Lucien stood alone before the panic room vault, his breathing ragged, his armor fractured and scorched. Green thread-light flickered weakly across his limbs, struggling to hold its form. His double-bladed sword, now chipped and cracked, hung from his hand like dead weight.
The walls around him bore deep gouges where earlier clashes had torn through steel like paper.
Then came the next wave.
Seven aliens surged from the smoke. They struck with terrifying coordination. The first slammed Lucien backward, crushing his ribs beneath a brutal punch. Another clipped his leg–knee buckling, balance lost. The third locked his right arm mid-swing—Lucien's double-bladed sword shuddered in the air before clattering across the floor with a shriek.
The others moved in tandem. One wrapped violet thread-light tendrils around his throat. Another planted its hand into Lucien's chest, raw energy sparking against his armor's weakened plates. Another came and drove him to the floor—hard. The ground cratered beneath him.
Lucien growled—he tried to budge but two more held him down.
He was pinned. Held down by six inhuman constructs. Their faceless heads hovered inches from him, gears-clocks orbiting in their palms—glowing, ever-turning, violet energy.
The last one stepped forward from the far end of the corridor, raising its hand. Its gear-clock began to spin—slow at first, then unnaturally fast. His palm building with sickening violet intensity.
One of the alien's forced Lucien to turn his head, just slightly, enough to see.
The reinforced panic room—the vault. The only place left that reminded him of the past.
Then—
A beam of violet thread-light ignited—it span the entire length of the corridor.
Time itself bent inward as the violet light cared forward. It struck the vault dead center. For a moment, everything was white–white and shaking. The force peeled through the reinforced walls, vaporizing the shell—disintegrating it.
The steel screamed. Then there was silence.
When the light faded, there was no vault. No room. No bodies.
Only a gaping crater of glowing violet ash—smooth, and absolute.
***
For a moment, everything stood still.
The corridor was a void of ringing silence, filled with a haze of falling ash and fractured light. Violet dust drifted like snowfall through the corridor, suspended in the fading aftermath of the vault's annihilation. A pale glow shimmered off the scorched steel walls—warped, buckled, groaning under the heat.
Lucien was silent.
His eyes locked on the ruin. His body trembled under the weight of the aliens restraining him.
He watched it all happen.
He didn't scream.
But he said nothing.
His silence was absolute.
Then—his fingers flickered with thread-light.
It began to leak from the tears in his armor—first a pulse, then a surge. His hand curled into a fist. His breath came ragged through clenched teeth. The air began to distort around him, warping slightly, as if gravity had momentarily forgotten what direction it pulled.
Then, like a snapped coil—
He erupted.
A shockwave of green thread-light blasted the aliens holding him outward—vaporizing the debris around them. Their limbs cracking from the force. Lucien rose—dragged upward by the violent energy pouring out of him. His body contorted with the emotion, shoulders twisting unnaturally before snapping taut.
His armor reformed—impossibly fast—plates snapping shut with sonic cracks, molten at the seams. His thread-light surged brighter than ever, casting long shadows that danced like phantoms across the corridor walls.
He wasn't glowing.
He was burning.
His eyes were hollow, yet filled with light—glowing green, bleeding from the cracks in his face. His double-bladed sword spun to life behind him, orbiting like a crescent wing before shooting to his arm.
And then—
He began to slaughter.
Lucien moved without pause, without mercy. He blinked across space, reappearing mid-air, impaling one alien through the spine before ripping the blade out sideways.
He didn't stop. Another blink—he carved through two more, bisecting one down the center, cleaving the other diagonally.
One alien turned its gear-clock to rewind time—Lucien snapped the gear with a single arc, catching it mid-twist and flinging it back into the alien's own chest. The resulting detonation turned the area around him into vapor.
Another aimed his palm at Lucien—building up a beam of violet light. But Lucien blinked through the charge and swung his blade, severing all four limbs in a blur.
