Chapter 135 God & Savior [Light]

The first worlds were easy. Mundane planets with a handful of capes, if any, and societies that bent quickly under the Directorate’s boot. We took them like taking rooms in a house: a skirmish here, a demonstration of power there, then banners raised and governors installed. The novelty of conquest wore off fast. After the third, the motion became routine… portal in, secure the hub, plant the doctrine, and bleed the resistance dry.

Powers were a constant we didn't fully understand. They cropped up as if every reality had the same ugly rumor sewn into its bones: some people carried sparks, some carried iron in their blood, some could tear walls apart with thought. We cataloged, classified, broke them down into dossiers and kill-profiles. We never asked the right question… why did these abilities appear? Where did they originate? We assumed dominion could paper over curiosity.

Our victories didn’t hold. By the sixth world we touched, the balance shifted.

A sickness arrived, something viral, abiotic, a toxin that turned breath into acid and nerves to static. It didn’t care for medals or rank. It took the unprepared first: the camp guards, the logistics men, then some of our most prized weapons. If I hadn’t had regenerator ratings then, I would have been a corpse among many.

I watched men convulse and dissolve and then knit themselves back together, half-alive and blank-eyed. We lost good people. Men who had been born for battles emptied away like water through a sieve. The Directorate’s medics failed. Their specialists failed. It was a calamitous, ugly lesson.

From those losses, the conquest pattern changed. Uprisings sprouted across the conquered worlds like mold in damp walls. New individuals began to pull, and ordinary people woke with hands that could smash tanks or voices that could rearrange stone. The historians in their polished halls scratched their heads and wrote tomes that would be used later as excuses. They argued genetics, environmental stressors, and some metaphysical nonsense about resonant frequencies. To me, it didn’t matter. People were gaining things we’d been bred to take. They were learning how to fight us.

I didn’t care about the policy debates. I cared about the war. I wanted more: more light, more sound, and more bones to crush beneath my feet. I trained until the world bent to my tempo. I pushed my body until the rating boards slapped me with a fifteen across the board, the highest the Directorate measured. They pinned their medals and called me their finest creation. That felt good… sharp and hot and correct.

Then the universe pushed back.

We met her on a red world orbiting a dim star, an absurdly beautiful thing, the sort of place that made strategists murmur. She arrived on a horizon like a sun being born: a woman rated at twenty-five, and when she moved, it was as if the stars rearranged themselves to accommodate the heat.

“You will bow,” one of our captains shouted, trying to marshal formation, but his words dissolved into the pressure wave that rolled off her like a tide.

She smiled, and the smile was a thing that melted things. She burned continents from their maps. Oceans were boiling in notes. Cities became blisters. The first shockwave hit like a star dropping into the atmosphere, heat like knives, pressure that inverted the shape of our uniforms and turned metal to slag. I felt the vibrations under my boots, heard buildings scream as their bones rearranged into steam.

She wasn’t a cape so much as a meteor given will. I watched whole fleets collapse into a rain of white-hot fragments. People turned and ran, and the distance they tried to put between them and her presence only made the air catch them in glass. It was obscene, beautiful, enormous, and homicidal.

We tried tactics. We tried coordination. We tried to hit her with everything we had, lethal rounds, explosives, and psychic dirty tricks. She laughed like thunder and telegraphed a flare so bright it seared my retinas through closed lids. She directed flames like orchestral crescendos and, with a single motion, set a world to unmaking.

The planet convulsed and split its skin. The crust cracked and then peeled, molten seams flooding its core like exposed arteries. In the space of minutes, an entire populated world became an incandescent wound. The light filled my vision, white at the center, red at the edges, and I understood in a way that didn’t need words what annihilation looked like from the inside.

I survived because I had to. Regeneration stitched me back when the heat would have vaporized other men. I fled with the rest of them, taking what scraps of order we could salvage. The portal screamed closed behind me, and I carried with me the smell of burned iron and the memory of people looking like candle wax under a hand.

We retreated. The Directorate issued statements praising “strategic withdrawal” and “re-evaluation of assault vectors.” They blinked in meetings and rearranged their maps and their language. We were taught, in new orientations, the difference between imperial hubris and reality.

I didn’t mourn the worlds we lost. Empires measure loss by cost, not sentiment. But as I recalled the entire thing in my dreams, I felt something unnameable pull at the place I kept for pleasure. Terror? Excitement? The line between them blurred after a while.

We fled for our lives. I had been one of their perfect weapons, and I had nearly been burned into nothing by a woman who was a sun. That day I learned two things: power could be beautiful enough to make you cry; and no empire, however arrogant, was immune to being swallowed by a brighter light.

