Chương 124: 123. Ten Feet of Stolen Eternity

Time stopped. The beam of pure erasure meant to delete her from the atomic level up didn't. It just… didn't. It hung there in the air, ten feet away, a monument to a job left undone. Dust hung like a bad museum installation. Sound was canceled. Within a ten-foot bubble around her, everything decided to take a simultaneous, permanent smoke break. Atoms quit. Physics called in sick. But Kelly? Kelly could move. Freely. Outside that bubble, the world carried on with its business.

She could feel the hum of normal time pressing against the edge of her little pocket of stillness. Inside, she was free to move. Everything else was a museum exhibit titled"A Moment Before Disintegration." She hadn't stopped time. She hadn't halted the universal clock. That was too tall an order, even for her. Instead, She'd just successfully mugged a piece of it.

She'd clung to the speeding train of causality and, through a combination of maniacal grip and catastrophic leverage, had managed to rip a single compartment free. She wasn't stopping the flow. She was holding a stolen bucket of water from a raging river, keeping it perfectly, unnaturally still.

Would you look at that, my own personal bucket of the TSA, Kelly thought, which stood for the Temporal Stream of All things—a name that had all the hallmarks of being made up on the spot and abandoned immediately after, like naming your cat "Cat" and wondering why it ran away with the neighbor. Much like Kelly, the name was a work in progress, one she had the creeping suspicion would probably outlive her. In frozen time, Kelly pushed herself up from the crater.

Moving with countless micro-tears felt like wading through set concrete. She took a slow, lopsided stroll around the frozen annihilation beam. It was a beautiful, pristine thing. A line of perfect, professional nothingness, caught mid-murder. She leaned in close, her nose almost touching the lethal energy corona. Huh, she thought. Her throat was a flat, dead thing in the absolute stillness, to torn to produce sound. So this is what my disintegration looks like. Scheduled for…

, She glanced at a wrist that wore no watch. About two seconds ago. You're late. She gave the beam a wide berth, not out of fear, but out of a sort of professional courtesy. It had a job. She'd just fired it. Ren was standing just outside of the frozen time field, jaw agape, his war hero's certainty replaced by dumbfounded shock.

It was a good look for him—the seasoned veteran, the unflappable mentor, currently wearing an expression usually reserved for people who'd just watched their tax return spontaneously combust. He was staring at the crater where his student should have been paste, then at the frozen line of his own annihilation beam hanging uselessly in the air, then back at the crater. His mouth was open.

Kelly almost gave the frozen beam a polite tap as she walked past—a little there, there, you did your best—then reconsidered, then she shuffled to the edge of her stolen time. She stopped right in front of him, close enough to see the dumbfounded creases around his eyes. The old war hero was doing an excellent impression of a hippo. Or a pelican.

Possibly both simultaneously, which spoke to either his range as a performer or the genuine shock of watching someone survive something that should have left them as a fine red mist. Ren stared, jaw slightly ajar, his eyes doing a slow, disbelieving sweep from the crater to the pristine line of frozen annihilation hanging in the air to Kelly. She was currently regenerating in the middle of it all—a miraculous recovery and a violent, internal argument her body was having about structural integrity.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

"How… are you still alive?" His gaze locked onto the frozen beam.

"Is that what I think it is?" He bent down, snatched a fist-sized piece of rubble—a leftover from when he'd tried to ventilate her five seconds ago—and chucked it into the field. It hit the edge of her stolen time and stuck there, frozen in mid-air, a new exhibit in the Museum of Almost-Killing-Kelly. The pressure in the air had changed. The air in the combat hall got thick, like the room was taking a last, deep breath before a dive. Not with tension—with raw, dense mana.

Her body was sucking it all in—a sponge in a desert, trying to fuel the regeneration that was currently losing a fight against the physics of her own stupid idea. Colors got louder. Sounds got brighter. Shadows gained hard edges. The immediate world had a headache, and she was the cause. Ren felt it too; she saw his jaw tighten in natural rejection, his eyes doing a quick threat-assessment of the suddenly soupy atmosphere. He studied her sphere of frozen time.

Everything about the phenomenon was a violation of a veteran's understanding of clean, orderly warfare. The frozen time, the bottomless energy source—even a beneficial mutation turned this extreme was just a different kind of threat. Ren's analysis was a tactical assessment scanning for the inevitable point of catastrophic failure.

"So... other mutations can be this... powerful. As powerful as his." He said it like he was reading an obituary." Unbelievable." He looked back at Kelly. Her movement wasn't just pained from muscle damage; it was fundamentally wrong, a stuttering, grinding dislocation that spoke of something deeper than flesh coming apart at the seams.

"You broke your mutation completely, didn't you?" The question was an accusation. He was diagnosing a weapon system on the brink of meltdown.

"Is your soul powering the freeze? Did you reset your loops? Break them? Or is it powered by your body?" He took a half-step closer, his eyes focused to points.

"It's damaged your soul, right? Altered the mutation." He didn't need a scanner or fancy skill.

"I can see it in your movements." He watched the shuddering mess of her body, the way a healed cut on her arm would split open again a second later from pure systemic strain. Kelly's regeneration finally patched together a working set of vocal cords, a larynx, and enough lung to push air through them. The rest of her was a comprehensive disaster zone. Every second, her biology performed a frantic, triage: Bones were suggestions. Muscles were shredded paper.

Regeneration was a frantic intern trying to rebuild a collapsing building with spit and tape, while the titanic strain kept swinging a wrecking ball through her. But she spoke. She drew in a breath. It tasted like a battery leak. Then she bowed dramatically.

"No, sensei." The word scraped out. A warm trickle of blood started from her ear then healed. Then started again.

"This… was an upgrade." She coughed, a wet, red noise.

"A new... evolution. A feature, not a bug. I froze time. In a little bubble." A grin ripped across her face, all blood and regenerating defiance.

"I was aiming for all of existence. You know. Baby time-god ambitions." She wheezed, the sound part laugh, part mechanical breakdown.

"But i guess a ten-foot radius of ' go to hell' will do for now." Fresh blood began welling from her tear ducts, tracing hot paths down her cheeks like morbid warpaint. It seeped from her nostrils, beaded along her lips, and dripped with soft pats onto the floor. Each drop sizzled faintly on the composite material, her body's frantic regeneration trying to reclaim it even as it fell.

The glow in her eyes wasn't from a trait or title; it was just the literal light of supercharged energy and ruptured capillaries illuminating damaged tissue from behind. She was a lantern powered by icaruian lunacy.

"It does kinda hurt my soul a little," she offered, her tone conversational, as if rating a bad meal.

"But I'm pretty sure the loop still works." Another violent tremor wracked her frame. More blood. More sizzling. Her troll regeneration was working overtime, gorged on Mana Vacuum, furiously patching and sealing, a miracle of biological and mana-fuelled stubbornness. And the strain immediately re-broke everything, a perfect, horrific cycle. She was a self-sustaining disaster. Ren's patience evaporated. The concern was there, but it was buried under a thicker, more immediate layer of furious practicality.

His expression shifted from analysis to the cold, clean fury of a professional watching an amateur burn down a priceless archive.

"Stop it. Now. Or I will kill you myself."