Chương 123: 122. A Handful of Eternity

[Trait: Time Affinity Grade II → Grade III] [Excessive use of the Title 'Mana Vacuum', has temporarily boosted the grades of all traits by 1 grade: Time Affinity Grade II → Grade III (Temporary)] [Epic Title Gained → The Eye of Time (I)] A notification, cold and Status-clear, etched itself into her perception. The strain peaked, a white-hot brand between her temples, and then… levelled. Not gone. Tempered. The chaotic flood of sensory data from the atomic clock didn't calm down. But she hardly cared.

Kelly opened eyes she didn't remember closing. The world was the same. And it wasn't. The Eye of Time opened, and it had a hell of a view. She exhaled, long and slow. A grin spread across her blood-streaked face, wide and genuine.

"There we go." Opening her eyes also caused her to discover that the universe had filed a formal complaint against her existence, and it was being processed through every available channel simultaneously. Pain, internal. Pain, external. Pain filing paperwork in triplicate. Around her, time was throwing a tantrum. Little rips started appearing across her body—outside and in.

It was a full-body argument where every atom had a complaint, and every cell in her body was arguing with every other cell about whose fault this was. Blood sputtered from her mouth in a wet cough, and Kelly accepted trying to stop time came with a free interior paint job. She clenched her teeth, trying to wrestle time into a submission hold. Her vision blurred with tears that were entirely physical. Stupid little rips in reality as her body fought against the impossible.

Her atoms had collectively decided to stop cooperating. The universe decided to gift her a personalized hell. She spat a glob of red onto the floor of the combat hall.

"What? It's not over?" It was, in fact, far from over. Ren watched her from a few feet away.

"Be careful." His voice carried a rare utter urgency that, coming from Ren, meant the situation had upgraded from concerning to cataclysmic. He didn't move.

"Whatever you're doing has completely removed the pressure in this room." He let that sit. Let it really sit.

"If you break your ability here, overload your mutation, shatter your mind, or your soul," he continued, each possibility landing like a separate, immovable fact, "the changes will stick." He stood poised, as if to intervene. As if he'd mentally calculated seventeen different ways this could end badly and was currently deciding which one to prevent first. To Kelly, it looked as if he was about five seconds from physically wrestling her away from time itself. A cosmic referee with a stick who wanted her to stop.

But the pressure's gone, Kelly thought. That means it's doing something. It's ripping me apart, but it's doing something. Kelly was trying to stop time for the entire universe. She was failing at that task. What she was actually doing was stopping time completely in small pockets around her. These pockets were bundles of atoms—a bundle of air here, a patch of skin there, some blood, a pinch of muscle, a bit of bone. An artery. You know, nothing important. Freeze one part of your body and move the rest?

You get tears. Simple, brutal cause and effect. So she was meticulously messing herself up, creating a constellation of microscopic rips as frozen bits grated against moving ones like gears in a machine with nothing holding it together. The only thing holding her psyche together was her willpower, which functioned like an industrial clamp. She shoved it down on the boundaries of her mind, body, and soul, and pushed. She could feel it. Not just her own Atomic Clock, but all of them.

The whole interconnected time stream that governed all of reality, the temporal river of everyone's mess. She was trying to stop it. All of it. Grind the whole show to a halt. Grab every droplet of time and make it freeze. It felt like mentally trying to strangle the ocean. Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author. But worse, because the ocean at least, didn't strangle you back. Except Kelly actually had a hold on something.

So the situation was more like a human trying to stop a train with their bare hands. Exactly like that, actually. The likely outcome: the hand being torn clean off. Kelly had a strong grip. She didn't let go. She used her willpower to keep strengthening that grip, digging her heels in while the train kept dragging her. So her arm stayed attached. She just got dragged at several hundred miles per hour, holding on, attempting the impossible while her own body started to disagree via internal bleeding.

The tears kept forming.

"It's a big train," she said, her words slurring slightly. Her Mana Vacuum didn't care. It kept pulling in a whirlwind of mana, compressing it into her body, boosting her traits. Great for power, terrible for structural integrity. It made the tears in time around her intensify. She was pouring rocket fuel into an engine that was currently shaking itself into scrap metal. A new kind of pain, cold and sharp, lanced through her chest—different from the physical rips.

