Promestein dropped the five of us off at a hotel. She shook her head when she found out that I didn't actually have the money to pay for it, but since Promestein had become super rich herself over the years, she plunked her card down at the reception desk and got us two rooms, one for Alice and I, another for Sonya and Ilias. Young Promestein remained at her older counterpart's lab, where presumably they worked through the night without rest and probably had some pretty interesting talks.
"Wakey, wakey, my lovelies!" Tamamo said, standing over our bed the next morning. I had to admit, it was better than Ilias' preferred method of waking me up.
"Tamamo!" Alice blurted, unaccustomed to not waking up early. "What time is it?"
"6 AM," the golden fox replied.
"Seriously?!" Alice exclaimed. "Tamamo, I've never known you to get up before noon."
"And you're usually up an hour or two before dawn."
"Sorry, it's being with Luka again. Ever since we were reunited, so to speak… I just want to lay in bed with him all the time. Oh, Tamamo, I'm sorry! I didn't mean to sound like I'm gloating! I know how much he means to you."
"Alice, you're like a daughter to me," Tamamo said. "The happiest day of my life was when you two tied the knot. I made my peace with losing Luka, like I lose everyone. You can't be an immortal and retain your sanity any other way. So I say this sincerely: I am SO happy for you two. To be honest, I came early because I wanted to see you two cuddled up."
"Oh, Tamamo, I'm so glad to hear that!" Alice said, placing her hands over her heart.
"Don't get me wrong, child," Tamamo warned. "He is still my husband. Treat him better this time or else I will come and take him from you. I have that right. And if it is at all possible when this is over, I expect him to visit me on my birthday, and our anniversary, every year. I don't think two days a year is too much to ask to be alone with my husband. You can have him the other 363 days."
"I…I think I can accept that deal."
"Do I get a say in this?" I asked.
"No!" they said in unison. Good to see I was still a piece of property to be haggled over. Monsters.
"C'mon," Tamamo said. "Let's go downstairs and have breakfast together. They have a wonderful restaurant here."
"Oh, Tamamo, you are speaking my language!" Alice exclaimed. 'I want French toast, pancakes, bacon, eggs, and applie pie! Ooh, and fruit! Lots of fruit! And a steak! A steak would go nicely with all that! And hash browns!"
"And THAT's why I got you up early," Tamamo said. "Come on, get dressed. I imagine the kitchen is going to be busy."
The six of us ate breakfast together, Ilias and Alice consuming unreasonable amounts of food, especially sugar. Ilias drenched her pancakes in an entire bottle of syrup, and ate so sloppily that her white robes was covered in it. She then flaunted her new power by simply casting a spell to restore the cleanliness of her robes. Alice, despite being a sloppy eater, somehow never got the food on herself, only everyone around her. Tamamo irritably flicked pieces of half masticated waffle from her fur.
Tamamo teleported us back to Promestein's lab, where Emma was asleep on a cot and the two Promesteins were animatedly talking about things way beyond my understanding. Even Tamamo's brow seemed to furrow, trying to understand what they were discussing.
"Um, could you two say that in human?" Tamamo asked.
"Oh!" younger Promestein said. "Sorry, we may have found a solution to chaosization. A way to win without directly taking on Black Alice."
"Is that really what we want?" I asked.
"It's not an ideal solution, but….we don't think you can beat her," younger Promestein said.
"Didn't you just give me a lecture about how my power can do anything?" I asked older Promestein.
"Yes…." She said reluctantly. "But the constraints you place on your power, as well as the limits of your intellect, those are real. Now you know I respect your intelligence, Luka, I always have. You're no dummy. But magic is not for the layman. My counterpart here informed me that Sonya and some other chaos being was able to negate your power? That information changes everything. If they can do it, then it's a certainty that Black Alice can do it."
"That's right!" I remembered with horror. "How can I win if she can just turn off my power?!"
"The short answer is, you can't," older Promestein answered. "The long answer is, your power is beyond even concepts like chaos. The problem is that you reach for your power in a way that your human senses can comprehend. Somehow you have to get past that. I just don't know how you would. Emma. Emma!"
