The Dimension was quiet again—too quiet, as if even ruin had learned to hold its breath.
No wind. No hum of mana. Only the soft pulse of absence.
Then came the sound.
A heartbeat.
But it didn't move forward.
Thump—silence—thump—backward.
It was a heartbeat running against itself.
Yuu opened his eyes to a coliseum rebuilt from the bones of time. The broken stones from earlier battles hovered in slow rotation, sliding into their former places as though centuries were being rewound by an unseen hand.
Above, the Goddess stood on a ring of light, arms folded, lips curved.
"This one is different," she said, her voice laced with amusement. "It isn't here to kill you."
He looked up. "Then what?"
Her smile widened. "To unmake you."
A shimmer split the shadows.
From it stepped something that did not walk. It floated—half bone, half mirror, draped in a silver cloak stitched with runes of sand.
Twelve hands spread from beneath its shroud. Each held a different weapon: axe, blade, chain, spear—all engraved with the symbol of an hourglass.
Its face was a void, polished like glass. Inside that emptiness flickered a reflection—his own.
Fifty Yuu's.
Fifty deaths.
Fifty endings.
He felt his pulse tighten. "What the hell is that?"
"The Timebound Reaver," she replied. "A creature forged from the residue of your deaths. It feeds on echoes."
"You made this?"
She smiled lazily. "No, dear mortal. You did."
The Reaver's first movement bent the air.
One of its twelve hands flicked forward.
A shadow struck behind Yuu—a perfect recreation of his first death, the Abyssal Warden's sword descending in a blur.
He twisted, blocking just in time. The clang of impact rang through his chest like old memory.
Pain returned exactly as it had the first time. His ribs snapped; the breath fled his lungs.
Another arm moved—his second death replayed, claws raking through his stomach.
Then a third—his fourth—his seventh.
Each blow came with its memory intact, pain re-experienced, not imagined.
His body trembled under the flood of recollection.
"I already survived these," he muttered.
But survival didn't matter; memory had its own claws.
The Reaver advanced, a swarm of his past selves turned against him.
He fought, but every defense opened another scar.
Each block re-ignited an old wound.
He was bleeding from places long healed, lungs tearing, spine burning.
Twelve weapons struck at once, twelve echoes of defeat folding together into one relentless symphony.
He fell to one knee.
Resonance slipped from his grasp.
The Goddess's gaze sharpened, but she didn't move to help. She simply watched, chin in hand, as though observing an experiment.
The Reaver re-formed the shape of his last death—Death Fifty—and brought the mirrored blade down.
Yuu didn't move.
The floor cracked open.
Stone burst.
Blood pooled.
Then silence.
You died – 10.
He expected the void.
Instead he awoke in an ocean of black water.
No horizon. No sky. Just a weightless abyss where light drifted in small spheres—each one a memory of dying.
They pulsed softly, scenes of pain replaying in miniature.
And standing among them was himself.
The copy was bare, weaponless, eyes blank.
"You were never strong," it said.
"You just got lucky. Again. Again. Again."
Yuu's jaw clenched.
He stepped forward, and punched his double square in the face.
Bone cracked.
The false version collapsed into the dark.
"Don't talk to me," he whispered, "like you ever got back up."
A ripple crossed the water.
The Goddess's form appeared behind him, a smirk lighting her eyes.
"Well," she said, "that's the first time you broke something in here."
He glanced over his shoulder. "Then let me break one more."
He opened his eyes.
The arena was back.
The Reaver hovered above, cocooned in reversed time, its twelve arms folding inward, its mask swirling with all his lives.
But something in Yuu had changed.
His aura no longer flowed forward.
It spiraled—motion without direction, a wound that chose not to close.
He stepped forward.
The stones resisted, time itself pulling backward. He walked anyway.
"I'm not done dying yet," he said.
Every breath echoed wrong.
Each blink repeated twice—forward and backward.
The Reaver moved, its mask now showing not only his deaths but everything he had lost: Rin's smile, the fall of his empire, the fading faces of his fiancées.
"Stop," he whispered.
The creature pulsed; another echo struck—one he'd forgotten, the death that had left him paralyzed on the cold dungeon floor.
He coughed blood.
Vision blurred.
He should have fallen.
Instead, his mana twisted.
The current reversed.
Backflow.
The Goddess's voice slipped into his mind, light as silk.
"You figured it out."
He answered, steady. "You said time was against me."
"Yes."
"Then I'll make time remember what I became."
He drew a blade—not from metal, not from memory, but from recoil.
Every death he had healed from screamed through his veins, every wound he had closed unraveling just enough to shape itself into power.
The aura condensed. It howled. Then it solidified.
A thin katana, curved backward, black as night, humming with the chill of decay.
Eclipse Arsenal – Blade Four: Nocturne Reverse.
He gripped it.
The edge shimmered, warping the air around it like a broken reflection.
The Goddess's laughter drifted from above. "Oh, that's new. Try not to erase me by accident."
He said nothing.
He moved.
Twelve arms descended.
He vanished—not stepping, but slipping between ticks of the clock.
When he reappeared, he was already above the Reaver's shoulder, swinging down.
Nocturne Reverse didn't strike its body—it struck its past.
The cut landed ten seconds earlier.
The Reaver's mask fractured.
An arm fell, severed from a moment that no longer existed.
It screamed, sound folding in on itself, a roar that reversed halfway through.
It adapted instantly, twisting two arms inward, launching distorted copies of its own attacks slowed by half a second.
Yuu slashed through empty air, erasing those moments before they could exist.
Each swing deleted a second from the creature's prediction.
For the first time, it hesitated.
He advanced, bleeding, trembling, but unstoppable.
The Goddess watched with a faint grin. "You do love ruining my timelines."
He ignored her.
He stepped through the creature's distortion, stabbed upward, reversing the strike mid-motion.
The blade pierced the Reaver's head—and reappeared a heartbeat earlier, stabbing it from behind.
The creature convulsed.
Its mirror face shattered.
"I remember everything you took," Yuu said.
The katana glowed faint blue, heavy with inverted pain.
He raised it once more and swung sideways through the air.
The world froze.
A ripple spread—one sound, like glass drowning.
The Goddess's smile faded into awe.
"That," she whispered, "was a backward slash."
The Reaver tried to flee through time.
Too late.
The blade divided it across moments.
Past and present tore apart.
Both bodies fell together.
Time collapsed inward, pulling the coliseum with it.
Stone rose, reversed, fell again, then broke into ash.
Only Yuu remained, standing on a single platform of unmoving ground.
Nocturne Reverse dimmed, sinking into silence.
Time fractures glowed along his arms, small rivers of light under his skin.
He breathed out slowly.
"You want my past?" he said.
His voice carried across the broken sky.
"Then I'll carve it back."
The Goddess laughed softly from somewhere unseen, her tone half-tease, half-admiration.
"Oh, little mortal… you're becoming something even I can't predict."
Yuu didn't look up.
He simply closed his hand, feeling the pulse of reversed light under his skin.
"My will," he whispered, "isn't bound by time."