Chapter 16: Raining in Manila

The sky over Manila wept endlessly. Rain slicked the busy streets, casting neon reflections on puddled asphalt and painting the city in shades of cold memory.
In a weathered taxi crawling through Makati’s congested roads, Kim Ji-yoo sat quietly, the melody of Wonder Girls’ “Nobody” echoing through the car stereo. She sang along under her breath—soft, almost wistful.
 “I want nobody, nobody but you… nan daleun salam-eun silh-eo…”
“You have a very good singing voice, miss,” said the driver, his accent thick but friendly.
Kim smiled. “Did you know that song originally came from South Korea?”
“Oh, I remember! It was a big hit here. Even us titos dance to that when we’ve had too much to drink,” he chuckled.
“It was the first K-pop song that truly shook the world, especially here in the Philippines back in 2009. After that, K-pop exploded—Psy, BTS, Blackpink... but Wonder Girls were first.”
“You seem to know a lot about it.”
“I used to be part of that world,” she replied flatly. “But trust me, it wasn’t all sparkle and stardom like people think.”
The driver paused, glancing at a small photo clipped near the dashboard—two young children with beaming smiles.
“Maybe we just choose to believe it’s better. Sometimes, hope is all we’ve got.”
Kim didn’t reply. She just watched the city blur past the window, lost in her own war of thoughts.
“Can you drop me at the next convenience store?” she asked.
The rain had intensified when she stepped out, instantly soaking her coat and travel bag. She cursed under her breath as she pushed open the store’s glass door, met by the blast of cold air conditioning. The hum of the lights above felt louder in her silence.
She went straight to the liquor section, grabbing a familiar dark bottle—a Spanish Brandy de Jerez. She loved the warmth it gave, the burn, the clarity. At the counter, she added a green-pack cigarette box with a practiced gesture.
“Rare to see a woman drink and smoke at the same time in the city,” the young cashier noted.
“Only in the city,” Kim said without looking up. “In the province, it’s a different story.”
“So you’re not a tourist?”
“Resident. But I live cheap. I split time between Tarlac and Laguna.”
“Oh? I’m from Laguna myself.”
“Which part?” Kim asked, lighting up with polite interest.
“Santa Cruz.”
She froze. Just for a second.
“Something wrong, ma’am?”
“Jet lag,” she lied. Her voice was too smooth. It always was when she wanted it to be.
Outside, under the narrow overhang, Kim sat at one of the steel tables the store provided for smoking customers. The rain continued to fall like clockwork, drumming on metal and concrete.
She poured a bit of the brandy into a makeshift cup and lit her cigarette, the warmth of both fighting the chill creeping into her skin.
Then… she saw it.
A carousel—its music faint but unmistakable—spinning in the middle of the road.
"What the hell...?" She whispered
It wasn’t the sight of the carousel that made her blink twice—it was the man riding a wooden horse, yelling:
 “¡Vámonos!”

