Jisoo's eyes were empty.
Not the emptiness of death, but the terrifying void of a clean slate.
He looked at me, then at the smoking ruin of his apartment, then back at me.
"Did you… did you do this?" he asked.
His hand reached for a pistol on the floor—a weapon he had cleaned a thousand times in front of me. Now, he handled it like a foreign object.
"No," I said.
My voice sounded like it belonged to someone else.
I wanted to tell him about the missions we'd pulled. About the time he saved my life in the tunnels of District 3. About the way he used to complain about the synthetic coffee I brought him.
But the Obsidian Relic hummed in my pocket, a cold vibration that seemed to swallow my words before they could leave my throat.
The Stone of Oblivion didn't just take memories. It erased the threads of connection.
To Jisoo, I wasn't just a stranger. I was a ghost that had never existed.
"Get out," Jisoo said, his voice trembling as he aimed the gun at my chest.
I didn't move.
The amber glow in his eyes—the mark of his contract with Time—was flickering. Without the memory of the contract, the power was consuming him from the inside out.
He didn't remember how to balance the debt.
"Jisoo, listen to me—"
"I don't know you!" he screamed.
His finger tightened on the trigger.
I saw it in slow motion. Not because of a contract, but because the Requiem was heightening my senses to a jagged, painful edge.
I could have disarmed him. I could have crushed his will.
Instead, I turned and walked toward the shattered window.
"You're better off this way," I whispered, though I knew he couldn't hear me over the ringing in his ears.
I stepped out into the night.
The fall from the fourth floor was nothing. I landed in a crouch in the alleyway, the impact rattling my teeth.
The city was different now.
The sirens had stopped.
There was a silence so heavy it felt like a physical weight on my lungs.
I walked out onto the main street of Sector 4.
Cars had drifted into each other, abandoned in the middle of the road. People were standing on the sidewalks, staring at their own hands, at their clothes, at the strangers standing next to them.
A man in a business suit was weeping quietly, looking at a wedding ring on his finger as if it were a handcuff.
A mother was holding her child, but she was looking at the girl with a gaze of pure, detached curiosity.
The Relic had been too powerful.
The Pale Watcher hadn't just saved me; he had lobotomized a sector of the city to do it.
I gripped the stone through my coat. It was feeding.
Every second it stayed in my possession, it pulled at the edges of my own mind, looking for a way in.
*"Ren…"*
The voice wasn't in my head. It came from the shadows behind a row of rusted shipping containers.
I froze. My hand flew to the hilt of the combat knife at my belt.
"Who's there?"
A woman stepped into the pale light of a flickering neon sign.
Elena Volkov.
She looked worse than I did. Her long, dark hair was matted with dried blood, and her eyes were bloodshot.
Elena was a Hemomancer—a blood controller. Most people thought her power was cool until they saw the price. She was a hemophiliac; every time she used her power, her own blood refused to clot.
She was literally bleeding her life away for every victory.
"You remember me," I said, my pulse slowing down.
"The stone… it didn't touch me," she whispered, leaning against a container for support. "I was inside a vacuum seal in the underground vault. By the time I came up… everyone was gone. In the head, I mean."
She looked at the chaotic street.
"What did you do, Ren?"
"I didn't have a choice."
"We always have a choice," she spat, coughing into a handkerchief. It came away crimson. "You just always choose the one that leaves a trail of bodies."
She stumbled toward me, her gaze fixing on my pocket.
"You have it. The Obsidian Relic."
"I have it."
"Give it to me, Ren. The Archive is sending a Purge Squad. Not Inquisitors. Executioners. They'll burn this entire sector to ash just to make sure that stone doesn't stay in the wild."
I looked at her. Elena was one of the few people I actually respected. She didn't hide behind contracts; she fought with her own life on the line.
But I saw the greed in her eyes. Not for money. For survival.
She thought the Relic could fix her. She thought she could erase the debt of her blood.
"It won't work, Elena," I said quietly. "The stone doesn't fix things. It just makes the world forget they're broken."
"I don't care! I'm tired of dying, Ren!"
She raised her hand.
