182 Clock & Gray
182 Clock & Gray
Clock sneered at me, wiping the blood from beneath his eyes. “How about you fuck off instead?” he snapped.
Before I could answer, the rabbit mascot hurled his bazooka at my head. I let the weapon slip through me, only for it to twist, shrink, and unfold into a tiny person with a manic grin. He didn’t waste a heartbeat. Clock barked a laugh and bragged, “The smaller the zone I freeze, the stronger it gets!”
My chest tightened. For a split second, everything inside me went still. My heart paused just long enough to hurt and probably kill anyone. The little gremlin at my side took the opportunity to stab my ribs with a null-metal blade. I felt the metal bite and drag, leaving a hot line of blood down my torso. It burned worse than any fire.
The man in the business suit materialized beside him, pulling out what looked like two keychains. They snapped into full-sized uzis in his hands. He opened fire like a lunatic, muzzle flashing as he screamed something about “proving loyalty to the legend.”
I gritted my teeth. “I can only take so much disrespect in one day.”
The bullets clattered uselessly off my suit, ricocheting across the ruined factory. Above me, the angel-woman fired a rain of energy beams. They slipped clean through my intangible body and turned the tiny gremlin behind me into smoking chunks before he could squeal. The suit-guy didn’t fare better. A tarot card whistled through the air and punched straight through his throat, leaving him to gasp and fold.
The rabbit mascot panicked. “Clock! Go, run! Run!”
The flyer dove down, snatching Clock by the shoulders. The rabbit bounded after me with ridiculous, piston-like jumps. I let him get close just to watch his hope spark for a second, and then I grabbed his helmeted face. The mascot suit ripped like damp paper, exposing the machinery beneath and the withered old man controlling it. I shoved electrokinesis straight into the wiring and his skull in one pulse. He died twitching, smoke curling from his jaw.
The suit’s material caught my eye. Null cape skin. Interesting. Rare. And still useless against me.
Clock and the flyer gained altitude fast, slipping through the broken ceiling and into open air. Good escape attempt. Wrong opponent.
I slipped two tarot cards beneath my boots. They were telekinetic cards, each one a versatile tool for murder and mobility. I let them lift me into the sky. I hovered after them, rising on invisible force like climbing a staircase made of air.
I caught the flyer’s ankle first. She thrashed, wings sputtering. “Clock! Help—!”
I phased her foot just enough to lock her flesh with Clock’s sleeve. I intended to kill them together in a single motion.
Clock reacted faster than expected. His face twisted and he froze her midair, forcing her body to lock. Then he kicked free, using his own time stop to redirect his fall. He hit the rooftop below in a controlled roll, barely taking damage.
The flyer, still frozen, dropped like a stone. I released her mid-fall, phasing the surface of her skin and her organs burst outward in a wet, red spray before she hit the ground.
I hovered above Clock, blood on my hands and suit aflame with fading embers from the earlier explosions. He stood alone on the roof, chest heaving, not daring to look back at the smear that used to be his subordinate.
“You’re quick,” I told him, my shadow stretching over him. “But abandoning your own people like that?”
I tilted my head.
“That’s pathetic, even for you.”
Clock was… impressive. I hated to admit it, but he was.
Even as he stood there panting, covered in the blood of comrades he had abandoned, he kept recalculating, reassessing, and surviving. A man dragged out of the lawless zones usually didn’t amount to much, since most of them relied purely on brutality and desperation, never technique or strategy. Yet Clock was the exception. He’d clawed his way up by stepping on every corpse he needed, capitalizing on every tragedy, steering Ender into something… almost formidable.
Emphasis on the ‘Almost.’
I dipped into his mind with Telepathy and Empathy, and his internal voice roared with panic.
‘Where did it go wrong? I prepared everything. How does a monster like this even exist?’
He was terrified, yet refusing to submit.
“You’re wondering what you did wrong?” I said, descending slightly, my shadow stretching over him. “Nothing. You’re the best this city could produce. But there are places in this world, farther and darker, where monsters rated nine are the baseline. Where cruelty is commonplace. Where I learned we are so small in comparisson.”
His pupils shrank as I added, “City-level fights don’t scare me anymore. They barely register.”
I genuinely felt a pang of pity. His power was interesting, and in another world, I might’ve wanted him as a tool. But I could feel in his mind that he wasn’t the kneeling type. He’d rather bite a throat out than bow.
Clock spat blood and managed a crooked grin. “If you’re so damn great, come down here and fight me with your fists.”
I could have ignored him. Should have. But something about his desperation amused me.
“Fine.”
I recalled the tarot cards, each one teleporting neatly back inside my coat. Then I dropped from my telekinetic perch, boots hitting the rooftop with a solid thud.
