Chapter 91

AFTERMATH

Despite exhaustion, pain, and injuries, the team stayed up late. Blood was washed away first. Armor removed. Wounds tended. Comfortable clothes worn. Then they gathered in the living room with their alien henchmen, as Annie insisted on calling them.

Talia went first. Her retelling was as it usually was; sharp and to the point. She described Sir Garret’s fighting style, the predictable patterns, the cathedral’s architecture creating clear sight lines. The brief exchange before combat. The decisive strike. She kept her emotion out of it, presenting facts like a mission report.

Augustus stood to tell his story. Natural theatricality came through in his voice, his gestures. He described the Axiom Grid’s impossible geometry, the wizard’s confident assessment of the battlefield. The floating cubes. The spellbook that responded to thought. The aliens watched with rapt attention, following every word. It was a story told and presented with the man’s dramatic flair, but without a single embellishment.

Annie’s turn came with explosive energy despite her injured leg. She gestured wildly, re-enacting the dinosaur surfacing from the swamp. The platform hopping. Her voice rose as she described the chase.

“And then it ate my fucking arm!” She held up her very-present arm for emphasis. “During the chase! Just bit it right off and chewed on it like a goddamn toy!”

The story continued. The building climb. Dropping the dinosaur eight floors and watching it get back up. Her voice cracked slightly when she got to that part, about thinking she was dead because there was no way it would fall for the same trick. And then she shared her reckless decision to leap from the building and use gravity to give her the punch she needed to finish it off.

They were not particularly thrilled to hear about it. But they were happy she’d made it back alive, which counterbalanced their need to talk to her about her strategic choices.

Alexander went last. His account was sparse, technical. He described the tower’s structure, the cultivator’s electromagnetic signatures, the cannon chambers. He glossed over the summit, the integration of powers, the moment of transformation. Just said he’d won, claimed both prizes, and that was that.

The others noticed his reticence but didn’t push.

Then Talia leaned forward, hands clasped.

“I learned something during my fight. About Sir Garret’s world.”

The room quieted.

“He mentioned they call the System ‘God’, and that their priests teach that the world is eternal. And then he mentioned people studying tree growth patterns who believed the world couldn’t be more than fifteen years old.” She paused. “Sir Garret said he himself was twenty-three winters old. With memories of a full lifetime.”

Augustus frowned. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“It doesn’t. If the physical evidence says fifteen years maximum, but people have memories extending back further… then something very strange is going on.”

“You think he was telling the truth?” Annie asked.

“I can’t be certain, but he seemed honest. Honorable, actually.” Talia looked at each of them. “If he was telling the truth, then we have to consider the possibility that the System is somehow fabricating these alternate realities and populating them. Or erasing their pasts. Or… I don’t know.”

“That’s really fucked up,” Annie said.

They sat with that for a moment. The implications sprawled outward in too many directions to process while this exhausted.

“I learned something too,” Augustus said, breaking the silence. “Erasmus recognized our arena. Claimed the whole battlefield was like some kind of three-dimensional casting circle. There were runes that he recognized from his world’s history, too. Said they were the origin of all arcane languages.”

“Meaning?” Alexander asked.

“Magic has formal systems in his reality. Rules. He mentioned formally trained mages versus hedge wizards.” Augustus glanced at his wand. “They turned it into something that could be studied. Structured knowledge. Everything I’ve been doing is improvised. Intuitive.”

“Can you learn it now that you have the spellbook?” Talia asked.

“Eventually, maybe. I’ll have to start with the basic runes I can recall from the arena.” He shrugged. “The spellbook is blank for a reason. I don’t know any yet.”

Gilly shifted nervously on the couch. Several of its appendages fidgeted.

“We should tell you something.”

All four of them turned.

“The System. It say fights were...” The alien struggled with the word. “Broadcast. Everywhere. All realities watch.”

“What?” Annie sat up straighter, wincing.

Alexander pulled up his System interface, finding the announcement he’d dismissed earlier. His eyes scanned it quickly.

“It’s true. The broadcast was multiversal, but…” He looked up. “Everyone saw it.”

“Everyone?” Annie’s voice pitched higher. “Like, actually everyone?”

“The System has reached out to affect everyone in our galaxy, apparently. And the announcement says exposure to Dreamers can trigger an awakening in others,” Talia said. “It’s using us to spread powers exponentially.”

Augustus leaned back, processing. “Then it’s completely out of our control. The only hope humanity had was that without direct confirmation about what was happening, the Galactic Council wouldn’t act. Now? I can’t even guess what happens next.”

