Chapter 549 (Bonus - s)
Which was approximately three minutes and fifty seconds longer than anyone watching would have predicted.
When Chronus finally caught his movement pattern and his hand connected cleanly with Cassius’s shoulder — not the full aging effect, a partial application — Cassius felt his arm go numb and his speed on that side collapse.
He went to one knee.
Chronus looked down at him.
"You bought her time," he said. "She’s almost ready."
He looked past Cassius at Freda.
"Whatever you’re casting, stop it," Chronus said, his voice losing the pleasant quality entirely for the first time. "I’ll kill him if you complete it."
"Then kill him," Freda said, her voice absolutely steady. Her hands were moving. Her eyes were focused. She had fifteen percent mana left and she was spending it all on one casting. "He knows that. He came here knowing that."
She met Cassius’s eyes across the plaza.
"I’m sorry," she said.
"Don’t be," Cassius said.
She meant it as an apology for what the displacement spell would do when it activated — not targeted, not controlled, not a smooth portal to a specific location. A force that would throw whatever it was anchored to through space, distance determined by the mana invested, destination determined by chance. He would land somewhere. Not here. Outside the field, given the range she’d invested. Beyond that, unknown.
It was the only way to get him out. The only way to get word to Loki.
"No," Chronus said.
He moved.
He moved fast — demon lord speed, the restraint he’d been showing gone, crossing the plaza in the time it took Freda to draw one breath.
But Loki’s soldiers came from every direction at once.
They’d been gathering for the last ten minutes — the survivors of every combat encounter throughout the city, the garrison remnants, the emergency responders, the civilians who’d chosen to fight rather than shelter. Dozens of them, streaming in from six entry points simultaneously, converging on the plaza in the desperate coordinated response of people who understood they were outmatched and had decided to be outmatched together.
They swarmed Chronus.
Not with the coordinated precision of trained units — with the specific determination of a population that had watched their city be walked through and had arrived at the point past which calculation stopped mattering.
For every one Chronus pushed back, three more arrived.
For every temporal aging strike that dropped someone, five more reached him.
He was handling them — easily, completely, the sheer weight of his ability making the outcome inevitable. But they were slowing him. Each fighter was one more second, one more step he couldn’t close toward Freda, one more moment the displacement spell ran.
Chronus’s expression had changed.
Not fear. Not alarm. Something colder — the expression of someone who had run a calculation and found the result irritating.
"Enough," he said, and released a temporal wave — not targeted, omnidirectional, a pulse of aging energy that expanded outward from his position like a shockwave.
The soldiers nearest him fell.
The ones at distance stumbled.
The plaza cleared a ten-foot radius around Chronus in three seconds.
And in those three seconds, the displacement spell completed.
The light was green — Freda’s signature, emerald-bright, the specific shade of her magic at full expression. It wrapped around Cassius like a second skin and then compressed — sharp, sudden, the displacement activation happening all at once instead of the smooth sequence a proper portal would use.
Chronus spun.
His hand extended, a temporal strike aimed precisely at Cassius in the moment of displacement—
The spell was already activating. The targeting was already locked.
But his strike was fast.
The two things happened simultaneously, and Cassius felt both: the displacement tearing him from the plaza, and something else — a searing, tearing sensation through his abdomen, a temporal decay strike that had been aimed at his center of mass and had connected in the last possible fraction of a second before the displacement completed.
The plaza disappeared.
—--------------
SOMEWHERE OUTSIDE VAEL’KIRA’S ISOLATION FIELD
Cassius landed hard enough to hear himself land.
The sound carried — a heavy, wet impact, the kind that came from velocity meeting ground without preparation. He skipped twice across the hillside outside the city’s northeastern boundary, each contact a new impact, before stopping in a patch of dry grass.
Silence.
The field’s edge was visible from here — that slight atmospheric distortion he’d identified from the command hall window, running in a great circle around Vael’kira. He was outside it.
He was outside it.
The communication stone was still in his coat pocket. He could feel it. He reached for it and stopped because his hand wasn’t responding correctly — the shoulder that Chronus had touched was compromised, muscle function degraded, the aging damage from the partial contact still present.
He used the other hand.
It found the stone. Pressed mana into it. Loki’s frequency, the urgent priority signal, everything he had.
"Lord Loki." His voice came out different than he expected. Rough. Lower. "Lord Loki, this is Cassius. Chronus has invaded Vael’kira. He entered the city approximately one hour ago. He has killed an unknown number — soldiers, civilians, the eastern gate garrison. He erected an isolation field over the entire city before entering. I was displaced outside the field using Lady Morgana’s apprentice’s magic." He paused to breathe. The breath felt wrong. "Freda is still inside. She’s at minimum mana. The remaining soldiers are fighting but the outcome is—" Another pause. "Please come immediately."
He stopped transmitting.
He placed the stone on the ground beside him with the careful precision of someone who was focusing on small controlled actions to manage something larger.
Then he looked down.
His hand was already there. He hadn’t decided to put it there — it had moved on its own, pressed against his abdomen in the automatic response of a body trying to manage damage.
He raised the hand.
The blood was dark.
He lowered the hand slowly and looked at what was beneath it.
Chronus’s temporal strike had connected in the last fraction of a second before displacement. Not his hand — his attack. A concentrated beam of temporal aging energy directed at center mass, hitting him as the displacement activated, following him partially through the activation before the spatial separation cut the connection.