286 Fate of the Sinful
286 Fate of the Sinful
[POV: Dr. Time]
World ZX-1272096 had always felt like a half-finished equation to me, a fragile constant in an otherwise obedient multiverse. It was the closest I had come to perfection, yet still just beyond my grasp, like a theorem missing its final proof.
The air itself hung motionless under my chronokinesis, particles suspended in silent obedience, light frozen mid-journey as though reality had forgotten how to proceed. I stood at the center of it all, unmoving in a world that could not move without my consent, and still, I felt the faint irritation of limitation pressing at the edges of my mind.
“I just need that boy,” I murmured, the words dissolving into the stillness without echo or resistance.
Even at my peak, I was not absolute here.
That truth lingered like a flaw etched into glass.
I maintained three powers simultaneously, a defiance of natural law that I had carved into existence through relentless refinement. Namely, a primary, secondary, and tertiary expressed in there absolute extremes.
My Researcher-30 hummed at the forefront of my consciousness, parsing variables, predicting outcomes, dissecting probabilities with clinical precision. Chronokinesis-20 coiled beneath it, strained slightly by the resistance of this world’s Source, fluctuating like an unstable current. My tertiary—intangibility—rested lightly across my form, allowing me to slip between states of matter as easily as thought.
It was enough for this undeveloped world.
The walls before me offered no resistance as I stepped forward, my body phasing through solid structure like mist through an open frame. The facility extended in sterile geometry beyond, a labyrinth of frozen personnel and halted machinery, each caught mid-action, their lives paused in fragments of intention.
Of course, outside this world, time continued its indifferent march, and the same was true for the SRC facilities that existed outside of time. I allowed that deliberately, a calculated risk designed to delay Eclipse.
Delay, not prevent.
He would come.
He always did.
My feet touched the polished floor of the hallway, the faintest sensation registering despite my partial intangibility. I raised my wrist, my watch unraveling layers of encrypted systems as I forced my way into the facility’s architecture. Data cascaded across my perception, doors unlocking, surveillance overridden, contingencies mapped and dismantled before they could even exist.
In my other hand, Samantha trembled as I grabbed her firmly by the throat.
A Rated-17 precog, insignificant in the grand hierarchy of power, yet useful in this precise moment. Her frail body felt weightless in my grasp, her existence already cataloged long before I had ever set foot in this world. Every decision she had made, every path she had foreseen, every fear she had tried to avoid, it had all been recorded, archived, and understood.
She had never been difficult to find.
“Tell me, Samantha,” I said, my voice steady, almost conversational. “Am I in the right place?”
I allowed time to resume for her alone.
The transition shattered her stillness instantly. Her body convulsed with regained autonomy, panic flooding into her system as her mind attempted to reconcile the impossible. Without hesitation, she bit down hard, her teeth tearing into her own tongue, severing it in a desperate attempt to escape me through death.
I watched the act with mild interest.
Then I rewound her.
The damage reversed in seconds, flesh restoring, blood retreating, the act undone as though it had never occurred. I pressed her against the wall with controlled force, enough to restrain, not enough to break.
“I would advise against inefficiency,” I said.
Her breath came ragged, eyes wide with a mixture of terror and defiance that I had seen countless times across countless worlds. It was a predictable combination, almost comforting in its consistency.
“Do you wish your children and grandchildren to survive?” I continued, my tone unchanged. “Cooperate, and I will spare them. I know everything and anything. There will be no place on Earth where they could hide from me if I so much as decide to hunt them down to every last one of your bloodline.”
She laughed.
“I don’t know who you are,” she said, her voice trembling yet unyielding, “but no.”
I exhaled slowly, more out of habit than necessity.
“The hard way, then.”
From the pocket dimension stitched into my lab coat, I retrieved the syringe. Its contents shimmered faintly, an iridescent fluid carrying the distilled essence of countless psychic iterations. Failures, anomalies, and rare specimens all reduced to a singular purpose.
I held it up briefly, letting her see.