I wanted to be that ‘light' and I’m going to make it happen, no matter what.

We moved on to different war fronts, the Directorate throwing us through one portal after another. Our orders were simple: conquer lesser worlds, seize their resources, and bring their populations to heel. Each new campaign blurred into the next with new suns, new skies, and new toys. The blood and dust might change color, but the rhythm of conquest never did.

And yet, I couldn’t focus.

Even as I tore through battalions and turned rebel strongholds to ash, my thoughts returned again and again to her… that silhouette of a sun that had obliterated an entire planet. That wasn’t power. That was godhood.

I wanted it.

That thought dug itself into my mind like a parasite. It kept me awake, drove my pulse, and twisted every victory into something hollow. No matter how many enemies I slaughtered or worlds I burned, I couldn’t forget the feeling of being small in her light.

I needed to be more. I needed to ascend.

So I threw myself into research. Every waking hour not spent killing was spent studying, experimenting, and theorizing. I dissected captured supers, I tested limits, I exposed myself to every imaginable kind of stimulus that might trigger another evolution. Nothing worked. My ratings stayed capped at fifteen. Always fifteen!

Eventually, I sought out the Witch.

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Her office was colder than I remembered. It was sterile, metallic, and lined with cables that pulsed faintly with psychic energy. The Witch sat behind her desk, her long silver hair bound into a braid that seemed to move of its own accord. Her eyes were like glass marbles: perfect, reflective, and completely empty.

She didn’t look up as I entered. “Subject U-731,” she said flatly, still reading from a tablet. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

I approached, suppressing the urge to tear the table in half. “Tell me how to increase my ratings.”

Her fingers paused mid-scroll. “Increase?” she repeated, tilting her head, almost amused. “You’ve reached fifteen across all categories. That is the theoretical ceiling of human capability. Anything beyond that would—”

“Would what?” I interrupted. “Kill me? Break me? You think I care about that?”

She finally looked up. For the first time, I saw a faint flicker of interest behind those eyes. “You wouldn’t be the first to try, Subject U-731. And yet none succeeded. Power is not linear. It curves. Eventually, the vessel cracks.”

“I’ve survived everything,” I said. “The White Room. The sickness. The uprisings. The wars. I’ve survived gods. Don’t tell me there isn’t a way.”

She set her tablet down and steepled her fingers. “Even if there were, the knowledge does not belong to us. Our understanding of power is… borrowed.”

That caught my attention. “Borrowed?”

“The research that built you, that built all of us, was not originally ours,” she said. “The Directorate’s foundation, our entire scientific doctrine, came from the data of an organization called the SRC. The Superhuman Regulation Committee. They exist across countless worlds. A multiverse-constant power, always there, always observing, and always collecting.”

“Another multiverse power,” I said, narrowing my eyes. “Like us?”

“In structure, yes,” she admitted. “But not on purpose. They do not conquer… Instead, they catalog. Every superhuman, every anomaly, every fragment of metaphysical power they can find. Much of what we know about our ratings, classifications, and evolution comes from stolen SRC archives. Even my psychic algorithms are derivative.”

“So,” I muttered, smirking faintly. “They have what I want.”

Her gaze sharpened. “You misunderstand. The SRC is not a force to antagonize. Even the Directorate treads lightly. They have erased entire empires without ever firing a shot.”

“Cowards,” I said. “All of you. You’d rather cower than take what could make you gods.”

She didn’t reply, just sighed softly and looked back down at her files. “Ambition has its place, Subject U-731. But you mistake obsession for evolution.”

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With the lead she gave me, I started digging.

The Directorate had thick files on the SRC, though much of it was classified even to my clearance. According to the scraps I found, the SRC was multiversal, operating silently in the shadows of countless worlds. They studied power. They dissected it, redefined it, and codified it. They might’ve been the first to ever map the structure of ability itself.

And the Directorate? They stole from them and then pretended they didn’t.

The higher-ups treated the SRC like a phantom empire. They called it a necessary unknown, something to avoid unless provoked. Their cowardice disgusted me.

“This is so boring…” I muttered once, staring at another censored file. “If they have the secret to divinity, then I’ll just take it.”

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Decades passed.

The war stretched on endlessly, across worlds where suns burned black and seas whispered in alien tongues. We fought time-stoppers, telepathic assassins, living storms, and gods who walked in mortal skin. We won some, lost many.

I watched new generations of soldiers come and go. I didn’t age since my powers kept me young, perfect, and unchanging. My body refused to decay. I became a relic of the first wave, one of the last surviving products of the original White Room.

And through all of it, not once did my ratings move beyond fifteen. No matter what worlds we conquered, no matter how much I bled or burned or killed, I could not ascend. Others like me appeared—other “perfect soldiers”—each capped at fifteen, each forever trapped in the same invisible cage.

