The Perfect Run

Once upon a time, Ryan and Jasmine had sat around a workshop and planned to
make an armor capable of destroying Dynamis’ HQ.
That promise was now fulfilled.
“You have two hidden switchblades below the arms and laser turrets in the
gauntlets,” Vulcan explained, as she helped Ryan put the power armor on.
Darkling slithered in the background, waiting for the experiment to begin. “Since
you intend to force your way inside the HQ, I added a nuclear-powered chest
blaster.”
“The Chernobyl?” Ryan asked with enthusiasm, as his Genius sidekick reinforced
the armor’s joints with a screwdriver.
“Yep. If the blast doesn't kill them, cancer will,” Vulcan replied with a grin, as she
grabbed the armor’s helmet. “What?”
He had heard it all before. “I want rocket launchers too.”
“No,” she said immediately.
“Aw, come on..."
“You sound like a child, and there isn’t enough space to fit more weapons. Also,
the blast might throw you backwards if you aren't anchored on the ground.”
“I'll keep that in mind,” Ryan replied, already imagining ways of abusing that
feature. “Vulcan?”
“Yes, that's my name.”
“Why the rabbit ears?” Ryan asked, pointed an armored finger at the helmet.
Using a design improved across multiple loops, Vulcan's power armor was a
technological marvel. An exoskeleton of lightweight, flexible alloy, it espoused
Ryan's form like a second skin. Its bright purple color made it impossible to
ignore, just as the courier liked it. Its servos enhanced the wearer's strength, yet
the armor remained light enough not to impair his mobility. A reinforced backpack
contained a miniature version of the Chronoradio, artificial brain included, which
should allow the courier to transfer a mind across time. Unfortunately, even while
working with Alchemo, Shortie hadn't found a way to bring more than one person
yet.
However, the armor’s strangest part was undoubtedly the helmet. Two long
antennae rose from it, which combined with the orange lenses, made the helmet
look like a robotic rabbit's head. Ryan knew he had something of a hare theme
going on, but this was too much. Too much.
“The antennae streamline your connection to the dimension which your power
draws Violet Flux from,” Vulcan said with a shrug, as she put the helmet on
Ryan's head. “The armor’s artificial brain will gather data to help you better
understand your power.”
Ryan glanced at the room around them, the bunker’s miniature particle collider. A
chilling frost filled this conical chamber, the walls covered in weblike,
biomechanical strands. Silver fluid flowed through them, and they hummed like a
living entity's veins; only a single blast door allowed someone to enter this facility.
Mechron’s technology had transcended flesh and metal to become something
greater than both.
This was the place where the bunker’s Al summoned Darkling once. Perhaps the
Alchemist had one such room in Antarctica, and used it to bring the Elixirs to the
realm of men. Ryan really needed to dedicate a loop to locate and check up on
that snowy base.
He had the feeling he would find many answers there.
Data appeared on the helmets lens after the courier put it on, the scene
reminding him of that fateful loop where he accessed the Purple World. However,
his current armor was a cut above the prototype. It included technology from
various Geniuses, and components impossible to reproduce without Mechron's
matter replicator.
Ryan would have to conquer the bunker again to make a new suit. Something
easier to say than do.
“Now we have to find a name for it,” the courier said. Ryan was sorely tempted to
rename himself Plushie Master, but that might infuriate their long-eared
overlords. “The Rabbinator?”
“That name sucks.”
“White Rabbit?”
“It's not white, and you're terrible at names,” Vulcan said, putting her hands on
her waist as she found a name of her own. “How about... the Saturn Armor?”
“I thought the Augusti had exclusivity over Roman gods’ names?”
“I am an Olympian, you moron, and I say Saturn. Maybe you could even kick
Augustus’ ass with it. Wouldn't that be great?”
“You know Jupiter defeated Saturn, right?” Then again, Ryan was all about
repeating lost battles until he won them. “How about Chronos instead?”
