Chapter 2: Playing with Fire
2026—a year that held a grimly distinct significance for the Chrono-Entropy Corporation.
After monopolizing time-jump technology, the Corporation routinely exiled countless dissidents, political obstacles, and citizens deemed useless into the merciless depths of past eras. Some had their heads torn off by rampant Carcharodontosaurus in the brutal Cretaceous period; some were skewered by the lances of medieval cavalry; others were abandoned in the squalid, plague-ridden corners of Black Death-era cities to await their demise. Every spark of resistance was systematically snuffed out by the Corporation’s cleaners patrolling the timelines. Chrono-Entropy had become an inescapable shadow looming over the world.
Across the timelines, the altars of churches and temples had universally replaced their traditional deities with statues of Chronos, the primordial god of time from Greek mythology. Beneath the image of the three-headed, serpentine deity, those who refused to submit gathered, lamenting a reality where time no longer flowed linearly. The seeds of rebellion were quietly sown. They called this spontaneously assembled rebel army “Clepsydra”—named after the ancient Chinese water clock that measured time through dripping bronze vessels.
The rebels had managed to salvage a fraction of time-jump technology, using it to flee and congregate in the year 2026, establishing this specific point in time as their final stronghold. Thus, 2026—a dark, chaotic era in the records of the Chrono-Entropy Corporation—stood as the Era of Radiance for the Clepsydra rebels.
And the fraudster, Diamonds, was a faint yet undeniable glimmer of light navigating this turbulent era.
Right now, in the depths of the pitch-black alleyway, a lethal struggle was unfolding.
The white-haired fraudster gripped a vintage-style, custom-modified Mauser pistol engraved with bubble-like textures. He pulled the trigger with fluid precision, but by the time the gunshot echoed, his target had already vanished without a trace.
“Diamonds, above you!” the burly gentleman bellowed in warning.
The fraudster snapped his gaze upward. The young man in black had launched himself into the air in a split second, ricocheting off the narrow alley walls with the terrifying agility of a nocturnal bat.
Diamonds knit his brows, reorienting his weapon, but he could not lock onto the cleaner’s hyper-accelerated movements.
“This kid moves like a rat—a flying rat,” Diamonds chuckled, immediately patching through a call on his earpiece. “Clubs Cat, where is the vehicle you’re piloting? We’re in deep trouble.”
A sharp, grating voice snapped back through his earpiece: “Dammit, Diamonds! You feed me low-grade cat food on a regular basis, and now you expect me to lay down my life for you at the critical moment?!”
“What do you want to eat?”
“Sturgeon caviar, botan shrimp—”
“Get the car over here. I’ll buy it all for you.”
“Really?” The sharp voice sounded marginally delighted.
“Really. I never lie to you.”
In the next instant, the call was abruptly disconnected. The fraudster sighed. “A cat’s heart is as fickle as the deep blue sea.”
“Believing you don’t lie is like believing I’m the First Emperor of China,” Hearts laughed.
Diamonds curled the corner of his lips. “Who says I’m not? Brother Hearts, if you wire me another year and a week of lifespan, I’ll summon a mechanical Terracotta Army to bail you out.”
“I already transferred a year and a week of my lifespan to you! Where on earth did you spend it?”
Right then, a dark silhouette plummeted from the sky. It was Quicksand. The long-handled handaxe he brandished flashed with a lethal, nightmarish glint.
Diamonds dodged the descending strike, steadying his top hat as he smiled at Quicksand. “Mr. Cleaner, what grudge do you hold against me to try and claim my life the moment we meet?”
The young man in black replied tonelessly, “You are an enemy of Chrono-Entropy. You stole a vast reserves of time from the Corporation, and you misappropriated the identity of a premier client.”
“You managed to extract a year and a week of lifespan from a con man—not bad,” Diamonds mused. “How about this: you return my year and a week, and I’ll return five centuries to the Corporation.”
The axe blade thrust forward, slicing toward Diamonds’ neck with microscopic precision.
“No need,” Quicksand declared coldly, passing judgment. “Transfer the five centuries directly to my account, and I’ll be the First Emperor.”
Yet, in the very next heartbeat, the razor-sharp edge halted a fraction of an inch before touching skin. The cleaner found his movements decelerating into an absolute crawl. Looking down, he realized his forearm had come into contact with a translucent, shimmering bubble.
This was a “Time-Stagnation Bubble”—a localized spacetime distortion generated by the micro-singularity reactor built into the Mauser pistol, capable of slowing down any matter it touched.
