Primordial Awakening: I Breathe Skill Points!-Chapter 28: Temporal Fracture.

Chapter 28: Temporal Fracture.
Zeph’s hand moved faster than the summoner expected—AGI 91 versus whatever diminished speed the wounded man retained. His fingers closed around the blade six inches from his chest.
The crystalline edge cut into his palm, drawing blood.
[ADAPTIVE RESILIENCE ACTIVATED]
[Damage Type: Crystalline Pierce + Soul Erosion]
[Resistance: 0% → 20%]
Pain flared, but somehow manageable. His VIT 161 kept the wound shallow.
The summoner’s compound eyes widened. "How—"
Zeph yanked the blade forward, pulling the gaunt man off-balance, and drove his knee into the summoner’s solar plexus with STR 101 behind it.
Bang!
The impact folded the man in half. Ribs cracked audibly. He stumbled backward, the blade dissolving as his concentration shattered.
The chitinous summoner unleashed his swarm—thousands of black beetles flooding across the floor in a living tide.
They swarmed up Zeph’s legs, mandibles tearing at his pants and skin.
[ADAPTIVE RESILIENCE ACTIVATED]
[Damage Type: Chitin Bite + Acid]
[Resistance: 0% → 20%]
The bites hurt less than they should have. His enhanced Vitality absorbed most of the damage, and the resistance made the acid feel like mild irritation rather than tissue-melting agony.
’Two damage types. Two separate resistance tracks. Five hits each to immunity.’
Zeph activated Force.
The D-rank skill surged through his enhanced body, doubling stats that were already formidable.
```
[FORCE ACTIVATED - D-RANK]
[DOUBLE ALL STATS FOR DURATION]
Strength: 202
Agility: 182
Vitality: 322
```
The world slowed to a crawl. His enhanced perception, backed by AGI 182, turned the summoners’ movements into something he could read and predict with perfect clarity.
More beetles climbed his legs. More bites registered.
[Resistance: 20% → 40%]
The pain diminished further. Halfway to immunity already!
Zeph’s hand closed around the goblin chieftain’s massive axe strapped to his back. The weapon that had felt heavy and awkward in his baseline state now felt perfectly balanced in his Force-enhanced grip.
He looked at the two summoners—wounded, desperate, but still dangerous B-rank awakened with decades of combat experience between them.
Then he looked at his own stats. STR 202. AGI 182. VIT 322.
Combined with Adaptive Resilience making him progressively immune to their attacks.
Combined with Temporal Fracture waiting as his ace in the hole.
Combined with The Inevitable title guaranteeing he’d survive at least one fatal blow.
Zeph’s lips curved into a cold, predatory smile.
The gaunt summoner saw that smile and felt something he hadn’t experienced in years.
Fear.
"You made a mistake," Zeph said quietly, his voice carrying the absolute certainty of someone who’d just calculated every possible outcome and found them all ending the same way.
"What mistake?" the chitinous summoner demanded, his swarm reforming into defensive patterns.
Zeph’s smile widened fractionally. "You stayed to fight."
Then he moved.
Bang!
The floor beneath his feet exploded from the force of his acceleration. Stone cratered as AGI 182 launched him forward faster than the summoners could track.
The axe came around in a devastating arc backed by STR 202.
The gaunt summoner tried to dissolve into his insect swarm.
Too slow.
Bam!
The blade caught him mid-transformation, shearing through crystallized bug matter and flesh with equal ease. Blood and blue ichor sprayed across the chamber in a wide arc.
The chitinous summoner’s beetles surged forward in a desperate counterattack, swarming Zeph’s entire body in a living cocoon of chitin and acid.
[Resistance: 40% → 60%]
[Resistance: 60% → 80%]
[Resistance: 80% → 100%]
The pain stopped entirely. The acid that should have been eating through his skin simply... didn’t. The bites that should have torn flesh couldn’t penetrate.
Complete immunity!
Zeph tore through the beetle swarm like a force of nature, his enhanced strength letting him move despite thousands of insects trying to restrain him.
His fist found the chitinous summoner’s face.
The impact created a shockwave that scattered beetles in a thirty-foot radius.
The man’s head snapped back with a wet crunch. He collapsed, his control over the swarm breaking as consciousness fled.
The gaunt summoner, half-dissolved and bleeding from a dozen wounds, stared at Zeph with genuine terror in his compound eyes.
"Monster," he whispered.
Zeph looked down at him, expression calm and utterly merciless.
"No," he said quietly. "Just someone who refuses to die."
His axe rose for the finishing blow—
Heat flooded the chamber. The temperature spiked twenty degrees in an instant.
Marcus had intervened!
The S-rank awakened stood at the chamber’s entrance, his Inferno Sovereign Physique radiating power that made the air shimmer and dance. His scarred face showed neither anger nor approval—just intense, calculating interest.
"That’s enough, anomaly," Marcus said, his voice carrying absolute authority. "We need to talk."
Zeph met the S-rank’s gaze, his Force-enhanced body still thrumming with power, the storage ring visible in his peripheral vision where it had fallen during the chaos.
Thirty seconds of Force remaining. Two wounded but not dead summoners. One S-rank who apparently might or might not be hostile. And a ring containing who knows what sitting between them all.
The variables shifted again.
The calculation continued.
And Zeph’s mind raced to find the solution that let him survive the next sixty seconds.
