Chương 52: 51: The Eleven Abominations VI

/// The victory screen faded with Prism's laughter. The living room, the warmth of the sofa, the smell of takeaway, the glow of the television, and the rhythmic clicks of a Rubik's Cube all dissolved into silence. Clock blinked. Violet skies. Grey glass. The taste of blood. His ruined hand still trembled.

For a moment, he wished he were back with his little cousin, when the most dangerous opponent in his life had been a gangster with a gun, when the biggest argument of the week was whether Prism had cheated at video games, and ending a car chase with a spectacular pile-up counted as an adventure. Now he bled into a world that didn't exist, surrounded by Abominations that erased nations and refused to stay dead. A weak laugh escaped him.

"…I'd rather be losing at video games." He inhaled. The memory folded away. His smile vanished. Clock rolled his ruined shoulder until it cracked back into place, raised his violet eyes to the waiting horrors, and sighed.

"Now then. Where were we?" — The silence that followed was a lie. They'd been waiting for it, the fraction of a microsecond where his output peaked and his awareness might falter. The battlefield reconfigured. From the glittering dust of Gurtu's death, five new horrors completed themselves around Clock. They were echoes of the titan's essence, volcanic fury refined into living weapons, held in phased pockets until the surviving Talons' calculations declared the moment perfect.

The Forge Hammer turned the space around it into crushing pressure and furnace heat. The Basalt Golem advanced with tectonic certainty, every step a localized earthquake. The Ash Stalker was a cyclone of diamond-fine cinders that flayed flesh and stole breath. The Core Wraith siphoned molecular heat itself, killing through proximity alone. The Fracture spread cracks through matter, force, and space, seeking to split his defenses apart from within. They attacked as one.

The air around Clock hardened with murderous intent. Clock didn't try to evade the inescapable. He spun once in the air, then shot forward headfirst as though fired from a cannon, Transport already active. He pierced the Forge Hammer's crushing field. BOOM. Transit overruled pressure. The invisible force shattered around him like glass. He tore through the Ash Stalker. KRAK. Its storm of diamond-fine cinders unraveled in his wake, collapsing into harmless dust.

The Core Wraith drank from the violence of his passage, choked on the structured fury of his Gloom, swelled white-hot, and burst like an overfed star. He became a violet needle stitching catastrophe through their perfect ambush, a human-shaped flaw in Syndicate logic. Only after clearing their formation did both hands snap outward, palms aimed at the converging ruins behind him. A rapid volley of Reverse Blast spheres erupted from his hands. The first wave struck the Forge Hammer.

Its field of irresistible pressure met a force that refused to be shaped. Reality screamed. The pressure zone shattered like overstressed iron as the Reverse Blast bloomed into a corona of violent light, the crack of a million anvils echoing across the wasteland. Already more Abominations were closing. This realm was too vast for ordinary battle. Combatants blasted even a few miles apart could lose one another entirely.

Without spatial manipulation or overwhelming speed, crossing those impossible distances was painfully slow. Clock had both. Most of his enemies did not.... The second wave met Elara. Her quantum shriek, meant to unravel existence itself, collided with a force that rejected it outright. The scream rebounded into her own myriad throats. Clock had prepared for her.

He'd woven an extra strand of Gloom into her sphere, compressing the birth cry of a galaxy, the collapse of countless stars, and the inertia of dead worlds into a single impossible weight. Elara answered with something worse. Her body convulsed, unleashing violent harmonic vibrations that destabilized fact itself. Reality around her lost coherence. Mountains bent sideways. Shadows detached from their owners. Distance forgot how to measure itself.

Cause and effect slipped apart as the battlefield dissolved into impossible nonsense. The prison holding her shuddered, she nearly escaped. Clock's eyes widened. Every muscle in his body tensed. Veins bulged beneath his skin, his forearms swelling until they looked ready to tear apart. Tendons stood out like steel cables as he poured everything into his telekinesis, forcing the fractured region back into a single, coherent whole.

Invisible pressure screamed against Elara's assault, the strain making his muscles quiver as reality buckled between them. For the briefest instant, the monstrous choir collapsed, revealing a woman. She was unnervingly tall, her skin a faint lavender-purple that seemed almost luminous beneath the bruised sky. Completely bald, she possessed silky yellow eyes that were unsettlingly serene amid the chaos.

Her grimace exposed uneven charcoal-black teeth, each ending in a jagged point, while long obsidian claws curved from elegant fingers better suited to a pianist than a butcher. Her expression wasn't fear. It was exhaustion. Then the illusion shattered, and the screaming abomination returned. Elara strained to sing again, but Clock denied her the rhythm. His telekinesis clamped every mouth shut for a single instant. It was enough. The tailored Gloom had already taken hold.

She unraveled into fading harmonics, her body dissolving into scattered frequencies. One final cursed vibration drifted across the battlefield.

"May your own song choke you, melody breaker." Then there was silence. — Their assault had achieved only one thing. It kept Clock's attention fixed at the heart of the maelstrom. He hovered amid fading violet blooms and ionized dust. Gurtu's echoes were gone, and his time-thickening barely mattered anymore. The survivors had adapted, slipping through cracks in reality, chaining pseudo-teleports, or simply accelerating beyond what his distorted time could comfortably restrain.

