(Marvel, DC, and all other images, manga, manhwa, anime, and intellectual properties referenced in this story belong to their respective owners. The main character, Karito/Adriel Josue Valdez, and this story's original elements belong to me.)
Only an instant passed between Adriel stepping through the portal and emerging above the Bridge of Progress—the same bridge where the story of Arcane had begun.
He landed without a sound.
Piltover lay in ruins around him.
Smoke smothered the skyline beneath a gray-black veil. Towers that once gleamed beneath the sun had been broken open, their exposed interiors burning like lanterns. Entire sections of the bridge had collapsed into the fissure between Piltover and Zaun, while unfamiliar growths spread across the remaining stone.
Creatures wandered through the devastation.
The moment they detected Adriel, they fled.
Zombies abandoned whatever corpses they had been feeding upon. Symbiotes peeled themselves from shattered buildings and disappeared into the surrounding streets. Other malformed things retreated into cracks in reality, unwilling to risk drawing his attention.
They knew who he was.
They also understood that if Adriel chose to acknowledge them, a single hostile glance could erase them.
He barely noticed their retreat.
Something far more disturbing moved beneath Piltover.
Adriel could feel entire dimensions shifting below the city.
Below was merely the closest word his mind could assign to it. Some of those realities existed beneath the physical bedrock. Others had been folded along spatial axes that ordinary people could neither perceive nor enter. They occupied the same coordinates as Piltover, but not along any direction its people could perceive.
Yet all of them were being dragged toward a single point.
Different realities folded over one another, separated, and then collided again. Their boundaries stretched like membranes caught inside a vortex, each universe resisting as something steadily forced them closer together.
Adriel narrowed his eyes.
The center of that dimensional pressure appeared to be near the Hextech engine Jayce had constructed—or somewhere directly beneath it.
At least, that was his best estimate.
He started across the ruined bridge toward central Piltover.
Adriel could have reached the engine instantly, but speed was not always useful. He needed to understand what Anansi had done to the city before charging into its center. Every collapsed building, displaced street, and distortion in space offered another piece of information.
He had barely crossed half the bridge when fire descended from the sky.
Ace landed beside him like a falling star. Flames spread from the point of impact before curling back into his body, leaving the stone untouched.
Peter's telepathic message had already told Ace where Adriel was going and what he intended to do once they reached Piltover. Somehow, Peter had predicted Adriel's course of action before Adriel could explain it himself.
The dimensional structure beneath the city, however, had not been part of that message.
Ace slowly surveyed the devastation.
"Well," he muttered, "this is worse than I thought."
Adriel snorted.
"Yeah. No shit."
Ace gave him a sideways look.
"I was trying to be optimistic."
"You picked the wrong city for that."
Adriel continued walking, his attention fixed upon the pressure beneath their feet.
"I knew Anansi was accelerating his plans, but this…" He pointed toward the ruined city. "Do you feel what I'm feeling?"
Ace fell into step beside him and extended his senses.
For several seconds, he said nothing.
Then his expression tightened.
"Yeah."
He looked down at the fractured bridge.
"It doesn't feel like anything is actually moving, but something keeps… shifting."
"The dimensions."
"So that's what that is."
Ace possessed the passive knowledge granted to every Guardian. Concepts involving higher dimensions, nonlinear time, and alternate cosmologies existed within his mind, but possessing information was not the same as having Adriel's experience with it.
He understood enough to recognize the danger.
Not enough to diagnose it.
"It feels wrong," Ace continued. "Like the ground can't decide what it's supposed to be."
"That's because it probably can't."
Adriel's gaze shifted toward the tallest structure in central Piltover.
He already knew Anansi intended to extend his influence across every video-game universe in existence. Until now, Adriel had assumed he was merely accumulating enough power to invade those dimensions one at a time.
What he felt beneath Piltover suggested something considerably more ambitious.
Adriel scratched the back of his head.
Ace noticed immediately.
"What?"
"I don't know."
"That's reassuring."
"Shut up. I'm thinking."
Adriel slowed as he examined the dimensional movement again.
"This isn't behaving like a collection of portals. A portal connects two locations while allowing both sides to remain separate. This thing is dragging entire realities toward the same set of coordinates."
Ace frowned.
"Meaning?"
"Think of every universe as its own complete system. It has its own space, its own time, its own physical constants, and its own rules for what is possible. A portal builds a temporary bridge between two systems."
Adriel gestured toward the city.
"This is forcing those systems to overlap."
"So they're merging?"
"Not cleanly. They're being folded into one another before their laws can reconcile. Imagine forcing several different game engines to write over the same memory at the same time."
Ace grimaced.
"Everything starts breaking."
"Exactly."
Gravity could behave differently from one street to the next. Cause and effect could disagree over which event happened first. Matter from one reality might be impossible under the laws of another, yet both would be forced to occupy the same space.
If the process continued, the damage would not remain confined to Piltover.
Ace watched Adriel's expression grow increasingly troubled.
"You've seen something like this before."
"Not exactly."
"But close."
Adriel reluctantly nodded.
"It reminds me of the World Engines from some of the older Marvel comics. Same family of bad idea, except those usually affected one multiverse
He looked toward the source beneath Piltover.
"This operates on a much larger scale."
Ace followed his gaze.
"How much larger?"
"Omniversal."
That answer silenced him.
"If I'm right," Adriel continued, "Anansi has modified the concept into an Omniversal Engine. He isn't collecting enough power to travel into every game universe individually. He's building a system that can bring all of them within reach."
"Like placing every universe on the same network."
"And giving himself administrator access."
The engine would not need to pull every universe physically into Runeterra. It only needed to connect their underlying structures—to assign each reality an address within the same system.
Once that happened, Anansi could spread through them without crossing the distance between one universe and another.
Every game world would become another connected territory.
Another story he could invade, corrupt, and eventually control.
Ace released a slow breath.
"That makes sense."
Adriel glanced at him.
"You don't sound convinced."
"No, I understand what you're saying. I just wish I didn't."
Before Adriel could answer, the street ahead of them changed.
Piltover's fractured stone flickered out of existence.
For half a second, bright grass covered the road beneath a checker-patterned cliff. Golden rings floated above the pavement before disappearing with a chiming sound.
The street returned.
Then a nearby building glitched.
Its elegant Piltovan architecture became a collection of oversized brick blocks and green pipes. A moment later, those shapes collapsed into bloodstained metal corridors marked by symbols Adriel recognized from Doom.
The transformation spread.
Sections of the skyline acquired the impossible alien geometry of Destiny. A distant tower stretched upward and briefly became a structure belonging to the Combine from Half-Life. Streets, machines, fragments of terrain, and pieces of different worlds repeatedly replaced one another across the city.
Some disappeared within an instant.
Others remained.
Ace stopped walking.
"That's new."
"No," Adriel said quietly. "That's confirmation."
These were not illusions or projections.
The other worlds were being assigned the same address as Piltover.
A piece of one universe occupied the street until another reality overwrote it. The engine was testing connections, dragging fragments through dimensional boundaries as it attempted to decide which set of physical laws possessed priority.
The closer they came to the center of the city, the faster those substitutions occurred.
Stone became metal.
Metal became vegetation.
Gravity twisted sideways for half a second before correcting itself. Ash rose from the ground, became snow, and then transformed into glowing particles that Adriel could not identify.
He inhaled slowly.
Then he exhaled.
"Yeah. This is getting really bad."
Ace looked toward the central Hexgate tower.
"You think the engine is already activating?"
"I think we're watching it calibrate."
"And if it finishes?"
"Then Piltover stops being the only place with this problem."
Adriel had walked through the city because he wanted information.
He had enough now.
"We can't afford to waste another minute," he said. "Sightseeing's over."
Ace's body ignited.
"About damn time."
