Before dawn, Verna Academy was like a completely different place than during the day. The temporal-element lighting in the corridors had been dimmed to minimal output, staining the walls in a thin, pale blue glow. The sound of footsteps on stone echoed unnaturally loud. pushed open the door to the technical laboratory with his shoulder, wondering how many times he'd passed through it now. Five times? Six? It had been like this all week. Verna Academy, standing along Cresta Street in District 3—a secondary education institution with roughly twelve hundred students and one of the few in the Chronos metropolitan area offering foundational temporal-element engineering education—was deserted at this early hour. confirmed this before booting up the terminal at his desk, running a hand through his dark blue hair. The communication device embedded behind his right ear glowed faintly. His father's, Elias Carter's, personal data drive. He connected it to the terminal and ran the decryption program. (Will it stop at the same place again?) thought this while tracking the screen with gray eyes. Last night and the night before, the encryption had transformed when he reached the third layer of the file, and the analysis had halted. This morning he was trying a new algorithm. The program ran. Numbers flowed. The terminal's fan hummed low. And then—a fragment opened. leaned forward. What appeared this time wasn't just a single word. It was a table fragment. Something was arranged in columns. The format was unified as "Gear-[number]" with organizational affiliations listed beside each. Horologion—the name confirmed in EP2—a partial list of operative codenames. read the column from the top. Gear-2, Gear-4, Gear-5... each followed by text like "District 1 · Governance Authority" and "District 5 · Commerce Council." The file was partially corrupted; the actual names couldn't be read. Only the codename-to-affiliation matches remained. Gear-7. His eyes stopped there. What was written in the affiliation column beside it was—"District 3 · Educational Institution." didn't move, staring at the screen for a while. District 3 educational institution. In this metropolitan area, there was essentially only one that fit. The Voss Memorial Research Institute, or— (Verna Academy) He pulled the notebook on his desk closer. Still facing the terminal, he opened his notepad and ran his pen across it. "Gear-7 / District 3 Educational Institution." By hand. He didn't want it saved digitally. He couldn't quite articulate why, but his father's remaining data contained the line "don't let them find the key first," and since then 's instincts had been gradually shifting. The line between places he could trust and places he couldn't had become sharper. He photographed the screen with a small personal device instead of the terminal. Analog. Low-tech. But certain. He still didn't know Gear-7's real name. The data ended there. But the fact of "someone at the academy" wouldn't change from this moment forward. closed the notebook. He needed to tell Mortenson Clara. --- During lunch break, Mortenson Clara headed to Verna Academy's medical wing alone. More precisely, she was making the choice to go alone while uncertain whether it was right. She'd told they'd meet at the technical laboratory after lunch. She hadn't mentioned Mira Lande. She had a feeling she'd be stopped if she did. The medical wing was a separate building from the main hall, beyond a connecting corridor. The smell of disinfectant drifted through the hallway, and each time Mortenson Clara caught it, these past few days came rushing back. The day Mira collapsed. The moment Mortenson Clara used the watch. The world freezing. Mira crumpling— (It might not be related) She told herself the same thing again today. But she still hadn't found words heavier than "might not be." The patient room was structured with glass partitions visible from the corridor. Mortenson Clara stopped. IV tubes. A quiet sleeping face. No problems with life support—that's what the academy's physician had said, but then added that there were no signs of consciousness returning. Only the words "symptoms differ from temporal-element intoxication" and "the cause cannot be determined" kept repeating. Mortenson Clara looked at Mira through the glass. Thirty seconds. One minute. In her uniform pocket, the sensation of the pocket watch transmitted to her palm. Cold metal. The texture of carved patterns. Mortenson Clara was acutely aware of what she was about to do while feeling that sensation. (I should stop) She knew that too. But Mira's face seemed to be gradually losing definition in her memory. The face in her recollection. Maybe people's faces became like this when days passed without seeing them—she thought so, but she couldn't be certain that was really all it was. Mortenson Clara gripped the watch. Time stopped. The IV drip froze mid-fall. A nurse walking in the corridor froze mid-step. Dust suspended in the light streaming through the window hung motionless. In the frozen world, only Mortenson Clara moved. She pulled the lever on the glass partition door—normally electronically locked—and since the locking mechanism was frozen too, it was just a door. She pushed it open and stepped inside. She stood beside Mira's bed. The first time seeing her face without glass between them. (She's really here) She reached out to check her pulse. In that moment— There was a presence. At the foot of the bed. It felt like it had "always been there." Not appearing—Mortenson Clara simply hadn't noticed. It was black. Something in human form, but not human. Its outline wasn't blurred—quite the opposite; its edges were sharp as if cut by a knife. Its height was roughly that of a standing person. In the still air, it didn't move. (Chronophage) The word surfaced in her mind. From the temporal-element technology history class—"the shadow of the hourglass," recorded in