The north pasture was no longer a field; it was a pressurized chamber of combat. The girl moved with a terrifying, disjointed rhythm, her presence flickering like a corrupted video file.
"Eve, high-output suppression!" I commanded.
I lunged forward, my Golden Peak impulse coating my fist in a shell of hardened light. I moved at a velocity that should have been unblockable, aiming a strike at her shoulder to disable her motor functions. Simultaneously, Eve surged from the left, a lash of Black Impulse void-energy snaking out to bind her feet.
We connected. My fist shattered her defensive purple aura, and I felt the sickening crunch of bone. Eve's void-tendrils wrapped around her, beginning to de-atomize the fabric of her uniform. For 0.4 seconds, we had won.
Then, the world stuttered.
A sickening sensation of vertigo washed over my processors. The sound of the wind reversed. The dust kicked up by my feet flew back into the earth.
I was back in my starting position. My hand was empty. The girl stood ten meters away, her shoulder perfectly intact, her uniform un-torn.
"A solid effort," she said, her voice dripping with a flat, mechanical boredom. "In that timeline, you managed to fracture my clavicle. I found the sensation... inefficient. So I deleted it."
"She's rewinding," Eve growled, his Black Impulse leaking into the grass in frustrated bursts. "How are we supposed to kill something that can just undo its own death?"
I didn't answer. I attacked again, pushing my core to Peak output. This time, it was a blur of pure kinetic exchange. I traded blows with her—my Golden shields clashing against her Purple entropy. Each impact sent a shockwave through the ground that shattered the windows of the barn 100 yards away. I landed a heavy kick to her ribs; she countered with a palm strike of pure entropy that sent me skidding through the mud.
Eve dove in, his hands wreathed in the Black Void, tearing through her purple defenses and leaving a scorched mark across her cheek.
Again, the stutter. The rewind.
The world reset. The bruise on her cheek vanished. I was back in the mud, but the mud was dry again.
"You are repeating yourselves," she noted, adjusting her glasses. "I can see the next ten seconds of your 'perfect' lives. I see every punch before you even twitch a muscle."
I stood up, my Golden light flickering as I analyzed the temporal lag. My internal clock was recording the anomalies. Even though time was resetting, my memory—enhanced by the Doctor's architecture—was retaining the data of the 'deleted' timelines.
I watched her eyes. As she prepared her next move, I noticed they weren't tracking the entire field. They were locked onto me with a singular, predatory intensity.
"Eve," I signaled privately. "The rewind isn't omnipotent. It's triggered. And the trigger is based on her Focus."
"What are you talking about?" Eve hissed back.
"She only reverses when I land a decisive hit," I stated. "She is projecting her future-sight primarily on me because I am the Golden Peak. I am the variable her mind prioritizes."
I looked at the Sheriff's cruiser, which had just skidded into the yard, its high beams cutting through the dark like twin blades.
"I have identified a flaw in the temporal spotlight," I told Eve. "She can see into the future, but she doesn't tell us how much she can see or how many variables she can track at once. We are going to overload her vision with the Sheriff's lights and my own luminosity. We are going to make the future too bright for her to read."
The girl's eyes flared a deep, dangerous purple. "I saw you realize that," she whispered. "But knowing the flaw doesn't stop the clock."
"Keep the pressure on, Eve!" I projected through our link, my Golden Peak radiance flaring until the pasture was washed in a sterile, incandescent light.
"It's useless, Adam!" Eve yelled back, though he didn't stop. He threw a flurry of Black Impulse spheres, each one a localized void designed to collapse anything it touched. To anyone else, it was a desperate, uncoordinated assault. To me, it was the necessary noise required to mask the signal.
The girl laughed, a sound that lacked any genuine mirth. She danced through our strikes, her body flickering in and out of the temporal stream. Every time my Golden blade or Eve's black lashes got close, she simply wasn't there anymore. She was living ten seconds ahead, casually stepping around the "ghosts" of our attacks.
"You are wasting your internal reserves," she said, her purple eyes tracking my every movement with predatory focus. "I have seen this ending a thousand times in the last minute. You exhaust yourselves, and I unmake you."
"Ignore the rewind, Eve! Hit her again!" I commanded.
Eve understood. He didn't need to see the plan; he only needed to trust the architecture of my logic. He surged forward, his Black Impulse turning into a jagged storm of entropy. I mirrored him, coming in low with a sweep of Golden energy.
She blocked. She dodged. She rewound.
The world stuttered, resetting us once again. But with every reset, she was focusing more intensely on me—the Golden Peak—trying to predict the exact moment I would try something new. She was so occupied with the "future" of my strikes that she failed to notice the geometric alignment I was forming with my discarded energy.
I wasn't just missing her; I was "planting" Golden nodes into the earth, hidden beneath the charred soil Eve was creating.
"Now, Sheriff! The lights!" I roared.
Brandt slammed the high beams and the searchlight on. The wall of white light hit her glasses, creating a momentary glare that forced her brain to recalibrate her visual focus. In that microsecond of sensory overload, I triggered the nodes.
I reached deep into a memory file the Doctor had encrypted in my core—a forbidden technique labeled Sub-Atomic Compression. I didn't fire a beam. I pulled.
The Golden nodes and Eve's lingering Black Impulse didn't explode; they imploded. A miniature, high-density singularity—a "Black Hole" of Golden-Black interference—snapped into existence exactly where she stood.
"Rewind!" she screamed, her eyes flaring a desperate, frantic violet.
She tried to trigger her temporal jump. She tried to step back ten seconds to before the trap was sprung. But a singularity doesn't just crush matter; it warps time itself. The immense gravitational shear of the miniature black hole gripped her temporal frequency and dragged it into a crawl.
Her ability backfired. Instead of leaping back ten seconds, she was caught in the event horizon of her own power.
To my sensors, she began to move in agonizingly slow motion. I watched her mouth open to finish her scream, but the sound took seconds to form. Her Purple Impulse, usually a jagged whip, was now a stagnant, frozen mist around her fingers. She was trapped in the "Now," the gravity of the singularity holding her in a temporal stasis field she couldn't calculate her way out of.
"The Doctor taught me that even time has a breaking point," I said, my voice sounding deep and distorted through the gravitational lens. "You aren't in the future anymore. You're in a moment that will never end."
Eve stood beside me, his chest heaving, his eyes wide as he watched the girl frozen like an insect in amber. The Sheriff's lights continued to bathe the scene in a harsh, cold white, illuminating the girl who was now a prisoner of a ten-second gap that refused to move.
We had stopped the clock. But as the singularity began to hum with a dangerous, unstable frequency, I realized that holding a god in a jar was only the beginning of our problems.