Luca DR

Edge 168

168 – Unending

The reunion with his family had been bittersweet. No matter what, some differences took time to come to terms with. Albert was not the same person he was when he left the present, he had grown and aged together with his team and his significant other. That had not been easy, the gap between himself and his family like a chasm. It didn’t help that he was powerful enough to do whatever he wanted.

No matter how much she had changed, Samantha Cromwell was still us...

Edge 167

167 – Epilogue III

This time, the place they arrived in was the right version of Temalas city. Or at least it looked like it. The ‘smell’ of the air – which was an intuitive way Albert used to indicate the quantum signature of the reality he was in – seemed right. Besides,

I have internet access. Date is… three days before you got the system for the first time.

Good. Let’s set everything up.

It was time to relay the plan to the...

Edge 166

166 – Epilogue II

Albert stepped through the portal. Portal travel was not always the same, and the experience was hardly uniform across the many ways it could happen. Even with this in mind, he could not help but be surprised when he stepped into the portal… only to suddenly find himself on the other side. Without a delay. Without fanfare.

Glancing behind himself, he saw the rest of his team appear out of thin air just like he did, wearing clothes that matched the fashion o...

Edge 165

165 – Epilogue I

Time passed. The city around them crumbled to dust. War, battles, the incessant erosion of existence itself. It all took a toll.

After the first few months, all that could be seen when looking out and through the shimmering shield around Sitea was a wall of solid red light. The world had died, consumed by Doom energy. The Alignment was being held back, first by the power of whatever machine had forestalled its advent for millennia inside Sitea and then, when t...

Edge 164

164 – Power gap

“Stay here,” Albert said, after deploying a shield to make sure his allies couldn’t be detected. “I need to see how strong those things are.”

“You are not going to fight them alone, are you?” Elle said a little bit more forcefully than Albert expected.

“Yeah,” Lina echoed her, “don’t take unnecessary risks. I didn’t abandon my old life just for you to die on me here.”

Seeing that even Scrappy was nodding along, Albert’s e...

Edge 163

163 – Sitea

Portal travel was… jarring. Most of the discomfort came from having to punch through what – to most people – amounted to an impenetrable defense: Sitea’s shield. Fortunately for them, Albert was not most people, and he made short work of the defensive dome of energy. Not to say he destroyed it, he simply circumvented it.

“Ah, finally, Sitea.” Said Albert. He had been the first to arrive. “Love to see yet another concrete wall. Nothing better than bein...

Edge 162

162 – Moving in and on

They kissed and kissed and kissed. It was long, and passionate, and full of emotion. There was a well of emotions behind it, pent-up desire on one side and reciprocation on the other, and in moments it went from platonic to desperate, revealing a need that both of them struggled to contain. They were in public, and for a moment the thought crossed Albert’s mind that he should rein it in, contain himself. But they were both powerful, and neither cared about w...

Edge 161

161 – Reunion

The village had changed in the thousands of years since Albert had last seen it. Now it was more like a sprawling metropolis, with no trace of the squat buildings that even in Albert’s time were already remnants from the past. Instead it had grown organically around a singular point of origin, spreading radially from where the imposing base of the Iperborea tree was so thick it was almost impossible to see it as a round object anymore. As if growing in tandem with th...

Edge 160

160 – Elven blood

“Sir Albert?” Scrappy said after they were done eating. “What happened to you? Why are you so different now? I can see that you are trying to be normal, that I do, but you are changed.”

Albert inhaled loudly, turning to stare up at the far away stars. Here, in his soulspace where everything was possible, he wondered if their existence was as real as that of those in the world outside. Yes, he concluded, just as the people he brought in with him were r...

Edge 159

159 – Power up

Just as the world began moving for the first time after so long, Albert made it so that it suddenly stopped yet again. But this time it was only the world that had stopped, not him. He was free to move. His eyes moved first, scanning the room even though he knew it down to the last molecule.

Then he gently slid off the weapons piercing his flesh. He felt the tip of the spear dislodge itself from his back, the sword slide out of his shoulder, and the claws tear o...

Edge 158

158 – Frozen time

Time stretched on. The attacks converging on Albert hung frozen in the air, mere meters away from him. He stood still, suspended in the liminal space between instants stretched into eternity by means of dilated time, an effect made possible by compounding two facets of reality bending together. The first was the ability to manipulate the flow of time itself, making so he could experience far more time in his reference frame than the rest of the room around him. The...

Edge 157

157 – Help II

“Help!”

A high-pitched whine filled the room, like the cry of a mother who had lost her child, a wail so loud as to be deafening. Albert’s heart thumped as his mind filled with panic and worry. He looked around, lost, eyes swivelling here and there but seeing nothing but darkness and shadows. The light from his sword was caustic and yellow. He could tell that something was moving, a rhythmic breathing and the snap of something like a dangling cable, but he ...

Edge 156

156 – Help

Albert grinned as he pulled a fat block of C4 from his inventory. Truth be told, he did not have nearly enough of it stored to blow up the room and make sure that whatever hid under the water was truly dead, but converting some of the energy contained in a nuclear weapon into more lower-yield explosive was quite trivial. Especially when one had mana and Doom cores to fuel the transformation.

In fact, the resulting C4 was much more potent than the real thing, which w...

