Time didn't move at the cabin that morning.
It shifted.
Retro noticed it first in the small things—the way firelight caught on the wooden walls, flickering in patterns that repeated too perfectly. The air carried warmth from the hearth, but something about it felt wrong. Stale. Like breathing the same breath twice.
He sat at the edge of the bed, fingers pressed to his temples, applying pressure that did nothing to ease the growing wrongness settling into his bones.
The room changed.
Not all at once. Not dramatically.
Just... wrong.
He blinked, and the table by the wall had a dent he didn't remember. Blinked again, and Lea's blanket shifted from deep blue to faded gray. The shadows on the floor stretched in directions that didn't match their sources, as if light itself had forgotten how to behave.
Retro exhaled slowly through his nose, measuring his breath. Trying to ground himself in something solid.
"This isn't right," he muttered to the empty air. His voice sounded flat, absorbed too quickly by the strange atmosphere. "Time's lagging."
The words felt inadequate. This wasn't lag—not the way mortals understood it. This was something deeper. Structural. Like the universe itself was stuttering over a damaged groove.
Across the room, Lea stirred.
Her breathing had been shallow for hours—the kind of sleep that came after trauma, more collapse than rest. Gaia's trial had taken something from her, carved out pieces she'd need time to regrow. Her eyelids fluttered, and for a moment she seemed caught between waking and dreaming, her face pinched with discomfort.
Then her eyes opened fully, unfocused and hazy.
"Dad...?"
Her voice was small. Uncertain. The voice of someone who'd woken from nightmares into something that might still be dreaming.
"Did you sleep at all?"
Retro didn't answer immediately. Couldn't, really. Because he was staring at his hands, watching them blur at the edges—just slightly, just enough to notice. His fingers phased out of sync with reality for a heartbeat, becoming translucent, before snapping back to solidity with a sensation like static electricity crawling under his skin.
He curled his hands into fists. The distortion rippled away.
"Dad?"
Lea's voice carried more alarm now. She pushed herself upright, movements slow and careful like someone testing whether their body would cooperate. Her tail dragged across the blanket with a soft whisper of fabric.
"You're... fading?"
The word hung between them.
Retro forced his hands to stay solid, pouring concentration into something that should have been automatic. Should have been effortless. He was a god—or close enough that the distinction barely mattered. His control over his own physical form should have been absolute.
Should have been.
"It's nothing." The lie tasted bitter. "Just residual mana. Or whatever the hell Phantom did."
But even as he said it, he knew better. This wasn't residual anything. This was active. Ongoing. Something gnawing at the fabric of his existence, trying to unmake him one molecule at a time.
Lea swung her legs over the edge of the bed. Her bare feet touched the cold wooden floor, and she flinched slightly at the contact. She moved toward him with hesitant steps, like approaching a wounded animal that might lash out.
"Dad... I saw something last night."
Her voice had changed. Gone quiet. Serious.
"When time froze. When Gaia was talking to me—it wasn't just us. The cabin wasn't empty."
She stopped a few feet away, hugging her arms across her chest. Her tail curled around her ankle in a self-soothing gesture she'd had since childhood.
"Someone else was here. Standing right where you are now."
Cold spread through Retro's chest. Not the cold of winter or ice, but something deeper. The cold of realization settling into bone.
"Describe them."
His voice came out harder than he'd intended. Too sharp. Too controlled. The voice he used when he was trying very hard not to lose control.
Lea flinched but continued.
"I couldn't see their face. Everything around them was..." She struggled for words, hands gesturing helplessly. "Warped. Like time refused to touch them. Like they were standing in a pocket of space that didn't exist."
Retro's jaw tightened until his teeth ached.
Phantom.
Of course it was Phantom.
The bastard had marked him—carved something into his very existence during their battle. And now reality itself was rejecting him, trying to shake him loose like a foreign body.
He turned toward the window, needing to look at something that made sense. Something normal.
The forest outside greeted him with impossibility.
Light dimmed as he watched—not the gradual fade of evening, but an abrupt drop, as if someone had turned down the brightness of the world itself. Snow that had been falling in gentle downward drifts suddenly reversed, flakes drifting upward in defiance of every natural law.
His breath caught.
Lea noticed too. Her ears flattened against her skull, an involuntary response to wrongness.
"Dad? What's happening now?"
Her voice cracked on the last word.
Retro stood slowly, deliberately. Power gathered in his palm—familiar, comfortable, the weight of a weapon he'd carried for lifetimes. His spectral sword materialized with a low hum that echoed strangely in the warped cabin, the sound layering over itself in dissonant harmonics.
"Time is folding on itself." He spoke carefully, trying to keep his voice level. Trying not to frighten her more than she already was. "Something's forcing it. Something strong enough to—"
The floor trembled.
Not an earthquake. Retro had felt plenty of those. This was different—more precise. Like something very large and very deliberate had just placed its weight on the world.
Then came the knock.
Knock.
A single sound. Clean. Almost polite.
Retro and Lea both froze.
The silence that followed stretched too long. Too heavy. Like the cabin itself was holding its breath.
Knock...
The second one came softer. Gentler. Somehow that made it worse.
"W-We're not expecting anyone, right??" Lea's voice had gone high and tight. Young. She sounded like a child, and it made something in Retro's chest constrict painfully.
He didn't answer. Couldn't spare the attention. Every sense he had was focused on that door, trying to read what lay beyond it. Trying to understand what kind of thing knocked politely before destroying you.
The third knock came—barely audible. A whisper of knuckles against wood.
Knock.
The entire cabin shivered. Not from the impact, but from something else. Recognition, maybe. Or fear.
Retro stepped forward, positioning himself between Lea and the door. His sword hummed in his grip, hungry and patient.
"Stay behind me."
The doorknob turned.
Slowly.
Not with force or urgency. Just a careful, measured rotation, as if whoever stood on the other side had all the time in the world.
As if time meant nothing to them at all.
The door swung open.
And beyond it—
Nothing.
No forest. No snow. No cabin steps or familiar landscape.
