Chapter 554 (Bonus - s)
A mage’s worst nightmare, Chronus thought, isn’t death.
Death is an ending. Endings have a certain mercy to them — they’re complete. What they took from you stops being something you have to live without, because you stop having to live at all.
But to take the magic — to take it specifically, completely, permanently, while leaving everything else intact—
The memories of every spell she ever learned. The muscle memory of every casting motion. The instinct, the love of it, the seventy years of identity built around being someone who could do this—
All of it, present. All of it, remembered. And none of it, ever again, reachable.
He smiled.
"Oh, Morgana," he said quietly, to the unconscious girl hanging from his hand, "this is going to be so much better than killing her."
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The mechanism, when he reached for it, was simple — simple in the way that the most devastating applications of his ability always were. Complexity was for people who needed to compensate for limited tools. He had never needed to compensate.
A mana core connected to the rest of a body’s magical architecture through what practitioners called the anchor threads — the specific, individual strands of arcane connective tissue that ran from the core outward to every pathway, every conduit, every point where intention became casting. In a mage as developed as Freda, there would be hundreds of these threads, each one representing years of training, each one a tiny, living connection between will and power.
Chronus’s temporal ability didn’t have to destroy the core. Destroying the core would kill her — too final, too close to the mercy of death he’d just decided against.
It didn’t have to destroy the pathways either. The pathways were just structure; structure could theoretically regrow, given centuries, given a mage skilled enough to attempt the reconstruction, given hope.
He was going to take the threads.
Every one of them. Aged — not slowly, not the way he’d aged the gate or the soldier’s arm, where the process unfolded visibly over seconds. Instantaneously. A single, total temporal acceleration applied to several hundred microscopic structures simultaneously, each one experiencing centuries of decay in the time it took for a heart to beat once.
The threads would not heal. They could not regrow — they were not flesh, not bone, not anything that the body’s natural processes understood how to repair. They were connections, and once a connection had been aged past the point of existing, there was nothing left to reconnect to.
The mana core would remain. Intact. Functional. Full of power that had nowhere to go.
The pathways would remain. Intact. The muscle memory, the instincts, the seventy years of training — all of it would remain, perfectly preserved, in a body that could never again translate any of it into anything.
A mage, forever, with no magic.
Knowing exactly what she was missing. Every single day. For as long as she lived.
"This is the part," Chronus said conversationally, to no one, because everyone nearby who could have heard him was dead, "where I would normally pause for dramatic effect. Build tension. Let the moment breathe."
He tilted his head slightly, as though listening to something.
Something was there — at the edge of his awareness, the specific quality of disturbance that his nature made him sensitive to above almost anything else. Not sound. Not magic, exactly. The texture of the timeline itself, somewhere beyond the isolation field, beginning to bend.
Three points of significant presence. Converging on this location. Moving fast — faster than should have been possible for beings traveling by conventional means, which told him they weren’t traveling by conventional means at all.
He read the signatures.
Loki. Predictable — this was, after all, his city, and grief plus rage made for excellent motivational fuel regardless of how theatrical the demon lord usually was.
Morgana. There she was. The disturbance her presence created in the timeline was distinctive — old enough that her very existence left ripples, the kind of permanence that Chronus had spent two centuries strategically avoiding.
And the third signature.
Chronus went very still.
Him.
The wrongness of it — the sheer, structural wrongness of a being that young carrying a presence that dense — registered the way it always did, every time he encountered information about Satou, as a kind of low-grade alarm at the back of his calculations. He had felt this signature before, distantly, through the soul fragment that had once been part of Richard. He had assumed, when Richard died and that fragment passed to the killer, that he would be able to track Satou easily through the residue.
He had not anticipated how loud the residue would become.
He calculated.
Three points of presence. The combined trajectory. The rate of approach.
Ten minutes, he thought. Perhaps less.
All three. Simultaneously. At his current strength — half of what it had been, the recovery from Richard’s death still incomplete despite three months, despite the preparations, despite everything he had built in the unmapped dark.
Tch.
He looked down at Freda.
"Well," he said, almost apologetically, "I suppose we’d better not dawdle."
He felt the threads before he aged them — felt the lattice of Freda’s magical architecture under his fingers, the intricate cathedral-work of seventy years, every strand humming faintly with potential even now, even at zero reserves, even unconscious.
He applied the acceleration.
There was no light. No sound, beyond the faintest sensation — something between a sigh and a snap, repeated several hundred times in less than the span of a single heartbeat, too fast and too quiet for any external observer to register as anything at all.
Inside Freda, in the part of her that wasn’t conscious but was nonetheless her — the part that had spent seventy years building itself around the specific joy of fire answering to her will, of water curving at her gesture, of darkness folding obediently around her intent — something happened that had no equivalent in the physical world.
Centuries passed.
For the threads. Only for the threads. Every connection between her mana core and the rest of her — every pathway, every conduit, every strand of the lattice Morgana had spent decades helping her build — aged past the point of existing, all at once, and crumbled into nothing.