SOP CH9: Defeated at the Outset

“The Time Entropy Group 2030 Branch Blood Arena’s Apricot Moon Tournament is about to begin! The contenders participating in this tournament are: ‘Rust Bone’ Sally, a former military-tech soldier who borrowed 2,777 hours of lifespan to treat the skeletal corrosion caused by defective cybernetic implants, with a record of 25 victories!”

“‘Flesh-and-Blood Engine’ Marion, former three-time champion whose metabolism surged wildly following a failed genetic modification experiment, burning through 48 hours of lifespan every single day. A single punch from him can pierce titanium alloy armor, holding a record of 196 victories!”

“‘Ghost’ A-Qiang, a brave newcomer fighting for his family’s lifespan balance, with only 2 hours of life remaining to his own name. Can he turn the tables in this desperate straits? A record of 1 victory!”

Inside the arena, a mechanical announcer proclaimed the profiles of each fighter with roaring fervor. Heads bobbed across the fifty thousand seats, and with every announced name, beast-like howls erupted from the stands. In this colosseum-like cage, it seemed as though the ones trading blood were humans, while those seated in the audience were the true wild beasts.

“And introducing another newcomer making his debut today, the Time Entropy Group’s time cleaner, ‘Quicksand’!”

Suddenly, the mechanical announcer’s voice began stammering. The spectators’ faces instantly changed color, and after a brief silence, whispers spread like wildfire.

“Possessing proud martial prowess, razor-sharp eloquence, and an unforgettable visage, undefeated in battle! Betting on ‘Quicksand’ is betting on an effortless, guaranteed victory!”

A figure vaulted onto the ring, megaphone in hand, reciting aloud at the top of his lungs. These words did not come from the announcer, but from Quicksand himself, currently blowing his own horn before tens of thousands of people with a completely deadpan face.

The mechanical announcer’s eyes suddenly flared red: “ID verification passed. Behavioral pattern abnormal. ID verification passed. Behavioral pattern abnormal.”

Branch personnel came rushing over, shouting at the production crew below the stage, “Cut the live broadcast! Verify the identity of the fighter on stage!”

A camera drone chimed: “Unsuitable public persona detected. Live broadcast disconnected.”

The entire venue broke into an uproar. Time cleaners were legendary figures whose identities remained state secrets, Quicksand being the sole exception. While most upper-tier elites had never seen his face, they knew of his illustrious name. Although the recording feed was automatically severed the instant Quicksand took the stage, the crowd in attendance had already plunged into chaos.

At the same time, Diamonds’s exasperated voice crackled through the Clepsydra communication channel:

“I am utterly done with this guy! What in the world did he jump up there to cause a scene for!”

The snow leopard snickered, “Liar, it’s rare to see you lose your temper like this. What does it matter? You two were meant to be decoys to pull security’s attention anyway. The more ruckus, the better.”

Taking a deep breath, Diamonds forced himself to calm down, barking orders across the channel: “Remaining assault squad members: Team One hijacks the security droids; Team Two fakes an alert and brings down the firewall.”

Meanwhile, Quicksand was already putting on a grand display atop the ring. Swinging his iron shovel, he took down one opponent per swing, chopping through them as cleanly as slicing vegetables, drawing gasps of shock from the entire audience. Branch personnel urgently dialed the director’s comms line, only to notice a figure had already appeared beneath the ring at some unknown point.

“Director!” a worker cried out. “Look at the stage…”

“Cleaner ‘Quicksand’, how could he appear here uninvited?” the figure chuckled. It was a burly man clad in a boxing headgear and draped in sable fur. His eyes were narrow slits that constantly shot dark glints from beneath his lids, his mouth perpetually curving upward like a protractor. He was none other than the director of the Group’s 2030 Branch, “Monkey Face.”

“W-we don’t know either. Whether he is truly Cleaner ‘Quicksand’ is still open to question, because his face is concealed…”

“Without ID verification, how did he get inside the branch?”

The worker pulled up the authentication logs from the mechanical receptionists, his face instantly turning deathly pale.

“The records indicate he passed authentication. He is Cleaner ‘Quicksand’…”

“An advisory was circulated between branches regarding a stolen ID chip earlier. Even if he passed verification, it might not be the man himself. Bring him down first, then contact the 2035 Branch to confirm his identity.”

Right at that moment, a buzzing drone swarm roared from the entrance, blotting out the sky, every chassis stamped with a water-clock insignia. Before anyone could react, the drones swept into mid-air, dispersing a massive cloud of pungent mist.

