Chapter 3 - Chapter 13 – Karak Highway — Thunder in the Rear-View

Chapter 13 – Karak Highway — Thunder in the Rear-View

The blue lights weren't police.

Lucas realised it the instant Cleo's van jolted off the potholed pier road and the pursuing SUV matched her turn without hesitation, beams hooded to combat mode. Malaysian patrol cruisers didn't run imported LED bars, and they certainly didn't cruise the mangroves at 03:00 with comms radio-silent. He stretched his mind, skimming the cabin behind them—three disciplined pulses, no idle chatter, each thought repeating the same mantra he had felt in Penang: Acquire target L-V. Capture intact.

Curator field team.

"Confirmation," he muttered, pulling back into his own skull. "They're after us, not smuggling checkpoints."

Cleo downshifted, tyres spitting gravel as the refrigerated van cleared the tree line and found tarmac. "Seat belts," she said, voice a syrupy Darwin drawl somehow calm over the whine of the compressor and the clinking of the cryobox straps. "Entropy won't help if we roll fourteen times."

Serena and Mei buckled without argument. Lucas braced a hand against the dash, twinge of the bullet bruise making him hiss. They shot onto Federal Route 1 just as dawn bled pale violet behind palms.

The road to Kuala Lumpur was ninety kilometres of serpent curves, palm-oil estates, and occasional roadside hawker stalls not yet lit for breakfast. Cleo aimed for Karak Highway—the old mountain pass—calculating that its switchbacks and crumbling guardrails would punish a heavier pursuit SUV. Entropy putty could keep her tyres supple; the Curators' beams couldn't.

Rain began as a fine mist, then thickened into silver rods, hammering the roof. Lucas felt the air-pressure drop—tropics brewing another flash storm—and the bruise under his collarbone throbbed with the same barometric pulse. He wondered if weather had become a sixth sense since he'd started living between seconds.

The SUV closed to fifty metres. Serena, wedged in the passenger seat with laptop, shoved open the glove box for any defensive miracle. Just loose napkins and a half-melted mint. "Ideas?"

"Plenty," Lucas said, "all stupid." He flicked the Zippo, watching flame distort in the draught before snapping it shut again. "Mei, jammer still running?"

"In burst mode," she answered from the cargo hold, tightening straps around the cryobox. "If they launch drones, we've got a kilometre bubble."

"Good." He inhaled, keeping his eyes on the streaming mirror. "Going to micro-influence driver attention. Might buy seconds."

"You promised low doses," Serena reminded.

"That was yesterday's fuel economy. Today we're red-lining."

He slipped into the sub-current—one-second stretch. Rain froze as crystalline needles; wiper blades hung mid-arc like bent metronomes. Lucas pushed his consciousness backward, across wet asphalt and through SUV's windscreen into the lead pursuer's frontal cortex: a stoic woman with a buzz-cut and the thought discipline of a chess engine. He nudged the emotional dial—doubt, just a whisper that maybe their quarry had decoys ahead.

Recoil punched Lucas's gut. He released before nausea spiked, blinking back to real-time. The SUV drifted left, headlights wavering as the driver radioed something unheard. Cleo seized their hesitation, flooring the van into a straightaway.

Mei clambered forward, handing Lucas a sachet of entropy putty. "Press that against our rear doors. If they shoot, slowing oxidation on the hinges could keep the structure intact."

"Or we're sealing ourselves in a cryogenic coffin," Serena muttered, but she helped anyway, smearing the metallic gel in figure-eights.

Thunder cracked overhead; fat drops became sheets. Ahead, signage warned of a toll plaza three kilometres. Cleo cursed. "If the booth's manned, cameras nail us."

"Micro-step chain through," Mei suggested.

"Four people, one van?" Cleo shook her head. "Risk stack crazy."

Lucas swallowed. "Risk's already binging on espresso." He turned in his seat, focusing on the dossier crate. "Cleo, can you slow decay on electronics—say, a toll barrier control box?"

"Fresh as pickled mango," she said. "Why?"

"Because fresh means malleable. If I TK-tap the servo at the right moment, the bar might misread and stay open."

"You get one shot," Cleo replied. "Entropy bubble lasts under a minute."

"Noted."

At the plaza the storm smothered visibility to faucet levels. Only one booth showed a dim green arrow; the attendant inside glanced up, unseen behind curtains of rain. Cleo aimed for the far-right lane, braking just enough to align.

Lucas pressed a palm to the dashboard, surfed a two-second slip. Everything bled slow. He pinpointed the barrier's control cabinet: a metal box streaked with rust darker than soy sauce. In the current it pulsed faintly where Cleo's entropy aura bled from the sachet she'd lobbed out earlier—fresh, living metal. He flicked a TK thread, delicate as playing a scalpel string.

The hinge pin inside the cabinet rotated. Spring tension released. Lucas timed return to reality: the barrier arm rose as if summoned by invisible ticket, clanking against its stop just as Cleo blasted under.

The booth attendant's mouth formed a delayed O; no camera flash ignited. Serena whooped. Behind them the SUV swerved into the next lane, barrier still locked. It punched through in a blossom of splinters, slowed only a beat but enough to widen gap.

Cleo's grin showed in mirror. "Nice surgery."

Lucas exhaled. Vertigo licked edges of vision, but adrenaline swept the bad taste away.

The highway pitched steep into rainforest hills where low clouds hissed across blacktop. Hairpin curves arrived like slaps. Cleo coaxed the van into drifts, entropy-slick tyres gripping where physics voted no.

Mei rode shotgun now, tablet open on the dossier scans. "Next Curator corridor marker nine k ahead—old maintenance ramp. They'll bottleneck us there."

Serena twisted around. "Can't we leave the road?"

"Not without a helicopter," Cleo dead-panned.

Lucas bit his lip. "What if we reverse the field? Ambush them before the corridor."

Mei considered. "We have putty, TK, jammer—"

"And this." Serena produced the half-melted mint from glove box like a magician unsheathing a sword.

Lucas blinked. "Sugar high not plan-worthy."

"Not the mint—its wrapper." She unfolded glossy foil, reflective even under storm gloom. "If we can redirect their headlights into jammer's EM spill, maybe fry night-vision sensors."

Mei's eyebrows rose. "MacGyver journalism."

Lucas tapped temple. "Combine with micro-step… Might just blind them."

They crested a ridge; valley vista flashed lightning, revealing a runaway-truck bay—a gravel shoulder that ended in dense jungle. Lucas directed Cleo to stop van just beyond the bay, nose angled outward. Rain hammered metal.

He breathed, rolled shoulders, then stepped out with foil wrapper and Zippo. Wind clawed at him. He strode to a kilometre marker post halfway down the gravel ramp, rain stinging bruise and burning memory of earlier explosion.

Three-second slip: world hushed. He wrapped the foil around post reflector, angling facets toward incoming lane. Zippo sparked—no need for fire, but the act steadied him. He slid back into time, pain whispering.

Cleo idled van lights off. Mei turned jammer to wide burst. Serena readied camera, though lens fogged instantly.

Headlights emerged—SUV slicing rain like blade. At fifty metres Lucas micro-stepped again, TK-flicking the foil edges just so. Reflection blossomed—a silent strobe of their own beams ricocheting into forward sensors as jammer whined invisible static.

SUV veered, tyres screaming. Lucas stayed in the slip half-beat too long—adrenaline drugging judgment—and foot skidded on wet gravel. Balance lost, he toppled sideways out of the micro-current, milliseconds dilating. The ground vanished; he pitched toward the ravine beyond the truck bay—nothing but black vines and thunder below.

For a breath he saw futures: broken spine, dossier lost, Mei and Serena cornered, boredom finally killing him the messy mundane way gravity always wins.

He screamed—inside his head—and slammed chrono-pause instinctively. The world froze. Raindrops hung like diamonds around his flailing body. But momentum in the slip obeyed earlier vectors; he still slid toward abyss, slower but unstoppable.

Lucas clawed air, TK-pulled at the flimsy kilometre post. Ten kilos limit—barely enough. The post budged, ripping from soft mud, trajectory intersecting his wrist. He latched on, pain spiking as shoulder tendons protested. Post and Lucas pendulumed in timeless ballet; boot heels snagged gravel.

Heart jack-hammered. The pause timer in his skull—just intuition—ticked menacingly. Five seconds left before rebound. No ground beneath left foot, only swirling void.

He propelled TK one more time, yanking his hips back onto slope. Knees bit stones. He released the post; it hovered mid-air like a curious flag.

Lucas dropped the freeze. The world roared: rain, wind, the shriek of the SUV careening into barrier on opposite shoulder with metallic shriek. Post clattered beside him, and pain punched so hard lights edged his vision.

Cleo was there first, hauling him by elbow. Mei covered retreat; Serena recorded brief footage of smoking SUV before dashing over. Lights inside vehicle sputtered—no movement. Either unconscious or recalibrating.

Lucas allowed them to bundle him into van. Blood seeped through ripped jeans from gravel gouges; bruise screamed new percussion. But chest still rose. Heart still hammered. Boredom—the real enemy—held no breath at all.

As Cleo floored accelerator again, Serena pressed gauze (where from? magic journalistic pocket) against his knee. "You almost checked out."

He managed a grin turned grimace. "Experiment. Verdict: gravity still champion."

Mei twisted, meeting his gaze. "And boredom?"

"Dead." He closed eyes, feeling storm rock chassis. "But its cousins—recklessness, hubris—apparently alive."

Lightning flashed, silhouetting hillside angles ahead. Mei laid a hand on the dossier cryobox. "We reach Kuala Lumpur in ninety minutes if roads stay clear. After that, Swiss vault awaits."

Lucas opened one eyelid. "Let's push the limits harder—just maybe tie a rope around me first."

Cleo laughed, throttle steady as they vanished into curtain of rain.

Behind, the wrecked SUV's door opened. A figure with a buzz-cut rose, eyes reflecting lightning—and lifted a handheld beacon that pulsed the Curators' hourglass symbol into the storming night.

