The bright moon hung high in the sky, shedding its brilliant light. As the midnight bell tolled, its deep reverberations startled a night owl from a rocky crevice. With a rush of bleak wind, the creature swept past the clock tower of Crown Tower. At that very moment, atop the roof of the tower, two figures stood locked in a standoff, their killing intent palpable.
One held a gun, while the other held a short cane embedded with a pocket watch. The two were engaged in a fierce, life-and-death struggle. Suddenly, the Time Cleaner, Raven, drew a sharp blade from within his short cane. The gleam of the sword flashed like a venomous snake striking from the shadows, lunging violently toward Diamonds.
Diamonds barely managed to dodge Raven’s incoming thrust. Their shadows intertwined and separated, resembling a dance beneath the moonlight—a frantic, high-stakes choreography that nevertheless carried a bizarre hint of ease. Yet, in that breathless split second, Diamonds once again heard the reversing tick of the clock hands on the short cane. Tick-tock, tick-tock. It sounded like Death knocking at the door.
In a flash, time rewound. The afterimages of the previous second flooded back, overwhelming Diamonds from every direction. He saw his own bullets retracting into the barrel of his gun, and his own body felt as though it were being violently yanked by an invisible hand.
The next instant, a sharp, agonizing pain erupted in Diamonds’ abdomen. Raven’s silver blade had pierced clean through his body!
Diamonds groaned, clutching his wound. Blood, resembling spilled red ink, instantly drenched a massive patch of his clothes. He realized immediately what had happened: Raven had just reversed time to strike the version of Diamonds that existed one second ago.
“Hey now, kiddo, that weapon of yours is pretty handy. Even an old-timer like me is getting a bit jealous,” Diamonds wheezed, forcing a laugh. “Any chance you could let your senior borrow it for a bit?”
Raven smiled politely. “I am flattered by your praise, Senior. However, this short sword likely wouldn’t suit your tastes. Looking at your movements, you seem much more accustomed to long-handled weapons—like that trowel-axe used by the Chief Time Cleaner Quicksand, am I right?”
His face pale, Diamonds chose not to answer the question, deftly changing the subject. “Speaking of which, how do you know so much about me? The bounty issued by the Chrono-Entropy Corporation doesn’t feature my actual face.”
His personal files were supposed to be classified as top-secret within the Corporation. Back when he defected, he had taken the opportunity to mischievously tamper with the database, replacing his own photograph with that of the rising martial arts star, Monkey Face.
“After all, we are the only branch residing in the past,” Raven explained unhurriedly, his demeanor perfectly pleasant. “To accurately capture our prey and ensure no friendly fire occurs among corporate personnel, we require access to deeper information. Consequently, our security clearance is actually higher than that of the 2035 branch. But precisely because of this, the Corporation made us dwell deep within ‘the past’ alongside these secrets, rarely deploying us. They fear us, yet they are forced to rely on our methods.”
Raven’s smile widened slightly.
“You did indeed alter your files at the 2035 branch, Senior. However, the Corporation had already backed up your data at the 1805 Branch long before that. That is how I know your true identity.”
“You clearly have the means to send my data back to the Corporation and inform the other branches in the ‘future,’ yet you haven’t done so. Why?” Diamonds asked.
“Send it to the other branches?” Raven feigned astonishment, then shook his head. “No, Senior. You are the exclusive prey of the 1805 Branch. I have no intention of handing you over to anyone else.”
Panting heavily, Diamonds cast a sidelong glance at Madame Spades behind him. He had hastily bandaged her wounds moments ago, but because Raven had intercepted him, he hadn’t been able to take her to get medical attention. Right now, Madame Spades lay collapsed on the ground, her face as pale as parchment, her status between life and death completely uncertain.
“You were originally… a Time Cleaner from the future as well, weren’t you? How are you able to operate in the year 1805 without any adverse effects?” Diamonds inquired. He was deliberately stalling for time, waiting for Quicksand to come to his aid.
Raven seemed entirely amused by Diamonds’ endless questions and replied with immense patience. “Have you forgotten? Every Time Cleaner undergoes cybernetic modification. Chips are implanted in our brains, and nanobots are injected into our bloodstream. When we travel to a specific era via the Corporation’s time-jump technology, our bodies experience no temporal rejection.”
He scrutinized Diamonds, narrowing his eyes.
“But you are different, Senior. You are a deserter who defected from the Corporation a very long time ago. Since then, how many times have you crossed the Stairs of Paradox? Because from where I stand, your bodily functions are severely depleted. You are practically no different from a dead man.”
The corners of Diamonds’ lips curled upward. The diamond stud beneath his eye seemed to tremble alongside his ragged breathing as he forced a radiant smile. “Well, if a dead man like me manages to beat you, wouldn’t that make you lose face completely?”
