The Core: The Dark Enemy

24: Weapons not suited for mortals

I put off looking into the war issue for a long time, simply keeping the time passing by outside at barely a snail's crawl. I just didn't want to move forward from the moment of wonderful reunion with my friends. I wanted, so much, to tell them that it wouldn't happen again but I knew that, given my track record, it would be a promise that I couldn't keep.

The Designer had left a trojan inside me and essentially playing god with my future. Truthfully, I was thankful for its influence in fixing what abilities I had absorbed, making them so that they wouldn't cripple my emotions but at the same time I was infuriated at how easily beings flippantly used others.

So, here I sat. Thinking.

Taking part in a war without the right mindset would lead to me doing things that I would probably regret later on.

Yup, it would definitely cause me to do things that I would regret.

"Cupcake for your thoughts?" Tutor asked as she held a tray in front of me filled with tiny frosted chocolate cupcakes. I had been sitting in the foyer of her villa, simply lost in thought while looking out through the thin curtains at the simulated lovely landscape. I had been doing that alot ever since Invicta had convinced me to go off and train together with her.

It seems that the improvements that the Designer had done to me had also included parameters within my VR space that allowed me to simulate what each of my abilities would do. Leave it to Invicta to be the first to notice the change and to want to try everything out.

The most bizarre inclusion made by the Designer was that it included other locations, not just my home dimension.

Yes, that was correct, the Designer had included the option to select different dimensions to test out, going beyond the two dimensions that I had been able to visit and including eight other options with the longest designations known to man. It even had a map, like branching nodes of a tree to show which dimensions were linked to mine. The branches were odd, looking less like any tree that I had seen and more like spiraled hoops that branched without reason.

After staring at it for too long I began to get the gnawing feeling that I was looking at something that had been around for so long that parts of it had died off in the past, leaving only the branching paths that were still connected.

Tentatively connected.

That observation wasn't what had been driving me to stare off into the distance for hours at a time, no, it was what Invicta and I had learned during our training sessions that had caused me to get lost in thought.

I had learned that my home dimension was incredibly, unspeakably fragile.

"Sure," I said as I reached for a cupcake with one hand while seeking out Tutor's free hand hanging by her side with my other. As I grasped the little desert and her warm and slender fingers I willed us both into a simulation that mirrored what was going on outside near Time's arm.

The action might have surprised Tutor, simply by the way that her slender hand clutched mine, or she simply enjoyed the action and wanted to make sure that I wouldn't let go. Either way, she ended up twining her fingers with mine as she stood next to me while letting the little tray hover off to the side in case I wanted more.

"Watch what Invicta and I learned about Loss," I said softly as I kept my eyes locked on hers.

I let just a tiny portion of Loss's power out, what felt, to me, like just a tiny puff of air between my lips. Loss flooded out of me. It wasn't a slow effect, no, here in my home dimension it was instantaneous in its spread. It ballooned out of me and devoured the cupcake in my hand, the tray next to Tutor, and all the light from the stars around us. Just the tiniest specks of power caused a depletion field of at least a hundred feet around us.