Albert felt the ravaging Alignment Energy sear his mind and his body. He convulsed on the ground, whimpering in pain.

His mind felt like liquid fire. A distant part of himself was vaguely aware that he only had a few seconds before Kainen and Hyvrlat’r realized he was fooling them.

The plan, so far, had yet to go off the rails. The version of Albert that hit the shield had been an illusion, yes, but not in the way he made the two attackers believe. It had been a double illusion. Albert had really hit the shield, managing to cast one last magic to hide himself before the pain and the runaway energies disabled him completely.

Meanwhile, a clone created with Solid-State Manifestation revealed itself, pretending to be the real Albert.

It was a dirty plan, but it had to be done this way because there was no way he could have cast two illusions, the magic too complex for his brain to handle. So far, it was going well. He had a solid plan, at least as far as the first part was concerned.

Ever since he sensed Hyvrlat’r following him three days ago, he had been quite aware that something wasn’t right. He understood, there and then, that he had fucked up. By sharing too much, now Kainen viewed him as the enemy. And why shouldn’t he?

Albert had cursed himself when the realization hit him, for being too trusty of someone like Kainen. Although… he could see why Kainen was acting the way he was. Albert had told him of his plans to change the past, an action which would put an end to Kainen’s existence in a way so total and complete that not even the idea of him ever being real would remain.

No, even though Albert made a mistake by sharing his goal, the true oversight had been sharing too much about his powers.

In his attempt to befriend the man, he had shared almost everything about his powers with him. A part of his mind also realized that perhaps Kainen had manipulated him into telling him about his powers as well, but Albert knew that he could not hide behind excuses anymore. It had been his own failing, and nobody but himself was there to save him.

It had been a mistake to trust someone who could not be trusted, especially after giving him all the reason to betray him, and that was that. No more.

In the three days that followed, he devised what later became the final plan to deal with the situation. His opponents had had much longer to plan, while he only had a few days. He knew his time was almost up when he finally could see the shield in the distance, shimmering with latent Alignment Energy.

The last piece of his puzzle was there, hiding in plain sight. As soon as he saw it he knew that his foolish plan wasn’t all that foolish anymore.

The call of power colonized Albert’s mind like the glint of gold to a miner. He changed his plans accordingly, becoming so reckless he couldn’t recognize himself at times. The gains that were to be had should he succeed blinded him.

The shimmering shield called to him.

Kainen didn’t seem to be able to see it, and even though the mystery of why the shield even used Alignment energy burned in Albert’s mind, he knew he had other things to think about first. Namely: survival. And power. Perhaps not in that order. Perhaps it wasn’t even strictly necessary to survive.

Figuring out his opponents’ plan was easy. The shield would fry him if he let it touch him, and since it was supposed to be invisible, all Kainen needed to do was lead him to it without warning him about its existence.

They would spring into action once he was incapacitated by the shield.

He chose to let them lead him to it.

Albert couldn’t deviate from what they expected him to do. They were better prepared, and they could overpower him even without the incapacitating effect of the shield. His only hope was to surprise them when they thought they had won, leveraging their surprise before they could react.

It wouldn’t be enough. They were surely prepared to handle him. He could feel wards against teleportation, and he knew that the elf wore protection against mind magic. Kainen did not have any that Albert could see, but it was too risky to assume he was unprotected.

The closer the duo got to the shield, the less options Albert had.

Another sharp spike of pain threatened to split Albert’s mind, yanking his consciousness from reminiscing about the past and into the present. Realizing that time was working against him, Albert forced open his eyes.

Through immense pain, Albert watched Kainen kneel over his body-double from afar. It was by far the solidest, the realest illusion Albert had ever created.

Albert grit his teeth. Unless he supplied the illusion with more mana, it was going to unravel itself in less than five seconds. But he couldn’t.

WARNING!

System overloaded. All skills are unavailable.

It wasn’t hard to find the source of the disruption.

It was the same energy that was making Albert almost unable to think straight. The pain was so severe, that his mind felt almost blank. Or rather, black. Compared to what he had to endure in the past, this was orders of magnitude worse.

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

He knew that seconds were ticking away. He had tried to do this in Bullet Time, but whatever had disabled the system had also canceled the skill. At the same time, his opportunity was slipping away from him.

The ticket to real power was being expended trying to kill him instead of making him stronger.

No. He couldn’t accept it.

A metallic taste exploded in Albert’s mouth as a warm liquid flooded it. Albert winced, seeing that he was drooling blood, and a dull ache spread to his teeth. Then another spike of pain pierced his mind. His eyes rolled into his head.

Albert found himself in a black space.

“Finally.” He found himself saying, a calmness to his voice that felt utterly out of place.

For a moment, he wondered if he even was the same person as he was a moment ago. All of a sudden, all that was left was a desire to move along with the main plan, all thoughts of survival be damned.

The pain was gone. All sensations were gone. He was standing, but it felt like nothing at all.

Slowly, as a part of his mind threatened to descend into panic from the sensory deprivation, another rejoiced in utter happiness. He was finally here, in the space of his soul. Where reality was yet to be written.

The panic surged anew. Now without the system to protect him, he was vulnerable, nothing more than a shallow human, frail and weak.

