Chapter 105
[Information-Energy Package (Epic) received: Touched by Mana (CDDA Magiclysm). Package duration: 24 hours!]
Temporary rewriting of your fundamental essence.
Loading this package initiated a forced but temporary evolution, synchronizing your spirit and body with the primal source of pure magic. You ceased to be a user of magic. You became its embodiment.
Your Task for the duration of the effect was to CREATE.
[Effects Upon Integration]
Upon activation, you immediately received a unique system status:
Status: [MANA AVATAR]
Duration: 24:00:00 (Real time). Condition: Irreversible; could not be canceled or removed early. Countdown began immediately.
While this status was active, you received the following modifications and abilities:
Modifications (Passive)
[Flow of Order] (Regeneration):
Your connection to the mana source became absolute.
Mana regeneration speed increased by orders of magnitude. You became a living channel, your reservoir refilling extremely rapidly after any expenditure.
[Bottomless Well] (Reservoir):
Your body adapted to contain an unthinkable volume of energy.
The capacity of your mana storage, your reservoir, increased by orders of magnitude.
[Absolute Sense] (Perception):
You gained exceptional, all-encompassing sensitivity to magic.
You saw, heard, and felt magical flows, auras, residual traces, and spell-weaves as clearly as physical objects.
New Abilities (Active)
[Spontaneous Creation] (Key Ability):
You gained access to an Archmage-level Spell Constructor. You were no longer limited to tomes or memorized formulas.
You could formulate an Intent (your goal, effect, and form) and a Will (your force) in your mind. The System would immediately compile these into a new, stable spell.
Note: Spells created this way might be short-lived or require saving for future cataloging.
[Embodied Intent] (Attack):
Your basic magical attack, your projectile, evolved.
Any magical projectile you released automatically became self-targeting.
The projectile's effect was fully determined by your Will, as described in Spontaneous Creation. For example, a Will to Burn would create a self-targeting fireball. A Will to Restrain would create a self-targeting projectile that applied shackles or paralysis.
[Crystallization] (Conversion):
You gained the ability to condense excess mana, either your own or ambient, into a stable physical form.
This allowed the creation of pure mana crystals for later use in enchantments, powering mechanisms, or creating traps.
Side Effects and Warnings
[Radiant Beacon] (Exposure):
Your body became an unstable vessel for such power.
During any use of magic, including passive perception or active regeneration, your body emitted a bright, visible glow.
Stealth during Mana Avatar was impossible. You would draw universal attention from allies and enemies alike.
[PROTOCOL "BLIND SPOT" TAKES PRIORITY OVER THE LAST POINT. THE LAST POINT IS MODIFIED!]
External stealth during Mana Avatar was impossible. Due to your body's glow, you attracted only physical eyes.
"The world exploded" was already a classic reaction at this point, but this time it was different. This wasn't Scrapper's Philosophy, which had simply changed how I perceived junk. This was a physical, fundamental rewrite.
I felt the info package, no, the information-energy package, slam into my soul. My body didn't just hum. It sang. The quartz lamp on my forehead, my third eye, which a moment ago had seemed the pinnacle of engineering ingenuity, suddenly felt unbearably dim and primitive compared to what I was seeing now.
Absolute Sense. I saw the world the way the Ancient One probably saw it. My diamond lenses became just unnecessary lenses. I saw through them. I saw through the ice. The cave was breathing. It was no longer dead. It was saturated not merely with mana, but with everything.
I saw the faint, slow flows of cosmic energy threading through the asteroid in every direction. I saw the residual, dead entropy of the vacuum lapping at the walls of my cave. I saw the echo. It was a dim, filthy purple scar that Dormammu had left in my soul. And the Bottomless Well inside me suggested I could use all of it as fuel.
It did not matter what specific type of mana it was. Cosmic energy was mana to me now too. Spiritual energy was also mana. I would not even get started on the energy from the various hidden and not-so-hidden layers of reality. There was so much of it in the universe, so concentrated, that the Ancient One and Strange actively drew on the Dark Dimension's energy for the superior quality it offered compared to what Earth's own energy could provide.
I had no plans to go anywhere near that. Not yet.
I could feel the Bottomless Well, a sensation like a second, hungry universe opening up inside me. I could feel Spontaneous Creation, my sluggish brain becoming a supercomputer again, but for magic this time. I could have created. I could have crystallized all this ice into a giant mana crystal. I could have done so much.
