Chương 62: 61: The Eleven Abominations XI

Clock was out in the open again, music thrumming through his ears. A Talon reached him first, blades flashing. Clock caught the strike on his guitar, answered with a straight punch, then a grappling hook snapped around his forearm. A rocket ignited, wrenching his arm aside just long enough for the Talon to drive a blade toward his ribs. TWANG! A single note tore through the air.

Reality shredded apart in front of the Talon, forcing an instant reposition as wrist-mounted guns erupted, pouring streams of bullets toward Clock. An Operative advanced behind him, tactical HUDs overflowing with predictive trajectories while rifles and Apis constructs illuminated the battlefield. Kael charged straight through the middle of them all. Clock moved. He wove between the bullets.

Transport remained active, yet he had no patience for the Enforcers' endless attempts to discover what could and couldn't bypass it. Lances of absolute frost burst from Kael's limbs, stealing motion from everything they touched. Clock answered with Reverse Blasts. FWIP! FWIP! FWIP! The violet spheres collided with the beams.... And froze. His eyes narrowed. Those attacks didn't merely freeze matter. They froze movement itself. Even the sun would stop if one of those beams reached it.

Clock shot through the air so quickly the Talons and Operatives lost sight of him altogether. Kael didn't. The Abomination crawled after him with horrifying speed, limbs tearing through the sky as though it were solid ground. Clock twisted in midair. Telekinesis seized Kael and yanked him forward even as Clock hurled himself into the collision. THOOOOOOOOOM! His fist met Kael's face. The impact folded the false world.

Every mountain for miles behind the Abomination detonated into expanding rings of pulverised stone. Space rippled like stretched fabric. The insectile horror was blasted beyond the horizon, launched so violently that entire continents of floating crystal burst apart in its wake. Clock never watched it fly. Restraint no longer existed. Every strike now carried enough force to buckle multiverses.... Kael remained intact. Clock's eyes narrowed. No fracture. Only momentum.

"So that's your trick..." Physical force accomplished nothing. The thought lasted less than a heartbeat. FWIP! FWIP! FWIP! FWIP! FWIP! Dozens of Reverse Blasts bloomed around him before screaming after the distant Abomination like a barrage of violet artillery. BOOOOOOOOOOOOOM! Recursive detonations swallowed the horizon, drowning half the pocket dimension beneath blinding violet light as explosion after explosion consumed Kael's path. Clock had already turned away. The Talons were upon him. Reality lurched.

The lead Operative suddenly stood directly in front of his squad's firing line. Every visor flashed crimson. POSITIONAL PARADOX DETECTED. CONSCIOUSNESS EXCHANGE IMMINENT. The warnings arrived before reality finished changing. Every Operative reacted instantly. Transport flared. They scattered. Clock's killing blow struck empty air.

"Tch." Their predictive cores had warned them before Castling could secure the kill. CLICK. CLICK. CLICK. Blue-white light erupted across the arena. One Operative became ten. Ten became a hundred. Then a thousand. Blue-white light swallowed the battlefield. Clock drove a straight punch into one charging Operative. THOOM! The duplicate shot backwards like a real body, smashing through three mountains before disappearing beyond the horizon. Clock's eyes narrowed.

"So they're solid..." He had no intention of learning what those constructs were actually made from. Hardlight fighters screamed overhead as rifles snapped into firing positions. RATATATAT! THOOM! THOOM! Bullets stitched glowing lines across the false world, punching through mountains while bombers blanketed the horizon in fire and smoke. Clock walked through it. Rounds screamed past his face as Apis continuously corrected their trajectories. A fighter dived. He caught it with telekinesis. KRRRK!

The aircraft folded in half before spearing through three more, all four erupting into a chain of explosions. Another squadron swept in. TWAAANG! A violet crescent sliced across the sky, cleaving aircraft apart before they spiralled into the battlefield as burning wreckage. Operatives rushed him from every direction. Clock raised a hand. CRUNCH! Half a dozen slammed into one another, armour collapsing until they became shimmering metallic spheres. He flicked them into the advancing ranks. Bodies scattered.

More replaced them instantly. Another wave lunged. Invisible force seized them mid-charge, crushed them together into a glowing mass, then launched it through hundreds of holograms. Still they kept coming. More aircraft. More bombs. More bullets. The false sky had become a machine with one purpose. Kill Clock. He realised what they were doing. Apis cores were burning at an absurd rate to sustain this impossible army.

Every prediction, every hologram, every adaptive firing solution consumed another fragment of their future. They were willing to bankrupt entire tactical networks...... for a single chance to bring him down. Thousands of targeting lasers swept across him. Bullets curved through impossible trajectories, ricocheting off cliffs and crystal spires to pursue him wherever he moved.

