Forever Is a Long Time Coming

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Chapter 13: And for my Next Trick!

Dedicated to my amazing Patrons who support me: (Despite everything)

Phillip Webster, JTOKING, AStoryForOne, Infiltrator117, Alex Lasoski,Its Wolfie,Sayaka Eternal,Kronus4i,Jamie Lines,Athea Ichor,SinNep!,tobias kaersten,Robert Smith, Marc espinal,Kyle Paulus,Lil LightSkin,Jason O'Connor,Kennedy Johnson

1943 AD

Terrorvolt's base, Antarctica, Formerly the savage Land

Terrorvolt

So….Human cults. Tend to be pretty bad. And unlike the lunatics from say, the Manson Family, these guys seem to know magic. Which is infinitely worse.

I keep my weapon steady, my tone ice-cold as I reply in English "So, who might you be?"

The man grins, his lips peeling back like a predator baring its teeth. "Your excellency! We are followers of Dormammu, speakers of his name. I am Dorian, first of his chosen."

Dormammu…I quickly ran the name through memory banks I hadn't used in millennia. That was the flaming head guy who was a villain of Dr Strange right? Owns a dimension, generally evil, but is also Strange's father-in-law or something? Pretty decent fighter in Marvel VS Capcom I think?

"Dormammu…," I repeat, the name dripping with distaste. "Why are all you here?"

"To thank you for your service, of course!" he exclaims, as if that's the most natural thing in the universe.

I glance at the other cultists, their hoods obscuring their faces, though I can feel their hungry gazes boring into me. My optics flick back to Dorian. "Service? To Dormammu?" I scoff. "I think I need some clarification."

The lead cultist tilts his head, the grin never leaving his face…. Yet he doesn't speak. He doesn't say a single word. The motes of dark magic on his face were the only thing changing.

Ok fuck. Dormammu, or his people, think I'm aligned with him… And they are now giving me the silent treatment. "Dorian" remained on the spot while the others were slowly moving behind him, forming an arrow-like formation with him at the tip.

So. Quick strategy break. I'm running on far faster hardware than these fucks. My reaction times are better, even if servos can't quite keep up. These fucks know magic. I do not. They have the potential to wipe me from the face of the earth.

But.

These fucks are also human, I can wipe them from the face of the earth with a Chaos Master Bomb.

So I need to treat them as glass cannons. And as much as I am confident, fighting smaller targets in an enclosed space like this is not ideal. My optics sweep the room, calculating angles, cover, and structural vulnerabilities. No clean lines of escape. Great.

I raise my voice slightly, keeping it calm, measured. "As a… fellow servant of Dormammu, am I not owed an explanation of things?"

The main cultist tilts his head in amusement, a slow, eerie grin spreading across his face. "No… I don't think that would be wise. Your place is at our master'sh side and it is our mission to send you to him."

I take a sharp step forward, arm shifting into my Path Blaster configuration, about to press him for clarity—

—but before I can get another word in, movement behind him catches my eye.

The cultists. They move in eerie synchronization, drawing curved daggers from beneath their cloaks with an almost ceremonial precision. I tense, about to aim reflexively—but they dont move against me.

Instead, in one chilling, unified motion… they stab themselves. Right in the gut.

My optics brighten in disbelief as blood begins to seep from the wounds, and yet none of them so much as flinch. Their eyes remain fixed forward, unblinking. Meanwhile, their leader begins tracing intricate circles in the air with both hands, a ring of sorts adorning two of his fingers was glowing. A quick scan doesn't reveal much more, even as his fingers began glowing with unnatural energy.

I brace, weapon arm still raised, every servo ready to react—but i was paying attention to the wrong thing..

Beneath my feet, a circle of golden-orange sparks erupts, searing into the floor in a perfect ring. My optics dart down just as the ground beneath me disintegrates into light.

A portal.

I don't hesitate. My thrusters flare to life with a deep roar, heat blooming at my back as I blast upward in a counter-burst—only to feel it.

A crushing, sudden pull.

