The monstrosity's eye fired. The blast was a concentrated beam of energy, a searing purple-black lance that tore through the air with a sound like a thousand mirrors shattering at once.
The impact was so violent that the mud beneath Elara's feet turned to glass in a split second, and the resulting shockwave sent a curtain of dust and violet static roaring across the courtyard.
Elara braced for the end. She squeezed her eyes shut, her stone arms unable to even raise her shield higher. She felt the heat—a dry, unnatural heat that smelled of ozone—but the pain never came.
When the dust settled, the silence was deafening.
Elara opened her eyes. Quinn stood directly in front of her, his back straight, his legs braced in the scorched mud. His right hand was outstretched, palm toward the monster. Hovering just inches from his skin was a small, hexagonal shield no larger than a dinner plate.
It was vibrating with such intensity that it emitted a low, screaming hum.
The blast had been caught.
Quinn's scowl was the only thing that broke his calm mask. He stood there for a heartbeat, his grey eyes narrowed in a look of profound annoyance. Then, he flicked his hand, and the remains of the purple energy dissipated into harmless sparks.
'Damn it,' Quinn thought, his mind racing through the "Paradox Logic" calculations.
'I tried to freeze the internal clock of the projectile, but the density of the Void energy was too high. I had to catch the kinetic energy instead. That just cost me three minutes of physical stability.'
He lowered his hand. His sleeve was burnt away to the elbow, revealing his palm that was scorched red. But worse than the burn were the jagged, grey stone-like scales creeping up his fingers. Temporal Rot.
"Paradox..." Elara whispered, staring at his arm.
"Don't speak," Quinn snapped, his voice tight. "I need to focus now."
The monstrosity didn't wait for a conversation. It let out a high-pitched roar that rattled the stone walls and began to gather energy for a second strike. Its multiple glass limbs scraped against the courtyard floor, preparing to lunge.
"It is too strong," Elara grunted, her teeth gritted as the stone numbness reached her shoulders.
"You cannot tank another strike like that."
"I don't intend to," Quinn replied. He adjusted his stance, ignoring the burning pain in his hand. He gripped his silver cane with his left hand, the mercury light at its head pulsing rhythmically.
"I tried to play by its rules. Now, I'm going to change the board."
The creature lunged, its massive glass body moving with terrifying speed.
Quinn didn't aim for the monster. He pointed his cane at the ground directly beneath its front limbs.
"Flux Logic: Accelerated Decay."
A ripple of golden energy hit the ancient Roman paving stones. In the span of a second, two thousand years of weathering were compressed into a heartbeat. The solid stone didn't just crack; it disintegrated into fine, shifting sand.
The monstrosity, caught mid-leap, found no purchase. Its front limbs plunged into the sand, and its massive momentum sent its hindquarters flying upward. It began a clumsy, violent somersault.
Quinn didn't waste a breath. He stepped forward, his eyes tracking a single piece of masonry that had been kicked into the air by the monster's struggle, a jagged chunk of a marble pillar.
He tapped the air with his cane.
"Echo Lock: Absolute Coordinates."
The piece of marble didn't fall. It stopped dead in mid-air, frozen in time and space as if it were part of the very foundation of the universe.
The monstrosity, still tumbling forward at high speed, couldn't stop. Its central eye collided directly with the frozen marble shard. Because the shard was "Locked" and immovable, it acted like an indestructible diamond drill.
The monster basically impaled itself on a stationary object.
With a sound like a crystal cathedral collapsing, the monstrosity shattered. A million shards of glass rained down across the courtyard, dissolving into grey mist before they even hit the mud.
Quinn exhaled, a thin trail of steam escaping his lips. He checked his watch. 00:10:12. He looked down at his scorched hand; the grey scales had moved another inch up his arm.
Quinn turned back to Elara. She was still a statue, her arms cold, grey marble, her body fused to the bronze scutum.
The "boy" she had tried to save was gone, vanished the moment the monstrosity died, leaving only a patch of scorched mud behind.
"He... he wasn't real," Elara said, her voice hollow.
"I told you. A lure," Quinn said, walking over to her. He didn't look triumphant; he looked like a man who had just finished a very long, very frustrating day at the office. He knelt in the mud beside her, ignoring the way his "Weight" made the ground crack beneath his knees.
"Your arms," he noted, his voice softening just a fraction. "The Kinetic Feedback grounded itself in your cells. If I don't pull it out now, the stone will reach your heart in ten minutes."
"How?" Elara asked. "Even your magic has limits out here."
"It's not magic, Centurion. It's an exchange," Quinn said. He reached out with his scorched, scale-covered right hand and placed it firmly over her marble-cold forearm.
"System Sync: Entropy Reversal."
Elara gasped. She felt a sensation like a thousand needles pricking her skin, followed by a sudden, rushing warmth. The grey stone began to recede, the marble texture dissolving back into tanned, living flesh. She could feel her fingers again. She could feel the rain.
But as the stone left her, it had to go somewhere.
Elara watched in horror as the grey calcification traveled up Quinn's arm. His fingers turned to stone. Then his wrist. Then his forearm, all the way to the elbow.
His scorched skin was replaced by the same cold, dead marble that had just imprisoned her.
