255 Old Powers
255 Old Powers
I stood behind Krissy as she commandeered an entire floor of the Company’s research wing like she owned it.
“What do you think?” I asked.
The console area had been transformed into chaos. Engineers rushed back and forth carrying oscillators, crystalline processors, old null-tech modules, and half-disassembled drones because Krissy had barked that she “needed to see how this world did its thinking.”
She was in her element.
The old woman hunched over a cluster of machinery she had personally selected, wires spilling like metallic vines from an improvised hub she was assembling. From the way she confidently moved, I could safely estimate her Researcher rating sat somewhere in the upper teens.
“Your dimension is obscene,” Krissy muttered, adjusting a dial before smacking the side of a humming unit. “Do you know how many fascinating redundancies you people built into your infrastructure? It’s like you expected half your geniuses to turn evil and sabotage the rest.”
One of my employees carefully set down a crate.
“Careful!” Krissy snapped. “If you drop that stabilizer, I will personally demonstrate gravity on your skull. Treat the equipment like it’s your firstborn!”
The poor man nodded frantically and retreated.
She glanced around again, eyes gleaming. “There are so many interesting toys here. You’ve got layered psychic dampeners next to quantum relays next to spatial anchors. No wonder your enemies keep trying to steal from you.”
Among all power classifications, Researcher remained the most enigmatic, even moreso than Intangibility. It did not throw fire. It did not bend space directly. Yet it shaped civilizations. It created the tools that allowed monsters and heroes alike to function.
“Found anything?” I asked.
“Just wait a sec,” she replied, moving from one terminal to another, tapping screens, rerouting signals, muttering to herself.
Despite my retained knowledge and memories from my own Researcher rating, I had no idea what she was doing. She operated on instinct layered over decades of adaptation.
“You want me to find your friend, right?” she said suddenly. “Ah. This is interesting.”
My attention sharpened. “What?”
“It seems your friend is no longer of this world.”
I frowned. “You mean dead?”
“Oh no,” she said casually. “I mean off-world. The signal imprint I’m tracing doesn’t terminate here. It bleeds. Parallel world interference. This is mindblowing. Are we sure time travel isn’t a thing too?”
I shook my head immediately. “Impossible. Don’t even think about it. Travel between parallel worlds is significantly easier than time travel.”
At least that was what the SRC insisted, and I believed them on that specific point. If time travel were feasible, they would have already weaponized it to prevent the catastrophic divergence that fractured everything in the first place.
A flicker of disappointment crossed Krissy’s face.
I understood it without her saying a word. If time could be reversed, Rodney’s eighty-year nightmare could be undone. Families restored. Entire generations spared.
She inhaled sharply, then perked up again. “Oh, this is interesting. We’ve got a tech-wiz on our hands.”
A massive screen flickered.
Streams of zeroes and ones cascaded downward before reorganizing into a crude digital face. The approximation smirked.
“Hello~!” the projection chimed. “I just came to check who was poking around. Who is the old hag?”
Krissy placed a hand over her chest in mock offense. “Don’t be like that. My very maiden heart will be hurt.”
She slammed a key.
The projection glitched and vanished, replaced by static.
“Just who was that creep?” she demanded.
“Master Sequence,” I answered calmly. “Enemy.”
Her mouth twisted. “Charming.”
“So?” I pressed.
She grimaced slightly. “Your entire building is compromised. Not just the servers I’m touching. Structural systems. Auxiliary relays. Surveillance redundancies. My money says your whole organization has eyes behind them.”
My jaw tightened.
If George had still been fully present, this never would have slipped through. He would have sniffed out digital contamination long before it metastasized.
Which made his removal even more strategic.
“I want to introduce you to the GDF,” I said. “And I want you to work on our systems. Thoroughly.”
She grinned, sharp and delighted. “Oh, absolutely. In fact, I’m thinking of bringing some of my coworkers here. More hands, faster purge. We can treat your infrastructure like an infected wound and cauterize it properly.”
“We’ll need contracts,” I replied. “I’ll inform Nicole.”
“I hope I’m not interrupting something important,” a familiar voice drawled behind me.
I turned.
Chad stood there wearing my Eclipse persona, dyed hair, porcelain mask, posture mimicked down to the subtle tilt of the shoulders. He removed the mask and handed it to me.
“I’m spent,” he admitted. “Need more family time. GDF paperwork is piling up. Also, boss lady wants to talk to you. Says it’s important.”
I accepted the mask slowly.