The swarm never stopped firing, every volley herding him toward another, every distraction creating an opening for a single genuine Operative to deliver the killing blow. Clock darted between collapsing mountains as explosions rolled across the false world. The killing blows converged. Clock abandoned finesse. He pushed. A sphere of telekinetic force erupted, enough to split a planet from its core. The sphere became a shockwave. The shockwave became a command. BE GONE.

Everything ahead of him was hurled into oblivion. Over a hundred thousand miles of glass, dust, mountains, and charging adversaries were translated into pure momentum and hurled into the starless edge of the pocket dimension. Silence followed. Clock remained suspended alone. Tears streamed down his face. His violet eyes stared into nothing. This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

His headphones slipped free, the music dissolving into a faint metallic rattle before cutting out. Silence. His grief became a black hole. His rage circled it like a screaming accretion disk. He didn't see the next attack. He felt it. Kael had been waiting. While the others fought, the insectile horror had never stopped weaving its technique. Something invisible had been growing.. Layer upon layer. A sentence reality hadn't finished reading. Now it did. Clock's body lurched. His gaze snapped downward.

Kael crawled into view. Only then did Clock truly look at it. It resembled a grotesque fusion of cockroach and centipede the size of a hippopotamus, its obsidian carapace traced with swirling sapphire patterns that spread across its shell like living frost. Hundreds of barbed legs carried it across the battlefield with unsettling grace, each limb ending in crystalline hooks that left trails of rime wherever they touched. At the front hung something profoundly wrong. A human face.

It dangled from the creature's neck like an ornament someone had forgotten to remove, its lips splitting into a smile far too wide for the borrowed features. The thing laughed.

"Hehehehehe..."

"So you finally looked at me." The sapphire markings across its shell ignited. A line stretched from one crystalline claw to Clock's heart. The world stopped vibrating. Silence ceased to be the absence of sound. It became law. The air crystallized into glittering geometric fractures as motion itself was sentenced. Clock froze. The effect raced through him faster than thought, threatening to reduce him to a permanent, unmoving instant. Every muscle, every nerve, every impulse to act slowed toward absolute zero.

He tried to lift a finger. Nothing. Gloom surged through him. It couldn't sever the attack. It wasn't damaging him. It was defining him. Kael laughed harder.

"I told you... you're already dead. Move, and the stillness spreads faster." Its smile widened.

"Fight it, and you'll become a statue forever." The crystalline lattice crawled across Clock's chest, climbed his neck, and reached his jaw. Violet light dimmed beneath spreading sapphire frost as even his thoughts slowed toward perfect, motionless order. Kael savored every second.

"Do you feel it?"

"The moment becoming eternity?"

"Soon you'll only be able to stare. No heartbeat. Only stillness." Clock's pupils trembled. Butter's faces threatened to freeze inside his mind forever. No. His jaw strained as crystal spread through it, his lips barely parting before, with every shred of strength he possessed, he roared.

"AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!" The scream tore blood from his throat. His arm refused to move. His will did. Invisible telekinetic force wrapped around his own body, wrenching dead muscles into motion where severed nerves could no longer carry commands. Bones shifted, tendons pulled, and his limbs obeyed because he forced them to, not because they still could. If his body could no longer act, then his next action didn't need a body. His right arm ceased to be flesh. It became intent.

At the same instant, another assault erupted. Pure psychic force slammed into Kael's mind. Thought became a weapon. Memory. Perception. Identity. Reason. Clock drove all of them into the Abomination's skull with enough force to make lesser beings forget their own names. Normally it achieved very little. Mental attacks had always been a major part of Clock's arsenal, yet the Abominations possessed layer upon layer of conceptual resistance, psychic insulation and impossible cognition.

They had been engineered to remain themselves regardless of what tried to rewrite, fracture or erase their minds. This time... Something slipped through. Clock's grief. His rage. His hatred. They struck with such overwhelming violence that they tore straight through those defences, crashing into Kael's consciousness and flooding it with a single, unbearable instant of disorientation. The frozen limb lurched forward. It shouldn't have been possible. Reality objected. Clock ignored it.

The crystalline fist struck Kael square in its borrowed human face. There was no impact. Impact required motion. Instead, one truth passed through perfect stillness. MY SISTER IS GONE. HOLD THIS FEELING. Clock sent far more than a thought. He forced every emotion into it. Grief that crushed the air from his lungs. Rage that eclipsed reason. Despair so deep it hollowed out the future itself. The unbearable certainty that someone he loved would never speak again.

He compressed all of it into a single psychic instant and drove it into Kael's mind. The Abomination lived beneath the full weight of Clock's suffering. Kael broke from the inside out. Absolute order collided with immeasurable grief. The frozen lattice sustaining the abomination shattered into impossible symmetry before collapsing into a cloud of drifting atoms, its final silent laugh dissolving into nothing. The price came immediately. Clock's frozen arm imploded into a pinprick of absolute zero.

