Omni PoV
The Time Room groaned again—echoes collapsing into themselves like broken ribs in a clock.
The air inside felt like static violence, a pressure system built from screams that had nowhere to go.
The walls pulsed, not alive, not dead, but aware.
Chrono stood in the center.
Barefoot, breathless.
Blood smeared across the tips of his fingers, his knuckles raw from repeated contact with stone, bone, and something that used to be nerves.
The Patriarch paced in a slow arc, his boots tapping in irregular rhythm—
tic… tic-tic… toc
—a metronome set to a mind that didn't care for symmetry or sanity.
"Every family has its little secrets," he said, plucking a splinter of bone from his coat like lint.
"The Zions? Ours is pain."
Chrono didn't answer.
His chest rose, fell—mechanical, automatic.
But his eyes tracked the Patriarch with inhuman stillness.
The old man stopped, tilted his head like a jackal sniffing amusement.
"You think this is torture?"
His voice cracked into a laugh that smelled like whiskey and gunpowder.
"This isn't torture, boy."
"This is heritage."
He moved fast—too fast.
Chrono barely flinched as the Patriarch's hand clapped the back of his neck.
The boy's knees buckled, not from the force, but from the flash of something—time pressure—rippling through his spine.
"You were born in fallout," the Patriarch whispered, voice suddenly intimate.
"Your bones grew under radiation."
"Your marrow forged in filth and flame."
"You're not normal, and I don't need you to be."
"I need you to be ours."
Chrono blinked slowly.
His voice was sandpaper and silence.
"That's not how loyalty works."
The Patriarch grinned.
"No, but it's how conditioning does."
"Baby steps, baby killer."
He shoved Chrono forward.
"On your back."
Chrono hesitated.
"I said on your back!"
The walls seemed to flinch with the scream.
Chrono dropped down without emotion, limbs falling like blades onto the stone floor.
The Patriarch stepped beside him and slammed a weight onto his chest.
It looked like metal.
It felt like time compressed into solid gravity.
"This is how the Zion Style begins."
"The Physical Route."[1]
"It's not about getting strong."
"It's about getting real."
"You will carry time."
"You will breathe it."
"Let it choke you."
"Let it violate your balance."
"Only then will your body adapt to what's coming."
Chrono's muscles flexed, but the weight didn't budge.
The veins in his neck bloomed like a tree of pressure. His expression didn't change.
The Patriarch crouched beside him.
"You moved your eyes when time was stopped."
"Do you even realize what that means? Most people freeze like deer in a god's crosshair."
"You twitched."
"You saw."
"That means your nervous system's been whispering to time."
"And time's been whispering back."
Chrono's lip quivered.
Not from weakness.
From focus. "So what comes next?"
The Patriarch stood, walked toward a wall lined with chains and stones.
"Next? You break."
"And then you rebuild yourself."
"Zion Style's Physical Route has only one rule: Survive time and adapt it."
"The rest is decoration."
He snapped his fingers.
From the ceiling, iron limbs descended—hammers, weighted pendulums, coils designed to strike with microsecond timing.
"Accelerate yourself, and they'll break you."
"Stop time, and you'll stall out."
"Reverse time, and you better pray your organs don't liquefy."
Chrono sat up, the weight crashing beside him like a failed god.
"Why not teach this slowly?"
The Patriarch cackled.
"Slow is for sermons and surgeons."
"Not warriors."
"You think time is polite?"
"Think it waits for understanding? "
"Time is a fist, Chrono."
"You either learn how to move with it—or you get clocked."
The machines activated.
Chrono moved—barely.
A twist of the neck, a roll to the left.
The pendulum kissed air instead of bone.
The second swing caught his shoulder.
Dislocation.
Chrono grunted.
Eyes unblinking.
He didn't scream.
The Patriarch clapped once.
"Good."
"Pain is payment."
"That shoulder was bought fair and square."
"Zion Style isn't a style—it's a scar."
"Passed from flesh to flesh, master to disciple, father to bastard."
He walked over and leaned down.
"My father broke my ribs so I'd learn the rhythm of blood."
"He drowned me until I could feel my heart beat with time itself."
"I learned it because it was the only thing that made sense."
"Everything else—love, fear, ethics—that was noise."
Chrono rolled upright again.
His breath hissed like a blade sliding free.
"And now you're doing it to me."
"Exactly," the Patriarch smiled.
"That's how legacy works."
"And maybe, just maybe, one day you'll do it to someone else."
"Maybe you'll even thank me."
Chrono narrowed his eyes.
"Doubt it."
The Patriarch's smile faltered, but not from offense.
From something darker—satisfaction.
"That's what I like about you, boy," he said, standing up straight.
"You're a shark without water."
"You've got no faith, no love, no anchor."
"But you adapt."
"That's all survival ever was—adaptation with a memory."
Another set of weights descended.
Chains snapped taut.
The ceiling creaked like it remembered executions.
Chrono stepped under the machine.
The Patriarch raised an eyebrow.
"Volunteering for more?"
Chrono spoke with a stillness that shouldn't belong to a Twelve-year-old.
"You said the body has to touch time."
"So let's see if it remembers me."
The Patriarch's face shifted—for just a second.
The psychotic clarity behind his eyes didn't fade, but something quieter bloomed beneath it.
Not warmth.
But a seed of respect.
Love?
And then the machines slammed into motion again, as time watched from behind the walls, amused.
"But you will."
"Oh, you fucking will."
Then he stood, voice booming:
"Session's over."
"Heal."
"Eat."
"Then we start again."
Chrono staggered to his feet, every muscle screaming.
But his eyes were clear.
He wasn't broken.
He was becoming Zion.
[1] Core Principle:
"The body must endure what the mind cannot yet comprehend."