The Pocket Dimension
The space between worlds was not black.
It was a shifting, nauseating grey, a canvas where physics had not yet decided on a painting.
There was no gravity here, only the suggestion of it.
Floating rocks, remnants of a convergence from five thousand years ago, drifted in lazy, impossible spirals.
And in the center of the void, trapped in a fissure of reality, roiled the Aether.
It was a cloud of angry, viscous crimson fluid.
It moved with a sentient malice, lashing out at the nothingness, seeking a host, seeking matter to infect and convert into dark matter.
Ernst floated toward it.
He moved with the precision of a surgeon entering a sterile field.
His boots utilized small magnetic thrusters—another Stark-inspired design—to navigate the zero-gravity environment.
He reached into his pack and removed three tripod devices.
They were heavy, constructed from a tungsten alloy, and each was tipped with a glowing blue Tesseract battery.
He placed them in the air. They didn't fall; they simply hung there, suspended by the strange laws of the pocket dimension.
He arranged them in a perfect equilateral triangle around the swirling Aether.
"Geometry," Ernst muttered, his voice sounding flat in the thin atmosphere.
"The cage of the universe."
He tapped the control sequence on his wrist computer.
"Active," Ernst commanded.
The devices hummed.
A high-pitched whine that vibrated the teeth.
Beams of solid, compressed blue light shot from the tripods, connecting to form a pyramid of energy.
Space contains Reality.
The Aether hissed. It sounded like steam hitting hot iron.
The red fluid slammed against the blue barriers, seeking a crack, seeking a weakness.
But the Tesseract energy was absolute. It was the hard border of the cosmos, the definition of 'here' versus 'there.'
The Aether was trapped.
Ernst adjusted the dials on his wrist, shrinking the containment field.
The pyramid contracted.
The angry red cloud was compressed, forced inward by the crushing weight of the Space Stone's energy, until it was a sphere the size of a football.
It pulsed violently, a heartbeat of pure destruction.
"Azazel, stand back," Ernst warned, not looking away from the sphere.
The demon was floating near a jagged chunk of rock, his tail wrapped around a protrusion to anchor himself.
He looked uneasy. The magic here felt wrong to him—too old, too chaotic.
"If I scream," Ernst said, his voice devoid of fear, "do not touch me. If you touch me while the circuit is open, you will be unmade."
"Understood," Azazel rumbled, pushing himself further back into the shadows.
Ernst took a deep breath.
He put on a heavy, lead-lined gauntlet on his right hand.
In the palm was a siphon port, glowing with Tesseract energy—a direct interface he had built for this exact moment.
Then, he opened the silver case at his waist.
Inside sat three vials of shimmering blue liquid.
CPH4.
The synthetic hormone.
The biological explosive.
He didn't hesitate. He didn't pause to consider the morality or the mortality rate.
He loaded all three vials into a high-pressure pneumatic injector.
He pressed the cold metal tip against the carotid artery of his neck.
Hiss.
The sound was sharp, final.
The blue liquid hit his bloodstream.
For a second, there was nothing.
Just the cold sensation of the fluid entering his warm body.
Then, the universe exploded.
It wasn't a sound. It was a cessation of limits.
Gravity ceased to apply to him, not because he was in zero-G, but because gravity was a variable he could now choose to ignore.
Ernst's feet lifted off the ground, his body straightening into a cruciform pose.
He didn't feel pain; he felt everything.
His nervous system lit up like a city grid coming online after a blackout.
He felt the rotation of the Earth in the dimension outside, the grinding of tectonic plates thousands of miles away.
He felt the vibration of Azazel's heartbeat, a slow, rhythmic thud twenty meters to his left.
He felt the individual photons of light from the Tesseract batteries hitting his retina, converting into electrical signals, and traveling to his visual cortex.
He didn't just see the light; he saw the math.
Brain capacity: 10%...
The fog of human biology cleared.
The background noise of hunger, fatigue, and doubt was silenced.
12%... 15%...
He looked at the Aether.
He didn't see a red cloud anymore. He saw a code.
He saw a complex, shifting algorithm of probability and alteration.
