The room hummed with the low murmur of anticipation, a sea of polished rings shimmering beneath the stained-glass windows of Flame Land Academy's Bone Artifact training hall.
Class A-Line sat poised, breaths shallow, eyes locked on the figure who moved through the center—Kraél, the unyielding master of relic arts.
His voice cut through the silence like a sharpened blade.
> "There are two kinds of Bone power," he began, his gaze sweeping the room. "Living Bone Artifacts—vessels fused with the essence of creatures still breathing the world's flame. They grant you strength, speed, instincts honed by primal life. But there is risk: the bone remembers… and so does the beast."
He paused, eyes flickering with shadowed warning.
> "Then there are Dead Bone Fragments—souls shattered beyond life, relics of power left cold and silent. They can be tools or traps. Most who touch them find only decay."
Aika shifted beside Yuji, fingers tightening into fists. She'd seen both: the allure, the danger.
Kraél's voice lowered, deepening.
> "Bone fusion is not merely magic. It is covenant. Pain, transformation, death, and rebirth."
Then—
The air trembled.
A sudden fracture splintered reality.
Time bent, warped, and shattered.
Three seconds—
Silence.
Frozen motion.
The world stopped, and Yuji's breath hung suspended.
Then reality shattered and reconstructed itself with a violent, searing pulse.
The classroom warped around him.
Walls burned in icy-blue flames.
Gravity reversed, pulling objects—and bodies—toward the cracked ceiling.
The polished floors now reflected a sky of ash and cobalt embers.
Kraél's voice echoed—twisted, backwards, warped through a hall of broken mirrors.
The students around Yuji blinked, frozen in normalcy, untouched by this blue inferno.
But Yuji saw it all.
The class, fractured.
The world, broken at its seams.
And then—
From the flickering flames stepped a figure.
A shadow of himself—yet not.
This was Yuji, but stripped bare of flesh and time.
Veins glowed like liquid starlight beneath pale skin.
No eyes.
No warmth.
Just an empty void where life once burned.
The fractured clone moved close, voice a raspy whisper that rattled the bones of Yuji's soul:
> "You were never meant to leave Zeyrus alive."
The words echoed in his mind, a dark hymn against the blue blaze.
Yuji reached out—
And the vision shattered.
The world snapped back to its rightful place.
Gravity grounded, flames vanished.
The students blinked, startled, confusion rippling through the room.
The frozen moment had lasted but a breath.
Then the door burst open.
Yumi stepped in, eyes sharp, breath ragged from sprinting.
She moved directly to Yuji's side, voice urgent but hushed.
> "I felt it—the fracture in time. It's worse than we thought."
Kraél's steady gaze flickered with something rare: unease.
> "You are not imagining things. This was a Time Split."
The students exchanged glances.
Whispers crawled beneath the room's surface like restless snakes.
Yuji's mind spun.
Time Element?
A myth spoken only in the Upper World—where gods bent reality like wet cloth.
But if it was here—
> "Then who is wielding it?" Yuji asked.
Kraél's eyes darkened.
> "Not you."
His voice dropped to a whisper meant only for Yuji's ears.
> "Someone else is playing with the fabric of reality."
The classroom seemed to close in—walls breathing, shadows twitching.
Yuji's fractured self had been a warning.
A shadow of death stretching from his past.
And the Time Element was the blade cutting the thread of his destiny.
Yumi placed a steady hand on his shoulder.
> "We need to find Xioner. If she remembers, she might hold the key."
Kraél nodded, spear lowering with finality.
> "Prepare yourselves. The fracture will deepen. And the lines between worlds will blur."
Yuji's eyes narrowed.
The arena outside, the Bone Artifacts—none of it was mere training anymore.
The war for his soul, for the truth of his existence, had just begun.
---
The sky above the Temporal River Gate shimmered with fractured hues—indigo, silver, and flame-red streaking across the heavens like bleeding memories. It was a sacred place where the pulse of time could be heard, if one stood still enough.
But Ryen Sylvan was not still.
His breath cut through the silence in sharp bursts. His boots scraped the stone, vanishing and reappearing in flickers of wind.
Again.
And again.
> "No… too heavy. I'm dragging air instead of becoming it."
He vanished—reappeared six meters ahead—
Stumbled—
Skidded, barely catching himself before tumbling into the flowing silver threads of the Temporal River. A single misstep there could erase years from your life.
> "Focus, dammit…"
Ryen straightened. His dark coat rippled from leftover friction. The Phantom Steps—his family's forbidden movement technique—was unstable. Level 1 allowed silent footwork. Level 2 gave temporary velocity shifts. But Level 3…
That was disappearance.
Blinking through space. Frictionless. Weightless.
He wasn't ready.
Yet his enemies wouldn't wait for readiness.
And neither would fate.
Suddenly, the air thickened.
A burn etched itself into the sky.
A celestial warning—letters written in flame-light that sizzled across the clouds like a divine decree:
> "THE BOY FROM ZEYRUS IS A DANGER TO TIME. LET HIM BLEED IN ALL WORLDS."
Ryen's blood chilled.
> Yuji?!
Before thought could form, the ground trembled—
A wave of masked assassins surged from the forest surrounding the gate. Their bodies glowed with Time Glyphs—etched runes stolen from Upper World scrolls.
Silent. Deadly. Dozens.
The first one lunged. Ryen ducked—spun—disappeared.
He reappeared behind the attacker. One clean strike. Gone.
But three more followed. Then five. Then nine.
Steel clashed against steel. Time stuttered. His Phantom Steps danced on the edge of collapse.
Ryen's breath grew harsh, eyes locked forward. The sky still burned with that cursed prophecy.
