As Vladimir washed his hands, he suddenly heard muffled shouts and hurried steps. Quickly, he looked outside of the #0 laboratory, searching for the cause of the commotion, just in time to see an armed soldier.

Wielding a silenced rifle, the soldier shot Margaret in the back and she toppled forward into him. Crimson spread across her coat, the bullet piercing her heart.

Vladimir stared into her cold, dead eyes, frozen in horror and a deep unwillingness. Dread enveloped him. The soldier barked a command through their mask, taking aim at him.

Luckily, Vladimir was no young blood, experienced in the ways of life and death.

He retreated into the laboratory and blocked the security door by overloading the locking mechanism.

“It will take a strong explosive for them to get through. At least it will slow them down,” Vladimir thought with subdued panic, already planning his next move.

His thoughts lingered on the images of his coworkers and his father, but he already knew what was happening.

Rotshields.

After a few seconds, he came to a conclusion. His one and only chance of escaping alive, his hail Mary, was the barely tested teleporter.

He leaned over the main computer, letting out a deep breath, and then started programming. His fingers expertly flickered on the translucent, green keyboard.

In his concentration, the world stopped existing. If he wanted to live, he had to be solely focused on the rapidly filling pages of the program.

Tense seconds passed as the sounds from outside the laboratory grew. Hest sweltered as a flame began burning away the blast door. Then, Vladimir hit enter, and the teleporter hummed with life as it charged. His task complete, he adeptly maneuvered through the menus, typed in passwords and numerous authorizations to arrive at his final duty. Self-destruction.

He set the sequence for 1 minute.

He clenched his teeth as he stared at the sequence, his mind rapidly contemplating his options. He slammed his hands against the computer. “Hell will freeze over before I let them take my baby! They think they can steal from me?! I'll show them. I'll show them all!”

Vlad continued to silently curse and entered the second part of the lab. He stood on the small platform within.

The teleporter hummed louder, rising to a raucous racket as it slowly charged up, the plates rotating faster and faster.

Vladimir could only impatiently wait, doing his best to suppress thoughts of his father and people.

”BANG!”

The explosion rattled the equipment and catapulted debris into the room. It shredded most of the tech and almost destroyed the blast window, but luckily it held.

Fifty armed soldiers swarmed the room and aimed at him. A regally uniformed man sauntered into the room, hands behind his back. Following him in, two agents dragged his father behind them.

“Finally we meet, Dr. Svoboda,” General Thatch smirked.

He always loved acting arrogantly whenever he could. As corny as it was, he made his opponents underestimate him. He had an aristocratic, narrow face dominated by the same eyes as Vladimir.

“I've read many great things about you. Now, if you would be so kind, come out so we could all go home, please. You must have guessed by now that Rotshields wants to talk to you.”

“Dad! Are you okay?” Vladimir shouted, ignoring the general who frowned.

“Don’t worry-” An agent interrupted his father with a punch to the gut Like a sack of potatoes, he fell to his knees, coughing and gasping heavily.

“Bastards!” Vladimir yelled. It was all he could do.

He hated it. The feeling of helplessness ignited a fury buried deep down.

"That was not very nice, agent,” the general playfully reprimanded.

The female agent shrugged.

“If you don’t come out, he will die,” Thatcher threatened, his face deadpanning.

The agent pressed her desert eagle against the back of David’s head.“You're pushing me, Dr. You're not giving me much choice, so I will count from 10."

Vladimir didn't move. He stared into his father's eyes, seeing the acceptance there. They both knew his fate had been sealed when he got captured. Neither of them could stop it. He couldn’t do anything.

All he could do was stay in the teleporter. It was his only hope, the whirring gaining in volume.

“Ten,” the general started the count-down.

“Don’t worry, Vlad! I love you! Go!” David yelled over the intensifying humming.

“Five,” Thatch continued.

“Dad… I love you!” Vlad teared up, feeling like a child. It was a dar cry from the 29-year old adult he was.

The humming intensified, drowning out David’s response. Sparks of white light appeared around Vladimir’s body.

“Fire!” Thatch screamed.

The first bullet echoed in the room. The agent’s 00D non-silenced Desert Eagle Mark XXII splattered David’s chest onto the floor.

Next, two soldiers hastily stepped up to the window and kicked it. With the help of their exoskeletons, they utterly destroyed it. Two bullets penetrated the teleporter’s accumulator, heavily damaging it.

Vladimir yelled in horror, but his voice was drowned out in the loud humming and cracking of discharged energized arcs. The white light spread out from the damaged part and grabbed everyone in the vicinity, completely immobilizing them.

“What in the-?!” The incredulous general was interrupted in the mid-sentence.

Vlad and 53 incredulous soldiers turned to quantum-level particles.

A small crack in space opened as an immense bolt of energy from the accumulator hit a point in the air. They all disappeared into the quantum realm, the small crack closing behind them.

Only David D. Svoboda’s body remained. He had a satisfied smile on his face, his eyes shut. His final rest claimed him forevermore as blood pooled around his lonely body.

On the last computer screen remaining, avoiding destruction in the midst of pandemonium, a hand with an erected middle-finger popped up.

