Chapter 5: Closing Time

Chapter 5: Closing Time

The vault door hissed open, not with the mechanical grind of steel, but with the sound of a sighing breath. The oppressive humming from the corridor intensified a hundredfold, washing over us in a physical wave of power. The air grew thick, tasting of ozone and old dust, and the tiny hairs on my arms stood on end, buzzing with static electricity.

We stepped through the doorway and into the heart of the machine.

It wasn't a basement; it was a cathedral of temporal insanity. The room was a vast, cylindrical chamber. In the center, a colossal arrangement of brass rings, spinning gyroscopes, and arcing tesla coils pulsed with a blinding violet light. It was the temporal engine, and it looked like a god’s own pocket watch had been smashed open and left to run wild. Streams of raw chronological energy, visible as shimmering, heat-haze ribbons, lashed out from the core, striking the walls and leaving behind flickering after-images of other times and places: a primeval jungle, a futuristic chrome cityscape, a field of silent, watching scarecrows. The very laws of physics were frayed at the edges here.

Standing before the chaotic engine, his back to us, was a man. He wore a simple, impeccably clean lab coat and was calmly adjusting a dial on a control console. He didn't seem to notice the reality-shattering cataclysm unfolding around him.

“Remarkable, isn’t it?” he said, his voice calm and academic, cutting through the din without any effort. He turned, and I was struck by how utterly ordinary he looked. He was middle-aged, with thinning hair, spectacles, and the weary expression of a man who has worked too many long nights. He held no weapon. He was just a man in a room full of impossible power. “The symphony of creation, all brought to heel by mathematics.”

“You must be the Head Warden,” I growled, raising PEACEMAKER. The silver revolver felt like a child’s toy in this place. “Closing time. You and your dust-bunnies are out of business.”

The man smiled, a thin, sad expression. “Jax Ryder. The Slayer. A relic, just like the creatures you hunt. A necessary impurity in an imperfect world.” His eyes flicked to Lyra, then settled on Elara. “And you’ve brought me the final piece. The Chronos Cube. The focusing lens. Thank you. You’ve saved me a great deal of trouble.”

“We’re here to stop you,” Elara said, her voice shaking but firm. She held the Cube defensively.

“Stop me?” The Warden chuckled softly. “My dear girl, I am not destroying the world. I am saving it. I am performing a system restore. Reverting it to its original, uncorrupted state. Before the plague of magic twisted it into this… chaotic parody.”

Lyra let out a low, guttural snarl. “You call us a plague?”

“What else would you call it?” the Warden replied, his voice taking on a harder edge. “A tide of unaccountable power that rips families apart, that preys on the weak, that turns cities into monster-infested slums.” His gaze found mine, and it was filled with a chilling, familiar pain. “I know you, of all people, understand the cost of that chaos, Jax.”

He gestured to the swirling temporal energies around us. An image flickered into existence on the wall—a quiet suburban street, bathed in the warm light of a summer afternoon. A small house with a white picket fence. A woman with dark hair was laughing as she pushed a little girl on a swing.

My breath caught in my throat. My gun hand trembled. It was my home. My wife, Sarah. My daughter, Lily.

“What is this?” I rasped, my voice raw.

“This is the world I am offering you,” the Warden said gently. “The world that was stolen. In the corrected timeline, the vampire that broke into your home was never born. The infestation never happened. They live. They are waiting for you to come home from a job selling insurance.”

For a devastating, soul-crushing moment, I saw it. I felt it. The warmth of the sun. The sound of Lily’s laughter. The phantom sensation of Sarah’s hand in mine. A life without blood and silver, without the stench of ghoul and the screams in the dark. A life where I wasn’t… this. It was a poison more potent than any I had ever faced, a beautiful lie that promised to heal every scar I had.

“He’s showing you a ghost,” Elara said, her voice pulling me back from the brink. “A possibility that can only be bought with the genocide of millions.”

I blinked, and the image vanished. The engine room, with its violent energy and cold steel, slammed back into focus. My heart was a block of ice in my chest. The offer wasn’t a gift. It was a temptation, the cruelest one imaginable, designed to break me.

