The world did not slow down.
He did.
That was his first realization.
The moment his eyes opened again, something fundamental had shifted in how information entered his mond. The Field of Skulls remained as it was, with bone dust drifting, fog crawling and distant movement caught from the corners of the eye.
But his mind no longer received it in the same crude sequence as before.
All the information in his mind arrived in a simultaneous mulch before being filtered down and then rearranged, allowing him to process it all much faster, and in much higher quality.
Distance, angle, motion, density... all of it stacked instead of linear.
He understood without thinking that this was not normal perception.
This was the aftermath of change.
Kua was speaking.
Nero heard him, but the words reached him slightly delayed compared to everything else. Not because Kua was slow, but because Nero's mind was no longer matching the normal temporal flow.
"…did something happen?"