But I cut myself off immediately. No.
Euphoria from an epic skill was a trap. It was the fastest, most reliable way to die in this world. I had become a Mana Avatar for twenty-four hours. But by the standards of this universe, what did that actually mean? It meant I had perhaps only approached the baseline level of a fresh Doctor Strange wearing the Eye of Agamotto, newly appointed as Sorcerer Supreme, or maybe a bored, low-effort version of Loki.
I was not an Archmage. I was a guy in an ice cave with a temporary buff. Yes, I would underestimate myself deliberately. I would treat this skill as just another tool, not a reason for arrogance. Constant vigilance was always the rule.
The euphoria had faded, leaving me slightly bitter. Emphasis on 'slightly': the high from having an Epic skill still outweighed everything else. But I had worked so hard. I had survived six days. I had deliberately spent twenty-three hours on monotonous, mindless physical labor, turning an ice cave into something resembling an organized base. I had sorted the debris. And the System, having watched my struggle with evident satisfaction, had immediately served up a cheat code on a silver platter that, while it wouldn't solve all my problems, would certainly render my asteroid base completely obsolete.
Fair enough. I was exaggerating about all my problems. Dormammu, much as I might wish otherwise, wasn't something I could annihilate right now, even with Mana Avatar active. Not yet. But it wasn't over.
My experience with Dormammu had taught me the most important lesson of all: if I ever went after him, I would do it personally, buffed. I wouldn't rely on System assistance, which could catch an entropic conceptual virus at any moment and strip me of some Legendary All-Erasing Conceptual Annihilation Magic at the worst possible time. No. I was done with that. Personal growth was the path, with all due respect to the System, without which, in fairness, I would have been nothing.
I shook off that train of thought. With a mental effort, I dimmed Absolute Sense. The mana flowing through me became more manageable. The bright glow of the Radiant Beacon emanating from my body immediately faded. At least I had stopped being a walking sun.
Right. Priority one was leaving this hospitable little asteroid. Sorry, frozen rock. You almost became my new base, but all good things come to an end eventually. Bad things too. Good luck not burning up in someone's atmosphere.
Now for Spontaneous Creation. A clean, instinctive pattern emerged in my mind; not like Scrapper's Philosophy, which had given me intuition. This was knowledge.
I formed my Intent. My goal was to reach my laboratory at the Thompson Corp building on Earth in the Solar System. I formed my Will to create a passage that was stable, led from me to the destination, and was secured so that nothing and no one other than me could pass through this portal.
I felt my Bottomless Well, my vast new reservoir, respond. I fed a minuscule fragment of mana into that Intent.
That was enough. My gaze through the diamond lenses, directed into the emptiness of the cave, pierced space itself. At that point, my Will tore through the fabric of reality. The vacuum did not merely open. It crystallized. It cracked like glass, as though I had swung a hammer at the foundation of existence. From the crack, a blinding white light began pouring out, light from beyond space. With a thought, I stretched that crack to the right size, shaping it into a perfect, rippling circle. Inside it, like a window, a clear image shimmered. My laboratory. I could see it as plainly as if I were already standing there.
Without hesitating, I stepped through the portal. It collapsed behind me, leaving no trace.
"Finally," I breathed. "Freedom."
The first thing I did was inhale. Real air, slightly sterile and filtered, but real. I silently commanded the nanobots that had covered me for six days to return to my body.
"Rubedo, begin immediate synthesis of NMT," I ordered.
The synthetic voice, which I had actually missed in some small way, answered with a brief acknowledgment. The building's systems activated at once, waking from sleep mode.
"Give me a brief status report. How long was I gone, and what happened in my absence?"
"Date: October 28th, 11:07 AM. Recorded disappearance: October 20th, 10:53 PM."
So the desync with my internal count was not that large. It was roughly half a day. Though the subjective experience was another matter. Dormammu had tortured me for far longer.
At the thought of Dormammu, the Bottomless Well inside me roared. My body blazed with light involuntarily, flooding the laboratory. I suppressed the surge immediately. Irrational. Emotions were triggers now. Another weakness to control, if I did not want to die prematurely.
I finally turned my attention to the lab. The damned boots and the table they had rested on were gone.
