His eyes were that same unnatural hue, the same piercing gaze that had watched from the shadows during the Sin War's worst nights. His eyelashes, white as his eyebrows, only emphasized their otherworldly intensity.
His beauty was too perfect, sharp cheekbones that looked carved by divine hands, lips permanently curved in the ghost of a smirk, a jawline that belonged on ancient coins. The pale-green shirt stretched across shoulders that moved with predator's grace, while silver rings adorned fingers that had never known labor, but which could coax a requiem or a riot from the strings of the blackwood guitar strapped to his back. Its body was polished to a liquid gloss, the wood so dark it glistened like frozen midnight. Across its curves, intricate silver filigree spiraled like captured lightning. Its strings were not wire, but braided filaments of brilliant violet energy -condensed Gloom that hummed with a silent, vibrating tension even at rest. A single, delicate fracture ran along its upper bout, sealed with what looked like molten silver- not a flaw, but a healed scar from some forgotten battle.
The chess piece earrings; a white queen on one side, black king on the other, swung slightly as he tilted his head, studying Yume with amused detachment.
He stood like a razor-edged shadow against the store’s pastel yarn displays, his spiked goth bracelets catching the fluorescents like a crown of thorns, black Earbuds gleaming like twin bullets loaded in his ears, a prince of ruin drowning out the world’s noise with his own symphony of static.
When he spoke, his voice carried the same melodic cruelty she remembered from long-buried nightmares:
"Focus. On. The mission."
And in that moment, Yume understood, this was no ordinary Syndicate operative. This was a ghost wearing new skin.
Mango’s shoulders slumped. "Ugh, fiiine." She turned back to Yume with a grin. "Bye, Yarn lady!"
And just like that, petals exploded in her wake, leaving Yume alone with the scent of camellias and an unwanted memory in form of a boy.
The yarn in her hands was now charcoal.
His violet eyes locked onto hers, amused, unblinking. His grin widened, slow and serpentine, as he adjusted one spiked bracelet with deliberate ease.
"Don’t mind Mango," he said, voice smooth as a knife through silk. "She gets... easily distracted."
Yume didn’t reply. The air around her thickened, charged with the metallic tang of a storm that had been waiting a decade to break.
"I’m Clock," he continued, tilting his head. "And you must be Yume." A pause. A heartbeat. "I’m here to kill you."
The ghost of a smile, colder than the void in Pest's core, touched Yume's lips. Her voice was a low roll of thunder, promising the deluge to come.
"Yatte miro." (やってみろ。) Go ahead and try.
Her golden collar unclasped from her neck with an unsettling sigh, hitting the ground with a sound like a guillotine’s drop.
An explosion of lightning erupted from Yume's body in all directions, disorganized, uncontrolled.
Untethered chaos.
The first millisecond: A flash so blinding it seared shadows into the walls, bleaching the world white. The shockwave tore outward faster than sound, shattering every window in a half-mile radius into glittering dust.
The second millisecond: The street itself vaporized, asphalt boiling into noxious black mist, parked cars melting like wax under a blowtorch. The yarn store disintegrated in a fractal of splinters, its pastel skeins igniting midair into tiny comets.
The third millisecond: The blast reached Clock. Or rather, it would have, if he hadn’t already moved, his body a smudge of motion, his laughter trailing behind him like a ribbon.
But the fairy had been ready.
Before Yume’s first synapse fired, Blur was already everywhere; a hyperkinetic comet splitting into afterimages.
A businesswoman mid-sip? Zipped to a rooftop three blocks away, still holding her miraculously intact coffee.
A mother and stroller? Relocated to a park bench, the baby giggling at the sudden rollercoaster ride.
A woman in the store reaching for a skein of purple yarn? Plucked away so fast her gown fluttered like a deflating balloon.
"YES! YES! FINALLY!" Blur’s voice echoed from a hundred points in space at once, her glee atomic. "LIGHT HIM UP, YUME!"
She wasn’t just fast, she was precision. Every rescue calculated to the nanometer, every life prioritized with cold, euphoric logic. A cat in a third-story window? Saved. A fly on the doomed store’s wall? Eh, let it fry.
Blur’s laughter echoed as she zipped the last bystander away. In one final, fleeting snapshot, she saw a kid huddled under a café table, utterly engrossed in a handheld game. Gunt-Orbers, she read off the screen.
She sneered, her infinite-speed mind delivering a verdict in a nanosecond. "Gunt-Orbers? Really? It's trash..."
Then she saw it. The ghost of a motion from seconds ago. A small, scruffy terrier was cowering, a fresh red mark visible on its ribs. The data was clear as scripture: the boy, frustrated at the dog begging for a scrap, had kicked it away to focus on his game.
Her sneer turned into a grimace of pure distaste. "Yeah, no. I don't like you."
A dramatic pause, just long enough for the café's roof to groan above him, dust sifting down onto his screen.
In a flash of light almost too fast to happen, the dog vanished from the corner.
It reappeared directly on the plush bedding of a "no-kill" animal shelter in Switzerland, a continent away. A confused yip was muffled by the mountain of premium dog treats that materialized around it, while a stack of cash tied with a neat ribbon landed in the shelter's donation box with a soft thump.
"...You can stay," Blur finalized.
And with a final, decisive zip, she was gone.
Mùhuái looked up a second later, his digital trance broken by the sudden, deafening roar. The world dissolved into a screaming, shuddering mosaic of gold and violet. The comforting weight of the console slipped from his fingers, the screen flickering with the doomed protagonist's final, pixelated stand.
