Adam floated there in front of the purple node where He’d sent an Observer Manifestation thinking about what to do next. Not one to put off important decisions for too long he recalled the manifestation. Soon after a prompt filled his vision.
A Manifestation has returned, would you like to review it now, Yes or No?
Adam chose “Yes” and then found himself looking down at his dad holding his mother’s hand as a baby was born. He watched Johnathan’s birth, his antics as a baby and young boy as he grew up into his teens, and then as a young man that joined the Boy Scouts. He found the ring, put it on, and went off to college. On his 21st birthday, he went home to Clovis to be with his mom and dad. Unlike his version of that night, This Johnathan’s life had gone a little differently.
As Johnathan walked into the house and called out to his mom and dad he turned into the kitchen and found them both sitting at the Dining Room table, tied to the chairs with two bullet holes in their chest and one in their head. Their eyes were open and vacant as they sat held by the ropes. The shock of finding them that way shocked Johnathan and at that moment the assassin stepped out and put two bullets in his chest and one in his head. The surprise and shock of the impact punched him back and knocked him to the ground.
Adam thought back to that night from his own history and realized that at that moment this Johnathan he was looking at had thought that he was a normal man, much as Adam had at the time. This time though he would not practice his meditation. If there was an Abi that was supposed to be in his subconscious he’d never talk with her, and he wouldn’t come into his new powers slowly. What kind of monster would such an event make? The questions he asked himself were soon answered.
Adam watched as Johnathan’s already high attributes saved his life. The bullet had not been able to penetrate his skull or his chest. They’d knocked him down and back but hadn’t done enough damage to kill him. As Johnathan hit the floor his body was already repairing itself. The Assassin was looking around to make sure there were no other threats when Johnathan, with 363 times the strength and speed of a normal human moved, moved in a flash, took the gun from his right hand, and shot him in the groin twice while the assassin’s head was turned.
Even watching through this manifestation, Adam could feel the intimidation radiating off Johnathan as he cuffed the assassin on the side of the head with his fist, knocking him out. He then picked up the assassin one-handed and took him to the dining table and threw him on top of it. His gaze went to his parents and the rage in his eyes doubled. Adam heard Johnathan whisper, “This will never happen again” as he methodically went through the assassin’s pockets, retrieving everything that he could. Suddenly Johnathan froze when he heard something his manifestation hadn’t picked up.
While Johnathan at this level would not have been comparable to Adam, he was more than capable of dealing with anyone else on an Earth without magic. Moving like the wind, Johnathan made his way upstairs and out of a window on the opposite side of the house from the individuals converging on the house from the backyard. From the roof, he quickly shot and killed the three men with submachine guns that were advancing on the house from the alley behind his backyard.
He left the bodies where they fell and looked up. He moved to one of the assassins, pulled more ammunition for the pistol in his hand from the dead man’s combat harness as he aimed into the sky, and fired. A drone that had been hovering about 1,000 feet up fell sparked and started to fall out of the sky. As the drone dropped, Johnathan moved. He jumped from where he was to the neighbor’s roof and then hopped from roof to roof until he caught the drone before it hit the ground. He removed the battery pack and headed back to his house. The noise he made landing on the roofs had drawn attention, but he was back to his yard, onto his roof, and through the window, he’d exited the house from, before anyone had even made it outside to see what had happened.
Once inside, he went up to the unconscious assassin on the table and mouthed, “Don’t need you anymore,” and shot him through the top of his head three times. He took off his clothes and underwear and dropped everything he was carrying in a pile on the floor by the table. The only thing he held onto was the drone. Next, Johnathan went upstairs to his dad’s room and grabbed some of his old sweats and a hooded sweater. He also grabbed five $20 bills from his father’s emergency stash and made sure to put everything back as he’d found it. He put the small hand-sized drone he had in his sweater pocket. the $100 in his pants and pulled the hood up to cover his features.
Johnathan came downstairs and walked out the front door like nothing was wrong. A few of the neighbors called out but he pointed at his ears to indicate he was listening to something then started jogging down the street. He jogged towards the outskirts of town and once he was there started heading south using the dirt roads and crossing the flat terrain as he could.
