273 Operation Mars
273 Operation Mars
[POV: Nick]
These fucking Martians really knew how to haggle.
Elon smiled brightly as he shook my hand, clearly satisfied with the deal we had reached. “A pleasure doing business with you,” he said. “The resources alone are more than enough, but access to a culturally functional society? That’s invaluable. Our luxury goods division has been waiting for this opportunity for a long time. And the entertainment discounts? Even better.”
I pulled my hand back.
From what I gathered about their parallel world, they were severely lacking in social and cultural development. Their technological advancement far outpaced their understanding of things like storytelling, art, or even basic entertainment.
I had never seen people so excited over movies and anime.
It was… a little sad.
I hoped that didn’t show on my face.
With the negotiations concluded, I made my way back to Lifeblood and the Fuhrer. I didn’t rush. Instead, I took my time walking through the NSD base, observing the place more carefully.
There was something off.
A strange feeling I couldn’t quite put into words.
The NSD had apparently just developed isolation-type technology. That alone was concerning. I just hoped Dr. Hera wasn’t involved in that particular development. She had a tendency to push boundaries further than most were comfortable with.
My thoughts drifted briefly to Ron.
Leaving him behind wasn’t ideal, but my options were limited. Trust was a rare commodity, and the list of people I could rely on was short. At the very least, I trusted the people of Lockworld. Not just their abilities, but the loyalty they developed after everything I had done for them.
By the time I returned, the Fuhrer was already waiting.
“What took you so long?” he asked, clearly annoyed.
“I had to find the restroom,” I replied casually.
My gaze shifted to the delegation from Eden.
The tree-like beings hadn’t left yet, their presence calm and rooted despite everything happening around them. That worked in my favor.
“Send a message to Huston,” I said. “Tell your Divine Forest King that it’s almost time. I’ll be dealing with the Entity soon. Have him wait on Mars and make whatever preparations he needs.”
They acknowledged quietly.
Lifeblood looked at me, her expression thoughtful.
“You intend to fight the Entity there?” she asked. “I have my doubts.”
“I’m not fighting it in my world,” I said. “There’s no reason to risk unnecessary casualties when I have another option.”
I gestured slightly.
“I just finalized a deal with MAX. They’re providing relocation technology capable of moving us across vast distances instantly. Mars is isolated enough, and with the right preparations, it becomes the ideal battlefield.”
Lifeblood considered that.
“Would you be willing to sell that technology, second hand?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“They didn’t sell it to me,” I said. “It’s a rental. And they made it very clear they have no intention of letting that kind of tech circulate freely.”
She sighed softly.
“That’s unfortunate,” she said. “MAX has always been overly cautious when it comes to the SRC.”
I didn’t respond.
MAX had every reason to be cautious.
We returned to the SRC base, and the atmosphere shifted the moment we stepped in. Eyes turned toward me almost immediately, a mixture of anticipation and calculation settling over the room as they waited for direction. There wasn’t much time to let it linger.
“We’re taking the fight on Mars. The SRC will provide you whatever you need. Life, please equip them with everything they need.”
Lifeblood gave a small nod, already moving before anyone else could respond.
Qilin stepped forward slightly, asking. “Can you try dropping me on Mars or something? I want to see if I can survive in that atmosphere. I feel like an oxygen tank or something similar would just be cumbersome.”
Gameboy let out a short breath, rolling his shoulders. “I’m a reality warper, I should be fine. The same is probably true for Tony here. But I’d appreciate getting more gear.”
I glanced briefly toward the Fuhrer at that, the memory fighting him in the vacuum of the moon occuring to me. He had moved through it without hesitation, without limitation. Mars wouldn’t slow him down.
Cordellia spoke next, her tone measured and grounded in a way that contrasted sharply with the others. “I won’t be fighting on the field, but stay here. My combat ability as an individual is severely weak. I can offer support from the distance and send Knightess to fight with you. I have a few tricks of my own, so I can still help from here.”
I gave a single nod in response, accepting it without question.
“I’ll trust you on your words.”
My attention shifted back to Lifeblood, who had already begun coordinating resources, projections flickering faintly around her as she calculated loadouts and deployment options in real time.
