Chương 53: 52: The Eleven Abominations VII

Lethe stared at the remains.

"…Lovely…" Then a calm voice answered from behind her.

"One question. Why did you let your guard down?" Every muscle in Lethe's body froze. Her pupils shrank. She spun, her hand already reshaping into a blade. Clock stood behind her. Whole. Untouched. She lunged. The edge screamed towards his throat. Clock leaned aside by inches and buried his fist in her stomach. THUD. Her body folded.

"No… that wasn't…" It had felt like a single punch. Inside her body, it was anything but. Two impacts. Ten. Twenty. Dozens. Hundreds. Perfectly layered strikes compressed into one instant erupted through every organ at once. Her diaphragm locked, her spine refused commands, and even breathing became impossible. She couldn't move. She couldn't transform. She couldn't even reach her abilities. Clock caught her by the throat and lifted her effortlessly from the ground. Realisation slowly spread across her face.

"I… I watched you die…" Her voice barely existed.

"…You cloned yourself." Clock's expression never changed.

"Did you really think I'd fight eleven abominations without a contingency?" He tilted his head slightly.

"I'm an abomination too. I know how disturbingly redundant we're built. Layers of abilities. Failsafes beneath failsafes." His grip tightened.

"I split myself into three. You killed one. There are still two of me." A faint smile touched his lips.

"The other is waiting inside a sealed pocket dimension." He sighed, almost wistfully.

"Unfortunately, I never learned to divide myself beyond that. My father, in his prime, could split into millions." His smile turned faintly self-deprecating.

"Rather pathetic of me, really." Lethe's composure shattered.

"NO!" She screamed, thrashing violently in his grip, her arms melting into silver blades that hacked uselessly through the air. Tears streamed down her face as panic consumed her.

"NO! YOU WERE DEAD! I SAW YOU DIE! I KILLED YOU!" Clock looked into her terrified eyes.

"Die with that knowledge." Violet Gloom flowed over his hand. It wasn't violent. It was gentle. Painfully gentle. Her body began unraveling into tiny strands of white light, each thread carrying away a memory, a thought, a heartbeat. She never screamed. She simply stared into his eyes until her own dissolved into glowing dust. Moments later, nothing remained. Not even ash. Clock lingered for a moment, staring at the empty space where Lethe had unraveled.

"… I'm sorry." The words were barely audible. He had been raised to fight. Trained to kill. Even so, he often wondered whether he would've become so willing to take a life without the burden of the psychic gifts sleeping behind his violet eyes. Reading minds was one thing. Seeing them across time was another. He had searched. Every single one of them. Not their present selves, but the countless futures branching from every choice they could still make. Somewhere, he had hoped, there might be a version that stopped.

One where guilt finally took root. One where compassion prevailed. One where they laid down their atrocities of their own accord. There wasn't. Century after century unfolded before him with merciless certainty. Cities burned. Children disappeared. Entire civilizations were harvested for experiments. Every act of kindness shown to them became another weapon to exploit. Every chance at redemption was discarded before it could bloom. Their minds were monuments, not to conviction, but to cruelty.

A hundred years from now, they would still be committing horrors, no matter who reached out a hand. Clock closed his eyes for a single heartbeat.

"There's nothing left to save." He turned away. The battlefield lost another ghost as he rose silently into the violet sky, carrying the weight of one more necessary death. — The Abominations answered with a whisper. The weeds grew first. The air thickened with rotting blossoms and fresh earth as black-barked roots burst from the glass beneath Clock. Needle-thin thorns crystallized through the atmosphere, burrowing into his lungs with his next breath.

Worse, a vine of impossible grief rooted itself around his heart, blooming from memories that were never his. Butter's smile fading to ash. Loves never lost. Failures never lived.

"Be still," Silas rustled from everywhere.

"Your fury makes fertile soil." Clock shunted the physical thorns from his lungs with micro-Transport, but the grief remained. It was a story forced into him. Silas cultivated emotion. Rage became volcanic glass in the veins. Love became strangling vines. Empty hearts were simply loaned feelings from his own garden, then charged interest in blood. Before Clock could reject the fiction, the second trap arrived. Ouro rose from the roots, a serpent of liquid night whose humming chains synchronized with his heartbeat.

Lub-DUB. Tighten. Lub-DUB. Tighten. The coils wrapped around his ankles. Every heartbeat fed them. Struggling only hastened the constriction.

