Chapter 99.
"I... don't understand what you mean," I lied, desperately trying to suppress a slight tremor in my voice. I played dumb.
What if he genuinely wanted my, well, essence? The essence of a 'displaced soul'? It was a desperate theory built on pure speculation, but it was the only thing I could cling to. At least until he said otherwise.
"I expected no less from you pathetic humans. Greedy, arrogant, stupid! Always thinking yourselves above everyone else!" Dormammu snarled.
The darkness, which until now had only thickened at my feet, obediently lunged forward. It began wrapping around me, and, with cold horror, I realized I had absolutely nothing to fight it with. My body went numb, reduced to useless meat. Paralyzed.
But it didn't stop there. The darkness that had cocooned me pulled upward, drawing me closer to the monster's enormous face. His violet eyes grew even more focused, more intense. They weren't boring into me. They were examining what was inside me.
Dormammu didn't rush his verdict. What felt like an eternity passed before he spoke again. And this time his voice was... calm? Kind? No. Coaxing.
"Human arrogance knows no limits. Neither does my power. But my patience knows no limits either. I offer you a place as my right hand."
That was... unexpected. I tensed immediately. There's a catch. There is absolutely a catch here. Dormammu, meanwhile, continued his monologue, savoring the sound of his own voice.
Together we will craft the finest dark versions of worlds! Worlds in which we will be Gods! Worlds that, thanks to the Creator's Spark within your soul, may be without number! Agree, and the entire Multiverse will fall before our shared Greatness!
At those words, the technomage researcher, buried deep inside me, screamed. This was a Pact. A profoundly repulsive one. Consent... the moment I said yes, I would become Dormammu's puppet. Literally his right hand. A multidimensional entity with a warped psyche could twist those words to mean anything it wanted, and interpret them however it pleased. That its interpretation wouldn't match mine was irrelevant.
All that mattered was that I agreed. And then my body and my soul would become part of Dormammu. I, as a person, would cease to exist.
"Why so... blunt?" I answered carefully, testing the waters. "You could offer mutually beneficial terms. Better ones."
I caught the flare of those violet eyes. Clearly not a good sign. The eldritch entity was not pleased that its trick had been seen through.
In the same instant, I was subjected to agony.
The cocoon of darkness in which I hung stopped being merely a restraint. The darkness began to consume me. Literally.
Pain.
All-encompassing, conceptual pain on every level of my existence. Physical. Spiritual. Mental.
I never could have imagined that thoughts themselves could hurt. They can. Each one landed like a white-hot needle driven into a nerve ending. I didn't want to think, but I couldn't stop thinking.
I had made another mistake. Again.
The pain vanished. Just as abruptly as it had arrived.
"Agree, and your suffering ends!" the creature thundered again.
Agree. The temptation was stronger than it had ever been. Just to never feel that again. But...
"Along with my existence!" I spat back stubbornly at the eldritch abomination. "How is that any different from dying?"
In essence, it wasn't. But if I simply died, Dormammu got nothing. (Or so I wanted to believe.) If I agreed to his Pact, though, with the Creator's Spark that this thing clearly understood far better than I did, he could accomplish horrors beyond imagining. Not even Strange could fix that. And I wanted the Earth, which I had grown genuinely attached to, to stay intact. At the very least, I had managed to leave some kind of legacy there.
My answer clearly did not satisfy Dormammu. The torture resumed.
Agony. Pain. Suffering.
I couldn't lose consciousness. Couldn't move a single part of my body. Couldn't even blink. Couldn't order the nanobots inside me to stop my heart.
I couldn't do anything.
All I could do was suffer. "Endure" would be too dignified a word for what this was.
The agony stopped.
"Agree!"
I stayed silent. Stealing those precious seconds while the agony retreated. While thinking didn't hurt. Something, anything...
Out of pure desperation, I mentally nudged the interface. The System. 900 OP remaining. My last reserve.
I scrolled the technology list. Either prohibitively expensive or completely useless in this situation. My eyes landed on a technology that had been useless to me before.
