232 Welcome Home, Dear
232 Welcome Home, Dear
I traveled through the multiverse the way others commuted between cities, stepping through SRC-sanctioned portals that peeled reality apart like paper curtains. Each world greeted me with different skies, different laws of physics, and different kinds of monsters wearing human faces. The constant was power. Ratings between fifteen and nineteen burned like beacons to my senses, loud and arrogant, impossible to ignore.
The first world was already at war with itself. A telekinetic tyrant ruled a continent from a floating citadel, his rating hovering just under sixteen. I didn’t bother with speeches or challenges. I phased through the outer defenses, ignored the screaming alarms, and let my intangibility slip inside his skull for just long enough to end it. His death was quiet and anticlimactic. The citadel fell from the sky minutes later, but I was already gone.
Another portal opened into a neon-soaked city where capes were celebrities and executioners rolled into one. A woman with probability manipulation had turned the justice system into a casino, deciding guilt by whim and spectacle. Her rating was eighteen, sharp and dangerous. She tried to smile at me when I appeared in her penthouse, confident that luck would save her. Luck didn’t mean much when space itself refused to acknowledge her existence. I walked through her, felt the resistance, then the surrender, and left her empire of chance to collapse under its own cruelty.
World after world blurred together. A fire god worshiped by zealots on a desert planet. A hive-minded warlord whose thoughts screamed across an entire moon. A living storm that demanded sacrifice to keep the seas calm. They all fought differently, each convinced their power made them inevitable. None of them understood what it meant to be hunted by someone who could step outside the rules they relied on.
Some battles were loud and catastrophic, tearing cities apart as I clashed with beings who bent gravity, time, or causality itself. Others were surgical, ending in silent rooms where only one of us walked away. Each kill fed me something tangible. My control sharpened. My perception widened. Space felt more pliable, more willing to obey. I could feel myself approaching thresholds the Archives had warned me about, and I adjusted, careful not to tip too far, too fast.
Between hunts, I barely rested. SRC safe zones existed outside of time, and I used them only to orient myself, pick the next target, and step back out again. Guesswork checked in when required, offering coordinates and warnings, but he didn’t lecture me. He didn’t need to. He could probably see where this path ended if I wasn’t careful.
I told myself I was choosing my targets well. Warlords, tyrants, monsters hiding behind ideology or divinity. Each death justified itself easily enough, especially when I imagined Nicole and our son waiting in a quiet house that deserved to keep existing. If this was the price to keep them safe, then I would pay it in blood without hesitation.
“Stop, stop, please, we are just trying to survive—”
I stomped on her head and ended it in one blow. There was no hesitation left in me for pleas like that.
This target had been troublesome in a way that almost earned my respect. She knew about the SRC, slipped through blind spots with practiced ease, and layered contingencies atop contingencies until even seasoned hunters would have backed off. She tried to bargain when she realized she was cornered, offering knowledge ripped from dead timelines, artifacts stolen from collapsed worlds, and even children taken from realities that should never have existed in the first place. None of it slowed me down. I dismantled her defenses piece by piece, patiently, until her rating stopped meaning anything at all.
Her power was fascinating in a clinical sense. Reincarnation. She could abandon a dying body, leap into another, and pull new powers with each rebirth, stacking them over time like trophies. That accumulation was why the SRC had struggled to pin her down for so long. It was also why she lost. I could touch her soul, and reincarnation meant nothing when there was nowhere left to run.
“You are the last one,” I said to her final incarnation. She leaned against a doorway, bloodied and shaking, the most recent power she had pulled manifesting as unstable precognition. I could feel her frantic attempts to see a future where she survived. She had been a long-standing thorn in the SRC’s side, ever since she unlocked replication and used it to build an organization centered entirely around herself.
“No, this is wrong,” she cried. “I did nothing wrong—”
I phased my hand into her throat and dragged her soul out, her true body exposed and helpless. The concept of souls was still strange to me. Once, I would have laughed at the idea. Now, I could feel the weight of hers thrashing against my grip.
“Please,” she whispered, panic breaking through. “I am innocent—”
“No, you are not,” I said evenly. “You tried to create your own SRC, and in doing so, you inherited all of its corruption. As a single body, that meant eventually all of you.” I tightened my hold as memories flooded through me, hers bleeding into mine. “I relived what you’ve done. Across lives. Across worlds. You’ve committed atrocities that made even me feel repulsed, and I know the SRC better than most.”
She made one final attempt, desperation stripping away all pretense. “Please. I can be useful—”
I tore her apart with both arms and let what remained dissipate into nothing. When it was over, I stood there and took a long breath, surrounded by the bodies of lives she had worn and discarded. My hands felt steady, but something deeper churned beneath the surface.
