Corrupted Bonds-Chapter 97: The Shatterpoint

SLOANE vs SLOANE 

The floor beneath Sloane shifted, cracked—not from the enemy's assault, but from the terrain itself responding to him. To both of them.

Twin Sloanes stood in mirrored stances, long coats rustling faintly in the tremors they called, surrounded by fragments of broken stone and glimmering dust. But where the real Sloane moved like a storm building in silence, his reflection moved like a god born from fault lines.

The chamber answered them both.

"You feel that?" the reflection said, voice low and dust-dry. "The ground remembers me better."

The moment shattered.

A jagged wall erupted between them—summoned by the reflection—and slammed toward Sloane like a blunt blade. He spun sideways, barely avoiding the brunt of it, skidding across loose shale. He raised a hand and pulsed a tremor of his own—a ring of terrain shuddered outward, tilting the floor beneath the reflection's boots.

But the reflection adapted, stepped into the quake, and launched a volley of jagged stone spears. One caught Sloane in the thigh—slicing through fabric and muscle. Blood poured.

He grunted, dropped to one knee, then slammed both palms into the floor.

A mist field ignited.

Vapor curled like smoke from the ground, obscuring vision—but only for a breath. Because his reflection laughed through the haze. The laugh was sharp, cutting.

"You think hiding behind fog makes you clever? It just means you're afraid."

Stone shifted. Another ridge exploded beneath Sloane, throwing him into the air. He crashed through a column of fractured marble, hitting the ground with a crunch that cracked something inside his ribs.

He coughed. Grit. Blood.

He tried to rise.

But the reflection was already there—standing over him, soil swirling around his boots, the environment bending in concentric rings.

"I could rewrite the battlefield with a thought," the reflection whispered. "But you still cling to symmetry. You still fight like you're building something, not breaking it."

Sloane's hand twitched.

The earth beneath the reflection groaned.

Cracks spiderwebbed up the reflection's legs, vines surging from the chamber's walls—born from buried roots, summoned by sheer will.

"I was building something," Sloane rasped.

But the reflection crushed the roots with a ripple of stone—flattening them instantly. He stepped forward, drove his boot into Sloane's chest, pinning him.

"You built graves."

Sloane didn't move.

Didn't need to.

He stared into his own eyes—into a version of himself who had let the world die beneath his feet—and saw only one truth reflected back:

This fight was never fair.

And he was losing.

REN vs REN

The moment their boots touched the floor, time stuttered.

Ren's laugh rang out first—an attempt to cut the dread. He rolled his shoulders, fingers crackling with kinetic static, and summoned a spark of his temporal field.

Across from him, his reflection didn't smile. He shimmered. Every flicker of movement left a burn mark in the air, a snapshot frozen and fractured. He was laced in jagged tendrils of temporal overload, strands of gold and violet searing across the chamber like an open nerve.

"You're the catalyst," the reflection said softly. "Every thread began warping the moment you were born. And you think you're just comic relief."

Ren blinked. "...Wait, what?"

The reflection disappeared.

A sonic boom snapped outward. Time folded in. Ren barely raised his guard before his own boot slammed into his ribs—from behind. He flew sideways, slammed into the wall hard enough to spiderweb the entire structure. Blood splashed across the stone.

"Try to keep up," the reflection purred.

Ren snarled, activating Chrono Anchor. The air pulsed with geometric locks, his immediate space freezing into a tight bubble.

He surged forward, hand cracking with Temporal Flare, a streak of white-gold that detonated in a burst of raw, compressed seconds.

The reflection dodged like a phantom—bending gravity itself to step through the time lock. He left ghost trails in every direction.

"Cute trick," the reflection whispered from behind.

Ren twisted and unleashed Phantom Trace—five afterimages exploded from his body, swarming the reflection in zigzagging paths of blue fire.

They struck—boom boom boom boom boom.

But the reflection rewound.

The entire burst reversed in time. The chamber unshattered. Ren was suddenly gasping, bleeding from the mouth, while the reflection stood untouched in the middle of a glitching spiral.

"You bend seconds," the reflection mocked, voice warping. "I fracture centuries."

