SOP CH24: One Hundred Percent

The bright moon hung high in the sky, radiating brilliant light. The chime of midnight reverberated, startling a night owl from a rocky crevice, skimming past the Tower of the Crown clock tower on a gust of chilling wind. At this moment, atop the highest floor, two figures stood locked in a confrontation, their murderous intent chilling to the bone.

One wielded a Mauser pistol, the other a short cane inlaid with a pocket watch, engaged in a ferocious struggle to the death. Cleaner Raven drew a sharp blade from his cane, the sword’s gleam darting like a venomous snake’s tongue as it lunged viciously at Diamonds.

Diamonds barely dodged the thrust from Cleaner Raven’s sword. Their shadows crisscrossed, dancing beneath the moonlight with a frantic urgency that nevertheless retained a sliver of composed grace. Yet right then, Diamonds heard the ticking of the clock hands turning backward on the short cane, each tick-tock sounding like the Grim Reaper knocking on the door.

Suddenly, time reversed, and the afterimage from a second ago overwhelmed Diamonds like a tidal wave. He saw the bullet retreat into the muzzle, his own body yanked backward as if by invisible hands.

In the next instant, agonizing pain ripped through Diamonds’s abdomen: Raven’s silver blade had skewered him clean through!

Diamonds let out a muffled grunt, clutching the wound. Blood seeped out like red ink, instantly soaking a large patch of his clothing. He realized instantly what had happened: Raven had reversed time and stabbed the version of himself from a second ago.

“Youngster, that weapon of yours is quite handy; it even makes me itch for one,” Diamonds chuckled breathlessly. “Mind lending it to your senior for a bit?”

Raven smiled: “I am honored by Senior’s praise, but I suspect this short sword would not suit your hands. Judging by your movements, you seem accustomed to wielding long-handled weapons—such as the file-axe used by Chief Quicksand, am I right?”

Diamonds’s face was pale. Without answering the question, he changed the subject: “Speaking of which, how do you possess so much intelligence about me? The bounty notices issued by the Group do not feature my true face.”

His information was considered absolute top-secret within the Time Entropy Group. After defecting, he had seized an opportunity to mischievously tamper with the database, replacing his own photograph with that of Boxing King Anvil, who was rapidly rising to fame at the time.

“Since we are the only branch stationed in the past, to accurately capture prey and ensure we do not mistakenly harm other Group personnel, we must possess more comprehensive intelligence. Therefore, our information clearance is even higher than the 2035 Branch. However, it is precisely because of this that the Group forces us to dwell deep in the ‘past’ with these secrets, rarely allowing us to mobilize. The Group fears us, yet cannot help but rely on our methods.”

Wearing a pleasant smile, Raven explained slowly.

“It appears you tampered with your file in the 2035 Branch, but the Group had long since sent a backup of your data to the 1805 Branch, which is how I obtained your true intelligence.”

“You clearly could have transmitted my information back to the Group, informing the other branches in the ‘future,’ yet you chose not to. Why is that?” Diamonds asked.

“Give you to the other branches!” Raven marveled, then shook his head. “No, Senior, you are the prey of the 1805 Branch. I will not surrender you to anyone else.”

Panting for breath, Diamonds cast a glance at Madam Spades behind him. He had hastily bandaged her wound earlier, but hindered by Raven, he had not yet been able to take her for medical treatment. Currently collapsed on the floor, her face was white as paper; it was impossible to tell if she was even still breathing.

“You were originally… a cleaner from the future too, weren’t you? Why can you move freely in 1805 without complication?” Diamonds asked. He decided to stall for time, waiting for Quicksand to arrive and assist.

Raven seemed quite eager to answer his various questions, explaining with utmost patience: “Have you forgotten? We cleaners have all undergone augmentations. With cranial chips implanted and nanobots injected into our bloodstreams, traveling via the Group’s time-jump technology to a specific spacetime will not trigger any rejection.”

He scrutinized Diamonds, narrowing his eyes:

“But you are different. You are a deserter who defected from the Group a very long time ago. Since then, how many times have you crossed through the time labyrinth? Because from what I can see, your body’s vital functions are exceedingly weak, no different from a dead man.”

The corners of Diamonds’s lips turned upward, the diamond stud beneath his eye seemingly trembling with his breaths as he forced a smiling facade. “Then if a person no different from a dead man were to defeat you, wouldn’t you lose all face?”

