Walking elegy (tensura/MCU true dragon self insert): chapter 14: TV, plans and loathing

I watched the news ticker scroll across the bottom of the television screen, the letters crawling with the urgency of ants fleeing a disturbed nest.

STARK INDUSTRIES ANNOUNCES BREAKTHROUGH IN CLEAN ENERGY RESEARCH - CEO Tony Stark to Present Findings at Next Month's Technology Summit

TENSION RISES IN EASTERN EUROPE AS REPORTS OF UNUSUAL SEISMIC ACTIVITY DUE TO WEAPON TESTING NEAR VLADIVLOSTOK EMERGE

SHIELD DIRECTOR FURY DECLINES COMMENT ON RECENT BUDGET ALLOCATION QUESTIONS

LOCAL WOMAN WINS $2.3 MILLION IN LOTTERY, THIRD MAJOR JACKPOT IN QUEENS THIS MONTH

The words meant nothing. Everything meant nothing.

Maybe it had been Linda's words that kept me tethered here, anchored to this sagging couch in this barely-a-studio apartment that smelled of old coffee and resignation. We can be miserable together, she'd said, and something in that simple offer of shared suffering had felt more honest than any comfort I'd received in either of my lives.

Or maybe it was simpler than that. Maybe it was just that my body still screamed with the memory of Velgrynd's flames, the burns that had carved themselves so thoroughly through my essence that I could still feel them even after the flesh had knit itself back together. The cut along my ribs where her claws had found purchase. The bruises that had gone bone-deep, reality-deep, because when a True Dragon hits you, they don't just damage your body—they damage the concept of you.

My older sister. My dear older sister, who had looked at me with those crimson eyes and decided I was acceptable collateral damage in her precious Rudra's holy war.

BREAKING: STARK INDUSTRIES STOCK RISES 3.2% FOLLOWING ANNOUNCEMENT

I wasn't watching anymore. I was seeing something else entirely.

Kael's face, split in a grin even as Velgrynd's flames consumed him from the inside out. Borin, who'd thrown himself between me and that strike meant to sever me from reality itself. Lyra—gods, Lyra, whose silver hair had caught fire like a halo, who'd smiled at me even as she turned to ash and ember, who'd whispered live with her last breath while her flesh blackened and peeled away.

Shale. The others. Thousands. Dozens of thousands.

My people. My soldiers. They'd known. They must have known what would happen when they chose to buy me those precious seconds. They'd seen Velgrynd descend like the wrath of a petty god and they'd thrown themselves at her anyway, bodies breaking against her power like waves against a cliff face, and all of it—all of it—had been to get me away.

Your plan worked, Lyra. It worked so fucking well that you literally threw me into another world.

The laugh that bubbled up tasted like copper and madness. Had I been double-isekai'd? Was that even a thing? First life: ordinary human. Second life: True Dragon in Tensura. Third life: True Dragon in the MCU.

The universe had a sick sense of humor.

This world felt like wearing a dead woman's clothes. Everything familiar but wrong, like coming back to your childhood home after decades away to find the furniture rearranged by strangers. Same bones, different flesh. I recognized the shape of things—the technology, the politics, the names on the news ticker—but it was all just slightly left of center, a photograph taken at an angle that made everything look distorted.

MEDICAL BREAKTHROUGH: NEW CANCER TREATMENT SHOWS PROMISE IN EARLY TRIALS

I was tired.

So tired that the word itself felt inadequate, a paper cup trying to hold an ocean. The kind of exhaustion that sank into your marrow and made a home there, that whispered sweet promises of surrender in your ear when you closed your eyes.

I still wanted to die.

There. The thought, naked and honest in the privacy of my skull. I wanted to close my eyes and never open them again, wanted to sink into that final nothing that I embodied, wanted to stop existing because existence had become a weight I no longer wished to carry.

The magic I'd used during the war—the spells that dampened emotion, that let me butcher millions without flinching, that turned me into an efficient killing machine—only made it worse. Because now, in the aftermath, I could feel everything rushing back in like a dam breaking, and the weight of those deaths sat on my chest like a mountain made of corpses.

