Chapter 100
Idiot. Moron. Fool. No, a self-important fool.
However much I wanted to pile on more insults, the simple reality of my situation humiliated me far more than any words could.
Metaphysics. I had already gotten burned by it once. Badly. It happened when I built the Resonance Chamber for Peter and stumbled into Morlun, and then Anansi. That was the first warning. Loud and clear. And I had obviously ignored it.
Why? Because every interaction I'd had with magic, in this world and others, had been "successful"?
I hadn't studied magic. I had dissected it. I had cut open Kraven's body like a lab assistant dissecting a frog. I had examined the source of Gwen's powers, breaking it down into spectrums I could understand. And when it came to my first potion using a mystical component, the Ghost Orchid, I had approached it more like an alchemist than a chemist, because at the time my knowledge hadn't been sufficient. For me, metaphysics had simply been another form of science to be cataloged and filed.
Even my encounter with Anansi had ended in our favor. Peter became Spider-Man, and the gamble paid off. I saw the result and brushed off the risks. Or so I wanted to believe. I wanted to think I had learned the lesson: don't joke around with multiversal eldritch entities, don't play God, don't assume you're the biggest predator in the pond. I had absorbed parts of that lesson. In practice, though, the most important lesson of all, constant damn vigilance, had gone right over my head.
Marvel metaphysics had always seemed relatively comprehensible to me. Graspable. And the techno-mage research methodology from another world was rooted in the magical principles of that world. Maybe those principles could be applied here, but the energy, the magic itself, works differently in the Marvel universe.
So what the hell was I thinking when I decided to apply that same "researcher" logic to a random, unknown conceptual artifact? Where was constant vigilance then?
Nowhere. Because I am such a brilliant researcher, I have not a single real achievement in fundamental research to speak of. I have no understanding of how magic actually works in this world. I have no basic safety protocol based on constant vigilance.
Rubedo. The Vanguard. Blink. Peter the Spider. Gwen, my girlfriend. Extremis. A massive body of knowledge and skills. Hydra destroyed. The start of a canon I more or less understood.
Too many good things had happened recently. I had relaxed. I had lost my vigilance. My constant vigilance.
And so, here was the price.
I hung in the void. Naked, wrapped in a nanobot cocoon, lost in space. I had lost a lot. Stuck with a crippled system. A crippled, "amputated" mind. Mental trauma courtesy of Dormammu.
That monster. I will kill him. That creature, what had the System called him? A Faltine Greater Being? He dies. I don't know whether something like him even can feel pain, but I won't stop until he does.
For the first time since my displacement into this world, I felt that degree of cold, concentrated hatred toward someone. I won't lie: right now it is more than just a goal. It has become a new reason to exist.
Destroy Dormammu.
Yes, I had become less intelligent. Significantly. Previously, my thinking had been light, fast, and functional, like an advanced supercomputer. Now I felt like one of the primitive automatons from a steampunk universe, maybe even from Arcanum itself. I was capable of only a limited set of tasks. I was not particularly agile or adaptive.
But even so, I still had far more than when I'd started my journey.
At minimum, I had Extremis and the nanobots. They were incredibly useful survival tools. I suspected that without them, I would have died in the Dark Dimension within the first few seconds.
At maximum, I had a legacy back on Earth. Rubedo. My personal archive of everything I had known before the "dumbing down." An AI capable of a great deal. The joke I'd made to Gwen, "he's the smart one and I'm the good-looking one," had suddenly become a grim reality. Prophetic words I never wanted to be prophetic. And yet here I was.
And then there was the System. Yes, the functionality had changed, but it hadn't disappeared. The time had come to find out what this "Daily Forging" actually was.
With a mental effort, a minimalist, pale-blue interface window appeared before me. In the center, a single button: "Daily World Forging". The upper-right corner no longer displayed an OP balance. In its place sat a single, solitary inventory slot. One more mental effort produced a brief description:
[Every 24 hours, the Host may Forge the World to receive time-limited items (24 hours)]
Right, understood. So the System had degraded that severely. One pull per day, and whatever came out would vanish after those same twenty-four hours. Sad? Definitely. Were there any upsides? Strangely enough, yes. There was no longer any dependency on OP and no need to unlock items. If I rolled something Epic or Legendary, it would be immediately available. And I suspected that because this wasn't full assimilation, there wouldn't be any serious problems with 'rejection' or my body failing to handle it.
