With the ground flatten and hardened, Zeel found the area suitable to create a makeshift camp…

It would be, by far, the most uncivilized place he would sleep, but luxuries never bothered him…

If anything, the only reason he preferred luxuries to the mundaneness of everyday life was that struggle reminded him of his time on the Nameless planet…

Hundreds of years later, and the programming that stripped him of his identity still existed somewhere in his deep unconscious…

Honestly, one of Zeel's main objectives of traveling the Multiverse stemmed from his intense hatred of the Nameless Planet…

He hoped, beyond all reason, that someday he would encounter the planet and reduce it to ruin, killing the demons in his heart once and for all…

Ridding himself of the depressing thoughts, Zeel used his hands to dig a seven-foot hole in the ground, making it wide enough to comfortably situate his body…

When he was finished with the task, Zeel used his finger to write a very faint rune on the nearby sand…

PEN – the rune read, and soon, the sands gathered and hardened into a sharp rock…

It did not look like a pen at all, but Zeel was already aware of the limitations of the Hybrid Runes…

Everything the Hybrid Runes did with his Divine Energy would be merely approximations…

With the sharp rock in hand, Zeel crawled into the hole and wrote 'SOLIDIFY' on all corners of the walls, ensuring nothing could borrow into his sleeping space from outside…

It was only after his sleeping space was secured, and Zeel needed cloth for his next rune, did he realize his lack of any clothing…

Nanites would usually construct his clothing, and it felt no different from his skin, hence, up until now, Zeel hadn't even noticed he had nothing worn…

Still, this didn't bother him too much…

Clothing was more of an idea important to Alice and Elizabeth, while he was comfortable in whatever would be most efficient…

After all, he had encountered many species in the past that loathed wearing any coverings…

Without cloth to utilize his next rune, Zeel frowned and gritted his teeth a bit…

Slowly, he used the sharp stone in his hand to slice layers of skin from his left arm…

Piece after piece of skin was stripped from his body…

Then, he took a fifteen-minute rest for some of the skin to regenerate before he started the process over…

When enough skin layers had been accumulated, Zeel buried the skin in the nearby sand and very carefully wrote the rune for 'CLOTH' on the surface…

The sand spun like a whirlpool, combining with Homo-Superior skin until all that was left were strips of slimy cloth-like material…

"Useful…" Zeel voiced, removing the cloth from the ground and placing the material over his newly established sleep space…

He dug his fingers into the borders of the hole, ensuring the strips of cloth-like materials would cover the hole entirely…

Then, using the sharp stone, he engraved the Hybrid Rune for 'MOISTURE' onto the cloth…

After, he stepped away and allowed the runes to complete the job while he focused on food now that liquids were taken care of…

With the snake in hand, Zeel crouched next to a flat rock and engraved the rune for 'FIRE', but unlike previous successes, this one did not work…

It seemed the runes could not create and sustain fire without a catalyst like wood…

His runes could only make things that were probable become highly likely, but it was in no way magic – creating a guaranteed event from impossibility…

But like all Homo-Superiors, it only took Zeel an instant of thought to find a workaround…

He didn't need a fire, he just needed the heat generated by fire to cook the snake…

Zeel quickly wrote the rune for 'HEAT' on the rock, and soon, the surface of the rock glowed dimly in the darkening surroundings…

Of course, this only worked because the desert sands had spent all day collecting heat, and the heat had to go somewhere so Zeel's rune simply collected it…

Quickly skinning and cleaning the snake's corpse, Zeel slapped the meat on the rock, sprinkling a little of his blood for added flavor…

---SIZZLE---

---SIZZLE---

---SIZZLE---

The snake's meat sizzled on the heated rock, and a rich aroma spread along with the winds of the desert…

A couple of minutes later when the meat was fully cooked, or at least cooked by Homo-Superior standards, Zeel used the sharp stone in his hand to enjoy a hearty meal…

It was bitter, and a bit bland, but passable nonetheless…

He had hoped the aroma would attract other creatures to the meal, but, unlike humans, animals could tell when danger was near, and they knew to avoid it at all costs…

By the time the meal was finished, darkness had overtaken the land; though, it was still as bright as ever in Zeel's Draconic Eyes…

If anything, he could see much clearer than before…

But sleep was still required, especially now that he couldn't store energy from the increased cosmic rays of night…

"[Omni-direction] …" Zeel whispered, closing his eyes to concentrate on the familiar path of Divine Energy coursing throughout his body…

The faint sensation to keep his current course was introduced into his mind, but it still felt as far as a couple of hours ago…

That meant he still had some ways to travel…

Standing on his feet, Zeel strutted to the hole from earlier and carefully peeled away the cloth that hid his sleeping space…

The inside of the hole was cooled to the touch like a building with Air Conditioning Units…

The cloth, itself, had accumulated a lot of moisture from the air, and with the absorbing capabilities of Homo-Superior skin, Zeel would have at least a gallon of water by tomorrow.