“This,” I explained, almost thoughtfully, “is a compound synthesized from the spinal fluid of various psychics across the multiverse. Precognition falls neatly under that umbrella, as you might know.”
Her eyes flickered toward it, recognition dawning just enough to deepen her fear.
“It is amusing,” I continued, tilting my head slightly, “how frequently your kind develops a sense of superiority. A belief that you are somehow elevated above others. And yet…”
I tapped the glass lightly.
“Look what I have made from you, a mind control serum. Imagine that.”
She stared at me, breathing uneven, her defiance tightening into something sharper, more resolute.
Then she spoke.
“Do your worst.”
There was no hesitation in her voice.
No plea.
No bargaining.
Only acceptance wrapped in resistance.
I drove the syringe into her vein without further delay, pressing the plunger down with steady precision. The compound entered her bloodstream, merging with her biology, rewriting pathways, unraveling safeguards her mind had relied upon for decades.
Her body reacted immediately.
Convulsions rippled through her, her muscles seizing as her precognition fractured under the invasive force. Visions would be flooding her now, not as controlled glimpses, but as an overwhelming cascade of fragmented futures, contradictions layered upon contradictions, certainty dissolving into chaos.
I watched closely.
I demanded, “Tell me where Ronald Caldwell is.”
The answer never came.
Samantha’s head ruptured in my grasp before a single syllable could form, the detonation abrupt and inelegant, a bloom of red and bone that painted my face and coat in viscera. For a fraction of a second, the world remained silent again, her body collapsing in slow, suspended ruin. I exhaled, more irritated than surprised, and allowed my intangibility to wash over me, letting the blood and fragments pass through as though I were never there to be stained.
“Predictable interference,” I muttered.
“Heh… you always did hate being interrupted.”
The voice came from ahead.
I turned.
George stood in the center of the hallway as though he had always belonged there, a contradiction carved into my time-stopped world. He held a researcher-grade plasma weapon loosely in one hand, its energy core struggling against the temporal drag, light stuttering at its edges. His white hoodie was as absurd as I remembered, decorated with lewd anime figures that clashed violently with the sterile geometry around us. His dark skin flickered faintly, glitching against reality itself, as though he existed one layer out of sync with the world.
“Heyo,” he added with a crooked grin. “Rematch?”
I studied him carefully, my Researcher-30 already dissecting every visible anomaly, every inconsistency in his presence.
“How are you moving inside my time-stopped world?”
He rolled his shoulders casually, as if the question bored him.
“Technically, it’s not stopped,” he replied. “Just slowed down to the smallest microsecond where it looks that way. And me?” He tapped his chest. “I’m a Power Mutate. Built different.”
I tilted my head slightly.
“You cannot fool me,” I said. “I have studied Power Mutates down to their most negligible variations. This…” My gaze sharpened. “This is something else. You are not resisting time. You are bypassing it. Perhaps through velocity, perhaps through an external system that allows your presence to be projected at speeds approaching temporal stasis.”
He snapped his fingers.
“Bingo.”
My attention shifted instantly.
To my right stood a machine I had previously ignored, its surface bending light unnaturally. Without hesitation, I reached out with intangibility, phasing through its structure and unraveling it from within. Components separated silently, falling apart in suspended disassembly, revealing the core beneath, camouflage technology layered over something far more complex.
“Clever,” I murmured.
My wristwatch pulsed as I accessed the surrounding data. Multiple signals appeared, converging toward my position, their movement reduced to an almost imperceptible crawl under my chronokinesis. Yet they were there.
Closing in.
A faint distortion rippled through space around me.
Then more machines appeared.
Dozens.
They manifested in staggered intervals, teleportation signatures still lingering in the air like scars. Each one armed, each one attempting to orient itself within a world that barely allowed motion. Their limbs shifted with agonizing slowness, plasma weapons charging in stuttering increments, projectiles struggling to even leave their barrels.
I watched them with detached disappointment.
“This is pathetic,” I said. “Tell me where Ronald Caldwell is, and I will spare this world.”
For a moment, nothing changed.
Then one of them moved.
Not slowly.
