Tier 3+ - Accidental Champion (Book 10) - Chapter 4 - Perhaps It Was Overkill

There were many things Xavier wanted to do before taking on Jhanku.

First of all, he wanted to locate all of the Denizens who’d been a part of that hidden base Arrack had trapped him in. The Denizens who’d been memory wiped and forced to serve “Management”—Arrack—and in turn were serving Jhanku, as Arrack had been Jhanku’s great-great-grandson.

He had Communication Stones connecting him to those he’d freed from that place. He could contact them. Ask them to enter his empire. They would want their revenge on Jhanku, just as Xavier wanted his revenge.

For Palini.

But contacting them wasn’t so easy.

There were limitations Xavier was well aware he was under. Time was both his biggest asset and his biggest issue. Contacting people outside his time stream would require him to enter a much slower time stream or even deactivate his time dilation field altogether.

Even if it only took him a minute of normal universe time, that minute would come at a cost.

Perhaps that was paranoia, but Xavier was right to be paranoid given what he was up against.

There were others he wished to contact. Yarien and her party, for one. He had spent a good deal of time with them when they’d cleared the descents of the Hell Moon Thazamar. His powers now far outstripped theirs, but it wasn’t their powers he wanted, it was their safety.

There were other things he wanted to do, too. Things that, despite how much time he had in his time dilation fields, he’d been putting off. Many decades had passed for him and the people of his empire since he’d returned from the Tower of Champions seven-hundred-and-fiftieth floor, and a great deal had happened during that time. But there were certain parts of his life he hadn’t been able to move forward in—the threat of people like Jhanku loomed far too large in his mind, especially when he kept finding the man’s spies whenever he took over a new sector.

There were hundreds of them.

And though barely any time would have passed in the normal universe’s time stream, Xavier had to imagine that Arrack had reached his great-great-grandfather and given the man a full accounting of what had happened at the base. The man would know about Xavier’s powers.

Well… he’d know about some of them.

That was why he couldn’t wait any longer. He’d conquered ten sectors. Ten entire galaxies, all under his control, every being on every planet following him. This was but a fraction of what he intended to do, but it still shook him from time to time just how far he’d come. When he stopped to reflect, to think about where he’d been when the System had integrated Earth, and where he was now… not in his wildest dreams would he have ever imagined leading a life like this one.

Taking over the universe…

It sounded like a sinister plan. The plan of a villain. Given who the Interdimensional Dragon actually was, Xavier sometimes couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps he was a villain. He was striving for ultimate power, after all.

Only so I can save the universe…

But what would happen when the universe was saved?

He’d asked that question of himself before, of course, and his answer was always the same: Peace. But there was a little voice deep inside his mind that wondered if perhaps there would be more than that.

Would he really be able to just settle down once this was all said and done?

Xavier shook his head, dislodging those thoughts from the main part of his consciousness, and relegating them to the far reaches of his mind.

That was a problem for another day, another time. The Xavier of the here and now had other problems he needed to deal with.

The first of those problems was: How to get Jhanku to come to him?

Xavier had become immensely powerful. His people had become immensely powerful. And so had their nineteen-hundred-and-ninety-nine counterparts—and, if needed, there was nothing stopping him from creating more unfoldings.

It was something he intended to do in the future, anyway.

And when all that power was pooled together, and his mind was linked with the minds of every other Xavier, and they all stood together against the same threat—the power they wielded wasn’t merely immense, it was unimaginable.

But even so, Xavier was strongest when he was on his home turf. If he ventured all the way to the inner sectors, he wouldn’t be able to use Unity Defence or Territory Defence. His people, of course, would benefit from those spells, and the power they poured through the portals connecting them to him and his counterparts would all culminate inside him, but without the two Defender spells he still wasn’t sure if he would even be able to handle that kind of power.

Ten sectors worth of power was… a lot. Ten sectors times two thousand? That was a hell of a lot more. That was twenty sectors worth of power, and though Xavier himself didn’t rule over more than ten of those, he could pull the power from all of them.

And Jhanku rules over ten thousand sectors, all in the same universe…

Xavier was hovering in space, above Earth.

While he didn’t have a hand in every single part of the expansion project, he’d made a point of being the first introduction to his empire on as many planets as possible. Still, even with all the travelling—or rather, conquering—he’d been doing lately, he’d made a point to spend as much time with those he cared about as he could spare. Portalling back to Earth from anywhere within the ten sectors he ruled only took him a moment and barely cost him any power at all.

It was well worth coming back to the house he’d built with Adranial, sharing a meal with her—sharing a bed with her—or spending a relaxing afternoon in the library before moving onto the next planet. It wasn’t only Adranial he would visit, either. His entire found family would have grand get-togethers, get-togethers that seemed to become larger every decade with how much each of their respective families were growing over the years.

