The world did not simply move. It unwound.

  In the span of a single picosecond—a heartbeat for light to travel a single centimeter—Meteor vanished. Not in a blur, but in a complete erasure of presence, only to reappear as a conceptual ring of destruction encircling Clock. He had just run the circumference of the massive island fifty times, not as movement, but as a prelude.

  The punch that landed had no wind-up, no telegraph. It was simply there, a fact of existence faster than light itself. It was physics as a blunt-force instrument. There was no finesse, only the sheer, beautiful, terrifying brutality of strength made absolute.

  The air around Clock’s chest collapsed, not just displacing but ceasing to exist as a gas, forming a momentary perfect vacuum. The shockwave that radiated outwards was not a sound but a wall of solid force that hit the ocean and pushed it back, creating a temporary, miles-wide canyon of exposed seabed.

  Inside his mind, Clock’s analytical faculties, honed over a lifetime of combat, screamed a single, useless number. One quintillion Newtons. Minimum. Perhaps an order of magnitude more. It was a force that could blast a supercarrier far into the moon.

  Transport ate it. The pocket dimension swallowed the cataclysm directed at his body. But the world was not so lucky. The very fabric of the island behind him shattered, the volcanic rock turning to fine, superheated dust in an instant.

  Meteor moved again. And again. Each time, he was faster. Clock’s violet eyes, capable of tracking individual raindrops in a storm, could no longer find him. He saw only the aftermath—a new canyon carved into the earth, a new mountain range of water rising from the sea. He was being systematically dismantled by a ghost.

  A terrifying, awe-struck realization dawned on Clock. He had known Isolde possessed an astronomical intellect, a genius that bordered on the prophetic. But these... these were not experiments. They were not powered by external sources or unstable serums. They were gods. Forged from scratch. Given gifts that defied the known laws of energy and matter.

  How?

  The next punch came.

  This time, Clock saw it for a fleeting picosecond. Not because he was fast enough, but because Meteor allowed it. The intricate jade designs beneath Meteor’s skin ignited, glowing with the light of a captive galaxy. The fist, now a nexus of impossible energy, connected with Clock’s chest.

  The force was fifty septillion Newtons.

  It was the concentrated weight of a civilization, the anger of a star, the finality of a meteor impact.

  FWUMP-KRAK!

  Transport stuttered.

  For the second time in his life, the flawless defense flinched. The pocket dimension, which had swallowed country-vaporizing blows without a quiver, gagged on this one. A fraction of the force, a mere sliver that would still liquefy a country, leaked through.

  It was enough. Clock felt his sternum ache. The air left his lungs in a silent, agonized rush. The message was terrifyingly clear: his ultimate defense had a limit, and Meteor was the hammer that had just found it.

  ///

  The data streamed into Clock’s mind, a screaming torrent of impossible numbers. Meteor wasn’t just fast; his speed was escalating, a reactor approaching critical mass. Each picosecond he was geometrically stronger, faster. The calculations were clear: in less than a second, the output would spike to a level that would override Transport for a single, fatal nanosecond.

  That was all Meteor would need. A nanosecond of contact with those indestructible claws, and Clock would be unzipped from throat to hip.

  His options were trash. He could summon his telekinesis to flip the entire island, a grand, theatrical gesture that would drain him to a husk and accomplish nothing but amusing a god before it killed him.

  Time.

  The thought was a desperate, final gambit. He had used stasis against Yume, but that was just seizing the matter around her, freezing her in a telekinetic gel. This… this was different. This was the source code.

  It was the only card left, untested, theoretical. A function of his power he’d only theorized, never dared to use. To stop a thing, you apply force. But to stop everything... you had to stop the clock.

  Do it. The command came from the deepest, most strained core of his will.

  Clock closed his eyes.

  He reached out with his mind, but not to push or pull. He reached for the frame rate of reality itself. With an effort that felt like trying to hold back the Big Bang, he did not seize the air or the light. He seized the universe's heart and clenched his fist.

  He held everything on the island in place. The vibrating air molecules, the scattered photons of light, the very concept of wind, the propagation of sound.

