259 Apotheosis
The bottom of Briana’s Trench was silent.
I lay on my back at the deepest point, staring upward through kiloters of empty darkness. It was completely dry down here. The trench that should have been crushed beneath impossible oceanic pressure was hollowed out like the inside of a massive wound.
Whatever had erased the ocean from the Devil’s Triangle, it wasn’t natural.
It certainly wasn’t divine.
I rested my arms behind my head and waited.
If the Entity had chosen this location for a reason, I would eventually find out. Until then, this place would serve another purpose. A fourteen-kiloter teor slamming into the planet would destroy continents if mishandled. Down here, buried beneath the seabed, I might be able to smother the worst of the aftermath.
Preferably.
There would still be earthquakes. Volcanic eruptions. Tidal shifts. Maybe worse.
But preferable was the best anyone was getting today.
My earpiece buzzed.
Guesswork’s voice crackled through it. “How are you doing there, pal?”
“Fits like a glove,” I replied lazily. “I’m dressed for the occasion and all too eager to phase that teor under.”
I tapped my smartwatch.
A holographic projection sprang into existence above my wrist, displaying the incoming object. Even simplified, the thing looked obscene. A burning scar across the simulation, descending toward the planet like judgnt.
I watched it quietly.
I believed I could do it.
Mostly.
Power exhaustion was still a factor. Phasing sothing that size wasn’t just about strength; it was about sustaining the effect long enough to move it thousands of kiloters through planetary mass.
What if I ran out halfway?
What if the teor dephased inside the mantle?
What if—
Guesswork interrupted my thoughts.
“Nicole just evacuated.”
“Good,” I murmured.
Then sothing tugged at my senses.
It felt like a ripple passing through the world. My perception, twisted as it had beco through intangibility, picked up sothing strange nearby.
Material turning immaterial.
People dying.
“There’s fighting in here,” I said, frowning.
Guesswork responded instantly. “Don’t leave your position. Leave it to the others.”
I pushed myself up slightly. “Who is foolish enough to pick a fight now of all tis?”
Guesswork sounded tired. “Cultists.”
I grimaced.
Of course it was them.
“Those idiots are going to die if they stay,” I said. “That includes the personnel stationed here.”
The plan had been simple. The teams around the Devil’s Triangle would remain until the last possible mont to monitor the teor’s descent. A portal would pull them out seconds before impact.
If they delayed even slightly, they would be vaporized.
Guesswork sighed into the comm. “That’s probably on us. A group of cultists managed to get their hands on portal tech from the other side and started swarming your area. Don’t let them distract you.”
I flexed my fingers.
Every instinct in my body told to go out there.
To end the fight quickly.
But this position mattered more than any skirmish.
Still, curiosity won out.
“Who’s fighting them?” I asked. “How’s Griffin?”
Guesswork answered, “Capes from the GDF, Company employees, and a few SRC special forces who happened to be nearby. As for Griffin? She was caught with sothing else…”
That explained the sudden spike in deaths I was sensing and the fact that I couldn’t sense Griffin’s soul with the teor.
I leaned back again, staring at the darkness above.
“I’ll leave the rest to you, Guesswork.”
“Don’t do anything reckless, Eclipse—”
I pulled the earpiece out and tossed it aside.
Enough talking.
I rose into the air.
My body dissolved partially into phase-state as I accelerated upward through the trench. Phase-warp twisted the space around , collapsing distance until movent beca sothing closer to teleportation.
The sky tore open above .
Fire streaked across it.
The teor had arrived.
I launched myself toward it.
The collision ca a second later.
I slamd into the burning surface with enough force to crater the rock beneath my feet. Molten debris burst outward as I landed, my boots digging into the asteroid’s skin while it scread through the atmosphere.
Wind roared past like a thousand jet engines.
Flas wrapped around the teor’s edges as friction ignited the sky.
I looked down at the planet rushing up beneath us.
Either I was about to beco the most foolish idiot to ever exist…
Or the greatest redeed sinner in human history.
There was no in-between.
Darkness swallowed everything the mont I phased fully into the teor.
My porcelain mask had already cracked from the heat before I entered. By the ti I reached the interior, it was little more than scorched ceramic clinging stubbornly to my face. My smartwatch had lted into useless slag around my wrist. Even my suit, designed to endure ridiculous punishnt, had begun to peel and blister. Only my shoes remained sowhat intact, and even they felt like they were slowly cooking around my feet.
I forced my body deeper.
Phasing wasn’t just passing through matter anymore. I rged with it. I sank into the teor’s core until I reached its heart and wrapped myself around its existence. My power spread outward, threading through every fracture, every mineral vein, every microscopic pocket inside the colossal rock.
