Zero State Quantum Break (Reiijōtai Ryōshiheki) a technique that allows Toneri to alter the synchronization and flow of events within targeted areas. In doing so, he is able to slowdown, stop, or even reverse time within a given object or area while the rest of the surrounding area remains normal. This allows Toneri to control the very flow of battle in ways never seen before.
By desynchronizing a region of space or an object, it's personal flow of events can advanced, reversed, ceased or overlapped. When using this ability, he causes a desynchronization of time to occur within desired regions of space, time or within a targeted object, entity or abstract. From this point on, he is able to shift the temporal phase of the affect entity in question.
From there, Toneri can shift his temporal phase forward or backwards, as well as cease it to freeze them in place or overlap it with another temporal event to cause extremely deadly effects. By putting objects out of sync with the present, objects are often render intangible and even invisible in some cases. An example of this is Toneri putting a target's weapon a half a second out of synchronization, mid-swing, rending the the weapon intangible for the allotted time and causing the blade to miss its target.
When used on one's self, the user is able to completely halt, advance or revert the flow of events, space, or time in relation to themselves. With practice and mastery, the user is able to activate the technique within itself to exclude others from its effects. If the user moves themselves ahead of the time stream, they are rendered intangible, yet invisible because the events of the future have yet to occur. Contrary to this, if the user moves behind the time stream, they are rendered intangible, yet visible because the events of the past have already occurred.
By alternative between the past, present and future of events, the user can achieve a unique form of combat, especially if the effects are utilized on a target.
Darkseid stood before the warped remains of the dissected Uranus, its halves drifting apart like titanic corpses split by divine surgery. Energy hissed off his frame angrily. The burn marks across his torso smoked faintly, the remnants of emerald chakra leaving behind crystalline fractures along his skin.
But then, the space around him bent.
The distortion was subtle at first. Atoms seemed to misalign. Light folded sideways.
Before he could act, Toneri was already there.
There was no motion to calculate him moving at all, only result that he had. One moment the space before Darkseid was empty and the next, Toneri stood within it, a katana of pure Gudōdama chakra formed in his grasp. Behind him, the truth-seeking orbs spiraled down to nine.
Darkseid moved.
Barely.
The swing came in at an impossible angle, from above no, from behind no, 'from both sides then?' The blade flickered, phasing in and out of reality, its temporal state unstable. It hovered for a heartbeat in two places at once, past and future before violently snapping back into the exact position it was swung from, as if time had caught up, unwilling to let the paradox settle.
The swing completed with a snap of light.
It missed.
By inches.
But that wasn't the point.
Toneri's smile was cold and calm, lips curving upward as his head tilted slightly.
"Shit… he's figured it out."
Darkseid had become… heavy. Not just physically but conceptually as well. Around him, Toneri could now see the bend of time. The gravitational pull the New God exerted was so intense, it warped not just space but the flow of events, a form of chronokinesis. His mere presence distorted Toneri's carefully crafted technique. Making it no longer fully effective.
The Gudōdama blade pulsed once its temporal signature fluctuating erratically before dematerializing into black smoke and rejoining the other orbs behind him. A ripple passed through the space like an echo of something that hadn't happened yet.
Darkseid's eyes narrowed.
He hadn't seen the technique before but he had felt it being used multiple times now.
The way the blade had flickered, the way his perception dragged, his thoughts accelerated, and his movements stalled all within the same instant.
It was a violation of the event stream.
Toneri had desynchronized a fragment of reality itself. A small region of spacetime where the blade resided had been peeled away from the moment, forced into a separate quantum flow, before being reinserted into the current frame of events.
Darkseid smirked.
'How… exciting'
He recognized the nature of the assault and more importantly, why it didn't work fully.
Because now, he was affecting reality's rhythm just as much.
Darkseid's mere existence warped the laws Toneri tried to exploit.
"Of course," Toneri murmured. "He's bending time around himself. My phase shift won't stick anymore."
Darkseid stepped forward, slow and deliberate. His boot pressed into fractured space, leaving behind ripples that shimmered through it due to gravitational distortion.
And then his form blurred. A burst of movement, and he was there before the boy, fist raised and coated in his omega energy.
But as it swung
Pain.
It came from nowhere. A sharpness bit into his side, the same path the blade had carved earlier, slicing through the same place in space.
"What…?"
The wound wasn't from the present.
It was a temporal echo, a resonance artifact left behind by Toneri's earlier strike and degraded by Darkseid chronokinesis, stitched into the very location in spacetime. By stepping into that space, Darkseid had realigned the causality that had been briefly suspended, completing the paradox and accepting the injury.
Blood trickled again. He snarled seeing the injury was minimal compared to what it could have been. And so he pushed forward.
Reality warped around him, a bubble of stabilized time forming at his back as he reasserted dominance over his own chronology. The echo faded and the pain dulled. His body corrected and Space bowed.
"Wouldn't it be embarrassing," Darkseid muttered aloud, voice like molten stone, "if a mortal used time to batter a god… who transcends it?"
Toneri floated opposite him, silent, watching.
They both knew.
This was no longer a battle of power or speed.
This was a battle for causality.
And both of them had started to bend it.
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