The source of these bubbles was the fraudster’s custom firearm; he hadn’t been firing ordinary bullets. Quicksand realized with a jolt that over a dozen of these time-stagnation bubbles were floating in midair, shimmering like crystalline ice floes. It was a calculated trap designed to lure him in. As Quicksand struggled against the deceleration, the fraudster flashed him a provocative, deeply mocking smile, looking every bit like a calculating fox.
Simultaneously, a self-driving, unmanned vehicle screeched to a halt at the mouth of the alley.
“Goodbye, Your Majesty. Enjoy hanging out here all night—don’t catch a cold!” Diamonds bolted toward the vehicle.
But in the very next fragment of a second, a series of violent explosions detonated in midair. The resulting shockwave rattled the fleeing duo, forcing them to stumble. Turning back, they saw the cleaner violently swinging his long-handled axe. Wherever the blade sliced, space itself cracked under quantum fluctuations, shattering the time-stagnation bubbles into nonexistence.
“That’s a cleaner’s weapon—it triggers localized explosions by amplifying the fluctuations of quantum foam. They are absolute professionals at the business of killing!” Hearts glanced back, cold sweat pooling down his neck.
“In comparison, what do we have in this era? Kitchen knives, pitchforks, and small handguns? The disparity in technology is absurd,” Diamonds muttered as continuous explosions rippled behind them like a grand display of fireworks. The intense shockwaves rattled his eardrums and left his head throbbing, making it difficult to even keep his eyes open. Right then, a razor-sharp wave of killing intent surged from behind.
Without looking back, Diamonds drew his weapon and fired a volley of time-stagnation rounds over his shoulder. Quicksand dodged the projectiles with blinding speed. He noted that despite giving off the impression of a purely intellectual strategist, the fraudster’s physical movements were incredibly fluid, like trying to grasp a passing gust of wind.
The handaxe swung down with lethal force, only to be caught mid-air by a pair of massive hands. The silverback gorilla prosthetic on Hearts’ left arm bulged with thick veins. The muscular strength of such a beast was six times that of a human, capable of snapping steel rebar with ease. Under that immense physical counterforce, the cleaner’s axe blade could not advance a single millimeter.
“Diamonds, move!” Hearts bellowed.
“Much appreciated, Brother Hearts, but I’ve already split!”
A lazy voice drifted over, causing the two combatants locked in a stalemate to stiffen. Glancing toward the alley entrance, they saw that Diamonds had somehow already slipped into the driver’s seat of the car. Escaping at the first sign of trouble was, after all, his absolute specialty.
In the next instant, the fraudster spun the steering wheel, gunning the engine as the vehicle charged straight down the narrow alley toward them.
It was a rusted, vintage taxi, its chassis heavily spray-painted with fluorescent graffiti of twisted staircases, vortexes, and explosions. It careened through the alley, obliterating trash cans and fracturing water pipes along the way. Diamonds leaned half his body out of the window, shouting, “Brother Hearts, you’re in peak physical condition, right?!”
“What?!”
“Well, your muscles are definitely sturdier than this vintage piece of junk, right?” Diamonds flashed a wicked grin. “My apologies!”
Before Hearts could fully process the danger, the taxi roared forward, slamming violently into the two men caught in the grapple. The sheer kinetic impact sent both of them airborne.
Hearts’ body shuddered violently, his cybernetic components grinding against one another as he crashed onto the roof of the vehicle. As the taxi barreled out of the alley mouth, he managed to wrench the door open and haul himself into the passenger seat, immediately delivering a furious smack to the back of Diamonds’ head. “Couldn’t you have given me a warning before hitting us with a car?!”
Diamonds ducked his head, dodging the blow while keeping a steady grip on the wheel. “Didn’t I just warn you?”
“That doesn’t count!” Hearts snarled through grit teeth.
“Relax, this car is fully insured.”
“I’m not!”
“If that cleaner catches up to us, we’re both completely dead.”
Hearts sighed. “An impact of that caliber won’t kill a cleaner. He’ll be hot on our heels.”
“I know it won’t kill him. To an absolute tank like him, that impact probably felt like a light massage. Don’t worry, someone is already handling the cleanup for us.” Diamonds glanced at the rearview mirror and smiled faintly. “Your people—the Clepsydra rebels—have already surrounded him.”
