Chương 55: 54: The Eleven Abominations VIII

Clock's hand swept across the violet strings of his guitar. TWANG. A single note became a crescent of shimmering energy that screamed toward Ouro, tore harmlessly through her, and continued between the towering ivory bones. Far beyond the Sanctum, an entire mountain was shredded into drifting dust. Ouro didn't so much as blink. The black chains woven through her hair shimmered faintly before settling.

"They eat energy," she smiled. A rusted chain snapped free from around her waist. FWHSSSH! It lashed toward him with enough force to end the fight in a single blow. CLANG! Clock intercepted it with the guitar, twisting the instrument like both sword and club. He swung for her head. She slipped aside, the chain coiling around the guitar's neck before snapping back toward him. He ducked, answered with another sweeping strike, and the Sanctum filled with ringing steel. CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!

She wove the chain through every exchange, each lash threatening to wrap around a limb or throat. Clock refused to let her dictate the rhythm, driving the guitar forward with broad, crushing swings that forced her to keep giving ground. An opening appeared. The chain wrapped a fraction too deeply around the guitar. Clock twisted hard. The instrument became a spindle, winding the chain tightly around itself before he ripped backward. Ouro was dragged toward him. His knee surged upward.

She dropped beneath it and, with a casual flick of her fingers, launched a tiny pebble. TICK. It struck the point of his elbow. His arm jerked violently. The guitar slipped free. The chain unwound with it. Locked together, both weapons spun through the gap between the colossal ivory bones and vanished from the Sanctum. Silence settled for a heartbeat. Clock looked at his empty hands. Ouro glanced at hers. A grin spread across her face.

"Well..." She rolled her neck until it cracked.

"Looks like we're using fists after all." Clock moved first. His stance settled into Liùhé Bāfǎ, every shift rotated seamlessly into the next as circles concealed straight lines and softness hid violence. Ouro grinned.

"Come." She planted her feet, low and immovable, her posture resembling a fortress rooted to the earth. Clock closed the distance. His opening palm feinted before transforming into a whipping high kick aimed at her temple. She didn't bother blocking. Instead, she stepped inside, jamming his thigh with her forearm as her shoulder slammed into his hip. Metodo Bianchi. Close the distance. Destroy leverage.

Clock pivoted away before her hands could lock onto him and flowed around her flank, his circling footwork carrying him into another combination. A knife-hand became an elbow, the elbow unwound into a spinning backfist, and his momentum carried into a low sweeping kick. Ouro answered with Calcio Storico's ruthless efficiency. A knee intercepted the angle. Her shoulder crashed forward. An elbow followed without hesitation. Brutality replaced flourish, every movement direct and purposeful.

His sweep skimmed past as her boot stamped into the floor where his ankle had been. Ouro drove forward again, shoulder first, forcing Clock to give ground.

"So... you killed Silas, eh?" Clock slipped around her elbow, but her forearm caught his ribs before he could escape.

"I did." Clock twisted free.

"Mamma mia..." She clicked her forked tongue.

"He was possibly the strongest among us. Anything with emotions was vulnerable to him." Clock slipped around another elbow, his palm grazing her shoulder before she caught his wrist. Ouro continued as though discussing the weather.

"Those thorns of his... they always grew stronger than whatever they were inside. Just enough that you couldn't bear them. Didn't matter if you were human, monster, or a god. They kept growing until they won." She hurled another brutal elbow, forcing Clock to lean away.

"I saw him walk into an entire district once. Nobody fought back. They just died. Black thorns burst through their bodies. Stems came out of their mouths... their eyes..." She shook her head.

"He could kill gods with that ability." Clock deflected another strike.

"I didn't ask for a biography." Ouro snorted.

"No, but you got one anyway." The exchange erupted. Clock flowed around her in a blur of circling footwork, dipping low, rising high, every palm becoming an elbow, every elbow unwinding into a backfist or kick before the last strike had finished. He fought like a dance, never giving the same angle twice. Ouro fought like a mountain. She moved only when necessary. A forearm nudged a kick aside by inches, her hand caught his wrist and dragged him into a crushing shoulder that forced him to twist away midair.

He landed on one hand, spun beneath her descending elbow, and sprang back upright. A spinning heel whipped toward her temple. Ouro slipped beneath it, wrapped both arms around his waist, and nearly drove him through the ground. He planted a hand on the terrain, twisted free before the throw completed, and swung both legs upward. She caught one ankle, but instead of resisting, he rotated with her grip, his free heel clipped her jaw. She released him with only a glancing blow.

