The cavern transformed into a theater of madness. As Sarah bypassed the temporal governor, the Machine ceased to be a vehicle; it became a white hole in the fabric of reality. The quartz disc spun so fast it vanished into a blur of pure, blinding energy, casting long, distorted shadows of the scuttling Morlocks against the hive walls."Kill her!" the Overlord shrieked, his voice nearly drowned out by the rising roar of the time field.The Spider-Morlocks descended like a living carpet of limbs and chattering teeth. Sarah grabbed a heavy bronze wrench—a tool she had left in the machine’s storage compartment back in 2002—and swung with the desperation of a woman with nothing left to lose.She cracked the compound eye of a lunging drone, the creature’s bioluminescent fluid spraying across her face. Another clamped its spider-like mandibles onto her shoulder, its needle-teeth piercing her flight jacket. Sarah screamed, slamming the creature against the machine’s chassis until it let go.She scrambled to the main lever.The Overlord was coming for her now, his cane discarded. He moved with a deceptive, predatory speed, his tattered robes fluttering behind him. He didn't use his eyes—the light from the machine was too bright for him—but he lunged by scent and sound.He tackled Sarah just as her hand reached the lever.They crashed into the stone floor. The Overlord’s hands, cold and thin as parchment, wrapped around her throat."You would destroy a million years of evolution for a memory?" he hissed into her ear. "You are a plague, Sarah! A ghost from a dead world trying to haunt the living!"Sarah struggled for air, her vision blurring. She looked past the Overlord’s shoulder and saw Weena. The girl’s eyes were beginning to roll back down, the intense temporal energy of the machine breaking the siren's trance. Weena looked at Sarah—really looked at her—with a flicker of human terror and recognition.She is alive, Sarah thought. She isn't a memory. She is now.Sarah reached up, not for the Overlord’s face, but for his dark glasses. With a guttural cry, she ripped them away."Look at your masterpiece!" Sarah screamed.The Overlord instinctively opened his swirling, hypnotic eyes. The raw, unfiltered light of the Time Machine—energy from the beginning and end of the universe—poured into his retinas.He let out a sound that wasn't human. It was a rhythmic, agonizing shriek as his own hypnotic power was reflected back at him a thousandfold. He clutched his head, collapsing away from Sarah as his nervous system began to overload.Sarah scrambled to her feet. she grabbed Weena, slicing the girl’s silk bonds with the edge of her locket."Stay behind the machine!" Sarah yelled over the roar.She jumped onto the platform and seized the main lever. In the 2002 movie, she had seen the potential for a temporal bubble. If she jammed the gears, the displacement wouldn't move the machine—it would expand the "Now" into a sphere of total destruction."This is for Mark," she whispered, her hand trembling. "And this is for Lucy."She slammed the lever into reverse while the quartz disc was still spinning forward.The sound of grinding metal was deafening. A sphere of distorted, golden light erupted from the center of the machine. It expanded rapidly, a dome of shimmering force that acted like a chronological pressure washer.The Overlord, still blinded and reeling, was caught in the edge of the bubble.Sarah watched in grim fascination as the "2002-style" death took him. Within the span of three seconds, his skin withered into leather, his leather into bone, and his bone into a fine, grey ash that was sucked into the temporal vacuum. He didn't even have time to scream as a million years of age caught up to him in a heartbeat.The Spider-Morlocks on the ceiling fared no better. As the bubble hit them, they aged into skeletons and crumbled, their dust raining down like gray snow.The cavern walls began to glow red-hot. The very foundations of the Sphinx were being erased."Hold on!" Sarah cried, pulling Weena into the center of the machine, the only "eye" of the storm where time remained still.The world turned into a white void. There was a sensation of falling, a final, thunderous explosion of sound, and then—absolute, terrifying silence.1234 copyright protection19ＰＥＮＡＮＡ82Igeima8l 尼

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