“That’s one big, ugly asshole. And a bigger, uglier hammer.”

“He’s not that big.”

“You always say that shit. And I always have to pull your dumb ass out of the fire.”

“Harlon, which one of us saves the other more?”

“Me. Because every time you need to save me, it’s because I put myself in danger to pull your ass out of the fire.”

“So. We are at best even.”

“No. You’re a dumb shit, and I’m a fucking moron because however stupid you are to get us into these situations, I’m stupid enough to keep following you and getting myself hurt.”

“Well, that sounds like Vera’s right, then. Some more Toughness will do you good.”

“Hey. Fuck you. You don’t see me using your wife’s words against you. She always says think ahead, think ahead. We wouldn’t be fighting these guys if you thought ahead.”

“And I wouldn’t be about to cripple this boy if he didn’t try to grab Rose.”

“…Yeah. But it’s more fun to blame you.”

“Harlon.”

“Yeah?”

“Has anyone told you you’re kind of a bastard?”

“You. All the time. So. You drop the big one and I’ll hurt the little guys?”

“Yeah. The usual way. And Harlon.”

“Hm.”

“Thanks for being here.”

“Just start the fight, dipshit.”

-Harlon Lowe and Roland Arrow

89 (I)

Companions [III]

“…Cast yourself into Adam’s mind. Do it. Now!”

More of Shiv’s mind snapped back together, but that was of secondary importance by far. What consumed all of his focus right then was the entity. Its retroactive rivers were retracting back into its original form. As the true shape of the eldritch being ripped free from Confriga’s decayed husk, the entity consumed all of its retroactive rivers.

The golden mana of its Chronomancy condensed around its immense form. Shiv blasted toward the entity with a spike of his gravitic field. His temporal shell was only half regenerated, but he was the only one that could stall this thing and contend with its time magic. But to Shiv’s disbelief, the entity still wasn’t done transforming. He drained momentum by slamming his field against his body. His speed spiked. He manifested his Strider of the Unbending Path over himself and reduced time to a trickle as he got within five hundred meters.

The creature’s physical manifestation twitched to a sudden halt just as it prepared to respond. But its material form was the least of his concerns. The Chronomancy mana around the creature began to sour without Confriga. The gold turned tarnished. Spots formed within the mana, spots painted with hues Shiv couldn’t comprehend. The entity’s “mana field” burst apart just as Shiv hammered a knee into one of its hundred-meter-long head fingers and tried to bend it off to the side.

The temporal detonation washed over Shiv but failed to fling him back in time. However, as the temporal explosion swept over him, he saw it paint an outline behind him as it traveled outward. It painted ethereal chronological echoes of him across the span of ten seconds. They trembled across various places in existence, and Shiv felt his temporal shell resonate with them.

Just then, the world around Shiv grew unbearably bright with burning time mana. And he saw the immolated visage of the entity multiply. Instead of Shiv facing a kilometer-sized eldritch titan with a great many temporal echoes bound to it by retroactive rivers, he was now dealing with twenty-six kilometer-sized eldritch titans. One lingered in the present, while the twenty-five existed in some kind of twisted past-present mix that allowed them to affect the current time while being seconds behind.

None of them were echoes. All of them were glaring at him with those golden, time accelerating eyes, and Shiv’s stomach plunged as his damaged brain realized just how felling fucked he was.

The only source of consolation was how all the entities seemed to be dissolving. Like the natural passage of time was grinding them all to dust.

But they weren’t dissolving nearly fast enough to spare Shiv as they all prepared to unleash a flood of time-accelerating beams from the hundreds of eyes lining their enormous hand-heads.

Then, in a haze of mind-broken stupor, a series of realizations came to Shiv.

Most of what the entity did with time while it possessed Confriga should be achievable by another Chronomancer. Well, aside from the damn echoes. That was utterly unnatural. What it did within his body was all achievable through Chronomancy. What Shiv currently beheld was unnatural. Things had pasts and presents. What they didn’t have were pasts that coexisted with their presents—as if the two were on the same spectrum of time.

And that meant that Shiv could theoretically do what it did earlier. At least somewhat.

