Degritone appeared in Melena's garden. "Has there been a change of plan?" She asked.
"Kinda. The system apparently is hard-coded to disallow the use of some Stavch flows through it. At least the three most important ones, potentially the fourth, as well. I suspected that the reason I couldn't become a timeline hopper was because it was subtly different, and the brief window in which I knew ripping spacetime was different and not disallowed made me think it would be.
"Anyway, plans. Yeah, we can continue the way, but things just escalated to the point that holding Earth will be irrelevant until long in the future. I might just release my robopolice and be done with it."
"I still say you should have done that from the beginning. Yes, some people might have fought back, but oh well. I have seen how indestructible those golems are."
Degritone shrugged. "We'll get Lolitropolis up and running, then I'll go ahead and respond to the escalation. Here," he summoned a few copies of the timeline hopper and weapon world constructs. "The more angular one will cause you to become a timeline hopper. The other one will let you enter the world of a weapon, where you will need to convince the weapon to become yours, whether that be through violence, talking, or whatever else. The power that grants is... eh? It's not too bad, not too relevant, either.
"It matters a lot at a stage where you won't be coming with me, but it'll only be around a 20% power increase at peak timeline hopper. Good for self defense, if nothing else, though being a timeline hopper among time bound people is already enough in almost all situations."
"I hate that I will not be able to come with you out into the omniverse, but I definitely understand your point. Fighting an evil version of myself would definitely doom the multiverse. You not being able to fight back would be horrible."
Degritone nodded and said, "Also thought of an upgrade to the cloak's defensive array. Give me a few seconds to finalize it, then I'll test it, debug it, and hand it out to everyone. Everyone's free to use the timeline hopper and weapon world constructs, though creating a civilization of timeline hoppers sounds really annoying."
"Is this definitely what those are? You did get them from someone who tried to kill you, they may be a trap."
"Eh, even if they were, they won't kill me because multiversal MC. I'll try them out first, I guess, but they look identical to the ones from the RP, so they should be the same thing. It'd be really weird if something looked this identical and wasn't the same thing. Huggies while I finish the cloak?"
Melena obliged and said, "I will miss you while you're gone."
"If everything goes to plan, it'll feel like seconds, at worst," he responded, then got busy with finalizing the upgrades, memorizing them to throw to his already overworked second thought process to keep them alive utilizing the System. His inability to make all these flows manually frustrated him, as he knew he would be almost a sitting duck if his System access was cut off. But for now, keeping a few hundred of these defensive arrays alive at once was only barely within his secondary thought process's capabilities.
It would no longer be able to think up innovations like this while keeping them tangible, though.
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"Alright, time to go." Degritone began constructing the timeline hopper construct around himself, slowly as to make sure there was nothing wrong with it. He wasn't sure how sensitive it was using Stavch, but he knew that a single syllable wrong in Raijingeki would lead to total timeline collapse. He wasn't sure how that translated to this construct, so he was extra careful.
He'd still fail in infinite timelines, but he already resolved himself to stop immediately if the timeline coordinates in his head ever changed at all, reducing relevant failures to those who messed up on the very last fraction of a second. He almost refused to do it at all, knowing he'd cause infinite lolis to cease existing, but he knew he had little choice in the matter.
His evil version was coming, whether he liked it or not. The only question was if he'd be prepared to stop him from erasing more lolis than his failures.
Once it completed, he felt the flow of Stavch before he saw it. The area around him turned blacker than a black hole to Stavch sight, all Stavch in Melena's garden not already used in a flow rushing toward Degritone. The size of this hole grew rapidly, engulfing everything in a pure, pitch blackness. To Degritone, though, it was almost blinding.
Invisible to all, a harpoon of Stavch was launched outward, piercing through space and racing past time, escaping the timeline altogether while tethering itself to Degritone's soul. It hooked into the multiversal membrane and began reeling in that tether. Degritone felt a tug as his soul was ripped out of the confines of his singular timeline and stapled to the membrane separating his multiverse from the void between multiverses.
This, alone, would simply be very, very deadly. However, simultaneously, the flow created a sphere of pure Stavch and filled it with just short of enough ambient Stavch to burst the sphere, which was then converted into spacetime. The space portion held no meaning outside a timeline, and the time portion only meant anything so long as it remained inside a multiverse.
