Chương 49: 48: The Eleven Abominations IV

Elara surged forward, seven throats already coiling around a single fatal note. She didn't move through space. Her foremost throat released a scream too quiet to hear, carving a circular tunnel through reality. The distance between her and her destination simply vanished. The resulting vacuum pulled her through the hollow with effortless precision. FWUP. She appeared exactly where she intended. The technique should have demanded impossible precision. She made it look instinctive. Clock tried to move.

He was still blindingly fast, but the double assault from the Shroud's punch and the Purification Orb had left deeper wounds than flesh. The punch had disrupted his mechanics physically. The orb had scarred them existentially. His body had healed. The damage hadn't. Like a scar, the distortion would take time to fade completely. On top of that, a significant portion of his concentration remained devoted to restraining the telekinetic syrup blanketing the battlefield.

If he let it slip for even a moment, the Choir would immediately outpace him. He blasted sideways, hurling reverse blasts into Elara's path. She simply vibrated them apart. Clock countercharged, aiming to erase her before the scream was born. She was ready. As he entered range, she vibrated the concept of his speed itself. His momentum juddered, collapsing into contradictory paralysis. His eyes widened. One more instant and she'd sing him out of existence.

"Castling." An ability that exchanged his consciousness with another's. The exchange itself had no inherent time limit and could last indefinitely. What was limited was the interval during which he could suppress the other consciousness within his own body, preventing it from acting. Without additional Gloom, that restraint lasted only a single second. By spending more, he could extend it for as long as he required. Right now, one second was enough. Reality lurched.

For a heartbeat, their consciousnesses exchanged bodies. Elara froze. Clock's crippled speed became hers, leaving her trapped inside his body, unable to move. Then she felt it. The Gloom. Vast. Endless. It pressed against her borrowed consciousness like an ocean folded into human skin. Clock, meanwhile, recoiled inside her body.

"Ugh. This feels uncomfortable." Seven throats opened at his command. The psychic chorus ripped across the battlefield, washing over the Abominations instead. Several staggered as the scream tore through friend and foe alike.

"That's better." The heartbeat ended. Reality snapped back. Clock was already moving. THOOM. A telekinetic piston of pure away struck Elara squarely, launching her miles across the shattered glass. She landed broken, her unfinished scream swallowed by the distance. His speed was only just returning when the next attack arrived. The Warpfluff. Clock fired a reverse blast. The violet sphere curved around the creature in a perfect spiral, its impossible gravity seized and rewritten.

Instead of striking, it completed a slow orbit before hurtling back toward its creator. It detonated harmlessly against Transport. The flash swallowed his vision for a fraction of a second. That was all the Warpfluff needed. Space clenched around Clock. Invisible distortions locked together, a prison woven from his own telekinetic signature. Every surge of violet force he'd unleashed had been mapped, absorbed, and turned back against him. His power became his jailer. Movement halted.

The remaining Abominations struck. From the flank came Kael's beam, not freezing matter, but motion itself. Atomic vibration ceased as silent diamonds of entropic death crept toward him. Clock roared. Raw telekinetic might erupted from every direction at once. The restraints groaned, cracked, then exploded apart, shards of warped space blasting across the battlefield. He turned to Kael, blood like galaxies glimmering between his teeth. He smiled.

"My turn." Gurtu's roar shattered the vitrified plain.

"Your turn ends now, little prince. I finally have you."... Gurtu was already moving, volcanic flesh cracking with molten light. He swung with pronounced judgment. The space above Clock's head accepted the verdict of his spiked bronze mace, a weapon carrying enough force to batter a planet.

"No more fancy dancing," Gurtu thundered.

"DIEEEEE." The strike was already true. That was the mace's law. The hit temporarily melted away every supernatural advantage. Gloom, conceptual abilities, shields, spatial tricks, even magical defenses burned away like frost cast into molten lava, leaving nothing but the target's natural durability to receive the full force of the blow. He couldn't overpower the certainty. So he outplayed it. Queen's Slide.

It was a technique he could invoke almost subconsciously whenever his Gloom felt subdued, one that had taken years of relentless practice to master. Reality acknowledged him as a queen upon an infinite chessboard. Along any unobstructed horizontal, vertical, or diagonal line, his position resolved instantly to the square he chose. It consumed no Gloom, only precision. Its current limit was one hundred meters per activation. So he slid again and again.