His temporal armor also wasn’t actually solidified. The mana was just moving so fast that it appeared solid. So long as his temporal armor remained intact, Shiv was the only one who could manipulate his personal chronological progression. And that allowed him to separate and manipulate his personal progress through time from how the world naturally progressed—or the mana of a rival Chronomancer.

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And he wasn’t actually stopping all the time in the world by driving his Chronomancy mana against the rushing current of the fleeting present. In effect, he was immersed in a magical shroud of fluid chronology. The thing he really did with it so far was accelerate his own pace of time so fast that the rest of the world became still. Effectively, one of his seconds might as well have been a year outside at the speed his mana was surging around him. It also induced a feeling of temporal friction as it ground against the slower pace of natural time, thus straining his movements.

Accelerating his personal pace of time was a powerful ability, but it should be far from the only thing he could do with Chronomancy.

His kukri had allowed him to anchor himself to a target across time. The entity could slip back in time across its retroactive rivers. Or use it to displace Shiv back across his own chronological history. And if it could do it to him, why couldn’t he do the same?

Thousands of temporal beams speared out toward Shiv from every entity at once

Shiv slammed his fists together one final time and filled his Momentum Core just so he could have another second to focus—to act.

Shit! Uh, okay. Moving my Chronomancy mana really fast around me is easy, but how the hells do I move myself back in time? And then Shiv sensed the resonance between him and his temporal echoes. Unlike with the entity, his echoes were just imprints on time. They couldn’t act or react, they didn’t exist in a retroactive river, but they were there. They stretched out over a vast distance of space, and he could feel each of them—there was a feeling of magnetism that pulled at him. Called to him.

For the first time, Shiv did something different from hyper-accelerating the dense field of Chronomancy coating his body. He let instinct guide him, mainly because a good portion of his mind was still badly damaged. He had no room for complex thought.

But instinct was enough.

Instead of moving his mana, he tried casting it out of him, the same way he might launch a spell via his Woundeater. However, his Chronomancy was rooted to his body—molded to him. Where it moved, he would move and vice versa. He tried directing his magic, but as he focused, his faint temporal echoes came aglow with golden radiance. Ten seconds of time. Ten places in space. Shiv felt a magnetism connected to each instance of himself, each of them as if mana anchors he could attach himself to. His Momentum Core discharged. Shiv reached out as far as he could and cast himself back across his own history.

His temporal shell cracked apart. But Shiv was reeled back across time, zipping through each of his temporal imprints until he snapped in place to where he was ten full seconds ago. The sensation felt just like using his kukri’s Chrono-Anchored Strike—and that was probably part of the reason his Chronomancy Skill Evolution turned out the way it did.

As he arrived, the last pieces of his shell broke away, leaving him vulnerable. But every beam unleashed by the two dozen entities struck nothing at all.

Thousands of time-accelerating beams tore through the place where Shiv used to be. A half-second later, he promptly discharged past them, leaving the eldritch time-creature as surprised as he was.

Dammit, Shiv thought as he crashed through a bridge and accelerated toward the obliterated bedrock of Gate Theborn. I wish I figured that shit out sooner. Godsdamned you, System. Just felling throwing me a skill without letting me practice…

The entities howled in outrage. “FIXED TIMELINE IN MAGIC! STRIDER! WHY DRACONIC SKILL EVOLUTION! HOW DO YOU HAVE THIS?”

But while the entity stuck in the present raged, all the other ones broke away to crush Shiv beneath their immense bodies. Even with his temporal shell broken, he could still perceive the other entities due to his attunement to Chronomancy. The way the entities could all attack his present despite being things from the past was bullshit. The fact that they were all a kilometer in size was also bullshit.

He barely reacted in time. He pulled himself to the side using his gravitic field and gained a stay of execution. Then, another two entities descended, and their shadows swallowed him.

