Alexis "Valkyrie" Huntingfield

Reality was falling apart.

I didn't understand what was happening or what caused it. All I knew was that it looked like the entire world had put into a blender made of kaleidoscopes. I grabbed onto someone, but I wasn't even sure who it was.

Having my eyes open was enough to give me a headache. At one point, I felt like I was standing on the surface of the sky, looking up at a contorted, labyrinthine version of the city, and then it curved and shrank, collapsing into a sphere that warped light like a metropolitan black hole.

Then it shrank further, collapsing all the way through itself and back out like an image through a pinhole camera, and the next thing I knew, I was looking at the inside of my own foot.

And it only continued to get worse.

My body unraveled. It was as if I were a doll made of cloth, and the universe was pulling on a torn thread, scrunching me up in one place even as it pulled me apart. Literally. It wasn't a metaphor to conceptualize what I was feeling—it was the way my brain interpreted what I was actually seeing.

I didn't know what happened that made something in my mind click, but within an instant, my perspective had changed. No, this isn't even about perspective. I was seeing the same things, but my mind had switched to interpreting them differently like one of those illusions where you either see a rabbit or a duck.

And now that I'd flipped the mental switch, it was obvious. Dad was right, I marveled. It's seven-dimensional.

My spirit traced a line through this greater reality, or maybe it should have—but the line was knotted and tangled, branching, looping, curling back on itself…

I was standing, metaphorically, at the bottom of a funnel and the apex of a pyramid, looking into every possible future and past, all encased in inviolable walls, the lightlike boundary of causality itself.

But there were holes. What should have been a perfect steel funnel was really a warped and dented, conical colander, and my spaghetti was going in and out every which way.

My abilities, I realized. Esoteric abilities weren't a violation of the natural laws—they were at the same time something less, and yet something much, much deeper. All I did was break causality in increasingly impossible ways.

Is that how regeneration works, and why everyone has it? Just picking and choosing different parts of multiple states in the worldline?

Frankly, I was too stupid for this shit. Maybe being a spirit gave me an advantage in being able to observe it, but that was the best I could do. A part of me couldn't contain a giddy excitement, salivating at the idea that I might be able to use this opportunity to tug at the timeline and send myself back.

A timeloop power would be nice…

With nothing better to do, I decided to go ahead and try it.

Saber

Reality was falling apart.

She never expected it to be this bad, but after the breach passed criticality, the contortion of space and even time grew almost unmanageable.

Fortunately, Saber had a tool for that.

Saber's abilities had remained so limited in range because of their true nature. Her blades might look like they were made of some exotic substance or out of 'pure energy,' whatever that even meant, but that wasn't right.

They weren't objects or even abstract 'energy' so much as they were an assertion of reality itself. By just Tier 6, her blades cut not with force or heat or even space, but with a demand—a demand of and by the world that they would cut.

It was both the reason she could harm Aurora even when she was at Tier 8, and the reason that almost no one else could. The other Tier 9 had grasped against the same fundamental power, manifest through his prismatic energy.

He didn't seem invulnerable because he was Tier 9, but because the reality around him carried an axiomatic assertion that he come to no harm. For the same reason, he lost a great degree of control of that rainbow light once it left a narrow radius—before Tier 9, he had the same true limitation as Saber, though it was less obvious.

The beams lost their axiomatic authority, becoming no more than raw power. Once he reached Tier 9, that changed, and the beams now carried that same level of authority to any distance.

An immovable object wielding an unstoppable force.

But only until he faced the same kind of power. Saber wasn't immune to his beams, but she could resist them or even deflect them, and likewise, her attacks didn't simply bypass his otherwise axiomatic invulnerability, but the infinities did cancel out, so to speak.

The red 'lighting' was new. It wasn't lightning at all, without even any intrinsic relation to electromagnetism, so perhaps it would be more accurate to think of it as a temporary crack in existence itself—in the kind of existence that transcended even a breach.

And so Saber's attention turned to the expanding, all encompassing breach even as her powers fought back against the contortion of time and space. I made a mistake.

She didn't regret her actions, and would have seen them through if not for how much worse the effect was than she ever would have anticipated.

Creating a perpetual incursion was one thing. Distorting the world beyond the point of interpretability was another.

This will work. It has to.

Saber's abilities were, counterintuitively, more general than Aurora's. She didn't have a constant field around herself asserting invulnerability, but rather had to consciously invoke concepts such as piercing, severing, or blocking.

Still, her abilities took on a theme, and it was one of violence. She knew without trying that commanding her new long-range ability with an intent such as mending would fail. But maybe there was an indirect way.

Focusing on the very idea of the breach, Saber unleashed all the power she could muster into a single demand.

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Be not.

Jagged streaks of crimson split through the world around her, racing through not just space but through time, carrying with the authority of the world itself that what was, was not. It was more power than Saber had ever used, and quite likely more than anyone had.

It wasn't enough.

The breach collapsed, violet cracks going dark, space and time springing back into a familiar shape… But only for a moment.

Saber had done something impossible. She'd erased the very existence of the breach—but that alone wasn't enough. With nothing left behind to fill the gaps, the surrounding reality wasn't stable. The only thing her display of almost godly power had accomplished was a fraction of a second of calm.

And then the breach tore reality asunder.

It wasn't the same one, not technically, but it might as well have been. Fuck. Saber could try again, but it was pointless. Deleting the breach itself had been her best bet, and the conceptual basis of her abilities wasn't suitable for repairing things.

In theory, it might be possible to throw even more power at the problem, erasing not just the breach but the damage to reality—but despite now being a high Tier 9, Saber was nowhere near having the kind of power that would be necessary to brute force something like that.

