284 Systematic Slaughter
284 Systematic Slaughter
[POV: Griffin]
It had been easier than I expected.
For an organization that operated across realities, their defenses felt… lacking. Maybe they had grown too confident in their technology, too reliant on systems that could be disrupted if you applied enough pressure in the right places.
I moved through another facility, stepping over the aftermath of the few fighters who had tried to stop me. They had been trained, certainly, but not enough to make a difference. In fact, some of them felt weaker than the threats Nick and I had faced in that medieval world we had been thrown into.
That thought lingered briefly before I pushed it aside.
I entered another portal and emerged in a different facility entirely. The moment I stabilized, I triggered the destruction of the portal I had just used through a clone positioned on the other side. The explosion rippled faintly through the connection before collapsing entirely.
I reached out and shut down the portal system from my current position.
A breath escaped me, heavier than I intended.
The effects were getting worse.
I could feel it now, creeping deeper into my mind. The Power Mutate was no longer just an ability I used. It was something that was beginning to use me in return, eating away at my thoughts, blurring the edges of who I was.
Not yet.
I clenched my jaw and forced myself to focus.
I still had things to do.
I moved toward the central system and forced it back online, channeling bioelectricity through my body by rapidly regenerating neural pathways and discharging the excess energy into the machinery. The process hurt, more than I wanted to admit, but the system responded.
The portal activated.
Before I could stabilize it fully, something burst through.
A figure in a flowing, blood-red dress lunged forward, her fist already mid-swing. I barely managed to raise my arm in time to block the hit, the impact sending a shockwave through my body as I was launched backward.
I crashed into the wall with enough force to warp the metal around me, the surface bending outward in rippling distortions like waves frozen in place.
Pain flared briefly before fading.
I lowered my arm and looked up.
I recognized her immediately.
“Lifeblood.”
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[POV: A-31725]
I had always thought the hum of the monitors would be the loudest thing I would ever hear in my life.
That low, constant vibration had defined my existence inside the SRC facility, a cradle of artificial purpose where clones like me sat in rows, eyes fixed on flickering lines that represented fractures in reality itself. My designation was A-31725, though names had never mattered here. We were all identical in function if not in face, observers of things we barely understood. My screen displayed a steady waveform, calm and unremarkable, the kind that lulled the mind into a false sense of permanence.
Then the line spiked.
A violent surge tore upward across the display, jagged and erratic, like something clawing its way through the boundaries of existence. Before I could even process it, the facility erupted into chaos as a red alarm blared overhead, sharp and relentless, drowning out every other sound.
From the nearby cubicle, my seatmate’s voice cracked through the noise, frantic and unrestrained. “My line just spiked! It’s breaching threshold! Everyone, get ready!”
Chairs scraped violently against the floor as we all moved in unison, training overriding hesitation. I dropped to my knees and reached beneath my workstation, fingers pressing against the concealed seam until the compartment clicked open. Inside lay the equipment we all hoped we would never need, sealed in sterile precision until moments like this.
I armed myself quickly, muscle memory guiding every motion as I secured the plating and fastened the weapon to my grip. Around me, others did the same, the sterile calm of our previous routine replaced by the metallic rhythm of preparation.
Our superior’s voice cut through the chaos, sharp and commanding. “Move! Move now! Don’t stand there like corpses!” She gestured toward the reinforced door at the end of the room, her expression carved from something unyielding. “Equip the highest rated null plasma on your gear! Password is 172-001-962-663! Now go!”
I turned to the secondary compartment, more deeply hidden, requiring precise input. My fingers moved quickly across the interface, entering the sequence as instructed. The compartment slid open with a hiss, revealing rows of null plasma rounds, each one marked between Rated-20 and Rated-25.
They were made from the blood of null capes, condensed into ammunition capable of erasing even the most powerful beings known to us. Even the Five Continuities, entities spoken of in controlled whispers, were not immune to these rounds.
I loaded them carefully, aware of the weight of what I carried.
We moved as a unit into the hallway, boots striking against the cold floor in uneven rhythm. I kept my eyes forward, though my attention drifted briefly to our superior as she led us. Brown hair pulled tight, posture rigid, gaze unflinching. She was not like us. Not a clone. She had lived beyond these walls, experienced a world we could only simulate through secondhand data.
