Timewalkers Odyssey

Chapter 10: Fragments of a Forgotten World

Arrival

The first breath hurt.

Ryke inhaled deeply, feeling the sharp sting of air laden with temporal decay. This world, or what remained of it, tasted of rust and endings, of things that once were but could never be again. His new body registered each sensation with unnatural precision, nerve endings hyper-attuned to the fractured reality surrounding him.

He flexed his fingers, watching as muscles responded with alarming efficiency. Too fast. Too precise. As if his physical form was anticipating commands microseconds before his mind could issue them. His reflexes felt alien, a perfectly calibrated instrument that he had not yet learned to play.

"Too much," he whispered, his voice strange in his ears. "Everything is... too much."

The landscape sprawled before him like a shattered mirror, each fragment reflecting a different truth. A tower stood sentinel in the distance, somehow existing in multiple states simultaneously, its base solid and ancient, its middle section crumbling in slow decay, its peak caught in an eternal moment of collapse, suspended between existence and oblivion. Time didn't flow here; it stuttered, hiccupped, doubled back on itself.

Overhead, reality wept. Storms churned, not with rain but with raw temporal energy, clouds that bled moments rather than moisture. Lightning flashed, or rather temporal essence flashed, and in those illuminated instants, Ryke glimpsed them, silhouettes of immensity, of wrongness, moving between the folds of shattered reality. Void beasts. Abominations that had once been something else were now corrupted beyond recognition.

Instinctively, his hand moved to his chest, feeling for something beneath flesh and bone, the Temporal Core, humming with faint energy. He reached deeper, past physical sensation into metaphysical awareness, gauging what remained after his transition.

Four units of a thousand, his consciousness registered. Four-tenths of a percent capacity.

Barely enough to maintain cohesion. Barely enough to exist at all.

Ryke checked his physical form next, running his hands over unfamiliar contours. His Nexus Shell, the exoskeleton of his reconstituted self, seemed intact, its parameters holding firm against the chaotic fluctuations of this broken timeline. The Survivor's Blade materialized in his hand, its weight comforting in its familiarity. Ryke studied the blade, watching as its edge caught light that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere, the metal vibrating subtly as if recognizing the nature of this place.

Around his neck his father's pendant, the one truly unchanged thing that had made the journey with him. He grasped it, feeling its worn edges press into his palm. A tactile anchor to who he had been.

The wind shifted, carrying the stench of temporal decay, and with it, a realization: he was utterly and completely alone in a world that should not be.

The World is Not Empty

Ruins stretched into the distance, architecture from some civilization he couldn't name. Buildings that might have been homes, structures that might have sheltered life, spaces that might have contained moments of joy or sorrow, all reduced to fragments, to potentialities rather than certainties.

Ryke moved cautiously, testing his new body's responses as he navigated the broken terrain. His footfalls were lighter than they should have been, his balance beyond reality, too perfect. The Scrapyard street rat he had once been would have marveled at this body's capabilities.

He stopped abruptly, sensing danger before seeing it. A patch of air before him shimmered, vibrating at a frequency just beyond normal perception. His enhanced senses detected the wrongness immediately, a micro-loop of time endlessly repeating. He watched as a single dust mote entered the field, becoming trapped in its cycle, falling and rising, falling and rising, an hourglass that never emptied.

Carefully, he circumvented the anomaly, advancing deeper into the ruins. Above him, the storms continued their silent rage, flashes of unlight revealing more of the landscape's desolation.

Then he saw them.

The first one moved like no living thing should move, advancing in stuttered increments, as if repeatedly being erased and redrawn by an unsteady hand. Its form defied categorization, aspects of it shifting between states with each temporal fluctuation. Parts resembled limbs, others flowed like liquid, and still others seemed to exist partially in dimensions beyond perception.

It was feeding.

The remains of something, Ryke couldn't determine what, lay beneath the void beast's undulating mass. The creature consumed not just flesh but time itself, absorbing the victim's past and future moments, leaving nothing but an empty husk devoid of causality.

He remained motionless, his Eternal Observer ability activating instinctively. His perception expanded, allowing him to witness multiple moments simultaneously without interference from his own presence. He saw not just the remains of the void beast before him but reflections of what it had been, fragments of a form once recognizable. A predator. Something with purpose. Something with intent.