A burst of thunder cracked, and suddenly—chaos.
World War II-era American soldiers were running down the street, tossing grenades.
A T-Rex—yes, a T-Rex—charged between them, roaring like a fractured time echo.
Then came samurai, blades gleaming, charging toward a man she instantly recognized from textbooks and historical dramas alike—Lapu-Lapu, warrior of Mactan.
Kim dropped her cigarette.
“What the fuck is happening?!”
And then it appeared. A pulse in the air, a shimmer, then a flash—
A portal tore open in front of her.
From it stepped Arth—his coat billowing—followed by a woman Kim had never seen before.
“Arth?! Is that… your sister?”
He ignored the jab. “Have you noticed anything strange?”
Kim blinked. “You mean aside from the T-Rex, the carousel from colonial times, and samurai fighting Lapu-Lapu in the middle of EDSA? Yeah. Something’s off, Arth.”
Arth nodded grimly.
Altair stepped forward. “It seems this place is caught in a phenomenon called  a Time Storm.”
In the shelter of an alleyway, Kim listened as Arth and Altair explained.
“A Time Storm is a temporal anomaly,” Altair said, her voice calm, analytical. “It causes periods in time to collapse into one another—events from different eras bleed into the present.”
“Manila’s the epicenter right now,” Arth added. “This whole area is caught in a cross-rip through history.”
Kim took a long drag from her cigarette. “So I’m not drunk.”
“You still might be,” Arth said dryly, “but this is very real.”
“We detected a Time Cog signature here,” Altair continued. “That’s what’s triggering the instability.”
“A Time Cog?” Kim echoed. “I think we encountered that Time Cog back at Kisaragi Station in Japan with that Dreamstrider”
“Japan? Kisaragi Station? A Dreamstrider? I don't recall, Kim” Arth replied with confusion
“I don't want to poke around your mind again as it might summon your master” she said “Last time I did that I turned into a bunch of butterflies”
“Then let me recapped you again, Kim” Arth said as he showed her three pieces of the Time Cog to her as it glowed with Temporal Energy
“There are seven across the multiverse. Ancient artifacts—fragments of a temporal engine that once controlled the flow of time. Someone, or something, is trying to gather them all… and weaponize them.”
A new crack of thunder rang out—not from the sky, but from a tank rolling down the street, firing shells at a flock of winged mechanical birds.
“We need to find the Cog before time fully fractures,” Altair said.
Kim dropped her cigarette, crushing it beneath her heel.
“Then what the hell are we waiting for?”
As the rain intensified and eras collided in the shadows of Manila’s high-rises, three unlikely allies stepped out into the chaos—armed with knowledge, scars, and an unyielding sense of purpose.
For in the eye of the Time Storm, past, present, and future were no longer separate.
And Time... had no mercy.
One moment, a kalesa driver from the Spanish colonial era crashed into a Jeepney. The next, an Apollo-era astronaut parachuted from the sky, landing on the wet streets as though ejected from a long-lost orbit.
“Time is unraveling in real time,” Altair muttered, scanning a floating hologram projected from her glove. “The temporal anchors are gone. We’re seeing bleed-through from multiple centuries at once.”
“And somewhere in all this madness,” Arth said grimly, “is the Time Cog.”
Kim lit another cigarette with a trembling hand. “How exactly do you find a clock part in a city swallowed by a history tornado?”
“By finding the center,” Altair replied. “All Time Storms spiral around a fulcrum. That’s where the Cog will be.”
“Where’s the eye of this storm then?”
The hologram blinked, showing converging spikes of temporal interference.
Altair looked up. Kim recognized the place.“Intramuros.”
They pressed on through the chaos—Arth slashing open glitching time rifts with his magenta colored photon blade, Altair redirecting anomalies with precision bursts from her chrono-gauntlet. Kim, still more human than hero, followed close, eyes darting around warily.
As they reached the outer walls of Intramuros, they passed a surreal scene: José Rizal arguing with a Spanish friar beneath an old archway, while a Japanese Zero fighter crashed beside a 1990s delivery van.
Kim stared, half-laughing. “Okay… now I know I’m drunk.”
Inside the fortress, the rain stopped.
Stillness.
The eye of the storm.
And there—hovering six feet above the ground in the middle of Plaza Roma—was the Time Cog.
It looked ancient and divine. A gold-etched disk, its teeth spinning slowly, suspended within a ripple of air. Pulses of energy radiated outward like sonar waves, distorting the timeline around it.
“This is it,” Arth said.
But as he stepped forward—
“CLANG.”
A blade struck the ground in front of him.
A massive warrior, cloaked in samurai armor, materialized from thin air. His eyes blazed with emerald light. He wasn’t just displaced—he was possessed.
“A Guardian?,” Altair whispered. “There’s no data suggesting some Cogs manifest as protectors from the temporal stream.”
The samurai charged.
Arth met him, and they clashed in a blur of metal and lightning. The storm overhead surged. With each swing of the samurai’s blade, reality glitched—like an old VCD skipping frames.
“You can’t fight time!” the warrior bellowed in an ancient dialect.
Arth sidestepped a strike that shattered a marble fountain.
“I’m not fighting time,” he growled. “I’m correcting it.”
Altair turned to Kim. “We need to weaken the Cog’s field. It’s feeding him temporal energy.”
Kim’s eyes widened. “How?”
Altair pulled out a resonance spike—a slender device shaped like a tuning fork.
“Plant this beneath the Cog. It'll disrupt the stream long enough for Arth to finish him.”
Kim took the spike, exhaled smoke, and sprinted into the chaos.
The plaza was a battlefield—fractured ghosts of time flickering like static. She ducked under a spectral carriage from the 1800s, dodged a glitching drone from the future, and slid beneath a falling banner of the American Commonwealth.
She reached the pedestal beneath the Cog.
Planted the spike.
A low hum… then a shockwave.
The Cog flickered. The samurai stumbled mid-swing.
Arth seized the moment—drove his blade into the warrior’s chest. The emerald light in the samurai’s eyes dimmed. His body crumbled into motes of fractured time.
Silence.
The Cog ceased spinning.
Altair approached, deploying a stasis field around it.
“Stabilizing… now.”
The Cog compressed, encased in blue light, and vanished into a containment orb.
Above Manila, the sky shimmered.
The rain slowed.
Temporal anomalies—soldiers, samurai, dinosaurs, rockets—began to fade, pulled back into their proper time streams like a retreating tide.
Kim stood still, soaked and smoking, eyes wide as the world rebuilt itself around her.
“So… that’s it?” she asked.
Arth nodded. “For now. That’s Cog number four.”
“And the storm?”
Altair glanced upward. “Gone. Manila’s timeline is stabilizing.”
Kim looked at them both. “You know… I didn’t ask for any of this.”
“You never do,” Arth replied. “But somehow, you’re always where you’re needed.”
She laughed bitterly. “Maybe the storm and I have that in common.”
Back in a dim convenience store, the news played on a flickering screen.
“Strange weather event in Manila has cleared after hours of intense rainfall. Experts baffled. Some claim it was a temporal anomaly, but authorities are dismissing it as a satellite malfunction…”
In a shadowed alleyway, unseen by all, a hooded figure emerged from a fading time rift.
He held a device pulsing faintly—its screen displaying a map of the multiverse. Four dots were lit in the same place.
Three remained dark.
“Four down…” he whispered, revealing two Time Cogs in his possession.“Three to go.”
The man was Ouroboros—like Arth, a hunter of lost time. But now, with two pieces in his grasp and only one Cog remaining, their paths were destined to collide.
As the city of Manila settled into another quiet evening, its skies clear, its people unaware—
Time itself held its breath.
Kim Ji-yoo is now in her hotel room reminiscing of the events that transpired during the rain as the weather in the City of Manila finally calmed down but she didn't realize a new storm is approaching.
“Arth is acting really strange” Kim whispered as she released a smoke in her mouth.
“You're right” a feminine voice said
Kim turned to see The Celestial Witch Sera seated in a stone chair. Her appearance has changed since they last saw each other. She looks more lessened as her long flowing black hair is now short and she has a burned scar in her face. The only thing hiding it is an eye patch.
“Sera?” Kim asked
“I need your help”

Chapter 16: Raining in Manila End