Chương 99: 98: Duo

The other Clock had no time to breathe. He and Ankou stood facing one another in the corridor.

"Shall we?" Ankou muttered. Clock ground his teeth together.

"I'll end this quickly. I'm getting sick of this." Ankou consumed the distance. Travel itself ceased to matter. The space between predator and prey was simply eaten away until Ankou existed where he needed to be. FWOOOM. He was already ten meters behind Clock. No path to anticipate. Only the result. The punch had already landed. A hole opened in Clock's abdomen where he had barely twisted aside before Ankou's touch connected. The missing flesh didn't regenerate. It didn't rewind.

It wasn't even recognised as damage. That part of his body had simply ceased to exist, as though it had never been there at all. No blood flowed. There was only absence. Ankou stood with its back to him."' End this quickly?'" A quiet chuckle escaped the darkness.

"I'm afraid that privilege was never yours to claim, young one." It turned just enough to regard him over one shoulder.

"You are undeniably formidable. I have never disputed that. Yet there is a reason you have spent so very long arranging your victories around my absence." Its gaze lingered on him with polite curiosity.

"And now, at last... here you are." A faint smile touched the edge of its voice.

"So do try to justify the anticipation." It faced him fully.

"I have had an exceedingly long day, and I should hate for this to prove a disappointment." Violet Gloom flared around Clock's jaw as he spun. Both hands snapped forward. Reverse blasts erupted from his palms. Ankou consumed them. His human outline bled away, limbs stretching into living darkness as the violet spheres vanished into the void that was becoming his body. The attack didn't slow him. It was a meal. Swallowed. Forgotten.

The maw rippled once, as though savouring something that had almost tasted like resistance, before reaching for Clock's throat once more. The distraction had bought Clock a fraction of a second. It was enough. He fled. He crashed through the fortress walls as though they were paper, tore through the facility's outer shell, ripped across razor-wire fences and blasted through trees that had stood for a century concealing what lurked beneath their canopy.

The New Zealand wilderness opened before him, ancient, endless and utterly indifferent to the god sprinting through it. The air changed. It was the kind of cold that belonged to a world that had never learned warmth, the chill of mist clinging to the forest floor and dew beading across emerald ferns. Towering kauri and rimu rose like ancient pillars, their trunks broader than houses, their roots splitting the earth into patterns that had been growing since long before the Syndicate learned to harvest dreams.

High above, the canopy formed a cathedral of green, filtering the first grey light of dawn into something gentle, patient, as though the forest had been quietly waiting for the sun to remember its place. The animals were already running. A herd of deer burst from the undergrowth, white tails flashing as they vanished between the trees, their hooves barely disturbing the damp earth. They never looked back. They didn't need to.

Whatever had emerged from the fortress had no name, but instinct recognised it long before language ever could. A falcon launched from the crown of a towering kauri, wings catching the pale morning light as it climbed toward a sky that wasn't yet safe. Possums, kiwi and creatures unknown to human tongues burrowed deeper beneath tangled roots that had held the forest together for a thousand years. Clock exploded through the treeline into a clearing.

Dew-laden grass shimmered silver beneath the fading stars, folding beneath his feet in rippling waves. Above him, the sky was bruised purple and blue, split at the horizon by the first thin ribbon of gold as dawn slowly reclaimed the world. The last stars lingered overhead, disappearing one after another beneath the growing light. He stopped. He turned. He waited. Ankou emerged from the forest. Or perhaps it had always been there. Where it stood, dawn itself seemed to dim.

The birds that hadn't yet fled fell silent. Grass beneath its feet forgot how to be green. It resembled the silhouette of a man carved from absence itself, a wound in reality, something dreamt too deeply beneath the world that had never fully accepted it wasn't meant to exist. It spoke. Its voice wasn't a voice. It was the sound of a vacuum filling, of light collapsing, of a universe struggling to remember something it had spent eternity trying to forget.

"Did you truly imagine," Ankou began, each syllable measured with immaculate restraint, "that four of you could overturn an empire?" Its silhouette shifted almost imperceptibly.

"A child who illustrates her desires. A girl harbouring a geometric heresy. A doe so desperate for sentiment that she has forgotten she was ever forged into a sword." A delicate pause lingered.

