The whole universe was holding its breath—and I mean everything. From the microscopic fungi chilling on asteroid dust to the hypermutant cockatoos on Earth-7 singing dubstep with their feathers. Even they could feel it.
The Andromeda Threat wasn't just some distant cosmic event anymore. It was a looming executioner with its blade poised—hovering right over the fragile, stubborn skull of life itself.
And on Earth-2—oh, glorious Earth-2, a big metal ball of brilliance and bureaucracy—high above the neon arteries of Metropolis B-102, in a building that could slice clouds for breakfast...
Haki stood alone. Well, sort of.
"These Off-world meetings are the worst... those HOHs don't know when to shut the hell up."
His voice was a paradox. Deep enough to make demons weep, smooth enough to put newborns into REM sleep.
Hell Dave: "Damn bastards."
Heavenly Dave: "Blessed be the ignorant... Amitabha, must you always speak in hellfire, Hell Dave?"
Hell Dave: "Amitabha-my-ass! Keep talking and I'll light you up."
Heavenly Dave: "Already glowing with divine radiance, fool."
Hell Dave: "One more word and I'll baptize you in thermonuclear sass."
Yeah… They bickered like divorced demigods in a sitcom with no commercial breaks. And all of it was echoing inside Haki's skull.
If someone opened Haki's head, it wouldn't just be wild—it'd be revolutionary. Like pulling back the curtain on madness and finding a TED Talk running on loop. Delusion didn't live here—it paid rent, bought furniture, and redecorated the walls.
And while the voices in his head were throwing shade and spiritual haymakers, Haki himself was still chewing on the godawful aftertaste of that meeting. Normally, any planetary council would drop dead silent when their resident genius entered the room. Not Haki. No one got the privilege of silence anymore.
"Savant, the HOHs have reported to their senior staff, who then reported to their senior staff, who then—"
"Haman, just tell me what happened before I eject myself from this building."
President Haman—a man who'd long made peace with Haki's zero-respect policy—sighed that "here-we-go-again" sigh and delivered the bad news:
"Genius, Lab 350 lit up like Judgment Day. The blast was so luminous it bent air. People got fried. Some... didn't walk out. But here's the kicker—four hours later, an area spanning 108,000 meters of dead space came to be, a region of pure electromagnetic silence. There were no signals, no light, no data, and no nothing. Just black. Like the facility vanished from physics itself. And without electromagnetic traps, anti-matter storage became Impossible. Everything went boom—silently. All electronic devices applicable to this situation…"
His words were dressed in formality, but if you listened closely, you could taste the sarcasm simmering beneath.
"..."
"..."
Then came the silence.
For about twenty seconds Haki hadn't said anything, just in deep thought. Haman knew what was coming.
The AHA Moment.
Haki's legendary "download-from-the-cosmos" look.
THUMPTHUMP
If you listened hard enough, you'd swear you could hear his neurons doing pushups. He wasn't just thinking—he was lifting quantum weights.
And as the phrases replayed on loop...
[Electromagnetic Dead-Zone.]
[Unviable.]
[Anti-Matter.]
...something inside him snapped. Literally. A blood vessel popped. Not metaphorically. Popped. The warm trickle of blood flowing down his brain gave him a cooling sensation, contradicting the discomfort he felt. It centered him. Usually, when a blood vessel in the brain ruptures, blood will flow into the surrounding brain tissue or space. This is known as a brain hemorrhage or haemorrhage. The blood can accumulate within the skull, potentially causing pressure on the brain and disrupting its normal function. But for Haki, it was routine for epiphanies… Weird, but it worked.
And that's when it hit.
"All responses, in the end, are beneficial to the universe. A universe within a universe, and so on… to infinity."
Eddie Brown, the Pioneer of Femto-Tech, said that three billion years ago and still hadn't been outquoted.
That wasn't philosophy, it was law. That was CORE CODE— the raw blueprint of the universe translated into Quantum JavaScript.
[Everything is a universe.
Expansion before cooling.
Order after the bang.]
Haki leapt to his feet.
"I need to get back to my lab."
"Wait—" Haman tried to hold him for a bit.
"Tell me one thing," Haki growled, his voice ten octaves lower. "Did the dead-zone... grow over time, or did it just snap into being?"