Just white. Endless white. Swirling, luminous void that moved like liquid light, spinning slowly in patterns that hurt to focus on. Like looking at an hourglass turned sideways, time made visible and wrong.
Retro's pulse hammered in his throat. His grip tightened on his sword until his knuckles went pale.
From somewhere within that glowing void, a voice drifted through. Young. Familiar. Carrying the weight of something that shouldn't exist.
"You are caught between seconds... trapped in a moment lost to time."
Lune.
Lea grabbed Retro's sleeve, her fingers digging in hard enough to hurt. Her whole body trembled against his back.
"Dad... are we dreaming?"
Retro wanted to say yes. Wanted to tell her this was just a nightmare, that they'd wake up and everything would be normal again. That the world made sense and followed rules and could be understood.
But he'd never lied to her before. He wasn't about to start now.
"No." He stepped forward, closer to the threshold where reality ended and impossibility began. "This is real. Too real."
And from within the white void, something took shape.
Slowly. Gradually.
Not tall. Not monstrous.
Small. Child-sized. Delicate.
A hooded figure emerged from the light like a photograph developing in reverse—first an outline, then details, then substance. Bare feet touched the wooden floor without making a sound. Silver hair spilled from beneath a dark hood. Eyes like fog over glass, ancient and young at the same time, focused on them with an expression caught between urgency and regret.
Lune.
But something was desperately wrong with him.
His cloak flickered—too fast, too erratic. His entire form seemed unstable, like a projection losing signal. Like even he didn't belong in this fractured moment, wasn't meant to exist here, was being rejected by the same forces tearing at Retro.
He raised one small hand, trembling visibly.
"You... shouldn't be here." His voice came out strained, each word costing him something. "Neither of you."
Retro stepped closer, his aura flaring instinctively—protective, threatening, desperate. The air around him warped with barely contained power.
"Then put us back."
Lune shook his head. The gesture looked like it hurt him.
"I can't."
Behind him, the hourglass sky cracked. The sound was terrible—not loud, but wrong. Like reality itself breaking. Pieces of something that might have been time, might have been light, might have been the structure holding existence together—they fell around the room in slow motion, dissolving before they hit the floor.
Lune's voice came quieter now. More certain. More terrible.
"The moment Phantom struck you... time never restarted properly."
Retro went very still.
Lea's breathing stopped entirely.
"Then when I died—" Retro started.
"You didn't die." Lune cut him off, and there was genuine sorrow in his young voice. "You didn't live. You were caught in the middle. A moment lost... that the world cannot place."
The floor tilted beneath Retro's feet. Not physically—he could feel the solid wood under his boots. But metaphysically. Existentially. Like learning the ground you'd been standing on was never really there at all.
"Dad...?"
Lea's voice was so small. So frightened. And Retro had no comfort to offer her because he barely understood this himself.
Lune's form flickered more violently now, his stability degrading by the second. He reached out toward Lea with obvious effort, as if moving through thick resistance.
"She is the key..."
His voice fractured on the words.
"...but the key... is breaking."
A violent shudder tore through the cabin. The walls groaned. The floor bucked. Reality itself seemed to spasm in protest.
Lea gasped, her free hand clutching at her chest. The false gem on her wrist—the one she'd worn since Gaia's trial—erupted with silver light so bright it cast harsh shadows in every direction.
Retro reached for her—
But the world split open.
Not metaphorically.
Actually split.
Like watching fabric tear in slow motion, reality peeled apart down an invisible seam. The sound it made wasn't a sound at all but a feeling—the sensation of everything you thought was solid proving itself hollow.
Time collapsed inward—
And everything went white.
The world didn't crack.
It didn't shatter.
It peeled.
Like something alive was being torn open from the inside, reality separated into layers that were never meant to exist independently. Lea's scream cut through the dissolution—
"DAD!"
The word stretched, distorted, lasting both an instant and an eternity.
Retro reached for her. His fingers extended across space that kept expanding between them, distance growing faster than he could move. Their hands came within inches—so close he could see the pale marks on her knuckles, the trembling in her fingers.
But they slipped through each other like vapor. Like neither of them had ever been solid at all.
A soundless impact rippled outward from the point where they should have touched. The shockwave carried weight without force, presence without substance. It expanded in concentric rings that made the air itself visible, layers of reality becoming briefly, horrifyingly apparent.
And then—
Time exploded.
Not with noise or light or violence, but with the sudden absence of everything those concepts meant. The fundamental structure holding moments in sequence simply... stopped. Gave up. Let go.
And Retro fell.
He hit something.
Stone, maybe. Or floor. Or the concept of surface made briefly, impossibly real.
The impact didn't hurt—which was somehow worse than pain. It meant his body wasn't quite physical anymore. Wasn't quite anything anymore.
Retro pushed himself up on shaking arms. His vision swam, colors bleeding into each other like watercolor in rain. The world around him looked like a painting someone had started to destroy—floating fragments of sky, snowflakes falling in directions that had no name, distorted echoes of moments he couldn't remember living.
He blinked, trying to clear his sight.
The world refused to solidify.
And then—between one breath and the next—everything froze.
Retro stood in the middle of a memory.
But not his memory.
A small child ran past him, bare feet crunching through snow that glittered too bright under moonlight. Purple eyes glowed faintly in the darkness—beautiful and terrified and so achingly young.
Nexus.
Maybe eight years old. Maybe younger.
Retro's blood turned to ice in his veins.
"No." The word came out hoarse. Desperate. "Not this again. Anything but this."
But time—or whatever passed for time in this broken place—didn't care what he wanted. It never had.
The memory continued playing itself out with mechanical precision.
Little Nexus ran like his life depended on it, which it probably did. His small face was streaked with tears and dirt, his breathing ragged and panicked. He kept looking over his shoulder at something Retro couldn't see, couldn't remember, some threat that existed only in the context of this stolen moment.
Retro reached out instinctively—the urge to protect, to shelter, to fix overwhelming every other impulse.
His hand passed through the boy like smoke through air.
Nothing. No contact. No substance. He couldn't interfere. Couldn't change anything. Could only watch, trapped in a nightmare made from someone else's past.