Emma snorted awake. "What? Huh?"
"Emma, how do you reach for the Luka power?"
"Oh, I just imagine that I'm still wearing the ring," Emma replied.
"Yeah, so there's no hard and fast rule for accessing it, yet in order to use it your limited mind has to be able to process the idea of using it. Still, without that crutch, I'm not sure how you'd do it. Like I said before, that power has no constraints in theory, but tons in practice. It's a difficult problem."
"Okay, so what's the plan for defeating Black Alice without facing her directly?" I asked.
"Promesteinium," older Promestein replied.
"Yourself?"
"No, Promesteinium. It's an element I synthesized that negates all magic. I learned that it was possible when I found out that Earth wasn't actually a completely different world from ours. It's origin was the same. There was a Goddess Ilias, and a Dark God Alipheese. They warred against each other, but the humans, almost completely by accident, stumbled on Promestenium. It's atomic number is 132. Despite how heavy it is, it occupies an island of stability in atomic theory. I was the first to discover it and synthesize it. So I won my fifteenth Nobel. What amazes me is that a human managed the feat in ancient times. What's more, I can only create tiny amounts of it using a super expensive atomic collider. Whoever originally discovered this and won the war for the humans just whipped it up in his kitchen or something. Either that, or humans had more tech back then than we know. Because what they did next was even more astounding."
"Okay, so first, you're talking about something Monster World calls negamite," I said. "I'm assuming you discovered this and named it after yourself?"
"Of course. I earned it, didn't i?"
"True. But I'm used to calling it negamite already."
"Fine, we'll call it negamite," older Promestein sighed. "So anyway, whoever discovered it in ancient times somehow injected a large amount of it into the very core of the Earth. It reduced the magic in the atmosphere by 99.99%. That rendered even gods nearly powerless. Since humans outnumbered both monsters and angels, the result was a foregone conclusion. But the war ended human civiliazation as well. It took thousands of years for the Sumerians to reestablish it. That's why the history was lost."
"That's a very interesting historical lecture," Alice said impatiently. "But if you can only produce this negamite in small amounts, how does it help us?"
"Well, obviously there are two possibilities. We can figure out how to produce more. If they could do it, we can do it. Put my counterpart and I on the task, Tamamo can lend her intellect to it as well, and Sonya can throw outside the box ideas at us. Sonya may not have a background in science, but with her brain, she's bound to think of things we wouldn't. The other possibility, which just presented itself, is to get your hands on some negamite. You said they have it on this Monster World?"
"Yeah, it seems to be a natural deposit out in the Safina desert," I said. "How much would I need?"
"I'd say about one hundred tons? That's how much is in the Earth's core."
"One hundred tons," I said, chewing on that for a moment. "And how would I get one hundred tons of a rare element out of the soil, transport it across worlds, and then inject it into the planet's core? All while my power is constrained severely by the negamite itself? Taking on Black Alice with a plastic fork sounds more plausible."
"That does pose quite the engineering challenge," young Promestein said. "Getting it out is easier than you think. Can you levitate?"
"A little," I replied uncertainly.
"Get good at it quick," young Promestein ordered. "From a distance. If you tried to do it while standing over the deposit, you'd have very little power to work with. But if you did it from a couple of miles away, you might be able to lift out a few hundred pounds at a time."
"The substance, when close to the surface, only affects magic in the immediate vicinity. A spell could still be cast from a distance and have effect where the substance actually is, although that effect would decline quickly when exposed to the negamite. Look, it's complicated and I can show you the equations, but a two mile distance and taking only a few hundred pounds a time should be doablea at your power level. Make a few trips, as in two to three hundred, and you've got enough. Assuming there's enough in that deposit. If there isn't, I'm sure you can find more on other worlds."
"Three hundred trips…. Between worlds," I said skeptically. "And then it has to be injected into the core of the Paradox world?"
"Leave that to us," younger Promestein said, smiling wickedly. "I already have plans for a subterranean rocket that can penetrate all the way to the core of the planet. I was going to use it for something else, but it will do just fine for this."
