Blue Volt didn't move.
The lightning around him stuttered—still violent, still immense—but no longer perfectly synchronized with his breath. For the first time since he'd dragged Asol into the wasteland, the storm hesitated with him instead of for him.
Asol felt it. Not as weakness. As weight.
"You weren't always like this right?" Asol said quietly, closing the distance by one more step. "You didn't start out running for Providence."
Blue Volt's jaw tightened. His teeth ground together.
"…Shut up."
But the words didn't carry force. The world warped. Not from speed.
From memory.
Back then, it was just him and his dad.
The Slums didn't have names—only sections people avoided if they could afford to. Rusted scaffolds, collapsed housing blocks, walkways patched together with scrap metal and hope that had long since expired. Nights smelled like oil and stale rain. Days smelled like hunger.
They lived in a room barely big enough for two cots and a hotplate that worked when it felt like it.
"Run it again," his dad said, coughing into his sleeve.
The boy frowned, already panting with sweat streaking dirt down his face.
"I just did."
"Again," his dad insisted, grinning despite himself. "You cut your turn too wide."
The boy sighed but he ran. He sprinted down the alley, bare feet slapping against cracked concrete, leapt over a broken pipe, ducked under hanging wires, and pivoted sharply and came back in a blur.
His dad laughed.
"See? You're faster than yesterday!"
The boy beamed.
"You really think so?"
"I know so," his dad said, pride shining through exhaustion. "You've got legs that don't belong in this place."
The boy hesitated.
"…Yours don't."
The smile faltered—but didn't break.
"No," his dad admitted. "Mine are done. But yours?"
He reached out, ruffling the boy's hair.
"Yours can take you anywhere."
The boy back then didn't have a name people cared about, but he laughed as he ran circles around their block, bare feet slapping broken pavement. He stole bread from stalls. He stole ration bars from people who were barely better off than them. Sometimes from neighbors. Sometimes from kids he used to play with. Every time, guilt burned—but hunger burned worse.
His dad never scolded him. He just sighed and said:
"One day… you won't have to run from things."
On the nights when the pain in his father's legs was too much, they'd sit on the roof of their building, watching the lights of the city flicker in the distance like another world.
"I wanted to run," his dad said once, staring at the horizon. "Not away. Just… freely. Wherever my feet felt like going."
The boy clenched his fists.
"If I was you," he said fiercely, "I'd run forever."
His dad smiled sadly.
"That's why you shouldn't waste it," he said. "You're faster than this place. Faster than fear. If you can run faster than everyone else… then sometimes you should run for them."
The words stayed with him. He believed him.
But then the sky screamed.
People in the slums didn't understand what was happening until the shadow passed over them. It was too vast, too wrong. A Kaiju descended like a god that had missed the point of mercy entirely.
The Slums vanished in fire and gravity. The boy didn't hesitate. He ran. He told his dad to stay low. To hide. He said he'd be back. He thought he could lure it away. He was fast. Faster than anyone. And probably faster than the Kaiju. But...
The Kaiju noticed him anyway.
The impact was absolute. And when he woke up, only seconds had passed. But the world was gone.
"Dad?" he croaked.
"Help… please…"
The boy scrambled up, ignoring the pain screaming through his ribs. His dad was crawling through the dirt, blood soaking into the ground beneath him and the boy fell to his knees.
"I'm here—I'm here—"
He grabbed his father's shoulders and realized he was too late. His eyes were empty. The body was warm. But his dad was already gone. The boy screamed and something inside him shattered.
If I was faster…
The thought burned.
If I was faster, I could save him.
And so he ran.
The world stretched. Then slowed. Then bent. The boy ran so fast that the sound of his footsteps arrived after he did. He ran so fast that light smeared around him. He ran so fast that causality lost track of where he was supposed to be.
And suddenly he was back. Seconds before and his dad was still alive.
The boy tried to tackle him out of the way but instead was too slow and watched the Kaiju's limb crush his father.
He ran again.
Still failed.
Again.
Still failed.
Again.
Still failed.