"And a boy who has spent his entire life mistaking retreat for survival." Clock's jaw tightened. Violet Gloom seeped into the dawn around him.

"I've faced worse than you," he replied.

"I've put down nearly a dozen of your kind." A faint smile touched his lips.

"You seem to have forgotten how those meetings ended. I walked away every single time." The darkness comprising Ankou's form rippled. It might have been amusement.

"That was our first acquaintance," it said.

"You were... unexpected. An anomaly. A contradiction the universe ought never have permitted. You prospered through our ignorance, discovering flaws before we knew they existed." Its edges drifted outward, greedily drinking in the newborn sunlight.

"Those oversights have since been corrected." Its gaze settled upon him.

"We know precisely what you are. There is no stratagem you might conceive that has not already been anticipated."

"There is no victory left for you to steal."

"You shall perish here, Clock." A measured silence followed.

"And your sister shall follow shortly thereafter." Clock merely smiled. Ankou continued as though addressing an unusually slow pupil.

"The girl carrying the Nonagon shall be harvested. Her delightful little impossibility dissected, replicated, and refined." Its tone remained impeccably courteous.

"Once the Syndicate comprehends the geometry she harbours, 'empire' shall become an embarrassingly provincial word."

"It shall inherit the universe." Its attention drifted elsewhere.

"And Korhess..." it murmured, almost wistfully.

"Poor, sentimental creature. She persuaded herself she could become a deer once more." A quiet chuckle escaped the void.

"Thornburgh is exceedingly patient. Years, decades, centuries... the distinction is quite meaningless."

"Her reserves of Apis will diminish. They always do."

"And when they have..."

"... she shall discover what she has always been."

"A beast of burden." A bird chirped somewhere beyond the trees.

"One Stepper. One collar. One length of rope."

"That shall suffice." Clock laughed. The sound rolled across the clearing like distant thunder.

"All I hear is a creature trying very hard to convince itself it isn't terrified." Silence answered him. Morning finally conquered the mountains. Golden light poured through the forest, igniting the mist and setting every droplet of dew ablaze.

"I do not fear death," Ankou replied at last.

"Death is merely an event. I precede it. I outlast it. I am the absence into which every ending eventually falls." Clock slowly cracked his knuckles. The sharp report echoed through the clearing.

"You've misunderstood." His violet eyes narrowed.

"I wasn't threatening you with death." A grin spread across his face.

"I was threatening you with me." He gripped time. His Gloom reached into the fabric of existence, found the thread binding past, present, and future together, and closed around it. The dawn stopped climbing. The mist froze where it drifted. Dew became a field of suspended diamonds, each droplet trapping the light of a sun that had forgotten how to rise. Birds fleeing the fortress hung motionless in the air.

Deer racing through the forest became sculptures of muscle and bone, forever locked in the final stride of a terror they would never finish feeling. This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work. Ankou moved. The Void Maw remained aware. It drifted through the frozen world like a shark through still water, its silhouette rippling as it passed untouched through the arrested moment. Time itself vanished into the darkness composing its body. It had consumed the pause.

Clock released his grip. The world lurched back into motion. Dawn resumed its ascent. Birds vanished into the sky. Deer disappeared beneath the trees. Clock stood alone in the clearing, breathing heavily as violet Gloom pulsed beneath his skin. It consumes everything, he realised. Force. Time. Light. Sound. Anything directed against it simply became another meal. Its resilience was only a consequence of what it truly was. Hunger given form. His gaze remained fixed on Ankou.

The creature required neither haste nor aggression. It merely had to exist. Given enough time, everything would eventually be drawn into that endless maw. Unless... A single thought surfaced. What if I gave it something it couldn't consume? His mind accelerated. Gloom was finite. Every technique demanded a price, and once his reserves were exhausted, they would take days to recover. There was no room for trial and error. The sequence assembled almost instantly.

Bishop's Path would confine Ankou to a single line of movement. King's Gambit would sacrifice part of himself, creating a duplicate capable of occupying Ankou long enough to create one decisive opening. DELETE would erase him entirely. His expression hardened. That final step remained the greatest uncertainty. DELETE erased existence itself. Ankou embodied erasure. If two identical principles collided, they might simply cancel one another, leaving neither capable of overcoming the other.

