SOP CH25: Breaking Through the Thorns

Moonlight drifted down from the firmament, cloaking the Tower of the Crown clock tower in a silvery-white reverie. Yet atop the tower, a cleaner wearing a beak mask and heavy black tweed trench coat sprawled on the ground, staring dumbfounded at the two heavily wounded figures before him.

The prototype for all Time Entropy Group cleaners, A-0, and the current Chief Cleaner Quicksand—such a combination was utterly absurd. After a long silence, Raven asked: “Cleaner Quicksand… why are you here?”

Quicksand looked down at him as if observing a crawling insect. Shuddering as though struck by an invisible whip, Raven blurted out:

“Why are you… standing with a traitor to the Group?”

Quicksand did not understand his words, but feeling that he had already mastered playing the part of the “Time Entropy Group’s Chief Cleaner” to perfection, he planted his hands on his hips and feigned arrogance:

“Who are you to try and cozy up to me? Is this how you speak to your invincible Grandpa Quicksand?”

Raven was baffled, scrutinizing Quicksand, suspecting his cranial chip was either damaged or had been uploaded with a comedy sketch program.

Clutching his injured arm, he struggled to rise, chuckling intermittently at Diamonds: “Senior, you truly exceed expectations, actually managing to secure such a reinforcement… What methods did you use?”

Diamonds offered a sly smile, mouthing the words: “A honey trap.”

Raven suddenly burst into loud laughter, the corners of his mouth trembling like withered leaves caught in the wind. The hands on the pocket watch inlaid within his short cane suddenly jerked, clicking back half a notch. In that instant, Diamonds and Quicksand felt an invisible field unfurl from him; time reversed, and the wounds on Raven’s body healed one by one.

Diamonds and Quicksand narrowed their eyes, recognizing the power of the short cane Raven wielded. Augmented by the Group’s technology, every time cleaner possessed the ability to manipulate and play with time; the opponent they faced was still a formidable threat.

“Very well. True or not, crossing blades with two top-tier seniors is my profound honor.” Raven let out a soft sigh. “However, this is my home turf, my era. No matter how you struggle, you cannot escape the cage I have set. Earlier I only mobilized 160 mechanical soldiers, but have you considered, Seniors, that the 1805 Branch possesses far more than a mere hundred-odd soldiers?”

Diamonds’s heart suddenly seemed to skip a beat.

Raven spread his arms like a stage actor delivering a climactic monologue: “To remodel this era, this branch has spared no effort in manufacturing over 570,000 mechanical soldiers! With a single command from me, they will conquer this world!”

Suddenly, countless figures of copper and iron materialized through the dense fog, a torrent of rust flooding into the Tower of the Crown. The joints of the mechanical soldiers shrieked as gears ground together, sounding like countless dull saws cutting through wood. With heavy, thudding steps, they marched over moss-covered stone stairs, packing the top floor to the brim.

Quicksand’s expression turned grave. Taking down a hundred mechanical soldiers just now had already left him battered and bruised, his flesh torn and bleeding. Even the most aggressive lion cannot fend off a surging wolf pack. If 570,000 mechanical soldiers attacked at once, the two of them alone had absolutely zero chance of winning.

Yet Diamonds chuckled softly: “Is that so? But I think killing just one person will suffice. The only one we need to kill is the one controlling these mechanical soldiers—which is you!”

With a sudden flick of his wrist, a small vial slipped from his sleeve into his palm. It was the deep purple physical enhancement potion Madam Spades had provided. Biting the cork off, Diamonds took a massive gulp, forcing his battered body to stand upright.

The exact moment Raven adjusted the pocket watch hands, Diamonds hurled a butter knife! The silver blade tore through the air, sinking deep into Raven’s palm with a dull thud. As Raven let out a muffled grunt, Diamonds pulled the Mauser’s trigger with lightning speed, sending a stasis bubble trailing right behind to crash against Raven’s hand.

Enveloped by the stasis bubble, time ceased to flow for Raven’s palm, frozen in that exact moment, stretching the agonizing pain of being impaled into infinity.

