Timeless Assassin - Chapter 1018 No Home To Return To
Chapter 1018 No Home To Return To
(Meanwhile, Planet V-Star, Leo’s POV)
*FWOOSH*
The Fourth Dimension folded back into stillness as Leo stepped out of the Dimensional Portal and back into the quiet clearing before the hut, his aura settling unevenly around him as the strain of another fruitless session lingered in his nerves.
The projection of the Timeless Assassin stood waiting exactly where he always did, hands clasped behind his back as though not a single second had passed.
“No progress,” Leo said, as he met the projection’s eyes without pretense, the frustration in his tone restrained but unmistakable. “I still can’t feel the slope of it. It’s like I’m staring at a wall and pretending it’s a horizon.”
The projection nodded slowly, neither disappointed nor surprised. “It is not easy to sense the gradient of time,” he said, as he studied Leo with calm detachment. “What you are attempting to grasp is not movement, but deviation. Not speed, but distortion. Progress will come one day or another.”
Leo let out a short breath that was not quite a laugh.
“Yeah,” he said, as he scratched the back of his head and tilted it slightly to one side. “But that day would come a lot sooner if you let me train more than one hour a day.”
The projection’s expression did not change, though there was the faintest narrowing of his eyes.
“Childish Impatience!” he said, as he folded his arms across his chest.
“Do you really believe repetition alone will force comprehension?”
He asked, as Leo snorted in response.
“It’s worked for me up till now….”
“It worked when I was learning dagger skills.
It worked for mana control.
It worked for every other skill I’ve ever learned.
So yeah. I think it will work….”
He said, as the projection shook his head once.
“Time is not a blade to be swung until it obeys you,” he said, as his voice remained steady and unyielding.
“If you drown your mind in it for too long, you will only distort your perception further.
So remember, cultivating patience is also a form of training.”
He advised, as Leo clicked his tongue softly.
“Great,” he said, as he ran a hand through his hair. “So now I’m training by not training. And you’re back to your default settings where your words make no fucking sense to me.”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever….” the projection replied, as he turned slightly toward the hut, signaling the end of the session without ceremony. “Complain all you want.
But I’m not changing my mind….
I’ll see you again tomorrow…”
He said, as Leo stared at his back for a moment, knowing better than to argue further, as despite his frustration he understood that the old assassin had never once misled him in matters of cultivation.
“Fine,” Leo muttered, as he straightened and let his aura settle
completely. “Same time tomorrow?”
“Same time tomorrow,” the projection said, as his form began to fade subtly at the edges. “Return only when your mind is clear.”
Leo gave a small nod before turning away, unaware that far from this quiet planet, he no longer had a home to return to.
(A few minutes later, the space that used to be Ixtal)
After his regular training session, Leo returned to the location he thought was Ixtal via the Fourth Dimension, as upon re-emergence, the scenery that unfolded before him was unlike anything that he could have ever expected in his wildest dreams.
For a moment, he genuinely wondered if he had made a mistake while travelling through the fourth dimension?
Whether he had miscalculated the trajectory of his tunnel and
teleported to a random part of the universe?
However, the amount of rocks and debris floating around him painted
a different picture.
“Huh?”
He muttered in disbelief, as the words felt foreign even to his own
ears.
All around him, instead of the blue and green sphere that had once floated proudly in this stretch of space, there was only ruin…. an expanding halo of shattered continental fragments, drifting magma clots, and pulverized stone reflecting distant starlight in dull, dying embers.
For a few heartbeats, his mind refused to process what his eyes were
seeing.
This wasn’t Ixtal.
It couldn’t be.
He turned slowly in place, as if expecting the planet to reappear behind him, as though this were some elaborate illusion or spatial mirage created by a distortion in the Fourth Dimension.
“I must have misaligned the exit vector…,” he murmured, as he closed one eye and extended his perception outward, scanning for familiar
mana signatures.
However, much to his shock, there were none.
No planetary mana core.
No defensive arrays.
No atmospheric pulse.
Only debris.
Cold.
Silent.
His breathing shallowed as fragments of what had once been
mountains drifted past him like broken teeth, as a slab of crust the size of a city rotated slowly through the void, still glowing faintly along one edge where molten rock bled into space.
“No…”
The word left him before he consciously chose to say it.
His heart began to pound violently against his ribs as disbelief gave way to something far darker, as his mind raced to construct alternative explanations – a planetary displacement spell, an illusion array, a dimensional overlay – anything but the obvious.
Then he felt it.
A faint, fading residue of divine essence lingering in the vacuum.
Kaelith.
The realization did not arrive all at once.
It seeped into him like poison.
His aura flickered erratically as the vacuum around him trembled in
response to the surge of unstable emotion, as his perception fractured between denial and understanding.
“This… isn’t real,” he whispered, as he reached out instinctively toward where the planetary core should have been, grasping at empty
space.
The silence of the void pressed in on him.
No heartbeat of a world.
No distant hum of civilization.
No laughter of his children.
Only absence.
As for the first time in a long while, Leo felt something inside him
begin to crack, as reality itself seemed unreliable, as the universe no longer obeyed the rules he had believed in, and as the quiet certainty that he had left home for just one hour…. just one hour…. began to spiral into a suffocating question.
“Did this really happen because I went away for one hour?” He wondered, as Amanda’s words from a couple days ago started to ring heavy in his mind.