I'd killed so many. Crushed armies beneath telekinetic force that could lift continents. Rotted flesh from bones with curses that made cancer look merciful. Stopped hearts by the thousands with a thought.

And I wanted to die for it.

But.

But.

Every time that desire rose up, every time I felt myself slipping toward that edge, I saw them. Kael. Borin. Shael. The unnamed thousands who'd screamed my name as they died, who'd burned and bled and been torn apart by Velgrynd's casual cruelty, all so I could live.

They'd given up their futures. Their lovers, their families, their dreams of peace after the war. They'd suffered wounds that I couldn't let myself imagine too closely without breaking. They'd been cut, been burned—

Lyra, burning, smiling, her eyes bright with something that might have been faith or might have been madness, telling me to live even as the flames ate her alive

—all so I could run away.

How dare I? How dare I think of dying when they'd paid that price for my survival?

I was tired. True.

I wanted to die. True.

But more important than either of those truths, more vital than exhaustion or despair, was the thing that burned in my gut. The feeling that eclipsed every other sensation, that burned hotter and brighter and stronger than anything I'd ever felt in three lifetimes.

Hatred.

Pure, distilled, absolute hatred.

I hated the Eastern Empire. I hated Rudra Nasca, that immortal bastard who'd decided that his half-billion human soldiers had the right—the divine mandate—to erase the Jura-Tempest Federation from existence. We were monsters, you see. Unholy creatures who dared to build a nation, who dared to exist outside human hegemony. We were an affront to his perfect world order.

So he'd sent Velgrynd. Sent his armies. Sent death and fire and righteousness to scour us from the world.

And I wanted to make them all pay.

I wanted to kill them. Not cleanly. Not quickly. I wanted to butcher them, to flay the skin from their bodies while they still drew breath, to make them understand—truly understand—what they'd taken from me. I wanted them to feel one ounce of the agony that lived in my chest like a second heart, black and poisonous and beating with malice.

I wanted Rudra Nasca to watch everything he'd ever built burn. I wanted him to see his empire crumble, his people scattered, his precious vision of human supremacy reduced to ash and memory. I wanted him to die knowing he'd failed, that his divine mission was nothing but the tantrum of a small man playing at godhood.

I wanted to break Velgrynd.

That thought tasted the sweetest, the most bitter. My older sister, who moved through the world with such effortless confidence, such casual arrogance. She barely even considered me a threat. Just her little sister, barely two decades old, practically an infant by True Dragon standards.

I wanted to wipe that certainty from her face. Wanted to make her afraid. Wanted to prove that she wasn't invincible, that her power wasn't absolute, that she could be made to suffer just like everyone else.

And then—then—I wanted to kill her.

Not just destroy her physical form. True Dragons respawned, reconstituted themselves from the fabric of reality itself. We were concepts given flesh, pillars that held up the world of Tensura. Killing us permanently shouldn't be possible.

I wanted to find a way anyway.

I wanted to give Velgrynd true death, or something so close to it that the difference wouldn't matter. I wanted to end her so thoroughly that she'd never come back, never threaten anyone I cared about ever again. I wanted her gone.

The fact that it was theoretically impossible only made me want it more.

I wanted all of this. Wanted it with a clarity that frightened me, that felt like looking at my own soul and finding it forged from rage and grief in equal measure.

But wanting wasn't enough.

I had two problems—insurmountable obstacles that stood between me and vengeance like mountains I'd need to level before I could even begin.

First: I was in the wrong universe.

Not just another dimension. Another multiverse entirely. The fundamental laws of reality were different here, the underlying structure of existence operating on different principles. Magic existed in Tensura as naturally as breathing; here, it was thin and anemic, more potential than actuality. Going back wouldn't be a matter of opening a portal or finding the right ley line. I'd need to navigate between entire multiverses, find my home dimension among infinite possibilities, and create a method of travel that could breach that kind of metaphysical distance.

It was possible. Everything was possible when you could manipulate reality itself.

But it wouldn't be easy.

