Chapter 22 – The Ultimate Weapon: Counting to Three

The floating bed was surprisingly comfortable for something defying every law of physics.

I sat cross-legged on the quilted surface, munching on the space grapes Thalia had conjured earlier. They tasted like regular grapes but sparkled faintly and made my teeth tingle. The bed drifted lazily in the collapsing pocket dimension while two cosmic horrors tried to murder each other twenty feet away.

Thalia’s void energy clashed against Loki’s chaos magic in waves of green and black.

The light show was honestly terrible. Like someone had given a strobe light to a toddler and told them to go wild. Each collision sent shockwaves rippling through the dimension, tearing holes in the fabric of reality itself. The floor had stopped existing ten minutes ago. The walls were folding in on themselves. The romantic canopy bed setup was now scattered debris floating in the void.

My migraine was getting worse by the second.

The noise was the real problem. My immunity protected me from the reality-warping effects, but it did nothing for the sound. Every blast hit like thunder mixed with nails on a chalkboard. I popped another grape into my mouth and winced as a particularly loud explosion made my ears ring.

Thalia screamed something in a language that probably predated human civilization.

Loki laughed and countered with a barrage of crystallized chaos shards.

I checked my watch. They’d been at this for forty-seven minutes. Forty-seven minutes of nonstop cosmic destruction because Loki thought kidnapping me for a surprise date would be funny and Thalia took personal offense to anyone else spending time with me.

Typical Tuesday honestly.

A beam of void energy carved through the space where the ceiling used to be. Reality peeled away like old wallpaper. I could see into other dimensions through the tear. One looked like it was made entirely of screaming faces. Another was just purple. I looked away before my headache got worse.

The fruit tray floated nearby, still somehow intact despite everything.

I reached for another grape.

A stray blast of green chaos magic hit the tray dead center.

The porcelain exploded into dust. Grapes scattered into the void, disappearing into dimensional tears. The last grape rolled off the edge of the bed and vanished into the infinite nothing below.

I stared at the empty space where my snack used to be.

Something inside me snapped.

Not fear. Not panic. Just pure exhausted frustration. The kind you feel when you’ve been dealing with nonsense for so long that one tiny thing pushes you over the edge. I’d been kidnapped from my day off. Dragged into a pocket dimension. Forced to watch a fight I didn’t ask for. And now my grapes were gone.

I was done.

I stood up slowly, brushing imaginary dust off my jeans.

Thalia was mid-attack when she noticed me moving. Her eyes went wide. The massive sphere of void energy she’d been charging fizzled out instantly. She threw her hands up like she was trying to stop a car.

“Kai, wait—”

Loki turned her head, saw me walking toward them, and her face went pale.

“Kai, don’t—”

I walked directly between them.

My footsteps were steady despite the lack of solid ground. The immunity my dad gave me extended to stuff like gravity and spatial coherence apparently. Both of them frantically tried to cancel their attacks at the same time.

Thalia’s void beam collapsed inward with a sound like reality being vacuum-sealed.

Loki’s chaos wave reversed course and slammed back into her.

The backlash hit them both like a truck. Thalia flew backward and crashed into a floating chunk of wall. Loki tumbled through the air, her limbs flailing before she caught herself with a burst of magic. They both hit the ground hard, or what passed for ground in this collapsing nightmare dimension.

I looked at the destruction around me and sighed.

The romantic setup was completely annihilated. The bed was torn to shreds. The candles had become dimensional anomalies. Even the stupid rose petals were burning with green fire. Hours of preparation, thousands of years of cosmic power, all wasted because neither of them could act like adults for five minutes.

“She started it, Kai!”

Loki scrambled to her feet, pointing an accusatory finger at Thalia.

“She kidnapped you first, Kai! I was just trying to rescue you, Kai!”

Thalia stood up slowly, her hair floating around her like she was underwater.

“Rescue? You call this a rescue? You destroyed everything!”

“You’re the one throwing void bombs like confetti!”

“Because you wouldn’t leave!”

I raised one hand.

They both went silent immediately. Two ancient cosmic entities, capable of ending civilizations, shut their mouths like students caught talking in class. The dimension continued crumbling around us, but the fighting stopped.

I took a deep breath.

“I am going to count to three.”

Thalia’s face went completely white. Well, whiter than usual. She looked at me like I’d just announced the end of the universe.

“Kai, please—”

“If you two aren’t standing at attention and ready to go back to your cells by the time I finish counting—”

Loki made a small whimpering sound.

“—I am cancelling all visits for a month.”

Dead silence.

The void itself seemed to hold its breath.

“No games. No chats. No checkups.”

Thalia’s hands started shaking. Actual fear crossed her face. Not the kind of fear mortals felt when looking at her. Real, genuine terror.