Every time, the outcome changed, except the ending. Sometimes his dad died screaming. Sometimes silently. And sometimes looking right at him.
The boy ran until the word again lost meaning until hope rotted into certainty.
It always happens.
So he ran one last time. Not to save him. But to say goodbye.
"I'm sorry," he sobbed. "I wasn't fast enough."
His dad smiled—soft, tired, proud.
"You were," he said. "You always were."
The boy shook his head.
"No—"
His dad pulled him closer with what little strength he had left.
"Listen to me," he said, voice fading. "Running backward doesn't save anyone."
The boy's breath hitched.
"Keep running forward," his dad whispered. "Don't look behind."
Those were his last words before his eyes closed forever.
Blue Volt staggered back half a step. The lightning around him spasmed violently, then reformed less sharp and less precise. His voice was raw.
"You think I didn't try?" he shouted. "You think I didn't run until time broke?!"
Asol didn't move.
"I ran until there was nothing left to fix," Blue Volt continued. "And do you know what I learned?"
His fists trembled.
"No matter how fast you are… some things don't change!"
The storm dimmed. Just a little.
"That's why I fight for Providence," Blue Volt said, quieter now. "He doesn't lie about it. He doesn't pretend the world can be saved."
Asol stepped closer.
"And you believe him because it hurts less than hoping."
Blue Volt froze.
"You stopped running forward," Asol said. "You changed who you're running for."
The lightning cracked—once—then faltered. Blue Volt's breath shook.
"I don't want to lose again."
Asol met his eyes.
"Neither do I."
Blue Volt didn't vanish. He stood there caught between speed and stillness, between past and present.
But the hesitation didn't last and Blue Volt moved.
Not fast, but faster than fast. Faster than the idea of motion itself.
Asol didn't feel the impact at first—only the sudden, impossible absence of distance. One moment Blue Volt was ten meters away with lightning stuttering around him like a wounded storm. And the next—
His collar was clenched in Blue Volt's fist.
Reality screamed. His Blue lightning didn't arc this time. It collapsed inward, compressing space around Blue Volt's body until the air folded like paper. The ground beneath Asol didn't crack—it simply ceased to exist between here and elsewhere.
Asol's feet left the earth. And the world tore. There was no direction. No up. No down. Asol was dragged forward through something that wasn't space but sequence—a corridor carved directly through the ordering of reality itself. Blue Volt didn't run.
He forced existence to catch up with him.
The tunnel formed around them in real time, walls made of stretched moments and overlapping causality. Colors bled into each other. Gold, violet, bone-white, and impossible hues that had no names because they were never meant to be seen.
Asol screamed. Not from pain. From overload. His mind was ripped open. Every moment of time surged past him simultaneously. He saw a star igniting for the first time, hydrogen screaming as gravity crushed it into fire, a city collapsing centuries before it was ever built, a child laughing, then crying, then dying, and then being born again as someone else.
And then he saw himself. Not just once. But thousands of times.
An Asol standing in Dystopia's ruins.
An Asol bleeding in Providence's garden.
An Asol dying.
An Asol almost dying.
And an Asol never arriving to Earth at all.
His Aura went wild, flaring desperately, but there was nothing to push against. No present moment to anchor himself to. His prosthetic arm vibrated violently.
"Blue—!" Asol choked.
Blue Volt didn't slow. His voice came back through the roar of collapsing timelines, steady and terrifyingly calm.
"You wanted to know why I don't believe in hope?"
The tunnel deepened and Time stopped behaving like a line and became a volume with layers upon layers folding over each other like pages torn from every book ever written.
Asol saw the Kaiju descend again onto another version of Dystopia.
Not once. But in every possible time it ever could have.
He saw worlds where it missed.
Worlds where it arrived earlier.
Worlds where it arrived late.
Worlds where Blue Volt saved his father but still ended up dying.
Worlds where his father never existed.
Worlds where Blue Volt never ran.
Worlds where he ran forever.
Asol's throat burned.
"This—this isn't—" he gasped.
"This is the truth," Blue Volt said.
The tunnel began to narrow. Not spatially. But Conceptually.