Which it just so happened to be. The separation of space and time was violent, jostling the pure Stavch sphere as the flow to make a timeline hopper manipulated the time around into itself, inside the now-missing space portion of spacetime, creating a mobius loop of time. It then took that mobius loop and plastered it along the inside of Degritone's soul.
Degritone's mind expanded, making a single, weak additional thought thread seem like nothing. It, too, expanded alongside Degritone's normal mind. He could perfectly remember the structure to become a timeline hopper, down to the Planck length, and replicate it hundreds of times simultaneously, if he wanted. He could actually do math in his head. Feeling around his soul, he took stock of how much work needed to be done.
On a multiversal scale, his soul, additionally empowered by hundreds of thousands of lightyears of ambient Stavch collected by the construct, was only slightly larger than the leading edge of a single timeline, the infinite size of each irrelevant to the multiversal membrane. He immediately got to work spreading himself as far as he could, mentally spinning the construct on the edge of his soul, rapidly diffusing his soul, gaining existence in additional timelines. He felt like any more would tear him apart after the 17th timeline.
He descended back into all the timelines he could enter, expecting to see 17 Melenas. Instead, only his main timeline's Melena greeted him. "Wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeellllllllllll-" Degritone grimaced and went about accelerating time back to roughly normal, pushing the edge of his now-flat soul against the multiversal membrane, "lcome back."
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
He looked around the other timelines he was in. There was nothing, not even light. Not even normal Stavch. He had to shatter his hand back into raw Stavch and let it float around to even see himself with Stavch sight. "No wonder she wasn't fighting like a timeline hopper. But also, now the Architects can't be allowed to exist," he said, switching between bodies every couple syllables.
"What?" Melena asked, having only heard, "onder, n hop, owed to."
Degritone blinked a few times and focused hard to keep his words in a single timeline, still entirely new to this experience. At least, physically so. He understood what was going on on an intellectual level, having somewhat experienced it in the RP, but physically experiencing it was a whole different beast. "It seems the Architects are harvesting Stavch from most timelines, and that's why we only split once in multiple years. Why and how we split so much before we gained the ability to teleport across timelines, but only once after, I'm not sure. Maybe the other Degritones were just from pre-System splits.
"Anyway, yeah, the Architects are almost deleting timelines. It's not quite identical, because actual timeline deletion would make them unavailable to me, but it's pretty close. Every Planck time, they're killing entire timelines of lolis. Almost every single one, based on the fact that we only split once in multiple years.
"I was maybe going to let them live and just be punished harshly for their crimes against lolis, having thrown so many into the meat grinder that is the System, but loli murderers on this scale can't be allowed to live. Or die quickly."
Degritone demanifested himself in all the empty timelines, then squirmed his soul until it was thick enough at the point of his original timeline to manifest all of his bodies there. Most of them went off to check on various different people and projects.
One for his family, one for Beltag, one for Victoria, one for Melissa, one to check up on Chicago, one for the world he took over, another specifically for the scared loli from that world that he now realized he never learned the name of, one for checking in on how the war effort ended with him gone, and one for going to a police golem and adding self-replication to the list of things they're able to do.
His family was doing well. His sister had broken up with her previous boyfriend and gotten married to another guy, with a baby coming in a couple months. A girl. Degritone was becoming an uncle, and to the best kind of nibling. Additionally, they'd had to defend themselves from their neighbors a few times, but they quickly learned why you don't touch anyone from Grimey Gulch.
Going to see Beltag and Melena was an interesting experience. Their timelines weren't anywhere near within range of his soul, and he wasn't sure how the System would deal with getting him to the known full timeline without damaging him by spreading him too thin.
The result was ingenious, to Degritone. They'd made it so, when a timeline hopper used a world gate or other System-assisted teleportation across timeline borders, it rotated the sphere of multiversal membrane he was attached to through the infinite-dimensional hyper-sphere that was the multiverse such that only one timeline he had access to changed. The mathematics required to do that systematically must have been annoying to figure out, he thought.
Beltag was glad to see him well after having not communicated for so long. He'd not changed much, still just fishing and napping all day. Though, he'd started researching the system more actively since they last talked, in case he had more questions. Which was moot with Melena and her group at his fingertips.
