Chapter 450: Past and Present! I
Advanced Humans moved through the streets with the casual confidence of apex predators in their natural habitat.
So showed their advancent obviously… eyes that saw in spectrums normal humans couldn’t imagine, flas surrounding their bodies, or lightning crackling over their skin!
Others kept their modifications internal, appearing normal until the mont they needed to bend steel or fight against Evolutius Beasts from the Catacombs!
The regular humans navigated around them with practiced ease, always intimidated.
This was Neon, where everyone was trying to beco sothing more than they were yesterday, and Advanced Humans stood at the very top of the ladder!
It was into this organized environnt that impossibility decided to announce itself.
BZZT!
The sound cut through the city’s ambient noise like a blade through conversation.
Above, the sky began to crack.
It was not clouds parting or atmosphere distorting, but actual fractures appearing in what should have been empty air!
Multicolored light blood from the cracks, colors that shouldn’t exist bleeding through from sowhere else.
The reaction was imdiate and panicked.
“Leyline Fracture!” soone scread, their voice carrying the terror of soone who had seen what usually ca through such tears in reality.
“Monsters! From the sky?!” Another voice joined the chorus of fear as people scattered, seeking shelter in buildings that suddenly seed far too fragile.
Advanced Humans activated defensive capabilities, energy shields and flas blooming like flowers made of light.
So took offensive stances, weapons materializing from hidden compartnts or being pulled from storage devices!
Everyone knew that Leyline Fractures ant- pure death and decimation!
But what stepped through the fracture wasn’t a monster.
It was sothing far more impossible.
Achilles erged from the crack in reality with the grace of soone stepping through a doorway they had just invented.
His form still blazed with stellar radiance, his skin shining like condensed starlight that had been convinced to take human shape.
The purple-gold of his hair moved with cosmic winds that didn’t exist in Neon’s atmosphere, and his eyes held depths that suggested he had seen the code of existence itself.
Every human and Advanced Human who had the slightest energy coursing through their bodies looked up in shock.
The enhanced senses of the Advanced Humans, their energy perception, their carefully cultivated awareness of power, all scread the sa impossible ssage.
Run.
Run against this being that…shouldn’t exist!
Not here, not now, not in this way. He radiated power that didn’t match any known classification, energy that seed to exist in spectrums they didn’t have nas for!
And he simply felt impossible to topple!
The crack in the sky sealed behind him with a sound like reality sighing in relief, leaving only the impossible figure floating above their streets as proof that the laws of physics were more like suggestions.
Achilles looked down at the Colony City of Neon…not as he rembered it recently, but as it had been.
Years in the past, before certain events had shaped certain futures!
“…”
He had done it. He had tunneled through ti itself, treating temporal distance as just another barrier to be bypassed.
“Fuck…” He couldn’t help the smile of possibilities blooming across his face.
The implications of what he had just accomplished…were just unfathomable.
But for now, he simply floated there, a being who had eaten ti’s rulebook and decided to write his own, looking down at a city that didn’t yet know his na.
Right after his appearance shocked the citizens of Neon, Achilles’s gaze turned toward a specific direction…not guided by sight but by sothing deeper, a pull that transcended physical senses.
Without a word, without explanation to the bewildered crowds below, he vanished from the skies, leaving only ripples in space where reality was still trying to understand what had just occurred.
Dozens of miles away, far from the gleaming skyscrapers of Neon’s comrcial districts, the cityscape degraded into sothing altogether different.
Here, where the neon stones and roads gave way to cheaper compressed materials, where the buildings were replaced by prefabricated housing that had seen better decades, lay the district that prosperity had forgotten…the slums.
The street of townhos might have been peaceful on any other day, their weathered facades telling stories of families making do with less, of dreams deferred but not destroyed. Today, those stories were being rewritten in blood and terror.
The road itself had split open like a wound in reality, a fracture extending down the street’s center as if space itself had been torn along a seam.
From this tear, monstrous Evolutius Beasts rose with maddening hunger, their forms a nightmare fusion of evolution gone wrong.
Wolf-like creatures with too many eyes and teeth that dripped venom, claws that could rend both flesh and spirit…they poured forth like a plague given form.
Screams echoed through the narrow streets as residents fled in panic. So were too slow. The sound of tearing and breaking mixed with cries that cut off too suddenly, painting a picture of carnage that needed no visual confirmation.
Near the epicenter of this chaos stood two figures who seed impossibly out of place.
