breaks time distortion

Four hands dipped into my Inventory, each grasping a Dust crystal that was quickly devoured and I instantly poured every ounce of that power into going faster. Time sped up with a rush of sensation that played across my skin, a moment of heat and cold, unusual solidity and emptiness. The air around me shifted as I rolled a step forward, even that simple motion bringing with it surprising friction as the air beyond my warped time moved far more slowly than that within it. Yet I didn’t stop there, but dipped my hands back into my Inventory and devoured another set of crystals, speed rising higher and higher with each moment and causing greater and greater changes. The flow of heat, the light around me, everything—it seemed strained by the barrier of altered time I held around myself.

Then I crouched slightly, feeling at once fast and slow. Muscles pulled in my back, my thighs, fighting against the walls that the very air seemed to have become, seeming more solid than gas. If they were walls, though, they may as well have been paper, for they fell as I pushed against them and fought my way forward with all my power. I pushed against the ground as I Lunged forth and—

The ground beneath my feet shattered. The air I passed through ignited around me, catching fire as it touched my skin, but I left the flames behind me even as each step created them anew. I way have said something, snarled words or whatever else, but if so, I outpaced the sounds by far. I drew close to the edge of the sphere of stopped time as the space beyond it slowed to a more normal speed—and then I broke through in a moment of cataclysmic weirdness. For that instant, I was moving through time at a faster rate than the world around me, but I was also halfway through a bubble that was moving slower than the world around it. I felt that strain upon my body as blood quickened and slowed, as nerves went haywire, as my brain and then heart seemed split in two. I felt myself tearing apart, but more than that, I felt the world around me shredding.

Temporal distortion met temporal distortion and tried to tear me apart to resolve the issue, but I refused. When it couldn’t do that, I felt the barrier around me cracking, the larger bubble bursting as if pierced by a needle, trying to equalize the impossibility instead—but I couldn’t allow that, either. Four hands dipped into my Inventory once more, swallowed four crystals, then eight, then sixteen, drinking deeply from my dwindling horde to try to reinforce the barrier, to give me the Acceleration I needed to rip through a wall of distorted time.

Maybe it the Elemental Resistance or some aspect of my new Wisdom abilities. Maybe it was the way Acceleration worked, speeding up time in my immediate vicinity. Maybe it was just the thousands and thousands of MP I spent in that single second, poured down the cosmic drain with a quick prayer to try and break the rules. I don’t know.

What I do know was that when my power clashed with Conquest’s, I was the one who one. I paused for an indescribable moment as our altered time streams crossed, an instant where time may not have even had meaning, and then I continued through. The bubble popped but the barrier held and I kept going.