Allison stepped into the 1943 Berlin timeline, the crown of thorns blazing amid the smoke. The roar of bombers intertwined with the hum of alchemical incantations, while Nazi symbols and twisted metal talismans littered the ruined streets. She clutched the coordinates her grandmother had given her—a derelict factory shrouded in black mist, where gear-like patterns seeped from the brick cracks, as if devouring energy from the earth below.
"The Guardian won't let you approach the ritual easily," her grandmother's voice echoed from the pocket watch, a faint alchemical array materializing on its face. "It has integrated the killing memories of all your ancestral enemies. Every battle you can sense is its experience."
Allison's thorny armor automatically enveloped her body, vines extending into detectors amid the gunfire. She evaded patrolling Nazi soldiers and sneaked into the factory's basement, where the stench of rotten alchemical potions mingled with the metallic tang of blood. At the center of the laboratory, a massive bell forged from infant bones was being smelted, its surface etched with the crests of the Winston and Lancaster families. The hands pointed to midnight—when the ritual would complete the graft of temporal immortality.
"Outsider." A chorus of overlapping voices emerged from the shadows. The fused Guardian rose from the furnace, its face that of Francis, but its body stitched from the of generations of enemies: a father's hand clutching a poisoned rose ring, a grandfather's eyes glowing with plague-purple light, even a grandmother's vertebrae forming its spine. Its presence caused temporal rifts to spread across the laboratory walls, like cobwebs of corrosion.
"You killed the puppets, but you didn't know the true experiment was yourself," the Guardian said, swinging its arm to fire shards of time. Rotting corpses from plague villages, 18th-century torture devices, and modern electronic pulses mingled in the attack. "Every Winston woman through the ages has been a vessel, and you—are the most perfect carrier."
Allison's crown of thorns erupted in flames, vines transforming into light blades to slash at the assault. But the shards, upon hitting her, instantly converted into experimental data, merging into the Guardian's body. "Your counterattacks were recorded long ago," it sneered. Holographic images of Allison's past battles across time appeared on the laboratory walls, each tactic dissected to expose weaknesses.
Gritting her teeth, she embedded the pocket watch into the core of her heart. Gears reversed, unleashing a temporal counterflow. Berlin's ruins suddenly overlapped with a medieval altar and a future laboratory, but the Guardian plucked all of Allison's memories of failure from the temporal,reinforcing its defenses. Her thorny armor began to corrode, and a bloodstain cracked across the silver face of her grandmother's pocket watch.
"Looks like I need more primal power," Allison said, tearing off her armor to reveal the thorny roots spreading from her heart. She the laboratory's alchemical potions, her corrupted blood and the potions forging new energy in her veins. The tidal wave of temporal energy the Guardian unleashed was absorbed by the roots, converted into fuel for her crown of thorns.
"You experimented on our family bloodline, but I forged myself from the curse," she shouted, leaping into the furnace to grapple with the Guardian amid the temporal chaos. Each strike made the bell tremble, its hands beginning to rewind. Suddenly, she wrenched the grandmother's vertebra from the Guardian's body and drove it into the bell's core. "The union of traitor and experiment—is the key to breaking this."
The crests on the bell exploded, and the temporal counterflow disassembled the Guardian into ghostly echoes of past enemies. Francis's face screamed one last time: "You've only destroyed a branch. The Lancaster immortality ritual endures in higher dimensions..."
The laboratory collapsed, and Allison plummeted back to modern-day New York. Her crown of thorns extinguished, the pocket watch displayed a successful mission in 1943 Berlin—but the bloodstain remained. She turned to the holographic diary her grandmother had left in the ruins of the old mansion, each page filled with for temporal immortality technology. Her grandmother had been the original mastermind, using the family bloodline to continue her research.
A encrypted call buzzed on her phone. Her grandmother's voice, laced with amusement, said: "Well done, Allison. But the real door is in..." The signal cut off abruptly. The pocket watch gears spun wildly, locking onto a new temporal coordinate. Allison realized: the Berlin ritual had been a mere facade. What her grandmother was leading her toward—was the deepest secret of the curse.