Even if DELETE succeeded, the cost would be immense. It would consume almost everything he had left. His casting arm would be destroyed, leaving the rest of the battle to be settled without Gloom or reality-warping techniques. After that...... only strength would matter. Clock understood exactly what that meant. Ankou was more than another Abomination. He was a bottomless pit wearing the shape of a man. His physical strength had no meaningful ceiling.

Every exchange pushed it higher until brute force alone overwhelmed whatever stood before him. Clock had lived by the opposite principle. Every moment of his life had been spent suppressing his own strength. The restraint had become instinct. Without it, an ordinary step could fracture a city block. A careless punch could devastate an entire skyline. Gloom acted as both amplifier and governor, allowing him to regulate impossible strength with absolute precision. Without Gloom...... that precision would disappear.

Everything would depend on his own focus. His thoughts returned to the corridor. Against the Steppers, he had restrained himself so completely they never realised how narrowly they had escaped death. Only the Engineer had forced him to abandon that restraint, and even then raw strength alone hadn't been enough. The armour had endured every blow until relentless punishment finally reduced it to scrap. Clock drew a slow breath. The plan was complete.

If Ankou proved physically superior after DELETE, Pawn's Advance remained his final contingency. The technique would tear muscle from bone, rupture his body from within, and might leave him permanently crippled. It would also keep him alive...... long enough to finish the fight. — Katherine ran. The fortress unfolded around her like a living map, each corridor a vein, each chamber an organ. Every pulse of the Nonagon against her hip revealed more of the place she had wandered without understanding.

It wasn't a facility. It was a city. Laboratories harvested dreams from sleeping victims. Dormitories stretched into endless rows of pods. Training halls echoed with children learning to kill before they had learned to read. Beyond them lay sprawling districts built almost entirely for Steppers. Apartment blocks stood beside laundries, recreation centres, cinemas, gyms, clinics, and parks beneath an artificial sky.

Everything a normal city possessed had been recreated underground to keep the Syndicate's soldiers comfortable. The smell of food drifted through the corridors. Kitchens. Industrial ones. She slowed just long enough to slip inside unnoticed. Clandestine wrapped around her like a second skin as cooks hurried between steaming pots and sizzling grills, oblivious to the invisible girl stealing breakfast.

Katherine snatched roast chicken and slices of beef from cooling trays, stuffing them into her satchel before slipping back into the corridor, chewing as she ran. Two floors below...... the beast waited. She had felt Clock earlier. Violet Gloom had flared through the fortress, followed by a shockwave powerful enough to rattle the walls. He had found Warpfluff. She could only hope he was still alive. The stairs appeared on her mental map. She took them three at a time.

Beside her, the elevator shaft hummed softly, its sealed doors vibrating with a frequency that made her teeth ache. She had never trusted elevators. Something deep within the Nonagon quietly agreed. The lower levels were eerily silent. Butter's battle had faded into a distant rumble. The corridors here were older, their stone darker, threaded with glittering veins of mineral that caught the dim lights. Ancient machinery throbbed somewhere beyond the walls. She became a ghost.

Clandestine concealed her from cameras, sensors, and scanning lenses. Operatives passed within arm's reach. Steppers stood guard every few metres, their white visors sweeping across the space she occupied before moving on without a second glance. There were so many. Thousands of trainees. Endless patrols. Entire districts devoted to housing the Syndicate's forces. The fortress could have accommodated millions, though she doubted even a hundred thousand lived here. Even so...... it felt disturbingly normal.

At last she understood why Butter had come. Why Clock had followed. You couldn't fight an army like this. A hundred Magpies could slaughter a pantheon. A thousand could erase the memory that gods had ever existed. The only way to defeat the Syndicate...... was to make them fight something far worse. The beast. The galaxy-thing sleeping beneath the fortress. She had to wake it.... Katherine rounded the corner and slowed.

The corridor was immense, easily thirty metres across, its ceiling disappearing into darkness high above. Massive support columns marched along either side like the trunks of petrified trees, their surfaces threaded with dim amber conduits that barely pierced the gloom. Pools of shadow lingered between the lights, deep enough to swallow entire squads. The place felt less like a hallway than an abandoned boulevard buried beneath the earth. The railgun round was already there. It hadn't been fired at Katherine.