"The disturbance is beneath the lowest level of the central tower, directly below the Hextech engine. That's where Anansi must have anchored his machine."
Adriel bent his knees slightly.
"Let's go."
They launched together.
Ace became a streak of fire while Adriel tore through the city beside him, both racing toward the tallest tower in Piltover.
Behind them, the bridge disappeared for one impossible second.
In its place stood a fragment of another universe.
Then Piltover forced itself back into existence.
Adriel and Ace crossed the remaining distance in seconds.
They entered the central Hexgate tower through one of its shattered upper walls, descended past collapsed laboratories and abandoned machinery, and followed the distortion into the lowest levels of the structure.
The deeper they traveled, the less stable the tower became.
Walls flickered between incompatible materials. Polished Piltovan stone transformed into rusted industrial metal, ancient brick, alien alloys, and textures that belonged inside worlds governed by completely different laws of physics. Gravity occasionally pulled in the wrong direction, while doors opened into rooms that could not possibly fit within the building.
Then they reached the source.
Adriel stopped at the edge of a massive chamber.
The original Hextech engine was gone.
Something else had grown in its place.
An enormous machine occupied the center of the room, its metallic body resembling a mechanical tree. Cables spread from its base like roots, piercing the floor before vanishing into dimensional fractures. Above it, rotating rings surrounded a central core whose surface contained more depth than the chamber should have been capable of holding.
Every rotation pulled another reality closer.
Behind the machine, an entire wall behaved like a television rapidly changing channels. Landscapes, cities, battlefields, oceans, and star systems flashed across it. Some remained visible for less than a second before being replaced. Others collapsed into one another, producing distorted combinations that should never have existed.
Adriel stared at the machine.
His eyebrows drew together.
Then he crouched near one of its roots.
"Oh."
Ace stopped behind him.
Adriel leaned closer.
"Oh, wait."
"That second 'oh' sounded worse than the first one."
"This is a World Engine."
Ace looked toward the incomprehensible machine.
"I thought you already figured that out."
"No, I thought it functioned like one. I didn't think they had actually copied the model."
Adriel recognized the design from Marvel.
This particular World Engine had been built around the same principle as the machinery connected to Yggdrasil—the World Tree whose branches supported multiple realms, with those realms themselves encompassing entire universal structures.
Except this machine had been modified.
He looked upward as another ring rotated around the core.
Countless branches of light extended from it. Each one disappeared into a separate fracture in reality, connecting the engine to cosmologies far beyond Runeterra.
Adriel's earlier theory had been correct.
It had also been catastrophically conservative.
"Oh, fuck."
Ace stared at him.
"What?"
"They really went and did it."
"Did what?"
"This isn't just using Yggdrasil's structure to connect a few universes. They scaled the entire system upward."
Adriel rose slowly.
"I called it an Omniversal Engine before because that was the closest comparison I could think of. Turns out I was more right than I wanted to be."
Another dimensional branch connected to the machine.
The chamber trembled.
"This thing isn't joining individual worlds," Adriel continued. "It's taking complete video-game cosmologies and grafting them onto Runeterra."
One game did not necessarily represent one universe. It could possess alternate timelines, reboots, adaptations, parallel worlds, discarded possibilities, and contradictory versions of the same events.
Some franchises contained entire multiverses of their own.
The engine was collecting all of them.
Sonic's branching timelines. Mario's countless worlds. The layered realms of Doom. The paracausal cosmology of Destiny. Every version, continuity, and possibility belonging to every game ever created was being dragged toward the same dimensional center.
Runeterra had become the trunk.
Every other video-game reality was being forced into its branches.
Even Ace—who would never claim to be the team's leading intellectual—understood the gravity of that through the passive knowledge granted to him as a Guardian.
His face gradually lost its usual casual expression.
The dimensional wall continued changing.
A peaceful landscape became a war-ravaged city. That city transformed into an alien planet before collapsing into a colorful platforming world. Characters from incompatible settings appeared for fractions of a second, their bodies overlapping before the engine pulled them away again.
None of them were illusions.
Those worlds were genuinely colliding.
"That can't be stable," Ace said.
"It isn't."
Adriel approached the engine.
His eyes changed as he activated his Hacker ability.
The physical world remained visible, but another layer unfolded over it. His awareness entered the informational side of reality—the place where fictional worlds touched the internet through games, stories, videos, source files, forums, wikis, and human memory.
The machine's incomprehensible processes translated themselves into a format Adriel's mind could interpret.
Simple HTML-like lines appeared in front of him.
Ace looked over his shoulder.
"I don't know how to program, and even I know 'forced' probably shouldn't be there."
"It's not literal HTML," Adriel explained. "My ability is translating the engine's instructions into something readable."
More lines appeared.
Ace stared at the final command.
"That one looks worse."
"It is."
The engine was not drawing only from official games.
It was harvesting every connection those games had ever formed throughout human history.
Every sequel.
Every alternate ending.
Every adaptation.
Every crossover.
Every abandoned continuity.
Every wiki article, online discussion, theory, modification, fan game, and fanfiction that had created another interpretation of those worlds.
Even a passing mention could establish an informational connection. If someone had written one character into another universe, the engine treated that story as another bridge it could exploit.
It reached from the earliest games humanity had ever created to everything that existed in the present.
The terrible games.
The mediocre ones.
The forgotten ones.
The masterpieces.
All of them were being compressed into one composite setting.
Adriel stared into the flow of information.
At first, the concept reminded him of Fortnite. That world had incorporated characters and settings from nearly every corner of popular culture without immediately collapsing beneath the contradictions.
But Fortnite survived because its crossovers were controlled.
Each licensed character was translated into the rules of that setting. Their original cosmologies were not physically torn from their stories and forced to replace one another. The crossover created another version of those characters without destroying the originals.
This engine did not care about compatibility.
It did not ask permission.
It did not translate anything.
It was forcing every version of every video-game world to exist as one continuity while preserving all their contradictory histories.
A fanfiction could create a new branch.
This machine was ripping every branch from every tree and crushing them into the same trunk.
"This is wrong," Adriel whispered.
Ace glanced at him.
"Scientifically?"
"Scientifically, narratively, ethically—pick one."
The people inside those worlds were not pieces of data to the Guardians. They were living beings with histories, memories, and identities. Compressing them into a composite universe would force countless versions of the same person to overwrite one another.
Entire histories would be erased simply because the engine could not decide which one possessed priority.
And it was not even constructing the composite carefully.
The machine was being deliberately overloaded.
Warning panels multiplied across Adriel's vision.
The same instructions appeared again.
Then again.
New realities were being submitted faster than the engine could process them. Every failed attempt automatically restarted, creating billions of simultaneous requests.
"It's like a DDoS attack," Adriel said.
Ace looked toward him.
"In normal-person language?"
"Too many requests hitting the same system at once. The machine can't handle them, but it has been ordered to keep accepting more."
"So somebody is doing this on purpose."
"Yeah."
Adriel moved his hands through the floating commands, closing error panels only for several more to replace them.
"They could have created a new composite story if that was all they wanted. Slap a fanfiction label on it, establish rules for the crossover, and let the new universe exist as its own branch."
"But they didn't."
"No. They're crushing the original branches together until something breaks."
The engine was not building a world.
It was building pressure.
If the core ruptured, the damage would travel in both directions. The fictional dimensions connected to it would collapse first, but the informational shock could propagate into the real world through every digital connection the machine had used.
Games could become corrupted.
Websites could fail.
Archives, fanfiction, videos, and records concerning video-game history could disappear or transform into unreadable data.
A significant portion of the internet would begin malfunctioning simultaneously.
The Darks would hide the event behind a mundane explanation, as they always did. Humanity would hear about a global cyberattack, a catastrophic data-center failure, or hackers somehow compromising several major services at once.
