Chapter 2087: The Price of Disunity The blood of Primordial Chaos stained a third of Limbo, and even in the ten thousand Origin Realms, the heavens above were covered by storms. Primordial Chaos was not dead; it was hard to kill beings like these, but he had been hurt and had lost a few of his Origin Force. However, to the Ancient Primordials who were now digesting the gains from the past, such a loss was not even a loss at all, barely a single hair lost from a camel’s back. They did not care about injuries like these; what they cared about was the fact that slowly, but surely, the Beast was recovering. Xyris, Elgorath, and Vorthas would not follow the wrong example of Eldrithor and attack the Golem alone. It was not as if they did not have the confidence in destroying this Golem, but the price would be too high, and by the time they were done with the fight, Death would have long recovered from its wounds, and the purpose of this ambush would be lost. The three Ancient Primordials attacked together. If they could push back the Golem, then they could kill Death before it could gather itself back together. Xyris led the charge as he used the same technique he had previously used on the Beast, but instead of stopping time, he accelerated it. Primordials, especially Ancient Primordial, deal with time on a Cosmic Era scale, and so when Primordial Time was accelerating time around a target, the time scale that was being used was calculated in trillions of Cosmic Eras at a time. A single Cosmic Era would see Realities age, even Primordials would begin to feel the weight of such time passing by, and Xyris was unleashing all of this force on the Golem as he tried to age the Golem into oblivion, flooding it with accelerated time and reversed entropy. 𝒻𝑟𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝑛𝘰𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝘤𝘰𝘮 The Temple stone did not age. It was made out of material that had seen the end of time, many times over, and was far older than the Ancient Primordials. Unleashing this storm of time on the Golem was a mistake, as Xyris’s mind was connected to the storm, and in that instant, he felt the weight of time held by the walls, and his mind fractured into pieces as his temporal assault rebounded, slamming into Xyris like a collapsing timeline. His purple wings disintegrated into dust as his bones aged forward and backward simultaneously until they splintered inside his own flesh. He fell, writhing, screaming as every second of his existence played out at once in an endless loop of agony. If his lifetime had been as short as a mortal’s, Xyris would still endure unimaginable pain, but he was more than sixty-five million Cosmic Eras old, and because he was a Primordial of Time, this time scale was particularly extended for him, making him live a million times as long. And so, if this move had been used against any other Ancient Primordial, it would be considered annoying, but for Xyris, this was his weakness made manifest. Every move by this Golem had been simple, but it had precisely exposed the weakness of each Ancient Primordial, and this was especially noteworthy to all those who were watching the fight, especially Eos. Xyris’s attacks were not useless, as the Golem seemed to have focused its attention on disabling the Primordial, and both of them used the opportunity to attack together, linking their Origin concept and pouring it into the Golem’s body. Golden memory-nails and carnivorous life-vines exploded all around the construct, seeking to bind and unmake it. The power in this move was incredibly deceptive, as the concept of memory and life made it almost impossible to accurately track the pattern of the attack or find a way to end it quickly enough. Finally, it seemed as if the Golem was stalled, and although its motions destroyed nearly all the bindings surrounding it, as long as there was a single piece of binding left, then in the next breath, they would have covered the body of the Golem again. The lack of cooperation among the Ancient Primordials was vividly displayed here. If Nyxara, Xylos, and Eldrithor had not charged ahead, then with Elgorath and Vorthas binding the Golem, they would have easily been able to kill Death. After they had escaped from the clutches of madness and regained freedom, they had been at their most united, but from the moment that Asteraoth had perished and the discovery that they could grow stronger by fully digesting the Origin Forces in their bodies, a subtle barrier had begun to silently grow between them. It also did not help that all of them were hiding their true thoughts from each other, and so, it was inevitable that in such an important fight, this catastrophic blunder had occurred. "Elgorath, I can hold it back for a moment," Vorthas called out, "Go, strike that Beast and we shall share its core between the two of us alone." Nodding in understanding, Elgorath disengaged, but it was as if the Golem understood what they had said, and the light on its face brightened as well, as all the screaming faces on its crown all turned towards the two Primordials and glaring at them, and its chest suddenly opened up. The motion was silent, as the stone split along the center in a vertical slit, revealing an interior of pure, frozen silence, an emptiness so complete that light, memory, and life simply ceased to function upon contact. This was silence that had been harvested from the nothingness between the death of an Existence and the rebirth of another. It was alien and incredibly profound, and even Eos, watching this fight, did not know how he would respond to it. He could only inform his Archais to keep moving backward and stay as far away from the fight as possible. The silence spread out in a vast dome around the Golem, and Elgorath’s golden threads snapped like brittle wire. Vorthas’s tumors withered into black husks before they could take root. Without the bindings, the Golem’s hand swept outward in a single, unhurried motion. Elgorath’s golden frameworks shattered entirely, and he was hurled into the void, wings trailing broken memories like comet tails. Vorthas was even more unlucky as he was impaled through the torso by a single finger of the Golem that had stretched into a spear, and his wounds began to bleed green life-force that spread across his body like flames. The Golem was injecting silence into Vorthas’s core, and this was killing him. It would take a long time to be sure, but if it was not interrupted, Vorthas would be bled to death over eons.