Then a wave of bullheaded confidence. He had meant to get here, and now he was here and he had a job to do.

He couldn’t tell how much time was passing, devoid of all sensations as he was. In the distance, he thought he saw light, but when he tried to walk towards it nothing changed.

Albert forced himself to calm down. This was all part of the plan. Still, there was a good portion of his mind that refused to calm itself down, threatening in its panic to drag the whole of his consciousness down into the abyss. This was like an abyss of sorts, perhaps the soul space, perhaps the fabric of reality itself.

If Alignment Energy was what triggered it, and the energy allowed to traverse the boundary of a universe, it made sense to think that he was nowhere at all. But the sense of panic that this thought brought was almost too much to bear. He would need to do something about it, and soon. Before he returned to the real world, or he would not survive.

Albert idly thought of the pattern demons. A story he read a long time ago, about a wound in the side of the world where nothing existed. And when a human mind peered into the wound, unable to comprehend the nothingness, it put things there.

Like looking at static and seeing shapes, the mind filled in the gaps with things.

He felt he was seeing those things. The generative model at the base of how a brain perceived the world simply made things up when it had no sensations to work with.

What was time when there was nothing at all? Space? Existence?

Then something changed. Albert vaguely remembered there being an outside to all this. He vaguely remembered fighting.

He remembered the pain. He remembered the plan.

Seizing the sensation of pain, brandishing it like a sword, he struck. Lightning split the dark, featureless heavens of whatever place Albert had found himself trapped in. In the light of the strikes, white and blinding yet familiar in some sort of way, he saw something.

Then darkness came again.

Albert hummed, perhaps taking an instant, perhaps ten thousand years to form a thought. Was he alive or dead? He shook his head. He really needed to remove this place from his memory once he reemerged into the real world, or he was going to lose all sanity. It didn’t matter here, there was no sense of time and he could spend literal ages lost in madness, but it mattered out there.

Pain helped him retain a sense of himself. And just as he thought of it, lightning struck again.

This time he saw it. A ball, dark like a core of iron, hovering in the air. The blackness surrounded this ball, denser the closer Albert looked to the solid core. Was it his core?

He thought about the pain of the Alignment Energy. Suddenly, lightning like he had never seen before struck. It lit the whole space, electric and brilliant, blinding him.

It struck the core, and the darkness shook. Albert took the first step outside the safety of his plan. He didn’t know what to do. He could not have predicted what he was going to see here. From now on, he was on his own. None of his preparations could help him anymore.

The light died, but darkness was no longer complete. On the surface of the core, Albert could see streaks of light and color. From them, tendrils of light extended into the darkness around the core, extending out and disappearing an infinite distance away.

Albert touched one of them.

The demons that filled his vision due to a lack of anything disappeared. What took their place was a blue box.

An empty one.

Albert removed his finger from the line he was touching, and the box was gone. The tendrils were all lines, all angles and segments, like logic pathways of a computer chip.

Albert touched another.

[QUEST INSTRUCTIONS]

Albert thought that perhaps he could take them, and fold them into a cube. He didn’t know why he thought that, but it seemed such a great idea.

The demons were back as soon as the lines dimmed, but thinking of pain made them visible again. The energy coursing through his body was there still, and he tapped into it every time lightning struck. Now, he could use it as a hammer to remake his own inner power into the shape he wanted.

Another lightning. This time, he was not thinking about pain himself. And this time, the energy was different. It was not bright. It was not electric and powerful. It felt cold, like metal. Did someone stab him? It meant that time still flowed, despite his earlier assumptions. Which also meant that he didn’t have much time.

He refocused on his current efforts.

After an unknown amount of time, Albert locked all the memories away forever and opened his eyes to a world of pain. The energies coursing through him were gone, but the pain they left behind was not. A cold sensation spread out from his abdomen, and his reflex to take a deep breath to replenish his starving body of oxygen was met with resistance. He coughed blood as his eyes slowly focused on the outside world.

Albert blinked away the blue boxes crowding his vision. The blurry world slowly sharpened.

Albert gasped, trying to crawl away, but his arms were made of lead. He couldn’t breathe properly, despite or perhaps because of the sensation of panic rising in his chest. Kainen loomed over him, taking most of his field of vision. A dagger protruded from his chest.

How? What was happening?

Memories slowly snapped into place. Too slowly. He felt his strength fade. He tried to summon magic, but there was none. He couldn’t feel his feet. Any sensation below a certain point he could not pinpoint was gone. They had crippled him.

The plan came to his mind.

He had failed, hadn’t he? He had underestimated the damage of the Alignment Energy and had been transported… where?

Albert was flooded with memories. Not all of them, and none of them coherent. They no longer came to him slowly, but in a fraction of a second thousand of images burst into his mind. There were years there. Decades of life and work.

All towards one goal. What goal?

“You are still alive?” Kainen laughed. “You almost did it. But we found you.”

Albert tried to speak, but his throat was pure pain. Pain, yes, but nothing like what he felt all those years stuck… where?

No words came, though. And with no power to back them up, they would have been useless anyway. Why did he not have power?

“Now die.”

Kainen slammed the knife down.

“No.” Albert said.