The morning in the cathedral vault was dim, lit only by strands of bioluminescent moss clinging to the stone like shy fireflies. For once, no alarms. No dimensional tearing. Just the light breathing of allies who had somehow found their way back to each other.
Brick awoke first, stretching and promptly knocking over a small pile of enchanted scrolls. Calyx swore, mid-incantation, as a rune destabilized and discharged a harmless puff of static.
"Oops," Brick muttered sheepishly.
Rafael stood at the edge of a collapsed wall, peering at the fractured horizon beyond. The world outside the cathedral looked like a cracked mirror, every shard a floating island of debris and warped memory.
Juno joined him, tossing an apple. "You planning to brood until your stubble grows sentient?"
Rafael caught the fruit but didn't bite. "Just thinking. About what comes next."
"That would be the Clockwork Cleft," Stanley said, approaching with his tome levitating beside him. "It's the next convergence point. All the temporal anomalies are bending toward it."
"We going through that gear-fueled death maze again?" Clara asked, strapping on her boots.
"Unfortunately," Stanley replied. "Unless we want the Shattercore to devour another ten realities."
"Yay," Lira deadpanned.
Beatrice flipped her staff. "Let's at least pack snacks this time."
--
The Clockwork Cleft
A canyon carved by time engines and paradox reactors, the Clockwork Cleft groaned and clicked as the group approached.
Great gear-like ridges turned in slow synchronicity across walls of metal and stone, interwoven with temporal filaments that pulsed like arteries. Hovering seconds blinked out of sync, creating stuttering echoes of sound and vision.
"I hate this place," Clara muttered. "Last time I got stuck in a loop arguing with myself."
"You lost that argument," Lira noted.
"She was very persuasive!"
As they entered, a low tone vibrated through the cleft, resonating with Rafael's system.
After a long time, it appeared again.
[WARNING: TEMPORAL DISSONANCE RISING. USER STABILITY AT 73%. CORE DISSONANCE: 11.7% AND CLIMBING.]
"Everyone stick to the tether markers," Juno ordered. Brick deployed anchoring nodes behind them, pulsing with stabilizing light.
Just as the fifth node flared, clockwork guardians erupted from hidden alcoves—bronze golems with time-dial faces and bladed arms ticking with deadly rhythm. Their joints hissed steam, and their eyes glowed with chronal fire.
"Contact!" Rafael shouted. "Form the crescent! Keep the cores in sight!"
The team surged into motion.
Clara dashed forward, blade flashing with mirrored flame, intercepting the first golem mid-lunge. Sparks flew as steel clashed against reinforced alloy. Stanley launched fractal hexes that split into recursive traps, ensnaring two more in a prism of repeating incantations.
Beatrice stepped into the path of a charging golem and unleashed a nullwave pulse that slowed it to half-time, then shattered its limb with a crushing blow of her staff.
Calyx spun, tossing spatial grenades that tore gaps into folded dimensions. One golem's upper half phased a foot to the left—severed from its lower body in a flash of pink light.
Brick barreled into the largest of the golems, slamming into it shoulder-first and driving it back into a turning gear ridge. The metal groaned and split, crushing one of the golem's arms as Brick ripped the other clean off.
Lira moved like a phantom, loosing arrows tipped with entropy sigils. The shots exploded on impact, unraveling the gears inside the constructs like threads snipped at their seams.
Juno vanished and reappeared behind one of the time-dialed sentinels, both daggers driving into the delicate center of its core. She twisted. It collapsed like a puppet cut from its strings.
A chime echoed above the fray. The air shimmered.
A figure stood on a floating platform made of locked moments—an Architect Echo, draped in temporal streamers that bent light and sound. Its eyes were an endless loop of frozen screams.
"You are not meant to be here," it intoned, voice layered with echoes of itself, harmonizing across past and future. "This timeline must end."
Stanley's eyes widened. "It's a Delta-Class Echo! That's not just a guardian—that's a fate editor!"
"Figures they'd send the worst kind," Juno hissed.
Rafael grit his teeth. "We're not backing down. Hold the line!"
The battle surged.
The golems adapted. One split into two smaller drones, moving at twice the speed. Another began absorbing spells and hurling them back distorted. Clara was caught in a reverse loop, fighting a version of herself that remembered every strike before she made it.
Calyx tore open a dimensional fold to send Stanley's spell straight through the echo's tether. Stanley redirected three hexes into five simultaneous impacts. Juno blinked through overlapping timelines, narrowly avoiding three versions of a deadly slash from a golem's wrist-blade.
Brick, breathing hard and bleeding from a cut along his brow, grabbed one of the drones and shoved it headfirst into a chrono-storm fissure. "Get scrapped!"
Lira called on a deep rune, sacrificing her own stability for power. Her next magical arrow split into twelve versions of itself—one for each nearby second—and struck true through the Echo's shoulder.
The Echo faltered. Reality stuttered. Rafael surged forward.
He stepped into a splintering moment, where all paths converged. The world slowed. He saw the next ten seconds stretched before him like threads. He picked one and leapt.
His code-spear burst from his palm, forged from resolve and corrupted data. He drove it through the Echo's chest, anchoring it to now.
Time screamed.
The platform ruptured. Golems convulsed and collapsed. The clockwork cleft quaked, then stilled.
--
Silence.
Calyx flopped down. "Anyone else feel like we just did a group project with reality as the worst professor?"
Juno snorted. "Don't get comfortable. There's more coming."
Stanley closed his tome, wiping sweat from his brow. "Next stop... the Scar of Symmetry. And it's not going to wait for us to recover."
Rafael looked around. Beatrice was bruised but upright. Clara sat sharpening her sword with a grim smile. Brick leaned on a half-shattered pillar, grinning through bloodied teeth. Lira was bandaging her arm, still humming softly. Juno stood tall, daggers sheathed. Calyx rubbed his temples, but his eyes were still bright.
Together. Alive.
Rafael nodded. "Then we move."
***