Another beast materialized on the periphery of his vision, then another. Different in composition but unified in wrongness. One bore traces of what might have been human features, a hand with too many joints, an eye without pupil or iris, a mouth that opened in directions impossible for human anatomy.

The realization crystallized within Ryke's mind with terrible clarity: These weren't invaders from beyond. These were this world's inhabitants, corrupted, transformed, their very essence rewritten by whatever cataclysm had fractured this reality.

They had not simply died. They had become.

His Temporal Awareness pulsed, pulling his perception beyond the immediate moment. He saw this landscape as it had been: vibrant, populated, alive. He saw the moment of transition, of corruption. He heard the screams as beings were not killed but remade, their existences stretched across incompatible states of being.

The vision faded, leaving him once again in the broken present. But the knowledge remained, settling like lead in his consciousness: this was not just a world in ruins. This was a world in torment.

Power or Purpose

Ryke retreated to higher ground, finding shelter within the hollow remains of what might have been a temple. Stone arches bent at impossible angles, creating a roof that defied architectural logic. Here, relatively hidden from the void beasts below, he settled into a crouch and focused inward.

His Temporal Core pulsed weakly within him, its energy critically low. He could feel its hunger, a vacuum within his being that demanded to be filled. The sensation was not physical pain but something more fundamental, as if his very existence had become a question that required an answer.

Four out of a thousand, he thought again. Barely enough to be.

He recalled how he had reached even this meager level, the confrontation in The Place Between, the impossible choice, the killing of his past self. The energy released in that paradoxical act had fueled his transformation, had granted him this new existence. Violence had been the catalyst, death the currency of his rebirth.

Four units. The cost of one life, his own. An irony that tasted bitter even in thought.

Ryke's gaze returned to the void beasts moving through the ruins below. Their corrupted forms contained energy, not just physical but temporal. He could sense it, a distortion in the fabric of reality that surrounded each creature like an aura of wrongness.

The possibility formed slowly, reluctantly in his mind: Could he harvest that energy? Could he kill these abominations and absorb their temporal essence? Would their deaths fill the vacuum within his core?

He ran his thumb along the edge of his Survivor's Blade, not hard enough to cut but enough to feel its deadly potential. The weapon seemed eager, as if sensing the direction of his thoughts.

"If I kill to grow stronger," he whispered to himself, the words tasting ashen, "what does that make me?"

The question hung in the dead air, unanswered. Below, a void beast suddenly lifted what might have been its head as if sensing his presence. The movement was jarring, too quick, too angular, reality bending uncomfortably around its form.

Ryke withdrew deeper into the shadows, but the question followed him, echoing in his consciousness: If his path forward was through violence, through absorption, through consumption of others' essence, was he fundamentally any different from the void beasts themselves?

No answer came. Only the distant rumble of the temporal storms and the hollow feeling of his depleted core remained.

The First Hunt

Strategy before action. That had been the old man's teaching in the Scrapyard, words that had kept Ryke alive when others perished. He would not abandon wisdom now, not when facing enemies beyond comprehension.

He studied the void beasts from his vantage point, activating his Eternal Observer ability to perceive their movements across multiple moments simultaneously. The smaller ones, no larger than a dog, moved with more consistency than their massive counterparts. Their patterns were erratic but discernible, their phases into complete materialization more predictable.

One in particular caught his attention, a smaller beast that had come to scavenge the remains that had been left to be consumed by time. It moved in cycles of approximately seventeen seconds, fully materializing for three seconds before partially phasing out of reality again. During those three seconds, it would be vulnerable.

The Survivor's Blade was ready for its first kill, feeling its weight shift subtly in his grip, it was, inevitable. The weapon seemed to hum with anticipation, its metal warming against his palm as if awakening from dormancy. This blade had seen him through countless battles in his previous life, from the merciless streets of the Scrapyard to the incomprehensible void of The Place Between. It knew combat as intimately as he did.

He descended silently from his perch, using fractured walls and temporal anomalies as cover. The beast across the way continued its feeding, unaware of the predator that was slowly approaching, moving unnoticed. Ryke counted the cycles of materialization, timing his approach to the creature's rhythm.

Fourteen seconds... fifteen... sixteen...

The void beast solidified, its form becoming momentarily constant, anchored fully in this single reality. Ryke moved, his enhanced body crossing the distance in a blur of precision, the Survivor's Blade arcing toward the creature's approximation of a neck.

