He moved, a bolt of violet hatred faster than light itself, fist pulled back to deliver a blow that would crack the planet's crust.

  He hit nothing.

  The space where she stood was empty. Only mist remained.

  A new sound pierced the muffled horror. Not a psychic scream, but a real one. High-pitched, raw, and agonized. From the ruined casino balcony above, a small figure dangled.

  Eclipse stood there, holding a little girl upside down by a single leg. The child's pajamas were spotted with red. The angle of her tiny limb was all wrong, the white of a shinbone jutting cruelly through the skin. The little girl shrieked, a sound of pure, animal terror.

  Eclipse tilted her head, examining the broken limb with the detached interest of a scientist observing a lab specimen.

  "Awfully fragile," she muttered, her voice a dissonant harmony of pity and contempt.

  Something in Clock snapped.

  The analytical part of his mind, the part that calculated force and trajectories, shut down. There was only the vector: from him, to her.

  He didn't teleport. He didn't run. The universe itself seemed to flinch as he arrived in front of her. There was no shriek of air, no burst of light. It was an instantaneous relocation of mass and fury.

  His fist, wreathed in a nimbus of telekinetic force that glowed like a dying star, connected with her jaw.

  KRAA-THOOOM!

  The impact was not a sound, but the negation of silence. It was a wet, percussive crunch of cartilage and bone that traveled up Clock's arm like a seismic shock. Her head snapped back at an impossible angle, and for a microsecond, he felt the intricate architecture of her skull disintegrate under his knuckles, the zygomatic arch, the maxilla, the orbital floor, shattering into a million microscopic fragments. The shockwave didn't stop there. It reverberated through her entire body in a wave of pure kinetic fury, a chain reaction of devastation. He felt the distinct, sickening snaps of her clavicle, her scapula, and her ribs turning to dust within her torso, a symphony of structural failure traveling down her spine before she was even thrown.

  The entire cruise liner, a vessel of eighty thousand tons, was lifted and shoved sideways in the water by the sheer concussive force. But even as his fist connected, a wave of telekinetic force washed down the length of the ship, a balancing hand that instantly righted the massive hull and locked every surviving soul safely in place, preventing so much as a single plate from sliding off a table. The air around his fist superheated into plasma.

  Eclipse had no time to react, no time to phase into water. She was a leaf in a hurricane. The blow blasted her through the multi-layered steel hull of the ship as if it were tissue paper, carving a perfect, molten tunnel through decks, cabins, and infrastructure. She became a humanoid projectile, hurtling out over the open ocean, skipping across the water's surface like a stone before vanishing beneath the waves with a final, geyser-like plume.

  Clock didn't watch her go. His momentum spent, he dropped to one knee on the balcony, his chest heaving. With a flicker of his will, he stabilized the groaning ship, his telekinesis gently settling the massive structure back to an even keel in the water and ensuring no one else was harmed by the aftermath of his own fury. The little girl, released from Eclipse's grip, tumbled through the air.

  His telekinesis, moving on an instinct faster than thought, caught her gently. A shimmering violet field cocooned her, stabilizing the horrific break in her leg, muffling her pain into a sobbing whimper. He lowered her softly to the deck, his own hands trembling not from strain, but from a rage so profound it felt like a physical illness.

  He stared at the hole he had punched through the world, at the dark water where she had disappeared. The message was clearer than ever. This wasn't a battle for victory. It was a battle for the very definition of what it meant to be alive. And his enemy saw everyone, even screaming children, as disposable props.

  ///

  The world narrowed to the sobbing child and the gaping hole in the ship. Clock knelt, the pristine black fabric of his Evade shirt pressing into the grime and blood of the deck. He didn't flinch. He didn't care. The memory of Mango’s grip on that same sleeve felt a lifetime away.

  The little girl trembled in his arms, her tiny body wracked with shock and pain. Her tears, hot and salty, soaked into the impossibly expensive silk, leaving dark, permanent stains. He didn't smooth them away. He just held her, one hand cradling her head, the other maintaining the gentle telekinetic field around her shattered leg. His violet eyes, however, scanned the horizon, his mind a radar dish sweeping the abyss for Eclipse’s cold, predatory signature.

  Nothing. She was hiding, licking her wounds, or worse, preparing another nightmare.