Not sluggishly.
It stepped forward at a speed that matched mine.
I adjusted instantly, ducking as it lunged, its motion unstable, its frame trembling under the strain. Heat signatures flared across its joints, metal warping microscopically as if it were being forced into a state it was never designed to sustain.
“Overclocked,” I noted.
I attempted to phase it apart with a glance, directing my intangibility through its structure—
—and failed.
Null metal.
The realization registered immediately.
“Interesting.”
Instead, I applied minimal force, nudging its frame just enough. Its already unstable structure collapsed under the interference, its components slipping out of alignment and disassembling mid-motion.
Before I could follow through, George was in front of me.
Too fast.
Far too fast.
His weapon discharged.
I tilted my head, the plasma ray skimming past me, carving a glowing line through the frozen air. He was already moving again, his fist coming in from the right with precise intent. I intercepted it, parrying the strike and countering with a sharp slap across his face.
My hand landed cleanly on his face.
His features fractured instantly, dissolving into motes of light and glitching geometry, scattering like broken pixels across reality.
As expected.
“A construct,” I said quietly. “That explains your mobility.”
It was the only plausible explanation. A body not bound by conventional matter could slip through temporal resistance far more efficiently, especially if anchored by external systems.
Then something struck me, hard.
A fist, dense and unyielding, slammed into my cheek from the left, carrying mass that the construct lacked. The force disrupted my balance for a fraction of a second. It was another machine.
This one similarly cloaked like the earlier offender.
Its presence flickered into awareness only after impact, its null metal plating rendering it invisible to my immediate perception. The timing was precise, coordinated with George’s assault.
My chronokinesis faltered.
That single disruption cascaded.
Time, which had been stretched to its limit, began to recoil unevenly around me. The delicate equilibrium I maintained cracked under compounded interference—null metals, overclocked machinery, external projection systems—all pressing against my control simultaneously.
The machines surrounding me seized the opportunity.
Their weapons, once stalled, surged forward.
Plasma discharged all at once.
The blasts converged on my position, streams of incandescent energy tearing through the fractured stillness and slamming into me from every direction.
…
..
.
[POV: George]
“Good job, Dullahan,” I said, though the words came out strained as my knees hit the floor.
The world felt wrong around me, stretched thin by the supercomputer. It had pushed me beyond what my body was ever meant to handle, accelerating me into a space where time itself barely moved, and now it was burning out. I could feel it in the tremors of my limbs, in the way my data refused to obey cleanly, in the heat crawling up my spine like something alive and angry.
My arms looked like they had gone through a shredder, skin torn, light flickering beneath where flesh had given way to construct. I wasn’t entirely physical anymore, not fully human in the traditional sense, and that was the only reason I was still conscious.
Dullahan’s presence wrapped around me like a second skin, her data threading through my senses, stabilizing what she could.
“Focus,” she said, her voice tight, almost trembling despite the digital filter. “The subject appears to be unharmed.”
“Yeah,” I muttered, forcing my head up. “No shit.”
I remembered him.
Not just from records or simulations, but from experience.
Dr. Time hunting us across fractured realities, never stopping, never hesitating, always one step behind and yet somehow already ahead. Back when Ron had been with us, back when we still thought we had options, he had been relentless in a way that didn’t feel human.
More like inevitability.
The plasma fire cleared.
And there he stood, unharmed.
The hallway around him was scorched and warped, machines half-melted or collapsing from their own overexertion, but he remained at the center like the concept of damage simply didn’t apply to him. His lab coat shifted subtly, absorbing, dispersing, rewriting the impact of what should have annihilated anything else. It wasn’t just armor.
It was something worse.
Something designed with an understanding of reality I didn’t even want to think about.
Dr. Time looked at us, his expression unchanged, his presence somehow heavier now that the attack had failed.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” he said coldly.
Then he raised a hand slightly, almost casually.
“Ten seconds,” he continued. “That’s all you get from me.”
And for the first time since we started this, I felt it.
Not fear.
Certainty.
We were on a countdown.
…
..
.