Contact.

The blade met resistance, then suddenly surrendered as it passed through corrupted flesh. The sensation was wrong, like cutting through water that was simultaneously ice and steam, states of matter overlapping in impossible configurations.

The beast did not cry out. Instead, the air around it screamed, a sound that existed somewhere between frequency and silence. Its form contorted, not in the familiar spasm of death but in a complex reconfiguration of reality itself. Limbs bent backward, folding into dimensions that couldn't be perceived, only inferred.

Then, collapse. The creature's form imploded, condensing into a singularity of pure temporal energy before dissipating into dust.

Something released, a pulse of chronological potential, a fragment of temporal essence. Ryke felt it rush toward him, drawn to his depleted core like water seeking the lowest point. The energy entered him, not through any physical means but through metaphysical absorption, his Temporal Core drinking in the released power.

As the essence integrated with his being, the beast he had slain appeared as it had been before corruption. A small bear-like creature, unknown to him, moving through ancient forests that no longer existed. The corpse lasted only a moment before fading, the creature's form dissolving into dust as if it had died centuries ago, its physical form finally catching up to its temporal extinction.

Ryke felt the change within himself immediately. His Temporal Core pulsed stronger, the vacuum within him minutely less empty. The change was not significant but still noticeable. His core had grown stronger, and his capacity to hold Temporal Essence increased.

Five out of a thousand.

A single unit gained. A mere 0.1% increase in capacity. At this rate, reaching full potential would require...

He stopped the calculation. The numbers were too large, the implications too daunting. What mattered was proof, proof that his theory was correct, that the void beasts could fuel his growth. One temporal fragment from a minor beast. Would stronger beasts yield more?

It wasn't much. But it was a beginning.

Predator Becomes Prey

The death did not go unnoticed.

From the shadows of a collapsed structure, a larger form emerged, its movements more fluid than the lesser beast's, its corruption more complete. Where the smaller creature had retained some semblance of its original shape, this one had fully embraced its transformation. Its body extended in impossible geometries, limbs bending at angles that defied Euclidean logic.

Yet beneath the corruption, Ryke could discern its original nature. A predator. A hunter. The massive jaw structure, the powerful limbs, the predatory stance, it had once been a wolf, or something wolf-adjacent, an apex carnivore adapted for pursuit and kill.

Voidhound, Ryke named it silently, recalling images from discarded books he'd found in the Scrapyard, creatures used for hunting, loyal yet lethal.

It moved with purpose, sensing the disturbance in the temporal fabric caused by its lesser kin's destruction. Its form glitched as it advanced, body flickering between states of materialization, yet never fully phasing out as the smaller beast had. This one had greater control, greater presence in reality.

A greater threat.

Ryke held his position, the Survivor's Blade still drawn but lowered to his side. Direct confrontation would be unwise, his enhanced body was still unfamiliar, his energy reserves minimal. The voidhound outmassed him significantly, and its corrupted nature made its capabilities unpredictable.

Instead, he slipped into the shadows, creating space to observe. The creature's movement patterns were complex but not random. It phased partially in and out of reality but never completely disappeared. Its sensory capabilities seemed acute, it tracked not by sight or scent but by detecting disturbances in the temporal field.

Most importantly, it wasn't alone. Two more voidhounds materialized at the periphery of the ruins, drawn by whatever silent communication had alerted the first. They moved in loose formation, instinctively coordinating their approach to maximize coverage of the area.

Pack hunters, even in corruption.

Ryke calculated his odds with cold precision. One voidhound, possibly survivable, though at a significant cost. Three, nearly certain failure. His new body was powerful but untested, his abilities not yet fully understood. Tactical retreat was the only logical choice.

He withdrew slowly, using the temporal anomalies scattered throughout the ruins to mask his movement. The voidhounds continued their search, their forms flickering as they investigated the spot where their lesser kin had fallen.

Distance. Observation. Adaptation. These would be his allies until he grew stronger.

Evolution of a Killer

The sun, or what passed for one in this fractured reality, began its descent, casting long shadows that bent in impossible ways across the ruined landscape. Ryke found shelter in what might have once been a watchtower. Its upper levels collapsed, but its base was still solid, offering protection and a vantage point.