He was still under the table.
The ceiling, having received no reprieve, gave its answer.
///
A tremor ran up Yume’s spine, the power dimming for half a breath.
By the time Yume’s lightning finished carving its scar into the city, Blur was already back on her shoulder, vibrating like a kid on Christmas morning.
"So," she panted, "round two?"
Silence.
Then the distant wail of sirens. The creak of a lone lamppost swaying before it collapsed. The smell of ionized air and, inexplicably, fresh popcorn who's vendor Blur had zipped away.
Yume flexed her fingers. The storm in her chest roared.
Clock stood untouched atop a melted traffic light, his grin unshaken.
"Good," he purred. "Now we’re talking."
The air shrieked.
One moment, Yume stood empty-handed, a lone figure wreathed in crackling lightning. The next, her fingers closed around a weapon that should not exist.
Gold erupted from nothingness, a sledgehammer the size of a tombstone, its surface etched with ancient inscriptions that burned to life, searing yellow under her touch. The inscriptions pulsed: "Shatter" in a dead language, its weight enough to crater continents.
"IMONO!" (異物 - ABOMINATION!)
The word tore from her throat as she appeared behind Clock in a nanosecond, her boots vaporizing from the sheer speed, the hammer already mid-arc, its path warping the air into liquid heat. The ground beneath her rippled, asphalt peeling back like scared flesh. Trees three blocks away snapped from the sheer pressure of her swing.
Clock didn’t turn.
His hand came up, in a single swift motion, and caught the hammer’s head. Bare handed.
CRACK.
The shockwave flattened the ruins around them in a perfect circle. Clock’s arm didn’t buckle. His boots didn’t scuff. His violet eyes didn’t even blink.
The inscriptions on the hammer flickered, dimmed.
Silence.
Clock’s fingers hadn’t even dented under the impact, his palm pressed against the weapon’s face, effortless.
But beneath the calm facade, a primal alarm was screaming in his mind, cutting through the static symphony blasting in his earbuds. The moment before Transport had engaged, he had felt it—not force, but authority. The hammer wasn't just carrying kinetic energy; it carried a command: Shatter. It didn't matter how durable his shadow-forged body was. Against that conceptual imperative, his durability was a polite suggestion. One clean hit, and he would be unmade. He had to maintain focus. Transport had to stay on. It was the only thing standing between him and oblivion.
"You transported the kizu (傷 - damage)," Yume snarled, her voice raw with realization, pulling him from his frantic internal calculations.
Clock’s violet eyes widened, just a fraction, just for a breath, before his smirk returned. "You figured that out fast."
"I didn’t feel my hit land," she hissed. "It just... kieta (消えた - vanished)."
His grin sharpened, a mask of arrogance over a core of cold dread. "Observant. Pity it won’t-"
Yume attacked.
Her hammer dissolved mid-swing, reforged into a naginata of crackling gold. In the same atom of time, she moved.
It wasn't a step or a dash. It was an erasure of distance. She crossed the space between them at one-quarter the speed of light - a velocity of roughly 75,000 kilometers per second. To any mundane eye, she simply ceased to exist in one place and appeared in another, the air behind her superheating into a temporary tunnel of plasma, the sonic boom delayed into a continent-flattening roar that would arrive long after the battle was decided. The golden naginata, its edge humming with the command to Sever, was already a line of lethal light aimed to part his head from his shoulders.
An authorial shade-shifting weapon, Clock's mind screamed, the analysis colder and faster than the steel singing towards his throat. It doesn't just change shape, it changes its function. From blunt-force erasure to piercing severance. They didn't tell me she had this.
And they certainly didn't tell me she could move like that.
But his body was already reacting. Not with a desperate dodge, but with a calibration.
To him, her light-speed blitz wasn't an untouchable blur. It was a predictable vector. A beautiful, deadly line of motion he had all the time in the world to intersect.
He didn't appear to move at all. There was no blur, no afterimage. One moment he was standing before the killing strike. The next, he was beside it, having matched her velocity exactly, his body drifting laterally with the casual, insulting grace of a leaf caught in her slipstream. His own speed wasn't a burst; it was a constant. A setting. As effortless as breathing.
Her brown eyes, moments ago blazing with predatory certainty, flickered -just once- with a shock so profound it momentarily bleached the fury from them.
He kept up. Not with strain, but with ease.
It was in that heartbeat of her surprise, watching her fluid transition from the impossible charge into a close-in fighting stance, that he saw it. He recognized the ancient fusion in her movements.
And he knew exactly how to invade it. Clock’s daggers met it in a shower of sparks, their silver edges singing against her fury. They held not because of their physical properties, but because he was violently feeding them a torrent of Gloom, a counter-authority that screamed "Reject!" against the hammer's command of "Shatter!". It was a desperate, costly negation, a spiritual arms race happening at the speed of thought. He couldn't let up for a microsecond.
Yume’s sharp eyes latched onto the daggers that materialized in Clock’s hands. They weren’t mere silver; they were voids given an edge, fed full with concentrated gloom. One slice, she knew with primal certainty, and it wouldn't just cut flesh, it would deaden every nerve in her body, a permanent light switch flipped to off.
She didn’t wait. She moved.
Twirling in the air like a vengeful top, she concentrated the storm’s fury into one arm and drove the golden sledgehammer into Clock’s chest.
