The Perfect Run

Aliens.

Of course it would be aliens! Everything made perfect sense now! Still, Ryan wondered if these visitors would look like tiny grey dwares, or humans with ridged foreheads. If the eight-meters tall monster in the snow was any indication though, they were probably cold-blooded.

Wait… Ryan glanced at the monstrous creature’s corpse, and came to a sudden realization.

“I knew it!” He shouted, pointing a finger at the colossal beast. “I knew it was the Reptilians!”

These scaled bastards had tried to infiltrate human governments to destroy democracy!

“It can’t be aliens,” Shroud said in denial. “Maybe the Alchemist… maybe she’s building a spaceship to leave the planet?”

“That piece of crap obviously crashed years ago,” Sarin pointed out. “If I listen well to our jackass-in-chief, a good four-fifths of it is buried in the ice. Who would build a ship like that?”

“We… we know Elixirs came from alien dimensions,” Len said, trying to scan the ship with her power armor. “It’s… it’s not impossible.”

Shroud still shook his head. “Can’t be aliens.”

He could accept the existence of a time-traveler, but not extraterrestrial visitors?

In any case, Ryan activated his time-stop as his group debated. Although he sensed an opposing force struggling back against his power, the icy wasteland turned violet to his relief. Since the strange purple lightning bolts in the alien skies kept moving in the frozen time, Ryan guessed they were made of Violet Flux.

Much like his experience in Monaco, his time-stop would work as long as the Resonators kept the portal open, allowing him to converge the Purple World with this pocket dimension.

But something else caught the courier’s attention. The Black Flux particles produced by his armor seemed to devour the space around them, creating tiny, almost invisible cracks in the fabric of reality itself.

“Huh?” Ryan said as time resumed. Though the black particles vanished, the damage they had caused remained.

“What is it, Riri?” Len asked, noticing his confusion.

“It seems my power has an anomalous effect on this thin place.” Come to think of it, Ryan remembered Black Flux consuming Alphonse ‘Fallout’ Manada’s radioactive Red Flux during their fight.

All hints so far indicated that the Black Ultimate One had given the courier the power to kill what couldn’t die. But how far could you push that definition? Could you kill energy? Items? Ideas?

Black powers were paradoxes, and didn’t follow the rules. Lightning Butt himself had become more like an animated statue than a man, and yet Ryan’s power could damage him. It could even kill a ghost.

Maybe it could kill Elixirs, or the alien energies they produced.

“That power gives me a headache,” Ryan said, deciding to prepare his team for battle. Sunshine and See-Through observed the dome cautiously, Sarin looked tense, Len and the didn’t hide their anxiety, and Mr. Wave barely restrained himself from going in guns-blazing. “Alright mooks listen up, who’s never explored a spooky alien spaceship among you? Raise your hand if this is your first time.”

Everyone raised their hand, except Ryan and Mr. Wave. “Mr. Wave caused the Fermi paradox,” the genome explained. “When alien civilizations see Mr. Wave, they go extinct.”

“Riri, why didn’t you raise your hand?” Len asked.

Sarin looked at Ryan with skepticism, which wounded the courier’s heart. “You saw aliens before, oh great and powerful leader?”

“Yes, but their ship was round and flatter.” Also, the passengers had kept trying to pay him in seashells for some reason. “In any case, rule number one for spaceships, and the most important one by far: don’t touch the eggs. A good egg is a boiled egg.”

The gasped. “But Sifu, eggs are cute and rounded!”

“Eggs are the enemy, soldier!” Ryan snarled with the passion of a drill sergeant, the adopting a military salute. “Any egg found in an alien ship is a potential W.M.D.! Boil them all!”

“Y-yes, Sifu!”

“Second rule, we don’t split up. Ever.”

“It wouldn’t change much,” Mr. Wave boasted. “Even if Mr. Wave faces an army alone, they will still be outnumbered.”

“I agree,” Ryan conceded, “but this is the principle of the thing.”

“I am usually more fond of dividing forces to cover a greater area, but in this case numbers might prove safer,” Leo agreed. “We have no idea what to expect within.”

“Which way do we use to move in?” Shroud asked, glancing at the blast doors.

“Mmm…” Ryan approached the gates to observe them. On a closer look, while the blast doors were mostly made of the same black metal as the rest of the ship, they showed hints of having been breached in the past. Someone plugged the cracks with a standard steel alloy. A cursory scan from his armor told the courier that the doors could probably survive extreme conditions such as atmospheric reentry. “Sunshine, we might need a solar eruption or two.”

“I see another perfectly good entrance up there,” Sarin said, pointing a finger at the hole in the ship’s metal dome. “If the lizard blasted his way out, then it means that path is clear, right?”

“Possibly,” Shroud conceded. “But we might find workers repairing the damaged area.”

“What bothers me is that nobody came to intercept us,” Hargraves said, his radiance dimming for an instant. “I expected more activity in the Alchemist’s base of operation, but the area looks deceptively empty.”

