Chapter 53 – Umbral Time
The world folded in on itself.
The walls of the chamber bent, stretching too tall and too narrow at the same time. The lamps smeared sideways without moving, their light dragging into long threads that didn't match their flames. The stone under my feet felt like it wanted to be a slope and a cliff and flat ground all at once.
Space buckled.
Time staggered.
[ System ]
[ Alert: Local Space-Time – Distorted ]
[ Source: Pact-Bound Entity (Unstable) ]
[ Projection: Standard Engagement – Unfavourable ]
The cult leader stood at the center of it, half-human, half something that didn't belong anywhere near Lumina. His shadow crawled up his spine like a live thing, and his too-many eyes shone with the reflected colour of places that didn't exist.
The air pressed against my lungs.
Melody's presence wrapped tight around my shoulders, a cold band.
"Master," she said quietly, only for me. "This rhythm is bad. He's pulling the whole room into his pattern."
I knew.
And I knew something else.
"With just you and the sword," I thought, "we don't win this clean."
She didn't argue.
"Not unless you let me cut until there's nothing left of either of us," she said. "And even then, it would be close."
The pact-thing laughed, the sound sliding along the walls as if the stone enjoyed it.
"See?" it said, voice layered. "The world softens. The page loosens. We can write something new here."
Its shadow spread wider, a black stain seeping across the floor, crawling toward us like spilled ink trying to decide what to erase first.
I tightened my grip on Melody.
I was a swordsman.
I'd always been a swordsman.
But I'd never stopped dreaming of being a mage.
And this was the perfect time to remember that.
"Melody," I said inside my own head. "Buy me time."
Her answer was instant.
"How much?" she asked.
"As much as you can steal," I said.
"Then let go," she said.
My fingers clenched on her hilt.
"Let go," she repeated. "Just a little. You've been using me like an arm. Let me be a body."
The shadow at our feet twitched.
The pact-thing took a step, and the chamber bent with him.
I exhaled once, sharp, and released my will from the sword.
My hand stayed on the hilt.
My ownership didn't change.
But I stopped telling the blade what to do.
Melody poured forward.
It felt like someone stepping past my shoulder—no weight, all presence. She moved down my arm, into the hilt, into the steel, and then out the other side, her spirit wrapping the sword like a second skin.
To my eyes, her black-haired, black-eyed form slid forward and grabbed her own blade with both hands.
To everyone else, it was just a sword that shivered, straightened, and began to move on its own.
The pact-thing's nearest eyes narrowed.
"Ah," it said. "A cursed artifact. That makes more sense."
Good.
Let him think that.
Melody stepped away from me, swinging herself up into a ready stance. The sword still existed in my grip in the physical sense, but her will dragged the steel, dragging my arm only as much as she needed to to make the illusion work.
"Cast," she said. "I'll keep him busy."
Then she moved.
The claymore darted forward, point drawing a thin, bright line in the warped air, forcing the pact-thing to shift its focus.
I stepped back.
My hand slid off the grip.
For the first time since we'd met, I was completely unarmed.
It felt wrong.
It felt light.
"Time," I thought. "I need time."
And the world, softened as it was, gave me something like it.
[ System ]
[ Skill Branch: Divination – Minor ]
[ Node: Record of Paths – Accessible ]
[ Temporary Field: Shadow Time ("Umbral Time") – Possible ]
[ Cost: High Mana / Cognitive Load ]
"Do it," I told it.
The world shuddered again.
Then, for me, it… slowed.
Not like Ezra's Quiet Second, where the world stretched cleanly and everything else froze.
This was messier.
The distorted chamber—the bending walls, the crawling shadow, Melody's moving sword, the pact-thing's half-formed limbs—all of it dimmed at the edges, like someone had pulled a thin curtain of dusk over everything.
An umbra.
A shadow over the moment.
Inside that shadow, my thoughts moved faster.
My heartbeat sounded too loud in my ears.