“Where are the security droids? An attack! It’s a raid by the Clepsydra rebels!”

The spectators choked on the dense capsaicin smoke, tears streaming down their faces. At the same time, ventilation ducts popped open automatically to exhaust the fumes. A contingent of Clepsydra fighters wearing gas masks and bearing water-clock tattoos leaped into the hall.

In an instant, pandemonium broke loose across the cavernous arena as upper-tier elites fled in all directions, coughing and screaming continuously. Hampered by the stampeding mob, the defense droids could not engage the Clepsydra fighters effectively, quickly falling one by one, their shattered metallic chassis littering the floor.

Seeing the arena descend into total anarchy, the corporate staff panicked. Just then, Branch Director Monkey Face laughed aloud: “Engage the climate control system and inject magnetic particulate dust.”

The staff executed the order, and before long, another cloud of smoke rolled through the venue. The propellers of the drones caught in the haze spun slower and slower. The magnetic dust adhered to the drones’ metallic plating, quickly stripping them of control.

Suddenly, gunshots rang out.

The panicked crowd surged out through the arena exits like a burst dam. Wearing thermal imaging goggles, the rebels skillfully fired tranquilizer rounds through the smog, dropping corporate personnel one after another.

Yet simultaneously, more security droids entered the hall, forming an iron wall that blocked the rebels’ advance. Without warning, the floor beneath the rebels began sinking away, walling them off from the upper-tier spectators.

“The structural layout here can reconfigure at will! Clubs Cat, did you breach the core server room yet? I’ve already stalled for fifteen minutes here.” Diamonds leaped onto the ring, speaking to the snow leopard while tossing a gas mask to Quicksand. Having undergone rigorous training, Quicksand could withstand capsaicin fumes, but his eyes were reddened nonetheless.

The snow leopard snapped irritably across the channel: “Not yet! The server room’s encryption relies on the Group’s time-jump technology. The cryptographic algorithm updates automatically at regular intervals, meaning cracking the key takes vastly longer than usual!”

“I leave it to you, stupid cat. I’ll figure out a way to buy more time,” Diamonds said, cleanly severing the comms.

Right then, his gaze sharpened. A ferocious gust of killing intent pierced toward him, and he twisted his body sharply, ducking a punch striking from behind!

Quicksand gathered his wits, raising his iron shovel to stand beside Diamonds. A figure had made his way onto the ring unannounced: wearing a boxing headgear and draped in sable fur, tall and heavily muscled, yet smiling with narrowed eyes, looking like a monkey’s head grafted onto the body of a tiger.

Diamonds smiled. “If it isn’t Mr. Monkey Face, Director of the 2030 Branch? We’ve been anticipating your arrival for quite some time.”

Monkey Face looked at him, his small eyes squeezed into two slits by his grin: “Did your boss, Anvil, not come?”

Hearing Hearts’s former moniker, Quicksand gave a slight start. Diamonds dropped his playful grin, staring at the man icily.

“I thought he would care a bit more about our branch. After all, we spent a fortune to cultivate such a superstar back then,” Monkey Face glanced toward the flanks of the arena, where Clepsydra fighters were kept from unlocking the cages by the security droids, while the captive slaves watched the chaos in terror. “He was once one of them, clawing up from the very bottom, stepping over the blood of countless fighters to become a Boxing King. Even now, no one can forget the brilliance he once radiated. To put it colloquially, this place is like his maternal home.”

“Our leader has no need for such a blood-soaked home.”

“Indeed, he doesn’t need it, because his star fell long ago. This is the year 2030, the era of the new generation Boxing King, namely myself, Monkey Face!”

Suddenly, Monkey Face broke into a savage grin, his lips practically stretching from ear to ear. Revealing his thick, vein-corded arms, he wore a metallic gauntlet whose circuitry branched like blood vessels, embedded with a holographic display showing his lifespan balance.

Diamonds’s expression turned dead serious; it was the first time Quicksand had ever seen him look so grim. Monkey Face took a stride forward and threw a lightning punch! That punch fractured into three distinct afterimages, assailing the upper, middle, and lower gates simultaneously. Diamonds and Quicksand parried together, discovering this fist was both blisteringly fast and immensely heavy, rivaling Hearts’s own power.

Diamonds whispered to Quicksand: “Careful! His quantum gauntlet incorporates time-jump tech. It compresses the three seconds needed to throw a punch into a single second.”

Dodging continuously, Quicksand thought to himself that this was precisely the technological gap Diamonds had described between the lower tier and the upper tier. While the 2030 Branch was far from the Group’s peak, mastering temporal tech carved an insurmountable chasm between them and the bottom tier.

