I decided to take my time while returning to the present so that I could improve my magic and my understanding of magic. Now that I knew the true importance of magic in this world, I knew I had no choice but to try to unravel the mysteries associated with it before I returned to face the three Immortals.

Coming to the conclusion that I had to fight all three Immortals had also been a difficult one. I now knew what all three Immortals wanted, which meant there was a possibility to make alliances between them for my benefit.

The Simurgh wanted complete control over all of its domains, and thus, over all of magic, and therefore, over this entire world. I knew this was unacceptable to me, even though the Simurgh would possibly offer the same deal to me that it had offered to Madness. An ‘outsider’ like me could be sent back to his reality if he agreed to surrender all of his power to the Simurgh. But not only could I not trust the Simurgh to fulfill its part of the deal, I could not allow the Simurgh to have complete control over this world and all of its inhabitants. I considered Kelser, Kol, Taoc and the others my friends. Even Noel, who was now opposed to me, was not somebody that I wished would lose her sentience and become whatever mindless drone the Simurgh considered suitable for its ‘perfect’ world.

The Evil Eye wanted control over the domains too, except it did not seem to want sentient mortals to lose their rationality. I suspected the Evil Eye would be happy to let domains like kindness, empathy, and justice exist outside of its control, perhaps even inside mortals themselves. However, the Evil Eye demanded complete obedience, perhaps even worship. If it had its way, everybody would be worshiping it, and there would be no other Immortal capable of resisting its tyranny. I suspected the Evil Eye would not be willing to make a deal with me anyway, since I had opposed it many times. And if a deal was offered, I wasn’t going to accept it, since I could not trust an entity that literally had ‘evil’ in its name.

Madness was still an enigma. His real motivations for coming to this world, his change in personality, all of them were still mysteries to me but at least I knew that all he claimed to want was Annihilation. Now that I knew that it was his mere appearance in the world that had shattered the Simurgh’s domains and given Madness his powers, I knew that Madness did not truly care for power and control the same way the other two Immortals did. He was also a being from another world, just like I was. He might sympathize with my desire to return to my world, although so far, he had suggested that I also pursue Annihilation as the way to go home, which I still wasn’t onboard with.

Madness was volatile, chaotic, and, well, insane. I couldn’t trust him even if our goals aligned. And if the way home did not involve Annihilation, he might not help me with it at all. And if it did involve Annihilation, then he might want it to himself. He had also somehow brainwashed Noel into serving him, which I still wasn’t willing to forgive. I couldn’t bring myself to trust Madness, and I kinda really wanted to beat him up for my own satisfaction.

And so, I decided to fight all three Immortals at the same time. It would be difficult and I would have to come back to the present with all guns blazing, but I felt like I could do it. I might only control the temporal domains, but my magic systems should let me come up with spells that existed outside the limitations of the domain system that the Immortals used. I had built up enough magic to be able to pull off some truly outlandish spells without worrying about exhausting myself too much. All that was left was inventing some new spells.

My new magic system allowed me to use knowledge from my old world directly, instead of needing to recreate experiments in this world. The only catch was that I couldn’t use knowledge that was still unconfirmed or purely theoretical from my previous world. This meant that things like string theory or science-fiction weapons like ‘photon torpedoes’ and ‘death rays’ were off the table.

I also didn’t want to do anything suicidal. I could probably spend millions of years going back and forth between the present, the past, and the future, all the while increasing my energy storage enough that I could create a miniature black hole and suck the Immortals into it, but not only might that not work for beings that could exist inside the Nothingness, but it would probably take the whole planet down with it. So, no black holes, no nuclear fusion, and no antimatter. I should steer clear of biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction, weapons meant to break up spacetime, or indeed, anything that might not effect the Immortals at all, such as instant death spells like the sort that might stop a beating heart or suck out the air from an enemy’s lungs.

There was also the question of how one could defeat an Immortal in the first place. Noel had once said that the Immortals were not just related to their magic, they were manifestations of magic, or the knowledge behind the magic. This meant that their physical forms were not as important as the abstract concepts that they embodied. The Immortals were, to a certain extent, personifications of their domains.

Could I kill a concept? People say you can kill a man but you can’t kill a belief, but what if the man was a belief? Could you kill him then? I did not know. The only thing I could think of was to try and rip the other domains away from the Immortals and then defeat whatever husk of a being that remained.

But how was I supposed to do that? I could use the power that the Simurgh had given me that allowed me to turn the Ikons into books and steal their Immortals’ domains that way, but I wasn’t sure if that was still possible. The ability had felt like a one time thing and it had been tough enough getting the domain of the Past from Princess Norn. There was no way the three Immortals would just stand by and let me slowly extract all of their domains. I needed another plan.

Perhaps I could pummel them with magic and figure out something later? Shooting first and asking questions later might work, but if I spent all of that effort beating up the Immortals but still couldn’t extract their domains, what would be the point?

I realized that I had to investigate the ‘domains’ that gave the Immortals their power. Thankfully, I now had some of them in my own possession. Actually, I only had one: Time. It was clear to me that the domains of the Past, Present, and Future, had only been split pieces of that one domain of time. Now that I had all of them, I could examine this complete domain and try to figure out how to counter the Immortals’ other domains.

The domain of Time was a strange collection of knowledge and abstract principles that I could not consciously understand. At times, it felt like I didn’t know anything about time, but whenever I would think about a specific question or time period or action relating to time, the relevant information would pop into my head and I would be able to do whatever it was that I wanted to do with it. This made it almost feel like I didn’t actually possess the knowledge at all.

It was as if all I possessed was the right to access that information. It felt kinda like having a password I could use to access information stored in a computer network or cloud. I had to search for the information in the database, and couldn’t consider it something that was truly ‘mine.’

But that made me raise an eyebrow. Weren’t the Immortals supposed to embody this information? How could they embody information that they could only access as if it existed somewhere else? And where did that information exist in the first place? Was it stored in the Nothingness? Inside the Immortals’ body? Or did it exist in a sort of metaphysical space that couldn’t be interacted with and was closer to the aether in some ancient sources?

I contemplated these questions as I juggled ball of hot plasma ten feet in the air.