The darkness moved again.
Not forward.
Around him.
Orion felt it immediately—not through sight, but through distortion. Space bent subtly,
unevenly, like pressure applied from multiple angles at once. His mana sense flared uselessly
for a fraction of a second, then stabilized as Protocol filtered the noise away.
This wasn't stealth.
This thing wasn't hiding.
It simply didn't care about being perceived.
Temporal Locus locked on.
The thread of presence was unmistakable now—thick, tangled, and wrong. Unlike normal
creatures whose temporal signatures flowed in clean continuity, this one's presence was
layered, overlapping, as though several existences were stacked on top of one another and
forced to move as one.
An abomination.
Orion exhaled slowly and let go of conventional sight entirely.
Vision was meaningless here.
The darkness wasn't just an absence of light—it swallowed illumination, bent it, consumed it.
