The alley was silent, frozen in time. Detective Loomis's leather boots struck the paper-like ground with a steady rhythm, like a ticking clock. To him, this world wasn't real—it was a draft, a place that needed constant revision.
He stopped at the alley's mouth. Adjusting his pristine white gloves, he pulled a ruby magnifying glass from his coat pocket.
"Stasis," he whispered.
Immediately, everything within a hundred meters froze. Dust hung in the air, suspended. The injured Reaper struggled to move, caught mid-motion.
Loomis walked carefully through the frozen scene, examining everything. He didn't just look; he read the world. When he passed his lens over the wall Zero had touched, he didn't see whiteness—he saw a gap in the story. Red words hovered above it:
[CRITICAL ERROR: UNKNOWN INTERFERENCE – SOURCE: UNDEFINED – STATUS: REDACTED]
"Interesting," Loomis said, his voice calm, metallic. "This deletion isn't the Editors' work. It's a manual scrape."
He knelt to pick up a single droplet of ink from the ground. The droplet vibrated, echoing a distant scream—Zero's scream.
Rising, he turned to his assistants, masked like blank pages.
"The target is Subject Zero," he said. "He's not just running. He carries Silas's tool. This isn't a glitch—it's a rebellion made real."
He opened a blue notebook and wrote a line in perfect script:
[GEOGRAPHICAL TRACKING PROTOCOL ACTIVATED. NARROW THE MARGINS. LEAVE HIM NO ROOM TO BREATHE.]
The notebook snapped shut. The buildings at the end of the alley began to shift, closing the passages. The Organization was rewriting the map in real time.
Loomis looked toward the grey horizon.
"You can hide between the lines, Zero. But remember—I place the period at the end of the sentence."