Jean's POV
The portal I opened led me to a dead universe with a peculiar past that the Phoenix explained.
"A powerful psychic who called himself the Shadow King found the Mind Stone at the beginning of the twenty-first century and drove himself mad trying to enslave every sentient mind that inhabited his universe. He was successful for a while, until the effort shattered him and every being he was connected to. The psychic backlash killed everyone else."
"Is this common?" I asked the Phoenix. As close as we were, we rarely spoke with actual words. We communicated well with impressions and general feelings.
"Dead universes or mass deaths caused by powerful psychics?"
"Both?"
"More and less than you'd think. Tyrants come in all shapes and forms—psychics, reality manipulators, egomaniacal conquerors, even seventh-dimensional beings hungry for whatever scrap of power they can find."
She was talking about Shin.
"Why did the Primordial being that watched this universe let it get this far?"
"Curiosity. Experience. Balance. Entropy. All things die. It is the way of things. A local divine or primordial might be moved to act if they find an outversal being sowing destruction in their domain, or a mortal wielding power that should be beyond them."
"Then why hasn't our local divine done something about Shin?" I asked, heat and frustration creeping into my voice. None of this would have happened if the being in charge of our universe hadn't been asleep at the wheel. Shin and his disciples had done plenty of damage.
According to the Phoenix, millions had been put to the sword at their collective hands.
When was it going to be enough?
"The One Above All's motivations are a mystery to me. He might be laying an elaborate, if costly, trap for Shin, or he might be trusting you and Dante to deal with the problem. He might not care at all."
I didn't like the sound of that.
"And what about this universe?" I asked. "Who watches this one?"
The Phoenix was quiet for a moment, almost contemplative.
"No one does, child. The divine being that ruled this place has moved on."
I didn't think that was possible, nor could I decide if it was a good or bad thing.
From everything the Phoenix had told me, I wasn't exactly expecting help, but the absence unsettled me almost as much as the calm cadence with which the Phoenix had delivered the news.
Shaking off my doubts, I delved deep into the Astral Realm of this universe. Every conscious mind, no matter how simple or nascent, had a presence here and left echoes. You needed a remarkable amount of power or proximity to your target to affect their mind on the Astral plane, but that was hardly all you could do here.
Astral teleportation was one of the earliest tricks the Phoenix taught me, and it had changed the way I fought, interacted with people, and saw the universe.
With the absence of life, I thought it would be simple to find Dante. What I hadn't counted on was Shin and his machinations.
An endless expanse of white unraveled before my psychic senses. There was nothing as far as the eye could see. No floating nimbuses of technicolor or vast oceans of interconnected minds—only ghostly lines of blackness on the horizon, and billions of imprints that could have been Dante.
That snake.
"He's trying to confuse us, but he forgets that I know your lover's mind better than even you do."
"Don't say that!" I blushed.
The Phoenix ignored me.
Fiery wings bloomed from my back and crackled in the void, and the Phoenix screeched, calling out to his mind. Golden, fiery trails emerged from the endless echoes, granting us brief snapshots of Dante's mental state.
He had called for us repeatedly, and no one had answered.
My heart ached.
Hold on. Just a bit longer.
With a flap of my massive wings, I shot toward the horizon, passing thousands of mental echoes. A few screamed at me, pleaded for aid, begged me for mercy, and showed me visions of Earth in ruin—but I stayed the course until…
I found him.
Reality parted, and I stepped across space. I was met by a darkness that swallowed my telepathy and the various visual enchantments layered into my armor.
No.
The Phoenix and I spoke as one and shattered the hold of the eldritch technique over us. The warmth, heat, and light of our fire penetrated the dark, weakening its hold over reality. Then a terrifying flash of purple light shattered it completely.
The battlefield hidden beneath the darkness was like nothing I had ever seen. A tiny purple sun sat at the center of a massive telekinetic construct as large as the moon. Every inch of it was covered in dizzying arrays of complex runic formations.
I recognized most at a glance, but others were new and intricate. Dante floated at the center of it all, inside a runic sphere covered in just as many runes as the outer construct, his skin lined with glowing sigils that lit up his bare body.
His eyes shone bright purple as he directed a constellation of Anathema fire. Hundreds of fiery orbs the size of a grown man streaked across space, harrying and assaulting a roaring masked figure.
It was Lauren—and she wore her soul on the outside of her body and wielded a katana. The Phoenix was just as confused at the sight as I was, but it didn't slow us down.
Lauren noticed me at the same time Dante did, and she raised her gun and fired. Dozens of bullets struck the defensive array hovering inches from my skin and ricocheted off, much to her frustration.
She slashed the All-Black, and thousands of creatures came screaming out. They swam through space unnaturally fast, and a quick scan of their minds revealed that they all had psychic shields. By all rights, I should have had a challenging fight ahead of me if I had stayed.
Space shrank, and I teleported.
A smile spread across Dante's face when he saw me, and he visibly sagged as he embraced me, all the while crafting hundreds of gravity-infused fireballs and hurling them through the spatial tunnel I had come through.
The fireballs burned through hundreds of beasts before vanishing, the darkness flooding back into the Necrosword.
Dante's soul felt healthier than I expected, and he seemed to be repairing himself—but not fast enough. Not nearly fast enough.
I was met with an avalanche of emotions, which triggered an outpouring on my end. Fear, guilt, gratitude, pain, despair, and love. We ran the gamut and came back to each other, neither of us quite believing we were alive. That we had found each other.
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