1 Time Track
The Outskirts. A barren wasteland, devoid of any native life. A barrier between the City and the Ruins beyond.
These were the junkyards, filled with trash dumped from the City, mutants from experiments gone wrong, and those abandoned by society. The endless pits of trash acted as an extra barrier to its perimeter walls.
And in a buried, decades old warehouse of the Outskirts, an 'Impurity' hid itself. It had been cast out of the City, deemed unfit to live.
The Impurity was being hunted, and it sensed them approaching near its final hideout.
...
"Boss, what's that?"
Asher turned around, swiftly pushing an unknown device into his brainstem.
The woman who called him 'Boss'... It was Tanya.
Tanya dug into her pockets, flicking a cigarette through the air and into her lips. With a burst of flame, the tip ignited.
The Impurity contemplated Tanya's wolfish demeanor. "A precaution," he said. If, no, when he died today-
"Master, don't be so nervous." Another voice whirred beside him, billowing a plume of white smoke into the air. Eileen, who had replaced her body with gears by now, tried to comfort him. Thin tubes pulsed royal purple fluids underneath her metallic skin.
Asher tapped his fingers restlessly. "I'm not nervous." A quick sweep of his gaze revealed nine others by his side, each a monster in their own right. They had chosen to follow him, even after he had been deemed an Impurity. Now they would all be killed, all because they trusted him.
"..." The Crying Child stood silently in the corner. Its face was made from a patchwork of pale, twisting hands. Whispers and wails filled the air, yet the figure could not weep. It warned its companions, plainly terrified. Out of all of them, the Crying Child was the most pitiful, made obvious from its painful new form.
"I hear ya! When I heard Boss got made an Impurity..." Tanya's voice faded, and her smile grew thin.
They were here already, the ones who hunted the impurities of the world. Obviously, they were here for Asher, and the Impurity knew he was already dead.
"So, now you realize what happens to those who defy heaven?" An Arbiter's voice echoed behind them.
Their executioner had arrived.
...
Asher spat onto the concrete floor. Instead of spittle, chunks of flesh coated the ground. The warehouse and the surrounding sectors had been demolished to rubble, evidence of their last struggle.
But this was the end.
"Do you know your place now? We can rip even you of all things to shreds in your current state." A gravelly voiced figure stomped on his hand.
The man who stood on Asher's hand was primly dressed, concealed by a brown carapace mask. Several glowing needles were inserted in the man's left arm, periodically pumping and extracting unknown fluids from his body.
The man was named Baral, the Claw.
"Quite the troublesome bunch you brought together, those Nine Distortions. Now they will never cause trouble again, how delightful." A regal black-haired woman wearing a gold embroidered coat stood by Baral's side, casually mentioning the nine people who trusted him, the people they killed in front of him.
Now, all was left of the infamous 'Nine Distortions' were their eviscerated bodies, strewn on the warehouse floor.
Floating lazily above the woman's outstretched hands were the Fairy and Key, higher dimensional weapons of artificial gods.
She was an Arbiter.
"Filled with woe, companions passed so suddenly? When Mother of Gears perished, seemed you held many tears?" A third voice interrupted.
The static outline of a woman lounged in a corner, clicking her mandibles in amusement.
Reality warped and glitched, wreathing her body with static white and obscuring her true form. Her shadow periodically flickered into something resembling a cross between a centipede and spider, with her chest bursting open to display a gaping, vile maw.
Her name was Luda, Beholder of the Eye.
"..." Asher merely closed his eyes.
"Good. Let us skip the last words." A glowing blue needle pierced through the Executioner's arm. Cyan aura covered his body, and he raised his hand, revealing a mutated claw. "Good riddance."
At the last moment, Asher's mouth trembled. "You won't kill me. I won't give you the satisfaction." His eyes didn't contain fear. Instead, they were filled with a strange resolve.
Luda chittered behind him, mocking his pitiable determination.
"Activate TimeTrack." As Asher spoke, a trail of blood flowed from the corner of his lips.
"Careful, Baral, Luda." The Arbiter's tone focused. Such an unpredictable Impurity would definitely have an 'ace' for situations like these. The Executioner and Beholder similarly backed off, though they looked on with more curiosity than wariness.
[Beginning TimeTrack Protocol]
A prompt appeared in Asher's vision, imperceptible by the three onlookers. He had never tested it before, so even he did not know what would happen.
This was his 'precaution'.
"Want to hear something interesting?" Asher's mouth curled into a smile.
Although the others didn't react, the Beholder shivered with instinctual unease.
Asher continued. "TimeTrack, that's its name. I injected it into my brain before you came. Its name seems similar to the Singularity of T Corp. You know what that means, right?"
Luda's chittering stopped.
