“You…” Justin’s face fell. He looked more disappointed than Xavier had ever seen him. Xavier hadn’t realised the young man would feel like that at all—but, had he thought about it for a moment, he would have known that he would. Justin sat down on his currently empty loot box, the chest bearing his weight easily. “You completed the floor without us?”

Xavier shook his head. “No. I didn’t complete the floor. I unlocked my Speed Core. I wanted to draw energy into it so I could gain the spell associated with it.”

“Speed Infusion?” Siobhan asked.

“I got a different spell. But that isn’t what I wanted to talk to the three of you about. At least, not yet.”

Howard crossed his arms. “What happened?” He glanced over at the door that sent them to the different floors of the tower.

“I…” He ran a hand through his hair. He wasn’t sure how to broach this. Again, he considered simply not telling them. And again, he pushed that thought away. These were the people he trusted the most in the world—in the universe, even. He released a sigh. “I met someone on the floor.”

Siobhan raised an eyebrow. An uneven smirk stretched up the left side of her face. “You… met someone, did you?”

“Not like that,” Xavier said. He sat down on his own loot box. Put his head in his hands. Telling them would make it feel even more real than it already did. But he knew that shouldn’t be the thing to stop him. Without knowing how to start this, he took the blunt approach.

“It was me,” Xavier said, his face blank, staring at the ground.

“It was you… what?” Howard asked.

“It was me who I met on the nineteenth floor.”

Siobhan raised her hands, palms facing out. “Back up. What are you talking about? What do you mean, it was you who you met on the nineteenth floor?”

Howard and Justin exchanged baffled looks.

Siobhan put her hands on her hips. Then her face shifted, her eyes widening as something dawned on her. “You met… yourself!”

“Now that she’d figured it out, maybe you could let us in on what’s going on,” Howard said.

Justin looked at Howard. “What, you don’t understand?”

Howard stared at him. “Neither do you.”

Xavier sighed. “I met an older version of me. Someone who is, obviously, from a different universe from our own. This universe is incredibly similar, however. It seems as though this—him speaking to me on the nineteenth floor—may very well be the first time our paths diverged.”

The others took a moment to absorb this. Even Siobhan, who’d seemed to have caught on to what had happened a moment ago. The fact that she’d understood what he meant didn’t seem to dampen the shock. Indeed, it probably increased it.

Xavier had known what was going on when he’d been talking to himself. He’d understood. And here he was, still trying to wrap his head around it.

“So…” Justin scratched the back of his neck in that sheepish way he often did. Only he didn’t look sheepish, just confused. “You met an older version of you?”

“I posited that this might happen,” Siobhan said. “Or, at least, that it might be possible.” She was tapping her index finger against her lower lip.

“You did?” Justin asked. “When?”

“When I was deep into my cups in the tavern.” Siobhan tilted her head to the side. “I guess I never said it out loud.”

“All right,” Howard said. He was staring directly at Xavier. “So you met yourself. What does that mean?” His forehead creased. “Why would an older version of you summon Champions? There’s no way summoning Champions who are powerful enough to complete the nineteenth floor would be any help to you in your current state, let alone when you’re older.”

“I can only think of one reason,” Siobhan muttered. “But this doesn’t make sense. Wouldn’t someone have discovered this? I feel like Adranial, at least, would have warned us.”

“Adranial doesn’t know,” Xavier said. “No one knows. Only me.”

Justin rubbed his head as though it hurt. “This is… too much.”

“This man. This other you. He wanted to speak with you?” Siobhan said, worry in her voice.

Howard grunted. “If that’s the case, it couldn’t have been about anything good.”

“No,” Xavier said. “It wasn’t.”

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He took a moment to recount to them everything that had happened in his conversation with himself. Every little bit of it.

The others looked more than a little crestfallen.

“The universe is ending?” Justin asked. “That can’t be right! Shouldn’t we have, you know, known about this?”

“Well, no one has been sure,” Siobhan said. “It’s just something that’s been theorised for a long time. You know, the heat death of the universe.”

“Oh. Right,” Justin replied. “But isn’t that, like, billions or years away? How would that effect any of us?”

Xavier tilted his head down. “It is a long time away,” he said. “But apparently the System… it was designed for this. To look for someone—someone who can fix this. Someone who can stop the end of all things.”

“And you think you’re that person?” Siobhan asked.

“I’m not the one who thinks so,” Xavier said. “But the other me… he’d been chosen by the System for this. It thought he might be the one. But he failed.”

Justin shut his eyes. “So when you say he was an older version of yourself, you meant, like, really, really old?”

“That must have been strange,” Howard said. “I’m having trouble imagining it at all.”

Justin’s frown intensified. “If this problem is billions of years away, is it really something we need to be worrying about?”

Siobhan looked over at him. She shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. We know our lifespans can be lengthened now. There’s a chance all of us will still be alive for this. Especially with how Xavier is going.”

