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315,000,000.
Jake stared at the long string of dark-gold numbers floating across his retina and felt his breathing hitch.
Three hundred and fifteen million emotion points. Every last one of them earned the hard way — by swallowing six Infinity Stones whole and personally stitching a fracturing Multiverse back together with his bare hands. In the entire Marvel Universe, he was pretty confident he was the only idiot both crazy enough and capable enough to pull off a deal like that.
High risk. Insane reward. That was just how the math worked.
Money sitting in a bank doesn't grow, he reminded himself. Power sitting in a system doesn't kill your enemies. There was no point hoarding points when something was coming — he could feel it in his bones.
"System," he said quietly. "Open the Super God Evolution Prize Pool."
[Ding! Super God Prize Pool — now open.]
[Single draw cost: 100,000,000 emotion points.]
Jake's eyelid twitched.
One hundred million. Per draw. Not per ten. Per single draw.
He stood there for a moment doing the math with the deadpan expression of a man watching his life savings evaporate in real time.
This isn't a lottery, he thought. This is setting a planet on fire and calling it an investment.
He took a slow breath.
"Three consecutive draws. Do it."
Three hundred million emotion points vanished in an instant, leaving a comparatively humble balance of fifteen million. Jake didn't wince. He'd learned a long time ago that hesitating on big spends just meant you died slightly more cautiously.
Then the reward hit.
BOOM—!!!
Something detonated in the depths of his mind — not painful, but enormous. An overwhelming surge of brilliant golden light erupted from somewhere behind his eyes, and before he could contain it, the light was spilling out of him, flooding through his skin, blazing outward until the entire main control room of the Watcher Station burned gold as midday.
The Omnitrix on his wrist popped up on its own. The dial extended with a soft mechanical click, glowing.
[Ding! Pity mechanism — triggered.]
[Ding! Extremely low-probability Grand Prize — triggered!]
[Obtained Universe-Level Conceptual Weapon: Ascalon Holy Sword — Fragment.]
The weight hit his palm before he even processed the notification.
Jake looked down.
Resting in his hand was a shard of metal roughly the size of his palm. Dark silver in color. No shine, no glimmer — just a cold, absolute stillness, like a piece of a dead star. Except across its surface, faint trails of starlight drifted in lazy arcs, slow and ancient.
Ascalon.
He recognized it immediately. The greatest weapon ever forged in the Ben 10 universe. The life's work of Azmuth — the smartest being in the known universe, the man who built the Omnitrix itself. Ascalon wasn't a sword you swung at people. Ascalon was a sword that redefined the rules. Its mere release of energy was enough to casually obliterate planets. Push it further and you weren't talking about destruction anymore — you were talking about rewriting the physical laws of the universe itself.
And this was a fragment of it.
Just a fragment, he thought. And it already feels like holding a mountain.
He let out a slow breath and brushed one fingertip — barely touching, no pressure at all — along the edge of the shard.
Squelch.
Blood welled up instantly.
The cut was clean and deep, opened without effort, without resistance, as if the concept of his skin simply hadn't been consulted on the matter. More than that — a thin black crack materialized in the air around the shard's edge, a hairline fracture in the spatial barrier of the room itself.
It had sliced through the dimensional wall of the Watcher Station.
From a brush of a fingertip.
Jake stared at the shard for a long moment. Then a slow, deeply satisfied grin spread across his face.
Those so-called high-dimensional gods with their absolute defenses and their conceptual invulnerability and their "I exist outside of cause and effect" speeches.
Can't wait to introduce them to this.
With a thought, the fragment dissolved into a streak of starlight and flowed smoothly into the Omnitrix's ultimate dial, integrating without resistance. The watch's faint hum deepened slightly — a sound like approval.
The third draw had landed on a batch of Universe-level rare mineral vein coordinates. Dozens of them, scattered across the Milky Way. Honestly, by comparison, it felt a little anticlimactic. Jake tossed them into his storage space without ceremony and decided to count it as a bonus rather than a disappointment.
