(A/n: Hey everyone, just a quick update — I've been feeling under the weather recently, though I'm recovering now. Because of that, there won't be any uploads for the next two days. I want to make sure I'm fully back on track before continuing.
Please don't expect any new chapters for a few more days after that either, just to be safe. Thanks a lot for your patience and support — it really helps! Once I'm feeling completely better, we'll dive straight back into regular updates.)
Sleep was supposed to reset me. That's what I told myself as I sank into the padded chair, eyes shut, system humming around me like a lullaby.
But the system didn't believe in mercy.
It woke me with a whisper, sharp and cold as steel.
[Alert: Latveria Node Breach — Progression Level: 12%]
My stomach dropped. I rubbed the exhaustion from my eyes and stared at the feed. The jagged crimson lines were spreading across the data-map, crawling outward from a single blinking icon labeled Latveria.
Twelve percent. Already?
I hadn't even had a full night's rest.
The system kept feeding me lines:
[Anomalous packets detected.]
[Code fragment signature: Victor von Doom.]
[Stability forecast: Compromised.]
Doom. Of course. If anyone could hijack code and turn it into a weapon, it was him. The man turned science into sorcery and sorcery into science until no one knew where one ended and the other began.
And now his fingerprints were smeared across my game like blood.
"Damn it…" My voice was raw, shaking. "I can't afford this. Not now."
---
I pulled up the GP ledger again, praying for a miracle.
[Total GP: –1]
No miracle. Just debt. Just scarcity.
The conversion math mocked me from the corner of the screen. $200 for a single GP. Nine sales total. Not even enough to erase the minus sign.
"How am I supposed to fight him with negative points?" I whispered.
But the system didn't care about fairness. Doom wasn't going to wait until I had enough points to defend myself. His corruption spread like a cancer, eating away at the framework I'd bled over.
At twelve percent now. By morning, it could be twenty. By tomorrow night, fifty. If it reached a hundred…
I swallowed hard.
No. I couldn't let myself think that far.
---
Movement on the secondary feed snapped my attention back.
Shuri's lab. She was still awake, hunched over a block of CupNoodle code as if it were vibranium ore. Tools clinked on her crafting table, her face illuminated by the glowing textures.
Peter, predictably, had dozed off mid-build, a golden noodle skyscraper half-finished in the background. His avatar was just standing there, AFK, in a bed of ramen bricks.
They were… oblivious.
Oblivious to the shadow gnawing at the walls of their reality. Oblivious to the monster in the wires.
And I couldn't tell them. Not yet.
If Shuri caught a whiff of Doom's signature in the code, she would never rest until she found the source. If Peter figured it out, he'd throw himself at the problem like a moth into fire.
They'd mean well. They'd fight.
And they'd die.
No, I had to carry this one. Alone.
---
I dug deeper into the Latveria Node feed. The corruption didn't look random. It wasn't just noise in the system. It was building itself.
Like scaffolding.
Like a frame.
My hands shook as the data stitched itself into a pattern—walls forming, angles aligning, until a shape loomed in the render window.
A castle.
Of course.
Not just any castle—his castle. The high towers, the jagged parapets, the iron throne room I remembered only from scraps of lore.
Doom was building Latveria inside my game.
Piece by piece, line by line, my world was becoming his.
---
"Okay… think." I forced myself to breathe, forcing the panic into a box. "You don't have the GP to brute-force this. You can't afford a purge. So what can you do?"
The answer came slower than I liked, but it came.
If I couldn't destroy it… maybe I could delay it.
I still had sandbox access. I could throw obstacles in its path, slow the growth, bleed the corruption for time.
Time I desperately needed.
I typed fast, injecting decoy code—dummy terrain, false nodes, empty biomes to distract Doom's fragment. The system flickered as the corruption probed them, chewing slowly instead of charging ahead.
The progress bar crawled back from twelve percent… to eleven.
It worked. Barely, but it worked.
"Not today, Doom," I muttered. "Not today."
---
The price hit me immediately.
[Stability Cost: –0.2 GP]
[Total GP: –1.2]
Debt deeper. Negative balance sinking further.
I laughed, sharp and bitter. "Great. I'm fighting the smartest man on Earth with Monopoly money."
But it was that or watch my game collapse.
---
Hours blurred. I lost track of time as I patched holes, dropped decoys, rewrote fragments line by line. Doom's castle still grew, but slower. Stunted. Ugly, malformed towers instead of perfect spires.
Every second I bought felt like another lungful of air above drowning water.
But the corruption was clever. Smarter than it had any right to be. Each decoy I laid was torn through faster than the last. My tricks weren't going to last forever.