It had been fired at the place the Talon's HUD knew she would eventually occupy. The slug screamed through the darkness at a velocity that made light itself seem sluggish, aimed precisely between her eyes. Harmony moved. The nunchaku appeared in Katherine's hand before the sound reached her ears. Before conscious thought could form, her perception had already sounded the alarm, and her body obeyed. The wooden shaft whipped through an impossible arc. CRACK.

The railgun slug ricocheted away, spinning wildly before burying itself deep inside a support pillar. Stone erupted outward in a shower of dust and molten fragments. The flattened projectile clattered harmlessly across the floor. Katherine frowned.

"... Huh." The Nonagon should've ignored it. Her protection rejected harm outright. Unless... Her gaze drifted to the embedded slug. Hexagon. It had been saturated for a very long time. The Hexagon's authority wasn't stronger than the Nonagon's, but saturation compensated for that. Layer upon layer of compressed influence had been packed into the projectile until sheer accumulation threatened to overwhelm refinement. Given enough pressure, even the Nonagon's protection could eventually be breached.

Her irises split apart, each eye tracking a different section of the corridor. Someone had seen her. Through Clandestine. Her heartbeat faltered. Only one thing in the fortress could've managed that. She looked up.

"Holy mother of Christ." The Talon clung upside down to the ceiling, perfectly motionless, white visor lenses glowing through the darkness. Interlocking feather-scales of amethyst and citrine still covered his armour, each plate shifting almost imperceptibly with every measured breath. Yet something about him had changed. Confidence. The Hexagon pulsed through the armour itself, flooding him with calculations, predictions and certainty.

Its authority didn't reside within the suit, but every plate had been steeped in it until the machine carried its influence like a second nervous system. Katherine's satchel twitched. She frowned. Another twitch. The Nonagon pulsed against her hip. Once. Twice. Again. Its rhythm became increasingly uneven, no longer matching her heartbeat. It shifted beneath the fabric as though something inside the bag were trying to turn over. The satchel tugged against her shoulder.

"What...?" The movement grew stronger. The Nonagon almost seemed to writhe, pressing insistently against the leather, its cobalt glow leaking faintly through the seams. It was restless. Hungry. Every pulse answered the Hexagon's presence, each beat arriving faster than the last, eager and impatient, as though it had recognised something it had been starving for. Katherine instinctively placed a hand over the satchel. It pushed back. Not enough to escape.

Just enough for her to feel that something living was moving inside.... The Talon's twin automated cannons unfolded from his shoulders. Their barrels tracked Katherine with mechanical precision.

"Where," he asked, his voice calm enough to freeze oceans, "do you imagine you're going?" He tilted his head slightly.

"You've wandered farther than anyone was ever intended to. Your concealment has already failed. Your allies are occupied, your escape routes are compromised, and you're descending towards something you lack both the authority and the intellect to comprehend." His visor never left her.

"You mistake survival for competence. Every step you've taken has been permitted. Every success you've celebrated has been measured. Continue downward if you wish." A faint pause.

"You'll simply arrive exactly where we intended you to."

"You are not escaping, Katherine." She sighed so loudly it echoed through the corridor.

"Oh, ta gueule." Oh, shut up. The Talon drew breath to continue.

"Your inability to appreciate the inevitability of—""Oh my God, tais-toi deux secondes, sérieux." Oh my God, be quiet for two seconds, seriously. She rolled her eyes so hard it almost hurt.

"Look, I'm not scared of you." She jabbed a thumb over her shoulder.

"You ran away from Butter, remember? So don't start acting like some tough guy because you found a dark corridor to camp in." Looking back up at him, she pointed at his upside-down form.

"And what's with this?" She snorted.

"Tu te prends pour qui?" Who do you think you are?

"Hanging upside down in the dark because you think it gives you some mysterious aura?" She squinted thoughtfully.

"Actually... how long have you been there? Were you just standing there for, like, minutes waiting in absolute silence? Right now you just look like a creep trying to kidnap a child. Even a Stepper would step up face to face." She folded her arms.

"You didn't try any of this with Butter. Funny how brave you get when she's somewhere else." The nunchaku spun lazily around one finger.

"Allez, descends." Come on, get down.