Adam watched as he went through the self-discovery of just how powerful he was. he thought back to that time for himself. This Johnathan should have been level 5,000 and if this Cosmos was following the same rules as the one he’d started in, Johnathan should have attributes right around 3,630 giving him an average running speed of just around 89 miles per hour. Without nanites and the skills to help him, his health regeneration would be about 1 per second but his mana and stamina regeneration would come back a little quicker, roughly 2% of his maximum every second. As long as he had food and water, he could probably keep up the pace he was jogging at for quite a while.
Johnathan stopped in Roswell two hours later, grabbed some water from a house on the outskirts of town that didn’t seem to have anyone home or any cameras anywhere then continued west. He stayed away from the roads but followed them as he could checking out his maximum running speed. He made his way to Tularosa then south to Alamogordo and southwest over to Las Cruces. Once he was at Las Cruces he made his way southeast toward El Paso. Once it was dark he made his way to a neighborhood that was near the Rio Grande River and then jumped over the wall and into Mexico.
As Johnathan made his way into the slums he came around a darkened ally to stare into what he now knew to be a gate, though it was unlike any gate that he’d ever come across. Through the gate, a landscape reminiscent of primordial earth with volcanoes and lava off in the distance was visible. As the alternate Johnathan had never seen a gate like this before he hesitated as a man in a business suit stepped through and locked his gaze on Johnathan. The portal closed behind him, and the man stepped forward displaying his small horns on the top of his head, red-slitted eyes, and red-tinted skin.
What followed next can only be described as similar to when Agent Smith attacked Neo at the end of “The Matrix.” Johnathan attacked. He utilized every hand-to-hand martial art trick he knew at his full strength and speed to attack the demon. Looking bored, the demon easily blocked or sidestepped every attack. When Johnathan paused and was about to step back, a very pleasant-sounding voice said, “My turn,” and moved so fast that even Adam’s observer lost track of him. When he reappeared one second later he was holding a sword against Johnathan’s neck. The demon withdrew the blade in a flourish and sheathed it. As he stepped around Johnathan and walked toward the entrance to the ally, “Come take a look,” the demon said.
Johnathan, followed the Demon to the edge of the ally as the demon asked, “Would you like the ability to do something like this to your enemies?” As the demon pointed to the numerous dead bodies that limited the landscape.
Johnathan looked to his right and left. As he looked up and down the streets, the first child screamed. This was followed by more screams until sirens could be heard in the distance. Littered throughout the street and in every vehicle were bodies of men and women that had either been stabbed, slashed, or cut in half.
Johnathan’s eyes lit up with malice as he said, “Yes please, what do you need from me in return?”
“What we’d like, you cannot give. From you, I need a vow stating that you will never try to harm or kill me, so long as I have not first tried to harm or kill you,” The demon said.
“That’s an odd way to make a vow, wouldn’t you want to just be able to harm me at will without me being able to retaliate?” Johnathan asked.
“Would you agree to those terms?”
“Fair enough, I Johnathan Bernard Vow never to harm or kill you unless you have tried to harm or kill me first,” Johnathan said.
“Come with me, we have work to do,” The demon said as a portal opened into a much nicer location than the hellscape the demon had stepped out of originally.
As they both walked through the portal the demon continued, “The first thing we need to do is get you ready for what’s coming. To do that…” the portal suddenly cut off.
A moment later a new portal opened in the ally and Johnathan stepped out onto the sidewalk. Johnathan appeared weathered and something had changed about him. He turned his head back towards the portal, “Thank you, Master, I will get done what needs to be done.” Johnathan said as he cast a spell to turn himself invisible then flew up into the air and headed north. The Observer easily kept pace and was able to see through Johnathan’s invisibility. While Johnathan flew he pulled out the wreckage of the drone he’d found on the day of his parents’ murder then cast another spell that brought up information that only he could see.
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Johnathan adjusted course and increased speed so that he soon arrived on the outskirts of St. Louis MO. He lowered himself into the backyard and phased through the wall into a house. As he walked along a hall he stopped at a portrait of a man, the same man that had tried to kill him in Clovis. It was a family picture of the man, his parents, and a sister. Johnathan walked through the house until he found the girl watching television with her parents. With little fan fair, he waved his hands, and a portal opened to the hellscape the observer had seen previously. Before the girl or her parents could react he’s already moved, picked each up, and thrown them through the portal which then closed.
