283 Desperation & Destruction
283 Desperation & Destruction
[POV: Nick]
The transition carried us beyond anything tied to a single world. The SRC did not exist within time as we understood it. Their base of operations sat outside its flow, insulated from causality, detached from consequence.
We arrived inside an office.
Mr. Known’s office.
The counterpart to Guesswork within their structure, the man who had operated within their system for longer than most could comprehend.
He was slumped in his chair, dead.
A single bullet hole rested cleanly in his forehead.
My hand rose unconsciously, fingers brushing against the same point on my own head. The body I inhabited bore the same injury, the echo of a moment that had already occurred.
I stepped forward and reached in Mr. Known’s forehead, extracting the bullet carefully.
“It looks like Guesswork used something very specific,” I said. “A null based round. Possibly at the highest threshold, though it was designed for a single use.”
I turned it slightly between my fingers before pocketing it.
Griffin scanned the room, already shifting into the next phase.
“Where do we start?” she asked.
I let Guesswork’s power take hold.
Using his body felt different now. Not foreign, not borrowed, but cooperative. As if some fragment of him remained aligned with what I was doing, guiding without resistance.
I pushed Mr. Known’s body aside and moved to the console.
The password came to me in fragments, each segment aligning as I entered it, a long sequence that would have been impossible without precognition. When the system prompted for biometrics, I dragged his hand across the interface.
The lock disengaged.
Data unfolded.
Coordinates, structures, distributions.
I absorbed as much as I could, committing it to memory with careful precision.
“There are six hundred fifty two worlds tied to the SRC,” I said. “Each with isolated facilities like this one, positioned outside of time. If we want to do this properly, we can’t move slowly.”
I turned toward her.
“We split up. I act as the decoy. I make noise, draw attention, and destroy facilities in the most visible way possible. You infiltrate. Use your shapeshifting, get inside, and destabilize them from within by forcing their energy systems to collapse.”
I tapped the console lightly.
“They run on the Source. Each facility draws from a single instance tied to its world. If you remove it, the structure fails. It will regenerate, but not here. It will return to the world it belongs to.”
Griffin exhaled, tension flickering across her expression.
“I don’t really know how to do that,” she admitted. “But I’ll figure it out.”
Guesswork’s power settled that uncertainty before it could grow.
She could do it.
Which meant she would.
I nodded once.
“It’s going to be a massacre,” I said. “There’s no version of this where it isn’t. But it needs to happen.”
The weight of what we were about to do pressed in, but it did not slow me.
“The SRC’s control has lasted too long.”
I paused, then continued, letting the full scope settle between us.
“Their tyranny isn’t limited to exploiting worlds or extracting resources,” I said. “They manipulate entire societies, engineer collapse, manufacture powers at scale to sustain their system.”
I watched her reaction carefully.
“They’ve reset cycles before. Entire stretches of existence wiped and restarted when too many worlds begin to access multiversal travel. It keeps their monopoly intact. It keeps them in control.”
The implication hung there.
“They claim it’s necessary,” I continued. “That it serves some larger goal, fixing the multiverse itself. But achieving that would mean the end of our world as it exists. There’s no version of that future where we coexist with them.”
The knowledge sat heavy, still new even to me, pulled directly from Guesswork’s memory.
“It ends with them,” I said. “Or it ends with us.”
Griffin’s expression hardened, any lingering hesitation burned away.
“I didn’t come here for half measures,” she said.
…
..
.
[POV: Dr. Time]
I hastened through the shifting corridors of my secret laboratory, a structure unmoored from causality itself, drifting in a distant fold of reality where neither time nor space held dominion. My thoughts flickered faster than the unstable lights above me as I reached out across layers of existence, attempting to contact Known. Silence answered. I tried Will next, forcing the signal through fractured timelines and sealed dimensions, yet again there was nothing but absence.
I moved deeper.
As I passed one of the primary containment halls, my gaze lingered briefly on a god-class cape rated well beyond conventional metrics, a Rated-20 anomaly bound within reinforced glass. His body convulsed endlessly as unseen forces tore his limbs apart, only for them to regenerate and be torn again in an infinite cycle of suffering. The Source embedded within him pulsed like a malignant star, fueling this secret facility. His screams echoed, though muted by design, reverberating more in implication than sound.
I ignored him.
The base itself existed beyond all planes, detached from any orbit or anchor, much like the rest of the SRC facilities I had designed, except far more hidden. A place where consequences could be delayed, altered, or erased entirely.
