Sean floated in the air, completely frozen in time. He could feel every bit of pain pulsing through him through his bullet wounds and all of his other injuries. He shifted his eyes to inspect the frozen form of the Immortal who had a comically surprised expression on his face as he seemed to have reflexively moved the barrel of the gun to track Sean as he moved. His breathing had completely stopped, his lungs frozen in time like everything else.

  Even now Sean could see at least three bullets suspended in mid air between him and the gun.

  There at the end of the hallway the Shadow stood there staring at Sean. It’s body flickered and suddenly it was standing right in front of Sean and seemingly inspecting him.

  “A puzzle. A strange turn.

  “One who was Immortal yet is about to die.

  “Sent back by one who has seen more of this strange winding path through time than I.

  “But my senses do not lie.

  “Is this part of the path, the journey?

  “Do I not see it clearly?

  “Yet live you must.

  “Able to disappear from this life when you need it most.

  “Why sacrifice yourself, to choose to cease to be?

  “It is not something which my mind can conceive.

  “In my life so different and alien to thee.

  “Where there are none who can speak.

  “Or hope for change.

  “Or to save those we wish to esteem.

  “When things are always the same.”

  The Shadow’s warbling voice shifted at the end in what Sean would almost describe as emotion. It kept staring at Sean for a long moment. His mouth suddenly came loose and could move all of a sudden as the Shadow remained still.

  Wait, did it actually expect him to answer?

  “Why did I sacrifice myself?” Sean said despite feeling supremely uncomfortable to be talking to the Shadow of all things. It was the supreme deity of almost every religion in the galaxy. Who was he to talk to it? If anyone believed him about this, then it would probably start a dozen holy wars at once as people tried to interpret what every little word meant.

  At least the Shadow was cryptic enough that they had plenty to argue about.

  “I don’t know,” Sean said as he realized he truly did, “I want to say it was because I knew I would return to the future when I moved. But I didn’t think about that at all. I just saw that Violet was about to get hurt and I just… did the first thing that came to mind. I finally was able to protect someone I cared about. I… I really was. I’ve never really been able to do that before, failure at every turn.”

  The Shadow kept staring at him with its orange eyes, still motionless.

  “I see.

  “She did make it free.

  “So perhaps things finally are working as you want them to be.

  “Failure, success…

  “So malleable, an ever changing mesh.

  “I will consider it,

  “As I continue forward to my next snapshot of a mortal death.

  “And next cycle perhaps I will understand its ever growing web…

  “Now forget.”

  — — —

  Sean fell to the ground as the loud bangs of gunfire from the gun practically deafened him. He thought he was going to die, maybe return back to the future. But instead he started to feel better. Better than he had in years. All the pain washed away like it had never been there. Somehow he was an Immortal again.

  Although the Shadow hadn’t come to visit him this time in its strange frozen space. That was odd. Another series of heavy impacts struck Sean’s stomach, but now that he was almost fully healed he sat back up with a groan and mostly ignored the assault.

  What was he doing? Right, there were still two more immortals to take out.

  “This is such bullshit!” the man with the gun whined, “Why in Gaia does this guy of all people get to be an Immortal right at the exact wrong time?”

  The second man who was closer jumped forward and scooped up the machete from the floor where Sean had dropped it in his haste to leap to the side to block the bullets with his body.

  Sean eyed the both of them.

  “All of us are Immortals now,” Sean pointed out, “I was kicking your asses back when I could be permanently injured, how do you think I’ll do now? Even two on one?”

  “Shoot him,” the man with the machete said, “I’ll free the others. The gruesome way.”

  The other man’s eyes widened at the statement, but before Sean could leap forward into the fight he stumbled back as the force of another barrage of bullets sprayed across from his chest.

  Sean did his best to fight his way towards the man with the gun, but the weapon still had plenty of ammo left and he managed a few lucky shots on Sean’s head which knocked him out for a few seconds before he recovered and had to squirm on the ground so that the other Immortal wasn’t able to land another immediate easy headshot as soon as Sean started moving again.

  “Faster!” the man with the gun said over the blasts of his gunfire, “I don’t have much more!”

  Sean was steadily crawling towards the man with determination like some sort of strange spider and the man with the gun kept slowly backpedaling away while glancing over at the man with the machete chopping away at the other Immortal with his leg embedded at the ground. He was having trouble since if he waited too long between swings of his blade the wound seal itself shut and completely healed back to how it was.