[Information Package (Uncommon): Antimatter Time Manipulation Principle (ATMP) (Final Fantasy XIII-3). Unlock Cost: 900 OP]
Useless now, too. But something in its description had caught my attention earlier: a localized three-second time stop. In a dimension where the Lord of this reality decided what flowed and how? It wouldn't help me.
But it was still better than just suffering.
Without waiting for my answer, Dormammu restarted the cycle. The agony returned. And through that all-consuming fire, I mentally confirmed the purchase. "Unlock."
900 OP burned away.
If there was even the smallest one-in-a-billion chance that this information package would kill me, or at least cause me to lose consciousness, I was ready.
It didn't kill me. I didn't lose consciousness either. But oh, yes. System pain. The pain of loading an "information package" was something else entirely. It was nothing like Dormammu's torture. It was the familiar sensation, almost comforting by comparison, of my brain being forcibly rewritten, of concepts being hammered in for which I did not have a single existing neuron.
And that mental fracturing, for several long seconds, drowned out the pain from Dormammu.
Conclusion? The System was a harder hit than Dormammu. Would that help me?
Armed with this new knowledge, I tried activating the ATMP for three seconds. A tiny reprieve? I felt... nothing. Utter emptiness. The darkness swirled around me exactly as it had before. My attempt had failed.
"What did you just do?"
The agony stopped. Dormammu's voice had changed. A note of curiosity had crept into it.
"In my dimension? Where I am the absolute Ruler?"
He wasn't asking many questions. He seemed genuinely astonished. It looked unnatural. But the important thing was that the agony had stopped.
"I... stopped... time..." I rasped, savoring the one second without pain. While he gave me that window, I immediately tried to bite off my own tongue. Idiot. Extremis regeneration kicked in at once, and Dormammu, understanding my maneuver, paralyzed my entire body again.
"Time?" he seemed to roll the word around. He informed me cheerfully, "There are no such concepts in my space!", incidentally explaining why the ATMP had failed. "But your little struggle... amused me. If you wish, you could create a world made entirely of Time. All you need to do is stand beside me."
I stayed silent again, bracing for the next round. It didn't take long.
It was like the Cruciatus Curse from the Harry Potter books, if the books were to be believed. Possibly worse. Conceptual pain that couldn't be turned off, that offered nowhere to hide.
The cycle resumed. Agony. Respite. His offer. My silence. Agony again.
How many times did it repeat? I lost count. All I wanted was to die or go blank. At some point, my consciousness simply began to drift. To dissolve. Like deep anesthesia, except instead of soft oblivion, there was endless, grinding pain.
Apparently, an unconscious version of me was of no use to Dormammu.
The agony stopped. But this time he didn't launch into the familiar lecture about future greatness, the creation of worlds, or any of the rest of the grandiose nonsense. Instead, he lifted my body higher, until I was almost level with his enormous violet fire-eyes.
"I wanted to give you a chance. You refused it," the creature growled.
The darkness paralyzing my jaw loosened. He was probably expecting a plea. Some kind of answer. Instead, I gathered what was left in my mouth and spat.
It was the bitten-off tip of my tongue, which had been sitting there, thick and coppery, the whole time. Extremis regeneration had long since stopped repairing it. Naturally, the spit never reached Dormammu's darkness. But the gesture was clear. At least to me.
The paralysis returned immediately.
"I'll have to do this the hard way."
A hand tore free from the churning darkness of his body: long, thin, shot through with violet veins of pure energy.
And that hand reached inside my body.
Not tearing through flesh. It passed through me like a ghostly but tangible needle, searching for something deep within.
The hard way. Now I understood. He hadn't been trying to break me. He hadn't been trying to convince me.
He simply wanted to pull the System out of me. Damn it all.
Wait. Not "damn it." A question. Why hadn't he started with this in the first place?
The answer appeared before my eyes in the form of System notifications.
[WARNING! DIRECT ATTEMPT TO INTERFERE WITH THE CREATOR'S SPARK!]
