The moment Kael stepped through the shimmering portal, the air around him twisted. The familiar clamor of battle and the sterile echo of metal were gone, replaced by an eerie stillness that gnawed at his senses. Floor Three stretched out before him — an endless coliseum made of countless glass pillars, each one fracturing reality like shards of broken mirrors.
Kael's boots tapped against the smooth, reflective floor, each step sounding louder than it should, as if the silence magnified his presence. He looked around, eyes sharp but unsettled.
Every pillar reflected a different moment frozen in time. A child's laughter, a blade slicing through air, a dying star's final glow. Flickers of lives long gone — or yet to be — trapped in these translucent prisons. The air smelled faintly of ozone and dust, like a forgotten tomb sealed tight by centuries of silence.
'What kind of floor is this?' Kael's mind raced. 'Where's the fight? The enemies?'
He felt a prickle of cold on his neck, like invisible fingers trailing his spine. The pulse of the red Hunter's Gate lingered faintly behind the portal he'd crossed — a relentless heartbeat, threatening and close, but out of sight.
His Gauntlet throbbed softly, almost in sync with his own pulse. The Tower's breath. The Tower's will.
"Keep moving," he whispered, voice hoarse, a bitter laugh bubbling under his breath. "You wanted to be fast? Well, here's your prize. Now run."
---
(Hunter's POV)
Somewhere between moments, between seconds bleeding into minutes, the Hunter stirred.
It was not a man. Nor a beast. It was the Tower's surgical blade — a nightmare forged from the fractures of time itself.
The Hunter moved as if it didn't belong to the present, gliding through dimensions like smoke drifting on a phantom breeze. Its form was wrapped in tattered temporal threads, each one unraveling moments it had consumed — memories, fears, deaths.
Its mask was a fractured mirror, cracked and jagged, reflecting glimpses of the lives it had extinguished. There was no face beneath, only endless void and infinite calculation.
Its voice was not a voice. It was a cold, fragmented echo — the sound of erased futures and forgotten pasts.
He is out of rhythm, it thought, senses stretching across the timeline, honing in on the anomaly: Kael Viren.
The Hunter's gaze snapped to the faintest pulse, a glow flickering at the edge of perception — the Chrono Core's sync signature embedded in Kael's gauntlet. It was a beacon in the endless weave of time.
Deviation detected. Correction required.
The Hunter moved silently, phasing through warped timefields. Past, present, and future flickered around it like a storm. Every step it took tore the fabric tighter, every breath pulled the strands closer to the moment of reckoning.
Its mission was simple — excise the anomaly before it became a wound that bled the Tower dry.
It whispered in tongues lost to all but the void, fragmented voices chanting ancient liturgies of correction and death.
He must be cut from the thread.
A faint trail pulsed brighter. The Hunter's cracked mask tilted, and beneath the shattered glass, something like a smile curved — cruel, empty, inevitable.
---
Back in the coliseum, Kael's breath hitched as the weight of unseen eyes pressed down.
He tried to shake off the dread curling in his gut, but every fiber of his being screamed. The Hunter was here — stalking him through time, hunting the rhythm of his heartbeat, matching the tempo of his footsteps.
He clenched his fists. "Fuck you," he whispered to the silence, voice low and ragged. "Come and find me."
He flexed his fingers, feeling the pulse of the Chrono Core synchronizing deeper, the power surging through his veins. But he also knew: raw power wasn't enough anymore.
This wasn't a fight of strength.
It was a game of shadows.
---
Time itself felt wrong on this floor.
The glass pillars warped and twisted, reflecting not only past and future but potential — branching paths of what could be, never was, or might yet become.
Kael's mind raced through scenarios — escape routes, ambushes, traps. The Hunter could be anywhere, anywhere and nowhere.
He crouched beside one pillar, eyes scanning the reflections.
In the glass, he saw himself — many versions. One bleeding, one victorious, one broken.
Which one would the Hunter find first?
The question gnawed.
Then, a ripple across the floor — a slight distortion like a whisper.
Kael froze.
There it was.
A movement. A shimmer in the corner of his vision.
The Hunter was here.
It did not announce itself with footsteps.
No.
It moved between footsteps.
Kael's breath hitched again.
"Come on, you bastard," he muttered. "Let's see what you've got."
---
(Hunter's POV)
The Hunter sensed Kael's challenge, the flicker of defiance, the raw pulse of desperation.
It closed the distance in blinks — slipping through fractured seconds, folding reality to emerge just beyond Kael's sight.
There was no mercy in its approach. Only inevitability.
The Hunter touched a pillar lightly, and the moment caught fire — memories surged, screams echoed, a past forgotten exploded briefly in a burst of temporal distortion.
Kael staggered back, heart pounding.
The Hunter's presence was a wound tearing open the timeline, a shadow that bled into every crack.
Its mission was clear: remove the deviation before it could unravel the Tower's design.
---
Kael steadied himself, forcing his thoughts clear.
He could feel the weight of the Tower's gaze on him — hungry, calculating, waiting to strike.