"I think I've got this."... The Talon said nothing. A sharp chirp echoed beneath Katherine's boot. Beep. Her brow furrowed.

"Oh, tha—" KABOOOOOOM! The floor combusted beneath her. A column of white-orange fire erupted through the corridor, blasting stone apart as molten tiles sprayed in every direction. The explosion wasn't merely hot. It burned with the concentrated fury of a star's core, every fraction of its heat compressed by the Hexagon into something catastrophically dense. She should've ceased to exist. Instead... Herculean planted her feet. Understatement buried the impossible beneath the merely survivable.

The Hexagon's influence collided with the Nonagon's authority, each rejecting the other just enough to rob the mine of its full lethality. Rather than vaporising her outright, the blast collapsed into something her body could barely endure. It felt as though oceans of boiling water had been poured across every inch of exposed skin.

"AAAAAGH!" Katherine screamed, staggering backwards as Harmony slipped from her fingers and clattered across the shattered floor. Her eyes squeezed shut for the briefest instant.

"I'm flaying you alive for this." SHINK. Her arm snapped upward on instinct. Metal met flesh. She looked up. The Talon stood directly before her. A Hukan blade had erupted from an outlet along the top of his forearm, its edge descending toward her skull. Her hand caught his wrist barely a heartbeat before impact. Not completely. The blade skimmed across her face. A burning line carved through her left eye. Blood spilled down her cheek. The eye with four irises split apart beneath the cut. Darkness claimed it.

She felt the change immediately. Her preset abilities...... fell silent. The Talon twisted his wrist, forcing the blade downward. Katherine didn't hesitate.

"Ellipsis." Reality skipped. A gap opened in the sequence of events. The Talon's visor searched the place she'd occupied...... and found nothing. By the time causality stitched itself back together...... Katherine was already several metres away. She wiped the blood from her ruined eye with the back of her hand.

"Say goodbye to your balls." She raised a finger.

"Real Sound." It wasn't the correct activation, but Harmony answered anyway. The Talon imploded. Invisible force detonated inside his body. His knees exploded backwards. His spine arched violently, his skull snapped upward, and his groin folded inward beneath an impact that originated from within rather than without. KRAK - THOOOOM! The armour rocketed into the darkness, smashing through support columns before collapsing in a twisted heap. For a single moment...... he didn't move. Katherine exhaled.

"Well tha—" Lines of luminous orange code suddenly materialised throughout the corridor. Countless. ACTION_INVALID ROLLBACK(Δt = 0. 348s) STATE_RESTORED RESUME_EXECUTION Reality obeyed. The sequence rewound. The Talon's broken body vanished from where it had landed. The shattered columns stood upright once more. Even the echoes disappeared. A fist materialised in front of Katherine's face. Too fast. Without Understatement the world had become impossible again. She couldn't block it. Harmony could.

The nunchaku flashed upward on instinct. CRACK! Wood met metal. The punch glanced aside, gouging a trench through the wall instead of her skull. Both combatants slid apart across the fractured floor. Silence settled between them. Katherine's left eye remained closed, blood continuing to stream from beneath the ruined eyelid. She understood.

"Code..." So that was the Hexagon's gift. It rewrote reality the way a programmer rewrote software, inserting commands directly into existence until the universe complied. She slowly rolled her neck. Pain raced through the burns covering her body. She ignored it. Pain didn't impress her anymore. She had watched Butter dismantle Enforcers with one arm, no Gloom, and a smile on her face. Katherine still had both arms. Both legs. One good eye. That was more than enough. The Nonagon had changed.

After devouring dreams and consuming the Apis spheres and prisms from the Steppers and Operatives, the energy sleeping inside it had long since eclipsed that of an entire solar system. She still hadn't told Butter. Even when the Nonagon had silently intervened against the Steppers, she hadn't realised what had happened. It had activated Ellipsis on its own, gently omitting those missing moments from her memory as though protecting her from the knowledge. Only afterward had she sensed the gap.

Butter still believed the Nonagon could power a solar system for eons. Katherine knew better now. It could power dozens. And once she consumed this Hexagon...... it would become stronger still.

"I'm really about to lose to one Talon while I have a Nonagon?" She cracked her knuckles, her brows knitting with disgust.

"That would be embarrassing." A frown spread across her face.

"So no."