CHAPTER 29
The moment Orion plunged into the collapsing heart of the Era-Eater, the world lost all shape.
Up became sideways.
Sideways became a memory.
Down turned into a past that was never written.
He did not fall through space.
He fell through erased time.
The void around him rippled like tar made of broken seconds. Fragments of years—dead, forgotten, stolen—floated past him as drifting silver sheets. They contained battles that never happened, cities that never existed, lives that were undone without witnesses.
Every fragment was cold.
Every fragment whispered nothingness.
And every fragment bent toward the Era-Eater's pulsing core.
It looked almost peaceful up close.
A dark star with a heartbeat.
A black sun rotating in slow, impossible spirals, shrinking and expanding like a lung breathing in collapsed futures. Every pulse pushed Orion backward. Every contraction threatened to absorb him, flatten him, blend him into the ocean of devoured time.
But he stepped forward.
His wings opened—not violently, not grandly, but slowly, with a quiet pressure that made the erased timelines shudder.
The six Space wings on his left hum with gravitational distortion, tearing open microscopic void tunnels with every flutter.
The six Time wings on his right glow with golden chronal runes, forming infinite circles of refracted seconds that layered around his body.
The Era-Eater reacted instantly.
Its darkness warped, erupting into thin lance-like tendrils that shot toward him.
They weren't attacks.
They were deletion lines—cuts aimed to erase him from existence entirely.
Orion's right eye flickered.
A timeline split.
He moved a second before the lances were even born.
They missed.
He snapped his claws in a single, fluid gesture.
"Paradox Rend."
A shimmering black-white arc carved through the void.
The tendrils disintegrated, turning into dust made of fractured moments.
The Era-Eater pulsed harder, its body thrashing like a living singularity.
The cavern of erased time warped, then inverted.
The creature's core stretched its shadow outward, forming a massive spiral maw—a whirlpool of devoured reality—aiming to swallow Orion whole.
The pull was unreal.
It wasn't suction.
It wasn't gravity.
It was fate being rewritten to drag him in.
Orion's foot slid back.
His wings flared.
Cosmic force burst from beneath his feet, cracking the erased ground beneath him—even though it wasn't really ground, merely the concept of floor the monster held in place.
"Pulling me into your stomach again?" Orion muttered. "You really don't learn."
His left eye—the Eye of Space—rotated, its galaxy pupil swirling faster.
The spiraling maw ahead began to warp…
bend…
stretch…
then fold in on itself.
Orion folded the monster's own space.
With a flick of his finger, he snapped the spiral closed with a loud, impossible click.
The devouring pull vanished.
The Era-Eater lunged.
Not physically.
But with an attack that hit deeper:
It tried to erase his wings.
Shadow-hands of lost time gripped the feathers of his Space wings, trying to pull them out of existence. Meanwhile, thin lines of retrograde seconds wrapped around his Time wings like chains, trying to freeze them back into infancy.
Orion's body spasmed.
For a brief moment, he saw a terrifying sight—
his wings beginning to fade.
But then—
He exhaled.
His pupils narrowed.
"Trying to take my wings? Wrong lifetime."
His twelve wings detonated in pure force.
The explosion wasn't sound.
It wasn't light.
It was conceptual rejection, the very nature of space and time refusing to be rewritten.
The creature recoiled.
Its core shook violently, fragments of stolen years spilling out like shattered glass.
Orion didn't waste the opening.
He shot upward, wings trailing cosmic crescents behind him.
Then he descended, claws blazing with eclipse energy.
The Era-Eater reacted too late.
Orion tore into the creature's surface—
not slicing,
not punching,
but unwriting the void-skin with his claws.
Silver and black eclipse-light poured from the wound.
The void-mass spasmed.
But it didn't die.
Instead, its form compacted, compressing into a dense orb of absolute erasure.
A silent core, beating like a heart made of oblivion.
Orion paused mid-air, feeling the shift.
It was preparing
a True Annihilation Burst—
the same attack that erased the future-him in the old timeline.
His wings tightened around him like a cocoon as he raised his right hand.
A white-gold clock halo formed.
A black space-ring formed behind it.
The two merged.
And his voice echoed forward, backward, upward, and across every erased year.
"Paradox Nova Collapse."
The orb in his hand expanded into a swirling star of black and gold—a miniature sun born of contradiction.
He hurled it.
The Era-Eater released its annihilation pulse.
The two forces collided.
Silence followed.
Then reality imploded.
A shockwave tore through the cavern, erasing erased walls, consuming consumed timelines, unraveling the monster's ribs of shadow. When the light faded…
The Era-Eater floated there—
but hollow.
Cracked.
Its form trembling.
Its core flickered with fear for the first time.
Orion lowered his hand.
His voice was quiet.
Steady.
Cold.
"It ends here."
He drew back his arm.
Space bent.
Time froze.
The concepts around him bowed.
And with his twelve wings spread wide, he unleashed his finishing strike—
"Celestial Eclipse Execution."
The world turned to black-white light.
The Era-Eater split from crown to root.
It didn't scream.
It simply ceased.
The cavern dissolved.
The erased ocean settled.
The timelines calmed.
And Orion stood alone in the aftermath—
breathing heavily,
wings dimming slowly,
surrounded by silver dust that drifted like falling snow.
Then—
The island shifted.
Something deep beneath the world stirred.
Something that had waited for him.
A voice—soft, ancient, familiar—whispered from the darkness:
"You're ready. Come to me."
Orion's eyes narrowed.
The next path had opened.