NOVEL NEXT Chapter 432: Time Loves Its Symmetry
The hill stood outside the now exposed city of Carthage like an island of peace.
From there, the battlefield stretched endlessly like a canvas, the smoke from the fires and flashes of light from battles adding color to what was otherwise a bleak painting.
The clash of armies was a distant roar, muted as if the hill itself refused to let noise intrude.
The Blurred Man stood with his hands folded behind his back, his figure wavering at the edges, as if reality could not decide what he should look like.
The world bent softly around him, outlines bending and straight lines wavering. His faceless mask of distortion turned down towards the carnage.
For a long moment, he was silent. Then he spoke, his voice layered, carrying strange echoes like different people were speaking at the same time.
"Do you think this will work?" He asked.
The air shivered, and a sliver of existence peeled away like paper burning at the edges.
From that tear stepped a figure draped in silk. Her face was veiled, her presence heavy yet oddly absent, as if her existence was something the world itself tried to forget even as she stood within it.
The Forgotten tilted her head, her voice carrying with it a shard of oblivion. "It was your plan, remember?" she said softly.
The Blurred Man chuckled. "Not quite. Technically, it was never my plan."
His head turned slightly, though there were no features to follow. "I am simply following the course of time. Which means," his blurred hand gestured lazily toward the horizon, "this is time's plan."
The Forgotten took a step forward, her presence bending shadows unnaturally long, as if the sun feared her. She gazed down at the unraveling world, then back at the blurred outline beside her.
"It will work," she assured him. "Yggdrasil has hidden itself in the roots of the world for too long. But the threads are at their breaking point. It will come out. It has no choice."
"And when it does?" The Blurred Man's voice shifted, darker for a moment, like a ripple of unease.
"When it does," the Forgotten whispered, "we will help destroy it. And we will finally be free of our orders."
The Blurred Man froze, his warped outline flickering once, like an image on the edge of breaking.
He raised his blurred face back to the battlefield.
"Time," he murmured, almost to himself, "does love its symmetry."
The Forgotten said nothing, only stood beside him, the two of them watching the world burn while waiting for a god to reveal itself.
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As the battle raged around them, Ren cut left across a street choked with toppled market stalls, with Lilith right behind him, and Thorn bringing up the rear with his bone arm unfurling into a hooked guard over his shoulder.
Over the rooftops, beyond the splintered arcade of stone shops and snapped lamp orbs, their target stabbed the sky.
A narrow watchtower in the adjacent layer, still standing after the uprooting of the city. The building was a visible landmark, tall enough to see various layers of the city.
"Keep low," Ren said, voice hoarse over the din of battle. "Straight line to that tower. If it moves, we move with it."
"Buildings aren't supposed to move," Thorn muttered.
"Tell that to the person that moved Carthage to make this battle possible," Lilith said, almost a laugh, and then her hand snapped and a knife sang into the smoke.
A Carthage scout collapsed with a short cry, the warning dying in his throat.
They hit the avenue that bridged their layer to the next. Where before there was a tunnel, now there was just a stone path.
As they stepped upon it, a squad rounded the corner at a dead sprint. They had on Carthage colors.
Out front, a sergeant in a ridged breastplate drove a halberd into the ground and shouted for a shield wall. Ten men. Then twelve. Then twenty, flooding from an alley like iron filings drawn to a magnet.
Ren didn't even slow down. His bracers chimed against his wrists as he shoved both palms forward. "Push."
Air buckled, propelled by both Push resonance and kinetic energy.
The front rank slid six feet backward as if the street had turned to oiled glass. Lilith's knives flashed past Ren's shoulders, four silver arcs that found gaps in gorgets and eye slits and went in with ugly, wet sounds.
Thorn hit the stalled line at an angle, his bone arm telescoping into a bladed pole that he slammed under a shield and ripped upward, splitting wood, leather, and the man behind both.
"Left!" Ren barked.
He vaulted a fallen cart, spun, and Pushed again with short bursts that turned spear thrusts aside, and sent a charging pikeman skidding past Lilith's hip so her returning knife could take his hamstring.
She stepped, turned, and recalled the blade with a twitch of Pull, the knife reversing in a blur to punch through the back of the same man's neck.
The sergeant bellowed and came for Thorn. The halberd scythed high.
Thorn ducked, shifted a charge into speed, and his world stuttered into slow motion. He slipped inside the arc, his bone edge snapping out to carve through the halberd's shaft, then slammed his shoulder into the sergeant's breastplate.
