Optional Music to Accompany the Chapter:
Rok Nardin & @SecessionStudios - The Sun Queen (feat. Uyanga Bold)
https://youtu.be/5LHyXGteSUc
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Chapter 22: Time's Grasp
Mid Afternoon - Early Summer : Year 0 | Month 1 : Over Fredericksburg, Virginia | East Coast United States
World: Earth | Rank: 6 | Population: ~1,893,120,000
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Watching the population of Leviathan tick from three, to two, to one, all before Bella and I were teleported made me freeze like a deer in headlights.
The sight of the world's population at one before I myself was disconnected and teleported brought with it a mountain of implications that just made my mind sputter like an engine choking on fuel.
Even if I went against what I knew and convinced myself that Bella was somehow being counted in the world's population, and was, for whatever reason, disconnected before the gate was completed, there was still one more being that was unaccounted for. -It could have been bad timing with something dying, but...- With the second stream of mana I felt funneling from the cores at the last moment, as well as the fact that the 'god' teleporting me somehow wasn't being counted in the world's population.. that was an impossibly unlikely scenario...
I was simply trying to deny that I had been tricked into doing his bidding. -The version I saw before me in the dungeon must have just been a fragment of his actual body...-
I didn't know how or ever even thought it was possible for a god to do such a thing before but, it didn't matter. -If his motive was for me to give him the mana to teleport off the world, he definitely had a destination in mind...- Meaning I was going to have to hop through another world before I could return to Earth. -What a pain in the ass...-
However, to my horror, that wasn't the case at all.
*Vwoop-Crackle* Before light could even reach my eyes through the rapidly scattering shell of the gate, electric snaps echoed through the silence, and the blue glow of lightning lit my armor.
...All before something slammed into me. *WHAM-CREEAAAAAKKK* -WHAT THE?!-
With the screech of tearing metal, something completely unstoppable drove a metal beam into my spine at thousands of kilometers an hour, rapidly liquifying in its futile attempt to catch me. *SNAP-CREAK-POP*
Before my mind could get up to speed, I tumbled, slamming through walls, carving a path through masses of cables, pipes, and metal beams before piercing a wall of mana and glass, and hurtling into a room full of people.
It was a wide, open space with towering ceilings—the walls decorated with skyglass, and the carpetted floor littered with tables and tiled sparring arenas.
I recognized it in an instant. -The guild hall of an airship?!- I was back on Earth.
But instead of panicking, my pupils dilated, and my mind's focus shifted from questioning to acting.
Zipping through the room so fast it appeared frozen in time, I locked my eyes on a sparring platform I was going to narrowly miss.
With two people inside, its barrier was active—a thick, blue-lit dome surrounding the entire area, but it was going to be just out of reach.
However, I didn't have a choice. -I have to slow down...- If I didn't, I was going to punch a hole through the hull and put the hundreds of people inside at risk.
So, the moment I was about to rip past it, I pushed Bella as far as I could from my chest, only keeping one hand hooked around her to stretch my closest arm as far as I could.
But, while I wasnt sure id it was enough, after my fingers glossed it surface and the dome reached its peak, they hooked.
*WOOM* The barrier instantly warped and screamed in strain, deforming, buckling, and peeling up the inner-edge of the floor as my fingers dug deeper and deeper into the blue haze. *CREAAAK* It was working. -Come on.. HOLD!-
But just as I thought I had slowed enough... *SNAP* The barrier split beneath my grasp—my hand carving through it like a blade in flesh before I threaded a needle through the crowd, and went careening toward the wall. -SHIT!- *WOOSH-CREAK-WHAAAAMMMM*
Throwing my arm out at the last second, I managed to narrowly keep from crushing Bella, but feeling my arm sinking into a thick layer of metal, I knew I had reached the edge.
I was close.. with one more wall I could catch myself.. but beyond the meter of metal alloy I was rapidly plunging through, there was nothing but open sky.
Letting go of Bella, having momentum pin her to my chest, I flared my arms and legs, trying to create as much resistance in the metal layer as I could.
And sure enough, feeling the metal getting firmer and firmer with every breath, my eyes lit. -COME ON!- I could make it.
It was going to be close, but I was certain.
Curling my other arm up into fresh metal, I quickly straightened and stretched myself out, trying to drag out every ounce of speed with the metal's grip. The alloy shrieked and buckled, curling up like molten clay as my body carved through it, sparks not even having a chance to spray with the distorted flow of time.
But with every centimeter, the resistance deepened. The first layer splashed like water, the second dragged at me like tar, and by the third, the metal began clinging like a hardened slime, wrapping itself around my limbs to catch me with a molten hug...
...And slowly but surely, I was dragged to a halt with hardly a centimeter of metal remaining between my back and the outer atmosphere...
Though.. the feeling of relief I should have felt, never came.
*Sn-n-n-nap-CRACKLE* Unable to pull my eyes off the hole I had bored through the airship, watching as electricity akin to lightning arced across the tunnel in slow motion, my mind raced to answer questions like my life itself depended on it.
Tracing the tunnel I had bored to the source, there was a sizable open space as opposed to an entrance hole.. but while indeed puzzling, the longer I stared, the more that confusion compounded.
At the source of where I was released from the gate, I didn't simply find the beginning of the destruction.. I found myself looking into the inside of a suite lit with skyglass I recognized.
-W..What the...- Skyglass.. I set... -There must be something I'm missing...- It was identical to the one I had been taken from. -It must be a coincidence...-
But it wasn't. *CREEEEEAK-RRMM* As if finally catching up with my impact, the colossal airship bellowed before the lights snapped into darkness with a deafening slam.