The weight of that settled over them.

“Well,” Annie said after a moment. “Fuck.”

After that, the night stretched out before them.

Someone suggested they watch the fights. Alexander wasn’t sure who. But suddenly they were all seated around the holo display, aliens pressed close, as the System’s archive loaded.

Watching yourself fight was uncomfortable. Like hearing your own voice recorded, except worse.

Talia watched her fight in silence, occasionally frowning. When it ended, she said, “That transition was sloppy. Should have adjusted the angle by three degrees.”

Augustus winced at several moments. “I didn’t realize I was that close to being hit. The footage makes it obvious.”

Then came the moment. The dinosaur’s jaws closing around her metal arm during the platform chase. Biting it clean off.

“See?!” Annie shot forward on the stool, pointing at the screen. “I told you! It just bit it right the fuck off!”

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The vindication in her voice was absolute.

Then Annie watched with growing horror all the way through to the end. “I look like a drowned rat covered in dinosaur blood.”

Alexander’s fight played last. They watched in silence as he raced up the tower, as Chen Wei pursued him with inhuman speed. The cannon chambers. The metal vortex. The desperate climb.

Then the summit. Both spheres claimed. Droney’s sacrifice. The resurrection.

And the declaration.

The living room stayed quiet after it ended. Nobody quite knew what to say.

“Well,” Annie finally managed. “That was edgy.”

Alexander just sighed.

Annie’s joke had landed, but he couldn’t quite laugh. Whatever moment of understanding he’d experienced on that tower, whatever cosmic awareness had stretched beyond himself and the arena, had washed away as if it had never existed. He still knew what his powers might achieve, understood that he partially awoke each machine he touched, that they looked at him with something like awe, as much as a machine could.

But the feeling of vast presence, of being observed from dimensions he couldn’t name, was gone. In its place remained only the ambition to achieve what he’d glimpsed in that moment.

His powers hummed within him now differently than before. No longer separate threads fighting for dominance, but synergized the way the others had always described theirs. He couldn’t wait to test how everything felt together.

But it would keep until tomorrow. Or today, but later.

They moved on to other fights. Queen of Hearts. Maximilian and his own dramatic declaration that felt eerily similar to Alexander’s. Julia. Cash. Iron Nadya. Flashpoint. Star Titan. Skybreaker.

Every single one of them achieved their own stunning victories.

Nobody was surprised. These were the strongest heroes and villains on Earth, people who’d reached the upper tiers of power through skill, determination, or sheer bloody-mindedness. Of course they’d won.

But as they continued watching, flicking through random matches from across the multiverse, the pattern changed.

Superhumans died. A lot of them.

A hero with flight and enhanced strength faced a cultivator who moved like water, redirecting every attack until a single palm strike caved in the hero’s chest. Dead in under three minutes.

A speedster tried to blitz a knight in full plate. The knight’s sword moved once. The speedster collapsed into two pieces.

Annie stopped eating halfway through a match where a dinosaur the size of a building swallowed a superhuman whole, armor and all. The saurian didn’t even slow down.

“Damn,” she muttered.

They watched match after match. Cultivators especially seemed to rack up kills with disturbing efficiency. Their techniques were simply more refined, more lethal, honed over what might be decades of practice rather than the handful of years Earth_1’s supers had been active.

The saurians were worse in a different way. Raw, brutal, evolutionary perfection. No technique. Just overwhelming physical superiority that shrugged off powers that should have been devastating.

The living room grew quieter as the victories turned into massacres.

“We got lucky,” Talia said finally.

Nobody argued.

Alexander downloaded everything while the others watched. They would be useful for strategic intelligence and threat assessments should they ever need it. Especially where their supers had made mistakes. Where they’d underestimated their opponents.

Where confidence had turned into a casket.

He briefly wondered if it counted as piracy, then dismissed the thought. The System had broadcast it publicly. This was reconnaissance, nothing more.

He organized the files methodically. Created folders. Tagged priority targets. Returned to the comfortable rhythm of analysis.

“We should talk about our new powers,” Talia said eventually.

They looked at each other. Exhaustion showed on every face.

“Tomorrow,” Augustus suggested. “None of us have a handle on them yet. It’ll take time to understand what we can actually do.”

There were nods all around.

Some of the aliens had already returned to their rooms, while others had crashed, sprawled across the various furniture in comfortable heaps. The team scattered to their rooms one by one.