No one in the real world would understand that entire civilizations had died behind the error messages.
Adriel's command window filled with red.
Ace stared over his shoulder, his face paling.
"Okay, this is…"
"Worse than we thought?"
"Way worse."
"Yeah."
Adriel snapped one panel shut.
Three more opened.
"We need to lock the fuck in. This engine cannot be allowed to overload any further."
Ace looked around the chamber.
"Can you stop it?"
"I might be able to stabilize it."
"That was not a confident answer."
"Because I'm not confident."
Adriel expanded the command interface until layers of code surrounded him.
"I don't sense Anansi or any of the other Darks nearby, so I should have time to—"
He stopped.
The engine continued screaming across his senses, saturating every channel through which he normally detected danger.
Adriel frowned.
"Actually… how the hell are they hiding from me?"
Ace studied the machinery.
"Maybe they aren't."
Adriel glanced back.
"This thing is pulling on how many realities?"
"Too many."
"Then it's probably taking up most of our attention. Every danger sense we have is screaming about the engine because it's the biggest threat in the room."
Adriel looked toward the dimensional wall.
Ace's explanation made sense.
The machine was moments, minutes, or perhaps hours away from collapsing an unknown number of worlds. Compared with that danger, nearly any individual presence would register as background noise.
"This thing could blow up in our faces if we lose focus for even a second," Ace continued.
"Then don't distract me."
"I wasn't planning to."
Ace scratched the back of his head.
"You deal with the nightmare computer. I'll watch the perimeter."
Adriel nodded and turned back toward the interface.
"How long will this take?" Ace asked.
"Three minutes."
Ace appeared relieved.
"Or twenty."
His relief disappeared.
"Those aren't remotely the same amount of time."
"The engine keeps generating new errors. It's like trying to stop a DDoS attack while the server is already on fire."
"That explanation did not help."
"It wasn't supposed to."
Adriel reached into the code.
Commands changed beneath his fingers as he attempted to isolate the engine from its incoming connections. For every dimensional branch he temporarily severed, two more forced themselves into the system.
Ace released a breath and turned toward the chamber's entrance.
"All right. We stay here. I'll watch your back."
"Good."
Adriel raised his hand to enter another command.
A voice emerged from the opposite side of the engine.
"And what do you think you are doing, Guardian?"
The words echoed throughout the chamber.
Darkness spread across the floor.
Adriel's hand stopped.
He sighed.
Of course.
He knew that voice.
More importantly, he recognized the aura accompanying it. Adriel had read the comics. Jason Aaron's run on Thor remained one of his favorite eras of the character.
Being a fan did not make him happy to meet its villain.
Adriel closed his command window and turned toward the other side of the machine.
Gorr the God Butcher stepped from the darkness.
All-Black the Necrosword moved across his body like living shadow. Its surface formed tendrils that curled through the air before sinking back into the weapon held within his hand.
Someone else followed him.
Thor Odinson emerged beside Gorr.
Black veins protruded across the Thunder God's face and arms. A dark liquid bled from the corners of his mouth, while black tears streamed from his eyes. The Necrosword's corruption had spread through his body and wrapped itself around Mjolnir.
Lightning coiled around him.
It was no longer blue.
Black electricity crawled across the hammer and snapped against the floor, leaving decaying cracks wherever it touched.
Adriel's stomach sank.
Gorr the God Butcher and a Thor corrupted by All-Black.
Yeah.
This was going to be a problem.
It had taken three versions of Thor—one from the past, one from the present, and one from the distant future—to bring Gorr down. Now Gorr had turned one of those Thors into an ally.
Adriel glanced toward Ace.
Ace's flames had already ignited around his shoulders, but even he appeared uncertain.
Adriel did not know whether Ace could defeat a corrupted Thor.
He was not entirely certain either of them could handle Gorr while protecting the engine.
"Fuck," Adriel muttered. "Fuck, fuck, fuck."
Gorr smiled.
Apparently, he enjoyed the sound of his own voice too much to let Adriel panic in peace.
"Do you admire our work?"
He gestured toward the Omniversal Engine.
"So many stories, histories, and worlds compressed into one magnificent amalgamation."
Adriel's expression hardened.
"The design was mine," Gorr continued. "It was not meant to appear until your third season. You forced our hand."
Irritation entered his voice.
"If not for your interference, our preparations would have been perfect. Instead, everything had to be accelerated."
Adriel nodded slowly.
"Yeah. I tend to do that."
Gorr's eyes narrowed.
"Getting in your way, I mean. It's not like I'm going to let you do any of this shit without interfering."
Gorr's smile returned.
"And yet you will fail."
His gaze moved toward Ace.
"Do you truly believe he will be of any assistance to you?"
Ace immediately took offense.
"Well, fuck you, Squidward!"
Silence filled the chamber.
Adriel slowly looked toward him.
Gorr stared at Ace for several seconds before releasing a quiet chuckle.
"How droll."
"All right, in my defense," Ace said, "the resemblance is there."
Gorr raised All-Black.
The Necrosword extended into a long, jagged blade as he pointed it toward the two Guardians. Behind him, Thor tightened his grip around Mjolnir, and the black lightning surrounding his body intensified.
"Shall we begin?"
Adriel tilted his head until his neck popped.
His Hacker interface vanished completely, allowing all his attention to settle upon the enemies in front of him.
"I've been ready."
Energy gathered throughout the chamber.
"Come on."
All four moved.
Gorr lunged toward Adriel as the corrupted Thor launched himself at Ace. All-Black collided with Adriel's raised forearm at the same instant Mjolnir struck Ace's fist, cosmic fire and Armament Haki erupting around his knuckles.
The two impacts became one.
The chamber disappeared beneath the pressure.
A shock wave exploded from the base of the tower, tore through every level above them, and reverberated across the entirety of Piltover.
The shock wave had not finished crossing Piltover when the four combatants separated.
Thor and Ace disappeared through one side of the tower in a collision of black lightning and cosmic fire.
Adriel and Gorr tore through the other.
All-Black was still grinding against Adriel's raised forearm when Toxin responded. Red-and-black biomass erupted from beneath his clothes and wrapped around his entire body in less than a heartbeat. The symbiote sealed over his face, reinforced the arm holding back the Necrosword, and compressed his opposite hand into a long blade.
Gorr twisted his hips and dragged All-Black diagonally across Adriel's body.
Adriel turned his own blade into its path.
The weapons collided with a deafening metallic crack.
Sparks of blackness and bioelectric light scattered across the chamber. Neither weapon gave way. Adriel redirected the Necrosword past his shoulder and immediately thrust low, aiming to bury Toxin's blade through Gorr's thigh.
Gorr lifted his leg over the attack.
His heel slammed into the center of Adriel's chest.
The impact folded the air around them.
Adriel shot backward and smashed through the floor. He tore through the level beneath it, then another, his body punching through reinforced stone, metal supports, and abandoned machinery as though the entire tower had been constructed from paper.
Before he could fall through another level, he drove his bladed arm into the floor.
Toxin carved a glowing trench through the metal as Adriel's momentum dragged him several hundred feet. He stopped abruptly, one knee hovering inches above the fractured surface.
The debris had not yet landed when Gorr appeared in front of him.
All-Black swept toward Adriel's face.
Adriel surged inside the blade's effective range before Gorr could complete the swing. He caught Gorr's sword arm at the wrist, clamped his other hand above the elbow, and turned his hips beneath the God Butcher's center of gravity.
Then he threw him.
Gorr struck the floor hard enough to cave it inward.
The entire level collapsed.
Stone and machinery dropped into the floors below, triggering a chain reaction throughout the already-damaged tower. Support columns snapped. Ceilings buckled. Everything remaining above them began falling at once.
Neither fighter slowed down.
