Walker continued to stare at the crack arcing its way across the Trinity strand. He watched, and watched, and watched. Five minutes passed with no changes. He looked over at David, who made a face and then shrugged.

"I don't know, man. This is all testing, right?"

"I guess. It just feels anticlimactic. We went through a lot of stress, pain, and anxiety just to get this shit out here, then it just flops around like a limp-"

An explosion rang out, one that didn't make a sound nor push the two back in the slightest, but it was an explosion nonetheless. Walker knew this because as he watched a pitch-black material begin to leak out of the strand directly in front of him, it overtook them both quickly in its growth. At first he panicked, believing that he was being swallowed by something he didn't fully understand. But, as more of the strand consumed his vision, he began to feel something else.

The darkness, that great blot of black in his eyes so all-encompassing that he could neither see nor feel anything else, had something else within it. He felt the edge of an idea that was all but impossible to describe fully. The closest memory he could attach it to was the day he'd surfed during a terrible storm. The water had crashed and roiled against this skin, further pressed upon by the furious wind driving it in ever-changing directions. This felt the same, as if the pitch-black material was straining for itself to move but felt outside forces driving it back toward the center of its birth.

His panic continued to drop as he felt a pulsing resonance within the deeper reaches of his psyche. Instead of fear, he felt something unique in his time within the Alpha Protocol—a sense of calm.

Rather than continue to float within and allow events to continue unchanged, Walker attempted to push himself toward the center, where the strand had originally cracked.

David's voice cut barely cut through the void, its sound seemingly far more distant than what he could recall, "Walker? Walker! Where are you?"

But he didn't answer. Not unlike a father knowing his child is in danger, Walker felt as if the strand needed him. It was in pain and was never meant to be contained in this fashion. He didn't know how he knew that, but some part of his isolated consciousness understood on a fundamental level that this wasn't right. That he'd done something out of order...something wrong.

The closer he grew to the center of the strand, the greater the pressure it continued to emit. Where before he'd moved at a sedate pace, now, every step felt like crossing miles in a single bound. It grew so intense that he was forced to use his kinetic strand for movement lest he be pushed back and lose any of the progress he'd already made.

To his memory, the strand had only been a few feet away when the fissure occurred. But, as he moved, it felt like hundreds of miles, thousands. David, who had just been speaking in the near distance, could no longer be heard. Any extraneous thoughts he might've had disappeared with the distance traveled behind him.

Walker didn't know that a great darkness had instantly begun to spread across the 4AA rendition.

He didn't know that there was a large impending calamity of the kind that the Evolvers hadn't seen since first creating their own multiverse.

He just knew that something was wrong, and that this strand, his responsibility, was in great pain.

After applying more force to his body than ever before, the extra propulsion needed to continue traveling at a decent clip, he felt the tendons in his knees begin to complain as he forced more energy behind him. Feeling himself begin to reach his limit, he could only grimace and continue to push as the darkness surrounding him gave off even greater pressure.

When he felt that he was approaching the center, reality began to take a different shape.

Moments soon stretched from the seconds they were meant to be into individual eternities. He was forced to close his mind to intrusive thoughts, lest he go mad from the philosophical ramifications of a thousand-year step taken.

Each stride Walker took through the endless expanse of time was a great journey across the years. Forcing his mind on each individual twinge of muscle and snap of tendon, he couldn't help but notice how the air around him thickened as if it were saturated with the weight of endless eons laying across his broad shoulders. As he moved past an unknown threshold, time seemed to give up its hold, and something else took its place.

Spacial fabric ripped, bent, and folded, causing Walker to shut his eyes and move by feeling alone. His body, still barely protected by the power of his soul, was having great difficulty holding itself together. Enough so that he felt his Icon separate itself from his chest, empowering him with the stored-up energy he'd taken from the Crystal Nomads. The thought of being forced to collect more was fleeting as he continued his push toward where it had all begun thousands of years ago.

When he felt that he was only inches away from the beginning of his quickly rising madness, Walker felt the Dimensional boundaries around him sunder. The strand convulsed, and within it, he viewed a panoply of altered and fractured realities spread from this singular moment. Each a fragment of himself, cracked and leaking like a Dali painting of old. Each sliver held a different version of Walker and the actions he might take in this moment of forever. Some were victorious, while others showed things he didn't like to think about.

Madness.

Death.

The implosion of the strand, leading to the eventual destruction of rendition 4AA.

Walker crying over a destroyed Symphony as he didn’t finish his work in time.

He reached out his hand, trembling from the stress of possibilities surrounding him, and saw himself doing so countless times as this singular moment became frozen within the history of a young universe. This was monumental. This was important.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

This was Walker Reed's attempt to stop oblivion.

Rather than touch the strand, which he was sure would somehow destroy him, even by accident, he tapped into his System Viewer and did something he had been considering since the moment he understood the strand was in pain.

He looked for a gap in the soul of the universe.

He hadn't truly understood what he had done until the Dimensional sundering showed him the future’s possibilities. Sure, he had ideas, but seeing it explained to him through countless images certified his hold on what was happening.

This strand wasn't a strand at all. It was far grander.

When a Strandbinder takes Time, Space, and Dimensionality, and forms it into something greater, the import of that power can't be mistaken. It can't be lessened.

This Darkness spreading across rendition 4AA, his adoptive universe, wasn't truly darkness at all. It was a collection of space. And the strand, which wasn't truly a strand, didn't just feel contained and wrong; it felt misplaced. Layered. Because the strand, which was not a strand, which was something else, wasn't meant to be here. That something else only had one answer.

This was a new universe.

