The pressure was a universe of stone, crushing him from every angle. But then, the attack changed. It wasn't the ocean pressing in anymore. It was an invasion from within.

  A new, sickening pressure bloomed behind his eyes. The vitreous humor in his eyeballs, the liquid that gave them shape, began to crystallize. His vision shattered into a kaleidoscope of blinding, jagged static. Before the neural scream could even register, a glacial freeze seized the core of his brain. He could feel the blood in his cerebral arteries solidifying into a slurry of red ice, triggering a catastrophic, instantaneous stroke. His thoughts stuttered, skipping like a broken record.

  A raw, guttural scream was trapped in his throat, silenced by the vise of pressure. With a Herculean effort of will, he turned his telekinetic force inward, creating a microscopic, vibrating shield around every organ, every vessel, fighting to hold the very architecture of his body together against its own rebellion.

  In that split second of internal struggle, he felt it: a needle-fine thread of water, sharper than any blade, worming its way through his telekinetic barrier. She was exploiting the nanoscopic gaps, the inevitable imperfections in his focus. It wasn't an attack of force, but one of infiltration. The thread aimed for his lungs, his stomach, his brain—seeking to drown him in the very air he held trapped inside, to swell and expand and tear him apart from the inside out.

  And then, the true horror began.

  His own body betrayed him. His arms and legs began to pull away from his torso, not by muscle, but by the water inside him being manipulated, stretched. He was being pulled in five different directions, a human starfish being drawn and quartered by the puppeteer strings of his own hydration. The agony was absolute, a white-hot fire in every nerve ending. With a series of dry, grinding pops, the synovial fluid in his joints—his shoulders, his hips, his knees—flash-froze into a gritty, crystalline cement, locking his body into a rigid, agonizing statue.

  The strain was catastrophic. Inside his skull, capillaries ruptured, unable to withstand the psychic overload. Thick, black blood began to stream from his nose, and then in terrifying rivulets from the corners of his eyes, mixing with the saltwater. The force required to hold himself together, to counter the continental-shifting power she was exerting on the water that comprised over half his mass, was literally tearing his mind apart.

  His body creaked, a ship about to be broken on the deep-sea rocks, threatening to be scattered into a cloud of gore and forgotten secrets.

  Suddenly a glacial freeze seized the core of his brain, his very thoughts stuttering to a halt as the blood in his cerebral arteries crystallized, triggering a catastrophic, instantaneous stroke. The pressure was folding him, the leviathan’s will a boot heel on his soul. His telekinetic barrier flickered, the white-hot migraine blinding his mind’s eye. This was it. The crushing, silent dark was winning.

  Then, the song in his earbuds changed.

  The frantic, experimental hip-hop he used as a weapon cut out, seamlessly transitioning as if sensing his despair. A single, clean, impossibly complex guitar riff erupted, a cascade of crystalline notes that defied physics. Then, a beat dropped, not of rage, but of triumph. A heavenly, layered symphony of drums and bass that felt less like a rhythm and more like a heartbeat for the cosmos itself.

  His song. Their song.

  He’d spent weeks curating this specific unreleased track, a secret masterpiece he’d stolen from a dead server. He’d imagined a hundred scenarios for the reveal: playing it for Butter after a successful mission, watching her genius mind unravel its complex layers, seeing her rare, genuine smile break through her usual focused scowl.

  He couldn’t do that if he was a red stain at the bottom of the ocean.

  The thought was a spark in the void.e psychic scream that tore from him was no longer one of pain, but of pure, defiant will. It wasn't a sound, but a force that resonated through the water, a shockwave of intent that made the leviathan herself pause for a microsecond.

  The guitar riff screamed in his ears, a battle cry for a future he refused to surrender. The heavenly beat became the drum of his own stubborn, furious heart.

  He pushed.

  Not just against the water, but against the crushing weight of his own doubt, against the memory of Yume’s victory, against the entire, suffocating ocean. His telekinetic power, amplified by a reason to live that was entirely his own, erupted from him. The water around him didn't just part; it vaporized in a perfect sphere, and he shot backwards not like a man, but like a cork from a celestial bottle, propelled several miles through the abyss in the space of a single, screaming guitar note.