Second, and perhaps more damning: I was weak.

Oh, by most standards I was godlike. Among the denizens of Tensura, I probably ranked in the top ten for raw power. I could lift continents with my telekinesis without breaking a sweat. I could rot armies with a thought, could curse nations, could embody the concept of Nothing so thoroughly that reality itself flinched away from my touch.

But Velgrynd was stronger.

Not by a little. Not by enough that clever tactics or luck could bridge the gap. She was vastly stronger, strong enough that our fight hadn't even been close, strong enough that I'd needed thousands to die just to escape her.

I knew why. Age. Experience. I was barely two decades old. She'd existed for over a millennium, had refined her power and skills across countless battles, had grown into her nature as a True Dragon in ways I hadn't yet comprehended.

Understanding didn't make it sting less.

It meant I needed to grow stronger. Not gradually. Not through slow accumulation of power over centuries I didn't have. I needed to accelerate my growth, to find shortcuts and cheat codes that would let me close the gap before Velgrynd found a way to this universe and finished what she'd started.

Fortunately, I had advantages.

I'd grown up with the MCU in my first life. Watched the movies, absorbed the lore, argued about plot holes on internet forums at three in the morning. Even through the haze of an entire lifetime between then and now, I remembered. Not everything—my memory got fuzzy around Phase Four, and I'd honestly forgotten what the hell that Wanda show was even called—but enough.

Enough to know about the Infinity Stones.

Six artifacts of unimaginable power, each one governing a fundamental aspect of reality. Space, Time, Reality, Power, Mind, Soul. Scattered across the universe, hidden or lost or guarded.

Let me think. Where were they now, in 2010, before Thor fell to Earth and kicked off the whole mess?

The Tesseract—Space Stone—was on Earth, locked or will be locked in a SHIELD facility after they'd fished it out of the ocean with Captain America's frozen body. Probably collecting dust in some warehouse while scientists poked at it with instruments they barely understood.

The Mind Stone sat in Loki's future scepter, which meant it was currently in Thanos' possession, waiting to be handed over as part of his scheme to claim the Tesseract. Unless I was misremembering the timeline. Either way, far from Earth.

The Reality Stone—the Aether—slumbered in its prison on Svartalfheim, dormant and waiting for Jane Foster to accidentally wake it up during Thor: The Dark World. Still dormant now. Still accessible, if I knew where to look.

The Power Stone was lost on Morag, that abandoned world where Peter Quill would eventually stumble across it. Just sitting there in its orb, unguarded except by distance and obscurity.

The Time Stone rested in Kamar-Taj, worn around the Ancient One's neck as the Eye of Agamotto. Protected by the most powerful sorcerer on Earth, which made it simultaneously the closest and hardest to acquire.

The Soul Stone... I frowned. Vormir. Guarded by Red Skull of all people, requiring a sacrifice of what you loved most to claim it. That one would be tricky.

But here was the thing: the movies had shown that the Stones could grant power to those who wielded them. Not just using them directly, but changing people through contact.

Wanda and Pietro Maximoff had gained their abilities from experimentation with the Mind Stone. Carol Danvers had absorbed the Space Stone's energy and become one of the most powerful beings in the universe. The Collector's slave had been granted temporary superhuman abilities just from touching the Power Stone before it burned her out.

The pattern was clear: exposure to an Infinity Stone, under the right circumstances, could fundamentally alter someone. Grant them abilities that rivaled the Stones themselves.

And Thanos—that purple bastard—had used five of the six Stones to casually erase half of all life in the universe with a snap. Five Stones. Half of everything.

If I could channel even a fraction of that power... if I could use the Stones to amplify what I already was...

Maybe then I'd be strong enough to face Velgrynd.

The irony wasn't lost on me. Infinity Stones and True Dragons were similar concepts, when you thought about it. Both were fundamental pillars of their respective realities, both were concepts given physical form, both existed as keystones holding up the architecture of the universe.

My plan, essentially, was to gather the power of six other "True Dragons" and use them to jump Velgrynd.