A patch of dark clouds veiled the moon, casting shadows like thick ink that darkened the clock tower. In the chilling, damp night wind, Raven gripped his short cane tight, locking his gaze on Diamonds.

After a long pause, he whispered: “Senior, are you waiting for reinforcements to arrive?”

Diamonds remained silent, but his body had quietly tensed.

“No one is coming to help you. That companion of yours has already been trapped by the 1805 Branch’s mechanical soldiers. Every single mechanical soldier is equipped with hands modified from military bayonets capable of piercing 5-millimeter steel plates, containing mechanisms that can unleash hundreds of steel needles in an instant. They possess boundless strength, boasting a grip force of 8 tons; even time cleaners are no match for them. And there are exactly 160 such soldiers present tonight! I’m afraid your companion will be reduced to a puddle of minced meat within five seconds of facing them.”

Raven suddenly laughed with theatrical exaggeration, his body trembling violently. “Do you understand? The probability of your companion surviving is less than one in a thousand! And with your gravely wounded body right now, even if he truly possesses that one-in-a-thousand chance of making it here, you will not live to see it.”

Diamonds coughed several times, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth, yet he rallied his spirits, raising the gun once more to aim at Raven with a faint smile:

“You severely underestimate me. This trivial injury is utterly useless if you intend to stop me.”

Raven’s voice sank: “I pierced your internal organs.”

“What a pity.” Wiping the blood from the corner of his mouth, Diamonds suddenly flashed a ruthless grin, his figure blurring as he lunged forward. “I haven’t had internal organs for a very long time!”

In that instant, as if breaking free from all restraints, he charged ahead. Raven could barely track his movements, only feeling the airflow around him disturbed. Diamonds pushed off the ground violently, his footfalls striking terror into the heart, and fired off several stasis bubble bullets in a flash of lightning. Raven swung his short cane but repeatedly hit empty air; he could barely catch the afterimages of Diamonds—no, of Cleaner A-0. He saw the opponent’s pitch-black, chilling eyes and the dazzling diamond stud beneath them. The stud radiated a blood-red brilliance, and the man himself looked like a demon bathed in fresh blood.

A razor-sharp gust of wind scraped past his ear as the moon’s shadow shifted, plunging everything into ink-like darkness. Yet Cleaner A-0 had long grown accustomed to darkness and slaughter: the sound of breathing, heartbeats, the rustle of clothing—he knew exactly how to extinguish a human life like the back of his hand. Raven’s heart palpitated, immediately followed by stinging pain all over his body, bleeding profusely. A-0 had sliced open several gashes across his body using a butter knife.

This prototype for all time cleaners was simply like an unsheathed blade, striking without the slightest mercy, completely different from the person he was moments ago. Clutching his bleeding wounds, Raven laughed:

“Senior, are you a kamaitachi or a praying mantis? Your cuts hurt terribly.”

A faint laugh drifted from the darkness, flippant and shallow: “A rose with thorns, of course.”

Suddenly, Raven instinctively sensed danger, tucking his neck just in time to narrowly dodge a blade slashing down from above, though the top half of his beak mask was sheared off. He activated the pocket watch on his short cane, attempting to capture A-0’s afterimage from a second ago. The hands whirred as the world halted, time reversing by one second, and A-0’s figure materialized before Raven’s eyes.

“Caught you!” Raven was overjoyed, a touch of madness creeping into his tone.

Yet at that moment, he heard A-0 chuckle calmly, like a seasoned hunter:

“Me too.”

In a flash, startling winds whipped around them. Although yanked back to his state a second prior, A-0 reacted with lightning reflexes, instantly dropping low. His body flexed and twisted mid-air like a supple vine, the butter knife transforming into a divine weapon in his grasp, viciously impaling Raven’s shoulder!

Staggering backward, Raven left a trail of blood in his wake. The emotions suppressed by his cranial chip seemed to loosen, as if he were tasting the flavor of fear once more, chuckling with a hoarse rasp:

“Truly worthy of being… the senior to all cleaners.”

“I dare not claim that title.”

A-0 strolled out from the shadows, his platinum-blonde hair flowing with a frigid luster beneath the moonlight, his smile hazy as if bathed in stardust.

