The sonic tide hammered the tattered great hall until its bones quivered; disciples of the Nethergate Sect with weaker cultivation bled from ears and nose before collapsing like felled wheat.
Across the giant’s bronze skin, veins bulged like furious serpents while his battered copper armor screeched and cracked against muscles straining for release.
A torrent even wilder than before detonated around him, chaotic, ancient, smelling of forgotten epochs, and the marble beneath his feet spider-webbed outward. “Vermin!” he rasped, the words grinding out like rusted gears. “I… Will kill you…”
The threat was coarse and halting, as though he had forgotten the taste of speech, yet the murderous intent inside each syllable almost took physical shape. To be repelled by a youngster of the Human Immortal Realm, a creature he deemed beneath notice, was a humiliation he could not swallow.
The hall shook as a thunderous blast answered his fury.
The giant kicked off the ground. Flagstones shattered like wet clay, leaving a crater in his wake as his body streaked forward, a bronze comet doubled in speed and momentum.
On his fist, ripples of warped Time Law unfurled, no longer a simple rewind of a moment, but concentric, quivering rings that threatened to drag everything nearby into a churning temporal whirlpool.
He meant to hurl Jared and the very space around him into that maelstrom, to erase them from existence. Yet the young man faced that wrath with an unclouded gaze, calmer than still water under moonlight.
A heartbeat earlier, on the razor’s edge between life and death, Jared had glimpsed the first thread of the time nascence’s true tapestry.
Time, he realized, was not a one-way river but a vast mesh, a net that could fold, pleat, and overlay itself. Slowing, hastening, or reversing a moment was nothing more than manipulating different knots of that net.
The giant‘s Time Reversal, then, was simply forcing one tiny node to wear an earlier layer.
Jared had failed before because his own weave differed in texture, unable to resist that superimposed past. Now, by matching frequencies, making his strands sing in unison with the giant’s for an instant, he avoided the overwrite.
Beyond that, he had grasped how to accelerate the flow across his entire patch of the net.
“Perfect timing, come at me!” Jared called, his shout sharp as steel against flint.
Instead of dodging that world-shredding punch, he drove forward, choosing collision over retreat. But the stance he adopted in answer froze every onlooker; their hearts missed a beat.
Jared did not unleash a dazzling sword technique. He did not summon a roar of spiritual energy. He simply lifted his left hand, pressing index and middle finger together like a blade.
The instant that blade rose, the flow of time around him warped, compressed, accelerated, obeying a quiet decree.
To Neville, to Sylvia, to every spectator, Jared’s outline blurred as if a hidden hand had slammed the fast-forward button. He moved beyond the reach of mortal perception. All they could see was an afterimage made of wind and intention.
It was not Jared who sped up. It was time itself, bent to his pulse.
“Time Acceleration!” The silent command echoed inside his skull like a muted drumbeat.
In the hair-thin instant before the giant’s fist, shrouded in ripples of Time Reversal, could crash into him, Jared’s sword finger struck first, defying sequence.
He did not pit raw strength against that terrifying blow. Instead, his new mastery of time condensed into a single, infinitesimal Time Needle.
With surgical precision, the needle speared the node where the laws of Time Reversal churned most violently, ready to engulf the world.
The faintest pop, no louder than a bubble breaking, drifted through the arena. The time ripples coiling around the giant’s hammer-like fist, ripples that could nullify any attack, collapsed like a punctured balloon the moment they touched Jared’s accelerating Time Needle.
The profound law fell into chaos, directionless in a single breath.
“W-What?!” The giant’s fury evaporated, leaving raw disbelief. His command of time, his proudest crown, had been severed by one negligible tap. The fact staggered him.
Impossible! His mind screamed the word, yet evidence mocked him.