"Mean? Can't possibly mean..." She turned back to the others. To her dismay, even the Arbiter held a wisp of fear in her expression.
The Singularity of T Corp involved time. TimeTrack, according to what Asher could research, had the ability to warp through time.
He wouldn't die here.
[Detected Imminent Danger, removing Host control.]
Asher wasn't too worried about the prompt. Soon he could get out of this place and restart.
"Stop him, now!" The Arbiter's Fairy wrapped around her left arm, sparkling dangerously. Her Key wrapped around her other arm, forming into a golden spear.
"I'll get another chance, you idiots. Hah- I'll make sure you regret coming after us." Asher couldn't even feel the pain in his body anymore. He watched Baral's claw, the Arbiter's 'Key', and Luda's spidery legs rushing towards him, but they were far too slow to reach him in time.
With one last laugh, his vision faded to darkness.
...
Asher found himself in a different place.
A void filled with darkness surrounded him. Stars blinked in the distance. His heart rate slowed down, eventually ceasing its beats. But he was still alive.
Asher looked around himself.
'Isn't this something?' He mused to himself.
Truly, this differed from anything T Corp had, much less any of the other Wings. None of the capabilities of the twenty-six Wings of the World could even compare to what he was experiencing now.
However, even he did not know what was going to happen next, the ancient manuscripts he had found about the device now imprinted in his brain said nothing about this void.
[Analyzing optimal growth route... Est. 10 minutes]
As he waited, the events of today surfaced with vivid ferocity. All of his companions died by the commands of the Head, the shadowy leader of the City.
Ever since the Head assigned him as an 'Impurity of the City', he was hounded by Stars and Nightmares, the Fixers from the Associations, and finally, the three vanguards of the Head. The Arbiter, Beholder, and Executioner.
Asher and his nine companions fought with everything they had against those artificial gods, but even the ten of them couldn't stop the onslaught of the strongest hunters in the world.
Why did they have to suffer?
The Nine Distortions were monsters in every sense of the word. They were also his closest confidantes.
He remembered the Crying Child's head, a writhing mass of greyish hands, rolling on the ground as it wailed. The flesh cogs implanted within the Mother of Gears' metallic frame, screeching in agony as they were wrung into pools of brackish blood.
The numerous shark's mouths covering the Eighth Chef, searching for food to sate its endless hunger, ultimately dying unsated. The Musician's bleats, shrieks, and clucks of pain as Luda plucked off and ate each of its heads one by one.
Asher's mouth twitched. Were its death throes also considered music?
L'heure du Loup grinned with her last breath, her battle-bred nature finally satisfied with her duel with the Claw. The Ringmaster's performance came to a bloody close, in a finale of explosions and gore. The Puppeteer's fleshy marionettes finally ceased their movements, the final puppet show.
The Blood Red Night, and Yesterday's Promise, fighting by his side until the very end. Now, their bodies didn't even exist anymore.
Nine of his blood-forged siblings, gone.
They were the twisted light of the world. The monsters, the Distorted.
Asher silently closed his eyes, but his tears refused to appear. Only a dry exhale came from his mouth. Then his eyes were open again.
Time in the endless void seemed stretched, and minutes felt like hours to him. Finally, another prompt displayed the device's success.
[Analyzed optimal growth route: Memory Sealing]
'Memory sealing? No! This can't be-!' Even as he struggled, he could feel his memories being repressed.
[Mental Maturity Rewind... Stat Reset...]
The memories of his allies and friends flashed in his eyes, then slowly sank into the darkness.
Sealed into the deepest pits in his mind.
[Initializing TimeTrack Protocol]
...
The Arbiter stared in shock at the sight in front of them. What used to be the Impurity's body had turned into purple sludge before their eyes, melting to the ground with a splash.
"Did he teleport?" The Executioner warily stared at the foaming sludge.
"My Fairy stays silent. Luda?" The Arbiter shook her head. The amber colored Fairy uncoiled from her arm, glowing in resignation.
"Luda'me has already ordered her spawn. Five minutes, the entire world will be searched." The Beholder chittered nervously.
Minutes of tense silence passed, but the sludge still bubbled with fervor.
"Sssss... The children stay silent. He is not to be found in this world. Probably in different timeline by now." The static surrounding Luda parted, revealing a blonde woman with skin the texture of insect carapace. As she blinked, her eyelids pulled and shut unnaturally. Her expression seemed dejected.
"We will report back. There is nothing else to be done here." Baral sighed.
"And let us pray for the poor timeline that must accept an Impurity such as him." The Arbiter closed her eyes in somber prayer, and her crystal tears flowed into rivers of sorrow, coating the world in frost.
The sludge behind them stopped bubbling, instead whispering in languages long forgotten.