Clock surged forward again, attacks flowing together without pause. Every blocked strike transformed into another before his foot even touched the ground. Ouro answered with ruthless efficiency, trapping an arm, reaching for the shoulder, hooking his leg, only for him to roll through each attempt. He cartwheeled over her sweep, landed behind her, and drove a knee toward her ribs. Her elbow met it. The crack echoed across the realm.

Pain shot through Clock's leg as Ouro stepped inside, seized the back of his neck, and tried to spike him into the ground. He turned with her grip instead, using the pull as momentum. His palm touched the ground, his body inverted, and both heels crashed into her crossed forearms. THOOM. Ouro slid back three steps, boots carving deep trenches through the glass. Clock landed lightly, breathing steady. Ouro rolled her shoulder, a grin spreading across her face.

"Now this," she said, settling into another stance, "this is a fight." Clock fired a pair of crossing punches. She slipped between them. Her fingertips brushed his wrist. His pupils narrowed. He abandoned the combination instantly. She laughed.

"You know."

"I do." Ouro settled lower into her stance, tapping her own chest with a thumb.

"My defence is impenetrable." Clock tilted his head.

"That's only because you haven't fought me." She raised an eyebrow.

"Eh?"

"I'm going to penetrate it." The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident. Ouro stared at him for a beat before a grin spread across her face.

"…Are you flirting with me?" Clock smiled faintly.

"You wish." Her laughter echoed across the plain.

"I like you." He refused to linger anywhere her grappling could begin. Every clinch, collar tie, overhook, or wrestling exchange was abandoned before it formed. Instead, he stayed mobile, relying on Long Fist's constant angles, explosive kicks, and unpredictable movement while she patiently stole ground one exchange at a time. Every failed grab shortened the distance. Every dodge nudged him toward weaker footing. Time slipped by. Neither found a clean hit. Both breathed harder. Then Clock understood.

Her defense had no true openings. Every guard concealed another trap, every apparent weakness invited a joint lock. She wasn't waiting for an opportunity to attack. She was waiting for certainty. He needed one mistake. Instead... She created his. Clock committed to a spinning kick. Ouro stepped underneath it. One arm wrapped around his planted leg. The other caught his wrist. Clock felt the lock settle into place before the pain arrived. Metodo Bianchi. Her hips turned. His shoulder isolated.

His elbow aligned for destruction. She smiled.

"Got you." His balance disappeared. Agony tore through his shoulder as she rolled, wrenching his arm behind his back. Bone groaned. His face struck the ivory floor. Her knee buried itself between his shoulder blades while the lock tightened another fraction. One more movement would've separated the joint. Clock stopped resisting. Ouro blinked. He'd chosen the wrong response. Or so she thought. His entire body relaxed into the hold. Borrow the force. Return the force. His shoulder slipped just enough.

Freedom wasn't possible. An opportunity was. CRACK! His humerus snapped. The arm folded at an impossible angle. Pain detonated through his body, but the new position gave him precisely the opening he needed. His free hand shot backward. One inch. Two. Biāo Zhǐ. A spear-hand thrust straight into her throat. THOCK! Ouro's grin disappeared. Her eyes bulged as her airway collapsed. The joint lock dissolved immediately, both hands flying to her neck while she stumbled backward, choking violently.

One step became another before her knees buckled beneath her. You could make it decisive while reinforcing that Clock understands she has to be fully unconscious before the countdown ends: She hit the ivory floor face-first. Clock didn't hesitate. He crossed the distance in a single stride, planted one foot beside her shoulder, and drove a short, compact stomp into the base of her skull. THUD. Her head bounced once against the ivory. The last tension drained from her body. Even her fingers loosened.

Silence settled over the Sanctum. Clock remained standing over her, breathing heavily as his shattered arm hung limp at his side. After a long moment, he let out a tired laugh.

"Told you…"

"I needed a lot less than forty-five seconds." The last ivory mark faded. Clock looked down at Ouro. One strike. That was all it would take. His good hand slowly rose. Then stopped. … Why? He frowned. She was an Abomination. She had tried to kill him. Ending her now was the logical conclusion. Yet his hand refused to move. He replayed the fight. She'd attacked him first only once. After that, every blow had come because he chose to attack her. There had been another moment.

When she'd coiled around him in her serpent form. She could've bitten him. She hadn't. His fractured mind lingered on the thought. Transport had been sealed. There'd been no escaping the venom of a Viper Abomination. One bite could've decided the fight before it truly began. But she'd chosen not to. Clock let out a quiet breath.