He rolled his neck. His joints cracked satisfyingly in a clean sequence from left to right.
"Alright." He stretched his arms overhead. "Training room. Let's see what Ultimate Humungousaur is really packing these days."
He turned toward the airlock —
Buzz.
The air died.
Not dramatically. Not with a sound. It just — stopped. Froze solid, like someone had pressed pause on reality itself. The second hand of the clock on the wall locked in place mid-sweep. Outside the Watcher Station, through the reinforced viewports, he could see the automated patrol drones hanging completely motionless in the void of space, suspended mid-flight.
No alarms. The Plumbers' sensor grid hadn't registered a single thing. No breach, no intrusion, no alert.
Because this wasn't a physical attack.
This power had descended from somewhere below the present moment — slipping in through the foundations of the timeline itself, bypassing every three-dimensional defense they'd ever built.
Swish. Swish. Swish.
Fourteen orange-gold doorframes tore open in the air around him. They appeared in every direction simultaneously — in front, behind, flanking, above — blazing rectangles of temporal energy ripped into existence like wounds in space.
Jake didn't move.
He stood in the exact center as the doorframes arranged themselves into a perfect encirclement, surrounding him completely.
Then came the sound of heavy boots.
Figures in black riot armor stepped through the portals in practiced tactical formation, spreading out to lock down every angle of the room. The armor was thick, layered, utilitarian — built for function rather than intimidation. On each helmet, the same golden acronym stamped in clean block letters:
TVA.
Every agent carried a translucent baton in their right hand. The tips pulsed with a dangerous orange glow.
Pruning Sticks.
Jake recognized them. One touch from those things and it didn't matter who you were — Avenger, mutant, god, cosmic entity. Your entire existence got erased. Not killed. Erased. Your timeline, your history, every version of you across every branch of reality — wiped out and thrown into the junkyard at the end of time like a broken toy.
The Time Variance Authority.
They'd finally shown up.
Took them long enough, he thought, with the calm of someone who had been expecting this knock for quite a while.
The Guard Captain led the formation. Broad, built like a linebacker stuffed into tactical armor. He stopped a measured distance from Jake, raised his left wrist, and checked the time controller strapped there — a compact device that looked like a radar display, spinning through data.
Then he looked up.
Through the dark visor of his helmet, his gaze locked onto Jake like a targeting system acquiring a fix.
"Time Criminal: Jake Rivers."
The Captain's voice carried no inflection whatsoever. No anger, no satisfaction. Just the flat, mechanical tone of someone reading off a form.
"You have eliminated entities that were not scheduled to die. You have consumed the essence of universes that were not designated for consumption. You have created an extreme deviation in the Sacred Timeline."
He raised the Pruning Stick. The orange energy at the tip crackled and spat.
"By order of the Time Guardians."
"You are to be... reset and pruned across all dimensions."
The command barely finished leaving his mouth before all fourteen TVA agents moved in unison, tightening the formation, Pruning Sticks raised, closing in from every direction with the practiced efficiency of a team that had done this a thousand times.
They really do think this is routine, Jake observed. Walk in, wave the stick, drag the target off to the big trash heap. Clean and simple.
Cute.
He didn't move. He didn't reach for the Omnitrix dial. He just stood there while fourteen enforcement agents of the most powerful temporal bureaucracy in the multiverse converged on him from all sides, and he reached up with one hand and — very casually — stuck a finger in his ear.
He cleared it thoughtfully.
Then he raised his left wrist, letting the Omnitrix catch the light, and turned his gaze to the Guard Captain. A slow smile pulled at the corner of his mouth. Not a warm smile. Not an amused smile.
The kind of smile that made smart people reconsider their life choices.
"Knocking on my door in the middle of the night to trim some branches?"
His right hand drifted over the dial with the unhurried ease of someone who had absolutely nowhere to be.
"Didn't your Director bother to warn you?"
The dial clicked up.
"The thing I love doing most..."
"...is pulling the whole tree out by the roots."
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