With every heartbeat, they grew harder to pin down. This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it A Talon appeared. Another Purification Orb sailed toward him. Clock lunged backward. The orb flickered. Hologram. WHUMP! A gravitic mine clamped onto his back, and his body lurched as the weight multiplied. One thousand times gravity. He remained airborne. One million. One billion.

Gloom surged against the impossible burden while his telekinesis crushed the device into molten fragments. Clock understood the mechanism immediately. No physical body could endure that kind of force indefinitely, and even magic had limits. Sooner or later, sheer brutality overwhelmed everything. But the Magpies never fought for "later." Their weapons burned themselves alive, condensing impossible output into brief, murderous bursts. They didn't need to sustain the pressure.

They only had to create a single instant where survival became mathematically impossible. The devices themselves were almost disposable. Once their Apis charge burned out, many could be ripped off by hand. A man with a decent shotgun could blast plenty of them apart. Cheap materials. Short lifespans. They only had to survive long enough for the Enforcer to finish the kill. Suicide tech, Clock thought. That was the pattern.

Build them cheaply, produce them by the dozen, and accept that most would destroy themselves within minutes if it meant forcing a lethal opening. The Antarctic faction approached warfare very differently. They wouldn't bury an opponent beneath countless gadgets. They would deploy a single masterpiece, virtually indestructible, capable of maintaining the same impossible effect for hours without faltering. Escaping it only delayed the inevitable. Those devices were ruinously expensive. He looked up.

Talons charged from every direction. Too many. He struck a chord. VROOOOM! The guitar unleashed a roaring shockwave that ripped across the battlefield, shredding everything in its path. The Talons remained. Hardlight constructs. They descended together, attacking from impossible angles with deliberately broken timing. Clock answered with flowing Capoeira, cartwheeling between blades, spinning through sweeping kicks and fluid counters before blasting straight through their formation. His senses screamed. Too late.

The hardlight dissolved into a drifting cloud. Sleeping gas. Dream-logic woven into the vapor until even beings like him could be lulled into unconsciousness. His vision blurred. His eyelids dipped for less than an instant. Transport flickered. His eyes snapped open as every instinct detonated at once. He tilted his head. FSSSHH! A relativistic round screamed past his face, carving a glowing trench through the air where his skull had been.

He lunged forward, only for another barrage to rip through the space he'd just abandoned. Dozens of rounds slashed across the battlefield at impossible angles, every shot timed to punch through his ribs and spine during the microscopic instants when Transport stuttered. There wasn't even time to draw a breath. A gun barrel was already pressed against his chest.

"Goodbye." BOOM! The round tore straight through him. Agony exploded across his body as it punched through his sternum, obliterated his spine, and blasted his spinal cord apart in a spray of cosmos-black blood before erupting from his back. Everything below the wound went dead in an instant while the projectile glitched a fist-sized hole through his torso, hurling him across the wasteland. More shots followed. BANG! BANG! BANG! Clock's eyes narrowed. Invisible force seized the incoming rounds.

They froze in perfect telekinetic stasis around him while he continued hurtling backward through the air, a trail of black blood streaming behind him like the tail of a comet. Clock smiled anyway.

"You're coming with me." Telekinesis seized the Talon. Every direction pulled at once. The armor held. The pilot didn't. He shuddered as impossible force peeled him apart inside the suit, flesh giving way long before the Apis shell finally ruptured. Then the Talon detonated. Clock's heart thumped in panic. He released the corpse instantly. KA- BOOM. The self-destruct declared. A silent wave rolled across ten miles of reality, proclaiming everything within its reach to be nothing more than rumor and fairy tale.

Mountains shimmered. Glass faded. Concepts unraveled. Clock escaped the edge by a heartbeat. Had it caught him, he wouldn't have died. He would've become fiction. He drew a slow breath.... The Talons were relentless. There was never only one attack. Every strike concealed another. Every opening served as bait. Every victory demanded blood. They layered weapons, gadgets, predictions, and overlapping kill-zones until survival itself became a calculation. A single mistake was all they needed.

Clock closed his eyes for less than a heartbeat. I can't die here. A memory surfaced. Years ago, while flying home above the city after another assignment for Lucien, he'd looked down through the clouds. A family slept beneath a sheet of cardboard. A little girl had wrapped herself around her younger brother because they owned only one blanket. Rain leaked through the broken overpass above them while cars rolled past without slowing. Hundreds of people walked by them every day. Nobody stopped. Clock had.

Just not that night. He'd gone home instead, and he hadn't slept. By sunrise, the idea had become an obsession. Time Flies. It wasn't a charity. It was a machine. Orphanages. Homeless shelters. Soup kitchens. Employment centres. Schools. Rehabilitation programmes. Every location connected to another so people didn't merely receive help. They were guided toward standing on their own. Lucien's assignments funded everything. Butter supplied what money never could. Food. Clothes. Medicine. Blankets. She simply...

drew them into existence. Neither of them ever took credit. Their identities remained hidden. Sometimes Clock visited anyway. Never as himself. To the children, he was simply Mr. Bartholomew, an awkward gentleman in a neat coat who always carried sweets in his pockets and somehow remembered every birthday. The children adored him. They climbed over him, tugged at his sleeves, proudly showed him their drawings, and laughed whenever he pretended to lose at games.