CH 14 – Tokyo — Flash Between the Lines

A thousand coloured umbrellas tilted like a restless sea across Shibuya Scramble, every pedestrian poised on the curb, waiting for the light to flip green. Lucas Vale — hood pulled low, knee still stiff beneath borrowed jeans — hovered on the edge of that tide, one shoulder pressed to a glowing vending machine. A week earlier he'd dangled off a Malaysian ravine post, lungs scalded, boredom roaring in his ears. Now Tokyo's neon buzzed against his temples, promising fresher risks, cleaner lines, and—if he was honest—somewhere to hide from the Curator SUV he'd overturned on Karak Highway. The bruise blooming down his left arm throbbed its own metronome under the winter jacket, demanding restraint he had no intention of granting.

A chime dinged overhead; the crossing countdown lit crimson digits: 5. Ad-blimps drifted above like lazy carp. Tourists lifted phones, angling for that perfect social slice of organised chaos. Lucas inhaled through his teeth, tasting rain-slick asphalt and kettle corn, and tried to decide whether the ache in his chest was fatigue or the hunger to meddle.

4.

From the corner of his eye he caught movement—small, frantic, out of rhythm. A toddler in a mustard-yellow coat slipped her mother's grasp and toddled into the road. The mother yelped, too late; the crowd, still obeying the red man, froze in horror. A delivery van slewed through the intersection, tyres squealing against the last blink of amber.

Instinct overrode the ache. Lucas felt the slippery pull of the void behind the tick of the second hand—the place between moments where everything else stalled and only he could breathe.

3 became an eternity. He stepped.

Time shattered.

Sound popped into cotton silence. Neon bled into a smeared oil painting. Mid-stride commuters hung like mannequins; pigeons hovered mid-flap; raindrops glittered as perfect glass beads. The child stood in the centre, a single shoelace floating parallel to the ground, mouth a round "O" of delight or terror—it was impossible to tell in still-frame.

Lucas's boots splashed through static puddles—no ripples, never ripples—and reached the van first. The driver floated behind the wheel, veins raised on his neck, eyes wide. A coffee cup levitated beside the dashboard, brown arcs frozen mid-spill. Lucas palmed the steering wheel and nudged the van five centimetres left with a telekinetic twist—a feather-light adjustment, but enough. The vehicle rolled on invisible rails in the arrested moment, tyres whispering against immovable asphalt.

Nausea licked his gut: too many micro-moves since the highway, too little rest. He ignored it, scooped the toddler beneath the arms, and – careful, Vale, heads bruise – hopped back to the curb. He set her beside a frozen high-schooler, aligning her feet so she'd finish her stumble into safety when the world restarted. On a whim he plucked the child's dropped marmalade bun from mid-air and tucked it into her mitten. Small mercies.

Even in stillness he heard his pulse hammer: Not a heist. Not a prank. An honest rescue. The novelty rattled him more than gunfire.

A wave of dizziness wobbled his knees. He pressed two fingers to a temple. "First-aid for timelines," he muttered, voice flat in the vacuum. The bruise in his shoulder radiated molten pins; the souvenir from Karak caught him each time he stretched.

Get out before the recoil hits. He pivoted toward the vending machine to reclaim his original position, but a flash of silver on the far side of the crossing snagged him—tourist on the second-floor café balcony, DSLR mid-click. The camera's shutter hung like a guillotine halfway down. The shot captured everything: the van offset, the child airborne between steps, Lucas in mid-stride. If the photographer noticed the glitch seconds later, they'd rewind frames until the impossible bled through.

His stomach tightened. Future headlines wrote themselves: Tokyo Freeze—Real-Life Glitch in Shibuya Crossing. Graves had taught him that cameras were prisons; Curators weaponised anomalies. Lucas swallowed bile, darted across the mosaic of paused umbrellas, and yanked the DSLR's memory card with a deft TK tug. It popped free like a kernel in reverse. He caught it, slid it into his jacket. No evidence, no breadcrumb.

Time to let the clock breathe again.

He exhaled. The world inhaled.

Sound slammed back: car horn, whistle, the mother's scream pitching into relief. The van swerved past empty space, clearing the toddler by more than a metre—driver completely unaware of his newly generous lane. People gasped; the child blinked, surprised to discover bun nestled against her chin. Lucas melted into the horde, the vending machine humming against his spine by the time anyone thought to look around.

The mother swept her daughter up and sobbed against her hair. Phones shot skyward, filming late, capturing nothing but traffic pulling away and an unremarkable crowd. Lucas pressed a thumb underneath his sleeve, fishing for a pulse. Fast. Too fast. He forced three deliberate breaths, the way Cleo had coached him in the van, purging vertigo with oxygen and mental arithmetic.

"You can do better than playing ambulance," his inner voice sneered—same voice that had dared him onto rooftops and yacht rails. But another, quieter echo complicated it: the child's weight, the mother's cracked whisper of thanks she'd never realise she owed him. Purpose felt…stable. Unfamiliar, but steady, like the world's axis pivoting a few degrees toward north.

He pushed off the machine into the eddy of pedestrians, dodging pastel umbrellas, ignoring the ache that trailed each step. With any luck, the entire incident would register as coincidence: mother in tears, van driver shaken, but no internet-worthy spectacle. Still, paranoia itched.

At the first alley he ducked between stacked kirin crates and let telepathy sweep the passing throng. Surface thoughts fluttered by: late for meeting, concert tickets, where's my umbrella… nothing about "time stopping." Good.

Yet one shard sliced through, bright and deliberate: "Tick-Skipper." The term he'd only read in the Hong Kong dossier whispered by some commuter half a block down. He swivelled, but the tide of bodies swallowed any single culprit. A coincidence? Or a spotter? His skin prickled.

A noodle shop with steam-fogged windows offered emancipation from drizzle. He took the counter stool farthest from glass, back to the wall. The chef—a barrel-chested man with a sumo-topknot—slid miso ramen under his nose before he finished ordering. Lucas nodded gratitude and let the broth's savoury haze thaw the chill.

The pocket-sized television mounted above the door replayed CCTV footage from an Osaka convenience-store robbery. He studied the time stamp—last night, 23:14—and counted frames. The feed jumped once, a half-second skip. Probably network lag, but fear twanged a string inside his ribs. You're seeing ghosts.

He fished the purloined memory card from his jacket and snapped it in half beneath the counter lip, mingling plastic crumbs with sea-salt flakes. Evidence destroyed, yet adrenaline refused to ebb. Instead of euphoria, an uneasy calm trickled in, like returning to shore after nearly drowning—he knew the metaphor too well. He remembered the kilometre post graunching his palms, the ravine's black maw, Serena's gasp when he'd reappeared on solid ground. Recklessness had saved him then; altruism had saved a child now. The former felt like lightning; the latter, sunlight. Which was more addictive?

He wolfed half the noodles, ignoring the chef's approving grunt, and keyed his rented phone. A quick search for #ShibuyaGlitch returned zero hits. Safe—for the moment.

Another ping vibrated. Unknown number, international. No preview; just a link. He hesitated, thumb hovering. Curator phishing? Or fencing by one of Mei's black-market contacts? Curiosity tipped the balance. Click.

A minimalist site loaded: black background, white monospaced text.

We watched that, Lucas.

We approve of rescues.

Do you want harder puzzles?

Below, a single icon: an hourglass inverted.

Pulse spiked. He glanced toward the door; only rain and scooter engines. When he looked back, the page refreshed itself to static. Message gone.

"Of course." He snorted into his bowl. "Because nothing says 'friendly outreach' like cryptic cyber-stalking." But dread coiled in the base of his spine: They knew not only his name but his location, his new behavior. Curators? Or some third party pulling the same threads he chased?

Lucas pushed the ramen away half-finished, appetite hijacked. He slid cash under the bowl and limped outside, knee protesting the sudden cold. Neon kanji blurred through rain, each sign a potential lens recording his every breath. He kept his hood low and picked a direction at random that wasn't toward the crossing.

The bruise flared with each step; he catalogued the pain—data points on the limits of his powers. Cleo's makeshift bandage beneath his shirt had loosened; warm dampness suggested the gouge had reopened. Tokyo pharmacies weren't known for no-questions-asked suture kits, but yen could outrun questions.

An overhead subway rumbled. He ducked into the shadows of a pillar support and opened his pocket notebook—physical, unhackable. Under Safe Houses he added Capsule Ryokan, Shinjuku; under Enemies he scribbled Hourglass net ghost. As his pencil left the page, a street performer's boom box cut off mid-beat for a second—digital stutter. The crowd groaned, then the song resumed.

The pattern hunted him.

Harder puzzles. The phrase rattled like dice on felt. Maybe the breadcrumb he'd bought in Hong Kong, the forum rumour of "walkers," wasn't mint-tin mythology. Maybe the child rescue had triggered a new test.

A gust funneled through the overpass, flinging rain sideways. He shoved the notebook away—slow, mindful of his shoulder—and spotted a convenience store across the narrow street. Fluorescent, bright, with an ATM that doubled as anonymous cash-out if he needed to reroute funds from Macau.

Lucas checked the flow of pedestrians. No toddler; no van. Good. He stepped—and the air behind him shifted.

Footfalls, too light for tourist loafers. The tail?

He angled telepathy backward like a parabolic dish. Static fuzz. Someone nearby shielded their surface thoughts, not deliberately but by sheer intensity of focus—like Graves mulling probabilities before a blackjack count. Lucas counted six strangers in umbrella range; five minds pinged clear. The sixth, a slim silhouette in charcoal coat, emitted only a faint hum. Danger or coincidence? Either way, Lucas lacked appetite for another car chase, especially in the rain.

Micro-influence, then. He inhaled the damp diesel-tinted air and exhaled a whisper across reality's grain: Turn right, find warmth, ignore him. Nausea flicked his gut like greasy chopsticks. The silhouette slowed, drifted toward a taxi rank, then hailed a cab without lifting her hood. Female. Buzz-cut? No; long hair spilled as she glanced down. Relief and dizziness twined.

Lucas swallowed the rising bile. Too many tricks, too little recovery. He needed a bed, antiseptic, and a twelve-hour blackout—but the hourglass page had shifted the timeline. Hard puzzles meant shorter intervals.

He checked into the capsule ryokan under the name Marcus Lind. The clerk barely looked up. Inside metre-wide coffin 42-B, Lucas stripped to boxer briefs and prodded the knee wound. Ugly, but not infected. He irrigated it with the capsule's drizzle shower, threaded butterfly stitches, and lay back against synthetic pillows.