THOOOOOM.
The impact didn’t move him an inch. He transported the force without a flinch, his smirk never wavering. But the shockwave had to go somewhere. The ground behind him for a mile simply vaporized, erupting into a canyon of dust and superheated air, a perfectly straight trench carved into the city’s heart.
Clock immediately closed the distance. Not with a blur, but with a sudden, cruel certainty — as if he had skipped the space between them.
His foot met her sternum. BLAM.
The impact was a tectonic ellipsis, a three-billion-newton footnote to their dialogue. Yume’s ribs weren't just struck; they became the anvil to a hammer made of closing distance and contempt. The air fled her lungs in a voiceless curse, her body folding inward before physics reasserted itself and snapped her backward like a broken marionette whose strings had all been cut at once.
She flew.
A comet of gold and fury, etching a scar of pure devastation through the ruins. Concrete shattered, steel groaned and peeled back like foil, the ground opening up in her wake as if clawed by some angry god. She skidded, tumbled, and finally dug her fingers into the molten earth, raking five parallel trenches through the bedrock to slow her velocity, coming to rest like a fallen meteor in a self-made crater of smoke and rage.
He let his gloom-daggers fall from his hands. They didn’t drop. They floated mid-air beside him, held aloft by shimmering telekinetic threads. In the same motion, his hands came up, crossing over his chest. With a thought, the blackwood guitar strapped to his back unclipped itself, flipping through the air in a slow, elegant arc until it settled snugly against his front. The wind from the distant explosions caught him now, billowing his pale-green shirt and whipping his snow-white hair into artful disarray. The silver filigree on the guitar’s body gleamed like frozen lightning.
Yume came for him, already in the air, her snarl more animal than human. The crater in her chest, the one his kick had left, was already sealing shut, skin weaving itself back together over newly formed ribs.
Clock didn’t dodge. He didn’t raise a guard. He simply listened.
His black earbuds were still in, feeding him a private, pulsing anthem of distortion and rage. His fingers found the guitar’s violet strings - not to strum a chord, but to pluck a single, decisive note.
He played in perfect sync with the crescendo screaming in his ears.
The world ripped.
A visible shockwave, not of air but of pure sonic annihilation, tore from the guitar. It wasn’t sound so much as it was force given a voice. The air in its path crystallized, then shattered. The ground didn’t crack - it unzipped, a canyon of nothingness gouging through the city block behind Yume in an instant. Skyscrapers in the wave’s path didn’t topple; they vaporized from the foundation up, erased into glittering particulates that hung in the air like a ghost of a skyline.
For Yume, there was no time to react. There was only the conclusion.
Clock’s finger had touched the string. The note that followed wasn't an attack that traveled. It was the auditory manifestation of a finalized command, fueled not by vibration but by raw, distilled Gloom. It bypassed the concepts of 'distance' and 'travel time.' The moment his fingertip made contact, the effect was already true at her location.
It was sound as a law of reality: Here, there is collapse.
The sensation was a pressure so absolute it felt like the universe clapping its hands around her, not from the outside, but from within the very coordinates she occupied. Her leap forward reversed into a violent, ragdoll tumble backward, not because a wave hit her, but because the space she was in decreed motion.
But worse than the physical force was the sound. Or the lack of it. For one crystalline, agonizing moment before the command fully overwrote her senses, she heard everything - the molecular scream of dissolving concrete, the subsonic groan of the earth splitting, the universe’s raw data stream - a final, overwhelming audit of a world being edited.
And then, with a wet, internal pop that was less a sound and more the feeling of a fundamental switch being broken, she heard nothing at all.
Her eardrums didn't just rupture; they were rendered logically silent. The command had arrived. The space where her hearing existed had been fulfilled.
Her eardrums didn’t just rupture; they burst. A trickle of warm blood traced the line of her jaw from each ear. The world plunged into a muffled, underwater silence, punctuated only by the high-pitched whine of total auditory death. She crashed into the ruins of a melted bus, her body cratering the metal.
Silence. A ringing, hollow quiet where a city block used to be.
Before the dust could even begin to settle, Clock was on her.
He became a whirlwind of impossible motion. He floated, using his flight not for height, but for brutal, unpredictable angles. He came at her from every direction at once, above, below, from the sides, a blitz of spiked boots and gloom-bladed daggers. Each kick carried the kinetic force of a continental plate shifting; each slash would have sheared a mountain in half.
To any superhuman eye, it would have looked like Yume, a blur of gold and lightning, was fighting a dozen copies of Clock simultaneously. She was a tempest of instinct and precision. When a gloom-dagger materialized aimed for her spine, she didn't turn; she twirled the massive hammer in her hands, spinning it behind her back with a deafening clang that deflected the blow in a shower of sparks. Instantly, she stomped the ground, kicking up a curtain of pulverized asphalt into Clock's path from the right, a disorienting feint that forced a microsecond of hesitation, just long enough for her to yank the hammer back around to block the real attack, a slash aimed for her neck from that very same side.
He moved with a dancer’s terrifying grace. An acrobatic flip in mid-air positioned him perfectly to launch a dagger not with his hand, but with a devastating roundhouse kick. The blade shot toward Yume’s face like a black star.
Simultaneously, Yume flung her hammer at his center mass. But this was no mere throw. She was already moving at a quarter lightspeed, a golden comet carving reality. As her arm extended, she pushed.
