The Chronomancer, a being of pure, cold logic, was faced with a logical impossibility. Its weapon, a device that unraveled causality, had failed against a being that seemed to have no cause. The anomaly—the paradox named Rimuru Tempest—had countered with a threat of its own: a sphere of pure, chaotic, creative energy that promised not just erasure, but utter, primordial un-making.
The Necron entity did not feel fear. It felt… a system error. It recalibrated.
It shifted its focus. Its single, glowing eye turned to Captain Arken. The Chronomancer raised a hand, and the space around the Deathwatch Captain warped. Arken found himself frozen, not by force, but by a bubble of slowed time. Before his eyes, his ancient, blessed Terminator armor began to age at a hyper-accelerated rate. Millennia of wear played out in seconds. Ceramite cracked, adamantium corroded, and holy seals of office turned to brittle dust.
"What is this sorcery?!" Arken roared, his voice distorting as time itself began to fray around him.
"It's not sorcery," Rimuru said, his voice cutting through the temporal distortion. "It's just a cheap trick."
He extended his own hand, and a barrier of absolute law, the authority of Covenant King Uriel, surrounded Captain Arken. Within the barrier, a new rule was declared: "Time will proceed at a normal, linear rate." The aging effect stopped instantly. The corroded armor stabilized.
The Chronomancer shifted tactics again. It attempted to reverse time on the bridge, to a point before the intruders had arrived. But the space around them refused to yield, held in a state of absolute lockdown by Rimuru's Spatial Domination.
The entity turned its full attention away from them, focusing its will back into the ship's core. The entire vessel began to shudder violently. The emerald lights of the conduits flared, and the psychic hum rose to a mind-shattering scream.
On the bridge of the Obelisk, every alarm shrieked at once. "Lord Inquisitor!" the sensor-officer yelled, his face pale. "The energy readings from the singularity are off the charts! The deletion event… it's happening now!"
Varrus gripped the command throne, his ancient face a mask of grim finality, watching the black hole on the viewscreen begin to pulse with an unholy, reality-devouring light.
<
Rimuru knew the time for defense was over. He had to sever the connection at its source.
He moved. His form blurred, appearing directly before the Chronomancer, Soulcleaver held high. The Necron entity, sensing the final attack, erected its ultimate defense: a shield of frozen, crystallized time, a barrier where a billion years passed in a nanosecond.
But Soulcleaver was not a physical blade. It was a concept. The concept of Absolute Severance.
And a concept can cut through anything.
The sword descended. It passed through the shield of frozen time as if it were not there. It struck the Chronomancer's slender, metallic form.
There was no sound. No explosion. The Chronomancer froze. Its single, glowing eye stared at Rimuru. And then, it fractured. Its body broke apart into a million crystalline shards, each one reflecting a different moment in time—the birth of a star, the death of a king, a silent city on an ancient world, the face of the Silent King himself. For a single, breathtaking moment, the history of the universe was reflected in its shattered form. Then, the shards dissolved into fine, grey dust and were gone.
With the Chronomancer's destruction, the energy flow to the singularity became a wild, uncontrolled torrent. The ship bucked violently, and the deletion event, now unguided, threatened to become a true, universe-wounding catastrophe.
"Captain, hold on!" Rimuru yelled. He leaped to the central dais where the Chronomancer had floated. He plunged his hands into the swirling emerald light of the ship's control core. He was not a passenger in this storm. He was the new pilot.
With Ciel guiding his every thought, he seized control of the Necron's reality-engine. He felt the infinite, hungry pull of the black hole, the complex, alien mathematics of temporal physics. And into that impossible equation, he introduced a single, simple, absolute command.
"Cease."
The violent shuddering stopped. The screaming psychic hum died. The emerald lights dimmed to a steady, stable glow. On the bridge of the Obelisk, the terrifying energy readings from the black hole plummeted, returning to normal. The system-wide deletion event was over.
Captain Arken stumbled, his armor now aged and pitted, but his body unharmed. He looked at the dust of the fallen Necron, and then at the small, calm figure who stood with his hands in the heart of the enemy's machine, having just single-handedly stabilized a weaponized black hole.
<
A vox-channel, filled with static and panic, chimed in Rimuru's ear. "Lord Inquisitor to Tempest! Report! In the Emperor's name, what is your status? Our sensors… the entire system just stabilized."
Rimuru pulled his hands from the now-tame energy of the core. He looked around the silent, alien bridge, a place of impossible power that was now, for all intents and purposes, his.
He keyed his own vox, his voice a model of calm understatement. "The paradox has been resolved, Lord Inquisitor. The law has been… amended."
A confident smile touched his lips.
"And I believe I have just acquired a significant shortcut for our journey home."