Alexander stayed up a while longer. Rewatching fights and taking notes. Making plans in case they ever needed them.

Finally, when dawn light started creeping across the terrace, he made his way upstairs.

None of them woke until well after lunch.

***

Alexander woke to evening light filtering through the windows.

He sat up slowly, muscles protesting. Everything ached in that distant way that came from pushing too hard. His body had recovered while he slept, but the memory of exhaustion lingered.

He dressed in comfortable clothes first, then pulled on his gear. The damaged chest plate settled into its familiar weight. Belt. Boots. Both gauntlets last.

He could sense the left one spark faintly, internally, when he pulsed Electrokinesis into it.

Alexander held it up, studying the damage. The exterior plating showed scorch marks and a hairline crack near the knuckles where Chen Wei’s blow had connected. He reached out with Metallokinesis, pulsing power through the device repeatedly. Probing the damage.

The internal circuitry responded normally. The capacitors charged. Energy flowed through the right pathways, though now with a minor flaw. The crack was superficial; the damage cosmetic rather than functional.

It would hold. He’d do a proper repair later, take the whole thing apart and examine it properly. For now, it was fine.

He made his way downstairs.

The smell of cooking hit him halfway down. Something savory, garlic and ginger and soy. Augustus stood at the stove with a wok, flames licking up the sides as he tossed vegetables with obvious skill.

Aliens occupied the living room. Two watched something on the holo display. Through the terrace doors, Alexander could see a few more outside, eating from bowls with various appendages.

“Evening,” Augustus said without turning. “Or should I say good morning, given your schedule?”

“Evening works.” Alexander moved into the kitchen. “Smells good.”

“Starting on dinner. Stir fry with some other dishes.” Augustus added something from a small bowl, the wok hissing in response. “How are you feeling?”

“Sore. Tired. But otherwise fine.”

“That tracks.” Augustus glanced at him. “The others went to Astra Omnia. Annie’s seeing a healer. Talia’s checking in with the information broker about those intel reports she requested.”

Alexander nodded slowly. He leaned against the counter, watching Augustus work. Behind the man, spectral hands moved with purpose. One chopped scallions. Another stirred a pot of rice. A third pulled plates from a cabinet and set them on the counter in a neat row.

Multiple tasks simultaneously. Some more complex than Alexander had seen before.

Augustus didn’t have his wand out either. He didn’t seem to be focused on the magic at all. The hands simply existed, working independently while he handled the wok.

Alexander filed that observation away but said nothing.

“I’ve been thinking,” Alexander said after a moment. “About the Santiago Systems footage.”

Augustus’s hands stilled briefly, then resumed their rhythm. “Go on.”

“I know we decided not to release it because of the aliens. That exposing them, and what they went through, might put them in danger. And because the whole System invasion thing on top of it could provoke the Galactic Council into action against Earth.” Alexander crossed his arms. “But the System just broadcast our fights to everyone. The galaxy knows now. Everyone knows. So the circumstances have changed.”

“They have,” Augustus agreed. He transferred the vegetables to a serving dish, the spectral hands moving it aside. “What are you thinking?”

“That maybe the original risk doesn’t apply anymore. The damage is done. The System is exposed now. All that’s left to consider are the aliens. But it’s not all bad, right? We saved them, they’ll support our claim. The Galactic Council would surely take that into account, and then maybe it all blows back on just Santiago Systems.”

Augustus considered that, starting on a second batch in the wok. The flames danced, oil shimmered.

“I’m not the best at politics,” he said finally. “But I think we should wait. Gather information about how the galaxy is actually reacting to the System revelation before we make any moves.”

He glanced over his shoulder. “We could also consider releasing it to the UEG instead of the media. Keep it internal. Use it as leverage or evidence without making it public.”

Alexander’s jaw tightened. “I don’t like that idea.”

“I know.” Augustus turned back to the wok. “Can’t say I blame you. They probably can’t be trusted to do the right thing anyway.”

Something distant crossed Augustus’s expression before he shrugged and let it go.

“Dinner will be ready in about an hour,” he said, deliberately changing the subject. “What are you planning to do in the meantime?”

Alexander pushed off the counter, heading for the terrace doors.

“Flying practice. And I need to figure out what the Core can actually do.”

Augustus nodded. “Don’t push too hard. You’re still recovering.”

“I’ll be fine.”

The terrace doors slid open. Cool evening air washed over him as Alexander stepped outside.