Chapter Text
The ground cracked beneath Ben’s feet, a sound like the spine of the world snapping. Maltruant’s temporal energy blast gouged a fresh crater into the street, deeper than the others, a ragged mouth hungry for more. The force sent chunks of asphalt spinning into the air like jagged, gray hail. Ben rolled sideways, a graceless tumble driven by pure survival instinct. Heat from the near-miss seared the back of his neck, a brand that promised worse to come. He’d missed being atomized by a hair’s breadth. By less than that. His body ached with a deep, fundamental protest after hours of continuous combat, every muscle screaming its own separate agony. Each ragged breath he drew burned in his lungs, the air itself thick with smoke and the ozone-tang of spent energy.
Around him, Bellwood lay in ruins. It was the kind of devastation that would have broken him if he’d had a single second to truly look at it, to process the scale of the loss. He didn’t have that second. Thick, oily plumes of smoke rose from shattered buildings, their facades peeled away to reveal hollowed-out interiors. Windows gaped like blinded eyes, staring at nothing. Fires burned unchecked through offices and apartments, painting the afternoon sky in monstrous shades of orange and bruised black. Somewhere in the distance, sirens wailed a useless, desperate song. Emergency services were a world away, unable to breach the epicenter of destruction where Ben fought alone, a lone figure against the unraveling of everything.
"You cannot win, Tennyson!" Maltruant’s voice boomed across the wasteland, a sound of grinding gears and absolute conviction. Each word was punctuated by the precise, clicking rhythm of his clockwork body as he advanced. His polished silver surface reflected the inferno around them, a mosaic of dancing flames that made him look less like a machine and more like something escaped from a hellish forge. "I have calculated every possible outcome. In every timeline, across every probability stream, you fall!"
Ben’s answer was not words. His hand slapped the Omnitrix on his wrist, a motion worn smooth by ten thousand repetitions. Green light flashed, brilliant and pure against the gloom, and the familiar vertigo seized him. His body expanded, reality stretching to accommodate new dimensions. Humungousaur roared, the sound erupting from a massive vaxasaurian chest, a challenge that shook dust from crumbling cornices. His form erupted from human confines, muscles swelling beneath scales as thick and layered as armored plate. The pavement beneath his feet buckled instantly, surrendering to his sudden tonnage. He charged forward anyway. The ground shook, a localized earthquake with each footfall that left deep, permanent impressions in the ravaged street. He swung his tail, a limb as thick and heavy as an ancient tree trunk, putting every ounce of his considerable strength into a blow meant to shatter mountains.
Maltruant was not there. The tail passed through empty air with a sound like a cracking whip. The time walker’s form shimmered, caught between ticks of the cosmic clock. Past and future overlapped in a nauseating blur, and the devastating strike met only the memory of where his body had been a heartbeat before.
"Getting real tired of your smug attitude!" Humungousaur growled, his voice the low rumble of grinding continental plates. He followed with a devastating punch, a blow that would have pulverized reinforced concrete into dust. Maltruant flowed aside at the last possible nanosecond, the displaced air scorching his metallic plating with a hiss. A near miss. Always a near miss.
A fragment of Ben’s awareness, the part not consumed by the fight, catalogued the periphery. It was a habit beaten into him by years of never fighting alone. Rook’s Proto-Tool lay abandoned near the overturned, sparking hulk of the Proto-TRUK, its systems dark and dead. Gwen was down. She slumped against the remnant of a brick wall, her once-vibrant mana shield finally shattered after holding back Maltruant’s relentless assault for what felt like an hour. Her hands still glowed with a faint, dying ember of residual energy, but her eyes were closed, her face pale. Pushed beyond her limits, then pushed further. Ten feet from her, Kevin’s crystalline form lay cracked and smoking. Dark fissures ran through the living metal of his transformation, a spiderweb of catastrophic damage. His usual defiant glare was absent, replaced by still unconsciousness. Grandpa Max’s voice crackled over a distant comms channel, a steady, calm presence coordinating evacuation efforts blocks away, but the Plumbers were stretched thinner than paper, overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the catastrophe.
It was just Ben now. Ben and the Omnitrix. A sixteen-year-old and a piece of alien genius technology against a time-traveling megalomaniac who could see the future and had already predicted every move on the board.