Clicking his tongue in annoyance, Raven waved his intact hand. A swarm of pitch-black silhouettes vaulted down from the cast-iron spire. Emitting high-frequency roars, the mechanical soldiers crashed down upon the two like collapsing mountains.

Quicksand moved, swinging his file-axe. The mechanical soldiers swarmed him like angry hornets, their hands spinning at high speeds into drills that whizzed past his ears. Without even turning his head, Quicksand violently jerked the file-axe backward, shattering the motors and reducers in the mechanical soldiers’ knee joints, leaving them dangling limply like dead branches. His movements were blisteringly fast, as if even his shadow couldn’t keep up. Unable to withstand the file-axe’s ferocious strikes, the high-carbon steel gears inside the mechanical soldiers disintegrated, scattering to pieces.

Breaking into a cold sweat, Raven still managed a smile: “I didn’t expect the backup Senior brought to actually be the genuine article. Is this a new cleaner model from 2026? How does his face and strength so closely resemble Chief Quicksand’s?”

Quicksand boasted with a deadpan expression: “That’s right, I am the newest model. Witnessed my power yet, you country bumpkin from 1805?”

Raven sneered and snapped his fingers.

Suddenly, concealed chains clanked, and Diamonds and Quicksand felt tremors beneath their feet. The floor they stood upon was actually constructed from trapdoors. With the mechanism triggered and counterweights dropping, the trapdoors flipped downward by 90 degrees. Losing their footing, the two plunged into the abyss below. Beneath them lay a massive pit lined with triangular spikes.

In a moment of desperation, Diamonds drew a butter knife.

Just a split second before being skewered, Diamonds pressed the blade against the tip of a spike, executing a breathtaking acrobatic handstand. Instantly curling his body like an elegant cat, he delivered a vicious kick to Quicksand in mid-air!

Quicksand slammed hard against the pit wall, but reacting decisively, he drove the file-axe into the stone to stabilize himself. Sweeping Diamonds with a murderous glare, he demanded:

“Why did you kick me?”

“If I hadn’t kicked you, you’d be a meat skewer right now. Instead of thanking me, you blame me. What kind of logic is that?” Diamonds smiled slyly. “That was payback for you kicking me into the time labyrinth.”

Quicksand had no retort. Right then, a massive buzzing hum erupted from above. Looking up, they saw mechanical soldiers plunging from the sky. The two swiftly vaulted out of the pit, only to be met by two more mechanical soldiers swinging sharp drills. As Quicksand parried, the rivets on a mechanical soldier’s abdomen violently popped open, and a figure darted out from within, delivering a vicious sword thrust into Quicksand!

The silver blade pierced Quicksand’s abdomen, blood dribbling from the corner of his mouth. Unfazed, his cold gaze shifted downward. That figure was none other than Raven, who had dismantled a mechanical soldier’s cooling grille to hide inside, catching Quicksand completely off guard.

“Quicksand!”

In a panic, Diamonds cried out.

Though impaled, Quicksand remained stoic, catching sight of Diamonds’s deathly pale, panicked face from the corner of his eye, and thought with a touch of surprise:

“Strange. He didn’t call me ‘black-hearted employee’ like usual, but ‘Quicksand’ instead.”

Having succeeded in his ambush, Raven felt immensely pleased with himself, yet when he tried to pull his sword back, it wouldn’t budge an inch. Quicksand had gripped the cane sword piercing his abdomen with his bare hand, completely ignoring the blade slicing into his fingers. Sweating profusely, Raven shouted: “5 seconds!”

He intended to reverse the blade’s time to five seconds prior, but in a split second, Quicksand swung his axe. It was a strike that transcended time. Suddenly, the second hand seemed to freeze upon the watch face, dust motes solidifying in the air. Space collapsed, the moonlight seeming to shatter into millions of fragments, followed by a deafening blast!

Raven’s short cane was cleaved in two by the file-axe. Quicksand had activated the temporal technology within the weapon, accelerating time particles until they detonated. His body moved involuntarily, as if intimately familiar with wielding this weapon all along. Yet as a price, he felt the strength and lifespan within his body draining rapidly.