[ System ]
[ Field Established: Umbral Time ]
[ Duration: Short ]
[ Advisory: Overuse Will Damage Mind / Core ]
"Fine," I muttered. "I only need it once."
***
I'd always been a swordsman.
But when I was younger—before the first death, before the first regression—I'd wanted to be a mage more than anything else.
Swordsmanship was simple: distance, timing, lines.
Magic was nothing but lines written into the world.
Back then, I'd pushed my way up to a Tier 4 mage on stubbornness and a half-broken mana core. I'd learned vector spells—small clean tools that let me tug on forces, redirect flows, nudge blades and bodies and mana itself. They'd been perfect for control.
Perfect for a boy with no real power trying to pretend he mattered.
Now, my core wasn't the cracked, stuttering thing it had been.
It was S-rank.
Alive.
Hungry.
I could feel mana rushing through me like a second bloodstream, each breath drawing it in, each exhale pushing it out in tiny, controlled leaks.
"Vector," I thought, feeling old patterns flicker under my skin. "Too weak on its own. Elemental is what matters here."
I needed fire.
Not the cheap, orange stuff scattered by first-years in the practice yard.
Real fire.
True flame.
Vera Flamma.
A Tier 5 spell.
Last time, I hadn't had the core to handle it. I'd understood the circuit in theory but never had the mana.
Now, I had both.
Magic in this world wasn't just shouting words and hoping something listened. To cast at this level, you needed three things.
First: knowledge that the spell existed.
Second: the circuit—the pattern of flow.
Third: output control.
I sank into the remembered circuit, drawing it out across my mind's eye.
A ring of runes.
Lines of force linking them.
A spiral of flow that took raw mana and turned it into heat, light, and motion.
[ System ]
[ Spell Model: Vera Flamma ("True Flame") ]
[ Tier: 5 ]
[ Mana Core: S-Rank – Capacity: Sufficient ]
The old me would have pushed mana into the pattern and prayed.
The new me knew better.
Output wasn't just "how much mana you pour in."
Fire was physics.
With enough regressions and enough time watching people burn, you learned a few things.
Fire ate fuel and oxygen.
Starved of one, it wavered and died.
Fed the right way, it changed colour—dirty orange to yellow, yellow to blue, blue to white. Temperature. Energy. The way the flame licked and moved, the way it swallowed surfaces, all of it was just mana wearing a different shape.
Water taught other lessons.
Water flowing down a pipe trickled when it was wide open, but choke it—narrow the space, increase the pressure—and the same amount came out faster, harder, more focused.
Mana was the same.
If I just flooded Vera Flamma's circuit, I would get a big fireball.
Impressive. Wasteful. Useless here.
If I choked the flow, narrowed it, gave it structure…
"I can make a line," I thought. "Not a ball. A lance."
I adjusted the circuit.
Where the standard Vera Flamma looped its output into a broad blossom, I knotted it—tight, narrow, forcing the mana into a compressed channel before release. I wove in the knowledge the old priests had muttered about sacred flames, the way true fire consumed not just matter but impurities, the way heat could strip things down to the bone and then further, until all that was left was ash and light.
"Combustion needs oxygen," I reminded myself, from the past life. "So feed it. Pull more air in. Compress it at the front. Raise the temperature. Yellow to blue. Blue to white. White to…"
Plasma.
The stage past ordinary flame, where matter stopped pretending to be solid or liquid or gas and just became charged particles screaming in all directions.
I didn't need a full star in my hand.
I just needed a fraction.
Just enough.
Mana flooded my channels.
It hurt, it hurt like hell.
S-rank core or not, Tier 5 wasn't gentle with the modification.
My veins burned cold-hot, my teeth ached, and my fingertips tingled like I'd stuck them into live Arks.
I shaped it anyway.
"This," I thought, "is why I didn't do this at eleven."
Melody's distant presence flickered at the edge of my awareness—steel meeting wrong flesh, her dragging the sword through trajectories that kept the pact-thing's focus on her manifested weapon and not on the boy in the back room quietly building a star.