A feeling crawled up Retro's spine—familiar and horrible. Recognition settling in like poison.
This was the night Atlas almost lost him. The night of the ghost mansion. The night fate first twisted its fingers through their family and refused to let go.
This was the night everything started to break.
"Lea..." Retro's voice cracked. "Where are you?"
The words fell into nothing. No echo. No response. They just died against the frozen air, absorbed and forgotten.
The world began to distort again—edges blurring, colors inverting, the memory fragmenting like glass under pressure.
And Retro felt himself sliding.
Pulled by forces he couldn't resist toward the next stolen moment. The next trauma. The next piece of past that should have stayed buried.
He tried to fight it.
But you can't fight time when time itself has shattered.
She fell.
Not through space—though her body moved, tumbling through emptiness that had no dimension.
She fell through emotion. Through memory. Through every nightmare she'd ever buried deep enough to pretend it didn't exist.
Lea hit ground that might have been snow. Might have been something else. Too reflective. Too quiet. Like powdered glass or crystallized silence.
She pushed herself up on trembling arms, her breath coming in sharp, painful gasps.
"Dad...?"
The word echoed wrong—not bouncing back but multiplying, fracturing into versions of itself that overlapped in dissonant harmony.
Dad dad dad...
Then—cutting through the echoes—
A child's laughter.
Familiar.
Wrong.
So deeply, terribly wrong.
Lea turned, moving slow like someone in a nightmare who knows what they'll see but can't stop themselves from looking.
And there—
Herself.
Younger. Maybe eight. Small and fragile in a way she'd worked so hard to grow out of. The child sat curled in the snow, face buried against her knees, shoulders shaking with sobs that made no sound.
Lea staggered backward, one hand pressed to her mouth.
"N-No—this isn't real, it isn't—"
But the scene didn't care about her denials.
The snow began to darken. First at the edges, then spreading inward like ink through water. The sky cracked overhead, fractures spreading across the pale expanse in branching patterns. The forest twisted, trees bending into shapes that defied geometry, their shadows reaching like grasping hands.
And there—
Standing at the edge of the corrupted clearing—
Her.
Lilly.
Not the Lilly who had been Lea's friend. Not the gentle, kind person who'd helped her learn to control her powers. Not the one who'd smiled and laughed and made her feel less alone.
The corrupted version. The monster. Eyes glowing with molten blackness that seemed to swallow light rather than emit it. Skin cracked like porcelain, darkness seeping from the fractures. Mouth open in a soundless scream that had been going on for years, maybe forever.
The thing that had nearly killed her three years ago. The thing that had given her the scar across her chest. The thing that had taught her that the people you love can become weapons against you.
Lea's breath stopped.
Her vision tunneled.
Her heart hammered against her ribs hard enough to hurt, each beat too fast, too loud, too much.
"Stop—" The word came out strangled. "STOP—!!"
But the corrupted Lilly didn't attack. Didn't scream. Didn't lunge with claws extended to tear and rend and destroy.
She just stood there.
Stood in the snow that was and wasn't real, staring at Lea with hollow, weeping eyes. Black tears tracked down her fractured face, leaving trails that steamed and hissed where they touched the ground.
Like she was begging.
Like she wanted Lea to end it. To finish what had been started. To grant the mercy of true death to something that had already died but couldn't stop existing.
Lea's legs gave out.
She hit the ground hard, claws scraping uselessly at the crystalline surface. Her breathing came in sharp, hitching gasps that might have been sobs, might have been hyperventilation, might have been her body forgetting how breathing worked.
The panic attack hit like a physical force—chest tightening, vision blurring, the world spinning even though she was perfectly still. Her hands shook so violently she could hear her claws clicking against each other.
She hugged herself tight, rocking slightly, trying to find something—anything—solid to anchor to.
"Dad... please..." The words came out broken, pathetic. Child-like. "Please find me..."
A thin trail of silver particles drifted into her peripheral vision. Gentle. Moonlit. Moving with purpose rather than wind.
Lune.
He flickered into form beside her, his small figure as unstable as before. He knelt in the snow-that-wasn't-snow, movements careful, like approaching someone who might shatter at a touch.
His hand—light as dust, barely substantial—settled on her shoulder.
"You are breaking..." His voice carried sorrow and certainty in equal measure. "But not beyond mending."
Lea sobbed, the sound ugly and raw.
"I just want to go home..."
Lune's expression shifted. Sorrow, yes. But beneath it, something harder. Something that knew comfort wouldn't help here. Wouldn't save her.
"Then survive this moment." His fog-glass eyes held hers. "Or you will never see him again."
The corrupted Lilly took a step closer.
Then another.
Her movements jerky and wrong, like a puppet with tangled strings.
And the world shattered again.
Retro stood beneath a sky that was cracking like an eggshell.
Snow fell upward around him, defying every law of physics. Trees bent sideways, reaching toward horizons that kept shifting. Stars blinked in and out of existence, here and gone and here again, unable to decide whether they were real.
He looked up at the fracturing sky and felt something cold and terrible settle in his chest.
Determination. Rage. The quiet certainty that comes when you've lost everything and discovered you still have something left to protect.
"I'm coming, Lea."
His voice carried no echo, went nowhere. But he said it anyway. Needed to say it.
"No matter what you're stuck in—I'll tear time apart if I have to."
His aura flared, raw and unstable. Power leaked from him in visible waves, distorting the broken reality around him even further.
Somewhere else—somewhere that might have been a thousand miles or a single heartbeat away—
Lea curled in on herself, Lune's faint glow the only warmth in an endless cold.
"Dad..." she whispered to the empty dark. "Hurry..."
They were both trapped.
Both bleeding into different fragments of time.
Both helpless to reach each other.
Caught in a single moment the world had never recorded.
A moment lost to time.
And the worst part?
They could feel each other. Just barely. Like a phantom limb, like an ache in a place that shouldn't exist.
Close enough to know the other was suffering.
Too far apart to help.
The fracture widened.
And deeper traumas waited in the dark, patient and hungry.