[INTERFERENCE OBJECTIVE: ASSIMILATION ATTEMPT]
[ANTI-ASSIMILATION PROTOCOL ACTIVATED. PERFORMING FULL SITUATION ANALYSIS]
[ENTITY INTERFERING WITH THE SPARK IDENTIFIED AS FALTINE GREATER BEING "DORMAMMU". SPATIAL COORDINATES OF INTERFERENCE: ISOLATED DIMENSION WITH DOMINANT CONCEPTS OF DARKNESS, ENTROPY, ABSORPTION. TEMPORAL COORDINATES OF INTERFERENCE: UNDEFINED]
[DETERMINING COUNTERMEASURE METHOD]
[ASSESSING HOST CAPABILITIES]
[DIRECT ESCALATION EXCLUDED. RISK OF HOST DEATH EXCEEDS PERMISSIBLE THRESHOLD]
[COUNTERMEASURE EXCLUDED. "ESCAPE" PROTOCOL PERMITTED]
[ESCAPE PROBABILITY LOW. MAXIMIZING "BLIND SPOT" PROTOCOL]
[INSUFFICIENT ENERGY. RECALCULATING]
[INITIATING FORCED CONVERSION OF HOST'S INFORMATION PACKAGES INTO CREATION ENERGY]
[THE FOLLOWING INFORMATION PACKAGES HAVE BEEN CONVERTED: Arcanum Blueprint Set, Master Clockmaker, Technological Modernization, Master Gourmet, Disassembly Risk, Non-Mage Technology, Individual Armament: XCOM Philosophy, Essence Smith, Iron Blood, Strange Science, From Trinitite to Power Stones, Muentika's Legacy for Future Smiths, Ritualist-Optimizer, Anti-Matter Time Manipulation Principle (ATMP)]
[ENERGY QUANTITY EXCESSIVE. "BLIND SPOT" PROTOCOL FULLY ACTIVE. INITIATING FORCED TEAR IN THE FABRIC OF REALITY]
All of it took less than a second. The notifications flared and disappeared. Before I could even register the list of what I had lost, I felt the effect.
It wasn't "dulling." It was a surgical amputation.
As if entire layers of knowledge had been carved away from my brain, my neural pathways responsible for the most complex concepts burned away. I had literally become less intelligent. The sensation was physical. Nauseating.
And in the same instant, reality tore open before me. Not a portal. A ragged, unstable fracture in the fabric of the dimension, leading into... empty, vast space.
The bindings of darkness holding me snapped as if they had never existed. I was hurled straight through that fracture, into the wide-open cosmos.
Dormammu roared, not in pain, but in fury.
The darkness could no longer touch me. His spectral hand, which a moment ago had been reaching inside me for the System, simply dissipated. In its place, a wave of pure, concentrated violet energy surged toward me.
The last thing I saw in the Dark Dimension was a tiny, venomous shard of that energy piercing through the portal after me.
The portal slammed shut.
Silence. And cold. The first thing I registered: I couldn't breathe. The second: the sensation of my blood boiling from within.
Space. Vacuum.
Free from Dormammu, only to die pointlessly out here? Extremis. Nanobots. Thoughts sprinted while my body convulsed from decompression.
Problem one: pressure. The vacuum was pulling the air from my lungs, boiling my blood. A few more seconds and the damage would be irreversible. Mental command. Trillions of nanobots flooded from my pores, my mouth, my nose, my eyes. They instantly wove a sealed, form-fitting "second skin" over my actual one. Sealed. Internal pressure stabilized. Blood safe.
Problem two: temperature. Space was brutally cold, at absolute zero. Extremis had already kicked in, forcing my internal temperature up to survivable levels. The nanobot skin became a perfect insulator, trapping precious warmth.
Problem three. The most important one. Oxygen. I needed air. I had minutes at most before brain death. Generating oxygen from nothing was impossible.