Trembling all over, with his short cane destroyed and left bare-handed, Raven was like a newborn infant facing two Byzantine heavy cavalrymen. He frantically pressed the shattered pocket watch dial, attempting to reverse time again to repair his weapon.

However, by this time, Diamonds had clambered out of the pit, his gaze as frigid as winter. Clamping a playing card between two fingers, killing intent flared from him. Under his masterful manipulation, the soft paper transformed into a razor-sharp blade, slashing viciously toward Raven.

What a terrifying opponent.

The thought flashed through Raven’s mind. By the time he twisted the dial, the playing card had already sliced into his flesh, nearly severing his fingers. But with a violent turn, Raven dialed time back to the moment Diamonds and Quicksand were still trapped inside the pit.

Reaching out his hand and seeing all five fingers still attached, Raven couldn’t help wiping away a cold sweat.

“Haha… Seniors, you… truly are formidable, top-tier experts the likes of which I’ve never seen,” he panted. “But I can restart countless times, until I finally defeat you!”

“No, the number of times you can restart has a limit.”

Suddenly, a figure leaped up from the pit. It was Diamonds, drenched in blood. Despite his battered appearance, his smile was unhurried and composed as he spoke:

“That limit is your lifespan. Every time you reverse time, it must consume dozens of times more of your lifespan, right? That is why you have only ever reversed time in increments of seconds.”

“So what? Senior, as the Deputy Director of the 1805 Branch, I have centuries of time to play with you.”

Tipping down the brim of his white top hat, Diamonds rested his hand on his holster, the corners of his mouth curving up:

“The amount of lifespan balance is not the key to this victory. To defeat you, I merely need to seal off your future completely.”

He raised his eyes, his gaze as cold as a frozen winter pool.

“Come, Junior. I will ensure every single one of your futures leads to only one conclusion—having your life ended by us.”

From that moment on, Raven’s nightmare began.

He watched Diamonds and Quicksand assail him time and time again. The file-axe plunging into his chest with the sound of ripping silk; playing cards slicing through his flesh, the agony lingering endlessly. Raven always dialed back the hands at the very last second, returning to the past, yet consistently ended up cornered and annihilated by the two apex cleaners.

After repeatedly experiencing the brink of death, Raven couldn’t help but feel an emotion no cleaner should possess: could he ever escape this hellish cycle? Diamonds was right. Merely altering past events was futile. He turned the hands back one day, five days, even further into the past, yet Diamonds and Quicksand always appeared before him, employing brutal methods to force him to turn the hands back once more.

Impaled and critically wounded an unknown number of times, even the sensation of near-death had become mundane. Until a certain moment when he collapsed to the floor in defeat, saying in a hoarse voice:

“I… I concede.”

Moonlight flowed over the roof of the clock tower like liquid silver. Wearing the beak mask, Cleaner Raven lay in a pool of blood, thrashing like a fish dying of thirst. Diamonds and Quicksand stood before him, their chests heaving violently from the brawl. To the two of them, the battle just now felt both protracted and fleeting, as if centuries had passed in the blink of an eye.

“However… Seniors, you certainly haven’t achieved victory either,” Raven laughed hoarsely. “Even my short cane cannot affect someone who has already passed away. The person you crossed the time labyrinth… traveled two hundred years back to save… can no longer be saved.”

Diamonds shuddered, lowering his eyes. Earlier, while fighting Raven and taking a blow to protect Madam Spades, he had swiftly checked her pulse, finding her body already turning cold. He said coldly:

“So what? The 1805 Branch still contains data regarding the Group’s time-jump technology. We can absolutely use that technology to jump back to a time when Madam Spades was still alive.”

“No, did you think I would leave Group secrets to our enemies? I have stayed in this era long enough, and have long wished to meet my end here. All physical records have already been destroyed, the intelligence stored solely within my brain.” Raven grabbed his shattered short cane, pointing the blade at his own forehead with a faint smile. “And now, I shall destroy my brain.”