Rubedo continued, reporting that on October 21st at 12:24 AM, the laboratory had been visited by Nicholas Fury, Phil Coulson, Gwen Stacy, and Peter Parker.
After receiving the brief report, I walked to the biochemical lab. The account included details of how the table and boots had vanished without triggering any of the building's monitoring systems, registering only as a severed connection to the table's electronics. I retrieved several packets of fresh NMT.
Only now did I notice I was completely naked. It did not bother me in the slightest. I used Spontaneous Creation again, forming my Intent for casual, durable clothes. Mana drawn directly from the lab's air wove itself around me, forming black trousers, a T-shirt, and boots. Yes, they would disappear in less than a day along with the skill, but that was better than walking around naked, especially given everything I had to accomplish in those same twenty-four hours.
"What are the major world events? And brief me on my associates and the people close to me?" I said.
I swallowed an NMT tablet. It hit immediately. But this time was different. The NMT, layered on top of the Epic Mana Avatar status, transformed my brain into something beyond a supercomputer. I became something like an oracle. My thoughts did not accelerate. They crystallized, so that now I was not simply analyzing. I was comprehending.
I ordered Rubedo to display the information as text on the main monitor. Listening to the AI's monotone voice would have been slow and inefficient. There was a lot to analyze. Terabytes of data had accumulated over eight days. I absorbed it, and the whole process took nearly an hour.
A fair amount had gone wrong in the world. But strangely, not nearly as much as I had been quietly dreading. The world had not collapsed. Humanity was alive. Most of the people I knew were all right. But some had not been so fortunate.
The first report was the hardest. Frank Castle was dead. My disappearance on the twentieth had immediately severed my connection to Rubedo, the AI that had served as Castle's tactical backbone. Rubedo had dropped into emergency sleep mode, and Frank, stripped of his support, had gone through with it anyway. Living up to his name, he had chosen to punish. He had stormed Fisk's base alone. Rubedo, having analyzed terabytes of data including S.H.I.E.L.D. files and a miraculously restored backup of Fisk's own systems, stated with absolute certainty that Castle was dead. No protection from Chimera, not even the plasma wings reconfigured to defensive mode, could have saved him from a blast like that, especially one triggered at point-blank range against his own body.
It was grim and cold, and this was my fault. It was not the most joyful news to deliver to Blade. I would have to think carefully about how to tell him. But as paradoxical as it sounded, there was an upside. It was a pragmatic, cold upside. Castle's revenge had been carried out. Kingpin was dead. Davos, unfortunately, was not. That particular slippery piece of work had proven too elusive. Fortunately, Rubedo had provided a full brief on him. That brief would be needed for a spell I had just conceived. I would get to him, possibly even within the next twenty-four hours.
Next were Fury, Hydra, and S.H.I.E.L.D. It was unpleasant across the board. My disappearance had caused the mental worms I had been maintaining to dissolve. As a result, according to Rubedo's report, most of the useful controlled Heads had died from dead man's switch protocols. But two of the slipperiest bastards, Strucker and Whitehall, had escaped. Simultaneously, the political pressure on S.H.I.E.L.D. and on Fury personally had multiplied. His enemies had smelled blood.
"Rubedo," I said without taking my eyes off the data. "Protocol Scorched Earth. Dig up the dirtiest possible compromising material on everyone putting the most pressure on Fury. If no such material exists, fabricate it. Maximum destabilization is the goal."
I was not just helping Fury. I was generating chaos to operate in his shadow.
"Leak that material online. Push it to as many news outlets as possible. Hack the most popular news aggregators and social media accounts and post it there. Obviously, leave no digital trail leading back to us."
Fury would be the first suspect, but that did not matter right now. Let the bastards dig through the pile of problems I was about to drop on them. This would buy me, Fury, and the Vanguard weeks, possibly months, to breathe freely. That brought me to the Vanguard.
Steve Rogers. He had come to at 10:41 AM on October 25th, New York time. His condition was stable. Nicholas Fury had conducted the initial psychological evaluation. He was currently active at S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters, filling in the gaps in his knowledge.
That paragraph opened Rubedo's brief on Cap. I read it hungrily, silently applauding Fury's play. It turned out this version of Rogers was not just a moral compass. He was something more. He was sensitive in the truest sense of the word. He was a genuine super-soldier with superhuman senses and an accelerated mind. My Mana Avatar gave me a visceral sense of what that felt like. Even after seventy years on ice, he was not far behind his peak form. And Fury was a master. Over the course of a lengthy conversation with Rogers, Fury had told him a great deal.
