I stood up slowly, leaning heavily on Kishin, blood still wet. The sight of that thing—that distorted, horse-like silhouette against the rift—made the hair on my neck stand up.
It wasn't funny. It was wrong. It was a god shedding its skin to become something faster, something more predatory.
Disgusting.
Behind me, Adaman and Irida remained frozen. They were staring at a nightmare that had once been their god.
"Adaman. Irida. Get out of here," I said, my voice low but carrying the iron of a direct command. "The temple is gone. There's nothing left for you to protect here but your own lives."
Adaman stepped forward, his hand trembling as he reached for his coat. "Corvin, we can't just leave you like this. You're bleeding out, and that thing—"
"If you stay, you'll just become another dead body," I interrupted, not taking my eyes off the spindly abomination. "Go. Someone needs to lead the clans when the dust settles."
Irida was the first to move. She placed a hand on Adaman's shoulder, her face pale but her resolve hardening. She knew the look of a soldier who had already made his choice.
"We'll go," she breathed, her gaze lingering on me and Akari for a final, heavy second. "Stay alive, Corvin. Both of you."
"Don't you dare die," Adaman added, his voice a rough whisper. "That's an order."
I didn't answer. I just watched their shadows swiftly disappear down the mountain path until only the sound of the ticking clocks remained.
"Akari," I said, my voice low and dangerous. I didn't look at her, but I felt her move to my shoulder, her presence the only thing keeping me upright. "When I move, you run. Don't wait for a signal, don't try to fight. Just run."
I rushed forward to intercept a stray shard of crystal, but as my foot hit the stone, the world snapped.
My movement, which should have taken a second, concluded in a heartbeat.
I overshot my mark, my blade whistling through empty air as the shard—which had been moving like a comet—suddenly slowed to a crawl, hovering inches from my face.
"Corvin! Left!"
Akari's voice sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a deep well, stretched and distorted. I turned, but my body felt like it was moving through waist-deep molasses. Every muscle fiber groaned against a resistance that shouldn't have been there.
"Shadow Claw! Intercept!" I choked out.
Spectral, purple claws erupted from the air, raking at the incoming projectiles. A standard defensive layer, but even a non-style move was starting to feel heavy.
Style Fatigue was a silent killer. It clouded your judgment. I could feel the fog thickening in my mind—the price of using Agile Style earlier to survive the blast.
Kishin blurred—his steel frame flashing in and out of existence as he fought his own battle with the timeline.
He had managed to knock the shards aside, but the impact sound arrived three seconds late—a deafening thud that echoed when the air was already still.
I looked up at the Origin Form of Dialga. It wasn't just standing there. It was flickering between the 'now' and the 'then.' One moment it was fifty yards away. The next, it was looming directly over us. Its massive front hooves cracked the very foundation of the temple before the sound of its movement even reached us.
"It's not just strong," I hissed, leaning on Kishin as a wave of nausea hit me. My fatigue was being amplified by the rift, turning a simple ache into a crushing weight. "It's... it's shortening the distance between then and now. We aren't just fighting Dialga… we're fighting it with the few seconds it decides to give us. Time itself."
"Then we just break the cycle!" Akari roared.
She didn't wait. She dived between the Origin Form's spindly hind legs—her movement jerky and uneven as she fought the time-lags. She threw a heavy balm, but the projectile froze in mid-air—caught in an area of stagnant time.
Dialga tilted its armored head, its crimson eyes flickering with an eerie light. The crystalline box at its throat began to glow with a loud, flashing, rhythmic pulse.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
"Get back!"
I dashed towards her—my heart hammering against my ribs. I didn't care about the cuts anymore. I didn't care about the blood loss. I tackled her just as the "frozen" balm exploded—not with fire, but with a shockwave of compressed seconds.
The blast threw us backward, but the "backwards" lasted forever. I felt my back hit a pillar—then felt it hit again—and again—as if the universe was replaying the impact on a loop.
Pain.
I tried to stand, but the stone beneath me was suddenly ancient and crumbling, then sharp and brand-new, cycling through centuries in the blink of an eye.
I coughed, and the blood on my lips tasted of iron—then vanished, as if the wound had never happened—only to bloom twice as deep a second later.
My mind, usually swift at identifying a perimeter breach, was screaming in a high-pitched, discordant alarm. The air was warping, the "tick" of the crystalline cage at Dialga's throat was accelerating into a sound like a thousand clocks shattering at once.
I saw the air ripple, a jagged distortion of pure entropy coiling in the god's maw. It wasn't aimed at our bodies—it was aimed at our existences.
"Kishin! Shield!"
The Aegislash surged forward, but even he was struggling. His spectral eye flickered a frantic, dying violet. As he raised one of his pauldrons to catch a violent burst of Roar of Time, the attack didn't just hit him—it aged him.
I watched in horror as his pristine, black-tempered steel began to rust and pit in real-time, the metal flaking away into dust before snapping back into its sharpened form.
"It's eating him," Akari whispered, her voice trembling. She was at my side, her hand gripping my arm so hard her nails dug into the fabric. "Corvin, the sword... Kishin can't take much more of that."