Evading another blow, Quicksand planted his foot and shifted his shoulders, stating in a flat tone, “In the world of martial arts, speed alone is unbeatable.”

Diamonds was baffled. “Huh?”

“Meaning, I will strike him at three times my original speed,” Quicksand declared.

Monkey Face’s eyes widened. He saw a young man in black charging toward him, the iron shovel turning into a black blur in his grip, biting down like a vicious dragon! Transcending time and space, the strike came down with terrifying, thunderous momentum.

In that split second, Monkey Face seemed to behold the Grim Reaper itself. Quicksand’s gray pupils were entirely void of emotion, as if looking down on vermin. Upon closing the distance, Quicksand whispered:

“Your punch is far inferior to Boxing King Anvil’s.”

Two inches, one inch, the shovel was on the verge of smashing into Monkey Face’s visage when Monkey Face let out a low growl, driving his fist hard into the shovel! In an instant, the lifespan balance on his holographic display fluctuated. He had burned 5 minutes of lifespan to induce a localized time loop, allowing the kinetic impact of that single punch to detonate repeatedly.

Unable to withstand countless blows dealt in a split second, the shovel shattered to pieces, Quicksand’s eyes widening slightly in shock. Seizing the opening, Monkey Face reverted one gauntlet, forcefully clamping down on Quicksand’s face and slamming him against the edge of the ring. Simultaneously, he hoisted his other fist high, the holographic display flaring with an ominous red light. Monkey Face’s lifespan was plummeting sharply, draining 30 years in a single second!

“True, I might not compare to Anvil. But this next punch is something even Anvil failed to withstand back then!”

Quicksand’s hair stood on end, an instinctual alarm ringing within him. Just then, Diamonds charged in from the flank, firing three rapid shots. Yet Monkey Face’s gauntlet possessed temporal dilation properties; the instant the lead bullets made contact with his fist, they were decomposed, shattered, and exiled into other spacetimes.

In that fraction of a second, Diamonds tackled him head-on, straining every muscle to wrench Monkey Face’s arm away. Quicksand locked eyes with him, catching an unexpected glimpse of raw anxiety across his features.

Perhaps this was the first time he had glimpsed the fraudster’s true self. Quicksand thought that while he had seen Diamonds smiling slyly, playing the trickster, lounging lazily, and feigning indifference, only this frantic Diamonds felt like a real human being who had stripped away his mask.

Diamonds’s tackle failed to divert the punch’s trajectory. With a brutal elbow strike, Monkey Face slammed Diamonds to the floor. Quicksand watched the incoming fist closing in, an unavoidable strike that compressed the duration between release and impact down to zero.

Without warning, a titanium prosthetic arm smashed in from the side, striking Monkey Face square in the torso!

Monkey Face went sailing through the air, that seemingly unstoppable punch failing to land on Quicksand. Quicksand tumbled to the deck as Diamonds scrambled up nearby, spitting out a mouthful of blood and calling out:

“Brother Hearts!”

The newcomer was Hearts. He panted heavily with ragged breaths, as if he had sprinted here at top speed and expended every ounce of stamina to deliver that single blow. His frame was colossal like a great shield, shielding Diamonds and Quicksand behind him like fledglings. Hearts turned his head to ask, “Are you two alright?”

Quicksand shook his head. He had never saved anyone, nor had he ever been saved; the sensation right now felt remarkably novel. Diamonds, however, knitted his brows and asked, “Boss, why are you here? The assault squad is handling this, you didn’t need to come in person.”

“Leaving so many didi fighting at the front lines while I sit safely in the rear, I could never be such a coward,” Hearts panted. “Besides, weren’t you two just in mortal danger?”

Monkey Face lay amidst scattered metal debris, yet he burst into hearty laughter.

“Anvil, you came after all! The superstar who once ruled the Blood Arena, how did you end up leading a pack of gutter rats?”

Hearts suppressed the rage roaring in his throat: “Isn’t it all thanks to you?”

“Yet you cannot beat me, that is an established fact. Long ago, you failed to withstand this punch in our duel, and the same holds true today.” A vicious grin crept onto Monkey Face’s visage, wrinkling like crumpled paper, his features bunching up tightly. “Take a look at your body. You’re repeating the exact same mistake.”

Diamonds and Quicksand looked toward Hearts in utter horror. When Hearts intervened just now, he had taken the blow Monkey Face threw by burning 30 years of lifespan. That punch carried an astronomical price, leaving devastating consequences in its wake. Time shattered wherever the strike passed. The surroundings dimmed, power cutting out everywhere except for the security droids. Beyond consuming a massive amount of lifespan, the 2030 Branch’s electrical grid had been drained dry in an instant.

