His hands clutched at empty air. The girl who lay on his lap was dead. Dead...Dead. For the last human ever born, death should have been natural. It WAS natural. He had watched everyone he loved grow weak and die right before his eyes. All the people he was unable to protect, the old, the sickly, the weak, the infirm. He couldn't protect any of them.

So why? Why was he crying for this girl he had spent only days with? Why wouldn't the tears stop even now, as darkness enveloped and released them at regular intervals? Why couldn't he stop them? His tears gave way to anger even as the kept flowing, and he clenched his fists and pounded the reinforced husk of the airship as it descended.

Suddenly a gasp of shock behind him forced him to turn his head. Hope was holding Mog, but something was wrong. The moogle had said nothing for several seconds, but was still breathing, raspy, tired breaths as his bauble moved weakly from side to side with a light springing sound. But now his form was changing. Becoming incorporeal. His form was becoming something like liquid. Currents broiled inside a body that was slowly becoming translucent, and smoke was rising from the moogle's wings.

Noel staggered to his feet, head light, staggering as he clutched his head. "Mog?" he said weakly, reaching his hand out to touch the moogle's soft white torso.

But there was nothing there to touch. Only smoke billowed between his fingers as he sharply retracted grasp, swirling into the black sky and vanishing.

"What...what happened?" Noel asked numbly, as Hope slowly, uncertainly, brought his hands back to his sides.

Hope looked hesitant. He too was in tears, but unlike Noel, there was something else in his face. Something colder. Bitterness. Loathing. "Serah's purpose in the timeline is done." Hope clenched his fists and spat over the edge of the airship. "So Mog's is as well."

Noel gasped sharply, then looked away. Time had snatched away yet another reminder of the promise he'd made. The promise he was unable to keep. Yet...if time still had the ability to do that, then time wasn't completely dead yet. There was still something left. Something that had control. But what did that mean? Time had crashed to a shuddering halt. The blackened skies, the grey mist that hung over everything. It was a contradiction in its own right.

"What is that?" For the first time, Noel heard a crack in Hope's voice, and looked up.

The air was distorting. The building before his eyes was being pulled into this rapidly growing distortion, an orange glow emitting from the hole that had been cut into space. Ripples of an ethereal gold, blue and green shuddered through the wormhole, bordered by shards of silver-colored crystal.

But it wasn't the distortions that worried Noel. It was the...creatures emerging from them.

There were at least three of them. Each was six feet tall, the height of a tall man. Their bodies were unnatural, stretched like a grotesque painting; arms and legs splayed and stretched into boneless constructs of snow white flesh. Red scarves were tied around their necks in such a tight knot that they would make any human suffocate. But the true abomination was their faces; clocks. White faces encircled with Roman numerals. As the clock hands rapidly turned, they cut slices into their faces from which blood flowed freely, then healed immediately. They were monstrous. More so than even the Ci'eth.

They floated through the air, blank faces turning back and forth. And then as Noel and Hope watched, a nausea inducing change occurred; a single slash opening int he clock faces in unison, widening and distorting like the wormholes they had emerged from. When the anomaly was finished forming, a single, purple eye with a pitch black pupil had formed where their foreheads should have been.

The creatures of clockwork hesitated a moment, then tore through the air with fluid, graceful movements, soaring towards the airship.

"Listen!" Noel jumped and Hope started at Sazh's voice. "I'm going to try to find a place where I can do an emergency landing! You're going to have to hold these little pests off while I do! Think you can do that?"

Noel stood straight, withdrawing his blades as he glared at the abominations descending upon them. A silent affirmation. The desire to vent his fury upon something, anything, was too good an opportunity to pass up. To forget his own failures and throw himself headlong into battle.

Hope silently dusted himself off and joined Noel. "Like we have a choice," he said with a slight shake to his voice. Magic rippled through the air; the cold, lifeless air igniting with an explosion of heat that propelled itself towards the clock creatures. They tore straight through the airborne inferno, spinning as they left plumes of rapidly ascending smoke in their wake, getting lower and lower as the single eye on their faces widened, glowing an even more brilliant purple than they originally were.

"Watch out!" Noel yelled, but Hope had already hit the deck as three rays of violet light ripped the air above his head, singing his scalp. With a grunt of pain, Hope sent a blast of electricity rippling through the air, tiny blue sparks dancing around his hands as the cluster of electric energy struck one of the creatures head on, sending it tumbling soundlessly into the ruined maze of Academia, thousands of feet below, its rubber-like white chest torn open and spewing blue fire.

