The Heart of the Universe, the Beyonder, and the editor's lighter...
"I am out."
Even the weakest of those, the Heart of the Universe, was something you needed a full protagonist halo to handle. Lose the halo, and the ending would be miserable beyond words.
Compared to that kind of death zone, literally anywhere else sounded better.
With that thought, Pendragon activated the ship's power system and left the Infinity Gauntlet in the main reactor.
After only a few microseconds of warmup, the jump drive took the city sized flagship and blinked it out of existence, leaving behind a whole planet full of agitated world leaders whose nerves were frayed to the point of visible shaking.
"So it really went to go bring back reinforcements!"
At this point, that seemed like the only explanation that made sense.
Pendragon had no idea he had just accidentally created a whole wave of paranoid world leaders. Right now he was traveling through another dimension.
To be precise, he was traveling through a "corridor" beyond dimensions.
He only called it a corridor to make things easier to understand. In truth, even space and time were twisted to the extreme here, to the point they stopped having any meaning at all.
Looking out from inside the ship, it was as if a single color had been stretched out infinitely, turning into a roaring multicolored torrent that battered the hull. Just one glance at it without his glasses on was enough to make Pendragon feel dizzy.
Probably because the ship's drive contained the Time Stone, time inside was relatively stable, which let Pendragon move around normally.
Then, while he was happily drowning himself in desserts, Pendragon suddenly realized something.
He might be stuck here.
"I feel like there was some kind of condition for traveling to other universes... what was it again?"
He lay sprawled across a pile of daifuku, his ahoge curling into a question mark, though it soon popped back to its usual shape.
Whatever. As long as there were sweets to eat and books to read, where he stayed did not really matter.
Honestly, staying here forever sounded great. At least he did not have to worry about a certain caped guy from the company with a big S showing up at his door.
Out of all possible universes, the places Pendragon least wanted to stay, besides Marvel, were DC.
As for reasons, well, everyone should understand.
And so, perhaps the most zen, salted fish style dimension traveler in history was born.
Pendragon simply set up a search function on his quantum computer and let the ship automatically scan for coordinates of other universes.
As for how long that would take, or whether it would find anything at all, that was anyone's guess.
Girl reading with tea... in progress.
No one knew how long Pendragon had been holed up in the ship. Her hair had been braided and now hung all the way down to her waist.
Inside the ship, which had been so quiet that the only sound was the turning of pages, a sharp beeping suddenly broke the silence.
The quantum computer had detected a signal from another universe and sent a notification to Pendragon.
Pendragon had been thoroughly engrossed in her book and tea. She was not particularly interested in yet another new universe and originally planned to just have the quantum computer log the coordinates of the signal, while she continued enjoying her peaceful life here.
Then the snacks ran low.
"Ahhh, it is the end of the world!"
When the sweets the Reality Stone could conjure became fewer and fewer, and their flavors gradually started to taste off, Pendragon's room was like it had suddenly been flooded. She rolled around on the disappearing grass, as if that would somehow make more pastries rain down from the sky.
Maybe because they had left the Marvel universe, the Six Infinity Stones no longer had the same level of authority in other dimensions. Their power was slowly fading.
The loss of the Stones' power itself did not bother Pendragon much. Any enemy the Infinity Gauntlet could beat, she could beat with her own strength too. As for the ones she could not beat, well, there was no point thinking about those.
The real problem now was that her snacks were running out.
Reducing the number of conjured sweets could preserve their flavor, but that tiny amount of food could never satisfy a king's appetite.
And those desserts whose taste had already gone strange were, in Pendragon's eyes, no longer food at all.
They were dust.
"Why is this happening!"
Even her ahoge lost its strength, flopping across her head and blending in with the rest of her hair, like an outstanding, hard working person being buried among a crowd of salted fish.
In front of her last plate of mung bean cakes, Pendragon sank into a full anime despair crouch. Her body began to lose its color and was just about to solidify into a stone statue.
Right.
Just as her CPU was about to shut down, Pendragon's ahoge suddenly sprang upright again, like a lightbulb flickering on.
"Didn't we pick up the coordinates of another universe earlier? Let's go there!"
Pendragon needed to confirm one thing. Was the Reality Stone weakening because of this specific dimension, or did it become useless the moment they left the Marvel universe?
Of course, restocking her dessert supply was still the main objective.
What? A world without sweets might as well be destroyed.
The quantum computer faithfully followed its master's order and started decoding the previously captured data.
For once, Pendragon did not stay in her candy filled room. Instead, she appeared in the ship's main control room, staring at the quantum core with big expectant eyes. Her ahoge wagged back and forth like a puppy's tail.
The small glowing sphere of the quantum computer pulsed with concentric rings of light. That was the optical effect generated by the ongoing quantum computations.
After running tens of millions of calculations and comparing over twenty thousand possibilities, the quantum computer finally gave Pendragon a confirmed result.
It was a distress signal.
The signal itself had been caught through super quantum exchange, so who knew how accurate the information really was. Either way, based on the coordinates parsed from it, Pendragon would have to stay in the ship for about half a day more before they could jump into that universe.
And that was with the Time Stone adjusting her local time flow. Otherwise, Pendragon might have needed a month, or even several months, before she could escape this "dimensional corridor."
"I was wrong. I should not have eaten all the mung bean cakes that fast."
Girl currently reflecting on life.
The massive ship had already locked onto a jump node into another universe using the remaining power of the Stones, but jumping something this big required an absurd amount of energy.
In the Marvel universe, a single Stone would have been enough to provide that level of power. Now, only Pendragon could stand in the engine room, eating black bean mochi while pouring huge amounts of magic into the drive.
After a long period of warmup, the ship finally shuddered, then violently ramped its speed up to the absolute limit, surpassing even the concept of "speed" itself, and broke free from that twisted realm where both time and space were distorted.
In the cold, silent depths of space, a terrifying black hole radiated an enormous gravitational pull that not even light could escape, plunging the surrounding region into absolute darkness and vacuum.
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