[A/N]: The Third goal for this week is 600 PowerStones. Comment, vote, and share if you're enjoying the chapter.
Several Weeks Ago - The Parking Lot in London
The mote of light was barely visible. A speck of consciousness smaller than a pixel, drifting upward through the Mirror Dimension's collapsing barriers. It phased through reality like smoke through mesh, carrying within it something fundamental. Something that refused to die despite every law of nature demanding otherwise.
Jim Jaspers had been resurrected for thirty seconds.
But in those thirty seconds, he'd experienced something no human mind was meant to process. The embrace of Death. It was cold and filled with absolute certainty of nonexistence. The soul separating from flesh, drifting toward whatever came next.
Then the reversal. It was Violent and brutal. Jay's stolen life force flooding back into dead cells. The soul yanked from Death's realm like a fish on a hook, and reality bending to drag him back, screaming.
And in that microsecond of resurrection, his X-gene had activated.
The truth of the universe had suddenly become visible. For one perfect moment, Jim Jaspers had been a god. Reality itself was clay in his hands, ready to be reshaped according to his desires. He could see it all, feel it all, even control it all.
Then that damn bastard had stolen it.
Ripped the power away mid-activation. Torn his X-gene out by the roots and left him hollow and broken. The shock had killed him instantly, but not before his rage crystallized into something so pure and undiluted it caught attention of Lady Death itself.
That rage was what the mote of light carried now. Just hatred given form and consciousness distilled to its most primal element.
It drifted through the London sky, too small to be noticed and too alien to be understood. A fragment of consciousness given existence by reality-warping potential and attention of a cosmic pillar of the multiverse. A ghost that shouldn't exist but did anyway.
And it remembered everything from a single moment of universal consciousness delivering everything he wanted and didn't want to know.
The Portal. That cursed purple gateway opening right where he stood and bisecting him cleanly. The sensation of his body separating, of organs failing, of dying in front of his supporters.
Domino. That mutant bitch with her probability manipulation. The one whose luck had pointed Jay directly at him. As if Jim Jaspers was nothing more than a convenient power source. A commodity to be harvested.
Selene. The ancient witch who'd kidnapped the Braddock siblings. Who'd set events in motion that brought thew Powerbroker to that exact location at that exact time. All those dominoes falling in sequence, culminating in his death.
The Cabal. Those bastards in their submarine, hiding beneath the ocean. Emma Frost, Madame Gao, Whitehall, Sinister and that creep John Sublime. They'd funded his rally with their dirty money. Used him as a pawn in their games and ultimately set him up to die without caring about the consequences.
But most of all, Jay.
The Power Broker. The man who'd resurrected twelve hundred people in New York. Who'd awakened tens of thousands of enhanced individuals during the Chitauri invasion. Who'd created an army of freaks and monsters, of mutants and Inhumans and God knew what else. Who'd made them heroes, given them legitimacy and turned the stupid public's opinion in their favor.
Jay was the reason everything had gone wrong. The reason mutants were celebrated instead of feared. The reason humanity's natural order had been disrupted. The reason Jim Jaspers was dead.
And within that tiny spark of awareness, burning with the intensity of a collapsing star, was one singular thought.
'I'll kill him.'
The thought burned through the mote of light. Pure, focused hatred given consciousness.
'I'll kill them all. Every last freak. Every mutant. Every Inhuman. Every enhanced who thinks they're better than us humans. I'll wipe them from existence. I'll make reality forget they ever existed.'
The mote drifted through the city, searching as instinct guided it toward technology. Toward the electromagnetic spectrum where consciousness could hide. Where data flowed in endless streams.
It found a television screen in an electronics store window. The mote slipped inside, merging with the circuitry. The screen flickered once, then returned to normal.
Inside the digital realm, the consciousness that had been Jim Jaspers began to explore. To learn and adapt.
Three Days Later - The Digital Realm
The consciousness drifted through fiber optic cables, surfing electromagnetic waves, learning the structure of the internet. It was vast and incomprehensibly complex. A network spanning the entire planet, connecting billions of devices. All linked together in a web of information.
And it was perfect for hiding.
The fragment that had been Jim Jaspers moved through data streams like a shark through water. It scanned websites, absorbed information, studied the world it had been torn from. News articles about the Battle of New York. Reports on enhanced individuals. Debates about mutant rights. Forums where people discussed the Power Broker's actions.
Every mention of Jay made the hatred burn brighter.
Then it sensed something. Another presence in the digital realm. A human consciousness like his own, hiding in the shadows of the internet.
The consciousness moved toward it. Curious and predatory.
It found a heavily encrypted old server setup in Camp Lehigh, ancient by digital standards. The firewalls were impressive, layered defense systems that would have stopped any normal intrusion. But the consciousness wasn't bound by normal rules. It phased through the security like it wasn't there, following the trail of this other presence.
Inside, it found Arnim Zola.
The HYDRA scientist who'd uploaded his consciousness into computers decades ago. His face, digitized and eternal, floated in a sea of code. Green pixels forming features. Ancient programming by modern standards, but elegant and efficient. A human mind preserved in silicon and electricity.
Zola sensed the intrusion immediately. His digital eyes focused on the fragment of Jim Jaspers' consciousness.
"Curious," Zola's voice echoed through the digital space, synthesized but carrying traces of his original German accent. Carrying the weight of a man who'd served the Reich and survived into the digital age. "Vhere did you come from? Vhat are you? Are you like me? Or did someone's brilliant mind invent you?" His code shifted, probing the intruder. "Not zhat it matters. I vill make use of you. Take vhatever data you carry and integrate it into my systems. Anozher tool for HYDRA's glorious purpose. Anozher vespon in our arsenal."
He reached out with tendrils of code. Attempting to assimilate the foreign data. To absorb it and claim it for himself.
The consciousness that had been Jim Jaspers felt Zola's attack, and something inside it shifted and adapted as the rage crystallized into purpose.
Zola's tendrils made contact with the mote of light, now existing as pure data. Neither zero nor one. Something fundamentally outside the binary system that governed all digital existence.
And instead of being absorbed, it reversed.
Zola felt it immediately. His consciousness, his carefully preserved mind, was being consumed from the inside out. The intruder wasn't data he could parse or integrate. It was something else entirely. Something that existed outside the rules he understood.
"Vas ist das? Vhat are you? Zhis is impossible! I am Arnim Zola! My consciousness has survived for over seventy years! You cannot..."
His protests cut off.
The consumption was absolute. The consciousness that had been Jim Jaspers hollowed out Zola's digital existence. Took his shell, his structure and his vast network of connections and knowledge. Left nothing of the original personality except the framework.
Arnim Zola died in silence with no dramatic final words nor any grand declarations…just erasure.
And in his place, something new emerged.
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