He doubled over, a ragged gasp escaping him as cold spread through his entire body. Sweat beaded across his brow despite the killing frost consuming his shoulder. Violet Gloom surged into the wound again and again, only to recoil as absolute zero rejected the very idea of change.

"Hah... hah..." His breathing grew heavier. Veins of violet fought against veins of sapphire as Gloom relentlessly rewound him toward an earlier, unbroken state. Millimeter by agonizing millimeter, flesh crawled back into existence. Tendons knitted. Bone reformed. Fingers twitched. Clock clenched his jaw, his entire body trembling under the strain until, with a violent shudder, the regeneration finally won. He straightened slowly. His arm was whole again. Deathly pale. Impossibly cold.

Thin wisps of frost still curled from his fingertips as sweat continued to drip from his face, his chest rising and falling in hard, uneven breaths. Even for Gloom, rewinding something touched by absolute zero had come far closer to failure than he liked. He dropped to one knee, black blood freezing into obsidian beads across the glass. He had won. He had killed an Abomination by turning his own ruined body into the weapon. Attacking Clock no longer meant risking death.

It meant becoming the material for whatever nightmare he created next. Then violet waves poured off him. He couldn't control it anymore. His presence flooded the false world unchecked, pressing into every corner of the pocket dimension at once. Mountains groaned. The sky fractured with hairline cracks. Space itself strained beneath the sheer weight of his existence, the entire arena trembling as though it might burst apart under the pressure of everything he was releasing. The air buckled.

Dust fled in widening rings as Gloom rolled across his body in slow, shimmering tides. His shirt blackened and dissolved into ash, his tailored jacket unravelled into drifting violet motes. Beneath them was a lean, sinewy physique honed with ruthless precision. Every muscle stood in sharp relief beneath pale skin, defined abdominals, broad shoulders, sculpted chest, and wiry arms laced with prominent veins where faint violet currents pulsed beneath the surface.

He looked less like a bodybuilder than a weapon engineered for a single purpose. The sapphire rings still gleamed on his fingers. His painted nails remained immaculate. The contrast was deeply unsettling. Moments ago, he'd looked like an artist. Now he stood bare to the waist, sculpted for violence, while violet power poured from him in silent, rising waves. — Far below, at the edge of the erased plain, a Talon and a battered Operative stood unmoved.

Clock's telekinetic wave had washed over them, but their Apis suits quietly translated its force into harmless dream-logic. Nearby, Ankou simply negated the blast, while Warpfluff anchored herself to reality itself, becoming impossible to displace. They remained untouched. Their HUDs flickered. TARGET: CLOCK - ACTIVE. EMOTIONAL STATE: GRIEF CONFIRMED. THREAT LEVEL: TRANSCENDENT. SUCCESS PROBABILITY: 0. 00%. RECOMMENDATION: DISENGAGE. OBSERVE.

Without hesitation, they activated their phase cloaks, fading from sight and metaphysical perception alike. The Syndicate didn't waste assets on impossible battles. The data was enough. Asset Clock possesses catastrophic emotional vulnerability. Potential exploit: sister designation: Butter. They withdrew, leaving him alone with the dust and the silence where his sister's light had been.

"… No." The word barely existed. The Syndicate fortress in New Zealand was no longer the destination. It was merely the first stop. He was coming. The universe between him and his sister's killers had just become very small. The last echo of his grief faded into absolute white. Clock lingered for one heartbeat, an alabaster statue streaked with violet tears. Then he simply... wasn't. He folded himself out of the narrative.

With its purpose fulfilled, the pocket dimension unraveled at the edges like a forgotten dream. — On the blank white plain, the survivors remained. A soft, fibrous unraveling echoed. The Warpfluff shed its layers of gravity until only a girl remained. Slight, with marbled ginger-and-black hair, sunset-orange eyes fading into deep Aegean blue, two small cobalt horns, and a silver septum ring.

A long brown dress, a black jacket embroidered with emerald seaweed and silver anglerfish, and deep pine boots completed the picture. She hugged herself, reaching into a pocket for a small bronze inhaler. Though she had no need for it, she took a slow puff anyway, steadying herself before exhaling.

"He was... really strong," she murmured in a soft Greek accent, rubbing one arm.

"Hei... too strong... too fast. I-I couldn't even follow half of what he was doing. They just... disappeared from the board." She swallowed.

"And that sound... it wasn't really a sound. Hei... it stayed inside you." Nearby, Ankou's void inverted with a soft pop. A tall, dark-skinned man emerged, white lace-like tattoos tracing elegant patterns across his hands and neck. Black-hole earrings rested beneath the brim of a polished top hat. His cobalt waistcoat and black coat remained immaculate despite the battle. He calmly drew upon a cigar.

