Velocity [Season II]

Chapter 88 - The Great Speedster War Part 9: Absolute Zero

Future Romaine's POV

This guy is seriously getting on my nerves. No matter what we do he just keeps coming back. And whenever he does he finds the most gruesome way to kill everyone.

I'm out of options at this point. I used up all my time energy to do the Time Flicker, and it's not like I have much of an edge without it. But as I promised, I can't give up.

"Ai ai ai." I sighed, "There's no end to you is there?"

Scanning his body up and down, his suit was tattered and he had sustained many injuries from my Time Flicker Attack. But I still can't figure it out, why do only my attacks damage him?

"I finally figured it out." I said to him, causally walking towards the left, "It's not that you never wanted to kill me over these past years, it's that you couldn't; no matter how hard you try, you can't escape your fate. So no matter what we do here, I'm fated to beat you in the end. Whether you like it or not, you'll never be able to kill me."

Though I partially believed the random words spewing out of my mouth, it was all just to buy time for myself.

By the time he caught on I'd already recovered enough energy for a quick Timestop; he dived towards me, trying to sever me with his claws, and I quickly engaged my Timestop, summoning my Lightning Staff and parrying his attack.

My Timestop then immediately wore off, once again forcing me into hand to hand combat. 

I rubbed my palms together to charge energy then slammed them onto the ground. The lightning channeled through the ground caused it to crack apart as it traveled towards Zero. Vanta Black Zero charged himself with more energy, engaging his Lightning Cloak again. 

He ran towards me and started to bombard me with another slue of attacks. Without my Timestop I wouldn't be able to keep up with this dude now. No matter how hard I tried to negate his attacks, he'd just keep coming.

When I was finally able to use Timestop, Vanta Zero simply increased his speed, essentially rendering its effects useless.

I summoned a bolt of lighting to my hand, wielding it as a staff again, and imbued the staff with my available time energy. The fight began growing dull as all I was able to do was block his attacks. Before long Vanta Black Zero broke through my defense, now continuing his onslaught on my body.

I used Time Flicker just to try getting away from him, but he caught on to how it worked pretty quickly; seeing as he was able to attack me at millisecond precision.

"Is this all you have left to offer Romaine?" he mocked, walking over to me as I lied helplessly on the floor, "Disgraceful."

"Zero.." I called, coughing up blood

He infused his leg with lightning and kicked me over. 

"Don't you dare utter my name mortal!" he belted

"Do you know why none of us call you by your real name anymore, even though more than half of us here knew it?"

"Because your worthless human selves can't let go of the past; if you still considered me as one of you then it would be much easier to slaughter all of you."

"No. It's because you can no longer be considered human. None of us will ever forgive you for everything you've done, but we can't recognize you as the person we all knew long ago; now you're just a power-hungry demon running around killing everyone in your path. We don't consider your name sacred, you just no longer have the right to be called by it."

Slowly rising to my feet, I witnessed the deaths of all my friends and family flashing through my mind.

"You killed everyone...every last person...if I had a connection to them you'd kill them. Why not just kill me?"

"To watch you suffer. And squirm around in despair like a helpless insect on its back."

"No..that's not it. I was already at that point years ago. You could've taken my life back then. Instead you let me live; I went on to meet new people, then you killed them all over again."

"Is it really that hard for your brain to conceive that I live for nothing else other than to watch you suffer? My hatred for you, goes beyond normal comprehension, and will last for generations."

Zero knocked me back, initiating another brawl. We kept going back and forth with me still not able to deal any actual damage. 

Eventually I ended up barely being able to stay on my feet. I reached the point where my muscles were too worn out for me to even move them. Vanta Black Zero took notice of my dilemma and charged towards me with two huge lightning bolts charged in his hands. Though he did so in a flash, before he got close I was able to trigger Hyper Perception.

-Mental Process-

How in the hell am I gonna solve this? It's like no matter what I do he gets even faster and adapts to it. I infinitely reduced his speed and he countered it by making his speed an indefinite value. I fluctuated his speed variable to definite values and he countered by increasing his speed itself to reduce the amount of times I can fluctuate it per second. And to further counter both of them, he instead rendered his actual speed as a constant and used the ever increasing undefined variable. 

So if his base speed is 10, the power boost is 'e'. And what he's doing is multiplying 10 by 'e' while also increasing e's value. It'd look something like this: 10 x (e). And because he's increasing it then it'd change to 10 x (e + 1), then 10 x (e + 2), and so on. None of my new moves can affect him now. 

I'm running out of time, and there's no other possible variable I could use to reduce his value. Unless...

-End of Mental Process-

My mind was completely empty, allowing my subconscious to take over for me.

I merely raised one hand towards Zero and emitted all possible energy I could muster. 

"Absolute Zero." I muttered

A wave of dark-ish blue energy shot out from my hand and hit  Zero; once it made contact with him, Vanta Black Zero came to a halt, completely frozen in time.

My face portrayed a slight smile of relief, knowing that it was finally over. And immediately after that, my vision went black, followed by all my muscles failing and me losing consciousness.