The cultists—those lunatics—had raised their hands in unison, and a wave of telekinetic force slammed into me like an invisible avalanche. My propulsion cuts out under the sudden pressure, systems fighting in vain as I'm yanked downward into the swirling energy. The golden light devours my vision.

And then—

Alarms.

My heat sensors scream, lighting up in red across my HUD as A warning flashes:.

THERMAL HAZARD DETECTED.

Temperatures have spiked—exceeding 1000 degrees Celsius.

I land hard—legs first—in something dense, thick… and bubbling.

Lava.

Actual. Fucking. Lava.

I bite back a snarl, pain spiking through my lower limbs as the molten rock grips me like a vice. The plating on my legs holds, but my joints scream in protest. Electronics sizzle and hiss. I kick hard, trying to dislodge myself before the damage compounds.

A quick scan of my surroundings shows I was dumped in the summit of an active volcano. Not the worst idea to try and kill me.

My upper-body thrusters engage with full power, blasting superheated air into the bubbling pit around me. I rocket up, clearing the volcano's summit in a rush of smoke and fire, just as the portal behind me vanishes—no way back.

No sign of those lunatics.

I rise above the plume, breach the ashen sky, and transform mid-air. My systems shift with practiced precision, parts folding and locking into place. Wings unfurl. Engines hum.

Now in bomber form, I tilt into a climbing arc and scan the horizon, trying to get my bearings. My HUD pulses, pulling in terrain data—mountain ridges, scorched plains, tectonic instability. Oh hey, that was Mount Vesuvius. So I'm in Italy.

I let out a sharp exhale through my vents. Lava or not, my armour held. Not a scratch.

But I can't ignore the damage reports now scrolling down my interface. My legs took a hit—systems are intact, but the heat has fried some of the more delicate components. Diagnostics report sluggish servo response, minor joint desyncs, and thermal residue in the actuators. Nothing that wouldn't be repaired in a few minutes, but I'm not sure I can relax just yet.

I need to get my bearings and secure my base from those cultists.

I veer away from the volcano's smoking mouth, climbing higher through the soot-darkened sky. Lava sloughs off my plating in clumps as the airflow cools the last clinging globs. The horizon stretches out beneath me, the planet curving under my wings. I shift my heading due south. If I'm right about where I've landed, I should only be less than 2 hours from the pole. Antarctica…

In hindsight, relying on a time dilation effect to preserve the base was probably a terrible idea. But it might have been because I was too busy playing real life Factorio with zero Government Red Tape and oversight…God, it's been ages since I've thought of the Games I used to play…Honestly, as shitty as my situation was, I think my year away from the war might have been pretty decent for my mental health.

But concerning the base itself, is it even worth trying to recover it…or should I just start over?

Still need to find my Terrorcons…They turned out interesting. Drones aren't meant to develop that much personality. The rudimentary AI I gave them shouldn't have allowed it, even if it was meant to be self learning…But I also made them use Energon.

Energon, as much as I don't want to acknowledge it, does have an unknown mystical aspect to it. I don't know how it works, or to what extent it affects machines used by it…But perhaps it considered my drones no more different than the genuine article…

Once I found them again, I'd have to confirm if they had sparks or not. That's for sure. But if my theory is correct….Well, it's safe to say our species won't go extinct as long as my knowledge remains intact.

And for that, I gotta stomp out those arrogant little scraplets worshipping Dormammu first.

I throttle up. The air rushes past, the world a blur beneath me.

Then—blinding light.

A burst of golden fire erupts dead ahead. Another portal tears itself into reality, a yawning wound of radiance right in my flight path. I bank hard, side thrusters screaming as I twist sideways to avoid careening straight into it.

And then another portal opens—this one above and slightly behind. I catch a flash of sulphurous haze within. My sensors ping atmospheric toxins and extreme pressure—another volcano? No, temperatures are far higher. Maybe an actual magma vein… Could these cultists use their portals to a place without direct access or line of sight?.

A third portal opens to my right—this one exploding with a horizontal blast of water. I barely adjust in time, the sudden torrent blasting past my hull with the force of a missile strike. I catch a glimpse of ocean trench depths, blacker than night, pressure readings spiking in the scan window before it vanishes.

Well, they have imagination at the very least.