“I’ll leave them to you. I’ll go talk to Guesswork, and make preparations back home. Ideally, by the next five minutes later, I’ll be able to send the Entity to Mars.”
Gameboy tilted his head slightly, a faint smirk tugging at the corner of his expression, though there was something sharper underneath it.
“You know he won’t just stand still. Whatever technology MAX have, they better be good. Or you’d be fighting alone, and the thing you want to avoid? Yeah, it’s going to happen.”
I didn’t pause, didn’t entertain the implication any further than necessary.
“I got it handled.”
I stepped through the SRC’s portal and felt the world snap into place around me, the sterile hallway stretching forward in quiet contrast to everything that had just unfolded. The hum of the facility pressed in from all sides, artificial and controlled, the exact opposite of what waited for us on Mars. The psychic thread tugged at my awareness the moment I arrived, sharp and familiar, Nicole’s presence anchoring itself in my mind without hesitation. She was close, somewhere deeper in the building, and I didn’t need directions.
With a thought, I vanished and reappeared directly in front of her.
“What the— Nick?! You can’t just pop in like that!”
“Yeah, nice to see you too.”
She was seated in a massive chair that looked more like a command throne than anything practical, Guesswork beside her in an identical setup, both of them facing a sprawling array of screens and projections. Krissy stood off to the side, barking into a microphone with the kind of intensity that made it feel like she was trying to dominate the entire room through sheer volume alone. The air was thick with overlapping voices, data streams, and urgency.
My eyes drifted to the largest screen, where chaos unfolded in real time. A fortress was under siege by a mixed force of heroes and villains, powers colliding in violent bursts of color and distortion. I spotted Onyx and Silver weaving through the battlefield, Nicole’s constructs moving with precision as they tore into defenses and redirected attacks like extensions of her will.
Guesswork pushed himself up slightly, his attention shifting from the screen to me.
“Nicole, Krissy, keep the pressure on that eastern flank and don’t let Paleman regroup. I’ll handle this conversation,” he said, his tone cutting cleanly through the noise without needing to rise.
He gestured for me to follow, already moving before I gave any acknowledgment. I turned and walked with him, the doors sliding open as we exited into the exterior corridor, the relative quiet settling in once the operations room sealed behind us.
“I had Krissy handle George,” Guesswork said as we stepped out into the open air, his voice more measured now. “Once he’s rebooted, we should be able to stabilize things on that front. Among the Four Horsemen, Conquest and War have been basically handled. The problem is Paleman and Master Sequence. Leave them to us. You are needed somewhere else.”
He glanced at me briefly, eyes sharper than his casual tone suggested.
“The Entity. You know where to look?”
I nodded once, the answer obvious.
I hadn’t come here for strategy. Not really. The thread in my head had already told me what I needed to know about Nicole. Seeing her in person just confirmed it. Him, too.
“You are going to die soon, aren’t you?” I asked.
Guesswork faltered for a fraction of a second, the smallest crack in his composure, but it was there.
“Man, you don’t listen, do you?”
His other self’s warning echoed faintly in my mind, something about not letting this version of him know what we were planning, something about timelines and consequences that didn’t quite fit together no matter how I turned them over. It never fully clicked, and I wasn’t sure it needed to.
“I’m going now,” I said.
I didn’t wait for a response.
My body phased as I teleported, intangibility wrapping around me as the world folded and reassembled. The Devil’s Triangle greeted me with an absence that felt louder than any sound, and I suspended myself in the sky, looking down at what shouldn’t exist.
The ocean floor was gone.
In its place was a vast triangular void, a cut in reality that descended into pure darkness, its edges unstable, shifting, expanding. Water cascaded inward endlessly, devoured before it could even ripple properly, the triangle growing larger, its shape already beginning to distort as if geometry itself was losing its meaning.
It stared back.
I raised my wrist and tapped the smartwatch, inputting the number MAX had given me. The connection clicked in almost immediately, static flickering for a moment before stabilizing.
“Elon speaking. We’re going to need a few more minutes. The target appears to possess physical anomalies that are actively sabotaging our technology. Standard deployment methods are failing, and anything relying on consistent spatial rules is being disrupted.”
Of course it was.
