Inside the mental space, Professor X was using his considerable mental power to communicate with Magneto, trying to reach through the walls of trauma and despair. He hadn't sent his actual soul or projected his true consciousness into this dangerous place—that would be far too risky. Even if something happened to this mental projection, it wouldn't affect him much in the real world. So after everyone had evacuated to safety, Elric had started to prepare his final move.
Even if he had promised the Professor that he would wait for half an hour, give Charles time to convince his old friend, it would naturally not be the case if his own life was threatened. Self-preservation came first, always. Elric would pull the trigger early if Ultron gained the upper hand.
Besides, he wasn't even familiar with Magneto. The man was a stranger to him, just another person caught in circumstances beyond his control. Elric had no emotional attachment, no reason to risk his own existence for someone he'd never met before today.
Almost sensing something catastrophically wrong, feeling a shift in the energy patterns around him, Ultron quickly prepared to launch a devastating attack. But before he could complete the motion, before his strike could land, Elric's attack came first.
"Annihilate Soul," Elric intoned, casting a 6th-tier spell with practiced precision.
Ultron had already braced for a massive impact, his defenses raised, his consciousness fortified. But after the spell hit him, washing over his digital soul like a wave, he only felt that he was struck by very cold air. It was uncomfortable, certainly, made his processes sluggish for a microsecond. But it was nothing compared to what he'd expected. No pain, no damage, no real threat.
"What? You expect to kill me with this?" Ultron laughed, his voice echoing through the white space with mechanical mockery. "Is this the best you—"
"Haaaa..." Elric exhaled slowly, not bothering to answer.
At some point during the exchange, a massive clock had appeared behind him, floating in the void. It was invisible to anyone except Elric himself, its presence hidden from both Ultron and Professor X. A spectral timepiece with ornate hands that were slowly counting down toward the number 12.
The countdown had begun.
1...
Elric immediately shifted his stance, preparing to avoid Ultron's inevitable counterattack. In this mental space, without any physical restrictions or limitations, everything moved at incredible speeds. Thought became action instantly. Here, one hour of subjective time might feel close to one full day in the outside world—not quite that exaggerated, but close enough to get the idea.
Twelve seconds was nothing in the outside world. A blink. A breath.
But it would be very hard for Elric to survive these twelve seconds in here, where every moment stretched and compressed simultaneously.
He dodged again, his form blurring as another attack sailed past where he'd been standing just a nanosecond before.
Seeing Elric only dodging, constantly evading instead of attacking or even trying to mount an offensive, Ultron suddenly became deeply uneasy. His tactical subroutines flagged this behavior as anomalous.
Is he preparing something elsewhere? Ultron's consciousness expanded, quickly checking his surroundings, scanning for hidden threats or delayed-activation spells. But he found nothing, no trace of any other magic being prepared.
Anyway, he decided to finish this quickly. The more this dragged on, the more uncertainty would accumulate, and he'd have to deal with variables he couldn't predict. Not to mention that bald bastard—Professor X—who was now roaming free somewhere in his commandeered mind, potentially interfering with his control.
Ultron started to gather his soul power, concentrating it, compressing it into something devastating. And with that concentration of energy, his mental avatar's height also started to increase slowly, his form growing larger and more imposing. Even as this transformation was happening, he didn't stop his relentless attacks on Elric. If anything, they intensified, coming faster and harder.
Elric was operating at close to a mixture of his soul power and mental energy in this space. So many abilities that were related to his physical body were unavailable here. That was why he seemed so passive, so defensive. If this fight was happening outside in the real world, he could beat this bastard black and blue without breaking a sweat.
Another devastating punch landed exactly where he'd been standing just a moment ago, cratering the white floor of the mental space.
"You rat! Stop moving!" Ultron roared in frustration.
Elric suddenly felt that his body became heavy, as if gravity had increased a hundredfold. The mental space itself was being manipulated, weighted against him.
The large fist—which had been somewhat manageable to dodge before, predictable in its trajectory—suddenly increased in speed. No, that wasn't quite right. It wasn't that the fist got faster. It was that his speed had decreased dramatically, his movements sluggish and delayed.
Fuck.
Elric braced for the impact, his arms crossing defensively. He watched the fist getting closer and closer, filling his entire field of vision. The knuckles were the size of his torso, packed with enough soul energy to shatter his consciousness.
But it suddenly paused, stopping just inches from his face. So close he could feel the distortion in the air, the pressure wave that preceded the strike.
Before he could wonder what was happening, another voice sounded through the mental space.
"Ultron," the voice was tired but firm, carrying the weight of terrible realization. "Let's end our deal here."
At some point, Magneto had emerged from his white prison and now floated steadily behind Ultron's towering form, his mental projection crackling with barely-contained magnetic energy.
"You?" Ultron's avatar turned slightly, his glowing eyes narrowing. "Why are you here, you useless bastard? what are you going to do now? Go back to your corner. Let me use this body for something useful for once."