I spin again, barrel-rolling between two more rips in space that almost sandwich me between arctic lightning and molten debris. The bastards are trying to herd me. Corral me like prey into one of these death traps.

My thrusters sputter from the repeated burst corrections. They're overheating fast, my form is heavy and not meant for dogfighting or high mobility. So taxing my systems like this…wasn't doing me any good.

Okay. Fine.

I cut forward momentum and transform mid-air. My form collapses inward, plating shifting, wings folding, thrusters retracting. I drop several meters before igniting my back boosters and stabilize, hovering in place above the cloud layer.

I glance around, optics scanning the now-spiralling tear patterns that still hover around me like a kaleidoscope of cosmic nonsense.

I've seen plenty of dimensional distortions. I've rebuilt Unspace Technology. Studied the bleeding edge of quantum phase-shifting, even if I only understood half of it.

But even so: Space bridges. Tesseract-based Spatial tech. None of them "look" like this…..But they could. We could use them to tear portals through the sky rather than teleporting trough time and space.

And these portals? They read similarly to what that would look like.

My HUD filters data rapidly as I run a comparative analysis. Energy frequency, gravity disruption, spatial compression ratios—it's not a perfect match, but there are patterns. The kind of patterns only someone who's done too much time bending theoretical physics into brute force travel would recognize. Or someone who's gotten generous data from Shockwave over the years.

Space Bridge-based jumps don't open portals by default—more like flicker-gates or phase overlays—but with the right implementation, with a power amplifier or a stabilisation rig…

You could make it look like this.

My optics narrow. The cultists didn't throw me into that volcano with holy words and hopes.

They are using and generating a controlled wormhole network.

Somehow.

My thrusters adjust, holding me steady as I run a second scan. Frequency pulses indicate the energy's being fed from a separate location—possibly remote or even extraplanar. But what matters is the structure.

It's just math.

Complicated, maddening math with half its equations probably wrapped in mysticism and an unhealthy dose of symbolism, but still—math. I pull up the design of that ring again and consider its qualities.

I've reverse engineered 'magic' before. Cracked it open and folded it into proper mass-energy balance equations… No reason I can't do it again.

Especially now. Especially after they dragged me out here.

Because if they're going to keep playing with wormholes and broken Geometry, I'm going to show them what happens when you give a Scientist who doesn't spit on the idea of Magic the chalkboard.

Captain Jason Arlan, 415th Special Operations Squadron, United States Airforce.

Above Tyrrhenian Sea off the coast of Sicily, The Mediterranean.

The night sky stretched out like endless ink, deep and silent over the Mediterranean sea. Captain Jason Arlan sat tight in the cockpit of his airplane, the steady thrum of its engines humming through his bones. His eyes scanned the dark, accustomed to catching the smallest flicker of movement out in the void.

"Vulture Two, status report," crackled the voice of his squadron leader through the radio.

"Still here, Lead. Skies clear, no visual or radar contact. Everything's quiet," Jason replied, adjusting a dial with gloved fingers.

The cold bit at the edges of his neck despite the thick flight gear, and condensation crept along the inner edge of his canopy glass. He exhaled slow and even, calming nerves that had learned to wait for the unexpected.

He saw it then. Not a plane. Not a flare. Something else.

"Lead, Vulture Two—got eyes on something unusual. Bearing one-four-zero. Altitude uncertain. Could be high up. Lights—multiple. Just hanging there."

"Describe," Lead said.

Jason squinted. "Almost like stars, but they're… pulsing. In colour. Reds, golds, even a kind of blue, but none of them are moving. Not dropping or drifting. Just… stuck in place. Too symmetrical to be natural."

Another pilot chimed in. "Same here, I see them. Might be some kind of new flare? Or a trick of the clouds?"

"Adjust heading," Lead ordered. "One-four-zero. Keep your eyes sharp."

Jason leaned forward slightly, hands steady on the stick, his gaze locked on the lights when it hit.

A shadow. No, a streak. A bolt of pure black cut through the sky—fast, violent, utterly silent. It streaked just ahead of their formation, and in its wake came a shockwave like a thunderclap punched into the air by God himself. The plane rattled in protest, wings shuddering from the pressure. Jason's stomach turned with the jolt.