[POV: Dr. Time]
I reached into the pocket dimension of my lab coat and retrieved the pill, its surface a dull gray that betrayed nothing of its complexity.
George’s reaction was immediate.
“Don’t let him take whatever that is!”
The machines responded in fractured unison, some firing plasma that still struggled against the remnants of my temporal suppression, others forcing themselves forward at speeds that bordered on self-destruction. One among them stood out, moving cleanly, efficiently, unburdened by the same limitations.
It was probably Dullahan working behind the machine.
Yes, I remembered now.
She moved with precision, intercepting before I could bring the pill to my mouth. For a fraction of a second, it appeared she had succeeded as she grabbed the pill.
Then the pill activated, its real purpose blooming awake.
It ruptured in her grasp, releasing an electrical arc that expanded outward in a violent bloom of energy and code. The virus propagated instantly, leaping from system to system, infecting every machine within range. Their movements stuttered, collapsed, and then ceased entirely as their internal architectures were dismantled from within.
They fell.
All of them.
“Not so fast,” a feminine voice echoed from my wristwatch.
I reacted without hesitation, phasing the device away from my body, but the detonation came a fraction too quickly.
The explosion tore through my arm.
Then feedback surged through my systems as my right arm separated completely, disintegrated at the edge where the blast had intersected with my phasing field.
George was already moving.
He closed the distance in an instant, firing his weapon repeatedly, each shot deflecting harmlessly off my lab coat in bursts of distorted light. I shifted my stance and phased my remaining hand forward, aiming to sever him at the core of his construct—
Something pierced me.
The interruption was precise.
A blade.
Null metal.
It slid into my abdomen with mechanical efficiency, its presence immediately disrupting my internal systems. My strike missed as George dropped low, following through with a second stab, deeper this time, twisting slightly as he withdrew.
The weapon shimmered into visibility, its camouflage failing just enough for me to register its structure.
“Well played,” I said, blood escaping my lips as I spoke.
My right eye flickered, the implant feeding me a cascade of diagnostics. Structural integrity compromised. Foreign agents detected. Toxins spreading through my bloodstream, tailored, no doubt, to interfere with both biological and non-biological processes.
Efficient.
Adapted.
Annoying.
More machines began to appear, teleportation signatures flaring at the edges of my perception.
My chronokinesis stabilized, just barely enough.
I froze time again.
Everything stopped.
I clenched my teeth, triggering the pressure plate embedded within my gums. The mechanism activated instantly, routing me through a predesignated teleportation sequence.
The hallway vanished.
I arrived in a desert.
Silence.
Heat.
No life.
I switched my tertiary ability without hesitation, replacing intangibility with teleportation. In the absence of competing variables, it surged to its peak, stabilizing at a level far beyond its baseline. I collapsed to one knee, breathing unevenly as my systems recalibrated.
Not enough.
I moved again.
Another world.
An apocalyptic wasteland, devoid of meaningful resistance, saturated with decay and emptiness. Here, I switched again, discarding teleportation for regeneration attached to the Source of this world. The effect was immediate and amplified, the absence of interference allowing it to reach its highest expression.
My body began to repair.
Flesh reformed.
Systems purged toxins.
Structures realigned.
This was a method refined through countless iterations, battles against entities that operated on scales far beyond conventional comprehension. Adaptation through environment. Optimization through absence.
I clenched my teeth once more, reactivating the teleportation route.
Back to the desert.
Then again.
Back to the hallway.
Time resumed.
George stood there, his expression shifting as he took in my restored form, the damage erased as though it had never occurred.
I straightened fully, my lab coat settling into place, pristine once more.
“Now,” I said, my voice calm, measured, absolute.
“My turn.”
I seized George by the shoulder the moment my systems aligned, my grip firm enough to anchor him despite the instability of his construct. Before he could react, I triggered the teleportation currently equipped on my tertiary, dragging him along as space folded and reassembled at my command.
We arrived at his origin point.
My wristwatch had been destroyed, but its purpose had already been fulfilled. The mapping was complete, every layer of this facility etched into my perception. My ocular implant fed me precise coordinates, guiding me unerringly to the core.