When Quicksand dragged himself up from the ground, the world was spinning violently. His physical body had sustained no major damage, but his skull—implanted with corporate cybernetic chips—could not withstand excessive concussive force. As his static-laced vision began to stabilize, he realized a crowd had silently materialized around him.
They were a grim-faced faction wearing reinforced leather armor and strapped headgear. Their exposed arms bore distinct tattoos of ancient water clocks, and they gripped iron pipes and heavy maces, closing in on Quicksand like an encroaching storm cloud.
These were members of the Clepsydra rebel army—a force comprised entirely of individuals pushed to the brink by Chrono-Entropy’s temporal dictatorship. In a flash, Quicksand understood the situation.
Someone muttered in a low voice, “Is this the time cleaner Brother Hearts told us about?”
“Look at that bizarre mask and weapon—it’s him, no doubt about it. Brother Hearts mentioned that time cleaners are temporal tourists, all of them wearing these eccentric, avant-garde outfits.”
The crowd advanced cautiously, fully aware that they were dealing with an unprecedentedly lethal adversary.
An incendiary bomb was hurled at the young man in the theatrical mask, igniting a roaring wall of fire within the dark alley. But in the next fraction of a second, the rebels watched in horror as the silhouette tore through the curtain of flames completely unscathed. As more firebombs were thrown, the young man in black spun his long-handled handaxe, whipping up a localized gale. He cleverly caught the incoming firebombs within the residual time-stagnation bubbles left behind by Diamonds, freezing them mid-air before batting them straight back into the crowd.
Screams of agony echoed through the flames as the rebels burned. They had never encountered a time cleaner who possessed such a reinforced, impenetrable physique coupled with such terrifying reflexes; their eyes could barely track his residual shadows.
The young man in black moved with catastrophic velocity, resembling a bolt of lightning tearing through the night, leaving a trail of blood wherever his path cut.
A rebel popped open a manhole cover, thrusting a jagged blade upward in a vicious ambush. The cleaner spun the handle of his axe with fluid grace, deflecting the strike. The moment their weapons collided with his handaxe, the rebel’s blade aged at an accelerated rate, shattering into rust. A massive wave of rebels leapt from the windows of the flanking buildings, raining down upon the young man like a torrential downpour, attempting to pin him down through sheer numbers.
But within the blink of an eye, the attackers were sent crashing to the concrete, groaning in agony. The strikes delivered by the cleaner’s axe caused the flesh of anyone it touched to age rapidly. The rebels realized with mounting horror that this black-clad youth truly was the Grim Reaper incarnate—he reaped human lives as effortlessly as breathing.
An injured rebel youth felt his throat gripped tightly as he was hoisted into the air. Suffocating, he forced his eyes open only to see his comrades strewn across the alley floor, incapacitated or dead. The cleaner stood before him, his gaze as cold as frost.
“Where is the fraudster? Tell me.”
“I… I don’t know.”
Quicksand reversed the grip on his axe, his grey eyes pinning the sweating rebel like a predatory hawk.
“Very well. I will break you until you find the answer.”
The lower layers of the Spiral City were an intricate maze of interconnected alleyways, resembling a subterranean ant colony. After breaking out of the initial sector, the battered taxi plunged into yet another narrow corridor.
Diamonds and the gentleman known as Hearts sat inside the vehicle. Seeing no pursuers in the rearview mirror, they finally let out a sigh of relief.
“Diamonds, what exactly is this time cleaner here for?”
“To assassinate me, of course. Who told me to be this famous? Such are the burdens of notoriety.”
“Yours truly has been meaning to ask—wasn’t Clubs Cat supposed to be remotely piloting this vehicle? Why are you at the wheel?”
“Your body is too dense, Brother Hearts. You broke the car’s transceiver during the impact, severing our connection with Clubs Cat. Now I’m stuck operating this thing manually,” Diamonds said, chewing his bubblegum.
Hearts scratched his head, shifting uneasily in his seat. “You aren’t trying to con me, are you? Maybe yours truly should tone down the intensity of my workouts… This car is a vital asset of Clepsydra. We’re going to get chewed out by Clubs Cat when we get back.”
Diamonds blew a bubble, then suddenly slammed his hand onto the seat adjustment lever. The back of the seat reclined instantly. In that exact microsecond, a gleaming axe blade punctured straight through the roof of the car, narrowly scraping past the tip of his nose.
“Diamonds!” the burly gentleman shrieked.