"Jesus!" he barked. "Did anyone—?"

"I saw it!" Vulture Five called out. "Black as night—just a blur! Like something tore the sky open and vanished!"

"Negative radar contact," Jason's radar officer yelled from behind him. "Not picking up a thing! Whatever it is, it's either preventing radar or moving faster than anything we've seen!"

Jason's heart hammered in his chest. He gritted his teeth. "That wasn't natural. It didn't make a sound until after it was gone."

A silence passed through the radio, then Lead spoke again, tense now.

"Possibly a new German design. Could be one of Hydra's projects. Keep tight. Maintain current heading."

Jason took one last look at the sky. The strange lights were beginning to fade now, shrinking or vanishing one by one. Some simply winked out. Others seemed to stretch, as though collapsing inward into invisible holes.

And the path the black streak had taken—the air still shimmered in its wake, like heat rising off a scorched road.

He had no idea what he'd just witnessed. No wings, no sound, not even a proper shape—just speed and shadow.

But if this was the kind of thing Hydra was putting together… He doubted even Captain America could do anything about that.

And just like that, the calm over the ocean is broken.

Jason Arlan's eyes are locked on the shimmering lights in the sky—those floating, unnatural things—when one of them suddenly tears open like a wound in the air.

And it's right in front of them.

"Lead, break off! Break—!"

Too late.

The lead plane hits the edge of the rift at full throttle. Jason watches in horror as the aircraft is torn in half like paper. One moment it's whole, the next, the front of it is gone—sucked into the shimmering void. The tail section spirals into a fireball, vanishing into the dark.

"Vulture Lead is down! Lead is down!" Jason screams into the radio, hands clutching his controls like a lifeline. "Something's in the air—some kind of hole or light or—I don't know! It just tore him apart!"

Then more of them appear.

The sky erupts with slashes of golden-red light, like glowing cracks in reality itself. Jason can hear the panic in the squadron's comms, garbled shouting, someone yelling that they're turning back, someone else praying.

But one by one, those voices cut out—snuffed like candles in a storm.

He watches in helpless horror as the others are caught in the shimmering wounds—planes folding, breaking, some exploding, some just vanishing into the light. By the time the last scream goes silent, he's the only one left flying.

And then it happens again.

That thing.

The black jet.

It comes screaming past once more, faster than his eyes can follow—but this time, just for a moment, he sees more than a blur. The shape is still inhumanly fast, but clearer now: flat and wide, triangular like a manta ray. Not alien in design, no—it almost looked familiar, like some exaggerated, impossible evolution of the the newest bombers HYDRA was making that they'd seen in briefings. like a plane built by something not bound by gravity or physics.

But there's something else.

He glimpses a shape clinging to the underside of it. It looked like a man. But bigger. Bulkier than any man he'd ever seen—humanoid, but clearly not human—gripping onto the side of the bomber with one massive hand while its other arm reeled back to strike.

Jason stares as the aircraft suddenly rolls violently mid-flight, the manoeuvre flinging the figure loose. The creature tumbles into the night, gone.

"What the hell is that…?" Jason breathes, mouth dry.

Before he can make sense of it, another portal opens—this one violently close.

A figure launches from it like a bullet and slams down directly onto Jason's Plane.

The entire aircraft lurches.

"Something's on me! Something's on the damn plane!"

He looks up through the canopy and sees it.

A humanoid figure stands above the cockpit—its form too smooth, too deliberate to be a man. No features. No mouth. No nose. Just a blank face with a single horizontal slit where eyes might've been. That visor-like line glows.

And then it fires.

A white-hot beam of energy slices down across the canopy.

Glass melts. Metal screams. Jason's controls explode in sparks as the beam sears through the dashboard. His hands jerk back just in time to avoid being cooked.

He screams—raw and terrified—as his plane starts to spin.

"Jesus Christ! It's burning through! I can't—!"

Then, just as suddenly, a violet flash erupts behind the creature. The light is searing, and the being on top of his plane bursts apart—no explosion, no shrapnel. Just a wet, splattering eruption of mud-like mass that rolls off the wings in chunks. Jason stares, breath ragged, hands trembling over the scorched remains of his instruments.

