Episode-1051
Chapter : 2101
"This is the inevitable," Liam said. "You want to play with time? Fine. Let's see how your suit handles a few thousand years in a single second."
Liam pointed a finger at the Trooper.
"Super Spirit Art: [Accelerated Decay]."
Epoch, the giant faceless angel, reached out a hand. Its fingers were long and rusted. It didn't touch the Trooper. It just touched the air in front of him.
A wave of gray energy washed over the Trooper. It wasn't a blast. It was a silent wind of aging.
"Rewind!" the Trooper screamed, slamming his hand onto his wrist dial. "Rewind! Reset!"
The blue light of the time loop tried to activate. It tried to send him back five seconds to when he was safe.
But Entropy is stronger than a loop. You can rewind a clock, but you cannot un-rust a gear.
The device on the Trooper’s wrist sparked. The metal casing turned brown. Rust spread across it like a fungus. The dial cracked. The glass shattered. The machine aged a thousand years in a blink. It crumbled into red powder and fell off his arm.
"My gear!" the Trooper yelled. "My tech!"
Then, the wave hit his armor.
The advanced, white composite armor of the Fire Fly Corporation—armor designed to survive explosions and space travel—began to flake. It turned yellow, then brown. The seals rotted away. The bolts popped out, turned to dust before they hit the ground. The suit simply fell apart, disintegrating into a pile of useless scrap metal.
The Trooper was exposed. He looked at his hands. His skin was wrinkling. His smooth, young hands turned spotted and thin. His fingernails turned yellow and fell off.
"No," the Trooper wheezed. His voice was old, thin, and terrified. "Stop... it..."
His hair turned white and fell out. His back hunched over. His muscles withered away.
In the span of two seconds, the Chrono-Trooper went from a prime soldier to an old man of ninety. Then a hundred. Then a hundred and fifty.
His bones became brittle. His heart, tired and worn out, beat one last time and stopped.
The Trooper fell. But he didn't hit the ground as a body. Before he landed, his flesh turned to dust. His bones turned to ash.
By the time he reached the dirt, there was nothing left but a pile of gray powder and a few rusted pieces of metal.
The wind blew across the ridge, scattering the dust. The Chrono-Trooper was gone. He hadn't just died; he had run out of time.
Liam lowered his hand. Behind him, the giant spirit Epoch faded away, returning to the void.
Liam looked at the pile of dust with a bored expression. He adjusted his collar and checked his pistol.
"Like I said," Liam muttered to the empty air. "Boring."
He turned to look for Lloyd.
________________________________________
Date/Time: Year 2513, Month of Sun, Day 18 – 06:48 AM
Location: The Ridge
While Liam was busy turning a soldier into dust, Lloyd Ferrum was having a different kind of problem.
Lloyd was piloting the Aegis Mark IV-Beta, the prototype mech suit that looked like a walking engine. It was powerful, but it was loud and heavy. And right now, Lloyd was trying to hit a ghost.
ZING.
A high-velocity sniper round slammed into the shoulder of Lloyd’s mech. It didn't bounce off; it phased right through the armor plating and impacted the internal frame, knocking a sensor offline.
"Warning," Lloyd’s computer buzzed. "Hull breach on left shoulder. Projectile bypassed physical shielding."
"I see him," Lloyd grunted, scanning the rocky terrain. "Or... I almost see him."
Fifty yards away, crouching behind a boulder, was the Fire Fly sniper known as "Ghost."
Ghost wasn't wearing heavy armor. He was wearing a sleek, shifting bodysuit that seemed to ripple like water. In his hands was a long, thin rifle that glowed with a purple light.
The problem wasn't that Ghost was hiding. It was that he wasn't fully there.
Ghost’s suit used "Phase-Shift" technology. He was constantly vibrating his molecules, shifting his body between this dimension and the next. For one second he was solid, and the next second he was intangible, like smoke. Bullets passed right through him. Swords couldn't cut him.
Lloyd raised the arm of his mech, aiming the built-in machine gun. He fired a burst of rounds.
Rat-tat-tat-tat.
The bullets tore up the ground where Ghost was crouching. But Ghost just stood up and walked through the hail of lead. The bullets passed through his chest as if he were a hologram. He didn't even flinch.
He raised his rifle and fired again. The purple beam hit Lloyd’s leg, passing through the armor and severing a hydraulic line. The Aegis mech stumbled, oil spurting onto the dirt.
"You are too slow, native," Ghost’s voice came over the radio frequency. It was a whispery, echoing sound. "You cannot kill what you cannot touch. I am between the seconds. I am in the gaps of your reality."