Then I phased the entire thing.
The mont I did, pain detonated inside my body.
It wasn’t the kind of pain you could scream away. It was deeper than nerves, deeper than flesh. Every muscle in my body felt like it was being torn apart strand by strand. My bones vibrated like they were about to splinter into powder.
“I’M NOT GOING DOWN!” I roared into the suffocating darkness. “YOU’RE JUST A PIECE OF ROCK AND I’M THE FUCKING ECLIPSE!”
My control wavered.
For a split second my intangibility unraveled in places, and I felt it instantly. Fragnts of the teor tore loose from the main body. Chunks the size of buildings sheared off and scattered outward as burning debris.
I clenched harder.
Because the mont my control slipped again, the entire mass would re-materialize wherever it was. That ant the ocean. The crust. Cities. Continents.
I tightened my grip around the teor’s existence.
Through my power, I could feel everything about it. Every surface. Every crevice. Every grain of cosmic dust embedded within it during its silent drift through space.
“I’M NOT GOING TO DIE JUST YET, YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT!”
Ti stopped aning anything.
Seconds stretched into eternities inside that black prison. I had no horizon, no sky, no ground. Only the sensation of falling endlessly while wrestling a mountain made of stone and gravity.
The real challenge wasn’t holding the teor.
It was knowing when to let go.
If I released too early, the object would rematerialize before reaching the planet’s core. If I held too long, I might phase it completely through the planet and send fragnts blasting out the other side.
Or I would simply die before finishing.
My body was already starting to fail. It felt like sothing inside was grinding my cells into dust. Every heartbeat scraped like broken glass against my veins.
Life began flashing through my mind whether I wanted it to or not.
I saw my birth.
I saw the small house where my father’s rage lived in every corner. I felt again the helplessness of those nights. The fear. The anger.
I saw the mont I killed him.
Then my mother’s strict discipline, the cold determination in her eyes as she forced to control my power. I saw myself hiding what I was. Enduring bullying. Swallowing humiliation because restraint mattered more than pride.
Then the day I stopped holding back.
I saw the blood.
The bodies.
The twisted belief that greatness required violence.
Royal’s death.
Taking Silver and Onyx for myself.
Losing them.
The revenge against Crow.
Wandering through lawless lands searching for purpose.
Fighting for agency in a world that tried to crush it.
Joining the Ten.
Betraying the Ten.
The strange phenonon that changed everything.
Learning the truth about the SRC.
Gathering allies.
Another world.
Getting to know Alia.
More killing.
Building the Company into sothing the world would fear.
Nicole.
Her smile.
The mont life began growing inside her.
Ron.
The slaughter of the Monarchy.
So many mories piled together that I could barely breathe.
“Ah… Ron.”
The thought surfaced from sowhere deep inside .
“Nicole… yes. I’m going to co ho.”
A soft voice answered from the shadows of my mories.
“I’m not your Nicole, silly.”
I blinked in confusion.
A silhouette stood in the corner of that ntal landscape, faint but unmistakable.
“Mom?”
She smiled gently, the way she used to when I was younger.
“I will continue watching over you.”
Then she faded.
Reality slamd back into place like a hamr.
The teor was still falling.
My grip tightened again.
With the last of my control, I forced the entire mass to fold. Space twisted as I compressed the teor into a flattened state, reducing its dinsional presence just enough to guide it deeper.
Down.
Further down.
Beneath the crust.
Beneath the mantle.
I navigated blindly through the planet’s interior. Normally the darkness would have been absolute, but my power let feel the world in ways sight never could. Rock flowed around like an ocean of pressure and heat.
Then I reached it.
The core.
Molten fire surrounded , a churning inferno of impossible temperature. Yet within that blazing heart, sothing else existed.
Sothing… wrong.
Or perhaps sothing ancient.
It rested there quietly, deeper than the molten tal and deeper than the gravity crushing the planet inward. It did not move. It did not think.
But it had presence.
An unspeakable existence slumbering at the heart of the world.
My power brushed against it.
The connection was imdiate.
I felt threads spreading outward from it, stretching across the entire planet and beyond, like invisible roots touching countless beings.
Including .
My breath caught.
“Is this… the Source?”
The Source of All Powers.
I had heard the na only a handful of tis. Dr. Ti ntioned it once with an almost reverent fear, and even the Archives held only scraps of fragnted knowledge.
Yet here it was.
The sight of the thing at the planet’s heart stirred a mory.
The Five Continuities… or I guessed, four of them.