Marcus stood at the chamber’s entrance, heat radiating from his body in visible waves. His expression was calm, almost conversational, as if he hadn’t just tracked a regional extinction event through half the Seattle ruins.
"That’s enough, anomaly," he said, his voice carrying the kind of authority that expected obedience. "We need to talk."
Zeph met the S-rank’s gaze for exactly half a second.
Then he activated Temporal Fracture.
Hum!
The world stopped.
Not slowed—stopped. Completely, utterly, absolutely frozen in a single moment of crystallized time.
Marcus’s mouth was half-open mid-word, his hand raised in a gesture that might have been peaceful or might have been the beginning of an attack. The heat emanating from his Inferno Sovereign Physique hung in the air like a visible shimmer, motionless.
The gaunt summoner was collapsed on the floor, compound eyes wide with terror, half-dissolved into his insect swarm. Frozen mid-transformation.
The chitinous summoner lay unconscious, beetles scattered around him in perfect stillness, each one caught mid-crawl or mid-flight like insects trapped in amber.
Even the dust particles floating in the air had ceased their endless dance.
Three seconds. That’s all the skill gave him. Three seconds moving at half his normal speed in a world where time didn’t exist.
Zeph didn’t waste a single moment on hesitation.
His body moved through the frozen tableau like a ghost walking through a photograph. AGI 182 cut in half was still AGI 91—more than enough to cross the distance to the gaunt summoner in the time-stopped world.
The goblin chieftain’s axe rose, the massive blade moving through air that felt like water, offering resistance but not enough to matter.
One second elapsed.
The axe came down on the gaunt summoner’s exposed neck. In the frozen moment, Zeph could see every detail with perfect clarity—the compound eyes that couldn’t blink, the mouth locked in a scream that couldn’t form, the half-crystallized insects that made up his partially transformed body.
The blade touched flesh.
Time remained frozen, but the cut began anyway—Temporal Fracture didn’t stop cause and effect, just delayed the resolution. The axe bit deep, sinking through skin and muscle and bone with the full force of STR 202 behind it.
Two seconds elapsed.
Zeph pulled the blade free and turned toward the chitinous summoner. His enhanced perception showed him the exact angle, the perfect strike, the killing blow that would end this threat permanently.
The axe swung again, faster this time because he knew exactly where to aim.
The blade found the unconscious man’s throat, cutting deep.
Two and a half seconds elapsed.
Zeph stepped back, his movements still sluggish in the time-stopped world, and positioned himself facing one of the tunnel exits—the one that led deeper into the Underground Bazaar’s maze rather than back toward the surface where more hunters might be waiting.
Three seconds.
Hum!
Temporal Fracture ended!
Time snapped back into motion like a rubber band released at full tension.
The gaunt summoner’s scream, frozen mid-formation, finally escaped his throat—but only for a fraction of a second before it turned into a wet gurgle.
His head separated from his shoulders, tumbling through the dissolving cloud of blue crystalline insects that had made up his body. The swarm lost cohesion immediately, thousands of insects falling to the floor as lifeless husks without their master’s will to sustain them.
The chitinous summoner never even woke up. His throat opened in a spray of blood and black ichor, beetles pouring from the wound in a final, futile attempt at regeneration that failed without conscious direction.
Both bodies hit the floor simultaneously.
[LEVEL 49 AWAKENED DEFEATED]
[+5,500 EXP]
[LEVEL 47 AWAKENED DEFEATED]
[+5,200 EXP]
[LEVEL UP!] x5
[LEVEL 25 → LEVEL 35!]
[+50 ATTRIBUTE POINTS AVAILABLE]
The notifications blazed across Zeph’s vision even as Marcus’s expression shifted from calm authority to genuine shock.
"What—"
Marcus didn’t get to finish the sentence.
Zeph was already moving, his mind processing the new attribute points with the cold efficiency of someone who’d spent three years making split-second survival decisions.
AGI was his escape stat. Nothing else mattered right now.
All fifty points dumped into Agility!
[AGILITY: 70 → 120]
[WITH SOLE SURVIVOR BONUS: 120 → 156]
[WITH FORCE ACTIVE: 156 → 312]
The enhancement was instantaneous. His already superhuman speed became something else entirely—a velocity that turned his body into a blur even to his own enhanced perception.
Zeph activated Phantom Step.
Swoosh!
The technique, still only E-rank but backed by his absurd Agility, carried him ten feet forward in a displacement that left afterimages trailing behind him.
Bang!
He hit the tunnel entrance at speeds that would have liquefied a baseline human.
Marcus’s hand shot out, fire erupting from his palm in a lance of heat that could have melted steel.
Too slow.
Zeph was already past the threshold, already around the corner, already disappearing into the labyrinthine tunnel system that made up the Underground Bazaar’s lower levels.
Behind him, Marcus’s voice echoed through the stone corridors, surprisingly mild despite the circumstances:
"Impressive. But you can’t run forever, anomaly."
Zeph didn’t respond. Didn’t slow. Didn’t look back.
His enhanced hearing tracked Marcus’s position—the S-rank was following, but not at full speed. Almost casually, as if he knew something Zeph didn’t.
The thought sent ice through Zeph’s veins, but he pushed it aside. Analysis could come later. Right now, survival meant distance.
He wasn’t interested in waiting to hear what the S-Rank had to say. Not when he could vaporize him without him even knowing!