[Edward POV]
Inside the quarantine room, Jenna lay on the bed. Her skin was pale and clammy, dotted with angry, blistering welts that oozed yellow pus like an advanced form of chickenpox.
Her eyes were bloodshot, the whites veined crimson, and thin streams of blood trickled from her nose and the corners of her mouth.
Every shallow breath rattled in her chest, the sheets beneath her stained with the evidence of the virus's assault on her body.
The doctors prepared to sedate her—her only chance of surviving was to be put into a medically induced sleep while her body fought.
"Mr. Newgate, you can't be here," the nurse said with frustration, trying to shove me out of the room.
"I'm immune. And I'm not a carrier, either," I replied, showing her my U.S. government clearance.
She sighed and glanced at the military personnel stationed around the hospital. One of them gave her a nod, granting permission for me to stay.
"Hey, Jen, you look awful." I stepped inside and joked, which made Jenna widen her eyes in disbelief.
"Edward. Why—MASK! Put on a mask—" She coughed violently, and I immediately grabbed her hand, sitting next to her.
"Jen. You don't have to worry about me. I tested yesterday, and I'm immune to this virus. In fact, I'm even studying how my blood can be used to help cure it. I'll be fine."
She smiled faintly. "Thank goodness. Did… did you hear they're going to put me to sleep today? Apparently the virus is wreaking havoc inside my body."
Jenna's chin quivered, but she tried to act like she was fine. I squeezed her hand tightly and said, "You're going to be okay, Jen. I'll make sure of it."
She laid back down as the doctors prepared to sedate her.
"Edward… sing for me. If I don't wake up… I want the last thing I hear to be your singing," she said earnestly.
I forced a smile. "Do you want me to sing your special song?"
"Of course."
I sang without accompaniment, "I'm only one call away… I'll be there to save the day… Superman's got nothing on me… I'm only one call away."
Jenna's eyes grew heavy as the sedatives took hold. My voice wavered but steadied as I sang, brushing her hair back from her fevered forehead.
"Call me, baby, if you need a friend. I just wanna give you love…"
Her eyelids fluttered, a weak smile curving her lips as she listened.
"No matter where you go, you know you're not alone…"
Finally, she slipped into unconsciousness, falling into a deep sleep. A single tear slid down my cheek. I continued the song, from start to finish, even though she was already gone to sleep.
"I'm only one call away," I finished with a shaky voice.
"I promise… I'm going to fix this," I whispered, kissing her hand as I made my vow.
…
My chest felt heavy. I haven't slept for almost 3 days. Sage had to put me to sleep before my travel, which led me to have a short 3 hour rest. Even then, I felt really guilty about it.
"Be sure to bring some food with you," Sage reminded me as I packed a beige backpack.
"Oh right. Food. That's the important one," I said, cramming my bulky supercomputer into the bag.
"Bring healthy crop seeds. If you get sick of grain pills, you can just grow them using the food growth spell you have in stock," she added.
I nodded and continued packing. Water filtration tube, grain pills, the virus sample, USB containing a copy of my AI, and my meteor sword. I made sure to bring everything that would help me survive for a month over there.
"Remember, don't procreate with the survivors," Sage suddenly said.
"Excuse me?" I froze, baffled as I was equipping the iron suit.
She repeated, "Don't procreate. Don't even kiss someone while you're there."
"I'm not going to, but… why exactly can't I?" I asked, intrigued.
"Different bacteria species," she replied easily.
I understood immediately. It was the same reason time travel was dangerous—bacteria and viruses evolve along with humans.
Kissing a survivor with a different immune system would kill them. Sage told me I was protected by the Afterlife system, so I would survive, but they wouldn't.
In fact, I couldn't even sneeze near them. Sage instructed me to wear the suit's filtration helmet at all times, even when sleeping.
It was hard to get excited about multiversal travel when a plague was still raging in my own world.
Jenna and her mother were brought to my hospital—yes, I had a hospital—and quarantined there.