"…For some reason…" He lowered his hand.

"… I suppose I won't kill you either." CRACK. The Sanctum shattered. The colossal ribcage exploded outward into a storm of bone fragments, and in the infinitesimal instant before Clock's powers returned, something struck him. It wasn't force in any conventional sense. It was confrontation itself. WHOOOM. An invisible wave slammed into his chest and launched him across the battlefield.

He folded with the impact instead of resisting it, twisting through the air as his body bled away the momentum in practiced rolls and rotations. Once. Twice. Three times. SKRRRRT. His boots carved trenches through the gray earth before he dropped into a low crouch, one hand against the dust. Power rushed back. Everything returned at once. His shattered humerus snapped back into place with a wet series of CRACK-CRACK-CRACKS. Torn muscle knitted together. Ruptured veins sealed.

Bruised organs repaired themselves before he could even draw his next breath. Then the voices came.

"…behind you…"

"…too slow…"

"…die…"

"…left…"

"…we found you…"

"… look up…" Hundreds. Thousands. Whispers poured into his ears from every direction at once, overlapping until they became a maddening chorus. Some sounded like children. Others like ancient men. Some laughed. Some wept. Others only breathed, wet and impossibly close, as though mouths hovered against the back of his neck. Clock's eyes narrowed. Auditory manipulation. He ignored it. A flicker crossed the edge of his vision. Without hesitation, he thrust out a hand. Fwip-fwip-fwip.

Three Reverse Blasts screamed across the battlefield. They passed harmlessly through the silhouette. The figure dissolved into drifting frost. An illusion.

"…here…"

"… no, here…" The whispers circled him, brushing against his thoughts like frozen needles. Then the hands came.... They clawed their way out of nowhere. Grey, skeletal things with fingers far too long, wrists disappearing into impossible darkness, bursting from the air itself. Others dragged themselves out of the ground, their arms stretching farther than anatomy allowed. Some were skinned raw. Others wore cracked porcelain masks where faces should have been. Every one reached for him. His soul.

The first hand seized his shoulder. Cold exploded through him. He felt something inside himself jerk upward, as though invisible hooks had caught beneath his ribs and were trying to peel him out through his own skin. Another caught his wrist. Another his throat. Another buried spectral fingers into the back of his skull. They pulled with the strength of nightmares. The battlefield lurched. Up became sideways. His left eye saw tomorrow. His right remembered yesterday. Smell became sound. Touch became sight.

His heartbeat echoed somewhere outside his body. The whispers grew ecstatic.

"…come apart…"

"…leave the shell…"

"…you don't belong in there…"

"… let us wear you…" Hundreds of ghostly hands tugged from every direction at once, stretching his consciousness like molten glass. His vision fractured into overlapping realities, each showing a different battlefield, a different death. Clock staggered. Rage surged into his chest. He almost screamed. He swallowed it. Losing control would only steal his focus. His defense. The spectral hands reached deeper. Every palm carried echoes. Hundreds. Thousands. Countless souls they had torn free over decades. Fear.

Desperation. Screams that never reached the air. Each touch whispered another stolen life. Understanding struck him with chilling clarity. This Abomination was terrifying against anything that possessed a soul. She wouldn't need to kill you. She'd simply reach inside, grasp your soul, and walk away with it as effortlessly as someone picking a banknote off the ground. His jaw clenched.

"No." The single word rang through his mind like the strike of a cathedral bell. He stopped resisting the hallucinations. He resisted the theft. Every fragment of his will collapsed inward, compressing into a single point of impossible density. Identity. Self. The unyielding certainty that he was Clock. The grasping hands trembled. Cracks spread through their wrists. The whispers faltered. Clock roared.

His Gloom erupted through his nervous system like violet lightning, flooding every stolen sensation with overwhelming presence. I AM HERE. The declaration was enforced. The ghostly hands exploded into black ash. The screaming choir collapsed into silence. His senses snapped back into alignment with violent clarity, the false realities shattering like broken mirrors around him. Clock rolled his shoulders once, breathing steadily again, violet eyes colder than before.

"Nice trick." His gaze swept the battlefield.

"Now come out." Instinct screamed. He looked down. Malakhi was already beneath him.

"The foundation is mine, Crownless." The glass gave way as she phased upward, hollow eyes burning with cold calculation.

"You shunted my heart-bomb. Clever. But I never planted it in your body." Her hands plunged into the metaphysical framework of his Transport.

