Rain slicked streets glistened under the fractured glow of neon signs. The city hummed like it always did, but for Kael, nothing felt normal.
Objects blinked. A lamppost flickered out of existence for a heartbeat. A puddle reversed its ripples. He froze. No one else noticed. But he did.
"What… am I seeing?"
A shadow moved across the alleyway. Too fast. Too wrong. Not like a normal person. Kael's chest tightened, heartbeat hammering in his ears. And then — the world shifted.
A fragment of the street folded upward, forming a jagged loop. A woman's scream echoed from above… but no one was there. The air shimmered with colors that didn't exist: pink snowflakes, green mist, purple fire.
Kael blinked. The street beneath him split, exposing a second layer of reality. Through the rift, he saw humans with elongated limbs, translucent skin, and eyes glowing like molten silver, walking as if they were normal. Birds with crystalline feathers swooped past, shrieking in harmonics that made his stomach churn.
And then the shadow attacked.
It wasn't a shadow. It was a clone of himself, but wrong. Its movements were delayed by milliseconds, eyes black voids with faint thread-like glimmers dancing across them. Its hand shot toward him — and Kael felt the air slow, the pulse of time itself resisting him.
He stumbled backward.
A scream split the air — Aris appeared, suspended midair in a dome of golden light that rippled like water. Time slowed inside the bubble, and the clone's strike merely grazed the edge.
"Get out of the way!" Aris shouted, voice echoing like it came from multiple places at once.
Kael ducked as threads of golden energy shot from Aris' hands, striking the clone. The impact shattered reality around them: buildings flickered in and out, puddles turned into molten silver, and dozens of timeline echoes of Kael appeared, each moving slightly differently, each screaming.
One of them tripped Kael's foot. Another grabbed at him with hands that melted like wax. A star-tiger, massive and ethereal, lunged from the fractured sky, gravity warping as its claws sliced through a mirror of the street.
Kael felt something stir deep inside — a pulse in his chest. Threads of energy, faint and trembling, coiling around his heart like living wires. He had never felt this before. Something old, something powerful, something dangerous.
The clone roared, morphing its arm into a jagged blade of black crystal. Kael's vision blurred. Time bent. Space folded.
Then Aris shouted again:"Kael! Focus on the thread in your chest! Don't resist it — let it move!"
A golden light erupted from Kael's chest, arcing toward the clone. For a moment, time itself seemed to pause — the clone froze mid-swing, the star-tiger's leap suspended in the sky, the buildings hovering like broken toys.
But reality was unstable. A fissure opened beneath Kael's feet. Another timeline ripped through the alley: humans with metal limbs, eyes burning like suns, flowed across the street; rivers of light poured upward; gravity twisted sideways.
Kael's heart pounded. He could feel his thread pulling — not just pulling, but demanding. Demanding power he didn't understand.
The clone's crystal arm shattered… only to reform in the hand of a second clone, rising from another timeline. And behind it, the shadowed figure whispered a single word that froze Kael's blood:
"Threadless… you are already mine."
The fissures widened. The sky fractured. And Kael realized — this was only the beginning.
Time bent. Space fractured. And he was standing at the edge of an endless war across realities.