"Do us both a favor and fall," Adyr murmured with a low sigh as he brought the massive black stone pillar down on Sszhar ’s battered head once more.

RUMBLE!

The impact sent the serpent reeling for a few seconds, its body pitching downward and leaving a trail of blood behind it, but the next second, it pulled itself together and ran again.

Adyr frowned at the stubborn Spark.

Every time he struck, he had to run a three-skill Spark combination, and it cost him energy. The Rank 3 Earthquake skill, which allowed him to drive a seismic pulse through the blow, cost 40 energy per use. The size manipulation on the Tower of Worth was the hungriest, an active skill that chewed at his reserves every moment and hurt like a steady rake inside his ribs. Burst Hop ’s kinetic charge was the third piece, packing his arms for impact and adding to the drain.

He checked his energy reserves and found only 4,373 left, well under the nearly 6,000 he had on arrival.

Flapping his wings, he went after the Spark again; he had not come this far to give up.

This was not only a chance to subdue a Rank 4 Spark; it was a rare chance to meet one he actually had the power to capture. With his full kit of skills, bloodline talents, and innate abilities, he was a perfect counter to Sszhar.

His Malice cleanly countered Dread Shackle

’s fear bind.

He had the physical power to damage an Aether Path Spark’s body.

He had the speed to leave it no room, staying one step ahead at all times.

If it were Colossith facing him, it would not be this simple. As an Astra Path Spark with defensive innate abilities, that one had enough durability to weather his attacks.

So with an opportunity like this in front of him, quitting was not on the table.

Catching the fleeing Spark midair, Adyr charged the combo again and lifted the Tower of Worth . The pillar swelled and dropped like a falling mass of stone, his strongest strike at present.

But this time, unlike his previous attacks, his staff missed the target. An unforeseen ripple opened in front of him, born from the crumbling void, and it knocked his balance off.

It was not a surprise. With each passing second, the Sanctuary was breaking down further, losing its integrity and splitting apart faster and faster. Plates of reality sheared past one another, pressure snapped in and out, and fine hairline seams chased themselves through the dark.

Until now, Adyr had avoided every crack forming in space because Gaze always showed him what would happen in the next 10 seconds.

For the first time, he could not see it coming.

The reason surfaced a heartbeat later.

It was not only space that was crumbling; time was crumbling with it.

Seconds bled into each other, echoes arrived before their sounds, and the rhythm of the void skipped like a broken metronome. He frowned, tightened his grip, and drove his body after the Spark again.

Gaze bloodline talent was tied to time. He did not know the exact universal rule it obeyed, only that it laid a thin map of near futures over his sight. Now that map was wrong. It was feeding him false futures and throwing off his judgment.

It happened again, not long after he realized the problem.

While he charged his next attack, Gaze showed a ripple opening ahead, so he shifted to safer ground and counted the beats to 10.

When the count ran out, nothing opened where he had expected a large ripple. The mismatch pulled his timing apart, and the sense of time in his head grew more chaotic, its distortion stronger, like a compass swinging without north.

He had thought this skill was OP and had started to rely on it far too much. Now he understood it had a weak point, and a weak point that could be fatal.

He was a serial killer who had lived by logic all his life. Making a mistake like this was something he should never allow. Yet even a mind trained like a program changed when the body beneath it changed, and his body kept changing.

Since coming to this world, his greatest battle had been between his own logical thinking and a fantasy system that broke every rule. Now a new layer had joined that conflict: the slow erosion of his logic itself.

The cause was his last mutation after taking the Synergy Crystal.

Just as with Thalira and Brakhtar, his mind and his way of thinking had already shifted more than he realized, quiet alterations in weight and instinct that were only now showing their edges.

I shouldn’t trust anything this easily, even if it’s my own power. He forced his thoughts into order, like a programmer debugging a stubborn bug.

He gave himself a second and analyzed the situation, something he hadn’t done in a while.

Watching the Rank 4 Spark, he ran the numbers.

Movement speed is down 40% from prime. Bleeding continues; the head is half-shattered.

He mapped its movement and escape pattern with zero tolerance for error.

It’s using Rift Maw and Riftwalk under heavy strain. A pocket dimension opened in seconds before; now it takes dozens.

He studied the crumbling void around him.

Since I started the pursuit, tremors have increased by at least 20%. Cracks are showing twice as often.

He drew a crude but accurate conclusion, trusting his old friend, logic, to the end.

I’ve got about 1 minute to catch it. Any longer and I walk away.

He even had his Earth body stop what it was doing and set a timer on his wristwatch. With his sense of time fraying here, a real timer on Earth would keep his count honest.

Then he moved again, tighter and more focused, like the hunter he used to be.

The only difference was that this time his prey wasn’t fragile humans but a Spark whose abilities he would once have called godlike.

And that difference was what drove his thrill to new degrees.

—

"Okay, we’ve seen enough. You can see there’s nothing to gain by staying," Maruun said, forcing his eyes away from the unbelievable performance Adyr was putting on.

They had already accepted the situation. The void was growing more unstable by the moment, and the fight between Adyr and the Rank 4 Spark was beyond anything they could safely touch.

Any thought of helping would only make things worse. With the power they had, the best they could do was get in his way, draw his attention at the wrong time, and die for nothing.

"Hey, drop the long faces. You saw him beating the Rank 4 Spark, right? Your leaders, that ogre and that shrewish woman, would still be alive as well." Loudbark, seeing the Lunari and Gorathim still hesitant, intervened.

"Just let’s leave and pray they are also somewhere safe. But accept already that there is nothing we can do by staying." He made his words sound reasonable, even drawing side glances from Maruun and the others, surprising them.

"What?" Loudbark barked, noticing the looks. He turned to the Core with a frown, muttering something under his breath as if insulted, grabbed the rope tied to the big book, and started pulling. "Move. Now."

With one last look at Adyr and the Rank 4 Spark, the others finally turned to go. They hurled the Core into the opening to the other side, then jumped in after it, one by one.