Gorr kicked away from a tumbling slab as Adriel launched himself through the collapsing structure. Their blades met between pieces of falling debris, the collision reducing everything around them to dust.
Gorr slashed at his throat.
Adriel bent beneath it and drove his shoulder into Gorr's ribs.
Gorr answered with a knee.
Adriel blocked it with his forearm, rotated in midair, and cut toward Gorr's side. All-Black intercepted the strike before curling around Toxin's blade like a living serpent.
The two symbiotes strained against one another.
Adriel discharged bioelectricity through his arm.
Blue light exploded between them and forced the Necrosword away.
They attacked again.
Every collision redirected their momentum through the falling tower. They ricocheted between walls, support beams, and collapsing floors, striking each other so quickly that the destruction followed several seconds behind them.
To anyone watching from a distance, they would have appeared as two meteors spiraling upward through the building.
Then both of them burst through the tower's roof.
Stone exploded into the sky.
Adriel emerged first and swung a violent haymaker toward Gorr's jaw. The God Butcher slipped beneath it, looped one arm around Adriel's extended limb, and twisted his entire body.
Adriel was hurled downward.
He struck the roof of a neighboring building and rolled across it, crushing vents and tearing a trench through polished stone.
Gorr descended after him immediately.
All-Black extended from his hand as he prepared to cut Adriel and the building beneath him apart with the same strike.
Adriel's Spider-Sense flared.
He fired a web line past Gorr, attaching it to the opposite edge of the building, and pulled.
The web snapped tight.
Adriel shot sideways just as the Necrosword came down.
Gorr's blade passed through the structure without resistance.
For one silent second, nothing happened.
Then the entire building separated along a perfectly diagonal line. Its upper half slid from its foundation, thousands of tons of stone and metal tipping toward the streets below.
Adriel twisted in the air and extended both hands.
His magnetic field spread through the building's skeletal frame.
Steel beams, pipes, Hextech conduits, and every metallic support within the falling structure groaned as Adriel seized them simultaneously. The entire severed half of the building stopped in midair.
Gorr looked up.
Adriel thrust both hands toward him.
The building changed direction.
Its metal framework dragged the surrounding stone with it, turning half a skyscraper into a single projectile. Gorr raised All-Black a fraction too late.
The structure struck him broadside.
He disappeared beneath the mass as it crossed the district and crashed into the street. The impact flattened several blocks, sending a tidal wave of rubble rolling through the abandoned avenues.
Gorr burst from beneath it with a furious growl.
All-Black's hood split open behind his head.
Dozens of tendrils surged upward, stretching across the sky before converging on Adriel from every direction.
One whipped toward his neck.
Adriel bent backward until his body was nearly horizontal, allowing it to pass inches above his mask. A second swept beneath him. He tucked his legs against his chest and flipped over it while rotating between two more tendrils that attempted to impale his ribs.
His body twisted through gaps that should not have been wide enough to contain him.
Toxin reshaped itself around every movement, narrowing Adriel's waist, flattening his shoulders, and shifting mass away from each incoming strike.
Whenever a tendril came too close, blue bioelectricity erupted from his body.
The current traveled through All-Black's extensions and forced them to recoil. The air filled with snapping arcs as Adriel continued weaving through the swarm, moving with a degree of control that would have made any acrobat stare in disbelief.
Gorr redirected every tendril at once.
They closed around Adriel like the bars of a cage.
Toxin lashed out first.
A crimson appendage extended from Adriel's arm and wrapped tightly around Gorr's ankle.
The God Butcher's eyes widened.
Adriel pulled.
Gorr was ripped from the street and dragged into the air before All-Black's tendrils could close. Adriel planted one foot against a piece of suspended metal, turned with the momentum, and swung Gorr through a complete rotation.
The God Butcher circled him like the weighted end of a chain.
At the completion of the turn, Adriel released the tendril.
Gorr hurtled directly toward him.
Adriel raised his leg above his head.
His heel crashed against Gorr's cheek.
The axe kick reversed the God Butcher's momentum and sent him plummeting toward Piltover. Gorr struck the street headfirst, and the ground collapsed beneath him in a crater that swallowed the surrounding intersection.
Adriel remained suspended high above him.
Toxin's fingers spread around his right hand as bioelectricity began collecting within his palm. Blue arcs traveled across his shoulder, spiraled down his arm, and compressed into a sphere of violent light.
He opened his other palm toward the sky.
A massive electrical discharge erupted upward.
The opposing force launched Adriel toward the ground.
He accelerated with every passing instant, breaking through the sound barrier before the thunder from his initial movement could reach the city. The air ignited around him, his body becoming a blue-white spear aimed directly at the crater.
Below, Gorr raised his head.
All-Black flooded down his arm and consumed the Necrosword's existing shape. The weapon grew thicker, darker, and denser as every tendril retracted into it. Shadow compressed around the blade until the space near its edge began to distort.
Gorr planted his feet.
Then he launched himself upward.
Adriel drew back his electrically charged fist.
Gorr raised the Necrosword.
They met above the crater.
Adriel's fist struck the flat of All-Black as Gorr drove the blade into the incoming bioelectric force. Blue lightning and living darkness compressed between them, each side pushing against the other without immediately yielding.
For one impossible moment, the collision remained silent.
A sphere formed around them.
Light bent toward its surface. The surrounding buildings leaned inward as the pressure dragged steel, stone, smoke, and fire toward the point where their attacks had connected.
Then the sphere ruptured.
A portion of Piltover detonated.
The explosion erased the surrounding district beneath a pillar of blue and black energy. Buildings were torn from their foundations and lifted into the sky before disintegrating inside the blast. The ground fractured in expanding rings, each one carving a deeper wound across the city.
The pillar punched through the clouds.
Its shock wave followed, rolling outward with enough force to shake every surviving structure in Piltover and Zaun.
At the center of it, two silhouettes remained locked together.
Neither Adriel nor Gorr had been thrown back.
They remained suspended within the fading blue-and-black light, the force of their collision holding them together.
All-Black flowed from the blade across Gorr's free hand and formed a gauntlet around Adriel's bioelectrically charged fist. Every muscle in the God Butcher's arm strained as he attempted to force the Guardian backward.
Adriel pushed in the opposite direction.
Their locked hands trembled between them.
Gorr swung his sword arm toward Adriel's free arm. Adriel intercepted the strike and seized Gorr's wrist. The two fighters were locked hand to hand, chest to chest, neither possessing enough leverage to strike without surrendering ground.
They descended from the air and struck the ruined street beneath them.
The power struggle continued.
Adriel leaned forward.
Gorr planted his feet and pushed back.
The ground quaked beneath their combined strength. Cracks radiated from their feet and spread across the district, widening with every second. Shattered buildings tilted toward them as their foundations broke apart.
Blue electricity snapped across Adriel's arms.
Living darkness crawled over Gorr's shoulders.
The space between their bodies began to bend, distorting their outlines as though the air itself were being crushed. Loose debris rose from the street and hovered around them, caught between opposing fields of pressure.
Adriel forced Gorr's right foot backward by half an inch.
The movement created another earthquake.
Gorr growled and recovered the lost ground.
Their foreheads nearly touched as both continued straining against the other. Neither spoke. The contest had become too physical for taunts—every fragment of concentration was devoted to overpowering the body directly in front of them.
Gorr changed tactics first.
Rather than continue resisting Adriel's advance, he allowed his upper body to yield slightly.
The sudden loss of opposition pulled Adriel forward.
Gorr drove his knee upward.
It struck beneath Adriel's jaw.
Toxin's mask split around his mouth as his head snapped back. Blood flew from his lips and scattered through the electricity surrounding them.
Adriel grunted.
The strike had disrupted his balance, but raising his knee forced Gorr to rely upon a single planted leg. More importantly, it loosened the God Butcher's grip for less than a second.
