I should have known the moment Strange said he wanted to get involved.

It was a normal day, me being bored and all. How the hell then did it turn to this?

“Come back here human!” The scraggly demon shouted at me as I floated a far distance away from him.

The berserker staff was in my hands and I have to say that it was a wonderful weapon, not one I needed, but a good one nonetheless. The effects of the weapon were mostly lost on me so it was nothing more than a very durable staff that gave me migraine. It also worked as a great conduit for magic. 

“You know, when I said I was bored, this wasn’t what I had in mind for a fun activity.” I said as I struck the demon with lightning, making it shriek. Strange was fighting the demon while I floated behind, firing my spells at it or sometimes testing out ideas with the staff. 

Demons were durable, not just against magic but pretty much anything else, so this unfortunately native of hell became my target practice. All Strange had to do was keep it busy until a new idea popped inside my head. 

“Are you done?”

“Yeah.”

The sound of a body hitting the ground echoed through the cave we were in as Strange killed the demon with ease. 

Scattered all around the cave were bodies of demons and humans that we slaughtered. They were involved in some sort of ritual that had them sacrifice the limbs and organs of humans to some dark god. Unsurprisingly, Strange had lost it and attacked the demons while I used the staff to crush the bones of the dark sorcerers. It was during the fight that I knew what it felt like and the amount of force needed to use a blunt weapon like a staff to cut off the limbs of someone. 

The crunching sound of the bones breaking before it is forcefully uprooted from the rest of the body was a sight to behold. I wasn’t sure if it was a lingering effect of the staff but I quite enjoyed the brutal display. 

It was a fulfilling day with death and… okay maybe the staff was slightly getting to me. It wasn’t directly manipulating my thoughts but it was making it more appealing than it was. I like bashing skulls in as much as the next guy but not to the extent that I’d find it fulfilling. 

I stuffed the staff back into my storage space, a nifty spell I picked up. I couldn’t store much inside it so it helped a lot in carrying a few important things. 

“That’s one way to spend the day.” I casually commented. “See you later, Strange.” And with that I was gone. 

Leaving Strange in the cave, I opened a portal to somewhere only a few people in this world knew about. A S.H.I.E.L.D storage facility where they housed most of their hidden prototypes of mass destruction. 

What I was looking for was a suitcase. One out of place in a facility like this. Inside the specialized suitcase was one of the most powerful relics of this universe. 

The Tesseract. 

The cube that housed the Space Stone. While I have been pretty much chirpy lately, I didn’t forget about my predicament. 

Fury didn’t mention anything about S.H.I.E.L.D having something like this because even though I was a friend, I was not a part of S.H.I.E.L.D. Just because we were friends didn’t mean we trusted each other with our darkest secrets. 

I even turned a blind eye to the parliament who thought that they could harness the power of the Tesseract to build weapons that were capable of killing any metahuman, eg. Me. 

I could hack into S.H.I.E.L.D’s network with no one on earth knowing. A classic case of stalking the Cicada and not knowing of the Oriole behind. 

They could plan all they wanted but all it would take was for them to push a wrong button for me to end them. They knew I meant business when I sent back the bodies of the dead agents that were sent to keep an eye on me after the whole Christmas debacle and the fact that it was delivered in the middle of one of their meetings made sure the message was received loud and clear. 

They seemed to have taken a step backwards but I knew that the reason for that was so that I could get a false sense of security until they were finished with their ultimate killer weapon. 

It was due to their paranoia that I was able to find out the location of the Space Stone. I didn’t take the stone the moment I found it out because while I could just stuff it with me, I wasn’t of the mind to hold a fabric of the universe in my pockets. 

Fury wasn’t the only one with paranoia, I couldn’t stand the thought of having it with me and me not being able to do anything with it. Though that didn’t stop me from borrowing it every now and then to experiment with. 

It was my first try in absorbing cosmic energy and I had almost killed myself. 

Trying to absorb a part of the undiluted and concentrated aspect of space was… Well it was as horrible as it sounds. 

I might or might not have blinked myself halfway across the planet on my first try and that too inside the body of a whale. What made the experience terrifying was that all my organs were misplaced, even my brain. Bones burst through my nose while my hands were twisted backwards as if it was its natural position. And that was me just trying to absorb a wisp of it. 

While I didn’t have any trouble using the Tesseract to tear a hole in space, trying to absorb part of the universe’s space was a very hard task, even for me. To put it in perspective, what I absorbed was nothing more than a drop in a universe-wide ocean. It was nothing in comparison and yet I almost threw my life away… literally. 

Ever since then, I would take time to come and get myself attuned to the energy of the stone. I had no defense whatsoever neither did I have any sort of tolerance to cosmic energies and I figured that maybe it was something I needed for my next evolution. 

