Chapter 9: Loki's Truths.
(Mathew's P.O.V)
Everything hurt.
Not like before. Not even close.
This was layered pain. Too much to categorize. Too much to survive.
I couldn't scream. My throat was ash. I could only twitch inside the burning, black husk of what used to be my body.
Loki stood nearby, watching with the satisfaction of someone reading the last page of a book he already knew the ending to.
"You're feeling it, aren't you?" he said.
His voice echoed through the chamber like static soaked in cruelty.
"That's not just your pain. That's every burn. Every flame. Every scorched nerve of every poor soul in one universe, compressed into your nerves. Children. Soldiers. Old men in hospital beds. You're living their last seconds, Mathew."
I couldn't respond. I could barely stay conscious. I drifted somewhere between.
Loki kept going.
"Nothing personal. This is just the part where you die. And then you don't have to worry anymore. About Jules."
He grinned.
"Blonde, right? Dimple on the left cheek?"
He turned to the temporal cloud above and reached.
One string—golden, flickering like it breathed—drifted down among the countless threads.
Jules.
He reached out to touch it.
His hand stopped.
Blocked.
A pulse of light repelled him, like an invisible wall had flared up around the string.
He frowned, then laughed, summoning a blade—elegant, narrow, and edged in something that didn't belong to any physics I knew.
"This timeline," he said, "was born from you. That makes it special. One of a kind in the entire multiverse. Once I slice this…"
He raised the blade.
"…your death will be permanent. And I'll inherit the rest of your power."
The blade began to descend.
Then something cracked.
Reality broke.
Loki vanished.
Gone in an instant.
The room shimmered.
I collapsed from the air, strings unraveling from my body.
Dr. Strange stepped out from behind a distortion ripple, hands glowing from the spell he'd just used.
"Mirror Dimension," he muttered. "Buys us sixty seconds, maybe."
He moved quickly, crouching beside me, unbinding the last threads still coiling around my arms.
"We have to go," he said. "Loki's too strong. We're not going to beat him like this. We need a plan."
I wanted to speak. Couldn't.
Then a boom.
Loki reappeared midair 10 seconds later, launched back into the throne room by some invisible force.
He landed smoothly.
With one wave of his hand, a massive red string slapped Strange across the room. He hit the wall, and it lit up—glowing with runes and symbols. A prison.
Loki adjusted his coat with a smirk.
"I was wondering when the other minor character would jump in."
Strange didn't struggle. He just breathed, slow and steady.
"I know we're not making it out of here," he said, "but before you kill us… humor me."
Loki raised an eyebrow.
Strange continued, "Out of all the Reality Warpers in the multiverse, why him? Why Mathew Malloy?"
Loki blinked.
Then smiled. "I wasn't expecting such an obvious question from a mind like yours, Stephen."
"Humor me," Strange said.
Loki began pacing again, casually twirling the dagger.
"You really haven't paid attention to the most important plot detail of all, have you?" he said.
"All Reality Warpers—Franklin Richards, Wanda Maximoff, Legion—can only bend the laws of their own universe."
He held up the dagger like it was a pointer in a lecture.
"Mathew's different."
He turned toward the center of the room, where I still lay motionless.
"His power doesn't just manipulate reality. It adapts to it. Whatever reality he's in—no matter how foreign, no matter how restrictive—it evolves. It updates. Automatically. It rewrites itself."
He spread his arms.
"That's what makes it Trans-Multiversal."
Strange smiled faintly. "So… it adjusts to any and all possible dimensions. Including their limits."
Loki rolled his eyes. "Were you even listening?"
But he stopped.
Because something had shifted behind him.
A breath. A vibration.
Then a voice. Weak, but rising.
"I understand now…"
Loki turned.
I was standing.
My skin had started to repair itself, piece by piece. My muscles stitched back together with green fibers pulled from the air around me. My bones reshaped. My eyes lit emerald.
Power didn't return.
Something had clicked.
It evolved.
Green threads pulsed across my shoulders, weaving into my form like armor made of quantum will.
I stood straighter. Stronger.
"Thanks, Doc," I said.
Loki's grin faded.
I took one step forward.
"This second-rate villain of the week," I said, "just leveled up…"
The throne room pulsed with light.
