Chapter 239: The Path of Moments
The message from the mysterious Chrono-Weaver was a single, flickering candle in the vast, dark room of their hopelessness. It was a myth, a legend, a ghost story whispered in the dark corners of the galaxy. But it was also the only new lead they had.
The problem was, the "Axis of Time" was outside their protective, lawless bubble. To get there, the Odyssey would have to leave the safety of its tiny, chaotic island and sail directly back into Regent Vorlag’s raging, orderly ocean.
It was, by every possible measure, a suicide run.
On the bridge of the Odyssey, the Matriarchs gathered around a holographic display of the bubble and the space beyond.
"The moment we stick our nose out of this bubble, Vorlag will know," Ilsa Varkov said, her voice a low, gravelly rumble. "It will bring the full force of its reality-bending power down on us. Our shields won’t hold. Our engines will fail. We’ll be a sitting duck."
"She’s right," Emma agreed, her face grim. "A direct run is impossible. We’d be erased before we got a hundred kilometers."
They were trapped. If they stayed in the bubble, it would eventually shrink and crush them. If they left the bubble, the Regent would instantly unmake them. It was a perfect, inescapable checkmate.
It was Zara who, once again, found a loophole. Her mind, which had been so joyfully exploring the possibilities of a rule-free universe, now turned to the problem of how to break the rules in a very specific, and very targeted, way.
"We can’t fly through the Regent’s territory," she said, a spark of manic genius in her eyes. "So... what if we take a little piece of our territory with us?"
She brought up a new schematic on the holographic display. It was the Reality Destabilizer, the insane device Valerius had built, the very thing that had created their bubble.
"The device creates a sphere of lawlessness," she explained, her words coming faster as the idea took shape in her mind. "But the files say the shape of the field can be modified.
It’s difficult, and it’s incredibly unstable, but it’s theoretically possible to focus the destabilizing energy. Instead of a big, defensive bubble, what if we could create a long, thin, offensive tunnel?"
The idea was audacious. It was brilliant. She was proposing they use their one defense as a weapon. They would create a temporary, unstable corridor of pure, chaotic, lawless space, a secret back alley through the middle of reality itself.
The Odyssey could, in theory, fly through this tunnel, protected from the Regent’s power.
"It would be like trying to navigate a submarine through a collapsing waterslide in the middle of an earthquake," Zara warned, her face serious. "The tunnel will be constantly trying to fall in on itself. The walls of the corridor will be pure, churning chaos. One wrong move, one tiny miscalculation, and the ship would be torn apart."
"And there’s another problem," Emma added, looking at the complex flight path simulations she was already running. "A ship as large as the Odyssey will barely fit. Navigating this tunnel will require a level of piloting skill that is... well, it’s basically impossible."
All eyes on the bridge turned to one person.
Scarlett, who had been listening quietly, just gave a slow, dangerous smile. "Impossible is just another word for a challenge," she said, her voice a low purr. She cracked her knuckles. "When do we start?"
The night before the mission, the mood on the Odyssey was thick with a heavy, silent tension. This was, by far, the most dangerous thing they had ever attempted. The chances of survival were slim, and everyone knew it.
Zara found Scarlett on the ship’s training deck. The room was dark, the only light coming from the glowing, holographic opponents that Scarlett was fighting.
She was a blur of motion, her body moving with a liquid grace, her practice daggers flashing in the dim light. She was pushing herself to her absolute limit, her face slick with sweat, her breathing coming in sharp, controlled gasps.
Zara stood in the doorway for a moment, just watching. She was a woman of numbers, of data, of predictable and repeatable results. And Scarlett was... the opposite. Scarlett was a variable she could never quite calculate, a beautiful, deadly piece of chaos in her orderly world.
"The statistical probability of us successfully navigating the tunnel is 1.7 percent," Zara said, her voice calm and matter-of-fact as she walked into the room. She held up a data pad, which showed a series of complex simulations of the coming mission.
In each one, a small, blue dot representing the Odyssey was crushed, torn apart, or lost in the swirling red chaos of the collapsing tunnel. "I have run the flight path through every possible scenario. The odds are not in our favor."
Scarlett didn’t stop her training. She dodged a holographic sword, spun, and took down two more opponents before finally deactivating the simulation. The glowing figures vanished, leaving the room in near darkness.
She turned to face Zara, a single drop of sweat rolling down her temple. She was not angry or discouraged by Zara’s grim report. She just smiled, a small, tired, and incredibly confident smile.
"That’s because your numbers are missing something, Zara," she said, her voice a little breathless from the exertion. "Your simulations can’t account for the most important variable in the entire equation."
"And what’s that?" Zara asked, genuinely curious.
Scarlett tapped a finger to her own chest. "Me."
In that moment, Zara’s deep, scientific respect for Scarlett’s skills blossomed into something more. It was a feeling of true, sisterly affection, a profound admiration for this woman’s unbreakable, unquantifiable will.
Zara, the woman of logic, suddenly understood that there were some things in the universe that you couldn’t measure with numbers. There were some variables that could only be understood through a simple, illogical leap of faith. She had faith in Scarlett.
The time had come. The entire Bastion Alliance fleet had gathered at the edge of the bubble, forming a protective wall behind the Odyssey.
"Alright, Zara," Scarlett’s voice said over the bridge’s speakers, calm and ready. "Do it."
Deep in the ship’s engine room, Zara took a deep breath and activated the Reality Destabilizer. The ship shuddered, and a brilliant, white beam of pure chaos shot out from its nose, piercing the shimmering wall of their bubble and drilling a hole into the ordered reality beyond. The tunnel began to form.
"We have a corridor!" Emma announced, her eyes glued to the sensor readings. "It’s unstable, but it’s holding!"
"Taking us in," Scarlett said, her hands moving with a surgeon’s precision over the controls.
The Odyssey plunged into the tunnel of distorted reality.
The view outside the main screen was a nightmare. They were flying through a tube of pure, swirling madness. The walls of the tunnel were not solid; they were a churning, boiling soup of color and light, where the laws of physics were being born and dying a thousand times a second.
The moment they entered, Regent Vorlag responded. A wave of pure, orderly force slammed into the outside of the tunnel, trying to crush it, to squeeze it shut around them. The tunnel began to shrink, its chaotic walls closing in on the ship.
"The corridor is collapsing!" Zara yelled. "Scarlett, you need to go faster!"
Scarlett pushed the engines to their maximum, sending the Odyssey rocketing through the mad, swirling passage. She was flying blind. The ship’s sensors were useless here. The only thing guiding her was the sound of Emma’s voice and her own, supernatural instincts.
"Flash of causality failure on the left wall!" Emma would call out, her eyes closed as she sifted through the storm of possible futures in her mind. "Veer right, now!"
Scarlett would wrench the controls to the right, narrowly avoiding a patch of the tunnel where the concept of "forward motion" had temporarily stopped working.
"Gravity spike dead ahead!" Emma would warn.
Scarlett would fire the vertical thrusters, lifting the massive ship over an invisible speed bump of pure gravitational force that would have flattened them.
She wasn’t just piloting a ship. She was flying a feeling, a prayer, a single, desperate hope through the heart of a conceptual hurricane. The laws of physics themselves were crashing down around her, and she was dodging them, one by one, with nothing but skill, instinct, and a stubborn refusal to accept the impossible.