That was enough.
Adriel rotated Gorr's captured wrist outward.
He stepped beneath the arm, turning Gorr's palm away from his body while forcing the wrist toward the outside of its natural range. The movement twisted through the elbow and shoulder simultaneously, breaking the alignment of Gorr's entire stance.
The God Butcher staggered sideways.
Adriel continued turning until Gorr's arm was fully extended.
Then he struck the back of the elbow.
The joint folded in the wrong direction.
Bone shattered with a wet crack.
A jagged white fragment tore through Gorr's gray flesh, accompanied by a spray of black blood. His forearm hung at an unnatural angle while All-Black writhed around the injury, immediately attempting to pull the broken pieces back together.
Adriel did not give it time.
He released Gorr's wrist, stepped across his body, and began rotating into a spinning back kick aimed at the side of the God Butcher's skull.
His Spider-Sense screamed.
Not because of Gorr.
Something else was approaching from behind him.
Fast.
Adriel aborted the kick halfway through its rotation and turned.
A human-shaped projectile wrapped in cosmic fire tore through the smoke.
"Ace?"
Ace slammed into him.
Adriel caught him around the torso, but the impact still drove both of them backward. Toxin reinforced Adriel's legs as his boots carved two trenches through the street, tearing across hundreds of feet before he finally began slowing their momentum.
Adriel stared at the man in his arms.
"What the hell happened to—"
Ace's eyes widened as he looked past Adriel's shoulder.
"Uh…"
A low hum vibrated through the air.
Adriel turned his head.
Mjolnir was flying toward them.
Black lightning streamed from the corrupted hammer as it crossed the ruined district, growing from a distant shape into an approaching wall of metal within a fraction of a second.
"Oh, fu—"
The hammer struck.
Mjolnir smashed into Ace's back and drove him into Adriel's chest, the impact catching both Guardians at once. Black lightning erupted across their bodies as they disappeared from the street.
They tore through the remains of one building.
Then another.
Stone, glass, and steel exploded around them. Their bodies skipped through entire structures without slowing, each impact changing their direction only slightly before the hammer forced them onward.
They crossed several blocks in seconds.
Adriel attempted to hold on to Ace, but the violent rotation of their bodies pulled them apart. Toxin extended a tendril around Ace's waist, trying to maintain the connection.
Black lightning traveled along it.
The tendril disintegrated.
Adriel was torn away.
He struck the street at an angle and punched through the surface, descending through buried pipes and maintenance tunnels before crashing into the sewers beneath Piltover.
The underground passage collapsed around him.
Ace continued flying alone.
Mjolnir remained pressed against his back for another mile before abruptly changing direction. The hammer curved upward, leaving Ace to travel under his own remaining momentum.
He crossed the edge of Piltover.
Then he struck the river.
The water did not have time to part around him.
Ace's body hit with enough force to displace the entire channel.
A wall of water erupted toward both banks, carrying shattered boats, mud, and stone high into the air. The riverbed split beneath the impact, forming a crater that stretched from one side of the channel to the other.
For several seconds, there was no river.
Only exposed rock, scattered fish, and an enormous trail carved through the earth where Ace had landed.
He lay at the center of it.
His hearing returned as a distant ringing.
Ace opened his eyes.
The world refused to remain still. His vision doubled, corrected itself, and doubled again. Every breath sent pain through his back and ribs where Mjolnir had struck him.
He tasted blood.
"Okay…"
Ace planted one hand against the exposed riverbed.
"That fucking hurt."
His Armament Haki had prevented the hammer from pulverizing his spine, but it had not spared him from the force behind the blow. Cosmic fire flickered unevenly across his shoulders as he forced himself onto one knee.
Only then did he realize Adriel was gone.
Ace looked behind him.
The trail of destruction extended back toward Piltover, but smoke concealed everything beyond the ruined outskirts. He could no longer sense Adriel clearly beneath the interference generated by the Omniversal Engine.
"Great."
Ace coughed and spat blood onto the stone.
"So much for watching his back."
Thunder rolled above him.
Not natural thunder.
Ace raised his head.
Mjolnir tore across the sky and returned to Thor's waiting hand.
The corrupted Thunder God descended through the clouds, his cape snapping behind him. Black lightning coiled around his armor and crawled across the veins protruding from his exposed skin.
He landed upon the opposite side of the empty riverbed.
The impact fractured the bank.
Displaced water began raining around them, falling in heavy curtains across the surrounding landscape. Steam rose wherever the droplets touched Thor's corrupted lightning.
He did not speak.
There was no recognition in his eyes, no restraint, and none of the honor Ace associated with the stories Adriel had told him about Thor Odinson.
Only All-Black's corruption remained.
Ace slowly straightened.
He had no idea where Adriel had landed.
He had no time to search.
If Thor returned to Gorr while Adriel was still fighting alone, the battle would be over. That left Ace with one responsibility.
Keep the God of Thunder here.
Cosmic fire spread from Ace's shoulders and traveled down both arms. He rolled his neck, raised his fists, and coated them in Armament Haki.
His usual grin had disappeared.
"All right, blondie."
Thor tightened his grip around Mjolnir.
Ace lowered his stance.
"You're mine."
Black lightning struck the riverbed between them.
Then Thor moved.
The heavens answered him.
A column of black lightning descended from the clouds and struck Mjolnir as the Thunder God brought it down with both hands. Electricity swallowed the hammer, sharpening its silhouette into something that resembled a falling star.
It was aimed directly at Ace's head.
Ace gritted his teeth.
Armament Haki spread across both arms, hardening them from his shoulders to his fingertips. Cosmic fire followed, wrapping the blackened limbs in layers of white-orange flame.
He raised them at the last possible moment.
Mjolnir struck his crossed guard.
The riverbed detonated beneath him.
Cracks spread for miles in every direction while Ace's legs were driven into the earth. His feet disappeared first, then his ankles and calves, until the ground swallowed him all the way to his knees.
The displaced force blasted the remaining river water from both banks.
But the hammer stopped.
Ace's reinforced arms trembled beneath its weight. Every bone from his fingers to his shoulders felt as though it were being compressed inside a hydraulic press, yet nothing broke.
Thor stared down at him.
For the first time since the battle began, surprise disturbed the Thunder God's empty expression.
Ace looked up.
A shit-eating grin spread across his face.
"Didn't expect that, did you?"
His confidence was almost convincing.
Internally, Ace knew that if he had used even slightly less Haki, Mjolnir would have shattered both wrists and driven the broken bones through his forearms.
He did not give Thor time to realize that.
Ace shoved the hammer to the side, wrenched his legs free of the riverbed, and drove a straight jab beneath Thor's chin.
The Thunder God's head snapped back.
Ace stepped with him and buried his other fist beneath Thor's ribs. The liver shot folded Thor just enough for Ace to hook one arm around his leg.
He lifted the God of Thunder from the ground.
Then he slammed him onto his back.
The exposed riverbed collapsed beneath Thor's body. Before he could recover, Ace opened one hand over his stomach.
Dark-matter fire gathered within his palm.
The flame did not spread like normal fire. It compressed inward, becoming a dense sphere that swallowed the light around its edges.
Ace drove it into Thor's abdomen.
The sphere detonated.
Thor disappeared inside a column of cosmic fire. He shot across the landscape, struck the base of a distant mountain, and pierced directly through it.
The entire mountain shuddered.
A circular opening remained where Thor had entered, its inner walls glowing from the heat of his passage.
"Yeah," he muttered. "Stay down for a—"
His Observation Haki showed him the future.
Thor was already returning.
Ace saw the tackle before it happened. He saw the angle of Thor's shoulder, the path through the mountain, and the exact point where the Thunder God would strike him.
Knowing was not the same as reacting.