The room we entered was singular in its purpose.
A supercomputer stood at its center, vast and intricate, its architecture so advanced that even I paused for a fraction of a second to process it. The design principles were alien to this world, generations—no, millennia—ahead of anything that should have existed here. Its presence alone suggested intervention, external influence, or theft from a higher tier of reality.
George moved.
Or tried to.
He swung at me with what little remained of his mobility, but by then, I had recalibrated my chronokinesis. Time tightened around him, locking his motion into stillness mid-action, his form suspended like a broken frame in an unfinished sequence.
“Too slow,” I said quietly.
I opened my lab coat.
The pocket dimension within it unfolded into reality, spilling its contents across the room in a controlled cascade. Dozens of gravity bombs materialized and settled into position, their surfaces humming faintly as they synchronized. I set their timers to five seconds, the countdown beginning immediately, each device primed to collapse everything in the vicinity into a singularity of crushing force.
Simultaneously, I switched my tertiary ability.
Teleportation dissolved.
Intangibility replaced it.
I had limited experience applying it in this manner, but the principle was sound. With time still frozen, I stepped closer to George and let my form slip through his, phasing into his structure, merging just enough to access what I required.
The countdown ticked audibly.
Five.
Four.
Within George, I searched.
His memories fractured under my intrusion, disorganized by his altered state, but my Researcher-30 compensated instantly, filtering noise from relevance. Images, data, fragments of thought all of it passed through me in rapid succession until I found it.
Ronald Caldwell.
Location.
Confirmation.
I withdrew immediately, separating from George’s form as the timer continued its descent.
Three.
Two.
I did not wait for the outcome.
I clenched my teeth, activating the pressure plate, and vanished.
The desert greeted me again for a fraction of a second as I re-equipped teleportation, then I moved once more, following the coordinates I had extracted.
I arrived in an underground office.
The transition was seamless.
A woman sat behind the desk, composed, still, as though she had been expecting me. Her hair was split cleanly between dark and white, her attire formal, controlled, incongruous with the chaos I had left behind.
Nicole Caldwell.
I frowned slightly.
“Where is your son?” I asked.
Even as I spoke, something felt wrong.
The air carried a subtle distortion, not physical, not temporal, but perceptual. My implant registered inconsistencies, minor at first, then compounding into a pattern that did not align with the data I had retrieved.
Nicole smiled.
“That was a fake memory you just saw,” she said.
My gaze shifted briefly to the window and saw the darkness outside
Nicole’s hair changed. The white bled away, leaving only darkness. She was a psychic construct. Before I could act, another Nicole appeared from the opposite side. This one with silver hair, her presence overlapping yet distinct, both occupying the same space with layered intent.
Another psychic construct.
I attempted to move.
I failed.
Their influence pressed against my mind, subtle but precise. Empathy, weaponized into something invasive, something restrictive. They imposed a singular state upon me—not pain, not fear, but isolation so absolute that it disrupted my capacity to act.
“Loneliness hurts, doesn’t it?” asked the Nicoles.
For a fraction of a second, it was enough.
They were weak individually, barely reaching the threshold of significance at empathy-15, but preparation had compensated for their limitations. They had anticipated me, structured their approach to exploit even the smallest opening.
Through the window, I saw it.
The sun.
Approaching.
Not rising.
Not setting.
Approaching.
The realization aligned instantly.
“This is not the location,” I said, more to myself than to them. “That bastard fed me wrong coordinates!”
It was a trap, made with a combination of false memories and this place, a containment pod.
I attempted to teleport.
Nothing happened.
The silver-haired Nicole smiled wider, her expression sharpening.
“Isolation technology from Lockworld,” she said. “Based on a reality warping from a Power Mutate.”
Isolation technology.
Used to conceal.
To remove.
To make something unreachable.
I had never considered its application as a prison in this form.
“Impressive,” I admitted.
The sun drew closer.
