166 – Epilogue II

Albert stepped through the portal. Portal travel was not always the same, and the experience was hardly uniform across the many ways it could happen. Even with this in mind, he could not help but be surprised when he stepped into the portal… only to suddenly find himself on the other side. Without a delay. Without fanfare.

Glancing behind himself, he saw the rest of his team appear out of thin air just like he did, wearing clothes that matched the fashion of 21st century Earth. He would have expected a trip through time and space – especially time – to be a bit more dramatic, but it wasn’t.

That was that.

Albert looked around. Downtown Temalas city. Sirens, traffic, smog. And yet… he sniffed the air. Ah, that was it. The source of the problem. He had not stepped into the past at all.

“It smells wrong. This is not our universe.” He said. “Look sharp.”

How could we fail a simple spell like this?

Unknown.

He took off without a word, the rest of his team barely having the time to get their bearings before they had to struggle to keep up with him. He could wade through the mass of people on the sidewalk with expert ease, but the same couldn’t be said for the girls. For them, the whole place was an utterly novel experience.

The flow of people, like a physical force. The road to their right, with countless cars speeding and honking their horns at each other, in an eternal rush to get nowhere. The air stank, or smog and pollution, plus all the smells of a great city. They passed in front of a Thai restaurant, and the waft of spice was enough to make Scrappy’s head spin. They saw a diner, the neon sign faded and barely visible under the sunlight. They crossed the road, on the confusing white lines that somehow meant that it was safe to cross there.

Scrappy’s head snapped and turned at every source of noise. She ground her teeth, baring the tiniest hint of her fangs to whoever dared look at her for too long. She did not manifest her ears or tail, but Lina almost giggled to herself when she thought how it would look like if she did. Lina herself was not completely at ease in this strange place, but at least she was more used than Scrappy was. She imagined Scrappy’s tail cutting the air in rapid movements, while her ears were pressed to her head as she hissed at people and cars. That would be a fun image, and she would make sure to tease the girl as soon as the two of them were alone together.

Speaking about cars. Lina was utterly fascinated at the concept. Metal boxes on wheels that could move on their own, lacking any magic. They were all round and strange, and she overheard Albert mumbling that they didn’t look like modern cars at all for some reason he could not explain. She did not care much, but she wondered how would truly modern cars look like if these were not it.

In the end, Albert suddenly stopped in front of a news stand. He grabbed the first newspaper he saw, absent mindedly tossing a coin at the man who was already yelling at him, and checked the date and time.

Right. May 6th 2021, Saturday.

This confirms it. May 6th was not a Saturday in our original reality.

Now that Albert knew for sure, his eyes began to notice a series of small details he had missed. Little things, apart from the obvious fact that not only had he ended up at the wrong time, but that the way time itself was kept was different. The traffic lights were blue, white and red. The people wore… strange clothes? That itself was not too odd in a big city perhaps.

There was no internet connection. Jeff had been trying to get signal ever since they got here, but found no trace of any wireless field anywhere.

Then there was the fact that there was no Alignment Energy anywhere. It didn’t track with what Albert know of his Earth. But then again…

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“Why is everything so analog?”

It was like digital technology had never been invented at all here.

Then, all of a sudden, Jeff spoke in his mind.

Something’s about to happen. I feel the gathering of energies.

Albert stopped. The girls almost crashed into him. Elle began to protest, but then she too felt it and the rest of the team did too only a few seconds later. Even Lina, the one with the weakest mana senses, could tell that something wasn’t quite right. Her skin seemed to tingle. Her insides clenched. It was the sensation of being watched, judged, of impending doom.

Albert’s eyes narrowed as he turned his eyes to the sky. There was nothing there that he could see, not in the visible spectrum, but his eyes still searched for something, for signs that something was about to happen. And happen it did.

A golden box appeared in the air in front of them. Not just them, however, but in front of everyone on planet earth.

Citizens of earth.

The 20000 years probatory period is now over. System integration will—

It flickered out with a wave of Albert’s hand. Only for him and his team, everyone else remained standing still and reading.

“We have no time for this shit.” Albert said, finality in his tone.

“What’s going on?” Lina asked. Her mouth was agape. She had never seen anything like this before.

“We landed in the middle of a major event.” Albert explained, annoyed even as his hands moved around frantically to create some sort of multidimensional structure made of pure Power. “It had such a low probability that it managed to hijack my time travel. I was wondering what on the holy side of the moon could ever hijack me. Now I know.”

“A… system?” Elle muttered.

“Almost spot on. A system apocalypse. Odds something like this happens are so low this universe is basically a beacon in the wider multiverse. Hurry, let’s get out of sight.”

With that, he rounded a corner and entered one of the shady dark back alleys. Once the whole team was there, he cloaked them as best he could.

“A system is always a pain in the ass. Something like this? Proclaiming to be alien? There’s no way to know how powerful it is.”

“What do we do?” Asked Lina.

“We get out of here, of course.” Albert said. “Okay, let’s do a joint cast teleport. Let me lead.”

He held out his hands. Elle took his right hand with both of hers, and immediately a current of warm, soothing energy flooded Albert. It mingled with his power, boosting it and empowering him like a nourishing balm. Then Lina and Scrappy took his left hand. From them he felt their raw, powerful and untamed energy join the stream that was his Power, already soothed and primed by Elle’s influence. Together, the four of them created something that was more than the sum of the parts, at the same time providing Albert’s Power with the fuel it needed to work.

“Okay, let’s get out of here.”

And they were gone.

This time, the journey was tumultuous. It felt like they were being physically yanked through time and space, compressed and stretched, put through a blender. They reached what felt the apex of their metaphorical trajectory, the point of maximum energy, and they began to fall. But their fall didn’t last nearly as long as it should have. Barely a moment after they began to descend into what would have been their target reality, something interfered.

They found themselves standing in front of an alien abomination so hideous and ugly it was hard to even put to words.

“Aberrants,” the thing spat. “I will rid—”

The sound of a finger-snap was all that was left of the alien.

Three heads turned to Albert. They found him fuming, his face contorted in a mask of anger and pure hate.

“I will not tolerate any more interference.”

From his tone of voice, and seeing that he was looking out into the distance, it was clear that he was talking to someone the others could not see.

“I will unravel your shitty system down to its last binary instruction if you don’t let me go. Do you understand?”

There was a moment of silence.

“I said no. I am going home and you are in the way. Do you want to end up like that poor excuse of a supervisor?”

The more he spoke, the more Albert’s face became a pure mask of anger. To the point that even Elle was concerned.

And then, the anger vanished.

“Good,” he smiled, as if he had never even been angry at all. “I’m glad we are one the same page. I hope we never meet again, assholes.”

Then he turned to face the girls. “Sorry, had to take care of some rude outside interference. We can go now. They even offered to power and stabilize our trip back to our own dimension, how nice of them! Ready?”

Nods.

Of course, the system aliens tried to use the wormhole back to Albert’s own dimension to send a trojan horse and system-apocalypse his own world. Too bad he saw it coming and took precautions.

In his wake, an entire multiversal civilization that took entire universes and enslaved them under the pretence of helping them with a system found itself suddenly devoid of said system’s protection. It did not last long.

The rebellions that destroyed it were said to have been the bloodiest in a good chunk of the local multiversal ruliad.