Ren lunged, his eyes glowing now, body wracked with strain. Every step he took broke the ground. He slammed an elbow forward—missed. The reflection caught his neck and froze him. Ren's body hovered in a frame of locked time—suspended.

"You think they need you?" the reflection hissed, dragging Ren's head close. "You're the spark. Not the fire. You die in every version. That's how he learns."

Ren's scream broke through the frozen shell. He shattered the time lock and exploded outward with a vortex of Temporal Feedback.

The two collided midair in a streak of light and shadow, fists and kicks flying like a storm of blades. The chamber around them cracked with every blow—walls peeling, air screaming, sparks flying off the resonance grid.

But Ren was slowing.

Every second he burned made the world tilt harder. He coughed blood, staggered. His nose bled. His knees buckled.

The reflection descended slowly, hovering above like a god in temporal stasis, blades of time circling his back.

"Goodbye, spark," the reflection said.

And struck.

LUCIAN vs LUCIAN 

The moment Lucian stepped forward, the air turned razor-thin.

A shimmer rippled across the chamber as space itself bowed—not to presence, but to power.

Lines of reality spiderwebbed outward from the soles of his boots like invisible threads snapping under tension.

The light didn't just dim—it fractured around him, bending into halos that shouldn't exist.

Across the chamber, his Reflection was already waiting.

Identical in form. Taller, somehow. Shoulders squared like the burden of gods weighed nothing. His scythe glowed with threads of suspended time, orbiting the blade like slivers of shattered memories—each one still screaming inside the steel.

He didn't draw it.

He unfolded it.

Lucian's hand gripped his own weapon as it shimmered into being—Dimensional Scythe, unstable and flickering, violet arcs dancing along the edge like sparks fighting not to vanish.

"You look tired," the Reflection sneered, voice cool, sharpened to cut without raising pitch. "Are you going to die again? Or do we get to make a scene this time?"

Lucian didn't answer. His breath hitched, sweat already trickling from his brow, staining the collar of his uniform. His ribs screamed beneath bandages. His body was far from recovered.

But he stepped forward anyway.

The Reflection grinned.

They moved.

Reality split.

Not metaphor—literal.

Their first clash sent cracks through the air. Like glass shattering in slow motion. Colors bled. Sound vanished. Walls twisted into recursive mirrors and looped the impact back three times—causing spatial aftershocks that ripped chunks from the floor.

Lucian ducked under a slicing arc, twisted mid-spin and blinked behind the Reflection—only to find a second version of his enemy already waiting. He blinked again. Nothing. Just a delay in the world rendering properly.

Time was already unraveling.

"You're sloppy," the Reflection hissed, parrying Lucian's blade with ease, shoving him back. "That tether to your humanity? You let it rot your instincts."

Lucian bared his teeth and forced his blade forward—Temporal Freeze triggered mid-strike, catching the Reflection in a cone of warped time. He charged—scythe raised.

The Reflection rewound.

In the blink of an eye, Lucian's forward lunge became a trip, a reversed misstep—his own momentum folding back on him.

He hit the ground hard. Palms scraped. Jaw clipped stone.

"You call this mastery?" the Reflection asked, striding forward. "You're barely a shadow."

Lucian snarled, pressed a trembling hand to the ground and activated Dimensional Spike. The floor beneath the Reflection imploded into a vortex of twisted spatial energy—pulling in light, heat, and noise.

The Reflection walked through it.

Unscathed.

"You don't get it, do you? This isn't your power anymore."

He reached out—and sliced through Lucian's shoulder with a time-blade that hadn't existed a second ago.

Lucian screamed.

Blood sprayed across the ground, sizzling as it hit a resonance fracture and blinked out of existence.

Lucian stumbled back—his breathing ragged, grip slipping on the scythe's hilt. His vision doubled. Tripled.

The Reflection mirrored him again—mimicked his pain—but with control. Precision. Grace.

"You break," he said, stepping forward, "because you care."

Lucian triggered Dimensional Displacement and blurred across the chamber—reappearing with a scream and Reality Warp flooding his aura. The chamber warped around him—walls folding in and out, floor heaving like breath, time halting for everything except him.

He struck.

And struck again.

And again.