Fluorescent panel light dimmed to navy. The ventilator hissed soft white noise. Yet sleep refused to grip him; memory replayed the Shibuya freeze, the hush of raindrops suspended mid-air, the impossible calm of lifting a child out of death's lane. He'd saved lives before—helping Serena dodge bullets on the yacht, yanking Cleo's van across lanes in Malaysia—but those rescues had been wrapped in self-preservation. This time, the thrill of risk had been secondary. The deed itself glowed warm, steady, even after adrenaline faded.

What terrified him was how good that felt.

He reached for purpose as if it were a physical switch and felt the intricate machine of his craving slide into a new alignment. Boredom is the enemy still, but perhaps the cure wasn't escalating chaos—it was choosing chaos that mattered to someone else.

A notification pulsed faint green inside the capsule's mesh: free Wi-Fi registration. He dismissed the login screen—and there it was again, superimposed in the browser bar despite no site loaded:

tick-skipper://welcome

The address flickered, then cleared itself.

Lucas's pulse drummed. He leaned back, spine popping against molded plastic. Somewhere, watchers expected a response. He could run, changing countries like shirts, or he could answer and steer the rules of engagement.

"Harder puzzles, huh?" he whispered to the capsule ceiling. "Deal me in—but on my terms."

He killed the tablet's power, plunged into darkness, and closed his eyes. Sleep hovered. Before it claimed him, a single image crystallised: the hourglass inverted, sand ascending instead of falling.

How many others are flipping the glass?

The question echoed as he slipped into dreams.

CH 15 – Shinjuku — Ghosts in the Codec

Lucas Vale woke to the sound of someone else's alarm, tinny and insistent through the honeycomb wall of capsule 42-A. For a moment he could not tell whether the high-pitched melody came from the present or from a dream still stuck between ticks. He lay motionless, mapping pain: shoulder stiff, knee throbbing like a minor deity demanding tribute. Three hours' sleep was a poor offering. The digital clock over his feet displayed 04:17, but the numbers blurred whenever his pulse spiked, as though even electronics recoiled from chronokinetic after-echo.

He exhaled long and slow. The nausea that usually followed a full freeze had faded to a metallic taste, yet the memory lingered—the toddler aloft, raindrops suspended, van nudged aside like a toy in a bathtub. First genuine rescue, first taste of purpose. Satisfying, yes, but the fallout remained unknown. Somewhere in Tokyo a fractured narrative was knitting itself from traffic sensors and pedestrian recollections, and the Curators—if they truly watched—were tightening threads around his name.

Sleep was a lost cause. He slid the capsule door aside, careful not to rattle the plastic latch, and shuffled down the narrow corridor of stacked pods. Fluorescent strips hummed overhead, bathing everything in morgue-blue. Two business travelers in tailored suits slept with VR masks clamped over their eyes, mouths slack—dreaming of alternate spreadsheets, he supposed. Lucas's own reflection ghosted across the curved acrylic: tousled dark hair, days-old stubble, bruising like watercolor beneath one eye. He looked less like a super-thief than a university dropout who'd spent the night arguing with vending machines.

In the communal galley he brewed convenience-store drip coffee, the kind that tasted as though the beans had been politely introduced to water but never shook hands. Steam fogged the stainless counter. He balanced on a stool, flipped open his battered netbook, and tethered to the hostel Wi-Fi.

The login page flickered, then defaulted to blank white. No fields, no logo—only a single blinking cursor and one line of text that hadn't been there last night:

./debug?—y/n

Lucas tapped the trackpad, heartbeat skating. Harder puzzles. Someone had promised them. He typed y.

The screen dissolved into matrix waterfalls, green glyphs cascading before resolving into a crude chat window. Title bar: //FORTUNE'S WINDOW v.2.1-b//. Below, a list of user handles scrolled. Most were predictable conspiracy usernames—XxThirdEyeWoke, PsiRanger, FlatPastafarian—the sort of crowd that stockpiled crystals and wore Faraday beanies. Yet one handle flickered amber instead of grey: Hourglass_mod.

The cursor jumped to a text field:

> welcome back, LV. timestamp confirms shibuya vector.

 latency: 0.43s

 integrity: 92%

 proceed? (y/n)

Shock iced his spine. They knew the intersection, the incident, likely even the precise millisecond he had stopped the clock. There was no point pretending ignorance. He typed y again.

A private channel opened. Static hissed through his earbuds—artificial ambience, maybe. Words assembled:

Hourglass_mod: You pivoted from selfish to selfless. Curious development.

Lucas_V: Flattered you're keeping score. ID?

Hourglass_mod: Call us Gatekeepers.

Lucas_V: Originality isn't your strong suit.

Hourglass_mod: Nor is yours, Tick-Skipper. You borrow seconds; we curate them.

The taunt pricked his temper. He flexed telepathy, skimming thought-noise in the dormitory beyond the galley wall. Nothing linked to the chat; whoever "Gatekeepers" were, they weren't physically close, or they shielded minds better than Graves during a card count.

Lucas_V: If you have a pitch, make it. Otherwise I'm cancelling the subscription.

Hourglass_mod: Very well. Solve the ghost test, earn an audience.

A link appeared, plain blue, no preview. He hovered the cursor. Ghost test sounded like a BuzzFeed quiz dreamed up by occult interns, but his heartbeat answered before logic: faster, eager. Challenge was the drug; purpose merely flavored the spoonful.

He clicked.

The page rebuilt into retro ASCII art: a derelict bulletin board straight out of the 1990s, all amber type and dithering. Thread titles filled the sidebar—Remote Viewing Log, Precog Crash Predictions, Lucid Dream Hardware. Post counts inflated by spam bots and bored teenagers. Mostly hoaxes, the outline in his stolen dossier had warned. Still, needles hid in hay if the magnet was strong enough.

Lucas applied his own filter. He searched for phrases that resonated against the memory of time-freeze: "tick-skip," "between ticks," "unyielded momentum." Ten hits surfaced. Eight were fan fiction. One referenced an indie videogame mod. The last was a thread with zero replies, timestamped three hours ago—the same window in which he had saved the child.

He opened it.

Subject: Need verification—momentum bleed during hard pause?

Body:Observed micro ripples in still air, like heat shimmer, 0420 JST, Shibuya. Anyone else see? Offer exchange: footage for answers.

Footage. His chest compressed. Either traffic cams had survived his precautions or the mystery poster had been physically present. Username: Nokito45. IP masked through three hops, yet still traceable with time and a few black-market scripts.

Momentum bleed. Lucas remembered the way his own exhale had stirred one raindrop, barely perceptible, before he'd reset the flow. If the observer had truly recorded that subtlety, they might not be hoaxers at all.

He was about to craft a careful reply when the thread refreshed itself and a second post arrived—by Hourglass_mod.

Exchange approved. Meet IRL. 19:00 JST. Address follows.

An address rendered in Kanji beneath: 千代田区外神田三丁目11番地—Akihabara, the electric district. Beneath that, one rule: Come alone. Devices optional but powered down two blocks prior.

Lucas skimmed a digital map in his head. The spot was an abandoned maid-café above a shuttered arcade—prime real estate back when nostalgia sold lattes, now another cavity in Tokyo's neon grin.

Cliff's edge decisions were his specialty. He saved the thread to an encrypted thumb-drive, shut the netbook, and downed the rest of the coffee, lukewarm detergent though it was.

Pain stabbed his knee as he slid from the stool; he forced weight onto the other leg, rotating to test. Acceptable margin. He ducked into the capsule corridor, packed what little he owned: passport, burner phone, notebook, roller pen, zippo. The memory card he had snapped sat in the trash—evidence of evidence. Futile to regret.

A soft rap stuttered against plastic behind him. He turned. Capsule 42-C's door inched open. A teenage girl peered out, purple headset clamped askew over dyed fringe. Her eyes widened.

"You're the guy from Shibuya," she whispered in accented English.

Time stretched—not paused, simply slowed by adrenaline. Lucas's telepathic reflex seized her surface thought: the van moved—how did—rewind—frames missing. She had been the balcony photographer, the DSLR owner whose card he had stolen. Fate, apparently, had a wicked sense of comedic timing.

He cut a curtain of micro-influence, gentle as lifting dust: It was just a trick of light. Cameras glitch. Go back to sleep. Her pupils dilated, lids drooping; the headset slipped. She gave a faint nod and retreated, sliding the door shut. Lucas braced an arm against the wall as nausea flowered—dimmer this time, but present. A reminder that every nudge cost blood sugar, electrolytes, maybe fragments of soul.

By sunrise he was on the Yamanote line circling toward Akihabara, kneecap wrapped under dark jeans and a spring insole cushioning each step. The train car rattled through tunnels, fluorescent handles swaying. Lucas eavesdropped on commuters: slice-of-life thoughts about bentō lunches, overdue rent, idol group gossip. Each pulsing mind reminded him that all humans were radios constantly broadcasting; only he could tune any station. That power still thrilled—but after the rescue, thrill alone felt cheap. Purpose tasted heavier, like stout instead of pilsner.

At Akihabara he rented a coin locker, stuffed the netbook and passport inside, and traced power lines overhead until he found the derelict arcade. Daytime foot traffic churned past—salarymen, tourists photographing vending machines that sold anime keychains. No one looked at the corroded rolling shutter. Yet behind the grime, Lucas sensed humming tension.

He circled two blocks, phone powered down as instructed, telepathy sweeping alleys for sniper calm—the slow, predatory breathing pattern Graves once exhibited when tailing. Nothing. A lone crow hopped along a power cable, cawing like a sarcastic tour guide.

At 18:57 he slipped through a side door left ajar. Dust motes spiraled in beam-slash sunlight. Arcade cabinets stood gutted, their pixel hearts removed, screens cracked. Up a narrow stairwell he found the maid-café lounge: pastel walls peeling, stuffed alpacas decapitated by time. One table remained upright, crowned by an hourglass the size of a wine bottle—sand running upward.

Optical illusion: magnetic iron filings, perhaps. Yet the gesture felt personal.

A figure leaned against a window frame, silhouetted by sodium street-glow. Slim, glacier-straight posture, matte motorcycle jacket. Hood up, obscuring features.

Lucas halted five metres away. "Nokito45?"

"Close," the stranger answered—voice modulated through a vocal filter, neither male nor female. "I'm the courier. Nokito is cautious."

"Clearly." He nodded toward the hourglass. "And dramatic."

