The world stopped breathing.
A thousand blades hovered mid-swing. Magic stilled in the air, suspended like drops of shattered glass. And standing at the eye of the storm was a boy no older than seventeen, his hair a tousled veil of silver-streaked black, eyes glimmering with fractured gold.
He did not breathe. He did not move.
Because in that moment—time itself obeyed him.
Across the battlefield, armies frozen mid-charge remained statues in the echo of a single heartbeat. Demigods and monarchs, monsters and titans—all locked in the stillness of the moment he had carved from reality.
In his right hand, a blade pulsed like a living heartbeat. Obsidian. Crimson. Eternal.
A sword that hummed with timelines not yet lived. A blade that bled history and drank possibility.
Chrono Severance: Fang of the Shattered Flow.
Aelric exhaled.
And the world shattered.
The silence cracked like porcelain, and with it, a hundred slashes bloomed across the bodies of his enemies, five seconds late. Screams followed. Armor burst. Spells unraveled.
He stepped forward once.
Reality caught up.
Behind him, the Divine Prince of Elarion—a man who was once declared unkillable by the Oracle Flame—collapsed, severed not through body, but prophecy.
Aelric didn't look back.
"Your fate was written in gold ink," he whispered, voice like a time-worn bell. "But I brought an eraser."
He lifted his blade again.
Time, unwilling, groaned beneath his will.
---
This wasn't how it began.
Aelric hadn't always been the wielder of a god-slaying blade. He hadn't always known the taste of temporal blood or the sound of fate breaking like glass.
He had once been ordinary.
A student. A brother. A boy who hated ticking clocks and never believed in destiny.
But that changed the day the sun blinked.
The day his world died, and time offered him a second chance—at a price.
The blade had chosen him not for who he was… but for what he could become. A paradox. A deviation. A fixed point that refused to obey the flow.
And in doing so, Aelric became a variable the gods could not predict.
He became the blade's master.
He became the Chrono Tyrant.
But that story—his story—does not begin here at the battlefield's end.
It begins far earlier, in a moment no one remembers...
…except the blade.
And it begins now.