"What were you going to use a rocket…. You know what, I don't want to know. I don't know if your idea is plausible, but I'll give it a try. Since I've been to Monster World, I can teleport there, no problem, and they probably can't detect my presence. But hundreds of trips! That'll take forever!"
"But it will work," Ilias noted. "Fighting a being of pure chaos who can just turn off your power, as well as the spirits, doesn't leave you any options for defeating her."
"I don't think an armlock is going to work this time," Alice pointed out.
"And unless you can develop a way to access your power that can't be blocked…." Promestein finished.
"Maybe he could experiment with other ways of accessing it?" Sonya asked. "Nuruko says that your power can be blocked by blinding you to the way you normally access it. But if you have multiple ways to access it, your opponent would have to constantly adjust and block those ways as well."
"Like whack-a-mole," I said.
"I don't know what that is."
"It's Luka being Luka," Alice sighed. "I know the reference now, I actually love that game. What he means is that his opponent shuts him down, but he starts up again using a different way of reaching his power. Then she has to see it and shut THAT down, and it might not be possible to keep the old one shut down. It would be like a game of whack-a-mole in the sense that she'd whack his power in one way, but then it would come back up in another, then she whacks that and the original way comes back to him. Like most Luka metaphors, it's not perfect, but I think you understand where he's going with it. Instead of the battle being two apocalyptic forces throwing universe destroying levels of magic at each other, it turns into a match of her devoting her magic to shutting down his magic. Which in turn would force her to use physical and pleasure attacks on you. Which you know how to fight."
"Why do final boss battles have to be so difficult?!" I said in exasperation.
"Final boss?" Sonya asked.
"Ignore him," Alice said. "Luka…"
"I know, speak like a normal person."
The real job for the day wasn't finding negamite, of course, it was evacuating the planet, a job that sounded just as unrealistic, but smarter people than me assured me that it could be done, and it wouldn't even require much thinking on my part. I just had to be a battery, basically. Micaela would do the actual teleporting. I asked why a Seraph like Micaela couldn't just borrow my power the usual way. She was a Seraph, after all.
"Oh, you'd like that, wouldn't you?" Alice said accusingly.
Never having had sex with Micaela, I had to admit a perverted part of me was intrigued, but in my defense I really did think it was the easiest solution. Promestein explained that first, this job required a true wielder, and no matter how many times Micaela had sex with me, the best she could achieve would be Emma's level of power. Secondly, there would be no guarantee that Micaela would know how to access my power. It had taken Eden a couple of days to get the hang of it, and her knowledge proved to be as rudimentary as mine. Since I was willing, using me strictly as the power source made the most sense. Emma would add her own share of my power to be sure that we'd succeed.
However, first we needed to get to subspace. Subspace was the domain of the Dark God, so when Micaela appeared to pick Emma and me up, Alipheese came by as well.
"Wow, kid," Alipheese said. "You just continue to surprise. So, ready to do this?"
I was, and so we were transported into the realm of subspace, also known as the astral realm. In the astral realm, concepts like holy and dark magic, and the multiverse became visible in ways the human brain could process. One could manipulate these forces from subspace in ways that wouldn't be possible on the surface of the world.
"Wow, this place is incredible!" Micaela breathed. "I feel like Ilias here! I can see all the people! This makes things so much easier!"
"Really?" I asked. "I don't see anybody down there."
"My senses are more attuned than yours," Micaela explained. "But the great thing about this realm is that I can show you what I see. Observe."
Micaela cast a spell and millions of lights appeared on the surface of the world.
"Each one of those lights is a soul," the Seraph explained. "Twenty million, give or take a few hundred thousand. Humans, monsters, angels. Plus Ilias and Alipheese, who are soulless, but I can move them later."
"You say that as if it's an insult," Alipheese grunted.
"You're a concept, you know that. It wasn't meant to be taken personally. You still have consciousness, you just can't die as beings with souls do. Only your consciousness can be dissipated, eventually to reform under the right circumstances. So, shall we begin?"
Emma and I nodded, looking at each other nervously.
