Chapter 288: Chapter 288

The Immortals tried to put up a fight but it was all in vain.

Scrounging up a ball of energy or scouring their own domain for a hail Mary spell, the Immortals threw all kinds of things at me but nothing stuck. I was unfazed by the Simurgh’s songs or the Silver Moon’s dancing or the former Evil Eye’s strange inky black tendrils. In the face of my nuclear explosions, their resistance was pointless.

I began sprinkling in new spells with new questions and challenges to their domains. If I was willing to split atoms, I was willing to cause other kinds of explosions and catastrophes. Thankfully, there were no Geneva Conventions in the Nothingness and my enemies were able to take a few chemical and biological weapons, a few cluster bombs, and even some orbital bombardments without dying.

The orbital bombardments had been the toughest to recreate. There was no atmosphere in the Nothingness and even gravity was mostly an illusion conjured up by those who expected there to always be gravity to hold them down to a hard surface. I had to conjure up a chunk of metal that could resist high pressure and heat, and then bring it down through a form of individualized gravity that relied on the power and weight of the domains attached to each Immortal. In a way, I was using their own domains against them and they didn’t know it. The Simurgh, in particular, was battered really badly by these meteors.

Surprisingly, the former Evil Eye really didn’t like the biological weapons I used against it. I knew disease wouldn’t have much effect on these Immortals, but I figured I could try something that might corrode various elements and compounds found in carbon based life. The former Evil Eye was now formed out of a strange black and brackish substance, which did not like the kind of random biological and chemical weapons that I had tossed out there based on my memories from Earth. I guess watching all those sketchy documentaries on the internet to fall asleep in my late teens had come in handy after all.

The Silver Moon, or the man who had once been Madness, did not like the metaphysical challenges I tossed at him. Most of my questions had been pretty denigrating.

Why had he failed to make use of the knowledge from our world? Why had he been pushed so far back by an otherworlder who had arrived far, far later than he had?

Why had he chosen the Simurgh instead of analyzing the truth of the world?

What was the point of his existence and his struggles if this reality was confined to a purely intangible state, if the story of the story was that it was a story? A little repetitive but it was absolutely blowing his mind right now.

The best part about the Nothingness was that I didn’t need to use things that were directly found in reality. That made it a lot easier to apply the knowledge from my old world, since I could sort of conjure up the nuclear fuel and the meteors and whatnot that I was using against the Immortals.

That made me wonder something. So far, I had been limiting myself to things that had either already been achieved or were theoretically achievable in my old world. That had been the one major limitation of my new magic system. But now that I was in the Nothingness, this primordial realm where matter, energy, time and space did not seem to matter, and where all did matter was my own imagination, power, energy, and will, could I not try to out something more? Something experimental, unreal, or extraordinary?

My brother got me into science fiction. Star Trek was a bit of a favorite of mine. What if I tried…

“Eat this phaser beam!” I shouted as a beam of yellow light shot out of my hands and crashed into the Simurgh.

The Simurgh let out a cry and one of its feather wilted before fixing itself back up again, but the glare it shot back at me told me that this attack had been particularly painful.

I smiled.

I had stumbled across something great but I needed to do a few more things to confirm it.

First, I launched, “a photon torpedo! Ha!” And with a deafening roar a burst of light slammed into the former Evil Eye and its inky blackness exploded into a burst of sparks.

The sparks reconfigured themselves back into the former Evil Eye, but the one deep black pupil swiveled back and forth like a googly-eyed toy and it ping-ponged back and forth like a bobble-head. I had a little more fun playing with the former Evil Eye. The phaser beam was a ton of fun too, since it made the little ball shaped Immortal suffer. At one point, it even sounded like the poor guy, eyeball, thingy was even sobbing. Almost made me feel sorry for him. Almost.

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He was the former Immortal of Evil, after all. He dragged me into this world, tried to kill me multiple times, and made a mess out of Noel’s home and the people that I once considered my second family. I had never been able to meet the elders Starry and Vell Jora again after the former Evil Eye tried to brainwash them.

But my biggest grudge was definitely still aimed at the scruffy looking man being tossed around by a torrent of questions and challenges. The Silver Moon had silver hair, eyes, and even a silver-tinged skin now, but I couldn’t forget the toga wearing man who would come laughing out of thin air, terrorizing me and my friends across time.

I hadn’t forgotten the way he sent me into the future.

I hadn’t forgotten the way he had driven a wedge between me and Noel. The way he had taken her in as an Ikon, afterwards, and the way he had mocked my attempts at opposing him.

My body was still sore from the beating I had took at the hands of his Ikon and the forces of the former Evil Eye at the capital of the spirits and fairies.

And honestly, I was angry at the fact that he had done all this to someone he knew was from the same world that he was from! To get back at him, I’d rough him up and beat him up real good, though I wasn’t unnecessarily vindictive. I’d take his limp body back to Earth with me. Without his domains and magic, he’d be an ordinary guy. Maybe one day, decades from now, we would meet in a quiet cafe somewhere and have an awkward but warm conversation reminiscing about the time we had been stuck in another world and fought each other for no good reason.

But today was not that day. Today was the day that I fire off a real laser beam that ionized the non-existent air and seared a hole into that smug Immortal’s forehead!

The Immortals tried to resist the beating they were taking, but there wasn’t much they could do about it. With every strike, I was stealing away bits of control over their domains, and I was being smart about it too. I went for the domains they were trying to use.

When the Simurgh tried to use the domain of Justice, I fired off an attack laced with questions about justice. From things like the meme-able trolley-problem to more direct questions about the Simurgh’s own actions and whether any of them could have been considered Just in any way.

When the former Evil Eye tried to use the power of Bad Luck, I asked him—through a photon torpedo—whether he could claim to rule bad luck if he had been born a literal Immortal? What was luck anyway, and could it ever truly be bad? Superstition, random chance, probability, the mathematics involved and the ethical dilemmas that he was skipping over, did he have any answers to those? No, he didn’t. Then, enjoy another laser beam!

When the Silver Moon tried to use the domain of Selflessness, which I had never imagined that he would be in control of, I asked him what selflessness meant, whether he thought his actions had ever been selfless, and whether he could have done more? To his credit, unlike the other two, he had some actual answers.

He answered, through a burst of power, energy, and also something hypersonic, that he had given his support to the sentient races of this world. He gave them free will, technology, and the building blocks of society. He had supported them directly during the age of monsters, when the Simurgh’s anger at being locked up had ruined much of what the Silver Moon had created.

He had been especially kind to the elves. He raised this point as a sort of counter attack towards my claim on the realm of Selflessness, but I answered that I was not concerned only with the elves, but with all of the sentient races of this world. And besides, I wasn’t trying to lay claim to the entirety of the domain of Selflessness, I just wanted to pull it a little further away from the Silver Moon, and in that, I had succeeded.

In fact, I had succeeded in breaking a lot of domains out of the control of the Immortals. The entirety of Nothingness was awash with the rigid, palpable power of domains, and the three Immortals were scrambling amid the bombardment of attacks, in order to gather as many domains as they could.

A little more. Just a little more. Then, they would be weak enough. Their claim to the domains would be shaky enough for me to end this silly little game, this frantic little story.

The end is near. I just need an opportunity. To push them to the edge of their seats and finish it all off with a big bang.