Chapter 140 End of Book 3 - Irradiate

Her office smelled of jasmine and old paper. The ceiling lights glowed with that sterile brilliance found only in the National Supreme Directorate’s upper halls.

The ‘Witch’ was an ancient existence known for her hedonistic pursuit of joy. When nothing could excite her anymore, she would find ways to amuse herself. In fact, the White Room had been part of such amusements. For a Telepath-14, there were few things that could go against her, except the Fuhrer. So, when the Führer enabled her to do as she pleased, the people around her were powerless to stop her.

Unlike the Witch I knew, this Witch lived for over four generations, while the one I knew only lived three. Time in this alternate world seemed to have moved forward a hundred years more compared to the world I knew.

“Who are you?” she demanded, watching herself in a tall mirror. Reflected back was a young woman with dark hair and a perfect, apathetic face. “How is this possible?”

“Guess,” I said, speaking through her lips.

“Get out of my body. Who are you? Do you not know who I am?”

I answered by giving her what she loved most: spectacle. I pulled up the memories I had and fed them into the tiny, curious spaces inside her head.

Sunkiller on his home, the way I pierced his chest; Iron Fang, light leaving his eyes as he went down in a red spray; SRC troopers at the Malufan, their firearms useless against my intangibility; the capes like Nightgard and Greywolf along with them; Lion King and Royal collapsing under the weight of unexpected treachery; the Murder of Crows’ puppets, each name a number on a ledger; a roll-call of Seamark capes, of the captain who I let die in an explosion, of a homeless mimic I mistook for Crow, of Crow himself, of SRC task-force members who thought themselves untouchable; the Ten… and finally Light, his arrogance burning bright and then snuffed under my hands.

Her composure fractured. For a flash, she trembled not with pleasure but with a naked, human fear that she had never allowed herself to feel. She heard it all and had no clever theory to slice it into. In that small, panicked silence, her telepathy frayed.

“Eclipse,” she said at last, tearfully crying at what was about to come.

I let the echo of that name feed the fear, magnifying it with my Empathy until she felt impossibly small.

She tried to strike back. She pushed her powers like a hammer through the psychic air, slamming telepathic force in my direction within her mind. Soon, something gave inside her. Her face flushed; a thin red bead welled at her nostril and ran like a tiny protest down her lip. Her hands trembled.

She doubled down, focusing every psychic technique she had into a single, desperate assault. The throw was precise and vicious. Her nose bleeding, she spat raw intent into the air, trying to carve me out with a surgeon’s blade of thought.

It didn’t work.

I met her with my own instrument: the same cold, exact incision Crow had used once before, the mirrored technique of ripping out a role, of excising a function. I shoved my will through her skull and pried. The bright, surgical telepathy she wore as armor was a costume I could step into and tear from the frame. I didn’t enjoy it. I simply did what the moment demanded: I shut down the pathways that let her translate thought into dominance.

“I can’t believe I am saying this, but Crow’s a genius when it comes to techniques…”

She staggered. She tried to pull back, tried to bite, but her hands lacked the authority they’d carried moments before. Her delicate fingers clamped in helplessness at nothingness. I was holding the perfect instrument of her power by the throat.

“H-How? I can’t use my powers anymore… They are not working properly…”

Her form sagged, a queen whose scepter had been removed. She struck at me with her last reserve and failed; the telepathic lash recoiled and dissolved into nothing. She went still.

“Enough,” I told her. “It’s time for you to go.”

With her own delicate fingers, I reached up, grasped her head, and twisted. The neck turned farther than human anatomy allowed. It was a clean one-eighty. The body stilled, mouth half-open, eyes staring at me with fear.

I let go of the possession as she dropped to the floor, while I stared down at her.

“Oh? What’s this? Still alive?”

Power ratings were starting to mean little to me. It was as if my powers were designed to kill capes, regardless of what there ratings were.

The Witch squirmed on the carpet, eyes fixed on me with hate. The old telepath tried everything a lifetime of refinement had taught her, from clawing at her skull, shaping tendrils of thought, and pushing a final desperate upload toward me as if she could smuggle herself out of that dying vessel.

“Oh, God,” she whispered, voice ragged. “Please… save me.”

She tried to shove a last piece of consciousness into me, a fearsome technique she’d perfected in other worlds. It faltered. It seemed she had never finished the technique in this timeline, making her inferior in many ways to the Witch that was so feared back in my world. Her hands scrabbled at my shoes; her eyes went bright and then dull.

With her death, I derived telepathy and included it in my power set.

When the light left her face for good, I stepped out into the hallway and slid into the guard’s body like a key into a lock. The man was oblivious, half-sleeping in his chair, gubernatorial boredom written across his features.

