Day 723[1] in Jerrica's Labyrinth
With that, time snapped back into motion like a whip cracking across the cosmos. The silence was shattered. BZZZZZZZZZZZT! The sound of hundreds of wings liquefied the air with their furious flapping, each wingbeat smearing the scent of sweet rot and ionized nectar into the room. From all sides, the ominous echo of the swarm grew louder, closer, impossible to ignore. Steez exhaled slowly, his eyes flicking toward the entrance tunnels where shadows stirred like boiling pitch. He knew they were coming.
In one swift motion, he slammed his palms together and cast, "Electric Mana Arts: Sasuke's Coat."
Lightning crawled up his arms, cracking and weaving around his body like a sentient net of silver veins. Sparks snapped from his fingertips and feet, and the air buzzed with ozone as the spell completed. A full-body cloak of reactive electricity, casting a faint blue glow around him. The scent of burnt air and hot metal wafted outward as his lightning-clad figure stood ready.
Behind him, a sudden whir—the quiet hum of something mechanical, close. His senses screamed. Steez twisted just in time to see a sleek, needle-like Chronohymenid drone lunging with a venomous stinger aimed for his spine. The moment it pierced his aura, it was met with death. VRRAKT!—electricity surged into the insect's carapace, frying its internals with a strobe of blue-white mana. The drone crumpled in mid-air and dropped like scrap metal, sizzling at Steez's feet.
But there was no time to breathe. In the span of a heartbeat, the once-empty chamber bloomed with new enemies. Royal Guards and Mana Drones flooded in like they were tearing through the seams of reality itself, blinking into place mid-air, crawling across ceilings, and emerging from hidden hatches in the walls. They saw the fallen drone by Steez's feet and didn't hesitate.
They began to circle.
Steez raised two fingers—index and middle—then focused. A sharp crack of lightning sparked at his fingertips, forming a glowing arc of energy between them. The air hissed. He curled his thumb into place and formed his signature mana handgun. Without a word, he started pointing it at every movement in the sky.
Then it came. A voice like razors whispered across the Hive Sanctum's comms: "Kill him."
What happened next? Chaos.
Bolts of lightning launched from his fingertip-gun, detonating on contact with royal exoskeletons. Boom. Zap. Crack. Steez was no longer standing still—he was a blur of motion, flipping off walls, corkscrewing through midair, using his legs like cannons and his fists like thunderheads. A stinger jabbed at him—he leaned backward at full speed, letting it pass inches from his neck before uppercutting the drone into the ceiling, detonating it with a jolt of electricity that left its wings twitching midair. He spun, flipped, landed on one hand, and kicked off again with a wild tornado motion.
"Stylin' on y'all!" he barked mid-air, smiling.
To Steez, this wasn't war. This was parkour combat. He moved faster than their compound eyes could track. Every strike landed like it was the first—explosive, final, surgical. Yet for every one he dropped, two more took their place. The swarm didn't thin, it only grew.
"This is getting old, fast. I'm finna just blow the whole thing up."
He didn't wait.
Activating [Chrono Trigger], the world around him froze. Mana—both artificial and organic—halted mid-flight. Wings paused mid-buzz. The blue glow of Steez's aura contrasted beautifully with the strange golden ambient glow of the Hive. He used the time-slow to dig deep into his Soul Core, pulling on his internal reservoir of Bio Mana—but then... something sparked.
A darkness.
It wasn't the [Chrono Trigger] that finished the spell—it was his [Dominus Desidiae]. The passive snapped into full control, overriding his cast. The result? Time didn't slow. Nah, that shit ceased completely.
Steez's body trembled under the force of the full soul-freeze as he channeled two opposing forces into one palm—Yin Mana, cold and unfeeling, swirled with molten tongues of Fire Mana, angry and primal. The fusion formed a blistering black-red orb in his hand—volatile, flickering like a mini star gone wrong. Mana pressure surged outward in heavy ripples, and Steez unfroze time with a smirk.
"Let's try this out. Pest Control."
The hive exploded.
A detonation of unholy flame erupted from Steez's palm. Black and crimson fire spiraled outward in a wave that flattened the beach, vaporized the trench, and shattered the inner Hive's foundation. Chrono Nectar geysered into the sky, only to pour back down in a liquid waterfall of gold, running down charred cliffs of hive bone and shell. The air sizzled. The ground cracked. The Hive's cavernous trench had become a crater, and the bee demons—gone. Vaporized. Or melted, in pieces, charred and curling like dead leaves. The only sound was the slow hiss of mana-infused sand cooling beneath his boots.