  Most importantly he held speed.

  And in doing so, for the first time in his existence, Clock stopped time.

  Not an imitation. Not a clever trick. True, absolute, temporal stasis.

  The world didn't slow. It ceased.

  The roar of the shattered island, the titanic shockwaves radiating out to sea, the impossible song blasting from Meteor's headphones, it all vanished into a perfect, crushing silence. The very light took on a flat, dead quality, frozen in place.

  Meteor was a statue, captured in the apex of his pounce, a perfect sculpture of unleashed violence, his glowing jade fist an inch from Clock's face. The particles of dust and debris hung in the air like a fixed constellation.

  Clock hovered in the silent, still heart of the stopped world, the only moving thing in a universe he had just paused. The strain was astronomical, a psychic hemorrhage that threatened to unmoor his own consciousness. He could feel the resistance of the universe against him, an infinite weight on a finite will. But he had done it. But he had done it.

  He had bought himself a single, timeless moment to think.

  The DELETE beam demanded a price he could no longer afford. The psychic strain of holding time itself in a vise had drained his reserves to dregs. He gathered the energy, the command on his lips, but the power flickered, a star on the verge of collapse.

  There was only one source left.

  On the other side of the island, the Clock facing Eclipse dissolved. Not in a flash of light, but like a phantom, its form unraveling into shimmering motes of nothingness. All the energy, all the will that sustained it, shot across the island and flooded back into the original.

  It was enough. For a single, picosecond.

  "DELETE."

  The silent, black beam washed over the frozen Meteor. It was not an explosion, but an erasure. His flesh, his muscle, the specially-made fabric that had withstood vaporization—all of it ceased to exist instantly, without a trace of ash or energy.

  Clock stared, his breath catching in his throat.

  HOOWWW?!

  The skeleton remained.

  It stood there in the timeless void, a perfect, grotesque sculpture of polished graphite and glowing jade, utterly untouched. The DELETE beam, which had just unmade a being of immense power, had washed over it like water over glass.

  Yes, it bypasses force and magic, but... why... oh.

  The realization was a cold spike. DELETE wasn't pure magic or pure physics. It was a fusion, a blasphemous combination of the two, a command written into reality itself. And the skeleton... the skeleton was a structure that existed outside that fusion. It was not subject to its laws. It was a relic from a different set of rules entirely.

  Clock stared at the empty rib cage, the hollow skull. Then what, exactly, was he regenerating from?

  The answer came to him with chilling, logical clarity.

  His brain.

  It was the seed. The source code. Protected within the one thing he could not destroy: the indestructible skull. As long as that single, vital organ remained safe within its unbreakable vault, it would be impossible to kill him. He would simply rebuild himself around it, again and again, an eternal, unkillable engine of war.

  The thought was a cold spike of clarity. The brain. If he couldn't break the vault, he could scramble the contents.

  In the timeless void, Clock's will became a needle. He focused his telekinesis, not on the graphite bone, but through it. He bypassed the unbreakable structure, aiming for the soft, vital tissue within. He tried to vibrate the brain into jelly. He tried to generate intense, focused heat to cook it inside its own casing. He tried to simply yank it out through the eye sockets and the foramen magnum.

  Nothing.

  The jade inscriptions etched into the graphite skeleton weren't just for show. They weren't merely structural. They were warding runes. His telekinetic probes didn't just fail; they slipped. They were deflected, scattered, and neutralized the moment they attempted to cross the boundary of the bone. The skull was not just a physical vault; it was a magical Faraday cage, perfectly protecting its precious cargo from any and all external manipulation, whether it was a continent-shattering punch or a microscopic telekinetic scalpel.

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  A flicker of genuine, icy despair threatened to seep into Clock's frozen heart. There was no brute-force solution. No clever workaround. He was staring at a perfect, self-replicating system.

  He had tested the only other obvious solution, and it had failed utterly.

  He had to find a different option. A more horrifying one. The micro-second ended. The stolen energy was spent.

  Time resumed.