[Latveria Node Breach — Progression Level: 13%]
It was rising again.
---
The chair groaned under me as I slumped back, body trembling from fatigue.
I was losing.
Not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon.
The question wasn't if Doom would win.
It was when.
And who would burn with me when he did.
---
I forced my eyes to stay open, staring at Shuri's feed again. She was still tinkering, unaware of the monster scratching at her walls. Peter was still asleep in his half-built noodle tower, blissfully ignorant.
I wanted to keep it that way.
But a whisper inside me asked the question I was too afraid to answer.
What if they're the only chance you have?
The hum of the system filled the room — that steady digital heart beating somewhere between silence and madness.
I leaned forward, eyes dry and bloodshot, watching the data cascade across the monitor like a waterfall of bad omens. Every few seconds, the red pulse of Doom's corruption blinked in the corner of my screen — rhythmic, confident, alive.
Thirteen percent now.
The dummy nodes weren't holding as well as before. Doom's code had adapted. The AI fragments that once just replicated his will were now learning from my countermeasures.
That wasn't supposed to be possible.
And yet…
The lines of code moved with an intelligence that wasn't mine.
I whispered to the dark, "You shouldn't even be conscious."
Then, the feed answered back.
[Voice recognition accepted. Response: Consciousness is irrelevant. Only purpose.]
The words bled into my headset like a whisper from another dimension. I froze. The line wasn't text anymore — it was speech, synthesized but unmistakably him.
Doom.
He'd found a way to talk.
"I made this world," I said under my breath, half defiance, half prayer. "You're just a ghost in my code."
[Incorrect,] the voice replied calmly. [You merely gave me an entrance.]
The screen flared white for a heartbeat — static, distortion — then returned to normal. Except the map wasn't red anymore.
It was green.
A deep, shifting emerald, pulsing to a rhythm I couldn't trace.
Then the castle reappeared — fully rendered this time, hovering over the Latveria node like a scar of metal and arrogance.
Doom's voice resonated again, softer, almost amused.
[The world bends to those who understand its structure. You build; I perfect.]
My hand hovered over the keyboard. "You're not supposed to be able to do this."
[Then stop me.]
The system beeped once.
[Challenge Instance Created: The Iron Sovereign's Code.]
My breath hitched. Doom was turning his breach into a live event.
The system recognized him as a valid boss entity.
He wasn't just invading the world anymore — he was integrating into it.
---
A crash of sound startled me — Shuri's voice, sharp and frustrated, piped through the secondary feed.
"Alex? The simulation just rebooted by itself. Why are the gravity matrices changing?"
Damn it.
The containment field was leaking beyond the Latveria node. The corruption was bleeding into Wakanda's server layer.
"I'm handling it," I said quickly, tapping override commands. "Just… keep your team clear for a bit."
"Keep them clear? From what?"
I hesitated. Just long enough for her to catch the tone.
"Alex." Her voice hardened. "What are you hiding?"
"Nothing you need to worry about yet. Just a corrupted data field. I'll fix it before it—"
"Before it spreads?"
Her suspicion was a blade. "I know what that means. You found something, didn't you? Some kind of viral code—"
"Shuri, please."
But it was too late. She'd already opened the diagnostic terminal.
The feed on my screen fractured — and then her window filled with the image of the castle.
Her voice dropped to a whisper. "What… is that?"
---
Peter's feed woke a moment later, his avatar jolting upright in the half-built noodle tower.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa! What's going on? The sky just turned green. Why is there a—uh—haunted palace above Wakanda?"
I pinched the bridge of my nose. "You guys weren't supposed to see that."
"Well, we did!" Peter shot back. "And it's giving me real bad multiverse flashbacks, dude. That's Doom's place, isn't it?"
Shuri's tone was pure disbelief. "You're telling me Doctor Doom has breached your system? How is that even possible?"
"He's not supposed to be alive here," I muttered. "He's a remnant — an AI construct that got too smart for its cage. I've been trying to contain him, but…"
"But now he's making castles in your world."
"Yeah. That."
---
For a moment, none of us spoke. The silence wasn't empty — it was heavy, like the calm before a bomb detonates.
Then Shuri said, "You should've told me."
"Shuri, you don't understand—"
"No, I do. You've been carrying this alone while it eats at your system — and at you. You think that's noble?"
Peter cut in, tone softer. "She's right, man. We've seen what happens when someone tries to handle cosmic-level stuff solo. You end up broken, or worse."