Steez hovered above it all, arms crossed, proud.
But the moment he relaxed, time stuttered. Then rewound.
His eyes widened as everything rebuilt before him in reverse. The crater filled in. The corpses were unburned. The Nectar waterfall reversed back into its vats. Even the destroyed hive walls reconstructed themselves. His jaw clenched. He didn't even need to guess.
"Damn, that bitch didn't get hit."
A female voice slithered through the air, commanding and disgusted.
"I don't like you, Lower Realm demihuman. You attack and destroy my home and children for what purpose?"
The Royal Guards he'd just killed… stood again. But not alive. No life force, no aura. These were hollow puppets, guided purely by Mana. He narrowed his eyes.
"So she can't use Astral Mana? Bet that. Means she's locked outta true resurrection."
Suddenly, the swarm split, wings folding as each bee demon kneeled. A golden pressure slammed into the room. Magick. Dominion—pure magick authority, like gravity set on "Boss Mode." Steez gritted his teeth as the room darkened with her presence.
And she appeared.
She descended the chamber steps like a living coronation, each measured stride echoing power and poise. Her six slender arms—each jointed in polished bronze segments—moved in graceful harmony, wrists adorned with filigreed bands of gold that glinted as Cerulean Water Mana pulsed through her veins. That mana bled through her peanut-toned carapace in faint, rippling streams, as if her very bones were lit from within by liquid sapphire.
Her face, sculpted and almost classically human in its symmetry, held a fierce beauty: high cheekbones, full lips parting just so, and eyes of milky blue that glowed like polished gem shards. Yet on each flank of her jaw, curved mandibles of burnished steel flexed with her every calculating smile, a reminder that her elegance concealed lethal intent.
Cascading blonde curls framed her visage, tumbling past a diadem of twisted black antennae and ornate gold filigree that crowned her brow. Behind her, gossamer wings stretched wide—iridescent panels shot through with veins of twilight blue—catching stray light and scattering prisms of color across the stone floor.
Her attire was the perfect alchemy of regality and warcraft: sculpted hip plates etched with time-worn runes, a draped sash of void-blue silk knotted at her waist, and twin seashell cups of burnished brass melding into her breastplate. Every element—ornament and armor alike—seemed crafted both to mesmerize and to withstand the fiercest assault. In her presence, beauty itself felt weaponized.
"Demihuman," she said, "you gaze upon the Time Diva of the West, Queen B'yonsei. Applaud before the bringer of your demise."
"Wut?" Steez deadpanned.
She frowned. "Lower intelligence as well. Very well. What is a child of the Time Archon doing attacking my home?"
"Who?"
"Very low intelligence. You must be a defective combative scout."
"Chill, yo. And my mother is not an Outer God."
She paused. "Your intelligence has returned? Good. But wrong, Demihuman. The Archon of Time is a male being."
Then she blurred.
The space around her bent. She sped up her personal temporal field, blinking around Steez in a blur, circling him with a blend of hunger and curiosity.
"With my Domain Art, I've read your strongest memories. To think that you fought a Zodiac Key. It's rare for someone of your strength to find their way this deep into Infernia."
"You've never met a real nigga like me before," Steez said, lifting a hand, "and this'll be your last."
He cracked his knuckles, ready to drop another spell. Storm Mana surged into his palm, forming a ball of static that screamed with power. He raised it to fire—only to freeze.
The mana unwound itself. Right in his hand. It broke apart, pixelating into raw magitons before dispersing harmlessly into the air.
"Can you quit attacking my home?" B'yonsei said softly. "I have many mouths to feed. And thanks to you, it will be a busy time giving them your corpse and mana."
"There won't be a later for you," Steez snapped, popping his neck. "Don't take it personally—but I'm a bit prejudiced against your kind."
Her eyes narrowed.
But Steez wasn't done.
"So I'm glad you finally showed your face," he said, flexing his fingers. "Now I can kill you all together while testing my growth."
He let his aura rip.
His body glowed with Bio Mana, a bright pulse of life-force and storm energy that roared around him like a hurricane in orbit. In response, B'yonsei smiled, showing her sharpened teeth as her own energy flooded the room, sweet and heavy, like poison wrapped in honey.