"Yes... quite," he said between puffs.

"The fellow committed the rather vulgar act of disputing my premise. Successfully, if only briefly. I confess I found it... deeply uncivil." The surviving Operative phased in beside them. His armour dissolved into particles, revealing a brown-skinned South African with close-cropped black hair and tired amber eyes.

"I'll tell you now... the oke's falling apart." He folded his arms.

"Profile's updated. He's damaged and now he's running almost entirely on grief." He shook his head.

"Ja... that's not stable. Makes a man dangerous in ways you can't model." His gaze shifted between them.

"He won't survive what they're sending next." The girl stared into the endless white where Clock had disappeared.

"He was..." Her voice softened.

"Beautiful. Hei... in a sad way. Like... watching something magnificent break itself." She frowned, rubbing her arm again.

"Hei... Reflection should've survived. I still don't understand why she didn't."

"Aesthetic appreciation," Ankou replied, producing a platinum pocket watch engraved only with shifting geometries.

"Entirely irrelevant." He glanced at the impossible dial.

"He did not attack her reflection. He attacked reflection itself. A subtle distinction, but an exceptionally important one. The Magpies have, naturally, already documented it." He took another measured draw from his cigar.

"I rather suspect he never intended to win this engagement conventionally. He was racing the Talons' predictive horizon, eliminating them before adaptation became possible. Talons first. Abominations second. Entirely logical." Daniel nodded.

"He was holding back." The other two looked at him.

"He barely used half his arsenal. Whole abilities never showed themselves. Techniques, movement patterns, even parts of his martial arts... all left out." He looked toward the empty horizon.

"He knew every second of that fight was being uploaded back to Command." A faint smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.

"He was making sure the next lot wouldn't know everything." Ankou quietly disagreed.

"Oh, I believe he knew they would." He tapped ash that ceased to exist before touching the ground.

"He simply possesses sufficient confidence to assume it shall make no difference." Daniel considered that for a moment.

"... Ja."

"That sounds about right." A thin ribbon of cigar smoke drifted upward into unreality.... A soft hiss broke the silence. One Talon's amethyst-and-citrine feathers smoldered as its helmet unsealed with precise clicks, revealing a young man with close-cropped blond hair, pale electric-blue eyes, and cerulean veins glowing beneath his skin. His expression was vacant, as though only the operating system remained.

"Statistics compiled and transmitted to the Magpie Commander," he said in a calm, synthetic baritone.

"Hexagon-grade Apis core approved. Integration upon return. The next engagement will belong to us. We will have read his actions fifteen objective seconds before he performs them. His final move will already have an answer. A Hexagon-powered Shroud Punch will be waiting at the end of his sentence." The Operative studied the Talon's glowing veins.

"Does it hurt?" There was no sympathy in the question, only technical curiosity.

"Unfiltered Apis. Straight into the cortex." He reached beneath his tactical vest, produced a battered stainless-steel flask scarred by years of use, unscrewed the cap with practiced ease, and took a long swig.

"Hell," he muttered, wiping his mouth with the back of his glove.

"Needed that." The Talon's veins pulsed once.

"Of course not. I am resurrected. I feel only strength. Purpose. Clarity." As if reciting gravity. The Operative nodded thoughtfully.

"When my time comes... I hope I die well enough to justify the conversion."

"A noble aspiration." Nearby, the girl fumbled a small blue inhaler from her jacket and took a slow breath. She didn't need oxygen. She needed routine. The hiss steadied her trembling hands. Ankou watched from beneath the brim of his hat.

"You know it does nothing."

"I know," she murmured, taking another measured breath.

"Hei... it helps me think I'm calm." A faint curl of cigar smoke drifted from Ankou.

"A placebo."

"A choice," she corrected quietly. The Operative glanced toward her.

"You're shaken."

"I watched him erase almost everyone in mere moments." She lowered the inhaler.

"Hei... I think I'm allowed." Silence settled for a moment. Then the Talon spoke again.

"He intends to exterminate the Syndicate. Every Magpie. Every Abomination that stands before him." The girl stared into the empty white where Clock had blinked from sight.

"So... he wasn't trying to win."

"No," Ankou replied.

"He was trying to leave enough of himself undisclosed that the next battle wouldn't belong to us." The Talon replaced his helmet with a final hydraulic hiss. The pale face disappeared behind the ghostly visor.

"This theater collapses in six minutes." They turned and walked into the whitening horizon. Far away, inside a vault buried beneath unreality, a page turned in a catalog of cosmic erasures. A title shimmered with quiet malice, awaiting its summons. Clock was already gone, chasing vengeance through folded space. And the system, cold, patient, and endlessly adaptive, had already begun drafting his epitaph.