A Battle Against Time Itself

"You cannot outrun time. But if you are clever enough, you can make time trip over itself."

Viraj ran.

Behind him, the Forgotten Gatekeeper unleashed another distortion wave, tearing apart the ground with pure paradox energy. Reality itself buckled, rewriting and collapsing in an endless loop.

Lucius barely avoided being swallowed by a rift that had never existed a second ago.

“This is insane!” Lucius shouted. “We’re fighting a damn time ghost!”

Viraj didn’t respond. He was too busy thinking. The Gatekeeper wasn’t an enemy they could fight normally. It didn’t have a fixed form. It wasn’t bound by the laws of physics, or even by the flow of time itself.

But that didn’t mean it was unstoppable.

The alternate Viraj smirked. “You’re overthinking it.”

“I tend to do that when I’m about to be erased from existence,” Viraj shot back.

The alternate version just shrugged. “It’s simple. The Gatekeeper is a paradox, right?”

Viraj’s eyes narrowed. He already knew where this was going. “So, we have to create a paradox strong enough to—”

“Cancel it out.”

Viraj grinned. “You really are me.”

Lucius groaned. “Okay, love the time-nerd moment, but could someone explain how we actually do that before we die?”

The Forgotten Gatekeeper was shifting again. It flickered between different forms, searching for the most efficient way to erase them.

Viraj didn’t wait for it to find one.

Instead, he did the one thing that made no sense.

He stopped running.

Lucius and his alternate self barely had time to react before Viraj stepped forward—toward the Gatekeeper.

The creature hesitated.

Viraj held up a hand. “You said we’re not supposed to be here, right?” he called out. “That we don’t belong?”

The Gatekeeper didn’t speak. But the air itself trembled at its presence.

Viraj took another step. “Then here’s a question for you: What happens when something that shouldn’t exist… refuses to disappear?”

And then—he reached into his pocket.

Lucius’s eyes widened. “Wait. Is that—?”

Viraj grinned. It was.

A paradox object.

A chronal fragment from a timeline that had been erased but still existed. Something that should not be real—and yet, he was holding it in his hand.

A sliver of a world that had been undone, yet persisted.

The Forgotten Gatekeeper froze.

For the first time, it hesitated.

Viraj’s fingers tightened around the fragment.

“Checkmate.”

And then—he crushed it.

The effect was instant.

Time itself screamed.

A paradox within a paradox. The Gatekeeper had been created to eliminate contradictions. But now—it was one.

The creature convulsed. Its form flickered uncontrollably, its shape breaking apart into fragments of infinite timelines, all crashing into each other.

Lucius barely had time to yell, “WHAT DID YOU DO?” before the entire world imploded inward.

Viraj grabbed both of them and ran.

The Gatekeeper was collapsing.

Not dying—unraveling.

The ground beneath them fractured. The temple in the distance flickered.

And then—the Path to Nowhere exploded into blinding white light.

The last thing Viraj saw before everything vanished was the Gatekeeper, reaching out—not in anger, but in understanding.

Then it was gone.

And so were they.

"Not all victories are won in battle. Some victories are won by forcing the universe to admit it was wrong."

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