Chapter 178: Unknown Creatures in Solada Town
The sun dipped lower against a bruised, overcast sky, casting long, skeletal shadows across the barren landscape.
Solada Town.
Kevin brought the car to a crunching halt against the gravel, parking it just outside the perimeter of a towering, weathered brick wall. They hadn't planned on a detour, but Kevin had a big mouth. While bragging to some mechanics at a local auto shop earlier that day, he had caught wind of a rumor: sightings of a bizarre, unearthly creature lurking in the ruins of Solada. Naturally, Klein and the group had to investigate.
Ben leaned against the hood of the car, his eyes tracing the crumbling mortar of the barrier. "Grandpa Max said Solada used to be a major military tech hub back in the fifties," he recalled, crossing his arms. "Some kind of top-secret research institution."
Kevin scoffed, kicking a loose stone against the brickwork. "Whatever they were researching, they definitely didn't want anyone poking around. Look at the size of this barricade. Fifty years later, and we still can't get in."
"You might want to rethink the fortress part. Come look at this," Klein called out.
His voice was flat, devoid of surprise, but carrying enough weight to draw the boys over. He and Gwen were standing a few dozen yards down the perimeter. The supposedly impenetrable brick wall had been violently breached. Two massive holes gaped in the masonry. One was jagged, roughly the size and shape of a large humanoid tearing straight through the brick. The other was a massive, crater-like opening wide enough to drive a truck through.
Kevin blinked, his jaw dropping slightly. "No way. That's impossible. Those definitely weren't here the last time I drove past this place."
"Only one way to find out what made them," Klein said, turning back toward the vehicle. "Let's head inside."
They piled back into the car and handled through the larger breach, the tires crunching over pulverized brick. Solada Town was a ghost town in the truest sense. Decades of neglect had left the buildings rotting and dilapidated. Beneath the dim, fading light of the sunset, the empty streets and hollowed-out storefronts radiated a classic, unsettling American horror movie vibe.
Kevin killed the engine by the curb, the sudden silence heavy and oppressive. The group stepped out, their boots scuffing against cracked asphalt. Dead weeds choked the overgrown yards, and the wooden frames of the houses sagged under the weight of time. They walked for several blocks, the eerie stillness clinging to them. Not a single bird chirped. Not a single insect buzzed. They were the only living, breathing things in the entire town.
Gwen hugged her arms, her eyes darting between the shadowed alleyways. "Did either of you notice the shape of that smaller hole in the wall?" she asked, her brow furrowed in concern. "It was perfectly humanoid."
"Something with two legs and a lot of momentum rammed right through solid brick," Klein noted casually. He crouched down, his gaze tracking a series of strange, winding grooves etched into the dusty pavement. "And whatever it is, it didn't bother covering its tracks."
A few feet away, Gwen suddenly stopped and knelt by the curb. "Guys, look at this."
Ben jogged over, leaning down to inspect the object half-buried in the dry dirt. "It's a bird," he muttered. He paused, correcting himself. "Well... a bird's skeleton."
He glanced around, his eyes catching another strange shape near a rusted fire hydrant. He scooped it up, brushing the dirt away. "And here's a lizard. But..." He tapped the skeletal remains against the concrete. It made a sharp, clinking sound. "It's completely petrified. Turned to solid stone."
"Petrified?" Klein raised an eyebrow, a spark of genuine interest finally breaking through his usual apathy.
He stood up, following the winding trail of grooves. The path of destruction wove erratically down the street, brushing past an old phone booth and scraping against the steps of a ruined police station. Klein strolled over to the phone booth. He ran a hand along the metal frame. It didn't feel like metal anymore. It was brittle, chalky, and entirely calcified. Just like the animal skeletons, the entire structure had been turned to stone.
Kevin stared at the booth, his eyes wide with disbelief. "How is that even possible? This town was abandoned fifty years ago. But this metal... it looks like it's been sitting in a desert for a million years."
Ben frowned, stepping closer to Klein. "Hey, do you think this is the work of some kind of mutant? Or maybe an Evo?"
Klein shook his head, his tone analytical. "No. This isn't standard petrification. It's aggressive, localized aging. The structural decay here is caused by the sheer passage of time, accelerated to an extreme degree. That means whatever creature or technology did this has the ability to manipulate temporal fields. Mutants and Evos don't have that kind of biological or technological capability."
Ben, Gwen, and Kevin exchanged bewildered glances. "Time?" Ben echoed, sounding entirely out of his depth.
"Exactly," Klein said, slipping his hands into his pockets. "For entities existing above the fourth dimension, time isn't some grand, mysterious river. It's a physical construct. Take the Naljians, for example. They operate on twenty-six dimensions. To them, time is basically a child's plaything." He gestured vaguely down the street. "Then you have Chronosapiens, like Clockwork. They aren't high-dimensional, but their unique biology allows them to naturally generate and control chronal energy. But the odds of a wild Chronosapien wandering around an abandoned Earth town are practically zero."
He shrugged, entirely unbothered by the terrifying implications. "Long story short, whoever or whatever is turning this town to dust isn't a simple monster of the week. Not that it matters. I can still handle it."
"Um... guys?" Gwen's voice wavered slightly. She raised a trembling finger, pointing down the fog-choked street. "I think I know what that creature is."