  The man who was currently having his legs chopped by the other man was screaming at a high pitch and wailing in pain until with one final strong blow the man with the machete cut cleanly through the leg and the other Immortal fell backwards to the floor panting with only a red stump there.

  The little flecks of flesh and bone reappeared and soon enough the man’s leg was fully healed. Sean only saw this in tiny flashes as he kept crawling towards the man with the gun before being eventually shot in the head again.

  “Won’t you just go down!” The man with the gun shouted in frustration and a little fear as Sean kept moving relentlessly, “You really are a monster.”

  The man tried to fire his gun again, but this time the weapon only clicked over and over, with no ammunition left to fire. Sean rolled to his feet and dived towards the man before he could recover his wits. Sean reached down and wrenched the empty gun from the man’s hand. The man smirked slightly, likely thinking that the weapon was out of ammo as he had just proved himself.

  He evidently wasn’t thinking too far ahead as Sean flipped the weapon around and used it as a club to hit the other man across the face and snap his head to the side in a sudden burst of motion.

  There was a shuffling sound behind him as Sean clubbed the man underneath him again with his metal club again. Sean turned and looked out of the corner of his eye behind him even as he raised his arms above his head for another swing.

  The man with the machete had already managed to free two of his companions who Sean had trapped in the walls and floor earlier. His heart sank as he saw the man with the machete working on the last man who had been trapped inside the wall head first with the rest of his body sticking out and flailing around.

  Alright, time to escape… Sean finished the last blow on the Immortal below him who seemed intimidated and trying to flee rather than fight Sean directly.

  Sean quickly stood up and started running farther into the facility away from the five Immortals now blocking his way to the elevator where Violet and Sierra had fled to.

  After a moment’s surprise, all five of the Immortals gave chase, with only the one man from before armed with the machete and the rest just running after him in their half shredded and dissolved armor.

  He tried to loop around and take a few turns to go back to the elevator. But he made a mistake. He had only seen a short glimpse of the floor plan that Sierra had used to navigate them to the room where Violet had been held. And while this hallway did indeed go back to the elevators… There was also a thick metal locked door in the way.

  Sean looked away for another way, but the only other ways went deeper into the facility where he was more likely to get lost then find their way back. Making his decision, Sean quickly shuffled up to the locked door and grabbed his right pointer finger in his left hand. With a loud sick snapping noise he pulled his finger all the way to the side so it dangled loosely off the side of his hand. Sean felt the phantom finger even as his finger began regenerating itself. Sean quickly stuck his phantom finger in the locking mechanism and waited for his finger to heal and dissolve away the lock.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  But his bet didn’t pay off and after his finger fully returned the door still remained firmly shut. Sean went to wrench his hand to the side again to carve into the lock again, but he had taken too much time. Hands grabbed his shoulders and dragged him backwards away from the door and threw him to the floor.

  Sean fought desperately to escape the five Immortals surrounding him, but after a few minutes, they managed to push him to the ground. After some swearing and arguing even as Sean thrashed and insulted them, they figured out how to completely lock him down so he couldn’t escape. One Immortal took each of his limbs and pressed them to the ground and kept his limbs completely immobile by putting their entire weight on it. All together, they managed to get Sean in a spot where he was trapped in the group.

  They seemed to expect for him to stop fighting after that point. But he just kept going. Eventually an hour later, some mortal soldiers from the Jade Congress finally found them. Sean almost escaped at that point because all of the Immortals were distracted. But he didn’t quite make it and was captured by the group again.

  There was quite the commotion for another two hours until finally they started wrapping Sean in a kind of sticky cloth that prevented him from moving too much as it kept his feet together and his arms locked at his sides.

  They just kept wrapping him up until immediate escape became impossible.

  Sean could escape, but it might take a few weeks or months of wriggling until he had enough space near his hands to injure himself and start eating away at his prison.

  They put a dark hood on Sean and then he was loaded into a vehicle and with a rumble started to be driven away. There he was wriggling in place and twitching within his sticky trap like a fly caught in a spider’s web in the bed of the vehicle.

  — — —

  “Put him in the pod. He’s too dangerous,” Sean heard a strangely familiar male voice say from behind him. They had put a strange pair of headphones on him to block out all sound. But with all of his thrashing they hadn’t fully put them on correctly, so he could still hear a little through them.

  “The sun will destroy him, and we’ll never have to worry about him ever again,” the male voice continued.