Reality treated each stretch as already traversed, chaining the movements together until he had crossed a mile without taking a single step. Gurtu's mace crashed through empty air while Clock's fading smile lingered where he'd been. Clock's eyes narrowed. Something was wrong. Gurtu moved at barely sonic speed, sluggish within the thickened time. Yet the instant Clock flickered away, volcanic pores burst open. Magnetically contained lava erupted from his skin, launching the giant like a living comet across the mile.

Even through the telekinetic syrup, Gurtu's sheer heat burned the medium away. The invisible restraint hissed into nothing around his incandescent body, boiling apart wherever the giant passed. Each eruption carved a temporary tunnel through the thickened field, stripping away its resistance long enough for him to surge forward before the syrup rushed back in behind him.

"IF YOU BELIEVE IN YOUR STRENGTH," Gurtu roared, "STOP RUNNING AROUND!" Clock looked genuinely offended.

"I am repositioning." The brute was already there. His mace swept for Clock's skull. Queen's Slide had already begun, subatomic triggers firing in attoseconds. Gurtu anticipated even that. Lava reservoirs in his shoulder and bicep detonated, driving the mace forward with terminal acceleration. The final distance disappeared in six picoseconds. Six picoseconds. You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story. Light crossed barely two millimeters in that span.

To Clock, it was still a crawl. He would dodge. Then Gurtu's taunt echoed through his mind. If you believe in your strength, stop running. Pride hot flared in Clock's chest For a single, disastrous instant, he hesitated. Dodge... or prove him wrong? That moment of indecision cost him. A molten aura blossomed around the mace head, the air shimmering with furnace heat. Space softened like iron in a forge, time flowing like lava down a mountainside. The strike ignored drag. Ignored delay.

It landed before Clock finished deciding. The heat melted the boundary between moments. The blow didn't arrive early. It had always arrived. A bill due before the meal was ordered. The impact registered at t = -0. 3 seconds. Clock experienced it at t = 0. Reality conceded. It erased defenses first, then delivered a strike no natural body could survive.

On Earth, the blow would've displaced crust, mantle, and core, stripped away the atmosphere, vaporized the Moon, disturbed Mars' orbit, and scoured the asteroid belt clean. Clock saw he couldn't dodge. His body flowed into a Liuhebafa spiral, every joint turning with the strike, every tendon yielding to bleed away as much momentum as possible. It wasn't enough. BLAM. The mace crashed into bare durability. Cosmos-dark blood splashed across Clock's white hair.

His skull cracked as a shockwave ripped five miles across the wasteland, flattening everything in its path. He crashed to the ground, vision swimming. Gurtu threw back his head and laughed.

"YOUR BIG MOUTH'S FINALLY SHUT. THAT'S MORE LIKE IT!" One enormous foot, broader than a suburban house, slammed onto Clock's chest, pinning him beneath the weight of a thirty-five-meter basalt colossus. The giant towered over the battlefield like a walking volcano, molten veins blazing through black stone as heat shimmered around his mountainous frame.

"Don't you have any smart words now? Didn't you say I was beneath you?" Gurtu leaned down, his magma-lit face eclipsing the violet sky, molten eyes burning like twin furnaces.

"Now you beg for your life." Clock coughed, dark cosmos blood spilling from his lips.

"…I'm not begging." Gurtu's laughter shook the battlefield.

"You will." He raised the mace. He truly believed he had won. The mace's strikes reduced whatever they destroyed to molten nothingness. Flesh, bone, regeneration, restoration - everything melted away, leaving nothing for healing to reclaim. Against any living creature, every wound was permanent. But Clock's healing had never been biological. The Gloom simply reversed his personal timeline. The shattered skull ceased to have been shattered. Blood flowed upward. Bone reformed.

In the next instant, Clock exploded to his feet. THOOM. The burst of force shoved Gurtu back several strides. Clock hovered before him, expression calm. Gurtu roared and swung again. Clock caught the descending mace with one hand. The impact rolled across the wasteland, but his arm never buckled. Gurtu's laughter died. His molten eyes widened. Clock smiled.

"Were you not enjoying yourself just now?" His fingers tightened around the weapon.