Time froze between 00:01 and 00:00.

Another hole in a reality opened and a humanoid arm pulled David's body through.

Right before the spatial rift closed, a small, rainbow-cooured blob flew through the portal to Earth. Unhindered by the steel and concrete, it broke through outside.

Time unfroze, and everything was consumed by a powerful explosion.

⌬⌬⌬⌬⌬⌬⌬⌬⌬⌬

Above a certain unimportant and almost dead galaxy that was around five times bigger than the Milky Way, an incredibly huge holographic screen hovered before a massive sphere, large several million kilometres in diameter.

The sphere itself was floating dozens of light-years. A grand, colourful pillar of energy flowed into the dark sphere from the galaxy’s core black hole with a speed faster than light.

A dark humanoid giant, even bigger than the sphere by at least four times, impatiently gazed upon the screen with his crimson eyes and merrily laughed. The bar on the screen showed energy saturation had just jumped from 99.8% to 99.9%.

“Almost! Finally! The mistakes in my path, all of them,” he tensed as he reminisced about his tedious past.

Then he menacingly laughed, sending tremendous waves of positiveness to all nearby galaxies and planes.

A few ancient and powerful beings covered their homes, acknowledging the sheer power of the ripples; It had to originate from something even more powerful than gods.

Every single living being in affected planes and galaxies became inexplicably joyful and began acting like they were high on acid and aphrodisiac.

The dark titan gave a command with his mind and a stream of incredibly complicated 3D code appeared on the screen. He chuckled as he concentrated on the code adding the last bits. “A little bit of fun… Also the edge, but not too much. Hehe…,” he grinned like a mad scientist while muttering under his breath at the slowly finishing code.

[Modules compiled]

The screen flashed with a message and turned back to the percentage bar.

[99.99%]

A few hundreds of kilometres away from the dark giant, an enormous blue portal opened in space.

Around 100 beings of different shapes and sizes emerged and formed a sphere around the dark giant incredibly quickly.

Tentacled blobs of sapient liquids, Cronenberg beings from which Cthulhu would run away screeching for mommy, several humanoid aliens, intelligent beast-men… Even an ethereal ghost-like apparition was floating around.

“Ooooh?! What is this? Do the little kiddies want to play? I am sorry, daddy is busy. Go to mama!” The dark titan mocked them.

“We are from the Tribunal of Justice. You are the criminal, Mo’Rask, right? Would not want to make a mistake...” The leader of the beings coolly asked.

"Again..." One of the humanoids whispered. The nearby tentacled blob gave him a playful poke.

“Heh... Seems like she went all out. Yea, no… I am no Mo’Rask. Never heard of him!” The giant brightly smiled with his eyes. After all, he lacked the face...

“Surrender and you will be offered a deal. Of course, after you return all of the stolen goods and Her daughter,” one of the beings sent the message.

“The girl is dead. Also..." the insane titan grinned, "the Hell I will return anything!” The dark giant proclaimed them with insanity in his eyes.

Noone wasted any more time and colourful energy beams poured on the Mo’Rask’s shields. Several layers of the protection cracked and disappeared into motes of darkness. The giant coughed out some kind of dark liquid with a frown.

“Heh… So, my time is nigh, huh… Come oooon! Faster!” He pleaded the percentage bar that was still not budging from 99.99% percent.

“Continue the attack! I will prepare the Breaker!” The leader of the beings ‘spoke’ and pulled a large book emanating a greenish, liquid-like aura out of nowhere.

The giant frowned as recognized the book and enhanced his defence as much as he could. Frankly, he did not expect they would find him here, so most of his processing power and energy went to the sphere. So he closed his eyes to concentrate.

[100%]

Meanwhile, the pressure emanating from the book grew so much that the space around vibrated and small cracks appeared in the space itself.

The dark giant’s shields became under even heavier pressure than before and he sputtered a dark liquid from his eyes.

From the cracks, 54 small, white energy bolts emerged, bypassed the defences without even pausing and dived into the sphere.

[54 viable souls accepted]

[Installation in progress...]

The mad dark giant, Mo’Rask, snapped his eyes wide open. “What. The. Fuck! What have you done!” He roared at the idiots, who were still trying to destroy his shields.

A small, green hexagon formed above the book. A large, green beam directly hit Mo’Rask’s protection, overwhelming it. The beam sent him flying directly into the sphere, shattering it and sending all of the strange light motes back to the aether.

The attackers halted and one of them pulled out an opaque vial. He aimed it at the criminal and Mo’Rask was slowly sucked in. A few attacks landed on him, trying to knock him out.

“Oh, no no no… It won’t go that easy for you, shitstains,” the giant growled, voice filled with an icy cold wrath as the vial continued to suck him in. Everyone got uneasy. This job was supposed to be easy.

When the sphere shattered it provided him with an opportunity to go at full power. His aura and energy swelled up and exploded as he stomped.

The vial shattered. A few of the opposing group were just vanquished like a fart. Not even atoms were left from them. The titan slowly pulled a black-glowing staff out of his back.

Then a battle ensued. Time and space broke in the first few moments, universal laws in the next.

A battle that rattled planes and took galaxies as collateral damage.