"You liked the Shibuya stagecraft." A chuckle—metallic echo. "Consider this our audition."

Lucas's telepathy met static: a white-noise veil around the courier's mind. Either technology or natural talent.

The courier produced a tablet, screen facing inward. "Evidence. Twenty-second clip. Yours for answers."

Lucas kept hands visible, palms open. "Ask."

"Rule set for chrono-pause. Maximum duration?"

"Five subjective minutes," he said, surprised by his own candor. The café smelled of mothballs and solder; confession seemed appropriate.

"Rebound symptoms?"

"Nausea scaling with exertion. Dizziness if I move mass or alter velocity vectors. Why the medical intake?"

"Because we don't recruit liabilities."

Lucas's pulse quickened. "Recruit?"

"Gatekeepers manage the real forum—the one beneath Fortune's Window. Hoax hunters act as our camouflage. We monitor anomalies, looking for…" The courier tapped the hourglass. "Tick-Skippers who show restraint. You finally did."

"And if I hadn't saved the kid?"

"You'd still be gambling in Macau, and Graves would be slipping cuffs around your wrists." The courier tilted their head. "Altruism buys trust."

Lucas snorted. "You sure about that? I lied to a mother, crushed her near-death into a miracle, and stole a photographer's property to hide. Hardly saintly."

"Intent matters." A finger tapped the tablet edge. "Meet Nokito tomorrow, 06:00, Fushimi Inari shrine, Kyoto. Sunrise gates are private enough for demonstration. Bring stamina."

Kyoto—the next breadcrumb in his stolen act outline, though the courier couldn't know that. Unless the Curators wrote the outline. Layers upon layers.

"Why not now?"

"Because tonight you'll review this clip, decide if sharing your truth is worth the headache, and maybe sleep." The courier extended the tablet. "Accept the ghost test reward, Lucas Vale. Clock's sand runs whichever direction we choose."

Lucas took the device. It weighed less than guilt yet more than curiosity. On screen the paused world shimmered—heat waves he hadn't noticed in the moment, radiating from his moving silhouette: momentum bleed, signature of chronal disturbance. Proof of flaw, proof of presence.

When he looked up, the courier was gone. No door creak, no footfall; simply absence. His telepathic net caught only pigeons roosting on a neon kanji outside.

He glanced at the hourglass. The iron filings inside spiraled faster now, grains racing upward toward a narrowing future. The café's dust-heavy air tasted like ozone and challenge.

"Sunrise in Kyoto," he murmured. "Harder puzzles accepted."

But first he needed exit strategy. Graves might already be scanning train manifests, and the Curators—if Gatekeepers were splinter faction—could ambush at any gate.

Lucas pocketed the tablet, wheeled toward the stairs, and let time slip half a heartbeat slower, just enough to feel edges sharpen. The knee protested each descent, yet adrenaline compensated. Outside, Akihabara buzzed its perpetual carnival of LEDs and chatter. None of the pedestrians noticed a grain of midnight sand stuck in Lucas's hair.

He reconsidered the word recruit. Joining any faction risked trading one cage for another. Yet solitary play had led him to rooftops slick with monsoon rain and a body count avoided only by inches. Maybe partnerships—temporary, negotiable—were a necessary evolution.

The commuter bullet train to Kyoto left every ten minutes. He would board one under a fabricated ticket, ride the electric seams of the country, and be under the thousand red torii gates before dawn. If Gatekeepers betrayed him, shrines provided columns to teleport between ticks, shadows to vanish inside.

Purpose pulsed in his veins, louder than boredom, clearer than fear. He slipped into the torrent of bodies headed for the station, one more umbrella in the night, yet entirely apart—ghost among codecs, orchestrator of lost seconds, willing to gamble them all on the next puzzle.

Somewhere behind him, sand reversed its flow.

CH 16 – Kyoto — Gates of Echoes

Fine mountain mist curled between the vermilion torii of Fushimi Inari like cigarette smoke slipping through church pews. It was 05:54, dark enough that the lanterns dangling from every fifth gate looked like molten coins, bright enough that the last stars were drowning in slate-blue dawn. Lucas Vale reached the first landing of stone steps and stopped to map the pain in his knee—three pulses, not four. Acceptable. The shoulder throb was background noise compared to the drumroll in his ears: uncertainty, anticipation, and the idiot thrill that always rose when he walked into a trap on purpose.

The courier had been precise—sunrise gates are private enough for demonstration—but the shrine was never truly empty. At the base of the hill two early photographers hoisted tripods; a vending-machine vendor rattled crates; a lone miko swept fallen leaves, her thoughts a gentle mantra about breakfast miso. Lucas's telepathy skimmed their surfaces, cataloguing harmless strangers, marking rhythms that would need preserving if he froze the clock.

He ducked under the first torii, paint flaking under his fingertips. Each gate bore a donor's black-lacquer kanji; he imagined every character a timestamp to another possibility. Six hours ago in Tokyo he had accepted the Gatekeepers' invitation because boredom was a worse predator than any cabal. Now, with each echoing footstep, he wondered whether he had misread the predator's name.

A soft chime pinged in his pocket. The tablet the courier had gifted last night woke itself, no network, no GPS—only a glowing hourglass icon that pulsed like a heartbeat. Beneath it flashed coordinates and a countdown: 00:03:17.

"Punctual, aren't we?" he muttered. Three minutes until show-time. He pocketed the device and climbed faster, ignoring the knee's protest. Cedar trunks loomed beyond the gates, black pillars in half-light. Somewhere among them, the Gatekeepers—or the Curators wearing new masks—waited with their ghost test.

At the ridge-bend where the path split, Lucas found an open courtyard flanked by stone foxes. Their marble eyes gleamed wet, fangs bared in permanent half-smiles. Between them stood Nokito45.

She—or he; the figure was slight, androgynous—wore a grey mountaineering jacket and an action-camera harness strapped across the chest. The lens pointed outward, recording everything. A GoPro, ironic given the request to power down devices, but maybe that was the point: the evidence was a bargaining chip.

"Lucas Vale," Nokito said, voice low but unfiltered. Accent Kansai, melodic. "You're earlier than first light."

"The sun was dragging its feet," he replied, forcing nonchalance. He extended telepathy like a fishing line; their thoughts were…calm ripples. Excitement edged by professional detachment.

A third figure emerged from behind a prayer tablet rack—the courier from Akihabara, still hooded, still broadcasting nothing Lucas could read. They carried the same upward-flowing hourglass, now sealed inside a plexiglass tube.

"Attendance complete," the courier said. "Ready to graduate from chatrooms to praxis?"

Lucas rolled his aching shoulder. "Depends on the curriculum."

"Demonstrate a hard stop for forty seconds," Nokito interjected, patting the camera. "We collect physics. You collect answers about what almost happened in Shibuya."

Almost? Lucas filed away the wording. "And the people downstairs?"

"We hacked the shrine's security loop," the courier replied. "For the next five minutes the cameras replay yesterday's feed. Your only collateral is the girl sweeping—the miko. We prefer her not to lose a limb when time skips."

Lucas exhaled through his nose, feeling the cold air scrape lungs still irritated by Tokyo smog. Forty seconds of full chrono-pause was trivial on a rested day; today, with knee ligaments tender and adrenaline already thinning, it flirted with the margin where vertigo opened trapdoors. But the data on momentum-bleed could be worth more than gold. It might explain the hallucination he'd kept quiet: during the Shibuya freeze he had felt a hum beneath the silence, as though some deeper engine of the universe idled just out of sight.

He cracked his knuckles—ritual more than necessity—and stepped to the centre of the courtyard. The fox statues watched like referees.

"All right," he said. "Count me."

Nokito lifted two fingers. "On zero."

Three…two…one—

Lucas tugged the hidden hinge of reality, the secret he'd discovered half-drowned at fifteen.

Sound imploded. Lantern flames hardened into glass-still sculptures. Cedar branches halted mid-sway. The miko's broom hung airborne grams above gravel, bristles splayed in impossible geometry. Forty seconds.

He walked the loop of torii in slow strides, stretching muscles to bleed tension. Each footfall left no imprint; he was a ghost threading a slideshow. Nokito's camera suspended in mid-beep; the courier's hourglass stopped reversing and simply floated, grains crystallised. All ordinary, familiar—and then the world shivered.

A vibration, subtle but visceral, like standing on thin ice flexing above dark water. Lucas froze mid-step. The air ahead rippled—no, rewound—trees bending then straightening, lantern light strobing backward, fox eyes winking. And into that rewind blossomed a vision:

He saw himself on a bullet train, window streaking with mountain reflections. Serena sat across from him, hair shorter than he remembered, eyes fierce and damp. Between them lay a silver tracker—Graves's, he knew—split open like an autopsy frog. The train lurched; an explosion bloomed beyond glass; Serena shouted a name Lucas didn't recognise.

The tableau snapped shut.

Lucas reeled, hand gripping a torii post to anchor the nausea. Visions were not part of his repertoire. Hallucination? Prophecy? The courier had warned of deeper layers; was this them, surfacing like whales?

Thirty seconds left.

He forced calm and swept telekinetic fingers across the gravel, tracing a circle of displaced stones—proof for after. His heart hammered as though sprinting, yet his body barely moved. Twenty seconds.

Another ripple: the cedar trunks blurred into skyscraper silhouettes, neon kanji flickering where prayer tablets had been. Shibuya crossing again, but night-time, and dozens of paused walkers moved among frozen civilians—three, four, five others with the same impossible grace as Lucas. One turned, meeting his gaze through the fracture of space. Their eyes glowed mercury-bright.

Fifteen seconds.

He wanted to speak, but lungs wouldn't obey; the rule held—no vibrations propagate in still time. The unknown walker tapped their wrist, a gesture of soon, then vanished with the cityscape. The shrine resumed its silent painting.

Sweat pricked his spine despite winter air. Ten seconds.

Nokito's camera still hovered. The courier's hood still faced him, but Lucas thought he sensed awareness, as if the envoy saw through the freeze. Impossible.

Five seconds.

He inhaled—difficult, air syrupy heavy—and released the hinge.

Sound crashed first—broom bristles scraping gravel, birds shrieking in cedar boughs. Lanterns flickered. Lucas staggered, catching himself on a fox statue. The courtyard spun, colours oversaturated. Forty seconds objective, but his muscles screamed like they'd sprinted miles.

