Chapter 660: Kronos (2)

The pressure swallowed the road so completely that Grey’s first instinct was to brace himself, though nothing around him seemed to have visibly changed. Kronos still stood several meters away, the overturned car remained behind him, and the cracked pavement beneath Grey’s feet hadn’t moved an inch, yet Center of Spirit suddenly began returning so much conflicting information that Grey almost wondered if the Ability had broken.

Kronos was standing in front of him, stepping toward him, already beside him, and somehow still occupying the place he had been several seconds ago.

Grey swung Virtueless toward the version approaching from his right, only for the weapon to pass through an image that vanished before the rod had properly crossed it. Pain exploded across his back an instant later, blood following a wound Grey hadn’t felt himself receive, and by the time he turned toward Kronos the God was still several meters away with his scythe resting casually against one shoulder.

Then Kronos disappeared, the image in the distance seemingly catching up to an action that had already happened, and Grey barely brought Virtueless across his body before the scythe crashed into it.

The impact sent him sliding across the road, but even that simple motion felt wrong as the sensation of his feet grinding against the pavement arrived several moments after he had already stopped.

Grey ignored it and pushed Center of Spirit harder, narrowing his awareness entirely onto Kronos while stripping away the countless temporal echoes appearing around him. He had managed to separate real intent from false intent only minutes ago, and he refused to believe that adding more noise suddenly made the same principle impossible.

Kronos stepped forward, and Grey caught the change in his balance before the scythe began moving, letting him slip beneath the first swing and drive Virtueless toward his ribs.

The rod struck something solid, yet Kronos showed no reaction until several seconds later when his body suddenly folded around an impact Grey had already forgotten landed.

Before Grey could capitalize, a cut opened across his thigh from an attack that hadn’t happened yet, and the scythe only flashed past that exact location after Grey had already stumbled away from it.

That was the problem. Center of Spirit was still reading everything correctly, but "correctly" had stopped being useful when the information belonged to different points in time.

Grey could sense Kronos’ center of balance, his intent, the movement of his soul and even the tiny preparation before every strike, yet some of those readings belonged to the Kronos of three seconds ago while others came from a version that wouldn’t complete the movement for another two.

The Dominion hadn’t fooled Grey’s senses at all, it had flooded them with truths that no longer arrived in the order necessary to use them.

Grey gritted his teeth and pushed deeper anyway, pulling on the newly discovered soul-side of his Neural Frame until Center of Spirit seemed to tighten around both halves of himself.

If the Ability had climbed from Level 31 to Level 36 simply from forcing itself to understand Kronos, then Grey only needed another step, another realization that would allow him to distinguish not just what Kronos intended to do, but when that intent belonged.

He waited for the familiar shift while the scythe came toward his neck, ducked beneath it, and immediately took a fist to the stomach from a Kronos who hadn’t moved yet.

Grey folded around the blow before the fist actually arrived.

When it finally did, the second impact stacked onto the first and launched him backward, his heels tearing twin lines through the asphalt while blood rose into his throat.

Grey planted Virtueless to stop himself, then spun around it as Kronos appeared behind him, correctly reading the incoming strike only for another scythe blade to carve across his shoulder from several seconds ahead of the exchange.

"You are still trying to read me," Kronos said, his voice overlapping itself so that the last word reached Grey before the first had completely faded. "Surely you’ve realized the problem by now."

Grey ignored him and forced Center of Spirit outward, trying something different as his perception widened from Kronos to the temporal distortions surrounding him. Instead of identifying a single center of balance, Grey attempted to map every version of Kronos at once, linking each movement to the one before and after it until the entire sequence existed inside his head.

For several exchanges it almost worked, Virtueless meeting the scythe twice in succession before Grey slipped past a third blow and drove the end of the rod toward Kronos’ sternum.

The strike missed. Or rather, it would miss.

Grey felt the absence before he finished swinging, then watched Kronos step away several moments later and complete the future Center of Spirit had already shown him. A knee hit Grey’s jaw from the past almost simultaneously, snapping his head backward before Kronos’ body flickered through the movement that had produced it.

Grey landed hard on one hand and immediately rolled aside, avoiding the scythe that buried itself into the road where he’d been. He pushed Center of Spirit even harder as he rose, waiting for another notification while he tried to organize past, present and future into separate layers, but there was no response from the Genesis System.

Kronos attacked again, and Grey blocked the present strike only to take its future continuation across the ribs before the movement connecting the two had even occurred.

Still nothing.

Grey changed his approach again, narrowing his awareness until he focused only on Kronos’ soul, then abandoned that and attempted to read nothing except the physical shifts of his body.

Each method gave him pieces of the truth, but Kronos’ Dominion continued rearranging when those pieces became relevant, turning information that would have made Grey untouchable in an ordinary fight into something almost actively harmful. Every additional thing Center of Spirit revealed only gave him another moment in time to accidentally react to too early or too late.

The scythe struck Virtueless hard enough to wrench Grey’s shoulder, and before he could reset his grip, Kronos appeared inside his guard and drove a palm into his sternum. Grey felt the bones crack, though the pain arrived strangely late, only blooming after he had already flown several meters and struck the pavement.

He rolled onto one knee with blood dripping from his mouth, Center of Spirit still burning at Level 36 no matter how hard he pushed it.

There wasn’t another breakthrough waiting for him. At least not like this.

Grey finally accepted that trying to force Center of Spirit higher was only giving Kronos more opportunities to beat the shit out of him, and another scythe strike across his side provided a particularly convincing argument.

He could read Kronos, probably better than anyone at his Class had any right to, but reading something meant very little when Kronos controlled when the information became true.

Grey caught himself with Virtueless as another temporal echo passed through him, then slowly lifted his head while the blood running from his mouth spread into a sneer. If Center of Spirit couldn’t solve the problem, then he would stop asking it to.

Two chains hanging from his left hand began to rattle while Grey’s attention shifted away from the Ability he had been desperately trying to push farther.

His eyes slowly glazed over.