Zeel slid in the hole, and found comfort in the deadly silence it brought…

Maybe, it could have been the desert at night, but the sound was pleasing nonetheless…

He re-covered the hole with the cloth, and closed his eyes, falling into an instant sleep as he slowed his brain functions to a crawl…

--------------------

The first thing to emerge in his dreamscape was two, very distinct, very damaging, conflicting emotions…

Next, a zero-sum protocol would emerge, insisting, on an instinctual level, that he revisit his final moments with Aurora and his subsequent death…

۞۞

Zeel watched like an outsider in his own dreams…

Like it wasn't him, yet him at the same time…

"You'll be forced to sleep for a couple of years as your body adjusts to the Cyber-Lines in your wings… and when you wake up, I'll be gone…"

"I was wrong…" Aurolana caressed Zeel's cheek, not refusing his sacrifice since it was already too late "It's not that you didn't care… you just never had a reason to care before…"

Just as Zeel was about to withdraw and close the stasis pod, Aurolana pulled him in for an intense kiss that lasted a couple of seconds, but felt like eternity…

"Goodbye…" Zeel whispered, closing the pod and narrowing his eyes on the Space Ship in the distance that was struggling to leave the Earth's atmosphere…

Using the last ounce of power he could muster from his Dimensional Shift Divinity, Zeel warped Elizabeth's and Aurolana's pods into a closed section of the Space Ship…

Zeel Crawford – 98%... (Corrupted Upload Cancelled)

Zeel sat on the ground and watched the nukes speeding across the skies, already aware of exactly which one was about to make landfall a couple of miles south of his position…

That would be the nuke that ends his life... if the imbalance of divinities didn't end it first…

Zeel's body started to turn into black ash, his fingers dissolving first as the rest of his body slowly followed…

---BBBBBBBBOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMM---

Zeel glanced south, marveling at the beauty of the incoming flames from the nuke's detonation…

"A good day to die…"

Then the flames engulfed his body…

Zeel Crawford, at the end of his life, did something unthinkable – he sacrificed for someone else…

But that was not the end, he knew it because he was watching how the events played out, and somehow, he was still alive…

However, the moment the flames engulfed his body, something else happened…

Using his authority in the dreamscape, Zeel paused the event and wanted to inspect further, but something dangerous overrid his authority, pulling him to another section of his Dreamscape…

۞۞

"What? How?" Zeel seemed confused, unable to even express authority in his own mind…

"So… you're here…" A voice echoed.

It was more powerful and better?

The slits in Zeel's eyes increased as he entered a flight-ready mode "And you are?" He responded, already contemplating ways to kill the owner of the voice…

However, what revealed itself in front of him was… well, him… but better, stronger, wiser, and infinitely more dangerous…

"I am Zeel Crawford…" The twin explained…

"But I am Zeel Crawford…" Zeel argued, relaxing his muscles because he was sure, beyond a reasonable doubt, that he wasn't able to beat this twin…

"No…" Zeel Crawford shook his head, clearly humored "You are just Zeel… or rather, me at about 50% strength… You are me with the loss of so many defining memories…"

"You're at 100%..." Zeel realized, and Zeel Crawford nodded, confirming his suspicions…

"Then, why don't you take over?" Zeel questioned, preferring to regain all his memories and abilities instead of staying in this 'crippled' form…

"In the final moment of our life, I realize that I will not be able to grow without losing vital information, so I shed that information in the Information Dimension, ensuring it would upload slowly once more…" Zeel Crawford explained, "So, we are the same and you will eventually become me once more… slowly but surely…"

"You want me to change… so when we are full again, we won't revert to just being killers…" Zeel realized, and Zeel Crawford nodded…

But something bugged Zeel, he could think of a thousand ways more efficient to do this… how was it that Zeel Crawford would not be able to think of the same ways?

"Why use such a roundabout way to facilitate growth?"

Zeel Crawford frowned, and seemed troubled for a couple of seconds before he eventually responded "Because… she is inside us… and she is very dangerous…"

"Who?" Zeel inquired, two figures flashing in his mind – The Red Queen, and Lorien… but which was it?

"Don't worry about it… you can't do anything against her… and if I wake up, she will kill me before I can even hurt her pinkie finger…"

"Then what should I do?"

"She's coming…" Zeel Crawford noticed, waving his hand and dispelling the dream instantly…

-----------------------

Zeel shot up, smashing his head into the rock of his sleeping space aka burrow in the ground…

"Well… if I am not fully Zeel Crawford, then I guess I have to get a new second name…" Zeel mused, running through several possibilities until he settled on one and the backstory to match "My new name is Zeel Croft, and I am a Treasure Hunter…"