Th Chapter 20: The Medical Emergency
The knocking on the steel door of the Vanguard Booth became insistent, accompanied by muffled, authoritarian voices. Elias took a deep, shuddering breath, tasting clean air instead of temporal distortion for the first time in what felt like a lifetime.
"Dr. Soh! We need access! The Chief Commissioner is demanding a report on Chronos's condition!"
Elias ran a trembling hand over her temples, pushing back the strands of hair stuck with sweat. She had to manage the fallout. The official story had been set when she initiated **Protocol Omega** and the containment field—a coaching overload requiring a mandatory communications lockdown. Now she had to turn that lie into a permanent truth.
### The Containment Report
Elias approached the door and manually disabled the security lock. The door slid open to reveal a frantic scene: two uniformed stadium security officers and a pale, jittery man in a suit—the Chief Commissioner's aide.
"Dr. Soh, thank God," the aide stammered. "What happened to Chronos? His booth is completely unresponsive. Is he stable?"
Elias maintained a calm, clinical demeanor, the coldness of the **Archive** lending her voice an unnatural steadiness.
"Coach Kaelen—Chronos—experienced a catastrophic cognitive burnout," she stated, stepping out and sealing the door behind her with a final, silent click. She would never re-enter the Vanguard Booth. "The demands of **$100\%$ efficiency** pushed his temporal control beyond human limits. I activated mandatory safety protocols, placing his command center into a specialized, temporary containment field."
She gestured toward the neighboring AETHEL booth—now an inert, unlit steel box in the midst of celebration.
"He is stable, but profoundly disabled. The intensity of his final jump—Round 7, the moment of maximum consequence—triggered a permanent neural shutdown. He is, medically speaking, in a state of **temporal inertia**."
The aide looked horrified, but the technical jargon sounded official enough to quell immediate panic.
"Temporal inertia? What does that mean for him?"
Elias met his gaze, her eyes flat and empty of emotion. "It means he is entirely contained. His mind is effectively a frozen point in time. He will require permanent, deep-level scientific observation. He is no longer capable of human thought, or coaching. He is finished."
The aide frantically scribbled notes, processing the information as a simple medical tragedy. The perfect coach had paid the ultimate price for his ambition. The **Singularity** was now Elias's prisoner, forever sealed in a temporal cage.
### The Succession
The crowd noise washed over them, celebratory and deafeningly unaware. Elias knew the next step must be executed immediately: securing her control over the scientific fallout and AETHEL's future.
"I need immediate, unrestricted access to the **Vanguard Project** lab for deep stabilization measures," Elias continued, her voice never rising above a controlled professional pitch. "The remaining temporal energy from the incident must be neutralized. I am the only scientist capable of managing this level of decay."
"Of course, Doctor," the aide agreed, desperate to delegate the terrifying science back to its expert. "The Commissioner will authorize any resources you require."
Elias had achieved her objective. She was no longer just the project leader; she was the indispensable protector of the timeline. The **Archive**—Aris's perfect, terrible memory—was sealed in her mind, and she had full access to the temporal tools she needed to manage the fallout.
### The Echo of Chronos
As Elias turned to leave, dismissing the security escort, a brief, sharp sensation pierced her composure: the cold, clean logic of the **Archive** presented a final calculation.
*Inefficiency detected: Liam's celebratory jump is $3.2$ degrees too high. Risk of minor muscle strain $1.4\%$.*
Elias flinched. The memory was not passive; it was still calculating, still seeking to enforce perfection in the most mundane events. She was trapped with a perfect, relentless calculator constantly running in the background of her consciousness.
She suppressed the urge to immediately check on Liam. The muscle strain was inconsequential. Her job now was not to coach players to perfection, but to ensure the entire system remained stable.
She had defeated Chronos by enforcing stability, but in doing so, she had become the vessel for his cold, perfect logic. She was the new operating system, the silent, invisible guardian of the timeline.
As the victorious AETHEL players were hoisted onto the shoulders of their team, chanting a victory won by human chaos and controlled failure, Dr. Elias Soh walked toward the emergency exit. She was walking away from the game and toward her true, eternal burden: the **Vanguard of Logic**.
The cost of saving the world was to forever know, with **$100\%$ efficiency**, how every minute decision would play out. She had traded the chaotic beauty of her own life for the perfection of Aris's memory, and the game, the real game, had just begun.