I'd need to be careful. The Stones were dangerous, had minds of their own in some interpretations, and using them incorrectly could destroy me as easily as empower me. But the risk was acceptable. What did I have to lose that hadn't already been taken?

Still, the Stones weren't my only option. The MCU was full of potential power sources, artifacts and abilities that could be exploited if I was clever enough.

The super-soldier serum, for instance. Captain America's enhancement hadn't just made him stronger—it had perfected him, brought him to the peak of human potential and then sustained him there indefinitely. Could my body metabolize it? I was a True Dragon wearing a roughly humanoid shape; the serum might interact with my physiology in interesting ways. Worth investigating.

The Heart-Shaped Herb from Wakanda granted enhanced abilities through what was essentially ritualized magic. Vibranium itself had metaphysical properties beyond mere physics—it absorbed kinetic energy, yes, but it also resonated with certain frequencies that bordered on the mystical. If I could get my hands on raw vibranium, study its properties, maybe I could incorporate it into my own energy matrix.

The Darkhold, whenever it showed up, was supposed to be one of the most powerful magical artifacts in existence. Written by an Elder God, containing spells that could warp reality itself. Dangerous as hell, corruptive by nature, but I was already the embodiment of Nothing—could the Darkhold's darkness touch someone who was fundamentally void-aligned?

The Ten Rings, assuming they existed in this version of the MCU. Ancient artifacts of unknown origin that granted their wearer immortality and enhanced abilities. The Rings had their own consciousness, their own agenda. But consciousness could be negotiated with, or dominated if negotiation failed.

Extremis, though unstable, could potentially be stabilized with my regenerative abilities. The formula granted superhuman strength, regeneration, and the ability to breathe fire—redundant for me, but if I could isolate what made it work, maybe I could apply those principles to enhance my own biology.

The Scepter that Loki would soon wield contained the Mind Stone, but the Scepter itself was Chitauri technology, designed to harness and focus the Stone's power. Studying that interface, understanding how non-cosmic beings could safely channel that kind of energy, could be invaluable.

The Bifrost's energy, if I could capture some during Thor's eventual arrival, represented a form of dimensional travel far more advanced than anything Earth had. It punched through space-time like tissue paper. If I could understand its mechanics, replicate its principles...

Asgard's vault itself was a treasure trove. The Casket of Ancient Winters contained the raw elemental fury of Jotunheim's frozen heart. The Eternal Flame that would later resurrect Surtur had the power to restore and enhance—what would it do to a True Dragon? The Infinity Gauntlet sat there as a fake, but even the dwarven craftsmanship that created a vessel capable of channeling all six Stones simultaneously was worth studying.

The Quantum Realm, though I wouldn't understand it for years yet, represented a space where time and scale became meaningless. If I could access it, navigate it, I might be able to accelerate my own temporal development. Live centuries in subjective time while only moments passed outside.

Ancient weapons and relics scattered across Earth: Gungnir, Mjolnir eventually, whatever artifacts the Eternals had left behind during their ten-thousand-year babysitting job. Each represented a different approach to channeling cosmic power into usable form.

The various enhanced individuals who'd eventually show up: the Hulk's gamma radiation had transformed Bruce Banner into something that could physically match Thor. What would concentrated gamma exposure do to me? Would it enhance my already considerable strength, or would my body process it in unexpected ways?

Pym Particles, when they came into play, represented matter manipulation on a quantum level. Shrinking and growing weren't just changes in size—they were alterations to the relationship between mass and space. Could I internalize that ability? Learn to shift my own density and scale at will?

The Sanctums held knowledge. Three houses protecting Earth from mystical threats, maintaining barriers against entities from other dimensions. The Ancient One had lived for centuries, drawing power from the Dark Dimension to extend her life. I needed that knowledge, needed to understand how this universe's magic worked and how it differed from Tensura's.

The Cosmic entities themselves, if I dared: the Celestials, who'd seeded Earth with genetic potential and occasionally checked in on their experiments. The Watchers, observing but never interfering. The Living Tribunal, maintaining balance across all realities. I couldn't fight them—wouldn't want to—but perhaps I could learn from them, understand how they perceived and manipulated reality.

