The void had rules.
Big cosmic laws. Deep metaphysical truths.
Nico ignored all of them.
He bobbed there as a blob of crimson goo with yellow lightning veining through him, humming to himself and making little shapes out of his own body. Sword. Gun. Booty. Sword again.
In front of him, the ROB looked deeply tired.
Random Omnipotent Being. Female. Pretty. Casual outfit that definitely wasn't designed to be stared at as hard as Nico was staring.
"I fixed your mess," she said, pinching the bridge of her nose. "Again. I patched your soul. Again. I relocated the collapsed fragments. Again. You are stable. For now. You could, I don't know, not break anything for five minutes?"
Nico noodled a tentacle thoughtfully. "Counter-offer. You give me your panties."
The void went dead quiet.
Her eye twitched.
"Repeat that," she said.
"You heard me," he said, doubling down because his survival instinct was mostly decorative. "Panties. Hand 'em over. I got trauma. I deserve fanservice. Emotional compensation."
Reality made a tiny, strangled noise.
"You want compensation?" she asked in a disturbingly sweet tone.
Nico brightened. "Finally, someone gets it."
She smiled in a way that should have made him shut up forever.
"New cluster," she said. "No brakes."
Her hand barely moved.
The slap hit his existence like a train.
One second Nico was hovering smugly in a nice clean void, about three seconds away from saying something even dumber.
The next, he was launched.
The universe grabbed him like a rock in a slingshot and fired.
He screamed instantly.
"AAAAAAAAAA–!"
He spun through a tunnel of warped light and tangled time, tumbling end over end. Colors smeared. Gravity forgot whose side it was on. Somewhere, a sign labeled "MULTIVERSAL SAFETY REGULATIONS" flew past him on fire.
"THIS IS ILLEGAL!" he shrieked, flailing all eight tentacles even though they didn't help at all. "I DIDN'T CONSENT! I TAKE IT BACK! I'LL TAKE THE BRA INSTEAD–!"
The tunnel narrowed.
Something ahead of him got bigger.
Much bigger.
Human. Robes. Wand. Weird face.
Nico's brain, such as it was, tried to process the details.
Pale skin. Red eyes. Nose going full snake. Evil aura. Bad vibes.
And, most importantly:
Wow, he's ugly.
His panic rocketed from 80% to 200%.
NOPE. NOPE. ABSOLUTELY NOT. I REFUSE.
He didn't think.
A tentacle snapped out in front of him, goo reshaping on instinct.
Liquid hardened. Edge formed. Blade.
He hit the man at full multiversal slap-speed.
SHHHK-THUMP
Tom Marvolo Riddle never got to say a word.
One instant he was standing there, about to deliver some dramatic speech to the three girls in the room. The next, his body met a screaming horny meteor with a sword-tentacle.
The blade went through him like hot knife through wet paper.
Top half, bottom half, instant divorce.
His wand slipped from his fingers. His mouth opened in silent outrage. No sound came. His brain didn't get enough time to register "I am being bisected by flying red slime" before it shut off.
The two halves of his body hit the floor with a wet, final sound.
Nico exploded across the flagstones in a gooey splatter, sword-tentacle carving a long groove in the stone along the way.
He smeared across the floor, then oozed upward in a wobbly heap.
"OW," he yelled at the universe. "My everything!"
He wobbled left, then right, then finally focused on his surroundings.
Big stone room. Torches. Table. Smell of dust and bad decisions.
And right in front of him:
Two separate chunks of dead wizard.
Nico stared.
Top half Tom stared back with dead, red eyes, face frozen in eternal "what the fu–"
"AAAH!" Nico screamed, recoiling so hard he splashed backward. "WHY IS HE STILL UGLY WHEN HE'S DEAD?!"
He slapped a tentacle over his nonexistent mouth, then looked around quickly.
At the far end of the room, three dark-haired girls in fancy robes stood together, backs to him, heads close, deep in conversation.
They had not turned around.
"…so if he truly intends to change the world," Narcissa was saying coolly, "he will have to deal with the Ministry's current stance first."
"Let him," Bellatrix muttered. "Let it all burn."
Andromeda sighed. "Can we at least meet him before you start burning things in his name?"
Nico blinked.
Then he slowly looked back down at the ruined corpse at his feet.
"Okay," he whispered to himself. "So. Good news: I am alive. Bad news: I just cut Skeletor Senior in half in front of his girl group and they didn't even notice."
A weird, dark smoke was already leaking out of the body. It wasn't normal death-stuff. This felt thicker. Wrong. Like rotten magic.
It brushed against him and his whole body twitched.
It tasted like pain, obsession, and "I think I'm better than everyone because my family never hugged me."
"HURK," Nico gagged. "Why does this smell like bad childhood and genocide."
The smoke tried to slip away, instinctively looking for another anchor, another vessel.
Nico didn't have a plan.
He just had reflexes and spite.
He lunged and ate it.