"I planted it in your meaning." Agony ripped through him. Transport stuttered. Reverse Blasts faltered. Violet light flickered as the foundation of his techniques came apart from within. For less than a microsecond, his defenses skipped. Out in the open. The remaining Abominations and Talons, finally converging from across the impossible distances of the arena, saw the opening. It was enough. — Clock felt it. A snap. A shared frequency he'd never consciously noticed fell silent. Butter.

The bond between them went dark. The Wraith's triumph lasted a heartbeat. The architecture it was unraveling ignited. Clock went still. The hands inside his Transport shattered, hurling the Wraith out of his metaphysical framework and forcing her phased body solid. Her hollow eyes widened. She had poured ice onto the heart of a star. His hands closed around both of Malakhi's wrists. The Wraith shrieked. Instinctively, she tried to dissolve back into mist. She couldn't.

Violet Gloom flooded through his grip, anchoring her to reality itself. The spectral woman convulsed as the impossible force tore through every layer of her existence, stripping away phase after phase until nothing remained to hide behind.

"LET GO!" She answered with everything she had. The air blackened. Dozens of translucent hands erupted around Clock, each twisted into the shape of screaming corpses. They clawed across his body, dug into his shoulders, wrapped around his throat and spine, fingers hooking beneath flesh that wasn't flesh as they searched for something deeper, tearing through whatever lay beneath.

"AAARGHHHH!" He roared as the spectral tide pulled from every direction. Clock refused to move. He locked eyes with her while his body was ripped apart and rebuilt again and again. Fear rooted her in place. He simply wouldn't budge. His fingers tightened. Her wrists groaned beneath the pressure. One by one, the ghoulish hands lost their grip. Several overshot completely, latching onto distant mountains instead.

Entire peaks screamed sideways across the wasteland as phantom fingers carved trenches thousands of meters deep through solid stone before snapping violently back toward their master. Clock never looked away. More Gloom poured into her. She began to burn with existence. Her face fractured. Ragged funeral wrappings blackened into ash. The spectral horror unraveled layer by layer until the monster disappeared entirely. A woman remained. She collapsed to her knees.

Long gray hair spilled around her shoulders, streaked with pale silver that shimmered like frozen moonlight. Deep lines carved through her corpse-pale face, giving her the appearance of someone who had withered for centuries without ever truly dying. Her nose was unnaturally long and narrow, almost beak-like, while rows of jagged peach-colored serrated teeth showed between trembling lips. Milky white eyes, empty of irises or pupils, stared into Clock's blazing violet gaze with naked terror.

White claws, long enough to be mistaken for talons, trembled at the ends of skeletal fingers. Skin so pale it was nearly translucent revealed faintly glowing veins beneath the surface. A tattered ivory-and-black dress clung to her gaunt frame as heat rippled through her body, her flesh flushing red while tears streamed down soot-stained cheeks.

"N-no..."

"I've..."

"This has never happened before..." Her voice dissolved into terrified sobs.

"I can't change back..." She scrambled backward on all fours, white claws scraping furrows through the stone.

"N-no... stay away...!" Every frantic movement carried her farther from him, yet her empty white eyes never left his face. Her screams had lost all malice, reduced to the raw, panicked cries of a cornered monster. Fear shook every word until they broke apart into ragged sobs. Clock didn't answer. He simply watched. His stare bored into hers with an intensity that bordered on inhuman. Slowly, almost lazily, he drifted forward without taking a step, suspended inches above the ground.

Violet telekinetic waves rolled from his body in silent pulses, rippling through the air like heat shimmering above a furnace. Dust rose around him. Loose stones trembled, then cracked. The ground groaned beneath an invisible weight as reality itself seemed to bow in his presence. Malakhi screamed louder.

"No...! Please...!" She clawed at the earth with trembling hands, dragging herself backward as though distance alone could save her. It never did. Clock kept floating toward her. WHUMP. A fist crashed into his jaw. The impact folded the landscape. Clock skipped through mountains like a stone across water, pulverizing ridge after ridge before finally skidding across the gray plain. He lifted his head, one hand instinctively snapping to his jaw. It had been dislocated.

For the briefest instant, shock crossed his face. Something had hit him hard enough to do that. His gaze shot upward. Someone hovered above him. Clock froze. It was himself. Almost. His eyes widened ever so slightly. The face was wrong. His features stretched like a warped reflection seen through cracked glass, and his smile arrived half a second too late. Violet eyes burned with empty imitation. Iriz. She'd finished watching.

"Your reflection," she whispered.

"My masterpiece."