I also contacted Raymond Reddington to see if he had information about Hargrave. He was searching too, tracking him somewhere in Africa.
I dispatched ZeroTwo and Mikasa to help Reddington find the man responsible for all this.
"If someone calls, you know what to do, right?" I asked Yuri.
Yuri nodded. "Tell them you're focused on the research. If one of your exes calls, I won't reject them right away. I'll explain what you're doing so their feelings won't be hurt—just in case you want to get back together with them in the future."
"I… never told you that last part." I looked at Yuri in disbelief. After her first sentence, everything else had been her own words.
She didn't react much, only saying, "I wish I could go with you and protect you, sir."
"Sorry, Yuri. I need you here when I come back. I can't live without your beverages anymore. Otherwise, I would've brought all of you with me."
If I took all my android apostles to the dead world, I was sure we could clean it up and build another civilization there.
"Sage, I think I'm ready," I said, fastening the helmet properly now. It was a mix between an astronaut helmet and an iron suit—sleek but heavily fortified.
"Alright. Be very careful, Edward. Oh…" She reached into her pocket and pulled out a green and purple vial.
"My esper serum?" I was stunned.
"Bring it with you. If you finish your research early, you can try the purple one. It's highly risky, but if you die, you'll return immediately. If not, then you'll finally see what happens when you take it." Sage suggested.
"Ohhhh, good idea." I picked up the green and purple vials. The green one was milder, and the esper ability it produced was weaker.
A circular multidimensional gate opened behind me. I waved to Yuri and Sage as I walked through it.
"Good luck Edward." Sage said.
"Be safe Sir." Yuri waved back at me.
My mind went blank as I experienced the trip. It was like I was put into a blender.
"Oh god. I'm getting a headache." I groaned.
A harsh, sandy wind hit me as I arrived at the destination. The city was filled with broken skyscrapers, abandoned streets filled with traces of battle and green ivy growing everywhere.
The wind blew stronger. Then, I found that the wind wasn't a natural wind. A massive pterodactyl flew across the sky. Its wingspan stretched over a mile, and the harsh wind was a byproduct of its flight.
The entire world felt hot. Like scorching hot. The temperature was at 50 degrees celsius here.
"It's like a dragon– What universe is this?" I racked my brain, but couldn't place it with anything I'd read before.
Sage had told me to come here for their advanced medicinal technology.
The apocalypse had started with an alien virus from a fallen meteor, so their research might prove useful for my predicament.
"I should find the lab Sage mentioned." I tapped my wrist armor, projecting a mini hologram. Several spherical drones shot out from my back, scattering across the city to scan.
Within minutes, I had a map of the city projecting from my hologram. I also saw the grotesque creatures roaming the streets through the drones.
They were humanoid, and huge. The smallest one was around 5 meters tall.
"Zombies? But that one has blades for hands… and that one spits fire… mutant zombies?" I muttered in disbelief.
I saw them fighting with each other, their battles were wrecking everything around them.
"No wonder Sage said I could die here." I raised an eyebrow, seeing their scary combat ability.
Jumping off the building, I dashed through the streets, conserving battery power and staying in stealth mode.
"I shouldn't pick fights—just head for the research facility," I muttered, while my AI decrypted the language of this civilization. It was a strange blend of Nordic and Japanese—confusing at first, but not impossible to decipher.
My armor's built-in AI tried scanning for signals—maybe fragments of an internet network or some kind of local transmission system—but it was a futile search. Either their entire system collapsed after the apocalypse, or they never had one in the first place. I was leaning toward the former.
I had been traveling for around fifteen minutes when I stumbled upon a strange scene.
A woman in a white dress sat crying in the middle of the street, her face buried in her hands. Her sobs echoed eerily through the empty ruins.
I slowed to a stop, narrowing my eyes. "This looks way too familiar."
Still, Sage had advised me not to ignore my human instinct. What if she's a survivor?
I sent a basic chakra construct—a formless clone—to check. It wasn't a shadow or wood clone, just a hollow mold shaped like me.