Crackling veins of her own lightning fused with the hammer’s golden light, not to empower its strike, but to propel it. In that nanosecond of release, she channeled the storm’s fury into pure, vectoral acceleration. The hammer didn’t just fly - it vanished from her hand, crossing the negligible distance between them at the absolute speed of light itself. It was no longer a projectile; it was a causality-breaking statement delivered in zero time.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
A feint, she thought, the plan’s first layer unfolding. He’ll Transport the hammer’s force. But the act of Transporting requires a micro-instant of focus. In that instant, his perception narrows.
Even if the hammer, moving at c, failed to land, it served its purpose: to monopolize his defense for a single, critical Planck time.
The second layer ignited. He’ll dodge the aftermath right, into the path of the gloom-dagger I’ll catch. Her free hand was already moving, not to block his kick, but to intercept the spinning blade, her fingers poised to seize its hilt the moment it arrived.
The third layer crystallized. I’ll leap to his left, recall the hammer from his right. Her muscles, charged with relativistic energy, were coiled to move not at a quarter lightspeed, but to jump laterally with enough force to shatter a city block, putting her outside his new position.
The final layer: a closing trap. Nowhere for him to go but back into my strike. The recalled hammer, the stolen dagger, her own lightning-wreathed body - three vectors of annihilation converging on the single point in space-time where his dodge would leave him.
It was a perfect, inescapable pincer, engineered across multiple velocities and intentions, a death woven not from one move, but from the guaranteed collapse of his reactions.
Clock didn't dodge. He flowed.
Clock didn't dodge. He flowed. He bent his torso backward at an impossible angle, his spine a perfect arch, letting the massive hammer whistle over him, so close it ruffled his pale hair. The move was effortless, insulting. He had not only evaded her trap; he had rendered it obsolete.
And it was in that moment, watching her fluid transition from the hammer's throw into a close-in fighting stance, that he saw it. He recognized the ancient, brutal fusion in her movements, the close-quarters grappling of Tegumi woven seamlessly with the sharp, destructive strikes of Kenpō. A style lost to time, one he hadn't seen in years.
And he knew exactly how to invade it.
Yume didn’t miss a beat. Her free hand snapped out and caught the gloom-dagger he’d kicked at her by the hilt. The handle was cold, leeching the warmth from her palm. Let’s see if your own poison works on you.
She used the momentum of catching the blade to launch herself at him, a golden comet aiming to bypass his transport ability with his own weapon.
Clock rose to look at her.
She was already in front of him, the dagger swinging in a horizontal slash meant to sever his head from his shoulders.
Clock didn’t transport. He didn’t block. He shifted.
His head moved a fraction of an inch, just enough for the deadly edge to whisper past his throat. In the same fluid motion, his own body became a weapon of destabilizing rhythms. He used the swaying, deceptive ginga of Capoeira to break his centerline, his movement a hypnotic dance that misdirected her focus. Then, he exploded from the motion with the brutal, compact efficiency of a boxing blitz, a sharp jab to disrupt her breathing, a cross that cracked against her shoulder not to injure, but to torque her posture and widen her stance.
It was this calculated, two-step assault that truly invaded the guard her hybrid style had created. Thrown off-balance by the fusion of circular evasion and linear force, the vulnerability in her Tegumi stance was exposed for a split second. His hand, a blur, finished the sequence. Yume saw it coming, a micro-movement in the storm of motion, and her body screamed to evade. But as she tried to pull her wrist back, an invisible, vice-like force clamped down, holding her arm in place for a single, crucial moment. Telekinesis.
Helpless, she could only watch as his two fingers struck the precise, paralyzing pressure point on the inside of her wrist.
A jolt of nullifying energy shot up her arm. Her fingers went numb. The gloom-dagger tumbled from her grasp.
Instinct screamed. With her free hand, she lunged to claw at his throat, to tear, to push - to make him flinch. Anything to buy a moment.
She didn’t even see him move. His left hand was already off her wrist, sliding across the face of his blackwood guitar.
VWWOOMP.
A single note - not strummed, but plucked with violent finality - bloomed from the soundhole, point-blank against her chest. The air between them crystallized, then detonated.
The force was intimate, apocalyptic. It didn't throw her - it erased her from that point in space.
Her teeth shattered in a rain of ivory splinters. Bones throughout her torso and shoulder cracked like a dropped china set. She flew backwards, a limp, golden ragdoll hurled through the ruins, carving a new trench through a collapsed bank facade before skidding to a brutal stop in a heap of rebar and dust.
Clock was on her again immediately.
She was wide open.
///
A streak of light manifested in the air beside them, resolving into Blur for a fraction of a nanosecond. She hovered there, munching on a stolen bag of chips, her gaze flicking between Clock's extended fingers and Yume's paralyzed, wide-eyed expression. The entire world was a frozen painting to her, a museum of impending violence.
She shrugged, sending a cascade of chip crumbs drifting in super-slow motion. "Meh. She can handle that."
And with that, she was gone.
The frozen moment shattered as Clock’s other arm, already in motion, became a piston-driven elbow strike rocketing sideways into her jaw.
But in the time it took for that blow to travel the last few inches, Blur had already:
1. Zipped into a boutique ice cream parlor three blocks away.
2. Drawn a perfect, swirly soft-serve cone from a machine whose motor was audibly groaning at one-percent speed.
3. Hopped onto the counter, kicking her feet as she took the first, blissful bite of vanilla-chocolate twist.
4. Noticed a young couple in a high-rise apartment, still tangled together in bed, the woman's hand frozen mid-gasp as the first shockwave rattled their windows.
