pathways, vaporizing the spores in a brutal act of mental cauterization. He expelled them in a gasp of black, iridescent vapor as the lichen cracked into ash. But the cost remained. His eyes looked haunted. Some memories felt borrowed. Rhizome had learned him. Clock turned toward her in fury. She was already gone. His mind remained a battlefield. The spores were dead, but their afterimage lingered.

Burst. Branch. Bloom. Root here. His hands trembled as he fought the urge to become wood. His legs strained against the instinct to root into the earth. He was a man refusing to become a monument. Then the silence broke. A high, piercing whine tore through the battlefield, like shattered glass given a soul. Clock's blood ran cold. He knew that sound. Purification Orbs. Authorization for their use was a nightmare of protocols, reserved for Magpie Commanders.

They weren't Enforcer weapons, but reality scalpels issued to elite hunters. Only three existed per faction at any time. How did an Operative have one? Purification Orbs balanced reality itself. Like acid meeting base, they reduced anything they touched into perfect equilibrium. Matter. Energy. Magic. Conceptual law. Everything resolved to cosmic zero. Their true horror was retroactive. A victim wasn't merely erased from the present. They were untethered from the past. Memories unraveled. Photographs blurred.

Records contradicted themselves. It was deletion as history. Clock hadn't sensed the plan. He could skim surface thoughts, but the illogical Apis energy cloaking the orbs concealed not the weapon, but the intent to use it. If he could hear the whine...... he was already inside the kill box. His eyes snapped open. Prismatic shards burst into existence around him. Billions of them manifesting as one.

In an instant, a perfect sphere formed less than five meters from his body, billions of crystalline fragments screaming around him in a flawless shell of absolute resolution. Their balancing logic hummed through his teeth. There was no punching through. Transport would resolve into nothing on contact. The orbs suppressed every spatial phenomenon within their sphere of influence. Teleportation failed. Spatial folds collapsed. Nothing could be summoned in or extracted out.

The only way past was to physically walk or fly through the lattice. Which was impossible. The shards converged the instant an opening appeared, and touching even one meant being calmly, perfectly resolved into nothing. A cage without a door. Only an end. The shards rushed inward. The first touched him. Then another. His shoulder dissolved. Blood burst from his mouth as crystalline fragments embedded themselves through his torso, their balancing logic interfering with every law his body relied upon.

Clock coughed, crimson-purple staining his lips.

"Clockwork." His telekinesis reached inward, grasping not space but the flow of his own time. He saw it. A vast golden clock suspended behind reality. His fingers reached for the minute hand. It barely moved. The shards lodged within him disrupted his focus, their resolving field resisting every attempt to rewrite causality. He could only force the hand back a single second. Tick. The world lurched. Flesh reformed. Blood rushed back into torn vessels.

The shards slid from his body and returned to the air as the moment unwound. Time thickened into crystalline syrup. Even with his perception, the shards possessed privileged velocity, balancing away the cost of motion itself. Only by compressing his personal timeline into impossible density could he stretch that fatal second into something visible. And there. A gap. As the sphere finished forming, one microscopic inconsistency flickered through the lattice.

A single quantum frame where the resolving field existed, but had not yet fully closed. Clock didn't hesitate. He exploded through the opening before it sealed behind him. He'd ambushed them. Purification Orbs were response weapons, doomsday protocols. An Operative carrying one meant his attack hadn't been an ambush at all. The truth settled with horrifying clarity. He would've sensed it. A Purification Orb was a wound waiting to happen, a silent scream of nullity that should've echoed through his Gloom.

He'd felt nothing. The Operative hadn't been carrying it. Ice slid through his veins. The suit had requested it. Linked directly to Syndicate logistics, it had scanned Clock, identified a recursive Gloom anomaly, selected the appropriate countermeasure from some buried vault of nightmares, then translated the weapon itself. Existential data compressed, transmitted, and reconstructed inside the suit between heartbeats. They didn't need to be armed. They only needed to identify him. Clock touched his body.

Whole again. It had taken years to realize he didn't regenerate the way others did. Butter's Gloom persuaded reality to make her whole whenever she was injured. His Gloom never repaired damage. It rewound his personal timeline until the injury had never happened. That was why the poison had been so dangerous. It attacked the concept of Clock rather than his body. The Purification Orbs would've erased him across every point in his timeline at once, leaving nothing to rewind to.

In almost any other fight, he could walk through attacks that should've wounded him and emerge untouched. This wasn't that fight. Fresh fury burned through the dread. Universe erasers, issued on demand to foot soldiers. Blasphemy. His violet eyes swept the battlefield, no longer searching for the roaring Abominations but for the surviving Talons and Operatives. They had to die. Now. Before another weapon arrived with his name already written into its equation.

Clock thrust out a hand and seized the battlefield itself. He thickened time everywhere, not with Clockwork, where he grasped time's hands directly at the cost of Gloom, but by using telekinesis to make reality harder to move through. It demanded focus rather than power, turning the air into invisible syrup that resisted every movement. An instant step became a millisecond. A relativistic lunge became a manageable blur. Distance no longer guaranteed safety.

The abominations still closed relentlessly, some through speed, others by collapsing space itself. The dampening would have to suffice. From impossible blitz to merely apocalyptic. The Screamsong reached him first.