"Time is a cage with mirrors for walls. But someone… something… is breaking the glass."—Kang the Conqueror
Somewhere Beyond Time – The Fracture Meridian
Time did not exist here.Not in the way mortals understood it.
But something ancient ticked.
Each second that passed was a reality bleeding. Every tick of the Convergence Clock was a world folding in on itself.
At the center, suspended in a storm of broken timelines, hovered a massive astronomical device: wheels within rings, drifting planets stuck in stuttered orbit, shards of time orbiting a pulsating core.
And at the heart of it all: a presence awakening.
Earth-616 – Jakarta
Kael leaned against the rusted edge of a rooftop as Riri scanned the shard again, her interface a blur of calculations and multiversal overlays.
"So... we have seven days before the multiverse eats itself?" Kael asked.
Riri didn't look up. "Six and a half now."
The Nova Variant—whose name was revealed as Seris-Va—joined them.
"It's not just collapse. It's convergence. Every unstable branch will crash into its nearest neighbor. Billions of timelines trying to overwrite each other."
"And that means?" Kael asked.
"Either a new order emerges… or all of existence disintegrates into contradiction."
Riri finally locked in the last data stream. Her helmet hissed open.
"The shard is reacting to a signal. It's coming from… Latveria."
Castle Doom – Hidden Chamber
Victor Von Doom stood before an obsidian console carved with runes and equations in ancient Wakandan, Kree, and Celestial dialects. The Fragmentum pieces he'd gathered floated above the console, harmonizing with Kael's.
Behind him, a voice spoke, smooth as silk over steel.
"You gather pieces of something you don't understand."
Doom didn't turn.
"Understanding is irrelevant. I will master it."
The voice smiled. If sound could smile.
"Good. Then you'll be the first to die when it breaks you."
In the reflection of Doom's gauntlet, a vague figure appeared—faceless, cloaked in gravitational haze.
The Architect of Collapse had arrived.
Later – Aboard the Nova Beacon Ship
The multiversal team gathered in a floating vessel orbiting outside standard spacetime, anchored to reality by Kael's shard.
Kael looked across the table. Alternate versions of himself—older, battle-worn, grim, wise, even peaceful.
"I don't understand why me."
The winged Kael spoke first.
"Because your shard is the purest. The nexus shard. It responds to choice, not force."
"Then how do we stop a convergence?" Kael asked.
Seris-Va activated the holomap. An impossibly massive structure unfolded in the center: The Convergence Clock.
"That. It's the heart of the collapse. And we need to shut it down from the inside before it completes its final rotation."
"How do we get there?"
"We break into Latveria," Riri said grimly, "and steal the coordinates from Doom."
A long silence.
Then Kael stood.
"So we fight a sorcerer tyrant, outsmart a cosmic entity, break into a clock that holds the fabric of time, and survive the multiverse eating itself."
"Pretty much," Riri said.
"Awesome," Kael sighed. "Let's go."
[To Be Continued in Chapter 9 – Latverian Gambit]