“This armor is my baby, so I name it. I name it Saturn.” She gave him a tap on the
back of his head. “So, you'll try the particle accelerator, and afterward it's raiding
time?”
“Yeah.” Livia had returned to her father, partly to make sure he wouldn't get
involved, and mostly so she would record the brain maps in a safe place. Ryan
couldn't afford to put her on the frontlines, since he needed her alive to transfer
her mind across time.
Len took care of the children, using bathyspheres to send them away before
things turned very messy. Alchemo had made a copy of his daughter's mind,
though he didn't tell her why, and currently struggled to do the same with Sarin.
The Genius theorized her memories were encoded in her molecular structure
rather than neurons, and so made a record of it; Ryan needed to figure out a
specialized solution for Sarin’s unique biology.
“You want to come?” Ryan asked Vulcan, almost eager.
“You bet I will,” she said with a grin. “Even if the bitch left them, I've got a bone to
pick with the corpos.”
“Itis time...” Darkling’s eerie voice caused Vulcan's head to snap in his direction.
“Open... the gate...”
“Damn it, I'm never getting used to it,” the Genius said, examining the Black
Elixir. “I would love to study you in-depth.”
“I have been... studied... far longer than you can imagine...” the shoggoth
replied, a hint of frustration in its voice. If it remembered all of Ryan's loops, then
he probably spent years trapped in a bottle. Perhaps even decades. “I have
waited... long enough.”
“Well, I'll keep the data then,” Vulcan said with a shrug, before exiting the room
through the blast door and leaving the shoggoth alone with the courier.
“Are you... ready?” the Black Elixir asked Ryan.
“Sure, but I don’t see why you need me in the room,” the courier said. “The portal
worked fine without me when Mechron’s machines trapped you in our
dimension.”
“I will need... your help... to stabilize...” The alien entity seemed to struggle to
find the right words in the human language. “You are connected... to the Purple
World... the crossroad of all space and time... even other worlds...”
Ryan looked at his armored hands. “All of space and time, huh?”
“Distance... past, and future... are illusions. All is connected.”
So cryptically helpful. Vulcan's voice echoed in the particle accelerator. “Ready to
break the laws of physics?” she asked.
“Let's make them cry,” Ryan replied.
Vulcan started the particle accelerator, the silver fluid pulsating with electricity.
The walls rotated around Ryan and Darkling, faster and faster, until they started
to blur. Gravity became lighter, the courier's feet slowly getting off the ground.
Colored lightning coursed through the silver fluid, and surged all across the room.
Bolts bounced off Ryan's armor, or hit Darkling’s viscous surface. The electricity
changed coloration in a strange pattern, from red to orange, from yellow to green,
from blue to violet.
Flux.
The lightning became blinding white for a brief instant, and then turned black as
the darkest night. Instead of surging in all directions, the bolts concentrated on a
single point at the center of the room, building up into a sphere. A dark spot no
bigger than a thumb, a black hole in the very fabric of reality.
“Too small...” Darkling’s many eyes focusing on the sphere with hope and dread.
“Open it..."
“How do I do that?” Ryan asked, having a hard time hearing the giant slime over
the sound of thunder.
“You are the key... open the gate.”
Ryan glanced at the sphere, and in a moment of scientific curiosity, took it in his
palms. His fingers trembled as he did so, an invisible force coursing through his
flesh and bones.
When his armored hands touched the sphere, his whole body shuddered, the
Elixir in his veins reacting to the eldritch power. His thumbs dug into the black
hole, its surface shifting like water. Ryan felt an intense, primordial cold inside
this miniature portal.
The courier activated his power, and time slowed down to a crawl. His armor kept
providing data even as the universe turned purple and violet particles floated all
around him. Black lightning coursed through the particle accelerator even in the
frozen time, colliding with the Violet Flux particles.