He sat with his back against weathered stone, the Survivor's Blade across his knees, and considered his position. The reality of his situation settled into his consciousness, no longer obscured by the shock of transition or the immediate need for survival.

He was alone in a hostile timeline, possessing a transformed body he barely understood, with a power source critically depleted. The path to strengthening himself would be long and fraught with peril, each encounter a calculated risk, each kill a minimal gain.

And yet, there was clarity in limitation. The old man in the Scrapyard had taught him that knowing your limits was the first step toward transcending them. His current weaknesses were defined, his challenges identified. That was something to build upon.

Ryke ran through what he now knew:

Not all void beasts were equal. Their strength, their corruption, their temporal signatures varied widely. The smaller ones could be taken in direct confrontation, but the larger ones, the voidhounds and whatever else lurked in this broken world, would require strategy, preparation, and perhaps even traps.

The capacity of his Temporal Core to hold Temporal Essence was significant and yet willfully short of guaranteed survival. The void beast he had killed had added to the reservoir of energy contained in his core, but his new body, his Nexus Shell had consumed almost as much as he had gained. Killing had increased his core's capacity to hold energy but he would need to absorb much more Temporal Essence to realize his full potential.

His Temporal Core would not fill quickly. At one unit per lesser beast, the journey to full capacity would be arduous. He would need to target increasingly stronger creatures, eventually challenging those that currently would barely register him as a threat. Patience and experience, just like when the Old Man was teaching him to repair broken things. It would take time and effort, but eventually, his skills and understanding would improve. When the time came, he would be ready.

The void beasts had once been something else, creatures, possibly even people, corrupted by whatever catastrophe had fractured this timeline. This knowledge didn't change the necessity of his actions, but it contextualized them. He wasn't killing in cruelty but providing release from a tortured existence.

Most immediately, he recognized the mundane but critical needs asserting themselves: hunger gnawed at his stomach, thirst dried his throat. Enhanced body or not, he remained bound to certain biological imperatives. Food, water, rest, these would need to be secured before he could continue his hunt.

The irony wasn't lost on him. After everything, after transcending death, after reforming his very essence, after traveling between realities, he still needed to eat, to drink, to sleep. Some fundamentals remained unchanged across all states of being.

As darkness fell completely, bringing with it a silence too absolute to be natural, Ryke allowed himself a moment of reflection beyond immediate survival. The questions that had no tactical relevance but weighed on his consciousness nonetheless:

Where was he? Not just in what world, but in what relationship to his original timeline? Was this future or past, parallel or divergent?

More importantly, what came after? If he filled his Temporal Core, if he mastered his new abilities, what then? He had no anchor point, no way to target a specific timeline. If he found a portal, where would it lead? To another hell like this one? To somewhere survivable? Back to his own time and place? Or somewhere he could never have imagined?

And what of the Scrapyard, of those that were left behind? Did they continue to exist in some other stream of time, fighting their own battles? Or had his actions somehow erased them, collapsed their potentiality into nothingness?

The questions spiraled outward, branching into infinite possibilities, each as intangible as fog. Ryke closed his eyes, feeling the weight of uncertainty settle across his consciousness like a shroud. In the Scrapyard, survival had been simple: find food, avoid danger, live to see another dawn. The parameters were clear, the objectives defined. Now, existence itself had become the puzzle, identity the riddle he could not solve.

His fingers traced the contours of his father's pendant, the metal warm against his skin,  tactile proof of a past that no longer existed, except in his memory. Perhaps that was all any of them were now, memories given form, echoes seeking substance in a universe indifferent to their persistence.

In the distance, a voidhound howled, and then another, and another, a sound that fractured midway, splitting into harmonics that shouldn't exist, notes that vibrated along frequencies beyond mortal hearing. Ryke opened his eyes, his enhanced senses detecting the subtle shifts in temporal energy as night fully claimed this broken world.

Tomorrow would bring hunting. Tomorrow would bring killing. Tomorrow would bring one more step along a path whose destination remained obscured. But for now, cradled in darkness, surrounded by the ruins of a civilization he would never know, Ryke allowed himself one final thought before vigilant rest:

He had been transformed beyond recognition, reborn into something beyond human understanding, though alone in a timeline shattered beyond repair, he remained, at his core, the survivor he had always been.

The Temporal Core within him pulsed once as if in agreement. Five units of a thousand. An opportunity, nothing more.

But opportunity was all he needed.