"Your mana," she purred, "will make the most delicious nectar."
There he was—on a planet so off-the-grid even hellspawn sent postcards instead of visiting. A forgotten corner of Infernia's Western Sector, draped in the blackest sand imaginable, where time didn't move in straight lines but twisted like a snake eating its own tail. Buried deep within that unnatural beach trench lay the grotesque wonder of the Chronohymenids' Hive—a bioengineered labyrinth pulsating with Temporal Mana. Its walls were a mixture of crystalline wax and hardened magiton honey, the air thick with a haunting sweet scent that burned your throat if you inhaled too hard. This wasn't just any honey; this was time-infused nectar that could make you relive your worst heartbreak or your greatest triumph, drop by shimmering drop.
Most of Infernia's denizens had long since learned to stay the hell away. Time-bending bee demons weren't something you casually pulled up on. But the Realest Nigga of All-Time? He didn't pull up. He arrived. And he was standing dead center in the Queen's throne chamber, heterochromatic eye to multifaceted eye with the Cardinal Empress of the West—Queen B'yonsei.
Steez radiated electricity like a second skin. The air popped and hummed with energy, each breath thick with static as blue-white lightning flickered across his arms, shoulders, and the edges of his braided curly crown. His aura surged in waves, pressing against the Hive's walls like a tsunami refusing to wait for the tide. The reborn Hive, reconstructed through twisted magic and reversed time, shook violently with every pulse from his body. Converted magitons bled into the room like iron sand drawn to a magnet, swirling like a silver-black storm in the tight Royal Chamber. The reanimated Chronohymenids, already grotesque in their puppet-like movements, began to spasm. Their exoskeletons clicked and ground against each other, wings twitching erratically as if the mana pressure alone was suffocating them from the inside out.
Across from him, Queen B'yonsei stood tall. Regal. Predatory. Her curvaceous carapace gleamed in the sickly light, twin antennae twitching as she looked upon her shaken army. Her long blonde curls bounced like slow-motion springs as she surveyed the disruption, cerulean water mana coursing through her eyes and veins. She tilted her head to assess the hive's structural integrity.
That's when Steez made his move.
"Shoryureppa!!" he barked, the phrase slicing through the static like a blade.
He vanished mid-syllable—gone, like a glitch in a broken timeline. The air cracked where he stood a moment ago. In the blink, it took B'yonsei to refocus her eyes, Steez was already in her face.
The rising uppercut landed flush on her jaw with a thunderclap that cracked reality's windshield. Lightning wrapped around his fist like a dragon made of pure rage, and as the punch connected, a ring of compressed wind and magick detonated outward. Her body shot up like a cork fired from hell's champagne bottle, smashing through the ceiling of the Hive and shredding a vertical tunnel all the way up to the surface.
Steez didn't even wait to see if she landed.
The moment her golden body vanished into the late day sky above, he tilted his head slightly, eyes glowing with cold fire, and lifted his palm again.
Mana flooded his hand—a torrent of Yin Mana, black as obsidian sorrow, swirled with vicious Fire Mana that screamed in angry reds and infernal oranges. His Soul Core ignited with intent. The air collapsed in on itself. The magitons vibrated so violently they blurred from view, forming a dense core in his hand. More than a bomb—it was a statement.
He whispered to the Hive, "Round two, bitch."
Then dropped the spell like a mic.
The resulting explosion wasn't so much sound as it was the absence of it. A vacuum boom followed by a roar that bent light and shattered everything within a mile radius. The Hive did more than burn; it un-happened. Walls became molten shards. Floors became vapor. The time-honey combusted into a sweet-smelling steam that turned lungs to jelly. The trench itself warped as the blast crater swallowed ocean water pouring in from the edge of the planet's beach above. The new golden waterfall gleamed in the daylight, cascading into the shattered remains of a once-proud hive now burning in black and red flame.
Steez hovered above it all, body humming with residual electricity, as fragments of Hive architecture and bee demon corpses rained down around him.
He didn't even smile.
Not yet.
The job wasn't done.