She felt the smallest, most fragile tears beginning in what must have been her very soul. Blood gushed from her nose, her eyes, her mouth. Kelly cried out, a raw sound that was mostly pain and partly pure, unadulterated annoyance at the universe's refusal to cooperate. The healing kicked in. Her boosted regeneration was fighting against the damage she was doing—to reality, to the laws of physics, and most inconveniently, to herself. It was a slow, grinding process.

Each stitch of mended flesh was immediately outmatched by the fresh, sparkling static of new tears forming as she wrestled with the cosmic clockwork. The universe was not designed to be put on pause. Her body was making that argument very clear. Then the world became a hammer. A force, simple and absolute, smashed her into the ground. Air left in a punch. The hall slammed up to meet her. A crater formed around her body with a sound of finality, and light fractured.

It was an incredibly strong blow, more than anything he'd evet hit her with, a category of impact her previous training with Ren had never even hinted at. The shock of it was a violent jolt to her concentration. Kelly did not stop pulling. The universe's atomic clock was a rusty, groaning vault door, and she was a chaotic, persistent crowbar. She levered her will against it, muscles and augments shrieking in unison, trying to grind the whole cosmos to a halt. Her vision swam.

Something warm and metallic filled her mouth. Just stop moving, she mentally screamed at existence. Take a nap. Ren stood over the crater her body had made. He curiously examined his arm, which sported fresh, jagged tears. It had just punched through air that had decided, briefly, to be partially frozen time and space. Ren had, technically, punched through time. Parts of his arm looked like poorly prepared zucchini.

"Sorry about this, student," he said, his voice carrying the weight of a thousand considered mistakes that led to this moment.

"But if you really are in a time loop, and if that really is your soul in there, then I'm doing this for your own good…" His arm unfurled, segments sliding and locking with a sound like a bank vault arming. It became a compact nanotech cannon—a smaller version of the one he'd used to eviscerate the dome and wipe out its corporate aristocracy. And from the looks of things, Kelly was next. The cannon began to charge.

A high-pitched whine climbed the scale, the sound of localized space objecting to what came next, building to a teeth-rattling shriek. At its muzzle, light collapsed into a point of pure, guaranteed nothingness. He fired at Kelly. A beam of focused erasure, a line of logic that concluded with the complete disintegration of biological matter into ash and base particles lanced out at her in a blink. It was coming to eviscerate her body and leave not one measly particle left.

Her organs, limbs, and head were scheduled for immediate, simultaneous retirement. Impact would mean deletion. Today would end. The loop would end. Her body, frayed and bleeding from arm-wrestling time, would get the final, definitive invoice for her arrogance, and more critically, her soul—the thing currently getting shredded by her own brute-force attempt to arrest time—would be damaged by the violent, stupid, unfinished tears she'd wrought in it. But… She kept pulling.

Not for one second did she stop trying to freeze time. The obliteration beam was a future appointment. Ren's drastic school bell was a footnote. The only thing that mattered was the immense, grinding resistance in her hands—the feeling of the universe's clockwork refusing to yield. Everything else was just noise, and Kelly was terrible at listening to distractions. Where the will came from she didn't know. She didn't care. Knowing was for people who had time to run diagnostics.

Her body's status report was a single, screaming line item: meat grinder, active. Her soul's memo was more direct: explode if you blink. She was holding on to the universe's atomic clock, a single, stupidly stubborn human arm hooked around the gears of the cosmic clock, pulling pulling at the train of existence with the specific intent of breaking it. Letting go? Not an option. Stopping meant a double-feature of death and turning her soul into a fractured mess beyond any repair shop's ability.

Kelly considered that outcome… suboptimal. She kept pulling. Her willpower was a perpetual motion machine fueled by spite and curiosity. It saw a "DO NOT TOUCH" sign on a universe-ending device and caused her first thought to be "How do i make this faster?" It had never received the memo about limits. It operated on a simpler doctrine: stopping was a form of quitting, and Kelly Voss did not quit.

Her particular brand of stubbornness had broken grant proposals, safety officers, and several expensive pieces of state property. So when time stuttered, Kelly, busy trying to snap the universe's spine, heaved with everything she had. Kelly broke time.