He would not let Yuji bleed.
> "Then bleed me instead!"
His aura flared. Silver wind spiraled around him, slicing through the air.
Phantom Steps—Level 3.
He vanished.
Not moved. Vanished.
Each step displaced air without friction. He blinked behind an assassin—his blade already moving—then behind the next. The rhythm became unnatural, inhuman, beautiful in its violence.
Ten gone. Then fifteen. Then twenty.
The last one hesitated—
And Ryen sliced the mask from his face before the man could even react.
Silence.
Ryen stood alone amidst the corpses.
Or so he thought.
Then—the stutter.
Reality twitched.
Colors inverted. Time bent. And a voice—not loud, but woven into the air—spoke behind him:
> "You shouldn't have learned this technique so soon… Ryen."
He turned.
No one.
Then—across the river's edge—he saw her.
Xioner.
Slumped near the Time Pillars. Blood spilling from her side. Her aura flickering like a dying ember.
Ryen's heart cracked open. He was at her side in an instant.
Her breath was ragged. Her gaze half-gone.
> "They tried…" she whispered, "to erase me from all timelines. I saw them… the ones who live outside time…"
Then her head fell against his shoulder.
Alive—but barely.
> They tried to remove her from memory itself…
Ryen's fury surged. The earth around him shuddered. Time warped again—
But this time, it obeyed him.
Not Phantom Steps. Not stolen movement.
But something deeper. Ancient.
Chrono Overstrike.
A power that bled from his lineage but had never awakened until now.
Every step he took stole a second from the enemy.
His presence fractured the seconds of those nearby. Movement slowed. Swords rusted mid-swing. Breath caught in lungs.
He walked like a god through a world gasping for continuity.
The air around him dimmed, blurred.
And when another wave of Time Assassins approached—he didn't even blink.
They fell before they reached him. Their own futures crumbling as he stepped through their timeline threads, slicing their destinies short.
> They wanted war with time itself… then they'll have it.
He lifted Xioner into his arms, eyes burning with cold resolve.
The sky still bore that cursed message.
> "LET HIM BLEED IN ALL WORLDS."
Ryen looked up and answered with silence.
Then he turned. Walked through the cracked gate, time bending to his will.
And his voice echoed—low, sharp, final:
> "If you threaten the ones I protect… I'll steal every future you ever hoped for."
---
The wind whispered like a heartbeat underground.
Beneath the Flame Academy—past the sealed doors, past the engraved halls lined with memory-threaded runes—lay a room no student, soldier, or scholar was ever meant to see.
They called it the Time Archive.
But it was no library.
It breathed.
Yuji Kazehaya stepped carefully behind Yumi, his boots clicking softly on invisible platforms suspended over an endless dark void. Light shivered above them—not from torches or crystals, but from shifting sheets of memory that floated midair like ghost pages, forever rearranging.
Beside him, Aika moved quietly, her eyes wide.
"Where are we...?" she whispered.
Yumi stopped. Her cloak fluttered slightly as if disturbed by more than wind.
> "This is where time hides the things it wants to forget," she said. "And where we find the things we're not ready to know."
A massive spiral of scrolls and glyph-lit cubes rotated slowly in the air, like a galaxy of knowledge spinning to its own ancient rhythm.
Yumi raised her hand. A string of light curled from her ring, reached into the spiral, and drew forth a single page—tattered, scorched at the edges, yet faintly glowing with living ink.
> "We found records here… about a group called the Temporal Fragmenters," she said, eyes sharp. "They don't belong to any world. Not the Flame World, not the Beast World. They exist outside of time. And they steal from it."
Aika frowned. "Steal?"
Yumi nodded. "They pull people from one timeline and insert them into another. They erase futures. Twist cause and effect. Some believe they're the ones who created the Dark Veins."
Yuji stepped forward, gaze falling to the page. His own name pulsed on the surface—Yuji Kazehaya—but the words were still forming, black ink crawling across like vines.
The sentence stopped.
Then it changed.
And finished itself:
> "Yuji Kazehaya… died in Zeyrus. But Time refused to accept it."
Yuji stared. The room dimmed. Somewhere in the Archive, a clock chimed once—and then again in reverse, as if regretting the sound.
> "What…?" Aika whispered. "That's not possible. He's alive—he's standing right? .
.... i Don't care if time rejects him or not. If he is targeted i will kill them all—"
The page shuddered.
A sound like thunder cracking through silence echoed from the walls.
And then the page ripped itself in half.
Not torn by hand. Not destroyed by fire. It simply ceased to agree with itself.
Ink splattered in midair. The spiral of archives above them stopped rotating. All the memories… all the scrolls… suddenly shook as if remembering pain.
Cracks ran through the floating platforms beneath their feet.
Time itself began to unravel in the Archive's breath.
Yumi grabbed Yuji's wrist. "We need to leave. Now. The Archive can't hold contradictions. It's rejecting you—or the truth it just showed."
Aika backed toward the exit bridge, light from her boots barely illuminating the void. Pages screamed as they turned themselves faster, slicing through the air in flashes of memory and forgotten futures.
Yuji stood at the center of it, unmoving. The words burned in his mind.
> "Died in Zeyrus…"
"Time refused…"
> What the hell am I?
> if I am dead who was he?? Was he my shadow or.... reflection
A voice—soft, ancient—whispered from the folds of the collapsing Archive. It came from everywhere and nowhere, like a prophecy that missed its deadline:
> "If you fear your future…"
"...it's because time already lived it without you."
The room shattered.
And the past, present, and future screamed together in silence.
---
END OF CHAPTER 30