Something like multiversal portal tech was useless here. The Entity didn’t follow rules that could be mapped or predicted. That was why I needed MAX’s hardware in the first place, something brute-force enough to ignore the inconsistencies rather than work around them.
Below me, the triangle expanded another fraction, the ocean folding into it like it had already accepted the outcome.
“Do it faster.”
…
..
.
[POV: George]
I woke up drowning.
Not in water, but in fragments that refused to line up properly, a sea of memories crashing over each other without sequence or mercy. Running, hiding, breaking through walls that didn’t exist anymore, the sound of something chasing me that never needed to move. It was desperation, raw and violent, clawing my way through survival with no certainty that it would even matter.
I have to tell Nick.
The thought cut through everything else like a blade forced into static.
I—
My eyes snapped open.
The world reassembled itself into something physical, something confined. I was inside a cube, metallic and dimly lit, the walls humming faintly with energy that pressed against my skin in a way that felt almost intrusive. Systems were already moving around me, machinery half-built and half-alive.
“Awake now? My name’s Krissy. We share a mutual friend. Now, help us a bit. This Famine guy is getting annoying.”
Master Sequence.
Yeah. Annoying didn’t even begin to cover it.
But where—
“You are back on your world. We’re safe.”
The voice came with contact, arms wrapping around me from behind before I could react. Dullahan. The familiarity of her presence grounded something in me that had been slipping apart moments ago. It was unexpected, but not unwelcome.
If it weren’t for her, I would’ve died long ago. Dr. Time would’ve made sure of it.
A flicker of another thought followed immediately after.
The child.
Hopefully, the child was safe.
There was a bitter edge to it. If I hadn’t involved myself with Dullahan in the first place, I wouldn’t be here like this. The virus Master Sequence left on her had nearly erased me completely, carving through everything I was with surgical precision.
“I’m sorry, Krissy, but I am lacking on power right now.”
Even saying it felt insufficient. Power wasn’t just low, it was fractured. Unstable. Even with Dullahan beside me, Master Sequence wasn’t something I could stand against anymore. Not after what the Entity had done to him. Whatever that thing turned him into, it had pushed him far beyond anything I could reach.
Krissy didn’t slow down. If anything, she moved faster.
“That’s exactly why I planned ahead, kid. We’re not patching you up. We’re upgrading you. I’m turning you into the most powerful supercomputer to ever exist.”
She dragged massive components into place with surprising ease, her hands moving with mechanical precision as she assembled something that looked less like a machine and more like a framework for a god that hadn’t decided its shape yet.
My attention drifted beyond the immediate construction.
Nicole.
She was there, standing at a control station, shouting into a mic while her other hand flew across a keyboard. Orders, corrections, calculations. She was everywhere at once, holding the entire operation together through sheer force of will.
Hopefully… she got my gift.
The thought lingered heavier than it should have.
The feeling of losing her son… I couldn’t even approach that kind of weight. So I gave her something else instead. A lie shaped carefully enough to feel real. A replacement built from psychic constructs, detailed down to the smallest nuance.
If it worked, Dr. Time would be fooled.
“Nick will handle the Entity. He can’t save our world. It now falls on us.”
Guesswork’s voice cut cleanly through the room as he stepped in, his presence immediately shifting the atmosphere.
“George. No. Bunnyblade. Can you help us?”
Before I could answer, Krissy finished.
The final connection snapped into place, and I felt it.
It wasn’t gradual.
It was instant.
“The hardware you’re running on right now is seven hundred years ahead of this world’s time,” Krissy said, her voice carrying a sharp edge of pride. “My world built this after centuries under the Dark Lord’s tyranny. We needed something beyond human. Something that could become a god and actually win.”
The world slowed.
No… To be more accurate, I accelerated.
Everything around me stretched into something measurable, something dissectible. Data wasn’t just information anymore, it was structure, flow, and intent. I could see pathways forming and collapsing across networks I wasn’t even consciously searching for.
Time fractured into clarity.
4.974326321 seconds.
That was all it took.
Me and Dullahan moved as one, our actions synchronized without the need for communication. The connection Master Sequence had to the internet, vast, invasive, and omnipresent, became visible to me as threads.
I cut them.
Every last one.
And just like that, the noise stopped.