Chronus displaced.
Slower than before.
The temporal halt was consuming the mana he'd been using to maintain his displacement speed — not replacing it with something equivalent, just requiring the same mana to maintain while the halt itself was running, the two operations competing for the same reserve.
He still displaced. But the window between Satou's movement initiation and Chronus's position change was measurably wider than it had been in the fight's first phase.
The strike caught his left side.
Not the arm this time — the ribcage. The specific impact of existence erasure meeting temporal architecture at the point where Chronus's physical form interfaced with the field he was generating, the void-black eating a two-inch section of what was adjacent to where the temporal field generation was densest in his body.