Ernst reached out with the gauntlet.
He pressed his palm against the blue barrier of the containment field.
"Feed me," he whispered.
The barrier opened a microscopic slit.
The Aether, sensing a host, sensing biological matter, surged forward.
It flooded into the gauntlet, hungry, hateful, eager to consume.
It entered his system.
"INTRUDER."
A voice screamed in Ernst's mind.
It wasn't a human voice.
It was ancient. Hateful. Dark Elven.
It was the echo of Malekith, the accursed. The consciousness of the Aether itself, a sentient weapon that despised the light.
It tried to seize his mind. It tried to drown him in visions of eternal night, of a universe returned to darkness.
Get out, Ernst thought back.
His mental voice wasn't a whisper; it was a thunderclap amplified by the CPH4.
It was the command of a god to a servant.
He didn't fight the elf's consciousness with willpower. That was a human struggle.
He simply deleted it.
He viewed the alien presence not as a ghost, but as corrupt data.
With a thought, he scoured the alien presence from the energy. He isolated the frequency of the consciousness and inverted it.
Format complete.
He consumed the raw emotions of the Aether as fuel.
20%... 22%...
The world dissolved into data.
Ernst saw the molecular bonds of the air in the pocket dimension.
Nitrogen, Oxygen, trace elements of Argon.
He saw the strings of probability tying the dimension together, the fraying edges where reality met the void.
And inside the red cloud, he saw the heart.
The Reality Stone.
It wasn't a rock. It was a singularity of concentrated potential.
He activated the magnetic claw in his gauntlet and grasped the Stone.
BOOM.
Red lightning tore through his body.
The reaction was immediate and catastrophic.
His skin began to ripple like water disturbed by a stone.
"Dr. Ernst!" Azazel shouted, horrified.
To the demon, Ernst looked like he was unraveling.
His skin was turning into dust, flaking away in grey clouds to reveal glowing, angry red energy beneath.
His hair withered, turned white, and fell out.
His fingertips dissolved, the bones turning to chalk and scattering into the void.
It was cellular collapse.
The metabolic cost of godhood was eating him alive.
The Reality Stone was rewriting him, and his human body was insufficient hardware for the software he was trying to run.
'I am disintegrating,' Ernst observed calmly.
His inner monologue was devoid of panic. Panic was a chemical reaction he no longer experienced.
'My cells cannot sustain the energy output. The molecular binding energy is dropping below critical thresholds. Entropy is accelerating by a factor of 10^9.'
He was becoming a being of pure logic, losing the anchor to his humanity.
He felt his consciousness expanding, spreading out into the cosmos.
He was everywhere. He was the rock. He was the void. He was the distant stars.
If he didn't stop, he would vanish. He would become a cloud of sentient dust, drifting forever.
"I need an anchor."
Ernst used the Reality Stone.
He forced his mind to hallucinate. He pulled up memories. Not just data, but feeling.
He remembered the smell of old paper in his father's library.
He remembered the taste of cheap coffee in the lab. He remembered the cold satisfaction of outsmarting Schmidt.
He forced himself to feel fear.
He forced himself to feel ambition.
"I am Ernst Shaw," he projected into the void.
"I am human. I exist."
He turned the power of the Stone inward.
He looked at his own DNA.
He saw the double helix, unraveling under the stress, the bonds snapping like overstretched rubber bands.
Rewrite.
He grabbed the strands of his own genetic code with his mind.
He scanned the sequence. Billions of base pairs.
He found it.
Chromosome 23. The anomaly.
The dormant X-Gene, the legacy from his father, Sebastian Shaw.
In most mutants, it awakened at puberty, triggered by stress.
In Ernst, it had been dormant, recessive, weak.
He forced it open.
He poured the infinite, chaotic energy of the Reality Stone directly into the gene.
He didn't just activate it; he supercharged it. He evolved it.
Jumpstart.
27%... Stabilization complete.
The red light faded.
The dust that was his skin swirled back.
It defied gravity. The grey flakes reversed their trajectory, flying back onto his frame, knitting together, hardening, changing.