But Kael wasn't a pawn.
Not yet.
With a shaky breath, he moved forward, weaving through the pillars, each step measured, each breath controlled.
Behind him, the red Hunter's Gate pulsed—ominous, patient.
And somewhere, in the fractured echoes of time, the Hunter prepared.
---
Kael moved like a blade drawn but not yet swung.
Each step forward was deliberate. Calculated. Measured by instinct honed through blood and fear.
His Gauntlet pulsed faintly, reading subtle disturbances in the floor's fractured timeflow — static humming through its circuits like a warning whispered too late.
'The bastard's watching me.'
Somewhere in this maze of glass and ghosts, the Hunter waited. Not attacking. Not announcing itself.
Studying.
Kael hated it. He could feel the presence—not directly, but through the silence. A growing pressure. A weight pressing into the back of his skull like someone was standing just out of reach with a blade to his neck.
He drew a slow breath.
'Tension will kill me faster than it will.'
"Think, Kael," he muttered, crouching behind a taller shard. "It's not invincible. Riven said it watches. Analyzes. It wants to find a weakness."
'So don't give it one.'
He extended his senses through the Gauntlet. Tiny chrono-pulses emitted from the armor now, subtle sonar waves tracking ripples through time.
A faint distortion echoed back.
Not near.
Not far.
Somewhere in the reflection.
---
(Hunter's POV)
Subject: Kael Viren.
Observation Cycle: 2,714 Moments Logged.
Tempo Disruption: Moderate-to-Severe.
Synchronization Probability: Unstable.
Correction Priority: Elevated.
The Hunter drifted silently across the edge of the moment, folding through time like a specter through fog. Its mask cracked again, silently shedding flakes of glass, each one catching a flicker of Kael's potential futures.
Some showed him kneeling. Others, burning. One — just one — showed him ascending.
That one was the most dangerous.
This one is adaptive. Strategic. Rage-tethered but learning restraint.
It stood beside a pillar showing Kael's reflection: the boy clutching his first kill, trembling, blood on his hands.
That version had long since died.
The Hunter remembered.
It had slain better men. Monsters more terrifying. Cores stronger. Wills sharper.
But Kael…
Kael was a wild card. Still shaping himself.
It must strike before the edge was honed.
---
Kael gritted his teeth.
He heard something—too faint to be real.
A click.
Like broken glass shifting under slow footsteps.
He spun around—
Nothing.
Just the endless rows of mirrored pillars.
But his Gauntlet confirmed it.
A micro-second time ripple.
A presence had flickered in and out of the moment behind him.
'Son of a—'
He rolled just as the air behind him cracked open.
A jagged line tore through space like someone slashing a film reel. Through it stepped a tall figure cloaked in void — limbs too long, fingers tapering into bladed tips that vibrated through reality.
Its mask was fractured glass, reflecting every version of Kael — alive, dead, triumphant, terrified.
Kael snarled, backpedaling as the Hunter took one step forward, time fracturing around it like water parting for a shark.
"You stalking piece of shit," Kael growled. "You want me? Come and get me."
The Hunter tilted its head.
Then moved.
---
It didn't walk.
It erased the space between them.
Kael had barely enough time to roll left — the floor where he stood splintered, exploding into a spiral of reversed glass and static sparks.
He hit the ground hard, grunting as he slammed against a shard pillar.
The Gauntlet reacted instinctively — pushing a pulse outward that bent time in a dome around him.
It slowed everything within range for 0.4 seconds.
That was all he had.
He sprinted out of the dome as the Hunter stepped through the slowed space like it wasn't affected, trailing its fingertips along the edge of the pulse with amused curiosity.
"Okay, great," Kael muttered. "Doesn't give a shit about time slowing. Fun."
He ducked behind another pillar, panting.
His mind raced.
The Gauntlet wasn't enough. He needed to outthink it. Outspeed it. If it was watching his patterns, he had to break them.
---
He paused his breath.
Waited.
Then—
He charged forward, not away.
Straight toward the Hunter.
---
(Hunter's POV)
Deviation detected: Sudden aggression. Tactic shift. High volatility.
The Hunter reeled slightly — Kael was no longer playing defensive. That broke the pattern.
Excellent.
It surged to meet him—
And Kael vanished.
For 0.2 seconds, he bent time around his boots and blinked beneath the floor's temporal layer, emerging behind the Hunter and slamming the Gauntlet into its side.
A pulse detonated — raw time energy lancing across its fractured shell.
The Hunter skidded through three pillars, shattering them.
Kael staggered backward, blinking through the static feedback.
His right arm stung, blood dripping from the elbow — the recoil had burned the nerve down to the bone.
But the Hunter was on the floor.
"Hah…" he spat. "Eat shit, mirror-face."
The Hunter rose slowly.
Its cloak frayed. Pieces of its mask missing.
And beneath?
Only void.
Not darkness.
Nothing.
No nerves. No lungs. No blood. Just absence.
Kael's smile vanished.
"Well… fuck."