The sky above the beach split with a sound like thunder cracking open a cathedral ceiling. Silver webs of light veined through the heavens, spidering across a dome of stars that no longer obeyed the rules of reflection. It shattered in layers—one mirror of the sky collapsing over another—until what hung above was a kaleidoscope of fractured dusk and daylight. Down came the pieces of the once-imposing hive: scorched hexagonal towers, charred obsidian honeycombs, and globs of burning gold-black wax, all trailing ribbons of red and black fire. The crash of them onto the beach echoed like war drums. Some vanished into the ocean with hisses of steam, others split the sand into smoldering trenches. And yet, amid all this chaos, Steez stood still. Silent. Unmoved—he was locked in. Focused. Watching something return through the broken sky like a diva descending from heaven. Or hell.
Steez narrowed his eyes.
Golden Chrono Nectar dripped from her wings like molten time, each droplet catching the fractured light and freezing midair before striking the ground. When they hit, they shattered like glass and reversed back into liquid in the blink of an eye. Where they touched, the sand sizzled—a serpentine burn left in trails of unearthly green. Mana-scorched. Corroded. And above it all, hovering with smug authority, was Empress B'yonsei—the Time Diva herself. Ain't nobody else could float like that between the tides and the damn sun, framed like a painting caught between birth and afterlife.
"Quite skillful with your use of mana," she said, her voice a harmony of several tones at once—like a choir trapped in a single throat. "Even if you choose to waste a lot of it."
Steez didn't answer. Not yet. His eyes tracked her every move. Then she raised her arm—graceful, queen-like—and the air around the crater on the beach vibrated with ancient math. Threads of blue and white magick spiraled out from her palm, dancing in loops as she began reassembling the Hive again. That same damn hive. The one he'd burned. Twice.
His jaw tightened.
Next time I destroy it, there won't be any bringing it back, he thought, his fingers twitching toward his side like they were itching for another fireball.
"Why such a look of disgust, Demihuman? All of time is mine to command within my domain."
"You could never dictate a real nigga's time."
She blinked at that. Then smirked.
"It is of no concern. As the only time that matters is Diva Time." Her voice crescendoed as she shouted, "Vessel Skill, drown him in his death. [Water Duke: Crocell]!"
She hummed—a soft, seductive tone—and the mana answered with a roar. Her V-Skill ignited the air, manifesting two tsunamis of liquid glass. Not water. Glass. Each one as clear as polished mirrors, twisting and roaring with reflected light and chronal pressure. They carved across the beach like twin blades, slicing the wind at subsonic speeds. Every drop trailed afterimages, echoes of motion, like music notes lingering in the air long after the sound left.
Steez didn't blink.
No chant. No flare of energy.
[Afternoon Star: Belphegor].
In less than a breath, he was gone—and then there, behind her. Just pure kinetic will bent into movement. The tsunamis slammed into each other where he had stood, disintegrating into a scream of hot wind and memory-ash. Before the ripples even cleared, he was behind B'yonsei, grinning as he launched a fireball crackling with lightning into her back.
The blast sent her rocketing downward.
She slammed into the ruined hive, ricocheting off the honeycomb roof before detonating a portion of it. A plume of fire and ebony splinters consumed the trench as sand and Hive wreckage exploded into the sky. The Diva disappeared beneath it all. The air was choked with smoke and mana dust.
Then—movement. She clawed out of her dirt-burial, wings tattered and body marred with molten cuts. Her eyes burned brighter than before. But there he was—kneeling in the sand, drawing childish loops with a stick.
"You finally back?" Steez said without looking up. "I'm glad you saw it my way and wanted to help destroy that monstrosity, too."
"You annoying, disrespectful meatbag," she hissed, seething. "The Innanet is a nexus station in time. My Hive is one of the four key seals that keep the succubus Jerrica from returning and restoring the Ars Goetia. You know nothing of its importance."
"The shit got bees in it. I gotta burn it with fire," he said, standing now, mana bristling across his shoulders. "Now, are you ready to die?"
"Insolent little... Back to the past—[Time Control: Domain Rewind]."
She sang a single low note. That's all it took.
The sky above snapped into rotating gears. Sunlight folded backward. Seconds reversed themselves. The waves rolled back into the sea like a film being rewound. Sandstorms reversed into dunes. The Hive pieces reformed like clay molded in reverse motion. Even the sun blinked. Off, on, off again.
But Steez didn't fall into the spell.
He reached within and pulled out something older than her song—[Dominus Desidiae]. His Sonata Skill drank the remnants of his [Chrono Trigger] and responded by silencing time. Not rewinding. Not slowing. Silencing. Everything stopped.
