4D chess with multiverse time travel.

After Lady Death left, I just stood there for a moment, shell shocked.

Not only were my plans destitute now, any future plans I make will be detected and destroyed by Lady Death.

I could try and skidaddle out of here with my kids and cut my losses but....

Not only was it not in my nature to tuck my dick up my ass and run away like a bitch but also that Lady Death was likely still here, reading my mind or hiding somewhere close, watching my every move.

If I tried to leave, she would likely kill us before we even made it two steps off the beaten path.

That also left me with few other choices.

I could leave my children and my ship here and run away alone. That would save me some time. But the results would be similar.

She would kill my children and destroy my hard earned ship.

No. That is out of the question. A last resort.

What else, what else?

Thinking of rebellion....is a moot point.

Not happening that easy.

There is no choice then.... is there?

Other than do what I had already planned minus the reality anchor.

How pathetic....how....

I stumbled.

Both metaphorically and physically as I took the next step, clutching at a desk beside me.

"Papa?" Riley asked, concerned.

"Mr. Saint? Are you okay?" Pietro added, walking up to me.

I shook my head, ignoring their words. Yes. This has to be done. The backup programs are in place. My children will be well taken care of.

I thought.

If I can't live my own way, I'll at least die on my own terms.

If Lady Death wants me to build her an escape, she can well do it over my literal dead body!

No point ignoring it. Not now.

I pulled out a flask of mega seed juice and gulped it down in one go.

A snap of my fingers and another two flasks go down my gullet.

A hookah of toxic mind altering substances, a huff of alien jet fuel and that toxic red mineral dust.

"Papa! Stop!" Riley banged on my forcefield, "You'll die!"

Tears were welling up in her eyes as my veins turned purple and my stomach dissolved from the toxic reagents.

No time to lose.

I ran out of the room, Pietro following close by.

No. No one can be allowed to interfere.

Immediately, I tripped Pietro up, sending him tumbling into a wall.

Barriers upon barriers flickered on in the my wake slowing their progress.

I knew they wouldn't stop Riley. Not with her devil fruit powers.

She would teleport past them.

But I didnt need to stop her. Just stall her enough.

I smiled miserably as the toxic reagents reached my intenstines.

I don't know if you know this but having your intestines melted and corroded in real time is pretty fucking excruciating!

I almost had the urge to stop and die right then there.

But I held on with all my willpower.

Just a few minutes more. Till I do what needs to be done.

Till Riley catches up.

It was almost in sight now.

My workshop. My lab.

I slid in unceremoniously, my stomach torn and bleeding.

I coughed up blood, as the solvents filled my lungs in toxic vapors, burning away at them.

No. Not yet.

I slammed the door behind me and burst out my powers at full capacity, turning the room into a jackson pollock of kaleidoscopic hues as the electronics went haywire, my powers soaking into everything even at great cost to my body.

But I plan on dying here. Or so I believed.

Wholeheartedly. Because that was what I needed Lady Death to believe too.

With a flip of my wrist, the telekinetic module clicked open.

Combined with the rest of my powers, it granted me what I needed for the moment.

Complete destruction.

I began to rip the storage containers off the wall, twist vaults, crushing all within, broken beakers and extradimensional charges laid out around me.

My technokinesis flared and broke the forcefield generator on the beast pens creating a maladaptive field over the workshop, flickering in and out of existence, before the A.I. stabilized it.

Now, in a room filled with extradimensional energy and isolated from the world, I let out one last blast of defiance in the face of literal death.

I ripped out my earpiece and crushed it between my fingers just as my throat dissolved to the toxins.

With a broken, gurgled roar, my throat turning into little more than torn meat flaps ooze and pus leaking from them, I pushed my powers beyond their limits and fractured space time in the room, portals, fragmented and cracked opening up all around me and in all my stores and vaults and other workshops, causing untold damage to the equipment.

With that done, my anger sated and my mission accomplished, I fell to my knees, a middle finger raised to the sky ...or was it space here?

It mattered not.

A drone dropped out beside me, and a speaker buzzed to life as I spoke my final words.

"Lady Death. I know you're watching this, so take the dicks out of your ears and listen up, slut!

If you think you can threaten me with death, you are sorely mistaken. Suck it! Suck it long and hard and swallow my cock deep, you whore! You want to escape this world? After daring to threaten my kids? Over my dead body bitch! Fuck you, and respectfully, go fuck yourself! Adios!"

