The train rumbled beneath Ren's feet as he sat still, spine straight, hands trembling around a warm cup of canned coffee he didn't remember buying. It was 2:15 a.m., and the fluorescent lights overhead buzzed with a sickly glow. People sat around him, absorbed in their devices or dozing off to the lull of motion. Normal. Mundane.
But he wasn't.
In his palm, the shard of the Fractured Hourglass ticked faintly—rhythmic, like a heartbeat. No larger than a coin, it pulsed with faint blue light, unseen by the world around him.
Ren turned it over, expecting it to fade, vanish, or disintegrate like so many of his memories had. But the shard stayed. Real. Solid. A contradiction in a world that had supposedly reset.
Across from him, the girl who had smiled earlier was gone. Her seat empty.
Had she been real?
Or had she just been the Clockwitch in disguise again?
He closed his eyes and tried to reach for his memories—of Adessia, of Ayane, of the Chronoguardians—but they floated just beyond reach, blurred as if behind fogged glass. He remembered the battle. The choice. The blade in his chest.
But the rest… the rest was fractured.
The train slowed. The speaker above garbled an announcement: "Next stop—Kanda."
The lights flickered. Once. Twice.
And then… time hiccuped.
It was subtle. The blinking of a man's eyes across from him skipped. A child's bouncing leg paused mid-air for a full second before catching up to itself. Even the canned coffee in Ren's hand shimmered as condensation reversed for a moment—dew crawling backward into the metal.
No one else reacted.
But Ren felt it.
Something was wrong.
The doors hissed open. Ren stepped onto the platform, trying to breathe normally, even as his heart told him he wasn't in Tokyo anymore.
Because no one else had gotten off.
No one else moved.
He turned. The train was frozen, passengers suspended mid-blink, mid-breath. A strange, humming silence filled the air—too still to be real.
And standing beneath the flickering light was a man in a white coat, black gloves, and an hourglass insignia glowing faintly on his chest.
> "Hello again, Ren," he said. "Or should I say… Hourborn."
Ren backed away instinctively. The man's face was obscured—blurred like a low-resolution photo. He couldn't see his features, but the voice was familiar.
> "Who are you?" Ren asked, his fingers curling around the hourglass shard.
> "I'm what came after the reset," the man replied. "I was created in the margin between decisions. You shattered causality to save the multiverse. Noble. But incomplete."
The lights above pulsed, and with each flicker, the man seemed to shift position—first to the left, then slightly behind Ren, then directly in front of him again.
Temporal skipping.
> "You should have erased the core, Ren. But instead, you fractured it. Now there's no central timeline. No anchor. Time flows like shattered glass."
> "I gave people a choice," Ren said, voice steady. "I gave myself a choice."
> "And now reality bleeds because of it."
The man reached into his coat and pulled out a device that looked like a broken watch melded with a tuning fork. He struck it against the air—and time rippled outward like a pond disturbed.
Reality peeled back like wallpaper, revealing glimpses of other timelines.
Ren saw versions of himself:
One where he never fell into Adessia, and became a salaryman with dead eyes.
One where he joined the Twelvefold Mask and stood beside Ayane as her second-in-command.
One where the Chronoguardians ruled Earth, time enforced by clocksteel soldiers.
And one—horrifying—where the Clockwitch reigned, and he was her chained enforcer.
Ren staggered.
> "You see now?" the man whispered. "The reset didn't fix the paradox. It amplified it. You are still the Broken Hour. The shard proves it."
Ren looked down. The shard now ticked louder. Faster.
> "What do you want from me?"
> "To finish what you started. Erase the Hourborn from all timelines. Purge the reset. Let time choose a single thread again."
Ren laughed bitterly. "You want to kill me."
> "Not kill. Unmake. There's a difference."
The man raised the tuning-fork device—and time began to collapse inward. Lights flickered violently. The world blurred. Passengers on the train began to scream, but the sound was warped, reversed, like someone playing a record backward.
And then—
Everything stopped.
A chime rang out. Soft. Clear. Familiar.
> ting—ting—ting
The distortion cracked like glass under heat. The white-coated man froze mid-stride.
A silhouette walked through the broken light.
She wore a dark trenchcoat, brass gauntlets, and a glowing mark on her temple—a single horizontal line. Her silver hair fluttered despite the still air.
Ren's breath caught.
> "Ayane…"
Her eyes were colder now. But unmistakable.
> "You really made a mess," she said dryly.
> "You're alive."
> "Sort of."
She pointed to the white-coated man. "That's a Threadwraith. An echo created when timelines fracture and overlap. They hunt instability. That means you."
Ren felt like the platform was tilting beneath him.
> "Why are you helping me?"
Ayane shrugged. "Because I remember too. Because maybe you were right."
She raised her gauntlet. A pulse of blue light struck the Threadwraith, freezing it in a column of suspended time.
> "You bought choice at the cost of structure. Now we deal with what comes next."
As reality resumed, the train blinked out of existence. The station was empty. Time reset the setting, but not the truth.
Ren stared at the shard in his hand. It no longer ticked.
Ayane turned away. "There are more of them. Threadwraiths. And worse. They're crawling through the cracks. The Clockwitch is gone. You made sure of that. But that just means no one's steering anymore."
> "So what do we do?"
She looked over her shoulder.
> "We rebuild time—one thread at a time. Or we watch everything unravel."
And with that, they stepped into the shadows of the underground tunnel, the shard dim in Ren's palm—but somehow heavier than ever.
To Be Continued--