"I know." I gritted my teeth, forcing my limbs to move.
At the altar, Dialga reared back on its massive, pillar-like front legs. The ring around its abdomen began to spin, creating a vacuum that sucked the sound right out of the air.
The "Tick-Tick-Tick" stopped.
Silence.
In that second, Dialga moved.
It didn't run; it simply deleted the time it needed to travel the distance between us.
One moment it was at the altar; the next, its shadow was a crushing weight over me and Akari. Its massive, three-pronged hooves came down like the judgment of a god.
"KING'S SHIELD! STRONG STYLE!"
I shoved Akari behind me and threw my weight into the blade.
A violent, blood-red aura erupted from Kishin, thick and viscous like rising heat off a blazing inferno.
The air around us grew heavy, pressurized by the sheer density of the light. It felt as if gravity itself had doubled, pinning my shadow to the stone as my feet anchored into the floor with a bone-deep weight.
My muscles bunched, hardening into something that felt more like iron than flesh.
Kishin let out a metallic scream—a sound of vibrating, tortured steel—as the hexagonal barrier flared to life.
The collision didn't feel like a hit. It felt like being pressed between two pages of a book. My vision went white. I could feel my body vibrating, the time-distortion trying to pull my soul out of my chest.
The Strong Style aura flickered, the heavy crimson light struggling to hold its mass against the weight of eternity.
Crack.
One of Kishin's pauldrons shattered.
Not into pieces—but into dust. Erased from the timeline entirely as if it had never existed at all. The remaining force of the blow slammed into my chest, and I felt my ribs snap—a clean, sharp sound that seemed to repeat three times in my ears, echoing across the "lag."
"CORVIN!"
I was airborne. The world was a blur of violet sky and crumbling marble. I hit the ground hard, sliding toward the edge of the Temple's precipice.
My grip on Kishin loosened, the blade clattering across the stone, its spectral glow reduced to a faint, dying ember.
Style Fatigue hit me like a physical wall, causing my mind to feel clouded, every thought dragging through a heavy fog. I tried to breathe, but my lungs were out of sync with my throat.
I looked up through a haze of red. Dialga was turning back toward Akari. She was standing alone in the center of the crater, a single balm in her hand, looking small and fragile against the silhouette of the end of the world.
"Get... up." I hissed at my own body. "GET UP!"
I couldn't move. My ribs were a jagged mess, and every time I tried to draw air, it felt like I was swallowing glass.
I watched, paralyzed, as Dialga lowered its armored head, the crystal in its neck glowing with a light that promised to erase Akari from existence.
My fingers clawed uselessly against the stone.
Not again.
Not her.
"Akari... please… run..." I choked out, but the sound was lost in the roar of the temporal rift.
She didn't run. She refused to.
Standing her ground in the center of the shattered temple, her silhouette framed by the swirling chaos of the sky, she simply reached into her satchel and pulled out the Origin Ball—not as a tool for capture, but as a vessel for summoning.
The Red Chain shards that made up its surface began to vibrate; a high-pitched, metallic thrum that resonated with the very foundation of Mt. Coronet.
Akari closed her grey eyes, taking a long, deep breath despite the deity looming before her.
"I am the anchor of my own world.
Sliver is my blood, and steel is my heart.
Unknown to the End, nor known to the Beginning.
O Origin of Space, Divine Lustrous Pearl—Awaken and heed my call!
Shatterer of stars and creator of the cosmos!
Reveal thyself to me!
Come forth, God of Space, PALKIA!"
Akari's voice cut through the cacophony of Dialga's roar. She raised the Origin Ball, and for a heartbeat, the world went silent.
The sky shook.
A crack formed in the air—not jagged like Dialga's temporal rifts, but a perfectly smooth, vertical seam of shimmering violet. It widened with a sound like a great echoing door swinging open. Light spilled out, iridescent and thick as liquid pearl.
Then, the spatial seam burst.
Reality didn't just break—it unfolded.
A massive, clawed hand of pale white gripped the edge of the void, slowly pulling it back like a curtain.
Palkia stepped through the seam, its towering form casting a shadow that seemed to stretch into infinity. Its wings, glowing with an ethereal light, fanned out to catch the chaotic winds, instantly smoothing the distortions in the air.
The two great pearls embedded in its shoulders pulsed with a rhythmic, stabilizing hum that grounded the stone beneath us
Where Dialga was the stuttering, erratic tick of broken time, Palkia was the vast, endless silence of space.
The space around Akari didn't just stop flickering—it physically hardened. The violent "stutters" of the timeline hit an invisible wall of spatial pressure and clashed.
"Kishin..." I breathed, my fingers finally closing around the blade's hilt. "We aren't... done just yet."
My Style Fatigue was still a dull roar in my skull, but the presence of the Pearl God had stabilized the "lag" enough for my lungs to find their rhythm.
Akari stood beneath the shadow of the Pearl God, her hand outstretched as if she were holding the weight of the sky itself.
In that moment, she wasn't a Survey member. She was the one thing holding the sky together.