A bird mid-flight. A drop of Chrono Nectar mid-fall. Even B'yonsei—locked mid-wingbeat, an inch above the dirt. The world was still, and he walked through it like gravity bent to his rhythm. Every step echoed with divine certainty. No hesitation. Just cold, calculated momentum.
"You slow and reverse time," he said softly. "It bends to my will."
The reconstruction halted. Hive shards suspended in midair like a paused explosion, golden Chrono Nectar hardening around them. He reached out and snapped a curved shard from the still image. The edge already glimmered like a blade formed from solid light. He slashed it horizontally across her torso.
Her body was hurled backward into the frozen wreckage. Time resumed.
Shards fell. The beach cracked open beneath the impact. B'yonsei hit the hive ruins with bone-crunching force, her blood splashing in arcs of molten emerald.
She rose, staggering.
"You worthless nobody! Invading my home and destroying my peace, for what? And now you've backed me into a corner?!"
That made Steez pause.
Was that true? Wasn't he just dropped off here? No mission briefing. No divine scroll. Just told to kill their ruler.
She saw that flicker of thought.
And pounced.
"Sink into forever despair—[Dangerously In Love]."
Her Ultra Skill ripped the magitons from the air. Her temporal barb glowed, releasing a venom of violet light that splintered reality. Time shattered like crystal around them. Echoes of heartbreak and warbled memories howled in unseen corridors. The beach faded. The stars above twisted.
They now stood in a crystalline ballroom suspended in a mirror-world, every breath haunted by a former self. The air shimmered purple. The sea turned jet-black. With every pulse of her heart, shockwaves of emotion and pressure slammed into him. Infants screamed. Old men sobbed. Women prayed. Lives Steez never lived flooded him in static bursts.
But he stood tall.
[King Remembered In Time]. The Ultra Skill anchored him across every branch of reality. Every possibility. Every version of him—alive, dying, broken, hopeful—all stood as one unshakable monument. The temporal pulse shattered around him. The air couldn't touch him.
He laughed.
Low. Cruel. Eternal.
"You may be right," he said, his voice laced with rising power. "But I don't see bees as real people."
The Bio Mana surged around him like smoke caught in a solar flare. Everything she'd thrown splintered against the pressure of his existence. Then he moved.
Lightspeed flicker.
He appeared behind her, his blade already humming.
One cut, clean and surgical, severed her stinger-thorn tail. The temporal barb clattered to the sand, pulsing once before fading like an extinguished heartbeat.
With that, Steez raised his makeshift blade.
"Heavenly Crescent Blade: Shammgod."
An attempt at Midnight's Edge.
His modified version. One-handed. Flashy. Lethal.
He carved a crescent slash through the air—the blade tore through time. A rift yawned open, releasing an eruption of pure Yin Mana. It coiled upward like a spiraling galaxy being born, spinning faster until—
BOOM.
The explosion didn't roar. It breathed. A silent supernova that bent the world.
A translucent wave burst across Innanet Beach.
From orbit, it looked like a halo of spiraling hourglasses.
Time itself broke.
Shards of seconds fell like glittering hail—each one a frozen heartbeat, a memory suspended in a drop. A gull's wing caught mid-beat. A smile arrested in motion. Light frozen mid-flicker.
At the epicenter: Empress B'yonsei.
Her wings unraveled like ribbons of smoke.
Her body began to disintegrate—cell by cell.
The hive and its golden nectar vanished into oblivion. Her mana signature—immense, divine, monstrous—blinked out like a radio gone dead. Even her Soul Core shattered, a final flash of blue-gold swallowed by the vacuum of nothing.
The supernova expanded outward, consuming the entire multi-Jupiter-sized planet, its shockwave cracking the crusts of two nearby neighbors like eggshells in a pressure cooker.
When the light faded…
Her pieces floated across space.
And the Diva of Time?
Gone.
The moment the planet ruptured beneath the pressure of god-tier force, the very laws of reality bent and shattered. Steez was thrown violently, yet gracefully, into the void—Infernia's Infinite Space. No ground. No wind. No gravity. No sound. Just an expanse of black so complete it swallowed even light, pierced only by the distant burn of a swollen, lonely sun casting white-blue flares like a cold god watching from afar. Floating around him were the remains of a world—mangled continents split open like broken eggshells, massive shards of molten stone still glowing with the final memories of heat and battle.
