"RRRAAAAAGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH—"
The sky was bleeding.
"ADAMAN! What is that thing?!" I bellowed the question, my voice nearly lost to the roar of the rift. I lashed out at the oncoming shrapnel—my Security Corps training taking over as I calculated the trajectory of every lethal shard.
Kishin's blade was a blur of silver, but my arms felt like they were filled with wet sand. Two armoured pauldrons orbited me, smashing into larger chunks of earth and marble that I hadn't cut down.
I looked toward the source of the destruction.
A cloud of dust in the distance faded away, revealing a colossal, ancient creature of deep cobalt.
Its body— adorned with jagged plates of silver steel and mysterious markings of azure—pulsing with a power that didn't belong to this world.
Its most striking feature was not the great, gear-like crest on its back, but at the center of its chest: a brilliant, glowing diamond.
The Adamant Crystal.
The jewel shimmered with a cold, metallic luster that seemed to catch lights from stars not yet born. Its presence created a heavy, suffocating pressure—a weight akin to being buried alive.
"WHAT! How am I supposed to know!?" Adaman exclaimed, his usual bravado gone.
He poked his head out from behind one of the temple's shattered pillars, ducking just as a fragmented head of a statue whistled past him.
Akari wasn't in the mood. "BECAUSE IT'S YOUR FUCKING GOD, DUMBASS!!" She screamed, leaping up to screech at him from behind me—nearly getting impaled by a jagged stone for her trouble
I winced, my perimeter collapsing. I deflected a volley of sharp quartz, earning a map of new cuts in the process. Security Corps logic was screaming at me: WITHDRAW.
I'm losing too much blood.
A momentary glance at the tears in my haori revealed fresh wounds oozing crimson, staining the Survey Corps blue into something unrecognizable. We need to leave… or we die here.
My fingers adjusted their grip on the hilt by a fraction of an inch—a Security Corps twitch designed to compensate for a slick, blood-covered handle.
My brain was a fog of fatigue, but my hands still remembered the mud-caked drills. The body moved on a dead man's autopilot, clinging to the only discipline it had left.
...Something's changed.
The air didn't just feel heavy. It felt… wrong. It was as if the atmosphere had turned into a thick, invisible liquid that resisted every movement of my lungs.
Every time Dialga's throat pulsed, the world stuttered. I watched a piece of falling marble slow to a guttural crawl in mid-air—hanging there for a heartbeat too long—before it snapped forward with a deafening, whip-like crack.
My own pulse followed the same erratic rhythm. My heart would skip three beats, then hammer against my ribs in a frantic rush.
Time was warping.
I'm out of sync.
The realization hit me harder than the debris. My vision blurred; the cobalt dragon in front of me was suddenly ten feet closer without ever having moved its legs.
I tried to lift Kishin, but my arm felt like it was moving through frozen honey, only to jerk upward with a violent, bone-snapping speed a second later.
"ADAMAN! Get your head down!" I roared, my voice sounding strangely distorted to my own ears. I lunged, Kishin's blade blurring as I cleaved a chunk of marble mid-air.
The impact sent a jolt of white-hot pain up my arm, reopening the gashes along my ribs.
I was trailing crimson across the ancient stone, the metallic scent of my own blood mixing with the ozone of the rift.
We were failing.
"Kishin, Iron Defense. Wall us!"
The blade echoed, vibrating in my hand. Before us, two pauldrons slammed down—cracks formed as they buried their heavy weight into the earth. Their surface shifted to lustrous steel, forming a great unyielding wall against the storm of rock and dust.
Beside me, Akari was a blur of motion, her breathing ragged but her eyes locked on the nightmare above us. She didn't waste breath on Adaman this time; she just grabbed him by the collar and yanked him behind Kishin's steel.
"Stay down or die, Adaman!" she snapped, but her hand lingered on the hilt of her own Poké Ball, her knuckles white.
She looked at me, seeing the blood soaking through my haori. "Corvin, you're slowing down. Don't you dare—"
"I'm fine," I lied, the words tasting like copper.
The sky turned a bruised, sickly violet. Dialga's mouth opened. It didn't roar; it exhaled. A stream of Roar of Time—a purplish, jagged pulse—erupted from its maw.
"King's Shield! Agile Style!"
The hexagonal barrier instantly flashed into existence, an azure aura radiating from it. The Agile Style hit me like a shot of adrenaline—sharpening my perception as the world slowed—but the pressure was catastrophic. My boots skidded back, carving deep grooves into the temple floor.
The steel wasn't just cracking—it was eroding. The energy was eating it away with the sheer weight of seconds and years compressed into a single beam.
"Hold... the line..." I wheezed. My knees buckled.
Then, the world turned inside out.
The light didn't just flash. It ignited into a cold, surgical brilliance that felt like it was ripping my eyeballs out of their sockets.
It wasn't just blinding me—it was as if it was erasing the very concept of darkness from the universe. The white stayed. It scorched through my eyelids and burned.
Every nerve ending in my body felt like it was being picked apart by needles. I could feel my own heartbeat slowing to a crawl, then racing until my chest throbbed with a sickening, uneven rhythm.
Then came the silence. It was a heavy, pressurized vacuum where the only sound was the frantic rushing of my own blood.
When my vision finally cleared, colorful spots still dancing, the cobalt dragon was gone.
In its place stood a tall, spindly abomination—a centaur-like mockery of its former self. Its front legs were massive, pillars of ancient metal, while its neck was encased in a crystalline cage that hummed with a sound like a thousand clocks ticking at once.
It looked less like a living creature and more like an unfinished statue of a god, forced into a shape it was never meant to bear.
"What is that?" Adaman whispered, his voice trembling. "That's not... that can't be it."
"It's the origin," Irida breathed, her voice hollow.
"The beginning of time."