  “But sir,” an unfamiliar female voice replied, “If we could turn him to our side, imagine what he could do. When he became Immortal he just shrugged it off and kept fighting. What kind of person does that? Somebody with incredible potential to help us.”

  “Somebody dangerous. Somebody that we don’t want to worry about having dual allegiances. Better to take him off the board. Especially because we still aren’t able to verify who he really is besides he probably works for the GFC. Is it ready?”

  “Yes, sir,” the female voice said reluctantly, “I still think this is a bad idea. He could be an asset.”

  “Noted. Now put him in the pod.”

  Sean felt himself lifted and shoved into what felt like an upright metal coffin. After a few minutes of faint voices from outside, the whole thing rumbled and Sean felt the telltale acceleration that showed that he’d been mounted on a rocket of some kind.

  After an hour or two the thrusters cut out and Sean was floating freely in space again. But luckily for him it had been nearly a week since he’d first been captured. They thought they had him stuck and helpless, but little did they know that he’d hollowed out a space right around both of his hands at his hips with all his constant movement.

  They didn’t seem to be aware of how Immortals could escape their bindings, and seemed to think that this sticky cloth would hold him in place as long as they needed. But Sean held his hand out and rested his pointer finger against the bony nub at the end of his hips. With a sharp movement and a crack his finger broke again and he twisted his hand around as quickly as he could.

  His regenerating pinkie dissolved a hole in the fabric all the way through so the very tip of his regenerated finger poked out from the surface of the cloth. He tugged backwards and his finger was sucked back inside and into the little space that Sean had near his hip.

  Sean repeated this process over and over until finally there were enough holes in a circle that he was able to punch his whole hand through the material to the surface. After that escape was fairly straightforward now that he could just dissolve away any sections as needed with his freed hand and then arm.

  Finally, after what Sean estimated must be a day or two, he finally was completely free and taking off the last little strip of sticky cloth from his shins.

  Sean carved a hole in the exterior of the ship. Ship was generous actually. As Sean went out into space and inspected the vessel, it was frankly unimpressive. It was literally a welded together metal box with a single sealed door that they had used to put him inside. The engine at the bottom had exhausted all of its fuel and was basically dead weight by now.

  Sean tried to remember some of the body piloting he’d learned with Asuta and Emily. The two of them had taken them all for some basic lessons sometime after the end of the Endless Flesh’s invasion.

  Sean took stock of his surroundings and carefully squinted at the faint blue dot in the distance and then directly at the sun.

  Well, he immediately went blind staring at the sun, but he slowly turned his head until he could see again. Although in the void of space his eyes were a bit puffy from the fluid being boiled from them so his vision was a bit blurry.

  As best as Sean could tell this vessel was heading straight for the center of the Gaian’s yellow sun. He had too much speed forward to really return to Gaia directly… so he’d have to do a gravitational assist.

  Sean estimated the angle and then crouched down on the exterior of the small vessel. Then with his most powerful leap he pushed off as hard as he could. He slowly floated away from the vessel as the two of them parted ways as his horizontal momentum from the jump pushed him perpendicular to the direction of where the sun would be.

  He carefully contorted his body into a strange twisted formation. It was a supremely uncomfortable thing to look at it and do, but every little bit of thrust counted for this. Basically any exposed surface on Sean’s body was constantly venting gasses and fluids as his Immortal body constantly regenerated them. So he had to get all of these ‘expelling’ portions of his body all pointed in roughly one direction so the accumulated venting of gasses would ever so slightly push him in the direction that he wanted to go.

  Now as you would imagine, the eyes, nose, mouth, and ears were the biggest offenders for venting the gasses. Ears made no difference since it was the same thrust on the opposite sides of the head and the thrusts canceled out. But the other source of thrust was from the bottom end. No, not excrement or pee or anything. But the accumulated gasses and fluids boiling off from the interior of Sean’s digestive tract and traveling through his body. And most of that came out of his rear.

  So Sean had to contort his body so he was curled into a ball with his legs folded behind his head. Then he opened his eyes and mouth to a maximum extent and made sure that his rear and his open mouth pointed the same way. Then he held that position as the gasses rushed out of him constantly and created thrust.

  And so he waited.

  And waited.

  And waited, staying completely still as he picked up speed moving horizontally to the star that was rapidly growing bigger as the last few days passed.

  But this was Sean’s maximum thrust, so it wasn’t like there was anything else he could do about it.