  The skeleton, mid-pounce, lost all momentum. It clattered to the black sand in a heap of inert, jade-etched graphite. And even as it fell, spiderwebs of flesh and sinew were already beginning to spin themselves across the bones, weaving a new body from the impossible template protected within the skull.

  ///

  The skeleton began to knit itself back together, but this time, it was different. This wasn't mere regeneration; it was a metamorphosis. Clock could only watch, his mind racing at lightspeed, options flashing and dying like faulty circuitry.

  He couldn't run. A creature like this would hunt him across the globe. It would follow the scent of his magic, his fear, straight to the only people he had left. Mango, with her chaotic innocence. Butter, trapped and waiting for him. ...Winter.

  The thought of the legendary W-9 was like a key turning in a lock. He had studied her videos, the way she didn't just overpower her enemies, she dismantled them with an artist's cold precision. How did you kill the unkillable?

  The answer wasn't a bigger gun. It was a perversion of nature itself.

  If nothing can harm his bones from the outside...

  The thought was animalistic, horrifying, and perfect.

  ...maybe his own bones can.

  A feral, blood-stained grin split Clock's face. He reached up, not for a weapon, but to adjust the crown on his head, setting it at a deliberately arrogant angle. With a thought, he cranked the volume on his earbuds, the chaotic symphony of his favorite track screaming directly into his brain, a soundtrack for the coming blasphemy.

  "I have an idea," he whispered to the transforming horror before him.

  The transformation completed. Where Meteor had stood there was now an eight-foot-tall bear-like humanoid. It was a were-bear, a creature of myth forged from laboratory hell. Its skin was the rich, dark brown of fertile earth, covered in a layer of coarse fur. Muscles like ancient tree roots coiled beneath, and the same glowing green inscriptions now pulsed across its bestial form, burning with even greater power.

  But it was the eyes that revealed the true horror. The vibrant emerald was gone, swallowed by pools of absolute blackness. Now, they were pits of darkness with a single, malevolent green flame burning at their core, a flickering echo of the life that had been utterly consumed by the beast. It pointed one thick, clawed finger at Clock, its voice a guttural, wet promise that rumbled from a cavernous chest.

  "You. Die. Now."

  ///

  The ground didn’t just shake; it screamed. The ocean itself heaved, and from its depths, boulders the size of suburban houses erupted, tearing through the air with the sound of a continuous avalanche. They raced at Clock from all sides, a closing fist of solid earth.

  He became a whirlwind, his guitar a weapon of pure sonic defiance. He spun, and with every movement, blasts of amplified sound shot out, shattering the incoming projectiles into harmless gravel and dust that rained down around him.

  A flicker in the periphery—a distortion of light, a void in the chaos.

  Meteor had moved.

  Clock didn't wait to calculate the new, terrifying coefficient of strength which was moving towards the Vigintillion Newton range and far beyond range. He didn't try to track him. He simply reacted, booming into the sky in a desperate, vertical launch, leaving a vacuum in his wake.

  He shot up for miles, the air thinning, the shattered island shrinking to a smudge on the vast ocean. He scanned the landscape, his enhanced vision searching for the beast.

  The island was empty. His eyes widened.

  Two massive, earthen fists, closed around his torso from behind, pinning his arm to his sides. The grip was instantaneous, absolute, holding his skull like a nut in a nutcracker. There was no impact, no warning roar. He had leaped after him, the very enchantments on his bones silencing his approach, negating the sound and the shockwave of his passage. The theatrics were over.

  Meteor wasn't interested in testing Transport anymore. He was going to bypass it entirely, applying pressure so direct and constant that Clock would be crushed inside his own invulnerable shell.

  They fell.

  The sky became a blur. Clock, trapped in that vise-like grip, unleashed his will. Wave after wave of pure telekinetic force blasted out from him, a continuous, psychic shockwave meant to blast Meteor into the stratosphere.