But the pixelated patterns in the skyglass, the arrangement of the tables in the wide hall, and the state of the disheveled passengers filling it...
...They had already been engraved into memory.
This wasn't just any airship.. it was the exact one I had been plucked from what should have been a month prior. As if not a single second had ticked by since then, I was released exactly where I had been taken.. and left to punch a hole through the ship as if my momentum had simply been sucked away by the system.
The mere proposition of that idea made my mind stutter.. however, I couldn't find fault with any of it. My time on Leviathan wasn't an illusion.. the section of the suite I was taken from was still missing, and the wide-eyed panther trying to orient herself on my chest was certainly no longer the robot she once was.
-That just means...- The five hundred years my system showed when I returned to Earth wasn't just slightly incorrect.. it wasn't even close.
Every warp, pause, and disturbance I felt wasn't merely my perception of time warping with age, boredom, distraction, or even the System glitching.. it was time itself dilating to each of the world's I visited.
-Just.. how many years passed then...- For a moment.. it was a meaningless realization.. a mere distraction from the chaos I knew was soon to erupt. After all, what was the difference between half a millennia and dozens to a being that had already isolated itself from its passing?
However, the moment my mental timeline shifted and my memories moved to resequence themselves on it, settled dust was lifted off them, and the recollection of sensations once blurred and dulled were resharpened into clarity.
In the next instant, my body moved on instinct. As if reacting to something I couldn't see or even feel, I rose my hands in front of my face, gripping and solidifying the energy in my upper body as an old skill would to brace myself.
I saw nothing.. sensed nothing...
...But my instincts screamed.
In the next moment, an impact akin to a strike from my prime landed in my palm—the shockwave piercing through them like a beam of ions before spreading within my skull.
It was a deadly blow, even for me...
Watching the energy-projected image in my mind, cracks blew through my skull like fragile glass, my brain liquifying as cells ruptured from the pressure of the shockwave...
It was a complete and total annihilation. Not a single neuron was spared...
But somehow, rather than everything snapping to darkness in the grasp of death that should have come, with every pulverized cell, my mind sharpened—my senses expanding beyond the five I had always known, and a mass of information I didn't know how to interpret slamming itself into my mind.
Something fundamental changed...
In that instant, conscious thought, once seemingly weighted and burdened compared to my subconscious, felt freed. As if my mind had suddenly switched to the more efficient wiring of my instinct, the clarity of my memories, the speed of their recollection, and even my control over their path compounded seemingly exponentially.
Rather than a mudslide, my thoughts flowed like a free river where the hitches, once capable of stopping ideas entirely, merely split into multiple directions until a new path was found.
It felt like my mind, once burdened with age, had been separated from time entirely, and now took a form beyond that with organic limitations...
...A form beyond that of a mortal being...
Snapping my eyes open, my vision, washed with blindness, focused on something just beyond my palms.. a knot.. a warp in a medium that wasn't physical...
Not space. Not mana.
But rather something dictating their flow...
-Time.-
With the swirling of what felt like a fluid in my abdomen, I could feel something faintly twisting and dilating its march, accelerating the fluid to bring reality to a halt and strike my flesh with something beyond its binds.
It was the strike of a god far beyond anything I could fathom.. not to kill, but to erase... Something I never should have been able to follow or react to beyond raw instinctual prediction.. yet now frozen, and caught in my palm.
But it didn't stay that way.
As if my body was being held in place by the grip of time, the same unfathomable force I recognized inside gates, I could only watch as my head was sent through the rest of the airships hull, the being's twist on time lost its influence, and my body was accelerated into the ground with the force of a meteor.
*FWIP-KRAKOOOOOM* Slamming through a column of steel, my impact sent out a tsunami of molten metal—the glow from it seemingly lighting the sky of fire before the shockwave spread the clouds in a concentric ripple as if mimicking that travelling through and destroying my body.
But I couldn't tell if it was my body or the Earth thst broke first.
*THOOOOM* The tremor my impact released was beyond deafening, ringing the planet like a massive bell as atoms split beneath me in a violent near-nuclear reaction.
But my gaze never budged. With my eyes rapidly healing and adjusting my focus never left the column of light I descended in, watching it carve a path through the tail of the airship whilst sending Bella tumbling out of the airship in free fall, thankfully still in one piece.
My body was broken and tattered beyond anything I had ever experienced, however, even still, my eyes burned with anger, matching the gaze of the being at the center of it all with an ignited passion.
...It was the God of Leviathan's true self.. an elven man with a crazed, predatory smile across his face.. mocking.. taunting.. as if certain he had sent me to my grave before darting to the side, grabbing hold of another silhouette falling through the air, and vanishing into a gate.
Everything I needed to know clicked in that instant. -So that was your objective...- My instincts flared as it finally—truly—set in. -You want Earth...-
*Blub-SPLASH* Forcing shattered limbs to move against the screams of pain, I got up, letting molten rock wash back over my waist before turning my attention to the airship trailing smoke and flames, and to Bella, flailing in panic as she fell.
My blood was boiling, not just metaphorically, but I still chose to still draw a breath—bringing the ash-laden air into lacerated lungs while rapidly forming and fraying muscle fibers spread like threads in a loom.
That pain.. it was deeper than almost anything I had ever felt.. yet in that moment, it simply ignited an ocean of fuel that had recently accumulated in me.
The drive for power.. the greed for strength...
...And the urge to make that god regret stepping into my sky.
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