Snow drifted upward in lazy spirals. The sky pulsed with sickly light, rhythm matching no heartbeat that had ever existed. Retro and Lea stood in different worlds—different hells—but the fractures were thinning. Overlapping. Reality's walls growing permeable.
Somewhere between their two broken moments, a third memory began to leak through.
Older than Nexus's terror.
Deeper than Lea's trauma.
A memory Retro had buried so far down he'd half-convinced himself it had never existed at all.
The world around him twisted like a ribbon being wrung dry.
Young Nexus flickered and vanished. The ghost mansion dissolved into particles of light. Atlas's old wounds, the trials of their youth, all the carefully preserved moments of controlled pain—
All of it shattered like cheap glass.
And behind it—
Oh god no please not this—
A field.
Gentle wind carrying the scent of wildflowers.
Sunset painting the sky in shades of amber and rose.
Retro's breath stopped.
Every muscle in his body locked. His vision blurred at the edges, tunneling down to a single point.
"No." The word came out strangled. Desperate. "Not this one. Not here. Please—"
But the universe had never answered his prayers before. Why would it start now?
She was there.
Standing barefoot in the grass that swayed around her ankles, her long brown hair tied back with a ribbon he'd bought for her birthday—blue silk that had cost him three weeks' wages and been worth every copper. Her smile was soft, warm, the kind that made the whole world feel safe.
Rose.
His first wife. His heart before he'd learned hearts could stop beating. His entire world before the world proved itself cruel enough to take her away.
Retro's legs trembled. He tried to move—to run, to scream, to do anything but stand here and watch.
But time locked his body in place like a prisoner awaiting execution. Chains made from causality itself, impossible to break.
His voice cracked, each word scraped raw from his throat.
"Please... don't make me watch this again... I can't—I CAN'T—"
The sky began to darken.
Not the natural fade of evening, but something wronger. Faster. Like someone was draining the light from the world drop by drop.
The wind died.
And from the forest edge behind Rose—
That sound.
The same sound he'd heard that night. The night everything ended. The night he learned that all his power, all his strength, all his god-like abilities meant nothing when it came to protecting the one thing that mattered.
Something enormous shifting through underbrush. Breathing that was too deep, too measured, too aware. The presence of a predator that had been god-touched, warped into something that shouldn't exist.
Retro's vision blurred red. His nails dug into his palms hard enough that blood welled up, dripping between his clenched fingers in slow, heavy drops.
"NO—DON'T—" His voice rose to a scream. "RUN—ROSE RUN—GODDAMMIT RUN—!!"
The plea never reached her.
It never fucking did.
No matter how many times he screamed it in nightmares. No matter how many centuries passed. No matter how many times he'd replayed this moment in the darkest hours of sleepless nights.
His warning never reached her.
She turned her head, confused by something she couldn't quite hear—a disturbance in the air, maybe, or some instinct whispering danger. Her expression shifted from peaceful to uncertain.
And then she saw him—the version of him that existed in this memory, younger and whole and not yet broken.
Her smile returned, gentle and concerned.
"Retro...?" Her voice was exactly as he remembered. Warm. Safe. Home. "Are you crying...?"
He remembered what came next.
He'd said he loved her. He'd started running. He'd been too late.
He remembered the blood—so much blood—on his hands, in his mouth, soaking into the grass until the earth itself seemed to weep red.
He remembered the exact moment his soul broke in half.
But now—trapped in this fractured time, this stolen memory forced to play itself out with mechanical precision—
He had to watch it again.
And again.
And again.
The monster emerged from the tree line.
Lea's world flickered violently.
The corrupted Lilly wavered. The snow became grass. The dark sky shifted to sunset colors that looked wrong here, imported from somewhere else.
For just a second—one horrible, overwhelming second—
She saw through Retro's eyes.
Not metaphorically. Not symbolically.
Actually saw what he saw. Felt what he felt. Experienced the moment that broke him as if it were happening to her.
Rose. Young and beautiful and alive and about to die. The monster lunging from the shadows. Retro's younger self too far away, running but not fast enough, screaming but not loud enough.
The pain that crashed into Lea wasn't physical.
It was emotional. Soul-deep. The kind of grief that transcended individual experience and became something universal and terrible.
It hit her like a freight train traveling at the speed of thought. Stole the air from her lungs. Made her chest feel like it was caving in, ribs collapsing around a heart that couldn't beat properly anymore.
She gasped, choking on sympathetic agony.
"Dad... this... this is what broke you..."
The words came out barely audible, more breath than sound.
Lune hovered beside her, his small form trembling like a candle flame in wind. Even he—ancient and powerful and existing outside normal time—seemed shaken by the force of Retro's trauma bleeding through the cracks.
"This memory... is forbidden." His voice carried genuine fear. "A wound older than your existence... older than reason. It should not be here. Should not be accessible."
Lea collapsed to her knees. Her claws dug into the ground—grass now, not snow, the memory-bleed getting stronger. Warmer earth and wildflowers instead of winter cold.
"No one deserves to feel that alone..." Her voice broke. "No one..."
The memory blurred again, reality having a seizure—
It happened fast.
It always did.
The god-touched creature—something that had once been a bear, maybe, or a wolf, before divine corruption warped it into a killing machine—lunged with impossible speed.
Rose turned at the sound, her expression shifting from concern to confusion to terror in the span of a heartbeat.
Retro screamed, voice cracking with agony that had nowhere to go, with rage that could tear worlds apart but couldn't bridge this distance.
"ROOOOSE—!!"
The monster's claws—each one as long as a sword, black as midnight and sharp as broken promises—pierced through her chest.
Through her ribs.
Through her heart.
Through everything that made her alive.
Her eyes widened. Shock, first. Then pain. Then something worse than either—understanding. The terrible knowledge that this was it. That she was dying. That there would be no last words, no proper goodbye.
Just this.
Blood welled up in her mouth, dark and thick. It spilled over her lips when she tried to breathe, tried to speak, tried to do anything but die.
She fell backward.
And the younger version of Retro—the one who existed in this memory, the one who hadn't failed yet but would in three seconds, two seconds, one—
He caught her.