Maltruant’s chest cavity began to glow. A core of time-wrinkling energy pulsed at its center, a sickly green heart beating out a rhythm of entropy. The air around him twisted, warping like heat haze over a desert highway. "I have already witnessed your defeat," he intoned, his voice carrying the weight of absolute certainty. "Why prolong the inevitable? In three minutes and forty-seven seconds, your transformation times out. In four minutes and twelve seconds, I strike you down. This is not conjecture, boy. This is observed fact."
Humungousaur’s massive form flashed green again, the light consuming him from within. Feedback materialized in a violent crackle of released electrical energy. The conductors along his arms glowed white-hot with already-absorbed power, and the antennae on his head sparked with a barely-contained storm. A cocky grin spread across Ben’s face, translated through the new form’s features. Yeah? Well, he’d gotten pretty good at changing the future. He spread his arms wide, an open invitation. The conductors flared like twin searchlights, and he drank in Maltruant’s next temporal blast, his unique biology converting raw chronometric energy into pure, surging electrical power. The sensation was like swallowing a lightning bolt whole. It was terrifying. It was exhilarating.
He didn’t hold it. He redirected it immediately, focusing the power into a single, concentrated beam that lanced from his chest. The street lit up as if a second sun had ignited at ground level. The attack struck true, square against Maltruant’s central gearwork. Golden sparks erupted in a shower of dying light. Gears ground together with the shriek of breaking machinery. For the first time since this endless battle had begun, genuine surprise registered on the time walker’s mechanical face. His temporal calculations, once a river of absolute certainty, now hit snags, throwing up error messages and contradictory probabilities.
"Impossible." The word was a whisper, a soft click of gears out of sync. Maltruant checked his internal chronometers, ran the calculations again, and again. "This was not calculated. This outcome did not exist in my observations..."
Ben gave him no time to recalibrate. In another flash of emerald light, Atomix stood where Feedback had been. His nuclear-powered form radiated a corona of barely-contained energy that made the very air shimmer and warp. He was a walking reactor, power incarnate. Every movement left faint, fading trails of light in his wake. "Let me give you a future you didn't see coming!" The declaration rumbled with the force of nuclear fusion. His fists clenched, glowing with atomic fire. Miniature suns, tiny and infinitely violent, formed in his palms. He launched the Nuclear Winner attack, pouring every joule of energy he could channel, every ounce of will, into the strike.
The resulting blast vaporized everything within its arc. It was not an explosion so much as an act of erasure. Windows shattered for blocks in every direction, a simultaneous chorus of breaking glass. The shockwave flattened already damaged buildings, reducing debris to fine, uniform powder. When the blinding light and smoke cleared, Maltruant was on one knee. His body was scorched black, his beautiful silver plating melted and runneled like candle wax. Exposed gears ground together, screaming in metallic agony. His temporal core, now visible through cracked armor, flickered weakly like a dying bulb clinging to its last filament.
"No!" The time walker’s howl distorted, skipping and glitching like a corrupted audio file. Rage and disbelief twisted his features. "I will not be defeated by a child! I will not allow this timeline to stand!" He flung his arms wide. The intricate gear atop his head spun one final, desperate time. The air around him shimmered, layering upon itself, folding into a pocket of fractured time. With a flick of his wrist, he reached into that distortion, his hand moving through phases of ‘was’ and ‘will be,’ and pulled something free.
A hexagonal device, no larger than a ring box, gleamed with subdued malice in his palm. He had kept it hidden, a last resort nestled within his person. His thumb popped the lid open. Inside, set against a field of void-black, was a single, red button. He pressed it without hesitation, without a moment’s doubt.
At first, nothing happened.
The battlefield held its breath. The fires still crackled. The smoke continued its slow ascent. The only sound was the faint, persistent tick of Maltruant’s own faltering inner gears. Ben blinked, confusion cutting through his battle focus. His chest heaved, drawing in air superheated by his own atomic energy. He waited for the counter-strike, the hidden weapon, the temporal trick. Nothing came.
The silence stretched. Five seconds. Ten. It became unnatural, heavy, a pressure on the eardrums. It felt as if the world itself had paused to listen for a coming doom.
