CHAPTER 28
The cavern shattered into motion the instant Orion flew forward.
Reality twisted, bending like melted glass as his twelve wings spread wide—six cosmic wings of space unfurling with collapsing galaxies, six luminous time-wings releasing trails of gold-white chronal dust that curled behind him like comet tails.
The Era-Eater responded at once.
Its massive body pulsed, not like flesh but like a devouring eclipse trying to swallow its own shadow. Where its surface rippled, space folded inward. Where it shuddered, time fragmented into spirals.
It did not roar.
It did not breathe.
It simply existed—and that alone crushed the space around it.
Orion's arrival was the first thing that pushed it back.
A single beat of his wings split the ocean of forgotten time beneath him, forming a cracked pathway that stretched forward like a blade of starlight.
He clenched his hands. His voice echoed, not loud but absolute.
"Come."
The Era-Eater collapsed forward, pulling the cavern into its mawless shape. The ground and the sky folded into its center like paper burning from both ends.
Orion dove.
His claws met the void-mass—
and the void rippled, absorbing light, dissolving the starlight in his skin.
But this time
he did not break.
The wings of Space sharpened, forming jagged cosmic edges. The wings of Time folded around him, layering seconds and hours and days into a protective spiral.
Orion's voice cut through the distortion:
"Paradox Rend."
Space ruptured.
Time screamed.
The Era-Eater's entire front layer split apart like torn silk, curling backward as if recoil existed even in a creature made of nothing.
But the Era-Eater adapted.
It always had.
It always would.
A second pulse erupted from its core—a gravitational implosion wrapped in time-reversal decay. The wave struck Orion directly.
His body shattered.
Not physically.
Not mentally.
But temporally.
For a fraction of a second, past-Orion, present-Orion, and a version of him that did not exist flickered in a chaotic blur.
His vision inverted.
His wings collapsed into smoke.
His body fell—
And before he hit the black ocean, a hand grabbed his shoulder.
A hand identical to his own.
He turned—
It was the masked memory, half-transparent, half fading, yet still present enough to act.
Its cracked mask flickered.
Its eyes—his eyes—held a strange softness.
"You forgot one thing."
Orion steadied himself in mid-air. "What."
The memory smiled faintly, mask collapsing to dust.
"You didn't die because you were weak."
The Era-Eater began pulling the entire cavern toward its body. Space rippled like stretched cloth.
"You died because you fought it alone—before the island, before the merge, before your Domains awakened."
The memory's last fragments lifted into the air like silver dust.
"You're not alone anymore."
The dust scattered.
And all at once, a rush of power poured into Orion's body—
everything the past version sealed, everything he erased to protect the future him.
His wings exploded with radiant force, expanding to triple their size.
Space bent.
Time trembled.
The ocean of forgotten years began to recede from the sheer intensity of his rising power.
Orion looked at his glowing claws, feeling the return of something he once lost:
The strength of a version of himself who had died fighting this monster.
A different voice—older, colder, deeper—unfolded within him:
You already defeated it once.
Now finish it properly.
The Era-Eater lunged.
The entire cavern collapsed inward as if the world was being swallowed.
Orion raised his hand.
His pupils tightened, turning into spiraling galaxies.
His right eye shone with roaring temporal light.
And the skill flowed out of him instinctively—
"Celestial Eclipse Execution."
The space before him inverted into blinding white.
Then black.
Then both.
Then neither.
The void-mass split.
Cleanly.
Silently.
Perfectly.
The Era-Eater recoiled in utter, primal rejection—because this was not just a wound.
It was an erase command delivered through the laws it thought untouchable.
The battlefield shook as the void-mass collapsed inward, shrinking, writhing, burning under its own erased timeline.
But it was not dead yet.
It pulsed again.
One final heartbeat.
One final collapse.
One last attempt to devour him.
Orion's wings rose, eclipsing the whole cavern in cosmic black and radiant gold.
And he whispered:
"This time, I end it."
He flew forward.
Straight into the collapsing heart of the monster.