"Your rhythm is mine." Then came the mirror. Iriz simply existed ten yards away, her polished body reflecting not Clock, but the perfect counter to whatever he chose next. Destroy Silas's garden, and she'd return the force twice over. Break the chains, and she'd reflect an attack that accelerated his heartbeat, letting Ouro finish the job. A flawless trap. Silas clouded his mind. Ouro tied death to his pulse. Iriz waited to punish every answer. They didn't need to overpower Clock.

They only needed him to choose how he would die.... Clock went still, grief blooming through his chest, Ouro's chain tightening with every heartbeat as Iriz waited to punish any answer. Castling, he thought. A single swap would break the trap. No. Not this time. He wanted to beat them with nothing but will and skill. A bloodstained smile crossed his lips.

"I will not die here." Instead of resisting Silas's false grief, he embraced it. His Gloom seized the borrowed sorrow and set it ablaze, turning despair into fierce, possessive devotion. The vine burned. The agony became his own, no longer Silas's. Then he changed his heartbeat. Ba-dum... ba-dum-dum... ba... Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. A rhythm with no pattern. Ouro's dirge stumbled, unable to follow the fractured pulse.

The chains loosened for a single confused instant. Clock moved straight at Iriz. She prepared to reflect his charge. At the final instant, Clock used Transport on the space before her, replacing it for a quantum moment with the space inside his own burning chest. Iriz reflected perfectly. But there was no attack. Only the blazing grief already consuming Clock. The reflection folded back into its source, collapsing into paradox. The grief devoured itself, leaving only a searing ache in his soul. The vine was gone.

Iriz's flawless surface fogged, then fractured into countless hairline cracks as her perfect logic failed to resolve the contradiction. Clock didn't waste the opening. A precise telekinetic shove placed Iriz directly into Silas's thorn field and Ouro's recoiling chains. The chains found her first. The thorns followed. They searched for emotion and life, finding only a mirror trapped in its own system failure. For one priceless moment, the three Abominations became entangled in the trap they had built for him.

Clock didn't wait. His chest still burned with the phantom ache of weaponized grief as both hands rose to erase the tangled trio. Warpfluff struck first. She knew better than to challenge a complete martial artist head-on. Instead, she rewrote his footing. An invisible field inverted his personal gravity. Down became up. Forward became backward. Every instinct governing balance became a lie. Then something bloomed inside him. Silas. The first grief-seed had only been a probe. This was the harvest.

Black-barked vines erupted through Clock's lungs, wrapped his ribs, and burrowed through his organs, serrated thorns sawing flesh from within. He coughed a spray of cosmos-dark blood laced with shredded leaves as his own battle rage fed the growth. Without hesitation, Clock reached into his own mind. His telekinesis shut down his limbic system. Every feeling was severed. Silas's vines, robbed of emotion, withered into brittle husks. His Gloom burned them to ash, expelled in another bloody cough....

That instant was all Warpfluff needed. The immense sphere of warped geometry rippled. Its impossible surface softened and folded inward as she shed the cumbersome mass, condensing into a shimmering humanoid figure whose translucent body resembled a walking soap bubble wrapped around a woman's silhouette. Gravity still distorted around her with every movement, the air bending toward her like light into a black hole. Gravity was her dominion. Not merely mass or attraction, but the concept of gravity itself.

Throughout the battle, she'd studied Clock, familiarizing herself with Transport until its conceptual weight became something she could finally grasp. She shrugged off his thickened time, moving like a ghost beyond physics. As her fist closed the final inch, she struck with more than force. Simultaneously, she lifted the weight of Clock's durability from his body and stripped the weight from Transport itself, diminishing the law just before impact.

His Gloom immediately rejected the manipulation, restoring both concepts, but not before she'd carved out a single infinitesimal opening. That fleeting gap was enough. The only reason Clock still existed was because his Gloom overpowered the alteration before it could fully complete. Had it lingered for even the smallest fraction longer, there would've been nothing left to regenerate. Her strike carried the condensed gravity of countless worlds. For a single quantum frame, Transport failed. The blow landed.

WHUUUMP! Space cratered. Clock blasted through the wall of the pocket dimension as reality split around him. The false world ruptured into un-space, and for one impossible instant, Warpfluff's punch dispersed him into a drifting cloud of particles, every atom torn apart beneath conceptual gravity. It was a flawless attack. Against almost anyone else, it would've been death. Their mistake was assuming Clock healed like a living creature. He didn't. His restoration belonged to the Gloom.

