Retirement, I decided, was a scam.
For the first century, it was great. Lia and I, stripped of our cosmic, reality-bending duties, were just two beings of immense, personal power with an entire, empty void to ourselves. We built a nice little pocket dimension—nothing fancy, just a comfortable mansion with a library, an armory, and an eternally well-stocked wine cellar.
We spent our days sparring, exploring the fundamental nature of our own, now-stable powers, and generally enjoying the quiet. I had my complete, personal Omnistructure. It no longer created worlds, but it was still a weapon of unimaginable potential. Lia was a sovereign entity in her own right, her soul a perfect fusion of a princess, a warden, and a goddess.
It was peaceful. It was calm.
And I was losing my fucking mind.
"I'm bored," I announced one Tuesday, startling a flock of phantom butterflies I had created out of sheer ennui.
Lia looked up from the ancient, cosmic text she was reading. "It's been a hundred and seven years, Kaelen," she said, her voice a calm, gentle melody. "You've only threatened to un-create the concept of 'Tuesdays' twice this month. I call that progress."
"Progress is boring," I grumbled. "There's nothing to conquer. Nothing to manipulate. No idiots to trick. I miss having idiots to trick."
My System, my loyal, personal assistant, seemed to agree. It had been mostly silent since my "retirement," but now it flickered to life with a familiar, shameless suggestion.
[SOVEREIGN'S WHIM: A CHANGE OF SCENERY]
[Description: The current reality ('Peaceful, Quiet Retirement Hell') is narratively stagnant. A new setting is required to stimulate the Administrator's core 'Chaos' protocols.]
[Objective: Go on a vacation. The Janitor has provided you with a 'retirement gift'—a single, untraceable, one-way ticket to any 'independent reality' of your choosing. A place outside the jurisdiction of the major cosmic 'companies'. A place to relax and unwind.]
[Suggestion: Pick the one that sounds the most... flammable.]
A vacation. A one-way ticket to a new playground.
The spark of my old self, the chaotic, sovereign monster, ignited in my soul.
"Lia, my love," I said, a slow, predatory grin spreading across my face. "Pack your bags. We're going on a trip."
The System presented me with a list of "unclaimed" realities. Backwater dimensions, forgotten realms, failed experiments. Most of them were boring. But one caught my eye.
[Reality Designation: 'Terra-Prime'.]
[Description: A low-magic, high-conflict 'mortal world' dominated by a single, hyper-aggressive, and technologically primitive species known as 'Humans'.]
[Narrative Status: Endless, cyclical, and gloriously pointless tribal warfare. High potential for... fireworks.]
"That one," I said, pointing. "It sounds delightfully messy."
The transition was seamless. One moment, we were in our quiet, void-bound mansion. The next, we were standing on a windswept hill, overlooking a muddy, blood-soaked battlefield.
Two armies of grimy, bearded men in crude iron armor were hacking each other to pieces with swords and axes. Banners with crudely painted wolves and stags flapped in the wind. It was brutal, savage, and utterly pointless.
"Ah," I said, taking a deep, satisfied breath of the carnage-filled air. "I'm home."
Lia, who had adopted a simple, traveler's cloak, looked at the battle with a detached, analytical gaze. Their tactics are atrocious, she sent, her thought a clean line of military critique. They leave their flanks completely exposed.
"They're mortals, my love," I said. "Their stupidity is their most charming quality."
We were gods here. Our power, even suppressed to avoid drawing unwanted attention, was so far beyond these primitives that we might as well have been the sun and the moon.
Our plan was simple. Find a nice, quiet corner of this world, build a cottage, and enjoy the local color. Maybe, just maybe, I'd introduce the concept of "guerrilla warfare" to one of the local warlords, just to spice things up.
But as we turned to leave, a new, unforeseen variable entered the field.
From the woods at the edge of the battlefield, a third faction emerged. They were not human. They were tall, elegant, and impossibly beautiful, with pointed ears and eyes that glowed with a faint, inner light. Elves. But they were not the peaceful poets of Xylos. They were clad in black, silent armor, and they moved with a lethal, predatory grace.
And their magic was… wrong. It was not the clean, ordered magic of the Tower. It was a twisted, corrupting, and vaguely familiar energy.
They fell upon the two warring human armies not as soldiers, but as butchers. Black arrows flew, dark magic erupted, and the human soldiers, who had been locked in a brutal stalemate, were now being systematically, and efficiently, annihilated.
This was not a battle. This was an extermination.
And leading the elven war party was a figure of terrible, beautiful power. A woman with hair as black as a starless night and eyes that burned with a cold, hateful fire. An elven queen, wreathed in shadows.
The twist was not just the arrival of this new, powerful, and genocidal faction.
It was the flicker of recognition I saw in Lia's eyes. A ghost of a memory from a life she no longer had.
And it was the new, urgent, and utterly impossible notification that screamed across my own, private System.
[!!! CRITICAL THREAT DETECTED: AETHELGARD-1 ANOMALY !!!]
[The 'Soul-Signature' of the elven queen... it is a 99.2% match for a known, archived entity.]
[MATCH FOUND.]
[ENTITY: 'The Vengeful Spirit of Seraphina'.]
[ANALYSIS: The ghost-entity you exiled from the Abyss was not destroyed. It has escaped. And it has found a new, powerful, and very angry host in this independent reality.]