Satoru returned into the lobby, sporting a rehearsed grin on his face.
It crumbled as soon as he saw Illyana and Wanda still squaring off inside as he stepped in.
Rintrah, poor kid, was wedged between them, and Piotr… Piotr was just sitting there.
Satoru tried to melt his smile around the edges. "Hey, everyone! Quick huddle. Your illustrious master has new instructions with the talks from the professors."
No one moved. Wanda and Illyana both stared at him — Wanda's pupils narrowed, Illyana's jaw rigid and sharp as an icicle. Rintrah's fur bristled, one thumb busy devouring the other.
He cleared his throat. "So, listen. The X-Men are doing a worldwide manhunt on these contaminated pills, while Doctor McCoy and Jean Grey work on a fix for that whole, uh, gene-warping poison situation."
"They want our help. You three, actually."
Satoru watched the frozen tableau for a couple of seconds, trying to decide just how dangerous the emotional fallout risked getting.
He could feel the tension swirling in the air like spells half-woven.
Satoru did the one thing he'd always done best: ignore the melodrama and pivot straight to business and get the hell outta there. "So! You three are going to work with the X-Men. They're convinced that your unique blends of, uh, magic and muscle will be helpful during the search phase, and you'll be coordinating with a few of their students as you track down the warehouses responsible for this stuff. You can think of it as… An exchange program between Kamar-Taj and School for the Gifted Youngsters!"
"An exchange program," Illyana repeated, her voice dripping with absolute sarcasm. She finally broke her stare from Wanda, turning her cold gaze toward Satoru instead. "Right. Isn't that convenient timing, huh, Gojo?"
"I think it's a wonderful opportunity!" Rintrah blurted out a little too loud. Satoru flashed him a thumbs up. "When do we leave?"
"The sooner the better!" Satoru immediately replied.
Wanda didn't say anything at first. She slowly lowered her gaze from Satoru, her fingers tightly curling into the fabric of her robes. She wasn't dense. She knew exactly what he was doing. He was running away from the confession, throwing them into a global field trip just so he wouldn't have to face her.
A mixture of disappointment and frustration pooled in her stomach, but she forced her expression to stay neutral. "If the Professor and the X-Men need our help to save their people, then we should go," she said quietly, her voice steady despite the redness still lingering on her cheeks.
Piotr stood up from the wooden bench, his massive frame towering over the group. He looked at Satoru, then at his sister, completely missing the romantic disaster happening right in front of him. "I'll show you guys the way so you can meet the others, they might still be teaching their students now, however. But, Logan and Scott are already putting a team together for the San Francisco sector. If you are ready, I can show you the way."
"Perfect! Lead the way, big guy!" Satoru chirped, clapping his hands together with far too much enthusiasm.
Piotr raised a brow at Satoru that was inching back towards the lobby doors. "Are you not going to meet the others, Mr. Gojo?"
"I'm fine, I'm fine. I'm super busy myself since, y'know, I'm now the Sorcerer Supreme and all that." He took a deliberate step backward, staying well outside the operational radius of both girls.
Illyana let out a sharp, bitter huff through her nose. She turned on her heel and started walking toward the elevator, her boots clicking aggressively against the floor. "Come on, Rintrah. Let's go see the others before Gojo finds another excuse to send us to a different continent."
"Right behind you, Illyana!" the minotaur rumbled, moving fast. "Let's go, Wanda!"
Wanda didn't follow right away, as she lingered for a single second. She looked straight into Satoru's face, her hand resting over the warm crimson pendant around her neck. She didn't say a word, but the look she gave him was enough to communicate that this conversation wasn't over. Not by a long shot.
Then, she turned and followed the others.
Satoru watched the elevator doors slide shut behind them, finally letting out a long sigh. A single drop of sweat rolled down his temple beneath the blindfold.
"Man..." Satoru muttered to himself, shaking his head as he turned back toward the medical lab. "I prefer killing off dimensional threats rather than dealing with those girls… Why did God have to make me so handsome…"
He looked up as if asking the sky even though there was only the ceiling there.
"Woe is me…"
…
[ Kamar-Taj ]
Satoru's now in his quarters, not in his old quarters when he was a master, but in his 'Sorcerer Supreme' quarters. Wong and the others found it inappropriate for a sorcerer supreme to stay in a building with other masters and all that yada yada.
Not that Satoru minds it, not at all.
He lay sprawled flat across the mattress, staring blankly up at the polished wooden ceiling beams.
His mind naturally drifted back to the two girls and further back to the kiss at the cliffside plateau…
The image of Wanda's intense, red-tinted gaze and the cold, unreadable glare Illyana had leveled at him flashed in his head.
Satoru let out a long, pathetic groan, throwing an arm over his covered eyes.
"Yeah, nope," he muttered to the empty room. "Future Satoru can deal with that disaster. Good luck to that guy."
Deciding to completely lock those thoughts away in a mental vault, he sat up and shook his head to clear it. He needed a distraction, and luckily, he had the two most sought-after objects in the universe sitting right in his inventory.