Metal crumpled, and the man flew.
"On me!" Ren called, already moving.
He dropped a coin with the flick of two fingers, slid under a thrust, and Pushed the attacker's knee sideways until it made a sound knees shouldn't make.
He felt the coin ping his awareness, and teleported to it, in the man's blindspot, taking the man's head clean off his shoulders.
They chewed through the line in a dozen brutal heartbeats and spilled into the open artery that led to the adjacent layer.
The tower stood there, waiting for them. They raced towards it.
That was when the world boomed.
Ren felt it in his teeth. A long, rolling concussion that flattened smoke and lifted dust in a concentric ring.
The shockwave hit like a solid thing. He slammed both hands down and Pushed at the air above them, while Lilith pushed at the ground.
Thorn held onto the both of them, anchoring the three of them as shingles went skittering across roofs and a signboard kited past his head.
"Yes. Thank you for asking. I'm still breathing," Thorn said when the world settled.
"That's the big names fighting," Ren answered, scanning the light blasted horizon. Somewhere to the south, a pillar of light flared and died. "They're going at it hard."
The next problem arrived with the shockwave's wake.
A flood, a human one, poured into their layer as they escaped the battle of titans in the distance.
Civilians running with baskets and bedrolls, limping wounded soldiers of Carthage, and howling invaders with eyes too bright.
Direction quickly dissolved, and panic took shape.
"Stay close," Ren barked. "Don't get caught in the tide."
They didn't. They pushed through it.
Ren became a moving wedge, his Pushes clearing a channel in the tide of people without breaking bone when he could afford not to.
Lilith followed behind, knives roving to clip the legs of invaders who turned their swords towards civilians. Her throwing knives came back red.
Thorn fought like a gate closing. With wide sweeps that discouraged anyone from getting within six feet of the people scrabbling along the walls.
When an invader vaulted for a child, Thorn threw a charge into speed and simply wasn't there, bone arm catching the man in midair and pinning him to the cobbles.
"Go!" he snapped at the mother. She ran.
The next squad that tried to stop them carried Carthage sigils but looked more like a mob, a hardened one.
Crossbows thunked from the eaves. Two enhanced arrows clattered off Ren's vine armor and one gouged his rib.
He Pushed the rest away in a fan, snarled, and sprinted up the wall, feet finding shallow grips in gouged mortar, his bracers sparking as he slapped a barrier into the air to turn a bolt aside.
He flipped onto the roof and bowled through three archers in a line, tearing them apart in less than a second.
Below, Lilith kicked a spear haft aside, stepped into the opening, and buried a knife to the hilt in the attacking soldier.
The street ahead cleared long enough to see the tower distinctly.
"Almost," Ren said, a grin appearing on his face.
The crush of people around them slowly lessened and the battle migrated.
Smoke filled the air as a loud group of invaders rushed towards them, their enhancements glowing as they attacked.
Ren tore them to shreds before they could even do anything else.
"Leave some for the rest of us, would you?" Thorn grumbled.
Ren simply grinned in response.
"Guys?" Lilith spoke in the lull of battle and they looked up.
Standing before the building was a figure. And as if on cue, the smoke shrouding the figure from view, parted.
The man slowly walked forward, water dripping from his cloak in slow, steady rivulets, hissing when it touched the cracked stone of the street.
His hair hung dark and wet, framing a face that had been filled with so much sorrow and rage, the man could make no other expressions.
One eye was deep and human, while the other glowed faintly gold, shimmering unnaturally, as if it was the brand of a curse.
The clang of swords and shouts of war blurred into background noise, leaving that single man standing in a strange, oppressive quiet.
Ren's eyes narrowed. He didn't need to guess who it was. "Tam," he said, voice low.
Lilith never took her eyes off him, her throwing knives already in her palms, ready to fly.
Thorn cracked his bone arm against the ground with a nervous grin and muttered, "Hi," the word coming out far too casual for the tension humming in the air.
Tam didn't answer right away. His head tilted, droplets rolling off his chin, his gaze fixed only on Ren. When he finally spoke, his voice was low, but a storm rumbled from within.
"Ren Ross." The syllables landed like falling stones.
"Tam." Ren stepped forward. "So it's you."
The golden eye flared. "It's me."
There was a slight pause.
Then, Tam lifted his hand, water swirling around it like snakes. "You have no idea how long I've been waiting for this."