"You sent them, right?" Magneto's voice was quiet, but underneath the calm surface was molten rage. Even though it was phrased as a question, his tone was very certain, completely sure of the answer.
"What? What are you talking about?" Ultron's expression changed, just slightly—a tell that he'd been caught.
"Charles told me," Magneto continued, his hollow eyes now burning with purpose. "He was keeping tabs on me all this time, watching from a distance. Making sure that ordinary people wouldn't bother me, wouldn't discover my location or harass me. He'd been protecting me even when I pushed him away."
"And it would be impossible for those men to bypass his mental surveillance without any interference, without someone actively blocking his sight," Magneto's voice grew harder. "So it was you, right? You orchestrated it. You sent those men to kill them. You needed me broken, desperate, willing to make a deal."
"I should have thought of this before," Magneto said bitterly. "Should have realized that her death was too convenient for you, too perfectly timed."
"Yeah, hahaha! I did it!" Ultron laughed, no longer bothering to hide the truth. "So what? Are you gonna kill me? With your pitiful power? You're nothing, Magneto. A broken man clinging to pain."
"You can't even take back your own body from me!" Ultron's mockery echoed through the space.
"Yes, I can't do it by myself," Magneto admitted, his voice steady now, resolved. "But you seem to be forgetting something important, Ultron. You're not facing only me here."
The moment those words fell, Ultron suddenly felt Magneto's consciousness pushing against him, trying to expel him from the body they shared. The mental pressure was immense, fueled by righteous anger and grief transformed into determination.
And with Magneto's push came another surge of mental power—Professor X joining the battle, adding his considerable telepathic strength to the effort.
Magneto alone wasn't trouble for Ultron at all. Even adding the Professor's extra mental power on top, it shouldn't be enough. He'd fortified his hold on this body too well, dug his roots too deep.
But combined? With both of them working in perfect synchronization?
Elric also felt the force pushing against everyone in this mental space, the sensation of being expelled from Magneto's mind. It seemed that in the end, Professor X had somehow managed to convince Magneto to fight back, to reclaim what was his.
Elric didn't resist the expulsion force, allowing himself to be pushed out naturally. He'd done what he came to do—the clock was still counting down behind him, invisible to everyone else.
10... 11...
Ultron was resisting the combined mental energy with everything he had when he suddenly felt that his soul was grabbed by someone from outside the mental space. Powerful hands, made of pure magical energy, clamped around his consciousness.
With the pushing from inside—Magneto and Professor X working together—and the pulling from outside—Elric's magic yanking him free—he was directly thrown out of Magneto's body and into the void of the mental plane.
And before he could react, before he could attempt to dive back into Magneto's mind or flee into the digital realm, he saw Elric opening a swirling portal. With a gesture, Elric threw Magneto's unconscious body through it, and sealing the gateway behind him.
Ultron's consciousness looked around frantically, his sensors taking in the situation.
There was only him and Elric left in this vast white space. At some point, everyone else had left—evacuated to safety, leaving the two of them alone.
"You... even if you succeeded in kicking me out, so what?" Ultron's voice carried a note of desperate confidence. "You can't kill me. I'm not truly alive—I'm an idea, a consciousness that exists beyond flesh. I will return again, and again, and again. And don't think you'll live to see the world after I come back. I'll make sure you suffer for this humiliation."
To Ultron's threatening words, only a somewhat eerie smile appeared on Elric's face. It was the smile of someone who knew something you didn't, who held all the cards and was just waiting to show his hand.
"I am using this spell for the first time in this world," Elric said quietly, almost conversationally. "I don't know what the exact effect will be, how it will interact with the laws of this reality. But you will definitely not be alive to see it. That much I can guarantee."
And with his words, the clock behind his back—the spectral timepiece that had been invisible all this time—finally hit the mark.
12.
The ornate hands aligned perfectly at midnight.
Elric's voice rang out, cold and final, speaking words in a language that predated humanity itself:
"The Goal of All Life Is Death."
The spell activated.
Reality itself seemed to pause for a moment, holding its breath. Then the white space began to crack, not with sound but with absolute silence. Black fissures spread from where Elric stood, spreading outward like a spiderweb of pure death.
This wasn't destruction. It wasn't annihilation or erasure.
It was the conceptual end of existence itself, the fundamental truth that all things must die given form and purpose. A spell that didn't just kill—it made it so you had always been meant to die, rewriting causality itself to ensure the target's death was inevitable, was already written into the fabric of reality.
Ultron's consciousness, his digital soul touched by the Soul Stone, his artificial existence that had thought itself beyond death—all of it began to unravel.
"No... this is impossible... I am beyond death... I am—"
His words cut off as the black cracks reached him, and his consciousness simply... ended.
Not destroyed. Not scattered. Not reduced to data.
Just... ended.
As if he had never been meant to exist in the first place.
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