The ancient relic hissed as it carved a thin line through the atmospheric pressure. Prime Ben shifted his posture, his skeletal visage tracking the cold luminescence of the blade.
"The weapon... its historical matrix isn't in the active archive," the commander noted, his tone dropping its casual weight as his movements became deliberate. His pale purple eyes flared, a secondary wave of localized illusionary energy rippling outward to reconstruct the mental cage, attempting to isolate Tyler Levison within a loop of shifting memories.
Tyler didn't pause to let the framework settle. He leveled the God Sword of Ek Chuah, his central tentacle tightening around the hilt as he drove the edge forward in a clean, vertical slash.
The mystical edge split the psychic pressure, cleaving through the layers of the false environment until the metallic city snapped back into sharp focus.
"What?!" Prime Ben's form wavered, his serious expression fracturing into genuine surprise as he glided back across the deck.
"The diagnostic changes now," Tyler's voice emerged from the Void-Wraith's chest, a low, wet rumble that carried no human inflection.
He moved with an unhinged, mechanical efficiency, the silver blade whistling through the air as he launched a relentless, heavy offensive. The baseline stats of the Carnitrix frame forced Prime Ben into a defensive crouch, his obsidian claws locking onto the incoming strikes to parry the kinetic force. He was entirely stripped of his window to counterattack.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
The edge of the sword rattled against Prime Ben's armored ribcage, but the commander's combat discipline held. He absorbed the shock through his joints, his posture remaining rigid despite the continuous barrage.
The struggle stretched into a cold war of attrition.
Ten minutes passed without a break in the cadence.
Twenty minutes.
Twenty-nine minutes.
The arena became a loop of automated violence—one titan maintaining a feral, heavy assault while the other systematically redirected the kinetic output, both waiting for the structural breakdown of the other's willpower. Yet neither could secure the decisive leverage to end the sequence.
"It's been a considerable interval since an opponent forced me to run the clock down to the threshold, Ben," Tyler said, his hollow voice carrying a sharp, bitter edge as his tentacles flexed.
Prime Ben exhaled a breath of cold fog, a hint of professional regret visible in his posture. "Is that the limitation of an unaligned watch? A hard timer on the active registry? That's an unfortunate flaw. I was hoping to see how well your frame holds together in the deep layers."
To him, a timer meant survival. If he could outlast the form, the younger user would drop back to a baseline human, ending the exercise before a true defeat could be recorded on his ledger.
BIU—BIU—
The jagged red icon on Tyler's chest began to pulse with a rapid, frantic chime, the organic filaments of the watch twitching as the energy levels bottomed out.
Prime Ben lowered his guard slightly, his limbs relaxing as he prepared for the de-transformation sequence to resolve. The match was over.
"There aren't any civilian observers within a five-mile radius, correct?" Tyler asked softly.
"The sector is entirely evacuated. Why?"
A dark, jagged smile parted Tyler's needle-teeth, his vertical eyes widening with a sudden, clinical malice. "Nothing. I merely wanted to clarify that during the first interval, I was only utilizing my own familiarity with the form."
"Now, the core is taking the wheel."
WHAM.
Tyler drove his palm down onto the pulsing red casing, forcing an absolute system override that shattered the timer.
A torrent of deep crimson light erupted from his wrist like a geyser, piercing the skyways and turning the horizon a violent shade of violet.
Prime Ben's composure shattered. A heavy, instinctual alarm bell rang through his mind as he caught the sudden shift in the air. The presence before him didn't smell like an alien baseline anymore; it carried a dense, unmitigated intent to slaughter—a frequency of pure bloodlust that eclipsed the psychological weight of warlords like Vilgax or the apex anomalies of his own universe.
"Hehe..."
The crimson fog parted, revealing Tyler's unhinged, manic smile. He took a deep, shuddering breath, his nervous system absorbing the raw adrenaline of the system's core logic.
His focus didn't just reset; it burned with a feral urge to dismantle the commander completely.
"The structural values remain identical," Prime Ben noted, adjusting his stance as he analyzed Tyler's physical dimensions. "The expression is non-standard, but the energy displacement hasn't increased. The muscle mass is the same."
The baseline stats of the Ghostfreak variant hadn't expanded. It was still the same two-meter frame. There was no mathematical reason to hesitate.
"Let's see if your head stays clear when I make you smile too," Tyler growled.