Nokito checked the GoPro, eyes wide behind ski goggles. "Zero momentum-bleed rings. You compensated motion perfectly."

Lucas wiped sweat from his lip, pulse a war drum. "Glad to impress. Now, my answers."

The courier uncapped the plexi tube and tilted the hourglass; sand flowed downward like physics intended. "What did you experience in the still?"

Lucas hesitated. Trust was a currency; he wasn't sure of its exchange rate here. But hiding might cost more. "A…double-exposure. Future flashes? Different locations overlapping."

"What locations?"

"Shinkansen carriage. And Shibuya again, but crawling with others like me." Saying it aloud quickened his heartbeat. The memory of mercury eyes felt carved into bone.

Nokito exchanged a look with the courier. "Side-effect we predicted," the courier said. "When a Tick-Skipper sustains a pause beyond the bleed threshold, temporal lobe may receive upstream echoes."

"Upstream from what?"

"From futures where you already made different choices."

Lucas blinked. "You're telling me I saw alternate timelines?"

"Possibilities," Nokito corrected. "Branches that quickly collapse if not reinforced."

"Meaning they're hallucinations," Lucas said, voice sharper than intended. His knee trembled; he locked it straight.

"Meaning they're roads that might exist," the courier countered, "and someone—Curators, Gatekeepers, whoever masters the deeper layer—can choose which road survives."

Lucas felt the cedar air thicken. The implications—manipulating not just events within time, but which future of them remained—dwarfed any casino scam. He swallowed bile. "Why show me this?"

"Because you're close to cracking the second hinge," Nokito said, gesturing to the torii wall. "Most Skip only borrow present seconds. You glimpsed the branching lattice. That makes you dangerous to everyone writing history."

The courier produced a business card—blank save for an inked hourglass. "There's a forum behind the forum. Coordinates rotate; this card updates when burned. Light it when you decide you want guidance."

Lucas accepted the card, Zippo in his other hand's pocket feeling suddenly heavier. "And if I decide I don't want strings?"

"Then watch for the mercury-eyed watchers," Nokito murmured. "If you saw them, they surely saw you."

Wind rattled the prayer tablets, wooden clacks like dice in a cup. The miko glanced over, puzzled at the foreigners conversing under sacred gates.

The courier tucked the hourglass away. "One final courtesy. Your vision of the bullet train? It happens tonight unless choices shift. Something about a tracker."

Blood iced. Graves. "You're clairvoyant now?"

"Pattern analyst," they corrected. "We see math where others see fate." They turned toward the descending path. "Sunrise demonstration delivered. The rest is yours to untangle."

Nokito followed, camera still running. Within seconds the pair vanished beyond the curve of torii, footsteps hushed.

Lucas sagged against a gatepost, letting the cedar scent settle his stomach. Forty seconds had cost him more than expected—muscles quivered, vision blurred at edges. But deeper than exhaustion simmered awe. He had touched parallels, tasted threads of unchosen days. If upstream echoes were real, then boredom was obsolete; mystery was infinite.

He straightened, flipping the blank card between fingers. Burn to update. The pyromaniac in him admired the flair. The survivor weighed risks. If the Gatekeepers played double-agent between Curators and walkers, their guidance could come with shackles. Yet ignoring them risked facing mercury-eyes alone.

A faint electric hum drifted up the hillside—Kyoto's first bullet train pulling into distant platforms. Lucas remembered the vision: Serena opposite him, tracker gutted on the table, explosion flaring beyond glass. Tonight, said the courier. Unless he changed the branch.

He tucked the hourglass card into his notebook under the Enemies heading—question mark appended—and started down the stairs, each step a reminder that reality still had gravity. Behind him, the fox statues resumed silent vigil. The rising sun painted the vermilion gates blood-bright, as though the shrine itself acknowledged new tributaries of possibility.

By the time he reached the vending machines at the base, commuters flooded the plaza, cameras clicking, unaware of anything but the perfect Instagram dawn. Lucas bought a can of black coffee, cracked it, tasted metal and caffeine, and smiled despite fatigue.

Harder puzzles? The path now split into more than two. One led to Serena, a tracker, and fire on rails. Another…he couldn't yet read. But the gates were open, and echoes waited.

He drained the can, crushed it flat, and stepped into the crowd bound for Kyoto Station, mind already rehearsing contingencies. First objective: find the tracker before Graves could plant it. Second: test whether choices truly rewrote echoes.

Above the torii line, a fox's stone eyes seemed to glint in approval—or warning.

Lucas grinned up at it. "Let's find out which future sticks, shall we?"

The prayer bells chimed, and the chapter turned on their fading ring.

CH 17 – Shinkansen — Velocity Games

The 07:04 Hikari to Tokyo hissed into Kyoto Station like a chrome shark, nose tilting a thin mist of winter rain off its windshield. Lucas Vale stood on the yellow tactile strip, shoulder aching where yesterday's forty-second freeze had wrung him dry. Every sensory channel was open: telepathy skimming the crowd, eyes flicking for hotel-standard luggage tags that might hide a transmitter, ears tuned to the soft click of shutter doors on platform cameras.

The vision from Fushimi Inari still pulsed behind his eyes—Serena across a train table, the silver tracker gutted, the distant explosion. If the Gatekeepers' math was right, some branch of the future wanted to carve itself into reality before sundown. He intended to break its pencil.

A ripple of commuter thoughts broke across him—presentation at nine, did I unplug the heater?, ramen for lunch—but one mind blazed brighter, a steady flame he recognized from Macau casinos and yacht storms. Serena Kaur, five carriages down, hood tucked, phone up as if reading news. The last time they'd crossed paths she'd been undercover in a poker room, and he'd stolen a king of hearts from the shoe while time slept. Now she tracked him the way some people collected stamps: methodically, patiently, with a quiet joy.

Lucas suppressed a grin. The duel was on.

He stepped into Car 9 with a mild limp—injury camouflage—and angled toward seat 9C. Window side; ticket bought under a forgettable alias minutes ago. The overhead rack swallowed his backpack. Before sliding in he scanned the floor seam between seats: nothing taped, no blinking LEDs. Good. But Graves wouldn't secure a tracker in plain sight; he preferred symbolism. A silver coin glued beneath an armrest. A pen gifted mid-journey. Lucas flicked telekinesis like a dowsing rod along the rows, feeling for foreign mass. Nothing yet.

Passengers filtered past, heads bobbing. Japanese salarymen with laptop cases, college tourists, a toddler in a dinosaur beanie gnawing melon bread. Lucas let his mind dip briefly into the toddler's world—simple delight, crumbly sugar—and felt the knot in his gut loosen. Then came a thought-pulse shaped like Serena, sharp with calculation: Seat 12A, angle for eye-line, watch wrists. She strolled by, feigning a yawn, scent of bergamot tea trailing. Their eyes met for a half-second; she offered an absent smile for the stranger he pretended to be.

He answered with the blandest tourist grin he owned.

Carriage doors sealed with a pneumatic sigh. A melody chimed, the rails lurched, and the train accelerated past rice paddies slick with dawn frost. 285 kilometres per hour and climbing—roughly two hundred times the pace of his caution.

At Kyoto-Uji tunnel's half-lit stretch Serena rose to fetch coffee from the vending alcove beside the lavatories. Lucas counted five breaths, then followed, limping just enough to hide the urgency. He found her tapping her Suica card against the machine.

"Long night?" he asked, English crisp.

She started—perfect acting or genuine surprise. "Do I know you?"

"Only in the sense all caffeine seekers are kin." He gestured at the rows of cans. "Black roast's your best ally on this line."

"Thanks." She selected one. Eyes dark, steady. "Business in Tokyo?"

"Of sorts. You?"

"Investigative piece. Corporate malfeasance." She popped the can, took a sip. "I look at patterns other people miss."

Telepathy caught the subtext: Patterns like casino wins, flight manifests, impossible frame-skips.

Lucas tilted his head, letting the fluorescent down-light exaggerate shadows under his bruised eye. "Sounds like you could write about anything these days. The world's a nest of oddities."

"Oddities pay the bills." She leaned back against the machine. "You limping because Kyoto's streets are tricky, or because oddities sometimes dodge bullets?"

Touché. He shrugged. "Twirled wrong on a dance floor."

Lie, her thoughts whispered; then aloud she said, "Must have been some music."

Lucas smiled, accepting stalemate. The toddler from Shibuya crossed his mind, but he batted the memory aside. Different game. "See you around, Miss Patterns." He ambled toward the front, heartbeat quickening.

Back at seat 9C, he closed his eyes and let telekinesis drift under the carriage floor, mapping bolts, wiring harnesses, voids between steel ribs. The train's power hummed, a singsong he'd grown to love. Halfway toward Car 10 a tiny anomaly pulsed in his mental grasp: cylindrical, metallic, magnet-mounted to the underside of a seat pedestal—seat 10D, if geometry served. The device radiated a low-band UHF trickle.

Tracker located. Graves's fingerprints all over the signal profile. Probably disguised as a lost vape pen or spare battery, anything easy to palm onto someone's bag at the next station. But Lucas's vision had shown the tracker gutted long after departure. Was the explosion directly linked? Or separate? He needed more data.

He slid from his seat, timed the sway of the train, and moved down the aisle like a man stretching cramped legs. At Row 10 he paused, rubbing his knee theatrically. The occupant of 10D—middle-aged businessman dozing—had briefcase on lap, newspaper tented over face. Perfect camouflage. Lucas reached to steady himself on the seatback, letting fingertips brush the metal under-seat rail. Telekinesis softened bone into antenna; he felt the tracker's magnet, cold kiss of alloy, and coaxed it free with a trickle of force.

It thunked into his palm, a matte-black cylinder smaller than a lipstick. No det-cap wires, just an LED and a recessed port. He pocketed it, heart hammering. Future altered? Perhaps. But echoes could branch again.

Tired adrenaline crept up the back of his skull. He returned to 9C, pressed forehead to glass, watched bamboo forests blur.

Ten minutes later Serena approached, balance easy despite the velocity. She held two canned coffees. "My earlier one was sweetened. Thought you said black roast."

Lucas accepted the can. "You looked like someone who needed sugar."

She sat opposite in 9D, uninvited. "Interesting. You've been on my radar, Lucas."