Steez drifted through the carnage like a man untethered, his body relaxed, suspended in null-space with no anchor and no concern. The skill [Self Sustain] hummed around his body like a thin veil of warm light, preserving his vitals, feeding his lungs with filtered oxygen, protecting him from the vacuum chill that could peel a normal man's skin right off. He blinked slowly, no panic in his eyes, just quiet curiosity.
"Shit," he thought, eyes narrowing against the distant light. "It's chilly. Just like Xi said it was."
His breath didn't fog—there was no atmosphere to fog in—but he felt the chill sink into his bones, not from temperature, but from the reality of the destruction he had just been part of. There was no planet behind him. No battlefield. No enemy. Just an abyss so empty, even silence had nothing to echo off.
"So it really destroyed that world?" he wondered, slowly rotating through the stillness, watching a chunk of mountainous terrain drift by like a lazy whale through the sea. "How strong are those techniques? Hell... how strong am I, really?"
The silence wasn't empty; it was deafening. Cosmic stillness pressed into his eardrums, into his soul. He floated there for what could've been minutes or centuries—time didn't tick in Infernia's void. One hand rose to his chin as he spun slowly on his axis, deep in thought. Below him, or maybe to the left—it was hard to tell in space—the last remaining particles of B'yonsei's Soul Core shimmered in and out of being, dissolving into nothingness like grains of salt dropped into oil.
Our mother's voice, warm but stern, echoed from the back of his memory like a fading gospel from an old radio:
"Leave the innocent out of your squabbles."
His eyes tightened, his jaw set. The weight of his actions began to settle in.
"Did I… kill innocent people?" The thought wrapped around his heart like barbed wire.
He turned, eyes searching the darkness for the place where the planet should have been. But there was nothing to focus on. No landmark. No crater. No residue. Just endless, undisturbed black velvet space. Even the gravitational scar of the planet's presence was gone.
Steez stretched out his hand and tried to summon the time-grains—those tiny specks of chrono-matter he usually manipulated so effortlessly to rewind or fast-forward reality. But in this void, with no reference point, the time-grains refused to gather. Like dancers with no music. Like a conductor without a stage.
"Tch," he muttered under his breath. "No point in trying. I don't even know where to rewind."
And just like it had been watching, waiting for his moment of resignation, the Prime Realm System spoke.
«Trial of the Bad is now complete. You have earned your passage.»
The voice was mechanical and cold, but there was a certain smugness in its tone, like a host who had just watched a guest stumble their way through a rigged maze. Before Steez could react, the void around him twisted. The floating debris bent and spiraled inward, reality folding like origami.
Then, light.
Warmth.
Sound.
Sand.
Steez stood flat-footed on the golden shores of Innanet Beach, the breeze playing through his braids like a familiar hand. The planet… was restored. Not just rebuilt. Restored. Like someone had pressed "undo" on a cosmic keyboard. Waves lapped the shore lazily, and the sky wore a peach-orange hue, just a few minutes from twilight. The sun was still high enough to throw shadows, but low enough to whisper that the day was nearly done.
He blinked, sniffed the salt in the air, and looked around.
No hives.
No Chronohymenids.
No B'yonsei.
Just… peace.
Steez raised an eyebrow, lips curling into a smirk.
"That works. I didn't have to do a thing."
«Due to completion of the trial, [DATA RESTRICTED] will now grant the Sonata Soul Core holder the bible, The Process.»
His eyes lit up.
"A Bible? Say less."
A shimmering glyph of golden scripture briefly circled his right forearm before vanishing into his skin like ink into paper. Information bloomed in his mind—a thousand ancient verses written in code and melody, flowing into his mental archive like a forgotten language he was born to remember. Before he could say another word, he was taught the skill [Spirit Weapon: Chill King].
Then came the final line from the Prime Realm System, its voice now dipped in something close to reverence:
«You've danced with the temporal water and lived to tell the tale. Shall I open the door to your freedom?»
Steez closed his eyes for a moment. He'd just fought one of his deepest fears—maybe not gotten over it completely, but proved something to himself. That nothing could stop him. Not time. Not memory. Not guilt. Not even fear.
He grinned widely, hands sliding into the pockets of his pants as he looked up at the sky.
"Yeah," he said to himself. "I might just be the Realest Nigga of All-Time."
[End of Chapter]
[1] Year Five.