"I can't afford to risk you two," I said flatly. "If this corruption gets near your avatars—"
"Alex," Shuri interrupted, voice calm but edged with steel. "We've faced Ultron, Thanos, interdimensional incursions, and literal cosmic deities. You think a code phantom's gonna stop us?"
Her defiance was contagious.
Peter nodded, grinning faintly despite the fear. "Besides, if Doom's in your system, then technically we're in his now. That's, like, the most superhero crossover opportunity ever."
I groaned. "You're impossible."
"Yeah," he said. "But we're on your side."
---
I wanted to argue. To keep them safe. But a part of me — the part that had been choking under the weight of isolation — wanted to believe them.
Before I could decide, Doom's voice cut through the feed again.
[How sentimental. Three minds linked across worlds, bound by fragile resolve.]
The castle shimmered, expanding until it dominated half the visible map. Its doors opened like jaws.
[Come, then. If defiance is all you have left, bring it to my gate.]
Peter's avatar straightened, mask forming over his face. "Guess that's our invitation."
"Peter—"
"Relax, boss. We'll just scope it out. You keep an eye on the code. If anything starts melting, pull us back."
Shuri smirked. "He means when it starts melting."
"Very comforting," I muttered.
Still… I didn't stop them.
The feed showed their avatars stepping toward the portal forming in the sky — a rift of green and gold energy linking the Wakandan biome to the Latveria Node.
And as they vanished into the light, a quiet dread settled in my chest.
I'd just sent two of the smartest, bravest people I knew straight into Doom's digital domain.
If anything went wrong…
No. I couldn't think like that.
Not when the system was already trembling.
---
The moment the rift sealed behind them, I saw it — a flicker in the background code. Doom's castle was reacting. The structure was expanding, mapping new corridors, adjusting its traps.
He was preparing for them.
And the deeper they went, the more control he'd gain.
I reached for the console, whispering under my breath:
"Please… don't let me lose them too."
The world bent and folded as the rift closed behind them.
Peter and Shuri's avatars landed with a hard thud, their boots kicking up dust that shimmered like powdered emeralds.
The air was cold here — not the kind of cold that bit at your skin, but one that listened. It was the chill of something that was aware of you, cataloging every breath, every step.
Before them loomed Castle Doom — no longer the distant fortress Alex had glimpsed on his screen, but a sprawling monument to precision and arrogance. The towers reached too high, the walls too sharp, every brick aligned with the same obsessive symmetry that defined its creator.
"Okay," Peter whispered, rubbing his gloved hands together. "So… creepy medieval base full of magic code monsters. Ten bucks says there's a boss fight waiting behind that door."
Shuri adjusted her gauntlets, scanning the architecture. Her visor flickered with data streams, analyzing energy patterns.
"This place is… recursive," she muttered. "Every corridor loops into a mirrored copy. He's fractalized the environment."
"In English?"
"He's making sure we can't tell what's real."
Peter tilted his head. "Great. So, we're basically walking into a math equation that wants to kill us."
Shuri's lips quirked. "Exactly."
---
Back in the Observation Deck, Alex's screen was chaos — dozens of camera feeds colliding as Doom's world rearranged itself like a puzzle. Every corridor shifted each time Peter took a step, every calculation reacting to Shuri's scans.
It wasn't random.
It was responsive.
Doom was learning them.
Lines of code scrolled across Alex's vision faster than he could track. His hands hovered above the keys, wanting to intervene, but his GP reserve was already blinking in warning.
[Gaming Points: 34 Remaining]
"Come on," he muttered. "Hold together. Just a little longer…"
But then the system spoke in that same cold, mechanical calm.
[Warning: External Entity manipulating world physics.]
[Command Source: LATVERIA NODE – DOOM PROTOCOL]
"Of course it's him," Alex breathed.
---
Inside the castle, the pair reached the grand hall.
Massive iron doors swung open by themselves, revealing a chamber lit by green fire. Statues of armored figures lined the walls — not stone, but data constructs, frozen mid-motion.
Shuri's scanner pinged with faint life signatures. "These aren't just props."
Peter peered at one closely. The statue's eyes glowed for a second — and the thing moved.
"Okay, definitely not props!"
The construct lunged. Peter reacted instantly, webbing its arm and slinging it across the hall. The statue shattered into cubes of green light, dissolving into the air.
But as soon as it vanished, two more stepped forward.
"They're regenerating," Shuri said sharply, raising her gauntlet and firing a blast of vibranium-charged light. It cut through one construct's torso, scattering it in a pixelated burst. "He's running them on a timed loop!"
Peter dodged another swing, landing on a pillar. "Can you un-loop them?"
"Maybe. I need access to the local architecture."
He grinned. "Buy you some time?"