She was Rated-20, a living weapon refined by reality itself.
The closest thing we had ever faced to this had been a hacker, a distant intrusion that never breached physical space. She had handled it alone, dismantling the threat with efficiency that bordered on effortless, burning down a planet that dared to lay hands upon our sacred sacntuary. That memory lingered now, a fragile reassurance against the rising dread in my chest.
Then came the screaming.
It echoed from deeper within the corridor, layered and overlapping, each voice carrying a different pitch of terror. The lights flickered violently, plunging sections of the hallway into stuttering darkness.
Something slammed into the wall ahead of me.
A body.
One of my peers.
He hit the surface with a sickening crack before collapsing to the ground in a heap of broken limbs. One arm was simply gone, torn away as though it had never belonged to him. His chest moved once, then stilled.
I froze for a fraction of a second, then forced myself forward, pressing against the corner of the hallway’s cross section. Carefully, I leaned just enough to see beyond it.
And I saw him.
A man in a dark suit walked down the corridor as if he had all the time in the world. A fedora cast a shadow over a porcelain mask, its smooth surface devoid of expression, reflecting the flickering lights in fragmented glints.
He moved without urgency.
Without resistance.
Our people fired.
Null plasma rounds tore through the air in rapid succession, each shot carrying enough force to erase entities far beyond our understanding. They struck him directly.
And bounced.
Some deflected outright, veering off at impossible angles. Others seemed to pass through him, only to reappear embedded in the walls behind, as though space itself had rejected the idea of harming him.
Eclipse.
The name surfaced unbidden in my mind, pulled from classified briefings and suppressed reports.
He tilted his head slightly, as if acknowledging the futile effort.
Then he moved his hand.
A single, casual gesture.
One of the operatives in front of him jerked violently as his body distorted. His head sank into his chest, phasing inward as though the boundaries of his form had ceased to exist. There was no resistance, no tearing, only the quiet collapse of structure. He dropped without a sound.
Eclipse continued walking.
Tarot cards appeared between his fingers, slipping into existence like fragments of a different reality. With a flick, one card flew forward, slicing cleanly through another operative’s neck before embedding itself into the wall behind him.
Another glance.
Another death.
A body folded inward unnaturally, limbs phasing through each other until nothing remained recognizable.
“Hold your ground!” our superior’s voice rang out, cutting through the unraveling panic. “He bleeds like anything else! You hear me? There is no invincible enemy! We are the line that holds reality together!”
Her presence surged forward, forcing us to stabilize, to aim, to fire with something resembling coordination.
“You were made for this!” she continued, her voice rising with controlled intensity. “Every one of you carries the means to kill gods! Do not waste it cowering! Stand and fight!”
Something ignited within her then.
Flames erupted across her body, not the natural orange of fire, but a vivid, toxic green that pulsed with a sickly luminosity. The air around her warped, filled with noxious fumes that burned the eyes even from a distance.
She stepped forward, then launched herself toward him, a streak of green fire cutting through the dim corridor.
“For the Continuities!” she shouted, her voice breaking into a roar. “For every world beyond this one, we do not fall here!”
She reached him in an instant.
And then she screamed.
It began abruptly, a raw, unfiltered sound that tore through the corridor. Her momentum carried her forward, but her body did not follow as it should.
Her skin separated, phased away as if she no longer have any skin.
It slid away from her frame in sheets, drifting downward as though gravity had only just remembered it existed. Beneath it, muscle and bone were exposed, then those too began to lose cohesion.
Her flames still burned.
Green fire clung to what remained of her, illuminating the moment with unbearable clarity as her organs slipped free, dropping to the floor in a grotesque cascade. The fire consumed them even as they fell, hissing against the sterile ground.
Her scream did not stop.
It stretched, thinning into something almost unrecognizable before finally cutting off as the last of her structure failed.
Eclipse did not pause.
He walked through what remained, his form phasing cleanly past the burning remnants, untouched by the fire or the death it illuminated.
And we were next.
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[POV: Will]
I had always believed silence to be the privilege of power.
