Chronus's feet left the ground.
He didn't struggle.
Not from lack of will. From accurate assessment.
There was nothing to struggle with.
His expression — the ancient settled quality, the calculation, the complicated grief-and-determination — all of it gone.
Just the exhausted face of something very old that had run out of everything.
They stayed like that.
Satou holding Chronus off the ground.
The frozen world preserved around them — the temporal halt still active, every person in the working's boundary still stopped at the exact millisecond the halt had activated.
The mechanism's temporal light above them, disrupted, advancing toward a threshold that was now forty-two minutes away with eight minutes of mana left to sustain the halt.
Six minutes passed.
The mana ran down.
—-------------------------
Eleven percent.
Satou read the number through the nightmare vision and said nothing.
He didn't need to.