The universe's fabric tore itself apart under the strain of Ryan's power, and his
hold on the portal became firmer. The courier extended his arms, and the gate
widened. The sphere slowly grew from a tennis ball’s size, to that of a soccer
one.
Ryan noticed a figure appearing at the edge of his vision, Violet Flux taking the
shape of a humanoid specter racing at him. Though the phantom seemed to run
towards the courier, it advanced slowly, only a few centimeters per second. The
closer it became, the sharper its features; the courier noticed a magicians hat,
the shape of a jacket.
This is me, Ryan realized. His other self in the Purple World, converging towards
his timeline. Always trying to catch up to the present. The armor enhanced his
power enough that he could observe how it worked in detail.
If the phantom caught up to Ryan, he would create a new save point.
“The moment is now..." Darkling said, its voice brimming with an all-too-human
emotion: hope. “Do it... do it now.”
And with a final push, Ryan opened the gate to the Black World.
The portal transformed into a disk two meters in diameter, a rift in spacetime
itself. Colored streams of light formed a halo at its edge, like a black hole’s event
horizon; a gate to a world of infinite darkness.
Ryan gazed into this abyss for seconds that seemed to stretch on forever. The
portals energies interfered with his power, preventing his other self from catching
up. Time itself grew unstable, and it frightened the courier. The Black World
existed beyond time itself, beyond reason.
And yet... it drew him in like a moth to a flame.
Ryan remembered how Geist and Bacchus both got a glimpse of higher
dimensions, and yearned to contact them again; just as Mechron had grown
obsessed with creating a portal towards his power's source, according to the
bunker’s files. The courier never understood why, until now.
A divine power dwelt within each colored dimension, and beckoned humans to
come closer.
“Follow me.”
Ryan glanced at Darkling, who impatiently slithered towards the portal. The time
anomaly didn't affect it in the slightest. “Where?”
“To the other side.” The sentient Elixirs form shifted, its liquid floating in midair
while leaving a pile of corroded human bones behind. “The Black Ultimate One
will free your spirit... from this flesh-shaped shell. Your mind shall no longer be
bound... by your gravity and molecules. I will show you places... places you can’t
even imagine. You will become free... from causality’s torments.”
Ryan glanced at the purple phantom, getting closer by the second. “I will leave
everyone behind if I do that.”
“But inside the Black World... nothing is forbidden. You could see her again.”
Jasmine?
A person who could have existed yet never did. An impossibility that defied all
laws of time and space. A woman who could only exist in an impossible place.
“No,” Ryan told himself. He had hope for the first time in centuries, and he
needed to save New Rome from annihilation. He had made too many promises
he couldn't break. “No, I can't...”
Her voice came out of the portal.
“I was a hero once.”
Ryan's head snapped back at the abyss, and the impenetrable darkness beyond
it. It spoke with another voice, the echo of someone long gone.
“God put us on Earth for a reason,” a man beckoned from the other side. “One
day, you will realize the boulder isn't your enemy. It's your friend.”
“Simon?” Ryan asked, remembering a fateful conversation centuries past...
No, it wasn't Simon. It was just an echo stirred up by the Black World, a lure to
draw him in.
And yet... and yet, this dimension existed beyond time and space. Could
something other than an echo remain on the other side? A remnant of canceled
iterations?
“All that you have erased...” Darkling whispered. “You can make it exist again...
a paradox.”
“Can't you bring me in for the ride too?” Felix's voice. “When you turn back time,
Ryan, I'll forget that. I'll be angry and bitter at her, all over again. Her death will
mean nothing.”
Ryan could bring them all back, if he crossed the threshold. Maybe find a Len
with whom things went right, or some of the countless men and women he left in
his dust. People he had loved and hated, known and remembered. Friends and
loved ones who only existed in his memories now.
The abyss tempted the courier so sweetly. Something on the other side called
him, begged him to leave that painful reality behind for a better one. One where
he wouldn't suffer anymore, and where his curse could finally end.