A second mental effort brought up the description for the System inventory slot:
[System items only]
Short and clear. And in a certain sense, frighteningly logical. If a physical item dropped while I was floating in open space, it would simply drift away. Inconvenient, to put it mildly. This way it would appear directly in the slot, and for the 24 hours it existed I could do whatever I wanted with it.
And what if something like a functional spacecraft dropped, or Rick's portal gun? Stranger things had happened.
Well, dreams. I was more than certain that my new reality would quickly cure me of dreaming. At least I wasn't heavily limited in attempts. All I needed to do was survive as long as possible and hope something like that came along eventually.
And the most encouraging part was that despite the 24-hour limit, nothing stopped me from making copies or reverse-engineering things. Say I rolled the knowledge of a skilled runic mage. I simply sat down and wrote it all out, locked it down. Maybe with Rubedo's help I could build something like a knowledge-transfer device, pulling what was in my head onto a digital medium. If an artifact dropped, I'd crack it open, analyze it, hand it off to Rubedo for scanning. It all sounded clean on paper. In practice, though, if the knowledge wasn't being integrated directly into my mind but delivered some other way, what then? And if items, because of those 'System' and 'temporary' tags, turned out to be nothing more than projections with properties?
In short, I'd see how it played out, but at first glance this 'crippled' System had considerably more going for it than I had initially thought. All right. First pull.
Please let it be something that gets me out of this frozen vacuum. Crossing my fingers, I clicked on Daily World Forging.
You have gained a fundamental, intuitive understanding of energy flows. This skill passively increases the efficiency of all your energy systems and outputs by 20%.
This bonus applies to everything you do or create. Your personal energy attacks, including magic, become 20% more powerful for the same effort, and your batteries, reactors, and any devices you build run 20% longer or output 20% more power for the same resource cost.
The description was less detailed than usual. Maybe because the skill was Common, or maybe because the System's overall degradation. Speculating was pointless; I'd find out eventually.
The info package was absorbed instantly, and almost immediately I felt the load on my heat-generating Extremis ease, if only almost imperceptibly. The System hadn't lied.
The only problem was that I'd remain trapped in this cosmic prison for at least the next twenty-four hours. Under these conditions, Energist was completely, almost comically, useless. Still, the overall drain on my body's stored energy had decreased. That meant the next twenty-four hours would only cost me roughly nineteen and a half hours' worth of calories. A small thing, but appreciated.
Still, twenty-four hours. And by Murphy's Law, my luck probably wouldn't improve anytime soon. Whatever luck I'd had with pulls, I'd burned through all of it in Dormammu's dimension. Epic, Legendary, Rare items, and here I'd immediately rolled a Common. That said, plenty.
I hoped this cosmic odyssey wouldn't drag on for ten thousand days. I hoped I'd make it back to Earth within a couple of weeks, at least. The System had to have some way to get me home. Hang tight, everyone. And then it hit me.
The consequences. My absence. Rubedo, suddenly and sharply less intelligent. The Guardian Mode I'd embedded in him just before being ripped out of reality had to have activated. Right now, I felt no connection to Rubedo through the quantum crystal near my neural interface, which meant the important processes he'd been running had almost certainly ground to a halt. Only a stub remained, running a handful of simple passive tasks.
And then there was Frank. Rubedo's support hinged on how well the revenge plan had played out. I wanted to believe he'd made the sensible call and pulled out tactically, but this was Frank. "Sensible" wasn't in his vocabulary. That meant I had to trust that what I'd given him had been enough. In some ways it was almost excessive, but Fisk's meta-thugs were still meta-thugs.
And then there were the Mental Worms. Damn it. I had lost "Strange Science." I could no longer feel my soul, the Reishi, the blueprints held within it, or any of the other manifestations of this world's spiritual dimension. I was no longer maintaining the signal.
Please don't let the Mental Worms disperse.
Deep down I knew everything would play out according to the worst-case scenario. The Worms would dissipate. The dangerous Hydra remnants whose tongues Fury had been methodically loosening, pinning down every last detail, would suddenly realize what had happened to their organization, and realize they were free again.
What would come next was hard to predict, especially at my current, crippled intellectual level. And my personal amulet, the one providing the intelligence buff, had been destroyed by Dormammu's entropy along with all my clothing.
*****
Nick Fury was irritated. That had been his permanent state recently. Problems. An enormous pile of them, and even he, a schemer with decades of experience, was struggling to manage them.
Hammer Industries had unilaterally terminated their contract for tactical belt supplies. That was a problem. He would have to find another manufacturer or squeeze one more project into his already overloaded production chain.
