A cold, metallic wind swept through the ruins of Devyasthana as the Veil-Walker shrieked and recoiled, sapphire flames crackling from the breach. Yakshini pressed her attack, her bone sceptre weaving a lattice of blood-red energy that scorched the air and sundered the ground beneath Roohi and Rudra. All around, chaos reigned—wishwolves lunged and howled, mystics hurled mantras and sigils, corrupted raged in inhuman growls beneath the iron-gray sky.
Rudra braced himself—and then time snapped.
The world shuddered, like a mirror struck by a hammer. All sound became a distant ringing. The battle rippled, slowed, distended. Even the Veil-Walker's thousand eyes flickered as though trapped in stuttering frames. The light bent, colors fracturing into impossible combinations, and the air turned sharp as the edge of a blade.
From the breach, a new figure emerged—not veiled in shadow, not blazing in starlight, but something colder, older—a man garbed in armor that shimmered between centuries. He strode forward, unmoved by the storm, stepping through swirling fragments of history itself: Mughal banners, futuristic cityscapes, ancient forests, all glimpsed and discarded in a single stride.
His face was sharp, ageless—a cruel beauty marred only by empty eyes. A clockwork device clicked and spun at his hip; in one gauntlet, he clutched a staff forged from fractured timelines.
The world groaned as his boots struck the ground. He smiled at Rudra, coldly, hungrily. "So. This is where the fable finally breaks."
Yakshini faltered, her power sputtering, uncertain for the first time. "Who are you? This is my conquest—my divine prey!"
The newcomer's gaze turned on her, hollow with disdain. "You are nothing but a footnote. I am Kaaldev, Master of the Chronoverse—Breaker of Cycles."
He snapped his fingers. Time reversed: Yakshini's spell unwound, stones flew back to their moorings, wounds sealed, and for an instant, the dead all gasped with new breath.
Rudra's mind spun. "He's warping the timeline. He's…unmaking our cause and effect."
Roohi clung to him. "We have to stop him. If he controls the breach, every world is at risk."
Kaaldev looked through them both, then swept his staff in a wide arc. The battlefield twisted—armies multiplied, fractured, doubled. Rudra saw a hundred possible Buntys across time: a warlord from the Maratha Empire, a cybernetic insurgent, a broken philosopher. The multiverse bled into one moment, and none.
"Why bother defending this tired world, Rudra Chakravarti?" Kaaldev's voice vibrated with eternal scorn. "You are the last hope of a failed cycle. Come with me. Relinquish your burdens. Travel the chronostream. In infinity, you are nothing."
Bunty, in this time and all times, roared and charged. Kaaldev flicked his staff. All versions of Bunty scattered, caught in different moments—a thousand lives, a thousand deaths, all happening at once.
Jessica, bounding from the air with blue runes burning, hurled herself at Kaaldev. Her sigils froze—midair, midspell. Kaaldev sidestepped without moving, and she fell, aged decades in her fall, then reversed in an instant to a child, screaming in confusion.
MG and Roohi joined hands, forming a psychic bulwark. "You can't have him!" Roohi spat, her voice shattering with the force of her will.
Kaaldev considered her, almost regretful. "You are already lost, Roohi Chaturvedi. In a billion timelines, this was always your fate."
He snapped his staff—and the psychic wall unraveled, showing Rudra every possible Roohi: victors, martyrs, betrayers, and none.
Rudra fought for breath. The pendant at his neck flared and dimmed. He could feel the breach pulling him, fate itself unspooling. His mother's voice was a whisper, barely audible over the storm of all histories.
*You are not the sum of your timelines, Rudra. You are choice. You are now.*
Kaaldev advanced, his staff spinning with the weight of infinite ages. "You have no future, boy. Only rewinds. Only ruin."
The Veil-Walker shrieked, sensing competition for the raw stuff of reality. Out of the breach, more horrors began to pour—clockwork manticores, time-warped rakshasas, phantoms stripped from erased realities.
With Roohi clutching his hand, Rudra lifted the pendant and screamed into the chaos, "I will not yield. I am every version of myself—and I choose to fight!"
His power answered. Light blazed—blue and gold and every color in between. The rift howled. Kaaldev's staff clashed with Rudra's will, and time convulsed, shattering the battlefield into a thousand, thousand shards.
He glimpsed it all: past and future, love and war, victory and failure—the lives he might have had, the choices he had yet to make. And in the burning heart of possibility, Rudra faced Kaaldev, the armies of multiverse at their backs, and the final war began.
Steel rang on chronosteel. Spells collided in fractal blooms. Friends and enemies flickered, merged, died and rose again. The multiverse screamed and remade itself around their struggle.
And in the center, Rudra saw—a single thread, shining pure amidst the chaos. He seized it, and reality bent, the next moment poised, trembling, between hope and annihilation.