When the world started moving again, nothing was where it should be.
Neon lights flickered in reverse. A pedestrian waved, froze, then rewound into a different gesture. A bus slid a meter forward, snapped back, then forgot it had ever moved. The air itself stuttered between moments, like a broken film reel jerking forward and back.
Yuna staggered, one palm pressed to her chest. The shard glowed faintly beneath her skin, every pulse a tug on her ribs, like she was a puppet being yanked forward on invisible strings.
Her stomach flipped. She pressed her other hand to the wall, gagging down nausea. "It's like... walking through bad choreography," she muttered. "Out of sync."
"Still alive," Stella said, pacing the lip of a collapsed awning with unshakable calm. Violet runes traced her fur, tails glowing like small pendulums, flames curling against the broken skyline.
Yuna swallowed. "What the hell was that?"
The fox tilted her head toward the fractured sky, ears twitching. For a moment, her expression flickered with something almost human-sad, thoughtful. When she finally spoke, her voice had dropped to a whisper.
"Not fracture. Return."
"...What?"
The moment vanished. Stella's tone turned brisk again, tail swishing sharply. "Doesn't matter. What matters is that shard in your chest isn't done with you. And neither is whatever's hunting us."
Yuna pressed the shard harder to her sternum, heart pounding with its rhythm. For an instant, she thought she heard laughter buried inside it-her own voice on stage, fractured, broken, out of sync. It slipped away before she could catch it.
Her ribbon twitched. She gripped it tight, sweat slicking the threads. "I'm not letting this thing take me."
Stella's teal eyes narrowed, unreadable. "We'll see."
The shard pulsed again, tugging her down the street. Yuna staggered after it, breath shallow, the fox at her side.
⚔️ Minji & Saber
The ruins of the Archive were never quiet.
Somewhere deep beneath Neo-Seoul's bones, gears the size of towers still turned, grinding against themselves in endless, groaning circles. The sound seeped into the stone, into Minji's teeth and bones, rattling like a second heartbeat that wasn't hers. The air reeked of rust and dust and ozone, like the storm of a machine trying to remember how to be alive.
Minji crouched in the shadows, fingers brushing moss from a crystalline shard wedged in the floor. Jagged on every edge, its glow pulsed faintly, like something asleep and dreaming.
"Class-C shard confirmed," Saber intoned, floating at her shoulder. The segmented frame hovered like a suspended blade, each piece clicking softly as it rotated, a single blue lens narrowing on the relic.
Minji's mouth quirked without humor. "Class-C? That's the third one this week." Her thumb traced its surface. The warmth unsettled her-it wasn't passive. It was like it recognized her.
"...No reporting?" Saber pressed, voice flat, too careful.
"No reporting," she said quickly. Then, lower: "Every time I hand one over, someone disappears."
The silence stretched heavy as iron. A flash of memory stabbed her-Officer Daewon's grin, gone the day after she'd surrendered the last shard. No one asked. No one explained.
She tightened her grip on the shard. "I'm not feeding anyone else to their machine."
The gears groaned louder, like the Archive itself disapproved.
Then-faint, impossible-she heard it. A girl's voice, threading through the grinding:
Tick... tock... I hear it in my veins-
Minji froze. The sound slipped away, leaving only her pulse racing.
"...What was that?"
Saber's lens dimmed. "Brainwaves spiking. You're syncing."
"I'm not. Not yet."
"That's what you said before collapsing in the stairwell and reciting the formula for time compression in your sleep."
Her glare cut sharp. "...Fair."
Before she could argue further, the chamber roared awake. Brass shrieked, gears locking into place.
The Guardian emerged.
Plated in tarnish, crowned with a cracked clock-face helm, its eyes burned an electric blue. Its arm swung like a pendulum, smashing the stone floor into glittering shards. With each movement, the tiles of the chamber shifted, realigning themselves as though the whole Archive had decided to turn against her.
