Tick.
A single metallic sound cut through the intersection. A pedestrian froze mid-step, one foot suspended above the asphalt like the ground had forgotten how to hold him down.
Zekai's eyes narrowed. What the hell.
It wasn't just the man. Engine noise, footsteps, chatter, the distant blare of horns—every ordinary sound of the city dropped out at once, leaving a silence so complete he could hear his own pulse.
Thump. Thump.
He turned his head slowly.
The drivers at the red light weren't frozen either—not exactly. One man blinked, unnaturally slow, like the motion had been stretched thin. A biker turning his head skipped between two positions with nothing in between, as if the world had forgotten to render the movement connecting them.
It wasn't that everything had stopped.
Something was wrong with the way reality moved at all.
Am I the only one seeing this?
Cold crawled up his spine. Every instinct in his body said the same thing.
Run.
He dropped and snatched his phone off the asphalt. The screen was still lit.
Grandpa Marcus — Call in progress.
"Grandpa?"
Static ripped through the speaker. The signal bars dropped to zero, and the call cut dead.
[Network connection has been forcefully terminated.]
"Damn it."
Marcus never called this early. Not once, in two years.
Zekai's eyes dropped to the black stone cube lying near his foot—the one that had fallen from the coat's hidden pocket. He remembered the impact now, the faint click before it hit the ground.
He hadn't even known that pocket existed until it emptied itself in front of him.
"...Why was Grandpa carrying this?"
He crouched and picked it up.
"—!"
Cold tore through his fingertips, deeper than ice, the kind that seemed to crawl under the skin instead of sitting on top of it. The thing weighed far more than its size should've allowed.
Why would he carry something like this.
"Mr. Zekai!"
His head snapped up. Aron was running toward him.
Running.
Everyone else in the intersection was frozen or breaking apart into those stuttering fragments. Aron wasn't. His feet hit the ground normal, his chest rose and fell with real breath.
Zekai's eyes dropped to his hands—the tarot box still clutched to his chest. For half a second, one of the crimson lines on its surface pulsed.
Then it didn't.
Was that real?
Aron jerked forward mid-stride, his body skipping several inches ahead in an instant—the same broken motion infecting the rest of the world.
But he didn't stop. He kept coming.
Why can he still move?
"You forgot this—!"
BZZT!
The traffic light overhead spasmed, its countdown scrambling into unreadable symbols before bleeding crimson.
The ground shook.
Not an earthquake. Pressure—something enormous pushing up from underneath the street itself.
A man nearby dropped his shopping bags. They split open, oranges rolling across the asphalt in every direction. He didn't react. He just stood there, staring at nothing, like a doll someone had forgotten to switch off.
The shadows stretched. For one instant they moved on their own, twisting against the light before snapping back into place.
Crack.
The sound of breaking glass rang out with nothing there to break. Space itself had split.
Aron's hand clamped down on Zekai's shoulder, shaking.
"M-Mr. Zekai..."
He turned. Real fear had crawled into Aron's voice now.
A vortex of grey mist tore open at the center of the intersection, twisting in on itself. Something moved inside it—he couldn't see what, and he didn't need to. Its presence alone was enough to set every nerve in his body screaming.
Past the vortex, the city carried on exactly as before. Cars moved. People walked. Somewhere, someone laughed at a joke Zekai would never hear.
An invisible wall stood between this intersection and the rest of the world.
Aron's face drained of color.
"What the hell is this?!"
Zekai didn't answer.
Then the voices came.
—Please!
—Run away!
—Save me!
—Don't leave us!
"Aaagh!"
Pain split through his skull. Beside him, Aron dropped to his knees, hands clamped over his ears, screaming. The voices kept multiplying—hundreds of them, folding into a single roar that shook something deeper than his eardrums.
Then one voice cut through the noise. Calm. Deep. A verdict, not a scream.
"You saw it... and did nothing."
Zekai's breath caught. That wasn't human. The air around them went dead still.
He forced himself to look at the vortex.
"Look at the mist."
Aron lifted his head. "...What?"
"It isn't expanding." His breathing slowed. "It's waiting."
Aron's expression cracked. He grabbed Zekai's jacket, fingers digging in.
"We have to run! We're going to die here!"
Zekai's heart slammed against his ribs. He bit down on his tongue hard enough to draw pain, hard enough to think straight through the panic climbing his throat.
"Don't move." His voice shook, but the words came out clean. "Stay next to me."
"Mr. Zekai, we have to run—right now! The mist's still open, we can still get out!"
Aron kept pulling at his shoulder. Zekai didn't move. Something in him refused.
The mist wasn't chasing them. It didn't need to. It was waiting, patient, like a hunter who already knew prey always broke first.
That's exactly what it wants.
His grip closed tighter around the black cube.
If we run, we die.
The vortex pulsed.
BOOM.
The pressure hit like a wall. Aron's body slammed into the asphalt.
Then—
Everything stopped. The screams vanished. The wind died. The tremors ceased. For one impossible second, even Zekai's own heartbeat seemed to disappear.
Flash.
White light swallowed the intersection whole.
"Mr. Zekai—!"
Aron's scream drowned beneath the roar of pure light.
Zekai shut his eyes. His body went weightless—no ground beneath him, no Aron beside him, not even his own hands left to feel.
Something tugged at his arm. His fingers loosened without permission.
The bouquet slipped free. White petals scattered into the blinding light, spinning around him in total silence.
One brushed his cheek. Then another. He reached for them anyway.
"Wait—"
His hand closed around nothing. The petals dissolved into the white.
Then there was nothing at all.
✦ End of Chapter 2 — The World Skipped a Step ✦