Hunt Through Time

In the silent halls of the Temporal Null Zone, where clocks refused to tick and time itself held its breath, a lone figure danced between seconds.

Aetheryl the Chrono-Agent.Not bound by time.Not bound by loyalty.Only moved by purpose.

Her form blurred and sharpened between heartbeats strands of temporal silk floated around her like living threads of fate. She stood atop a fractured timeline, watching thousands of realities unfold and collapse in reverse, forward, and sideways.

A Temporal Key-Sigil appeared beside her etched with Zalthorion's mark.A summoning.

She didn't turn. She knew who approached.

Zalthorion appeared, not stepping through time but anchoring it around him. Even here, where the multiverse frayed and flexed, he was unshaken.

"You've come to bargain," Aetheryl said, her voice fractured and layered, as if spoken by past, present, and future selves.

"I've come to show you what's already started," Zalthorion replied, lifting a hand.

A Chrono-Thread extended from his palm a captured glimpse of Zoom/Hunter Zolomon destabilizing timelines across entire worlds, collapsing civilizations before their histories even began, always laughing, always faster than anyone could react.

Aetheryl's expression didn't change, but her temporal threads stilled. She observed the echoes.

"He is unraveling causality itself," Zalthorion said, voice low. "Even you cannot outrun entropy forever."

Wagner's voice cut in from a projection behind him. "And when he destabilizes enough anchors, you will cease to exist too, before you were ever born."

She turned to Zalthorion. "And what do you offer me in return?"

Zalthorion didn't blink. "Closure."

A pause. She tilted her head.

"I know who broke your loop," he said, stepping closer. "Who left you outside time. Help us, and I'll show you."

A silence longer than eternity.

Then a pulse of energy. Aetheryl vanished from her realm.

Location: Earth-Timelock Echo

A quarantined world caught in a perpetual rewind-loop, the perfect hunting ground for a monster like Zoom.

He was already there tearing through seconds like they were threads, destabilizing past and future in every step.

But then, the sky fractured.

Aetheryl descended like a blade.

Not running.

Not chasing.

But collapsing inevitability around him. Each of her movements sealed off a timeline leaving Zoom with fewer and fewer paths. She didn't move faster than him.

She made it so he never moved at all.

The chase began and the very nature of time screamed in terror.

The world around Zoom blurred into ribbons of color as he ran no, tore through the city, phasing through steel, glass, and stone as if they were fog. The pulse of the Speed Force echoed in his bones, erratic and strained. Something felt wrong.

Then it came.

[NEW DIRECTIVE: ELIMINATE THE CHRONO-AGENT]

The words didn't flash. They engraved themselves into his mind, like molten iron seared into synapses. Zoom faltered for half a second a lifetime at his speed, as a pressure surged within him.

He felt it.

The Speed Force.

It was… resisting.

Pulling away from him, like a parent withdrawing from a violent child. He reached instinctively for it only to feel something else, colder, more invasive, take hold.

The system.

No longer satisfied with enhancing him, it consumed.

The Speed Force screamed as it was siphoned twisted and warped to fuel the directive. Zoom's body surged forward, his lightning shifting from bright yellow to a jagged, crackling void blue laced with black fractals. Buildings weren't just phasing anymore they ceased to exist in his wake for milliseconds, time refusing to acknowledge what he'd touched.

His eyes blazed with artificial focus.

"I am time. And you… are already erased."

Zoom tore through realities. Not just cities, not just timelines foundations. The corrupted Speed Force howled through his veins, laced with the system's control, each step carving cracks into the chronology beneath his feet. Time flinched. The world bent.

And then—

She arrived.

No sonic boom. No flash of light.

Just silence. Stillness. A presence.

Aetheryl hovered in the void between seconds, wrapped in flowing strands of time-threaded cloth. Her eyes were nebulae burning slow stars that had watched empires rise and fall in the breath of a hummingbird.

She didn't chase Zoom.

She was already there.

Zoom skidded to a halt on a vertical river of frozen clockwork gears that ticked with universes inside them.

"You," he hissed, static rippling across his face like broken film. "You're not even running."

Aetheryl tilted her head. "Why run from what must be?"

He growled. "Because I can outpace it."

He launched no, erased the space between them, his hand crackling with voidlight, reality burning behind him.

And she moved.

She didn't accelerate. She unfolded across probability. Her movement was a suggestion rewritten into truth. She side-stepped him by being elsewhere in his timeline, not just his path. His punch hit the ghost of her.

Zoom stumbled. "What are you?"