It was hopeless. The damage was done, and now she would need to figure out how to recover. Perhaps they could bring people to other worlds, start building a new—

An immense presence weighed upon the world. It was like nothing Saber had ever felt—beyond even the few Tier 10 or maybe 11 Anathema that had begun slipping into the world. It loomed over everything, so immense that Saber couldn't get a sense of scale. It might as easily be Tier 13 or Tier 100, if such a thing could even exist.

The world seemed to bend and shake under that vast presence, and the sky darkened—the sky was back. The ground was back. They were still in the middle of the incursion, but time and space had returned to something resembling normal.

Saber looked back up, just in time to be blinded by a blossoming well of golden power.

Wheels of golden inscriptions twisted into existence, hundreds of glowing rings looping around the cracks of the breach, no, thousands, millions, hundreds of millions…

And each one of them contained enough power to make Saber's core tremble. They contained the incursion, locking it down like the individual links of an enormous, esoteric chain. Then they spun, as if tightening a cosmic screw that had come loose, and the breach began to seal.

Saber only marveled for a moment before daring to look back up.

It was too bright to see anything, but oddly, she had a brief impression of a great, ringed eye, infinite golden loops of impossibly complicated design whirling, growing, shrinking, all focused on reversing the cataclysm.

The others would not call you Anathema if I created you without the capacity to make mistakes.

Saber twitched as an impossibly deep and high voice resonated through the world and deep into her soul. It wasn't hard to figure out the source, though, and she flinched back against the creature's words.

You acted too soon, little one. You and your people are not ready, though I do see a spark of creation in you and one other.

…And there seems to be an even littler one plucking at the threads of fate. My, but what tenacious little heretics you all are! Never before have my children been so quick to create so-called Anathema of their own. And now this little one has the hubris to think she could bend the weave and weft to her will…

Saber stared up at the blinding, golden light with no regard for how her regeneration repaired her retina again and again as it burned out. The Tier 9 was enraptured, hanging on every word like she was a prophet grasping at whispers of the divine.

Maybe she was.

This will not be a perfect fix,

The voice warned,

but it will do.

There was a flare of gold and violet, and everything twisted.

Alexis "Valkyrie" Huntingfield

With a sudden realization that I was awake and lying on a hard surface, my eyes shot open, and I sat up to near total darkness.

Concrete floor and walls, dust, rubble… I didn't understand where I was.

Didn't… I thought we were in an incursion. I remembered that, and then the breach went crazy a second time, but even worse. Everything was all weird, and then I was looking at the true nature of reality, and then…

It was hard to remember. I also felt weird. Like, really weird. Something felt incredibly, deeply wrong.

I blinked. Licking my lips, I felt like… Wait, what? My hands shot up to my face, and I felt nothing inhuman. Just normal human lips and jaw… I felt my body, but I was skinny, so I wasn't in my Vonnie form. If anything, I was too skinny.

What the fuck, why is my chest so flat? I was growing very concerned, and to make matters worse, I realized I felt weak. Weaker than I should have been even in my Vonnie form. Weaker than I should have been months ago, before I knew I was anything other than an ordinary human.

My eyes shot open, and I jerked upright, finding myself in a dim stairwell. But I was also in the busted, concrete corridor.

"What the fuck?" I asked with two different voices in two different places.

One of them was Vonnie. The other was… I wasn't sure. It definitely wasn't my normal body, but it wasn't a monster, either. Speaking of which, I opened a third set of eyes and stretched a body made out of hundreds of tons of metal.

"Okay, this is just getting ridiculous," I growled, muttered, and whispered. "Why the fuck am I in three different forms in different places at the same time?"

And what was the deal with the first form I'd woken up in? If anything, it should be my original, 'Alex' body, but it still felt wrong.

A quick check also confirmed my worst fear—I couldn't use any of my powers in two of my bodies.

The upside was that I felt like all of my pieces were near each other. The dragon body was half buried in rubble and brilliant red sand, the weird body was in a concrete hallway with rubble piles, and Vonnie was in a plain stairwell that looked like it could connect to the corridor.

I decided to start the search with my Vonnie body, since it was small and maneuverable, as well as having a decent amount of light in the area.

First, I tried going up the stairs, but there was another collapse blocking me off from ascending higher. Second, I tried going down, and sure enough, the bottom led into a dark, concrete corridor.

"God damn, that looks spooky," I muttered. Then I raised my Vonnie voice. "Hey! Me! Get over here!"

Sure enough, my other human body heard Vonnie shout, and it wasn't far. That told me which direction to walk in, and I shuffled off to join up with… myself…

Thirty seconds later, I finally saw a child step out of the darkness, freeze in place, and stare with her mouth open, just like I was doing with my adult, Vonnie body, and probably with my giant dragon body too.

"What the fuck," we said in unison. "That's just me, but like ten fucking years ago?"

It really did look like a child version of me. It was also wearing an outfit that I remembered—my fucking middleschool uniform? Seriously?

Getting all of my versions split into entirely separate bodies was weird enough, and one of them had for some reason also de-aged by an entire decade?

Something vibrated in my Vonnie pocket, and I pulled out my phone. Instead of the familiar lock screen, elegant golden text scrawled across a black background.

It was unwise to play with the threads of fate, little one. You could not have harnessed the power you sought even if I had not intervened.

I have done the best I can to fix several mistakes today, including your own.

I will not do so again.

With understanding and fondness, the Architect

For a long moment, I just stared at the screen, trying to process it all. So that's what happened, then. The damn cosmic horror that throws out Star Cores like candy did this. Convenient that Stephanie just told me what its name is.

That must also have something to do with the breach going completely crazy. The Architect implied that I wasn't the only one to have tried doing something I shouldn't, and it cleaned up after all of us, explaining why I was in a random underground building instead of in the incursion with all the others.

"Well, shit," both of my human bodies told each other. "This is going to be weird."

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