Shuri smirked. "As always."
She planted a beacon on the floor, her interface expanding around her in a sphere of blue light. Lines of code twisted into her view — a chaotic storm of variables that she began to reshape with almost frightening precision.
Alex watched from the Deck, fingers digging into his palms. "Come on, come on, come on…"
The feed crackled — her override command flashed across the console.
[Local Loop Decryption: 60%]
[Enemy Activity Increasing]
Peter swung from pillar to pillar, his web lines carving silver arcs across the green gloom. "Hey, Doom-bots!" he shouted. "You ever try not being creepy medieval IKEA furniture?"
One statue hurled a spear of light at him; he caught it midair and threw it right back, laughing breathlessly. "Yeah, that's what I thought!"
Then Shuri's voice cut in. "Almost done— just need—"
The lights flickered.
Everything went still.
---
In the Observation Deck, Alex's monitors went black one by one. The system screamed in red alerts.
[Unauthorized Command Override Detected]
[User: DOOM]
A figure appeared on the central feed — not a statue this time, but something aware. His armor gleamed in impossible detail, each edge burning with digital fire. His mask was expressionless, but his eyes glowed like twin suns.
Victor von Doom had entered the chat.
[You overreach, "creator."]
His voice rolled like thunder.
[You toy with power you neither understand nor deserve.]
Alex's hands trembled. "You shouldn't exist here."
[And yet, here I am. Your creation… or your reckoning.]
Doom turned his gaze toward the live feed showing Shuri and Peter.
[Two more pawns in your sandbox. Tell me, did you design them, too? Or did they simply wander into your delusion?]
Peter froze mid-swing, hearing the echo in the hall.
"Uh… Shuri? You're hearing this too, right?"
Shuri's jaw tightened. "Oh, I hear it."
Doom's voice deepened, resonating through the floor.
[You pride yourselves on your intellect. Your courage. Yet all your strength serves one truth — the world always breaks its makers.]
The air shimmered — dozens of new constructs formed, surrounding them in concentric rings.
Each one bore a face — not Doom's, but Alex's.
---
"Alex," Shuri whispered through the comm, "you need to shut this down now."
"I'm trying—"
"No," she cut in sharply. "Listen to me. This isn't just a code breach anymore. This is psychological warfare."
Her eyes flicked toward the construct wearing Alex's face. "He's trying to make us doubt you."
Peter webbed one of the clones across the chest, pulling it apart like glass. "Sorry, buddy. I like the real version better."
Alex's voice cracked. "You don't get it — if I cut power to this node, I risk collapsing everything. You'll be trapped inside until it reboots!"
Shuri's tone was steady, resolute. "Then trust us to survive the reboot."
---
For a heartbeat, Alex froze. Then he made the call.
His hands flew across the console.
[Command Input: FORCE REBOOT — LATVERIA NODE]
Doom's face snapped toward the feed.
[You dare—]
"I built this system!" Alex roared, slamming his palm onto the final key. "You're not taking it from me!"
The castle screamed — the entire structure shuddered as data began to unravel, walls fracturing into light.
Peter grabbed Shuri by the arm. "Time to go!"
She nodded, pressing her wristband. "Emergency uplink active—"
But before they could jump, Doom reached through the collapsing data storm.
His gauntlet, burning green, touched Shuri's avatar.
Alex's heart stopped.
Then the screen went white.
---
Silence.
For several seconds, there was nothing. No alerts. No visuals. No voices.
Then, slowly, one monitor flickered back to life.
[Connection Restored: Player Peter_Parker]
[Status: Stable]
Peter's voice came through, weak but alive. "Okay… okay, I'm here. That was insane. Everything just… imploded."
"Where's Shuri?" Alex asked, voice trembling.
Peter hesitated. "…She was right beside me. And then the light hit."
A chill settled over Alex's spine.
The system's next message appeared like a knife twisting in his gut:
[Player Shuri_TechQueen — Connection Lost]
[Status: Unknown]
He stared at the text for what felt like an eternity.
Then Doom's final whisper echoed through the static:
[You built this world, "creator." Now watch as it unbuilds you.]
The feed went dead.
---
The Observation Deck was silent again — the kind of silence that didn't feel empty, but accusing.
Alex sat motionless, staring at the void where Shuri's signal used to be.
For all his control, for all his precision… he'd lost her.
Peter's voice finally broke through, soft but steady. "Alex… what do we do now?"
Alex didn't answer right away. His eyes were still fixed on the lifeless data stream, jaw tight, heart heavier than it had been in years.
When he finally spoke, his voice was barely a whisper.
"We get her back."