Almost the moment the team completed its journey across timelines, rifts tore open across the sky.
Countless gray-white Temporal Phantoms poured out. Their hazy bodies flickered, appearing above the city one moment and teleporting to the estate's outskirts the next. Their movements followed no pattern.
Ordinary energy attacks passed through the Phantoms' misty bodies without causing any real damage. Only temporal power, chaos essence, or techniques that could bind the rules themselves could disperse the fragments of time sustaining them.
"Deploy the defenses!" Wanda's scarlet Chaos Domain surged outward, covering the entire perimeter of the estate. Its disorderly power warped the local flow of time, throwing masses of Phantoms attempting to raid the estate into temporal chaos. Their paths lurched wildly off course.
2B drew her sword. Pure white spiritual energy, threaded with a faint temporal glow, coated the blade as she cut cleanly through a Phantom. Its misty body shattered into vanishing motes of time. A2 swept her heavy blade across the field, dispersing a whole cluster of incoming Phantoms with a broad shockwave.
Hancock's gaze remained cool as she released her petrifying power with precision.
Unlike in an ordinary fight, she carefully moderated its strength, freezing only the fragments of time that anchored the Phantoms so that excessive force would not disturb the timeline.
The frozen Phantoms stood like gray-white statues before crumbling completely.
The Temporal Phantoms acted on instinct. Pressure exerted against their souls could briefly stall their attacks and give the others an opening.
Battle spread quickly across the modern timeline. Flashes of clashing light filled the sky above the city as the defenders intercepted the Phantoms, taking care to stay clear of residential areas so the fallout would not harm innocent people.
Meanwhile, on the sealed Sentry apocalypse timeline, the barren, shattered wasteland descended into