And that was when it truly hit me. The amputation. A surge of sharp, helpless bitterness. I couldn't remember the blueprints. I no longer knew advanced chemistry or physics. Everything the System had given me, all my knowledge, had burned away as fuel for the escape. I smothered the surge immediately. Survival was the priority.
But logic. Basic logic remained. Think. I needed oxygen (O2). I would exhale carbon dioxide (CO2). I needed a closed-loop system. Command to the nanobots: build a filter. Capture the CO2 molecules I breathed out. Break the chemical bond. Return the oxygen (O2) to my lungs. The carbon (C)? Scrap it. Use it as raw material for the nanobots themselves.
I issued the mental command. The nanobot skin around my mouth and nose thickened, forming a primitive but hopefully functional scrubber. The first desperate breath: it arrived. It worked.
I didn't know exactly how it had worked. Maybe the amputation had erased the blueprints but left intact the baseline logic and whatever knowledge I'd picked up through lived experience, the kind you pick up whether you want to or not. Maybe the neural interface wired into my spinal cord was smarter than I had given it credit for. But the fact remained: within a minute, I had stopped suffocating, thanks to the passive closed-loop cycle I'd established.
An ironic thought surfaced. Was I the perfect cosmic being now? Recycling carbon dioxide, feeding on the heat of my own Extremis, capable of surviving in open space indefinitely?
Not quite. Energy still doesn't come from nowhere. I had plenty of it, but more never hurt. Another mental effort. Several high-calorie capsules of food-grade silicone filled with nutrient gel materialized in my mouth, and I swallowed them immediately.
Now. Now I could at least think.
I had survived. I was alone. Stripped of everything. In the boundless cosmos. And the last thing I remembered was that shard of Dormammu's violet energy that had...
[WARNING! ENTROPIC DECAY OF THE CREATOR'S SPARK DETECTED!]
Damn it. That violet fragment from Dormammu. It had hit after all. If I lost the System, I would have absolutely no chance of survival. None at all.
[ESTIMATED SUBJECTIVE TIME UNTIL COMPLETE SPARK DECAY: 1 MINUTE 37 SECONDS]
[INSUFFICIENT ENERGY TO PREVENT DECAY]
One minute and thirty-seven seconds. And naturally, "insufficient energy." Why was I not surprised? This was turning into a really terrible joke.
Go ahead, System. Finish me off. Strip me of Extremis and the nanobots so I can die in this lifeless void at the edge of the universe. And not a soul will ever know, because I'm a 'Blind Spot.' The Creator's Spark is what matters, right?
[PRIORITY 1: PRESERVATION OF THE CREATOR'S SPARK]
[PRIORITY 2: PRESERVATION OF HOST LIFE]
[INITIATING CONTROLLED DIMMING OF THE CREATOR'S SPARK WITH SUBSEQUENT PURGING OF THE ENTROPIC VIRUS FROM HOST SOUL]
[PORTION OF SYSTEM FUNCTIONALITY REDUCED]
["WORLD FORGING" REPLACED WITH "DAILY FORGING," CRAFT POINTS REMOVED, TECHNOLOGY TAB REMOVED, UNLOCKED TECHNOLOGIES CONVERTED TO ENERGY FOR ENTROPIC VIRUS PURGING, INVENTORY REDUCED TO 1 "SYSTEM" SLOT, ALL ITEMS IN INVENTORY CONVERTED TO ENERGY]
[ENTROPIC DECAY PREVENTED, CREATOR'S SPARK PRESERVED, HOST LIFE PRESERVED, SYSTEM FUNCTIONALITY RESTRUCTURED]
Everything happened so fast, I didn't even have time to react. My brain, which had just survived the vacuum, was trying to process a second amputation within what felt like a single day. Or hour. Or minute.
So now I was a System invalid? No functioning inventory. No technologies. No Craft Points. All that remained was something called "Daily Forging" and one "System slot."
At least I was alive. And the worst adventure of my new life appeared to be over. I had survived.
I hung in the void, wrapped in a cocoon of nanobots, and finally allowed myself to take stock of what had just happened.
What. Was. All. Of. That.