She collapsed into his arms with the terrible weight of sudden death. Warm. Still breathing but not for long. Still alive but not really.
Her hand shook as it rose to touch the side of his face. Her fingers left a smear of crimson across his cheek—a mark he'd carry for days, unable to wash it away, unable to let go of that last physical trace of her.
"Love... you..."
The words came out wet. Broken.
Final.
And then her body went limp.
Dead weight.
Gone.
Retro broke.
A sound tore out of him that wasn't quite human—raw, guttural, primal. The sound of a soul ripping itself in half. The sound of a god realizing he was powerless when it mattered most.
The world around him trembled.
Cracks spread through the sunset sky like a windshield taking an impact. The grass beneath him withered and died in spreading circles. The air itself seemed to scream.
"I'LL KILL YOU." His voice rose to a roar that made reality flinch. "I'LL KILL YOU. I'LL KILL—EVERYTHING—EVERY FUCKING THING THAT BREATHES—!!"
He rose from his crouch, still holding her body. Gently placing her in the grass like she was made of glass.
His aura exploded outward in a violent storm of black and red. Power that had been carefully controlled for his entire life—power he'd learned to measure, to limit, to keep safely contained—
It broke free.
Mountains in the distance cracked and crumbled. Trees vaporized, turned to ash and less than ash in seconds. The sky itself screamed, clouds torn apart by the sheer force of his rage and grief made manifest.
He tore the god-touched monster apart with his bare hands.
Not quickly. Not efficiently.
Slowly. Piece by piece. Making it suffer for every second she'd been alive. Making it pay for every moment he'd never have with her.
And when it was dead—
When it was nothing but scattered pieces that would never reform—
He kept going.
He tore apart the forest.
Then the mountains.
Then the sky.
Then himself.
Because maybe if he destroyed enough, broke enough, killed enough—
Maybe it would bring her back.
It didn't.
It never did.
The memory-fracture around Lea shook violently.
Lea screamed as the world convulsed around her.
The boundaries between memories collapsed entirely. Snow and grass and blood and stars and Retro's grief and her own fear—everything merged into one chaotic storm that had no center, no logic, no mercy.
"DAD—STOP—!!" Her voice was raw. "PLEASE STOP—!!"
But Retro couldn't hear her.
He wasn't in the present anymore. Wasn't even really in the past.
He was stuck in the moment he became a monster. The moment grief transformed into rage transformed into a force of nature that wanted nothing except destruction.
And he was breaking the memory—and everything connected to it—because if he had to feel this pain again, if he had to watch her die again, if he had to exist in this moment one more fucking second—
Then everything would feel it too.
The entire goddamn universe would burn with him.
Reality buckled under the strain.
Light exploded in directions that had no name.
And both Retro and Lea were swallowed by the collapsing fracture—dragged into the abyss of a god's grief—
Where no one could save them.
Where maybe no one should.
Reality shattered.
Rose's dying scream. Retro's roar of agony. Lea's desperate cry. Lune flickering in panic—all of it folded in on itself like paper being crumpled by an invisible hand, creation undoing itself at the seams.
The air froze mid-breath.
The light died mid-flicker.
Existence itself paused on the edge of a blade, balanced between continuation and complete annihilation.
And then—
Cutting through the chaos like a knife through silk, like the first word spoken into eternal silence—
A single voice.
"Enough."
The word didn't echo.
It consumed. Swallowed sound and motion and even the concept of what came next. When Gaia spoke, reality held its breath—not from fear, but from something deeper. Respect. Recognition. The acknowledgment that some forces were older than defiance.
Retro froze mid-scream.
His mouth still open in a rictus of anguish. His aura still exploding outward in violent waves. His eyes still burning with the kind of pain that could unmake worlds.
But he stopped.
The collapsing memory halted like a paused painting—every fragment of broken reality suspended in the moment before annihilation. Lea's tears hung crystalline in mid-air. Blood drops from Retro's clenched fists floated like tiny rubies. Even the destruction he'd been causing—the shattering mountains, the burning sky—all of it simply stopped.
Not frozen, exactly.
Waiting.
Gaia stepped forward from the fractured horizon.
She didn't walk. Didn't manifest the way lesser beings might. She simply became present—drawn from the wounded fabric of the world itself, called into being by necessity and sorrow in equal measure.
A silhouette formed from starlight and shadows, from immense, suffocating power wrapped in something achingly gentle. She was tall—taller than the mountains Retro had been destroying—but her height felt natural rather than imposing. The space around her didn't bend or warp.
It yielded.
Grateful for the mercy of her presence. Relieved to have someone who could fix what was breaking.
Her face was calm as still water at dawn.
Her eyes were not.
They were full of pity—the kind that cut deeper than any blade. The kind reserved for those who had already lost everything and didn't know they were still falling. The kind that said I understand and I'm sorry and this will hurt all at once.
And beneath that pity, something else.
Fear.
Not fear of the collapsing timelines or the fractured memories bleeding through reality's wounds. Not fear of the god-touched monster that had killed Rose, or even the destruction Retro had unleashed in response.
Fear of Retro himself.
His eyes burned with light that had nothing to do with vision.
Red-gold and molten, overflowing with bloodlust and grief so raw it had become indistinguishable from madness. Power leaked from him in visible waves—not the controlled release of a skilled warrior, but the uncontained hemorrhaging of someone who'd torn out all their own safety measures.
His aura distorted the air around him, made the frozen moment scream in silent protest against forces it was never meant to contain.
He tried to move.
Tried to reach for the monster—the thing that had taken her. Tried to reach for Rose's body, still warm in his arms in this terrible suspended instant. Still bleeding. Still dying even though she was already gone.
Tried to tear apart the universe for failing him.
His voice came out distorted when he spoke—barely human, filtered through layers of anguish and rage that had warped him into something unrecognizable.
"L... let me go..."
The words broke apart as they formed, fragmenting under their own weight.
"Let me kill it... Let me save her... Let me—"
He couldn't finish.
Couldn't speak the truth he couldn't bear to admit:
Let me die with her.
Gaia moved with impossible gentleness.