After Ron’s abduction, I had not used doubles much. Seeing someone else wear my face even briefly stirred something unpleasant. Paleman was definitely on the top of my shit list as of the moment.
“Did she say what it’s about?” I asked.
Chad shook his head. “Just that it can’t wait.”
I turned to Chad. “Do me a favor first. Tell Nicole to meet up with Krissy here.”
“That would be me,” Krissy replied without looking up from the disemboweled server rack in front of her. Sparks flared briefly before she smacked something back into place. “Bit busy in here. It might be rude to let the boss meet me here, but that other guy’s being feisty. Ha ha. Probably got pissed I shut him down mid-sentence.”
Master Sequence.
The fact that he had been sitting comfortably inside our infrastructure long enough to banter unsettled me more than any overt attack would have. I had hoped to get a clearer signal of George through all this interference, perhaps even force some form of contact, but that door remained closed.
It was probably strategically sound that Ron had been removed from this building. If Master Sequence truly had eyes everywhere, then keeping my son here would have been negligent.
That did not stop the bitterness.
“Where’s Griffin right now?” I asked.
“Southern Faust,” Chad replied. “GDF branch.”
“What is she doing there?”
He stared at me like I had just asked what oxygen was. The look lasted half a second before he politely smoothed it away.
“There’s a civil war there,” he said carefully. “You don’t know? It’s been ongoing for roughly three years. Wait. I see.”
I narrowed my eyes. “What’s so funny?”
He crossed his arms, an amused glint slipping through. “I’d bet good money you’re ignorant of anything outside CCS.”
“What CCS?”
He looked genuinely pained. “Council of City-States. Your birthplace. What, do you live under a rock?”
I reasoned, “I got too used just calling it the Council, but CCS have a nicer ring to it.”
I was familiar with the SRC. Markend. The multiversal implications. The Archive records that hinted at fractures and divergences. I had spent so much time treating the SRC as my primary axis of conflict that everything else blurred into background noise.
Apparently, that background noise included a three-year civil war in some other place.
Chad exhaled through his nose. “That’s your problem. You reduce everything to us versus them. Big shadow organization versus you. I mean, I get it. Hard not to. Still.”
“Just fuck off,” I muttered.
He raised his hands in surrender and left me alone.
For someone in my position, I knew embarrassingly little about my own world. I was an uneducated dropout brute with average high school grades. I was not a statesman. I was not a historian. I was a hammer who had been pointed at increasingly cosmic nails.
Except when it came to my powers.
There, I was sharp.
I left the research wing and headed toward the Company’s private airbase. If Griffin was in Southern Faust, then that was where I should go. George’s disappearance, Dullahan’s extraction, Master Sequence’s infiltration, and the cult’s movement? All of it could be connected through instability zones. A civil war was fertile ground for manipulation.
I could have flown there myself. Crossing continents was trivial now with warp. However, navigation without proper geographic familiarity was a different issue. The Faustian continent was vast, and I had spent most of my active career in and around the Council territories.
I informed the airbase crew of my destination. Within minutes, a sleek Company jet was prepped.
The pilot, a middle-aged woman with calm eyes and steady hands, ran through her preflight checks while I settled into the copilot seat.
“Southern Faust,” she confirmed. “You planning to land at the GDF branch or just dramatic entrance?”
“Let’s keep it simple,” I replied. “Land at the branch.”
She smirked slightly. “Shame. I heard you once dropped onto Monarchy’s base like a meteor.”
“Strategic landing,” I corrected.
“Of course,” she said dryly. “Fuel levels optimal. Navigation locked. Weather over Faust is unstable, but manageable. You ever been there before?”
“Briefly. Not enough to claim I know it.”
She nodded. “Faust isn’t like CCS. City-States are compact, politically dense. Faust is sprawling. Old territories. Long grudges. Civil wars don’t start there without layers.”
“That’s what I’m counting on,” I murmured.
She glanced at me sideways. “You look like you’re carrying more than a regional conflict.”
“I am.”
She did not press further.
The engines roared to life. The runway lights streaked past as we accelerated.
For a moment, I remembered riding a rocket toward Monarchy’s base, calculating trajectory mid-flight and slamming into fortified ground with deliberate precision. That had been simpler. Direct. Impact-based.
Now everything felt layered.
The jet lifted smoothly into the sky, banking southward.
As far as I understood it, the world was divided into four major continents, each fractured into dozens of City-States. In the era before the current order, patriotism had meant something larger. Countries had spanned vast territories. They had national anthems, flags, standing armies, shared myths that bound millions together.