  Then he fired with all his might.

  Ten Reverse-Impact Blasts, spirals of devouring light, shot across the abyssal plain. They were not mere energy; they were promises of negation, written in the language of Gloom Sorcery. The ocean meant nothing to them. Force was a concept they were designed to bypass. They could not be quenched, could not be dispersed. They had to be answered, met head-on, deflected with equal power, or gracefully dodged.

  And for a leviathan larger than a monument, graceful dodging was not an option.

  The blasts had to be met. Their potency multiplied over the distance, feeding on the immense pressure. When they struck her, the confluence of energy was world-ending.

  The sea boiled. For a hundred miles in every direction, killing everything in it, the ocean turned to superheated steam in a flash of light hotter than the sun. Even from his distant vantage, the heat washed over him, scorching his clothes and warming his skin.

  It wams the split-second distraction he needed.

  He didn't retreat. He attacked.

  His mind, a supercomputer of combat calculus, had already mapped the variables. Leviathan’s immense size. Her control of the crushing depth. Her momentary pause at the psychic scream of his will. She was a goddess in her temple, and he was a speck. So he would become a spear.

  All thoughts of style, of preserving the fabric of his Evade shirt, of maintaining the performative distance of a prince, burned away in the white-hot forge of his desperation. This was not about winning a duel. This was about creating an opening, a shockwave in her consciousness so profound she would forget to hold the ocean in its fist.

  He drew back, coiling in the abyssal dark, and then he became acceleration.

  He channeled everything—the rage, the fear for Butter, the insult of the cruise ship, the memory of Yume’s boot on his neck—into a single, physical vector. Himself.

  His telekinesis flared not as a weapon to strike her, but as a perfect, self-contained engine and sheath. He wrapped his body in a cocoon of Gloom Sorcery, a localized event horizon that contained the unthinkable energy of his thrust. Within that field, physics screamed and died. He was a railgun slug fired from the heart of a black hole.

  The number was not hyperbole; it was a cold, calculated output: over nine hundred quintillion newtons of force.

  To comprehend it was to court madness. It was the approximate force of a continent being lifted. It was the kinetic energy of the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, compressed into a human-shaped projectile. It was a thrust that, if unleashed unshielded upon the Earth’s crust, would not merely split the planet—it would punch a clean, glowing hole through the mantle and core, ejecting a plume of planetary viscera into space and leaving a wound that would redefine geography for eons. Tectonic plates would shatter like china. The biosphere would be erased by the atmospheric shockwave alone.

  All of that, contained. Directed. Focused into the point of his shoulder, aimed at the center of her coral-adorned chest.

  He hit her.

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  There was no sound, for sound was too slow, too trivial. There was only a visual paradox: the Leviathan, a mountain of scale and myth, did not move. She did not flinch. She did not sway.

  The contained cataclysm of force dissipated across her form like the last sigh of a summer breeze. Her scales flared for a microsecond, drinking the energy, distributing it across the immeasurable mass of her being, and venting it harmlessly into the infinite heat-sink of the ocean she commanded.

  To her, it was less than a pillow. It was a neutrino passing through a star. A statistical irrelevance.

  Her abyssal eyes, which had widened in momentary curiosity at his scream, now refocused. They found him, this gnat who had just attempted to topple a monument with a whisper. A flicker of something like pity, cold and ancient, passed through their lightless depths. Then her hand—a city-block-sized construct of bone, scale, and will—moved.

  It did not swing. It did not claw. It simply reached for him, a slow, inevitable tide of flesh closing around the space he occupied. It was a gesture of absolute, effortless dominion. The message was clear: your greatest effort is my casual afterthought.

  But Clock had not expected to move her. He had expected her to notice him. And in that moment of supreme, dismissive attention, her will was centered on the act of catching him, not on maintaining the hydraulic prison that crushed his every cell.

  Her fingers, like five titanic pillars, began to enclose him.

  He didn't try to dodge. He triggered the second half of his calculated gambit.

  Using the very force of his own impact as a springboard—the minuscule fraction that rebounded from her implacable skin—he inverted his telekinetic field. The cocoon of containment became a lens of expulsion. He didn't push against the water; he rejected the very concept of the medium around him.

