Patience was a worn blade, and Lyra's was razor thin.
She held her position in the alley, her eyes locked on the sewer entrance. Kaelen had vanished inside minutes ago, but to her, it felt like an eternity. The subtle hum of "wrongness" emanating from that hole had intensified. It was now a palpable pressure in the air, a dissonance that made her teeth ache.
She trusted Kaelen's intellect. She'd seen him open an arcane lock with a word. But this was different. He hadn't gone to solve a puzzle. He had gone to fight a hiccup in time itself.
Her strength, her sword, her combat experience—they were all useless against such a foe. She felt like a sentry guarding a door while her commander waged a war on a different plane of existence.
Her helplessness was a poison. Her emotional state was simple: she was afraid for him.
Suddenly, the Ouroboros symbol on the grate flared with a blinding light. Cracks of energy sizzled across it.
With a sound like a thousand panes of glass shattering at once, the symbol imploded into nothing. The pressure in the air increased tenfold.
A low, guttural groan emanated from the tunnel, the sound of stone and time being twisted beyond their breaking point.
Lyra drew her sword, the steel gleaming coldly in the gloom. Her body was coiled tight. She was ready to fight.
But nothing emerged. The tunnel remained dark. The threat was invisible, a force crushing reality itself within.
Then, something bizarre happened.
A small, egg-sized stone materialized in mid-air, a meter from the sewer entrance. It floated, hovering in space. It pulsed with a violent internal light, like a furious heart.
Lyra recognized it. It was the artifact from the deal in the sewer. The Runic Stabilizer. Kaelen had it.
Why was it out here? Its appearance made no sense. Was it a trick? A distraction?
Lyra's mind, trained for combat tactics, could find no logic. Her enemy's actions were incomprehensible.
The distortion in the tunnel reached a crescendo. The very air seemed to ripple. Lyra raised her sword, bracing for the impact, for the wave of energy that would surely erupt from that portal of chaos.
She expected a monster. She expected an explosion.
She did not expect the silence that followed.
The groaning stopped. The pressure vanished. The air fell still.
The tunnel was dark and quiet. The artifact hovered.
And Kaelen… Kaelen was nowhere to be seen.
(Point of View: Kaelen)
Terror was a physical force. Kaelen felt his bones creak under the pressure of the collapsing reality. The Hunter didn't need to touch him. It was simply clenching its fist, and the universe around Kaelen obeyed, crushing him.
[WARNING] Physical Integrity: 78%... 72%... 65%...
His death was being calculated in real-time.
His initial plan had failed. He had the artifact, but he had underestimated the fury of its keeper. Panic screamed at him to do something, anything. Edit the Hunter. Edit the space. But he knew he lacked the power. His Entropy was already dangerously high. Such a massive edit would overload him and make him an even bigger target.
His goal was not to survive the game. It was to start controlling the board.
It was that thought, an echo of his new determination, that cut through the panic. He was an archivist. His weapon wasn't power. It was logic. He analyzed the situation with cold clarity.
The Hunter wanted the Runic Stabilizer. The Stabilizer contained the loop's energy, which the Hunter coveted. The predator's full attention was focused on Kaelen because he held the prize. The Hunter's plan was simple: crush Kaelen, take the artifact.
Kaelen's solution, therefore, had to be equally simple. He had to separate the prize from the target. He had to give the Hunter a choice.
He focused his mind, ignoring the crushing pain. He accessed his Edit ability, but aimed it not at his enemy or the environment. He aimed it at the object in his hand.
He formulated the most audacious command of his life.
[user.kaelen] Initiate command: [transfer_object_coordinates]. Target: [Dwarven Runic Stabilizer]. Destination Vector: [Relative Coordinates: Z+15 meters].
He was telling the System to move the artifact fifteen meters along the Z-axis—straight out of the tunnel and into the alley where Lyra waited.
[system.kernel] MAXIMUM WARNING: Coordinate editing of an object across a temporal anomaly barrier is a high-severity protocol violation. Extreme Entropy cost imminent.
His plan was insane. Its execution was an immense risk. Kaelen didn't hesitate. Confirm.
[Entropy Generation: 5.0%. Total Entropy Level: 12.5%] [WARNING] Entropy Level exceeds stability threshold. User data corruption imminent.
The pain in his mind was blinding. It was like lightning striking the inside of his skull. For a second, his vision dissolved into red static. But through the agony, he felt the Runic Stabilizer vanish from his hand.
It had worked.
Instantly, the crushing pressure on his body lessened by ninety percent.
The Hunter, its form a tear in space, turned. Its "attention" shifted from inside the tunnel to outside. It sensed its meal escaping. Its fury, once focused on Kaelen, now beat against the barrier of the collapsing loop, trying to reach the artifact that was now beyond its grasp.
The predator was trapped in its own snare. Its greed had made it a prisoner.
Kaelen had his window. Mere seconds.
He couldn't go back through the entrance. The Hunter blocked the path. He needed another exit. He scanned the code of the disintegrating environment. The walls, the floor, the ceiling—all of it was fraying. But amidst the chaos, he saw it.
A secondary sewer pipe, its structure almost completely erased. A dead end in the real world, but in the world of code, it was a corrupted data link. A back door.
He didn't have time for a complex command. He needed brute force.
[user.kaelen] Initiate command: [delete_variable]. Target: [Structural Integrity: Secondary Drainage Pipe].
The system didn't even issue a warning. His Entropy was already so high, a small edit like this was a drop in the ocean. The pipe in front of him simply ceased to exist.
Where there had been stone and metal, there was now a black hole, a portal into a space of visual noise and auditory static. It was the System's backend, the raw space between the lines of code.
Kaelen didn't think twice. He threw himself into the hole.
Behind him, he heard a roar of pure fury that was made not of sound, but of tearing time. The temporal loop collapsed in on itself, sealing the Paradox Hunter within.
Kaelen hadn't defeated it. He had tricked it. He had imprisoned it. He had used the predator's own greed against it.
He was falling. Plummeting through an ocean of raw data. Impossible shapes and colors streamed past him. The sound was of a million voices speaking at once, but with no words. It was the pure language of the System.
He had escaped.
But his relief was short-lived. His Read showed his own status.
User Status: CRITICAL Entropy Level: DANGEROUS (Cascading Corruption Active)
He was dying. His own code was being corrupted by the Entropy he had generated.
Then, a new notification appeared, this one with the cold, final authority of the System kernel itself.
[system.kernel] WARNING: Unauthorized access to System 'backend' detected. [system.kernel] Initiating emergency sanitation protocol. [system.kernel] Your entity will be purged from existence in T-60 seconds.
He had escaped the prison of time only to land on a digital death row.
And the clock was ticking.