Chapter 105 The Countdown to Nothing

Chapter 105 The Countdown to Nothing
The timer on my hand burnt. 00:58… 00:57… It was a bright, angry red. I stared at it, frozen. The rain kept falling, hitting the pavement with a flat, dull sound. Beside me, Kael, or the man who looked exactly like him, walked away, sipping his coffee. He didn't know me. He didn't know about the labs, the loops, or the dome. To him, I was just a girl standing in the middle of a busy sidewalk.

00:50…

I had to move. I didn't know where, but staying here was a death sentence. I turned and ran. I didn't care about the people I bumped into or the cars honking as I darted across the street. My heart was thumping in my ears, a frantic drumbeat that kept pace with the ticking numbers on my skin.

I ducked into an alleyway. It was narrow and dark, filled with trash and the smell of wet cardboard. I leaned against a cold brick wall, gasping for air.

"Okay," I whispered to myself. "Think. The Overseer said this was the real game. He reset the board. Kael is a stranger. Zero is gone. And I have one minute before… what?"

00:35…

The timer wasn't just a clock. It felt like a countdown to a permanent delete. If it hit zero, would I disappear? Or would I just wake up back in the lab, strapped to a chair, ready for Loop 106?

I couldn't go back. I wouldn't.

I ripped a piece of fabric from my sleeve and wrapped it tightly over the red numbers. It didn't hide the heat, but it stopped me from having to watch my own life tick away.

00:20…

A shadow stretched across the alley floor. I spun around, my fists raised, ready to fight.

Standing at the entrance was Zero. She wasn't wearing her soldier uniform. She wore a plain, gray hoodie and jeans. She looked like she had just crawled out of a nightmare. Her hair was messy, and her eyes were wide with fear.

"You idiot," she breathed, running toward me. "You actually pulled the trigger."

"I broke the system," I said, my voice shaking. "I thought… I thought we were free."

"There is no free!" she hissed, grabbing my arms. "There is only the board. You didn't delete the system; you just forced it to restart. And do you know what happens during a restart? Everything that shouldn't be there gets wiped."

"Like us?"

"Like us," she said. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a small, silver coin. She pressed it into my hand. It was ice-cold. "This is a glitch. It’s a piece of the original code that I managed to hide during the crash. If we can get to the city’s main power hub before the timer hits zero, we can inject this. It’ll force the system to see us as part of the permanent file. We won't be deleted."

00:10…

"Where is the hub?" I asked.

"The clock tower!" she yelled, pointing toward the centre of the city. "Run!"

We sprinted out of the alley. The city felt different now. The people were moving in strange, jagged patterns, like characters in a game with a bad connection. Some of them were simply freezing in place, their skin turning gray and static-like.

The clock tower loomed ahead. It was massive, a dark spike of iron against the dying sky.

00:05…

We reached the base of the tower. The door was locked tight.

"Kick it!" I screamed.

Zero and I both threw our weight against the heavy wood. It groaned, the hinges screaming in protest.

00:03…

One more push. The door flew open. We scrambled inside, racing up the narrow, spiraling stairs. My lungs felt like they were filled with needles.

00:02…

We reached the top. The massive gears were grinding, slow and heavy. In the centre, there was a small, glowing terminal, the heart of the city’s control.

"Put the coin in!" Zero gasped, collapsing onto the floor.

I lunged for the terminal. I held the silver coin high, ready to jam it into the slot. But as my fingers touched the metal, a voice echoed through the room. It was deep, metallic, and sounded like the earth itself cracking.

"You have chosen to stay."

I froze. A man stepped out from behind the giant clock gears. He wasn't the overseer. He wasn't Kael. He was a man made of moving clockwork, bronze skin, glowing blue eyes, and limbs that ticked with every move.

"Who are you?" I demanded.

"I am the one who keeps the time," the clockwork man said. He raised a hand, and the air around me turned into a solid wall of ice. I couldn't move. I couldn't breathe.

"The system does not allow glitches," he said, walking slowly toward me. He looked at the coin in my hand with a look of pure hunger. "That coin belongs to the void. And you… you belong to me."

He reached out and snatched the coin from my hand.

00:01…

He held it up to the light, his eyes widening. "You didn't fix the code," he whispered, a terrifying grin spreading across his metal face. "You brought me the final piece I needed to break reality."

He crushed the coin in his hand, and the entire world started to tilt. The ground fell away, the sky shattered into glass, and I felt myself falling, not down, but out.

"What have you done?" I screamed.

"I have ended the game," he said, and he pushed me off the edge of the world.

As I fell through the empty, dark space between realities, I saw something that made my blood freeze. Below me, thousands of other Earths were floating in the dark, each one inside a giant, pulsing glass bubble.

And in every single bubble, I saw myself dying.

A hand caught my ankle, stopping my fall. I looked up. It was the overseer, but he was crying.

"Eara", he sobbed, "the clockmaker isn't the final boss. We were the protectors. We were keeping the door shut."

He pointed to a massive, dark shadow rising behind the Clockmaker, a shape so big it covered all the bubbles.

"And now," he whispered, "you just let it in."