The dead god is gone—but he left a joke no one understands.
---
Sector 5 began with silence.
No birds. No wind. Not even their footsteps echoed.
The ground beneath them was obsidian glass—fractured in places, stitched with glowing veins of time-scarred gold. Above them, the sky was layered in still frames of different timelines. They could see versions of themselves walking, killing, dying—across different layers of possibility.
"This is... wrong," Naomi whispered. Her voice sounded delayed, like she spoke into a vast hall of mirrors.
"Time here isn't linear," Silas said. "It's fractured. We're walking through echoes."
A ripple moved across the horizon. Shapes flickered and vanished.
Naomi pointed. "Did you see that?"
"No," Silas said, eyes narrowing. "But I felt it."
They reached the edge of a cliff that didn't exist seconds ago. Below it: a spiraling void filled with floating clock faces and twitching mannequins, each frozen in different stages of laughter or agony.
A voice echoed from beneath them—half-joke, half-eulogy:
"Knock, knock."
Silas didn't respond.
Naomi exhaled. "Who's there?"
A figure emerged from the void. Broken. Dismembered. Familiar.
Jokriel.
Or something wearing his corpse like a marionette.
> [Trial of Sector 5: Time's Dissonance - Begin]
"You killed me," the echo rasped. "But jokes echo. And I... echo forever."
Silas summoned Wrath instantly, surrounding himself in crimson flame.
Naomi's threads spread wide.
Jokriel twisted into a dozen versions of himself—all in different poses of mock death, from slit throats to hanging by laughter.
The clones leapt.
The sky shattered.
Time snapped.
Naomi saw herself from five minutes ago, warning herself not to turn.
She turned anyway.
Silas blinked—and saw Naomi impaled, only to blink again and find her whole.
"Focus!" Naomi shouted. "We're looping!"
Silas snarled and invoked Greed, absorbing the stability from a nearby clock construct, anchoring himself.
Naomi used her threads to braid causality—gripping one moment and dragging it into the next.
Their enemies collapsed in on themselves, looping into extinction.
But Jokriel's echo wasn't done.
He fused with the horizon, becoming a mask stretched across the entire skyline.
"You laugh at death," the echo hissed. "But what if death laughs back?"
The sky rained blades.
The land fractured.
Naomi pulled Silas into a bubble of frozen time. "We can't brute force this!"
Silas breathed heavily. "Then what?"
Naomi's eyes narrowed. "We find the punchline."
They raced into the core of the echo, weaving through collapsing time fragments, leaping from moment to moment. Each one showed them something—hints, patterns, truths they'd missed.
A girl who once screamed. A man who once smiled.
Then they saw it.
The first laugh.
Jokriel's true core—a singular moment where he stopped fearing death and began worshipping absurdity.
Silas reached out.
And crushed it.
Jokriel's echo screamed—a sound that wasn't sound but memory.
> [Trial Cleared: Echoes of the Laughing God]
[Reward: Hourglass of Collapse – 1 use only. Resets time in a 60-second radius.]
[Path Unlocked: Sector 6 – The Vale of Forgotten Clocks]
Naomi stood silent.
Silas looked at her.
"You okay?"
"No," she said. "But I think we just killed a joke that no one understood."
"Good," Silas muttered. "I hate punchlines."
They walked onward.
And time remembered how to tick again.
---