I reached a smaller chamber and tapped against the glass.
The pod within hissed open.
Fluid spilled across the floor as a figure collapsed forward, gasping, her crimson hair clinging to her skin like living blood. Lifeblood. I had extracted her at the precise moment before the Entity consumed her entirely. She trembled, disoriented, her body bare and vulnerable, eyes darting wildly as she struggled to comprehend her surroundings.
She looked at me, voice shaking but sharp beneath the confusion. “What is the meaning of this?”
I snapped my fingers.
Time froze around her, suspending every droplet of liquid mid-fall, every flicker of motion reduced to stillness. I stepped closer, observing her halted expression with clinical detachment.
“I don’t have to explain anything to you,” I said evenly. “But the bottom line is this, the SRC is done. Finished. You are free to try and save it, or your comrades, if that illusion still appeals to you. The truth, however, is simpler. The SRC was nothing more than my tool, and now that it no longer serves a purpose, I intend to abandon it. Though… as things stand, it may yet have one final use.”
I turned slightly, tapping a holographic panel beside the screaming cape’s chamber. The glass responded instantly, dissolving into nothingness as access was granted.
With a flick of my hand, the cape froze mid-motion, his agony halted in a grotesque still frame.
I reached forward and grasped the Source within him, forcing the intangible into form. It resisted for a fraction of a second before condensing into a sphere of writhing energy in my palm. I turned back to Lifeblood and pushed it toward her suspended form.
“This is the deal,” I said. “You hinder Eclipse and Griffin long enough, and the entirety of the SRC becomes yours to command. Now… git.”
Another snap.
She vanished.
I wasted no time.
I rushed deeper into the facility, passing sealed chambers, broken experiments, and abandoned constructs until I reached the core. There, suspended within an intricate apparatus of both arcane sigils and advanced machinery, was the vessel I had spent so long preparing.
The infant floated silently for a moment before its eyes snapped open.
It began to cry.
The sound was sharp, piercing, unnatural in its intensity. I activated the machine without hesitation. It roared to life, gears and energy circuits intertwining with mystical inscriptions as the process began.
The crying escalated into something strained and pained as the infant’s body began to change.
It grew rapidly.
A child. Then older. A boy. A teenager. An adult. Each stage flickered past in seconds, flesh stretching, bones reforming, consciousness forced into existence without the grace of time to stabilize it.
I drew a knife and slashed my palm, allowing blood to spill onto the interface.
This technology was incomplete, unstable, a dangerous fusion of mysticism and science that I had deliberately avoided using until now. But the threat closing in on me demanded risk. I had learned enough from past failures, from cycles reset and mistakes repeated. The Entity had delayed me long enough.
Now, it was gone.
Truly gone.
There would be no interference in the next cycle, should I choose to reset. Though with this vessel, I had no intention of doing so.
This was meant to be the endgame.
Before I could speak the incantation and the final binding words, the vessel convulsed.
Blood erupted from every pore of its body.
I paused.
In that moment, I realized something had gone wrong.
The vessel lifted its head and looked at me, smiling with a manic, almost gleeful expression that did not belong to something freshly born.
“I don’t know who you are or what you are,” it said, voice layered with something older than its form, “but don’t take away my childhood.”
Its eyes ignited with an eerie blue glow.
Then its body began to come apart.
Not physically, but conceptually, dissolving into fragments of existence that unraveled into nothingness. I analyzed rapidly, reconstructing the sequence of events, and the conclusion struck me with cold clarity.
The infant I had taken… was a clone.
A decoy.
I gritted my teeth, anger rising sharply beneath my otherwise controlled demeanor.
The vessel’s fading form tilted its head, amusement evident even as it ceased to fully exist.
“You should run,” it said. “Your luck isn’t looking so good. My father will be coming… and he will kill you.”
There was no reason for fear.
I had transcended such limitations long ago.
And yet…
An unfamiliar discomfort settled within me, subtle but undeniable.
The remnants of the vessel flickered, its voice distorting as it spoke one final time.
“Let your death be as painful as it is miserable. When the sword of Damocles finally falls on you… know that it was your own doing that triggered your undoing.”
Then it was gone.
Silence returned to the lab, heavier than before.
The temptation to reset everything gnawed at me as I stood alone in the dim hum of my laboratory. A full reset would be clean, efficient, a return to controlled variables where mistakes could be erased rather than endured.
