Chapter 10: Clockwork and Gale
The Chronos-Paradox Construct lunged, moving with a series of jerky, impossible movements that defied linear time. One second it was twenty meters away; the next, its massive, steam-powered fist was slamming into the spot where Aiden had just been standing.
Aiden had reacted instantly, throwing himself to the side, but the temporal whiplash hit him hard. He staggered, spitting blood, the Chronos field around his body violently flickering.
"It's not just physical! It uses localized temporal feedback!" Aiden yelled, clutching his chest. "Every time I try to slow it, it sends the cost back into my core! I can't use Chronos's Reckoning!"
"Then don't! I'll handle the front!" Rin roared, his eyes blazing with furious focus.
Rin and Master Wei launched their combined attack. Rin, leading with the Rending Gale, assaulted the Construct's metallic shell, while Wei, a blur of motion, targeted the joints with concentrated bolts of emerald Qi.
The Construct was tough, designed by Mephistopheles to withstand physical and energy damage. Rin's blade, which could shear through adamantine, only scratched the surface of the clockwork armor, the wounds instantly healing as the Construct manipulated its own local time.
Wei slammed a potent bolt of Qi into a shoulder joint. For a moment, the joint seized, but the Construct merely rewound the damage on its arm by two seconds, restoring its integrity.
"It's reversing the damage!" Wei cried, frustrated. "We can't hit it faster than it can rewind!"
Aiden, pushing himself up, saw the problem. They were fighting a creature that could cheat time, but only within a very small local field. To defeat it, they needed a single strike so massive, so fast, and so precisely timed that the Construct couldn't reverse the damage before its central core was destroyed.
Aiden felt the pain of the tether, the sickening pull in his gut that warned him Rin was on the verge of exhaustion. He had to act. He had to risk his life, just as he had done in the past, but this time, he had to trust Rin to trust him.
He activated his lowest-cost skill, ignoring the brutal feedback.
"Rin! Target the main gear housing, center of the chest!" Aiden screamed, his voice strained. "Wei, create a diversion, now!"
Master Wei didn't question it, trusting Rin's decision to follow the Arbiter. He focused his energy and hurled his most chaotic, powerful Qi blast—the Dragon's Pulse—at the Construct's head.
The Construct ignored the Pulse, knowing it would simply rewind the damage. Instead, it focused its retaliatory temporal strike on Aiden, the true threat. The Construct opened its central clockwork housing, and a wave of pure Temporal Displacement shot out, aimed directly at Aiden's core.
This was it. The moment of absolute sacrifice.
Aiden didn't flinch. He didn't try to dodge. He had predicted this exact moment. He accepted the damage, the blinding pain of his own time being ripped from his body.
But just as the Temporal Displacement was about to hit, Aiden used his supreme skill, one last time, ignoring the devastating cost.
"Chronos's Reckoning: Temporal Window!"
He didn't rewind or slow the enemy. He focused all his remaining mana, not to stop time, but to create a single, one-second bubble of absolute, stable, linear time around the Construct's center mass. He spent every ounce of his energy to ensure that for one second, the Construct could not cheat.
The Construct's temporal shields dropped. The Temporal Displacement energy that was about to hit Aiden's chest suddenly stopped.
"RIN! NOW! BREAK THE CORE!" Aiden roared, his voice cracking from the effort, his body already collapsing from the mana depletion.
Rin, witnessing Aiden sacrifice his body to create the perfect strike opportunity, didn't hesitate. He saw the window—one second of stable reality, a moment of perfect, calculated chance created by the man who loved him enough to manufacture his own hatred.
His sword blurred. He poured every ounce of his remaining wind-elemental mana into one final, absolute attack.
"Rending Gale: Absolute Execution!"
The blade became an invisible, concentrated vortex of destructive wind, striking the center of the Construct's chest. Because the local temporal field was momentarily stabilized, the damage could not be reversed.
The strike was absolute. The clockwork mechanisms shattered, the Temporal-Paradox core exploded, and the Construct collapsed into a pile of smoking metal and ash.
[CHRONOS-PARADOX CONSTRUCT DEFEATED. TEMPLE CLEARED.]
[HUNTER CONTRIBUTION: RIN (BLADE OF THE RENDING GALE), 55%. AIDEN (ARBITER OF CHRONOS), 45%.]
The Naga Temple went silent. Master Wei rushed over to Rin, while the other Hunters stared at the sheer devastation.
Rin, however, ignored Wei. He ran straight to Aiden, who had collapsed onto the stone floor, his body shaking uncontrollably, his skin pale and slick with sweat. He was unconscious, his mana core utterly depleted, the faint blue glow of his Chronos power almost completely extinguished. He looked dangerously close to death.
Rin knelt beside him, his warm hands cupping Aiden's cold, damp face. The invisible tether between them, no longer a chain of constraint, felt like a lifeline. He felt the rapid, shallow pulse of Aiden's core—and the overwhelming, familiar love that had been hidden beneath two lives of cold calculation.
Rin looked at Master Wei, who had followed him, his face etched with confusion.
"He didn't use his power to save himself," Rin whispered, his voice thick with a sudden, devastating realization. "He used it to create a window for me. He calculated his own collapse to guarantee my strike would land."
Wei stared at the collapsed Arbiter, his certainty about Aiden's treachery suddenly wavering.
Rin gently lifted Aiden's limp body, ignoring the silent gasp from the rest of the Vanguard. He pulled Aiden against his own chest, supporting the exhausted strategist's weight.
"He may be a monster," Rin said, his eyes burning with a mix of fury and tenderness, "but he is my monster. And he is alive because he paid a price I can't even imagine."
He held Aiden close—a touch that was raw, intentional, and an irreversible breaking of the emotional distance. The tether tightened, no longer painful, but reassuring, linking two souls that were doomed to love and hate each other forever.
The system flashed one final message, confirming the dramatic shift in their relationship:
[FLOOR 1 CLEARED. HUNTERS, PROCEED TO THE ASCENSION GATE.]
[ASCENSION REWARD: ARTIFACT ACQUIRED: THE DRAGON'S SCALE OF RESILIENCE.]
Rin carried Aiden into the light of the Ascension Gate, their fate now visibly entwined.