Horizon of Time

Time was not Penny's ally, nor was the load of keeping track of the situation. In one eye she followed Turail's present. In the corner of the other, she maintained awareness of Gadot and Shamnail. In her mind's eye, she watched what Yua watched, seeing the threads of possible futures, a chaotic tree of actions and reactions fanning out to infinity over seconds.

Gadot slammed Shamnail into a vending machine. The glass shattered, raining snacks over the whelmed angel. That was reality, but for a fraction of a blink Penny thought it was just another vision from Yua.

Instead, those dictated Penny's next moves against Turail. She was already breathing heavily, and the unforeseen failure point of Penny's own body had begun to occur to her. Reading the futures Yua saw as she knelt at the edge of the battle was far more taxing than experimenting with the ability to do so had been. Every decision Penny made predicated on foreknowledge forked into more possibilities, revising and accounting for every minuscule movement that was firmly written into the immutable past. Lines withered and vanished, and in their place new ones sprouted.

Penny prided herself on her intellect, her will. Even if it was a sin, she would still be proud of that much. But this was getting absurd; there was just too much information pouring through her mind.

She made a sudden, unexpected step to the left. Turail recovered, his angle of attack shifting. Penny raised her hand forty-five degrees at precise speed, and diverted the tip of the spear away from her body. Just enough that it caught one of the buttons on Penny's blazer, tearing the threads free and sending the bright brass button tumbling through the air, its vectors and every interference Penny was capable of spreading out over the immediate future as a spider's web.

The flying button brushed Penny's wing tip, then bounced aside. As Shamnail recovered, shaking off bags of chips, his left foot found it, leaving him just slightly unsteady as Gadot drove at him again.

That instant, that blink of a mind's eye following the button's course to a favorable outcome for Gadot was enough that futures involving Penny's own match with Turail rushed by her, possibilities unachievable, burning away the time she had left, converging the futures she was trying to react to onto the present's razor edge.

Penny swung. Turail interposed the haft of his spear against her, but the space gave her another breath of futures, another infinitude of time and information.

As Penny gave physical ground to earn more temporal advantage, she wondered how Yua was holding up against the avalanche of a constantly changing future. But she couldn't spare the girl a glance; if Penny turned her head at the wrong moment, she lost it.

Gadot could hold, she told herself. He was winning. Penny had to worry about setting her own destiny in stone before time ran out.

Thus, she took a more aggressive stance. Her weapon was holding, and time was not something she was gaining as much as she'd hoped, the margin of the future remaining smaller than the margins in Pravuil's perfectly framed tomes. If Penny didn't give herself a chance for victory beyond that horizon, she would never simply receive one by happy chance.

Still, it was with direction that Penny pressed the attack. Every jab, every cut, every riposte after parrying Turail's attempts to fight back, was chosen and measured by the future, was clawing for a horizon that would bring Penny victory.

Painstakingly as her mind reckoned it, Penny worked her way within Turail's guard. She barely even saw her opponent any longer, her strikes against him not aiming for his body as much as for the futures that Penny wished to prune away, pursuing the theory of combat towards a definitive ending.

Desperate for what was over the temporal horizon, Penny continued to work herself into a fugue, divorcing her actions from meaning and simply moving as the line she wanted to pursue dictated. As she drove Turail back with her frenzy, she ceased to prune disfavored timelines, seeing only the one, deciding each branch with nearly automatic fervor.

It may have required Yua's cooperation, but it was Penny's ultimate method of battle, setting her body in motion by the analysis of information alone. She raced towards the horizon, drawing closer. She needed an opening more than she needed more time. She needed just one lethal strike against Turail to come over the horizon, no matter how close to it Penny stood.

Unfortunately for Penny, her horizon was not long enough to escape chaos. The rolling horizon of the future revealed to her new split second after new split second. But an instant before it happened, every one of them, every path in its slight differences, showed the same inevitable misfortune as Penny's foot came down on the very button her machinations some ten or twenty seconds earlier had dislodged and directed down its path to this time and place.

Penny had kept with the best practices of melee. Her center of balance was low, and her footing was solid enough that a momentary slip of her leading foot would have mattered very little. But in its manifestation on the future, that small misfortune set a chain of inevitability into motion. When Penny slipped, so to did her concentration. Possible futures withered as Penny's ability to react to their branching points was stolen away from her by a bright brass button.

Three possibilities. Penny shifted her weight left. Shamnail's spear tore through Penny's right flank, and she staggered the way she had shifted. Two possibilities. Penny raised her sword as she staggered, and as Shamnail whirled he slammed the blunt end of the spear into her gut rather than the tip into her forehead.

Penny fell, sprawling across the carpet. She was frantic to regain her advantage in time, but her body's inability to keep up continued to steal futures from her even as her focus regained them. A parry became an injury because she would move her arm too slowly. A recovery of momentum became a fatal stagger if she had to gasp for breath.

Penny played for time, but time was not on her side. The branches that had seemed infinitely numerous were now clearly numbered. The choices she had that seemed like a guide to flawless victory were now between bad and worse.

She took a lunge to her thigh. The world spun, as the pain of the spear tip ripping through her leg blotted out every other thought in Penny's mind.

She winced, and grunted from the agony.

When she opened her eyes again she found she was on her knees, and Turail was mid-lunge, aiming for Penny's heart.

A thought of silent thanks to Yua crossed Penny's mind, along with the truth that she might never be able to say as much. There were nine possibilities to calculate.

Trying shaved the number to five.

One led to her death on Turail's spear. Four left.

The next dodged immediate death but left her helpless. Three remained.

On another future Penny could duck this blow but have no chance to avoid the next. Her body simply wasn't strong enough. Two options.

In real space, Penny began to raise her hands, her body already following the remaining threads of possibility even ahead of her mind.

As the spear tip neared in reality, it brought with it the rolling horizon of the future.

An ending came into view.

Penny had only one play to make.