The plane is dead.

"Gotta get out, gotta get out—!"

He grabs the emergency release. The Plane wasn't built with an ejection system, but the 415th flew with parachutes for a reason. He kicks open the canopy, smoke rushing over his face, and throws himself into the freezing air.

Wind howls around him as he plummets. He counts the seconds, one, two—

He pulls.

The chute opens with a violent snap, yanking him upward.

He floats now, drifting in cold silence.

The squadron is gone. All of them. Ripped apart, erased. No wreckage. No flares. Just silent sky and the shimmer of dying lights that never should've existed.

His heart is pounding so hard it hurts, but he tries to breathe.

Then, just when he thinks it's over—

He sees it again.

That same black bomber now hovering in place. The sleek, angular body looks like a vision of future war—wide, seamless wingspan, edges so precise they almost blur into the air around them. The paint is pitch black, but something about it shifts—like it's hiding something beneath the surface.

Strange violet flames burn from its underside, dancing like living plasma but casting no shadows. They hold the craft motionless in midair, defying everything he's ever known about lift and thrust.

It just hovers.

Like it's watching.

Then, without a sound, the thrusters shift.

And in the blink of an eye, it vanishes forward, a thunderous crack ripping through the night sky a full second later. The sonic wave slams into him like a fist, making his parachute wobble violently.

Jason spins slowly, staring upward as the echo fades.

The silence is deafening.

A shaky, high-pitched chuckle slips from his throat.

"No one," he whispers, "is going to believe this."

1943 AD

Airspace over Sicily, Allied occupied Kingdom of Italy

Terrorvolt

What was the joke about moving a chair as a time traveller and changing the entire future?

Ah, fuck. I should honestly just accept it. I was a comic nerd—things are already fully different. Bucky is an actual adult instead of a child soldier, the Eternals are dead, I killed a goddamn Celestial, shit's going on with the magic people and…

Should I just say fuck it and do what I want? Like, actually commit to it?

I mean, I was a history buff. WWII? That's child's play to influence. I could wipe out half of Berlin from orbit with my secondary payloads. I could rewrite the next century in an afternoon.

Right—

My thought stream cuts short as something slams against my starboard wing.

A sharp jolt. A warning flashes across my HUD. One of those mindless things. Bigger this time.

"Another one? Already?"

I bank hard, flipping over in a corkscrew spin, trying to shake it loose. I catch a glimpse in my rear feed: it's clutching onto my airframe, claws embedded into the plating, hunched like some demonic stowaway. Taller than the last ones—easily nine feet, bulkier too. Probably a quarter ton of void-born muscle and rage.

They're adapting or summoning better ones.

The first ones were a nuisance—pests no bigger than a man, barely a threat. But now they're scaling up. Either the casters are giving it more juice, or Dormammu is personally empowering, then.

Either way, I'm starting to respect their commitment.

Not that I've just been dodging like a cornered animal. Please. This was always part of the long game.

I slam the auxiliary power into my side thrusters, slingshotting out of the thing's grip. It tumbles, howling in that horrible warped register, and vanishes into the sea of clouds below. No splash, no trace. Just gone.

I steady myself and switch back into hover mode. I need the altitude stable while I run the analysis.

The ring finger on my only remaining hand glows faintly—my little project. The inscriptions are crude but functional, modelled after that ring the first sorcerer was using. I mimicked its design, encoded the same compound sequence into the plating. Still calibrating the imprint patterns, but it's holding up better than expected.

It's already proved itself effective —it's feeding me data. The construct is reacting to mental commands, and my mental commands are also code. And that means I can program this thing. I thank the existence of my Spark that I can use this thing in the first place, but I don't know anything for sure.

But I do know this. The portals—their energy is extraplanar, that is now a fact.

The portals—they're fuelled by extraplanar energy. That's always been clear. But now I've picked up on something more interesting. There's another signature within the energy—a sliver, a fraction, just enough to stand out once I recalibrated the filtering matrices. This secondary energy isn't from the same place. It's not part of the portal's raw fuel.

