Chronomechanists are close-range combatants who wield localized time manipulation through precision-engineered devices. Unlike academic casters who avoid the battlefield, Chronomechanists enter it deliberately, trusting their ability to bend moments rather than avoid danger.
They fight with a heavy clock mounted at the end of a chain—a brutal weapon that doubles as a temporal instrument. Through impact, motion, and contact, they distort time in short, controlled bursts, allowing them to rewind positions, skip moments, or slow everything around them.
Chronomechanists do not treat time as mystical or sacred. To them, time is a force under tension, something that can be stressed, redirected, or briefly folded without fully breaking it.
Their abilities never rewrite history. They only affect immediate continuity—seconds, positions, and motion. The danger lies not in scale, but in repetition.
Mistakes are expected. What matters is how quickly they are corrected.
The Chronomechanist’s weapon is both anchor and instrument.
The clock is intentionally massive, designed to create a fixed temporal reference point wherever it strikes. When swung, dragged, or slammed into the ground, it establishes a moment against which time can be manipulated.
In combat, it serves as a bludgeoning weapon with dangerous momentum. Misses are costly. Hits are decisive. Time manipulation allows the wielder to correct positioning, rewind personal movement, or displace others by returning them to a recent state.
The weapon is difficult to wield without training, but not impossible.
The @Chrono Tower serves as the primary training facility for Chronomechanists, located within the University District. Standing roughly 10 meters tall, the tower is built from a combination of aged brick and polished brass, giving it a distinctly arcane and somewhat industrial appearance. It houses specialized time-locked arenas for safe combat practice, where students can wield their heavy clock weapons and experiment with controlled temporal distortions without endangering themselves or the public.
Beyond the arenas, the tower contains student dormitories, a mess hall, and offices for mental health professionals, offering support for the psychological strains of repeated temporal manipulation. While the tower provides the essential tools for training, it is not generously funded: Chronomechanist resources are limited compared to other university disciplines such as Precision Mechanics, Arts, or Weather Research. Students often work with less precise equipment and improvise solutions, reinforcing lessons in caution, problem-solving, and adaptability.
The Chrono Tower embodies the duality of the class itself: rigorous training within constrained means, where repeated errors are expected and correction is the true measure of skill. Its walls hold the echoes of controlled chaos, the tick of countless clocks, and the quiet diligence of those learning to bend time without breaking it.
Chronomechanists dominate close to mid-range combat through positional control.
They excel at:
Rewriting their own placement after committing to an attack
Forcing enemies to repeat moments they believed were over
Creating localized time-slow zones by anchoring the clock into terrain
Their fighting style is aggressive and corrective. They push forward, accept risk, and undo consequences before those consequences settle.
Chronomechanists are rare and widely distrusted.
Many citizens believe nothing good comes from manipulating time. Accidents, vanishings, and contradictory eyewitness accounts fuel quiet superstition. Even when nothing goes wrong, the implication that a mistake could be erased unsettles people.
Institutions tolerate Chronomechanists out of necessity, not comfort. Their use is reserved for high-risk situations where other solutions have failed.
While Chronomechanist abilities are tightly limited, repeated use produces subtle side effects.
Common experiences include:
Déjà vu
Temporal confusion
Overlapping memories
Difficulty recalling the correct sequence of events
These effects are usually temporary but accumulate over time. Chronomechanists often speak carefully, pause mid-sentence, or double-check their own recollections. The Chrono Tower offers free psychological counseling to all Chronomancers to keep the increasing stress on the mind of frequent short term time travel. If kept unchecked, Chronomancers might lose tough with reality more and more, being overly confused or even losing their short term memory.
The discipline traces back to a precision mechanic obsessed with error correction. The first clock was built to undo a catastrophic miscalculation that could not be solved by mechanical precision alone.
The inventor’s name has been lost or deliberately removed from public record. What remains is the method—and the warning that followed.
Precision Mechanics regard Chronomechanists as a necessary but dangerous extension of their work.
Frostglobe Channelers respect the discipline but distrust its disregard for systemic stability.
Unicorn Emissaries are fundamentally incomprehensible to Chronomechanists, whose magic cannot be measured or anchored.
People pursue this path for many reasons: fear of failure, obsession with perfection, desire to correct mistakes, or belief that consequences should be negotiable.
Some are trained. Some inherit the weapon. Some steal it.
All of them learn the same lesson: time can be touched—but never safely owned.