The city screamed.
It wasn't the wind, or the groaning of ancient stone it was the city itself, alive in its death, remembering every moment of ruin and forcing those memories into sound.
Kael gritted his teeth as the wailing pierced his mind, each echo dragging him backward visions of this world's final days playing across his thoughts. Fires raining from broken skies. Families turned to ash. A monarch begging a god that never answered.
"Kael!" Lyra's voice cut through the madness, grounding him. "They're coming again harder this time!"
The Timewalkers were reforming. Their mirrored masks glinted with the memories they'd stolen, and with every attack, they grew faster more precise. They weren't just fighting bodies. They were fighting a timeline trying to rewrite itself.
Kael rose, eyes black with silver lightning. "Then it's time we change the narrative."
He launched forward, abyssal wings tearing through the air. A hundred shadows followed in his wake his army of darkness, loyal, unyielding. They struck in unison, but each Timewalker dodged as if they'd already seen the outcome.
"They're learning," Valen warned. "Adapting."
"I know," Kael growled. "That's why we stop playing by their rules."
He slammed both hands into the fractured skystone platform beneath them, channeling his abyssal essence deep into the realm's temporal spine the ancient web of time that bound everything here. The effect was immediate:
The world shuddered.
Time itself hiccuped.
The Timewalkers, reliant on perfect precognition, staggered as the flow of causality fractured. Their movements became erratic, vulnerable.
Kael wasted no time. He surged forward and ripped through the first mask with a blade of pure abyss. Behind it, instead of a face, was a scream a soul fragmented by centuries of repetition.
But now, it was free.
One by one, the others fell each death an unraveling of a paradox, each kill a healing of the world's broken timeline.
When the last Timewalker was severed from its loop, the city breathed. The winds calmed. The ash softened.
Kael dropped to one knee, breath heavy, power humming in his veins like a storm caged behind skin. The sky above shifted from violet to a bruised blue the first step toward healing.
Valen approached, placing a hand on Kael's shoulder. "You didn't just kill them. You rewrote them."
"I gave them an ending," Kael said quietly. "So this world could begin again."
A low hum vibrated in the distance. The core of the corruption the thing that had fed the Timewalkers, that had torn this world apart—was stirring.
Lyra narrowed her eyes. "That wasn't the final boss, was it?"
Kael rose slowly, abyssal crown flickering above his head like a flame caught in a void. "No," he said. "That was the past clinging to power."
He turned toward the heart of the city, where the true enemy waited beneath layers of forgotten time.
"And now we face the one who taught time how to break."