Horologion's ancient texts, an entity of unknown nature that responds to time-stopping. It didn't approach. It didn't move. It simply existed there. Yet Mortenson Clara's entire body froze. More frightening than an attack was this certainty of "waiting." The quiet of something that knew it didn't need to hurry. Mortenson Clara released the watch. Time resumed. The drip fell. The nurse walked the corridor. Mortenson Clara found herself in the hallway, back against the wall, sitting on the floor. With her hands on her knees, steadying her breathing—Mortenson Clara slowly began to realize what she had lost. The day she first met Mira. She searched for that memory. She remembered the location. The first-year classroom at the academy. Light came through the window. Someone was laughing. But—Mira's face was gone. Not blurred. Erased. In that memory, where Mira should have been, there was nothing. Only the empty space of a human form remained there. Mortenson Clara kept her mouth closed and stared at the ceiling of the hallway for a while. --- As lunch period ended, Mortenson Clara returned to the technical laboratory. was there. In his usual spot, at the terminal. When Mortenson Clara entered, he looked up, met her eyes for just a moment, then indicated with only a glance: "come here." Mortenson Clara sat beside him and told him everything. The frozen world. Standing beside the bed. The presence at its foot. The black entity with sharp edges. And what she realized after leaving the glass door—that Mira's face had vanished from the memory of the day they first met. never interrupted. He listened while checking logs on his personal terminal. When Mortenson Clara finished, turned his terminal screen toward her. A waveform graph. Near the time of today's lunch break, the values spiked—nearly three times the first occurrence. [serious] "The magnitude of the temporal-element spike is nearly three times the first incident," [serious] "The duration of the aftereffect has also tripled. The time the Grim Pendulum's presence registers on measuring equipment has increased significantly compared to last time," Grim Pendulum—the designation had given to that entity. The shadowy presence that drew closer to physical manifestation with each time-stop. opened his notebook. Handwritten text filled the page. Mortenson Clara leaned in to read from the side. "With each activation of the pocket watch, the Grim Pendulum's degree of fixation in physical space increases. Memory loss is not accidental damage but matches a pattern of consuming experiential memory as substrate. At the current rate of activation, complete physical manifestation could be reached in three to four more uses." Mortenson Clara read that sentence, then read it again. [serious] "How certain is that?" [serious] "The data matches the model. To increase certainty, we'd need more observation points. But adding observation points means using the watch again," [serious] "So I'm recommending against it," The word choice of "recommending" was very . Not a command, not a plea. Present the data and leave the judgment to Mortenson Clara. But the weight of that "judgment" felt heavy to her now, and Mortenson Clara pretended to reread the notebook while searching for the right moment to look up. wasn't angry at her. He wasn't trying to convince her. He simply brought information, organized it, and laid it out so Mortenson Clara could read it. That—in the midst of this fear—struck her oddly. Not indulging her panic, not lying that everything would be fine, but seeing her as "someone capable of handling reality accurately." Mortenson Clara almost cried for some reason. She couldn't quite explain why. She didn't cry. But her eyes grew hot, and not wanting it noticed, she picked up the notebook. That's when 's terminal chimed. Not a high-pitched sound, just a short electronic alert. But 's movements stopped. Mortenson Clara looked up too. Red logs scrolled across the terminal screen. [surprised] "From an IP address inside the academy—" His voice cut off. remained frozen, staring at the screen. The next moment, he spoke in a very quiet voice. [cold] "The file's gone," Mortenson Clara leaned in to look. The decryption session log. The file fragment from Elias Carter's data drive that had been analyzing this morning—it had been deleted by remote access. Not corrupted. The file itself was gone. A clean deletion using administrator privileges. It had been executed during the four minutes had stepped away from the academy terminal to wait for Mortenson Clara. [serious] "They knew I'd left the terminal," His voice was low, emotion carefully controlled. [serious] "Someone monitoring the network knew. And they knew the target was Elias Carter's file," Mortenson Clara felt her mouth go dry. Gear-7. District 3 educational institution. The characters had written in his notebook this morning took shape in her mind. pulled out his personal device. The photograph of the screen from this morning was still there. That's all that remained. --- Until after school, the two of them moved to the academy library. The deepest corner of the bookshelves—a dead end that had somehow become their usual spot since Mortenson Clara started studying with . The afternoon light streaming through the window slanted across the shelf's edge. Outside, clouds were gathering, and the light had no color. They both leaned in to look at the photograph. enlarged the image on his personal terminal. "Gear-7 / District 3 Educational Institution"—those two lines were readable. The lines before and after were either cut off at the image's edge or too corrupted to decipher. [serious] "You'd need network administrator privileges, or equivalent access rights. Someone who had Elias Carter's name set as a surveillance target," Mortenson Clara counted on her fingers. People at Verna Academy who could do that—Principal Doris Heygan, IT management staff, seni