That’s when I realized. It wasn’t just a limitation. It was designed.

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I returned to the Witch’s office. She was older now, or maybe she just looked it. Her eyes were tired, but her mind still burned with psychic static.

I slammed my hand on her desk, cracking the reinforced glass. “You’re going to tell me the truth this time.”

Her head tilted slowly. “About what?”

“Don’t play dumb,” I growled. “You said you didn’t know how to raise the ratings. That was a lie. You do know. You’ve always known. You just don’t want to admit it.”

Her lips curved into the faintest of smiles. “And what makes you so sure?”

“Because it’s too perfect,” I hissed. “The limit. The symmetry. Every one of us capped at fifteen, no matter what. You didn’t fail to make gods… You designed us not to be gods.”

She said nothing. Her silence told me everything.

I leaned closer, electricity humming off my skin, eyes glowing faintly blue. “Fess up, Witch. Tell me who set the ceiling. Tell me who’s pulling the strings.” The lights in the room dimmed. Her psychic field flared like a phantom wind. I wanted to be a god, and someone took it away from me. Someone has to be held accountable.

“Yes,” she said. “You’re right. The limits are artificial. Every super-soldier was conditioned from inception. There’s a lock in your minds and your cells. It’s irreversible.”

“Why?” I asked, my voice low, barely human. “Why cripple us?”

She didn’t flinch. “Because the Directorate feared you. You were never meant to surpass them,  only to serve.”

Her calm bothered me. It wasn’t submission; it was something else. “You’re being awfully cooperative,” I said.

“I’m tired,” she answered. “And… because there’s someone who wants to meet you.”

That was how I met the Prophet.

We sat in a private booth, isolated from sound. The man across from me wore a cowl and white robes, his hair jutting from beneath like tangled wire. His eyes, clouded but sharp, studied me with amusement.

“I know what you seek, child of the White Room,” he said. “Power beyond the limits they branded into you. You wish to be more than a soldier. You wish to be a god.”

I leaned back. “You talk too much. Can you give it to me or not?”

He smiled faintly. “Yes. But first, you must stop the end of a world.”

He went on about cosmology, parallel worlds, timelines, and fractured dimensions. I half-listened until he said the words ‘the end of all things’. That caught my attention.

He spoke of a world whose axis tilted wrong, colliding with other realities, a broken knot in the multiverse. “The laws there don’t align,” he said. “It resists order, resists control. But in that chaos, one might ascend. You could learn to touch the origin of power itself.”

That was when I told him, “Then let’s go there now.”

But the Prophet shook his head. “You don’t yet comprehend what awaits. You must see it first… meet the being who holds dominion over that place. Meet God.”

The Witch appeared beside him, her eyes faintly glowing. My vision warped. Space folded inward, then darkness, absolute and endless. I stood in a world drained of light and before me, something radiant, white, and featureless stood watching.

I couldn’t move. The pressure was suffocating. My skin burned, my bones screamed. For the first time, I felt fear. It was a raw, crawling terror that made me understand my own insignificance.

Then everything ended.

When I opened my eyes, I was back in the room. The Witch was pale, breathing heavily. Her appearance was as sudden as the vision. As for the Prophet, he was smiling.

“You’ve seen it,” he said softly. “Do you understand now, child?”

I nodded, trembling. “What is that?”

“God,” the Prophet said. “The anomaly that will consume that broken world and every parallel reality tethered to it.”

The Witch stepped closer. “You can stop it, U-731. You can become the power needed to stop it.” She was manipulating me, but I didn’t care. The idea of becoming a savior… a god… was too tempting.

The Prophet gave me the means: a ritual of psychic transference, a merging of will and flesh. My consciousness would overwrite a vessel born from the same bloodline as my mother, an inheritance designed for me alone. Through her, I would gain the latent potential of my lineage and the freedom to evolve beyond my limits.

It was not possession, not entirely. It was ascension.

So, I crossed the veil between worlds, my mind burning, my soul shedding its shape. I arrived naked beneath an unfamiliar sky of the isolated world the Prophet spoke of.

The air was fresh, the gravity different. I could feel the power here pulsing deeper and freer. It was like breathing in creation itself. I knew what I had to do. I would gather others, shape them, and build my own pantheon. Prepare for the day when even gods would tremble before me.

I laughed. I laughed until my throat hurt and my skin sparked with electricity.

“Ha ha ha ha ha! Yes… yes! This world is mine!”

I raised my hands to the sky.

“I will save this world,” I said, smiling wide enough to hurt. “And in saving it, I will become God.”