Reincarnated with a lucky draw system

Chapter 595 595: ANGERING THE UNKNOWN

A rift tore open, but what emerged was not a warrior or a fleet.

It was a hospital bed—sterile, white, and jarringly out of place among the asteroids.

Surrounding the bed were various life-support instruments of varying sizes, their rhythmic beeping the only sound in the oppressive silence.

Nightflame and the Mad One surged to their feet, their weapons primed as they stared at the bizarre new arrival.

"You really had to force me to reveal my true self, didn't you?

Consider me... impressed," the sick voice added, punctuated by a wet, rattling cough.

With agonizing effort, the figure on the bed pushed himself upright, his skin translucent and his frame skeletal.

"Who are you?" the Mad One demanded, his suit's sensors failing to categorize the biological mess before him.

"The real culprit.

The mastermind," Nightflame guessed, his face hardening into a mask of cold fury.

He could feel the resonance emanating from the ill man.

"Indeed.

'Mad One,' is it?

You are far from the brightest," the man said, his sunken eyes flickering with a dim, cruel light.

"Initially, I wanted you for your intellect.

You would have been a fine addition to my collection.

But not anymore.

You've become a nuisance.

You can die now."

"What nonsense are you—"

Thud.

The Mad One's massive frame hit the asteroid floor like a sack of stones.

He was lifeless before his sentence could even finish, his soul snuffed out in a heartbeat.

"You know, your plan was perfectly executed," the man continued, turning his gaze toward Nightflame.

"Trapping a sliver of my subconscious within that robot in an infinite loop... it was clever.

But the most brilliant part was how you deftly hid a time bomb in case I intervened.

Quick thinking.

Truly.

But your time has run out."

"Urgh!" Nightflame suddenly screamed, his hands flying to his face.

It felt as if white-hot needles were being driven directly into his pupils.

The pain was astronomical, greater than any injury he had sustained in his long history of warfare.

"Time to be done with this once and for all," the sick being—Aegon—muttered.

The hospital bed began to roll forward, gliding toward Nightflame as if pulled by an invisible tide.

"Your body... I want it," Aegon informed him, his voice devoid of emotion.

"Of course, I cannot break your soul; I'll give credit to the Nameless Soul for that.

Nor can you be killed by conventional means.

Which is why I will follow a more... pragmatic approach."

A sickening squelch filled the air.

The skin on Aegon's forehead tore open, and his skull split apart with the sound of dry wood snapping.

From the ruin of his head, a pulsing, grey-matter brain rose into the air, hovering with a life of its own.

It began to drift toward Nightflame's head.

Nightflame tried to retreat, tried to strike, but his body refused to obey.

It was as if his nervous system had been hijacked, his muscles turned to lead.

"I need to break free!" Nightflame thought desperately, his mind screaming against the paralysis as the pulsing brain drew closer.

"I need to break free!" Nightflame's thoughts screamed against the encroaching darkness, his mind a frantic whirlwind trapped in a paralyzed cage of flesh.

As the pulsing, grey mass of Aegon's brain drew closer, Nightflame caught a sudden, horrifying inkling of the grand design.

Aegon didn't just want the vessel of his body, nor did he care for the flickering light of his soul.

His intention was far more surgical and sinister: he sought to replace the consciousness itself.

A person was merely a composite of body, mind, and soul.

By excising the mind and sliding his own consciousness into the gap, he could claim Nightflame's formidable physical power and soul-born resilience while maintaining his own malevolent agency.

He wanted to wear Nightflame like a suit of armor, leaving the original spirit discarded and forgotten.

Nightflame's mental gears ground together, desperately searching for a loophole, a countermeasure, or any plausible path to salvation.

But every tactical simulation ended in a cold, mathematical zero.

"Give it up," Aegon advised, his voice a dry, rattling hiss that vibrated through the air.

"You won't be able to avoid what is coming.

Your struggle is merely an irritation."

Nightflame went still.

He slumped in his invisible chains, his features slackening as he finally appeared to accept the crushing weight of his defeat.

But inwardly, his thoughts drifted back to a "mad" idea—the concept of the Big Bang and the raw, untamed dawn of time.

"Hey.

What do you think you are doing?" Aegon asked, his brow furrowing as the sensors within his mechanical bed spiked.

The pristine calculations he had were suddenly deviating into chaotic, unpredictable variables.

"Enjoy the body... until I return to destroy you!" Nightflame finally managed to rasp out, the words tearing through his paralyzed throat like jagged glass.

In that final millisecond, Nightflame seized total, reckless control over the fundamental laws of time.

With a roar of metaphysical effort, he shattered his own existence, creating an infinite array of parallel versions of himself and flinging them across the tapestry of the multiverse into every conceivable timeline.

"You fool!!!

What have you done?!!!" Aegon yelled, his composure disintegrating into a primal, shrieking fury.

The force of the outburst was too much for Aegon's terminal, withered body.

Under the pressure of his own rage, the biological vessel began to break down, its systems flatlining in an instant.

With his original body reduced to a corpse, Aegon had no choice.

His brain plunged into the now-vacant, soulless vessel of Nightflame.

Nightflame's final, defiant gamble had breached a threshold that should never have been touched.

His actions had incited the wrath of something unknown and incomprehensibly powerful—a force so absolute that it caused his Nameless Soul to be annihilated, ground into nothingness by the gears of causality.

But Nightflame didn't care.

Having his soul destroyed had been his objective from the moment he realized he couldn't win.

He would rather be erased from existence than become the throne for his enemy.

"Damn it!!

He ruined my plans again!!!!" Aegon roared, looking out through Nightflame's eyes with a burning, impotent anger.

He had lost the gamble.

While gaining the body was a significant prize, finally allowing him to utilize the Mystic Brain to its absolute limit, the loss of the soul was a catastrophic blow.

A soulless body was a limited tool, a major setback in his grand design.

Above all, Aegon realized with a jolt of cold dread that he had to accelerate his path to the Throne for All.

He had to claim it before whatever Nightflame had angered arrived to visit the nine entities.

Across the infinite sprawl of the multiverse, infinite versions of Nightflame flickered in infinite timelines.

The destruction of the parent soul was a tectonic shift in reality.

It was a stroke of incredible luck that Aaron had severed his spiritual ties with his clone the very moment of his creation; had that link remained, the repercussions of Nightflame's actions would have led to Aaron's instant and total destruction.

As they traversed the infinite timelines, each version of Nightflame found themselves hunted.

Something moved in the shadows of time—a predator that Nightflame couldn't understand or outrun.

In one timeline, a version of Nightflame that had reached the absolute peak and claimed the Throne for All was snuffed out before he could even understand the clause that ended him.

In another, a version that had reached the prestigious ranks of the Legends died before he could even comprehend the nature of the attack.

Even the weakest version, tucked away in a quiet, forgotten timeline, lost his life to the silent stalker.

Infinity was famously known to never end, but this time, it reached a violent conclusion.

Every single iteration of Nightflame was hunted down and executed in their parallel timelines, except for one.

The final Nightflame was the one who had reached the infinite timeline of the Big Bang.

He did not die at the hands of the mysterious hunter, but he died nonetheless.

The moment he manifested at the dawn of creation, he was vaporized by the sheer, agonizing overflow of primordial antimatter.

As his form dissolved into the white-hot sea of the universe's birth, a booming, voice tore through the endless sea of antimatter, vibrating with a divine, frustrated authority.

"What have you done?!

I was supposed to be the one to take his life!"