Lucius watched the house from a nearby rooftop and kept his senses stretched across the quiet street. Porch lights glowed over trimmed lawns. A dog barked once somewhere down the block before losing interest in the evening. Traffic noise stayed far away, reduced to a distant hum behind rows of houses and trees.
Phastos was the first to arrive.
Lucius recognised him immediately. The Eternal walked along the pavement with a small boy holding his hand. The child talked without pause while Phastos listened with the patience of someone who had already survived several thousand years of worse conversations. They reached the front path, and the boy ran ahead to the door.
Phastos stopped at the path for a moment.
His head turned slowly as he scanned the street.
Lucius noticed the hesitation and narrowed his eyes. The Eternal was not looking at anything specific, but the instinct was there. A faint sense of wrongness, perhaps. Lucius remained perfectly still and kept invisible. His telepathic senses stayed pulled inward as well. He did not even brush against the man's mind.
Phastos exhaled and patted the boy's shoulder before stepping inside the house.
A while later, the husband returned home. The man parked outside stepped out of the car with a tired stretch and went inside carrying a grocery bag.
Lucius allowed himself a small nod because the address and the target both matched his expectations.
If the array had been wasted on the wrong address, he would have been extremely annoyed, and someone inside SHIELD would eventually have paid for that mistake. Then again, someone in SHIELD was going to pay for things regardless. That problem had already been scheduled.
The hours passed slowly while Lucius continued observing the house.
Lucius moved from position to position around the property while staying invisible. Occasionally, he looked through the windows to confirm activity inside. The family ate dinner. The boy talked constantly while the two adults exchanged the sort of casual conversation that came from living together for years.
Lucius watched the small domestic routine with mild curiosity because the Eternal had chosen a very ordinary life, a quiet street, a partner, and a child waiting for him at the dinner table every evening. Like a little kid playing house.
Lucius tilted his head slightly while watching them.
"Immortality and this is the retirement plan," he murmured under his breath.
The lights began shutting down room by room. The child disappeared into his bedroom first. Phastos followed some minutes later. The husband remained downstairs for a little while before finally switching off the last light in the house.
When it was around two in the morning, the house had gone completely quiet.
Lucius waited another ten minutes.
He remained still because patience had saved him from trouble more than once.
When he was satisfied, he teleported directly into the boy's room.
The child slept curled under a blanket shaped like some cartoon animal. Lucius stepped forward, lifted him carefully, and teleported away before the mattress had time to settle.
He reappeared two streets away in a quiet patch of parkland and set the boy down on the grass beneath a tree. The child stirred and rolled slightly but did not wake.
Lucius watched him for a moment.
"Congratulations," he muttered quietly. "You are the only person in that house who is having a good night."
He vanished again.
Lucius returned to the house immediately.
The central activation rune sat just inside the perimeter of the house near the front porch. He stepped onto it and spoke a single word.
"Sacrifice."
His intention sharpened like a razor.
The ritual recognised the supernatural target he had defined. The Eternal named Phastos. The human partner registered only as an excess offering to the entity. Lucius concentrated on that distinction carefully. He wanted the Eternal's power, not anything else connected to the household.
Energy stirred along the circle he had carved around the property. The symbols answered one another and closed the boundary. The house became the centre of a quiet, invisible mechanism.
Lucius stood on the porch and waited.
The reaction began gradually as the ritual took hold.
The air shifted first. A low pressure formed inside the boundary as the geometry of the array began drawing power toward its centre. Windows trembled faintly in their frames, though no sound escaped the property line.
Lucius felt the moment the ritual reached its conclusion.
A presence moved through him like a storm passing through an open structure.
He inhaled.
The breath pulled something immense into his chest. Universal energy poured through him as if the air itself had become light. It spread from his lungs into his heart, then out through his blood. Every nerve lit up in sequence as if someone had replaced the limits of his body with a wider design.
For a moment, he stood motionless while the new power threaded through muscle, bone, and mind.
His senses expanded outward. The neighbourhood appeared clearer. He could feel electrical signals inside nearby houses. He could feel the shape of the ground beneath his feet as if the planet itself had become part of his awareness.
After several seconds, the connection stabilised.
Lucius exhaled slowly.
The world looked more than what it was, as though the resolution had increased.
He glanced once toward the park where the boy now slept and gave a brief shrug.
