10:11 a.m. — The Hourglass District
The city breathed with noise. Car horns. Chatter. Somewhere, a musician played a violin too beautifully for it to be casual. But Not Nice heard none of it. Not really. When the ring wasn't active, the world was all grayscale and static.
He walked past the fountains of the Hourglass District, his trench coat swaying, silver revolver hidden beneath. People turned to look, some sensing something off. They always did. He didn't feel like a person anymore. Just a shape—cold and drifting.
His destination sat nestled between a crumbling bookstore and a bubble tea shop.
No signs. No open hours. Just a rusted plaque nailed to the door:
"ARCHIVE 13 — TIME IS A FABLE TOLD IN BLOOD"
He pushed it open.
10:14 a.m. — The Librarian
The smell hit him first. Paper, dust, and burnt candle wax. Then, silence. The kind of silence that bends around you, that listens back.
A man sat at the far table, old beyond measure. Not in the way of years, but of weight. Burden. His coat was moth-eaten velvet, and his eyes were like tarnished glass. One look, and you knew he had catalogued things the world forgot existed.
"You are late," said the man, without looking up.
"I didn't know I was invited."
"You are always invited. You just rarely accept."
Not Nice said nothing. He reached into his coat and placed a folded piece of paper on the table.
The man unfolded it.
The diagram drawn in blood and ash shimmered faintly.
A spiraling symbol of claws devouring a chain — the mark of an Override Clause.
The old man blinked. Once. Slowly.
"Where did you find this?" the librarian asked.
"Off a corpse in Greymarket. Took three bullets to drop him. Used the fourth to finish the memory wipe so he couldn't scream."
The librarian smiled. "That sounds like you."
"I want to know if it's real."
The man took the symbol, lit a violet flame beneath it, and waited.
The paper didn't burn.
Instead, it whispered. A thousand voices, murmuring in forgotten tongues.
The librarian nodded solemnly.
"It is real. And dangerous. A Clause like this is a recursive tether. It doesn't just unbind you—it devours the Forfeiture and reweaves it. You could regain your emotions… but also something else. Something you didn't mean to bring back."
Not Nice stared, unblinking.
"I'll take that chance."
10:47 a.m. — The Catch
"There is, of course, a price," the librarian said, folding his hands.
"Name it."
"You must kill a Contractor like yourself. Not one of the weak. A marked one. Someone with an active Pact and a Forfeiture of their own."
"Why?"
"Because an Override can only be claimed through relative resonance. You must strip the power from someone equally damned."
Not Nice thought of the man he had shot yesterday. A petty thief. Barely a whisper of magic. That soul had only given him a few hours of warmth.
But now?
He had to kill someone like himself. Someone who had chosen power over love.
Someone who had something worth taking.
He could feel the ache behind his ribs. A phantom echo of the ring's fading warmth.
"Kill someone like me. To feel like me again."
"I'll do it."
12:02 p.m. — The Target
The librarian handed him a photo.
Crisp, monochrome. A woman in a tattered red coat. A glare like broken glass. A sword made of whispers on her back.
"Codename: Velvenna. Pact class: Binding-Blood. Forfeiture: Her name and all memories of her existence were erased. No one remembers her—not even herself."
"She kills not for power. Not for survival. But to leave a mark on the world that cannot forget her again."
Not Nice tucked the photo away.
The tragedy wasn't that he had to kill her.
The tragedy was that if he didn't use the ring before then…
he wouldn't be able to feel sorry.
1:09 p.m. — Dead Zone 7, Outer Periphery
The ruins were always silent in a suspicious way. Nature had no business reclaiming the zone, and yet ivy crawled up glassless skyscrapers, and birds flitted through rusted beams. The kind of place where stories came to be forgotten.
Not Nice moved like a shadow among ghosts. His coat brushed the wall of a collapsed skybridge as he emerged onto a ledge with a sniper's view. In the distance, by an old fountain cracked with age, she stood—Velvenna.
Her red coat fluttered despite the windless day.
Her sword—if you could call it that—muttered. Voices, memories, regrets of those it had pierced. He couldn't hear them, but he could feel the residue of its grief radiating off her like heat from a burning church.
She was looking at something in her hand.
A paper crane.
She crushed it in her palm without emotion.
Then she turned and walked into the empty building across the square.
1:22 p.m. — Memory Bullet Preparation
Behind cover, Not Nice rested his back against a column. He closed his eyes and reached into the vault of his mind.
He selected a memory.
His daughter's sixth birthday.
The pink balloon tied to her wrist.
The way she said, "You smiled funny today, Daddy."
Because that was the first day he couldn't feel it.
He exhaled.
The ring glowed faintly as the memory dissolved.
The bullet formed—pure white, humming with temporal weight.
1 of 6 shots.
He could feel the loss immediately. Not the pain of it—just the hollow. He didn't remember what her laugh sounded like now. Or what flavor the cake had been.
"You don't kill with bullets," he reminded himself.
"You kill with the parts of yourself you can afford to lose."
He loaded the metaphysical shot into Hourbringer.
1:40 p.m. — The First Exchange
He waited for the right moment. Velvenna exited the building, dragging a corpse behind her. A man in Pact robes, still smoldering.
Not Nice raised Hourbringer.
Aimed.
BOOM.
Time slowed.
The shot collapsed into her, not with force, but with weight. Like gravity folding in on a moment.
She froze mid-step, eyes widening as her surroundings thickened into syrup.
But she didn't fall.
She turned her head. Slowly. Her neck twitching against the warped physics.
And then—impossibly—she moved.
Cut.
His side flared with sudden heat. She had leapt through the slowness, dragging her whisper-sword behind her like a comet's tail, and sliced a line of pain across his ribs.
Not Nice stumbled back, shocked. That shouldn't have been possible.
Velvenna looked at him, confused, then angry, then blank.
"You remember me?" she asked.
He paused.
"I will," he said. "For the next five minutes."
The moment he spoke, the world paused.
And she smiled.
A strange, sad, crooked thing.
"You shouldn't have said that."
1:44 p.m. — Full Tempo
The slowness collapsed. The world slammed back into real-time like a snapped rubber band.
Velvenna surged forward.
Not Nice fired a second shot—another memory gone, another ripple of deceleration—but she twirled midair, her sword dragging against the echo and cleaving time like fabric.
She was cutting through the slowdown.
He ducked, rolled, pulled a third shot—his wedding day—and loosed it point-blank.
This time, she screamed. She felt that one.
He could feel the recoil of it in his bones. The aching echo of vows forgotten.
She collapsed backward into rubble.
Breathing hard. Crying without knowing why.
He approached slowly.
"You're strong," he admitted.
"I don't want to be forgotten," she rasped.
"You won't be," he said, kneeling beside her.
And then, without hesitation, he pulled the trigger on the fourth shot.
The memory of his wife's laugh in the rain.
The bullet didn't kill.
It sealed her.
Time folded around her in a recursive bubble, a living mausoleum.
He reached down and touched her chest, ring-to-heart.
"Debt Claimed."
A surge of feeling rushed in.
Color. Warmth. Pain. Joy. Guilt.
Tears slipped down his cheeks.
And for the first time in weeks… he felt them.
2:12 p.m. — The Quiet After
He sat in the ruin, alone now, the bubble holding her in stasis behind him.
He remembered everything.
He hated everything.
"I kill to feel… just so I can feel what I've lost."
His fingers curled around the black ring.
It pulsed gently, like a heartbeat.
There were still two bullets left in Hourbringer.
Two memories he hadn't touched yet.
But he would.
Eventually.
He always did.