  Meteor held tight. He grunted, his muscles coiling like mountain ranges, pushing against Clock's force with an effort that was both immense and casual. He was a cliff face weathering a hurricane. He brought his head forward, jaws unhinging to reveal that picket fence of bear-like teeth, aiming to simply bite Clock's head from his shoulders, Transport or not. The message was clear: your tricks are meaningless against absolute, primal power.

  ///

  The world dissolved in a silent, gut-wrenching lurch. The sky, the ocean, the sensation of falling—it all vanished, replaced by the hollow, fractured elegance of Clock’s pocket dimension. The sky was a ceiling of shattered mirrors, the ground an infinite chessboard. Here, the physics were his to write.

  Meteor’s bear-like form faltered for a nanosecond, the sudden change in reality disrupting his primal focus.

  It was all the opening Clock needed.

  With a thought, he didn’t push against Meteor’s grip. He inversed the vector of the force itself. The immense pressure Meteor was exerting to crush Clock’s frame was instantly reversed, turning inward on his own arms.

  KR-RRACK!

  The sound was like two ancient oaks snapping. Meteor’s own titanic strength blasted his arms apart, wrenching them away from Clock’s head in a violent, uncontrolled jerk.

  Clock didn’t float back. He dropped, his boots hitting the chessboard with a definitive click. The rage music in his ears became his tempo. He became a blur of motion that defied the very concept of inertia.

  He moved faster than acceleration, striking from three angles at once. His fingers, sheathed in telekinetic force, became spears that bypassed the orbital bone and pulped the dark, flame-filled pits of Meteor’s eyes. A piston-driven fist ignored the density of abdominal muscle, striking deep into his gut with the force of a depth charge. A force of one octillion Newtons. As Clock's fist withdrew from Meteor's stomach, it wasn't just blood that followed, but a spray of liquid life that was fundamentally wrong, a violent crimson, tinged with a luminous, poisonous green, like blood from a wound in the earth itself.

  Finally, a devastating jab, its power focused into a single, reality-warping point, connected with Meteor’s snout. Five octillion Newtons.The impact didn’t sound. It un-made sound.

  Then, with a contemptuous flick of his will, Clock expelled the beast. Meteor’s form was violently ejected from the pocket dimension, a cannonball of broken flesh and fury shot back into the real world.

  He crashed into the heart of the black-sand island. The impact wasn't a crash. It was a detonation.

  A silent, expanding sphere of pure force vaporized every tree, every rock, every contour of the land, leaving behind a perfectly smooth, glassy crater half a mile wide. The island, already shattered, now had a massive, smoldering bald spot, as if a god had pressed a thumb into its surface. At its epicenter, buried in superheated sand, was the steaming, regenerating form of Meteor Emeraldin.

  ///

  Clock immediately blurred towards him with a speed that put light to shame. He fired a Reverse-Impact Blast and then, in an act of impossible physics, plunged his fist into the devouring energy. He fused its properties with his punch, creating a strike that grew more powerful the farther it traveled, a paradox given form.

  He didn't waste a nanosecond. Meteor was stronger now, faster; Clock could feel the geokinetic rage building, an earthquake that would not just split the island but the very continent beneath it.

  Clock's hands, moving with stolen, impossible force, blasted into Meteor's torso with an escalated force of twenty decillion newtons. There was a wet, sickening crackle of parting cartilage and bone as he gripped and wrenched, ripping two of the unbreakable graphite ribs from the beast's chest.

  In a single, smooth motion—before the roar of agony could even leave Meteor's mouth—Clock reversed his grip and plunged the stolen bones, like divine daggers, up through the beast's jaw and into the base of its skull. With a final, concentrated surge of telekinetic will, he channeled a storm of destructive energy through the ribs, using his own indestructible bones as a perfect conductor.

  The force erupted inside Meteor's cranial vault, turning his brain to liquid.

  But a body with a dead brain can still have a final, synaptic reflex.

  Meteor's arm lashed out. The claws, moving with a speed and force hundreds of times greater than anything before, carried a final, vengeful imperative.

  They passed through Clock's waist not like a blade through flesh, but like an eraser over a line, imposing the concept of severance directly onto his existence.

  They both fell to the glassy, cratered ground.