The man appeared to be in his fifties, though sothing about his bearing suggested those years had been harder than most.
Tall despite the slight hunch of soone carrying invisible weights, handso features marked by exhaustion that went soul-deep. His clothes were simple, worn but clean…the attire of soone who had learned to find dignity in poverty.
His body showed no signs of Advanced Human modification, no energy signature that would mark him as anything more than baseline human.
Yet against Lower Body Modification Beasts, creatures that could tear through steel with casual ease…he stood tall.
With nothing more than a walking stick, worn smooth from years of use, he was performing the impossible!
Each swing knocked aside wolf-like beasts that should have torn through him like tissue paper.
The stick moved with precision that transcended re skill, finding exactly the right angle, the right mont, to redirect killing blows into empty air.
He created a small circle of safety, not for himself but for others, giving families precious seconds to flee while he held the line.
How could a seemingly injured and feeble man do this?
The woman beside him provided part of the answer simply by her presence. Similar in age but carrying those years with a grace that made them seem like decoration rather than burden, she stood with the calm of soone who had faced worse and survived.
The pack circled them now, having recognized the greater threat. Dozens of red eyes focused on the pair with predatory calculation.
The man’s movents were slowing, the walking stick trembling slightly in his grip. Not from fear, never from fear…but from the simple exhaustion of a body pushed beyond its limits.
Tears trailed down his cheeks as he grasped the woman behind him with his free hand, pulling her closer as the circle tightened. She responded by reaching up to wipe away his tears, her smile carrying the serenity of soone who had already made peace with what was coming.
She whispered to him, her voice barely audible above the growling of the pack, but the words carried weight!
“My Adras, did you not tell you were once a King? Stand tall now, my King.”
Her King.
The words were spoken with the finality of a last gift, a reminder of what he was beneath the disguise of ordinariness. They were ant to be the last words between them, a farewell dressed as encouragent.
The wolf pack surged forward for the kill, a wave of teeth and claws and hunger that would not be denied.
Advanced Humans were always late to the slums…there were barely any who lived here, no one with enough influence to demand quick response.
The ergency forces would arrive eventually, count the bodies, file the reports. Another Leyline Fracture incident in a poor district. Unfortunate but unsurprising.
Had there been just one defender. Just a few who cared enough to be there when needed.
But at the mont when death seed inevitable, when the first claw was inches from flesh…
WAP!
Space above them twisted and distorted as if soone had pinched reality like clay, reshaping it according to will that wouldn’t accept no for an answer.
The distortion was visible…a sphere of warped air that made the eyes water to look at, as if that patch of existence had forgotten how to exist properly.
Achilles appeared in that impossible space, and the mont he materialized, the world changed.
Space itself twisted around every Evolutius Beast in the vicinity.
Not dramatically, not with grand gestures or explosive force. Simply and terribly, the space they occupied began to fold. The frawork that kept their atoms properly separated collapsed inward, the distance between their molecules reducing to zero.
They crumbled into themselves like origami being crushed by invisible hands, their howls cutting off as their throats folded into their lungs, their lungs into their hearts, everything compressing into masses of blood and bone that splattered onto the cracked street.
For every, single, beast!
Even the tear on the road began to close as if it was fearful and being zipped up!
…!
The silence that followed was absolute.
Achilles descended with the slow grace of inevitable truth, his stellar form casting light that had no source, his purple-gold hair moving in winds that existed in different dinsions.
His eyes…those depths that had seen the backend of reality…fixed first on the woman.
His mother. Still beautiful despite the years, still carrying that grace that had drawn an Emperor King from his stellar throne to walk among mortals.
She stood frozen, her hand still raised from wiping away tears, her expression caught between disbelief.
Then his gaze shifted to the man. Tall despite the disguise of weariness, powerful despite the facade of weakness.
The walking stick trembled in his grip.
The Eighth Adrastia Emperor King.
His father.
Achilles’s eyes grew heavy with the weight of temporal paradox, of possibilities reshaping themselves around this mont that shouldn’t exist.
His parents should have died here.
But now…
Fuck all that.
His entire existence buzzed with the tension of being where he shouldn’t be, when he shouldn’t be. The universe itself held its breath, waiting to see what impossible thing would happen next.
When he spoke, his voice was calm despite the magnitude of what was occurring. Two words that carried the weight of love that transcended ti, of a son who had broken reality itself for the chance to say them…
“Mother. Father.”
…!
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