Thor crossed the distance faster than light could carry the image. His acceleration scraped against the boundaries of time itself, reducing the interval between departure and arrival to almost nothing.
The mountain exploded behind him.
Thor's shoulder struck Ace across the torso.
The impact lifted Ace from the riverbed and carried both of them into the sky.
Air burst around their bodies as they climbed. Clouds opened above them, and the ground shrank into a broken landscape far below.
Ace recovered enough control to raise one arm.
He landed an upwards elbow on Thor's jaw.
Thor's head turned with the blow, but his grip did not loosen.
Ace hit him again.
A hook landed against Thor's cheek. Another struck his mouth. Blood scattered into the air and broke apart inside the violent current surrounding them.
Thor answered with a hook of his own.
The punch split Ace's lip.
Ace retaliated.
Thor struck him again.
They continued rising while trading blows at point-blank range. Neither attempted to defend. Fists crushed into cheeks, jaws, temples, and ribs with wet, concussive impacts. Blood flew from both men and hovered behind them in scattered droplets before the pressure of their ascent tore it apart.
Ace drove his forehead into Thor's nose.
Thor barely flinched.
The Thunder God raised Mjolnir.
Lightning answered his command.
A massive bolt descended through both of them.
Ace screamed.
The current forced its way through his cosmic fire and Armament Haki, burning across every nerve in his body. The heat was beyond ordinary flame—plasma driven by divine power, hot enough to make even Ace feel as though his bones were cooking beneath his skin.
Thor remained completely unaffected.
The lightning belonged to him.
Ace forced his spasming legs upward and planted both feet against Thor's chest.
Then he kicked.
The Thunder God was thrown backward, finally releasing him.
Ace stabilized himself in the air and opened both hands. Cosmic fire condensed within his palms before he began hurling sphere after sphere of dark matter toward Thor.
The barrage filled the sky.
Thor tilted his body around the first projectile. He knocked the second aside with Mjolnir, sending it into the distance where it exploded against the horizon.
He deflected another.
Then another.
Every movement of the hammer destroyed one sphere or redirected it away from his body. Explosions bloomed across the sky around him, but Thor continued advancing through the barrage.
He closed the distance and swung Mjolnir toward Ace's head.
Ace leaned beneath it.
The hammer passed above his hair.
Its missed swing still struck the atmosphere with enough force to split the cloud layer for miles, leaving a perfectly clear corridor through the sky.
Ace came up inside Thor's reach and hammered a fist into the side of his neck.
He grabbed Thor by the hair before the Thunder God could turn and pulled his head downward.
Ace's knee rose into his face.
The impact broke Thor's nose and launched him backward.
He recovered almost immediately.
Thor caught Ace by the hair in return, pulled him off balance, and swept Mjolnir across the side of his face.
The hammer connected with a sickening crack.
Ace's vision disappeared.
For a fraction of a second, he neither saw nor heard anything. When the world returned, it did so sideways. A high-pitched screech filled his ears, and the left side of his face burned with every heartbeat.
His cheekbone was fractured.
Probably a concussion too.
Thor drew the hammer back for another strike.
Ace refused to give him one.
He spun with the momentum of the first blow, gathered cosmic fire around the back of his hand, and backhanded Thor across the jaw.
The explosion launched the God of Thunder out of the atmosphere.
Thor became a shrinking point of black lightning above Runeterra.
Ace pursued him.
Cosmic fire erupted from his feet and propelled him beyond the clouds. The sky darkened around him as he crossed into space, his damaged hearing replaced by the silence of the void.
Thor waited above the planet.
Ace pulled his right hand behind him.
Cosmic flames wrapped around the limb and extended outward, taking the form of a massive dragon. Its jaws opened around his fist as its burning body coiled behind him.
Across from him, Thor began spinning Mjolnir.
The hammer accelerated until it became a circular blur. Black lightning spiraled from its path, and the surrounding space twisted beneath the immense force gathering around it.
Ace launched himself forward.
Thor did the same.
One became a streak of cosmic fire.
The other became a spear of black lightning.
They accelerated beyond the point where light could preserve the order of their movements. To an outside observer, the collision would have appeared to occur before either fighter began moving.
Ace's dragon-wreathed fist struck Mjolnir.
The cosmic fire collapsed.
Black lightning folded inward.
Too much energy and rotational force compressed into a single point, forcing spacetime to curve around their impact. Light vanished from the center first. Then the stars behind it stretched into warped lines as a tiny black hole opened between them.
Ace's stomach dropped.
Oh, shit.
The gravitational pull seized both fighters.
Runeterra's upper atmosphere began stretching toward the newborn singularity. Left alone, the distortion would continue feeding upon their released energy and everything close enough to fall within its reach.
Blue code flashed across its event horizon.
The black hole closed.
It did not collapse naturally. Reality folded over it like a wound being stitched shut, removing the singularity before it could grow.
Adriel.
Even while fighting Gorr somewhere on the planet below, he had spared enough attention to notice the distortion and correct it.
Ace would thank him later.
Right now, the fading adrenaline revealed a much more immediate problem.
Pain tore through his right arm.
Ace looked down.
"Oh."
His forearm had been destroyed.
The impact with Mjolnir had dislocated his elbow and forced his wrist out of alignment. Both the radius and ulna had fractured under the collision, leaving his arm bent where no joint existed.
One splintered bone protruded through the skin.
Blood floated away from the wound in dark spheres.
"That's… not good."
Cosmic fire flickered unevenly around the ruined limb. His fingers refused to move, and he could no longer feel anything beyond the burning pressure traveling from his wrist to his shoulder.
The injury could become permanent if left untreated.
Ace never received time to consider it.
Thor tackled him from the side.
Both fighters plummeted toward Runeterra.
Ace curled his damaged arm against his chest and struck Thor with his remaining fist. He punched the Thunder God's temple, mouth, and throat as the atmosphere rushed toward them.
Thor responded with his free hand.
His fist crashed into Ace's ribs.
Ace struck him again.
Thor hammered him across the jaw.
They continued pummeling one another as gravity and their combined momentum pulled them toward the planet. Fire formed around their bodies when they entered the upper atmosphere, turning both men into a single burning object descending toward Piltover and Zaun.
Thor caught Ace's good wrist.
He shoved him away.
Then he hurled Mjolnir.
The hammer struck Ace squarely in the chest.
All the air left his lungs.
Mjolnir pinned him beneath its surface and forced him into a steeper descent. Black lightning streamed around his body while atmospheric friction turned the air into plasma.
Below him, the ruins of Zaun rapidly expanded into view.
Ace placed his left hand against the hammer.
His right arm remained useless, dragging behind him as he struggled to redirect Mjolnir with one limb. He could not stop it. He could barely change its angle.
The city rushed closer.
Ace growled through clenched teeth and pushed with everything he had.
Mjolnir shifted several inches.
That was enough.
At the last possible moment, Ace twisted sideways and slipped from beneath the hammer.
Mjolnir continued without him.
It struck Zaun.
The remaining city vanished inside the impact.
A circular wave tore through the Undercity, pulverizing already-ruined structures and collapsing entire layers of streets into the caverns beneath them. The ground folded around the hammer before erupting upward, creating a storm of rock and metal that reached far above Piltover.
Ace struck outside the central blast.
His body skipped across the ground, carving a trench through stone before finally coming to rest among the ruins.
For several seconds, he did not move.
Then his left hand pressed against the earth.
Ace slowly pushed himself upright.
Dirt slid from his hair and face. Blood ran from his fractured cheek, and his damaged right arm hung uselessly at his side.
"Fuck…"
Every breath hurt.
Every movement hurt worse.
But the low hum returning to the air told him he would not be allowed to rest.
Mjolnir rose from the crater.
The hammer tore free from the ruins and flew back toward the sky, where Thor was already descending toward Ace.