"It... snapped."
That smile. That smile on Haki's face—it wasn't human. Predatory. Not wicked, but definitely not safe.
"Perfect."
Haman was panicking now. Rightly so.
"You can't just leave—Savant, we don't even know what experiment you're planning—"
"Oh, Presido." He turned, already halfway out the door. "I'm going to need trillions of "atoms"... from a Graver Star. And as for the experiment? Let's just say... I might've just figured out how to contact the soul."
Haman's eyes slowly widened in realization.
"WHAT?!"
"There's no way, br- erm… Savant, didn't you say the soul and electromagnetism were related, how could a phenomenon that creates EDZ's (Electromagnetic Dead-Zone(s)) be relate- wait… could it be, but how is that possible!!!" It seemed Haman had also realized something at that moment and was about to ask more.
Unfortunately, Hell Dave took over at that instance, "Just put the fries in the bag, bro."
Haman: "Nobody says that anymore!"
"…"
Haman: "GET BACK HERE!"
The guards remained still. No one with half a brain dared to step between the two brothers—not anymore…
Back at the Lab…
His chamber? Less "lab," more "pocket universe." The floor flowed like memory foam dipped in nanotech. The walls weren't walls—they were ideas frozen into shape. Each cabinet held secrets sharp enough to kill gods—Ahem, yet to be proven, but still…
Haki sat cross-legged on a reactive pad.
He instantly became centered and focused.
One breath. Two. Three. Four. Five.
Then he exhaled—a thousand times. You read that right. Not possible in your time, but Haki hadn't been "normal" for centuries.
His blood started running like plasma in a fusion core, His heart started singing threatening to excuse itself from his chest. After some time, his skin started glowing red. This was Adrenaline blooming like sakura on steroids.
All of HAKI Locked in, ready to be called out at moment's notice.
"ACCA."
A whisper. No, it was a summon. Like an anime transformation, a new version of Haki stepped forward—calmer, crueler, and colder. Adjusting his invisible glasses like a villain on episode 7.
Shifting focus to what was before him, we see… A rat. But not your regular lab rat. This bad boy had biceps. Genetically engineered muscle mass. Generations of mutation and tinkering. Somewhere along the line, it stopped being a rat and started being a beast.
[Please, sir, I have a wife! A family! Two kids!]
Its thoughts, translated by the AI. Haki felt all its emotions—Pathetic. Honest. Desperate.
[Even if this gives us a 1% shot at surviving… please.]
It seemed the rat wasn't entirely clueless about the identity of the demon before him—someone with a towering reputation. On more than one occasion, his actions had sparked upheaval on a massive scale, and in nearly every case, the aftermath included casualties... a lot of them.
His only so-called "saving grace"? The fact that everything he did, every chaotic decision, was for one purpose: to give humanity a fighting chance against the apocalypse.
And truthfully? If someone ever bothered to do the homework, they'd find that the ripple effects of his choices—however ruthless—had been undeniably crucial for the survival of the human race. He was, after all, the pioneer of Yocto-Technology.
As for the unfortunate rodent, his nervous rambling was met with nothing but the cold, calculating stare of Acca—who, at that very moment, was calmly collecting Quick-Basic data: arithmetic, logical, and relational.
He didn't even flinch. Not even on a subatomic scale.
"Damn right."
Survival ain't free. Someone always pays.
The rat was secured—every limb restrained. Even the extra fifth limb, which looked... let's just say it earned its own lab journal.
Then the tools appeared. Floating. Waiting. Sharp. Silent, ready to slice and dice.
Just as said 'slicing and dicing' was about to occur, the scent of the room changed and the cause of this smell seemed to be coming from a liquid that had just formed on the floor.
That liquid... that unholy compound...
Soluble in diluted H₂SO₄. Turns red litmus paper blue. Toxic? Sure. But scientifically? Perfect.
They called it Peace… or was it Piss? Either way, passing it out surely brings peace.
It puddled across the lab floor, seeking for lower grounds to flow to.
And sure enough, the ground soon opened forming a funnel like shape, collecting the liquid.
'No, not yet.' Haki knew the plot of the rat, trying to make him laugh to break his focus… unfortunately the one in control was not hell or heavenly, it was Acca.
To be continued...