The clone approached her cautiously. "Hey, what's wrong?"
The woman froze mid-sob. Then her head snapped up with unnatural speed, revealing a mouth full of jagged teeth and glowing, pupilless green eyes. Her arm shot out like a whip, stretching four meters as it pierced straight through my clone's chest.
The image burned in my mind, reminding me of an old game mechanic– {You have startled the Witch.}
My clone vanished in a puff of smoke. The creature let out a piercing shriek, so loud it rattled windows and summoned a horde from the distance.
Before my eyes, her body twisted grotesquely, muscles tearing and reforming until she loomed five meters tall. Acidic drool hissed as it dripped from her maw, eating through the concrete.
"Oh thank god," I muttered in relief, already sprinting away while monitoring her through a drone orb. She searched frantically, but took a wrong turn—and stumbled into a hulking titan with blades for hands.
The two monsters clashed violently. I watched as the Witch tore into its corpse, pulling out a glowing core. She devoured it whole, and her claws lengthened into gleaming blades as her body swelled another meter.
I shuddered. "They're evolving… by consuming each other."
Heart pounding, I moved carefully through the chaos, slipping past the horde until I finally reached the outskirts of an abandoned research compound.
I crept through the shattered glass doors of the research compound, sweeping the interior with my drone orb. The lobby was a ruin of overturned desks, mold-eaten couches, and long-dead bodies mummified by time. The air reeked of decay and rust.
"Empty…" I muttered, stepping over a toppled filing cabinet. "Whatever was here got picked clean years ago."
The labs deeper inside were no better. Broken vials scattered the floor, and the main servers had been ripped out or smashed to useless scrap. Not even a notebook remained—just dust, claw marks, and dried blood smeared across the walls.
"This is a dead end." I let out a slow breath, frustration mounting. "Nothing here can help me."
Outside, the wailing of the Witch echoed faintly in the distance, and I knew the horde would soon be drawn back this way. That bitch seemed obsessed with finding me.
The entire town was swarming, a death trap just waiting to close in. Staying here any longer was suicide.
"I could fight, but that will take a lot of energy and time– something I don't have right now."
I slipped out the side exit, keeping low as I navigated through the shadow of broken buildings. That's when something caught my eye—spray-painted across the cracked facade of a government office building.
Bright red letters scrawled in uneven strokes. After translation, it read–
"HUMANITY CAMP – 100 KILOMETER→"
Beneath it, someone had drawn a crude map of the district in thick black lines, marking a path through the maze of rubble. The edges of the graffiti were faded, but still legible.
I narrowed my eyes, tracing the route with my finger. "A survivor camp… here? Could it still exist?"
Hope mixed uneasily with caution. If people were alive, this was my first real lead. But if the message was old, it could just as easily be bait—or a graveyard.
"Unfortunately, I don't have the time to be cautious," I muttered, breaking into a sprint as I followed the arrow's direction.
A piercing shriek split the air again. Even from nearly a kilometer away, the Witch had locked onto me. Her voice carried across the ruined city, and with it came the thunder of countless footsteps. She was bringing the horde straight to me.
"This is going to be troublesome." I skidded to a stop and turned, watching the flood of bodies surging closer.
"I can't lead them to the humanity camp. At this pace, they'll keep hounding me until I'm cornered. No… I need to erase them. All of them. Right here."
I reached into my storage and activated two of the gacha prizes I have.
[One-time Use Skill – Uchiha Madara: Fire Style, Majestic Destroyer Flame]
[One-time Use Skill – Natsu Dragneel: Fire Dragon Roar]
Both devastating large-scale flame techniques.
"Majestic Dragon Destroyer Roar!" I shouted as my helmet retracted backward, revealing my face. I just wanted to experience shouting out an attack name before it happened.
Chakra and magic fused, ripping through my body before erupting from my mouth in a torrent of blinding white fire. The flames didn't spread—they consumed. A roaring inferno that carved through the street.
The first wave of demons never even had time to scream. Their bodies disintegrated, melting into ash as the firestorm tore through them.