“Perhaps the thing killed everyone on its way out,” Sarin guessed.

tempted,” Ryan said. “On one

actions until we can figure the truth out,” Hargraves

I’m not roughing up that bitch of a mad scientist along the way. She owes me more than a decade of

I agree with the Psycho,” Shroud declared. “While we might need her knowledge, there’s no way I’m leaving

of the full truth, and an open conflict will lead us nowhere. Let us act cautiously, figure out what is happening, and then

group settled on exploring the dome

If it looks cute and cuddly…” Ryan loaded his chest

followed by Shroud, Mr. Wave, and Leo the Living Sun. Shortie

out, the dome was only the upper part of a colossal sphere with a diameter slightly more than two hundred meters wide. One end of a five-meters wide bridge extended out to a central platform equipped with strange

orbital monitoring systems, albeit far more advanced and damaged. The projections

to secure the dome’s other entrance. Meanwhile, the courier and the Carnival members checked out the projections

using different arrays

red star here, a green bird there. These phantom images only existed for an instant before returning to the white, and the shapeless

stars, and lights. A shining heart of nuclear chaos burnt at its center, the first and greatest sun illuminating the universe; and when Ryan squinted at it, he realized that this

matter: steel, glass, iron, stone, gold, zinc, water, gas… all metals, all liquids, all inorganic matters Ryan knew of were represented there. Other stickers contained substances he had never seen, crystals that shifted like living beings, blackened metal as dark

them all, a patchwork of chaotic ideas made real. Nothing unified the creatures and places of this realm, except that they only ever

that superficially imitated a planet, but one where everything was alive. A pulsating cell with seas of green slime, teeth mountains, and forests of blood vessels. The atmosphere itself buzzed like trillions

information that ever was, is, and would ever be. The azure glow of a supreme godmind cast the light of enlightenment like

violet expanse of compressed space and strange mirrors closed this

World from his brief contact with it.

causing Ryan’s head to snap in

had decided to float amidst the holograms, swiftly pointed a

eyes widened as he followed his friend’s finger. One of the stickers of the Rubik’s cube was made of a substance that the courier had already seen before.

you of anything?” Shroud

The substances that surrounded it were all metals, from iron to bronze and gold. It was at the very

body,” Leo Hargraves whispered, astonished. “It’s the same color, the same texture… I would wager my life

ability to absorb these alloys had seemed to affect

it suddenly made

the source of all inorganic

exist in the

A world without time.

“Adamantine…” Ryan whispered.

down on him from

mythology, said to be harder than anything? Did

align, creating an anomaly where he alone could affect causality. But that substance, the adamantine, didn’t come from

unnatural metal from a higher realm where things like death, time, or the laws of physics held no sway. From its location in the

wonder it behaved in such

whispered to himself. “I

“Julie Costa?” Ryan asked.

touch,” Mr. Wave answered, his voice more somber than usual. “Create new life, or give people cancer. Pretty

“but it may be that Julie’s power simply didn’t register him

aging and tumor then?” Shroud asked, having clearly done his research. “We know he doesn’t eat or breathe. If he is made of metal,

if he had a latent cancer before he gained his power, the tumor might have gained his

power only gave his body the properties of that alien metal,” Ryan theorized. “Lightning Butt may not eat or breathe, but I know for a fact that he sleeps, creepily so. There are still

physics themselves, causing a slow, almost

Livia’s time-skipping. Other conceptual abilities might bypass the invulnerable

only person capable of harming Augustus,” Shroud said, “or whatever ability you used to

shouted from the other end of the bridge, interrupting the discussion.

rejoined their allies, making their way into the next room in a

workstations, biomechanical servers, and heart-shaped vats full of swirling liquid. Alien orange crystal growths had started taking over the ceiling like an infection, while piles of Wonderboxes lined up

immediately moved to

so many Elixirs at once!” The Psycho whistled as she opened a wonderbox,

attention to the strange vats, finding seven of them north of the laboratory. Each contained gallons of Elixir, one for each of the seven standard colors. Computers, human computers, were linked to

joined up in a central computer, equipped with large control panels

asked Shroud, as

approached the computer and reactivated it, but quickly shook his head in denial. Only a white spot to write numbers and letters had appeared on the screen. “It’s password-protected, and that machine is clearly

crumble beneath a seven hundred kilos bear of mass destruction, Ryan would

that?” Shroud asked in shock, as Len joined the

a psyche profile of the Alchemist based on compiled second-hand information,

through the membrane separating it from the outside world. To his surprise, the slime created a tentacle

and a better bet than seven, the exclamation point reinforces security, and

kept searching through the

all encrypted, but I can figure it

this may contain all the

laser genome had moved in front of the demolished door leading into the next part of the complex. “Do you

hole in the walls. The corridor beyond had no lamp to light it, leaving only an abyss of

eye open,” Hargraves said warily. “This place is too precious to be left undefended,