"Then take my hands, each of you," Micaela instructed. Emma and I each took one of Micaela's hands. "Now, grab hold of your power. Yes, I see it. All you need do now is will me to have full access to it. Thank you, Emma. Luka…"
"I know, I'm trying!" I said. Okay, Micaela can use my power as much as she wants, as long as she's holding my hand, I thought. Power, let Micaela use you.
"Thank you, Luka," Micaela said. "And now…."
In an instant, the twenty million lights disappeared.
"Micaela, did it…?" I asked with dread.
"Look above you, at your birth planet," Micaela said, smiling softly.
The twenty million souls that had been spread all over that magical world appeared in a small dot on Earth, in the Western United States. Micaela had done it! Only a few remained, concentrated in Port Natalia, where Promestein's lab was.
"Congratulations, Luka and Emma," Micaela said. "You have saved twenty million lives today. Now see that you give them a home to return to when the crisis has passed."
Micaela returned us to the lab, where our companions awaited. Even inside the lab, the world felt different. It's hard to explain. All intelligent life had been removed from the planet except for the people in that room.
"So are you guys staying behind?" I asked.
"Pretty much," older Promestein replied. "This world still needs defending, so Emma and Ben stay. If the apoptosis run around unopposed, this world could be consumed in a day. Tamamo and I will remain here to continue our research. My young counterpart here, along with Sonya, will return and work the problem from the Paradox world. I understand you also have a Tamamo there?"
"We do, but she's been awfully busy dealing with a counterpart of her own that's been a problem," I said.
"Communication shouldn't be a problem going forward, since you can teleport her with them anytime we need to all put our heads together," older Promestein noted. "So if you two have a breakthrough, have Luka drop you off here so you can share it. And if we have breakthroughs here…. Well, Luka, try to come by and visit. Even if we haven't found anything, it would be good to see you."
"Promestein, if I can help it, I'm never letting you out of my life again," I promised. "And Tamamo…."
"Beloved Luka," Tamamo sighed.
Alice looked away as Tamamo embraced me and kissed me passionately. I imagined it must have been hard for Alice, since it was real love, not just feeding or repaying old debts. But we were in a very strange situation and Alice could not just tell me to leave my wife. Tamamo woudn't ask that of me. Alice wouldn't either. Although I was sure some passive aggressive behavior on Alice's part would be frequent.
"I guess I have a new mission," I said. "We've found out everything we can here, and did some good as well. Is everyone ready to go back home?"
"Can we at least get some takeout first?" Alice asked. "Oh wait, no one else is here."
I hugged everyone goodbye, then turned back to my Ilias.
"Ilias, if I survive all this…." I said. "I want to know everything. All fifteen losses. Every detail. Show me the losses the way you showed me the first one with Lime."
"Luka, are you sure?" Ilias asked. "I don't think you understand. Showing you your deaths, that's easy. But when you didn't die, I didn't rewind you right away. I could only do that when your soul was free. More than half the time you lived years, sometimes a lifetime, with the monster that defeated you. If you were to remember all of those lifetimes…"
"It would make it hard for him to cope," Alice finished. "Luka, trust me. You don't want that."
"Then maybe don't show me everything," I said. "Just…. Show me the most important parts. I thought about this. If I experienced these things, I worry that maybe on a subconscious level I'm already affected by them. I need to know."
"If you survive, and save us all," Ilias said. "Then yes, I owe you that much. And please save my world. I love visiting Earth, but I can't bear to live my life with no power. Even in this diminished state, I still rely on magic all the time. If I had to do laundry… I'd just die!"
"I know, right?!" Paradox Ilias agreed. "Before I could just cast a spell to clean this robe, I had to scrub it and dry it every day! It was torture!"
The two Iliases hugged fiercely. "Oh sister, I feel for you, I do! I can't even imagine what you've been through! And you didn't even have servants?!"
"None!" Paradox Ilias exclaimed.
So typical of Ilias to only show genuine empathy towards… herself.
"Well, are we ready to get going?" I asked.
"Just do the thing," Alice said impatiently.