The Witch shrieked in defiance, her elongated limbs stretching outward as if to block the flames—but the white inferno swallowed her whole, her silhouette writhing and twisting in the fire.
Buildings collapsed as their stone foundations softened and ran like wax, the asphalt beneath my feet bubbling as if the earth itself had caught fire.
For a moment, the city looked like the inside of a furnace.
By the time the flames died down, the temperature had spiked by at least forty degrees, the air shimmering with heat.
What remained of the horde were nothing but blackened shadows burned into the ground. From their ashes, crystals spilled across the street—thousands of them, faintly glowing in the heat.
Most were dull gray, the cores of low-level spawn. Some shone faint yellow, a few glimmered green, and even fewer burned with the brighter hues of pink or blue.
I exhaled heavily, but before I could say anything, my Observation Haki screamed a warning. I jumped to the side.
A burned, elongated arm slammed into the spot where I had been standing.
"You're not dead?" I muttered, eyes narrowing in shock.
The Witch was regenerating, her charred body knitting itself back together at an alarming speed. Her burned flesh peeled away as fresh skin forced itself into place.
She glared at me, her face twisted with rage.
"You're quite troublesome," I said coldly. "I'd like to fight you longer to see what you're really capable of, but… you creep me out. So let's finish this."
I activated another card. [Uchiha Sasuke – Amaterasu.]
My three-tomoe Sharingan twisted into a six-point Eternal Mangekyō. A black flame burst into existence, clinging to the Witch's upper torso.
She grimaced, shrieking as she tried to smother the flames with her hands—but the fire only spread faster, consuming her arm.
She collapsed, writhing in panic, rolling across the ruined ground. Acid spewed from her mouth as she desperately tried to douse the flames, but Amaterasu's black fire only licked greedily at her body, devouring everything it touched.
Her screams grew weaker. After a minute, her thrashing stilled, and her body finally collapsed, beginning to decompose into nothing.
I carefully willed the one-time-use Sharingan to spare her core. It glimmered in the ashes, a swirling prism of color— like a rainbow.
Using a mage hand magic I have learned, I swept the battlefield, pulling the scattered crystals into my grasp. Two thousand cores in total, and I could sense the lingering energy in them.
"How do I bring this with me? I have a feeling that something troublesome will happen if I leave these here."
I had no storage skill even though I have hundreds of gacha prizes in store.
I pocketed six of those, one from each category.
"I should destroy them." I said, sighing in frustration.
Suddenly, my ocean ring glowed slightly. "Hmm?" I retracted the armor around my right hand, and the blue ring suddenly absorbed the cores for me.
"Are you keeping it for me or are you absorbing it for yourself?" I muttered jokingly. Then, I realized I could sense the cores inside– submerged into a water body.
Without looking back, I turned and ran toward the direction of the humanity encampment.
"Only a few stragglers left in the city huh?" I muttered as I checked the drone feed.
"If I have an opportunity, I might come back and clean up this place." I thought out loud.
It took me half an hour to get to the map location while travelling on foot.
Unfortunately, what greeted me was an abandoned camp site instead of a thriving humanity's shelter.
I searched the camp for some information, and suddenly, my observation haki was detecting someone coming from my back– an invisible person.
He thought he could kill me– I was glad that I could finally meet a person to get the lore of the world from.
He almost stabbed me with a spear, but I grabbed his neck even when he was on stealth mode and threatened using the translated language here, "Undo your ability if you want to live."
He choked and coughed, trying to punch my hand away, but he was too weak to do so. He finally turned off his ability, letting me see the long haired, dirty beard, half naked old man with only a few teeth left.
His body was thin, his back was hunched. He has no shoes on, or any other clothes except for dirty gray underwear.
"Who are you– A caveman?" I asked with disbelief.
"Hey fuck you man!" he cursed at me.
Since he tried to kill me, I wasn't polite and pulled back my helmet before staring at him with my sharingan.
"Tell me, everything…"