Our eyes were locked together in some form of ominous tension. He wore a dark green trench coat that was unbuttoned, with a caribbean green outline. His sleeves were rolled up to his elbows and he had these two parallel lined black tattoos that ran down his forearms. He wore black pants along with black shoes, the streak in his hair was a caribbean green color, his eyes matching. He had brown hair, with his eyes having lapsing blue-green clocks inside them, black fingerless gloves on his hands and a marking on the back of them in a green color.

He sat in this meditating type position, his legs crossed as he floated above this altar-like pillar. With a swift turn of his arm, a floating green clock appeared on the back of his hand.

“One week. One second.”

The clock shone brightly before shooting up into the endless sky, it cleared the hazy fog instantly. Giant green mechanical rings formed. They looked similar to the sigils that encompassed my right arm during [Spell Creation].

I felt a pulse in my core, my left eye shivering slightly.

The green rings faded.

“Hey- Ode…?”

There was no response.

Did even my mind get cut off?

What the fuck’s happening right now?

“You.”

“Me?” I pointed toward myself.

“No, the guy behind you, dumbfuck.”

My face straightened out, not amused by his response.

“You’re the new fucker right? One?”

“Yeah?”

“Good, you’ll be training with me for three weeks.”

Heh-... three weeks? I don’t think I have that kind of time though.

“Um… but-”

“It’s three weeks here, three seconds in the real world.”

“How-”

“Shut.”

“Huh-?”

“I said shut the fuck up. Do you not have ears?”

I stood there silently.

“Good. Now I’m going to run you through a quick practical exam.”

The man stood up, his coat flapping in the non-existent wind behind him.

||ESSENCE SPLIT||

His body started multiplying, green magic circles with a clock sigil on them formed, they were rotating in a clockwise direction. New versions of himself kept walking out until there were about ten of him in front of me. The only thing they seemed to be lacking was the yellow-gold number in their eyes.

“Let’s hope you live.”

“What?”

With a snap of his fingers, his clones jumped after me.

“Rewind; thirteen minutes!”

“Gambit: Revision thirty-two!”

Before I could process what happened, one of the clones appeared behind me. His hand reaching forward toward my core. I quickly pulled myself down just before his finger collided with my eye. I looked up to see an identical copy of our current world coming down to collide with us.

“What the fuck…?!”

||FIRE BEAM; MODIFICATION, HEAVENLY FLAME||

The golden-white flame burned in the palm of my hand, I grabbed my wrist and guided my arm in a circle around me. Three of the ten clones were spliced in half.

The metallic green pillars seared slightly, the dent only appearing to reach six inches deep.

I eyed the other seven carefully, it also appeared that the three I had cut down weren’t regenerating.

I formed a crimson red slime sword in my hand

||CON-PARADOX||

I ran my hand along my blade, the sigils binding with it and filling it with anti-anti-magic. A purple aura starting to form and shape around the sword. I watched as they formed caribbean green swords, some of them shaped like small daggers. 

Anti-anti-magic wasn’t really magic, but it wasn’t anti-magic either. It was just a counter I had originally made to rewind the construct of how I viewed anti-magic. To be honest… I don’t know why I even used it, they weren’t using anti-magic…

They bolted toward me, I deflected each strike. Taking enough time so that I didn’t slip up. We had practically switched sides now, with me being closer to the altar now.

||TELEPORT||

I warped behind the clones and with a quick sweeping strike I beheaded four of the remaining seven. I reached forward and grabbed one of the last three’s coats, I threw him up toward one of the green crystal pillars. That secondary copy world above us crashing down. The pillar’s ground against each other, crushing the clone in between them.

Now there were two left.

They flipped around and jumped back.

||SWORD BOLT||

My wrist flicked forward, the anti-anti-magic– fuck… that’s such a mouthful. I’m just going to call it alter-magic, okay?

AHEM

My alter-magic sword piercing straight through the right clone’s stomach. 

“Now to wrap this up.”

||FIREBALL; MODIFICATION, PURPLE FLAMES OF HELL||

The small purple flame burst in my hand, I built up its velocity before whipping it toward the clone. The flaming ball disappeared before it exploded on the clone’s body, his body being burnt into nothingness.

Alright! I beat them all-

But where did the original go…?

“Time; Freeze.”

In a delicate whisper from behind me I heard two words echo in my ear. My body locked into place, a shiver drove down my spine. Nothing moved except for that one man.

He sighed before stepping in front of me.

“You’re too naive.”

I-... I can’t move…

His fingers snapped and time started rewinding… the corpses of the clones reassembling, the secondary world above us rolling back before disappearing, my body moving back to its original position. The only thing that was unmoving was him.

“Let me introduce myself. Variant two hundred twenty four, Chronos.”

“Time; Unfreeze.”

My body unlocked, and within that instant the clone's corpses collapsed to the ground. They were mangled and broken to pieces again. Chronos’s hand expanded and absorbed all of them. He looked up and gave me a slight smile.

“Just time varieties, too bad they aren’t that strong~”

“So… you’re a variant?”

“Hm…? Yeah, why?”

“No, no, I was just surprised… Ode didn’t pick up a signal…”

Chronos sat down on the central altar.

“Well I’m nowhere near you. So it logically makes sense.”

“Then how are we-”

“This is the Realm of Time. Similar to the Lacuna in a sense~ think of it as my direct domain.”

He has his own personal domain? How does that work?

“Now, now, save your shitty questions for later. Our time is limited.”

“You said we had three weeks though-”

“Yeah. We aren’t going to waste a single second more.”

He warped his arm and formed a blue-green slime sword that was curved quite a bit. He tossed it to me, I caught it and held it up straight. The blade was swung around to the left in a similar way to a crescent moon. It didn’t appear to be a sickle… well, maybe a longer one. Though the bend in the blade wasn’t as much…

“It’s a shotel. Now swing it vertically 1,000 times.”

“Heh-?”

“I didn’t stutter. Fucking swing it.”

I swung the sword down, I felt the air being cut through. 

“Wrong. Again.”

“How was that wrong?!”

“You aren’t skilled. You’re just aimlessly swinging the sword around. If you didn’t have abnormal powers and help from the system you’d have died a long time ago. Now, swing.”

I swung down again, my hand clenching the sword’s hilt.

“Wrong.”

Chronos stood up with a deeply displeased sigh. He walked over to me before ripping the sword out of my hands.

“Since you’re so incompetent, how about I give you a demonstration swing?”

He got into this straightened out form, one foot in front of the other. He took a deep breath before letting it out slowly. Both of his hands clutched the hilt before they struck downward, the thin blade splicing the air. The pressure sent out a wave, which cut the green metallic type rock around ten feet in front of him, ripping it open.

“That’s how you swing. Now do it.”

Chronos threw me the shotel again. I attempted to mimic what he did, I took up the same pose. I took a few deep breaths, calming myself down. Within a second of me exhaling I swung down, cutting through the air. The tip of the blade slammed into the green stone beneath me, causing this almost heartbeat-like pulse of green to push out from where my sword impaled. My arms were shaking from the sudden impact. Chronos sighed again with uprooted disappointment.

He walked over to me, and put his hand firmly on my shoulder. He leaned forward while looking back at me with an overly happy smile, his eyes arched as well.

“Hey, One~ I got a question~”

His face went grimly dark. His smile going straight, his eyes wide open and his blue-green irises starting to glow. The air felt still, his grip tightened harder.

“Are you fucking retarded?”