He nearly dropped the coffee. Her voice had dropped soft enough that nearby passengers heard nothing, but the name landed like a gavel. His telepathy showed her mind a storm of possibilities: deny? test? record.

"Lucas?" He feigned confusion.

"Lucas Vale," she clarified, business card sliding from her sleeve. It was his Macau alias, one he'd used for hotel check-in months back. "You left a footprint every time you won big."

The duel sharpened. "Coincidence and good luck."

"Luck doesn't explain camera glitches." She leaned closer, pupils flaring. "Or why a security consultant named Graves now flies spiral patterns across Asia looking for the same traveller."

At the mention of Graves, sweat prickled beneath Lucas's collar. The train roared through another tunnel, lights flickering; for half a heartbeat the echo of his vision—the explosion, Serena's face lit by fire—superimposed over reality. Not yet, he told himself. Branch unchosen.

He softened his expression. "You've built quite a dossier on me. Should I be flattered or worried?"

"Depends what you're hiding." She tapped his canned coffee. "Let's share truth for truth. I'll start: I'm chasing anomalies because I think there's a story bigger than casino fraud."

"Your turn," she prompted.

He could gift her half-truths, or dangle misdirection. Purpose counseled honesty; survival warned caution. He compromised.

"I'm searching for others," he said. "People who don't fit the normal curve. Some whisper the name Curators, some Gatekeepers. I don't yet know who wears which mask."

Serena blinked. Surface thought spiked: He knows the rumors. Aloud she said, "You think secret societies recruit… outliers?"

"I think secret societies enjoy collecting anything rare enough."

"Does that include you?" She brushed hair behind one ear. "Are you rare, Lucas?"

The train's intercom announced Nagoya arrival in six minutes, saving him from an answer.

At Nagoya, half the carriage emptied into crisp air. Serena disembarked to buy bentō; Lucas followed, tracker still in pocket. On the platform he spotted a familiar square jaw and greying temples—Graves, trench coat blending with travellers. The man studied a phone displaying carriage layouts.

He hadn't booked a seat; he was placing the tracker post-Kyoto, banking on anonymity among interchange crowds. Lucas's heart slammed. The timeline wasn't amended; he'd only stolen the first device. There were others.

Serena returned, eyes tracking Graves a micro-second too late. "Corporate security spook, ex-Interpol," she whispered. "He's one chapter of my story."

Lucas inhaled, tasting metal. "Then our chapters align."

"What's in your pocket?"

"Insurance." He flashed the tracker. The LED pulsed amber, searching for a base signal—likely the detonator that would turn the device into more than a GPS tag.

Serena's gaze darted to Graves. "How about we crash his investment?"

Lucas considered freezing time, yanking every bag open, but fatigue coiled round his muscles like lead rope. Too obvious, too draining. They needed sleight-of-hand, not sledgehammers.

Once aboard again, Lucas guided Serena toward Car 11—granter of unreserved seats—and pointed to overhead racks filled with luggage Graves had shepherded inside. Telepathy skimmed the items: laptop, umbrella, tourist souvenirs… and a perfume box lined in lead foil—wireless shield. Bingo.

"Distract him," Lucas murmured. Serena sauntered up the aisle, "accidentally" brushing Graves's arm with her bentō bag. Soy sauce spilled on his cuff; apologies erupted. While Graves dabbed at stains, Lucas executed a micro-step—quarter-second personal time stretch that left the world a slow-motion reel. No freeze, minimal strain. He vaulted onto seat armrests, plucked the perfume box, swapped in the tracker from his pocket, and returned to the floor as normal speed resumed. Whole operation: maybe two subjective seconds, less for anyone else.

Sweat needled his spine. He slipped the original perfume box into an American tourist's roller case further down. Graves finished cursing the soy blotch, unaware.

Serena rejoined Lucas near the vestibule. "Now what?"

"Now the tracker rides in circles." Lucas pointed to the tourist's luggage tag: destination Osaka—he was detraining next stop to connect south. "Graves will follow the wrong trail. Explosion averted."

"Explosion?" she echoed, dark brows knitting.

Lucas bit back the prophecy. "Call it an educated hunch."

Intercom chimed; the train knifed north.

For the next hour they shared a table in the dining car. Serena grilled him lightly—where did you grow up? (Perth), why the limp? (bad tango), what scares you? (mid-tier karaoke). Her laughter warmed the sterile carriage. Yet underneath, Lucas felt her curiosity sharpen to surgical edge.

Between sips of miso soup he probed her surface thoughts: He's fun, but impossible. If he's a thief, why warn me? If innocent, why so many aliases? The loop repeated. He realized with a pang that honesty might liberate them both—but the bullet's velocity was wrong; disclosure on a public train two seats from Graves risked chaos.

At Shizuoka, Graves exited, tailing the roller case. Lucas watched through tinted glass as his rival vanished into the station concourse. Branch diverted—hopefully. Relief exhaled inside him like escaping steam.

Serena raised an eyebrow. "Friend of yours seems busy."

"He chases phantoms," Lucas said. "Sometimes he catches soy sauce instead."

She studied him over the rim of her cup. "One day I'll ask for the unabridged version."

"One day I might answer."

The sun climbed, dappling Mount Fuji with peach-gold as the train arrowed past. Lucas's lids drooped—fatigue ambush after micro-step. Serena handed him her neck pillow unasked. He accepted, head weighting the vinyl. For a drifting moment he nearly slept.

Then the world stuttered.

A half-second skip—coffee sloshed out of synchrony, lights blinked. Passengers looked up, puzzled. Lucas's blood froze; he hadn't paused time. Something else had nudged the gears.

His eyes snapped to the window. Atop the embankment a figure stood motionless as a statue, blurred by speed. Mercury-bright eyes.

Echo turned real.

Lucas jerked upright, heart detonating. Serena saw the movement, followed his gaze, but the figure was gone, lost behind rows of cypress.

"What is it?" she asked.

"Thought I saw someone I know," he lied, voice dry.

Mercury watcher on this track. So the rival faction—or whatever future walker—wasn't confined to visions. They could watch in real time, maybe even intervene.

The stakes recalibrated upwards.

Tokyo signals approached; skyline shimmered. Lucas fingered the hourglass card in his pocket. Burn to locate Gatekeepers again? Maybe they could explain watchers. But trust had price tags higher than yen.

Next to him Serena packed away cups. "You look like somebody who just dodged fate."

"Maybe fate's still drafting the contract," he said.

The train braked into Shinagawa; announcements chirped. Passengers queued for doors. Lucas sensed a new presence at the carriage end—a slim woman with buzz-cut hair and a Curator lapel pin half-hidden. Blue-LED earpiece flashed once.

Not Graves. Someone fresher, and with reinforcements.

Lucas met Serena's wary eyes. "Feel like another dance?"

"Always."

The doors slid open. Crowd surged. Buzz-cut agent pivoted toward them.

Lucas tightened grip on his Zippo, mind already calculating angles, stopwatch digits cascading behind his retina.

The duel had graduated beyond playful.

And somewhere, in an unwritten branch, the hourglass flipped.

CH 18 – Seoul — Critical Hit

Lucas Vale limped through the glass atrium of the Hyper-Grid Esports Arena, Seoul's neon-slick cathedral to competitive gaming, hiding the flare in his knee beneath the lazy swagger he'd perfected on casino floors. The last forty-eight hours—bullet-train feints, Shinagawa station dodges, and a clandestine ferry hop across the Straits—had ground his battered shoulder until every heartbeat felt like a hammer-tap on bone. But adrenaline still whispered the same promise: one more score, one more surge, and the pain would fade behind the roar.

He tugged the brim of a borrowed Snapdragon Dragons cap lower, skirting a merch stand where teenagers queued for jerseys plastered with sponsor logos. Inside, a best-of-five final for StormCore 2150 was minutes from kickoff. A thunder of bass rattled the concourse, rattling Lucas too—though for him the resonance was psychic. Thousands of minds, caffeinated and hyped, pulsed around him like a living circuit board. The chatter skimmed just below conscious hearing: We need better vision wards mid… If Cider recycles that macro strat we're doomed… She actually cosplayed the mech-commander skin, that's dedication.

Lucas breathed through the mental swell, filtering to the one frequency he'd come to poach.

"We can't win without a miracle," a male voice spit in crisp Korean, laced with panic. "Sub's a no-show, coach. We forfeit map one, maybe the whole purse."

Bingo. Lucas followed the thought to its owner—a wiry man in coaching black pacing near the Team Polaris locker room. Fear bled off him like static. Lucas let telepathy dig two layers deeper: an image flashed of spreadsheets, sponsorship penalties, and the coach's personal debt. Desperation made people open to miracles.

Lucas flicked his Zippo lighter in his pocket—his private talisman for timing hacks—and stepped into the corridor.

"Coach Ryu?" He coughed out basic Korean he'd polished on the flight. "Heard you're down a flex support. I can fill in."

Ryu blinked at the stranger with an Australian lilt. "We don't take fans backstage."

Lucas let a grin slide. "Not a fan. A contractor. Friends call me CircuitGhost." He tossed the alias like a lure, adding a gentle micro-influence push—just enough to tilt the coach's emotional needle from suspicion to curiosity, no more. "Pull my ranked stats if you want, but the bigger edge isn't my aim. It's intel."

Ryu folded arms. "Intel?"

"Live reads on enemy comms," Lucas said, technically not lying. "No hacks, nothing traceable. Just… uncanny game sense. Five minutes and I'll prove it. If I'm wrong, you bench me and I vanish."

A thought flashed across Ryu's mind—Could this foreigner be another of SM.iLT's psych-ops stunts?—but debt anxiety bludgeoned caution. He jerked his head toward the locker room. "Five minutes."

Polaris's boot camp smelled of energy drinks, motherboard solder, and frightened ambition. Five players jerked upright as Lucas entered, one of them—IGN Mirṣad—clutching his mouse like a rosary.

Ryu rattled off explanation, summoning skeptical frowns. Lucas let the team's surface thoughts wash in: Who is this kangaroo?Coach is losing it.If we tank today, title sponsor walks.

Lucas spoke English—common tongue among top tiers. "I'm here for information parity. You'll hear my callouts through local comms. Trust them, and I'll buy you map one."

He slipped on the spare haptic visor, jacked into the spectator terminal, and sank into the HUD feed. Immediately the hum of the arena outside narrowed to a tight corridor: his own breath, the click of keys, and the staccato inner monologues of the enemy squad, Team Iron Pulse, seeping through walls like radio waves.