"A paradox lock," she said softly, weaving strands of events between her fingers like silk. "You cannot outrun fate… when I've already tied it to your spine."

Chains of forgotten futures snapped around Zoom's limbs. For a moment, he stood in a dozen places at once dying in all of them.

But then…

The system surged.

His scream shattered the echo of Aetheryl's trap. Time splintered. A loop cracked. The corrupted Speed Force roared, stripping him of all restraint. Fractal lightning tore across the skies a dozen timelines collapsing just to keep up with his speed.

"I MAKE MY OWN FATE!" he howled, splitting from himself in three different versions each from a different second in the same moment.

Aetheryl's eyes narrowed. She pressed her hands together.

"You are not the fastest thing here."

She didn't chase him.

She arrived where he was going, where he would be, and where he should've never been simultaneously. Zoom struck her with the force of collapsing stars, but she was inevitability.

She absorbed it with stillness.

"You will slow," she said gently. "Even light fades."

And the trap reformed, this time not as a lock, but a singular moment, unchanging, inescapable. Aetheryl turned his speed into the key to his own stasis.

Zoom screamed not in pain, but in defiance as the paradox cage held. Temporal chains wrapped around his existence like molten lead forged from causality itself. His form flickered, his scream stretched into a spectrum of past and future selves each failing, each breaking.

Aetheryl floated above him, arms outstretched, whispering the binding mantra of the Temporal Anchoring Protocol. She wasn't just subduing him she was rewriting his fate.

But something changed.

A pulse. Rotten, wrong. The Speed Force twisted and corrupted rebelled.

"No…" Aetheryl's voice trembled, for the first time.

The system retaliated.

Within Zoom, veins of raw temporal energy turned black. Muscles snapped and reformed. Bone cracked like glass then reknit in alien patterns. His face stretched into a grin wider than his skull could allow, splitting flesh into gory ribbons of paradox.

Zoom was mutating. Not evolving degenerating.

The system whispered through his broken mouth:[RECONFIGURE. ASSET CORRUPTED. DISTRACTION PROTOCOL ACTIVE.]

With a burst of anti-chronal force, Zoom's new grotesque body surged forward—not with speed, but collapse. His every step unwound the terrain beneath, a mockery of velocity—too unstable to follow, too volatile to stop.

Aetheryl raised a barrier of pure inevitability, a lattice of outcomes frozen mid-bloom, each one a trap of fate. But Zoom's form, now more eldritch pulse than man, tore through it. Not by power, but by being unbound from meaning.

Aetheryl's mind reeled. "He's not bound to time anymore," she whispered. "He's become... a crash of realities."

As she engaged the horror, blocking and phasing, something slipped out of Zoom.

The system.

It tore itself from the broken host, leaving behind a slumped, twitching husk of corrupted speed. A dark shape, like a code fragment written in nightmare drifted away on the edge of causality.

It fled.

Searching.

Hunting for a new host.

Aetheryl watched it go, her cosmic senses reaching but the system was already several realities away. Zoom, now broken and foaming at the mouth, twitched beneath her, the Speed Force weeping out of him.

She activated her recall beacon.

"Target neutralized. But the system has escaped."

Her eyes, glowing with aeons, turned toward the breach it had left behind."Prepare Evolto City… it's no longer just copying powers. It's learning."

Aetheryl's blade of condensed time sliced through the grotesque, mutated shell that was once Zoom. As the shattered husk disintegrated into temporal dust, she exhaled, her glowing eyes dimming ever so slightly.

She phased back into the Temporal Null Zone a pocket outside of all time and causality where she could regroup and report.

Moments later, a figure appeared from the shadows Zalthorion, his presence commanding the void itself.

She bowed slightly, then looked up with quiet frustration.

"Who broke the loop? Who left me exposed outside of time?" Her voice was cold, but with an edge of bewildered anger.

Zalthorion's gaze darkened, a shadow crossing his face. "It was not by chance, nor a flaw of your making."

He stepped closer, voice lowering to a grave whisper:"There is one who moves unseen between realities, a force older than even the Destroyers... a shadow of the multiverse itself."

His eyes pierced the void as if seeing the future. "They fractured your loop intentionally. They want this chaos."

A faint, sinister smile crept onto Zalthorion's lips. "Prepare yourself, Aetheryl. Because this… is only the beginning. The real predator is now awake."

The air thickened, and the faint echo of a distant, distorted laughter rippled through the Null Zone a chilling promise that the unseen foe was already watching, waiting to strike.