  Meteor was human again, his transformation undone, the two jade-etched ribs protruding gruesomely from his skull. Clock was in two pieces, his torso separated from his legs, his life bleeding out onto the hot sand.

  He thought of Eclipse, her own body severed by his hand. He coughed, a spray of blood painting the air.

  "Karma," he rasped, a final, wry observation, "really is a bitch."

  An impossible pain, a cold, clean severance that transcended nerve endings, shot through his very being. For a single, horrifying second, Clock existed as two separate entities, his mind screaming at the violation of its own unity. The world tilted, his vision graying at the edges as he collapsed.

  And in that white-hot void of agony, a single, bizarrely clinical thought surfaced.

  How... how is Eclipse not screaming her lungs out?

  He had erased half of her. He had felt this same fundamental unmaking, this schism of the self. Yet her voice, when she spoke, had been one of mythic awe, not mind-shattering pain.

  Then, his gaze, blurring with the onset of dissolution, fell upon Meteor's corpse—the human boy with his own ribs driven through his brain. The memory of the fight flashed: the city-vaporizing punch, the DELETE beam, the burst organs, the pulped eyes. An endless cascade of brutality that would have atomized a normal psyche.

  And he never cried out. Not once.

  The realization was a different kind of blow. His own pain was a nova, blinding and finite. Theirs was a constant, burning star. What unimaginable pain tolerance had Isolde engineered into them? What horrors had they been built to endure without flinching?

  For the first time, a sliver of something that wasn't fear or hatred—but a grim, horrified respect—pierced through Clock's ego. These weren't just monsters. They were masterworks of suffering.

  But then, another thought, cold and sharp as the claws that had cut him, cut through the agony.

  The severance.

  The claws hadn't carried force. They hadn't triggered Transport. They had simply... passed through. As if his body, his magic, his very existence, were irrelevant. The concept was all that mattered.

  He could have done this from the very beginning.

  The claws didn't just ignore physics; they ignored defenses. Magical, physical, it didn't matter. Transport, his ultimate shield, was a magical effect. It was useless against a weapon that simply enforced the state of "being cut." Meteor hadn't needed to build up force, to test its limits, to punch him into the sky. The first, casual swipe of his hand could have ended this. He could have bisected Clock in the first second of their fight without even breaking a sweat.

  A bloody, pained grin spread across Clock's face. A final, dark laugh bubbled up from his ruined torso.

  He wasn't a genius.

  The most powerful, unkillable creature he had ever faced, and it had never even occurred to him to use his greatest weapon with any finesse.

  All that power, and the strategic depth of a hammer.

  Otherwise, I would have died in the first second.

  Then the thought was gone, and so was he. But in the space between dissolution and nothingness, a final, chilling series of connections fired in his dying mind.

  Why? Why send them now? Is this her clean-up? Her final solution after Niiilam failed?

  Isolde was never straightforward. There was always a deeper design.

  A memory, sharp and unbidden: a shard of a reflection, glimpsed in the sky-mirror of his own pocket dimension a second ago. A fleeting anomaly he’d dismissed as cosmic static.

  The confirmation detonated in his mind. Seven years ago.

  The truth was more horrifying than he had imagined. It meant Eclipse and Meteor were not just weapons. They were children. Mentally seven years old, their consciousnesses trapped in lab-grown, battle-hardened bodies, just like Mango.

  Gods with the minds of toddlers, given the power to unmake worlds.

  He gulped, a phantom action in his vanishing form. How many more did she have?

  She had perfected the formula. She wasn't just using God Essence; she was synthesizing it. Creating it from scratch. An infinite army, an endless production line of unkillable monsters, was not just possible, it was inevitable.

  The last of Clock's consciousness solidified around a single, cold, absolute resolution.

  Isolde had to die. It was a necessity. She was far too dangerous, far too intelligent, to be left alive.

  Then, he was gone. He dissolved. Not into blood and viscera, but into shimmering, fading motes of light.

  Now, with two clones destroyed, only one-third of his power and consciousness remained to save Butter. The cost of victory had never been higher.