Then, a low, subsonic pulse thrummed through the ground, through the air, through Ben’s very atoms. The Annihilarrgh answered its master’s call with a hungry beat. "If I cannot have this timeline," Maltruant shrieked, his voice sharpening into a distortion that hurt to hear, "if I cannot witness my victory, then no one shall have anything!"
The ground beneath Maltruant buckled. Not a collapse, but an unmaking. A circle of absolute blackness opened at his feet. It was a void, a hole in reality that swallowed light, sound, and hope itself. Its edges shimmered like liquid obsidian, widening not with explosive speed, but with a slow, deliberate, and insatiable hunger.
From that abyss, tendrils of pure cosmic night erupted. They were jagged, twisting streams of anti-light that lashed upward into the smog-choked sky. Each one writhed with a vile, pseudo-life, stabbing through the cloud cover and clawing at the heavens as if to tear them down. The raging fires around them guttered out instantly, not smothered, but consumed, their energy and matter sucked into the growing void.
The hole grew larger. It spread outward in a perfectly circular ring. Pavement, debris, the fractured skeletons of Bellwood’s buildings—all collapsed into its maw and were erased without a trace, without a sound. It left behind only expanding emptiness, a growing pupil of nothing in the eye of the world.
Ben staggered back, one of Atomix’s massive arms rising instinctively to shield his face. There was no blinding light to hide from, only the suffocating, oppressive weight of absence that pressed against his senses. The tendrils multiplied, rising all around the void’s circumference until the sky itself looked strangled by black, throbbing veins. Then came the sound. A groan torn from the fundament of the universe, a deep vibration that rattled Ben’s bones and made the air taste of cold ash and static.
The Annihilarrgh pulsed again. Each beat widened the wound in space. Reality itself seemed to fold in on itself at the edges. Dimensional barriers, walls Ben hadn’t even known existed, grew thin and translucent as tissue paper. The fabric of the universe stretched, strained, and began to fray. Through the tears, Ben watched in horror as glimpses of other worlds, other realities, flickered at the corners of his vision. Alien skies, bizarre cityscapes, impossible geometries—they pressed against the thinning membrane of his own world, trying to bleed through.
"What are you doing?" Ben’s voice, amplified by Atomix’s power, carried the rumble of a star’s core. But even as the question left him, understanding arrived with horrible, ice-cold clarity. The device wasn’t a weapon. It was a key. A key to turn off the universe. "You're insane! You'll destroy everything! This entire planet, everyone on it!"
"Better nothing than defeat!" Maltruant shrieked, his form beginning to dissolve into the temporal energy he commanded, becoming a living wound in space-time. "Better the end of all things than my failure!" The displacement wave began to spread from him, a ripple of uncreation expanding at light-speed.
Ben’s hand moved. It slapped the Omnitrix, not to transform, but to scroll. His mind raced, faster than it ever had, sifting through a catalog of incredible power. He needed something that could stop this. Not just overpower it, but reach past mere causality, argue with the fundamental laws of reality itself, patch the tears before they spread beyond any hope of containment. His thumb found the familiar symbol, the one he used sparingly, the one that came with its own profound cost.
Alien X.
He pressed down just as the wave of displacement erupted outward in a perfect, silent sphere of destructive energy that dissolved reality molecule by molecule, rewriting ‘is’ into ‘was not.’
The transformation should have been instantaneous. Should have taken him from Atomix to Celestialsapien in the space between heartbeats. But time itself had become unmoored. Cause and effect loosened their hold, their connection fraying. Ben felt the immense, paradoxical presence of Alien X begin to fold into him, three distinct voices clamoring for attention in the architecture of his mind—Serena’s cool logic, Bellicus’s roaring passion, his own desperate will screaming for control. But the wave of uncreation hit before the transformation could complete, before the three could even begin their eternal debate.
Reality fractured. Like glass under impossible pressure, it webbed with cracks, and each shard reflected a different universe, a different possibility. An infinite, kaleidoscope of might-have-beens flooded Ben’s crumbling consciousness.
