Earlier—while Duvan searched for Cyrene

  Cardinal Abel ran through the abandoned warehouse district, his breath coming in ragged gasps.

  Behind him, the girl pursued with terrifying calm.

  Not running. Just walking. But somehow keeping pace, as if distance meant nothing to her.

  "Please!" Abel's voice cracked with desperation. "I can give you anything! Money, artifacts, information! Name your price!"

  The girl—Cyrus—said nothing. Her heterochromatic eyes glowed in the darkness, one blue, one gold, both radiating cold determination.

  Abel had watched this mysterious figure systematically dismantle Magism Unos over the past hours. While everyone else recovered from the Deep's invasion, while defenses were scattered and attention diverted, she'd moved like a ghost through their organization.

  Hideout after hideout. Safe house after safe house. Asset after asset.

  All destroyed.

  And now she was coming for him.

  "I know secrets!" Abel tried again, his back hitting a wall. "About the Grand Protectors! About the Deep! About—"

  Cyrus raised her hand, and Abel felt hope surge through him.

  She was going to negotiate. She had to. Everyone had a price—

  Her sword materialized in her grip. Not drawing it. Not pulling it from a sheath.

  It simply appeared, formed from compressed time itself, just like the Time Prince's constructs.

  "No—wait—"

  Abel activated his emergency teleportation charm—the one that should have transported him to the furthest safe house, the one he'd kept secret even from Pope Edna.

  Reality rippled. The spell engaged.

  For a fraction of a second, Abel felt relief. He was escaping. He'd survived—

  Time stopped.

  Not completely. Just a brief hiccup. A momentary freeze that should have been imperceptible.

  But in that frozen instant, Cyrus moved.

  Her sword cut through the space where Abel's neck had been.

  Time resumed.

  Abel's head separated from his body with surgical precision.

  His consciousness had exactly long enough to register what happened—the betrayal of his own escape spell, the impossibility of someone stopping time mid-teleport—before everything went dark.

  His body vanished, carried away by the completed teleportation.

  But his head remained, rolling across the warehouse floor, expression frozen in shock.

  Cyrus looked down at it with no satisfaction. No anger. No emotion at all.

  Just cold efficiency.

  "One down," she said quietly. "One to go."

  Pope Edna stood in the grand cathedral that served as Magism Unos's public face—all soaring architecture and stained glass depicting humanity's struggles against the Deep.

  Beautiful. Inspiring. A perfect mask for the rot underneath.

  He'd been expecting this visitor. Had prepared for it, in fact.

  The moment Cardinal Abel's life signature had vanished from his monitoring system, Edna had known. Someone was systematically eliminating their leadership. Someone powerful enough to kill an Ascender with nullification abilities.

  The doors to the cathedral exploded inward—not blown apart by force, but kicked with precise application of enhanced strength.

  Cyrus walked through the wreckage, her cloak billowing dramatically, both eyes glowing now with active power.

  "Bold entrance," Edna observed, his hands clasped calmly behind his back. "Very theatrical. The Time Prince himself would approve."

  Cyrus said nothing. Just advanced with that same terrifying calm she'd shown Abel.

  Edna studied her carefully. Young. Female. One blue eye, one gold eye.

  That gold eye was distinctive. Unmistakable.

  The Time Prince's signature color.

  "You're related to him, aren't you?" Edna's smile was knowing. "Lord Excy. That eye—that ability—you're his child. Or perhaps his and the Saintess's hidden offspring?"

  Still no response. Just steady approach.

  "We had suspected," Edna continued, buying time while his hand moved subtly toward the device in his pocket. "That the Saintess might have born the Time Prince a child in secret. That you might be the reason for their arranged marriage. How fascinating to have that theory confirmed."

  Cyrus's expression remained neutral, but something flickered in her eyes.

  Close enough to the truth to sting, Edna noted with satisfaction.

  "I've prepared for this day," he said, his voice taking on a more ominous tone. "Did you think I'd simply wait to be killed? That I wouldn't have contingencies?"

  His hand closed around the device.

  "If I fall," he said, his smile becoming manic, "humanity falls with me."

  He activated three separate triggers simultaneously.