Blur's eyes twinkled with impish delight. She took another lick of her ice cream.
"Oh? What do we have here? Hehe."
Saving them was going to be fun.
Blur hovered over them, a tiny, ice-cream-licking judge. Her gaze swept the room, taking in the details. Then she saw it. On the nightstand, the man's phone was still on, its screen glowing. A new text notification was visible.
「明天见，帅哥。亲亲 - 杰西卡」
(Míngtiān jiàn,shuàigē. Qīnqīn - Jiéxīkǎ)
Can't wait to see you tomorrow, handsome. Xoxo - Jessica.
It wasn't from the woman in his arms.
Blur's glee shifted into something colder, more precise. She dove into the phone's data, her mind sifting through texts, photos, and dating app profiles in the space between two heartbeats. The evidence was overwhelming and pathetic.
Her nose wrinkled. "Ugh. A cheater. And a sloppy one too."
She looked from the man's oblivious face to the woman's worried one. The math was simple.
With a decisive zip, she grabbed the woman. In the same motion, she plucked the woman's purse, keys, and a framed photo of her with her girlfriends from the dresser.
The man remained in the bed, his arms now curled around empty air.
Blur deposited the woman into the passenger seat of her own car, which was now parked safely in a scenic overlook fifty miles away. The purse and photo were on the seat beside her.
Blur gave the woman a tiny pat on the head.
"You deserve a boyfriend who doesn't cheat," she chirped. "And a better view. You're welcome!"
Back in the high-rise, the man flinched as the shockwave finally hit, the windows exploding inward. He was alone, confused, and about to have a very, very bad day.
///
Clock’s other arm was already in motion, a piston-driven elbow strike rocketing sideways into her jaw.
The impact was sickening, a crack that echoed over the ruins. It wasn't just force; it was perfectly delivered, concentrated devastation — a ten-billion-newton blow that shattered her jawbone like spun glass.
Yume’s world snapped white, then black. Her flight failed. She plummeted, a broken doll, and crashed into the street below with a resounding THOOM that cratered the asphalt for two hundred meters.
Silence, for a single, suspended second. He didn’t just hit hard. He didn’t just move fast.
Yume’s head swam, vision blurring. He fights like Crook.
The thought seared through her mind like the lightning in her veins. The same precision, the same arrogant grace, the way he pivoted just so... infuriating.
And that fury fueled her. It wasn’t just emotion — it was a catalyst. In the crater, her shattered jawbone clicked and fused, teeth pushing up from bloody gums like pearls of polished ivory. Her cracked ribs knitted, denser than before. Muscles reknit with filaments of gold; broken bones healed not just to whole, but to something harder, something hungrier. She could feel it — a terrible, glorious amplification. The more he broke her, the more the storm inside rebuilt her, stronger, faster, angrier.
She looked up.
Clock floated at the crater's precipice, a forty-foot shipping trailer balanced effortlessly over his head. There was no shimmer of telekinesis, no psychic strain, just the pure, terrifying physics of superhuman strength making a mockery of mass and steel. With a grin sharp enough to cut the twilight itself, he slammed it down.
It was a brutal, physical impact. The trailer wrenched her body downward, crushing her into the crater with a deafening CRUNCH of compacting earth and shattering steel. The force wracked her, driving the air from her lungs and hammering her into the packed dirt.
For a moment, there was only the groaning of twisted metal and the patter of falling debris.
Then, a low growl emanated from beneath the wreckage. A hand, fingers curled like talons, punched up through the trailer's roof. With a shriek of tearing metal, Yume shoved the multi-ton wreckage off herself, rising to her knees. Her silk gown was torn, her hair dusted with grime, but her skin was unbroken. Her bones, whole.
She glared up at him, chest heaving, her eyes promising murder. The trailer hadn't broken her. It had just made her angry.
///
Yume shot up from the crater, asphalt melting around her bare feet. The air crackled, not with lightning, but with pure, undiluted fury. The hammer dissolved into golden motes. This required precision, not brute force.
She launched herself at Clock, a blur of motion and intent. A crushing, invisible wall of telekinesis, denser than a bank vault door, slammed into her, blasting her back into the pavement with a ground-shaking thud.
Yume growled, pushing herself up from the new imprint her body had made.
Clock’s hand was already on the strings of his guitar. The violet filaments hummed, resonating with the static still screaming in his earbuds. He didn’t play a note, not yet - he simply plucked the air above the strings, and the tension alone began to vibrate the ruins around them.
Yume roared, not in pain, but in raw, untamed anger. Her golden weapon rematerialized in her hand. Instead of charging, she flung it at him, a comet of vengeance aimed not at him, but at the guitar itself.
Mid-flight, the naginata dissolved. It reforged into the sledgehammer, its runes blazing “Shatter” with apocalyptic intent - a hundred billion newtons of conceptual force screaming toward the blackwood body.
Clock’s smirk didn’t falter. He flicked a finger. Telekinetic force, dense enough to halt a meteor, slammed into the hammer’s path.
It didn’t even slow.
Of course, his mind hissed. It’s not just mass. It’s authority.
He didn’t try to stop the hammer. Instead, his free hand came up, palm open toward it - not to block, but to receive. His smirk sharpened.
Transport.
The hammer struck the air just before his guitar. And in that moment, the force - the hundred billion newtons, the kinetic scream, the command to Shatter - simply vanished. It was shunted away into the silent, hungry dimension where Clock stored all violence meant for him.
The hammer itself, now inert, harmless, began to drop.
But Yume was already moving. Her will pulled, and the hammer dissolved into liquid gold mid-fall, flowing back across the distance in a gleaming arc. It solidified in her hands not as a weapon, but as a wide, tower shield of burnished gold, its surface etched with a single new rune:
“Endure.”
Clock’s fingers were already dancing across the strings.
VVVWWRROOOMM—
A single, distorted chord tore through reality. It wasn’t just sound. It was sonic annihilation, a wave of visible distortion that vaporized the air in its path, tearing a half-mile trench through the city behind him and racing toward Yume with the speed of thought.
The soundwave hit the shield.
The impact didn’t ring - it thudded, a deep, world-shaking groan. The shield held, but the force blew her backward, feet skidding through molten asphalt, the air screaming around the edges of the barrier. The horrific noise was muted, but the pressure was immense, grinding the shield against her forearms, buckling the ground beneath her into a deepening crater.
Behind the shield, Yume’s eyes burned with promised lightning.
///
A microsecond earlier, Blur had run the calculations. Her infinite-speed mind presented her with a menu of clean, instant victories.
Option 1: Zip Clock into the event horizon of a black hole two galaxies over. Simple. Tidy.
Option 2: Simply hit him herself. At her true, infinite velocity, his precious Transport would be a sieve trying to drink from a firehose. He would vaporize before it could react. Of course, the collateral shockwave would likely scrub the entire landmass of China from the map, but the mission would be complete.
She dismissed them both. A glance at Yume's face, a mask of years of pain finally finding an outlet, was all the data she needed. This wasn't about efficiency. This was therapy.
So, she chose Option 3.
In that instant, a tiny streak of light zipped through the space between them at an impossible vector. It was too fast to be seen, or even felt. For a fraction of a nanosecond, Blur was there, not saving anyone, but delivering a two-handed, full-force shove to the small of Clock's back.
"BOOP!" a voice giggled from a kilometer away.
To any observer, it would have looked like nothing. But Blur had pushed him across that small distance at a velocity that defied physics. The sudden, relativistic whiplash nearly turned his brain and internal organs to slurry. For a single, critical moment, his vision whited out and his mind went utterly blank, dazed and disoriented.
It was just enough. Clock's telekinetic focus shattered. His balance faltered, his feet skidding meters across the air, a flicker of genuine shock widening his violet eyes.
It was all the opening Yume needed. She leapt again, a true tempest unleashed. Her right hand shot out, fingers curled like talons, aiming to rake the smug violet eyes from his skull.
Clock didn’t retreat. He rolled into the attack, using her own momentum against her. As her claws whistled past his face, his body uncoiled like a spring, a piston-like punch driving toward her ribs.
Yume was ready. She batted his fist aside with her forearm, the impact ringing out like a clap of thunder. But she didn’t stop there. Her other hand snapped forward, gripping his wrist, locking his arm in place.
In the same fluid motion, her free hand became a blade. A devastating, flat-handed strike aimed like a spear straight for his neck. This was the test: if his "Transport" required a conscious trigger, perhaps a contact attack, too fast to process, could bypass it.
She let it fly. Clock didn’t move. He let it land.
Her fingertips, capable of punching through battleship armor like tissue paper, thudded against his throat.
And stopped. Not deflected. Not transported. Just... stopped.
It was like striking a mountain forged from neutron star. The impact jarred her entire arm to the shoulder, a dull, shocking pain reverberating through her bones. There was no give, no fracture, not even a flicker of discomfort in his gaze.
The plan, to pierce the flesh and rip his spine out, evaporated. Her fingers lay harmlessly against impossibly durable skin.
A new, chilling realization dawned. Transport wasn’t his only defense. His very body was a fortress. His skin was terrifyingly, fundamentally durable on a level she had never encountered.
Clock giggled.
It was a light, airy sound, utterly out of place amidst the ruin. The giggle of a little kid who’d just played the best prank.
That sound.
It didn’t just clear the anger from Yume’s eyes; it shattered it, replacing it with pure, unadulterated shock.
It was Paris’s laugh. The exact one he’d make when he’d pulled off some ridiculous, impossible trick, his eyes crinkling at the corners.
For a heartbeat, she was frozen, her world reduced to that familiar, haunting sound coming from this abomination’s lips.
It was all the opening he needed.
Clock zoomed forward, the air screaming in his wake. His fist, now clenched and wreathed in a nimbus of distorting energy, aimed an earth-shattering punch at her ribs, the same spot he’d struck moments before.
And Yume, trapped in the echo of a dead man’s laughter, could only watch it come.
His DNA, corrupted. Paris.
Clock’s fist connected, and for a fraction of a second, Yume wasn’t in the ruins of a dying city.
She was twenty years younger, knees pulled to her chest, hidden in the tall grass by the riverbank.
///
The water murmured over smooth stones, a lullaby of liquid and moonlight. Crickets sang in the reeds, their chirps syncopated with the occasional plop of a frog slipping beneath the surface. Fireflies drifted like embers from a distant hearth, gilding the edges of Yume’s silhouette where she sat, her face streaked with tears she’d thought no one could see.
A twig snapped.
Paris didn’t announce himself. He just sat, his shoulder brushing hers, his knees bumping awkwardly into his chest like he’d forgotten how long his legs were. For a while, he said nothing. Just watched the river with her, his breath steadying to match hers.
The night held its breath. A heron cried somewhere downstream, lonely and low.
"You know," Paris finally said, voice softer than the water, "hard times always remind us to be grateful for the good." His fingers fidgeted with a loose thread on his sleeve. "Things will get better, Blue."
Yume wiped her cheeks roughly. "You still call me that even after I took the dye out of my hair."
Paris smiled. Not his usual grin, smaller, truer. The kind that made his crow’s feet crinkle.
"It was never about the hair." He tilted his head up to the stars. "You make me feel... blue. Like a clear, beautiful sky. Full of hope and love."
Yume’s breath caught.
The river sang. The fireflies pulsed. Somewhere, an owl called, its voice weaving through the willow branches.
Paris turned to her. She turned to him. And they kissed. Oh how they kissed.
Not like warriors. Not like soldiers. Like two people who’d forgotten how to be anything else. His lips were chapped from the wind, hers salty from tears, and the world narrowed to the press of his palm against her jaw, the way his thumb brushed the apple of her cheek like she was something precious.
The river kept flowing. The night kept breathing. And for once, Yume didn’t feel like a storm.
She felt like the sky.
///
Clock’s fist shattered through Yume’s ribs with a force of fifty-billion-newtons, and the memory exploded into agony.
Blood didn’t spray - it boiled from the wound, a dark, smoking mist that hung in the air like a phantom of her pain. Ribs, reduced to splinters, shredded the soft tissue of her lung. She tasted copper and ozone, and beneath it, the faint, impossible sweetness of river water and Paris.
Tears fell freely now, sizzling like acid where they struck her collarbone, etching tiny, smoking trails down her skin. The scent of scorched earth, ionized air and her own blood filled her lungs, but all she could taste was the ghost of a kiss and the iron promise of revenge.
Her lightning answered. Not with rage. With grief.
Every parry shook her bones. Every slash carried centuries of grief. She didn’t fight him, she exorcised him, her strikes screaming with the weight of dead cities and a love reduced to lab notes.
Clock laughed, low and mocking. "You’re shaking, Storm princess."
I’ll show you a storm.
She mentally tapped into the Agavix, the infinite dimension of power all Storm assassins drew energy from. The more emotion and connection to it they had, the stronger, faster, more dangerous they were.
The golden hammer rematerialized in her hand once again, dissolving into a seething swarm of liquid gold. It wasn't a weapon of blunt force anymore, but one of ensnarement. The light solidified into heavy, golden chains that shot forward not at his body, but at his head. "Obstruct" .They wrapped around his eyes with the speed of a thought, a blinding, searing-hot cage of solid energy.
Clock recoiled, a sharp hiss escaping his lips as the chains scorched his pale skin, his smirk vaporizing mid-syllable. He was blind, his superior perception and spatial awareness utterly neutralized. He had no opportunity to see, to calculate, to dodge.
And in this very moment, Yume was devoured by emotion, her next attack shook the atmosphere.
The air turned white.
It wasn't lightning. It was a star being born and dying in the same instant, a lance of pure, screaming creation that was also the absolute end of everything it touched. The air turned inside out, bleeding colors that didn't have names, a searing negative image of the world, where the only light was the darkness of a god's wrath.
It moved faster than time had any right to allow. A million times beyond light.
It hit Clock with the force of a continent breaking free from its tectonic plates, five hundred trillion newtons of raw, shattering power, all focused into a single, devastating point.
The impact was silent for a heartbeat, the universe itself too stunned to make a sound.
Then Clock folded. His body wasn't just thrown back; it was erased from its position. His ribs cratered inward, not like a stomped can, but like a meteorite striking a moon, the shockwave of flesh and bone blasting outwards. A visible halo of distorted air erupted around him, and then he was gone, a human bullet shot through the cityscape. He didn't crash through buildings; he vaporized them, his body carving a molten trench twenty miles long, a scar of glass and fire across the face of the city. Behind him, the air itself caught fire, a trail of superheated plasma marking his impossible journey, his gloom essence shrieking as it scrambled to keep him in one piece.
///
A sound like the sky being skinned alive piercing through the air, a thousand hurricanes compressed into a single, shredding note. Then came the light, if it could be called that, a negative sun, void of illumination that burned the eyes of every living thing for miles.
Yume’s lightning wasn’t a strike. It was her hatred, her rage, her jealousy given form.
The bolt that struck Clock was a betrayed god's final judgment. Tendrils of incandescent cobalt and furious gold unspooled through his flesh, cooking his shadow-forged skin from the inside out, seeking the memory of Paris buried in his stolen DNA. The heat -beyond a billion degrees concentrated into a needle’s point- was unthinkable. The air around them vanished, turned into a perfect vacuum that then collapsed with a WORLD-ENDING CRUNCH, imploding so violently it sucked entire skyscrapers off their foundations, twisting them into a spiraling vortex of metal and concrete that was promptly blasted into atomic dust.
Sound ceased to exist. There was only the sizzle of reality itself frying at the edges, the stench of ionized blood, the crack of Clock’s ribs shattering under the force of a woman killing the living reminder of her stolen love.
The blood of my love, made weapon.
The thought ruptured her. Paris had never betrayed her, but here stood his echo, this profanity, wearing the face of the monster who’d scraped their love from petri dishes and warped it into this.
「死ね、異形め！」
(Shine, igyō-me!)
"DIE, YOU ABOMINATION!!!"
Transport flinched. The pocket dimension gagged on the lightning’s fury, spitting half back into the world, and Clock flew.
Not gracefully. Not smirking.
A ragdoll of meat and gloom, tumbling through skyscrapers like a bullet through wet paper, his body leaving a corridor of molten glass in its wake.
The lightning left her veins feeling hollow, like she'd poured her own blood into the storm. Her rage kept her on her feet.
Ten heartbeats passed.
Then a black comet streaked back, Clock’s form wreathed in telekinetic flames.
No smile. No taunt. No guitar. Just a raised hand and a city block ripped from its foundations, hurled at her like a god’s insult.
Yume bared her teeth. Pure laughter erupted from her, raw and broken.
Finally. Now we fight.
///
A streak of iridescent light zipped into the maelstrom, resolving into Blur hovering a few feet from Yume’s face. The fairy’s head tilted, her vast, luminous eyes scanning Yume’s feral grin, the raw power bleeding from her in waves.
Her tiny hands came up in a slow, deliberate clap.
Clap. Clap. Clap.
"Okay! Okay! She finally gets it!" Blur chirped, her voice a pleased hum. "No more moping. All the way unleashed. Good girl."
She tapped a finger on her chin, the world frozen in a syrupy slow-motion around her furious, golden core. Her gaze, capable of tracking the birth and death of subatomic particles, flicked past the epic battle. She saw it, a visible shockwave from one of Clock’s deflected blows, expanding in a silent, shimmering wall of force directly towards a still-intact, traditionally styled restaurant with a red sign reading "Jade Dragon."
"Tch. Not on my watch," she muttered, though her watch was the entire flow of time itself.
In the space it took for the shockwave to travel the first millimeter, Blur was gone from Yume’s shoulder.
She was inside the restaurant.
The air was thick with suspended panic. Patrons were frozen mid-bite, waiters mid-stride, a single drop of tea hanging eternally from a spout. Blur pulled out a chair at a pristine table, sat down, and picked up a menu that hadn't even begun to flutter from the incoming blast.
"Let's see..." she mused, tapping the laminated page. "The usual."
In the next picosecond, the table was groaning under a feast materialized directly from the kitchen. It wasn't just food; it was a curated tour of Chinese haute cuisine, every dish perfectly prepared at the exact peak of its flavor, stolen from the very moment before service.
· Peking Duck, its skin glistening like amber, sliced paper-thin beside delicate pancakes.
· Xiao Long Bao, soup dumplings so delicate they trembled in their steam.
· Kung Pao Chicken, with plump peanuts and vibrant chilies.
· Mapo Tofu, swimming in a fiery, numbing Sichuan sauce.
· Steamed Whole Fish with ginger and scallions, its eye staring blankly at the frozen chaos.
· A platter of perfectly charred Char Siu pork.
· A towering Golden Swallow nest soup.
Simultaneously, across the city, an afterimage of Blur was at an arcade, slamming buttons on a 'City Brawler' cabinet she had magically overclocked to keep up with her. On the screen, her character performed an infinite combo.
Back in the restaurant, she took a massive, simultaneous bite of everything. "Oh yeah, take that... mmph, this Peking Roasted Duck is divine," she mumbled, a drumstick in one hand and a soup dumpling in the other, her gaze flicking to the arcade screen in her mind's eye.
Her peripheral vision caught a flicker of motion in the kitchen. But it wasn't aimed at her. A massive chef's knife, sent flying by the initial shockwave, was tumbling handle-over-blade in perfect slow motion, its lethal point aimed directly at the forehead of the head chef, who was frozen in a futile, protective stance over his woks.
Blur sighed, a puff of air that sent a dozen suspended dust motes spiraling. "Honestly, the mess." She lay down across three chairs for a quick nap.
She woke, stretched, and yawned. The knife was an inch from the chef’s face.
“Special of the day is… relocation!” she announced.
In the time it took the blade to travel its final millimeter, Blur became a whirlwind.
For the chef, it was a disorienting blink.
The chaos of his kitchen: screaming metal, the wok's heat, the tumbling cleaver... vanished.
He stood on a sun-drenched Neapolitan street, the bay brilliant blue before him. A heavy canvas bag was in his hand.
“A token for the duck,” a voice chimed in his skull, cheerful and metallic. “Sublime. You have a discerning patron’s gratitude.”
He fumbled the bag open. Stacks of €500 notes. A fortune, stolen from a Milanese vault in the same instant she’d savored his sauce.
“Try the pizza. Rabilet’s is… acceptable. A 7.9. Now, a tedious cinema awaits its evacuation.”
The presence vanished, leaving him with the lapping waves, the stolen money, and a god’s thanks.
Zip. The elderly couple were at a Kyoto café, mid-bite.
Zip.The family was in a Vancouver park, their dumplings still steaming.
She’d saved them all. Impeccable taste was a virtue she rewarded.
She reappeared in a cinema a few blocks over, where a dozen people were frozen, watching a trailer for a movie called Fairy Hunter. On the screen, a CGI elf was being speared by a soldier.
Blur hovered in front of the screen, hands on her hips. "Oh, really?" she said, deeply unamused. "Byeeee."
“Oh, really?” Blur said, unamused. “Byeeee.”
She vanished.
A millisecond later, the shockwave arrived, obliterating the restaurant, the arcade, and the cinema, turning them and everyone still inside to dust.
