Within that cocoon, he mirrored the giant’s rhythm, syncing his own microseconds to the impending rewind until both laws vibrated in eerie resonance.
A low, deep hum erupted. The giant’s Time Reversal rippled outward precisely on cue. Yet this time, the moment it met Jared’s synchronized field, everything changed.
The eerie current of time nascence, able to roll any assault back to the instant before it erupted, touched the faint halo that clung to Jared’s skin. Instead of resetting him, the current faltered. Its sweeping authority to overwrite and rewind simply dissolved.
Jared’s own timeline began to reverse in perfect resonance, matching the invader’s pulse for pulse until a fragile equilibrium formed.
Time streamed backward, yet it could no longer drag Jared’s battered body into the past.
Stripped of that treacherous favor, the giant‘s sure-kill kick shed its temporal cloak and shrank into raw, unvarnished strength. That strength still roared, but Jared’s flesh, hardened by countless baptisms in Heavenly Spirit Liquid, now stood ready.
Now!
Jared’s eyes flashed like twin comets. The instant the titan’s foot descended, he hurled his fist upward.
He poured every ounce of power into the punch, hitching it to his fresh command of time. Rather than rewind, he accelerated the flow around his knuckles to its final limit—Time Acceleration, a brand-new facet he had seized only heartbeats ago.
The collision detonated. A thunderclap louder than any prior clash ripped the hall apart.
A hurricane of energy spun outward from the two combatants, flinging up earth for over a hundred meters. Even the vaulted ceiling of the Nethergate Sect’s grand hall split open, stone raining like broken stars.
The giant groaned, a muffled, startled cry, half pain, half disbelief.
A savage, razor-edged force, brimming with the power to shred temporal balance, knifed from the sole of the giant’s foot through every inch of his frame.
His gigantic body shuddered. Staggering backward, he carved deep footprints into the shattered floor, cracks spider-webbing in his wake.
Using the recoil, Jared flipped once and landed lightly. Blood still traced the curve of his mouth, his face milk-pale, yet he stood as straight as a pine, eyes honed to a blade. Though his aura flickered weakly, a new depth, ancient, unfathomable, now breathed around him.
He raised a hand, and the Dragonslayer Sword answered with a joyful draconic cry, streaking back into his grasp.
Silence. The entire grand hall of the Nethergate Sect froze, soundless and still, as though even air dared not stir. One could have heard a needle strike the ruin-strewn tiles.
Every spectator stood rooted, jaws slack, staring at Jared, sword leveled at the giant, posture unbowed. He had actually repelled that unbeatable monster, and he had done it on the brink of death.
Neville blinked hard, convinced his senses had betrayed him.
Sylvia clapped a trembling hand over her lips. Tears still glittered on her lashes, yet fresh joy blazed beneath them, a beam of dawn slicing through endless night.
The composure on the Soul Devourer’s face drowned under a glacial darkness. Mockery fled, replaced by a chill that seemed to leach warmth from the world.
His fingers tightened on the throne’s armrest, unaware. The arm of black iron groaned, sinking beneath his grip until hair-thin impressions of his nails appeared.
The giant had assumed he could read this Human Immortal fledgling the way a butcher sizes up a lamb. Yet the quicksilver insight and meteoric growth Jared displayed now leapt far beyond any script the giant had written.
For the first time, the hulking warlord felt the future slip from his grasp, as though the fight itself had begun to breathe on its own, ignoring the hand that once puppeteered it.
He glanced down at the tingling soles of his massive feet, then up at Jared, whose breath came ragged yet whose eyes shone with a star-strewn depth that seemed to contain whole heavens.
Those once vacant orbs inside the giant sparked for the first time with living flame: astonishment, confusion, and above all a volcanic rage that threatened to set the ruined hall ablaze.
A guttural roar ripped from the giant’s throat, nothing human, more like some primordial beast awakened from stone.
The sound crashed through the air in rolling waves, rattling the shattered pillars and flinging dust like rain.