"What's the matter?" Gurtu simply stared. Impossible. The mace stripped away every defense before the true blow landed. Its mass had been compressed until a moon occupied the space of a mace head, its core raging like molten lava beneath a thin shell, then hurled by Gurtu's monstrous strength at beyond-relativistic speed. Nothing survived a hit. Nothing could even stop it. Yet Clock stood there holding it with one hand. With Pure muscle, refusing to yield an inch. The realization hollowed Gurtu's expression.

This should have driven through anything that relied on flesh alone. Only creatures born to embody strength itself, beings like Korhess, were supposed to stop it bare-handed. Clock noticed the incomprehension spreading across the giant's face. He understood. He had just stopped, with one hand, a blow that could hypothetically tear through an entire solar system. None of these experiments came close to matching his raw physical strength. Korhess had once seemed impossibly powerful. He'd overpowered her too.

Queen's Slide. His forehead smashed into Gurtu's. THOOM. The basalt giant blasted backward, tumbling across the wasteland as mountains folded beneath his body. Heat poured from him in thick, rolling waves, attempting to burn through the very space he occupied. Peaks surrounding the impact melted into rivers of slag, the air peeling apart beneath the furnace-like pressure. Even Transport began to fail, forcing Clock to hold the technique together through sheer will alone. That was what made Gurtu so dangerous.

He ignored logic, laws, and rules, reducing everything to a contest of will and stubbornness. It didn't matter if an opponent was infinitely stronger. If Gurtu's will surpassed theirs, they would burn anyway. Fortunately, Clock was every bit as stubborn. Otherwise, there would've been nothing left of him but a puddle of molten ruin. — Gurtu lunged back with a roar, volcanic skin splitting as magma bled from fresh cracks. Clock met him head-on. There was no flourish. Only acceleration.

The air collapsed behind him as he shot forward so quickly the battlefield seemed to pause. He remained perfectly upright, hands still in his pockets. Then he passed straight through Gurtu. THOOOM! The force of Clock's impossible velocity propagated through the basalt titan like a continent-wide earthquake. Cracks raced across magma-veined stone before the accumulated momentum detonated outward.

Gurtu exploded apart, his colossal torso opening into a tunnel of pulverized rock and molten fire as boulders the size of houses tumbled across the battlefield. Clock drifted to a halt several miles away. Behind him, the scattered fragments shuddered. Stones rolled backward against gravity, molten rivers reversed their flow, and shattered slabs locked seamlessly together as though time itself had rewound. Within moments, Gurtu stood whole once more. The giant drew one slow breath. His body swelled.

Mountains of basalt folded over fresh layers of stone. Rivers of lava brightened from crimson to white-orange. His horns lengthened, his shoulders broadened, and the mace in his grip grew with him until it dwarfed entire mountain ranges.

"You think..." he growled, molten blood dripping from his grin, "... that only you can grow stronger?" Hatred rolled from him in suffocating waves. The false world trembled. Every heartbeat made him larger. Every ounce of rage made him heavier. Then he charged. Clock met him. The collision shattered the silence. Clock's fist buried itself in Gurtu's jaw. Gurtu answered with an elbow. Clock slipped beneath it, driving three punches into the titan's ribs before spinning into a heel kick. The mace came around.

Clock raised one arm. CRAAACK! The impact caught his forearm and blasted him through the sky like a meteor. Before he'd crossed a mile, Gurtu was already behind him. His mouth opened. An ocean of lava erupted. The torrent painted the heavens red and orange, swallowing Clock completely before hammering him out of the air and into the glass plain below. The ground vanished beneath the impact as Gurtu descended after him, both hands wrapping around the colossal mace.

He raised it high overhead, then brought it down with every ounce of his impossible strength. THOOOOOOOOOOM! The realm convulsed. Cracks raced across the endless glass horizon. Entire mountain chains folded inward. Dust rose like continents collapsing. Gurtu looked down. Nothing. A Reverse Blast detonated across his shoulder, then a barrage. Clock floated hundreds of meters behind him, violet spheres hammering into the titan like celestial artillery. Each explosion erased mountains.

Each impact would have obliterated lesser beings. Gurtu simply leaned into them. His body adapted. The heat no longer slowed him. The force barely mattered. Clock frowned.

"He's adjusting..." The titan roared, launching himself into the air before descending with the mace already swinging. Clock caught the strike with his guitar. CLAAAAANG! The impact bent the instrument but failed to break it. Clock pivoted instantly, seized Gurtu's ankle, and hurled the giant across the battlefield. The titan hadn't crossed a hundred meters before stomping against empty air. Reality buckled. He blasted himself back. One enormous hand wrapped around Clock's body, pinning both arms to his sides.