She crossed the space between them without disturbing the suspended chaos. Each step careful, measured, as one might approach a wounded animal with teeth bared and nothing left to lose.
An animal that could kill you.
An animal that might want to.
She reached out slowly, giving him time to see it coming. Giving him the dignity of choice, even knowing he had none.
Her hand touched his cheek.
Retro convulsed violently.
The space around him fractured like ice under pressure. Reality itself cracking from the sheer power locked inside his body—power that had nowhere to go, no outlet, no purpose except destruction.
Raw energy arced from his skin in visible lightning, burning the air, making the suspended moment vibrate with barely contained apocalypse.
Gaia's expression flickered. Pain, maybe. Or sorrow at what she was about to do.
"You will destroy everything," she said softly.
Each word careful. Deliberate. Chosen with the precision of someone defusing a bomb.
"You already have... in countless timelines."
The truth delivered like a eulogy.
Retro's body trembled, muscles locked in conflict with themselves. Every instinct screaming to keep fighting—because fighting meant he didn't have to feel. Fighting meant he could pretend there was still something to save.
Power seeped from him like blood from mortal wounds, like light from dying stars. His aura twisted and writhed, desperate, begging to continue—
Begging to keep destroying until there was nothing left that could hurt him.
Gaia's voice dropped lower, threaded with pain that matched his own:
"I cannot allow this. Not again."
She raised her other hand with the weight of terrible necessity.
Above her palm, a sigil materialized.
Ancient time-magic older than written language. Older than the gods themselves, perhaps. Symbols that hurt to look at directly, that suggested shapes the mortal mind wasn't meant to comprehend. Geometric patterns that folded through dimensions human eyes couldn't perceive.
A spell only gods could cast.
A spell even gods feared.
Retro's instincts screamed danger through the haze of grief.
His aura exploded against the forming spell—violent, chaotic, primal. The collision made a sound that wasn't sound at all, but the feeling of bones breaking. Of hope dying. Of a soul tearing itself apart trying to escape its own skin.
The frozen world around them cracked under the strain.
"NO...!" His voice shattered into a thousand jagged pieces. "DON'T TAKE THIS AWAY...! DON'T MAKE ME WATCH AGAIN—!!"
Because he knew.
Somewhere in the fractured remains of his sanity, buried under the rage and grief and madness—
He knew what she was about to do.
This memory was all he had left of Rose. This pain was proof she had existed. And if Gaia took it away—if she erased even this terrible moment—then Rose would truly be gone.
The pain was his last connection to her.
And Gaia was going to sever it.
"Please—" The word came out broken. Child-like. The plea of someone who'd already lost everything begging not to lose the memory of having had it. "Please don't—she's all I—please—"
Gaia's voice cracked.
The first real emotion breaking through her divine composure, spilling out like water through a dam.
"I'm sorry, Retro."
And she meant it.
Every syllable carried the weight of genuine regret. Of a choice that would haunt even an immortal being. Of doing the necessary thing and hating herself for it.
She pressed her glowing hand to his forehead.
The spell activated with a pulse that rippled through every layer of reality.
Retro's scream was cut short—swallowed whole by an overwhelming silence that fell like a burial shroud. The kind of silence that existed before the first word was ever spoken. That would exist long after the last echo faded.
His body went limp.
Puppet with cut strings, falling forward—
But Gaia caught him before he hit the ground.
Caught him with the care of someone handling something infinitely precious and infinitely broken. Cradled him against her chest like a child. His head lolled against her shoulder, face slack, all that terrible rage and grief finally, mercifully absent.
He didn't breathe.
He didn't resist.
He didn't dream.
He simply... stopped.
Retro—god-killer, world-shatterer, the man who'd survived things that should have destroyed him—
Rendered harmless.
Sealed away from his own power. Sealed away from himself. Forced into a coma-like state that was the only thing preventing him from tearing reality apart atom by atom.
Gaia held him for a long moment, her ancient eyes closed.
When she opened them again, they glistened with something that might have been tears—if gods cried the way mortals did.
Time resumed for her like a blade dropping.
The suspended tear completed its journey down her cheek, leaving a burning trail. Her legs gave out as the emotional storm crashed down all at once—grief and terror and confusion and helplessness.
She hit the ground hard.
Claws scraping dirt and grass and blood-soaked earth. Gasping for air that suddenly felt too thin, too insufficient for the weight of what she'd just witnessed.
"D... Dad?"
Her voice was small.
Frightened.
A child's voice, cracked clean in half by helplessness.
The word hung in the air, unanswered. Mocking her with its inadequacy.
Gaia turned with the slow, inevitable motion of continental drift.
Still holding Retro in her arms like a sleeping child. Like someone she'd failed to save. Like a burden she would carry for eternity because there was no one else strong enough to bear it.
The goddess moved with impossible grace, kneeling and laying Retro gently on the ground.
She arranged his limbs with tender precision. Made sure his head rested on soft earth rather than stone. Made sure his hands weren't twisted awkwardly, that he looked peaceful rather than broken.
The intimacy of it was somehow worse than violence would have been.
Like preparing a body for burial.
Gaia's eyes met Lea's, and the young woman felt her breath stop.
Those eyes held the weight of countless ages. Uncountable decisions. The accumulated sorrow of watching civilizations rise and fall, of guiding mortals through their brief, bright lives only to watch them die.
"He is alive," Gaia said.
Each word carried the weight of absolute truth. The kind of certainty that came from being older than lies.
"But if he awakened in his current state... he would tear open the world. Not metaphorically. Not eventually."
A beat of silence, heavy as tombstones.
"Immediately."
Another pause, longer this time.
"And he would not stop until there was nothing left to tear."
Lea's breath broke into something between a sob and a gasp.
"Why...?"
The word came out raw. Desperate. Small.
"Why show him that memory...? Why make him suffer like that...?"
She wanted to scream it. Wanted to rage at this being who had just stolen her father away, who had forced them both through hell and called it necessary.
But all she could manage was this broken whisper.
This plea for understanding.
Gaia's expression softened—but her eyes carried a depth of pain that could swallow suns. That had witnessed the birth and death of universes and found both equally tragic.