“I resigned from the Group long ago. Right now, I am merely an unemployed vagrant, a professional fraudster.”

“Haha, it seems you have gained quite some insights during your long stay in the lower tier. As a professional fraudster, you must frequent casinos, I assume? Senior, I wish to make a bet with you. Will you accept?”

“Why should I?”

“Because very soon… you will be forced to accept my terms.” Raising his chin slightly, the moonlight cast sharp patches of light across his face, two gazes as frigid as frost shooting out from behind the lenses. “Do you know the function of this short cane? Seeing my previous demonstration, you must think it is a weapon capable of reversing time by one second, and only one second.”

“In truth, its capabilities are not limited to that. Its true effect is returning an object to its past state. Although it consumes dozens of times more of my lifespan—in essence, there is no time limit!”

Diamonds suddenly shuddered.

In the next moment, he felt an agonizing pain tearing through his flesh. Looking down, he saw that the short cane had pierced straight through his arm. Standing a short distance away, Raven smiled: “This was the position of the short cane twenty seconds ago.”

The hands of the pocket watch swept across the dial in frantic trajectories, like comets caught in stellar gravity. In a flash, Diamonds stumbled; the blade skewering his arm had vanished, leaving only a bleeding hole. Searing pain then erupted from his back. At some unknown point, the blade had stabbed into his spine. Raven chuckled: “This was the position of the short cane thirty-seven seconds ago.”

He continued: “Fifty-four seconds.”

Diamonds’s leg was pierced.

“One minute.”

A gash ripped across Diamonds’s back, and he let out a muffled groan.

“Four minutes and twelve seconds.”

Following Raven’s ruthless recitation, the blade’s position shifted constantly, carving more and more wounds into Diamonds’s body. Blood sprayed outward, rapidly dyeing the white suit crimson. Raven threw his head back and laughed, the sound as grating as fingernails scratching across glass. Having laughed his fill, he spoke savagely:

“Senior, why aren’t you fighting back? Don’t you possess a cleaner’s weapon in your hands as well?”

Raven’s gaze landed on the Mauser pistol in Diamonds’s hand, realization suddenly dawning upon him: “I see. No wonder the stasis bubbles you fired popped in a mere moment; it’s because your lifespan balance is nearly depleted. Didn’t you take far more than several centuries of time when you defected from the Group? Where did all that time go?”

Drained of color, Diamonds panted and laughed: “Used it to keep a kept man. I’m feeding a giant glutton who can down seventy hot dogs in a single meal.”

“Haha, you truly know how to joke. So, what say you now? Do you wish to accept my bet?”

Raven looked down at Diamonds, gazing at the “prototype” who had once struck terror into the hearts of all cleaners. Hair plastered to his pale forehead, illuminated by the crimson blood, his knuckles turned white as he clutched his wounds, panting heavily like a doll that could shatter at any moment. Raven spoke slowly:

“The rules are as follows: I will spin the hands at random, making the blade materialize in a certain position. If you guess right, you can dodge its strike. How about it? A simple, easy-to-understand game, isn’t it?”

Suddenly, the hands of the pocket watch twisted backward, warping spacetime once more. Diamonds stiffened, staring fixedly at the pocket watch. At which exact second would the hands stop? Would Raven pierce his heart directly in the next instant? With no time to think, he rolled to the side. Yet right then, Raven’s voice rang out like a death knell:

“101 seconds.”

Time reversed. Diamonds felt a sharp agony as the blade materialized in mid-air, then hurtled forward as if possessing a will of its own, impaling his shoulder. Unable to maintain his grip on the Mauser, his arm went limp.

“You lost, Senior. The bet continues until… a victor is decided.” Raven smiled dangerously. “23 seconds.”

Diamonds dodged again, yet was wounded in the leg by the blade once more. Walking up to him, Raven’s eyes carried a trace of pity, as if watching a butterfly struggling in a spider’s web, and said:

“You’ve lost too much blood. Is Senior’s mind no longer clear? Let’s add a time-limit challenge to spice things up. Next time, I will pierce the heart of that old woman over there.”

He announced his intended move to Diamonds, satisfied to see the latter’s pupils contract sharply. Toying with this formerly illustrious figure in the palm of his hand brought him immense gratification. Raven grinned, revealing a smile thick with viscous malice, and spun the watch hands once more.