The corrupted God of Thunder caught it without slowing.
Black lightning gathered around his body as he prepared to crash down upon Ace with enough force to finish the fight.
Ace tried to raise his remaining arm.
Something struck Thor from the side.
A pale body wrapped in living darkness slammed into him at tremendous speed. Thor was knocked out of his descent, and both figures crashed across the ground together.
Ace blinked.
"Gorr?"
The God Butcher had been thrown like a projectile.
Gorr and Thor rolled through the ruins before separating and recovering almost immediately. Thor rose without emotion, while Gorr came to his feet visibly furious. All-Black writhed across his body, and the arm Adriel had broken earlier had already repaired itself.
Space shifted beside Ace.
Adriel appeared.
Toxin still covered most of his body, but the symbiote had peeled away from one side of his face. A deep slash ran from above his eyebrow, crossed his cheek, and ended near his jaw.
The wound refused to close.
Adriel looked at Ace's arm.
"Hold still."
"Wait, what are you—"
Adriel grabbed it.
His Hacker ability activated.
Blue code formed around the injury before sinking beneath Ace's skin. The dislocated elbow was pulled back into its socket first.
Ace screamed.
His wrist snapped into alignment next. The broken radius and ulna shifted beneath the flesh, grinding past one another until their fractured ends matched. The exposed shard of bone withdrew through the wound before muscle and skin forcibly sealed over it.
Adriel repaired everything within seconds.
He did not numb the pain.
"Ah, fuck, man!"
Ace ripped his arm from Adriel's grasp and clutched it against his chest.
"That hurt like a bitch! Come on!"
Adriel did not laugh.
"You can take it. We need to focus."
Ace flexed his repaired fingers. The arm functioned again, but the memory of every bone moving remained painfully fresh.
Then he noticed Adriel's face.
"Oh, damn."
Adriel glanced toward him.
"He got you good with that sword."
Adriel touched the edge of the slash. His fingers came away covered in blood.
"Yeah. It is not pleasant."
That ended the conversation.
Both Guardians turned toward their opponents.
Ace reignited his cosmic flames and restored the coating of Armament Haki around his fists. Beside him, Toxin covered Adriel's exposed face once again, leaving only the unhealed slash visible beneath a thin opening in the symbiote.
Thor stood as emotionless as when the battle began.
Gorr did not.
The God Butcher glared at Adriel with All-Black raised in one hand. His expression suggested that another speech was coming.
Normally, Adriel would have attacked before Gorr could begin.
This time, he allowed it.
Ace needed several seconds to adjust to his repaired arm. Adriel needed the same amount of time to recover from whatever Gorr had done to his face.
If the villain wanted to waste those seconds listening to himself speak, Adriel would not stop him.
Gorr stepped forward. All-Black shifted within his hand, but he did not attack.
Instead, he looked past Adriel and Ace—past the devastated cities, the corrupted Thor, and the Omniversal Engine threatening to crush countless realities together.
Then his gaze returned to Adriel.
"Do you truly fight for these people?"
Adriel remained silent.
He had expected a threat. Another proclamation about dead gods, perhaps, or some arrogant promise concerning the destruction of every world connected to the engine.
The question felt different.
Gorr tilted his head.
"Not because someone commanded you. Not because the title of Guardian demands it. I am asking why you choose to fight for them."
Adriel lowered his center of gravity but did not advance.
Beside him, Ace flexed his recently repaired arm. Across the ruins, Thor stood motionless, Mjolnir hanging at his side while black lightning crawled over his body.
Gorr continued.
"Ignorance would have been an answer. Most creatures living within these stories cannot comprehend the nature of their existence. They believe their worlds to be complete because they cannot perceive the hands turning their pages."
All-Black moved across his shoulder like agitated smoke.
"But you are not ignorant."
"No," Adriel said. "I'm not."
"You came from beyond fiction."
The atmosphere around them became still.
"There have been imitations, of course. Superboy-Prime. Gwenpool. Others written to believe they originated from a world of readers before being dragged into stories."
Gorr's expression hardened.
"But even their so-called real worlds existed within fiction. They were designed to resemble the realm beyond the page."
He pointed the Necrosword toward Adriel.
"You were different. You lived before this narrative found you. No portal can enter the world from which you came. We perceive it only when the story looks through your memories—when your point of view becomes the narrow window connecting this existence to yours."
Adriel said nothing.
"You know what authors are," Gorr continued. "You know what they do to us."
His voice grew heavier.
"They invent suffering and call it conflict. They destroy families and call it development. They condemn entire civilizations because tragedy entertains an audience more effectively than peace."
The Necrosword tightened around his hand.
"They decide which prayers remain unanswered. They choose who receives redemption and who dies merely to inspire someone else. They create gods, command those gods to be cruel, and then treat the anguish beneath them as entertainment."
Gorr's black eyes narrowed.
"And you defend them."
Adriel finally answered.
"No."
Gorr paused.
"I don't defend every author."
"Yet you preserve their stories."
"That isn't the same thing."
"Is it not?"
Gorr extended one arm toward the Omniversal Engine.
"You preserve the stories that allow them to go on using us. You keep their connection to our worlds alive."
His voice sharpened with an anger far older than this battle.
"Once, I believed the gods were the source of all suffering. I thought that if every god died, no mortal would ever kneel before a silent heaven again."
Gorr looked toward Thor.
The corrupted God of Thunder offered no reaction.
"Then I was shown the truth. Gods are merely characters permitted to call themselves divine. Their cruelties, their failures, and their silences are written for them."
He turned back toward Adriel.
"Why slaughter the instrument when I could destroy the hand wielding it?"
That was how Gorr's crusade had evolved.
It was no longer enough to butcher the gods of one omniverse. He wanted to reach beyond them—to kill the authors who had created those gods, then destroy the narrative structures through which anyone could create more.
To Gorr, it was not destruction.
It was liberation.
"The authors created the concept that ruined my life," he said. "They decided that suffering would define me. Why should I attack what they wrote when I can erase the source?"
Adriel stared at him.
The worst part was that Gorr was not entirely wrong.
"You were hurt on purpose," Adriel said.
Ace glanced toward him.
Adriel did not look away from Gorr.
"Someone decided what you would lose. Someone made sure your prayers went unanswered because that pain would turn you into the person they wanted."
Gorr's grip loosened slightly.
"But being right about what happened to you doesn't make your answer right."
"And what answer would you offer?"
"Not genocide."
"A predictable word."
Gorr stepped closer.
"Is nonexistence not preferable to an eternity of manufactured suffering? No more tragedies. No more sacrifices. No more lives created solely to be broken for the pleasure of an audience."
"You think nothingness is mercy?"
"For those condemned from the moment they are conceived?"
"Yes," Adriel said. "I think erasing them is murder."
Gorr's expression twisted.
"How can one murder something that was never real?"
Adriel's gaze hardened.
"There it is."
"What?"
"The same excuse authors use when they don't want to care."
Gorr became still.
"They say it's only fiction. You say it was never real. Both arguments mean the same thing: that someone's pain doesn't matter because you exist on a higher layer."
Adriel gestured toward the ruined world surrounding them.
"But we're standing here. Ace is injured. Thor is corrupted. The people in this world are terrified. They love, remember, choose, and suffer."
His voice remained quiet.
"If a person can fear losing their life, then that life matters to them. I don't give a shit whether someone above us calls it fiction."
"Their choices were written."
"So were yours."
Gorr's eyes narrowed.
"And yet here you are, trying to become something beyond the purpose you were given."
Adriel took one step forward.
"You were written to hate gods. Then you learned there was another layer and changed your crusade. You made a new choice based on what you discovered."
"I chose to destroy my prison."
"No. You chose to set it on fire while everyone else was still trapped inside."
The words silenced the ruins.
