The air had grown colder.
Not the ordinary chill of stone corridors or underground draughts—but a cold that crept beneath the skin, that seemed to whisper through the marrow and watch from the shadows.
Something in the research facility had shifted.
No lights flickered. No sirens screamed. No scientists whispered behind frosted glass.
But inside Cell 32, something impossible had begun to stir.
Lucien lay motionless on the surgical slab, bound by restraints that had long since ceased to feel foreign. They clung to him now like parasitic roots, burrowed deep into skin, flesh, and spirit. His chest rose and fell with ghostly stillness. His eyes—fixed on the lamp above—were open, but vacant.
The light had become part of him now. Burnt into his retinas like a second sun.
Beside him, in the sealed chamber beyond the reinforced divider, his younger brother remained unconscious. Another session of nerve-mapping had left him limp and draped like a forgotten doll. But Lucien could still hear him—soft breaths threading through the silence.
And that was enough.
Enough to kindle something.
Something final.
> "They think they can trap power in glass vials. That they can bottle the mutant gene and sell it like perfume."
> "But they don't understand mine."
> "It isn't chemical. It isn't even biological."
> "It's conceptual."
> "A forge made of thought. And tonight... it ignites."
---
Within the Mind:
In the vast cathedral of his consciousness, reality folded.
Lucien stood barefoot in a realm of black marble and burning reflections—a palace of arches that stretched into forever, carved from obsidian thought and fractured time. Between the pillars floated fragments of fiction—gods and monsters from every myth, comic, manga, and game he had ever consumed.
Featherine's monocle spun lazily in the air, catching nonexistent light. Ajimu's constellation of skill-spheres shimmered with unnameable energy. The Presence loomed like a silent psalm beside Kars, whose body twisted through every possible evolution, ceaseless and grotesque. Somewhere above, the Watcher observed without sight.
And Lucien—naked, bloodstained, wrapped in the tattered rags of mortality—dragged behind him the rusted chains of suffering.
He approached the floating totems one by one. They pulsed as he neared.
Featherine.
> "Let them never narrate my end."
Ajimu.
> "Let them never comprehend me."
The One Above All.
> "Let them never reach me."
Kars.
> "Let them never decay me."
Griffith.
> "Let them never betray me."
He reached for them—not with fingers, but with resolve. Will shaped the raw ether like a blacksmith bending myth into steel.
And in the centre of that mental cathedral, a shape began to coalesce.
A seed.
Not a seed of life. Not of change. But of erasure.
A black sphere, so perfect it consumed reflection. Light bent away from it. Thought recoiled. It was a hollow point in creation—a void that screamed without sound.
Lucien stared at it with reverence.
And whispered,
> "You are not meant to grant power."
"You are meant to erase consequence."
"You are me. The Oblivion Seed."
---
In the Real World:
His back arched.
One by one, the monitors in the lab beeped in protest—then fell silent.
Lucien's vital signs vanished.
No heartbeat. No brainwaves. No cell activity.
On the screen, he had become a corpse.
But inside the cell, something else had awakened.
Black veins began to crawl across his flesh—not sickness, not infection—but something other. They slithered in unnatural spirals, burning softly with a colour that did not exist on any spectrum the world could name.
The restraints melted.
Not broke.
Melted—unwritten from reality, unable to identify what they were meant to contain.
Machines sparked and died. Monitors flickered and shattered. Surveillance feeds went dark.
Lucien opened his eyes.
They were not glowing.
They were empty.
As if the light had fled them.
---
> "Subject 32 has entered critical—"
The voice over the intercom was cut short as the observation door exploded outward, not with force—but rejection.
The room itself had expelled its contents like a body vomiting poison.
Lucien stood.
Whole.
Not healed—but whole.
Blood still clung to him, but it no longer touched him. It slid off like oil off glass.
> "Power signature is gone—no, wait—it's... nothing."
> "Subject 32... he's vanished from the scanners."
Lucien stepped forward.
The floor did not creak. The air did not move.
He left no presence behind.
As he walked, the world around him bent to avoid him. Soldiers raised rifles. Mutants reached into their arsenal of powers.
Nothing worked.
Time froze. Lucien kept walking.
Telepathic pulses shattered in midair. Gravity was distorted. The corridor twisted itself like a dying serpent.
Lucien walked up the wall, as though the concept of direction no longer held him.
One man screamed and pulled the trigger—
The bullet crumbled to ash.
> "WHY ISN'T HE—"
"WE CAN'T—"
"WHAT IS HE—"
They never found the answers.
Because nothing could touch him.
He wasn't armored.
He wasn't shielded.
He was simply not part of the world anymore.
---
He reached the main vault.
And turned.
A corridor of wreckage and silence stretched behind him, lined with weapons that had refused to fire, and powers that had chosen silence.
He smiled.
> "You taught me how to suffer."
"Now I'll teach you what happens when you chain Oblivion."
---
He didn't run.
He walked.
Cameras failed.
Systems bled static.
Mutants felt their powers wither at the edges of his aura.
The doors peeled apart like butter. The alarms never found their voice.
And when Lucien stepped into the outside world—felt the cold, real wind brush across his face for the first time in years—
He inhaled.
And the multiverse—its laws, its gods, its cages—shuddered.
For Oblivion had entered the game.