Startled, the two lunged forward, but a mechanical soldier suddenly crashed in from the side, blocking their path. From behind the mechanical soldier came Raven’s maniacal laughter:

“Let me give you one final gift, Senior. I have implanted your biometric data into the mechanical soldiers’ target recognition modules. Even after I die, they will not cease operations. 570,000 mechanical soldiers will block your path to the time labyrinth, hunting you down to the ends of the earth. You can never return to the future. This era shall be your sarcophagus!”

The moment his voice faded, the two saw a spray of blood erupt behind the mechanical soldier. Raven had driven his short cane straight through his own skull.

Cleaving the mechanical soldier aside with a swing of his axe, Quicksand rushed to Raven’s side with Diamonds. His head pierced through, Raven was already dead. Diamonds adjusted the pocket watch hands in an attempt to reverse time, but it had no effect on a dead man. The blade had precisely destroyed Raven’s cranial chip; they could glean no further information from it.

To make matters worse, they heard an earth-shattering grinding noise, like tens of thousands of millstones grinding simultaneously. Looking down from the Tower of the Crown, the shadows of mechanical soldiers swarmed like ants, advancing in a vast, overwhelming tide.

“Black-hearted boss, what do we do now?” Quicksand asked. “We failed to save the person, and now we’re besieged. I don’t want to work this shift anymore, can I resign?”

Rising from Raven’s side, Diamonds limped over to Madam Spades, silently checking her breath. Suddenly, a ripple of shock crossed his face.

“Madam is still alive!”

Astonished, Quicksand watched as Diamonds turned Madam Spades’s body over. Although bleeding from her heart, her frail chest still rose and fell slightly. In her hand, she clutched an empty reagent vial. The two realized what had happened: in the moments following her critical injury, she had frantically drunk the new “Water of Life” she had intended to unveil today. Relying on this potion modified with temporal fluid, she had barely managed to cling to life.

“I didn’t expect her new invention to actually work. Give me a hand, we’ll take her with us and escape together,” Diamonds said.

“Escape where?”

“To 2026, our era. I still have some medicine here that can temporarily stabilize her condition. If we can get her to Doctor Hua, that old man will definitely be able to perform a miracle.”

Just as they spoke, mechanical soldiers poured into the Tower of the Crown like a tidal wave. The dull grinding of interlocking gears sounded like countless rusted scissors snipping the air, completely blocking their exit.

Diamonds pulled out the high-strength alloy cables from the backs of the mechanical soldiers they had defeated earlier. Swiftly knotting the cables together and attaching grappling hooks dismantled from the soldiers’ hands, he tossed it to Quicksand: “We use this to descend the exterior wall.”

Following instructions, Quicksand secured the cable around a stone pillar, but suddenly heard a few coughs. The coughing grew louder. Quicksand whipped his head around, only to see Diamonds covering his mouth as large streams of blood flowed through his fingers.

“Black-hearted boss, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” Diamonds’s face was deathly pale. “Let’s go quickly, we can’t stay here.” Following the death match just now, he was covered in wounds. On top of that, his body was an empty shell missing its internal organs; what should have been his vitals was a complete mess. With his condition deteriorating rapidly, he didn’t know when he might collapse.

The two slid down the wall using the cable. Suddenly, the mechanical soldiers raised their heads in unison, eyes glowing red as they raised their arms to fire tens of thousands of steel needles! The dense swarm of needles shot forth, seeming to punch countless holes through the air, leaving behind a torrential whistling sound.

Whirling his file-axe to sweep away the steel needles, Quicksand carefully rappelled downward. He felt a heavy weight upon his shoulders; since moments ago, Diamonds had gone completely silent, hanging onto him like a corpse alongside Madam Spades. He remembered Diamonds’s frail performance—even before he arrived for the rescue, Diamonds had already taken several sword strikes from Raven.

“Black-hearted boss, are you still alive?” Quicksand asked.

No response. Leaning against him, it felt as if Diamonds had even stopped breathing. Quicksand’s attention wavered for a split second. Right at that moment, the mechanical soldiers gathered beneath the Tower of the Crown emitted a violent grinding of gears and began to transform. Their joints, hinges, and sliding rails interlocked, resembling a colossal, violently beating heart.