The weight of inevitability pressed in from all sides.
"You think I stopped because I was afraid," Blue Volt continued. "I stopped because I saw the ending. Over and over. You break Providence? Something worse fills the gap."
The tunnel convulsed and Asol saw Providence killing him in every possibility and every future—
"You don't beat systems," Blue Volt said. "You replace them."
Asol gritted his teeth.
"And you think serving one makes you better?"
Blue Volt tightened his grip.
"I think it makes me honest."
The tunnel shattered outward.
They emerged into silence and Asol crashed to his knees, vomiting nothing as his body tried to reject what it had just perceived. His head rang like a bell struck too hard.
When he looked up—
He stopped breathing. They stood on nothing. And everything.
The Timescape stretched infinitely in all directions. It was a vast, luminous void filled with floating moments, each one suspended like a shard of glass. Entire histories hovered in place: wars frozen mid-explosion, civilizations paused at their peak, lovers caught in the instant before goodbye.
Time existed here as terrain. Time flowed in all directions. Forward, backwards, sideways, slanted, up, down, etc... It flowed in infinite directions.
Streams of glowing chronology flowed beneath their feet like rivers. Above them, branching paths split and rejoined endlessly, fractal highways of cause and effect. And Asol felt small. Painfully so. Blue Volt released him and stepped back, lightning finally settling into a controlled, constant glow around his body.
Asol forced himself to stand, legs shaking.
"You… you dragged me through all of time."
"Not all," Blue Volt corrected. "Just enough."
Asol looked around, chest tight.
"This place—this isn't natural."
Blue Volt gave a humorless smile.
"Neither am I. This vast and infinite space was created when I once ran to the ends of time to bear witness of what's to come. I have to tell you. It isn't beautiful. I saw creatures and beings beyond comprehension devouring realities. But hey! That's enough sidetracking."
He gestured outward.
"I can move anywhere. Anywhen. I can see how choices end before they're made." His eyes hardened. "And that's why I know what you're trying to do is going to fail."
Asol staggered to his feet fully now, breathing hard.
"You showed me endings," he said. "Not inevitability."
Blue Volt's lightning flared.
"Same thing."
"No," Asol snapped. "You showed me what happens when people give up control to systems like Providence. When everyone chooses the least painful lie."
Blue Volt froze.
Asol stepped forward, despite the vertigo, despite the screaming in his head.
"You ran backward to save one person," Asol said. "Then you stopped running forward for everyone else."
Blue Volt's jaw tightened.
"You think I don't know that?"
"I think you decided pain was proof," Asol replied. "That because suffering repeats, resistance is pointless."
He gestured around the Timescape.
"This place? It's a graveyard of almosts. You don't live here. You hide here."
The lightning around Blue Volt surged violently.
"I hide so I don't watch people die again!"
"And yet," Asol said quietly, "you still do."
Silence rippled through the Timescape.
Somewhere, a frozen moment cracked.
Blue Volt's voice dropped.
"If you keep going," he warned, "you will break things you cannot put back."
Asol met his eyes—steady, furious, alive.
"Good," he said. "Some things shouldn't be put back."
The Timescape screamed. Not with sound—but with desynchronization. Reflections shattered into reflections of reflections. Entire centuries peeled away from the ground like brittle paint. The sky fractured into impossible angles, each one showing a different ending that could no longer agree on which came first.
Blue Volt accelerated again.
This wasn't speed anymore. This was priority. He existed before his own motion, lightning compressing into a singularity of intent. The space where he would be detonated outward as he arrived there first, causality scrambling to follow.
Asol felt it. Not as impact—but as inevitability. The blow struck his guard and then struck again a millisecond earlier. His Adamantium arm screamed, sigils flaring white-hot as cracks spidered violently up the forearm. Aura detonated out of him in a raw, defensive burst, barely preventing his chest from caving in.
He was launched backward. Not flying. Removed.
He skipped across broken moments with his body tearing through overlapping instants: a battlefield, a classroom, a burning city, a quiet room with Fujiwara asleep. Each collision hurt differently because each one was real somewhere.