"Good luck with the next foster home," he muttered.
Then he vanished.
-
Lucius spent the next hour confirming something that mattered more to him than cosmic philosophy.
The strip club he chose sat several blocks away from the main streets. Music pulsed through the room while coloured lights crawled across a low stage that smelled of cheap perfume and spilt alcohol.
Lucius took a seat near the back with a clear view of the stage. Men near the front shouted encouragement while dollar bills moved from hands to garters with impressive speed.
A dancer climbed the pole and swung herself around it with practised confidence. When she dropped back to the floor, the crowd howled.
Lucius leaned back in his chair and watched with deliberate attention.
This test mattered.
Cosmic energy manipulation and immortality were impressive. None of that meant anything if the ritual had cross-wired something in his ...head.
The dancer bent forward and rolled her hips while the lights flashed across her bare skin. Lucius watched the movement with the focus of a man checking the calibration on an instrument.
A minute passed.
Then another.
He felt the expected reaction in his lower-body and allowed himself a satisfied breath.
"Good," he muttered quietly. "Still works."
Lucius glanced at the twerking dancer, then back toward the stage, where another woman was already stepping out of her heels.
He slid several notes across the table and tucked one into the dancer's garter with casual precision before leaving the premises of this fine establishment.
"Congratulations," he muttered lightly. "You have helped confirm that my evening went extremely well."
-
The forest south of Alkali Lake welcomed him back with cold night air and the familiar quiet of remote wilderness.
Lucius sat on a fallen log and pulled Bob from his inventory. The book opened on its own, and the letters shifted across the page until the new entry formed.
Name: Lucius Noctis
Race: Eternal
Class: Wizard
Affinity: Alchemy, Rituals
Innate Skills
- Rapid Healing
- Mental Shields
- Teleportation
- Telekinesis
- Flight
- Force Field Generation
- Energy Blasts
- Molecular Manipulation
Racial Skills
- Genius-level Intellect
- Master Scientist
- Master Engineer
- Master Combatant
- Multilingualist
- Immortality
- Superhuman Strength, Durability, Speed, Agility, Stamina, Reflexes
- Regenerative Healing Factor
- Cosmic Energy Manipulation
- Construct Creation
- Technopathy
Class Skills
- Veil of Fate
- Blessed Brewing
- Sacrificial Array
- Array of Convergence
Lucius stared at the page without blinking.
His race had changed. Homo Superior no longer appeared anywhere on the page. In its place stood a word that carried far older weight.
Eternal.
The change in intellect revealed itself more quietly. He did not suddenly feel like a different person. What he noticed instead was the structure of his thoughts. When he focused on a problem, his mind began presenting solutions from several angles at once. Strategies formed naturally, each one branching into variations. All he needed to do was identify and focus on the problem. He was already focusing on problems, so he saw no problem there.
One particular issue immediately demanded attention.
SHIELD.
More precisely, the blood samples they had taken from him.
His mind began assembling the path automatically as he focused on the problem. He started mapping the structure of both HYDRA and SHIELD's systems in his head, beginning with the likely access points, then the server architecture that stored operational data, followed by the storage nodes where biological research would be archived and the human operators who would have interacted with the work. As each layer aligned with the next, the full plan constructed itself in his thoughts with clear, sequential steps.
The answer appeared quickly once his mind finished mapping the problem.
Their systems could be accessed. Their data could be traced. Any research tied to his blood could be located and erased. Physical samples could be destroyed. The minds of the scientists involved could be fried.
Lucius nodded slowly.
"Yes," he murmured. "Fury will love that."
Before any of that began, he performed one final test. He reached for the new power. Cosmic energy responded instantly.
Orange light gathered around his hands in shifting geometric shapes. It behaved the way it had in the memory of Phastos from the film. Energy lines moved between his fingers while constructs began forming and dissolving in rapid sequence as he explored the mechanics of the ability.
Lucius rotated his wrists slowly. The glowing structures followed the motion with perfect mimicry.
He shaped the energy again. The constructs rearranged themselves, folding and unfolding in complex patterns like living architecture made of light.
The forest reflected the orange glow while the structures became more intricate with every movement of his hands.
Lucius watched the process with calm fascination. He was not building; ideas were swimming in his mind, and the shapes were changing accordingly in real time.
The shapes only grew brighter, sharper, and more controlled as the cosmic energy answered his will.