But...
The courier’s eyes wandered to the phantom of his past, catching up to him. He
thought of all the promises he made, all the people who trusted him. There were
fewer than the billions he erased, but they were alive. He couldn't abandon them,
even for a chance at happiness.
Both the black and the purple pulled him in a different direction, and Ryan
couldn't decide.
So the abyss spoke again, sinking its claws into the courier’s mind.
“Even if I disappear... promise you won't forget me.”
The courier followed Darkling into the Black World.
The warmth of Earth's dimension vanished, replaced with an absolute, chilling
cold. Yet it felt strangely comforting.
The Black World was darker than the darkest abyss, and yet Ryan could see
things moving inside. Living equations that had gained a life of their own; an
ouroboros devouring its own tail, never running out of mass; stillborn realities
neither time nor depth held sway.
This eldritch realm had a pulsating heart, a great darkness of unfathomable size.
A black hole that made the one at the center of the Milky Way look like a speck of
dust. An entity whose mere attention could erase Ryan from existence, if it didn't
consciously hold back.
The Black Ultimate One.
It had sent the voices to communicate with Ryan, the way a human might attempt
to mimic an ant's language. The entity had heard the courier’s wish, and would
grant it in its own way.
Darkling's form changed, from that of a slime to... something else. Something
that gave Ryan a headache when he looked at it. A sphere with triangular ends
and recursive eyes, prismatic wings, and impossible geometries. An entity that
couldn't exist in Earth's reality, and could now regain its true form.
This place changed Ryan too. His hands seemed to flicker in and out of
existence, turning into eldritch darkness one moment, and back to normal the
next.
The courier was a creature of physical laws, of molecules and organs. This place
had no logic, no rules to constrain him. The Saturn armor maintained his form for
now, a shell protecting his essence, but the blackness would consume it. Ryan
would lose his physical form, forget the very concept of a shape and ascend into
something more than human.
Something free.
“Don’t go, Ryan.”
The voice was the courier's own.
Ryan looked behind him, the portal nothing more than a lone star surrounded by
the dark void of space. A figure of violet light had stopped running, and instead
waited on the other side like an abandoned child.
“I cannot follow beyond this gate,” the purple phantom pleaded with Ryan's own
voice. “If you close the door... we will part ways forever.”
“You are my Elixir,” Ryan realized, his voice echoing all around him. “My save
point.”
“I am your other half. The power slumbering within you.” The phantom extended
a hand at Ryan, but couldn't cross the portal. “If you ascend, you will no longer
be human. You will become a denizen of this black realm, and you won't return.”
“I don’t want to come back.” Ryan marked a short pause, a layer of ice growing
on his armor from the cold. Darkling awaited at his side, silent as a tombstone. “I
have come back too many times already.”
“I know,” the phantom said, apologetic. “And I am sorry for it. When we bonded, I
looked deep inside of you. I tried to understand what you wanted, to fulfill your
greatest wish.”
“Then why did you give me this power? Why do you keep reviving me, even
when I die of old age?”
“Because I thought this power would make you happy, Ryan. That is what all
Elixirs want for their humans. To help. Even if sometimes, we are not very good
at it. You are so different from us...”
“If you want me to be happy, then stop bringing me back again and again!” Ryan
snarled, unloading centuries of bitter despair. “Just let me rest!”
The phantom marked a pause, its voice brimming with genuine sadness. “I
cannot, Ryan. I cannot stop you from returning. I cannot undo the wish you made
when we bonded, nor change its parameters.”
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I »
Then you know why I must go.
) 5
Ryan's breath turned to ice, the
darkness draining him of his warpnth.
The Black U Ijmate rie betkoned
him(to- INNS; the portal, and leave
: Troe re i
Earth forever. “It just... it just hurts.
Even now... even now, I will leave
people behind. Even with that
technology and all this help... I will
. ”
snuff countless lives out.” The
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the latest chapter there!
