Lucas pressed against a sandstone cliff that kept phasing between 1947 and 2147, watching platoons of translucent soldiers march through each other. A Roman legionnaire’s gladius passed through a TerraGenesis drone’s chassis. A Union cavalryman rode screaming through a cyborg’s torso. All bleeding quantum static, all unaware they were already casualties of wars yet to come.
“Schr?dinger’s battlefield,” Elena muttered, calibrating the skull to her wrist implant. Her Fibonacci tattoo pulsed like a dying star. “Every war that ever was or will be, happening here simultaneously.”
“Bullshit.” Lucas chambered a round in his Mako. “That’s Omaha Beach over there.”
He pointed to where D-Day landing craft plowed through Martian sand, their hulls disintegrating into chromium butterflies. The skull’s song hit a minor key—Elena’s mother’s ashes shifted inside their cracked vial.
Click.
The cliff stopped phasing.
Now they stood in 1864 Virginia, the stench of gangrene thick as the Nevada sun beat down on Civil War tents. A field surgeon sawing off a phantom limb froze mid-cut, his face melting into Elena’s features.
“We’re the infection,” she whispered.
Lucas spat. “We’re the fucking cure.”
——
The artifact demanded payment.
Elena wired the skull to a Confederate cannon using uranium stolen from the Manhattan Project’s ghostly supply train. Temporal energy crackled across the bronze barrel, etching Vognir equations into metal older than America.
“This’ll either stabilize the timeline or erase Delaware,” she said, sweat mixing with temporal runoff.
Lucas tossed his empty flask into the quantum sand. “Why not both?”
The cannon fired.
Reality screamed.
——
The blast wave froze soldiers mid-scream across epochs. Elena stumbled through the suspended chaos, watching Minié balls hover inches from Roman shields, plasma bolts petrified before vaporizing Zulu warriors. The skull in her hands grew heavier with each step—it was feeding.
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Memory Fragment (Not Hers):
Vognir scientists weeping mercury as they programmed human DNA to mourn. A galaxy-wide suicide note written in grief enzymes.
“Lucas!” She grabbed his arm—the one with the neural scar. “We’re not stabilizing anything. We’re providing the energy they’re harvesting.”
He shook her off, aiming at a frozen SS officer. “Then let’s unplug the buffet.”
His bullet shattered the temporal stasis.
Hell arrived in 48 frames per second.
——
The battlefield became a Bosch painting rendered in quantum foam. Crusaders bled nanobots. Stealth bombers dogfought pterodactyls. Elena’s tattoo burned through her shirt as the skull broadcast their location across all timelines.
“Incoming!” Lucas tackled her as a Viking longship materialized overhead, its dragon prow vomiting Tesla coils.
Elena rolled, firing her stolen Luger at the ship’s spectral sail. The bullets became equations that unwove reality’s fabric. The longship disintegrated into a rain of screaming runes.
“Stop shooting!” she yelled. “Every impact creates new timelines!”
Lucas grinned wild-eyed. “Then let’s make some art.”
He emptied his clip into the ground.
——
The bullets bloomed.
Each round birthed a fractal reality:
-
A jungle where Viet Cong fought dinosaurs.
-
A cyberpunk Tokyo drowning in Nazi propaganda.
-
Their own corpses floating near Saturn’s rings.
The skull laughed in ultraviolet.
Elena grabbed Lucas’s face, her nails drawing blood. “The Vognir didn’t just predict this—they designed us to cause it!”
His neural scar pulsed in time with the spreading chaos. “So?”
“So we break the fucking pattern!”
She kissed him again—harder this time, teeth drawing blood. Their combined neural feedback formed a Klein bottle paradox. The field hospital tent behind them inverted into a four-dimensional labyrinth.
Soldiers from all eras turned as one.
“Now run,” she breathed.
——
The labyrinth walls screamed.
Elena navigated by the skull’s vibrations, Lucas covering their six with time-displaced ammunition. A Union soldier’s musket ball took out a drone. A laser blast from 2147 vaporized a samurai.
“Left!” Lucas shoved her into a corridor where Roman numerals bled into binary code.
The central chamber pulsed with sickly light. Inside floated the source—a black cube harvesting anguish from every battle ever fought. Nazi scientists, TerraGenesis execs, and Vognir ghosts worked side-by-side at its terminals, their hands passing through each other.
“Endgame,” Elena whispered.
Lucas primed a grenade from the Kuiper Belt Wars. “Dance time.”
——
The explosion shattered the cube into temporal shrapnel.
Elena shielded the skull as reality folded—
—They stood in the Martian excavation site.
—Omaha Beach.
—The Nevada desert.
All at once.
The soldiers froze again, this time disintegrating into quantum ash. The skull sighed, its song fading.
Lucas picked a Roman dagger from the sand. “Did we win?”
Elena studied the artifact. New glyphs glowed on its surface:
YOU ARE THE DISEASE
AND THE CURE
AND THE DISEASE AGAIN
A Terran battleship materialized overhead.
“No,” she said. “We became interesting.”