"Paradox! Stop!" she said, trying to pull her hand away.
"Stay still," he commanded, his jaw clenched so hard a muscle jumped in his cheek. He didn't let go until the last bit of stone was gone from her body.
When he finally pulled away, his right arm was a heavy, lifeless limb of grey rock. He had to use his left hand to lift it and tuck it into the pocket of his trench coat.
"Why?" Elara whispered, standing up and reaching out to touch the stone sleeve of his coat.
"You've crippled yourself for a ghost. For me."
"Don't be sentimental, Centurion," Quinn said, his voice tight with suppressed pain. He stood up, though he was visibly lopsided now.
"A tank who can't move is a paperweight. I'm just shifting the weight to the person who can afford it... barely."
"But your hand—"
"Is a temporary tax," Quinn interrupted, checking his watch with his left hand. 00:11:45. "Every time I force a change in the script—like keeping you alive—the universe sends a bill. Temporal Rot is just the universe's way of deleting what shouldn't be here. By saving you, I'm taking your 'erasure' onto myself. Now, if you're done mourning my manicure, we have a Standard to fetch."
They entered the Principia with a sense of grim urgency. The interior of the command center was a tomb of flickering light. The air was so thick with pressure that Quinn was forced to lean on Elara's shoulder just to keep moving. Every breath felt like inhaling wet wool.
"There," Elara breathed.
In the center of the room, standing on a raised stone dais, was the Standard of the Ninth.
It was a magnificent bronze eagle, its wings spread in defiance, but it wasn't just metal anymore. It was humming with a blinding, white-hot intensity. Swirling around the eagle were thousands of tiny, glowing sparks, the "bits" of the five thousand men who had been erased. The Standard was acting as a lightning rod, holding the last remnants of the Legion's soul.
"The Standard," Elara whispered, her hand trembling.
"It's... it's beautiful."
"It's a battery," Quinn corrected, though even his cynical voice held a note of awe.
"That relic contains the collective 'Existence' of your entire Legion. If we take it, we can power the Archive's defenses for a century. It's also the only thing that will stabilize my arm once we get back."
Elara stepped toward it, but she hesitated.
"If I take it... the fort... my men..."
"They're already gone, Elara," Quinn said softly, his mercury eyes reflecting the white light of the eagle.
"The Standard is the only part of them that's still 'real.' If you leave it here, Aethelgard will eat it, and they'll be forgotten forever. If you take it, they live on in the Archive. As a foundation."
Elara looked at the eagle, then back at the man who had turned his arm to stone to keep her standing. She reached out and grasped the cold bronze staff.
The moment her fingers closed around the metal, the world screamed.
A wave of pure white energy detonated from the Standard. The flickering soldiers in the courtyard outside vanished instantly.
The stone walls of the Principia began to dissolve into grey pixels, falling away like ash in a windstorm.
"Go!" Quinn roared over the sound of the collapsing timeline.
They ran.
Floors turned to mist beneath their feet. The sky above was no longer grey; it was a yawning, black void filled with the hum of the End.
Elara carried the Standard in one hand and her shield in the other, her heart pounding against her ribs. Quinn was a half-step behind her, his stone arm swinging dead at his side, his face pale with the effort of maintaining the "Archive Door" against the tidal wave of Static.
"There! The rift!" Quinn shouted, pointing his cane.
The doorway to the Archive was flickering like a dying lightbulb, barely ten feet away. But between them and the door, the floor was simply... gone. A twenty-foot gap of pure "Nothingness" had opened up.
"Jump!" Quinn commanded.
"With you?" Elara asked, looking at his lopsided frame.
"I'll catch the momentum! Just jump!"
Elara didn't hesitate. She grabbed Quinn's good arm, tucked the Standard under her shoulder, and leaped.
For a terrifying second, they were suspended in the Void. Elara felt the coldness of non-existence licking at her boots. Then, Quinn snapped his fingers—a sound that echoed like a gunshot in the vacuum.
"Spatial Swap: Asset Priority."
In a blur of blue light, their positions shifted. They didn't fall into the pit; they were "pulled" toward the door as if by an invisible bungee cord.
They tumbled through the rift, crashing onto a soft, crimson rug of the Paradox Archive entrance.
The heavy oak door slammed shut behind them with a definitive thud.
The silence of the antique shop was absolute. No wind. No void-monsters.
Only the smell of old books and the steady, comforting tick-tock of a hundred normal clocks.
Quinn lay on his back, staring at the ceiling, his chest heaving. He slowly lifted his left hand and looked at his pocket watch.
00:00:04.
"Four seconds," he rasped, a weak, arrogant smirk playing on his lips.
"Practically a vacation."
Elara sat up, clutching the Bronze Eagle to her chest. She looked at Quinn, then at his right arm, still solid, grey stone.
"You're a madman, Quinn Paradox," she said, her voice shaking with a mix of fury and relief.
"Maybe," Quinn said, closing his eyes as the shop's "Safe Zone" began to hum, drawing the Standard's energy to begin the long process of healing.
"But I'm a madman with a 5-star Vanguard. Now... put that eagle on the mantle. It's been a long day."