Chapter 9 - Lost in Time

Universe: ???

Time: ----

Location: Time Vortex

The scene opened with the Ouroboran captain standing at the bridge of his ship, staring out into the void. His crew moved with precision around him, preparing the time ripper for deployment. Aeon Prime was close—he could feel it. The war, their desperate struggle to preserve their universe, had reached its breaking point.

"All systems ready, Captain," his assistant, Yin, said, standing beside him.

"Good," the captain replied. "We make our stand here. Aeon Prime cannot be allowed to escape."

The scene flickered. The same assistant stood beside him again.

"All systems ready, Captain."

The captain blinked, confused for a moment. He had just heard that, hadn’t he? Shaking it off, he gave the same response, watching the crew move with the same mechanical precision. And then, again, the scene flickered.

"All systems ready, Captain." The exact same words. The exact same movements. This time, the captain’s breath caught in his throat. His mind raced. He tried to move, to speak differently, but his words caught in a strange loop, as if they weren’t his own.

"All systems—" the scene flickered once more, locking him in a nightmare of repetition. Everything began again. His assistant, the crew, the weapon—over and over, the same moment replayed in front of his eyes, as though time had collapsed into a single, unending instance. He was trapped, unable to break free. He tried to shout, to break through, but the loop would reset, snapping him back to the same point.

"All systems—"

Suddenly, everything froze. The sounds of the ship ceased. The movements of the crew stopped. Time stilled. The captain gasped for breath, realizing something had broken the cycle. Then the loop snapped. He stumbled forward, free from the time prison that had held him for who knows how long. His assistant, who had been trapped beside him, collapsed to the ground, breathing heavily. For the first time in ages, they were aware. They were free.

“What... what happened?” his assistant gasped, her eyes wide with disorientation. The captain steadied himself, shaking off the mental fog. He knew something had changed, something monumental. The ship, which had been caught in the loop with them, was still now, yet something lingered—an ominous connection, as if the vessel itself were alive and tied to something beyond. His eyes darted to the main console, where the once-frozen systems suddenly flared to life. But the readings weren’t what he expected. They were far worse. The captain’s heart sank as a massive energy spike appeared on the screen. Just then, someone appeared from a dark room.

“You are welcome. For helping you out with this loop of a thing” She said. She wore a hood and had a scar on her left arm. Also, her left wrists were replaced with a machined one. She had lost it probably from battle. Everyone in the ship brought out their weapons, facing it at her.

“Calm down a little” She said.

“Who are you?” The captain asked.

She made clicking sounds with her tongue. “That, right now is not important. I just saved you. You owe me a lot”

The captain signaled to his team, and they dropped down their weapons.

“I’m from Universe 21. You can call me Vera. To go straight to the point, I came because I need your help to prevent the multiversal war. To prevent the end.”

“The end? You mean the anti-matter wave?” The captain asked.

“Yes, that. Aeon prime has broken free”

The Captain’s heart paced as he heard those words. His mind drifted away, to the time of the civil war which had scattered their civilization.

The bridge had been in chaos. The Ouroborans had fractured, split into two opposing factions. The resistance believed in a singular future for their universe—one where they alone ruled, and all other realities would be destroyed. They saw the multiverse as a threat, an unstable collection of potential outcomes that had to be eradicated. But the captain's faction, the protectors of the Ouroboran ideals, sought to preserve the multiverse’s balance. They fought to stop the destruction of countless universes. The captain's ship had been at the heart of the final battle. It was inside the Epochis, which held the rest of the civilians. They were going to deploy the gravix weapon, using it to trap Aeon Prime within the singularity of a black hole. It was the only way to stop the entity from destroying everything. But the resistance had infiltrated their ranks. Just before the device could be deployed, one of their own—a high-ranking officer—had betrayed them. The gravix device was sabotaged, and the time-traveling mechanism of the ship had been blown apart, sending waves of temporal distortion rippling through the vessel. He remembered the explosion, the way time seemed to warp around him as his people were flung into different timelines. Though not intentional, the resistance officer had succeeded in scattering them across the multiverse, across various times, fragmenting their forces. In the chaos, the captain had tried to reach the console, to stabilize the ship, but before he could make it, the temporal distortion sent his ship flying across space, and into a time vortex. There, a time loop had snapped shut around him, locking him and those in his ship in a repeating moment.

He had seen the faces of his betrayers, and he had felt the surge of helplessness as his people were ripped away from him. The Ouroboran civil war, once a battle of ideals, had become a war of survival. The captain had lost, trapped in time while his people were divided, scattered across countless realities. And now, in the present, with Aeon Prime free, the war that had started long ago would continue. The Ouroborans who had survived the scattering—those who had been thrown into the farthest reaches of time—would begin to awaken. The multiversal Ouroborans, those who had once controlled time itself, were now fractured, existing in countless variations across different timelines. Some would remember who they were, while others would fight to be the last of their kind. But the captain knew one thing for certain: Aeon Prime would come for them all. And it would be up to him—and whoever else survived—to stop it.