"Guardian Class R3," Saber barked, his voice clipping into static. "Minji-!"
She rolled just as the pendulum arm swung, the wind of it searing past her cheek. Her plasma blade hissed to life, throwing sparks into the shadows.
The Guardian's distortion field bled across the room. Space warped-ticks of herself peeling away, trailing in parallel echoes. Her afterimage slashed forward, carving her shoulder open with her own blade. Pain burned black through her skin, smoke rising where blood should be.
"Not today," Minji growled.
She vaulted upward, teeth bared, and jammed her blade into the Guardian's joint. Sparks spat down in molten rivers. The arm shuddered but didn't fall.
The Guardian's free hand clamped around her waist, gears grinding. Ribs bent under the pressure, snapping like kindling.
Saber's voice fractured, splitting into three streams at once-mechanical, distorted, and a whispering language she couldn't recognize.
"-Minji! Use the shard-NOW!"
Her vision tunneled, her chest screaming. She tore the shard free from her pack and rammed it into the Guardian's core.
The shard pulsed-once in rhythm with her heart, once with something deeper.
The distortion collapsed. The Guardian folded in on itself like a clock collapsing into midnight.
Minji dropped to her knees, gasping, blood slicking her ribs. Saber's lens flickered with static-he looked doubled, fractured into two machines at once, then steadied.
On the walls, static bled into an image. Yuna's face. Pale. Urgent.
"...If you're seeing this," her voice stuttered, caught between frames, "I've broken through. Find the others-before they find you."
The feed cut. The gears groaned once, then fell still.
Minji touched the blood streaking her arm, breath sharp. "...She's real. Still out there."
"Coordinates locked," Saber confirmed, his lens tightening. "Chrono-9. Timestamp: 03:03:03."
Minji's grip tightened around the shard, the warmth now steady, purposeful. Her lips pulled into something between a smile and a snarl.
"Then that's where we're going."
☕ Afterwards Nexus Coffee - Chapter 2A
(Scene: the same impossible café outside of time. Steam curls from mugs that never cool. The crew gathers around a round table. The ribbon rests on the counter, glowing faintly, like it's listening too.)
Yuna: (sighs, flopping into her chair) First a shard burns my chest, then a faceless monster tries to erase me, and now everyone's voices are buzzing in my head. I can't even get a coffee break without trauma.
Stella: (stretching on the back of Yuna's chair) You survived. Which means I survived. Which means it's a victory.
Minji: (leaning across the table, smirking) "Victory"? I fought a Guardian that almost snapped me in half. And Saber here glitched into three different voices. That's not a victory, that's a workplace hazard.
Saber: (blinking) Correction. Triple resonance synchronization is a feature. Not a bug.
Jiwoo: (raising a brow) You say that, but it sounded like you were auditioning for a choir.
Ara: (soft, but with a little laugh) I thought it was... kind of pretty.
Minji: (snorting into her tea) Don't encourage him! Next thing we know, Saber'll be singing lullabies.
Yuna: (perks up) Honestly, I'd take a lullaby. Anything over that broken-clock humming stuck in my head.
Stella: (teasing) You're just jealous Minji got the Guardian solo while you were too busy holding hands with your ribbon.
Yuna: (blushing, defensive) It was glowing! I thought it was important!
Minji: (deadpan) Sure. That's definitely why you were staring at it like a love letter.
Saber: (projects a hologram of a heart emoji over the ribbon) Evidence supports Minji's conclusion.
Yuna: (groans, hiding her face in her mug) I hate all of you.
Stella: (tail flicking, smug) Correction: you love us. Otherwise, the loop would've erased us already.
(The café lights flicker. Outside the window, gears grind faintly in the void, reminding them the fight isn't far away. Still, the warmth lingers here, stitched together by tea, laughter, and the fragile thread of their bond.)
Narration: Even when the world threatens to fracture, sometimes survival tastes like bitter coffee and shared banter.