My piece said, I collapsed on the floor as the darkness creeped in, just as a glowing silver light filtered in through cracks in the door, and the door blew open.

The last thing I saw was Riley, tears streaming down her face.

She rushed in, kneeling by my side, administering CodeRed to me, as a bubble of silver grey shimmered above her and she muttered something incoherent.

But I knew what was needed for my plans to succeed.

"Riley ...." The speaker system stuttered, "I'm sorry. Papa was weak. I couldn't protect...you. But now you're safe." I raised my bloodsoaked hand and caressed her face, leaving streaks of red on her tear stained cheeks.

"You will be safe... Papa... loves you. Never forget that....oka-"

Then the darkness took me and I went with a smile.

All according to plan.

.

As I descended into my mind, forming layers and layers of thought streams, palaces of dreams and highways of bulk information, I turned my mind into a labyrinthine contraption of eldritch proportions, an impregnable fortress.

Now, in a forcefield inside another forcefield, soaked in extra dimensional energies that blocked the sight and hindered the movements of Lady Death, with the added protection and interference of Riley's operation room powers, and her shard's energy twisting within me, keeping me alive and away from the grasp of death, I could finally think in peace.

Could I have used this method to ward off Lady Death? Sure.

If I had greater stores of extradimensional energy charges, or if the energy itself stuck around for longer instead of dissipating within minutes.

I could make containment fields sure.

But even if I accomplished that, Lady Death might just have killed me by destroying everything else around me and letting me flash freeze to death in space.

So that won't work.

No. The only way to beat her now was to play 4D chess with multiversal time travel.

And that is exactly what I did.

The suicidal rampage earlier, a class act worthy of a dozen oscars by the way, was very much a deliberate and necessary.

My actions there helped me stealthily lay the foundation for the downfall of Lady Death. In a manner she wouldn't expect.

I knew she was omnipotent, but I had always wondered, a lingering thought.

Was she also omniscient?

The answer she had inadvertently given me today was clear.

A resounding no.

How do I know for sure?

Because if she was omniscient, she would have known what I planned on doing when I entered that stony, barren dimension, naked with just a piece of paper and a one use portal charge.

And yet she allowed me to not only go to that dimension, but also retrieve the research documents from the SCP Foundation and return without so much as a threat or warning.

No, that came today, once, I assume, she spotted the Reality Anchor blueprints completed and displayed on my screen.

Which gave her away.

She wasn't omniscient.

Not that she couldn't still be, or that wasn't able to now become so, but rather the fact that she couldn't be fucked to be omniscient.

No.

I don't know if she prefers the excitement of the unknown or if being an all powerful entity had made her complacent and lazy, but it seems for some reason that despite all her powers, she is not omniscient.

I can use that to my advantage.

Because with her powers she could have probably understood the means of escape I proposed, copied them from me and had someone else recreate them for her.

But she likely didn't.

Was it because her contract with One Above All barred her from attempting to escape?

Probably.

But was it a chance I'm taking?

Hell no.

Hence, the plan.

And that stupid suicide attempt. All to fool her.

Even if it meant traumatizing Riley.

A bit cruel, yes. Manipulative, very much so.

But ultimately, necessary trauma for me to defeat death.

And for all intents and purposes, my plan succeeded.

How do I know this?

Because not once during my rampage did Lady Death show up to stop me.

Not when in the middle of it I enchanted a couple of key shards. Not when I 'accidentally' leaked extradimensional energies into the room.

Not when I opened shattered portals all across the ship, secretly teleporting several necessary materials out of the MCU and into a barren dimension.

Not even when my portals just happened to shroud my Project Phoenix system in a space time anomaly, sending a severed clone corpse to the same barren dimension.

Nope.

Not once did Lady Death show up.

And that would be her undoing.

Even as I lay here getting treated by Riley, in another dimension, the materials I sent away are working out my instructions.

This is where my powers come in handy.

My shard gives me the ability to imbue an object with my powers and use that to tie a concept of my choosing to it.

But that wasn't all my power did.

It also gave me full control of that enchanted object. Across the multiverse.

Yup. Even unconcious, I am controlling a swarm of nanobots in another dimension, creating a brand new lab and a list of tasks.

And first on that list?

Project Drithrashtra, a name I had chosen for ironic reasons, the best reasons!

Made from the shards of Clairvoyant, who had the ability to view things across dimensions and Doormaker, who could create portals into the multiverse, with a smattering of other shards, and a negentropic base.