  The first would release a creature from the Deep—one they'd secretly captured and contained beneath the city. A Voidling Alpha that would rampage through populated areas.

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  The second would deploy a disease—a modified plague that had taken years to develop, engineered to spread through magical means, to sicken and kill thousands before anyone realized what was happening.

  The third—the most personal—would send assassination orders to every Magism Unos agent still operational. Priority targets included all the Grand Protectors and their known associates.

  If I'm dying, Edna thought with vicious satisfaction, I'm taking everyone down with me.

  But Cyrus was already moving.

  She'd known.

  Somehow, impossibly, she'd known exactly what Edna would do.

  Her sword flared with stored Chrono energy—not her own ability, but power she'd accumulated and compressed over time. Every scrap of time manipulation she'd saved, hoarded, prepared for exactly this moment.

  Time stopped.

  Not just around her. Not just in a small bubble.

  Everything within the cathedral froze. The air, the light, Pope Edna mid-activation of his devices.

  And then Cyrus accelerated.

  Moving through frozen time, her perception dilated to supernatural extremes, her body pushed beyond normal physical limits.

  Her first slash severed Edna's hand from his wrist—the one holding the activation devices.

  Her second cut through his throat.

  Third through his chest.

  Fourth, fifth, sixth—a blur of motion, her blade moving faster than thought, carving through flesh and bone with time-enhanced sharpness.

  She didn't just kill him.

  She unmade him.

  Countless slashes in the span of a frozen heartbeat, each one cutting not just physical form but temporal cohesion, ensuring no healing, no resurrection, no magical contingency could bring him back.

  Time resumed.

  Pope Edna exploded into chunks of flesh too small to be recognizable. Blood misted the air. The activation devices clattered to the floor, incomplete, their sequences interrupted mid-execution.

  Cyrus stood in the aftermath, her gold eye returning to its original blue—both of her eyes are now similar.

  She was breathing hard. The expenditure of stored Chrono energy had been massive. Every reserve she'd built up, gone in a single devastating attack.

  But it had worked.

  Abel's creature release: prevented.

  Edna's plague deployment: stopped.

  The assassination attempt: never happened.

  Three catastrophes erased from the timeline.

  Three horrors her mother would never have to face.

  Because in Cyrus's original timeline, these things had happened. Abel had released that creature, killing hundreds before being stopped. Edna's disease had spread through the settlements, claiming thousands, and when Duvan tried to look for a cure in the deeper parts of the Deep where no man has ever survived, he returned with a cure but at the cost of his left arm. This weakened humanity even further as Duvan is one of the Grand Protectors.

  And the assassination attempt on her mother—on Hera—had succeeded.

  Not this time, Cyrus thought grimly. Never again.

  The cathedral had a hidden basement.

  Cyrus had read about it in classified documents from her timeline. Documents that detailed Magism Unos's secret research. Their experiments.

  Their crimes against humanity committed in the name of survival.

  She descended the concealed staircase, her enhanced senses already detecting what waited below.

  The smell hit first. Blood, waste, chemical preservatives. The scent of suffering compressed into confined spaces.

  Then the sounds. Whimpering. Ragged breathing. The occasional scream, muffled by whatever restraints they used.

  The basement was extensive—a network of rooms and cells that shouldn't exist beneath a public cathedral.

  And in those cells were people.

  Mostly children.

  Some were dead—bodies that hadn't been removed yet, left to rot in their cages. Some were barely alive, clinging to existence through sheer biological stubbornness. All showed signs of experimentation—surgical scars, magical modifications, the kind of alterations that happened when you treated people as test subjects rather than humans.

  This, Cyrus thought with cold fury, is what they did in the name of survival.

  She'd read about this too. About Lucifer's eventual proposition—to continue Magism Unos's research after their fall. To use their findings, their techniques, their experimental data for humanity's benefit.

  The demon had argued it was practical. That the suffering had already happened, that letting that pain be meaningless was the real crime.

  In her timeline, this may have started the war between Lucifer and Celeste’s faction. This led to both sides perishing which caused more problems and bringing more burden to the remaining Grand Protectors.

  Duvan—her mentor and father figure—had been firmly against it. Had argued that using evil's fruits, no matter how practical, poisoned everything built upon them.