Rubedo's report on Rogers was captivating. It was not a recruitment. It was a psychological operation of the highest order.
Fury had used the classic, flawless carrot-and-stick approach, served up under the guise of objective reality.
He gave Cap the good news that Bucky Barnes was alive. Then he immediately hit him with the bad news: Bucky was a brainwashed vegetable, a zombie who had served the enemy. He gave him the good news that Peggy Carter, the love of his life, had lived to see the present day. Then he immediately followed it with the bad news that she was, essentially, a frail old woman fading away in a hospital bed. He gave him the good news that the United States was considered the most powerful nation on the planet. Then he immediately hit him with the bad news, showing him the cost at which that power had been won.
Rubedo noted that Fury, according to top-level classified internal reports, had covered far too much ground. He had touched on everything from what became of the super-soldier serum and the observation that Rogers' staggering success had never been replicated, to a detailed list of American war crimes over the past seventy years. Fury was playing a very subtle game.
He presented it all as honestly as a history lesson could be taught, if such lessons existed. He presented it without grandstanding or propaganda, just a cold recitation of facts. For an idealist like Rogers, that was a thousand times more devastating than a direct attack. Cap absorbed it all hungrily and thought. He thought deeply. And, logically, he asked Fury for more time to think it over.
That was when Fury delivered the finishing blow. He crushed what remained of Rogers' morale by revealing that Hydra, the enemy of his entire former life, had not merely survived. It had taken root in every layer of the state apparatus, in the very country Cap had loved so deeply. And it was S.H.I.E.L.D., the SSR's successor, not the mighty government machinery itself, that had dismantled most of Hydra, at least.
After that, Fury left the room.
A tablet was brought in with Rogers' meal, along with a brief explanation of what it was and how to use the great archive of human knowledge known as the internet. For the next few days, Rogers sat online, absorbing the history Fury had not had time to cover himself. He found confirmation of every one of the Director's words on his own.
I was now more than confident that Rogers was ours. Objectively, there was no better way to recruit an idealist of his kind. The United States was no longer the country he had fought for, but S.H.I.E.L.D., in his eyes, was still the SSR he had known and still worthy of his loyalty.
I mentally rubbed my temples. Cold analysis was good, but the next items in the report were personal. I moved on to Gwen and Peter.
The first was in a semi-depressive state. Rubedo's report was clinical. It stated that she had barely left the apartment in the past five days. The S.H.I.E.L.D. agents Fury had assigned to her, strictly for observation, were maintaining surveillance without incident. Their reports indicated the girl was perfectly aware of their presence but had no desire and no real reason to do anything about it. Fury, who already had more than enough on his plate, was predictably planning to resolve the Stacy situation before the Vanguard's public debut.
Semi-depressive state. What a clinical, cold phrase. She probably didn't believe I was dead, but the situation itself couldn't have been anything but oppressive. A sudden, almost uncontrollable impulse flared inside me. I could open a portal right now and be beside her in an instant. I could rush to her, hold her, reassure her, and tell her I was back. But I held that impulse in check. Eight days of survival had taught me something. Emotions were a luxury requiring extreme restraint. Analysis first. The reunion would happen soon regardless. Right now, I needed to finish the report.
Peter's situation was somewhat more encouraging. Unlike Gwen, he had channeled his emotions into action. He had been actively patrolling the city streets in her absence. According to the reports, over the past week he had become a public favorite and prevented more crimes than the police managed in a year. His instincts were simply honed in the best possible way. On top of that, Parker had managed to clear his university backlog and was actively searching for me. Rubedo attached a brief summary drawn from Peter's browser history and a couple dozen government sites he had hacked. It was genuinely touching. He wasn't just waiting. He was moving.
I skimmed over a few smaller items. Blink was fully operational across all fronts. The Vanguard was ready for its debut, with Fury still hesitating on the date. These were discussion points, matters to be addressed soon. Because, as arrogant as it might sound, I was back.
And Fury had been actively looking for me. Rubedo confirmed he had even reached out to Xavier, which, given his level of paranoia, was no small achievement.
Overall, the picture was reasonably clear. I closed the report. It was time to start playing.
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