Victoria, surprisingly to Degritone, was a princess. Not sure if I knew that. I might have. It's been a very long time. She got a feast made upon his arrival and they caught up. He couldn't taste anything, and the food was actually useless to him, so he just deleted it after it got out of sight inside him. Her kingdom was peaceful, mostly. The normal crime and underhanded politics of an average kingdom. Victoria herself was doing much better than a captive, having been power-leveled, which was unusual for her world. Most people didn't want to stay in the bodies of children forever. She didn't particularly care, after Degritone's display.
He was immediately stabbed in the head by Melissa's brother when he showed up. He laughed it off and said, "Nevermind, then. See ya later, Melissa and... Jake? I forget your name. It's good to see you in good health," then demanifested that body.
The trip to Chicago was uneventful.
The world was going well. More rebellions had to be put down than any of the Degritones would have liked, but it was unavoidable. Hostile takeovers when very few people wanted them tended to make the general population angry.
The oracle loli was doing much better. Whether he'd known it before and just forgot or never knew Padina's name, he learned that that was her name and that she was doing, to her, surprisingly well. Some of the Degritones had extracted the alarm Skill from her. She'd gotten attached to a specific Degritone, who was always with her. Degritone prime didn't know that, either. How she distinguished between the many Degritones, no one ever knew.
The war had taken a little longer to finish than anticipated without Degritone prime, but otherwise went exactly as predicted. The display on Venus, which he watched from a video someone recorded through a Skill-enhanced telescope, was more effective on some people than what he'd done in the war.
Adding self-replication to the golems was as seamless as adding it to the text file in the golem control panel. Chuuni was a genius. These are permanent flows, no system required. Did he figure out arbitrary flow creation? If there's one thing I regret from this adventure, it's never learning what Chuuni did during his training.
And simultaneously, back with Melena. "Can you tell what they are using it for?"
"No. Wow, this is disorienting. I definitely should have slowly worked myself up to my current maximum instead of instantly going to it. Not that I can't still do so manually, but still. I have the capability, I feel I should use it."
"How are you even certain it is the System taking all the Stavch? It could be that the System stabilizes the timelines against whatever is devouring Stavch."
"I doubt it, but I guess it's not impossible. I'm not as good at modifying what timelines I have available as what the system does - yet anyway - but watching it happen in real time by constantly rotating my position to see the newly created timelines reveals that something is siphoning the Stavch across timelines, rather than already being inside it.
"I can't properly concentrate on entire timelines, nowhere near it yet, but following the flow of Stavch reveals it all goes to a single point, then flows off through adjacent timelines in that singular point, physically. I could follow it off, but if whatever's siphoning all this Stavch off can use even a fraction of it, a fraction of infinity is still infinity. Heck, it's technically infinity to the infinity, since it's the infinite Stavch from infinite timelines.
"Anyway, all that to say that I can't just go stab whatever's doing this in the face. Yet. I know how to find it, when it's time, at least. I don't yet trust the cloak's ability to work should my system access be cut off, say by an angry Architect using admin privileges. I don't know the constructs for its stuff yet. I could probably take on the Wardens, though big doubt I have enough timelines to meaningfully hurt the biggest dogs there.
"I need to gather information. I need to know the Stavch flows for everything that matters. Which requires interacting with people. Gross."
"Enchanting would love doing that. Learning more about Stavch constructs is all they try to do, recently. You have a team at your back for doing the things you do not wish to do. At least, until it is time to leave this multiverse."
Degritone's nonexistent heart fluttered and he flashed to hug Melena. He smiled as he said, "I love you most, out of all the lolis that are real and I've interacted with. I'm definitely going to be sad I can't see any lolis when I leave, but you're definitely going to be my least favorite to leave behind."
Melena hugged him back and said, "That is a very specific modifier. So, there are other lolis you like more than me, that are fictional, and do not claim that I will always be your favorite?"
"Midna will always be my number one, no matter what. And there may be a loli out there I will like more than you. Definitely is, when you consider Midna exists for real somewhere out there, though she has Link and I won't take that from her. Outside her, there's a level of infinity it almost physically hurts my head to think about - and I don't even have pain receptors - number of lolis out there. I can't claim that there will never be one that tugs my heartstrings more than you."
Melena just smiled and rolled her eyes as she shook her head into Degritone's chest.