It hit him like spiritual garbage: horcrux-tainted soul fragment, mixed with dark magic and ego. For a second his goo flickered. Images slammed into him out of order: a diary, a cup, a ring, a locket, green light, a castle, the word "Mudblood" said with way too much passion.
His thoughts made a wet skid noise and crashed.
"TOO MUCH LORE!" he screamed, flailing. "GROSS! BAD TASTE! ZERO OUT OF TEN!"
He shook himself like a dog, red lightning flashing across his form.
Tom's stolen memories sloshed around in him, badly digested and half-understood. He did not sort them. He did not analyze them. He just mentally shoved everything into a box labeled "EVIL CRAP" and punched the box.
Out loud, he panted, "Shouldn't have done that. Definitely would do it again. Free power, ugly flavor."
He realized, belatedly, that there was still a lot of body on the floor.
And blood.
And that he was in a weird wizard room with three girls who could turn around at any second and see their future dark messiah sliced like deli meat.
Panic hit him for the second time in five minutes.
"Hide the crime, hide the crime, hide the crime," he muttered, tentacles already moving.
He flopped onto the nearest chunk of Tom Riddle and did the least sophisticated thing in the universe.
He ate it.
No style. No dignity. Just full feral vacuum cleaner.
Bones cracked, robes dissolved, organs vanished, all sucked into crimson goo. It was disgusting, but he'd had worse. Somewhere. Probably. He couldn't remember. His brain was busy screaming.
Top half gone.
Bottom half next.
He squelched across the floor like an industrial mop from hell, slurping up flesh and fabric and ominous dark energy. The wand clattered against the stone as he bumped it.
"I'll take that," he said, like any of this was a normal transaction, and swallowed the wand too.
Behind him, the girls kept talking.
"I'm only saying," Narcissa was continuing, annoyingly calm, "if he's incompetent, Father will never forgive us for attaching the family name to a failure."
Bellatrix sniffed. "I can tell when a man is powerful."
"By his… magic?" Andromeda asked dryly.
Bellatrix smirked. "Among other things."
Nico, halfway through inhaling the last bit of Dark Lord thigh, choked slightly.
Okay, note to self: that one is horny and violent. Hot, but terrifying. Focus.
The last scrap of robe disappeared into him. The stone floor was now blessedly corpse-free, though still kind of damp. He spread a thin layer of goo over it to soak up the rest.
He sat in the middle of the room, now alone, vibrating, stuffed full of stolen dark wizard and bad life choices.
His whole body buzzed with Tom's residual magic, soul gunk, and a worrying amount of secondhand racism.
"Wow," he said weakly. "I have never felt this contaminated. I need a shower. And a priest. And a therapist. In that order."
Then he remembered.
The girls.
He looked up fast.
They still had their backs to him.
Somewhere in the chaos of the teleport, the slap, the murder, and the emergency cannibalism, the universe had apparently decided to give him five extra seconds of plot armor.
He stared at their silhouettes.
Three witches. Powerful bloodline. Pretty. Dangerous. One of them literally talking like she wanted to set the world on fire for fun.
His brain did not think "strategy" or "long-term plan" or "political leverage."
It thought:
Hot goths.
Nico's goo rippled.
Then another thought smacked into the first one:
Wait. If I killed snake-nose and they're here to meet snake-nose, and there is no snake-nose, I am going to die so hard.
He froze, mid-ripple, like a slime caught in a flashlight.
At that exact dramatic moment, Bellatrix's head twitched, like she'd heard something.
She started to turn.
Nico panicked.
Every scrap of stolen, half-digested memory inside him shoved one blurry idea at the front of his smooth, stupid brain:
Pale. Red eyes. Robes. Lord.
"Fuuuuuuuuu–" he began.
His body started to change.
His goo climbed up, up, shaping into something tall and human-looking. Skin. Hair. Robes. Face.
Crimson hardened. Yellow lightning faded under the surface. Features rearranged into something very much like the man he'd just turned into leftovers.
Red eyes blinked open.
Not quite right. Not perfect. A little too shiny. A little too fluid around the edges.
But if you didn't look too close?
Dark Lord enough.
Bellatrix's shoulders squared as she turned fully.
Nico, mid-transform, forced his mouth into something like a calm, sinister expression.
His heart, if he'd had one, was screaming.
And then:
"My Lord?"
Her voice. Close. Expectant.
His brain short-circuited.
Hot voice.
That single horny neuron fired so hard it wiped everything else.
The last of the goo snapped into place.
He stood there, wearing Tom's face and Tom's robes like a cosplay made of crime, staring at three witches who had no idea their meeting had gone from "talk to Voldemort" to "talk to horny dumb slime that just speedran murder."
The universe inhaled.
Before anyone said anything else.
Before Nico managed to decide whether he was going to talk, run, or die.
The scene froze.
Time didn't actually stop.
But the chapter did.
Nico, freshly teleported, freshly slapped, freshly guilty of accidental dark lord dismemberment, stood precariously at the edge of his new life.
And behind those red eyes, one extremely simple thought was looping:
Do not say anything about panties. Do not say anything about panties. Do not say anything about panties.
End of Chapter 1.