The Power of Ten Book Four: Dynamo

A Shout-out to MH Johnson's Book, Battleforged: The Billion Dollar Heist. The author reached out to me asking for an exchange, and I have read up through Chapter 11. I like it, and it's going on my Favorites. There's some grammar errors that can be remedied, but so far the system and leveling are to my tastes.

If you like leveling stories where the protagonist does NOT know the system, this is a nice story. The beginning reminds me of my Ebook The First Day with how stuff comes crashing down, although the orcs and stuff are there a lot faster...

Link! https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/53366/battleforged-book-1-the-billion-credit-heist-an/chapter/1018585/chapter-1-killer-rats-are-the-least-of-our-problems?source=campaign&campaign=08daf837-1cc9-4ea7-8e41-f84dc932eff5

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There were over four dozen high Epsilons at Primus and Superman’s level in the room with me now, and most of them just closed their eyes in pain. The powerful mystics, like Dr. Strange, Zatanna, and Dr. Fate, could naturally sense it all as it happened, little twitches that made us all depressed as they merged together into the background now.

Nobody wanted to crash a planet and destroy the realities. Likewise, no one wanted the planets to lead to another Reality Incursion and keep the process rolling along faster.

On the other hand, even if they took action, all it did was buy a little more time, as the Incursions were going to happen regardless, and saving a dimension now just meant it was going to be hit with another Incursion not too far in the future.

“Make the list public. Morgan or Ursula can send volunteers to any dimension we are willing to clear. If nothing else, every one we destroy means another last-minute Uni-mind we have the time to make.”

Callie, Mimi, and Sersi were on Uni-mind creation duty for alternate worlds while I was hunting. They didn’t have to join the Uni-minds, only start them up, and the enhanced powers and combined intellect of the collectives instantly understood the process and what to do once started.

The timeline where Primus and Callie’s kids lived had been alerted early, and was ready to vacate as soon as the first Incursion had materialized above it. Likewise, the Guardians future realm had literally sucked in the populations of every race in the Sol System and gone for cover as soon as their End Time closed in on them.

We’d alerted as many alternate worlds as we could, making known the survival solution. Some went along with it, some didn’t. A few of the more ruthless and powerful ones had destroyed three other worlds by now, and some had been invaded by thousands or even millions of ruthless Mapmakers and destroyed.

“My initial run is going to be solo. I am first going to find out what we are going up against, and then return so we can figure out what to do against them.”

Nobody contested that. Everyone had puh-lenty of work to do against the unlimited amounts of Mapmakers out there. Despite our slaughtering them, their numbers were only increasing, as every fallen world birthed millions more of them. Our collection of heroes was increasing virtually every day, but the power levels required to slaughter the things meant the odds would never be in our favor.

I eyed the trans-dimensional coordinates on my scanner, opened a Portal to the first point where it intersected our level of existence, and went hunting.

------

The trail led up and out of reality. I had no surprise at the latter, but the up made me grimace. If it was Mythos or demonic in origin, it would’ve gone ‘down’ or straight Outside. No, this was translating into higher spaces, where things of cosmic power were, up near the level of the Infinity Abyss station itself.

I was under a LOT of stealth protocols. My Cosmic Awareness was tuned to sense anything similar coming at me and politely fill in Nothing To See Here, Move Along, with magic, super-science, and cosmic energy backups to make me Beyond Invisible.

Converging points rising towards a single destination, and I heard the conflicts, reverberating up from the lower planes, and despite myself had to turn my head and watch.

The cosmic beings were being slaughtered across multiple dimensions, and I knew that energy signature...

Beyonders!

One Beyonder per universe, slaughtering all of the Celestials therein. Great colored and armored forms coming to the fight, and being massacred before they could defend their realms, making the inevitable truly so.

Two Beyonders, taking on Lord Chaos and Master Order, killing them, so neither Fate nor Chance could find a way to save their realm.

Three Beyonders, challenging the very power of the Living Tribunal per universe, and their combined power bringing the ultimate adjudicator down.

Of a greater power yet, there was no sign. Perhaps it was already dying as the multiverse was being destroyed.

I eyed the planar door ahead of me, and recognized the energies. It was the same as that hole in space the Beyonder had opened for the Secret War, extending down from Beyond.

The Beyonders had made a move against the multiverse, and were getting rid of it so they would not be bounded by it.

The total idiots. They had no idea of the power of the Void, nor could they process the fact that they were temporal beings, and linear in nature, making them hugely vulnerable, even if they could reach through time and influence it. They were not free of Time... but the Void was.

They were committing cosmic suicide by this action. When the Void came, it would strike at them across their entire existences, and they would perish, barely knowing what was going on.

Idiots, or perhaps just cosmic nihilists? I didn’t know, and I didn’t have the time to learn.

We were going to have to kill Beyonders, who knew how many of them. I didn’t even want to enter their realm, which was probably made up of Them as much as it was another space and place.

We would have to bring them down to a lower plane, lure them out there, and kill them.

I put away the tracker and turned around, ready to depart, already thinking...