A passing shroud of dark clouds veiled the moon. The shifting shadows resembled thick, viscous ink, painting the clock tower in pitch blackness. In the chilling, damp night wind, Raven gripped his short cane tightly, staring at Diamonds.
After a long pause, he spoke softly. “Senior, are you waiting for reinforcements?”
Diamonds remained silent, but his muscles subtly tensed.
“No one is coming to save you. Your companion has already been pinned down by the 1805 Branch’s mechanical soldiers. The hands of every single mechanical soldier have been modified into combat bayonets capable of piercing a five-millimeter steel plate, and they house mechanisms that can fire hundreds of steel needles in an instant. They possess monstrous strength, with a grip force of a whopping eight tons—even standard time cleaners are no match for them. And there are no fewer than 160 of those soldiers deployed on-site today! I am afraid your companion won’t last five seconds against them before being reduced to a puddle of mincemeat.”
Raven suddenly burst into a theatrical laugh, his shoulders shaking. “Do you understand? The probability of your companion surviving is less than one in a thousand! However, given the shattered state of your body, even if that one-in-a-thousand miracle did happen, you won’t live long enough to see it.”
Diamonds coughed violently, blood staining the corner of his mouth. Yet, he forced himself to stand tall, raising his Mauser pistol once more to aim at Raven. He smiled faintly.
“You underestimate me too much. A paltry little scratch like this isn’t going to stop me.”
Raven’s voice turned heavy. “I pierced your internal organs.”
“What a shame.” Diamonds wiped the trail of blood from his lips, his expression suddenly twisting into a fierce, feral grin. In a flash, he lunged forward. “I haven’t had internal organs for a very long time!”
In that instant, it was as if he had broken free from all physical restraints, charging forward with blinding speed. Raven could barely track his movements; he could only feel the surrounding air violently tearing apart. Diamonds slammed his foot against the ground with a thunderous impact, firing off several time-Stagnation bubble bullets in the blink of an eye. Raven swung his short cane wildly, but his strikes met nothing but thin air. He barely managed to track Diamonds—or rather, the afterimage of Time Cleaner A-0—catching a glimpse of those pitch-black, freezing eyes and the dazzling diamond stud beneath them. The diamond stud glinted with a blood-red light, making him look like a demon bathed in gore.
A sharp gust of wind sliced past Raven’s ear as the moonlight shifted, plunging everything back into the ink-like night. However, Time Cleaner A-0 had long been accustomed to darkness and slaughter; breathing, heartbeats, the faint rustle of fabric—he knew exactly how to extinguish a human life using these cues. Raven’s heart seized. Suddenly, a wave of sharp pain washed over his body as blood began to pour; A-0 had used a simple steak knife to carve multiple lacerations across his flesh.
This legendary prototype of the Time Cleaners was like an unsheathed blade, showing absolutely no mercy—a stark contrast to his demeanor moments before. Clutching his bleeding wounds, Raven laughed.
“Senior, are you a sickle-weasel or a praying mantis? Your slicing really hurts.”
A faint, frivolous chuckle drifted from the darkness. “A rose with thorns, obviously.”
Suddenly, Raven’s instincts screamed danger. He ducked his head, narrowly evading a downward slash, though the top half of his raven mask was sheared clean off. He quickly activated the pocket watch on his short cane, attempting to lock onto the afterimage of A-0 from one second ago. The clock hands whirred and spun, freezing the world around them. Time coiled backward by one second, and A-0’s figure materialized directly in front of Raven.
“Caught you!” Raven rejoiced, his voice tinged with a hint of madness.
Yet, in that exact moment, he heard A-0 chuckle calmly, like an experienced hunter who had anticipated the trap.
“Me too.”
In an instant, a tempest erupted. Although A-0 was dragged back to his state from one second ago, his reflexes were blinding. He immediately dropped his center of gravity, his body stretching and twisting in mid-air like a supple vine. The steak knife in his hand transformed into a divine, lethal weapon, plunging brutally into Raven’s shoulder!
Raven stumbled backward, leaving a trail of splattered blood. The emotions suppressed by his brain chip seemed to loosen, and he felt the long-forgotten taste of terror wash over him. He let out a raspy, dry laugh.
“As expected of… the pioneer of the Time Cleaners.”
“I don’t deserve that title,” A-0 said, stepping out of the shadows. His platinum-blonde hair shivered with a cold, ethereal luster under the moonlight, his smile faint and shrouded, as if he were bathed in stardust.
“I resigned from the Corporation ages ago. Right now, I’m just an unemployed vagrant. A professional con man.”
“Haha, it seems spending so much time at the bottom of society has given you some insights, Senior. Since you’re a professional con man, you must frequent casinos. Senior, I want to make a bet with you. Care to accept?”
