Ignoring the Titan's furious curses, five minutes passed.
By then, Superman had calmed down a little.
"Do either of you have any idea how dangerous this place is?" Clark turned toward his kid, and toward his cousin, who had apparently just been used as a weapon.
"Uh... he brought me here! He said he needed to save your life!" Kara immediately sold Ian out without the slightest hesitation, exposing him completely.
Clark's pupils shifted.
He thought about the strange feeling he had last night, and about Ian's so-called nonsense.
"Who told you to come here?"
Clark snapped his head toward Ian.
"My super-intelligence?"
Ian answered honestly for once. He really was telling the truth. He had figured everything out through deduction alone. Unfortunately, the look on Clark's face only made it seem like he wanted to punch something even more.
"We're going to have a long talk later," Clark said sternly to Ian, then turned and fired off several more blasts of heat vision. The already ruined Titan began to crack apart even further.
Then the countless distorted lights around them started collapsing, revealing the wastewater plant cafeteria outside the illusion. Fragments of scattered light were pulled together by some unseen force, gathering frantically into one place.
A black sphere began to form.
Inside it, a shattered world flickered in and out of view. Countless unwilling souls seemed to be screaming at the outside world from within. Clark looked unsurprised, as if he had seen this before.
"What is that?"
Kara stepped forward, wanting to touch it.
"Don't touch it!"
Clark yanked Kara back at once.
His expression was grave, edged with both caution and concern.
"Is that the thing that hurt you?" Kara lowered her head and looked at Clark's arm. She could sense his injury, so it was not hard to guess why he was wary.
"Did whoever sent you here tell you how to deal with this thing?" Clark did not answer Kara. Instead, he turned toward Ian, who was staring at the black sphere in shock.
"I have no idea. That big shot didn't say."
Ian's eyes were bright and innocent.
"Maybe I can get rid of it?" He was already imagining himself as Gul'dan, packed full of fel energy every day. Just thinking about it made it obvious that kind of power-up speed would be insane.
At the thought, Ian swallowed.
Clark caught the reaction immediately.
"Pica. Hannibal mentioned that symptom before."
Superman let out a sigh. He was just about to call Kara over and have the two of them try blasting the strange black sphere out of the air with heat vision before it fully solidified and escaped.
Then the sphere suddenly trembled.
"Become our new hope!"
It shot straight toward Ian like an arrow released from a bow. Clark reacted instantly and raised a hand to intercept it, but the black sphere passed right through his palm as if his hand was intangible.
[Mergeable data detected!]
Ian heard the abrupt notification from his system.
"Ah~"
His eyes lit up with delight.
He opened his mouth on the spot, ready to welcome the free meal being delivered to him.
And at that exact moment, everything froze.
The world around him rapidly drained of color.
"Are you insane?!"
A pale hand appeared out of nowhere.
It seized Ian by the throat.
He could not swallow the prize that had already reached his mouth. Then the fake Death, Tessa, or rather a certain mysterious lady who clearly had no interest in introducing herself, slowly revealed her full form.
She simply gave Ian's throat a squeeze.
"Puh!"
The black sphere popped right back out of his mouth.
"You just stole food right out of my mouth!?"
Ian got mad, but only for about a second. What else was he supposed to do? He was facing one of the top-tier beings in the entire universe. All he could do was watch as her black-gloved hand closed around the sphere.
"Do you even know what this thing is? And you were about to put it in your mouth?" The woman looked cautious even while holding the black sphere, as if she was handling something extremely dangerous.
Ian raised an eyebrow.
"If I didn't eat it, how was I supposed to find out what it was?" he shot back, using his own bizarre logic to cover up the fact that his system had basically told him it was safe to consume.
"..."
The mysterious lady did not seem especially suspicious.
Her attention was fixed on the black sphere in her hand.
"This is a broken world. You can think of it as part of a universe. A fragment of a universe. What it carries inside it are things that do not belong to our universe."