As Noel gripped his blades tightly, he realized why these creatures unnerved him so much. They were soundless. Even as they died in agony, they remained deathly silent. Emotionless, faceless things such as these. They didn't belong here. They didn't belong anywhere.

The creatures were getting braver now, Swooping in for direct attacks. Hope went down with a cry of pain as a clock hand materialized in front of a creature's arm, slicing into his neck. Noel couldn't tell whether he was dead or not, and as he slashed at and missed the third creature, he knew he didn't have time to check.

As he focused on the third monster, he didn't notice the second one actually landing upon the airship. For the third time, a distortion gathered, this time focused around the creature's legs. They were fusing, turning a sharp ebony black. The incredibly durable husk of the airship cracked and buckled under the shifting creature, and when the distortion cleared, Noel saw that the creature had turned its legs into a sharp, clock hand-like appendage, which it had buried into the airship.

With a growl of frustration, pain, and fury, Noel gathered energy in his right hand. White, with a swirling black energy within that bulged and twisted with immense power. It was cold to the touch, but he knew there was incredible destructive heat stored within. Bringing his hand back for momentum's sake, he hurled the energy at the planted clock being.

Yet as it approached the creature, a purple circle gathered beneath it. Circular in shape, with golden numbers forming at intervals, and a silver hand turning rapidly. Yet another clock symbol, this one etched into the airship's deck with dancing multicolored flame.

The energy ball stretched as it came into contact with the clock surface, which threw up a violet force field. The explosion was closer than Noel had expected, and he was thrown off his feet, his ears popping as a high pitched whining sound reverberated through his eardrums. As he landed on his arm with a cry of pain, Noel saw something that made his heart race, then sink in utter despair and helplessness.

He cried out and reached forward as Serah slid off the crippled airship, but was too slow. Much too slow. Her limp, lifeless form tumbled from the great airborne machine, arms and legs flailing uselessly as they were buffeted by currents of wind generated by both the high altitude and her own descent. As she vanished into the clouds, Noel was left uselessly holding his hands out to thin air.

"What in Pulse is going on out there?"

Sazh's voice shook Noel from his shock, and he jumped to attention. "Uh, uh, the-the monsters are planted in the airship." The third creature had buried itself into the airship while Noel was down, and had its own clock face etched into the airship, centering its unnatural form.

"Kid, did you just say they're planted into my airship?"

"Y-yeah," Noel shook from the cold of being out on the deck for so long, and the shock from all that had happened in the last hour alone. "I-I can't stop them. They're protecting themselves."

"And Hope?"

Noel scrambled on his hands and knees towards the fallen researcher. His throat was slashed, and blood bubbled up from the laceration. Noel couldn't tell whether the jugular had been cut; there was too much blood and he was too shaken up. But for now, he was breathing. Alive.

"He's down. There-there's a lot of blood," stammered Noel uselessly.

"Damn. Alright kid. I need you to grab Hope and get inside. There's nothing else you can do now, so getting you two inside is the best thing we can do."

Noel stammered out a numb affirmation, then hefted Hope over his shoulders. He expected some resistance from the clock creatures, but they didn't give any, remaining in their positions like twisted decorations cutting into the flesh of their only way out.

When they were inside, the sudden warmth of the airship like an oven, Hope was immediately taken away, hefted onto the shoulders of two men and a woman, who placed him on a stretcher and wheeled him away to places unknown, yelling out for emergency bandaging, suturing, pressure on the wound, drugs, and the like. Noel was only half paying attention has he walked robotically towards the cockpit, where Sazh piloted the airship.

"You did good out there kid." Sazh himself hadn't been crying. He seemed to have channeled all his grief into getting everyone on the ground safely. "Let me take care of the re-what?"

"What is it?" Noel snapped his head back towards the older man.

"One of my co pilots has lost control of their termina-another one just lost his as well! What's going on here?"

A sudden realization struck Noel like a heatwave. "Those things on deck...they're taking control of the airship!"

"How the hell is that possible?" hissed Sazh, gripping the wheel even tighter. "Alright kid. I'm going to need to perform an emergency landing in a lake near Academia! If we don't then those clock headed bastards up top'll make sure it's a crash landing! Sit down in a passenger seat and buckle up. It's gonna be a bumpy ride."

Noel numbly did as he was told as Sazh echoed his advice to Noel in an airship-wide announcement. There was a little panic, but everyone was prepared for something like this, which was more than he could say for himself. As the airship shook from the creatures above and in preparation for the landing below, Noel had only one wish. To survive.

He wasn't done yet.

He couldn't be done just yet.