Even complete erasure merely caused it to rewind him to an earlier state of existence, restoring what had been lost as though the destruction had never happened. Only an attack capable of eradicating both his present and the past the Gloom reached back to could kill him permanently. The Gloom seized reality and rewound him into existence. The countless particles shuddered and stopped fleeing. He felt every moment. His organs were ghosts remembering how to be organs.

His brain was dissolved thought forcing itself back together. Streams of black-violet light reversed course from impossible distances, converging until a human silhouette condensed once more within the fractured void. With a scream that tore through metaphysics, he burst back through the breach, blood streaming from his nose, copper and cosmos coating his tongue. He didn't speak. His counter came without warning. His newly reformed fist spasmed forward under telekinetic acceleration, wrapped in dense Gloom.

It carried judgment. Warpfluff abandoned her body, anchoring her existence to the concept of Gravity itself. T - THOOOM! Clock's fist overruled the concept. Warpfluff was driven into the ground by absolute decree as violet fractures raced thousands of miles across reality. Her existence collapsed back into a broken, girl-shaped ruin, surviving only because she endured subjective minutes of total destruction inside a single moment. Pain remained, the agony of a universal constant commanded to stop.

She lay there trembling. Every breath came as a ragged shudder. Her entire body shook uncontrollably as the implications settled over her. That attack... Even weakened by everything that had come before, it had carried enough force to scour a universe clean. Her white eyes widened with something she hadn't felt in ages. How strong... is this thing? He'd been holding back. The realization hollowed her out far more thoroughly than the pain ever could.

Clock hovered above the impact, his right arm flickering between solid flesh and drifting dust, muscles shredded, veins ruptured. No time to recover. He was already in front of Silas. The punch landed. THOOOOOOM. Silas staggered violently as bark exploded from his body. Black timber, roots, blossoms, and twisting vines tore away in a storm of splintered growth. The Verdant Cradle peeled apart, revealing the man buried within.

He looked to be in his early thirties, with olive skin, tangled forest-green hair streaked with brown, and a neatly trimmed beard framing a tired face dusted with freckles. Thin vine-like tattoos wound across his neck and hands beneath the sleeves of a weathered moss-green coat draped over simple dark clothes. Round wire-rimmed glasses rested crookedly on his nose, framing warm amber eyes that looked more accustomed to studying wildflowers than ending civilizations.

He resembled a gentle botanist who had wandered into the wrong apocalypse. He stumbled backward, staring at his own trembling hands.

"…No…" His voice cracked.

"…That's… never happened before…" His gaze slowly rose to meet Clock's. Understanding hit. Fear followed.

"You…" His breathing became ragged.

"…You were holding back." Every clash. Every wound. Every death. None of it had demanded Clock's full strength. He hadn't been fighting at his limit. He'd been conserving himself. Panic overtook him.

"No…" Clock closed the distance before his brain could catch up. One hand clamped around Silas's face. Silas let out a broken scream as his jaw was forced open.

"Eat up." A fully charged Reverse Blast blossomed in Clock's palm.

"No-!" Clock drove it into his mouth. Silas's scream became a muffled, desperate howl as Clock launched skyward, carrying him by his face alone. He hammered frantic punches into Clock's chest, each one backed by enough force to flatten mountains, yet they landed with all the effectiveness of a terrified child striking an adult. Clock paid them no mind. The violet sphere continued to swell inside Silas's throat, its light shining through his neck and illuminating his horrified eyes from within.

Then Clock released him. BOO M. Nothing remained. Clock swept the battlefield. Who was left? His eyes settled on Ouro. The Chain Serpent reacted instantly. SHHKK! Its body unfolded. What had moments ago been no larger than an anaconda unraveled into a colossal serpent larger than the surrounding mountains, its endless body woven from liquid night and countless black runed chains. Every movement shook the false horizon as the chains lashed through the air like living whips, carving invisible scars across reality.

A single strike would knock destiny itself out of him. Its enormous jaws yawned impossibly wide, each curved fang the size of a skyscraper, polished to ivory points. A forked tongue, longer than rivers, flicked through the air, tasting him. Then it lunged. The mountainous serpent shot across the battlefield with terrifying speed, its maw swallowing hills whole as it pursued him, jaws snapping shut again and again, each bite threatening to erase not merely his body, but the very concept of his future. SKREEEEEE!