"Okay, here we- what's that?"
A klaxon alarm was going off in the lab and lights were flashing red.
"Apoptosis attack!" older Promestein said. "Ben! Emma! You're up!"
"Where?" Ben asked.
"Looks like they are heading for a small town near Edenport! Thank God we evacuated, there's no way you would have gotten there in time to save everyone!"
"They'll still erase that town and those people will have no homes to come back to!" Ben said. "Luka, want to tag along?"
"Sure, if you need me," I replied.
"They don't, but you need practice cutting loose," older Promestein noted. "Those things aren't alive in any real sense. Take 'em out."
"Alice? Tamamo? Ilias?"
"Go," Tamamo said. "I always stand ready to help if something powerful comes out, but most of the time Ben and Emma can beat them back pretty easily."
I nodded and the three of us exited the lab.
"Oh My God!" Emma shrieked. "I'm actually going into battle with the legendary hero Luka! Ben, isn't this the coolest?!"
"Yeah, risking our lives, super cool," Ben said in annoyance. "Not that I'm not thrilled to be teaming up with you, Luka, but I've never been the hero type. It's probably why the ring didn't work for me. Emma's a hero through and through."
"Believe it or not, I didn't start out as a hero," I said. "I preferred to run from fights or talk my way out. I became a hero mainly because it never seemed to work."
Emma, still giddy, took off into the air, heading towards Edenport. Ben shrugged and gestured for me to go next. I slowly levitated into the air.
"Seriously, dude?" Ben said. "You don't know how to fly?"
"I've done it!" I said defensively. "I just haven't done it often."
"Your shoes have jets in them."
"They do?"
"No!" Ben screamed. "Your shoes do not have jets! But if you imagine they do…."
Ohhhh…. I grabbed hold of my power and imagined that I was Iron Man, with boot jets. It took off after Emma, although I was unbalanced and tumbling. I really should have practiced this more. I had flown last… when? In the Forest of Spirits?
Ben pulled up alongside me and steadied me. "Don't just use your power! You have Sylph!"
"Forgot about me, already?!" Sylph exclaimed.
"Sylph, lend me your power!" I yelled.
A gust of wind steadied me and propelled me along in a more controlled fashion.
"You're going awfully slow for having the wind spirit!" Ben yelled. "Watch this!"
Ben zoomed ahead of me like a bullet shot out of a gun, leaving a sonic boom in his wake that almost started me tumbling again. Sylph took it upon herself to steady me. I was grateful that this version of the spirits took a more active role in helping me use their power. My original spirits that Ben was making such great use of had tended to be more passive most of the time.
"Luka, lend me YOUR power!" Sylph suggested. "I can go pretty fast, but somehow Ben is using his version of Sylph in ways I can't even imagine! But if you added your power to mine…"
"Can they really work in tandem?" I asked. "Normally I can use one or the other."
"Can't hurt to try!"
"Actually, Sylph, there are all kinds of ways you both can get hurt," Undine said.
"Nothing ventured, nothing gained!" Sylph countered.
I willed my power into Sylph the way I had for Micaela. My speed suddenly increased tenfold.
"Whoaaaaa!" I yelled as I zoomed past first Ben, then Emma, who looked at me and grinned. Emma increased her own speed to match mine.
"In case you didn't know," Emma shouted over the screaming wind. "I'm a very competitive person!"
"Liike Granberia!" I shouted back.
"She's so my hero!" Emma squealed, then with a burst of magic nitro, zipped past me.
We raced to the small town, which signs announced was called Fairfield. Population 3291. Some buildings had already been corrupted, as well as some fields where food should have grown. As fast as we'd come, they had managed to do significant damage. If they had come just an hour earlier, people would have died. Or worse.
Emma wasted no time, using pinpoint blasts to blow away the airborne apoptosis. Many of them, noticing the threat for the first time, too to the air, firing projectile weapons. I summoned my star spangled vibranium shield. Emma surrounded herserlf with a magic field that the bullets just sparked again. Ben was so proficient with earthpower that he didn't even flinch as bullets bounced off his impenetrable skin. Ben waded into the fray, arms swinging, pulverizing apoptosis with each strike. He destroyed another apoptosis with lasers from his eyes.