The puddles of blood and rain on the street began to quiver.
Slowly, the liquid rose into the air, forming long, jagged needles that pointed directly at my throat.
"Don't do this," I warned.
The black lotus on my hand began to throb. The seventh petal was burning now, a cold fire that made my skin crawl.
"I'm taking that stone," she said, her voice cracking.
The needles flew.
I didn't move. I didn't need to.
I didn't even use the Requiem.
The Obsidian Relic in my pocket pulsed once, a deep, resonant thrum.
The blood needles didn't hit me. They didn't even fall.
They simply dissolved into grey dust in mid-air.
Elena gasped, her knees buckling. She clutched her chest, her face turning a ghostly shade of white.
"My… my blood…" she wheezed.
"The Relic isn't a tool, Elena," I said, walking toward her. "It's a conceptual weapon. It erases the 'truth' of things. Right now, it's erasing the truth of your power."
I stood over her, looking down into her terrified eyes.
I could feel the Stone of Oblivion whispering to me. It wanted her. It wanted to erase her too.
It would be so easy.
One thought, and she would forget her pain. She would forget her debt. She would forget me.
But then I would be truly alone.
I reached down and grabbed her by the collar, pulling her up.
"Listen to me," I hissed. "The Archive is coming. If you want to live, you stay behind me. Don't use your power. Don't speak. Just run."
"Why?" she choked out. "Why help me?"
I looked at the seventh petal on my hand.
"Because if I let everyone forget me, there won't be anyone left to tell me when I've turned into one of them."
A distant roar echoed through the city.
It wasn't a siren. It wasn't an engine.
It was a scream—a collective, harmonized scream of something that wasn't human.
The Archive had arrived.
And they hadn't brought men.
High above us, circling the smoke-clogged sky, were the Hounds of the Void.
Shinigami-beasts, bred for one purpose: to hunt down anomalies.
They looked like skeletal wolves made of stitched-together shadows, their eyes glowing with the same bruised purple as the petals on my hand.
"They're here," Elena whispered, her voice failing.
I looked at the Obsidian Relic in my hand.
It was no longer just a stone. It was a key.
And the door it opened was one I wasn't sure I could ever close.
*"Ren…"*
The Pale Watcher was standing at the end of the alley.
He didn't point. He didn't gesture.
He simply tilted his head toward the north.
Toward the Archive's main cathedral.
He wanted me to go there.
He wanted me to finish the Requiem.
I looked at Elena, then at the sky where the Hounds were descending.
"Hold on," I said.
I grabbed her arm and triggered the Authority.
But I didn't command a Shinigami this time.
I commanded the Relic.
"Forget the distance," I whispered.
The world twisted.
The alleyway stretched like pulled taffy. The sky folded in on itself.
There was a moment of absolute, terrifying nothingness.
When my feet hit solid ground again, we weren't in Sector 4.
We were standing in front of the massive, obsidian gates of the Archive.
The heart of the enemy.
Elena collapsed, vomiting onto the pristine marble steps.
I stood tall, the Relic glowing like a dying star in my palm.
The gates began to groan, opening slowly to reveal a long, dark hall lined with hundreds of Inquisitors.
And at the very end, sitting on a throne made of human bone and silver, was a man I thought was a myth.
The Grand Arbitrator.
He looked at me, and then at the stone.
"You brought it back," he said, his voice echoing like thunder in a tomb. "The Sovereign finally returns the stolen property."
"I'm not here to return it," I said, my voice cold and steady.
I held the stone up.
"I'm here to make you forget you ever owned it."
The Grand Arbitrator smiled.
"With only seven petals? You're brave, Ren. But you're missing something."
He snapped his fingers.
From the shadows behind the throne, a figure stepped forward.
My heart stopped.
It was Jisoo.
But his eyes weren't amber anymore.
They were pure, abyssal black.
"Meet our new Executioner," the Arbitrator said. "The man who was erased… has been rewritten."
Jisoo raised his sniper rifle.
The barrel was pointed directly at my head.
He didn't hesitate.
He pulled the trigger.
And for the first time in my life, I couldn't see the future.
Because the Relic had already erased it.