Chapter 71: Clash of Eternity
FWOOOOOM!
Light, raw and blinding as a newborn star, speared through the abyssal gloom of Tartarus, illuminating caverns that had known only darkness for eons. Where it touched, the very stone sublimated, leaving glassy, smoking trenches.
"Damn you!" Cronus roared, rolling across the shattered ground. Half his torso was a charred, blackened ruin, tendrils of new flesh already squirming to repair the damage. His eyes, burning with primordial fury, locked onto the figure striding from the heart of the inferno.
Cyd walked through the dying solar fire as if it were morning mist. In his hands, [Pandora, Reforged] had taken the form of Ares's greatsword once more. But this time, the weapon acted like a vortex, drinking the surrounding flames. A blade a hundred feet long, forged not of metal but of solidified, white-hot wrath, coalesced around the dark core.
"Don't run away now, Former King," Cyd called, his voice echoing with a resonance that wasn't entirely his own. "We've got all the time in the world."
"Human," Cronus spat, pushing himself upright as his body finished knitting itself together. "I have endured the emptiness of this pit for spans of time your mortal mind cannot fathom. I am prepared to wait forever. You, with your stolen immortality… do you have the resolve to fight me for all eternity?"
"Eternity? I'm going to finish you and be home for dinner." Cyd took a single step forward, then swung.
The motion was tectonic. The hundred-foot blade of condensed fury carved through the air, not with the whistle of metal, but with the roar of a collapsing sun. It swept toward Cronus, destined to erase him.
"Amusing. What was my dominion again?" Cronus didn't move. He merely raised a hand and snapped his fingers.
Click.
Darkness, not of shadow but of absolute cessation, exploded from him. It washed over the world in an instant. Color drained from everything. The raging flames of the blade froze, becoming a sculpture of brilliant, motionless orange. The displaced air hung in crystalline waves. The very heat of Tartarus vanished, replaced by a silence so profound it was a pressure on the soul. Time had stopped.
Cronus walked calmly around the suspended mega-blade, his footsteps the only sound in the frozen universe. He stopped inches from Cyd, whose face was locked in a fierce snarl, eyes staring blankly ahead.
"I am the master of Time," Cronus whispered, his voice unnaturally loud in the stillness. He reached out, index finger extended, aiming slowly, deliberately, for Cyd's left eye. "Time is the one immutable law of creation. The one who commands it is the true ruler. No one defies—"
His rant died in his throat.
Cyd's eyes, which should have been as dead as the rest of the world, moved. They shifted, tracking the approaching finger, then locking directly onto Cronus's own gaze.
Impossible.
A primal, icy dread shot down Cronus's spine. "Don't look at me like that!" he shrieked, abandoning his careful attack. His fist, wreathed in distorted, accelerated time, blurred forward to crush Cyd's skull.
Cyd moved.
His head tilted just enough. His left hand was a blur of silver-grey as [Pandora] shifted forms in the span of a frozen heartbeat. The greatsword was gone. In its place, the scythe of Hades, its curved blade trailing an afterimage of void. Cyd drove it upward in a vicious diagonal slash.
Shhhlick.
Cronus was cleaved in two from hip to opposite shoulder. The two halves slid apart in the timeless air.
"I AM ETERNAL!" The halves roared in unison, the flesh bubbling and stretching like taffy to reconnect. "Your little scythe cannot kill what has no concept of death!"
"Then I'll beat death into you until it sticks!" Cyd roared back. The scythe melted, reshaped, and became the star-forged hammer of Hephaestus. He brought it down in a crushing overhand blow.
PULVERIZE.
Cronus's upper body ceased to exist as a coherent form. It became a fine, red mist.
"USELESS!" the mist screamed, coalescing back into a torso, then arms, then a head wearing a mask of pure rage.
"Then I'll break you down to your last atom!" Cyd panted, shifting stances. The hammer dissolved. A crackling, blinding energy descended from nowhere—the raw authority of the storm. It forged itself around [Pandora], shaping it into a staff of pure, condensed lightning, a smaller, more focused version of Zeus's master bolt.
[Pandora, Reforged] — Zeus Manifestation
"Hold still," Cyd growled, leveling the crackling staff at Cronus's reforming face.
"That shape… ZEUS!" The name was a curse ripped from Cronus's very soul. Enraged beyond reason, he charged, a blur of time-accelerated motion.
Cyd fired.
The world turned white and deaf. A beam of pure thunderbolt, thicker than an ancient oak, lanced from the staff. It didn't just hit Cronus; it consumed him, vaporizing his newly formed body and carving a smoking, glass-lined canyon through the bedrock behind him for miles. The recoil was monstrous, slamming Cyd back several yards, his boots carving trenches in the stone.
"Okay, that's got some kick," he grunted, hefting the still-crackling staff.