"Still alive," she sent, dry. "Please hurry up, Master. He's starting to learn."
"I'm working on it," I shot back.
The circuit locked.
The flow stabilised.
Mana poured through the pattern, compressing, heating, stripping away everything that wasn't necessary.
I raised my right hand.
Fire appeared above my palm.
Not orange.
Not yellow.
A small, impossibly tight sphere of blue-white flame spun lazily over my skin, the air around it hissing as molecules broke from the heat alone. It was the size of my thumbnail and heavier than any stone I'd ever lifted.
The room around me flinched.
The warped lamps flickered.
The pact-thing paused.
Its wrong eyes snapped toward me.
Ah.
There it is.
Now I had its attention.
Melody broke away in a slash, dragging the sword back into a guard between us and it.
"Master," she said, worried.
[ System ]
[ Vera Flamma – Core Stable ]
[ Output Mode: Compressed ]
[ Expansion Trigger: Distance / Time ]
The pact-thing laughed again, but there was a tremor in it now.
"What is that?" it asked, its voices overlapping. "You bring a candle to the Depth?"
"Something like that," I said.
My hand shook.
I gritted my teeth and stepped forward.
The Vera Flamma core hovered just above my palm, a hunger so intense it almost had a personality. Every instinct screamed to let it go, to throw it, to get it away from my skin.
"Melody," I said, low. "I'm going to hurtle it past you. Don't be in its way."
"Understood," she said immediately.
No protest.
No fear.
Just trust.
She shifted side-on, sword between us and the pact-thing, giving me a clear line.
The pact-thing spread its arms.
"Come, then," it said. "Let me see your little light. I will show you how easily it goes out."
The world flickered at the edges as Umbral Time strained.
I moved.
I thrust my hand forward and released the trigger in the circuit.
The blue-white core leapt from my palm.
At first, it stayed small.
A bead of true flame, trailing a thin line of heat.
Then—distance.
That was the choke.
The further it travelled from my hand, the more the compression unwound.
The bead stretched, thinned, and then bloomed—not outward like a sphere, but forward, a lance of blue-white fire that grew thicker the farther it went. A reversed torch. A river of star-stuff that was narrow at the source and wide at the impact point.
It carved through the warped air, erasing the lines the pact-thing had written into the room.
Where it passed, the distortion screamed and melted like wax.
The pact-thing tried to move.
Too late.
The lance of flame struck it full in the chest.
For a heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then Vera Flamma opened properly.
The blue flame went white.
From white, it reached for that next stage—edges sizzling into plasma, stripping matter into charged particles.
The pact-thing's half-human, half-elsewhere body didn't burn the way normal flesh did.
It un-made.
The robes went first, turning to ash and then to nothing. The human parts blistered, charred, then vanished, leaving glowing traces of bone that cracked, melted, and dissolved. The outer parts twisted, trying to rewrite themselves into shapes that could survive, but every attempt demanded a structure, a rule, a pattern—and the flame ate patterns.
Eyes popped like bubbles in boiling water.
Shadows tried to cling and were peeled away.
The smell in the chamber wasn't just burning meat.
It was hot metal.
Scorched ink.
The sharp, sterile bite of air that had been stripped of everything that wasn't itself.
The pact-thing tried to say something.
The words caught in a throat that no longer believed in throats.
It raised one hand—or what was left of it—and reached toward me, fingers unraveling into threads of darkness and light.
Then there was nothing to reach with.
The Vera Flamma lance widened one last time, swallowing the platform, the circle, and the thing standing on it in a column of blue-white fire that touched the ceiling and stayed there for three slow, burning heartbeats.
Then it snapped out.
The chamber dimmed.
The stone where the leader had stood glowed dull red, then cooled, spiderwebbed with cracks.
There was no body.
No ash.
No scraps of cloth.
Just a scorched patch of floor and a faint, shimmering afterimage burned into my vision.
I exhaled and nearly dropped to one knee.
My mana pathways screamed.