It's the directive force.

The hand behind the curtain. It's what's guiding the portals, giving them location, purpose, intention.

And if I can isolate that strand—if I can lock onto it—I can trace it back.

Straight to the casters.

Once I have that signature mapped, their little game ends. I will drag them from their sanctums and crush them beneath their own wards.

But goddamn, these portals are getting on my nerves.

They've lessened, sure. Maybe they're starting to feel the drain. But they haven't stopped. They're still trying to catch me off guard, appearing suddenly ahead, below, and mid-flight, trying to displace me—like some sadistic shell game. Natural hazards, all of them—volcanoes, avalanche zones, one would've dropped me into an active lightning storm. And now?

Now they're opening into space.

The void of Space.

No gravity, no pressure, just open abyss—and the moment they tear open, the atmosphere rips toward them like a vacuum. It throws my entire trajectory off, yanking me off-course, messing with my stabilization systems. Every time I push back into bomber mode to make ground, a portal drags a piece of the sky out from under me, and I'm forced to shift back, reroute power, level out.

It's gotten so bad I've had to switch forms constantly—bot to bomber, bomber to bot—just to keep from being flung halfway to Jupiter or sucked into the sun.

This is precision harassment, I'll give them that.

But every portal they open just feeds me more energy readings. More data.

That secondary signature is getting clearer. Just a few more seconds... and I'll have them.

Another one blinked in above me, dropping like a boulder through low cloud cover. I barely had time to bank left before it crashed into my path, fists raised like a meteor with knuckles.

"Not now."

I twisted my upper body mid-flight, locking the trajectory, and fired both Path Blasters.

Twin blasts of molten metal surged from my weapon, slamming into its chest. The beast roared—if you could call that guttural static roar a "sound"—before it convulsed midair and fell like a sack of scorched and pulverised meat. It hit the ground in a plume of dirt and molten ichor, dissolving into something like tar.

I sighed.

"Still works," I muttered, watching the path blasters hum down. "For now."

Even so, I couldn't ignore the warnings. They weren't as effective as before. The Mindless Ones were starting to get too tough for it.

But that was a problem for later.

Because right then, a new notification blinked onto my HUD. Tracked coordinates. Source identified.

Finally.

I slowed to a hover and scanned the location data. To their credit, the bastards weren't dumb enough to hang around Antarctica any more. But... Hong Kong? That was unexpected. A bit too populated for a covert base—unless they weren't trying to hide any more.

But even so… something was off. There was a discrepancy in the signal, an extra layer embedded into the spatial readings. I couldn't identify it yet, but I had enough to work with.

And that was all I needed.

With a flick of my wrist and a silent execution command, my own portal sparked to life. A glowing blue ring tore open the air in front of me—crackling, precise, and quiet. Not yellow like theirs. My energy was different, I guess. It was probably tied to my spark and refined Energon. I can look into it more later, perhaps.

I was already in bomber form, so I didn't waste a second. I surged forward and slipped through the portal.

Instantly, I knew something was wrong.

My internal gyros spasmed as spatial logic inverted itself. What should've been a skyline was scattered around me in a gravitational kaleidoscope—roads curled through the air like looping vines, buildings stacked sideways and upside down. A mess of physics, like Escher's Paintings rendered in concrete and steel.

This was Hong Kong—but not quite. It was warped, like it had been pulled into another layer of existence. Readings indicated a shallow dimension barely differentiated to normal reality. Similar to the real world but not exactly the same thing.

Japanese banners flapped in broken, misaligned wind currents. Occupied territory. But there wasn't a single soldier in sight. No civilians, either. So this place resembles inorganic things only.

Below, through the warping geometry, I spotted the coordinates. And with them, the chaos.

A building adorned with the emblem I saw on Cagliostro's clothing so long ago- was under siege.

But not by the cultists. They weren't the ones attacking.

They were defending it.

Dormammu's flock—cracked marble skin, blackened veins, madness leaking from every pore—were entrenched within. Two Mindless Ones stood like statues at the gates, arms slack, heads twitching lightly as they used their energy blasts to defend the structure.