He slammed into a jagged shard of frozen time and slid down, coughing blood.
Blue Volt didn't rush him. He stood in the air, lightning dragging the Timescape inward toward him like gravity.
"You feel it now, don't you?" Blue Volt said, voice echoing from multiple angles. "That panic. That instinct screaming that if you were just faster—"
He snapped his fingers. The world rewound three seconds and Asol suddenly found himself standing again—unhurt—for half a breath before the same punch slammed into him from the same angle, this time harder.
He crashed again and Blue Volt walked forward, boots not touching anything.
"I lived in that thought," Blue Volt continued. "Every second. Every failure. Every corpse."
Asol dragged himself up, blood dripping from his lip.
"You ran back," Asol rasped. "Again and again."
"Yes."
"And it never worked."
Blue Volt's smile twitched—then broke.
"Because it wasn't meant to."
The Timescape convulsed violently. Blue Volt appeared inches from Asol, fist hovering at his throat. The lightning around him howled, bending even the fragments of time away from his presence.
"You think Providence owns me?" Blue Volt whispered. "No. I chose him."
Asol's eyes widened slightly.
"I chose a world where things don't change," Blue Volt snarled. "Where people like my father don't die because the universe rolled bad dice."
He grabbed Asol's collar again.
"But you? You want to tear that down," he said. "You want chaos! Uncertainty! Hope!"
Lightning erupted.
Asol was dragged again—through another tunnel, shorter this time, violent enough to shear memories loose. He saw Blue Volt as a boy running barefoot through rain-soaked slums. His father laughing weakly. The Kaiju's shadow blotting out the sky.
Then they slammed back into the Timescape.
Asol reacted on instinct. He drove his Adamantium arm into the fracture point beneath them. The impact didn't damage Blue Volt, but it damaged the space. The Timescape cracked like glass under strain and Blue Volt stumbled back a step.
"…You're breaking the medium," he muttered.
Asol staggered upright as his arm trembled violently.
"I don't need to outrun you," he said hoarsely. "I just need to make it so you can't keep running."
He clenched his fist.
Aura surged—not explosively, but densely, compressing inward until the air screamed under the pressure.
"You're not moving forward," Asol continued. "You're circling the same moment over and over—pretending it's control."
Blue Volt's lightning flared erratically.
"DON'T—"
"You heard him," Asol snapped. "Your dad."
The Timescape flickered—showing a dying man smiling through blood.
Keep running forward.
"You're not," Asol said quietly. "You're just afraid to stop."
Silence. Just for a fraction. That fraction cost Blue Volt. Asol stepped forward—slowly, deliberately—and slammed his Adamantium fist into the ground again.
The Timescape buckled and reflections collapsed into singularity. The sky fractured inward. The tunnel behind them began to unravel. Blue Volt snarled and vanished, reappearing behind Asol with a thunderous kick that sent him skidding but his timing was off.
Just enough.
Asol twisted, grabbed Blue Volt's wrist with his flesh hand, and held on.
"You can't outrun someone who won't let go," Asol growled.
Lightning detonated point-blank. Both of them were thrown apart as the Timescape collapsed entirely, folding in on itself like a snapped film reel.
Reality screamed and spat them both back out. They slammed into the barren wasteland outside the lab, carving twin craters into dead earth beneath a screaming sky. Dust rolled outward for miles.
Asol lay on his back as Blue Volt knelt in his own crater, one hand braced against the ground, lightning sputtering unevenly around him.
He was breathing hard.
"…You're insane," Blue Volt muttered.
Asol coughed, then laughed weakly.
"Yeah," he said.
Blue Volt looked up conflicted.
The dust hung, suspended in the air as if the world itself was unsure whether it was allowed to move yet.
Asol forced himself onto one elbow. His vision swam. His Adamantium arm was scorched nearly black along the forearm, sigils cracked and flickering weakly like a dying constellation. Every breath burned. Every heartbeat echoed too loud in his skull.
Across from him, Blue Volt stood.
Not floating.
Standing.