Hearts’s body seemed to dissolve away, his silverback gorilla arm sheared clean off, his titanium prosthetic nowhere to be found. His limbs looked as though they had been fed into an industrial shredder, battered and broken, the severed cross-sections glowing with a bizarre, shifting iridescence. Monkey Face looked upon Hearts collapsing toward unconsciousness as though viewing a discarded machine part. Quicksand’s tone turned frigid: “What did you do to him?”

Monkey Face smiled amiably: “Nothing much, just repeating an old trick. Anvil, the rebel army is nothing more than rotten wood and withered branches, completely out of our league. Your era has passed.”

He turned to issue orders to the security droids: “Surround the rebels, let none escape!”

Diamonds suddenly whispered, “Fall back.” Hearing this through the comms, the snow leopard blurted urgently, “Wait, the key is almost cracked!”

“Figure out another way on your end. I’m pulling brother Hearts out; he’s gravely injured.”

Hearing that, the snow leopard calmed down as well: “I’ll do what I can.”

Diamonds turned and shot Quicksand a glance, and Quicksand understood immediately. Hoisting Hearts’s massive frame between them, they leaped down from the ring. Having been battered by Hearts’s punch earlier, Monkey Face was still struggling to rise, merely shouting for the guards to pursue. Leaning against the two of them, Hearts spoke haltingly, “I’ve caused… trouble for you both.”

“Given our bond, Boss doesn’t need to say such things.”

Quicksand added, “Give me another autograph when we get back.”

Hearts raised his head with difficulty, offering them a faint smile. Quicksand did not know what that gauntlet had done to Hearts, only that this powerfully built man had seemingly been shattered in an instant. Just as they reached the exit, Monkey Face’s voice drifted from behind:

“Anvil, don’t you want this?”

Diamonds froze in his tracks. Hearts turned his head with great effort, his eyes widening in shock.

Monkey Face raised his hand, and a camera droid projected a holographic feed: inside a glass display case resting on velvet lay a fair-skinned arm, its severed joint shimmering with flowing rainbow hues. It looked like the arm of a young girl.

“Duo… duo,” Quicksand heard Hearts grind out through clenched teeth, a ragged growl tearing from his throat.

“Isn’t this the arm of the daughter you’ve searched for so long? I mercifully recovered it for you. If you want it back, play a game with me,” the creases of Monkey Face’s smile bunched together. “A game whose victor was never decided long ago.”

“A duel to the death! The most liberating contest in the Blood Arena. No time limits, no restrictions, the one who takes their opponent’s life by brutal means emerges victorious!” the announcer droid chimed in with impassioned, static-laced electronic tones.

“The duel begins in three days, the grand finale of each month’s tournament. The victor claims the luxurious prizes offered by the 2030 Branch along with 100 years of lifespan. If you win, you can reclaim your daughter’s arm, and I will release all the slaves in this arena.”

“You know as well as I do that the disparity in strength between your rebels and us is as night and day, leaving you zero chance in a straight fight. This is a perk granted to you. As the former Boxing King, you must be intimately familiar with the procedure. Though with your currently shattered body, who knows if you’ll even last until then, haha!”

“How is this a perk? This is obviously a trap designed to lure us in,” Diamonds said coldly.

“Indeed, but the reward is terribly enticing for you all, isn’t it? Just that 100 years of lifespan alone is enough to vault you into the ranks of Spiral City’s upper class! As for why I generously offer these perks, it’s because you make excellent opening acts. You see, the moment you crashed the stage, the viewership ratings for the next Apricot Moon tournament shot through the roof, didn’t they?” Monkey Face laughed sinisterly. “You are welcome to visit anytime, Clepsydra rebels.”

Faced with Monkey Face’s grating cackle, Hearts merely whispered to the two beside him:

“Help me up. Let us head back first.”

Diamonds hesitated: “But, Boss…”

Hearts shook his head, offering a warm smile: “Let us go home.”

Where was “home”? The place where he lost his wife, where his daughter remained scattered like a dormant wooden doll, had long been broken, no longer a shelter. That battered bar cobbled together with Diamonds, Madam Spades, the regular patrons, and this newcomer who had joined midway, felt far more like a place where Hearts’s soul could find rest. Quicksand asked:

“Are we going back to Poker Bar?”

Hearts turned his face, smiling softly.

“Yes, that is home. Because that is where you all are.”