  The conflict between Lucifer and Celeste over this issue torned the Grand Protectors apart.

  Best to eliminate the problem entirely, Cyrus decided.

  She moved through the basement systematically, using what remained of her time abilities to break locks, disable security, free survivors.

  For the experimental equipment, the research notes, the databases of torture disguised as science—she destroyed everything.

  Sliced then burned. From equipment to papers or any trace of the research. Gone.

  No data to debate over. No research to tempt Lucifer's pragmatism. No reason for the Grand Protectors to fracture.

  The survivors followed her in a daze—children too traumatized to speak, adults who'd given up hope of rescue, all of them blinking in the cathedral's light like they'd forgotten what freedom looked like.

  Cyrus led them outside just as reinforcements arrived.

  The cathedral's front entrance was suddenly crowded with official presence.

  Grand Protector forces. Guild investigators. Celeste's angels providing immediate healing to the freed prisoners.

  One of the commanding officers—a stern woman with captain's insignia—approached Cyrus immediately.

  "You—identify yourself. Are you responsible for this?" She gestured at the cathedral, at the freed prisoners, at the general chaos.

  "In part," Cyrus said calmly.

  "That's not an answer. Who are you? What organization do you represent?"

  "Future Tech," Cyrus replied, which was technically true given that she'd been working from their intelligence.

  "Future Tech doesn't have operatives who—" The captain paused, clearly struggling with how to phrase it. "—who destroy entire religious organizations single-handedly… Aside from Lord Excy."

  "First time for everything."

  More questions came from multiple directions. Other investigators, angels trying to coordinate medical care, officials trying to understand how an entire cathedral had become a crime scene.

  Cyrus answered the minimum necessary, deflected the rest, and gradually worked her way toward the edge of the crowd.

  "Wait—we're not done—"

  But she was already gone.

  Not teleportation. Not invisibility. Just taking advantage of chaos and moving with purpose while everyone else was distracted.

  She had somewhere to be.

  Cyrus found a high vantage point—a rooftop overlooking the commercial district.

  Her eyes shifted, the brown fading back to glowing blue as she activated her enhanced perception.

  And there, in the distance, she saw him.

  Duvan. The Time Prince. Her father—though not yet, not in this timeline.

  He looked exhausted. His coat was soaked from rain. His shoulders were slightly slumped in a way she'd never seen in her own time.

  He was searching. Using his abilities despite obvious depletion, checking alley after alley, his expression worried in a way that made her chest tighten.

  He's looking for me, Cyrus thought, a smile crossing her face. Well, for the me of this timeline.

  Little Cyrene, who'd run away scared and confused, who was probably hiding somewhere crying about parents who didn't love each other.

  Cyrus remembered being that little girl. Remembered the hurt, the confusion, the desperate wish that mama and papa would just love each other like other parents did.

  But Duvan, he showed her that love doesn’t come just from blood and it isn’t conditional.

  This brings a smile to her face as she remembers how she was amazed to know that her mama was actually married to Duvan, the Time Prince.

  It was at this time, the me in this timeline will finally know. This time, I will protect mama and also… If I can meet Papa again.

  She remembers the last time Kieran had seen him, before he went to become an adventurer to provide for her but at that time, Hera’s death was still fresh and her papa never came back again.

  Abel, dead. Edna, dead. Magism Unos, dismantled. The catastrophes that had defined her timeline, prevented. Hopefully so.

  And down there, her father figure was searching for her with the kind of care and concern that warmed something in her chest.

  She watched Duvan disappear around a corner, still searching, and felt pride mixed with affection. She remembered how Duvan always used to tell her that he do things because he wanted to and he’s selfish.

  Selfish my ass. You just really like to think that way, she thought. Exhausted, depleted, but still searching for a child who isn't even his yet. Still caring. Still trying.

  Cyrus settled in to watch a bit longer, her bloodstained cloak billowing in the wind, her heterochromatic eyes reflecting city lights as the Chrono in her sword is charged again.

  She'd done what she came to do. Eliminated the threats. Changed the trajectory. But, there’s still more things to do in order to give this timeline a better chance.