“Gah!” Blood sprayed from Jared’s lips as ribs snapped, his body flew like a rag doll, gouging a trench across the marble until the far wall stopped him with a sickening crack. His aura plummeted, the Dragonslayer Sword skittering away to whine in helpless protest.
“It’s over…” Neville whispered, despair thick in his throat. Hopelessness clouded his face. If even Jared had fallen, and so utterly, who could still stand against the Soul Devourer?
Is the Nethergate Sect truly fated to die here today? All around him, disciples paled, many collapsed to their knees, shivering in dread.
The Soul Devourer nodded in dark satisfaction and told the giant, “Enough play. End him swiftly…”
The giant obeyed, heavy footsteps echoing through the ruin of the hall as he marched toward Jared’s broken form. He raised one boot, his power and that eerie Time Law ripple condensing around it, ready to crush the fallen warrior’s skull.
The shadow of death swept over Jared.
Jared lay sprawled across the frost-slick ruins. Shards of stone bit his skin, and every nerve pulsed with agony, yet his fogging mind spun like a broken projector, replaying, frame by merciless frame, their brief but brutal exchanges.
Most of all, he kept circling back to that impossible instant when the current of time itself had been forced to run backward.
Time reversed… Not accelerated, not slowed… Rewound…
When I decelerate, I merely drag the river’s surface, altering its flow… He, though, he dives straight to the source. He overwrites, resets, erases… What is the essence of time? A river? A plucked string?
Or a single, pliable membrane that can be folded, spliced, and laid over itself?
Every past whisper he had ever grasped of the time nascence collided with the shock of this higher law now battering his senses.
In that dizzy point between life and death, theories clashed, sparked, and fused within him. He seemed to glimpse the river in full flood, to see a thousand diverging tributaries braid together again, binding past, present, and future into an indivisible thread.
My deceleration merely slackens one stretch of the torrent, but reversal, reversal forces a branch of water back up the gorge… To achieve that demands power and comprehension far beyond mine… Yet all laws share a single womb.
If he resets a single temporal node, maybe, if I pierce that node precisely as it resets, I can intervene, or render my own law immune to his overlay.
The giant’s mountainous foot, heavy enough to shatter cliffs, rose above Jared, humming with death.
Neville squeezed his eyes shut, unable to watch the execution. Sylvia tried to push herself upright, but her limbs buckled, glossy tears of despair blurred her vision as she collapsed again.
Then, at the final heartbeat before annihilation, light flared within Jared’s previously dim eyes, bright and cold as newborn stars.
That glare belonged to a man who had torn aside a veil and glimpsed truth’s scaffolding.
He saw it, the exact instant when power gathered around the giant’s foot, the air trembling with the coming Time Reversal. In brilliant clarity, he located the temporal node about to be reset.
So that’s it!
Insight rushed through him like dawn flooding a cavern. The bottleneck inside his comprehension shattered, his command of time nascence vaulted to a new summit.
Deep within his nascence space, a lone star roared to incandescent life. He no longer tried to decelerate or oppose the giant’s Time Reversal. Instead, he melded with it, matched it beat for beat.
The instant before that titanic foot could descend, just before the law activated, Jared gathered every last sliver of spiritual energy.
The reborn time nascence folded inward, cocooning him, sealing especially the fragile space around his skull. A heartbeat hung, stretched thin as silk.