Howard shook his head and kept doing so as he talked. “This isn’t an immediate problem. We shouldn’t have to worry about this. The end of the universe… it’s too far out.” He sighed. “I can’t see how this matters.”

Xavier nodded. He’d thought about that too, somewhere between being shocked to meet himself and overwhelmed at the new responsibilities that had just been put onto his shoulders. “I’ve had a similar thought, but the fact that he came to me… this might be a long, long time away, but that doesn’t mean we should forget about it. It doesn’t mean we should live our lives as though it might never happen.”

Siobhan blinked. “You want to do something about this, don’t you?”

“Don’t you think you will be sick of life by then? When you’re billions of years old?” Howard asked. “Don’t you think you’ll be… ready to leave it all behind?”

“No,” Xavier said, then he looked at Siobhan. “To what Howard said. To what you said? Yes, I want to do something about this. If it wasn’t important, that other version of me wouldn’t have gone through the trouble of contacting me like he did.”

Justin was still looking a little baffled by all of this. “We’ll live long enough to see the end of the universe. Everything will end, then there will be nothing left. We’re all gonna die one day—everything will die. No loved ones. No legacy. Nothing left behind. Is this even all worth it, if it’s all going to be lost?”

Xavier chuckled. He couldn’t help himself. He’d never heard Justin speak like this before. “You all right there, Justin? Having a little existential crises?”

Justin looked up at Xavier through his hands. “What does it all matter if one day nothing will be?”

“Because, right now, everything is,” Xavier replied. “It doesn’t matter if it all gets taken away, or even when that happens. As far as I know, we can only ever live in the present.” He looked at Howard. “I know I’m still young, especially in the grand scheme of things, but I can’t ever see how immortality would be a burden. Life is everything. Having it eternally? That would be the ultimate prize. Even if the end is billions of years away… it wouldn’t be true immortality if it came.”

Justin nodded slowly. Then his expression shifted. “We might live for billions of years.” He smiled. “Or we might live forever. That… that is awesome!”

Siobhan shook her head at him, but she was smiling while she did it. “Didn’t take him long to come back around.”

“Small blessings,” Howard said. “I still don’t see how this changes anything.”

Xavier raised his chin. “It changes everything. This… all of this, every decision I make—every decision we make—it’s all about the long game. All about ensuring whatever it is that causes the end of everything is defeated.”

“I still can’t get over the fact that the System was created by someone,” Siobhan said. “It feels like something that was always here.”

“It was always here—in our universe. But that isn’t the case for others.” Xavier stood up from the chest he’d been sitting on. “It’s time we move forward. We have a universe to save.”

Howard chuckled. “Not for a long, long time you don’t.”

Xavier didn’t reply to the man. He understood what Howard must be feeling—he felt it a little himself. In a way, this didn’t feel urgent. Not one bit. There were other things he needed to worry about. Other things that should be on his mind.

But all of them were just a path toward this.

Xavier had a goal before this. Several of them. But he now knew where all his actions would be leading him—he now knew what his ultimate goal was, and his ultimate prize, too.

If I stop the end of the universe, I can become immortal. I’ll be able to live for all eternity.

It wasn’t simply power that he craved, even though he did. It was something more. Something that he’d never truly had.

It was freedom. The freedom to do whatever he wished, whenever he wished, for as long as he wished. To not have to worry. To not have anything that needed to be done. To pursue the things he wanted to pursue.

That’s what true power was, and that’s what he would get if he were able to save the universe.

“So, what do we do next?” Justin said. He clapped his hands together, a big smile on his face. “Saving the universe doesn’t sound like it’s going to be easy.” He slapped Xavier on the shoulder. “But we’ll be there to help.”

“It’s easy to say that when something is literally billions of years into the future, isn’t it?” Siobhan said.

Justin smirked but didn’t reply.

“First,” Xavier said. “We see how my new spell works.”

“Your new spell?” Justin asked. “Wait, that’s right, you revealed your Speed Core! What’s the spell? You said it wasn’t Speed Infusion?”

Justin’s secondary core was a Speed Core. Xavier could see why the young man might be curious. “I got a spell called Time Alteration.”

“Time Alteration?” Justin blinked. Then his face lit up. “That sounds unbelievably awesome! Are you kidding me? You can alter time? I revealed the same core you did, why didn’t I get Time Alteration?”

“Maybe because you revealed it at a lower grade,” Siobhan posited. “Or, perhaps, because you’re not the one who has been chosen by the System to save the very universe itself, and you don’t have anywhere near his level of power or number of titles?”

“Okay, Siobhan, fine. There might be a few reasons he got that spell and I didn’t. But that doesn’t mean you have to rub it in.”

“I wasn’t rubbing it in, I was—”

Howard raised a hand. “That’s enough bickering, children. Xavier has a spell to cast.”

Xavier smiled and nodded at Howard. “Thanks, Howard.” He looked around the Staging Room, took a quick breath, then he cast his Time Alteration spell for the first time.