Edge 155

155 – First rule of warfare

Albert perked up. “Oh, oh oh oh! This Alignment Bio-Lab do be hiding all sorts of goodies!”

He didn’t realize that he was speaking quite loudly until Scrappy got up and joined him. Albert felt bad like that time he had woken up his cat, and seeing the girl stretch and yawn only strengthened the image in his mind.

“Sorry, did I wake you?” He asked apologetically, although he had to suppress a chuckle at how similar she looked to a cat...

Edge 154

154 – Gore

Albert stared at the sign painted on the concrete wall. The letters were quite well-preserved, which went against what he believed would have happened after so much time had passed. It didn’t matter much, but his brain seemed to fixate on the tiny detail for longer than it actually was.

ßALIGNMENT BIO-RESEARCH FACILITY

COMMAND CENTER – ELEVATOR à

Jeff, where to?

The AI initiated a scan. Behind, the rest of Albert’s team were growin...

Edge 153

153 – Break-in

“Interesting,” Albert said, stopping for a moment to look around. He licked a finger and measured the air. “I am reading a faint electrical energy signature hidden by all the other mess. I wonder how any generator could have survived all these years.”

Trailing behind him were Lina and Scrappy. Despite both of them being fairly high into B-rank thanks to their powers, they were struggling to keep up with him. What from a distance had looked like a large, ...

Edge 152

152 – Scent of portals

Morning was a slower affair than Albert would have liked. He was hyped up after having found one of the core fragments last night, but the same couldn’t be said for the girls. Scrappy was being rebellious just for the sake of it, at least Albert hoped it was the case, and Lina was shell-shocked.

After a while spent eating breakfast in silence, right when Albert was about to think of something to break the ice a little bit, she started asking questions....

Edge 151

151 – Four-way split

“Alright. Just a few more moments in the shadows, Scrappy, then you can come out okay?”

A muffled hum came from a space beyond the material realm.

Albert surveyed the terrain while he finished preparing and laying out the items for the ritual in a small ellipse around him. The two axes of the ellipse were made of diamond dust, while at the vertices he placed modern-day sensors, gunpowder and ammunition taken from his inventory. He could open it e...

Edge 150

150 – Dead mage

“We are quite lucky, girls.” Albert said after gathering the trio back together. “There is one survivor, and they look badly wounded. Looks like interrogation time!”

Lina’s blood grew cold. Who could ever survive such power? How? How could she hope to defeat them, even if they were wounded?

Then she looked at Albert, who was fresh as a rose, sporting two dozen more weapons such as the one he just used. Weapons that she knew he could use with a s...

Edge 149

149 – Nuclear weaponry

Three figures sneaked across the open field under the cover of night. Two of them were cloaked to appear completely invisible in the dark, the light itself bending as to not touch them in the slightest. To anyone who could see it, which only amounted to one person and one AI in the whole universe, they would appear surrounded by a shimmering field of force that reacted to every photon that passed in the general area and gently redirected it.

The third fi...

Edge 148

148 – Catching up

As they made their way towards the source of the magical signature Albert was able to feel, the group began to come across the first signs of activity. It was only the last few stragglers at first, the slowest of the zombies who had been damaged too badly by the battle to be able to keep pace with the rest of the group, even in their frenzied state.

As the hours passed, more and more groups of zombies became visible. The team kept a good distance from them, b...

Edge 147

147 – Following scents

Albert was outside the hedge camp. It was time to move out, but before dismantling everything he needed to find a lead towards the energies he presumed were the originating from the Kirkesis core.

“Two approaches to power,” he mused in the meantime, knowing that only Jeff could hear him here. “Lina, who I made overpowered from the start. Her abilities are not supposed to be fair or balanced at all, and I’m pretty sure we will get to see some nice...

Edge 146

146 – Ritual

With the important talks out of the way, it was finally time to proceed with giving Lina back some semblance of power. It didn’t sit well with Albert to see her so diminished, and even though she was hiding her emotions on the matter it was evident that she was very uncomfortable.

“Lina, it’s your turn.” He said without preamble. For a moment the woman in question looked like a deer caught in the headlights, a confused-frightened expression on her face. 2023-11-27 17:21:37 +0000 UTC View Post

Edge 145

145 – Talks

“…I might.” The girl said in a small voice. “But I would like to have some more time to think about it, Sir. That I do.”

Albert smiled. “Oh? And why would that be? Are you on the cusp of something?”

“It’s strange. Hard to explain… that it is…” she trailed off. Her eyes looked lost in the distance for a moment before refocusing. “But I do feel like I am. Like I might unlock something if I delve deep enough in the magic.”

Alber...

Edge 144

144 – Night stalking

It was on the way back from hunting, sporting a decent collection of cores in his pocket both for his own consumption as well as for the girls, that Jeff gave Albert an update.

Albert. I have an update on the concentration of Doom energy. According to the readings, we are approaching 5% concentration, and the rate at which it increases is growing. I devised a new prediction model.

“How long do we have before the place becomes uninh...

Edge 143

143 – Inventory access

Albert concentrated. Okay Jeff, pulling plates and cutlery out of my inventory was all fun and games, but how about something useful. How about a gun? I really miss handling a gun after so long.

I don’t know, Albert. Jeff’s voice, if someone could call reading text that was loaded with intent and emotion a voice, was getting more and more butlery by the day. By all means, even simple cutlery should have been impossib...