The aliens dropped one by one.
There was no rhythm. No technique. Only violence—pure, and chaotic. A force of grief and wrath distilled into flesh.
When the final alien tried to flee—Lucien didn't even blink.
He raised his hand.
The air screamed.
A single white thread-light beam punched through the corridor like a god's finger—piercing the alien, the wall, the ceiling, and everything beyond. It didn't even have time to die. It simply vanished.
Then—
Silence.
The corridor was unrecognizable.
Charred, cratered, and scorched green and violet.
***
The dust had begun to settle.
It floated in ghost spirals across the ruined corridor, glowing faintly with violet and green. Where once there had been a vault—walls reinforced with layers, shielding, and hope—there was now only silence. A perfect crater, glassed smooth by unbearable heat, lay carved into the wall.
Lucien stood at its center.
No metal. No clothing. No Bones. No trace. Only ash.
He stood there silent—alone, the world around him dimming. The walls scarred—blackened—seemed to recoil from him. Behind his figure, green and violet embers fluttered like embers in the wake of destruction.
A single mournful silhouette, framed at the center of the devastation. His head bowed. His hands low.
Then—his body vanished into thread-light, leaving only the quiet sound of falling dust and a smear of green trailing into the dark.
The silence he left behind was absolute.
And the ruin mourned without words.
***
The air was perfectly still. No wind, no sound—only the faint hum of unraveling time. Lucien stood alone on the rooftop of what remained of Chronos HQ, the skeletal edges of the structure clawing into a fractured night sky. Rubble stretched in every direction, a broken graveyard beneath a dead moon.
His breath fogged the air once—then stopped.
He raised his head. And the world froze.
The stars halted in their courses. The clouds above paused mid-shift. Gunfire, explosions, screams—all ceased.
A shudder rippled through the void above, silent and divine. The sky fractured—not like glass, but like an old painting cracking along hidden seams. The cracks spread outward, green veins blooming into a celestial wound. Through it spilled a void threaded with faint trembling gold light—a place that had no stars, no gravity, no sound.
From the fractured void above—came judgment.
Giant green beams of light descended.
Hundreds.
Each one a blinding lance of pure thread-light, enormous and roaring with compressed power. They aligned with impossible precision—like a cosmic constellation rearranged for the sole purpose of devastation.
Then—
They fired.
It was silent at first.
Then—the world screamed.
Skies ignited green and white, bursting into a firestorm that blinded the heavens. Rivers boiled. Mountains cracked. Forests disappeared. The entire battlefield—human, alien, steel, and soil—was reduced to light and vapor. Shockwaves tore through space itself. Cities in the distance lit up like dying stars.
And in the heart of it all—Lucien stood. Unmoving. Unspeaking.
The blast whipped around him like a hurricane from hell. Thread-light arced against his form, sparking off the crystalline armor. But he didn't flinch. He didn't brace. He simply stared upward. His body bathed in the light of absolute destruction.
It was the judgement of a god made man.
Those who witnessed it—time refused to remember them.
***
From the stratosphere, the world looked broken.
The could line had split open like a wound, revealing a blighted crater that stretcher for miles in every direction—green and gray ash swirling in concentric patterns, as if the land itself had been scarred by divine punishment. The coastline was gone, the mountains sheared off into flatness, and even the rivers were dried veins of blackened glass.
At the very center of it all, barely more than a speck from above, stood Lucien.
He was motionless. His armor—fractured and glimmering, still hummed faintly with residual thread-light.
His gaze was locked downward—toward the smoothed violet crater where the panic room once stood.
There was no expression on his face. No rage. No grief.
Only the calm of something that had ended.
The sky above had begun to close—the fractures sealing into faded gold scars. The stars peeked through the veil again, as if the world had forgotten the violence that had just reshaped it.
But Lucien remembered.
No word spoken. No tear shed.
Only the sound of ash burning across cratered earth.