This pattern repeated three more times. Each family member of the assassins was thrown through the portal. When that was done. The last family he’d cleansed had a son that was into programming, just as Johnathan had been. Johnathan went to his room, hacked his computer, and went to work. He broke into every secure site of every government agency leaving, what the observer recognized as a subtle yet obvious trail back to this terminal. Then he waited.
Within an Hour a blacked-out helicopter flew over the area and a squad of six people dropped into the house, looked around, and confiscated the computer. A black van pulled up to the house and the six-man team entered the house and went to work. Johnathan watches as the house was sacked and key items were loaded into the van in under three minutes. Johnathan flew above the helicopter which continued to circle the house. Johnathan waited until the van drove off and followed the helicopter as it kept pace with it as it headed back to their base of operation which was in Colorado Springs CO.
Adam began skipping through the memories as he watched Johnathan systematically remove a massive portion of the population of Earth from its surface. He didn’t kill people outright, he just sent them through the portal to the hellscape which never showed anyone moving on the other side. Eventually, a portal opened, and the demon he’d met before stepped through carrying a glowing hexagonal prism.
“You’ve done well, Johnathan,” the demon said as he handed the hexagonal prism to Johnathan.
Johnathan took the hexagonal prism reverently and then placed it on the ground as he chanted.
“Only through death, is rebirth possible.
Only through destruction can something be created.
Only through service, can one rule
Only through obedience, can one rebel
Only through pain, can he hope to find pleasure again.”
As Johnathan finished, he started tapping each of the six sides of the hexagonal Prism six times. It seemed as if there was a sequence to which side needed to be tapped in what order but there was no way to visually tell which side was which. Once six sides were tapped the hexagon started to unfold and a glowing white field started to spread as the demon and Johnathan stepped through the portal and it closed. The observing manifestation stayed ahead of the glowing field as it continued to grow until the entire planet was covered. It continued to spread. Eventually, the sun was engulfed but that didn’t matter because the observer was flying away from the energy field as it continued to grow and expand. When he recalled the Manifestation the Milky Way was a memory and the curtain of white energy was still growing.
Adam came back to his senses floating in front of the purple orb as it started to flicker. Adam quickly cycled his vision into the past and noted that it was still purple and stable just an hour ago. So, whatever the effect was it wasn’t traveling into the past. Why then had the nodes He’d visited just recently all turned black so quickly? Then he had it. Adam flew up and around the curvature of the primary node to look at the nodes closest to it and viewed them in the far past. Whatever was being done to those nodes was happening in the past. Because these first nodes were falling, every node that split off from them was falling as well, except for the two purple nodes, which were still starting to flicker.
As he watched, every branch except the two that the purple nodes were on started to glow from within. This started from the farthest nodes out. Suddenly one flared white, popped, and the energy followed the connection to another node which turned white and popped. This continued in rapid succession until entire branches were gone. It reminded Adam of a fuse blowing and causing other fuses to blow in a cascade.
When the nodes beyond Cosmos 2 flared white and disappeared the energy from Cosmos three rushed back towards Cosmos 2 and stopped. There was a pearlescent glow within the purple coloring of Cosmos 2 now. When Adam looked at the other purple node he noticed that it also had a pearlescent coloring to it. It was at that moment that he realized that except for Node 1 and 2 and two different branches there were no other nodes or cosmos in this Realm Space anymore. What was that demon trying to do? Why was Johnathan helping him?
There had been universes within each of those Nodes, multiple universes. How much negative Karma would destroying all those universes, and the beings within those Universes, give someone? Adam opened his personal interface to check and see if this had affected his karmic luck and was relieved to see that his actions had not. A better question, where was the asshole? Sometimes, just sometimes, maybe he shouldn’t tempt fate, or at least make it so easy.
A portal opened and the Johnathan he just wondered about appeared in Realm Space not 100 feet from Adam. Then something weird happened. Not able to control himself Adam was yanked toward Johnathan as they were both yanked toward the prime node. The very first node in this Realm space. The first Cosmos. As Johnathan and Adam slammed into each other, because it looked like Jonathan had been drawn to Adam against his will as well, he heard him say, “What the fuck?”
Through the portal, he saw the demon stick his head out and wave as he called out, “Places to be, things to do, have fun Johnathan, and thanks!” The demon’s head disappeared and both Johnathan and Adam sighed just before Prompts filled Adam’s vision.