The mechanical soldiers assembled into a gigantic monstrosity, combining armor, gears, and gun barrels like scattered building blocks pieced together. Using both hands and feet, it lunged toward the three of them, its silhouette blotting out the sky and sun like a Titan from mythology. The giant’s fists smashed into the top of the Tower of the Crown, snapping the hinges and sending the three plummeting abruptly.

His heart leaping into his throat, Quicksand used the file-axe against the wall to brake, repeatedly detonating space below to create cushioning explosions.

They finally managed to land on the ground. Quicksand immediately hoisted Madam Spades onto his back and scooped the unconscious Diamonds into the crook of his arm like a sack of potatoes, sprinting away toward Madam Spades’s manor. A massive, dark swarm of mechanical soldiers formed a giant metal wall, pursuing and intercepting them from all sides.

Like a porter, Quicksand carried two heavy bodies and ran as fast as his legs could carry him. Reaching the riverbank, he saw enemies on three sides; only the river shimmered with light, as if coated in a layer of silver foil.

“Gentlemen, over here!”

Suddenly, a shout carried through the night wind. Turning his head, Quicksand saw a flat-bottomed boat drifting down the river, its bow painted white, with a maid waving and shouting from aboard.

Quicksand recognized her as Morana, the maid working in Madam Spades’s manor, the “adopted daughter” who had been brutally beaten by Madam. Leaping forward, he landed on the boat. The mechanical soldiers halted at the shore, as if worried their joints would seize up if submerged in water. As the small boat sailed out of the encirclement, Quicksand finally breathed a sigh of relief, asking the maid:

“Morana, why are you here?”

A sheepish look appeared on Morana’s pitted face, partially hidden by her mask: “I saw you… taking too long to return, and felt uneasy, so I rushed over.”

“It’s a good thing you came.”

“This was also… Madam’s arrangement.”

Quicksand paused, feeling a touch of surprise: “Madam’s arrangement?”

At that moment, Morana caught sight of the dying Madam Spades. Letting out a cry of shock, she hurriedly knelt down: “Madam!”

Although Madam Spades had drunk the Water of Life to barely sustain her vitals, having her heart pierced meant she could not escape the Grim Reaper’s grasp. Her face was ashen, standing at death’s door. An inexplicable anxiety rising in his chest, Quicksand told Morana:

“Do you know where the time labyrinth of this era is located? I’ll take her to the modern era for treatment. Maybe she can still survive.”

“The time labyrinth is beneath Madam’s manor. It’s an asset of the Group, I… I stumbled upon it once before.”

“Then let’s go, head there,” Quicksand said, though his gaze unconsciously drifted toward Diamonds. The other man had lost consciousness, head slumped as he leaned against the side of the boat. His white suit was wrinkled and covered in bloodstains, looking like a pitiful, torn ragdoll. Passing through the time labyrinth would inevitably take a physical toll. Could Diamonds withstand it? Quicksand couldn’t help but worry.

Yet at that moment, a faint voice spoke up:

“No need… to take me.”

It was Madam Spades’s voice. Quicksand and Morana crowded around her, seeing her face pale as ash, her lips trembling slightly.

“Madam, how are you?” Morana urged hastily, looking as if she were about to cry. Despite the severe beatings she had suffered, she still remembered the Madam’s grace in giving her a second chance at life.

Madam Spades’s gaze fell upon her, suddenly softening like a final ember bursting from cold ashes. She looked up at Quicksand:

“I won’t… make it. Sir, take Morana… and leave this era.”

Suddenly, the disfigured girl was at a loss. “Me?”

Under the moonlight, everything was starkly black and white, the world seeming draped in mourning garb. Holding Madam Spades’s hand, Morana’s heart beat wildly, swallowed by a terror as if she were about to face a life-altering judgment.

“Yes. My child… the 1805… Morana, you are me, living in this era… still completely ignorant of the future.”

Madam Spades’s face was white as frost. Exhausting her final sliver of strength, she whispered to Morana:

“And I, who arrived in this world through the time labyrinth… am you, originally from another spacetime.”