  To his relief, over his days of travel, he managed to gain enough horizontal momentum that he didn’t smack directly into the star itself. Instead he rushed by its right side. Close enough to sizzle and burn his skin from the proximity before it healed, but not enough to cause him to actually fall into it. Just like someone swirling him around like he was on a rope, the massive gravity of the star turned his straight speed into a curved arc around the side of the star and sped up as he did so. Sean rotated around the star in a short arc before he gained enough speed to ‘break’ the rope or out of the sun’s gravity well and go flying away from the star again and back into empty black space.

  Navigation in space was tricky. Everything looked like little white specs and it was hard to know exactly where you were just with your eyes.

  But there was one easy trick that Sean could use to locate Gaia. He knew approximately how big the sun looked in the sky when he was living on Gaia as Malketh. The closer to the sun he was the bigger it looked, and the smaller the farther away he was from it. So all he had to do was keep adjusting his distance until he was in the right spot. Then he would have to wait or look for the blue and green dot of Gaia visually as best as he could in the black void of space.

  Because if the apparent size of the star was the same at his point in space, then he should be the same distance from the sun as Gaia. And if he wandered around at that distance for long enough at that distance that matched Gaia’s orbit, then he should eventually run into the planet again.

  So that’s what he did. He didn’t know how long it took. He often overshot and overcorrected the apparent size of the sun. Every bit of thrust he built up in a certain direction also had to be countered in the opposite direction in a slow process before Sean could even think of traveling in a new direction.

  To change directions, Sean would bite off a few of his fingers. Sometimes just the blood gushing from the healing wounds were enough to give him thrust to spin around and adjust his heading properly. But if he needed more precise adjustments he could take his severed fingers and throw them carefully away from himself to add or stop any spin he had or to change direction.

  Mostly he could change his direction just by contorting his body around in a different way, but the more gruesome way had much more precise and fast results than the other way.

  There were Immortals that used the gruesome method to use their blood as a much faster source of thrust than what Sean was doing now. But he had never learned that technique, and it was hard to control the thrust from his hand without sending himself spinning rapidly like a top, which sometimes took him over an hour to fix before he could set off in the right direction again without spinning around so wildly.

  Anyway, Sean weaved back and forth around the orbital distance of Gaia away from its star for a while. And eventually after a long period of extreme boredom, he finally caught a tiny glint of blue among all the other whitish stars filling space.

  Sean made his way towards the blue dot that rapidly grew in size in his blurry vision. Sean could easily see that it was indeed Gaia with the blue oceans and the large gray moon hanging besides it.

  Sean kept moving at high speed and altered his course for the largest ocean on the planet, not bothering to slow himself down. At high speed he smashed into the Gaian atmosphere, not wanting to risk getting caught in orbit or recaptured by some satellite that the Jaded Congress had up here.

  Sean’s body burned up over and over again as he plunged down towards the vast ocean below.

  Even as he fell, Sean spread out so he could skydive a bit and enjoy the view as he fell through the clouds and shimmering waves below as the air rushed by him and filled his ears with the roaring sound of wind.

  Then he smacked the surface of the ocean at massive speed, his body flattening like a pancake for a moment as all of his momentum halted at once.

  When he regenerated his body, he opened his eyes underwater. He was deep underneath, the surface of the ocean above barely glimmering above his head. Sean took a few deep breaths of the salt water around him and let it fill his lungs. After the cloud of bubbles poured from his throat, he slowly began to drift downwards rather than up to the surface like he had before.

  Sean let himself sink, but even as he did so he remembered his swimming lessons with Brenda on Immortus Station. He started doing the frog stroke and picked a direction and started swimming.

  Whatever sensors in orbit would have detected his reentry and likely tracked his touchdown point in the ocean. But with the way the ocean currents would carry him and his intention to remain completely submerged until he found a good place to get a better assessment of the situation… He doubted that they’d be able to track him or realize that he was the one who had come down from orbit.

  Whoever had blasted him off to the sun had thought that they were going to be killing him. Best that it was kept that way until Sean knew who and how many people that he was dealing with.

  Sean saw a school of fish swimming below him calmly as he frog stroked through the water, distracting him from his thoughts. He smiled slightly as he watched the fish slowly outpace him and swim away again. Maybe this could be nice. See the ocean life of Gaia in its natural state. He needed some real excitement again after that excruciatingly boring time he’d spent there up in space. Especially since he had to actually pay attention somewhat to navigate and couldn’t just meditate to pass the time like he would try if it were something else that might be boring.

  Regardless, it was over now. And there was plenty to see in the ocean here.

  Things could certainly be worse.