This made the expansion phase feel like an incredibly relaxing stage of his life, far more relaxing than he’d imaged conquering new sectors would be. But it wasn’t as though he was hauling armies from one galaxy to the next. That wasn’t how he took over planets—it wasn’t necessary.

Though he knew taking over the entire universe wouldn’t be so easy as these ten sectors had been.

Xavier released a long breath inside his Force Armour and watched as almost two thousand portals opened all around him. The other versions of him passed through the portals all at once. The moment they did, their minds connected once more. Though they were always in contact through the Communication Stones, they usually only connected like this once a year. They would have done it more often, but there was no need. Besides, doing it always left an… empty feeling afterward. They each shared the sensation that though they valued their individuality above all, the feeling of being connected in such a powerful way was intoxicating.

Especially considering just how much power it allowed them to wield.

Whenever they made these connections, they shared everything with each other. All the individual knowledge they’d gained. All the refinements they’d each made to their neural pathways. All the techniques they’d learnt. Everything.

This was something that helped stop the Xaviers from diverging too much from one another. It wasn’t that they didn’t mind if they did diverge, it was more that they wanted to remain similar enough that their minds were always able to become in sync like they were right now.

Some of them had diverged—in fact, technically, they all had. Some in small ways, some in large ways. Xavier marvelled at the things the other versions of him had done as they marvelled at what he had done.

When the sharing was complete, and they were all up to date, the planning phase began. They’d already agreed long ago that they would go after Jhanku for the first time in Xavier’s original universe. Though there wasn’t any sort of hierarchy between them, there were a few simple ways they distinguished their different versions and planets.

The main way they distinguished them was through a simple number system. As they were able to connect their minds on such a significant level, the numbering never felt as though they were putting any one of them before the other—there was no ego or jealousy involved, no calling one alpha and the other prime to spare feelings.

Xavier was Xavier 1, and each unfolding after was the next number until Xavier 2,000.

It wasn’t terribly creative, but it didn’t need to be. It was the perfect solution for them. And logically it followed that if they were to try something new, they might as well try it in Xavier 1’s universe first.

As their minds melded and their thoughts became as one, plans were formed and discarded faster than the speed of light until they finally came upon one that seemed workable.

There were parts of this conglomerated consciousness that were fairly confident they would be able to defeat Jhanku even if they weren’t on their home turf, but those parts weren’t the majority, and doing so was thought to be a last resort.

Unless there was a good reason, the Xaviers didn’t see the point of taking such a risk.

And so, they would lure him to Xavier 1’s domain.

Even doing that would take a long time, outside their empire’s time dilation fields. Many centuries would pass as they forced Jhanku to come to them. They could afford to use that time, if needed, but allowing time to pass like that… it could open them to other threats, ones they weren’t even aware of.

That wasn’t the only problem, either. Doing such a thing would force time to pass in all two-thousand connected universes the Xaviers inhabited. If an unexpected threat did come, that threat would come in each of the different universes all at the exact time.

Which meant they wouldn’t be able to face it together.

The plan that finally came about to fix that little problem was considered more than a little insane, but the Xaviers agreed it would be the best method. And if it failed… well, they would cross that bridge when they came to it.

Now, it was time to travel to the inner sectors.

And for the first time, they were all travelling together—it was the best way to bait their enemy, after all.

Each of the Xaviers pulled a portion of power from their respective domains, then they pooled that power together into a single spell. They didn’t use all the power they’d taken, just a fraction of it in case they would need to do this again. They pushed that power into a single spell—Xavier 1’s time dilation spell.

This was almost exactly what they’d done back on the seven-hundred-and-fiftieth floor of the Tower of Champions, except the time dilation field Xavier wielded now was even more powerful than that one had been.

Time inside his own empire, an empire of ten sectors with every single planet inside of it under their own powerful time dilation field, appeared to stop. The Xaviers were moving so much faster than those in their empires that in an entire day barely a minute would pass for their people.

Perhaps it was overkill, but when it came to taking on one of the top ten most powerful beings in the entire universe, things like overkill were more than required.

After casting this spell, Xavier spent a good few hours in recovery. This was a far more powerful time dilation field than even the last one he’d powered in a similar way back on the seven-hundred-and-fiftieth floor.

They didn’t need to combine their powers for the next spell they cast. Once Xavier’s energy channels had been fully healed from using so much energy on the time dilation field, he manifested a spell pattern for a large intergalactic portal. There was no need to rely on his Universal Travel Key, though he still had that on him.

The two thousand Xaviers emerged in the orbit of Jhanku’s home planet, the planet at the very centre of his ten-thousand sector empire, and closed the portal behind them.

Each of the two thousand Xaviers was heavily concealed. Had they been outside the time dilation field, even Jhanku wouldn’t have been able to sense them up there.

They were completely invisible.

Now, it was time to set the lure.