"You should not have used his power before me."
The voice came from behind him. Cyd's eyes widened. He tried to turn, but it was too late.
A hand, moving faster than perception—a hand existing in a bubble of hyper-accelerated personal time—shot out. It didn't strike Cyd. It passed through the space occupied by his left arm.
There was no impact. No sound. Just a sudden, horrifying absence. Cyd's left arm, from the shoulder down, simply ceased to be. Not severed. Not vaporized. Erased, as if it had never existed. The Zeus-staff clattered to the ground.
"I am not limited to stopping time," Cronus hissed, materializing a few feet away, his form whole once more, though paler, strained. "Acceleration. Deceleration. Leaps. I am Time. And once I destroy that trinket on your wrist, you lose access to all your borrowed power."
"This 'trinket'?" Cyd gasped through the shock, looking at his stump. The jade bracer, however, still hung in the air where his wrist should have been, as if held by an invisible hand. The Zeus-staff levitated beside it. "It's a little sturdier than that."
As he spoke, new bone, stark white, sprouted from the empty socket. It grew with impossible speed, weaving through the floating bracer. Muscle and sinew wrapped around it, followed by veins, then finally, flawless new skin. Within three seconds, a perfect, new left arm flexed its fingers and closed around the haft of the lightning staff.
"It's not over," Cyd snarled, his voice gaining strength. "Not until you're dust!"
"No… I cannot end here." For the first time, a flicker of something other than rage crossed Cronus's face—doubt. He was truly immortal. So was Cyd. He couldn't stop Cyd's time globally, only manipulate his own for devastating, unpredictable strikes. But Cyd had thirteen gods' worth of answers and a weapon that could become any of them. It was an endless, unwinnable stalemate.
A stalemate that, given infinite iterations, his immortality might wear out.
"Absolutely not! I must have my vengeance!" Cronus clawed at his own face, drawing black ichor. "You… you force my hand!"
"Huh?" Cyd tilted his head. "You could just… give up. I don't care about you. But all you see is burning the world down. Sorry, but I kind of like that world. The people in it."
"Then I will banish you from Time itself!" Madness glittered in Cronus's eyes. The dark aura of stopped time erupted from him again, freezing the world.
"Just die already!" Cyd shouted, hurling the lightning staff into the air. As it flew, it morphed—not into a staff, but into a brilliant, coruscating spear. He caught it by the haft and threw it with all his might at Cronus's heart.
"TOO SLOW!"
The spear struck true, punching through Cronus's chest with a spray of golden ichor. But Cronus laughed, a wet, gurgling sound, even as he coughed up vital fluid.
The frozen world around them didn't thaw. Instead, it began to fracture. Like glass under extreme stress, cracks of absolute nothingness splintered across reality. If stopped time was a paused film, these were tears in the celluloid. They weren't gaps in space, but in causality itself.
RIIIIIP—
From the largest tear, countless hands emerged. They were not flesh, but constructs of solidified void, cold and intangible to normal matter. Yet their grip was undeniable. They seized Cyd's limbs, his neck, his torso, their touch like ice burning through to his soul.
"What the hell are these?!" Cyd roared, trying to tear them off. His hands passed through them as if through smoke, but the pulling force was immense, dragging him toward the rip.
"That is a place where the concept of Time does not exist," Cronus wheezed, clutching his speared chest. "The ultimate exile. Once caught, you never leave. Drift there until you forget how to think!"
"Damn it!"
The hands pulled with irresistible force. Cyd was dragged off his feet, toward the yawning, chaotic maw. More void-hands swarmed over him, engulfing him in a cocoon of chilling negation.
"Cough… I must… stop the expenditure," Cronus gasped, sinking to his knees. The world began to flicker, the time-stop straining. "Zeus… you won. It will take me millennia to recover from this."
"NOT! DONE! YET!"
A hand—a real, flesh-and-blood hand wearing a jade bracer—shot out from the mass of void-hands. It clawed at the air, fingers straining toward Cronus.
The spear still lodged in Cronus's chest trembled. It wrenched itself free in a gout of ichor, flew into the air, and shifted mid-flight. It became the scythe of Hades. With a sound like a dying sigh, it swung down and buried its tip deep in Cronus's back.
"NO!" Cronus screamed, his hands flying to the haft protruding from his chest.
"GET OVER HERE!"
The scythe yanked. Cronus, weakened, drained, was hauled off his feet. He flew, shrieking and tearing at his own flesh in a desperate, futile attempt to sever the connection, toward Cyd's outstretched, straining hand.
CRUNCH.
Cyd's renewed left hand closed around Cronus's face, fingers digging into the divine flesh around his eyes. With a final, monumental heave, Cyd pulled the former King of the Gods into the temporal rift with him.
