Chapter 661: There

The two chains snapped outward the moment Grey’s eyes glazed over, one curling around his left forearm while the other stretched into the distorted space surrounding Kronos.

Grey didn’t try to force Center of Spirit any farther, leaving the Ability active only as a reference while he shifted most of his attention toward the Recursive and Branching portions of his Neural Frame. If reading Kronos wasn’t enough, then Grey would stop trying to read him and start taking apart whatever the fuck he was doing instead.

The Recursive chain moved first, catching onto the temporal path left behind by the next sweep of Kronos’ scythe and following it backward rather than attempting to predict where the attack would land.

Grey still took the cut across his ribs, but this time the chain retained the entire process, from the first twitch of Kronos’ shoulder to the future wound appearing before the blade actually arrived. It immediately ran the sequence again through Grey’s Neural Frame, then again, each repetition stripping away another piece of useless information until the relationship between the moments became slightly clearer.

The Branching chain joined almost immediately, splitting its attention between every point where that same attack could have diverged. One path followed the scythe as Grey saw it, another followed the wound that appeared early, and several more stretched toward the different temporal echoes of Kronos that Center of Spirit had been returning as equally valid.

Most of those branches collapsed into nothing, but a handful remained, giving Grey his first crude outline of how Kronos was separating cause from consequence.

A fist still caught Grey across the mouth before he could make use of it, though he managed to roll with the impact instead of taking it cleanly.

Kronos’ knee arrived from another moment before Grey recovered, only for the Recursive chain to recognize enough of the buildup that Grey twisted away and turned what should have broken his jaw into a glancing strike.

The difference wasn’t much, but considering Grey had spent the last several exchanges getting beaten like he owed Kronos money, he would take it.

The scythe came again, and the Branching chain spread into a web of possibilities while the Recursive chain tore through the previous examples looking for anything they shared.

Grey saw six positions where Kronos might exist, three moments where the attack might begin, and two places where blood could appear before the weapon arrived, yet beneath all of those possibilities there was one repeated change that happened every time.

Kronos’ Recursive Frame established the temporal process first, reaffirming the sequence no matter how many times it was disrupted, while the Branching Frame grew alternatives off of that foundation until the same action could reach Grey through several different relationships with time.

Grey finally understood why the two Frames fit Kronos so disgustingly well.

Recursive created the loop, making the manipulation stable enough to repeat even when reality should have rejected it, while Branching gave that loop somewhere new to go every time.

One attack could become ten possible attacks without losing the original sequence holding them together, and if Grey responded correctly to one branch, Kronos simply shifted into another while Recursive preserved enough of the process to keep everything from falling apart.

Virtueless swept across Grey’s body and caught the next scythe strike before it could reach his chest. For the first time since the Dominion expanded, Grey blocked the attack before any part of it touched him.

Kronos’ eyes narrowed slightly, and Grey paid for noticing when a delayed kick landed against his hip and sent him sliding across the road.

The Recursive chain caught that process too, however, while the Branching chain immediately spread through the possible follow-ups, allowing Grey to plant Virtueless and turn around it just as Kronos appeared behind him.

The rod slammed against the shaft of the scythe, Grey stepped through the collision, and his elbow clipped Kronos across the jaw before the God could shift the exchange into another branch.

The battle tightened from there.

Grey was still losing, there was no pretending otherwise, but the losses were getting smaller every time the chains completed another cycle. A cut that should have opened his stomach became a line across his side, a strike meant for his temple caught his shoulder instead, and one temporal echo that had fooled him three exchanges earlier was discarded before Center of Spirit even finished registering it.

The problem was that every answer Grey found exposed several more questions.

Kronos didn’t use Recursive and Branching as two separate tools in the clean way Grey had initially imagined, they folded through each other so often that Grey occasionally lost track of which one had initiated the change.

A repeated temporal sequence could develop new branches, those branches could be fed back into the original repetition, and the newly altered loop could then branch again until Grey was looking at something closer to a living tree than a technique.

Every time the Recursive chain learned the trunk, the Branching chain showed Grey another canopy growing out of it.

Blood ran from Grey’s nose as both portions of his Neural Frame strained under the load, the situation only made worse by the fact he was forcing so much out of the very same two that were so much weaker than the others. Though, his expression only grew more focused.

He ducked before a future version of the scythe reached him, ignored the Kronos appearing to his left, then drove Virtueless toward empty air on his right. Kronos materialized directly into the strike and barely twisted enough for the rod to scrape past his ribs instead of crushing through them.

That was close. Close enough that Kronos stopped smiling.

Grey’s chains rattled louder as he pressed forward, Recursive running every successful read back through his mind while Branching tested variations faster than he could consciously follow. Center of Spirit sat beneath both of them now, no longer trying to solve the Dominion on its own, but feeding balance, intent, and soul movement into the two chains so they had more information to tear apart.

The next exchange ended with Kronos taking Virtueless across the forearm.

The one after that forced him to block with the scythe.

By the third, Grey’s chain had wrapped halfway around the weapon before Kronos pulled free, and Grey caught the smallest flicker in the God’s expression as he realized exactly what was happening.

Grey was getting closer.

Kronos changed his approach immediately.

The scythe stopped moving toward Grey and twisted instead toward Virtueless, not striking the rod itself but tracing a slow arc around it while the Dominion contracted into an impossibly narrow point. Grey felt the shift through the weapon before he understood it, a strange pressure wrapping around the soul hidden within Virtueless rather than the black material surrounding her.

The angel lady reacted with a sharp pulse.

Grey’s expression changed.

Kronos had sensed her.

Time compressed around Virtueless until the rod seemed to exist a fraction behind everything else, then expanded in the opposite direction around the soul within it. The dilation wasn’t trying to hurt her, at least not directly, it was stretching the moment of her existence outward, forcing her presence to linger across time far longer and far louder than it naturally should have.

Grey yanked Virtueless back, but the change had already happened, and then something answered.

The angel lady’s presence pulsed once through the rod, stronger than Grey had ever felt it, and somewhere impossibly far away another faint pulse returned. Then another came from a different direction, followed by a third, each one distant enough that Grey couldn’t tell whether they were separated by worlds, space, or just time.

Kronos smiled again.

"So there you are."

The skies rumbled.