Its light intensified, no longer distant, no longer abstract. Heat followed, then pressure, then the slow, inevitable disintegration of everything within its reach. My systems reacted immediately, attempting to compensate, to adapt, to find an exit that did not exist.
The isolation held.
The constructs maintained their influence, ensuring that even a fraction of a second of inefficiency remained.
The surface of my skin began to burn.
Then peel.
Then fail.
And still, I calculated.
It took more than I preferred to admit.
The isolation field resisted in ways that were not immediately apparent, its structure layered with contingencies designed to deny not just escape, but even the attempt to conceptualize it. My systems strained against it, calculations branching and collapsing in rapid succession until I forced a narrow solution through sheer persistence. The teleportation anchor buried within me responded, not cleanly, not efficiently, but enough.
I tore myself out.
The desert returned.
I collapsed onto the sand, my body half-ruined, skin burned into blackened fractures, nerves exposed and screaming in delayed response. My lab coat, once a masterpiece of layered defenses and hidden systems, hung from me in charred remnants, barely holding together.
I did not linger.
I switched my tertiary to teleportation and moved again, shifting to the wasteland where environmental interference was minimal. There, I replaced it with regeneration, allowing it to surge to its peak. Flesh reformed, systems purged, damage reversed in a grotesque, efficient cascade.
I convulsed.
Then I vomited.
The pressure plate came up with it, slick with blood, the small mechanism that had been embedded in my gums now ejected alongside strands of connective tissue. It clattered against the ground, still faintly ticking, still linked to the deeper system anchored within my chest and, more importantly, within my soul.
I removed what remained of my lab coat.
It fell apart in my hands, utterly burnt and useless.
I inhaled deeply, the air thick with decay, radiation, and countless engineered pathogens. My systems filtered what they could, adapted to what they could not, rewriting my internal equilibrium in real time.
“Took you long enough.”
The voice carried across the wasteland with quiet certainty.
I looked up.
Eclipse stood at a distance, immaculate despite the environment, his fedora casting a shadow over the porcelain mask that concealed everything and nothing. His posture was relaxed, almost casual, as though this confrontation had already been decided.
The light dimmed.
A shadow passed over me.
I shifted my gaze upward and saw it.
A massive form eclipsing the sky.
A griffin.
No, not merely a creature, but a presence I recognized.
Amelia Morose.
The Power Mutate I had once directed toward a different version of this man. She had succeeded then, in her own way, eliminating an Entity that wore his name.
“This hardly seems fair,” I said, straightening despite the lingering damage. “There are two of you, and only one of me.”
The griffin’s voice rumbled, layered with something primal and something distinctly human.
“We don’t need it to be fair.”
Flame followed as the creature spat it at me. A torrent of fire descended toward me, devouring the air itself.
I froze time.
The inferno halted mid-expansion, a suspended wave of destruction, but Eclipse moved through it regardless, his form slipping into that warped state of his, bypassing my control with unsettling ease.
He was already upon me.
His fist came first.
I dodged.
Another followed, then another, each strike carrying not just force, but distortion. Around him, tarot cards flickered into existence, slipping in and out of phase, their edges cutting through space in ways that defied conventional geometry.
One grazed me.
Then another.
They sliced through flesh, through structure, through layers that should not have been so easily parted. My regeneration struggled to keep pace, repairing as quickly as I was being undone.
I released the frozen time.
Instead, I wrapped myself in a temporal field, compressing and layering time across my body to simulate invulnerability. The next wave of tarot cards struck and deflected, their trajectories disrupted as though reality itself rejected their intrusion.
Eclipse adjusted immediately.
His fist came again, warping as it moved.
I intercepted it.
Our contact lasted less than a second.
It was enough.
Time surged through him, not forward, but concentrated, forced into a localized collapse of years. His hand aged rapidly, skin wrinkling, structure weakening as the accumulated weight of time bore down on it.
He pulled back instantly.
His arm hung limp.
I advanced.
He dodged my strikes with precision, slipping just beyond reach each time, adapting even while compromised. A jab, a kick, a follow-up, but none connected cleanly.
Then impact.
A force from behind.