A temporal echo? With my focus off the tracker, I could tell that someone had already been here ahead of me. Frowning, wondering who had beat me here, I headed after them, absolutely certain it wasn’t one of ours...

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Doom and Owen Reece of 616... and they were joined by the Stephen Strange of that dimension. Doom was all in white... and Dr. Strange was all in black.

They were accompanied by men in black robes and black-skinned women in white outfits, with all the trappings of a cult. They were calling Doom ‘Rabum Alal’, and were serving him as they might a god, obviously not knowing the truth of what was going on...

---

“Did I say you could leave?”

The wave of disruptive force swept out and over me. I pondered whether or not to hold steady against it and simply accelerate my leave-taking, and decided that this should be interesting.

I did, however, freeze his attempt to shunt me out of sidereal space right in place, stepping out of its path and draining it down into a cross-stream of time. Halfway across the room, I stepped out into his reality in the Great Library here he’d taken over, which, if I was not mistaken, had actually been created by and then abandoned by the Beyonders.

“Interesting. I was wondering if you were watching those subshift vectors. I tweaked them about ten minutes ago, so I imagine you registered my presence then, and simply waited until I was vectoring to a downshift out of here.”

Whatever he was going to spout died on his lips. I had simultaneously shown I could evade capture, was testing him, he’d passed the test, and I had been here longer than he’d thought or been able to sense.

“Who are you, and why are you here?” he ground out carefully.

“The proper phrase is ‘Why are you still here?’” I corrected him, turning my attention to the Molecule Man there. “Master Reece, why are you hunting down and killing your alternates?” I asked him directly.

He looked at me and at Doom, who was staring at me very intently, but Doom did not tell him to stay silent. “They are living bombs, infused with Beyonder energy capable of disrupting and collapsing an entire universe. The Beyonders spread the technique to all of my alternates in all universes, even making sure one of me was born in each one to accept it.”

I regarded him coolly. “I see. You triggered the Incursions by setting the first one off.” That was why the energy signature of it looked different from up in the Infinity Abyss, and rang across each reality before their first Incursion. They had interrupted the Beyonders’ plan of simultaneously wiping out all realities, but the disruption in alternity balance started the Incursion process, so they had a back-up that eventually would do the job regardless, merely giving the different dimensions more time to see it all coming.

Furthermore, they were bombs capable of destroying an entire universe. They were being captured and transformed by these two, their power added together...

I eyed the collection of frozen and unmoving Molecule Men mashed together by the one still alive. “You’re making a bomb to destroy the Beyonders.”

“One wouldn’t do it, but multiples detonated at one time...” Owen Reece began, but I waved him to silence.

“You can’t detonate them in Beyond; it would be useless, as the space won’t collapse to finalize their destruction. Thus, you will need to lure them out into a lower space, binding them within some form of finity, before collapsing time and space together with your bomb and obliterating them.

“The problem is that there is no way all the Beyonders will exit their space at once just for you, so you will need to kill the ones that are left behind, and you’ve no way to do so.”

“Uhhh...” Owen Reece said helplessly, looking to Doom, who was still staring at me.

“We’ll take care of it. Just keep doing what you’re doing.” He looked a little startled at that, but I wasn’t going to go into details. “And that mostly answers all the questions I had. Master Reece, Master Doom.” I bowed to them both, the Molecule Man looking a little surprised and pleased despite himself.

“I did not give you permission to leave,” Doom ground out warningly, starting to raise a hand.

“I’ve already left, so your permission is not required, thank you.” The image I left behind flattened to two dimensions, then down to a line, shrank to a spot, and was gone.

---

Doom set down his gauntlet, staring at the spot the Amazonian golden woman had disappeared from. His suit’s systems had been unable to scan her properly, and even the energies she wielded had no set pattern or source, thoroughly confusing his sensors.

That she could enter and leave the Great Library without his knowledge or permission bespoke a tremendously advanced talent for infiltration and spatial control, above his own current capabilities.

She pointedly had not left her name. Her use of ‘we’ indicated others were working with her, but there were no others present, he was certain. He was updating his systems to track her means of ingress and egress even as he considered how she had actually pulled it off, and what it would take to duplicate, nay, exceed what she had done.

He was certain she was at least a step ahead of him, meaning he would have to be two, three, or four ahead to catch her if she chose to pull such a stunt again.

Whoever she was working with was confident of killing a Beyonder, and furthermore managing to do so in their realm Beyond! Victor von Doom considered what it would take for such a thing to be possible, what kind of tools it would take, and the amount of power necessary to pull it off.

His gauntlets creaked on his throne. Even with the full power of a Cosmic Cube or the Infinity Stones, he knew he would not be a match for multiple Beyonders. Furthermore, the Stones lost all power if the dimension they came from was destroyed, and his plan was to lure them out as the last worlds were destroyed, and his ‘stop-gap’ prevented final destruction. Those responsible would naturally appear personally to finish the job.

But... if some did indeed remain behind, they could not be allowed to live. But how to kill them?