A German military clan had filed a complaint with the U.S. Senate over the 'unlawful' detention of one of their heirs, a Hydra scumbag. He had been forced to leak footage of that heir participating in the quartering of a member of an 'impure race.' Not a pleasant video. It had plunged Fury's mood even lower, given that he himself belonged to that same race.
Irritable. On edge. Paranoia that over the past week had become absolute. The one consolation was that he had loyal people on his side who could handle some of the routine. The downside was when those loyal people came to him with problems beyond their authority to solve.
And those problems were multiplying by the hour.
"Director!" Coulson burst in without knocking, visibly shaken. Very visibly shaken.
A cold, ugly feeling of dread gripped Fury immediately. Coulson did not disappoint.
"Whitehall has escaped, sir. He took Strucker with him. The others... the protocol was triggered. Most of the controlled are dead."
His heart skipped a beat and sank. This was not a problem. This was a catastrophe. A disaster of epic proportions.
Pierce. The key figure keeping a sizable portion of the government's old guard in check. Dead. The Viper. The communications channel with several European families that had helped limit the damage. Dead. Malik. Everyone had assumed that even from prison, he still controlled his cult. The cultists who had survived Hyperion's reach had assumed the same. Dead.
The Mental Worms. Had they been on a timer? Why hadn't Thompson said anything about that? The pressure on S.H.I.E.L.D. following the simultaneous deaths of the "Heads" would now multiply many times over. And the worst part was that the Security Council would now receive a new secretary who, with all the grace of a bull in a china shop, could cut the one thread keeping Fury on the Council in the first place.
Thompson. He needed to contact him immediately.
The moment that thought crossed his mind, a notification arrived on his tablet. One of his trusted operatives monitoring New York's criminal underworld. A massive explosion on the outskirts of Manhattan. Wilson Fisk's command base. Fisk himself was presumed dead. S.H.I.E.L.D. had already taken control of the situation. Agents had cordoned off the site, but the situation itself was ugly.
A full-scale war over Fisk's territory on the streets of New York was exactly what he did not need right now.
Fine. At least with the gangs there was a clear playbook. He would have to coordinate with other agencies and roll out a heavily armed response against anyone foolish enough to stick their heads up. A problem, but a manageable one. Unlike this.
"Get me Thompson," Fury said, pressing the intercom button on his desk. Instead of Thompson, his advanced AI answered. Fury didn't like what it said.
"Connection with John Thompson is not possible. Please try again later," the flat, synthetic voice informed him.
"Explain why the connection with Thompson is impossible!" Fury barked into the speaker, already feeling icy fingers of fear creeping up his spine.
Instead of an answer, a short tone sounded. The AI had simply ended the call. Damn it.
"Get me Thompson!" Fury repeated, hitting the button again.
"Connection with John Thompson is not possible. Please try again later." The same dead voice. The call dropped again.
Out of pure stubbornness, Fury went through the motions a couple more times. Then he accepted it was futile. He slowly rose from his desk and pulled on his coat.
"We're going to Thompson Corp," he said flatly to Coulson, who, judging by his expression, had already pieced it together. What was happening no longer merely smelled bad. It reeked.
If something had happened to Thompson, and if that something was directly tied to the simultaneous loss of control over the Hydra heads, then his entire forward strategy, every plan he had built, ceased to have any meaning. Too much that was fatal had been tied to this strange young man. He was a young man toward whom, recently, he had begun to feel something that was almost, just a little, like respect. He had not had enough time to know him well, but what Thompson had shown had been enough to impress even Hyperion, and Hyperion, Fury was forced to admit, was a sound judge of people.
In some sense, the plans almost did not matter anymore. It would simply be unpleasant to lose such a valuable ally.
Getting soft in my old age, Fury thought, as he settled into the passenger seat of the car.
Coulson drove in silence. Fury thought about what to do if reaching Thompson turned out to be genuinely impossible, for whatever reason. Whether death or disappearance, it mattered. If death, that was a loss. If disappearance, there was still a chance.
"Wake Stacy, have her get to the building," Fury typed to one of the agents watching Gwen's residence. He thought for a moment, then added: "Have her swing by Parker's and bring him along."
Those two had sharp instincts. If there was even a slim chance of getting answers, it wasn't worth passing up. The car pulled into the parking area outside Thompson's building. The building had its lights on and looked completely normal from the outside. The agents posted around the perimeter showed no signs of alarm.
That was the most unsettling thing of all.
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2.Marvel: Cosmic Forger of Infinity = CHAPTER 163
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4.Harry Potter: Reborn as Draco Black = CHAPTER 90
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