A flurry of god-tier arcs, every slice of his scythe screaming through reality, carving fissures that bled light.

And yet—

The Reflection moved within the frozen time.

He turned, slow and vicious, stepping through Lucian's ultimate attack like it was a training exercise. The resonance in his voice dropped.

"I am what you become when you stop believing they're worth saving."

Lucian faltered.

That pause—

Was fatal.

The Reflection snapped forward—grabbed Lucian's wrist, twisted. SNAP.

Lucian's knees hit the floor, scythe clattering beside him.

The Reflection stood over him now, backlit by an eclipse of fractured timelines, his coat billowing as dimensional gales tore through the room.

"You keep trying to save him." His blade lifted. "But what if you're the thing he needed saving from?"

Lucian tried to crawl.

But his hands bled.

His power—gone haywire—collapsed into itself, fraying the air behind him like dying sparks.

The Reflection drove the scythe downward.

Lucian raised his arm— freewēbnoveℓ.com

And the world cracked in two.

Stone splintered.

Time wept.

Reality detonated outward in concentric rings.

Lucian screamed—not in defiance. But in despair.

And this time...

No one could reach him.

Rowan's Despair

Rowan couldn't breathe.

The moment the scythe came down, a sound split the air—not from the weapon, but from something deeper. Something within him.

It wasn't a scream. It was a rupture.

Like a heart snapping in half.

Lucian hit the floor, unmoving.

A blast of dimensional recoil spiraled outward—windless but deafening. It knocked Mira off her feet, slammed Quinn into a fractured wall. Vespera's charm flared violently, then went dark. Time stuttered in place.

And Rowan—

Rowan collapsed.

His knees cracked against stone.

His hands hit the floor a breath too late to catch himself, palms scraping raw on shattered crystal and scorched grit. He didn't notice the blood.

He didn't notice the pain.

All he saw was Lucian, crumpled in the distance. A smear of blood trailing beneath him, seeping through his coat like ink spilled in water.

"No."

It came out like ash.

He tried to crawl.

His arms shook, useless. One elbow buckled under his weight, sending him down again, chest thudding into the stone with a dull grunt. He gasped—and choked on it. Like grief had taken form and punched straight through his diaphragm.

"Lucian—"

His voice cracked open.

Every syllable carved out of his throat like barbed wire.

"Lucian, get up. Please—please—"

The others were speaking—shouting—but it all blurred.

Ari cursing.

Ren screaming for backup.

Sloane's voice low and strangled with something like guilt.

But none of it mattered.

None of it reached the place where Rowan's soul was now bleeding out.

He dragged himself across the floor—like someone drowning, like someone begging to reach a light already fading. One hand at a time. Fingers skidding over blood-wet ground. His resonance flickered, trying to connect—searching blindly for tether, for anchor, for anything.

The link—the bond—was fleeting.

"No, no, no—come on—" Rowan's voice cracked again. He reached Lucian's side and gripped his shoulder. It was warm.

But limp.

Lucian's head lolled, his mouth slightly open, blood threading from his lips.

Rowan sobbed.

A single, shaking breath that wracked through his chest like collapse made sound.

"I—I wasn't supposed to lose you like this. Not again. Not when we just—"

He pressed his forehead against Lucian's temple, tears slipping down, hot and fast, pooling in the hollow of his collarbone.

"You promised," he whispered, voice raw. "You said we'd get through this."

Lucian didn't move.

The Reflection stood across the room, silent.

Watching.

Unflinching.

Mockery wasn't needed.

Because this—this—was victory enough.

Rowan's entire body trembled.

His guiding field surged without direction—wild, lashing, cracking lines across the ground in violet-white arcs. Pain screamed up his arms from overexertion, but he clung to Lucian like letting go meant death would finish what it started.

"Don't leave me," he whispered.

His fingers found Lucian's hand, curled tight around nothing.

"Please..."

Another whisper.

Like a prayer no god had answered.

The chamber pulsed—low, slow, like a heart taking its final beat.

And Rowan broke.

A scream tore from his chest—full, choked, raw and final.

It echoed through the hall like a storm mourning its own thunder.

Not rage.

Not fury.

Just loss.

The kind that eats everything.