This was a brand new power that would allow me or rather the nano swarm I had thrown into this barren dimension, the ability to come and go undetected between realities.

This would also help me steal away the flesh of Ego, The Living Planet without being noticed.

Because Lady Death wasn't omniscient. Which meant she wouldn't know that I had more than one method of teleportation across dimensions.

She was going to keep an eye out for my glowing green or Wanda's soon-to-be burning yellow portals, not the sucking black portals the newly made shard created. No. Not only were they not expected by Lady Death, they were also nigh imperceptible.

A bonus feature for me.

With the shard ready I moved on to the next part.

My swarm picked up the shard and moved it to where a headless clone corpse lay, doused in CodeRed.

And right where it's head should have been, lay a meat puppet, writhing in agony, having been torn in half by a stray portal.

Just as planned.

The CodeRed, now acting like a medium, regenerated the two biomasses, and merged them together into an unholy creature with the head of a meat puppet and the body of one of my unused Project Phoenix clones.

Through my swarm, my power extended to the chimera, seeping into it as I began to program it, using the meat puppet's brain chip as a base.

The basic functions first, then more advanced capabilities, loyalty, and obedience, knowledge of experiments, some of my muscle memory and at last, the blueprints of what I needed it to make for me.

A Scranton Reality Anchor.

Finally, I input a set of times and places into it, a sort of biological alarm clock ticking down to the exact moment I intended to slay the Celestials so it could rip away their flesh as needed.

And with the last vestiges of my leftover hold on the swarm, I enchanted the body with one concept.

Sustainability.

To make sure it would survive in this barren dimension till the appointed date arrived wothout food or water.

And there it was.

A completely independent doll that would become the lynchpin in my plans to defeat Death.

With that done, there was only one more thing left to do.

Seal my own memories regarding this into the chimera's bio chip and program the same timetable into my chip.

To remind me of when and where the Celestials need to be killed.

Why seal away my own memories?

Into a meat puppet in another dimension no less?

Because I cannot afford to fail this time. If my calculations are right, the extradimensional energies are about fade from the room right about now, allowing Lady Death to return to the ship. And she cannot be allowed to find out my true plans.

And for that, I can't be allowed to know them myself, so that even if she reads my mind, she can't find anything odd.

There will be a price to pay no doubt.

Lady Death will be angry at my attempt to chip her, but ultimately, this will be my victory. By hook or by crook.

.

I awoke with a start, and found myself face to face with Lady Death, unbridled rage writ across her face.

She grabbed me by the neck, her nails digging into my skin as she lifted me up with just one hand.

"What did I tell you about betraying me?! You think you can escape my grasp so easily, boy?" She spat, "You are a greater fool than I had hoped.

So let me clear up your misconceptions"

She raised her other hand, ripping through my chest and pulled out my still beating heart.

She cradled it in her palm for a moment, relishing in my pain, as I thrashed about in her grip, before her nails sliced into my heart.

Suddenly, veins of black creept all across my heart, winding and crossing over each other, like a demented spider web of irrational patterns, and a searing pain burned through my body, a sweet, sickly smell filling the room.

"A curse." Lady Death continued.

"You think you can escape me, boy? You are wrong. But I will not stop you if you wish to die. This curse, it will rot you, from the inside out, slowly and steadily devouring you alive."

I winced as the pain continued to grow, and with one sudden jolt, she thrust my heart back into my chest.

I screamed.

And I screamed.

The pain rushing through my nerves like molten lava, made of needles and knives.

The worst pain imaginable and yet somehow even a step further assaulted me, it's sudden strike nearly shattering my will altogether.

But it stopped short, leaving me the barest thread of life left.

I gasped, taking gulping breaths as I found my self back on the bed, and she cackled, relishing my pain.

"You have one year, boy. Either I make my escape, or you die. A horrible, cruel, painful death. Your choice.

Oh, and even if you leave this world, the curse will not vanish. It will not be broken. Ever.

If you try to break it, let's just say, it won't be pretty.

So choose wisely, boy. You don't have long." She giggled, before she vanished, satisfied.

___________________

The extra chappy for 200 powerstones is here!

Alright guys, moment of truth.

Is this plot line okay? Or should I try something else and delete the last two chapters. Tell me now before it's too late.

I can still fix it if I start now. So be quick!

Thanks for reading.

See you later tonight with another chapter.

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