He was taller, mostly because of that absurd pompadour, but he still raised his fists in a clean boxing stance. I mirrored him, lifting mine, letting Enhancer guide the small adjustments in posture.
Clock struck first with a straight jab.
I felt the time-stop snap onto me like a cold shackle. I resisted, letting intangibility pulse through my limbs just enough to shake it off, and ducked under the fist. My right jab snapped forward in response, aiming to end it in a single punch.
My knuckles connected with his cheek, and I phased his skin a fraction of a second later, but nothing happened.
My brows lifted. “Huh.”
Clock grinned like a wolf and grabbed my arm, twisting his hips with surprising technique. In one fluid motion, he threw me clean over his shoulder.
The world flipped.
I tried to phase him downward mid-throw, intending to bury him alive with a single touch, but again, nothing. No reaction. No pull. No phasing.
WHAM.
He slammed me into the rooftop hard enough to rattle my lungs. Air blasted out of me in a sharp grunt as the concrete cracked beneath my spine.
Clock stood over me, laughing like a madman, blood in his teeth and joy in his eyes.
“I CAN SURVIVE THIS!” he howled. “I’LL SURVIVE BY KILLING YOU!”
Clock shouldn’t have been able to do this.
When he first resisted my phasing, I assumed it was some obscure null-metal tool or a hidden gadget strapped somewhere under his cheap jacket. But when I focused through Empathy, all I felt was joy, relief, and hope bleeding into it like a drunk man overflowing with emotion. That wasn’t the emotional profile of someone using an existing countermeasure. That was the emotional profile of someone who believed they’d just found the answer at a spontaneous moment.
He mounted me hard, clipping his legs around my waist like a pro fighter and pinning my hips to the cracked rooftop. His fists hammered down, each blow trembling through my arms as I blocked, letting them thud and scrape against my forearms. It wasn’t the hitting power that bothered me. Instead, it was the how.
I tried jolting him with electrokinesis. The charge danced over his skin, crackling up his arms. He flinched, but he held on. The man powered through the pain, teeth clenched, eyes wild. I tried shifting my posture, twisting my hips to break his mount, but he beat me to every escape attempt, slipping his weight just where it needed to be.
He wasn’t strong. Not physically. But he was… denying me. Denying my abilities. Denying my movement.
I read deeper with Telepathy.
And I found tiny, hyper-condensed pockets of time-stopped space around his hands, forearms, chest, and legs. Every part touching me was wrapped in a localized bubble of absolute stillness. A pocket dimension of zero momentum.
He was freezing every surface that made contact with my body.
He wasn’t blocking my intangibility directly. Instead, he was creating a “no-movement zone” around my form, keeping the molecules from slipping through anything because they literally couldn’t move. In my psychic perception, it looked like dead, frozen patches of existence of dark voids where nothing flowed. If I phased, the part of me inside those patches simply refused to budge.
Clock could only punch because his arm was swinging into contact, crossing the border between normal space and frozen space. The instant it made contact with my body, the fist itself froze in its own miniature bubble, creating a dull but relentless impact.
They were just weak hits, but enough to annoy me.
His hips and legs were the worst. They pinned me in place with ridiculous efficiency. Because they were pressed against me constantly, the frozen zones around his thighs and shins prevented me from phasing downward. Even the ground beneath me was trapped from my perspective, impossible to slip into.
Touch-based time stop, huh?
It was… familiar. His limitations mirrored mine when I was just learning. Line of sight. Touch. Perception-based boundaries.
Clock’s power worked the same way intangibility once did for me, restricted by what he could see, what he could hold, and what he could conceptualize. And like mine, it had the potential to grow.
I almost salivated at the thought. I could derive this. Unlike Ironflesh’s null metal physiology, this? This was compatible. This was something I could break down and fold into my own power system.
But first I needed him alive long enough to take it.
I looked him dead in the eyes as he raised another fist.
“You want to live?” I asked calmly.
He snarled, spit flying. “Fuck you!”
“I’m serious,” I said, even as his fist glanced off my cheek. “Let your powers down. Let me derive them. And I’ll let you walk away.”
Clock barked a laugh, raw and reckless. “Liar! You’ll kill me the second I let go!”
…He wasn’t wrong. But I had genuinely considered sparing him if he cooperated.
He didn’t want reason. Then he’d get the other option.
I sighed, annoyed.
My biokinesis wasn’t useful here, since I could only affect myself. My knowledge of anatomy was too shallow to manipulate someone else. And electrokinesis wasn’t subtle. It fried or failed. I needed something precise, something invasive, and something that could shake the mind.
Then I remembered Wolfe. The old bastard had once used empathy to slip past my intangibility, forcing empathic telekinesis to somehow achieve through direct contact. I rarely used this application of Empathy, because of how complicated it was and didn’t really go well with my intangibility. However, I have other powers now.