My S-rank core howled under my ribs like something alive, sucking in ambient mana as fast as it could to refill what I'd just ripped out of it.
[ System ]
[ Vera Flamma – Complete Understanding ]
[ Mana Capacity: 13% ]
[ Advisory: Rest Recommended ]
I Ignored.
The room was very quiet.
The remaining cultists stared, some slack-jawed, some gibbering, some curled up in corners clutching their heads.
Melody stepped back to my side, sword tip dragging a small, smoking groove in the stone where she walked.
She took one look at the empty platform and then at my shaking hand.
"…You're insane," she said softly.
"Probably," I said.
Her lips twisted into a smile.
"No matter how much you tell me about your past and your regressions," she said, "you never fail to surprise me."
I let out a weak laugh.
"That's truly rich coming from the sword," I said.
She tilted her head, pleased.
***
After that, it was the quiet work.
I walked through the wreckage of the Abyssal Pact's early nest with Melody at my shoulder and the System's faint overlays marking what mattered.
[ System ]
[ Node: Destroyed ]
[ Survivors: 7 (Mentally Unstable) ]
[ Records: Intact – 3 Rooms ]
[ Vault: Present ]
We bound the survivors—the ones whose minds hadn't been completely eaten by what they'd called—and left them facedown on the floor for the Church and the city guard to find later. I took their ledgers, their contracts, their little black books full of noble names and payments.
"Proof," Melody said, watching me stack them.
"Leverage," I corrected. "Proof just makes people hold inquiries. Leverage makes them move."
She accepted that.
In a side room, we found the treasury.
Chests of coin. Piles of trinkets. Enchanted items taken as payment or spoils.
I took what I could carry.
I didn't take all of it.
There was no need to be greedy when I planned to burn the rest later as a message.
At the back of the vault, half-hidden behind a stack of crates, was another door.
Smaller.
Reinforced.
No sigils on the outside.
Just iron and wood and a lock that had seen too much use.
The smell behind it was wrong.
Not like the ink-and-metal of outer influence.
Closer to rot. Sweat. Fear.
I stared at it for a long second.
Melody's voice went very quiet.
"Prison," she said.
"Or stock," I said. "Or both."
I stepped forward and rested my hand against the wood.
It vibrated faintly under my palm.
Something moved inside.
Slowly.
Weakly.
I broke the lock.
The door swung inward with a creak.
The room beyond was small. Bare stone walls. No lamps. The only light was what spilled in from behind me.
Chains clinked softly.
In the centre of the room, a cage sat bolted to the floor—a crude thing made of thick iron bars and ugly welds. Inside it, huddled in the furthest corner, was a girl.
An elf.
Even curled in on herself, I could see the long ears, the fall of pale hair matted against her back. Her limbs were too thin, too sharp where bone pressed against skin. Her eyes, wide and terrified, gleamed green in the half-light, pupils flaring as she tried to see who had opened the door.
Her skin should have been smooth.
It wasn't.
Patches along her arms, neck, and one side of her face bulged in ugly, uneven swellings—like tumours, like knots of flesh that had forgotten how to be part of a body. The colour there was wrong, mottled purple-grey, threaded with faint dark lines that pulsed very slightly, out of sync with her heartbeat.
Corruption.
Not demonkin.
Not quite Outer.
Something in between.
She pressed herself harder against the back bars, trying to make herself smaller.
Her voice came out as a raw, cracked whisper.
"Please," she said. "I'll be quiet. I'll be useful. Just… don't—"
She saw my uniform.
My sword at my hip.
The ruined chamber behind me.
She froze.
Our eyes met.
For a second, the whole world shrank to the rectangle of rusted bars between us and the way her hands shook as she tried and failed to hide the parts of her that looked wrong.
Melody's presence settled over my shoulder like a weight.
"Master," she said softly. "She's… bad off."
"I see," I said.
The elf girl's lips trembled.
She looked at me the way someone looked at a new nightmare, hoping it would be kinder than the last one.
The cage creaked as I stepped closer.