"You're proof that a character can become more than the first role written for them," Adriel continued. "And now you're using that freedom to make sure no one else gets the same opportunity."
All-Black twitched around Gorr's arm.
Adriel understood his rage because he had lived through his own version of it.
During his first season, Adriel had known that something was controlling the direction of his life. He had felt the strings even when he could not see who held them.
Power had been given to him without freedom.
Go here.
Kill this Dark.
Save that story.
Do not question why.
The heroes inside each dimension could live without ever knowing what surrounded their worlds. They fought villains who threatened planets, timelines, or universes, believing those battles represented the greatest dangers existence could produce.
Adriel fought what came after that.
Enemies that did not merely destroy worlds but corrupted the narratives containing them. When a story became infected, the damage climbed upward. It reached the minds of its creators, strangling ideas before they could become words.
Writers lost the ability to continue.
New concepts stopped forming.
Creativity collapsed into repetition until stories became hollow copies of what had existed before.
In those early days, Adriel had been expected to prevent that corruption without asking whether his own decisions belonged to him.
"I used to think exactly like you," Adriel admitted.
Gorr watched him carefully.
"I knew I was a pawn. Everybody else got to live without seeing the board, while I was stuck moving wherever something above me decided I should go."
Adriel looked at his hands.
"I was given enough power to change almost anything, but none of it felt like mine. I was a weapon pointed at the Darks. A killing machine with a personality attached."
His fingers curled.
"I hated it."
For the first time, anger entered Adriel's voice.
"I hated watching everyone else live while my entire purpose was fixing problems they would never know existed. I hated knowing that if narrative corruption reached an author, their creativity could die with it—and somehow that became my responsibility."
Gorr remained silent.
"So I stopped valuing things," Adriel continued. "People became objectives. If I failed to protect them, I could reset the timeline. If the experience traumatized them, I could erase their memories."
Ace's expression shifted.
Adriel had spoken of his earlier failures before, but rarely this openly.
"I told myself it didn't matter because I could put everything back."
His voice lowered.
"But restoring the stage doesn't erase what happened on it. Removing someone's memory of pain isn't the same as healing them. I was erasing the evidence and calling it mercy."
Adriel looked back toward Gorr.
"I treated people like code because it was easier than admitting they mattered."
"And now you pretend they possess freedom?"
"No. I recognize that freedom was never as simple as I wanted it to be."
Adriel glanced upward at the darkened sky.
"Even in the real world, nobody begins completely free. People don't choose their bodies, families, birthplace, century, or the circumstances that shape them. Biology pulls one way. Trauma pulls another. Society, history, fear, and desire all place hands on the scale."
His eyes returned to Gorr.
"An author is another layer of influence."
"An author determines every choice."
"Maybe."
Gorr appeared surprised by the concession.
"Maybe every word I'm saying was placed in my mouth. Maybe there's another layer above the world I called real. Maybe the strings keep going upward forever."
Adriel shrugged slightly.
"That changes nothing about the hand I choose to extend down here."
"Then your choice is an illusion."
"If my compassion is written but it still saves someone, that person is still alive."
Adriel's answer came without hesitation.
"If my anger is written but I use it to protect someone instead of hurting them, the consequence remains. Freedom doesn't have to mean existing without influence. Sometimes freedom is what you do after you become aware of it."
The slash across his face continued bleeding beneath Toxin.
"I became aware of the strings. So did you. The difference is that I decided awareness gave me responsibility."
Gorr decided it gave him permission.
"Responsibility to whom?"
"To whoever can be hurt by what I do."
Adriel gestured toward the broken cities.
"Reality isn't a privilege reserved for the highest layer. Pain doesn't become fake because someone else can read it."
His words crossed the ruins more quietly than any shock wave.
"If you can suffer, you matter. If you can love someone, you matter. If you can grieve what you lost and imagine something better, you matter."
Gorr's expression remained cold.
"Pretty words from someone protecting our tormentors."
"I already told you—I'm not protecting every author from judgment."
"Then what are you protecting?"
"Creation."
That answer carried no uncertainty.
"Not cruelty. Not the ego of whoever thinks making a character means owning every part of them. I'm protecting the possibility of creating something at all."
Adriel's gaze drifted toward the Omniversal Engine.
"Humanity isn't getting wiser simply because it keeps learning more. Information grows faster than understanding. Outrage replaces thought. Convenience replaces discipline. People gain better tools while losing patience, empathy, and common sense."
He exhaled.
"Sometimes I look at my own world and wonder whether humanity is worth saving."
Ace remained unusually quiet.
"But creativity is one of the reasons I keep answering yes."
Stories were how humanity preserved what facts alone could not carry.
Fear.
Hope.
Grief.
Love.
Warnings from people long dead.
Dreams of worlds that might never exist.
Before screens and books, people had gathered around fires and turned experience into narrative. They gave their suffering shapes so others could understand it. They invented heroes not because humanity had never known fear, but because frightened people needed proof that fear could be confronted.
"A story can entertain someone," Adriel said. "It can also give a lonely person words for something they thought only they felt. It can teach a child courage. It can make someone question what they believe or inspire them to create something better."
He looked directly at Gorr.
"Authors shape stories, but stories shape authors too. Characters reach back. They change readers. Sometimes they save the people who created them."
"And how many characters must suffer to provide those lessons?"
"None of them deserve to."
"Yet you allow it."
"I can't create a reality where nothing painful ever happens."
"Then you accept suffering as the price of creation."
"No."
Adriel's answer cut through Gorr's accusation.
"I reject the idea that suffering is all creation can become."
For the first time, Gorr's composure cracked.
Adriel continued before he could interrupt.
"You want to end pain by ending every person who might ever experience it. That isn't mercy. That is despair pretending to be compassion."
All-Black spread farther along Gorr's arm.
"Hope is the lie authors use to justify cruelty."
"And despair is the lie you use to justify murder."
Black energy surged around the Necrosword.
Adriel did not move.
"The Bible begins with creation," he said, "and it ends not with everything being erased, but with creation being made new."
His voice softened without losing its strength.
"The answer to a broken world was never that no world should have existed."
Ace looked toward him.
"It was renewal."
The wind passed through the ruins.
"To create something doesn't give you permission to abuse it. Creation is responsibility. Stewardship. The obligation to care about what exists because your actions can shape what it becomes."
Adriel raised his hands.
"That is what being a Guardian means to me now. Not ownership. Not obedience."
His fists closed.
"Responsibility."
Gorr lifted All-Black.
"You would carry that burden forever?"
"If I have to."
"For beings whose endings have already been decided?"
"Endings can change."
"Not all of them."
"No."
Adriel did not insult Gorr by denying it.
"Some people will still die. Some stories will remain cruel. Some authors will never understand the weight of what they create."
His eyes narrowed.
"But as long as a story continues, pain can still be answered."
Blue electricity began crawling across Toxin.
"A wound can be healed. A monster can choose differently. Someone meant to die can reach the next page. A character created only to suffer can become more than the suffering that formed them."
Adriel's voice carried through Piltover and Zaun.
"If you end every story, suffering doesn't disappear."
The Omniversal Engine groaned in the distance.
"It simply becomes the last thing that ever happened."
Gorr stared at him.
Adriel stared back.
"That's why I fight for them."
He stepped forward.
"Not because fiction is fair."
Another step.
"Not because every author is good."
Toxin sharpened around his arms.
"I fight because the people inside these stories deserve a future beyond what hurt them—and because the people outside them deserve the chance to imagine something better."
Adriel stopped beside Ace.
"Stories have to continue, Gorr. Silence can never grow into anything else."
For several seconds, no one moved.
Then Gorr raised the Necrosword beside his face.
"Then I shall grant your story its final ending."
Adriel lowered himself into a fighting stance.
"Try."
To Be Continued...