"He had to see it," she said quietly.
Gently.
Like explaining death to a child who'd just lost someone for the first time.
"The fracture in his soul has been festering for too long. Left untended, it would have consumed him entirely—consumed everything he touches. Everyone he loves."
She paused, letting that sink in.
"This was surgery, child. Necessary and terrible and the only way to save him from himself."
She reached out slowly, giving Lea time to pull away if she wanted to.
When the young woman didn't move—couldn't move, frozen by shock and grief—Gaia gently touched her forehead with two fingers.
Warmth flooded through Lea's body.
Not comfortable warmth. Not the gentle heat of a fire or a summer day.
This was the warmth of cauterization. Of wounds being seared closed. Necessary pain.
"And you had to see what lies inside his heart," Gaia continued, her voice soft as falling snow.
"You will need strength for what comes next. Strength that cannot be forged by comfort alone. You needed to understand what drives him. What broke him. What made him the man who could raise you with such gentle hands despite carrying such terrible grief."
Lea's vision blurred—not from tears this time, but from Gaia's overwhelming presence.
Like staring at the sun. Like trying to comprehend infinity. Like standing at the edge of an abyss and feeling it stare back with interest.
"This world is breaking," Gaia said.
The words felt like prophecy. Like fate being spoken into existence. Like the kind of truth that changed everything just by being acknowledged.
"Retro is the key to its survival—or its annihilation. But keys can open doors..."
She paused, her gaze distant. Seeing futures Lea couldn't begin to imagine. Possibilities branching into infinity, most of them ending in darkness.
"...or break them beyond all repair."
She stood in one fluid motion, ancient and terrible and impossibly sad.
White petals—or were they fragments of time itself?—began to drift around her. Falling upward as much as down, obeying laws that predated gravity. Laws that had existed before the universe learned how falling worked.
"I will return him to you once his mind is restored," Gaia promised.
And Lea believed her with a certainty that bypassed logic. This being would not lie. Could not lie, perhaps. Was too old and too tired for deception.
"Until then..."
Her form began to fade.
Dissolving into light and memory and the space between heartbeats. Becoming less solid with each passing second, retreating into whatever realm gods inhabited when they weren't intervening in mortal affairs.
"...protect him."
The voice grew distant, echoing from everywhere and nowhere.
"Protect him from the world. Protect the world from him."
Her outline blurred to near-invisibility.
"And protect yourself from what you will have to become."
The world folded inward—
Reality stitching itself back together with the careful precision of expert hands mending torn fabric.
And Gaia vanished.
Gone as thoroughly as if she had never existed at all.
Lea was alone.
Alone with her father's unconscious body, slack-faced and vulnerable in a way she had never seen. Alone with the cold silence of the redwood cabin materializing around them as reality finished putting itself back together.
Alone with a night that suddenly felt too large for her to handle.
Too heavy for her shoulders.
Too much for someone who was still just twenty years old and terrified.
She looked down at Retro—this man who had raised her, protected her, loved her with a fierceness that sometimes scared her because it was so absolute.
This man with god-like powers who had just been rendered helpless by his own grief.
And she had absolutely no idea what to do next.
The wind whispered through the trees outside, carrying the scent of pine and distant snow.
Somewhere, a clock was ticking.
Somewhere, the world was still breaking.
And Lea was alone with a sleeping god who might wake up and destroy everything.
She pulled Retro's head into her lap, smoothing his hair back from his forehead with trembling fingers.
"I've got you, Dad," she whispered.
Not sure if she was trying to comfort him or herself.
"I've got you."
Outside, the night grew colder.
And in the distance—too far to hear but close enough to matter—
Others had felt what happened.
And they were coming.
When Gaia forced Retro into the coma-like state, his rage didn't fade.
It couldn't.
Grief that deep, power that vast—it had nowhere to go. No vessel strong enough to contain it. No cage that could hold it.
So it did what all impossible things do when trapped:
It broke free.
The rage echoed outward like an earthquake in the soul itself.
A pressure wave of raw emotion—pain and fury and grief compressed into something almost physical—rolled across the continents. No wind carried it. No sound announced it.
Just the unmistakable aura of a god losing control.
Bleeding out into the world with no one near him to witness. No one to stop it. No one to help him.
Only the world itself, forced to feel him break.
Nexus froze mid-swing.
His blade nearly slipped from his grip—something that should never happen. Something that hadn't happened since he was a clumsy child first learning to hold a weapon without dropping it.
A cold shockwave tore through him.
Invasive. Wrong. Alien.
Like his very blood was rejecting a poison trying to force its way into his veins.
His shadow expanded without permission—reactive, protective, ancient instincts awakening to a threat it couldn't see. Couldn't touch. Could only feel approaching like a storm on the horizon.
The words came out barely audible, more breath than voice:
"...Uncle Retro...?"
Beside him, Maris—who wore the pendant of the merfolk, who could sense the truth of any aura through her carefully honed abilities—gasped.
Her True Aura Sense flared violently.
The ability she'd spent years learning to control suddenly spiraled beyond her command, drowning her in a tsunami of someone else's emotion. Someone else's pain made manifest and impossible to ignore.
She gripped her chest, pupils blown wide with shock.
With sympathetic agony.
"That aura—" Her voice came out strangled, each word forced past the pressure squeezing her lungs. "Nexus, it's Retro's... but it's twisted. Fractured. He's... he's hurting."
The last word broke on her tongue.
Because Maris had felt pain before. Had sensed anger, fear, even despair in the auras of others. She'd trained specifically to withstand emotional overflow, to filter and process without drowning.
But this?
This was agony given form. This was a soul tearing itself apart. This was grief so absolute it had transcended the individual and become universal—a scream the whole world could feel.
Nexus clenched his jaw hard enough to make his teeth ache.
Muscles locked with tension he couldn't release. Couldn't process. Could only endure.
Uncle Retro was the strongest person he'd ever known.
Not because of raw strength—though the man had that in abundance. Not because of his powers or his centuries of experience or his god-like abilities.