"Yes. It is part of another universe. The remains of a dead universe." She lightly moved her fingers around the sphere, and ripples spread across its surface.
Faintly, countless tiny lights flickered within.
It looked like countless living things were screaming inside it.
"Huh. That high-level, huh?" Ian was anything but calm. The explanation she was giving him made his skin crawl the more he thought about it, especially since what he had personally gotten out of all this had not exactly been ideal.
"So there's still life inside these shattered universes." Even with a bit of unease rising in his chest, Ian immediately latched onto the chance to pull useful information out of her.
"Echoes of the past, nothing more. They do not really count as life. Of course, if this kind of universal wreckage manages to attach itself to another universe and complete its revival, then those echoes can indeed become alive again."
For some reason, the mysterious lady had stopped speaking in riddles for once.
She had switched to full question-and-answer mode.
And Ian, of course, was not about to waste a chance like this.
"That can really happen? One universe can latch onto another one? Like a parasite?"
He could not help thinking about the few people he had already met who clearly did not belong to the DC universe.
Was that another kind of universal parasitism?
While Ian was still muttering to himself internally, the woman continued.
"To be precise, only universes like this one, already shattered and reduced to fragments, choose parasitic attachment. Universes that are still intact usually take a gentler approach. That kind of silent fusion is much harder for us to detect. It is far less obvious than the parasitic behavior of broken universal wreckage."
She looked at the black sphere in her hand with open disgust.
"Us?"
Ian immediately caught the wording.
"That is not something you need to know."
Clearly, she had no intention of answering that question.
"Okay."
Ian processed the information for a moment.
"So why did this broken universe show up inside a cook's body? Does it pick some chosen one or something?"
As far as Ian was concerned, this was directly relevant to him.
No way was he skipping it.
"If something wants to parasitize our universe, then naturally it needs to choose a host from within the universe first. A host with a 'legal' identity, so to speak. But do not make the mistake of thinking that makes the host lucky."
"These foreign substances look for lives with weak wills or empty hearts. They offer those people false power and false purpose, making them believe they have been chosen for some mission."
"But in reality, everyone parasitized by these shattered universes is just a disposable tool. That poor bastard you drove to his death was not even the same one your father encountered yesterday."
The mysterious woman gave Ian a long, meaningful look.
"You should thank me for saving you. Otherwise, you would have ended up just like every victim in every case I've handled. A puppet being manipulated from the shadows, gradually losing your own will until you became a madman."
"There would have been voices in your head. Rising and falling, whispering, tempting, corrupting. Those are the obsessions left behind by the echoes trapped in the wreckage of dead universes." Her voice was serious.
"Believe me. No one can withstand that kind of erosion. Even beings like us..."
Her voice suddenly stopped.
A faintly wistful look appeared on her face.
It was hard to tell who she had just thought of.
"Hm? Why is your face getting paler and paler?" She cast off whatever memory had distracted her and looked back at Ian, only to find that the boy looked deeply wrong.
Even in this black-and-white world, his face had gone pale enough to be alarming.
"It's nothing... I'm just naturally pale."
Ian forced a smile.
For the nightmare world he entered every night, he felt like he had finally found an explanation.
But...
It still did not explain everything.
Like purpose?
He did not have one.
Those obsessive voices?
He did not have those either.
Even the little mental issues he used to have were practically healed by now.
Was that normal?
Then again, if he thought about it carefully, he and that cook were different in other ways too. The cook's power had come from some shattered universe and was unstable as hell.
Ian's power came from his system.
Solid. Reliable. Completely different.
There was really no comparison.
The moment Ian reached that conclusion, his heart calmed again.
And just like that, he settled right back down.
(End of Chapter)
[Check Out My P@treon For +20 Extra Chapters On All My Fanfics!!][[email protected]/euridome]
[+500 Power Stones = +1 Extra Chapter]
[Thank You For Your Support!]