“It seems I still need practice… The Witch almost broke through my possession at the last second, after all…”

Using the Witch’s knowledge of the inner webs and my own hybrid of intangibility, empathy, and lower-rated telepathy, I moved like a ghost. I picked rooms, schedules, and weak points. It helped that every official was mundane and didn’t have powers of their own. Admittedly, a lot of them possessed robust willpower, but they were still nothing compared to the mental power of the Witch. Their psychic bodyguards had proven themselves competent, but they also didn’t compare to the Witch. So, I dealt with them promptly.

A week passed, and their world was quickly pushed into anarchy.

The ideology of the National Supreme Directorate was the supremacy of ‘humans’ over the mutant superpowered and races of inferior color. In this world, if you didn’t match the human aesthetic of the Führer, you were inhuman and were persecuted. By taking advantage of this divide, it was easier to induce a revolt.

To add coals to the fire, the high ranking superhumans of the government also began to move and push for there agendas after being suppressed too much, unable to run for office.

While all of this chaos was happening, I was grinding my Researcher-ratings by possessing scientists or highly Researcher-rated individuals. I learned their language from the inside and absorbed their syntax and method. Each possession left a residue, a tiny vector where knowledge clung to me. I felt myself grow smarter in small, useful ways: how to tune a strange machinery, how to soothe a volatile feed, and how to take someone else’s careful hack and turn it reliable.

Oh, I sabotaged their supply lines, too. Ports that funneled raw material to off-world colonies clogged overnight. I redirected shipments, cut feed-lines, and closed the doors to the Directorate’s favorite resource worlds. High-risk systems, those hotbeds of mutation and instability the Directorate relied on for fuel and weapons, were shunted back toward their own planet until the Directorate found itself feeding on its own ruin.

In just a matter of a month and a half, since I arrived in this world, I reduced the Directorate into a failing world that was coming closer and closer to its annihilation. If they survived this, they would probably come out stronger than before, but that would be for a long time in the future. By then, it was no longer my problem.

I stood on top of a building overlooking one of the larger skirmishes with a line of riot shields and armored cars, a cluster of rebels with improvised weapons, and the sky scrawled with tracer fire. I had USB sticks in my pocket. They were for data, evidence, and leverage when I returned to my world.

Part of me wanted, purely selfishly, to find the Führer and end him myself. The man who made Light possible deserved a proper curtain call. It would have been satisfying. But the opportunity never presented itself. The Directorate fragmented faster than any one assassinated head could heal. A war of attrition broke the center before I could reach it.

So I let it stand as one glorious failure for them. They had birthed monsters and bred their own downfall. I’d press my thumb into the fresh wounds and move on.

“Well, I have better things to do, don’t I?”

Behind me was a giant portal I had worked hard to build for the past month. It had the coordinates of a place that I recovered from the Witch's mind. I jumped at the portal and found myself staring at the ruins at the end of the world.

Above was a pitch black sky, and everywhere you looked was a gray outline of what the world now looked like.

Standing just ahead of me as if waiting for me was a familiar man, wearing a cowl. Above him was a glowing fireball. With a closer look, I noticed it was a skull illuminating the place. The skull was alive. The man under the skull removed his cowl. Staring at me with pale, white, blind eyes was an old man.

“How did this happen to you, Guesswork?” I asked.

He tilted his head. “Aren’t you curious?” His tone was measured, as though rehearsed. “I suggest you don’t do anything… rash. A reflection of God now resides within me. Touch even His shadow, and He will devour you. Gaze upon His visage, and it will drive you mad. Hear His words, and it will unmake you.”

“God? You jest… God is not real…”

“Oh, but he is… He lives in everyone of us… He is the power you ‘pull’ from and the existence beyond the veil of the subconscious.”

I came here for revenge and to hurt people. Not to hear him prattle. This version of Guesswork was clearly nuts, and I didn’t feel a bit of sympathy with him. I took out a handgun from my waist, loaded with imitation of nullifier rounds, courtesy of the National Supreme Directorate.

“There is no need for that,” remarked Guesswork as he peeled his robes, showing his chest was torn out, the heart missing. “I am already dead.”

“What the fuck?”

Guesswork continued, “I made a certain deal with a certain doctor. In exchange for lengthening my time to the destined day I would meet the savior, I would allow him to study me… He was such a strange man…”

I shot once, and the bullet landed on Guesswork’s forehead. Guesswork just smiled as the hole bloomed on his forehead, no blood pouring out. I stared at my handgun, thinking it was defective.