"Now that's cool!" Salamander exclaimed inside my heart. "Why can't you do that?"
"Maybe I didn't read as many comic books as he did," I retorted, unleashing a wide area blast that took down several at once. An arcing delayed blast blew several more on the ground sky high a mile away. I had some tricks too.
We spotted a large number of apoptosis in the town square, busily reducing downtown into pure chaos. The three of us landed in the middle of them. Standing back to back, the three of us destroyed them by the dozens, Emma and I with our power, Ben with his laser vision.
"Okay, now to deal with the stragglers," Emma said, before being blasted into a nearby home by an unseen foe.
Ben and I looked up. Hovering in the air was a very powerful looking apoptosis. I said a silent thanks to any god that was listening that it wasn't Adramelech. Still, was it powerful enough to hide my power from me? Experimentally I tried to blast it. It didn't shut me down, but it easily dodged out of the path of my blast and returned fire. Since it was purely an energy blast, a quick shield rendered it harmless. The apoptosis smiled wickedly and sprouted machine guns all over its body.
"Oh shit," Ben said. "Cover! Cover, dammit!"
The apoptosis opened up. My vibranium shield deflected the rounds, but not much else did. The high caliber, high velocity rounds seemed to punch through everything. Ben could only flatten himself on the ground and cover his head, hoping for Gnome to save him should any of the bullets hit. He was clearly not sure of that, otherwise he would have just let the apoptosis hit him.
I fired another blast at him. Missed again. A second blast out of nowhere didn't. The apoptosis reeled and began sparking, but retained enough awareness to focus on the new threat. Emma had pulled herself out of the rubble of the house she'd been thrown into. Throwing caution to the wind, she flew towards the apoptosis and put her hands on its head. Screaming at it in rage, she directly infused her power into the thing's skull as it fired bullets into her chest at close range. The sudden overflow of power caused it's head to explode. It's pieces fell to the ground. So did Emma.
"Emma!" Ben yelled, rushing to her prone form.
"Oh, that sucked!" Emma groaned. Between Emma's superior energy shield and her tough dragonkin skin, few bullets had gotten through, but some had. The wounds would be fatal if untreated. Fortunately, she knew healers. Even better, she had one with her today.
Ben looked at me, pleading. I nodded and placed my hands on Emma's chest. The bullets popped out of her scales and the wounds healed. At least I was good for something, I thought. I hadn't done badly, all things considered, but Emma and Ben were on another level.
"That was so awesome!" Emma enthused when we got back. "You were like, Bam! Pew! Bam! And Ben was like 'hulk smash', and I was like 'blow you're ass up, asshole! How do you like that shit?'"
"How much damage?" Promestein asked, pouring cold water on my young companion's victory dance.
"Quite a bit," Ben reported. "But the good news is that we're getting so good at fighting them that almost none of the damage was caused by us."
"When they first started out, the property damage was unreal," Promestein explained. "Teaching them to use their powers with more discipline has been a chore, to say the least."
"You're our Professor Xavier," Ben said, offering Promestein a high five. She ignored it.
"Well, Luka, I hope that was a little bit of battle practice," older Promestein said. "I guess you really can go now."
"Thank you for the mission, Promestein," I said. "I was at a bit of a loss as to what to do next."
"You're welcome," she said, then hugged me fiercely. "I missed you so much, Luka."
"Promestein, are you crying?"
"Yes, I am, you fool!" she laughed. "I have so many regrets. Getting another chance, with you, with my younger counterpart here. It's a little overwhelming. I never thought I'd get opportunities like this. I sure as hell don't deserve them. Come back for pizza sometime?"
"I'd blast through the gates of hell to make that date," I assured her.
"Ooh, bad reference," Promestein said.
"What?"
"We literally had to fight the devil," Emma said nonchalantly. "Promestein got trapped on the road to hell for awhile."
"Oh."
On that awkward note, I returned my Paradox companions home.