Virus Evolution: Pokémon, Marvel & Beyond

Beside the massive orb of light, now visibly dimmed, the figure of the Creator God appeared.

"You bastard… what have you done?"

Arceus arrived almost instantaneously. As the master of spatial authority, it could reach any point in this world at will.

One glance at the core told it everything.

The colossal figure in the sky, it had been nothing more than bait. All this time, its attention had been expertly diverted.

Peering through the blood-red wormhole, Arceus saw something that made its divine presence tremble: another planetary core, and within it, another Arceus.

That Arceus, even larger than a mountain range, was pierced by countless fleshy, blood-soaked tendrils.

Golden streams of energy were being siphoned away through those tendrils—primal energy, the power of creation itself.

Without even making contact, Arceus could sense the truth: the stolen energy was its very essence, the divine substance of life and genesis.

With a single thought, Arceus extended its awareness to the world on the far side of the wormhole.

That world glimmered faintly, its surface reminiscent of the dawn of creation, boundless oceans, and only two sprawling continents. Life had already begun to flourish.

Besides the Tree of Beginning and several Mythical Pokémon, a variety of flora, fauna, and Pokémon had emerged. The biodiversity was still lacking, but it was unmistakably the blueprint of a new world.

And yet, in this budding world, everything, from its Legendary Pokémon to its smallest lifeforms, radiated a presence entirely foreign and deeply antagonistic to Arceus.

The virus.

That same presence filled the entire planet.

It was clear now: the virus was the world's will, its ruling consciousness. And it had ensnared a Creator God, using it as a living battery to fuel life on this world.

"Caught me, huh?" Lucius appeared before Arceus once more, his tone half-teasing, half-reverent. "No wonder they call you the God of Creation. You saw the truth in an instant."

Lucius knew Arceus had fully grasped the nature of the Ultra World.

Before coming here, Lucius had sealed his world's native Arceus within his World Base's planetary core. Then, using the world's own will, he had hypnotized it, tricking it into believing the Ultra World was its original domain.

Thus deceived, the Creator God had restarted the cycle of creation.

It had forged Regigigas to shape the continents.

It had grown the Tree of Beginning, giving birth to Mew and Ho-Oh.

It had created Kyogre to govern the oceans, and Groudon to command the land.

And with Lucius's subtle injections of genetic material, it had given rise to new flora, fauna, and Pokémon to populate the world.

But this time, it had not created the Dark Trinity—Dialga, Palkia, or Giratina.

Their betrayal in the original world had left a seed of doubt buried deep in its divine heart.

Lucius had a second goal: to upgrade the World Base. And for that, biological diversity was essential. No being was more qualified to generate such diversity than a Creator God that had already performed the miracle of genesis once before.

The only difference was this: the Ultra World's core was dying.

This second creation wasn't drawing from an infinite well. It was draining the Arceus itself. The God of Creation was burning its own life force, and when that energy ran out, it would vanish into nothing.

"…"

The Arceus of this world stared at the cloaked shadow before it, icy dread welling from deep within.

Capturing a Creator God and turning it into a planetary battery... Arceus had no words for such blasphemy.

But now that Lucius was trying to siphon this world's core as well, Arceus had no choice.

It had to intervene.

In a flash, spatial energy crystallized into an attack.

Spacial Rend.

A blade of rifted space slashed toward the thick conduit draining the planet's core.

But at that very instant, a second Spacial Rend shot out from the other side of the blood-red wormhole, identical in force, perfect in timing.

The two attacks collided head-on.

SZZZZZCHHHH—

A screech tore through the air, a sound sharp enough to shred the soul. Black cracks spiderwebbed across space like shattered glass.

The energy orb at the core shuddered violently, its unstable pulsing threatening to implode at any moment.

Panicked, Arceus severed the attack.

Its divine senses screamed at it, one wrong move here, and the planetary core would detonate.

This explosion wouldn't just level a city or incinerate a continent.

It would annihilate the entire planet.

Its gaze shifted across the wormhole.

The other Arceus, the one impaled by tendrils, had opened its eyes.

But they were no longer green.

They were a fathomless void of obsidian—lifeless, cold, and utterly devoid of emotion.

The virus had worked its way through every fiber of its divine host. Infected through and through, the god was completely under its control.

Even with the knowledge that it would soon perish, its life drained by the very act of creation, it could not rebel.

And now, the virus had found a second, nearly identical source of planetary energy, a core perfectly in sync with the first.

It had begun transferring that power to its host.

The energy was potent. Alive. On par with the Ultra World's original source.

With this new supply, its creation would no longer be finite. It would not fade. It would flourish.

And so, it had to keep draining.

At that moment, two Arceus, each from a different world, stood opposed.

Arceus glanced at its own destabilized core and knew: a careless fight here would trigger annihilation.

But not fighting didn't mean surrender.

Drawing upon its dominion over time and space, Arceus summoned the will of its world and attempted to forcibly collapse the blood-red wormhole.

But then, the ground trembled, violently.

This wasn't a localized quake.

The entire planet was shaking, violently enough to nearly throw it off its axis.

The tremors themselves posed no danger to Arceus, but the cause?

Even a god shivered.

A titanic meteor, kilometers in diameter, was hurtling toward the planet at ten kilometers per second.

Impact was mere minutes away.

And on the surface of the planet, countless human-made devices had been erected, technology unmistakably artificial, emitting gravitational waves aimed at the sky.

Arceus understood at once.

The virus had deployed these machines to pull the meteor toward the planet.

"Damn it…"

In all its eternal life, never had Arceus faced such a dire conundrum.

If it flew to destroy the meteor, it would have to abandon the core, leaving it vulnerable to further siphoning.

But if it did nothing, the meteor would strike, obliterating the world in an instant.

Forced to compromise, Arceus released nine elemental Plates from within its body, fusing them into a divine avatar.

The avatar teleported to the surface instantly.

A blast of hyper-destructive energy wiped out every gravity-emitting device in an instant.

All of them were high-grade ∞ Energy Weapons, human inventions from the original world.

Since the day Groudon had returned to its Primal form, the Hive had been harvesting divine energy scattered in battle by Mythical and Legendary Pokémon.

From the rise of the Holy Leviathan Empire to the Unovan War, every major conflict had fed their caches.

Now, hundreds of fully charged collectors lay stored in Devon Corporation's highest-security vaults.

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