He saw a world where he’d never found the Omnitrix. A summer vacation that stayed boring and ordinary, a life defined by school and video games and a vague, unfocused longing for something more. He saw another where Vilgax had won that first, desperate battle on Mount Rushmore, where the watch had been torn from a ten-year-old’s wrist, where Earth became a conquered staging ground for a galactic tyrant’s hunger. A dozen more flickered past: timelines where he didn’t exist at all, where his parents had never met at that convention, where the Omnitrix pod had streaked through the atmosphere and landed in a desert or an ocean or on another planet entirely. The images unrolled too quickly to be grasped, a blur of alternate lives and deaths and choices. Hundreds of timelines. Thousands. Millions. All of them pressed against the thinning walls of his own mind, threatening to dissolve his identity into a statistical average of all possible Ben Tennysons.
The Omnitrix screamed.
The sound existed beyond physical noise, a raw cry of digital agony as its systems overloaded. It was a piece of Galvanic technology trying to complete a hyper-complex biomatrix transformation while the very dimensional barriers supporting its function collapsed. It fought to maintain cohesion, to keep Ben’s form locked to a single, stable state, while the seams of reality widened into chasms around them. Ben felt himself being pulled apart in a thousand directions at once. His body tore between states of being—partially Atomix, energy bleeding off in uncontrolled radioactive waves; partially Alien X, cosmic matter flickering in and out of solidity; and something else, a formless, unstable potential the watch couldn’t lock down.
He tried to scream. To give voice to the terror and the pain. But the sound scattered across dimensions, each syllable existing in a different universe, leaving him silent in his own. His body fragmented at the edges. His consciousness splintered, thoughts coming loose like pages torn from a book in a hurricane. The Omnitrix was the only anchor, a point of green, defiant light in the howling chaos of dying reality, the one thing keeping him from dissolving completely into quantum probability, from becoming a ghost in the machine of the multiverse.
Around him, fragments of other realities brushed past like clouds of luminous mist. He could see into them, but only barely, and never for long. For a single, gut-wrenching instant, he swore he saw a version of himself wreathed in violent, crackling violet energy, eyes glowing with malevolent power, while a slimmer, differently-proportioned Four Arms stood beside him, face etched with a loyalty that looked like grief. The vision dissolved as quickly as it had formed, swallowed back into the formless haze.
And through all of it—through the collapse, through the splintering, through the impossible flickers of other selves—one image cut through with terrible clarity.
Maltruant.
The time walker’s body was dissolving into shimmering strands of chronometric energy, unraveling like a broken clock. His temporal core finally burned out in a cascade of golden sparks that faded into the void. His final expression was one of grim, satisfied realization. He had done it. He had killed them both. Destroyed them both. Ended everything. A draw achieved through total annihilation.
Then there was only the sensation of falling.
Through an infinite void where up and down had no meaning, where gravity was a forgotten concept. Time did not flow here; it seeped, it pooled, it ran backward and sideways and inside out. Ben Tennyson tumbled through the spaces between worlds, through the gaps in reality where nothing should exist, where not even vacuum dared to linger. Behind him, with a final shudder he felt in his soul, the multiverse closed the wound Maltruant had torn. It healed the breach, restored the barriers, sealed the rupture at the cost of leaving a single piece of debris stranded on the wrong side.
Him.
He drifted. Or perhaps he fell. The distinction held no meaning here. There was no measure, no sun or shadow to mark the passage of time. Seconds might have stretched into centuries, his mind trapped in an endless, weightless now. Or centuries might have collapsed into a single breath, all of history passing in a blink. His body continued to flicker between forms, a malfunctioning hologram. Atomix’s nuclear glow bled into the starry silhouette of Alien X, then sputtered back into the incomplete, half-remembered outline of Humungousaur, then into something else entirely—a shape that was all sharp angles and unfamiliar biology, here for a heartbeat before vanishing. Each shift felt wrong, incomplete, as though the Omnitrix itself was concussed, struggling to remember what he was supposed to be.
He had no idea how long he remained in that limbo, for time was a liar here. It stretched and folded and collapsed without pattern, leaving him suspended in a moment that might have been a heartbeat or an age. Through it all, the only constant was the Omnitrix. It pulsed faintly against his wrist, a weak, irregular heartbeat. Its green light flickered like a dying candle in an immense dark, but it held. It kept him tethered to a single point of existence. It was the sole reason he hadn’t dissolved completely into the background probability of the multiverse, becoming a mere footnote in the grand ledger of what-might-have-been.
Reality ended.
And then, without warning, it began again.
Somewhere else.