Virus Evolution: Pokémon, Marvel & Beyond

A colossal figure loomed across the sky, its face obscured beneath a dark cloak. It wasn't simply massive, it blanketed the heavens, casting a shadow so wide it felt as though it could pluck the sun from the sky between its fingertips.

The Old One Virus: Lucius.

When the crimson wormhole first tore open, Lucius had discreetly swapped out the cursed virus strain marked by the Perish Song, smuggling in an untainted strain instead. By sidestepping the system's purge protocols, he evaded expulsion altogether.

Of course, even if he had been ejected, Lucius could've returned instantly using the Spacetime Key. The only cost would've been sacrificing a few rebel pawns, an insignificant price.

The massive body taking shape in the sky now was condensed from half of the primordial energy he'd just infected and absorbed.

"You... the root of death, a parasite of time and space, how dare you show yourself before me," Arceus growled, its voice echoing with divine fury. The fire in its eyes flared so brightly it threatened to incinerate Lucius where he floated.

Lucius laughed, long and loud. Though the sound wasn't a true vibration of air, it still made the sky tremble, the sun and moon dimming in its wake.

"Arceus… You're just the creator of a minor world. Beings like you, cosmic gods of your caliber, are a dime a dozen in the multiverse. Today marks the day of your extinction." Though his face was hidden beneath the cowl, Arceus could feel the disdain radiating from Lucius.

As Lucius finished speaking, a massive hand, dark as night and wide as mountains, emerged from the cloak's folds, stretching downward to crush Arceus like a titan's palm descending from the sky.

"Fool," Arceus growled. Light exploded from its eyes as it activated its mastery over time, drowning the entire planet in the currents of temporal power.

Lucius's descending hand fell into an infinite loop, no matter how it pressed down, it could never reach the earth.

But then, from the lifeless, war-scarred soil below, a lone tendril of blood-flesh sprouted like a serpent and wrapped itself around Arceus's leg.

In a flash, a Sacred Sword cleaved through it, severing the vine.

Yet in the next instant, a swarm of flesh-vines erupted from the ground like maddened weeds, coiling upward until the mountain-sized Arceus was completely entangled, buried within a grotesque, mountainous mass of living tissue.

Though the world's surface had been ravaged by the rampage of the Dark Trinity of Time and Space, rendering the land barren and devoid of life, Lucius had already absorbed half the primal energy and buried the virus seeds deep within the planet's crust.

Just as the monstrous blood-mound reached its full form, golden flames burst to life along its surface, illuminating the airless sky in a radiant blaze of gold.

In less than two breaths, the flames reduced the entire flesh-vine mountain to ash.

As Arceus's gaze bore into him, the massive cloaked figure shifted tactics. Rather than pressing down with brute force, he raised a finger, and from it, released countless bolts of wild, crackling lightning.

The thunderbolts rained down over a span of a thousand miles, forming from afar a brilliant forest of silver-white lightning.

In the heart of this storm, a massive cruciform halo manifested above Arceus's head, spanning hundreds of miles.

Each lightning bolt that struck the halo was instantly redirected back into the sky, slamming into Lucius's towering shadow.

This was the power of Transfer, a divine authority reclaimed earlier from Hoopa.

Though most of the attacks were diverted, enough lightning still struck the ground to send the land into violent convulsions.

But Arceus didn't notice the true threat.

Deep within the planet's core, far below the devastated surface, a blood-red wormhole silently pulsed open.

Lucius was a virus. Deception, not direct confrontation, was his domain.

The titanic shadow, the entangling flesh-vines, the storm of lightning, all were diversions.

His true objective?

Destroy the planetary core.

Only by annihilating the core, killing the very heart of the world, could he complete his mission of planetary extinction.

The core was a massive orb of radiant energy, once serene and majestic. It continuously supplied life energy to the surface, a luminous heart nourishing the world.

Now it was unstable, surging with explosive power, like a miniaturized sun undergoing ceaseless nuclear fusion.

Closer inspection revealed a single blood-flesh tendril, over a hundred meters thick, piercing into the glowing orb. It slithered forth from a gaping crimson wormhole, draining energy from the core like a monstrous siphon.

Lucius had timed it perfectly, when Arceus's attention was locked above, a fragment of his will infiltrated the core, opened a link between this world and the Ultra Space beyond, and deployed a living conduit.

He knew precisely what he was after.

The planetary core wasn't just a power source, it was the cradle of Arceus's existence, the birthplace of the first life, the fountainhead of creation itself.

Arceus, hailed as the Original One, wasn't an outsider god, it was this planet's firstborn, a lifeform granted dominion and divine authority by being the first to awaken.

In the original world (Lucius' world), Arceus had slumbered within the core to restore its power until the Unova War, when it finally emerged to reclaim the Dark Trio of Time and Space.

Meanwhile, the Ultra World's core, once similar, had withered after losing its stellar supply. Its life force was nearly exhausted.

By draining this world's core, Lucius could both revitalize his dying World Base and complete his directive.

Above, the battlefield stretched wider, gouging deeper scars into the already devastated terrain.

Arceus grew increasingly alarmed. Lucius's energy seemed boundless. Though Arceus had shattered him at least ten times, each time he regenerated swiftly. Meanwhile, Arceus's own recovery was slowing.

That was no coincidence.

Arceus's power was drawn directly from the planet's core, the very essence of life itself.

But now that core was bleeding out, siphoned away to nourish a starving Ultra World.

Lucius's seemingly endless strength came not from himself, but from Arceus's own cradle.

Once again, Arceus seized Lucius with spatial power and unleashed its Judgment ray, reducing him to particles.

But within half a minute, the cloaked giant reappeared, untouched.

Arceus, in contrast, had already expended energy thousands of times over. Its strength was wavering.

"What's going on? My recovery is slower than ever," Arceus thought, for the first time in its eternal existence… troubled.

In all the eons since its birth, no battle had lasted this long. Even clashes against other Mythical Pokémon had never taken more than minutes.

Something was deeply wrong.

As the world's first lifeform and its living will, Arceus could feel every shift in the planet's essence. Until now, it had been too focused on battle. But as it cast its awareness deeper—

It felt it.

The world's energy was fading.

For the first time, the Creator felt true crisis.

Arceus immediately invoked Future Sight, but what it saw was chaos. Nothing. A horizon shrouded in absolute entropy.

Such a thing had never happened before.

Was there no future?

Without hesitation, Arceus ceased its assault on the looming shadow in the sky and vanished in a flash of Teleport.

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