The other lifted the mace. Clock pushed with flight. Nothing. Gurtu's grip tightened. The arm holding him began glowing crimson as muscles compressed impossibly, strength folding inward upon itself.

"A millionfold..." Clock's eyes narrowed. He answered with a telekinetic burst powerful enough to fling a moon from orbit. The invisible wave struck Gurtu full force. The titan screamed in exhilaration. His body grew again. Basalt plates expanded. Magma turned blinding white. His horns split the violet sky. Clock's expression hardened. At my current output... I can't overpower him. Gurtu's laughter echoed across the realm.

"When we started... I could already crush stars!" The arm gripping Clock glowed brighter.

"And now?" Another pulse.

"A million times stronger!" Another.

"A million... TIMES... AGAIN!" The mace began shining with the same compressed crimson light. For one terrifying instant, Clock understood. The first blows had already possessed enough force to displace solar systems. This...... was something else entirely. Gurtu released him. The mace connected. THOOOOOOOOOOM! Clock disappeared. His body skipped across the glass plain, carving trenches hundreds of miles long before finally tumbling to a stop. Silence. He staggered upright. Every bone in his body protested.

Hairline fractures spread through his skeleton. His muscles screamed. Every one of those impacts had bypassed Gloom and Transport entirely. The mace simply refused to acknowledge either. Clock inhaled sharply.

"A trillion-fold..." His eyes widened. His swings are comfortably beyond multiple galaxies now. Far across the horizon, Gurtu roared again. The sound alone sent concentric shockwaves racing through the false world. His body was still growing. His rage was still escalating. The sky itself glowed from the heat pouring off him. Power bled from him without restraint.

It streamed upward in roaring columns like a waterfall in reverse, dense enough to look almost liquid, each surge shedding incandescent particles that dissolved before they touched the ground. Clock clenched his jaw.

"That release... it'll draw the others."

"I have to finish this."

"Now." The titan blurred. Too fast. A trillion-fold. Clock's hands hadn't even finished healing before Gurtu was already there. The colossal mace filled his vision, descending with enough force to erase everything beneath it. Clock's violet eyes narrowed.

"Clockwork." A colossal clock face manifested behind him for less than an instant. Its hands lurched backward. Tick. Reality obeyed. The battlefield rewound exactly two seconds. Cracks sealed. Dust flew back into shattered mountains. Lava streamed upward into Gurtu's mouth. Clock's broken bones knit themselves together before breaking again as the titan's swing unraveled into its wind-up. Time snapped back to the instant before Gurtu had blurred forward. Only one thing remained unchanged. Clock's memory.

Gurtu would explode forward again, unknowingly repeating the exact same charge. This time, Clock was already preparing. He opened his mouth. A shrill, rising whine split the battlefield as a point of violet light ignited behind his teeth. It swelled with terrifying speed, flooding his face in ghostly radiance. Jagged reflections danced across his eyes while the glow bled through strands of white hair and spilled between his lips like a star trying to escape.

The sound climbed higher and higher, an unbearable metallic scream that made the air shudder and the glass beneath his feet tremble. A Reverse Blast condensed inside his mouth. The instant it left him, Clock invoked Castling. Reality acknowledged two occupied squares and exchanged them without transition. CLACK. Clock and Gurtu traded bodies in the same instant the violet beam crossed the space between them. There was no opportunity to react, no distance left to evade.

The attack met the basalt titan the moment he materialized before it. The violet blast slammed into the charging giant, hurling the colossal monster backward through the burning sky. Clock groaned. Being inside Gurtu's body for even a second had been unpleasant. Then reality snapped. His consciousness returned to his own body as Gurtu staggered, blinking molten eyes in confusion before his expression twisted into rage. Clock rolled one shoulder with a quiet wince.

"…I see." He understood now. That Reverse Blast had been powerful enough to erase continents, yet through Gurtu's body it had felt less like annihilation and more like taking a punch. Painful, but not nearly enough. His violet eyes settled calmly upon the towering basalt giant.

"I'll have to increase it." He flexed one hand. That exchange had told him everything he needed. The titan's durability, internal structure, regenerative threshold, even how force propagated through the layers of living basalt and magnetically contained magma. He had his data now. The next shot would be calibrated accordingly.