His hair grew back in seconds—not the brown of before, but a stark, metallic black.
His body solidified.
His bone density increased threefold. His muscle fibers wove themselves into a lattice of carbon-reinforced tissue.
The disintegration stopped.
Ernst dropped to his knees, gasping.
The sound of his breath was loud in the silence.
The gauntlet on his hand smoked, the metal warped and fused by the heat, but the Stone sat securely in the port, glowing a dull, obedient crimson.
"Dr. Ernst!"
Azazel rushed forward, kicking off the rock and floating to his master's side. He caught Ernst by the shoulders, steadying him.
"You... you were gone," Azazel stammered, his yellow eyes wide with genuine terror.
"You turned into dust. I saw through you."
Ernst looked up.
His glasses had shattered, falling away.
His eyes were no longer the dull hazel of a scientist.
For a moment, they shone with a terrifying, electric intensity—a shifting nebula of blue and red—before fading back to a piercing, icy blue.
"I know," Ernst rasped.
His voice was different. Deeper. Resonant.
"I had to rebuild myself. The hardware was obsolete."
He stood up, brushing ash from his shoulder.
He felt the fabric of his suit, the texture of the weave.
He felt different.
He felt... hungry.
But not for food. Not for the brandy back at the estate.
He was hungry for energy. He felt the ambient radiation of the pocket dimension prickling against his skin like a warm rain.
"Did it work?" Azazel asked, looking at the stone now secured in the gauntlet.
"The Aether?"
"Better than I hoped," Ernst said.
He flexed his hand. The air around his fist distorted, space bending to his will.
"I didn't just get the Stone, Azazel. I unlocked my inheritance."
"Inheritance?"
Ernst reached to his belt.
He pulled a Luger P08 pistol from his holster.
He checked the chamber. Loaded.
He clicked the safety off.
Then, he pointed the barrel directly at his own chest, right over the heart.
"Dr. Ernst, no!" Azazel shouted, reaching out to stop him.
BANG. BANG. BANG.
Three shots rang out in rapid succession.
The muzzle flashes illuminated the grey void.
The bullets struck Ernst's chest.
There was no blood.
There was no pain.
There was no staggering backward.
At the moment of impact, the kinetic energy of the bullets was absorbed instantly.
The lead flattened against his sternum and fell to the floor, useless discs of metal.
Ernst didn't even flinch.
His skin rippled slightly at the point of impact, glowing with a faint, amber hue as the energy was sucked into his cells.
He felt the power. It was a rush, a shot of adrenaline that hit him in the molecular core.
He metabolized the force.
He held up his left hand, pointing at a floating rock ten meters away—a chunk of granite the size of a car.
With a flick of his wrist, he released the stored energy.
He didn't need the Tesseract or the Stone for this. This was him.
A blast of pure concussive force shot from his palm.
CRACK.
The rock pulverized. It didn't break; it turned into powder, exploding outward in a cloud of dust.
"Kinetic and Energy Absorption," Ernst smiled, looking at his hand, where the skin was cooling down from the discharge.
"Just like my father. But enhanced. My father absorbs and releases. I absorb, process, and optimize."
He looked at Azazel.
The demon was staring at him with a mix of fear and awe.
This was not the scientist he had guarded in the Alps. This was a predator.
"My brain is operating at 27% capacity," Ernst stated, the numbers flowing through his mind like a ticker tape.
"I can reorganize matter at a molecular level using the Stone. I can sustain my body indefinitely on ambient energy. I don't need to sleep. I don't need to eat. I can calculate the trajectory of every bullet on a battlefield before the trigger is pulled."
He paused, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a spare pair of glasses.
He put them on, hiding the intensity of his eyes.
The mask was back in place, but the monster beneath was fully awake.
"I am..."
He straightened his tie.
"...finally ready to play the game."
——
Authors Note:
I have analyzed the physics of 'Writer Motivation.'
It turns out, my typing speed is directly correlated to the number of shiny blue rocks (Power Stones) in my inventory.
200 Power Stones = 1 Bonus Chapter
10 reviews = 1 bonus Chapter