A combination of Empathy and Electrokinesis. A psychic shock.
I lifted my left hand despite the frozen resistance on my wrist and pressed my palm to Clock’s forearm. He tried to punch me again, but I didn’t give him the chance.
A sharp current lanced through him, electricity laced with emotional force, the equivalent of shoving a thunderstorm directly into his nervous system. His entire body arched, his back bowing as a mix of terror, sorrow, and pain poured into him in one brutal surge.
“Pitiful,” I said softly as he convulsed in my grasp. “You had to pick the hard way.”
The moment Clock spasmed under the empathic shock, I grabbed both his arms and pulled him closer. His skin was cold with sweat, but I tightened my grip and activated the one ability I almost never used. It was possession.
The world around me dimmed as my consciousness slipped into him.
I was gone, and I was him.
Everyone had a story some tragic, some pathetic, and some infuriating. People acted the way they did because something pushed them, broke them, or carved them into shape. Clock was no exception. His cruelty wasn’t born out of nothing. It came from somewhere deep, a place where the world had already beaten him long before he ever hurt anyone else.
I felt his childhood wash over me like a fever dream. Gray, that was his name then, was born in a whorehouse that smelled of perfume, sweat, and rot. His mother didn’t love him. She barely looked at him unless she needed someone to fetch water or scrub floors. She never hugged him. She never said his name with warmth. The only praise he ever got came from enduring pain in silence.
He grew up rough, but he believed he had a decent life because the other kids liked him. He had a pretty face, the kind that made people stare. In the lawless, beauty was a curse disguised as luck. The matron smiled at him like he was a prized animal. She taught him to keep quiet, to keep his skin smooth, to wash himself properly, to smile at men and women with hungry eyes. She had already planned to whore him out. He didn't understand what that meant at first. When he finally did, he convinced himself it was normal.
Even when it hurt, he endured it. He would stare at the old clock on the wall and listen to its ticking, letting the rhythm carry him away from his body. After every session, the matron would praise him, stroke his hair, and tell him he was valuable. To a starved child, that counted as love.
The happiest moment of his entire childhood was when the matron gave him a camera, secondhand and scratched. He treasured it. He took pictures of the girls, the boys, the alley cats, the roof, the sky, and anything beautiful he could find in a world that had none.
But dreams didn’t last long in the lawless.
His older sisters talked endlessly about the City-States. They told stories about rich men and tall towers and clean streets. Gray believed them. He let himself imagine leaving someday. Maybe working in a shop. Maybe taking pictures for money. Maybe being seen as a person.
Then the raiders came.
They burned the whorehouse to the ground. They dragged the women and older girls by their hair. Gray fought, but he was small, and nobody cared what he wanted. They threw him into the pits because he wasn’t “pretty enough yet.” The camera he loved was crushed under a raider’s boot. Something inside him snapped at the sound. When the last shard of it broke, so did his restraint, and he pulled for the first time, gaining the ability that would keep him alive.
I tried to escape the memory then, but I couldn’t. I had gone too deep. The immersion gripped me like iron chains.
His life didn’t get better after that. Every day in the pits was a fight to not die. Every opponent was another slave covered in blood, trembling from hunger and fear. Gray survived because he stopped thinking of them as people. He stopped thinking of himself as one too.
I thought the White Room was bad. I thought I had seen enough of what a mind could endure. But there was something more heartbreaking in tragedies that weren’t designed by a mastermind. Tragedies that happened simply because the world was cruel.
Years passed. One fight after another. One corpse after another. Hope was a foreign word. Then one day, chaos spread across the lawless. Rumors said a lightning man was tearing through the City-States. When the walls of the pit cracked open from a distant shock, Gray saw him. A man bright as a storm… It was Light. He was searching for Missive back then, driven insane by fear. He left devastation everywhere he passed, but his presence created an opening in Gray’s prison.
Gray clawed his way out and never looked back.
I finally tore myself out of the memory. The sensation of being two people at once split my head for a heartbeat. I found myself kneeling on the ground, still inside his body, still holding his arms. My breaths came out shaky. His tears streamed down my cheeks.
He hadn’t been a monster at the start. He had simply learned from monsters.
But that didn’t change what he was now.
I tightened my grip around his skull. He asserted his presence in a last flicker of defiance mixed with fear, like he still couldn’t believe I existed. I lowered my voice, whispering something only he would hear.
“Good luck in the next life.”
Then I snapped his neck. The sound was small, almost gentle. His body slumped, and along with it, the last echo of Clock faded.
I stood, letting his form fall to the broken concrete.
And for a moment, I felt… tired.