“See?” Guesswork prodded on the hole in his forehead as he continued. “I don’t know about the other me, but in this life, I developed the power of clairvoyance. It’s quite costly, though, since it consumed my lifespan. The good thing is… unlike most forms of future sight, mine was absolute. No matter how unrealistic, they would always come true.”

I guessed the name ‘Guesswork’ was rather an inappropriate name.

“Prophet, why did you send Light on my world?”

“Why ask about a question that you knew the answer to?”

“You said this ‘Entity’ was the source of all powers. If it is, then the vision that you saw, how can you tell it is trustworthy? From your words alone, you are implying you saw a future where I probably triumphed over this ‘Entity’, because if it wasn’t the case, why refer to me as savior?”

The Prophet tilted his head again, almost pitying. “Everything is predestined, Eclipse. Your coming here, this conversation, even my death. Perhaps it is the work of God. Or perhaps it isn’t. The distinction has long ceased to matter.”

He looked past me, toward the black horizon, where the dead world bled into nothing. His next words came out like an echo of something older than him, as though someone else spoke through him.

“God is not your enemy,” he said. “The one you call ‘Entity’ is merely misguided… a child that’s wandered too far from home. You don’t need to destroy it. You need to set it right. You need only accept it in your heart.”

I scoffed, realizing where this was going. The reason the Witch colluded with this madman in front of me was because she desired amusement, and she saw something in this ‘God’ that might fill that void. As for the Prophet, he was just a fanatic.

“So this is what you traded your sanity for?” I said, smirking. “A fairytale about a cosmic babysitter? You talk like every doomsday preacher who ever lost a debate with reality.”

“I see, I see…” The Prophet laughed. “Just like the doctor, you ridicule my God… He said something along the lines of chaotic power convergence. Did he really think I will believe everything he says just because he put fancy words in them… Ah… forgive me. I haven’t spoken to anyone this candidly in… how long has it been? I lose track in this place." His smile softened, almost nostalgic. “But you’ll see, Eclipse. When the end of the world arrives, you’ll make the right choice. You’ll let Him in. The Chosen always do.”

Slowly, the Prophet’s skin became fragmented with dark veins.

“It looks like my time is up… That damn quack doctor sure has perfect timing… I will see you in heaven, savior.”

The Prophet exploded into a burst of black ash, spraying outward with a blast of psychic energy. The air warped, and from the ashes, something massive tore through… It was an eruption of white fire and shadow.

The Entity!

It unfurled like a nightmare, rising to the height of several buildings. Its body was incomprehensible, all sinew and shape and shifting geometry, but its head! Its head was almost human. A pale white face, smooth and featureless, except for the eyes that glowed like dying stars.

I jumped backward on the portal, landing right on the rooftop of the building I had just come from. Erupting from the same portal was the head of the ‘Entity’ with a pale white face the size of a small house. The portal ring, made of special hinges and metal bands, broke as the fabric between dimensions was purposefully enlarged and ripped apart by the ‘Entity’ as it cried out. “RGARARARARGARGAGRGA~!”

What was a ‘god’ in that? It was just a monster at this point. As the fabric between dimensions broke, it brought its entire bulk to this side forcibly. The building crumbled under me as I fell downward while I maintained my intangibility.

“I can’t believe this is supposed to be just a reflection…”

The pale face opened its giant maw, intent to eat me. I pressed a hidden detonator under my suit. Just within the building were several nukes I stole and smuggled to this place. There was an intense burst of light. I didn’t think I’d need the nukes, but I am glad I prepared them.

“Time to go home, I guess…”

A single nuke was enough to erase a city block. Dozens, synchronized, turned the world into a blinding ocean of light.

The first detonation ruptured the air itself. The shockwave expanded faster than sound could follow, flattening everything within kilometers. Steel bent and melted. Concrete evaporated. The very atoms seemed to scream as they tore apart.

The next wave came before the echoes of the first could fade. It was a chain reaction of annihilation and a choir of suns born all at once. The skyline disintegrated, skyscrapers dissolving into motes of glass and ash that spiraled upward into the firestorm.

Inside that expanding inferno, I remained untouched.

The flames passed through me like mist. The pressure that should have crushed my bones instead rippled through my incorporeal form in gentle waves, like heat through smoke.

Below me, streets became rivers of molten glass. The clouds above ignited, bleeding red and gold across the torn horizon. The shockwaves layered over each other, a symphony of destruction rolling endlessly outward.

The Entity’s colossal silhouette writhed at the center of the blast, the pale mask melting and folding inward as the explosion swallowed it whole. Its scream was a distortion of air and psychic residue, before it was reduced to nothing.

Even in that blinding light, I could see the edge of the portal unraveling, the fabric of space twisting shut with a violent ripple.

“That’s one way to end this, huh? But I guess… This is only the beginning…”