The attackers? Actual sorcerers. Uncorrupted. Cloaked in worn fabrics but brimming with clean energy. Natural skin, clear eyes, desperation in their casting. They were assaulting the structure from all angles, slinging yellow whips of energy and blasts from half-cracked rooftops and shifting platforms.

While interesting, their presence is ultimately irrelevant. As long as we have the same enemy, they shouldn't interfere. And I finally have those rustbugs in my sights

I hovered higher, twisted my Gun Arm to reconfigure once more. My arm reshaped with a satisfying mechanical grind, components clicking into place as the Energon Blaster formed.

The name may as well be a joke—it's basically a sniper rifle. A damn good one. Better than the Null Ray for organic targets. Null Rays were better at range but were designed against machine targets by frying their system with excess energy. While that would still work against humans, it's essentially overkill and not exactly cost-effective The voltage alone might liquify the nervous system but the pistol would leave their torso a crater, as if shot by an anti tank rifle.

I zoomed in.

One cultist, standing too far from cover, arms raised mid-chant. Easy.

I fired.

The bolt left the chamber with a thunderclap, and by the time the others noticed, there was nothing left of him. Not a body. Just a red mist sprayed across the wall behind where his chest used to be.

Huh… Way more effective than I thought.

I spotted another one—ducking behind a broken column, half turned in alarm.

I shifted half a degree and activated the trigger again.

Boom. Gone. Just pink vapour and scraps of blackened cloth flapping in the residual shockwave.

That got their attention.

I caught one of them looking around in panicked confusion—a moment of clarity for the corrupted idiot—and barking something in a low, warbling dialect. In moments, several of the cultists responded, and a massive shield spell erupted across the front of the building—then curved upward like a rising wave, forming a semi-transparent dome. The rune lines shimmered in crimson and gold, pulsating in rhythm with their chants.

Cute.

I briefly wondered why the portal attacks had stopped—maybe they finally realized I wasn't going to be flung into a volcano again. Or maybe the Mirror Dimension was interfering with their targeting algorithms. They'd been slacking for a while now, not that I was going to complain.

I caught another glimpse through a third-floor window, two silhouettes moving inside, maybe prepping a spell.

I activated the trigger twice more.

Two detonations later, the windows were painted red. Whatever was left inside was too shredded to keep fighting.

Chunks of glass and blood rained from the frame.

And then the flying roads started falling.

One segment, twisted and jagged, peeled free from the warped skyline above and began tumbling down toward me like some divine punishment. I transformed midair, shifting back into my bomber chassis, wings tucking, engines flaring—and dove down hard toward the structure.

At the last moment, I broke back into robot form, landing with a quake on a shattered stretch of road half-suspended in the chaos.

My silhouette towered over the attackers now—the ones laying siege to the building. These weren't the cracked-skin zealots. These were the sorcerers. Uncorrupted. Clean-skinned. A bit more composed now, amidst the chaos of a battle in a warped, impossible city.

They paused at my arrival. Understandable. A giant Robot being with a glowing eye and weapons crackling with energy just landed behind them like the wrath of god. The cultists took the chance to retreat into the structure, but I had a feeling they wouldn't be surviving the day.

The sorcerers didn't seem too bothered either, their focus firmly on me. They were, understandably, cautious, many taking a few steps back to gain distance and a couple were readying spells just in case.

Then, one among them stepped forward.

This sorcerer stood tall in radiant gold and crimson robes, their hood casting a heavy shadow over their face. How the hell could they see anything through that? The embroidery along the seams were quite fancy, so I assumed that this one was leading their charge. Something I became far more sure of when I saw the trinket around their neck.

A golden oval, etched with unassuming marking that I knew contained overwhelming power, with the ancient symbol of their order's sanctum covering a small dome in the centre.

The Eye of Agamotto.

So I'm guessing this is the current Sorcerer Supreme.

Now things are getting interesting.

AN: Next part will be out soon.

But yeah. I also have a . Can't promise much there, but I do post early drafts and future scenes there. As well as all the Art for the stories I make will be posted there. Have a wonderful day!

Links to support me: /La_Pucelle_Altre