“I will literally take a vacation. I’ll go to the beach. I’ll turn my phone off. You won’t see me for thirty days.”

“Kai, you can’t—”

I held up one finger.

“One.”

They both scrambled into motion like someone had hit the panic button.

Thalia frantically smoothed down her hair, which was still floating and writhing like living shadow. She straightened her dress, fixed the torn hem with a burst of reality manipulation, and wiped a smudge of void energy off her cheek. Loki dismissed her weapons, straightened her shirt, and tried to look innocent. Her eyes shifted from amber to blue, the color they turned when she was trying to appear harmless.

I held up two fingers.

“Two.”

Thalia’s hand moved, carving a portal through the collapsing dimension. The edges glowed with that familiar sickly green light. Through it I could see the facility, the concrete walls of Sector Seven covered in ice and flowering vines. The alarm was still blaring. People were definitely freaking out.

Loki floated over to stand next to Thalia, looking anywhere except at me.

“Kai, I just want to say, technically speaking—”

I raised my hand slightly.

“Two and a half.”

She shut up immediately.

They stood side by side, heads bowed, looking exactly like schoolgirls caught fighting on the playground. Thalia’s hands were clasped in front of her. Loki was literally standing at attention, shoulders back, spine straight. An ancient void queen and a goddess of chaos, reduced to this by the threat of being ignored.

I walked toward the portal.

“Let’s go.”

They followed without a word.

The transition from dying pocket dimension to regular reality felt like stepping from a sauna into an air-conditioned room. The temperature dropped forty degrees instantly. The sound of the alarm was deafening after the weird muffled quality of the dimension. My boots hit solid concrete and I nearly stumbled from the sudden return of normal physics.

Sector Seven looked like a war zone.

The blast doors were melted slag. The walls were covered in a thick layer of ice on one side and flowering vines on the other. A tree was growing through the ceiling. An actual tree, with roots drilling through reinforced concrete. Security monitors sparked and flickered. The sprinkler system was going off, adding water to the chaos.

Director Esdeath stood in the center of the destruction.

Her arms were crossed. Her face was perfectly calm. But the temperature around her was dropping by the second. Frost spread from her feet in crystalline patterns. The water from the sprinklers froze mid-air and clattered to the ground as ice. Her eyes were the color of a glacier, cold enough to make absolute zero look warm by comparison.

She looked at me.

Thalia and Loki both cowered behind me like I was a human shield. Two cosmic horrors, hiding from a human woman with ice powers. The absurdity would’ve been funny if I wasn’t so tired.

I walked forward.

Past the cowering goddesses. Past the destroyed security checkpoint. Past the growing tree and the frozen waterfall. I stopped in front of Esdeath and met her gaze.

“Do your worst.”

She tilted her head slightly.

“You know I can’t fire you.”

“I know.”

“Your immunity makes you irreplaceable.”

“I know that too.”

“So instead—”

She snapped her fingers.

A security guard appeared carrying a stack of papers that had to be three inches thick. He set it on the remains of a desk with a heavy thud. The top sheet read “Incident Report Form 27-B: Unauthorized Dimensional Breach.”

My soul left my body.

“—you’ll be filling out the incident report forms for everything that just happened.”

I stared at the stack of papers. There had to be a hundred pages minimum. All requiring detailed descriptions, timelines, witness statements, and damage assessments. I could already feel my hand cramping just looking at it.

Thalia peeked around my shoulder.

“I could help—”

“Silence.”

Esdeath didn’t even look at her. The temperature dropped another ten degrees. Thalia retreated back behind me immediately.

I picked up the first form.

The questions were insane. “Describe the dimensional coordinates of the breach.” “List all reality-warping effects observed.” “Estimate repair costs for structural damage in multidimensional currency.”

I looked at Esdeath.

“This is cruel.”

“This is protocol.”

She walked past me toward Thalia and Loki, her heels clicking against the icy floor. Both of them straightened up, trying to look innocent. Thalia’s dress was perfect now. Loki’s hair was neat. They looked like angels. Absolutely unconvincing angels.

I turned back to the paperwork and sighed.

Fighting gods was easy. Surviving reality-warping attacks was simple. Even getting kidnapped into pocket dimensions was just another Tuesday. But bureaucracy? Bureaucracy was the true nightmare. The real horror that no immunity could protect against.

I pulled out a pen and started writing.

Behind me, Esdeath began lecturing the two cosmic horrors about facility regulations and appropriate conflict resolution. Thalia tried to argue that technically she hadn’t left her cell willingly. Loki insisted the kidnapping was justified by the rescue clause in the prisoner handbook.

The alarm continued blaring overhead.

Water continued dripping from frozen sprinklers.

I wrote down the dimensional coordinates as best I could remember them and moved to question two.

It was going to be a very long night.