WARNING: Error Negative Karma is interacting with Error Positive Karma
WARNING: Entry into Prime Node is forbidden by quantum apparitions
As he read that message a third Johnathan was drawn from the 1st Node below Adam and Johnathan and slammed into them as they struggled. The new Johnathan didn’t slam into, and through Adam and Johnathan, no, not through. As the third Johnathan touched Adam and Johnathan both were drawn into the new Johnathan and all three began merging!
Adam: Odin, Get everyone back to….
Adam tried to get that information off to Odin as his mind and body were flooded with the lives and memories of two other Johnathans. Part of him noticed that both purple nodes flared white and popped and then the first nodes from the prime node turned black, flared white, and also popped. Adam focused on the merging that was taking place.
The Johnathan that had been pulled out of the Primal node had been a programmer for a major technology corporation and had no idea what was going on. The Earth he had been pulled from appeared much as Adam’s had been. They were almost identical. That Johnathan didn’t believe in magic either though he couldn’t explain the prompts he kept seeing. He was part of a group that believed that something had been placed in their eyes to create the prompts he saw and interacted with. It wouldn’t be that hard to do. Only Logic and Technology made sense. With a quick glance, Adam looked at that Johnathan’s personal level which showed him at level 10.
The Evil Johnathan on the other hand was another matter entirely. It didn’t matter that he was only level 5,000 and capped. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t created nanite technology or become a creature of Chaos. He had become a Creature of Order which canceled out his Creature of Chaos benefit. None of that mattered. What actually mattered and he didn’t figure this out until afterward, was that he had almost as much negative Karma as Adam had positive Karma and when they touched a cascade of karmic energy began to be annihilated. The longer they touched the faster the annihilation happened until a critical mass was reached.
Once a critical mass was reached, the merging was completed. Just as that happened, Adam felt Odin withdraw part of himself and seal it off just in case as he tried to get Adaline and Pandora to safety. All portals for his family and their friends were closed and they were safe in his original place of power. Hopefully, the barrier of nothing would protect them.
An explosion of karmic energy rocked realm space as both Adaline and Pandora were ejected from his soul space and disappeared. Some of the nanites that had been in there went with them as chunks of planet Earth did also. Odin had done well though as he saw the chunks morph to surround both in a protective coating as they flew out of his soul space. They’d been holding each other, mother and daughter as their cocoon of nanites had vanished. Wherever they’d ended up, Adam hoped they’d be together. If they lived he would find them. As part of him watched his love and his daughter disappear his mentality absorbed the benign Johnathan’s memory and personality from the Primal Node he was falling through into the Universe inside. As he crossed the node’s barrier, he found himself falling into Earth’s night sky over Nebraska as a shooting star, part of him recognized the pattern of Kansas City MO, Des Moines Iowa, Omaha NE, and Lincoln NE.
The primary part of his mentality though, that part of him, only had time for the eradication of the evil Johnathan’s mentality. Adam kept his memories and stored them away, then he ripped his very mind apart. Instinctively, he knew there could only ever be one of them and there was no way that he would let this monster continue. Where He’d almost been gentle and allowed the Prime Johnathan, how he thought about the Johnathan from this first node. to be incorporated into him, Adam did not do the same for a version of himself that had killed so many.
As he eradicated and absorbed two other versions of himself, he also received a warning prompt.
WARNING Chaos Identity contained in your Soul Space and infested within your being is not compatible with this Cosmos. As a creature of Chaos, you may continue to harbor those identities, but they will not be permitted to contaminate this Cosmos.
WARNING: You have entered the Primal Cosmos of this Realm. Certain features of your parent Cosmos are not available in this Node
WARNING: This Primal Node has been Locked. Major events no longer produce nodes within this Realm.
Congratulations! All portions of your Soul have been reunited. You have achieved Absolute Soul Level at 100%.
Congratulations! Your Soul Level has increased to Transcendent 0%
His Soul Level had increased, and he was in a Primal Cosmos. While that was interesting the more important question that he wanted to be answered was, where were Adaline and Pandora? That was the last thought he had as he slammed into the ground at a terminal velocity just north of Grand Island NE. It was almost ironic that at that exact moment, his mind decided that the strain He’d just gone through was also enough to finally knock him unconscious.