  He couldn't leave these people here. Not in this floating tomb.

  Closing his eyes, he pushed his power outward in a way that was foreign to him. Destruction was his language; this was a clumsy, painful translation. A soft, violet luminescence bled from him, washing over the shattered atrium. It wasn't true healing—he wasn't Butter—but it was raw, concentrated life energy. He staunched internal bleeding, fused cracked bones, shocked faltering hearts back into rhythm. It was a brutal, telekinetic triage that drained him more than any battle, leaving him feeling hollowed out.

  As the light faded, the silence was broken by the raw, unfiltered sound of grief. Whimpers turned to wails as the survivors truly saw the massacre around them. The scale of the loss became undeniable.

  A man stumbled towards him, his face a mask of tears and grime. He fell to his knees before Clock, not in worship, but in utter despair.

  "Please," the man choked out, his voice cracking. "If you're an angel... if you're anything... my wife... she's over there. She's... gone." He gestured weakly towards a shape obscured by wreckage. "She was pregnant. Our first. Please... just... help them. Help them make it to heaven. She was nothing but good in this world. Nothing but good. Promise me."

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  Clock looked down at the man, the words sticking in his throat. He was a prince of arrogance, a thief, a weapon of mass destruction. He was no ferryman for souls. He was about to say, I can't promise that. I don't know anything about heaven.

  But he saw the man's eyes. It wasn't a request for divine intervention. It was a plea for a reason to take the next breath. It was the last, fragile thread of hope a human heart could cling to.

  He met the man's desperate gaze, his own voice low and stripped of all its usual theatricality.

  "I promise."

  It was a lie. It was a necessity. The man bowed his head, a shudder of relief passing through him, then rose and walked away into the gloom, his grief now bearing a purpose.

  Clock looked down at the girl in his arms. Her sobs had quieted to hiccups. He gently brushed a strand of hair from her forehead.

  "I have to go now," he whispered, his voice barely audible. "To get the fish lady."

  He stood, lifting his gaze to the survivors, a few dozen souls huddled together, their eyes fixed on him. There was no fear in their faces now. Only a desperate, terrifying hope. A raw, unwavering faith that he was their salvation.

  He wasn't a hero. He knew the darkness in his own heart, the petty vengeance, the towering ego. He was not a good person.

  But they needed an angel. And for them, that was what he would be.

  In less than a fraction of a second, the calculus of his power shifted. He didn't just move them. He enveloped every survivor in a perfect, inertial-dampening cocoon of violet energy. Then, he moved.

  The world became a streak of color and void. He shot across the entire ocean, a reverse meteor, carrying his precious, fragile cargo. The force of his passage, if unshielded, would have vaporized them. He felt the immense strain of controlling so many individual shields at such velocity, a psychic ache deeper than any physical wound.

  In an instant, they were standing on the solid, safe soil of a coastal city, the stunned survivors gasping as reality re-formed around them.

  To overcompensate—for his failure, for his lies, for the sheer inadequacy of it all—he gave them something tangible. With a thought, his diamond-encrusted crown, the ultimate symbol of his preening vanity, shattered. A shower of flawless, glittering stones, each worth a fortune, gently rained down, coming to rest in the palms of each survivor. A final, useless apology written in gemstones.

  Then, he was gone.

  But in the space between his departure and the stunned silence he left behind, a single, traitorous tear escaped, tracing a clean path through the grime and blood on his cheek. It was followed by another. The events of the last few minutes—the symphony of pops, the woman in the green dress, the broken child, the weight of a thousand silent, grateful stares—were a psychic poison trying to seep into his soul, to break him where Eclipse's powers had failed.

  He refused to let it.

  He clenched his jaw, the sapphire grills grinding against his teeth. He swallowed the sob that threatened to become a scream. There was no room for trauma, no time for a breakdown. The path ahead was paved with more monsters and more difficult choices. He had to be strong.

  For Mango, who was waiting for her pineapple yogurt. For Butter,who was trapped in the dark with a demon. For the little girl with the shattered leg, who now believed in angels. And for himself, because the moment he acknowledged the horror was the moment he would shatter, and a shattered prince was no use to anyone.

  He was a spear of vengeance once more. He zoomed back across the ocean, his mind screaming a single, focused imperative.

  Find Eclipse.