And then there were the subtler sources. Consciousness itself seemed to have power here. Wanda would eventually become the Scarlet Witch not through training but through awakening to what she'd always been. Vision would gain life from an Infinity Stone but develop a soul through something else entirely. Could I learn that trick? I was already a concept given form—could I become more concept, less form? Spread my consciousness across reality itself until I was less a being and more a fundamental law?

The more I thought about it, the more possibilities emerged. This universe was young, relatively speaking. Its power structures hadn't fully calcified yet. The Sorcerer Supreme was powerful but aging. The Asgardians were complacent, their vault poorly guarded. SHIELD was compromised by HYDRA and didn't even know it. The Infinity Stones were scattered and largely forgotten.

I could work with this. Had to work with this.

But I needed to be efficient. Strategic. I couldn't just grab at every source of power I encountered. Some would synergize with my nature; others would clash catastrophically. I needed to prioritize, to create a roadmap of acquisition that would let me grow as quickly as possible without destroying myself in the process.

Start with the accessible: the Tesseract, the Eye of Agamotto, Asgard's vault once the way opened. Move to the difficult: the Reality Stone on Svartalfheim, the Power Stone on Morag. Save the Soul Stone for last—I wasn't sure what I loved most anymore, wasn't sure I had anything left to sacrifice, and I wouldn't know until I stood before Red Skull on that mountain.

Supplement with everything else. Steal vibranium from Wakanda. Recreate the super-soldier serum from SHIELD's files. Hunt down magical artifacts that SHIELD had locked away in their warehouses. Learn sorcery from Kamar-Taj, even if I had to break in and steal the books.

I had advantages here that no one else did. I could survive in space, could teleport across vast distances, could manipulate reality in ways that would make most of this universe's inhabitants think I was a god. I just needed to leverage those advantages, to move carefully enough that I didn't attract attention I couldn't handle.

Because that was the other thing I needed to remember: I was stronger than almost anything in the MCU, but not invincible.

If this were the comics, I'd be more cautious. Comics-Marvel had beings that could casually destroy multiverses, entities that made True Dragons look like particularly aggressive housecats. The Living Tribunal, the Beyonders, the One-Above-All—these were powers I couldn't even comprehend, let alone fight.

But the MCU was weaker. More contained. The power scaling was, frankly, kind of pathetic compared to the source material.

That was good for me.

Still, being stronger didn't mean I couldn't be trapped. Sealed. Tricked. Loki was weaker than me but he'd spent millennia perfecting deception—could I claim with certainty that I'd see through his schemes? The Ancient One could manipulate time itself; what if she decided I was a threat and trapped me in a time loop? Dormammu couldn't be killed because he existed outside time, making him functionally immortal even if he wasn't particularly strong by my standards.

And numbers mattered. The Avengers had taken down Thanos through teamwork and sacrifice, through exploiting weaknesses and making plays he didn't expect. If Earth's heroes decided I was a threat, if they pulled a Jujutsu Kaisen and jumped me all at once...

I'd probably win. But "probably" wasn't certainty.

I needed to be smart. Needed to avoid making enemies I didn't need, avoid revealing the full extent of my abilities until I had no choice.

Which brought me back to the television, to the news ticker mentioning unusual seismic activity in New Mexico.

I might be wrong—my memory of the timeline was fuzzy around the edges—but the lack of ambient magic I could sense, the date being 2010, the mention of Puente Antiguo... Thor hadn't happened yet. It would happen soon.

That was... useful.

During most of the first Thor movie, Odin was in the Odinsleep, lost to the world while his body regenerated. Loki was acting regent, too busy with his emotional breakdown and schemes against his brother to properly guard the vault. The Bifrost would be activated multiple times, creating windows of opportunity.

And Odin's vault held treasures beyond just the fake Infinity Gauntlet and the Tesseract that wasn't even there anymore.

The Eternal Flame, burning with Surtr's power.

The Casket of Ancient Winters, containing the concentrated might of Jotunheim's frozen heart.