But because he never broke.
Through wars and loss and burdens that would have crushed anyone else, Retro had been the immovable constant. The foundation everyone else built their lives upon. The man who caught you when you fell, who stood between you and the darkness, who weathered every storm without flinching.
Until now.
"He's... dying."
The words tasted like poison in Nexus's mouth.
"Or something's ripping him apart from the inside."
Maris grabbed his hand tight enough to hurt, her claws digging into his skin slightly. An anchor. A promise.
"Then we find him."
Her voice carried steel—the kind of absolute determination that came from loving someone enough to follow them into hell.
"No matter how far. No matter what it takes."
Nexus nodded once. Sharp. Decisive.
They didn't know where Retro was. Didn't know what had happened or what kind of threat could do this to someone that powerful.
But that aura—that scream without sound—was still echoing through their bones.
A beacon of pain they couldn't ignore.
And they would follow it to the ends of the world if they had to.
Atlas had been deciphering ancient relic scripts when the world suddenly stopped.
Not literally—his heart still beat, dust still drifted through the stale air, his breath still fogged in the underground cold.
But everything essential ground to a halt.
Like reality itself had paused to witness something terrible. To pay respects to suffering too profound to overlook.
His breath caught sharp in his throat.
His knees hit the ground without his permission, stone bruising through his pants. The frost relic in his palm—an artifact he'd bonded with years ago, that had saved his life more times than he could count—
It cracked.
Straight down the middle.
Clean split, sudden and absolute, with a sound like breaking bone.
A force hit him like a mountain of grief made manifest.
Physical. Undeniable. Crushing.
His tail bristled, every hair standing on end. His ears flattened against his skull in an instinctive response to danger that his conscious mind hadn't even processed yet.
"...Retro?"
The name came out confused. Disbelieving.
Because he'd felt his brother's aura before. Had grown up in its shadow, had trained under its weight, had been both comforted and challenged by its presence for decades.
But never like this.
This wasn't fury. Wasn't the controlled anger Retro occasionally unleashed in battle when the situation demanded overwhelming force.
This was despair. Pure and absolute and drowning.
This was his brother breaking.
Atlas's heart hammered with anxiety he hadn't felt in years—not since he was young and helpless, watching his older brother walk into battles that should have killed him. Waiting by the door for someone who might never come home.
"Big bro..."
His voice cracked, went soft and shaken in the empty ruin.
"What the hell happened to you?"
The broken relic in his glove pulsed a warning tone—a sound it made only in the presence of catastrophic threats. Dimensional tears. Reality breaks. God-tier disturbances that could end civilizations.
But this wasn't an external threat.
This was a god-tier emotional collapse.
And somehow, that was worse.
Because Atlas knew how to fight monsters. Knew how to navigate ruins and solve puzzles and survive in hostile environments.
But he didn't know how to fight his brother's grief.
Didn't know how to reach someone drowning in pain this deep.
Gronn was issuing orders to a squad of young adventurers when it struck.
The campfire went dark—flames snuffed out as if smothered by an invisible hand.
Snow froze midair, flakes suspended in defiance of gravity. The very air seemed to thicken, resisting movement.
The old veteran grabbed a support post as the pressure nearly brought him to the ground. His knees threatened to buckle under weight that had nothing to do with physical force.
Everything to do with something far more fundamental.
His weathered face showed rare shock—eyes widening, lines deepening, the carefully maintained composure of a career soldier cracking just slightly.
"...Retro."
Not a question. A certainty.
He'd known the man for decades. Had fought beside him through campaigns that should have killed them both. Had drunk with him, argued with him, trusted him with his life more times than he could count.
And he'd never felt this from him.
Never felt Retro's aura carry this flavor—this texture of absolute collapse.
"You stubborn bastard..."
Gronn's voice came out rough. Almost reverent.
"You've got to hold on."
Around him, younger adventurers panicked.
Gasping for air. Clutching their chests. Some falling to their knees, overwhelmed by the sheer force of emotion pressing down on them from miles away. Unprepared for what it felt like when someone that powerful started breaking apart.
Gronn growled low in his throat, protective instinct flaring.
"Stand down!" he barked at his people, voice carrying the authority of command. "Get inside—now! This isn't an attack!"
One of the younger ones looked at him—face pale, eyes wide with fear and confusion.
"Sir, what is it?"
Gronn's expression went grim. His aged eyes shadowed with understanding earned through too many years of seeing things break.
"That wasn't power," he said quietly.
Each word weighted with terrible certainty.
"That was heartbreak."
He cursed under his breath—a long, creative string of profanity cobbled together from three different languages and twice as many campaigns.
Because Gronn had survived wars. Had lived through monsters and disasters and situations that should have killed him ten times over.
He knew what danger felt like.
This was different.
"If Retro's hurting like that..."
He looked toward the horizon. Toward nothing and everything. Toward wherever his friend was suffering alone in the dark.
"The world's in trouble."
All of them felt it.
Nexus with his shadows and fierce loyalty.
Maris with her supernatural senses.
Atlas with his broken relic and brotherly love.
Even old Gronn with his weathered wisdom and soldier's instincts.
They all felt the same thing:
Retro wasn't fighting someone.
Retro was fighting himself.
And losing.
The world carried the echo like a scream in the bones of the earth. Like a frequency only those who truly knew him could hear. A psychic beacon of agony broadcasting across impossible distances:
Retro needs help.
He is breaking.
He is falling.
And they would come.
All of them.
From different corners of the world, following that beacon of pain, they would converge.
But they didn't know—couldn't know—the truth:
Retro wasn't just raging in the real world.
He was raging in a coma, locked in a god-forged prison of memory and grief. Trapped in the moment Rose died, forced to watch it again and again and again. His power turned inward, devouring him from the inside out.
His body lay unconscious in Lea's arms at the cabin, perfectly still.
But his heart was screaming.
And the world—vast and ancient and interconnected in ways mortals couldn't fully understand—was listening.
Bearing witness.
Mourning.
Because when a god breaks, the universe itself feels the fracture.
And this god wasn't finished breaking yet.
Not by a long shot.