The moment the sky stopped shaking, Adam moved.
Not forward. Not back.
Inward.
His body stilled midair, eyes closed, as if listening to a song only he could hear. The void around him quivered, then broke apart in thin fractures of silver. From each split stepped another Adam. Not illusions. Not shadows. Twelve of them, each carrying a sliver of his will.
They spread out across the broken plane, forming a wide arc around the forge, the drifting relics, and the two figures waiting at the center—Veylor, and the Construct.
Every clone burned with a faintly different rhythm. One vibrated with temporal threads, another with pure probability. A third barely moved, its presence bent toward entropy itself. None were complete, but together they made a net. A mind stretched across twelve bodies.
Adam stayed in the center, the conductor of his own orchestra.
