He Who Plans Ahead . . .

The Invigilator felt the draw of energy and instantly knew what was happening. It was a minor niggling siphoning of his strength, but he noticed it. He had prepared for this moment. He had foreseen the betrayal and knew that his Horseman would kill anyone that he suspected would be taking over his duties as a destroyer of worlds. That was why he had allowed him to find the list of potential candidates. He had used the list to mislead him from the true, and sole, contender for the role of a destructor. The fact that he had sacrificed so many innocent lives to do this did not even occur to him. Does the sun care if a child used a magnifying lens to scorch some ants? No. These beings were less than ants to him.

He knew that his Revelator had engaged his former Horseman and that the pair were engaged in a life or death struggle. Unfortunately for the Horseman, his contingency plan made the Revelator all but indestructible while on his homeworld. Nothing the Horseman did or could bring to bear against this operative could cause any real harm.

He felt a surge of shame, for he had trained the Horseman, and the fool should have known better than to go against an enemy in his own lair. He had been doing so well striking down the alternate Declans. None of them had ever had a chance because he had struck surely and swiftly, but now he went head to head against a chimera whose powers echoed his own. That was arrogance, and it would be his downfall.

The invigilator considered viewing the skirmish as it happened but decided that it did not matter what happened. He knew his Revelator could not lose, and therefore he would not need to intervene. The Horseman would either die or escape, and again neither outcome mattered more than the other to him. The only thing that he was thankful for was that his former astronomical assassin hadn’t struck somewhere else. Off homeworld, the Revelator would be on his own, bereft of his additional power boost, and would be no match for the Horseman in a straight up fight.

He turned his attention away from his minions, he had far more important things to focus on. The list of worlds that needed eradicated continued growing exponentially. He continued to delete the vast majority of the universes on his own, the ones that had just microseconds left before their rot would fester to a point that nothing could be done and he would fail in his task of overseeing the multiversal project. The Invigilator knew that there was little hope of his eliminating these contaminated worlds doing more than just slowing the progression of the others and that all he was doing was putting a finger in the proverbial dike. Eventually, he would have to destroy every universe that had been created and ban additional one from being translated into reality. That was the only real way to close that door once and for all, but he had been tasked with simply pruning the root away from the roots, and could not burn the orchard to save the grass. Still, it was only a matter of time. With each passing moment, his list of options grew shorter. He could make a million Revelators, Shivas, or Horsemen and they would not be enough to help.

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He had, instead, chosen the one man in all of creations to be molded into a scalpel that he use to cut out the cancer that was metastasizing across dimensional planes. He also recognized that once the infection got into the multiverse then it would be inevitable that his own plane of existence would contract the disease as well. He was the firewall, the shield, the last hope of his people and they bound his wrists in regulations. He could not do what was needed to be done, and so had to struggle to keep the sickness at bay. He knew the only real cure was to kill the patient, but so far he was doing nothing but biopsying cells from a soup of pure putrefaction.

He felt the power drain stop suddenly and idly wondered if the Revelator had killed the Horseman. He knew the reverse could not be true, and with that in mind he lost interest in their actions and returned to his task at hand. Another thousand worlds had just progressed to a point where the infection would become contagious, and he had to expunge them from existence. He sighed and returned to his arduous task.

A quintillion googleplexes of lives were snuffed out with a simple thought, and still, he had to continue his grim task. He swore that when he next spoke to the architects that he would demand that they try to instill some sort of immunization action into the weave of their cosmos, but he already knew that they would complain that it would only serve to stifle their creativity and inhibit what they could do during the creation process, but it was worth a try. Some of them might listen. Most wouldn’t though. They had higher ideals and loftier goals than to worry that their pet projects might actually lead to the destruction of their own species. He waved a hand and another five thousand universes vanished in a blink. They had never existed. They had been erased from time and space, both of those dimensions being little more than an instrument of measure for the Invigilator. His biggest concern was that every universe he destroyed was replaced by the architects before the last atoms of the old one dissolved into nothingness. It was a losing battle, he cut away infection and they replaced the space he had extracted with fresh tissue. He could enjoin entreat for a moratorium on the Creation project, but he knew they would never consider a slowdown let alone a complete cessation for any amount of time. His work would only end when he failed, and he would not fail.