The griffin’s tail struck me with overwhelming momentum, sending me across the wasteland, my body tearing through debris before slamming into the ground hard enough to fracture what had only just been restored.
I attempted to shift my tertiary forcibly, but it was useless as the Source of this world only adapted regeneration.
A claw descended.
It crushed me into the ground, the pressure immense, forcing me deeper with a second strike that buried me beneath layers of broken earth.
“Enough.”
I switched my primary with my secondary.
Chronokinesis surged to its peak at rated-30, unrestrained, elevated to a level that bent the framework of the world around me. My tertiary remained regeneration, holding me together as the strain escalated.
I inhaled.
Then I accelerated myself.
Time wrapped around me and tightened, my personal flow of time increasing to a degree that rendered everything else inert by comparison. Eclipse’s resistance became irrelevant under this approach. I was no longer trying to stop him.
I was leaving him behind.
I moved.
The world blurred into insignificance as I crossed it in an instant, distances collapsing under my stride, speed surpassing what even the highest-tier speedsters could sustain. My body aged under the strain, cells burning through their lifespan at an unsustainable rate, but regeneration countered it, maintaining equilibrium through constant renewal.
I reached the opposite end of the planet, and stopped at an abandoned laboratory. I entered and began immediately.
Materials were scarce but sufficient. My Researcher-20 currently equipped to my secondary mapped every usable component, every fragment of technology that could be repurposed. What would have taken months under normal conditions unfolded in seconds under my accelerated state.
I opened my chest, literally.
The mechanism within revealed itself, a clock-like construct embedded into my core, intricate and precise, the anchor of my teleportation system. I modified it directly, integrating improvements, reinforcing pathways, expanding its capacity to bypass interference like the isolation field I had encountered.
Blood pooled and then vanished as it was replaced.
Systems aligned, upgraded, and were optimized.
The roof exploded inward.
I did not need to look to know.
The griffin landed, its mass shaking the structure, debris scattering in slow arcs relative to my perception.
The door opened.
Eclipse stepped in.
“You sure can run fast,” he said.
“You are quite quick on your step, too… Let me guess, teleportation through intangibility. My Nick could also do something similar.”
Griffin’s body shifted in a grotesque bloom, the surface of her form splitting open from the eye as something forced itself outward. Flesh parted without resistance, and the person inside burst free, naked and glistening, reshaping even as she emerged.
I observed the transformation with clinical interest as her frame compressed, muscles tightening, bones reforming, until tiger-like features overtook her entirely. Fur rippled across her skin, claws extended, and her posture lowered into something predatory and certain.
Griffin looked at me and spoke with a voice layered in something deeper, “You are done for, Time. Surrender.”
I scoffed at that, dismissing the suggestion with a tilt of my head as if she had offered me something trivial. “And what? So you can kill me easier?” I turned my attention back to Eclipse, narrowing my gaze slightly as I pressed, “Where is the boy, Nick?”
Eclipse’s expression hardened, though there was something almost incredulous beneath it as he responded, “You want my son, so you can be god, is that right? Do you know how insane that sounds? What even is a god?” His tone carried defiance, but also a kind of grounded certainty that I found… primitive.
“I guessed you don’t know faith, huh?” I replied, my voice quieter now, almost reflective as I let the words linger. “That’s the problem with the newer worlds. They lack faith.”
“I make my own faith,” Eclipse shot back.
That drew a small smile from me, sharper this time, more genuine in its edge. “I am the same. Kill him, Amelia.”
The command was not loud, yet it carried weight, and I felt the mechanism I had buried within Amelia’s mutation stir to life. A hidden addition, something extra layered into the gift I had given her, now awakened at my will.
Even as it activated, however, a realization settled over me with unwelcome clarity. This was a lost run. The variables had skewed too far beyond prediction, and the outcome had already slipped from my grasp. The boy would have to wait. There would be other timelines, other worlds, other iterations where I would succeed.
This Eclipse was stronger than I had accounted for, and I recognized the boundary of inevitability. There was no victory here.
