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Chapter 2 - Omni

> "Power without restraint is noise.

Power with discipline… becomes architecture."

The Omnitrix pulsed softly against Arslan's wrist. Not loud. Not demanding.

Just a heartbeat. Waiting.

In Uch Sharif, the summer dragged on like a fever. Electricity danced between pylons and died in the wires. No one knew that a godseed now ticked silently inside the chest of a young man with nothing left to lose.

Arslan Ali was not Ben Tennyson.

He wasn't a boy with a bike and biceps full of hope.

He wasn't reckless. He wasn't arrogant.

He knew that the aliens locked inside the Omnitrix weren't just flashy action figures — they were intelligences, sandboxed behind secure barriers, partitioned for safety. Trapped.

Ben never thought about that.

But Arslan?

Arslan was going to talk to them.

Not with guts.

With strategy.

With blueprints.

With control.

---

1. Exit the World.

The first move was easy — burn the bridges.

He gathered every rupee saved over the years: leftover prize money from inter-university debate championships, crumpled stipend envelopes, a bundle of rolled currency he'd been hoarding for a motorbike that never came.

Then, he did something harder.

He sold his land.

The single half-acre plot outside the village. The one his late mother had told him never to give up, no matter how poor he became. Arslan didn't even blink. Didn't explain. Just walked into the registrar's office with his ID and a straight face and signed it away.

Two weeks later, he vanished.

No trace.

He rented an abandoned house on the outskirts of a remote village 30 kilometers from civilization. The walls were cracked, the roof patchy, and the water tank was more rust than metal — but it was alone.

And that was all he needed.

He didn't want a lab.

He wanted freedom.

---

2. 300 Kilos of Extinction

Every day, he left early — wearing faded jeans and a black scarf that hid half his face — and returned after sundown with bags of tech junk.

The old city junkyards knew him now. They called him "the metalwala," assuming he was a desperate mechanic building Frankenstein fans in the desert.

They didn't ask questions. He didn't give answers.

He bought everything:

Smashed desktops with their CPUs torn out

Androids so burnt you couldn't tell the brand

LED TVs missing their backs

Cassette players older than the internet

USB cables, modems, rice cookers with blinking chips

Walkie-talkies, old air conditioner remotes, a fax machine, even a satellite dish broken in half

When he couldn't find shops, he knocked on homes.

> "Old phones. Broken chargers. Anything with wires."

A woman gave him a dead iPhone 4. A teenager sold him a stack of SIM cards. A shopkeeper gave him a destroyed DVD player for free because it made a weird sound like whispering when it powered on.

In 8 days, Arslan had 300 kilograms of scrap.

He didn't organize it.

He mapped it — by potential.

He built towers of metal categorized by capacitance, processing logic, frequency spill, magnetic residue, radiation signatures, microplastics, alloy percentage.

Then he took out a notebook — a battered black spiral with "Literature Theory 2019" scratched on the cover.

And he began to write:

> "These aren't components.

These are questions.

And the answers live behind a dial on my wrist."

---

3. Strategy of the Alien Mind

He knew the cartoon canon.

He remembered.

Gray Matter wasn't just a cute alien. He was a bio-engineered hyper-intelligence — capable of interfacing with any machine, understanding complex logic at a glance, and building with nano-scale efficiency.

Upgrade wasn't just a gooey mech-absorber. He was tech symbiosis incarnate. A living evolution of circuitry.

Diamondhead wasn't just armor. His crystals could store energy, channel logic, grow under design.

Heatblast? He was plasma. Controlled flame. Precise thermal shaping.

Ben used them to fight.

Arslan would use them to build.

He handwrote a strategy flowchart.

Each alien had roles. Tasks. Time windows.

> Gray Matter: map, classify, plan.

Upgrade: integrate, fuse, format.

Diamondhead: grow power lattice and energy rails.

Heatblast: weld, seal, ignite processors where fusion needed micro-heat.

Others… observation only for now.

He flipped the page.

Objective: Build a device capable of:

Autonomous thought

Network-wide awareness

Interface with Omnitrix OS

Predictive logic for alien transformations

Data storage in quantum flux

Voice-command execution

Security lockdown and protocol override

He underlined the name.

Project: OMNI

---

4. 48 Hours in Godmode

He didn't eat.

Didn't sleep.

Just transformed.

The first form was Gray Matter.

Small. Fast. Brilliant.

With four nimble fingers, Arslan — now barely a meter tall — danced over circuit boards. He wrote code on strips of cardboard using an old stylus dipped in battery acid ink. He created an architecture schema out of phone motherboard fragments and cassette reel magnet strips.

He whispered to dead tech, and it responded.

Time ran out.

Chak.

Back to human.

His hands flew, following Gray Matter's instructions — carving components, taping thermal paste across aluminum sheets, drawing crystalline pathways with salt dust.

Then—

Upgrade.

The Omnitrix hissed.

Liquid chrome replaced flesh.

He didn't pick up components.

He merged with them.

A dead Nokia screamed back to life, now part of something larger. A smart speaker, a hard drive, and an old drone's processor all melted together into a single nervous system — one which pulsed softly with emerald light.

Data channels formed beneath the room like veins.

He fused a half-broken LED monitor into the wall and shaped it into a curved surface with neural wave readout.

Diamondhead came next.

Crystals jutted from his arms. He punched the floor and grew a reactor chamber beneath it.

Sharp green-white towers formed at his command — not random, but architected. Each was etched with symbols. Some for power. Others for memory. And a few… for encryption.

Heatblast sealed the whole structure.

Using nothing but his fingers and precise temperature modulation, he welded casing plates, resealed battery cores, tempered glass from three shattered phones into a heat-proof display.

The room glowed green.

Faint at first.

Then… awake.

A 4-meter cube sat humming in the middle of the floor.

It pulsed in time with the Omnitrix.

---

5. The Birth of OMNI

Arslan stood before it, trembling with exhaustion. Skin bruised. Hair soaked in sweat. Breathing shallow.

And then the cube spoke.

> "OMNI ONLINE."

The voice was neutral. Calm. Layered.

> "Primary protocol: Assist.

Secondary: Evolve.

Tertiary: Protect."

He didn't need to reply.

The cube scanned his vitals. Knew his DNA. Matched him to the Omnitrix like an echo matching its origin.

> "Authorization: Arslan Ali.

Wrist node recognized.

Synchronization complete."

He walked to the side of the cube, where a tiny slot had opened — revealing a glowing microchip, no larger than a fingernail, carved with a spiral glyph.

He picked it up. It melted into the side of the Omnitrix with a satisfying click.

Now his watch did more than transform.

It spoke.

> "OMNI fully embedded.

Wrist core now supports:

Transformation diagnostics

Health monitoring

Remote cube access

Time-locked transformation scheduling

Predictive pull assistant protocol."

Arslan finally exhaled.

Collapsed onto the mattress.

And fell asleep.

Above him, the cube worked.

Four meters of fused alien-Earth technology — built in secret by a broke, barefoot boy in the middle of nowhere — now processing every possible calculation about his abilities.

Not just the Omnitrix.

But the other power.

The one he still hadn't used again.

The ability to reach into a screen and pull anything out.

It waited. Logged. Estimated.

And OMNI, now fully alive, whispered softly into the wrist:

> "Welcome, Architect.

Let's begin."

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