The Destroyer, an enchanted armor that could go toe-to-toe with Thor himself.

The Warlock's Eye, the Tablet of Life and Time—artifacts whose purposes I only vaguely remembered but which were clearly powerful enough to be locked in Asgard's most secure location.

I could work with this. If I timed it right, if I was careful, I could access Asgard during the chaos of Thor's banishment. Loki would be too distracted to notice one more anomaly, too focused on his plans to realize someone was raiding the vault.

I'd need to move soon, though. Once Thor arrived, events would accelerate rapidly.

But first...

I turned my gaze to Linda, still sleeping on the other couch. The woman who'd seen someone broken and bleeding and invited them into her home. Who'd offered shared misery as if it were a gift, and maybe it had been.

She looked peaceful, her face relaxed in sleep despite the lines of exhaustion and hard living that marked her features. The news had called her older than fifty, though she looked older still. Life hadn't been kind to her. This apartment, barely large enough to qualify as a studio, was evidence of that.

She'd helped me anyway.

That deserved recompense.

I stood quietly, my movements making no sound—a trick I'd learned in my second life, how to move without disturbing reality's perception. I'd become very good at being unnoticed when I wanted to be.

My magic rose around me like invisible wings, power that existed in the space between concept and reality. I was the embodiment of Nothing in Tensura, held dominion over death and curse and void. That dominion extended to interesting places when you thought creatively.

Most people thought of curses as purely negative. Hexes, jinxes, malevolent magic designed to harm and weaken. And yes, I could do that. I'd done that extensively during the war.

I'd cursed soldiers to rot from the inside out, their organs liquefying while they still lived to scream. I'd cursed entire battalions with synchronized heart attacks, watching them drop like puppets with severed strings. I'd crafted plagues that turned flesh necrotic, that filled lungs with fluid, that caused bones to crumble to dust within living bodies.

I'd cursed enemy commanders with paranoia so intense they'd murdered their own troops. I'd cursed supply lines so that food turned poisonous, water became acid, weapons shattered at first use.

I'd pulled memories from dying soldiers—where their families lived, what they loved most—and cursed those distant loved ones to die in their sleep, hearts simply stopping for no medical reason, just to spread despair through enemy ranks.

I'd animated corpses and sent them shambling back toward enemy lines, cursed to speak the names of everyone they'd known in life until the psychological damage exceeded the physical threat.

I'd crafted curses that took days to kill, that left victims in screaming agony as their bodies betrayed them in every possible way. Curses that made allies attack each other, unable to recognize friend from foe. Curses that caused soldiers to experience phantom pains from wounds they'd inflicted on others.

The Geneva Convention would need to invent new categories of war crime to cover half of what I'd done.

My telekinesis had been worse. Continental scale meant I could cause earthquakes by shifting tectonic plates. Could divert rivers, collapse mountains, raise tsunamis. I'd buried armies beneath landslides, crushed fortress cities by compressing their foundations, created sinkholes that swallowed thousands.

I'd lifted enemy soldiers and simply... held them. Suspended in air while their allies watched, helpless. Sometimes I'd release them unharmed as a show of mercy. Other times I'd crushed them slowly, bones breaking one by one, while their screams echoed across battlefields.

I'd torn weapons from hands across entire armies simultaneously, left them defenseless. I'd reversed the trajectory of arrows and spells, sent them back to their sources. I'd grabbed supply caravans from miles away and hurled them into enemy encampments, crushing dozens with their own resources.

The scale was the worst part. I could kill individually—precise, personal, looking into eyes as I ended lives. But I could also kill wholesale. Thousands at once. Tens of thousands. Select an area, decide everyone in it needed to die, and make it happen with a thought.

I'd been efficient. Clinical. The emotional dampening spells had helped with that, let me murder on an industrial scale without breaking down.

But curses and telekinesis weren't the only tools I had.

I held dominion over death itself, and death was more flexible than people realized.

I could kill diseases with the same ease I killed people. Reach into a body, find the cancer cells multiplying out of control, and simply... stop them. Command them to die with the authority of an embodied concept. The tumors would necrotize and be absorbed by the body, gone as if they'd never existed.