Then came the Dark Age of superpowers.
After that came the Great War.
The war had shattered the old nations. Entire governments collapsed under the weight of uncontrolled abilities, rogue demigods, and weaponized anomalies. When the dust settled, centralized states had proven too vulnerable. Power consolidated at the city level, tighter, denser, easier to defend and easier to monitor.
Now territories were compact, overcrowded, and intensely fortified. The Council of City-States, the CCS, was the closest thing left to a proper country.
What little we were taught in school about the Great War was sanitized. The real records were buried. I had read fragments through the SRC’s imitation Archives and glimpsed more through the authentic ones. They hinted at older powers that had guided events from the shadows, entities and individuals who cooperated with the SRC when interests aligned.
The gravity manipulator who once fought Griffin came to mind. He felt like one of those remnants.
The jet descended toward Southern Faust.
I was preparing questions in my head when the sky erupted.
A blur streaked toward us, followed by a resounding impact.
The cockpit disintegrated in a bloom of fire as a flying cape tore through the fuselage with a combination of invulnerability, superspeed, and brute force. The explosion engulfed the jet midair.
Time slowed in my perception.
I possessed the pilot instantly, slipping into her nervous system before shock could shut it down. Intangibility wrapped around us like a second skin. Shrapnel phased through. Fire parted.
The blast was excessive. Deliberate overkill.
I did not recognize the attacker. I was unfamiliar with most capes outside the Council and GDF circles.
Still inhabiting the pilot’s body, I forced a rapid descent using warp to correct trajectory. We plummeted toward the outskirts of the conflict zone. Moments before impact, I phased us underground, sliding through soil and stone, then re-emerged several hundred meters away in the shadow of a collapsed structure.
I released her.
“Hide,” I told the pilot.
She did not argue.
Smoke curled across the skyline. The GDF branch was ablaze. Its emblem, half-melted and hanging from a fractured facade, was the only indication of what the building had once been.
I felt it then.
Psychic prodding.
Someone was triangulating my location.
I warped.
Intangibility bent space so sharply it resembled teleportation. I followed the psychic thread back to its origin and emerged inside an abandoned factory several kilometers away.
Uniformed soldiers froze when I appeared in their midst.
One of them dropped his rifle.
“E-Eclipse!”
“It’s him!”
“The Butcher!”
“The most violent villain—”
Panic cascaded through the room.
I did not give them time to organize.
With a glance, I phased the first man downward. His body slipped through the floor and vanished into the earth. Another tried to trigger his power. His nervous system unraveled as I disrupted its spatial coherence by basically plunging them to there deaths.
One by one, they fell.
Guns never fired. Powers never activated. They simply ceased.
The telepath at the center of the room collapsed backward against a crate, eyes wide, urine spreading beneath him.
I reappeared directly in front of him, closing distance through warped intangibility.
He shrieked and lashed out, attempting to induce a migraine, a psychic spike meant to cripple cognition.
It brushed against me like static.
I entered him.
Possession had become smoother since my evolution. I absorbed his memories in a torrent. Childhood in a rural Faustian district. Enlistment out of economic necessity. Years of mundane service. Gradual indoctrination under a general who promised unity through decisive action.
Orders.
Stage an attack on the GDF branch. Escalate tensions. Frame opposing factions. Trigger wider mobilization.
The flying cape who destroyed my jet had been part of the same unit.
I withdrew and snapped his neck without ceremony.
His body slumped.
The ceiling above exploded inward.
Griffin crashed down in a storm of debris, wings flaring wide to slow her descent. In one hand, she gripped the corpse of the flyer who had obliterated my jet.
She dropped the body at her feet.
“So,” I said evenly, surveying the carnage around us, “what was so important that you had to call for me through Chad?”
Amelia folded her wings slowly, feathers streaked with soot. Her gaze flicked across the dead soldiers and then back to me.
“Someone contacted me,” she said. “Claims to be a time traveler.”
My attention sharpened.
She continued, “He insisted on speaking with you specifically. Considering how often you vanish off-world and how difficult you are to reach, I asked Chad to remain on standby so he could inform you the moment you resurfaced.”
A time traveler.
I thought of Krissy’s fleeting hope. I thought of the SRC’s insistence that time travel was impossible.
I also thought of the Great War and the buried truths behind it.
“Where is he?” I asked.
Griffin’s expression hardened.
“He’s waiting,” she said. “Come, I’ll lead the way.”