  ///

  A hand, cold and impossibly strong, shot out of the water and grabbed his ankle from below.

  It wasn't a grab. It was an anchor. It was the abrupt, shocking finality of a snare snapping shut. One moment he was supersonic, a force of nature; the next, he was wrenched to a dead stop with a jolt that shuddered through every bone and joint. The kinetic energy didn't dissipate, it backlashed through him, a thunderclap of arrested motion that left his teeth rattling and his vision swimming.

  It yanked him down. Not with a pull, but with a suction that defied physics. The surface light vanished in an instant, plunging him into abyssal blackness. He spun, telekinetic light flaring from his body, searching for Eclipse.

  He didn't find the woman. He found the goddess.

  Leviathan. Her true form. She was a mermaid titan, larger than the Statue of Liberty, her skin a mosaic of iridescent scales and ancient coral. Her hair was a living forest of kelp and phosphorescent anemones, and her eyes were vast, drowning pools of the deep-sea trench, devoid of mercy. From her fingers extended claws of bleached, porous bone, each one the length of a city bus and sharpened by eons of abyssal currents. When her lips peeled back, it was not in a smile, but a slow, tectonic shift that revealed a picket fence of teeth—jagged, overlapping spears of enamel the color of drowned ivory, built not for chewing but for gripping and rending on a colossal scale.

  Below her torso, the humanoid form melted away into the true engine of her horror: a muscular tail, wider than a subway tunnel, covered in scales that shifted from volcanic glass to the sickly pallor of a deep-sea creature never meant to see the sun. And along the monstrous curve of her neck, slits like ancient wounds pulsed rhythmically—her gills, each one a dark, fleshy crevice that breathed the crushing pressure of the deep, a sight more unsettling than any fang or claw.

  Fear, cold and primal, coursed through Clock's bones.

  Then, she made a sound. It was not a roar, but a low-frequency pulse that bypassed the ears and vibrated directly in the marrow of Clock’s bones and the fluid of his inner ear. It was the sound of pressure—the groan of a continental shelf shearing apart, the shriek of a submarine’s hull collapsing at a depth where light is a forgotten myth, all fused with a biological component that was infinitely more terrifying: the chittering, wet friction of thousands of unseen, chitinous things moving in the dark. It was a sound that spoke of vast, lightless spaces and the things that have grown there, patient and hungry. It was the voice of the abyss itself, and for the first time, Clock understood it wasn't empty. It was full, and it was aware of him.

  She swung her hands. It was a slow, tectonic motion in the dense water, but it carried the force of a shifting continental plate.

  They connected.

  Not with a punch, or a blow. It was a clap.

  Her two colossal, city-bus-sized palms came together with Clock trapped between them.

  FWUMP-KRAAAAA-KABOOOOOM!

  The sound was the death of a world. It was a pressure bomb detonating in the deep. Transport screamed, a psychic shriek of overload as it frantically swallowed the core of the impact, the force that would have vaporized a moon. It ate the planet-killing force, but it was like a man trying to drink from a firehose; it could swallow the water, but not the pressure.

  The residual force—the mere hydraulic shockwave, the concussive brutality of the impact that Transport couldn't process fast enough—exploded through him.

  His senses whited out. For a single, terrifying microsecond, the universe ceased to be. There was no sight, no sound, only a blinding, neural static. The delicate structures of his inner ear were scrambled, sending his balance into a nauseating spiral. The telekinetic field holding the water at bay flickered, sputtering like a dying lightbulb, and for that infinitesimal moment, the full, crushing weight of the abyssal pressure slammed into his body from all sides.

  It was the psychic equivalent of being smacked in the back of the head with a sack of bricks. His consciousness, his very hold on his powers, stuttered.

  Then, the world rushed back in with a roar of agony. The water around them had vaporized into a temporary vacuum, which then imploded with the sound of a dying star. The shockwave pulverized a submerged mountain range miles away.

  The pressure of the deep, manipulated and intensified by her will, reasserted itself, holding him in a crushing, telekinetic vise. He couldn't fly. He couldn't move. His barrier was the only thing keeping him from being folded into a singularity, but now he could feel the cracks in his own focus from the sheer shock of that clap. The strain was immense, a white-hot migraine searing his brain as the ocean itself tried to erase him.