I could curse wounds to heal, force flesh to knit and bones to set properly. Tell pain to stop and watch it obey.

I could even curse someone with health, with life itself—not healing, but rather a state of enforced vitality that would keep them functioning at peak physical condition. Their body would fight off illness, repair damage, maintain itself at optimal levels not through healing magic but through the curse of perfect health.

And then there was luck.

Luck was a funny thing. In a deterministic universe, it didn't exist—but we didn't live in a deterministic universe. Probability was real, quantum uncertainty was real, and that meant luck was real too.

And luck was always relative.

When someone got lucky, someone else got unlucky. The universe balanced its books. If I gave one person improbable fortune, I was implicitly cursing everyone around them with corresponding misfortune. The zero-sum game of probability redistribution.

Wasn't that one of the greatest curses? To know that your good fortune came at the expense of others' suffering?

I wove the spell carefully, precisely. Linda would wake tomorrow feeling like a teenager again—no, better than a teenager, because she'd still have her wisdom and experience. Her joints wouldn't ache. Her heart would beat strong and steady. Her vision would sharpen, her hearing clear. She'd have energy that people half her age would envy.

And she'd be lucky. Absurdly, impossibly lucky. Lottery-winning lucky. Hundreds of millions of dollars lucky, with more windfalls to follow. Every game of chance would tip in her favor. Every random opportunity would find her. Every dangerous situation would resolve without harm.

The curse settled around her like a second skin, invisible and unbreakable. She'd never know it was there, would attribute everything to random chance or delayed karma or simple good fortune.

But she'd live well. Comfortably. With the resources to help others the way she'd helped me.

I leaned close, speaking softly enough that I wouldn't wake her even as my words inscribed themselves into reality.

"Thanks for allowing me to be miserable with you," I whispered. "But I'm the kind of person who prefers making others miserable."

My form began to dissolve, ghostlike, as I prepared to teleport. Not just space—I was reaching across dimensions, finding the specific vibrational frequency that would take me where I needed to go.

"We'll probably see each other again," I continued to her sleeping form. "Maybe not soon. But I don't forget debts."

The dissolution accelerated. I was becoming less physical, more conceptual, preparing to slip between the cracks of reality.

"Right now, I can't truly allow myself to be miserable, even though it's the only thing I want."

My voice was fading, becoming barely more than breath and intention.

"With me gone from Jura-Tempest, we probably lost more fronts. Dozens of thousands died when they didn't have to. Rimuru and the others must be worried sick, overwhelmed trying to compensate for my absence."

Almost gone now. Just a shadow, a suggestion of presence.

"I'll only allow myself to truly grieve after I've won against her. After the Eastern Empire is ash. After I've murdered Velgrynd. After I've had enough time to build their graves—Kael, Lyra, Borin, and all the others who died for me. Only then. Only then will I grieve."

With those words, I was gone.

Reality inverted, compressed, expanded. The sensation of teleportation across dimensional boundaries felt like being turned inside-out and then right-side-in again, like falling through a kaleidoscope made of crystallized possibility.

I opened my eyes to mountain air, thin and cold.

The sign before me depicted a stylized mandala, ornate and weathered, with text in both Nepali and English: Kamar-Taj - Private Property - No Trespassing.

Prayer flags fluttered in the wind, their colors bright against grey stone and white snow. The building before me looked ancient, all carved wood and stone architecture that had witnessed centuries. The kind of place that felt sacred not because someone had declared it so, but because the weight of practice and dedication had seeped into every surface.

The Ancient One was in there somewhere. The Sorcerer Supreme, keeper of the Eye of Agamotto, guardian of the Time Stone, probably the most dangerous individual on Earth at this moment.

I'd grieve later. Mourn later. Break down and cry and scream later, when I'd earned the right to collapse.

But for now, right now, I had an appointment.

A date with a bald monk lady who could manipulate time itself.

A dragon seeking power and an immortal sorceress.

How utterly and profoundly cliché.