The last thing Cronus saw before the void swallowed them was Cyd's eyes—those dark, human eyes, now glowing with an eerie, reflected light from the chaos, fixed on him with unwavering, terrifying resolve.
Then, the rift sealed behind them.
---
The clash was eternal.
Or was it?
A year? A decade? A century? A millennium?
Cyd didn't know. This was a place outside. Time was meaningless. There was only the fight. An endless, grinding war of attrition between two beings who refused to die.
Cyd learned the rhythms of Cronus's time-manipulation—the micro-accelerations, the frozen instants of attack. Cronus learned the patterns of [Pandora]—the shift from flame to ice to lightning to void. They killed each other. A thousand times. Ten thousand. Blasted to ash, frozen and shattered, dissolved in acid, disintegrated by pure temporal decay. Each time, they reformed from the nothingness, fueled by their respective immortalities, and fell upon each other again.
But immortality, Cyd learned, was not an infinite resource. It was a well. And even the deepest well can run dry.
---
He didn't know when it started. The healing took longer. A missing limb took minutes instead of seconds. A gaping chest wound didn't close, just… stopped bleeding.
Cronus was faring worse. His reforms grew grotesque, misshapen. His control over time became erratic, wild. The endless battle was eroding them both, wearing down the very concepts that sustained them.
The final act was not glorious. It was brutal, desperate, and profoundly ugly.
They had long since lost their weapons in the formless chaos. [Pandora] lay nearby, a dark shape against the non-color of the void. They fought with hands and teeth and raw, fading divinity. Cyd, using the last dregs of Ares's fury, slammed Cronus down. Cronus, with a final surge of temporal force, hooked his fingers into Cyd's ribs and pulled.
CRACK-SQUELCH.
Cyd screamed, a raw, animal sound, as several ribs were ripped from his body, trailing torn muscle and viscera. He collapsed, but as he fell, his hand found [Pandora]. Not in any divine form. Just the box. The heavy, unadorned, original black box.
He raised it over his head and brought it down on Cronus's skull.
THUD.
Again.
THUD.
And again.
THUD. CRUNCH. PULP.
There was no grand technique. No divine light. Just a man, broken beyond imagining, using a tool as a bludgeon, beating what remained of a god into a formless, quivering mass of primal matter.
Finally, the mass stopped moving. Stopped regenerating. The light of immortal defiance in its last, scattered fragments of eyes guttered and died.
Cyd slumped forward, [Pandora] slipping from his numb fingers to rest atop the ruin of Cronus. He tried to stand, but his legs gave way. He fell to his knees, then onto his side. His body was a ruin. Wounds that should have healed weeks ago remained open, weeping a thick, sluggish fluid that wasn't quite blood. His stolen ribs were gone. His heartbeat, when he could feel it, was a faint, irregular flutter in a hollow chest.
But his eyes were clear. He stared at [Pandora], and at the meat beneath it.
It's… over.
The duel of immortals… ended when the immortality ran out.
A soft click echoed in the absolute silence. [Pandora] began to move. Not to transform, but to open. A lid slid back. From within, not a weapon, but a structure unfolded—a vast, intricate clockwork ring. At its center, two hands, one long, one short, began to turn with a gentle, ticking sound.
The pulverized remains of Cronus stirred. They were drawn toward the open box, not by force, but by a gentle, irresistible suction, like iron filings to a magnet. Every last speck of the former Time God was pulled into the mechanism. The clockwork ring glowed with a soft, golden light for a moment, then the lid closed silently.
[Pandora, Reforged] had claimed its final prize.
Ah… this time… it's really over.
With the last of his strength, Cyd rolled onto his back. The void swirled above him, a kaleidoscope of non-colors. He lifted his left arm, the movement agony. The bracer was still there, cool against his ravaged skin. One crystal, the black one of Hades, glowed with a faint, stubborn light.
"Victory…" he whispered, his voice a dry rustle, "…is offered… to the gods."
A tear, hot and surprising, traced a path through the grime on his temple. "Teacher… I think… I saved… the world…"
His arm fell. It hit the non-ground with a soft, final thud.
"I should be allowed… to sleep… a little now… right?"
The blessing of Hades—the power that had defied death itself—was gone. Spent. Extinguished in the final, mutually-assured destruction. With its passing, the last ember of unnatural life in him flickered out.
His chest stopped rising. The faint, erratic flutter in it ceased. The light in his dark eyes softened, then dimmed, gazing unfocused at the chaotic sky of the void.
"Everyone…" The words were only in his mind now. "I'll keep my promise… So…"
"Wait for me… just a little while."
On his lifeless wrist, the jade bracer remained. All thirteen crystals were dark, their power dormant, their purpose fulfilled. All except one. The black crystal of Hades, though dim, still cradled a single, persistent pinpoint of light deep within its depths, a final, gentle vigil in the timeless dark.