Yet in that very instant, Diamonds’s mind went entirely blank. His muscles tensed, and ignoring his injuries, he lunged toward Madam Spades like an arrow released from a bowstring.

He had crossed through the time labyrinth “Stairs of Paradox” and traveled to 1805 precisely for Madam Spades. If he let her die here, all of his and Quicksand’s efforts would have been in vain.

However, in the very next second, Raven’s deeply amused voice drifted from the side.

“Trusting your opponent too easily is a bad habit, wasn’t that what the 2035 Branch taught us? You trusted me far too much, Senior.”

Suddenly, Raven snapped his fingers, and the short cane vanished. When it reappeared, it was plunged deep into Diamonds’s chest.

In that hair’s-breadth moment of life and death, Diamonds abruptly drew the Mauser and fired a shot straight at his own chest!

The muzzle spat a stasis bubble, enveloping his body. His fall slowed, seemingly frozen in mid-air, and precisely because of this, the blade failed to pierce completely through his chest. The stasis bubble popped, and Diamonds rolled to the floor in a ragged heap, a gruesome wound blooming across his chest, bleeding relentlessly.

Raven walked over, taking in his miserable state like admiring a piece of art he had crafted himself. “It seems Senior’s luck in gambling is truly abysmal. How about this: I will give you one last chance. I will spin the hands; you guess how many seconds into the past it will land.”

Diamonds laughed intermittently, finally murmuring weakly:

“Eight seconds.”

“Oh? Are you that confident?”

“Because that is my lucky number. Just treat it as me placing a straight-up bet.”

“But the odds of a straight-up bet are 1 in 35. The probability of winning this bet is far lower than that,” Raven said as he spun the hands. With a soft click, the hands finally halted on the number “9.” Behind his lenses, Raven’s eyes narrowed as he smiled brilliantly. “You lost the bet, Senior. What a pity. You can die in peace this time.”

Suddenly, the blade materialized out of thin air. In the next moment, tearing through the flowing wind with a sonic boom, it lunged straight at Diamonds, defying all laws of inertia!

Just as the sharp blade was about to impale Diamonds’s body, in that split second, a colossal crash erupted from the top floor of the clock tower.

The iron gate was blasted off its hinges, flying through the air like a piece of torn paper under an immense impact. Raven felt as though struck by a meteor, his vision tumbling upside down. He crashed heavily onto the floor, feeling as if every bone in his body had fallen apart. Scrambling up to look, he was horrified to discover that a mechanical soldier had smashed into him.

The blade was caught barehanded by someone, slicing open their palm, crimson blood dripping onto the floor. Raven stared dumbfounded, seeing a gray-haired youth panting heavily, standing protectively in front of Diamonds, gripping the blade that was about to impale him. Behind the youth, the dismantled parts of mechanical soldiers littered the entire path.

The gray-haired youth was covered in wounds, his clothes soaked in blood. Several bloody streaks snaked from his temple down to his jaw. Those gray eyes were crystal clear, yet utterly devoid of the slightest ripple of emotion. Though not entirely unscathed, he had actually neutralized over a hundred killing machines single-handedly. Raven was not only stunned by this reality, but even more horrified by the identity of the person before him. He stammered:

“You are… Cleaner…”

The gray-haired youth did not answer, as if he hadn’t heard the question at all. Tossing the blade aside, before Raven could even blurt out the name, the file-axe flashed—skimming like a startled swan across water—and struck Raven dead in the shoulder!

Sprawled on the floor, Diamonds laughed tremblingly: “Look, junior. What I was betting on wasn’t that minor round just now, but the probability of him making it here. What does a straight-up bet matter? You said he only had a one-in-a-thousand chance of getting here, and I won that bet.”

Tumbling to the floor, Raven ground his teeth, his gaze toward the gray-haired youth brimming with sheer terror. He recognized this man, the Group’s Chief Cleaner Quicksand, the individual standing at the absolute apex of all active cleaners, yet for some unknown reason, he had sided with the traitor. Standing before him, covered in wounds yet seemingly impervious to pain, the gray-haired youth looked like a terrifying god of death.

Wiping the blood from the corner of his mouth, Quicksand hoisted the file-axe high once more, a dark, heavy light swirling in his pupils. He cast a sideways glance at Diamonds, his expression detached, and said:

“No, stupid boss. My odds of winning have always been one hundred percent.”