Magic helped a lot and sometimes I got the phantom feeling of being stuffed full. But it wasn’t the breaker I needed. Magic just helped me fill the requirements for my next evolution but I felt that I needed something to blend everything together. And the Infinity Stones were the only alternative, given that they were actually solidified primordial energy that birthed the universe. 

I still haven’t forgotten how I died last year which no one knew about. While I might have been taking my sweet time in enjoying the moments, that didn’t mean I neglected the other avenues of strength. 

Two stones were currently on earth – The Time and Space Stone. 

I couldn’t go for the Time Stone since, well since it was being protected by the Sanctum and it was better that way which left only the Space Stone as an avenue. 

The Power Stone was off-world and on an uninhabited planet. 

The Reality Stone was hidden in a forgotten world by Odin’s father, Bor, millennia ago. 

The Mind Stone should be with Thanos currently and I was in no way stupid enough to go fight him and his children on my lonesome. It says a lot about the guy if he could lay waste to planets and have his name feared throughout the cosmos. Yeah, not yet. 

And finally, the Soul Stone in Vormir. I wasn’t touching that shit by a planet-long pole. 

The only Infinity Stone that was loosely protected was the Space Stone. Hell, Loki floored S.H.I.E.L.D’s base and walked out with the Stone and they could do nothing to him. So I didn’t feel bad about baptizing the specialized case for the Space Stone in runes that would let me know if someone came within a hundred yards of the Stone. 

That and a whole slew of runes with different functions that would ensure the safety of the Stone until I portaled there. 

The Tesseract floated atop my palms as tendrils of my energy wrapped around it, trying to merge with the excess energy it was giving off. 

I had been at it for almost two hours now but I still didn’t have a benchmark of what I would call success. What would happen if I absorbed the concept of Space? Could I even absorb a concept, talk less a primordial one? My body was made to accommodate ungodly amounts of energy so why couldn’t I absorb a concept that had been solidified into pure energy?

Each of the Stones contained a limitless amount of energy over their own domains which meant that no matter how much I absorbed, it would cause no sort of defect on the Tesseract. 

The reason why I was going through this route was because it was a feasible way and a huge boost in strength. It was impossible to absorb something that held an unlimited amount of energy inside the body of any being unless the body could constantly change and adapt to it and act as a container for all the excess energy. 

My body was the perfect vessel to house an Infinity Stone without deteriorating due to absurd energy levels it emits, given that I am first able to adapt to it, which was proving quite difficult. 

I wonder how people would feel if they knew I was holding the crystallized form of what is essentially this universe’s space in my hands. It was only when I held it that I was able to know the truth about the Stones each having a level of sentience. 

It was more like a thought than an interactive sentience. I felt like there was no place in this world I could not go to. All I needed was a thought and I could be anywhere. It opened up so many possibilities that I was almost tempted to open up a hole in space and visit alien planets but I had stopped myself. All in due time I suppose. 

I withheld a groan as my attempt for the umpteenth time in absorbing and controlling the cosmic energy inside the Tesseract ended in another failure. I was getting there but the progress was too slow to my liking. 

While I could use the energy within the Tesseract to rip apart space, I couldn’t in no way make this energy a part of me. If I assimilated it too fast then I would just find myself, this time maybe not on earth but on some volatile planet with my brain floating in the sun while my heart was drowning in the arctic. 

All I needed was just to find a way to assimilate that sliver of cosmic energy and I would be able to do this pretty easily. If only a stone was giving me this much trouble then how much harder would trying to assimilate all six stones be? 

It would be a monumental task to find a being capable of welding all six stones with ease. And no, Ultron don’t count. That guy was such a cheat. 

It was only when I tried absorbing the energy of the stone that I realized why it was that of the three people that used the stones, one died while the other two almost did. 

A normal mortal man couldn’t handle just wearing the gauntlet that housed all stones. All it took was a snap and Thanos and the Hulk almost died, and these two guys were crazy durable and they couldn’t survive more than a snap.

It was the reason why I wanted to get used to its energy as fast as possible because the plan I had in mind was one that would catapult me in strength by more than a few degrees and needed to be able to use a stone without any crutch. 

“The things we do for power.” I knew the possible consequences of what my action could bring but like always, I didn’t care. It was my survival on the line and I was sure that no more than ten people would care if I were to die, so why should I care about the numerous unnamed people who would die?

I wasn’t about to become genocidal all of a sudden. All I was saying was that it was inevitable that a lot of people would feel the brunt of the action I was going to take very soon. 

The last people to feel it would be those on earth, but the universe? It would become so dark that it would make the night seem like day. 

I wonder when I became this bipolar. A few hours I was chilling with Strange while dismembering dark sorcerers but now? Though it was a hard choice for me to make, it was one I did knowing fully well that it might very well be the end of a universe. 

What else can a man do if not dream?.... I almost forgot, I haven’t dreamt for years.

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