Trapped In Elysium: A Virtual Reality Nightmare-Chapter 183: Barrier

The king moved like a shadow.

One breath, and he was still. The next, he was upon her.

His robes whispered like silk soaked in blood as his arms outstretched, impossibly fast. Before the queen could even draw breath to speak—before she could summon a single spell or will her body to move—his hands clamped around her head. Not in violence. Not in mercy. But in cruel, deliberate precision. Like a man opening a vault.

Her eyes went wide.

He wasn’t hurting her. Not in the way anyone else might notice. There was no blood, no scream. But she felt it—deep in her bones, in the brittle roots of her spirit. A pressure. Cold and sharp and vast. Like drowning in ice.

His thumbs pressed just beneath her ears. Not hard. Gentle, almost. Reverent. But the magic behind it—the will—was monstrous.

"Stop—" she gasped, a single breath before her voice was swallowed.

The king didn’t speak.

His eyes were closed. His brow furrowed only slightly, like a man listening to a distant sound. But beneath that still mask, something terrible stirred. His mind dove through her memories like a spear into still water.

He pierced through moments like paper. Memories she’d clung to for centuries.

But he wasn’t looking for sorrow. Or sentiment. He pushed deeper.

Beyond the moments she knew she remembered. Beyond what her soul chose to carry.

He was diving into the roots of time itself.

The queen trembled.

He was pulling at something she couldn’t even see. Like threads that had once been tied to her—but no longer existed in this world. Yet he found them. The echoes. The afterimages. He was ripping through timelines, combing through buried versions of her—the ones that no longer lived in memory but still whispered in the marrow of time.

And she knew what he was looking for.

The act she didn’t remember anymore. The desperate choice—the forbidden command—when she’d sent Marcus into the past.

She didn’t remember it now.

Not with the way time had twisted.

But the king—he could feel it. Like a loose tooth in the mouth of time.

She choked on a gasp as her body quaked under the pressure. Her knees gave out, but his grip held her upright. He didn’t even look at her. His eyes remained closed, his focus buried in the formless corridors of her soul.

And then—

He found it.

A flicker.

A shadow of a command spoken in a breathless moment. A ripple of energy cast from her hands. A name whispered—"Marcus"—and a tear falling from her cheek as the past opened to receive him.

The king’s eyes snapped open.

They blazed with fury.

So it was true.

She had interfered. The rite had been broken by her hand. By her will. Even if she couldn’t remember it now, her soul bore the scar. And that pendant—the one carried back by time, now resting in Liam’s pocket—it had no place in this sacred rite.

The rage that burned in the king’s chest was no longer cold. It was personal.

He had waited. Had prepared. Had suffered. 𝑓𝑟𝑒𝘦𝓌𝑒𝑏𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝘭.𝒸𝘰𝑚

And she... she had the audacity to meddle.

He could feel time buckling around his discovery. Threads snapping. Futures unraveling.

If he moved now—if he went back, hunted the queen in the past and stopped her interference—everything would shift. The world would split like glass. The timeline would fracture, and the cost would be unfathomable.

But he did not care.

The king was selfish.

He had waited too long. Given too much.

He would have Liam.

Even if it meant tearing the past apart with his bare hands.

And as the queen’s eyes rolled back and her body slumped, drained and barely conscious, the king released her—not out of mercy, but because he had no more use for her.

He had what he needed.

And time... time would bend to him again.

The queen crumpled to the stone floor like wind-whipped silk. Her limbs fell useless at her sides, her breath shallow, eyes glassy, mind somewhere between memory and void.

But the king had already turned from her.

His wrath demanded more than punishment—it demanded correction. It demanded control.

He would not let this stand.

With a snarl that shook the very walls of the chamber, he thrust his hand into the air and slashed downward—not with a blade, not with magic as it was known, but with command. The authority of a soul ancient and sovereign, forged from fire and vengeance and madness long since born. The very fabric of space screamed as it tore open, a jagged wound forming in the air before him.

The portal was unlike anything the queen had ever seen—no swirling blue or ethereal light. It was pitch black, void upon void, framed with crackling arcs of gold and red. It pulsed violently, like a heart carved from the bones of dying stars.

The king did not hesitate.

He stepped forward, one foot into the rippling dark.

And then—it happened.

A crack rang out. Not from the portal.

But from him.

His entire body jerked like he’d walked into a wall of lightning. His scream ripped from his throat, not like a roar, but a sound of confusion—of shock. One that hadn’t left his lips in centuries.

The darkness of the portal flared white.

His second foot never made it through. His body—mighty, imperial, carved from soulflame and shadow—was cast back from the portal with violent force.

He staggered backward, clutching his chest, eyes wide with disbelief. And in that moment, for the first time in millennia... the king felt pain.

Real pain.

Not the sting of wounds. Not the ache of ancient weariness. But pain that reached beyond flesh, beyond spirit.

A searing burn in the core of his soul.

As he reeled, the portal flickered, then began to warp—rejecting him, pushing him out of the current of time he had hoped to enter. The strands of reality around it twisted and unraveled like cloth burning from the edges, unraveling faster than he could repair.

And then—flashes.

Unbidden, from the center of his mind, a memory—not his own—but borrowed, pulled forward as the portal punished him.

He clutched his side as the pain intensified, the burning spreading through his limbs, coiling up his spine like fire inside bone. He couldn’t move forward. Couldn’t breach the stream of time.

The portal shuddered. Like it was aware. Alive, even.

And it did not want him.

Despite his strength—despite being more powerful than the queen a dozenfold—it didn’t matter.

Because it wasn’t just magic that blocked him.

It was her will.

Even in her unconsciousness. Even without her memory. The queen’s soul essence—woven into the pendant, resting now in Liam’s pocket—stood as a wall between the king and the past. She had given everything to protect him, and that gift had become more than a charm or tool.

It had become a barrier.

It was living.

The king stumbled again. Fury twisted his face. He slammed a fist into the wall beside the portal, cracking the stone, snarling like a beast denied prey.

He’d seen what the pendant had done. Not just interfered. Not just disrupted the rites. It had locked the past. Set the timeline like a steel door. And now, the king could not go back.

Could not undo.

The queen, barely conscious on the ground, twitched, her lips parting just slightly as if some fragment of her soul still burned with resistance. A flicker of life. Of purpose.

She had unknowingly given Liam more than salvation.

She had made sure the king’s hands would never reach backward again.

He turned slowly, seething, his eyes still smoldering with hate, with need. The portal behind him began to fracture and close, rejecting him a final time. Sparks rained down from it like dying embers.

The king would not forget this moment.

And he would not forgive it.