The robot tore open a rift in the fabric of space, intending to leave the battlefield far behind.
But the mont he stepped through, the world flickered.
He found himself right back where he started, his tallic fingers clutching the throat of the very last surviving soldier.
Frustration surged through his circuits.
He surged his internal core, releasing a burst of antimatter that consud the struggling man instantly.
With a chanical huff of annoyance, he opened another rift and departed.
The transition was instantaneous and jarringly familiar.
He was back again, standing in the sa coordinate of the void, his hand once more clamped firmly around the soldier's neck.
At this mont, his processors flagged a critical error: sothing was fundantally wrong with the causality of his location, though his logic gates couldn't yet calculate a solution.
He decided on a different tactical approach.
Instead of killing the man, he released his grip, letting the soldier drift away as he opened a new rift to escape.
The reality shifted into sothing truly surreal.
Another version of himself materialized out of thin air.
This second robot reached out, clutched the soldier's neck, and devoured him with a pulse of antimatter.
The original robot shook his head, the strange temporal echo chilling his core, and decided to leave the scene for good.
He reappeared yet again.
This ti, the loop had fractured further.
Two variations of himself already existed in the space: one that had spared the soldier and another that was still in the middle of the execution.
"This is getting weird," he muttered, his vocal synthesizers distorted by the temporal pressure.
Believing the soldier was the anchor for the loop, he grabbed the man and prepared to jump through the rift with him, intending to remove the trigger from the equation entirely.
He stepped through, the rift closed, and he reappeared once more.
Now, there were three variations.
One was snapping the neck, one was leaving the soldier behind, and one was attempting to leave with the man in tow.
No matter what choice the robot made, the outco was an inescapable constant: he would always return to the rift.
The only thing that changed was the growing crowd of his own divergent tilines.
---
Deep within an asteroid belt, far removed from the collapsing logic of the battlefield, Nightfla and the Mad One materialized.
"This should be safe for now," Nightfla inford him, his eyes scanning the tumbling rocks for any sign of pursuit.
"Yeah.
But that robot will likely be hunting us again soon," the Mad One inferred, his voice heavy within his suit.
"I am sure he has already calculated our destination."
"I know," Nightfla replied, a thin, dangerous smile playing on his lips.
"That is why I placed him in a multilayered ti loop—a living ti bomb.
With the loop active, he is effectively paralyzed by his own choices.
His main body will eventually figure out how to sever the cycle, but the mont he breaks the loop, ti itself will detonate.
If the explosion doesn't kill them outright, it will scatter them across different, unconnected tilines."
"You thought this through.
Good," the Mad One nodded, impressed by the tactical cruelty of the trap.
"I had to.
But moving past that, I need your help," Nightfla said, his tone turning grave.
"Hmm?
My help with what?"
"Antimatter.
I need you to attack with it."
The Mad One stared at him, the lights of his suit flickering in shock.
"Have you gone completely mad?" he asked, finding the request beyond absurd.
"I need you to start with the simplest, lowest-yield attacks.
Then, slowly and thodically, increase the lethality," Nightfla explained calmly.
"You...
you are trying to adapt your very biology to antimatter?"
The Mad One shook his head in flat disapproval.
"Give it up.
It isn't possible.
Countless legends and powerhouses have attempted to build an immunity to the antithesis of matter, and every single one of them t a grueso end."
"I will be alright.
Trust and just do what I ask," Nightfla requested, his gaze unwavering.
"Well, I would love to oblige your suicide mission, but I'm fresh out of antimatter," the Mad One admitted, gesturing to the depleted weapon systems of his suit.
"And I doubt we will be allowed to harvest more from the local sources without being tracked down by the authorities."
"You can't synthesize antimatter yourself?" Nightfla asked, surprised.
"No.
Antimatter is the literal antithesis of a particle—the mirror opposite of matter.
To create that void, and then convert it into a universal grade of antimatter that can effectively erase all known matter, is not a simple task of chemistry.
It has requirents that even my technology can't bypass on the fly," the Mad One explained, his voice echoing with the frustration of a scientist hitting a wall.
"Hmm.
What if we simply go back to the mont of the Big Bang?" Nightfla asked, posing the question as if it were the simplest solution in the world.
The suggestion struck the Mad One like a physical blow.
His eyes widened behind his visor, his mind racing through the catastrophic variables.
"We wouldn't survive long enough to tell the tale," the Mad One said, his voice actually trembling within his boots.
"The concentration of raw antimatter at the dawn of creation is so dense that attempting to ta it would be like trying to bottle a supernova.
It is impossible."
He looked at Nightfla, convinced now that he was standing next to a true lunatic.
"Besides, the Big Bang is rely one of an infinite number of tiline variations that lead to creation.
Singling out that specific origin point would be a needle in an infinite haystack."
"Hmm.
That's true.
Pinpointing the source would take a massive amount of temporal processing," Nightfla conceded, nodding slowly.
"We should consider more grounded possibilities for now," the Mad One suggested, desperate to move away from the topic of universal suicide.
"I'm afraid this is the end of the rope for both of you," a raspy, death-riddled voice wheezed through the vacuum.
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