The silence which followed the biomech attack was a breathing thing. there was smoke winding and turning on sparking pieces of metal. Miguel was breathing hard in the middle of the Alchemax plaza, and the adrenalines were subsiding and giving way to a rich and tired finally to the point of familiarity. Zane was talking a mile an hour across the comms.
Ok, first diagnostics indicate the destruction of the primary assault force. Pulse, that code you put into their network is... wow, it is beautiful. It is making a recursive argument in their central processing unit on the nature of prime numbers. They are just undergoing a philosophical meltdown.
Just use the machines something to think of other than world domination, said the voice of Lyra, with a smirk in it. Their firewalls were pitiable enough.
Miguel gave himself a little, dismal smile. Maybe the gearhead was right. Perhaps this... team work thing... needed to have its--
The plaza air was shivering in the middle. Not as in his own stage-drift, an artificially induced vibration. This was a bloody, nauseating spasmodic convulsion of reality itself. A pin-prick of blackness ripped a hole, not of space, but of time. Out of it burst a silent, blinding ball of blue light.
The wave was not one of sound or strength. It was pure temporal energy.
"Chrono-surge! Everyone down!" Zane screamed and his voice broke.
This world of Miguel became inverted. His systems in his suit protested, his chrono-senses reeking with a feedback of screaming echoes and twittering futures. He was plunged back, sliding on the sidewalk. A single, horrible moment he somehow experienced the stretch and thinness, the snapping, of his own timeline.
The light was gone in an instant as it had come. In place of the sphere was a man on one knee coughing.
He wore the remains of a military grade tactical suit, which was scalded and welded over in some places to his flesh. The energy of chrono-electric--a crude, unbalanced relative of that of Miguel himself--flashed in mad, wild lines across him. His hair was scalded, his face smeared with soot and a morning, dreadful horror. He walked like a soldier with the trained discipline of it, but his eyes... his eyes were mad scanning the neon-lit skyscrapers, the floating holograms, the rubble of Onyx and biomechs with the horror of a man looking into his nightmare.
"Hostile emergence! Unknown chrono-signature! It's off the charts!" Zane barked.
The eyes of the soldier were fixed on Miguel. He had witnessed the suit of armor, the devastation, the fantastic futuristic city. He saw a threat.
"Identify yourself!" the soldier snarled, and his voice was harsh and his accent was a newsreel a century old.
"Stand down!" Miguel ordered, he put his hands up in a conciliatory movement. "You're disoriented. You have had a time-travelling--
The soldier didn't wait. He moved. And it was not the graceful movement of the Speed-Weave; but it was a fierce, explosive outburst. In a spurt of blue lightning he was across the distance, a fist that was like a piston aimed at the head of Miguel.
Miguel hesitated, and the impact of the blow was sufficient to stumble him. Kinetic conversion. He is making movement into crude power. Unrefined. Dangerous.
"Hey! Time-out, you relic!" The noise was stopped by the voice of Lyra. A Photonic Web captured on a surrounding roof, where the goal is to cover the legs of the soldier.
He saw it coming. He grunted and stamped him down and a pulse of chrono-lightning snapped the web before it could build up. "Ambush!" he bellowed and swiveled and poured a gush of pure force at the place of Lyra. She pulse-drifted aside, the energy vaporizing a hologram billboard on her.
"Pulse, get clear! The nature of his strength is too wobbling to cut! Zane warned. I read a giant erection in his core, Miguel, I read it! He's going to blow!"
The soldier was an organ of feral efficient violence. Each block, each blow was instinct that had been perfected by war. He was not making an attempt to subdue, he was trying to live. He stepped--a heavy, rattling imitation of some such power of Miguel--behind Miguel, and struck him a blow that scattered a strand of golden web upon his armored back.
"Enough of this!" Miguel gritted his teeth. He was unable to confront the crude and explosive strength. He had to be smarter. He has provided the soldier with a succession of afterimages, disorienting him, and weaving a web of Chrono-Web, not to ensnare, but to damp. Some sort of time-cage to retard his desperate vitality.
"Zane, now!"
"Chrono-Knuckles payload! Might get his nervous system fried if this does not come true! A little canister hurled out of a drone, and popped at the feet of the soldier. It emitted a rewind field of localized, not of molecular, momentum. The kinetic energy of the second punch of the soldier abruptly came to a halt, his own kinetic energy was turned in upon itself. He screamed and tore himself, fell.
At that point of perplexity, Lyra did not attempt to webbing him. Rather, she projected her vision of the past through her Echo Vision. She concentrated on the soldier, on the final clear memory that was sticking to him like smoke.
A huge, manufacturing reactor room. Laboratory workers in vintage laboratory suits. On his breast he wears a badge: Cpl. K. Storm. Chrono-Defense Initiative. The smell of ozone and fear.
She caused that echo to trickle into the open comms channel and made it bigger.
Kaiden Storm the soldier stood still. His head turned around, his mad eyes discerning ghosts. "The... the reactor... The test..."
His guard dropped. The sparking vitality within him died. He glanced of Miguel down to where Lyra was now exposed on a crumbling ledge, to the small drone flying about with the voice of Zane coming out of it.
The struggle exhausted him, and in its place came the weariness of bone and bewilderment which was even more dreadful. He fell on his knees with gasping breaths.
"Where... what year is this?" his voice hollow he mustered, his voice.
And at a slow pace Miguel came near, his suit also de-escalating. "It's 2199. You're in Nueva Central."
The head of Kaiden sprang up, with fresh horror-stricken eyes. His gaze was past Miguel, beyond to the tall spires, floating traffic lanes, the alien beauty of the city that he was meant to defend.
"This..." he stuttered, and his voice failed him. "This is all wrong. The estimates... the future that we were creating... This isn't it. This isn't my future."
The chapter does not conclude, but with a great and frightening query, kneeling shattered in the rubble of a struggle he had never intended to engage in.