"Stack nano-bots top lane. Catch Mirṣad over-extending.""Force early Dragon burn."

Lucas relayed in calm English between Polaris headsets. "Pulse is five-stacking top. Mirṣad, bait but disengage after fifteen seconds. J-Chen rotate for counter flank."

Mirṣad obeyed, voice shaky: "Copy… baiting."

On screen, the enemy's ambush collapsed into a crossfire trap Lucas had orchestrated ten seconds ahead. First blood. The crowd erupted. Polaris's confidence spiked like a stock price.

Lucas rode the momentum, weaving telepathic strands into surgical calls—predicting ult buys, lining up trap corridors, pre-emptying Pulse's macro rotations. Within nine minutes map one ended in a blitzkrieg Polaris win.

The team jumped up, roaring. Even the stoic tank, a man built like a fridge, smacked Lucas's good shoulder hard enough to jolt knives of pain down his arm. He swallowed the grimace.

Ryu's phone vibrated: sponsors texting, hearts exploding emoji, promises of bonus crypto. He yanked Lucas aside. "You're a magician. Two more like that and we split a fat piece of prize pool. But you don't go onstage; rules forbid mid-match analyst feed. You ghost in this room."

Lucas shrugged. "I'm allergic to spotlights."

And maybe to bullet wounds, he reflected, rolling his shoulder until it popped. Adrenaline fuzzed the edges of the ache. He could manage two more maps.

Map two was closer. Lucas felt telepathy strain under the avalanche of crowd thought as tactics grew chaotic. Twice he had to micro-pause reality for half a heartbeat to read enemy screens—burning spoonfuls of chrono-energy he couldn't spare—but the gambits paid off. Polaris secured an overtime victory.

Map three, championship point, started with Pulse adapting—thoughts grew guarded, playbook elastic. Lucas picked up a stray inner whisper: "Stranger in their room feeding?" The rival coach, no doubt suspecting foul play. Security could yank connections mid-round.

Lucas inhaled, weighing risk. He could hard-pause time, scout their entire strat folder—easy win—but the arena held cameras, motion sensors. Prolonged freeze risked glitches, exposures. And his knee screamed each minute. Not yet. Instead he nudged emotion: slid doubt into Pulse's star carry, coaxed hyper-aggression. The carry dove too deep, Polaris counter-collapsed, and the map swung.

When the final Nexus exploded, confetti cannons thundered. Lucas leaned back, headset askew, exhaling like a diver breaching surface. The roar felt distant, cotton-muffled—a sign he was nearing his fatigue cliff.

Ryu thrust a ledger wallet into Lucas's palm. "Our crypto cut. 2.5 bitcoin, as promised. You saved our season."

Lucas pocketed it. "Pleasure doing weird business." Then he slipped out before photographers could immortalize the mysterious strategist.

He exited into a freezing dusk, neon kanji reflecting in puddles. Hyper-Grid's façade was a kaleidoscope marquee of winners' avatars. Lucas kept moving, the world's noise pin-prickling his raw synapses. He needed quiet, food, and a lay-low hostel before Serena traced his breadcrumb. She'd survived the Shinagawa showdown, catching a later train to Haneda; her last text—You can run but can't ghost read me forever.—buzzed across his conscience.

A voice in Korean murmured behind him: "Mr. Vale appreciates e-sports?"

Lucas's pulse dipped. He turned slow to see a buzz-cut figure in nondescript streetwear—same square jaw as the Curator agent who'd boarded the Shinkansen. Seoul chapter, apparently. Behind the agent, pedestrians flowed oblivious.

Lucas forced a genial smile. "Got the wrong guy, mate."

"Saying so won't change trajectory." The agent's eyes gleamed oddly glassy—mercury watchfulness—matching Lucas's glimpse outside Kyoto. No tell-tale ear-comms; perhaps telepathic themselves. Unsettling.

Lucas evaluated distance to the subway entrance: twenty metres, crowded. Freeze escape viable but risky; every second of chrono-pause lately stabbed his knee. Option two: misdirection.

He widened telepathic feelers towards passers-by. A nearby salaryman's brain echoed stress about an overdue child-support payment. Lucas nudged, micro-influencing panic. The man halted, patting pockets, then bolted shouting for police, believing his wallet stolen. Chain reaction—others startled, jostled, a swirl of chaos masking sightlines.

Lucas slipped left, ducking beneath a holographic billboard. He risked a 0.3-second time-glitch—everything stilled, sound vacated—to vault a locked service gate. On resumption, he landed in an alley smelling of garlic waste and ozone. The agent appeared at the alley mouth almost simultaneously, unfazed. Either they'd tracked the chrono-trail or possessed sharper reflexes than mortals.

"Lucas," the agent called, using his real name now. "Curators want conversation, not conflict."

Lucas's breath puffed white. "Funny recruitment method."

"Consider this persistence admiration." The agent advanced one slow step, palms unarmed. "You altered a deterministic prophecy on that train. Our philosophers are intrigued."

Behind the calm tone Lucas felt currents of intent, but reading the agent's thoughts was like tuning to a scrambled channel—noise, echoes, fragments: —tick—skip—causality weave—

Lucas backed up until a brick wall halted him. His knee trembled, a warning of limits. He thumbed his Zippo—habit—and flicked the lid open. Flame burst, a metronome to focus. In the mirror of the flame, time beckoned, an ocean he could plunge into. But if the agent could see through pauses, he might strand Lucas mid-freeze, like insects trapped in amber.

He smirked instead. "Tell your philosophers I'm on a honeymoon with chaos. Inbox is full."

The agent exhaled, eyelids lowering. "Then they'll escalate contact."

He reached into his jacket—not for a weapon but a slim metal card embossed with the Curator ouroboros symbol Lucas had stolen from the private museum. He tossed it underhand; Lucas caught reflexively. The card pulsed with cold, faint energy—as if storing static time.

"When ready," the agent said, "press the center. We will answer."

Then he stepped back—and walked away. No threat, no tackle, simply vanished into street currents.

Lucas stared, shaken not by danger but by the restraint. Boredom, his old nemesis, peered from around the corner of intrigue—except this wasn't boring at all. This was a gambit.

A female voice from behind: "You and mysterious cards, honestly."

Serena Kaur emerged from shadow, camera bag slung cross-body, hair wind-tossed. She must have tailed him from the arena—ever the bloodhound.

Lucas pocketed the card. "Thought you'd still be in Japan."

"Thought you'd stop stealing moments that aren't yours." She glanced at his limp, softer. "Also thought you might need backup."

So many thoughts to read, so many he refused. He managed a lopsided grin. "I just made two-and-a-half bitcoin. Drinks on me?"

She raised an eyebrow. "Crypto's volatile. I'll take ramen and answers."

A siren wailed two blocks over—perhaps cops corralling Lucas's panic-seeded distraction. Streetlights flickered, haloing snow-flurries that had begun drifting. Lucas felt every micron of fatigue in his marrow, yet a thrum of exhilaration overrode it. Curators escalating; Graves somewhere en-route; Serena unwillingly on his side.

"Ramen then," he conceded, pushing off the wall. "But know this: tonight I may have broken an esport meta and angered a metaphysical book club."

Serena snorted. "Just another Thursday."

They started down the alley, but Lucas glanced once more at the card. The ouroboros caught neon glare, winking circuitry veins. A touch away sat answers, or traps, or both.

He closed his fist over it as a new thought sliced through—Escalation is inevitable; choose the terms.—and wondered if it was his own or an echo planted by the mercury-eyed watcher.

Somewhere above, an advertising drone pivoted, lens frozen on the alley. Lucas felt the hairs on his neck lift—did it catch his micro-pause earlier? Did the world now have another glitch frame for Graves to analyze?

Snowflakes fattened, muting city din. Lucas and Serena stepped into the pale drizzle, unaware that the drone had already begun streaming anomalous footage to a security hub on the other side of the Pacific—where Mason Graves leaned in, eyes narrowing.

And the card in Lucas's pocket pulsed once, like a second heartbeat, waiting for him to press.

CH 19 – Seoul — Spark over Hannam

Lucas Vale slouched against a waist-high planter of baby pines, surveying the rooftop of the Hannam Riverline Hostel as if it were another esports map. Paper lanterns looped from pergola beams, every bulb tinting the frost-rimmed air blush-peach. A Bluetooth speaker thumped retro K-pop; somebody had spiked the makgeolli keg with soju; and below, the Han River cut a mercury ribbon through neon Seoul. Lucas's knee ached like a rusted hinge, his shoulder burned with every clink of bottleglass, and the Ouroboros card in his jeans pocket pulsed a faint, arrhythmic chill.

He'd promised Serena ramen. Ramen had turned into a shared cab ride, cab banter into "one quick drink" after they'd spotted the hostel's fairy-light terrace, and now—two hours later—Lucas's inner clock ticked past midnight. The ledger wallet stuffed with 2.5 bitcoin felt heavier than the cap he'd borrowed at the arena, but the weight nagging him most was boredom's old phantom. Parties were background noise; he wanted a sharper edge. And boredom knew exactly how to tempt him.

Across the deck, a circle of exchange students clustered around a cheap portable heater, half-listening to a tipsy Canadian named Drew explain the rules of a phone-based drinking game called "Trigger." Each round began with someone blurting a dare into the group chat; the digital wheel spat out a random target. Execution meant social glory; refusal meant chugging a cup of neon-green "nuclear" soju.

Lucas sipped his Cass beer—not that he tasted it—and let telepathy skim the party chatter. Surface thoughts fluttered like confetti: God I hope Ji-Ahn notices me… These city lights make my Insta grid pop… Wish Dad believed this internship mattered…

Serena leaned her elbows on the parapet, scarf whipped by winter drafts. Her cheeks, flushed from rice wine, softened the hard edge of journalistic focus; still, her eyes kept sliding to Lucas, measuring him against the stranger on Macau's casino floor and the myth the Curator agent had confirmed. She didn't know about the card pulsing cold against his thigh—he hadn't found the words.

"You promised noodles," she said, flicking a sesame seed off her sleeve.

"Technically I promised food." Lucas raised his cup. "Fermented rice counts. Carb is carb."

"Your definition of dinner is tragic." Serena's gaze traced the skyline. "At least the river view compensates."