Better yet, I could simply travel back to the precise moment I retrieved the clone and correct the error at its root. While I was at it, I should have eliminated Guesswork far earlier in the timeline, before his interference compounded into something inconvenient.
The problem was not desire, but limitation.
I had already strained the temporal lattice far beyond acceptable thresholds during my confrontation with the Entity. Each jump, each correction, each overwritten strand had weakened my cohesion with time itself. A full reset remained viable since it relied on externalized systems, a backup multiverse ready to overwrite the current state of existence around me. That process would not require me to personally traverse the seams.
Time travel, however, was another matter entirely.
In my current condition, attempting it would be catastrophic. I would unravel between temporal layers, my existence stretched thin until it lost definition, reduced to a wandering specter trapped in some forgotten purgatory outside continuity. That outcome was unacceptable.
I exhaled slowly and adjusted my approach.
The vessel remained the priority.
If I could not move through time physically, then I would simply project my consciousness across it. That method carried less risk, provided I maintained a stable anchor in the present. I closed my eyes and reached outward, extending my awareness through the currents of causality, searching for the signature of the vessel I had failed to claim.
Something resisted me.
I frowned.
This was not a blindspot in the conventional sense. I was familiar with those, individuals like Guesswork who existed in a state that defied observation even by someone of my capacity. This obstruction felt different. It was not absence, but interference. A deliberate barrier.
Pressure built behind my eyes.
I felt warmth trail down my lip and reached up, wiping away the thin line of blood from my nose. The resistance remained firm, unyielding, denying me access no matter how I adjusted my approach.
I withdrew.
There was no need to overanalyze the situation. The answer was already obvious.
If the vessel was connected to him, then there was only one place I needed to go.
I snapped my wristwatch into place and began dialing a precise sequence of codes, each one corresponding to a set of coordinates tied to Eclipse’s homeworld. The device hummed softly as it calibrated against the fractured state of reality, compensating for the instability surrounding my existence.
“Nicole Caldwell,” I murmured under my breath.
The teleport engaged.
Space folded, and I vanished from the lab without a trace.
…
..
.
[POV: Lifeblood]
Everything was unraveling faster than I could contain it.
Reports flooded in from every active channel as more than half of the SRC’s facilities slipped into chaos, their systems failing or outright detonating in cascading failures across disconnected layers of reality. I steadied myself and conjured a dress from my own blood, the liquid forming seamlessly over my body before hardening into a deep crimson fabric that pulsed faintly with my heartbeat.
“Status updates,” I demanded, my voice cutting through the noise of the command room.
Security teams scrambled to trace the origin of the disruptions, but the pattern was inconsistent, erratic, as if multiple hands were tearing through our infrastructure at once. Facilities outside of time, places that should have been untouchable, were going dark one after another.
Eclipse had already been located.
Elite SRC soldiers were deployed and engaging him, though I held little confidence in their success. He was not someone who could be contained through conventional means.
A distortion flickered near the center of the room.
Will appeared.
He looked at me, surprise flashing across his face before he spoke. “…Lifeblood? You’re here? How are you even—”
“It’s a long story,” I interrupted, shaking my head slightly. “One I don’t think I’m ready to unpack. I frankly have no idea what to make of Dr. Time. I knew there was something odd about him, something dangerous in a way that’s hard to explain. Regardless, that doesn’t matter right now. I know what I want, and I know what I have to do.”
Before he could respond, one of the analysts turned toward us, panic evident in his voice.
“We’ve identified another hostile actor,” he said quickly. “A shapeshifter is attacking multiple facilities, killing scientists and sabotaging our multiversal portal technology. We isolated the portal systems from the main power grid to slow them down, but… it doesn’t seem to matter. They’ve already found a way to bypass it.”
I shifted my attention to the main display.
A familiar figure filled the screen.
Griffin.
Electricity surged from her body in violent arcs as she flooded one of our portal systems with overwhelming energy, forcing it into a catastrophic overload. The structure collapsed in on itself moments later, consumed by its own instability.
That was… unexpected.
She was a Power Mutate, yes, but that level of output exceeded anything on record a Power Mutate was capable of. It defied the known limitations of her classification.
Will stepped closer, his expression tightening as he watched the destruction unfold.
“I’ll deal with Eclipse,” he said. “I still have his soul with me. That should give me an edge.”
I nodded once, already turning away.
“I’ll handle Griffin.”