With a sharp, guttural roar, his tentacles extended like iron lances, striking the platform with enough force to splinter the metal as his body shot forward in a blind, supersonic charge.
The two phantoms collided mid-air.
BANG!
The impact caught Prime Ben off guard, his head snapping back as his torso was thrown into a dangerous, uncomfortable tilt. The acceleration... it's doubling the baseline threshold!
WHOOSH!
Tyler didn't give him a single heartbeat to correct his center of gravity. He ignored the feedback in his own joints, his tentacles moving in a chaotic, high-speed blur that slammed into the commander's frame from every conceivable angle, the God Sword of Ek Chuah cutting a lethal arc through the center.
He was no longer conserving his reserves. In the first phase, Tyler had balanced his output to maintain a defensive buffer. Now, under the control of the Error-Killing Consciousness, he was fighting like a machine designed solely for destruction.
"Gah!" Prime Ben gritted his teeth against the white-hot pain blooming across his armored torso, his eyes flaring with an iridescent sheen. "If you won't protect your blind spots, I'll end this with a sensory collapse!"
The moment his vision locked onto the target to trigger the illusion—
Tyler's head snapped upward, his tracking parameters predicting the psychic spike before the energy could leave the commander's mind. He unleashed a counter-illusion instantly.
The two mental fields collided invisibly in the space between them, the opposing frequencies canceling each other out in a silent spray of spatial static.
Prime Ben's breath hitched, a sudden chill running down his spine as his tactical calculations failed. He didn't just break the technique... he read the neural pulse before the action materialized. That's impossible.
To test the hypothesis, the commander subtly flicked his tail, catching a heavy piece of iron debris from the deck and launching it toward Tyler's blind spot without shifting his gaze.
Tyler's eyes remained fixed on Prime Ben, his mind continuous outputting a secondary wave of mental interference. Yet, his upper torso shifted an inch to the left with smooth, effortless precision, letting the iron chunk whistle past his ear without touching a single hair.
The tracking was flawless. The Error-Killing Consciousness allowed him to process every physical and mental vector within the environment simultaneously.
"How am I supposed to map a script that adapts before the pen touches the paper?" Prime Ben muttered, his jaw tightening.
BOOM!
A concussive roar echoed from Tyler's maw. His jaws split wide, gathering a massive reserve of deep purple laser energy while his eyes continued to cycle the iridescent sheen of the illusion field. His tentacles maintained the physical assault without a single drop in velocity.
He was deploying every attributes of the Void-Wraith at the exact same moment.
A standard user had to cycle through their abilities, shifting focus from mental manipulation to physical strikes to energy output. But with the watch's unhinged code unsealed, Tyler operated as a singular, unified platform of lethal parameters.
"I can't parry this," the commander realized, his mind throwing out ten different defensive matrixes only to discard them instantly. His claws were occupied with the sword, his own mind was fighting off the illusion, and he had no structural mass left to block the central trajectory.
BOOM!
A pressurized, deep purple energy wave erupted from Tyler's maw, striking Prime Ben's chest at point-blank range.
The force was absolute. The commander was launched from the deck like a stone from a mortar, his frame twisting as the radioactive heat cooked his outer plating.
"ARGH!!"
The laser wave carried him deep into the upper skyways, the concussive detonation splitting the clouds in a dazzling display of violet light that illuminated the skyscrapers like artificial fireworks.
"Hehe... I always hated the ones who think they can out-think the hardware," Tyler rasped, his chest plate venting a thin stream of purple exhaust. "With the error unsealed, the math and the muscle belong to me."
He didn't feel the strain. His nervous system was numb to the feedback.
WHOOSH.
High above the clouds, a brilliant green light flared.
"A shift in parameters," Tyler's smile widened, his needle-teeth glinting as his tracking registered the new frequency. "The displacement... you went for the Kinecelere-Slayer."
He spun on his heel, his eyes locking onto the space behind him before the sonic boom could even register.
CRASH!
Prime Ben, currently scaled into the sleek, blue-armored frame of The Kinecelere-Slayer (XLR8), hit the metal deck at terminal velocity, his wheels skidding through the sand and scrap as he lost his balance, tumbling to the ground.
He looked up, his predatory visor lifting to reveal a look of genuine, creeping terror as his eyes met Tyler's gaze.
The boy hadn't just predicted the vector; he was already waiting for him to land. The speed of that rotation was unnatural—it was the movement of an executioner who had already mapped his death.