  KRAA-BOOOOOM!

  The ocean, for a mile around, turned inside out. He didn't so much break the surface as he became the surface, erupting from the water in a column of vaporized sea and violet light that pierced the green-tinged sky like a vengeful geyser aimed at heaven.

  He zoomed, a laser of desperate motion, the sonic boom of his exit still ripping the ocean apart below. He shot into the sky, the g-forces that would pulp bunker steel meaning nothing to him. He halted, hovering a thousand feet above the boiling, chaotic sea, his chest heaving not from exertion, but from the psychic strain of containing and redirecting a continent-killing force.

  His designer clothes were smoking, the delicate embroidery of dragons scorched and still sizzling from the residual energy. His body ached with a deep, marrow-level fatigue. The performance was over. The anger was gone, burned away in the futile, star-hot furnace of his attack, replaced by a cold, surgical fury.

  She hadn't just tanked it. She hadn't even acknowledged it. The sheer, gravitational indifference of her power was a lesson more humiliating than any defeat. It told him that all his strength, all his stolen power and curated ego, was a parlor trick before a natural law.

  He looked down at the churning water, where the shadow of the Leviathan was already re-submerging, her interest in him seemingly spent. The cold fury in his veins crystallized into a single, diamond-hard truth.

  Brute force was a dead end. She was a system. And systems had to be hacked.

  They were stronger than he'd thought. Far stronger. And Butter was running out of time.

  "Fine," he whispered, his voice a dry rasp, the word carried away by the thin, high-altitude wind. "I'm going all out."

  He split.

  One Clock remained, hovering over the boiling sea, his violet eyes locked on the reforming titan below.

  One Clock vanished in a shriek of air, reappearing back on the black-sand island, his gaze falling on Meteor.

  The third and final Clock didn't even look back. He turned and shot towards the bunker's entrance at a velocity that set the air on fire. His mission was clear. The assassins were now secondary objectives. His real target was inside.

  He wasn't going to waste any more time fighting them. He was going to erase them from the planet.

  The Clock over the ocean took a deep, steadying breath. He had to use that technique. He couldn't beat her; apart from her monstrous strength, this was her turf, her element. There was no room for error.

  He opened his eyes, violet irises burning with concentration. He pointed a single finger at the Leviathan. Using his telekinesis with impossible precision, he began to unravel the atoms at his fingertip, a process that should have unleashed a chain reaction of nuclear fire. Instead, he sheathed his body in a concentrated telekinetic barrier and fed his magic into the unraveling, forcing the cataclysm into a single, contained point. It fought him, a star fighting to be born, but his will was an unbreakable cage. It formed not into light, but into a slender beam of absolute, light-devouring black.

  "DELETE."

  The beam made no sound. It was an absence that screamed. It shot out, not traveling but arriving, erasing the very concept of speed from its path. It erased the air, leaving a perfect vacuum. It erased the wall of solidified water Eclipse summoned, which simply ceased to be. It erased the ocean it touched, and it hit the Leviathan as she swam away at hypersonic speeds.

  It did not burn or blast. It ate. A perfect, crescent-shaped portion of her titanic form, from her hip down through her magnificent tail, vanished into non-existence.

  The beam stopped. Clock was drenched in sweat, panting, floating down to hover just above the waves. He stared at the result. Where the Leviathan had been was now only Eclipse, returned to her humanoid form, severed at the waist. The ocean water, which should have knitted her back together in a microsecond, merely lapped at the void where her flesh ended. The DELETE had consumed not just her body, but the very potential for its regeneration.

  She coughed, a gurgling, wet sound, and blue-green blood, thick as oil, spilled from her lips. Yet, her voice when it came was not one of pain, but of ancient, measured awe, echoing with the pressure of the deep.

  "The song of unmaking... a silent note I have not heard in a thousand tides," she breathed, her abyssal eyes fixed on him. "You are strong, little prince. I did not see that beam coming. It was... inevitable."

  "Who sent you?" Clock demanded, his voice raw.

  A mythic smile, tinged with her strange blood, graced her lips. The answer was not a secret, but a statement of fact, a name spoken with the weight of a fallen kingdom.