Silhouette > 97

They missed. They misjudged his exact position due to his outline. Once more, Silhouette saves my—

Shiv’s thought broke as one of the entities finally slammed down on him. The world went white with pain. Shiv’s body let out a series of sickening cracks. Adamantine Adaption kept him alive, but the blow was still harder than anything he ever took. When the entity drove its hand-shaped head into him, the air didn’t combust, and no inferno spread. Instead, the air ionized as plasma consumed Shiv. Everything went bright, and he ended up getting ground into the bottom of the gate. A tidal wave of heavy stone broke and melted around Shiv as a firestorm seared his skin.

He let out an agonized rasp as he puked out blood for what felt like the thousandth time. And before he could try shifting out of context or even struggling against the temporally displaced entity pressing down on him, another entity phased through it and slammed down on Shiv again.

Shiv choked. Both of his lungs burst. More entities crashed down on him. His bones shattered. His muscles tore. He saw Adam’s arrows tear through corrosive rifts and pass through the entities without ever hitting them. The Young Lord knew where they were, but he couldn’t affect when they were. The only one he could affect was—

The entity rooted into the present moment smashed against Shiv thereafter, and everything went dark. It felt like a second. It felt like an eternity. Then, with a final heavy blow, Shiv jolted back to a formless consciousness and realized he was dead.

Momentum Core 95 > 98

Adamantine Adaption 139 > 144

Strider of the Unbending Path 113 > 119

Gravitic Wrestler 129 > 133

Silhouette > 101 (Skill Evolution Reached)

Skill Evolution: Silhouette (Adept) > The Creeping Void (Master)

The Creeping Void 101 (Master)

The Silhouette hiding Shiv’s Revenant form filled with absolute pitch black darkness, rendering him extremely noticeable. The eyes of the entities snapped to him immediately, and Shiv cursed silently as he thought that he resembled a splotch of black ink on the world.

But then the darkness continued to spread. It spilled out from him. It painted the space around him and kept growing. The crawling darkness exploded out from Shiv and thickened into an opaque miasma that just kept building as long as he willed it. And to Shiv’s pleasure, he could perfectly see through the darkness despite its unnatural thickness. The entity, however—

“WHAT IS THIS? CAN’T… CAN’T SEE ANYMORE? WHERE? WHY? NO LACK OF LIGHT ELUDES MY EYES—NO! NOT DARKNESS. VOID. NOTHINGNESS. HIDDEN IN ABSENCE! ANOTHER MONSTER SKILL-SOUL-SHAPE-POWER! WRONGNESS!”

Shiv reached out and drained the entity. It channeled beams out from its eyes. Beams of discordant color, beams of searing energy, beams of time, and more. But it couldn’t see Shiv, and with each passing second, it was lost in the darkness. His darkness. The blackness that kept leaking out from the evolution of his Silhouette.

In seconds, the bottommost portion of Gate Theborn was clouded by a shroud of impenetrable blackness.

Once again, this was more concealment than outright stealth. When he used this skill, his enemy would generally know where he was. But generally wasn’t good enough for the entity to track where Shiv was, to notice that he just hatched out from a resurrective cocoon at the base of its present-time body, and was in the middle of launching himself up and away.

Blastwaves of force shook Shiv as the entity began to slam instance after instance of itself down upon the world. It was like watching a blind man try to crush a cockroach. It could vaguely hear him. It could feel the air he displaced while flying. But most of its eye beams still slashed wide and unfocused.

But once more, quantity proved a quality in and of itself. All twenty-six entities unleashed a devastating display of unknowable colors from all of their eyes. Even wrapped in an impenetrable darkness, there was no way for Shiv to dodge the attack.

Conventionally.

He shifted out of context. The beams tore the space he occupied. Reality twitched and disfigured for a moment as another place beyond Gate Theborn slipped through countless rifts. A place that clawed at Shiv’s very sanity to witness. But then it receded as the entities quelled their gazes.

“What… What happened… Why darkness… What is… Sense disturbance in future-time-not-past-present. But why here? Missing pieces from… Don’t—not something in past. Would know if something tried to change my pas—”

And then a series of corrosive arrows tore out into Shiv’s darkness. Twenty-six arrows descended. Twenty-five struck nothing. One inflicted the first actual instance of damage the entity ever suffered.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep