For the first time in his existence, Clock felt agony.

  Yume’s lightning had liquefied his insides, not burned, not charred, but melted, as if his very molecules were wax thrown into the sun. His gloom essence convulsed as it fought to rebuild him, flesh knitting itself back together in stuttering, pixelated strands. He could taste his own regenerating lungs, the copper-sharp tang of his blood boiling then cooling midair as his body reassembled itself.

  Transport. Activate Transport.

  His mind clawed for the pocket dimension, even as his vision swam. The city block he’d ripped free -a section of the Nanjing Road pedestrian mall, now uprooted and dangling with the shredded awnings of luxury boutiques- hung suspended above him, trembling in his telekinetic grip. With a snarl, he hurled the entire mass of history and commerce at Yume, only for his gut to lurch as she vanished from sight.

  Then, her foot connected with his face.

  THOOM-KRAK!!!

  Clock’s head snapped back so fast his neck vertebrae popped like a gunshot. The impact whited out his vision. For half a second, there was nothing, no sound, no thought, just void.

  Then: waking up midair, his body cratering through the skyscrapers of Lujiazui's financial district like a meteor. He tore through the glass skin of the Shanghai World Financial Center, steel and glass exploding around him in glittering shards that rained down onto the Century Avenue below. He hit the ground hard enough to fold the eight-lane boulevard into a canyon, asphalt splitting like rotten fruit, exposing the tangled guts of the city's subway lines.

  A hundred billion newtons. Straight to the face.

  The thought surfaced through the shock, cold and detached even as his jaw fractured and his perfect cheekbone caved inward. She wasn’t this strong before, not even an eight of what she is now.

  A secondary, more chilling calculation sliced through the first. And she wasn’t this fast, either.

  A moment ago, he had been tracking her effortlessly as she moved at a quarter of lightspeed -a velocity that would turn any human city into a firestorm from air friction alone. He’d matched it with insulting ease, a predator toying with its prey’s greatest effort.

  This time, he hadn’t noticed her move.

  There was no tracking. No vector to follow. One moment she was across the crater, a golden statue of rage. The next, her foot was already inside his face, having crossed the distance at a speed that made her previous blitz seem like a slow-motion replay. The math was irrefutable: if her strength had octupled, then her speed -the kinetic expression of the same furious power - had kept pace.

  She was now eight times as fast.

  She had punched him at twice the speed of light.

  The impossibility of it -the physics-shatering violation- was a footnote to the raw, cratering impact. The force that caved his face wasn't just greater. It was sovereign. It arrived not as a strike, but as a decree written directly into his bones.

  And there she was.

  Not just descending. She was already there, having moved faster than his crash. With a sickening YIKE of impact, her bare sweaty foot stamped down onto his face, grinding his perfect features into the shattered asphalt of what was once the heart of modern Shanghai. He saw nothing but the sole of her foot and a sliver of her wild, hate-filled eyes glaring down from above, the twisted wreckage of the Oriental Pearl Tower looming in the background like a broken promise.

  Instinct screamed. Telekinetic force erupted from him in a raw, uncontrolled sphere.

  THOOM.

  The blast wasn't aimed, it was a reflex. It tore the ground out from under them and sent Yume rocketing backward, ripping a new trench through the city as she tumbled through the skeleton of a half-constructed supertower in the Pudong business district.

  Clock scrambled to his feet on the crater's edge, his face already knitting itself back together, but the phantom pressure of her foot on his cheekbone remained. The imprint of her sole was seared into his pride.

  What the hell is wrong with this woman?!

  Before the thought could fully form, she was blitzing towards him again, a golden streak over the Huangpu River. But she wasn't using her hammer. Instead, she cackled like a madwoman, her voice a crackle of static and fury, as she ripped huge slabs of shattered skyscraper from the ruins of the Bund's historic waterfront and hurled them at him. A hailstorm of colonial-era masonry and modern rebar, each slab the size of a bus, screaming across the river.

  Clock didn’t think. He reacted.

  Twelve Reverse-Impact Blasts erupted from his palms, streaking through the debris. They didn't just hit the slabs; they deformed them, vaporizing granite and twisting metal into molten confetti. But their true horror wasn't mere destruction. It was compounding escalation.

  Each blast was a spiraling maw of kinetic energy and concentrated gloom, designed to multiply in force, speed, and thermal fury with every meter it traveled. The beams spiraled toward Yume through the expanding cloud of dust. She twisted midair over the river, a golden serpent, dodging five, six, seven, but the eighth slammed into her ribs. The impact wasn't just a transfer of momentum. It was the localized arrival of a cataclysm. It was a delivered verdict. The force was that of a continental plate hammer-struck. The speed meant she absorbed all of it in a nanosecond. And the heat -if that blast had struck any normal structure, it would have felt less like an explosion and more like a country-sized mass, carrying the thermal violence of a solar core, had been teleported into the impact point.

  The distant force multiplier -now a laughable understatement- sent her spinning like a bird shot with a cannonball, crashing through the roof of the Shanghai Grand Theatre. The sheer thermal backwash of the blast alone scorched the river below into steam and the city blocks around it into glass. Buildings miles away in the Jing'an district detonated from the stray beams' multiplicative shockwaves, entire blocks of the French Concession reduced to atomic dust in the background, mere collateral to a single, focused point of solar annihilation.

  And this was with his intervention. The moment the beams had streaked past Yume, Clock had been forced to perform a desperate, split-second lobotomy on his own attack. He’d mentally severed the flow of Gloom fueling the ones that missed, draining them dry before their exponential escalation could continue unchecked. Left to their own devices, they wouldn't have stopped at the city limits. They would have crossed oceans, multiplying in fury with every mile, their contained infernos blooming into continent-scouring events. They were less like energy blasts and more like primed stellar cores packed into spheres of screaming light - tactical apocalypses on a hair trigger.

  Even neutered, their death throes were cataclysmic.

  Blur’s afterimages split into a thousand, ten thousand, a million streaks of light as she evacuated 2,856,792 people from the carnage -emptying the Super Brand Mall in a blink, clearing the Yu Garden bazaar in a breath, plucking students from the Fudan University campus. Only the flies in the abandoned wet markets remained, buzzing confusedly where humans had once stood.

  Clock barely had time to stand on the ruined banks of the Huangpu before Yume was on him again, her hammer screaming downward.

  Transport NOW.

  The hammer’s impact vanished into the pocket dimension, but the shockwave didn’t. The air itself rippled, flattening the ruins around them in a perfect sphere, flipping tourist ferries in the river like toys, debris scattering like shrapnel across the water.

  Yume leapt back, landing on the bent mast of a capsized cruise ship, grinning like a feral thing. "How’d that blast feel?"

  They didn’t tell me she was this strong. This crazy. Are they trying to get me killed?!

  A blur of motion. Not Yume. Too fast, too... impish.

  Before Clock could process the new threat, he felt a sudden, shocking draft. A violent yank from behind. His perfectly tailored trousers were wrenched down to his knees, the fabric digging into a profoundly undignified and deeply uncomfortable wedgie.

  Blur zipped to a halt twenty feet away, perched on the head of the Amorous Bund statue, a toddler she'd just plucked from a collapsing overpass held in one arm. With her free hand, she held up his silver-buckled belt like a trophy.

  "Transport that!!!" she sneered, and vanished in a streak of light.

  Clock stood frozen for one mortifying second in the center of the devastated Bund, his pale legs exposed to the ruined skyline, the complex forces of his telekinetic blasts momentarily forgotten in a wave of sheer, unadulterated indignity.

  ///

  Clock’s trousers snapped back into place with a sharp telekinetic tug, his face a mask of cold fury. He blitzed forward, no finesse, only rage. A piston-like jab cratered her ribs - ten billion newtons. A cross cracked against her jaw - fifty billion. She took them, grinning like a maniac, her head snapping back but her feet planted firm. Each impact sent a THOOM of force into the earth, the shockwaves radiating out through the city's foundations, toppling ruins miles away. She was a monument, and he was the hammer, each strike proving her indestructibility.

  Another blow to her jaw. THOOM. One hundred billion newtons. This time, her body didn't move an inch. The force dissipated into her, absorbed, fueling the mad light in her eyes. She was so much more than before. Denser. Stronger.

  Rage flooded him, hot and reckless. Fine. If force wouldn’t break her, velocity would.

  He increased the speed of his hand to half the speed of light - a punch moving at 150,000 kilometers per second. At that speed, mass became relativistic. His fist didn't just carry force; it carried the energy of a world-breaking asteroid. Four hundred quadrillion newtons gathered in his knuckles.

  It wasn't just force. It was density. The space around his arm didn't just warp; it collapsed, compressing into a lens of screaming physics and bent light, a localized gravity well so intense it began to siphon the surrounding storm into a spiraling vortex of vaporized rain and ionized air. The numbers weren't theoretical. At that magnitude, the energy packed into his fist exceeded the total kinetic energy of every tectonic plate shift on Earth in a century. It was a force capable of punting a small moon out of orbit, of cracking a planet's mantle like an egg.

  Enraged, he gathered every ounce of strength, every shred of gloom essence, and launched it forward - aimed not just to erase her from existence, but to unmake the point in space she occupied.

  The consequences began before the punch even landed.

  Atmosphere: The air in its path didn't part. It fissioned. Molecules were torn apart into constituent atoms, atoms into nuclei and electrons, creating a momentary, star-hot plasma trail that glowed with the UV intensity of a solar flare. A vacuum corridor, hundreds of meters wide, was carved instantaneously through the sky, causing the surrounding air to rush in with a thunderclap that registered on seismographs three countries away.

  Tectonics: The force, focused downward, didn't just hit her. It transmitted through her -or the space where she stood -and into the planetary crust below. Even a fraction of a percent of that energy bleeding into the ground would be enough to trigger localized fault rupture. Deep underground, in the stressed rock of the continental plate, minor, unknown fault lines groaned and shuddered. In the coming hours, a series of sharp, shallow earthquakes -magnitude 5.8 to 6.3- would ripple through the region, their epicenters mystifying geologists.

  Orbital Mechanics: On a purely Newtonian level, the equal and opposite reaction of striking with that much force, even against a being who could Transport it, had to go somewhere. Clock’s body, braced by his gloom-sorcery, became the anvil. The Earth, however, was the hammer. The planet itself recoiled - not enough to be felt, but enough to be measured. Ultra-precise satellite laser ranging would later detect a minuscule, momentary perturbation in Earth's rotation, a deviation on the order of a fraction of a micro-arcsecond. It was the equivalent of the entire world stuttering on its axis from the blowback of a single man's hatred.

  All of this -the atmospheric scarring, the seismic pre-shock, the planetary wobble -was merely the byproduct. The prelude. The collateral whisper of a force that, if it were ever allowed to connect fully with an unyielding surface, would not leave a crater.

  It would leave a new ocean.

  The punch was not a attack. It was a geological event given a target.

  And Yume's hand snapped up to meet it. Her palm met his fist. The sound was not a collision, but a full stop. A period at the end of a sentence. The cataclysmic force simply... ceased. Her fingers closed around his knuckles, holding the annihilation at bay. Her grin widened, a silent, terrifying mockery.

  "Ara, ara," she whispered, her voice a soft, chiding rustle, like dry leaves skittering over a grave. "Kitanai na (汚いな - How messy). Are you trying to break our world?" Her eyes, pits of ancient, gleaming malice, locked onto his. "Omocha wa, yasashiku asobinasai (おもちゃは、優しく遊びなさい - You must play with your toys gently)."

  Her leg pistonned upward in a brutal shove kick, her heel planting squarely in the center of his chest.

  It wasn't a strike meant to break bones, but to break momentum. The force was a concussive wave that launched him backward like a cannonball, the air driven from his lungs in a shocked gasp before his mind could even register the failure of his attack.

  He was a ragdoll in a hurricane, tumbling helplessly through the air. It was only through a desperate, flailing effort that he arrested his flight, his boots skidding across the ground as he landed, his mind reeling from the whiplash and the sheer, disrespectful physics of it.

  And on pure, shattered instinct, he fired his last resort. Multiple Reverse-Impact Blasts erupted from his palms, a storm of devouring light aimed to obliterate her.

  Yume didn't block. She became a phantom, zigzagging through the barrage, a cackling blur that closed the distance in a heartbeat. He threw up a wall of pure telekinetic force to halt her charge. She bullied straight through it, the air shattering like glass around her. He tried to fly back, to regain space and control.

  Too late.

  Her hand, iron-strong, clamped around his ankle and yanked him down like a fish on a line. Her other fist, wreathed in lightning -not just as a weapon, but as a containment field- connected with his jaw in a devastating uppercut.

  One trillion newtons.

  The lightning didn’t just channel the force - it contained it, a crackling golden sphere of energy wrapping around the point of impact, compressing the cataclysm into a single, brutal point against his skull. It didn't shatter the horizon or vaporize mountains; she kept the destruction focused, personal, intimate. All the world-ending force was poured into his jaw, and his jaw alone.

  KRACK-BOOM!

  He was launched upwards like a rocket. It all went white.

  When the light returned, he was airborne, disoriented, the coppery taste of blood filling his mouth. Yume shot past him in a golden streak, then reversed her trajectory, meeting his ascent. She grabbed both his ankles, her grip like industrial vices.

  With a roar that tore through the battlefield, she used her own momentum and his, swinging him in a brutal arc overhead before slamming him down into the earth with the full force of a god driving a nail.

  BAMM!!!

  The impact was cataclysmic. It wasn't a sound so much as the planet screaming. The shockwave wasn't a ring; it was a continent-scale tsunami of pure force, visible as a shimmering, ground-hugging wall of annihilation that traveled at the speed of thought.

  The earth directly under Clock didn't crater; it liquefied, vaporizing into a superheated glass bowl three miles wide. But that was just the point of impact. The real devastation radiated outwards. The force that failed to be contained by his indestructible body had to go somewhere.

  Every standing structure within seven miles - the skeletal remains of the Jin Mao Tower, the husk of the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum, entire districts of shattered high-rises— was not just flattened. It was scoured from the face of the earth, transformed into a flat, smoking plain of fused silica. The Huangpu River was blasted backwards in a momentary, terrifying miracle, its bed laid bare before the water rushed back in a cataclysmic tidal wave of steam and mud.

  Blood instantly pooled in Clock's organs from the internal shock, his vision swimming in and out of focus. For a being whose skin could shrug off a direct nuclear strike, the fact that he felt anything was a testament to a force that bypassed durability through sheer, unconscionable overkill. It wasn't a precise attack. It was the universe having a localized tantrum, and he was the anvil.

  I have to get up!!!

  The thought died in his synaptic void.

  She was there before the impulse could finish firing. There was no blur, no displacement of air, not even the violent rush of causality catching up. One moment, empty space. The next, her.

  She was moving even faster than before. Her rage, her grief, her sheer, undiluted hatred had pushed the screaming engine of her power past another catastrophic threshold. Where she had been a comet, she was now a fundamental violation.

  Five times the speed of light.

  At that velocity, she wasn't just breaking the sound barrier; she was outrunning time’s own ability to record her motion. Light from her position reached Clock’s eyes after she had already arrived, making her a phantom of pre-emptive violence. The laws of physics didn't just bend; they were rendered irrelevant in her wake, leaving only the metaphysical scar of her passage.

  Hot fingers, charged with killing lightning, thrust through his eyes.

  There was no time for Transport. No time for thought. There was only the sensation -a sun-bright agony of pressure and tearing- and the silent, absolute knowledge that this time, she hadn't just closed the distance.

  She had deleted it.

  He screamed. A raw, guttural sound of agony he didn't know he could make. His telekinesis erupted in a final, desperate, uncontrolled detonation, a personal Big Bang that scorched the earth for a mile in every direction and sent Yume flying away like a discarded doll.

  As his gloom essence frantically knitted his ruptured eyes back together, the darkness swimming with afterimages of her feral grin, he knew he had no choice. It had to be now.

  He split. Feeling his body detangle into three separate forms.

  ///

  Three Clocks lunged at Yume from all sides, daggers flashing, telekinetic strikes bending the air. The battle had spilled south, into the Hongqiao transportation hub. They swarmed her amidst the wrecked maglev trains and the shattered canopy of the Hongqiao Railway Station, turning a monument of modern transit into a brutalist arena.

  But it was a lie. A beautiful, desperate lie of motion.

  In truth, there was only one Clock, and he was burning.

  He wasn’t just moving fast. He was violating his own reality. The gloom essence that was his lifeblood, the foundation of his magic and durability, was now being fed directly into his cellular engines as raw, screaming fuel. He was overriding every biological and magical failsafe, forcing his form to ignore the material laws that bound it, achieving a conceptual velocity he was never designed to sustain.

  Ten times the speed of light.

  He fractured his own perception, creating afterimages so perfect and interactive they were nearly autonomous - three bodies moving in flawless, impossible sync. To any sensor, any eye, it was a trio. To him, it was a single consciousness stretched across a nanosecond, screaming in triplicate. His true top speed, the maximum safe velocity his engineered body could handle, was a little over light-speed. He had never even needed to move this fast before. It was a theoretical limit, a red line he’d never crossed.

  He had crossed it. He was miles past it. And the cost was a pyre of his own soul.

  Because Yume wasn’t just matching him.

  She was rendering the concept irrelevant.

  His ten-times-lightspeed blitzes, his triplicate assaults - they met her not as overwhelming force, but as predictable geometry. She flowed between his strikes not because she was faster in a quantifiable sense, but because her speed seemed to come from a different source altogether. It wasn't velocity; it was inevitability. Her lightning didn’t just crackle around her; it fueled her with something he could not fathom - a power that drew not from a finite well of gloom, but from the infinite storm of her grief and rage.

  He knew, with cold, crystalline terror, that she could end him now. Another blast of that star-core lightning, and his overtaxed form, his burning gloom, would have nothing left to give. She could reduce him to ions from a mile away.

  She wasn’t.

  She was here. In the melee. Trading blows. Letting his daggers kiss the air near her throat, letting his telekinetic slams crater the ground at her feet.

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  She wanted to enjoy this. She wanted to feel his bones break under her hands. She wanted to see the arrogance bleed from his violet eyes and be replaced by the dawning, final humiliation of knowing she had broken him, personally, intimately, completely.

  He couldn’t let that happen. He had to end this. Now. Before his gloom exhausted itself and left him a hollow, motionless puppet at her mercy. Before she decided the game was over. He had to make her pay. Not just for the pain, but for the sheer, unforgivable humiliation of making him burn his own future to keep up with her past.

  The clones moved as one, a pincer of gloom and malice. But in the heart of the storm, the real Clock was already planning his exit. Not to run. To make her regret ever forcing him to ignite his own soul.

  She became a whirlwind, her naginata a blur of gold and lightning. She parried a gloom-dagger, the impact sending a spiderweb of cracks through the air itself. She ducked under a telekinetic slam that vaporized a line of high-speed trains, then drove the hilt of her weapon into a clone's stomach. The clone folded around the blow with a sickening crunch, gasping with Clock's shared pain as it was launched backward through the station's main concourse, reducing pillars and ticket counters to powder.

  The second clone came from above, dropping through the shattered glass roof, a telekinetic hammer the size of a locomotive forming in the air above her. Yume didn't even look up. She dissolved the naginata and met the descending force with her bare fists.

  BOOM-CRACK!

  Her punch didn't just block the attack; it shattered the telekinetic construct into a million shards of dissipating energy. The shockwave radiated outwards, peeling back the station's roof like the lid of a tin can. Before the clone could react, she was on it. Her fingers, sharp and relentless, dug into the clone's throat like five steel nails, crushing the glitching shadow-flesh beneath them.

  "Tabini deru zo," she snarled, the Japanese words sharp and guttural.

  (旅に出るぞ- Let's take a trip.)

  With a heave that tore up the maglev tracks beneath her feet, she hurled the clone like a discus. It became a blur, tearing a path of total destruction southwest, vaporizing everything in its path until it cratered into the side of the Hongqiao International Airport's control tower. The towering structure buckled, then collapsed in a slow-motion avalanche of steel and glass, silencing the last of the airport's emergency systems.

  The original Clock watched his clone get erased from the skyline. Rage, pure and undiluted, boiled over. The smirk vanished from his face, replaced by a snarl that showed too-sharp teeth.

  He dropped into a low stance, his boots cracking the platform concrete, and his hands shot out. His fingers, deceptively slender, dug into the reinforced steel underbelly of a wrecked Maglev train car. With a raw, guttural roar that tore from the depths of his being, he heaved.

  Muscles that could bench-press continents corded beneath his pale skin. There was no telekinetic shimmer, only the shrieking protest of metal as the entire 200-ton train car was ripped from its moorings and twisted girders. He didn't lift it; he wrenched it free, holding the colossal mass of steel and composite material above his head like a warrior hoisting a spear.

  He didn't throw it. He swung it.

  The multi-ton train car became a colossal, brutal club. The air screamed as he whipped it around in a devastating horizontal arc, aiming not just for Yume, but to erase the entire section of the station she was standing in.

  Yume, who had been turning with a feral grin to face the third clone, found the world replaced by a wall of screaming metal. Her eyes widened a fraction.

  KRA-K-THOOOOOM!!!

  The train car connected. The impact didn't sound like a crash; it was the fundamental sound of maximum force meeting absolute durability. The train car didn't just shatter; it compacted, folding around her form like foil around a diamond, before the sheer kinetic energy blasted the entire mass backwards into a million shrapnel pieces that scythed through the station's support columns.

  Yume was gone, blasted from her position, a human cannonball fired through three successive concrete walls and out the other side of the station terminal.

  The original Clock stood panting for a microsecond, his shoulders rising and falling, the raw physical exertion a novel and furious sensation. The air stank of ozone, dust, and his own furious pride.

  And beneath it all, a new, chilling data point scrolled across his hyper-accelerated awareness.

  He was burning gloom to perceive reality at a rate calibrated to ten times the speed of light. At this stratum of consciousness, the world was a near-frozen diorama. Dust motes hung in intricate, unmoving constellations. The spray of debris from their clash was suspended in glassy arcs.

  Yet, in the far, far distance, on the bleeding edge of the ruined metropolis, he saw it.

  A streak of golden light. Not stationary. A blur. A comet-tail of impossible velocity, zipping through the frozen cityscape like a needle through tapestry. It darted, zigzagged, vanished and reappeared kilometers away in the span of a single, stretched-out thought.

  It was the fairy. Blur.

  He wasn’t seeing her move. He was seeing the aftermath of her decisions. At ten times lightspeed perception, he should have been able to track anything short of a teleport. But Blur… she wasn’t just fast. She was a violation of sequential time. Her path wasn't a line; it was a probability cloud collapsing into certainty. She was in multiple places at once not through duplication, but because her speed had broken the chain of cause and effect.

  Just how fast was that thing? The thought was a cold wire drawn through his core. If this -a distant, barely-perceptible streak- was what she looked like to his overtaxed senses, then her true velocity existed in a realm of physics he couldn't even model. She wasn't moving through space. She was editing it.

  A grim understanding settled over him. Yume was an unstoppable force. But Blur… Blur was the proof that the very arena of their fight was an illusion. That there were rules beyond the rules, and Yume had a guardian who operated on them.

  The fairy’s distant light winked out, but the implication blazed brighter in his mind. He wasn't just fighting a storm. He was fighting a storm with a goddess for a strategist. And the goddess didn't even need to look at him to win.

  Then from the new, smoking hole in the station wall, he heard it. Not a groan of pain. A laugh.

  Clock immediately repositioned himself, lunging from her newly created blind spot, a gloom-dagger aimed for her kidney as she re-entered the shattered concourse. Yume didn't turn. The grin was still on her face, wider now, a mask of pure, unhinged delight.

  An idea, sweet and vicious, sparked in her mind. Butter.

  In her hand, the golden light reformed not into a hammer or blade, but into a pair of nunchaku, their chain a crackling arc of lightning. She dropped into a low spin, the motion a perfect, joyful mimicry of the girl she'd left behind.

  The glowing nunchaku swept up, catching Clock's dagger arm at the elbow with a CRACK that sounded like a continental plate shearing in two. The arm didn't just break; it disintegrated into a cloud of splintered shadow and shrieking static.

  Before the echo of the impact could even begin to fade, before Clock's nervous system could scream its protest, Yume completed the spin, her body uncoiling like a released spring.

  "Bakushō!" (爆昇！ - Explosive Ascent!)

  The word was a sharp, guttural command, a perfect, brutal fusion of her bottomless fury and the joyful, destructive physics she'd stolen from Butter's playbook. The second nunchaku swung upward in a devastating arc, not just striking, but connecting with a precision that bypassed muscle and bone to speak directly to the laws of motion.

  This impact made no sound a human ear could register. It was a fundamental event. The air between the weapon and his jaw ceased to exist, compressed into a momentary vacuum. The force -a localized, focused cataclysm of over two trillion newtons- was applied not as a blow, but as a single, absolute vector: Up.

  Clock didn't travel horizontally. There was no graceful arc. His head snapped back on a neck that should have vaporized, his body following not like a thrown object, but like a artillery shell fired from a planetary cannon. He was erased from his position.

  The shockwave hit a microsecond later. A visible dome of superheated air blasted outwards from the point of his departure, vaporizing the station's remaining glass, peeling steel supports like banana skins, and lifting Yume's hair in a static-charged halo. The ground beneath her feet cratered, not from her weight, but from the equal and opposite reaction of launching a body into orbit.

  He ripped through the remnants of the station roof, leaving a perfect, man-shaped hole. He tore through the cloud layer, his form a dark, screaming scar against the blue sky, the atmosphere itself igniting around him in a brief, pathetic sheath of plasma. In less than two seconds, the faint glint of him vanished completely, not into the sky, but into the star-dusted blackness of space, a new, temporary satellite of utter defeat.

  For five blissful seconds, there was silence in the wrecked train station: a deep, ringing silence born of absolute, physical finality.

  Yume stood panting, the golden nunchaku dissolving from her hand into motes of light. A faint, satisfied smirk touched her lips. One problem, violently and conclusively solved.

  Then, the void above her twisted. The sky didn't crack; it glitched, a digital stutter in the fabric of reality. With a sound like the universe tearing its own seams —a horrifying, high-frequency shredding of physics— the space-bound Clock was forcibly recalled. He didn't fall; he was reprinted onto the Earth, crashing back into a heap of twisted train cars fifty feet away with a concussive WHUMP that shook the entire ruin.

  His form flickered violently, a corrupted file trying to load. The pristine, razor-edged beauty of his features was a ruin. A spiderweb of fractures split the pale skin of his face, not bleeding red, but weeping a thick, mercurial fluid that sizzled and evaporated into static. The entire left side of his skull was visibly caved in, a grotesque dent where the nunchaku had landed, and from this fracture, the same liquid gloom poured in a steady, horrifying stream, matting his white hair and dripping onto the shattered concrete below.

  His jaw was not just a mess; it was unhinged, hanging at an impossible angle, a puppet with its strings cut. The glitching shadow-flesh struggled to knit the bone and sinew back together, but the damage was too profound, too conceptually severe from her "Explosive Ascent." For a few terrifying seconds, all that held his head together was his own desperate will and the frantic, sputtering efforts of his regeneration.

  But through the gruesome mask of his injuries, the raw, undiluted hatred burning in his stabilized violet eyes was a physical force, a promise written in the silent language of annihilation.

  He had been in space.

  Not just airborne. Her uppercut hadn’t just launched him; it had exiled him. He’d flown past the stratosphere, through the exosphere, a human comet trailing blood and static. He’d tumbled past satellites, glanced off the pocked face of the moon, caromed through asteroid belts with enough force to shatter minor planets. The cold vacuum had kissed his ruined face. The silence had been absolute.

  Anger was the only thing that had brought him back this fast. Not calculation. Not strategy. A pure, gravitational loathing that had pulled him back through the atmospheric re-entry like a scorched spear of vengeance.

  Pain was his state of being now. He could feel his liquefied organs sloshing, his shadow-flesh stitching itself in frantic, glitching spasms. It took everything in him -every ounce of engineered will, every scrap of gloom-forged pride- to not start vomiting the blood pooled hot and thick behind his ribs.

  He was a broken vessel, but the malevolence within remained perfectly, terrifyingly intact.

  It was in that moment, as he fought to rise, that the second clone —the one she'd thrown into the airport—finally extracted itself from the control tower's wreckage. Both remaining Clocks looked at her, and then at each other. A silent understanding passed between them.

  The original Clock, his body still crackling with unstable energy, raised his one good hand. Not to attack, but to control. To utterly dominate the flow of the battle he was losing.

  "Cease."

  The air around Yume turned to glass.

  Clock’s telekinesis seized the air itself, locked every molecule in place, froze oxygen mid-vibration, suspending dust motes like insects in amber. Her lightning stalled mid-arc, her snarl preserved in a silent scream. Even the blood spray from her body hung motionless, a ruby-red constellation trapped between heartbeats.

  Yume stiffened, mid-swing, her eyes widening as the second clone stepped in.

  He moved with the desperate, calculated speed of a gambler staking everything on a single card.

  In the picosecond his telekinesis froze the molecular air, his mind; accelerated to a terrifying, self-destructive degree, finally connected the dots.

  It wasn't just a partnership. It was a symbiosis.

  The data streamed in, a cascade of perfect, damning correlations: the way Blur's light pulsed in perfect, resonant time with the flicker of Yume's lightning. The way the fairy's speed spiked not in response to danger, but precisely when Yume's fury crested, as if drinking from a well of pure rage. They weren't just allies; they were a closed circuit. A perfect, self-sustaining engine of destruction.

  Blur wasn't just saving Yume.

  She was being supercharged by her.

  And in that singular, crystalline moment of understanding, Clock saw his one and only path to victory. He had to break the circuit.

  He broke speed itself to land the punch. The universe slowed to a crawl, the frozen dust motes becoming stationary stars. His fist, no longer a casual gesture but a focused spear of annihilation, did not hover. It blurred, covering the inch to her sternum in less than time, the knuckles tearing the storm-scented fabric of her gown on impact.

  Then the world folded.

  ///

  Clock's arm became a singularity, a black hole of motion where physics died screaming. The air between his fist and her skin ceased to exist, atoms crushed into oblivion before the strike even landed.

  And he did not let it touch the world.

  Gloom -thick, hungry, and absolute- coiled down his arm like a serpent of dead stars, swallowing the shockwave before it could even form. The twenty quadrillion newtons of force were not unleashed upon the earth. They were contained, funneled entirely into her sternum and her alone, while the Gloom devoured the apocalyptic backlash that should have vaporized the city.

  Impact.

  Blur’s light guttered like a heartbeat flatlining mid-sprint as Clock’s stasis seized Yume. The connection snapped. Instantly, the world turned to mud.

  Ugh. Syrup. Flaming syrup. Who designed this?!

  Her wings stuttered, her afterimages flickering like a buffering video. Every rescue now cost thrice as much, burned thrice as bright. It was infuriating. She was a sports car suddenly forced to drive through a swamp.

  A flicker of her consciousness scanned the city. Crying child in a collapsing school? Priority one. Adorable.

  Wounded man bleeding out in a crater? Priority two. Less messy that way.

  Yume? Priority three. She’s durable. And this is character-building!

  The logic was flawless, the execution, infuriatingly slow.

  The hit had already landed. And Blur wasn’t fast enough.

  A devastating one-inch punch to Yume's sternum. Twenty quadrillion newtons delivered with surgical, soul-shattering intimacy.

  Yume's body didn't move, it warped. Her ribcage became a cathedral of collapsing arches, shadows boiling up through ruptured veins like ink through water. Organs twisted inside out, nerves unspooled like dropped thread.

  Yume screamed.

  And Clock screamed with her.

  His clone's perfect posture shattered as phantom fractures spiderwebbed up his own arms, bone splinters pushing against the inside of his skin like broken porcelain. His teeth cracked under pressure that wasn't there, filling his mouth with gritty shards of enamel. A phantom blade of agony lanced through his gut as Yume's diaphragm tore, his own stomach violently puncturing itself. Hot, metallic blood bloomed between his lips, as his perfect face contorted into a wet mask of raw, glitching recognition.

  This wasn't a strike. It was a reckoning.

  "HOW?!" Clock gasped, the word a wet, gurgling ruin as he collapsed back into one singular, broken form. The accumulated damage rippled through him, the liquefied insides, the shattered jaw, the phantom fractures, making his vision swim in nauseating blurs of gold and static. He could barely stand, his body swaying on legs that felt like mismatched prosthetics.

  Blood poured from Clock's lips as he clutched his stomach, his perfect, unbreakable body now a ruined puppet of glitching shadow-flesh. His magic stitched his organs back together in frantic, pixelated bursts that felt like being sewn together with barbed wire and lightning. Each reknit muscle fiber screamed as it reformed, his flesh knitting in jagged, unnatural patterns, a grotesque patchwork of shadow and meat, barely holding the screaming consciousness within.

  Then to his utmost horror, she stood.

  Yume rose from her knees like a marionette pulled by vengeful strings, her shattered ribs clicking as they slid back into place. Torn flesh sealed itself with threads of lightning, she rolled her shoulders, testing, smiling.

  Clock's breath hitched. No. No no no!

  His healing was agony, a desperate scramble of shadow and willpower. But hers?

  Effortless. Like time itself bent to undo her wounds.

  Yume watched him, a predator studying its crippled prey. The deep gash across her own torso sealed without a sound, the skin weaving itself back together until it was smooth and unblemished, a silent mockery of his suffering.

  She tilted her head, a blood-stained grin spreading across her lips. It was not a smile of joy, but of cold, absolute vindication.

  When she spoke, the language itself was a weapon. Gone was the faint, melodic accent, the softened consonants. Her voice was now crisp, clear, and surgically precise, each word delivered in perfectly enunciated English that cut through the air with more chilling finality than any roar.

  "Did they not tell you, little thief?" The words were ice. "The lesson you failed to learn?"

  She took a single, deliberate step forward. The ground did not crack. The air did not shake. All the sound and fury of the battle seemed to drain away, leaving only the dreadful, intimate space between them.

  "I do not simply endure injury."

  She cracked her neck. The sound was not loud, but it was the clean, final snap of a bone resetting; a sound of healing, not breaking. It echoed in the sudden silence with terrifying clarity.

  "I return it."

  Clock’s vision swam, a fractured kaleidoscope of pain. Blood and gloom-sorcery ichor dripped from his chin, but now a fresh, hotter stream of crimson wept from the corners of his eyes, seared by the residual lightning still cooking his optic nerves from the inside. The agony was a symphony of impossibilities, the phantom sensation of his own bones grinding to dust, the taste of his liquefied organs bubbling up his throat, the electric fire branding his synapses. He was a puppet with its strings cut, his body a glitching, half-rebuilt prison of screaming nerve endings.

  Yume stood silhouetted against the ruins, lightning cracking the sky like a whip. Her golden hammer reformed, its runes pulsing with cold, living contempt.

  Her foot scraped forward, one step. The sound of grit under her sole was the only warning. Clock flinched, a full-body spasm that tore at his freshly knitted muscles. His body, still a patchwork of shadow and meat, recoiled from her mere presence, his veins still burning with the echo of her corruption.

  For the first time in his engineered, perfect life, Clock knew true, soul-deep fear.

  And then, staring at the hammer, a memory, long buried and dismissed, slammed into the forefront of his mind with the force of a physical blow.

  It was you.

  The Syndicate logs. He’d watched it nine years ago, a piece of archival footage among hundreds. A grainy video from the sun-scorched salt flats of the Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia. The location was a stark, white mirror to the sky, a place where reality seemed thin.

  A half-dozen remnants of the Sin War had awakened from their geothermal slumber, and they were hungry.

  · The Grief-Mantis: A fifteen-foot tall praying mantis whose chitin was the color of a tarnished silver mirror, swirling with oily, rainbow hues like spilled petrol. From the joints of its limbs and the seams of its carapace seeped a thin, violet-black fluid that smoked faintly and smelled of ozone and forgotten graves.

  · The Sound-Badger: A low-slung, rotund beast with matted, iron-colored fur and a sonic-speaker snout that could unleash a focused blast to shatter a mountain's foundation.

  · The Chroma-Fox: A beautiful, nine-tailed fox whose shimmering, rainbow pelt could refract any energy attack back at its source with triple the potency.

  · The Rust-Hulk: A walking, humanoid mass of corroded industrial machinery and scrap metal, leaking a brownish aura that accelerated time, turning anything it touched to dust in seconds.

  · The Spore-Stag: A majestic, terrifying stag with antlers made of glowing, pulsating fungi; a single spore could rewrite the DNA of a city's population, turning them into its vegetative slaves.

  · The Granite-Gorilla: A titan of living, adaptive granite, its intelligence growing exponentially with every physical impact it sustained.

  They were a gallery of walking apocalypses. And then she had arrived.

  The woman in the footage was a vision of impossible contrast. She wore a tiered, sailor-style Lolita dress in a soft powder blue, with elaborate white lace trim and satin ribbons tied in large, perfect bows on the sleeves and chest. The dress was covered in a subtle pattern of embroidered silver stars and tiny musical notes. She accessorized with a white lace choker, matching wrist cuffs, and pristine white platform boots with heart-shaped buckles. Her dark hair, tied in twin-tails, had vibrant sapphire-blue streaks and was adorned with oversized, star-shaped hairpins that glittered in the harsh Bolivian sun. A small, silver brooch in the shape of a tiny rabbit was pinned neatly over her heart. She was grinning, a carefree, bubbly smile as she skipped towards the assembled armageddon, holding nothing but that golden pin.

  The Grief-Mantis, sensing her vibrant life, was the first to move, its silver scythe-like arms falling to sever her very spirit. The girl didn't retreat. She sprang onto its torso, plunged her fingers into the smooth, hard chitin of its face, held on, and with a sound of shattering diamond, ripped the mantis's head from its body.

  The other monsters erupted in a unified onslaught. A sonic blast from the Badger, a kaleidoscopic beam from the Fox, a cloud of mind-altering spores from the Stag, a rust-wave from the Hulk, all converged on her position.

  And then, it was as if the video skipped a single frame.

  One moment she was at the epicenter of eleven simultaneous world-ending attacks. The next, she was twenty feet behind the horde, her back turned, casually adjusting one of her star-shaped hairpins as if checking her makeup. The golden pin was back on her dress.

  Clock had been utterly bewildered. The monsters were frozen mid-action. Then, like a terrible symphony concluding, they all fell apart at once. The Chroma-Fox's beautiful pelt dulled to gray and crumbled to ash. The Granite-Gorilla cracked into a thousand inert boulders. The Spore-Stag's glowing antlers dimmed and shattered like glass. The Rust-Hulk simply collapsed into a pile of harmless, ancient rust. She had hit all of them, with an object that had shifted from pin to hammer and back, faster than the camera; faster than his eyes, could track. He remembered his juvenile skepticism. But the Syndicate didn't keep fakes. He remembered focusing on the Grief-Mantis, a creature that fed on abstract concepts, immune to mere kinetic force. She had just tapped it. It wasn't about force. It was about authority. The command etched onto the hammer's head, now blazing before him in the present.

  Shatter.

  It was her. That bubbly, impeccably dressed girl from the salt flats. The woman before him now was a hollowed-out, deranged ghost of that person. Her eyes, which had once sparkled with mischievous joy over a field of monsters, now held only a storm of grief and bottomless rage.

  What the hell happened to you? The thought was a desperate, silent scream.

  The memory faded, leaving him more vulnerable than any physical wound. The legend was real, and he had provoked it.

  She swung.

  ///

  The hammer came down. A final, golden judgment he could no longer outrun.

  A sensation he had never known, cold and absolute, flooded his veins, short-circuiting the arrogance that was his birthright. It wasn't pain. It was the void. The certainty of his own end, a concept his engineered perfection had never been forced to entertain.

  This was it. The first and last time. He was going to die.

  The realization was a supernova of terror in his mind, burning away all strategy, all pride. There was only the animal instinct to not be unmade. His incomplete technique, the unstable, forbidden thing he’d been forbidden to even attempt, was no longer a choice. It was a suicide note written in a language that could, maybe, also kill its recipient.

  He had no choice. A miss would leave him a hollowed-out husk for her to casually dismember. A hit would see the unfathomable damage reflected back, a metaphysical grenade in a phone booth. His chances of survival were not just close to zero; they were a theoretical phantom, a negative integer. But it was the only option that didn't end with him as a red smear beneath her heel.

  It was the only option that meant he could, perhaps, take her with him.

  Energy bled from his pores, a price he couldn’t afford. But survival demanded payment. His fingers twitched, a trail of blackened blood ran down his chin from his nose. Impossible focus.

  He raised his trembling hand. Violet energy, not light, but the absence of it, coiled around his index finger. The air hissed as atoms unraveled at his fingertip, reality itself recoiling from the violation. He felt his own flesh destabilize: skin flaking into ash, muscle fibers fraying like rotten thread, the bone beneath glowing white-hot before dissolving to the knuckle.

  Sacrifice.

  He fed his gloom essence into the void, a torrent of stolen time, dead stars, and Crook’s corrupted legacy. The beam ignited.

  Not light. Not energy. Anti-creation.

  "DELETE."

  A column of distilled unravelling tore across the battlefield. It made no sound. Offered no warmth. It simply unmade.

  Concrete didn’t shatter, it ceased having ever been poured.

  Skyscrapers vanished mid-collapse, leaving ghostly outlines in the air.

  Light bent into the beam, devoured by the hungering dark.

  A billboard on the edge of the effect was cut in half. The half that remained showed a smiling model sipping a soda. The other half was simply... not. No jagged edge, no torn paper, just a perfect, smooth line where reality ended.

  Blur moved faster than panic, zipping Yume backward in a nanosecond as the beam grazed the edge of her gown. The fabric didn’t burn. It erased, leaving a perfect void in its shape.

  The beam carved onward, through streets, through mountains, through the horizon itself, leaving a corridor of pure, silent nothingness. No debris. No radiation. Just a scar in the fabric of existence, edges glistening with residual dark magic like weeping tar.

  Clock collapsed, his right hand a smoldering ruin. The taste of his own evaporated blood coated his tongue. Shadows writhed up his arm, stitching flesh over the missing finger in jagged, painful pixels.

  Yume’s weapon -still molten gold from its last transformation- reshaped. It flowed from a hammer into a massive, executioner’s axe, its edge gleaming with the cold light of a vengeful sun. She didn’t telegraph the swing. She simply was there, the axe already cutting a horizontal arc through the space where he knelt.

  Clock leaped back, his boots tearing gashes in reality itself as he blurred into a retreat.

  Yume closed the distance, moving so fast it looked like she deleted the space between them.

  The axe came down. Not at the speed of light -faster. It moved at the speed of consequence, of vengeance fulfilled. It did not glow. It did not shine. It simply arrived, a line of absolute severance drawn through the world.

  It passed through Clock’s shoulder, through his ribs, through his spine, and out the other side.

  There was no resistance. His skin -that fortress of shadow-forged, neutron-star density -parted like warm wax. His flesh unzipped. His organs, dark and glistening with mercurial gloom-blood, spilled onto the fractured ground with a wet, final sigh.

  He fell. In two pieces. Dead.

  Yume stood over the carnage, chest heaving, the golden axe dripping void-black blood. And then her eyes -sharp, predatory- darted to the right.

  The body at her feet was already dissolving into static and shadow-smoke.

  Clone.

  Her gaze snapped up, across the ruins, toward a flicker of movement—a pale figure already half a mile away, bleeding gloom from his fresh wounds, fleeing not with grace, but with desperate, staggering speed.

  The real one was escaping.

  Clock didn’t wait. Gritting his teeth, he collapsed into his pocket dimension as Yume zoomed towards him, the darkness swallowed him whole...

  ... but not before Yume's hand lashed out, a lightning-wreathed claw aiming to tear out his throat.

  He twisted in panic, too slow.

  She missed his throat but her fingers hooked under his jaw instead and wretched.

  Flesh tore from his skull. Cartilage snapped like wet rope. The black king earring plucked free in a spray of shadow-thick blood, along with his ear and part of his jawbone.

  For one terrible instant, Clock’s perfect face gaped where his ear had been, a raw, red crater edged with glitching pixels of regenerating shadow.

  Then the void swallowed his scream.

  Her laughter echoed after him, unhinged and hungry.

  「逃げろ、小僧。必ず見つけてやる。」

  (Nigero, kozō. Kanarazu mitsukete yaru.)

  "RUN, LITTLE THIEF. I’LL FIND YOU."

  Through the closing rift of his pocket dimension, she caught a final glimpse of Clock’s regeneration, his jawbone knitting itself in jagged, pixelated strands, the missing ear reforming as a grotesque stub of shadow-flesh. The black king earring, though, was gone for good, its twin queen left dangling, lopsided and alone.

  The bloody earring and torn flesh throbbed in her grip. It wasn't warm with magic or a heartbeat, but with the fading echo of a stolen laugh.