"…to final boss."
(General P.O.V)
The moment Mathew's eyes turned fully green, the air split open.
BOOOM!
A sonic ripple blew outward from his body, vaporizing every thread within a 20-meter radius. Loki staggered back, coat whipping in the dimensional wind as the strings of the throne room fluttered and screamed.
"You've evolved," Loki laughed, steadying himself. "Good. Now it's a fair fight."
Mathew didn't answer. He launched.
They collided mid-air.
KRAKOOOM!
Fists met. Space folded in on itself.
The blast tore through the throne room, blowing apart walls, windows, the ceiling—and then the floor inverted. They both fell through into another layer of the end-time realm, a skeletal city made from dead timelines and discarded causality.
Here, the rules broke further.
Loki summoned narrative strings from beneath his coat—thousands—lashing them forward. Mathew twisted in air, weaving matter itself into barriers of pulsating green. Each string that touched him now reacted differently, slowing, unraveling, combusting in confusion.
Loki's face twitched.
"You're adapting already."
"Faster than you expected," Mathew said, voice low.
Loki pulled a chunk of the ruined dimension into a blackened orb—warping space, time, life, and death into a supernova black hole, compressed so tight it screamed like a dying star.
He hurled it into a floating community made from the remnants of broken Earths. Pruned versions of characters like Loki's, Deadpools, Johnny Storms, even the Sentry tried to protect the people.
FWOOOOOM.
The singularity crashed toward them like the judgment of a god.
Mathew extended both arms and screamed. He spun his fingers in opposing directions—twisting water, dark matter, quantum entropy and anti-thermal pressure into a counterforce: a Superaqua Blackhole.
The two singularities collided mid-air.
BWWAAAAAAAAHHHM!!!
Time stuttered. Light bent. Gravity tried to scream—but the collision consumed sound itself.
Both collapsed into a spiral of silence.
Mathew hovered over the survivors, jaw tight.
"You fight like a fool," Loki sneered. "I have your Reality Warping power, and mine. And what do you have? A few strings you can braid? Congratulations. You're good at knitting."
He waved his hand.
Narrative strings whipped out, slashing through fractured moons, rupturing floating relics of long-dead worlds.
Mathew gritted his teeth and pushed.
He grabbed one green string from the sky. Then another. He didn't twist them—he rewrote their flow. Reassigned their values. Unraveled cause from effect. Suddenly, every space Loki moved into existed before he reached it.
And SNAP!—Mathew trapped him.
The Mirror Dimension closed in on Loki like a glass coffin.
Loki screamed—and shattered it himself, sending splinters everywhere.
Mathew raised his arms to block.
But then—dozens of glowing portals formed from the shards.
Wanda. Franklin. Galactus. The Beyonder. Molecule Man. Proteus.
All warped into place for a second, their power scanned—replicated by the God of Stories.
The shards bent into a single shape in Loki's hand. A sleek obsidian quill with golden runes spiraling down its spine. The Narrator's Pen.
He grinned.
"This pen writes universes."
He flicked it.
Mathew vanished.
Erased. Instantly.
The realm dimmed. Loki laughed. "Done. Finally. The story belongs to me!"
Then—
A voice.
"Nice performance," Strange said casually.
Loki froze.
"What?"
Then Mathew's voice echoed too, "You really thought we'd let you monologue your way into godhood?"
The devastated battleground glitched.
Everything Loki saw—gone.
The fight. The win. The Pen. Even the portals.
None of it had ever happened.
It was all in his mind.
The illusion cracked open like shattered glass as Loki's body slammed back into the real throne room, disoriented.
Mathew stood in front of him, arms glowing. No longer burned. No longer weak.
The green threads around his body danced like serpents.
Loki stumbled, eyes wide.
"What—what did you do?"
Mathew smiled.
"I distorted your perception, remember?"
His hand pulsed once—and red sparks tore out of Loki's chest, swirling around Mathew's fist before vanishing into his body.
Loki gasped.
"You… you took them back."
"All of them," Mathew said. "And then some."
Loki dropped to one knee, breath catching.
Mathew walked past him, toward the throne.
"You know what we call that in storytelling?" he said, not looking back.
"A plot twist."