Klein, Ben, and Kevin turned. Emerging from the shadows of a collapsed storefront was a bizarre, shifting entity. It was a blue-and-white humanoid figure, its edges blurring and phasing out of reality like a bad hallucination brought on by eating toxic mushrooms. It was walking toward them, though that word hardly described its motion. It glided forward in a disjointed, stuttering rhythm. It had no feet, or rather, it didn't need them, simply drifting across the asphalt while leaving a trail of accelerated decay in its wake.
Kevin cracked his knuckles, a feral grin spreading across his face. "Whatever it is, it's finally something to punch." He slammed his hands onto the concrete curb. A wave of gray, rocky texture surged up his arms, rapidly encasing his entire body in a thick layer of solid stone.
"You said it!" Ben agreed, already dialing up the Omnitrix. He slammed his palm down on the core. A blinding flash of emerald light illuminated the gloomy street, and in his place stood the towering, crystalline form of Diamondhead.
"Wait! You guys, don't—!" Gwen shouted, throwing her hands up to stop them.
But it was too late. Kevin and Diamondhead were already charging headlong toward the temporal anomaly, roaring battle cries.
"Oh, you two absolute idiots," Gwen groaned, burying her face in her hands. It was painfully obvious that neither of them had absorbed a single word her cousin had just said.
Every entity she knew of with temporal abilities—Alien X, Clockwork, the Naljians—possessed power on a scale so vast that fighting them head-on was practically suicide. Charging blindly at an opponent who could literally weaponize time without a solid countermeasure was the height of stupidity.
She spun around, expecting Klein to intervene. Instead, she found her cousin leaning casually against a rusted streetlamp, watching the impending clash with the mild, detached interest of someone watching an entertaining nature documentary. Seeing Klein so relaxed instantly eased the knot of anxiety in Gwen's chest. If he wasn't panicking, he had the situation completely under control. Taking a deep breath, she focused her attention back on the mysterious creature, analyzing its movements.
Diamondhead fired a rapid barrage of razor-sharp crystal shards, while Kevin lunged forward with a heavy, stone-fisted haymaker.
The creature didn't even flinch. It simply stuttered out of sync with reality, the crystals and Kevin's fist phasing harmlessly through the space it had occupied a fraction of a second prior. Before either boy could recover, the entity darted forward with terrifying, unnatural speed. It phased straight through the walls of a nearby house, leaving a massive, crumbling hole in its wake, and vanished into the distance.
Does it actively want to avoid a fight, or is it just operating purely on blind instinct? Klein mused, tapping his chin thoughtfully.
He pushed off the streetlamp and strolled over to the house the creature had just breached. Crouching by the jagged hole in the wall, he ran a finger along the exposed wood. The timber flaked away instantly, reduced to brittle, petrified dust.
"Where did it go?" Ben demanded, having already timed out and transformed back to his human form. He and Kevin jogged over, panting slightly.
Kevin gritted his teeth, his stone armor shedding away as he glared at the fresh trail of accelerated decay. "Damn it. That freak got lucky."
"You got lucky, you idiot," Klein retorted, shooting Kevin a deadpan look. "That thing accelerates time upon physical contact. If either of you had actually managed to land a hit on it just now, you'd both be eighty-year-old men right now, complaining about your arthritis."
Ben and Kevin froze. They slowly turned to look at each other, the color draining from their faces as the sheer terror of what they had just attempted finally sank in.
Gwen exhaled a long breath, pointing toward a relatively intact brick building across the street. "Well, the only good news is that it didn't destroy the town library during its escape."
Kevin rolled his eyes, crossing his arms. "Oh, right. Because reading a book is exactly what we need to do right now, Dork."
Ben shot Kevin a look of utter disdain, marveling at the fact that someone could actually be more clueless than he was. "She wants to look up the town's records to figure out what that thing is, genius. All we know right now is that this place used to be some kind of military base."
Turning around to see if Gwen agreed, Ben realized that both she and Klein were already halfway up the library steps, completely ignoring them.
"Hey! Wait up!" Kevin yelled, and the two boys scrambled after them.
Inside the dusty, dimly lit library, the air smelled heavily of mildew and old paper. Miraculously, one of the ancient microfiche machines and an old terminal still had auxiliary power. Gwen immediately took a seat in front of the glowing screen, her fingers flying across the clunky keyboard, while Klein, Ben, and Kevin crowded behind her.
"Most of these microfilms are completely corroded," Gwen muttered, her eyes scanning the flickering green text on the monitor. "But I can piece together enough of the surviving logs. No matter how you look at it, this entire base was built for one specific purpose: the Paradox Project. It was a massive, government-funded time experiment."
"The Paradox Project?" Ben's eyes widened in sudden realization. "Wait... Professor Paradox!"
Gwen nodded grimly, tapping the screen. "Exactly. It's the same Professor Paradox we know."
Kevin held up his hands, looking completely lost. "Whoa, whoa, time out. Who exactly is this Professor Paradox guy you're all talking about?"
Ben glanced over his shoulder. "He's a time traveler. We ran into him a few times when we were kids."
Gwen stared at a grainy, black-and-white photograph of the eccentric scientist displayed on the monitor. "Is that mysterious creature related to him somehow? What exactly went wrong with this experiment?"
Klein didn't look at the screen. Instead, he slowly turned his head, his gaze locking onto an empty, shadow-draped corner of the library.
"Why don't you come out and explain it yourself, Paradox?" Klein said, his voice echoing slightly in the quiet room.
"Oh my. You found me after all."
The shadows rippled. A swirling, luminescent blue portal tore open the fabric of space in the corner of the room. With a polite smile and a casual adjustment of his lab coat, Professor Paradox stepped out of the rift.
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