“My world,” I said, the words tasting like ash, “died with them.” I steadied my aim, my finger tightening on the trigger. “And I’ll be damned if I let you erase this one to pay for your own regrets.”

The Warden’s sad smile returned. “I thought you might say that. A shame.”

Lyra roared and charged, a silver-and-black blur of motion. She crossed twenty feet in the blink of an eye, her claws extended to tear him apart.

She didn’t make it.

She slowed, her movements becoming thick and sluggish, as if she were running through molasses. The Warden hadn't moved a muscle. He’d simply… stretched the time around her. She was caught in a bubble of slow-motion, her furious snarl frozen on her face.

“Crude,” he murmured.

I fired. The muzzle flash was blinding. The silver-etched bullet screamed across the room. Halfway to its target, it stopped dead in the air, hanging suspended a foot in front of the Warden’s chest. He plucked it out of the air as if it were a floating piece of lint.

“You see?” he said, examining the bullet. “Your actions are just events on a timeline. And I am the editor.”

He flicked his wrist. My own bullet shot back at me. I threw myself to the side, the round searing past my ear and embedding itself in the wall behind me. At the same time, Lyra was abruptly released from her temporal prison, her own momentum sending her tumbling forward. The Warden simply sidestepped her, raising a hand. The leather on Lyra’s shoulder aged a century in a second, cracking and crumbling to dust, the flesh beneath blistering. She howled in pain and surprise, stumbling back.

He was untouchable. He could stop us, slow us, reverse us. We couldn’t fight a man who controlled the very battlefield of causality.

“It’s the engine!” Elara shouted over the roar. “It’s projecting a field around him! But the Cube… it exists outside of linear time! It can anchor us!”

The Warden’s eyes narrowed. “Clever girl.”

He waved his hand, and a half-dozen shimmering, translucent copies of himself flickered into existence, all moving at once, their temporal echoes attacking from the past and future.

But Elara was ready. She thrust the Chronos Cube forward. It didn't emit light or energy. Instead, it drank it in. The chaotic hum of the room seemed to center on the black obsidian box in her hands. A bubble of stable reality, no bigger than twenty feet across, solidified around us. Within this space, the Warden’s temporal clones flickered and died. The air felt normal again. Solid.

“Now!” she screamed, sweat beading on her forehead. The strain was immense; I could see the runes on her skin glowing so brightly they looked like they were burning her.

The Warden, caught within our bubble of stable time, looked surprised for the first time. His ace was gone. He was just a man in a lab coat again.

Lyra, ignoring the pain in her shoulder, lunged. She was the distraction, a force of nature meant to keep him occupied. She slammed into him, and they went down in a tangle of limbs, her claws and fangs against his desperate, frantic defense.

It was the opening I needed. He was anchored. He was real. He was vulnerable.

I raised PEACEMAKER. The silver sights aligned on the center of the struggling forms. It was a difficult shot, but it was the only one.

“For them,” I whispered. For Sarah. For Lily. For the broken, ugly, beautiful world they had left me in.

I fired.

The bullet struck the Warden in the chest. His eyes went wide with shock. His control over the engine vanished. Lyra scrambled away as the entire room went haywire.

The violet light from the engine core turned a furious, blood red. Alarms blared, a sound no one had ever been meant to hear. The temporal ribbons lashing out from the core became a chaotic storm, tearing chunks of reality from the walls. The engine wasn't just running wild anymore. It was coming apart.

The dying Warden looked at the overloading machine, and then at me. A final, terrifying smile touched his lips.

“You’ve chosen chaos,” he choked out, blood on his lips. “Now… you can drown in it.”

His body dissolved, not into dust, but into a cascade of pure chronological energy that was sucked back into the heart of the collapsing engine. The central core flared, and a wave of raw, unmaking power erupted outwards, promising to wipe not just us, but the entire city, from the timeline. We hadn't just won the battle; we’d just triggered the apocalypse.