Before hiring a single caretaker, he quietly read every applicant's mind, searching for kindness instead of qualifications. He'd rather rebuild an orphanage from its foundations than entrust a child to the wrong person. Once, a little boy had hugged him so tightly his shirt became damp with tears.

"I don't wanna go back outside again..." Clock had smiled.

"It's alright." The boy looked up.

"You promise?"

"I promise." The child believed him without hesitation. Afterward, Clock stepped into an empty hallway...... and cried. Butter found him a few minutes later. She didn't ask why. She simply stood beside him until he was ready to leave. The memory faded. Clock opened his eyes. I still have promises to keep. Hundreds of children were waiting for Mr. Bartholomew. Thousands depended on Time Flies. People who'd finally found work. Families who finally had homes. Lives still being rebuilt. He couldn't fail them.

He wouldn't. Clock inhaled slowly. Then exhaled. The violet fire surrounding him steadied.

"I'm going home." His ruined torso knitted itself back together as Gloom rewound him to wholeness. He exhaled slowly. He could recover from almost anything, so long as Gloom remained. That was the problem. It wasn't infinite. And the fortress still waited. Thousands remained. He couldn't afford to keep spending it like this.... His instincts flared. More abominations were closing in. He unleashed reverse blasts in their path. The Twin Razors were faster.

Lethe slipped behind the blooming spheres, her blade already singing for Clock's spine, while Mneme carved through the leading edge of a Reverse Blast, briefly severing cause from effect. Clock's fingers twitched. Invisible telekinetic force nudged both sisters barely a fraction sideways. It wasn't enough to stop the attack, only enough to interrupt their rhythm. Both faltered for a single heartbeat. For a Planck instant, Mneme succeeded. Then the exponential law remembered itself. Mneme forgot how to remain whole.

She dissolved into drifting silver fragments before the echo of her blade had finished ringing.

"NOOOO!" Lethe's scream ripped across the battlefield. Grief and fury twisted her perfect features as she lunged after the fading shards. Clock was already gone. Queen's Slide. Space folded around him, depositing him hundreds of metres away just as her blade swept through the place he'd occupied. He barely had time to breathe before the air around him fractured. One slash became ten. Ten became a hundred.

Pale crescents bloomed into existence from impossible angles, not travelling toward him but simply appearing where he was, carving through space itself. Clock moved again. His body suddenly felt... lighter. He looked down. His torso floated several feet above the lower half of his body. His waist ended in a clean, impossibly smooth line. Intestines spilled into empty air while his legs toppled away beneath him. There wasn't even pain. Not yet.

His mind struggled to catch up with what his eyes had already understood. I've already been cut... Then the agony arrived. His scream never fully escaped. Lethe hadn't merely swung her blade. She had separated cause from effect. The slash existed before the motion that created it. His body had already been divided while she was still preparing the attack. A cheat. The Gloom surged desperately toward the wound. Nothing happened. Along the severed line, causality itself had been amputated.

The injury no longer belonged to the timeline the Gloom occupied. Healing simply... couldn't find it. Blood flooded from Clock's mouth. Another pale line appeared. A hundred more. Transport couldn't stop this. There was nothing to redirect because nothing had truly struck him. Lethe's blade hadn't traveled to its target. The wound simply was. Cause had been severed from effect, leaving injuries that existed without an impact for Transport to intercept. Another line opened across his shoulder. Then another.

His remaining flesh fragmented into neat crimson ribbons. Arms. Shoulders. Neck. Skull. Everything came apart, piece by piece, as though reality had quietly decided he had always been cut. Silence. Clock lay scattered across the battlefield. Dead.... Far away, Lethe staggered before collapsing onto one knee, her breathing ragged with exhaustion.

"… It's over…" Liquid silver peeled away from her body as the Abomination unraveled. In her place knelt a young woman with porcelain-pale skin and jagged, spiky hair as dark as night, the uneven strands jutting in every direction as though cut with shattered glass. Tiny mirror-shard earrings caught the pale light with every trembling movement. She had no eyebrows, leaving her face strangely bare, while her irises resembled fractured mirrors, countless cracks splintering through them instead of ordinary pupils.

Crystal bracelets encircled both wrists and ankles, each faceted band chiming softly as she shook. Barefoot upon the grey glass, she wore a sleeveless black dress beneath a weathered white coat cut with razor-like hems, the fabric hanging loosely from her slender frame. She threw her head back. A cracked, breathless laugh escaped her.

"Hehehe…" It grew louder.

"HAHAHA!" The laughter dissolved into exhausted, almost hysterical cackling as tears streamed down her face.

"You… stupid… arrogant… bastard…" She wiped at her eyes with the heel of her hand, only for fresh tears to replace them.

"You actually… hah… actually made me think… you could win…" Her shoulders trembled between sobs and laughter.

"Serves you right…" She laughed again, sharp and broken.

"Cocky little shit…"