Lightning crawled over him in broken threads. They were no longer elegant, no longer precise. The ground beneath his boots was glassed in jagged spirals where time had briefly tried to outrun itself and failed.
For a long moment, neither moved.
Then Blue Volt laughed. It was quiet. Hoarse. Almost disbelieving.
"…You're really not running," he said.
Asol spat blood onto the dirt and pushed himself upright, swaying.
"Ran enough in my life," he replied. "Didn't get me anywhere."
Blue Volt looked down at his own hands.
The lightning flickered—then hesitated.
That had never happened before.
"I should kill you," Blue Volt said. Not as a threat. As a fact. "It would be safer. Cleaner. You've already seen too much."
Asol shrugged weakly.
"Wouldn't be the first time someone decided that."
Blue Volt's jaw tightened. His gaze lifted—not to Asol, but past him. Toward the distant glow of Aegis Prime's Dome, barely visible on the horizon. Toward the city that had taken everything he loved and called it order.
"You know what Providence told me," Blue Volt said slowly, "after he found out what I could do?"
Asol stayed silent.
"He said, 'Speed is wasted on those who hesitate.'"Blue Volt scoffed. "He said grief was inefficiency. That if I kept moving forward fast enough, nothing could ever catch me again."
The lightning around him surged—then sputtered.
"He never asked where I was going," Blue Volt whispered. "Or why."
Asol shifted, pain screaming, but he met the man's eyes.
"And your dad did."
The name wasn't spoken. It didn't need to be.
Blue Volt's Aura spasmed violently. Time around him shuddered—reflections flashing in and out: a boy running barefoot through rain, a man smiling through broken breath, a hand squeezing another and letting go.
Keep running forward and don't look behind.
Blue Volt clenched his fists.
"I thought if I kept moving," he said, voice cracking despite himself, "if I stayed useful—if I stayed fast enough—then the world wouldn't take anything else from me."
He laughed again, sharper this time.
"All it did was teach me how to watch it happen in slow motion."
Silence stretched between them. Blue Volt exhaled. The lightning died as tt faded into the air like embers cooling after a fire.
"I planted myself on Providence's leash," he said. "Because at least then I knew who was holding it."
Asol straightened as much as he could.
"And now?"
Blue Volt looked at him. Really looked at him. A one-armed survivor from a dead world. Standing when he should've stayed down. Refusing to run, even knowing how badly that could end.
"…Now," Blue Volt said quietly, "I'm standing in a crater I made trying to prove I was faster than fate."
He took a step forward.
Asol tensed instinctively—but Blue Volt stopped well outside striking distance.
"You broke the Timescape," Blue Volt continued. "Do you understand how stupid that is?"
Asol snorted.
"People keep telling me that."
A corner of Blue Volt's mouth twitched despite himself.
"I can't fight Providence head-on," Blue Volt said. "Everything that Kazuma told you is true. Providence has some sort of leash on everyone including the Heroes and... Aoi."
"I know," Asol said.
Blue Volt's eyes darkened at the name.
"But," Blue Volt went on, "I can do something else."
The air around him shifted.
"I can misroute patrol timings," he said. "Delay response windows by microseconds that stack into minutes. I can blind predictive models without tripping alarms. I can be where Providence expects me to be—while doing something else entirely."
Asol stared.
"…You're talking about betraying him."
Blue Volt let out a slow breath.
"I'm talking about finally running forward," he said. "Not back. Not in circles."
He met Asol's gaze, lightning flickering faintly—not as a weapon, but as resolve.
"You're right," Asol said. "Suffering never ends."
He stepped closer and extended a hand.
"But it doesn't have to be managed by men who think they're gods."
Blue Volt looked at the offered hand. And then at Asol and his beaten, bloody body.
Asol thought of Kurogane. Of Kazuma. Of Aoi smiling through something that wasn't hers. Of Providence's marble halls and locked doors that wanted to be found.
Blue Volt reached out with his flesh hand and took it. His grip was firm. Real. It wasn't a leash. It wasn't a command.
"I'm not doing this for your justice. I'm doing this for my Dad."
The war had just gained its fastest traitor.