“Why should I?”
“Because very soon… you won’t have a choice but to accept my terms.” Raven tilted his chin slightly, the moonlight casting sharp, jagged slivers of light across his face. Behind his lenses, his eyes gleamed like frost. “Do you know the true function of this short cane? After witnessing my previous demonstrations, you must think it’s a weapon that can only rewind time by one second, and one second only.”
“In truth, its capabilities go far beyond that. Its actual effect is to revert an object to its past state. Although doing so drains my remaining lifespan by dozens of times over—inflicting it upon an object inherently imposes no time limit!”
Diamonds suddenly felt a cold shiver run down his spine.
The next moment, a violent sensation of tearing flesh ripped through him. He looked down, only to find that the short cane had pierced through his arm. Standing a short distance away, Raven smiled gently. “That was the location of the short cane twenty seconds ago.”
The pocket watch hands spun erratically on the face, like a comet caught in the gravitational pull of a massive star. In a split second, Diamonds staggered. The blade passing through his arm vanished into thin air, leaving behind a gaping, bloody hole. But a split second later, an agonizing pain flared up in his back—at some unknown point in time, the blade had already skewered him from behind.
Raven smiled. “That was the location of the short cane thirty-seven seconds ago.”
He continued ruthlessly. “Fifty-four seconds.”
Diamonds’ leg was pierced through.
“One minute.”
Diamonds’ back was slashed open, causing him to let out a muffled groan.
“Four minutes and twelve seconds.”
As Raven remorselessly chanted the numbers, the position of the blade shifted continuously, carving an increasing number of deep wounds across Diamonds’ body. Blood splattered violently into the air, quickly dyeing his white suit a gruesome crimson. Raven threw his head back and laughed, his laughter sounding like nails scraping across glass. When he finally stopped, his face contorted into a hideous grin.
“Senior, why aren’t you fighting back? Don’t you also hold the weapons used by Time Cleaners?”
Raven’s gaze fell upon the Mauser pistol in Diamonds’ hand, and a look of sudden realization dawned on him. “Ah, I see now. No wonder the time-Stagnation bubbles you shot shattered so quickly. It’s because your remaining lifespan is almost entirely depleted, isn’t it? Back then, didn’t you steal centuries’ worth of time from the Corporation? Where did all that time go?”
Diamonds’ face was completely devoid of color, but he gasped for air and laughed. “I spent it all keeping a pretty boy. I’ve been spoiling a gluttonous bastard who can eat seventy hot dogs in one sitting.”
“Haha, you certainly know how to joke. Well then, how do you feel now? Are you ready to accept my wager?”
Raven looked down at Diamonds, observing this “Prototype” who had once struck terror into the hearts of all Time Cleaners. Strands of hair clung to Diamonds’ pale forehead. Set against the stark contrast of his blood, his knuckles turned stark white as he desperately clutched his wounds, panting heavily like a fragile doll on the verge of shattering. Raven spoke slowly.
“The rules are simple: I will spin the hands of the watch randomly, causing the blade to materialize at a certain coordinate in time. If you guess correctly, you can evade the strike. What do you think? A very straightforward game, isn’t it?”
Suddenly, the pocket watch hands twisted and spun backward, distorting time and space once more. Diamonds tensed up entirely, his eyes locked onto the watch face. Which second would the hand stop on? Would Raven pierce his heart in the next instant? There was no time to think; he threw himself into a lateral roll. But at that exact moment, Raven’s voice rang out like a funeral knell.
“One hundred and one seconds.”
Time inverted. Diamonds felt a burst of excruciating pain as the blade materialized out of thin air, hurtling toward him as if possessed by a mind of its own, skewering his shoulder. He lost his grip on the Mauser pistol, his arm slumping limply to his side.
“You lost, Senior. The game continues until… a victor is decided.” Raven smiled dangerously. “Twenty-three seconds.”
Diamonds tried to dodge again, but the blade pierced his leg once more. Raven walked up to him, his gaze filled with a twisted sense of pity, as if looking at a butterfly struggling helplessly in a spider’s web.
“You’ve lost too much blood, Senior. Is your mind getting foggy? Let’s add a time-limit challenge to the mix. Next turn, I will pierce the heart of the old lady lying next to you.”
He predicted his own move aloud, watching with immense satisfaction as Diamonds’ pupils shrank to pinpricks. Toying with this once-legendary figure brought him an unparalleled rush of euphoria. Raven grinned, a smile dripping with malicious intent, and spun the watch hands once more.
In that precise fraction of a second, Diamonds’ mind went entirely blank. Every muscle in his body coiled tightly. Ignoring his horrific injuries, he launched himself forward like an arrow released from a bow, lunging toward Madame Spades.
