The central platform of Titan 00 was a slaughterhouse of glass and dust.
"They're not stopping!" Lyra screamed, ejecting a spent magazine. "For every one we shatter, two more crawl out of the pit!"
The Entropy Stalkers—swirling vortexes of sentient sand—swarmed up the sides of the floating rock island. There were hundreds of them now. A rising tide of gold and black dust that hissed like a thousand snakes.
"Zephyr! The barrier!" Julian roared.
"The wind is tired!" Zephyr gritted his teeth, spinning his staff so fast it was a blur. The whirlwind containment field he was maintaining around the platform was shrinking. "The air here... it is heavy with age. It fights me."
A Stalker broke through the wind wall. It lunged at Skid, its sand-arm extending like a spear.
Julian was there in a flash.
SLAM.
He didn't punch it; he shoulder-checked it with his nanite side. The impact shattered the Stalker into loose dust.
But the dust didn't fall. It swirled around Julian's arm, eating at the nanite mesh.
WARNING: STRUCTURAL AGING DETECTED. ARMOR INTEGRITY 85%... 80%...
"Get off!" Julian activated his Sonic Emitter, blasting the dust away with a pulse of white noise.
"Skid!" Julian shouted, backing up to the console. "Tell me you have a solution!"
The Code of Ages
Skid was sweating. Her hands flew across the holographic interface of the Titan's control node.
"It's not code!" Skid yelled, panic edging her voice. "It's calculus! It's 4th-dimensional geometry! I'm trying to tell it to target a specific coordinate, but it keeps defaulting to 'Universal Reset'!"
Marcus Vane stepped up beside her. He holstered his pistol.
"Move over," Marcus said.
"What?"
"I'm an Architect," Marcus said, his eyes scanning the complex fractals on the screen. "I speak Geometry. Look at the variable here. It's a closed loop. The Titan wants to flip the hourglass to the beginning."
He reached into the hologram. He didn't type; he grabbed the geometric shapes and twisted them.
"We don't want a loop," Marcus muttered, his fingers working with the precision of a surgeon. "We want a ray. A vector."
"If you break the loop," Skid realized, "the energy has to go somewhere."
"Exactly," Marcus grinned—a rare, genuine expression. "We turn the Reset into a Beam. Instead of rewinding time for everyone... we accelerate time for the target."
"A Decay Ray," Skid whispered. "We're going to age the Dissonance to death."
"We need to invert the flow," Marcus commanded. "Bridge the connection to the upper pyramid. Skid, handle the power relay. I'll handle the math."
The Glitch in the Fight
On the perimeter, the fight was getting weird.
Isolde swung her wrench at a Stalker.
Whiff.
She missed. But a second later, the Stalker's head exploded.
"What the...?" Isolde blinked. "I missed that!"
"Time lag!" Julian realized, firing a sonic blast that hit three seconds after he aimed. "The local reality is breaking down! The Titan is waking up!"
"It makes me dizzy!" Zephyr stumbled, his wind wall flickering.
A massive Stalker—the size of a truck—formed from the combined dust of ten smaller ones. It roared, a sound like grinding stones.
It raised a massive hammer-fist made of dense obsidian sand. It aimed for Marcus and Skid at the console.
"Incoming!" Lyra shouted.
She fired a grenade. The grenade froze in mid-air, suspended in a time bubble.
"Oh, come on!" Lyra yelled.
The Stalker swung its fist.
Julian jumped. He moved between the monster and the engineers.
He raised his nanite arm.
I can't block this with force. It will age me to dust.
I have to block it with Resonance.
What is the opposite of Entropy?
Stasis.
Julian twisted the ring. He channeled the memory of the Emperor's power.
FREEZE.
He slammed his palm against the Stalker's fist.
A ripple of blue light exploded outward.
The Stalker stopped. Not just its movement, but its vibration. Its atoms locked in place.
Julian held the pose, straining. His arm screamed as the energy drain spiked.
"Hurry... up!" Julian groaned through gritted teeth.
The Inversion
"Got it!" Marcus shouted. "Vector locked!"
"Power routed!" Skid slammed the final key.
HUMMMMMMM.
The massive hourglass Titan groaned. The floating pyramids began to rotate in opposite directions.
The golden sand that was flowing upward... Stopped.
Then, it turned Black.
And it began to flow downward.
SYSTEM: MODE INVERTED.
OUTPUT: DIRECTED ENTROPY.
The Keeper's voice echoed through the crater, sounding surprised.
"You have altered the pact. Very well. Let us see if the future can survive the past."
A pulse of black light erupted from the Titan.
It washed over the platform.
It didn't hurt the team. But when it hit the Stalkers...
They didn't shatter. They Withered.
The massive Stalker Julian was holding simply dissolved. It turned from obsidian to grey dust, then to nothingness, in the span of a second.
All around the crater, the army of Stalkers fell apart, their time ran out instantly.
The silence returned to the desert. But this time, it wasn't heavy. It was expectant.
The Liftoff
"We did it," Skid slumped against the console. "We weaponized time."
"It's not over," Julian said, looking at the sky.
The static jamming field cleared. The sensors on the Sovereign's Will came back online.
"We have a signal!" Isolde checked her wrist-comp. "The Dissonance... it's entering the atmosphere!"
Julian looked at the massive Titan.
"Marcus, can you pilot this thing?"
"It doesn't have a cockpit," Marcus said, looking up at the floating pyramids. "It follows the Conductor."
Julian nodded. He raised his hand toward the Titan.
Chronos. With me.
The ground shook. The massive hourglass structure began to rise from the crater. The floating rocks aligned into a defensive ring around it.
"To the ship!" Julian ordered. "We lead the fleet!"
The Gathering
An hour later, the Sovereign's Will was airborne, flanked by the massive, floating form of Titan 00.
They flew toward the Capital.
As they approached, they saw them.
The Gilded King (Titan 01) stood tall, hands healed (or at least capped with golden light).
The Leviathan (Titan 02) rose from the bay.
The Magma Strider (Titan 03) cooled its lava to form armor.
The Gale-Warden (Titan 04) spun its rings furiously.
The Frost-Breaker (Titan 05) howled at the sky.
And joining the formation, the Chronos-Keeper (Titan 00) took its place in the center, floating above them all like a crown.
Six Titans.
"Where is the enemy?" Lyra asked, looking out the viewport of the dreadnought.
"Look up," Julian said.
The sky above the Capital tore open.
It wasn't a ship. It was a Biosphere.
A massive, fleshy, writhing planetoid the size of a moon entered the lower atmosphere. It was covered in mouths and eyes. It dripped a purple ichor that sizzled when it hit the clouds.
The Dissonance Mother.
It let out a sound.
It wasn't a roar. It was a song. A chaotic, maddening melody of a billion screaming voices.
Reeeeee-ooooooo-KRRRRRT.
Inside the ship, everyone grabbed their heads.
"It hurts!" Zephyr screamed, curling into a ball. "The wind is bleeding!"
Julian stood firm. His nanite arm vibrated, fighting the frequency.
"It's trying to overwrite us," Julian said. "It's trying to make us part of the noise."
He walked to the ship's comms. He patched into the Titans.
"All units," Julian's voice was calm, cold steel. "Target the Mother."
"We don't need a shield," Julian whispered. "We need a symphony."
"Skid. Drop the beat."
(Note: A metaphor for initiating the coordinated attack).
Julian raised his fist.
"Fire."