Lucas studied her profile, caught half-lit by a lantern's glow. The last time he'd examined a face so intently it had been through casino security glass. Now the urge was different—curiosity, sure, but also gravity.

He broke eye-contact first, scanning the party for mischief enough to distract him from the ouroboros heartbeat. Drew had just broadcast the next Trigger dare: "Swap two people's phones for five minutes without them noticing." The wheel spun on screen, names flickering.

Lucas's lip twisted. An idea sparked—small, harmless, the kind of prank he'd once pulled at Perth uni orientation. Except ordinary pranks lacked that extra drizzle of chrono-spice.

The wheel beeped, landing on a nervous Greek student wearing mittens so thick he could barely thumb-type. Laughter rippled. The Greek, Nikos, grimaced, already tipping back his glass in resignation.

Lucas cleared his throat. "I'll substitute for him." He pitched the words with a micro-influence tug, a playful nudge that stole the crowd's attention. "Fairer odds if someone with nimble fingers steps in."

Cheering approved the stranger's volunteering. Serena arched a brow but said nothing.

The rules hammered into Lucas's brain: swap two targets' phones unseen, return before they notice, no physical force. He could do it the old-fashioned pickpocket way—or he could cheat time.

His Zippo lighter lay warm in his palm. He clicked it open, flame a tiny metronome. He breathed once, twice—stepped between ticks.

Silence swallowed the rooftop. Lantern cords froze mid-sway. Rice-wine vapor hung still as sculpture. In the chrono-pause, Lucas moved, knee twinging but obedient. First phone: Drew's, jutting halfway from his hoodie pocket. Second: the Greek student's; he plucked it from mittened grip. Swap positions. He considered adding garnish—changing lock-screen selfies, sending cryptic emojis—but fatigue tugged at his ribs. He kept it simple.

He flicked the Zippo shut.

Sound returned like surf. Drew blinked, hoodie swaying. Nikos glanced down, puzzled to feel smooth glass instead of mittens. Gasps and laughter cascaded as realisation dawned; the swap had occurred in the breadth of a heartbeat.

"Mate, that was wizardry!" Drew crowed, slapping Lucas's uninjured shoulder. "How'd you snake them?"

Lucas shrugged, performing modesty. "Trade secret."

Serena's arms crossed. "You used your 'talent,' didn't you?" she muttered beneath music.

Lucas maintained a façade of obliviousness, but Serena's thought darted clear: Show-off. Also… impressive. The compliment warmed him, then chilled with consequence—because boredom was never sated. Already partygoers were chanting for a bigger trick, a wilder dare. Trigger's wheel whirred again.

"Kiss the host without warning."

Drew's grin faltered; the wheel had stopped on him. The host— tattoo-sleeved graduate student named So-Min—gaped, half amused, half insulted.

Lucas read panic blooming in Drew's thoughts: She's basically my TA tomorrow. Dead, so dead.

Another spark. Lucas should have walked away, found ramen, iced his knee. Instead he fed the spark. He whispered to Serena, "Reputation salvage job?"

"Don't," she warned. Too late; he was already tuning emotional dials—only mild amplification—to push group mood from voyeuristic anticipation toward collective silliness, diffusing the dare's sting. He wove an alternate suggestion into the students' thought-stream: wouldn't it be hilarious if the wheel, just this once, swapped dare and participant? The idea spread like candle-flare across dry paper. Laughter pivoted; Drew's relief bloomed; So-Min toasted the group with platonic bravado.

Serena watched Lucas like a cryptographer intercepting code. "You manipulate them," she said under the music, "the way DJs remix basslines."

Lucas tried to grin boyishly, but guilt nibbled. "Tiny nudge. No harm done."

"Harmless until you mis-calibrate." Serena looked at the students. "Or until someone realises the glitch."

At that moment, Nikos noticed his phone lock-screen: Drew's girlfriend. Confusion fulminated. He demanded explanation; Drew defended, jostling So-Min's sleeve. So-Min's drink sloshed across her jacket; she swore, instinctively shoved Drew; the Greek's elbow caught an American tourist's ribs. Volume escalated from laughter to cursing. Within twenty seconds a circle of accidentally offended strangers traded shouts in three languages, each convinced the other had started it.

Lucas felt chaos spin—a cascade he'd triggered by underestimating friction. The emotional momentum now fed itself; micro-influence couldn't simply re-dial once mass psychology took hold. And he was too fatigued for a broad-field push. He tasted copper panic on his tongue—flashback to the gambling yacht storm slip that nearly killed him.

Serena stepped beside him, tone low. "Fix it."

"Working on it," he hissed. But the brawl gears meshed. Drew lunged at the American; Nikos tried to intercede; So-Min grabbed a broom as makeshift barrier. A lantern cable snapped, sparking; the speaker stuttered.

The fight threatened to topple someone over the parapet onto the alley four storeys below.

Lucas weighed a time-freeze. But the rooftop boasted security cams aimed at the deck for liability; a hard pause would imprint another glitch frame for Graves or—worse—the Curators. He inhaled, probing for a subtler lever.

Serena didn't wait. She dove into the melee, intercepting Drew's arm mid-swing, planting her feet in a Muay Thai stance Lucas hadn't known she possessed. She barked crisp Korean, ordering space. Her calm cut through testosterone fog; some heads turned. She then addressed So-Min in quick banter, half apology, half compliment on her music playlist. Compliment created rapport; rapport dampened anger.

Lucas leapt in, shoulder screaming, and physically slid a table to widen distance between combatants. He poured a pitcher of ice water over the speaker, silencing the beat—strategic quiet. The lull allowed voices to recalibrate.

He channeled a pinpoint shove of telekinesis, nudging an untouched bottle from the ledge to shatter at his feet. Startled eyes pivoted to the noise, away from each other. In that moment he broadcast a telepathic ripple: Embarrassing, over nothing, be cool, tourists filming. He didn't force thoughts, only mirrored latent embarrassment each fighter already felt.

The conflict deflated like a punctured balloon. Nikos mumbled apology. Drew clapped So-Min on the shoulder; So-Min rolled eyes but cracked a grin. Someone restarted the music at lower volume. Crisis ended in under ninety seconds.

Serena returned, exhaling. "Ramen would've been safer," she chided, but her shoulders trembled with leftover adrenaline. "Next time your boredom wants a snack, buy puzzles."

Lucas chuckled weakly. "Lesson learnt: never stir a crowd on an empty stomach."

"Or on an empty moral ledger." She brushed glass shards from her jeans. "You feel that?" She meant the electric hum between them, the post-danger charge neither telepathy nor micro-influence could fake.

Lucas did. He also felt knee tendons throbbing and the cold Ouroboros pulse intensify, as if the card sensed his lurch toward purpose…and wanted to reorder priorities.

He took Serena's hand—not pushing emotion, just contact. "Let's leave before my curiosity bankrupts us in broken crockery fees."

They threaded toward the stairwell, weaving through clusters of gossip now spinning versions of the scuffle. Halfway across the deck Lucas froze—metaphorically this time. Over the parapet, two blocks east, a single strobe of red-blue police light painted the river's mist. Routine patrol, maybe. Or maybe a response to noise complaints expedited by a certain security consultant reviewing micro-pause anomalies from a drone feed.

Lucas's breath clouded. "We need to move."

Serena followed his gaze. "Graves?"

"Paranoid hunch. But I've learned to bet on those." He squeezed her fingers. "We duck through alleyways, find noodles, lay low."

Serena nodded but tugged him to a halt under a burnt-out lantern. "Lucas, back there—you defused what you detonated. That matters." Her hand rose to brush the collar of his jacket, close enough he caught the cedar scent of her shampoo.

Low music faded behind them, replaced by city hush. Lucas leaned fractionally closer—intending, perhaps, something reckless—when metal vibrated against his thigh. The card.

A pulse, stronger. Cold radiated outward like dry ice. For a heartbeat he swore he heard overlapping whispers—languages he didn't know, timing out of sync. Serena felt him stiffen. "What's wrong?"

He fished the card free. Under lantern shadow, the ouroboros symbol glowed faint silver, scales shifting, loop tightening. At its center, a pinprick of white expanded then contracted, as if counting down.

Serena stared. "That from your agent friend?"

"Calling card," Lucas said. "Literally."

The pinprick flashed thrice. On the third beat, Lucas's vision tunneled. A holographic display sprang mid-air: a schematic of branching lines, each node labeled in cryptic coordinates. At the top: BRANCH-ΔK, Seoul — Contact Event Pending. Below it, a scroll of text: Press to accept dialog. Decline incurs observational escalation.

Serena exhaled a single syllable too rude for polite Korean. "So the Curators schedule appointments now?"

"Or threats wearing polite suits." Lucas tapped the holo—hesitant—and it vanished, leaving the chilled metal inert again.

He pocketed it. "They want conversation because I changed a train crash that never happened. Tonight I just almost sparked a rooftop tragedy. They study causality and I'm their wild ferret."

"So what's the play?" Serena asked.

Lucas gazed toward the Han River. In the water's reflection, he saw three rotating lanterns and, impossibly, the after-image of mercury-bright eyes. Watching. Measuring.

"The play," he whispered, "is choose who writes the rules before someone else writes them for you."

Serena squeezed his hand. "Then maybe start with ramen and a strategy session?"

Ahead, the stairwell door slammed—Drew and Nikos trotting down, laughing, bruises already cherished as story currency. Life reset so quickly after chaos. Lucas swallowed self-reproach, feeling the high-wire thrill inch toward guilt's shoulder.

"Yes," he said finally. "Ramen first. Card choices after."

They descended into stairwell shadows. Behind them, a lantern rekindled in random gust, shedding sparks that drifted over scattered glass shards—tiny constellations dying before hitting the concrete.

And four rooftops away, a lens recalibrated, tracking thermal signatures—streaming live to a hotel suite where Mason Graves paused the footage, zooming in on Lucas's face, lip-reading his final, nervous grin.

Graves tapped his tablet, firing off an encrypted message: "Target confirmed Seoul. Pattern escalation suggest imminent Curator meet. Dispatch intercept unit."

Rooftop sparks hissed out. Downstairs, Lucas and Serena pushed into the night's labyrinth, unaware that the choice of noodles over negotiations had bought them mere hours.

For some puzzles, the timer starts before the solver even knows they're playing.