Even with his godlike power, Ryan couldn't save everyone.
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« . :
Death... death does not exist in the
Purple World, which is why it
fascinates the rabbit. It is innocent
. . ” e
like a child, as I Sea dhe TT
PEAR keptifs i nd extended, still
hopeful its partner would come back
to it. Back to the pain of immortality.
« :
Humans die, yet they move on, even
without your power. You wanted to
return to the past, to change the
present. This was the wish you
” :
made.” The content is on
Novelxo.org! Read the latest
chapter there!
The portal seemed to waver, the connection weakening.
“But you can move on now,” the specter argued. “You can stop looking to the
past, and towards the future. Make new memories, and happier moments. You
can grow old, have children. Find peace.”
Ryan sighed. “I feel old already.”
“But you won't grow old alone anymore,” the Elixir argued. “You have never been
alone, Ryan. I have always been with you, though you could not hear me. Every
time you stumbled, I helped lift you up. When you entered the Purple World, itis I
who begged the Ultimate One to help you. Because I care for you.”
Care.
Others cared for him. Len had fought at his side countless times, even after all
Ryan cost her. Livia placed her trust in him, just as he took a gamble on her. He
had befriended Felix, Fortuna, Jamie, and so many others. Sarin and other
madmen had placed their hopes in him, of all people.
If Ryan left Earth behind, he condemned it. He would leave it to the Plushie, to
Bloodstream, and Augustus to ravage. He would abandon Len to suffer, Livia to
remain with her father, Felix to face his doom, and New Rome to burn.
But if he retuned...
“I will never see them again if I go back,” Ryan said with a heavy heart. “All the
people I left behind. If I can recreate their essence in this place, perhaps I can
bring them through the portal...”
“If you use the Black to bring the dead back, they will suffer. Like your friend, they
will be paradoxes in a universe unsuited for them. An existence of pure agony.”
The specter shook its head, the portal slowly shrinking. “Let the dead rest, Ryan.
Your place is with the living.”
Ryan glanced at Darkling, and at the colossal black hole. None moved to restrain
the courier, and no past echo tempted him further.
The decision was his own.
Her
He couldn't stay.
His Elixir was right, he didn’t belong with the dead. His place was with Len, Livia,
and all the people who placed their trust in him. Even if it hurt... even if it hurt,
Ryan had to let the past go.
“I'm sorry, Darkling,” Ryan said, as he turned to the friendly shoggoth. “I can't
stay here.”
“I understand,” the entity replied, its voice bizarre and yet comprehensible.
“You're not mad?”
“Black is paradox... freedom from all laws... the ability to say no to everything.
Even to itself.” The eldritch horror marked a short pause. “When you are satisfied
with what you achieved, and wish to end it all... I will wait for you here.”
“Thanks,” Ryan said, nodding at the creature. “Farewell, Darkling.”
“Goodbye... my friend.”
Ryan took a step, and although there was no ground to walk on, he crossed the
distance with the portal in an instant. The Black World itself bent to his will,
granting him his wish.
The courier crossed the gate before it closed, returning to the particle
accelerator. “Welcome home,” his other self said.
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The courier canceled his power
before he and his other self could
touch, before a new save poi pt gould
form. Tigne gesumediaonce, and the
obrtal collapsed into nothingness.
The violet particles vanished, and the
courier stood alone in the particle
accelerator; the only witness of that
strange contact with the beyond. The
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“Did it work?" Vulcan's voice echoed in the room.
In response, Ryan activated his power and froze time. The world turned purple,
and the violet specter appeared again at the edge of his vision.
“Can you speak?” the courier asked.
No answer. The specter kept moving in his doppelganger’s direction, but made
no sound. Perhaps direct communication had only been possible due to the
Black World's interference. Ryan extended an armored hand at his double as if to
reach for it, and immediately froze.
Black particles floated out of his body, alongside the violet ones.