“The roof is completely totaled. We’ll have to patch it up with scotch tape later. We’re low on resources in this era, so scotch tape fixes everything,” Diamonds remarked calmly. He nimbly slid from the driver’s seat to the passenger side, clamping his teeth down on his Mauser pistol as he extended both hands out of the window to grip the roof rack.
“Take the wheel, Brother Hearts! The Corporation’s bloodhound refuses to lose the scent. I’m going to throw him off.”
Up on the roof of the moving vehicle, the young man wearing the flame-patterned mask stood firmly, gripping his long-handled axe.
Just moments ago, using his explosive muscular power, he had sprinted through the narrow pathways, closing the distance until he leaped onto the roof like a phantom, driving his axe straight through the chassis.
Quicksand was Chrono-Entropy’s finest hunter—once he locked onto a target, he never let go. Yet, as he drove his axe down, he didn’t feel the sensation of piercing flesh. Instead, the handle of his weapon suddenly became as heavy as a mountain.
What is this? Before the question could form, a silhouette darted onto the roof with the speed of a calculated strike, delivering a vicious kick aimed straight at his chest.
“Mr. Cleaner, I didn’t request any door-to-door service. There’s really no need to be this attentive.”
Quicksand crossed his forearms, absorbing the force of the kick. Without a word, he engaged the attacker—the white-haired fraudster, Diamonds. The wind howled furiously around them, whipping the fraudster’s platinum-blonde hair across his face, yet that enigmatic, superficial smile remained entirely intact.
“I am here to pack up your life and deliver it to hell,” Quicksand replied flatly. “Special delivery. Now, what did you do to my axe?”
“Nothing much. Just slapped a time-stagnation bubble onto it, extending the time it takes for you to pull it out by a tiny margin.”
Diamonds smiled smoothly, firing a quick succession of rounds at Quicksand. The cleaner deflected the incoming time-stagnation orbs. Right then, two rebel soldiers who had been lying in ambush on the rooftops of the flanking buildings lunged through the air, diving toward the young man in black with drawn blades.
Quicksand reached back without looking, snapping his hands around their ankles. Using them like heavy flails, he swung both rebels violently toward Diamonds. Startled, Diamonds dropped low to duck beneath the human projectiles. As the two rebel soldiers fell screaming off the roof of the speeding taxi, Diamonds snapped his wrist and fired two time-stagnation bubbles to cushion their descent, ensuring they wouldn’t shatter their bones against the concrete.
Seizing the microsecond of Diamonds’ distraction, Quicksand channeled immense power into his upper body, finally wrenching his long-handled axe free. With a powerful lateral sweep, he shattered a water main running along the alley wall. Water erupted instantly; the moment each droplet contacted the kinetic field of the axe blade, its localized time accelerated drastically, transforming the spray into a dense volley of supersonic water bullets hurtling toward Diamonds.
Diamonds instantly recognized the mechanism—the cleaner’s weapon could accelerate an object’s intrinsic timeline and kinetic velocity, the exact inverse of his own time-stagnation abilities. Reacting immediately, he fired a rapid succession of rounds. The expanding stagnation bubbles linked together, forming a translucent shield that dropped the supersonic water droplets into an absolute standstill.
Simultaneously, Diamonds fired a shot straight into the air, severing the overhead clotheslines. A massive cascade of heavy fabric collapsed, completely obscuring Quicksand’s vision. The cleaner sliced through the cloth with his axe, only to find that Diamonds had already closed the distance, standing right in front of him.
“Since you’ve come all this way, Mr. Cleaner, why don’t you try a taste of my personal blend? On the house today,” the fraudster chuckled. With a flick of his left hand, a canister of high-grade pepper spray materialized in his grip.
A dense cloud of chemical irritant erupted into Quicksand’s face. A searing, blinding pain scorched his eyes, obliterating his vision. Yet, he did not retreat; instead, he held his ground, swinging his long-handled axe in a lethal perimeter around himself. He felt a heavy boot connect with his torso, and the sheer force sent him hurtling backward off the roof.
The fraudster had kicked him off the high-speed taxi.
Diamonds stood on the roof for a brief moment, watching the road behind them. Once he confirmed they had definitively thrown the cleaner off their tail, he nimbly slid back into the interior of the car.
“All taken care of?” Hearts asked.
“A piece of cake.”
“It was just pepper spray. He’ll probably recover and catch up to us within a minute.”
“Of course it isn’t that simple. I always keep an ace up my sleeve.”