I wasn’t certain I was strong enough to fight the Entity yet, but I could feel myself approaching the realm of the Five Continuities. The gap was closing, slowly but undeniably.
Then my watch began to sing.
The tone cut through the silence, sharp and urgent. When it stopped, text scrolled across the display and a neutral voice addressed me. “Contamination at seventy-eight percent. Warning. Levels above seventy-five percent may be dangerous. Recommendation: return to origin world and rest.”
I still didn’t fully understand contamination beyond the SRC’s explanations. It had something to do with the Source, with existing outside your native reality for too long. Outside my world, my death was stalled, my deterioration delayed, but the cost was this creeping instability. Stay away too long, jump too many worlds, and the contamination would accelerate until madness set in. Or worse, mutation. Light had been both, even if calling it mutation felt inadequate.
To safely remain in another world long-term required extensive conditioning, and I had no intention of going through something tiresome.
“I guess it’s time to go home,” I muttered.
I tapped the watch and issued the command. “Pick me up. I’m going home.”
A portal opened. I stepped through and emerged inside a decontamination chamber, sterile and humming softly. It wasn’t designed for dimensional contamination, but for sickness, parasites, and stranger things that clung to travelers between worlds. A few days ago, some kind of ghost had latched onto me, and even now I wasn’t entirely sure how that had happened.
Beyond the reinforced glass, Guesswork raised a hand and waved.
Once the decontamination cycle finally ended, the seals hissed open and I stepped out into the corridor. Guesswork was already waiting for me, leaning against the wall like he’d been there the entire time.
“That took longer than usual,” he remarked, his head tilting slightly in my direction.
“So?” I replied, not bothering to hide my impatience.
He straightened and shifted into report mode. “We’ve done extensive examination of the tissue example you’ve provided. It seems that outside your origin world, the deterioration inflicted by the Entity on your body has halted entirely. We still don’t understand the mechanism well enough to reverse it naturally, but if we could obtain samples from the Entity itself, it would likely change everything. If the worst comes to pass, I suggest you remain within SRC facilities to recover from dimensional contamination. It’s not ideal, but it’s safer than prolonged multiversal exposure.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said, more firmly than I felt.
I had roughly three months before the strange deterioration finished me off. Staying inside SRC space might slow things down, maybe buy me time, but it also meant leaving my world exposed. Now that the Entity had regained its capacity for thought, it wouldn’t act recklessly. It would plan, prepare, and strike when it benefited most. That meant I needed to minimize multiversal travel and keep my presence where it mattered most.
The Company needed better information flow, and as much as I disliked it, leaning on the SRC for that didn’t sound as bad as it once did.
“Get me home,” I said, fixing the mask over my face and smoothing out my suit as best I could.
“Okay,” Guesswork replied simply.
He gestured to one of the nearby researchers, and they began working the portal array. While the machinery hummed to life, Guesswork spoke again. “The power handover from the SRC to the Company is progressing slowly. I hope you understand.”
I nodded. The agents assigned to my world on behalf of the SRC were dragging their feet, hiding behind layers of procedure and territorial bureaucracy. It was irritating, but not unexpected.
“It would be easier if you took one of the Five seats,” Guesswork added, almost casually.
“I already told you, I’m fine without it,” I said. Then I glanced at him. “And do you really want to be under me so badly?”
He avoided eye contact, which was answer enough.
The portal finally stabilized, its surface shimmering with the coordinates of my world. I gave him a short nod. “See you when I see you.”
I stepped through and reappeared in my room, the familiar weight of my world settling over me immediately. The air felt denser, heavier, but also right. I walked over to the mirror and inspected myself. The suit was wrinkled in several places, stretched and creased from too many fights. There was dried blood smeared across the mask.
I sighed. I really needed a shower.
The door opened behind me, and Nicole walked in carrying plastic bags full of groceries. She froze when she saw me. The bags slipped from her hands and hit the floor with dull thuds as she stared.
“YOU! FUCKER!” she screamed.
That was… rude. I blinked, momentarily caught off guard. This wasn’t exactly the welcome-home scenario I’d imagined, but I supposed that was on me.
“YOU’VE BEEN GONE FOR A WEEK!” she continued, fury radiating off her. “AND YOUR BLOODY SHOES, DAMN IT!”
I looked down. My shoes were smeared red, the dried blood caked into the soles. When I looked back, I saw it clearly: bloody footprints trailing across the carpet and onto the floor.
“Oh,” I said quietly, finally understanding why she was livid.
