The air on Kratos was thick, not with oxygen, but with the metallic tang of blood and the humming static of frozen time. Every breath Kael took felt like inhaling ground glass. Around them, the battlefield was a macabre museum: a Vorthax Centurion caught in the middle of an explosion, the orange fire solidified into jagged shards of glass; a rebel soldier mid-scream, his eyes wide and unblinking.
Standing before them was Ares, the Berserker. His armor was a deep, bruised crimson, pitted by five centuries of impacts that had never been allowed to heal. He didn't just stand; he vibrated with a violent, unstable energy that made the air around him ripple like heat off a summer road.
"Ares, stop!" Valerius stepped forward, his amber blade lowered in a rare gesture of peace. "It's over. The war you're fighting ended five hundred years ago. You're trapped in a machine's nightmare!"
"Ended?" Ares laughed, a sound like grinding tectonic plates. He swung his dual-bladed axe, the weapon carving a wake of red chronometric sparks through the air. "Look around you, General! The metal still screams! The fire still burns! On Kratos, the war is the only thing that is real! You? You're just a glitch in the loop!"
Ares lunged. He moved with a stuttering, "glitchy" speed—one moment he was twenty feet away, the next he was burying his axe into the ground where Kael had been standing a millisecond prior.
"Kael, watch the frames!" Lyra shouted, her hands glowing as she struggled to maintain a stability field around the trio. "He isn't moving through space; he's skipping through the time-loop's frames! You can't track him with your eyes!"
Kael rolled beneath a follow-up swing that shattered a frozen tank into a thousand static pieces. He felt his Resonance Gauntlet whining. The Tier 4.0 power was there, but the Chronometric Cage was trying to rewrite his physics. Every time he tried to jump, the planet tried to "reset" his position to where he had been three seconds ago.
"I can't hit what isn't there!" Kael gritted his teeth, his violet aura flickering. "He's part of the planet's code now!"
"Then change the code!" Elis's voice crackled through the static in his ear. "Kael, he's the battery for the Loop-Anchor. He isn't just fighting you; he's powering the time-dilation. If you can sync your gravity with his heartbeat, you can force him back into 'real-time'!"
Ares appeared behind Kael, the axe descending like a guillotine.
"Now!" Kael roared.
Instead of dodging, Kael reached up and grabbed the glowing red haft of the axe with his gauntlet. The impact sent a shockwave of chronometric energy through Kael's body. He saw visions of his own birth, his life in the junkyard, and a thousand possible deaths, all flashing in a single second.
[SKILL ACTIVATION: CHRONO-GRAVITY ANCHOR]
Kael didn't push Ares away. He increased the gravity inside Ares's armor to ten thousand times the planetary norm. He wasn't trying to crush him; he was trying to pin him to a single point in time.
"You... little... worm..." Ares gasped, his red eyes flaring. The ground beneath his feet turned to liquid metal as the sheer mass of his body increased. The "glitching" stopped. He was solid. He was anchored.
"Valerius! The Anchor!" Kael screamed, blood beginning to leak from his eyes as he held the Tier 4.5 Berserker in place.
Valerius didn't hesitate. He vaulted over Kael's shoulder, his amber blade extended. He didn't strike Ares; he struck the glowing red crystal embedded in the center of the Berserker's chestplate—the Loop-Anchor.
CRACK.
The sound was louder than a supernova. The red barrier surrounding the planet shattered like a falling mirror. Suddenly, the frozen explosions thawed. The mid-air plasma bolts resumed their flight, slamming into the dirt. The thousands of Wraiths and Centurions simply vanished, their energy returning to the planet's core now that the loop was broken.
Ares fell to his knees, his crimson armor fading to a dull, rusted grey. He looked up at the sky—a real sky, filled with stars and the three Dragon-Ships descending through the clouds.
"The silence..." Ares whispered, his voice trembling. "I forgot... how quiet the world is without the screaming."
[QUEST COMPLETED: BREAK THE LOOP] [SHIP SECURED: THE CRIMSON FURY] [NEW PARTY MEMBER: ARES (BERSERKER PILOT - TIER 4.5)] [KAEL ARDENT PROGRESS: TIER 4.2]