Diamonds snapped his fingers.
Back on the alley floor, the fallen Quicksand suddenly heard the sound of popping bubbles echoing all around him.
During their brief clash on the roof, Diamonds had subtly encased both of them within an overarching time-stagnation bubble. Their entire duel had been occurring within a heavily decelerated state. The moment Diamonds caught the cleaner off-guard, he had kicked him out of the localized field, leaving Quicksand trapped inside the pocket while he escaped.
The moment the time-stagnation bubble dissipated, any matter left inside would instantly snap back to real-time velocity. Through his bloodshot, burning vision, Quicksand realized that dozens of lead bullets—fired prematurely by the fraudster during their fight—were currently hurtling toward him at point-blank range.
He hadn’t anticipated the fraudster keeping such a sinister trap in reserve. Gritting his teeth, Quicksand spun his long-handled axe with mechanical velocity, the blade creating a defensive vortex that batted the lead rounds away one by one. But just as he deflected the last bullet, a massive structural groan echoed from above.
Looking up, he beheld hundreds of massive neon signs suspended directly over his head.
When Diamonds had fired into the air earlier, he hadn’t just cut the clotheslines—he had systematically severed the iron support beams holding the massive commercial signs in place. Now, with the stagnation field dissolved, the massive neon structures came cascading down like a glittering, multicolored avalanche, crushing down upon him with catastrophic force.
CRASH!
In the distance, inside the speeding taxi, Diamonds looked into the rearview mirror and flashed a theatrical gun-gesture with his fingers, smiling faintly.
At that exact moment, a deafening explosion rattled the lower district behind them, and a massive plume of dust surged into the sky.
Hearts watched the roiling cloud of dust through his side mirror. Having listened to Diamonds’ concise breakdown of the trap, he sighed deeply. “That was quite a theatrical setup.”
“Couldn’t be helped. The guy is Chrono-Entropy’s chief time cleaner; he leaves a trail of absolute devastation wherever he walks. A trick like that is barely a minor inconvenience to him.”
“What about those destroyed neon signs?”
“We’ll have the Clepsydra boys patch them back up with scotch tape later.”
“Why is it always scotch tape?!”
“This is 2026—an era that has been completely stripped of its resources by the upper layers. We’re lucky if we can even find a bottle of superglue.”
Hearts sighed. “You’ve been targeted by a relentless bloodhound. Your days ahead aren’t going to be peaceful.”
Diamonds sat in the passenger seat, gazing out at the passing neon wasteland. “For us lower-class citizens who have had everything stolen from us… peace was never an option to begin with.”
Hearts caught his profile out of the corner of his eye. The white-haired fraudster’s youthful face was illuminated by the shifting neon glow, looking almost ethereal, carrying a faint, translucent sorrow. Hearts suddenly felt that this fraudster was very much like his own bubbles—radiant and magnificent on the surface, yet harboring a fragile vulnerability that would shatter at the slightest touch.
“That cleaner’s physical capabilities are truly monstrous,” Hearts remarked, shaking his head. “To the ordinary eye, his movements are completely imperceptible. He can inflict a dozen lethal wounds within a single fraction of a second…”
“Oh, no.” Diamonds suddenly spoke up.
“What’s wrong?”
“Brother Hearts… I completely forgot about what you just mentioned.” The calculated, unphased demeanor Diamonds had maintained collapsed instantly, his face turning entirely pale. “That avant-garde kid really is… terrifyingly fast.”
“So? What about it?”
“Inside the time-stagnation bubble, the internal timeline of all matter and individuals is slowed down. But once the bubble pops… his axe… the wounds he inflicted… they manifest all at once. I really did… reap what I sowed.”
Diamonds’ speech pattern began to slow drastically, resembling a jammed cassette tape. Hearts snapped his head around, only to find the fraudster’s face completely devoid of color. His pristine white suit had been shredded into over a dozen savage, jagged rents, and a torrent of fresh blood was rapidly staining the seat crimson.
“Hey! Diamonds!”
“Brother Hearts… I’ll have to trouble you to drive the rest of the way. I’m going to sleep for a bit… wake me up when we arrive. And… right now, I have to officially admit…”
Cold sweat poured down the fraudster’s refined face, yet he forced his lips into a stubborn, sharp grin. Even on the brink of collapse, his eyes burned with a vibrant, ecstatic spark of excitement.
“I’ve finally run into… the most relentless adversary of my life.”