I was such a klutz sometimes. I told myself it was because I’d been too excited to get home and see my partner’s face again, because I’d survived, because the world hadn’t ended while I was gone. That excuse lasted about half a second in my head before I discarded it. Nicole wouldn’t buy that for a moment. With her, you had to be proactive or you were dead.
“Let me handle it,” I said quickly, already moving before she could respond.
I walked over to the carpet, dropped to my knees, and placed my hand over one of the bloody footprints. I glanced back at her with what I hoped was confidence. “Just watch. I’m a genius of intangibility.”
I phased the footprint.
Except the carpet phased with it.
The fabric, padding, and a neat section of flooring sank straight through the house like it had never existed, disappearing into whatever unfortunate space lay beneath. I froze. Nicole froze. We stared at each other in complete silence, the missing carpet quietly mocking me.
I cleared my throat. “Ahem. It seems I am still combat-sensitive and suffering from an adrenaline high. I’ve been busy.”
She raised one eyebrow slowly, the look alone sharp enough to cut. “But you have enhancer ratings related to body coordination and self-mastery.”
Ah. Shit. That landed exactly where it hurt.
“Let me try that again,” I said, far too quickly, already stepping toward another footprint before she could stop me.
I placed my hand down the floor with exaggerated care. “This time, I will show you I’m a reliable—”
The house phased.
Not a room. Not the floor. The house.
The entire structure dropped out of reality in an instant, vanishing straight through the ground like it had been politely asked to leave existence. Wind rushed past me. Gravity followed. Then everything stopped as abruptly as it had begun.
“…guy?” I finished weakly.
Nicole stood perfectly still, framed by the one remaining piece of furniture that hadn’t phased with the rest of our home. Her eyes were cold in a way that made villains tremble and gods reconsider their choices.
“Nicholas Caldwell,” she said evenly, “you’re lucky there’s still the couch.”
Soon enough, the neighborhood erupted.
Someone down the street shouted that their electricity was dead. Another voice complained about water pressure dropping. I heard the unmistakable crack of pipes bursting somewhere nearby, the infrastructure finally reacting to the fact that an entire house had just been phased underground like a bad magic trick. I swallowed hard. The cover-up alone was going to cost a ridiculous amount, not to mention the actual damages. There was no way to spin this as anything but a catastrophic screw-up.
I stood up slowly and fixed my collar out of sheer habit, trying to reclaim some dignity before I spoke. “There’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for my lack of control,” I said carefully. “I’m usually not this clumsy. This sort of thing can happen if you suddenly rush your ratings from sixteen to eighteen in roughly over a week—”
Nicole cut me off immediately. “And we are going to have another conversation about that, on top of you suddenly disappearing!” Her voice cracked with anger and something sharper underneath it. “You said you’d be back soon, Nick, but it’s been a week. Promises are important, okay? I thought you ran off on me again!”
That one hit harder than any punch I’d taken out there.
Silver suddenly appeared beside me, hands raised in a placating gesture. “Oh, come on, surely he has a good reason—”
“Shut it, Silver!” Nicole snapped, her voice rising another notch. “You were the one who whined the most for the past week about him. ‘Where is Nick?’ ‘Why is he gone?’ ‘Did he leave us?’”
Onyx materialized near Nicole, visibly startled. “C-Calm down, sis—”
Nicole spun on her. “I am not your sis—”
She stopped mid-sentence.
Standing at what used to be our front door was a cluster of girl scouts, none of them older than ten. The one in front was frozen mid-knock, her fist hovering awkwardly in the air. All of them were staring at me, wide-eyed, taking in the half-destroyed house, the supernatural women, and the blood-stained man in a suit.
Ah.
This was officially beyond expensive cleanup territory.
Onyx leaned toward us and muttered, “Should we silence them?”
Silver shot her a glare sharp enough to kill. “Onyx.”
“Oh, come on,” Onyx replied defensively. “You know that’s not what I mean. There are plenty of ways to silence someone—”
She didn’t get to finish.
“Mommy!” one of the girls screamed.
“There’s a scary lady!” another cried.
“Ghost!” yelled a third.
One of them fainted outright, dropping backward.
Phasecrash appeared behind the group in a blur and caught the collapsing girl before her head hit the pavement. Two-D stepped out from one of the sedans parked nearby and calmly fired tranq darts in rapid succession. The girl scouts crumpled one by one, unconscious before they could scream again.
Phasecrash glanced at the fallen kids and frowned. “Isn’t that a bit much? Won’t the dosage hurt them?”
“They’ll be fine,” Two-D replied flatly. Then she turned to me. “Uhm… boss. I believe we should go.”
I stared at the scene in front of me, the ruined house, the unconscious girl scouts, my furious partner, and my security detail doing damage control in broad daylight.
Yeah.
I’d screwed up really bad.