Walker was sure of it. The dimensional realities showed the two universes, the old in rendition 4AA and the new that he had just created, clashing and crushing each other. The new attempted to expand, while the old attempted to simply survive its younger sibling.

A universe, at its core, was an engine for expansion. Power. Stability. Something that starts with a crash and bang, and never stops growing. But what happens if you place an ever-growing object, one whose expansion isn't just forced upon it but is intuitively built into it, within another?

Boom.

It had to be a universe, as nothing else made sense. He even had further evidence from the system itself. Those errors and descriptions suddenly became clearer as he used the frozen moment to further investigate what was happening.

The system didn't know how to compensate strand resources for something so singular. So individual and powerful. He hadn't created life, but the possibility of countless lives to come. Countless worlds and stars. And power.

Walker tried not to consider the rewards inherent in what he had done, as if he didn't find a way to separate his newly formed universe now, everything he'd ever done would end. No, instead, he was looking for a hole in 4AA's overlay—in its soul—a gap that could be used to separate his burgeoning expansion from the already established rendition—something, anything, that could keep everything from ending.

His system viewer didn’t greatly help. Although the new universe had only just popped up, it seemed to fill his vision completely. The only reason he could tell the difference was that this new universe only held striated lines rather than the solid grids he had grown used to with the 4th rendition. As if it were so new that nothing else had truly formed yet. A part of his mind recognized that it meant the system, or soul, of the universe was untouched. Fresh. Clean.

Walker mentally shook his head as he continued to search with his mind, his body still mostly stuck in time. But he could find nothing to help him out of this predicament. It didn’t matter if he looked up or down, left or right. The overlapping universes left no real gaps to be found. Leaving him only one option.

He’d have to punch a hole.

But what would that do to a baby universe? Did it need time to form before he should do this? That point was moot, as he didn’t have that much time. But, if this one failed, he didn’t want to go around making more universal strands. Not yet, anyway. Plus, what happens to a universe when it dies? There was no way the implosion of something so colossal could happen with a whimper. And yet, he didn’t see much choice in the matter.

There was a lot of trickery to this as well. He needed to punch a hole powerful enough to not only break through this universe, but the fourth rendition as well. There’d be no point in only doing it once. That would require either something special, or a shitload of soul power.

The problem was, even though he’d already recharged once, he’d burned a lot of that just protecting himself from his use of the Kinetic strand. Moving through the initial expansion of a universe could not be underestimated. He didn't know how far he had traveled or how much time had passed since everything first began.

Even his psyche, something he had been developing to maintain an even presence since first defeating Kwaya in the Tree of the Gods metaphysical plane, felt loose, as if someone had popped the top off of his mental bottle and shaken the insides all about. He was sure that not much time had passed, but he wasn’t extremely sure, which worried him. Was this all for nothing? Had Symphony already failed because he wasn’t there for the Creator Wars?

Those thoughts didn’t leave him with much hope. And as he’d done in the past, Walker began to think a bit strangely. Suicidal even. What was the point if everything he’d worked and bled for was gone? What was the point of it all?

A distressed man, caught in a trapped moment, called out to his Icon. Pulling on all of the darkness at his disposal, greatly reduced by the strain of reaching this place, and covered his body from head to toe.

He knew, just knew, that this was a moment in which his skills and experience were the best that could be found. There was no help coming, and no one else within the entire faction of Evolvers who could do what he could. It was only up to him. And with that thought in mind, he took a large group of the Kinetic strand and spread it across the darkness enveloping him.

At once, he felt the grip that time had held on him begin to loosen. Not willingly, but through force. With his System Viewer ability still on, Walker balled up as much extra Darkness as his Icon felt it could spare, and covered his right hand.

Thinking quickly, Walker squeezed his fingers into the thinnest combination that his limited dexterity could provide. A punch wasn’t necessary for this moment, no, a stab would do. He needed to penetrate through the new universe and keep going.

As his fingers joined together, Walker did something he hadn’t done before. He shifted the darkness covering his body from the bottom of his feet, and slowly moved it upward. Asking his Icon for a bit of help, together they shifted the darkness, still enjoined by the Kinetic strand, in an unpleasant arc. The torturous feeling of small strands of kinetic energy puncturing his skin as it got loose didn’t go away, but there was nothing else to do but try.

Combining everything into one powerful bullet was the only way. It wouldn’t do much to fire off the kinetic strand into space, as it didn’t work that way, from what he could tell. He also didn’t have enough power to simply fire darkness either.

Walker gritted his teeth as his skin continued to look more and more like Swiss cheese. After deciding to leave his upper body alone, not pulling his mind out of his personal time displacement, he finally grouped enough of the strand and darkness together for the rest of his body to heal.

Walker shifted his vision to look at what he’d done.

Covering his spear-like hand, a great blot of darkness filled with the orange bolts of kinetic energy sat. As he watched, small sparks of it leapt out, clearly unhappy about being bunched together so closely while also being contained.

Knowing this was his one shot to get this right. Walker reached his arm back as far as he could, needing the extra momentum to serve him in this moment. As he swung his arm forward, he watched as the Dimensional rifts all followed his trajectory. He couldn’t eyeball exactly what they were doing, but a few showed different angles, ones that ended with an explosion that took away his vision of the event.

Taking the lead from his other possibilities, Walker angled his hand so that rather than shooting just past the universe, he did the opposite.

Walker threw the soul-empowered kinetic strand directly at the Universal strand.

It landed right on the mark, making not a sound. Instead of punching a hole through the universes, it seemed to empower the fractured strand itself.

In less time than it took for Walker’s temporally charged mind to see, the darkness surrounding him was sucked into a small hole, and he along with it.