An incandescent orange beam erupted from its maw. Lamentations. Clock twisted aside, flowing through the sky in a seamless series of aerial rolls and corkscrews as the beam swept beneath him. The landscape it touched ceased to possess the concepts it had once embodied. Another conceptual attack. The chains ignored defenses. The beam ignored defenses. Both bypassed the body entirely and argued directly with existence. Clock's eyes narrowed. Final form. Ouro hadn't revealed this before.

The transformation must've been expensive to maintain. Not every Experiment possessed mastery. Judging by the instability of its power, Ouro had probably carried its Abomination for only a year or two. Tremendous power. Little refinement. The beam abruptly fractured. TKTKTKTKTK! Dozens of blazing orange lances ripped across the sky like machine-gun fire, chasing Clock across impossible distances.

He slipped between them effortlessly, every dodge flowing into the next as though the barrage had been choreographed around him. Reverse Blasts answered. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! Violet spheres hammered into Ouro's colossal body. Nothing. Clock watched the impacts vanish across the serpent's scales. Damage rejection. His senses sharpened as Clockwork sifted through the creature's state. About an hour. That was all this form could sustain. A faint smile crossed his lips.

"Clockwork." Everything stopped. Silence swallowed the battlefield. Before him materialized Ouro's clock, immense and bronze, its hands trembling beneath invisible laws. Clock reached out, placed two fingers upon the minute hand, and calmly turned it beyond the next hour. Gloom burned away as payment. Tick. Time resumed. The gigantic serpent convulsed. KRRRKKK! Its chains unraveled into drifting smoke.

Night peeled away from its scales as the impossible body collapsed inward, shrinking until only a young woman remained. Smooth dark skin stretched over a lean, powerfully athletic frame, defined shoulders flowing into sculpted arms and a firm abdomen. High cheekbones framed a striking face with slanted silver eyes, a straight nose marked by a tiny mole, and full lips that parted to reveal slender, viper-like fangs above a forked tongue. Thick brows sharpened her predatory gaze.

Long black hair, braided with broken chain links and threaded with ivory cowries, spilled down her back. A sleeveless charcoal robe hung from her broad shoulders, its open sides revealing the toned lines of her torso, while rusted iron coiled around her waist like a forgotten belt. She blinked, swaying unsteadily.

"What...?" Clock was already in front of her. BOOM! A point-blank Reverse Blast slammed into her chest, swallowing her in a sphere of violet light that expanded for a heartbeat before collapsing into drifting embers. Glowing chains scattered like incandescent dust. Clock turned to leave. KRRRSHHHK! Curved ivory bones erupted from the earth in a perfect circle around them, soaring hundreds of feet into the air before arching inward.

Rib met rib with a deafening CLACK, sealing them beneath a colossal skeletal dome as the battlefield vanished behind a cage of living ivory. Laughter echoed through the Sanctum. When the dust settled, Ouro still stood without a single mark upon her. The black chains woven through her hair and wrapped around her waist glowed faintly before fading back to dull iron.

"They eat energy," she laughed, brushing ash from her shoulder.

"Every last drop." Her silver eyes gleamed with savage delight.

"Ah... you really are a fool." Her soft Italian accent lent an almost playful warmth to the madness in her voice.

"You've-a trapped yourself with me." She spread her arms.

"Welcome to the Ivory Sanctum." The air shifted. Clock felt it immediately. Transport ceased to exist. Telekinesis followed. Gloom itself fell silent. Every supernatural law simply unraveled, leaving only flesh, bone, and breath. Ouro's smile widened, a forked tongue slipping between sharpened teeth.

"Inside-a here," she purred, "we are both only human. No little tricks..." She slowly raised a hand.

"Just fists." Above them, forty-five glowing marks carved into the ivory ceiling flared to life.

"One disappears every second. If you don't knock me unconscious before the last one..." Her grin stretched wider.

"... you die." Clock glanced at the countdown, then back at her. A quiet chuckle escaped him.

"I'll need far less than forty-five seconds." Ouro's eyes blazed. CRACK. CRACK. CRACK. She rolled her shoulders and flexed her fingers, anticipation replacing laughter.

"Eh? Is that so?" Her grin turned feral.

"We'll see."