According to them, the Entity had once been . A version of Nick who had co too close to the Source. Soone who had pushed their power so far that the boundary between self and power collapsed. The result had been mutation on a scale that shattered identity.
A predator that devoured worlds.
The Entity.
I stared at the sleeping presence beneath the molten layers of the planet.
I shouldn’t touch this thing.
That conclusion felt extrely obvious.
Unfortunately, knowing sothing and doing sothing were two very different matters.
Because the Source was pulling on .
My entire being felt like it was slowly sliding toward it, like gravity had suddenly gained a will of its own. The closer my power brushed against it, the stronger the pull beca.
mories began to surface.
But they weren’t mine.
Different lifetis. Different paths. Fragnts of experiences that didn’t belong to the Nick I knew. Cities I had never seen. Worlds that looked wrong. Battles fought under alien skies.
And in every one of those mories, sothing was present.
The Entity’s voice erged from nowhere and everywhere at once.
“Co.”
The word echoed inside my skull like it had been spoken across eternity.
“Give yourself up to , and I shall give myself up to you.”
Rage snapped through instantly.
“Fuck you!” I shouted into the blazing core.
The voice continued calmly, as if my outburst ant nothing.
“You stand at the threshold between the beginning and the end. Every cycle begins here. Every cycle returns here. To reject the Source is to reject your own origin.”
I blinked in irritation.
“I didn’t understand shit,” I muttered.
Then I rubbed my forehead and scoffed loudly.
“Yeah, must be nice for you, smarty-pants. Sorry, but I’m an uneducated brute at best, and just a really violent guy who knows how to kill at his worst. So no, I don’t know about the beginning or the end.”
I jabbed a finger toward the Source.
“They’re aningless to .”
My voice hardened.
“The only thing that matters to is the present, and right now, you’re being one big pain in the ass.”
For a mont the Entity said nothing.
Then the voice returned, softer this ti.
“How fascinating.”
The tone carried sothing almost resembling admiration.
“Your will is crude, unrefined, and inelegant. Yet its density rivals collapsed stars. Your mind rejects inevitability through sheer defiance.”
There was a pause.
“But it is futile.”
The Source moved.
Or perhaps sothing within it moved.
Dark tentacles spilled outward from the sleeping presence, stretching through the molten core like living shadows. They twisted toward with slow, deliberate hunger.
If those things touched , I had a pretty good guess how that would end.
However, I had sothing the Entity didn’t account for.
A thread.
It was thin and fragile, but unbreakable.
The psychic connection linking to Nicole and my son stretched across existence itself. Distance ant nothing to it. Ti apparently didn’t either.
I grabbed onto that thread with everything I had.
Ron.
Nicole.
I focused on them like an anchor.
The pull of the Source fought back imdiately, trying to drag closer, trying to drown my identity inside that endless presence.
But I pushed.
I forced my power outward, using the connection as leverage.
My body began sliding backward.
The tentacles lunged.
I bared my teeth and spat one last promise into the darkness.
“The next ti we et, it’s gonna be a fight to the death.”
Reality snapped. One mont I was standing inside the molten heart of the planet. The next mont I blinked and found myself lying naked in the middle of an enormous crater.
I stared at the blue sky.
“What the hell happened?” I muttered.
A portal opened nearby with a soft ripple.
Guesswork stepped out, adjusting his tie like he had just walked into a mildly inconvenient eting. He clicked his tongue the mont he saw .
“Welco to the world of the living, Nick.”
His eyes scanned briefly.
“Oh, Nicole’s gonna be thrilled,” he added casually. “Probably both in the good ways and the bad ways.”
I pushed myself to my feet, feeling… different.
Not weaker.
Not stronger exactly.
Just different.
Guesswork clapped his hands once.
“Congratulations on reaching Intangibility-30. You’re basically a god now.”
He turned his head slightly.
“Sweetie, help him get dressed.”
His assistant stepped through the portal carrying a small bag. Gloryhole handed a plain white t-shirt and a pair of jeans with professional efficiency.
I put them on while frowning at Guesswork.
“So,” I said slowly, “how did it go?”
My voice tightened slightly.
“Griffin?”
Guesswork didn’t hesitate.
“She’s dead.”
For a brief mont sothing violent surged up inside . I nearly lashed out. Then I forced myself to calm down. Either she had actually died… or she had succeeded in faking her death like we planned.
Guesswork waved his hand impatiently.
“Let’s go,” he said. “We’re going to be very busy soon.”
He paused.
Then he added casually.
“You’ve been gone for two years now.”
I stared at him.
“Excuse !?”
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