Chapter : 2102
Lloyd steadied his mech. He checked his energy levels. The heat from his earlier fight with Viper was gone, but his mana was still recharging.
"He's right," Lloyd thought, his mind racing with the cold logic of an engineer. "I can't shoot him. He’s shifting his atoms out of the way before the bullet hits. He’s cheating physics."
But Lloyd knew a thing or two about cheating.
"If I can't hit him in space," Lloyd whispered, "I have to hit him in time."
He closed his eyes inside the cockpit. He reached into his soul, ignoring the fire of Iffrit and the lightning of Fang Fairy. He went to the cold, quiet corner of his power where the clock ticked.
"Zafira," Lloyd commanded. "I need the scalpel."
The air inside the cockpit grew freezing cold. Behind the massive metal suit, a spectral figure appeared. It was Zafira, the Weaver of Eras. She floated in her black funeral dress, the clock in her eye ticking backward.
She reached out and placed her ghostly hands on the controls, overlapping with Lloyd’s hands.
"The Minute Blade," Lloyd said.
A long, thin sword made of grey light appeared in the hand of the Aegis mech. It wasn't a physical sword. It was a concept. It was a blade designed to cut the things that connect moments together.
Ghost saw the sword and laughed. "A sword? You think a knife will work when bullets failed? I am untouchable!"
Ghost triggered his phase-shift. His body turned transparent, ready to let any attack pass through him. He aimed his rifle at Lloyd’s cockpit, preparing for the kill shot.
Lloyd didn't charge. He didn't run. He watched the sniper through his monitor.
He used his [All-Seeing Eye] to analyze the frequency of the phase shift. He saw the pattern. Ghost wasn't invisible all the time. He flickered. He was solid for a nanosecond, then intangible for a nanosecond. He was vibrating.
"There is a gap," Lloyd realized. "Between the shift."
Lloyd raised the Minute Blade.
"Void Step," Lloyd said.
Usually, Void Step was a teleport. It moved you from Point A to Point B. But this time, Lloyd combined it with Zafira’s power.
He slashed the air in front of him with the Minute Blade.
Schwing.
The blade didn't cut the air. It cut the distance. It deleted the space between Lloyd and the sniper.
One moment, Lloyd was fifty yards away. The next moment, the massive black mech was standing directly in front of Ghost, occupying the space where the air used to be. It was instantaneous. There was no travel time.
Ghost’s eyes went wide behind his visor. He tried to phase, to turn into smoke.
But Lloyd was already moving.
"You can hide between the seconds," Lloyd said, his voice booming from the mech’s speakers. "But I own the clock."
Lloyd didn't use the sword to kill. He used his fist.
The right arm of the Aegis mech began to glow. The white-and-gold plating of the Nova spirit slid into place. The fist became a ball of blinding white plasma.
"Zero-Distance Nova Punch."
Ghost tried to shift. He tried to become intangible. But Lloyd used Zafira’s power to "freeze" the moment. For one tiny fraction of a second, Ghost was locked in his solid form. He couldn't phase. He was just a man in a suit.
Lloyd punched.
The fist of the mech slammed into Ghost’s chest.
There was no sound of breaking bones. There was only a blinding flash of light and a sound like a thunderclap trapped in a box.
BOOM.
The plasma explosion happened inside the sniper’s personal shield. The energy had nowhere to go. It vaporized the phase-suit instantly. It disintegrated the rifle.
Ghost didn't even have time to scream. The sheer heat and force of the punch turned his body into atoms. He didn't fall down; he just ceased to exist.
Lloyd followed through with the punch, his metal fist slamming into the rock behind where the sniper had stood, shattering the boulder into dust.
Steam hissed from the arm of the mech. Lloyd stood up straight, shaking the debris off his fist.
He looked at the spot where Ghost had been. There was nothing left but a scorch mark on the ground in the shape of a shadow.
"Target neutralized," Lloyd said, his breath heavy.
He turned his mech around. Across the ridge, King Liam was dusting off his hands, standing over the pile of ash that used to be the Chrono-Trooper.
The two men locked eyes. They were tired. Their machines were hot. But they were winning.
"Two down," Lloyd said over the radio.
"Good work," Liam replied, cracking his neck. "Now, let's go help the others. I think the Commander is getting lonely."
Lloyd revved the engine of the Aegis. The black metal giant turned toward the final threat. The ridge was almost clear, but the war wasn't over yet.
Date: Year 2513, Month of Sun, Day 18 – 06:48 AM