He held out both hands and snapped his fingers.
Snap!
The sleek, silver Vibranium-Uru brooch detached itself from his hidden pocket of space.
In his left hand, the yellow Mind Stone sat there. In his right hand, was the Time Stone within the Eye of Agamotto.
Satoru leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees as he stared at the two Infinity Stones in his possession.
He had been too busy grinding out dimensional incursions for the past month to actually test them out properly.
"Alright, shiny pebbles," Satoru smirked, his crystalline blue eyes reflecting a dangerous mix of green and gold light. "Let's see what happens when Limitless meets the laws of Time and Mind of the universe."
He didn't activate them fully — doing that inside a residential wing of Kamar-Taj would probably turn the courtyard into an abstract painting.
Instead, he channeled a minuscule thread of his own cursed energy into his left hand, probing the frequency of the Mind Stone first.
The response was instantaneous and smooth. The Stone didn't clash with his cursed energy; it acted like an amplifier.
His Six Eyes, which already processed atomic-level details, suddenly felt like they were viewing the world through a macro lens that completely ignored the concept of hidden intentions.
He could feel the ambient consciousness of the entire mountain range — birds, sleeping monks, and the anxious thoughts of an apprentice three floors down worrying about the foundational mandala assessment.
"Neat," Satoru muttered, shifting his focus to his right hand.
The Time Stone within the Eye of Agamotto was entirely different. When his cursed energy brushed against the green gem, the flow of time around his bed violently stuttered. A stray dust mote freezing mid-air was his only warning before a tiny, localized loop formed. He watched the same speck of dust fall, freeze, snap upward, and fall again in a continuous millisecond cycle.
A reckless thought popped into his mind. 'What if I…'
He brought his hands closer together, letting the two differing laws mingle in the space between his palms.
The closer they were to each other, the more they shone brighter, but they didn't resist each other, it was as if they were… exchanging 'hi/hello' with one another?
'How fascinating.' Satoru's brows raised as he stared at the Infinity Stones.
Then, he proceeded with what he wanted to see.
He channelled his cursed energy into it…
And that was Satoru's mistake.
The gold and green wavelengths suddenly violently collided when CE was added into it.
The tiny loop with the dust mote instantly tore wide open. Space cracked like cheap glass, and a jagged, swirling rift of raw space-time distortion erupted right over his mattress, humming with a terrifyingly pitch-black and violet vortex.
"Shit!" Satoru barked, his lopsided grin instantly vanishing.
He didn't wait. He threw both hands outward, spreading his palms toward the distortion to force it shut.
He channeled his cursed energy at maximum output, trying to overpower the rift.
But the moment his cursed energy touched the anomaly, the rift flared violently. It was eating the CE like it was being fed instead of stopping.
The distortion treated his cursed energy like high-octane fuel, expanding twice its size in a millisecond and beginning to siphon the energy right out of his gut like a vacuum.
"Ah, nope! Bad idea! Cut it! Cut it!" Satoru muttered frantically, violently severing his cursed energy flow before the rift could completely hollow him out.
The tear was still widening, its gravity starting to pull the bedsheets, the pillows, and the heavy wooden headboard toward its center.
Desperate to stabilize the threshold, Satoru used both energy from the Realm of Dormammu and the Darkforce Dimension.
His forehead flashed with the mark of Dormammu and apparitions that looked like octopus arms began to swirl around him.
For a fraction of a second, it actually worked. The vortex stuttered, the black-and-violet edges grinding to a temporary halt.
"Yeah! Take that, you stupid little—"
VROOOOOOM.
Just as he began to insult it, the rift inverted itself. The tear violently ballooned, expanding across the entire bedroom ceiling in a massive, swirling maw of absolute gravitational pull.
Satoru's crystalline blue eyes went wide. His veins and muscles bulged through his black formal robes as he planted his boots into the floorboards, fighting the crushing weight with every ounce of his superhuman physical strength. The floorboards groaned and snapped beneath his heels.
"Wait, wait, wait! I have—"
He didn't even get to finish his sentence. The gravitational pull spiked.
With a comical, high-pitched yelp of, "Oh, come on!", Satoru's boots lost their grip.
His limbs flailed for a split second before his entire six-foot-three frame was violently yanked off the floor and pulled directly into the center of the vortex.
Pop!
The jagged rift snapped shut instantly, collapsing into a single, silent point of light before vanishing completely.
The heavy silence returned to the Sorcerer Supreme's quarters. The wind outside the window whistled softly, ruffling the slightly crumpled bedsheets. The room was perfectly back to normal, completely undisturbed, except for one glaring detail.
Satoru Gojo was no longer there.
And right in the center of the mattress, left completely behind by the space-time vacuum, the yellow Mind Stone and the green Time Stone within the Eye of Agamotto tumbled onto the fabric, clinking softly against each other before settling on the bed's sheets.
...
[ Author's Notes ]: Well... That just happened. Stone me?
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