Yet even seated upon the Seat of the Mind, at the very apex of psychic dominion among the Five Continuities, there was no silence to be found. The screams reached me without obstruction, slipping through every barrier as though reality itself conspired to deliver them directly into my consciousness. Telepathy carried their thoughts, while empathy forced me to feel each fracture, each unraveling moment of terror as if it were my own.
They did not die quietly.
“Please, make it stop—my body won’t stay together—please—!”
“It’s inside me, I can feel it moving—why can I feel my bones folding—?!”
“I don’t want to die like this, I don’t want to—someone kill me first—please—!”
Their voices overlapped, layered into a chorus that swelled beyond coherence, each mind collapsing in its own way as Eclipse moved through them. Some begged for mercy, others for death, and many simply dissolved into incoherent noise before vanishing entirely.
I watched myself in the mirror as it all unfolded.
A dark-skinned man with impossibly blue eyes stared back at me, composed, precise, untouched by the chaos echoing through my mind. The purity of that blue had always been a mark of distinction, a visible measure of control, of refinement, of superiority within the psychic spectrum. There had been whispers, even among the Continuities, that my eyes were too perfect, too vivid to belong to anything ordinary.
I adjusted my necktie with careful fingers, ensuring the line was straight.
The screaming continued.
I turned away from my reflection and reached for the box beside me, its surface smooth and unremarkable, betraying nothing of its contents. When I opened it, the air seemed to shift, as though something within resisted even being perceived.
Inside rested a sphere.
Eclipse’s soul.
We had taken it long before he became what he was now, back when he had still been Nicholas Caldwell, back when he had still been containable. I had witnessed two hundred thirty-four cycles, seen the rise and fall of existences that defied comprehension, and yet the memory of his transformation remained distinct.
This was not the Entity.
This was something else, but that didn’t offer any comfort to me.
I lifted the sphere into my hand, feeling its subtle resistance, its refusal to be fully grasped despite its tangible form. It pulsed faintly, not with life, but with something adjacent to it, something that suggested continuity beyond destruction.
I sat upon my seat and turned it idly between my fingers.
Then I sighed.
There was no more time to consider.
I opened the compartment beneath me and retrieved the syringe, its contents shimmering with a density that reality itself seemed reluctant to acknowledge. The Source. Raw, unfiltered, and corrosive to anything that dared to wield it without consequence.
I pressed it into my arm and injected it.
Power did not arrive gradually.
It flooded.
Every nerve ignited as something vast and invasive surged through me, expanding my awareness beyond its already immense scope. The risk was understood. I had seen what it did to the Entity, how it warped and consumed, how it elevated and destroyed in equal measure.
I did not have the luxury of restraint.
I needed to reach Rated-30.
I needed it now.
The door before me exploded inward.
Eclipse entered without urgency, his presence distorting the very perception of space as he stepped across the threshold. A tarot card flicked from his hand, cutting through the air with impossible precision.
I caught it effortlessly, halting it mid-flight with tactile telekinesis before letting it cut me to death.
“The devil, is it?” I said, inspecting the card in my hand. “The Entity fancied himself as one. Now, it’s time to renegotiate.”
I raised the sphere.
Then I crushed it.
Glass shattered outward, dissolving into nothing as my hand closed around the essence within. It resisted, violently, but I poured everything into it, every fragment of psychic force I could summon, compressing, constricting, forcing pressure onto something that was never meant to feel it.
Eclipse staggered.
A wet sound escaped him as blood spilled from behind the porcelain mask, staining the front of his suit in dark streaks.
I observed him calmly.
“They say a person has a total of six souls,” I continued, tightening my grip incrementally. “Each housed within the limbs, the heart, the chest. Fragments of a greater whole, a shared origin. Some argue the body and soul are indistinguishable.”
I pressed harder.
A sharp crack echoed through the room.
His arm snapped.
“Following that logic,” I said, watching him with quiet focus, “it should be possible to harm the body through the soul.”
Another squeeze.
More snapping.
I reached deeper, focusing my will, attempting to seize something vital, something central, something that would end this.
Then I leaned in slightly and whispered into the thing I held, layering telepathy, empathy, and hypnosis into a single directive.
“Kill yourself.”
For a moment, he bent.
His hand rose to his mask, his posture faltering as if the command had taken root.
Then he straightened.
And he laughed.
“Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha~! Amusing to no end!”