From the safety of the portal, the real Alex watched the aftermath. He saw Tsuru break down in tears, the stoic "Great Staff" of the Marines shattered by the loss of her pupils. He saw Garp and Sengoku standing in a silence so heavy it felt like a funeral for the world's hope. Even Zephyr looked aged by decades, staring at the empty training grounds where the "Sunlight Trio" once practiced.
Alex felt a sharp, foreign ache in his chest. It was an emotion—grief, perhaps, or guilt. But as he focused on it, the feeling felt distant, like a radio signal from a galaxy away.
"Why does it feel so wrong?" he mused, his Rick-intelligence analyzing his own neurotransmitters. Then, he remembered. The thousand years in the void. A millennium of absolute nothingness had done more than just grant him clarity; it had frozen his core. His heart had turned into a permafrost of logic. The emotions were there, but he was no longer "plugged into" them. He was a god wearing the skin of a man, watching a play he had written himself.
He looked at the real Beth, Space Beth, Summer, Kanae and Shinobu, safely asleep in the stasis pods of his soul-space, unaware of the trauma they had just "suffered." He had saved them, optimized them, and used them.
"I need to fix this," Alex whispered to the empty void of the Omniverse. "If I can't feel, then I'm just a machine with a god complex." With a flick of his wrist, he set the coordinates for a world that specialized in the soul and the heart. The portal hummed, a bridge between a world of iron and whatever came next.