I moved without hesitation, activating the teleportation device embedded within my chest, expecting the familiar pull of displacement to tear me from this failing scenario. Nothing happened. No distortion, no shift, no escape. My thoughts faltered for the briefest moment as confusion intruded.
Huh?
In the corner of my vision, through the lens of my eye implant, I caught movement.
George stood there, just at the edge of perception, grinning with a knowing cruelty as his thumb dragged slowly across his own throat in a mocking imitation of execution. The memory struck instantly when I had possessed him to acquire intel on the boy’s location.
He must have left something in me back then.
The realization arrived at the exact moment a hand pierced through my chest from behind, bursting out through bone and flesh with violent precision.
It was not human. It was furred, massive, and monstrous in shape, and for a suspended second, I simply stared at it as if it belonged to someone else. My gaze dropped to my own exposed chest where my heart still beat, wet and trembling in the open air.
Amelia’s voice came close to my ear, low and steady, almost intimate in its proximity. “I don’t know about having faith, but I know resolve.”
Before I could respond, Eclipse’s hand followed, driving into me with equal force, yet far more deliberate in its intent. His fingers did not seek flesh or bone. They reached deeper, grasping something unseen yet entirely real. When he found it, I felt it.
Pain did not describe it.
“N-No! No!”
The words tore out of me as he began to pull, and I felt myself being extracted, something essential unraveling from within my existence. My soul was being dragged free.
At the same time, Amelia crushed my heart in her grip. I felt it rupture, collapse, and cease, yet my body refused to accept the finality. My regeneration surged instinctively, trying to repair, to rebuild, to deny what had been done. It failed. Something in my blood had changed. Something she had altered rendered my recovery incomplete, unstable.
Her hand remained lodged inside my chest as she struck again with her other arm, punching straight through me and leaving a second gaping void. The sensation layered upon itself, compounding into something unbearable yet inescapable.
“I just gave you cancer,” Amelia said, her tone almost casual, as if remarking on an experiment. “But don’t worry, I’ll get you first, before the cancer did.”
Then she pulled.
My body tore apart under the force, ripped cleanly into halves that fell uselessly to the ground. I was aware of it, aware of everything, even as my physical form became meaningless. Eclipse held my soul in his grasp, and his voice cut through the chaos with cold certainty.
“You’ve been arrogant.”
His hand tightened, and a portion of my body simply vanished, erased as if it had never existed. There was no transition, no decay, only absence.
“You’ve abused your power,” he continued, squeezing again.
More of me disappeared. My lower half ceased to be, leaving behind only fragments, entrails, incomplete remnants that no longer functioned as a body.
“No more,” Eclipse said.
And then, there was no more.
Except there was.
I opened my eyes.
Darkness surrounded me, vast and suffocating, stretching in every direction without form or boundary. The air, if it could be called that, felt heavy with something oppressive, something ancient and saturated with despair. I heard it before I understood it. Sobbing, countless voices layered together, rising and falling in a chorus of suffering that had no end.
Then the voices turned toward me.
Every damned soul I had condemned, every life I had twisted, every existence I had discarded—they were here, and they knew me. Their cries sharpened into accusations, into pleas, into something far worse than either.
I ran.
I did not choose a direction because there was none to choose. I simply ran, driven by a rising panic that I had never experienced, something raw and unfamiliar clawing its way through me. This could not be happening. This was not a variable I had accounted for. There had to be a mechanism, a flaw, an exit I could exploit.
I needed to get out of this place.
Something seized my foot.
The force dragged me down instantly, and I hit the ground hard, the impact jarring through me as I twisted to see what had taken hold. My breath caught as I recognized him.
Will.
His form was ruined, one eye bulging grotesquely from its socket, his lips split and slick with blood. His dark skin was marred and broken, riddled with decay as worms crawled slowly across and beneath it, writhing through him as if he were nothing more than soil.
He looked at me, and his voice came out as a broken rasp, fragile and desperate.
“Save me—”
The word hung there, unfinished, and in that moment, understanding settled over me with absolute certainty.
This place was hell.