  "That was no secret. It was Isolde."

  Clock's breath hitched. His violet eyes widened in genuine, unfeigned shock, his arrogance completely shattered by the two syllables.

  Isolde?

  She's still alive?

  ***

  The second Clock materialized over the black-sand island in a shriek of displaced air. His gaze immediately found Meteor, who was perched on a volcanic boulder as if he hadn't a care in the world. The powerhouse was leaning back, a cracked coconut in his hand, slurping the juice with gusto, his headphones still blasting that stolen track. He bopped his head to the beat, and as Clock descended, he merely lifted a single, lazy hand and flicked his wrist upwards.

  The ground beneath Clock erupted. A boulder the size of a small car shot up like a cannonball, crashing into him with enough force to flatten a skyscraper.

  FWOMP.

  The impact vanished. Damage Transport swallowed the kinetic energy whole, leaving Clock utterly unshaken, his descent not even faltering. He didn't break his stride, his violet eyes locked on his target.

  Meteor took another loud slurp from the coconut, the grin never leaving his face. "Want a bite?" he asked, juice dribbling down his chin.

  Clock's hand snapped out. There was no banter, no theatrical wind-up. He simply moved, crossing the distance in a nanosecond. His fingers, sheathed in a nimbus of telekinetic force, closed around Meteor's face.

  Then, he slammed him into the heart of the island.

  It wasn't a punch or a throw. It was an execution of velocity. Clock became a piston, driving Meteor down at lightspeed. The impact didn't sound like an explosion; it was the deep, groaning crack of a continent being wounded. The entire island jolted. The black sand beach lifted into the air in a frozen wave before crashing down. The volcanic rock beneath them split open, a canyon racing from the epicenter to the sea, glowing with freshly exposed magma.

  Clock hovered over the new, smoldering crevasse, his hand still outstretched. Below, buried under miles of shattered rock, was Meteor. The coconut was vaporized. The music had stopped.

  ///

  The volcanic rock at the base of the new crevasse shuddered, then exploded outwards. Meteor clawed his way into the open, his clothes torn but his skin—now slick with magma—utterly unburned. He was still grinning, but it was tighter, sharper.

  "What's the matter, Chalk boy? You're angrier than before." He wiped a glob of molten rock from his shoulder. "Eclipse must've shown you her true form. It scared you, and you ran back here."

  "I didn't run," Clock stated, his voice a flat, cold blade of sound, devoid of its usual theatrical lilt. The saltwater drying on his skin felt like a cage.

  Meteor's eyes, gleaming like peridot in the gloom, narrowed slightly. "Then she should be here soon." He said it with a casual certainty that felt like a physical weight.

  A ghost of a smile, cruel and utterly without humor, touched Clock's lips. "That would be... difficult." He let the pause hang in the sulfurous air, a bomb waiting to detonate. "Only half of her remains."

  Meteor's grin vanished. His emerald eyes widened, the diamond specks within them seeming to harden. "...Half? You... you hurt her?" A flicker of genuine, unvarnished anger crossed his features, a storm cloud on a once-sunny day. He closed his eyes, took a breath, and then, with two brutal slashes of his own claws, he tore the high-tech gauntlets from his forearms.

  They hit the ground.

  CRRRUNCH.

  The solid volcanic rock beneath them didn't just crack; it cratered, pulverizing under the weight as if a warship had been dropped from orbit.

  Clock's smug sneer evaporated, his violet eyes widening in genuine, unfeigned shock.

  That was impossible.

  His mind, a supercomputer of tactics and arrogance, had already filed the data: High-tech brackets = geokinetic power source. He had let Meteor tear them off, a condescending king allowing a fool to hang himself with his own rope. He thought the boy was stupidly severing his own connection to the earth in a fit of rage.

  But the truth, announced by that cratering CRUNCH, was far more terrifying.

  They weren't a power source. They were a cage.

  Meteor looked up, his expression now one of serene, terrifying focus. "They weren't power sources," he clarified, his voice a low, tectonic rumble. "They were two hundred and fifty-ton restraints. Each."

  He didn't leap. He didn't lunge. He pounced.