He had braved the temporal labyrinth of the Stairs of Paradox to reach the year 1805 specifically for her. If he allowed her to die here, all the efforts he and Quicksand had made would be utterly ruined.
Yet, in the very next instant, Raven’s amused voice echoed from the side.
“Trusting your enemy blindly is a terrible habit. That’s what the 2035 branch taught us, isn’t it? You trusted me too much, Senior.”
Suddenly, Raven snapped his fingers, and the short cane vanished. When it reappeared, it plunged deeply into Diamonds’ chest.
At that ultimate point of crisis, Diamonds abruptly raised his Mauser pistol and fired a shot directly into his own chest!
The barrel manifested a single time-Stagnation bubble, enveloping his own body. His descent slowed exponentially, freezing him in mid-air. It was precisely because of this artificial temporal drag that the blade failed to pierce his chest entirely. As the time-Stagnation bubble popped, Diamonds crashed heavily to the floor, rolling frantically. A horrific, mangled wound adorned his front, blood flowing without stop.
Raven walked over, taking in the pathetic sight as if admiring a masterpiece of his own creation. “It seems your luck in gambling is truly atrocious, Senior. How about this? I will give you one final chance. I will spin the hands, and you guess how many seconds ago the blade will land on.”
Diamonds laughed in ragged, broken intervals. Finally, he spoke in a whisper.
“Eight seconds.”
“Oh? You sound remarkably confident.”
“Because eight is my lucky number. Just consider it a straight-up bet on a single number.”
“But the odds of a straight bet are one in thirty-five. The probability of winning this particular gamble is far lower than that,” Raven remarked, spinning the hands. The pocket watch let out a soft click, and the hand finally came to a halt on the numeral nine. The eyes behind Raven’s lenses crinkled with absolute delight as he smiled radiantly. “You lost the bet, Senior. What a pity. This time, you can die in peace.”
Instantly, the blade materialized from thin air. The next moment, it tore through the air with a deafening sonic boom, defying all laws of inertia as it lunged straight for Diamonds’ throat!
Just as the lethal edge was about to impale Diamonds’ body, a thunderous explosion suddenly shattered the quiet of the Crown Tower’s roof.
The heavy iron door was blown completely off its hinges. Struck by an unimaginable, colossal force, it sailed through the air like a crumpled piece of paper. Raven felt as if he had been struck head-on by a falling meteor; his vision spun violently as the sky and earth inverted. He crashed heavily to the ground, his entire skeleton feeling as though it had been shattered into pieces. As he scrambled to sit up, he realized with utter horror that a mangled mechanical soldier had been hurled directly onto him.
The incoming blade had been caught mid-air—gripped by a bare, human hand. The sharp edge sliced deep into the palm, sending crimson blood dripping onto the cold stone floor. Raven stared open-mouthed, utterly paralyzed with shock. He saw a gray-haired youth, panting heavily, standing like an impenetrable wall in front of Diamonds. The youth’s hand held the lethal blade in a vice grip. Behind him, a trail of destroyed mechanical parts lay scattered all the way down the corridor.
The gray-haired youth was covered in wounds, his clothes thoroughly soaked in blood. Several crimson tracks snaked from his brow down to his jawline. Those gray eyes were piercingly clear, yet they held absolutely no emotional resonance. Though far from unscathed, he had single-handedly annihilated more than a hundred killing machines. Raven was not only stunned by this impossible reality, but he was utterly terrified by the true identity of the man before him. He trembled, his voice shaking.
“You’re… the Chief Time Cleaner…”
The gray-haired youth offered no reply, acting as though he hadn’t even heard the question. He tossed the intercepted blade aside carelessly. Before Raven could even finish uttering his title, the signature trowel-axe flashed through the air like a startled swan skimming across water, striking Raven squarely in the shoulder!
To the side, Diamonds let out a shaky, trembling laugh. “Look at that, junior. The bet I placed wasn’t on that petty little game of yours. I was betting on the probability of him arriving here. What does a straight bet even matter? You said his chances of making it here were less than one in a thousand. And yet, I won that exact probability.”
Raven collapsed into the dirt, his teeth grinding together in sheer terror as he stared at the gray-haired youth. He recognized this man. Quicksand, the legendary Chief Time Cleaner of the Corporation—the absolute pinnacle of all existing Cleaners. Yet, for some inexplicable reason, he had chosen to side with a traitor. Before him, the gray-haired youth stood battered and bleeding, yet he seemed entirely impervious to pain, radiating the terrifying aura of a literal god of death.
Quicksand wiped a streak of blood from the corner of his mouth, raising his trowel-axe high once more, his eyes dark and bottomless. He cast a cold, indifferent sidelong glance toward Diamonds, his expression completely flat.
“No, idiot boss,” Quicksand said quietly. “My chances of winning have always been one hundred percent.”
