The sky above the fractured realm had bled into ink. Clouds of static churned like a cursed ocean, and lightning screamed sideways across the dying heavens. What remained of the battlefield was a broken cathedral of bone and black glass, floating over an abyss that pulsed with the heartbeat of the Gatekeeper.
The Gatekeeper had become something far beyond monstrous.
Twisted by the failed loops and the parasite soul that once powered it, it now towered like a god. Its body was stitched together from the failed corpses of every cycle—arms of shadow, ribs of screaming light, wings made of inverted time. Its face had been replaced by a mass of churning eyes, each blinking to a different rhythm.
The cohort stood, battered, surrounded by a rain of ash and memory.
"Final round," Lilith whispered, blood trailing from her lips.
Zephyr adjusted his grip on the Edilion Fang. It pulsed now—red-black flames licking up the blade. "We end this here."
The Gatekeeper roared.
The realm shattered.
And they charged.
FLASHBACK: Lilith
Once, Lilith had been Eleanor Weiss—an art therapist in Berlin, who worked with mentally unstable children. Her hands, now twisted with black ribbons, had once held chalk, paints, and broken minds. She had watched a girl gouge her own eyes out while whispering about "the black palace."
Lilith had ignored it—until the same visions came for her.
Drawings she didn't remember sketching. Symbols on her apartment wall. One night, she sleepwalked into an abandoned chapel and awoke with her veins glowing and her eyes no longer her own.
She was no longer Eleanor.
She had been chosen.
Necros barreled toward the Gatekeeper, bones erupting from his back like wings. "GO, LILITH!"
Lilith's ribbons unfurled like serpents, wrapping around the Gatekeeper's limb. She pulled, twisting it off-balance. "It's resisting. HOLD IT!"
Necros impaled the ground, summoning a geyser of bone that stabbed through the creature's gut. It howled, its eyes bleeding time.
Tenshin stepped into a mirror shard, vanished—
—and reappeared above the Gatekeeper with a bladed crescent of energy, slicing down.
FLASHBACK: Tenshin
Tenshin Miyazawa had once been a prodigy physicist from Osaka, obsessed with quantum time mechanics. His obsession drove him to a secret experiment: mapping consciousness through superposition loops.
He failed.
He saw alternate versions of himself—the murderer, the savior, the coward. He was pulled through one of his own prototype mirror fields, into a version of reality where time had decayed.
There, he was broken.
There, he was rebuilt.
Now, his body was stitched with time fractures. His voice echoed milliseconds ahead of his words.
The Gatekeeper shrieked. One of its wings disintegrated into screaming faces. It backhanded Tenshin into a collapsing obelisk.
Necros lunged, but the beast speared him through the side with a shadow blade.
"ZE–PHYR!" he roared.
Zephyr was nowhere to be seen.
FLASHBACK: Necros
Dr. Emilian Cross had been an ex-mortician turned underground surgeon. He harvested illegal bodies for tech corporations and developed experimental death-stopping serums. When one of his corpses reanimated, whispering coordinates in an unknown tongue, Emilian followed.
He found a black gate beneath an old asylum.
He was pulled in—and reawakened in a world where the dead ruled thought.
There, he became Necros, the Bonewright of the Rift.
Lilith dove in, slamming her tendrils into the Gatekeeper's neck.
The creature staggered.
Tenshin returned, forming time rings that froze one of the Gatekeeper's heads mid-scream.
They had it.
For a moment.
Then the Gatekeeper exploded.
A shockwave of corrupted light blasted them all backward. Necros was pinned under a collapsing pillar of bone. Tenshin's left arm phased out and reappeared mangled.
Lilith collapsed to one knee, bleeding from her mouth.
It was almost over.
But not yet.
FLASHBACK: Zephyr
His name had once been Alexander Mirov.
He had grown up in Siberia, alone, broken, lost.
At 13, he watched his mother's murder—ritualistic, occult. The cultists carved runes into her skin as he hid under the floorboards. One of them had whispered: "Your blood is cursed. You will unlock the gate."
He ran. He buried the memory.
Until one day, during a thunderstorm, he slit his palm out of rage—and the wound opened a portal.
The Void answered.
It marked him.
Now, Alexander was Zephyr—the Chrono-Drifter. The one fated to shatter time.
Now, Zephyr appeared again.
But not as they knew him.
His cloak was burning with red sigils. The Edilion Fang had changed—now glowing black with a white aura of warped seconds. His eyes were pure silver. A clock rune hovered behind him, spinning violently.
The Gatekeeper saw him and roared in recognition.
"I see you now," Zephyr whispered. "You were human once."
FLASHBACK: The Gatekeeper
He was once Lucien Dovahr, a philosopher from Florence. He had devoted his life to understanding death—not avoiding it, but embracing its meaning.
When a dimensional rift swallowed his town, Lucien volunteered to enter and record what he saw. But he never returned.
Instead, the void consumed his soul.
It used his philosophy as fuel. Twisted it into paradox. He became its first prisoner.
And its first warden.
Each loop he endured, his form decayed. Until there was nothing left but obligation and madness.
Now, he no longer remembered why he existed.
Only that he must stop escape.
Zephyr launched forward.
Time rippled.
He landed blow after blow, each strike aged the Gatekeeper by centuries. The beast's limbs began decaying—turning to ash and memory.
Lilith regained her footing and joined him, slamming her ribbons into its skull.
Tenshin surrounded it in a fractal ring of light—paralyzing its movement.
Necros, half-dead, raised a mountain of bone to trap the creature's legs.
The Gatekeeper howled.
Zephyr rose into the sky.
His sword screamed with every voice from every loop that had failed.
He descended.
"RESET DENIED."
And the blade struck.
The Gatekeeper's chest exploded, releasing a burst of pure white—a childlike cry echoed as the parasite soul was released, shattered into light.
Its limbs disintegrated.
Its head melted into dust.
The realm began to collapse around them.
They had won.
Silence.
Lilith dropped to her knees. "We... did it."
Tenshin helped Necros up.
Zephyr stood, still, staring into the empty void.
Something was wrong.
Lilith turned toward him. "Zephyr...?"
He didn't answer.
His grip tightened on Edilion Fang.
Necros blinked. "What are you doing?"
Zephyr turned—his eyes now flickering with static.
"The Gate said only one escapes."
Lilith's heart dropped. "What?"
Zephyr's mouth curled into something unreadable. "It's me."
He stabbed Tenshin in the chest.
Blood sprayed.
Necros roared, but Zephyr turned and slashed his leg, then kicked him into the collapsing floor.
Lilith screamed, launching every tendril at Zephyr—
He vanished.
Reappeared behind her.
Whispered: "You were my favorite."
And drove the sword through her spine.
She coughed blood, choking, eyes wide.
"You bastard…" she gasped.
Zephyr leaned in. "One escapes."
As the world fell apart, Zephyr walked alone, covered in their blood.
And somewhere deeper in the void...
Dylan's eyes flickered open.