Datch turned and looked at the bald sorceress.
She wore a vivid yellow robe whose hem swayed gently in the scorching air stirred up by the fighting.
She held her hands clasped in front of her, keeping a calm yet watchful posture.
The eyes beneath her hood were full of deep wisdom and studied Datch with careful focus.
After observing her for a moment, Datch instinctively reached for her information panel.
It had become second nature. Whenever he met a new NPC, he opened the info bar first to confirm their identity and affiliation and to see whether they had a quest.
NPCs with quests were treasures. NPCs without quests were worthless!
The next instant, Datch suddenly realised something.
He was in the New York of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
He hadn't yet confirmed whether the game system he had used in the Warhammer universe worked across multiple universes.
The Infinity Gauntlet was an artefact from the Marvel Universe, so naturally it worked here. He had no idea about the other functions.
Surprisingly, though, the info bar popped up.
A faintly glowing rectangular screen appeared in his field of vision, displaying her complete information line by line.
[Name: The Ancient One. Supreme Sorcerer, ruler of Kamar-Taj, sacred site of the mystic arts, Guardian of the Time Stone…]
What followed was a long, detailed background explaining that the Ancient One was the guardian of Earth's dimension, the enemy of Dormammu and the keeper of the timeline.
The screen was packed with small text, and from it Datch could clearly learn everything about the Supreme Sorcerer.
"The game functions work in the Marvel Universe too?" Datch said with some surprise.
He had assumed the system only worked inside the Warhammer universe, but it seemed it was bound to him personally.
It should work normally no matter which universe he went to.
That was an unexpected bonus.
If the info bar worked, then the inventory, skill panel, and item hotbar surely did too.
He was still the Fourth Calamity, free to do whatever he pleased.
Heh! Heh! Heh!
Come, call me the Lord of Calamity across every realm.
Despair, you fools!!
Setting the thought aside, Datch looked up and smiled at the Ancient One.
The so-called Supreme Sorcerer was insignificant before the Fourth Calamity.
"Supreme Sorcerer, what exactly do you mean by disrupting the balance of time?"
The Ancient One sensed the threat posed by the mysterious man before her.
She brought her hands together in front of her, secretly formed a seal, and prepared to act at any moment.
"You do not belong to this universe. According to the established timeline, you should not be here. To avoid unforeseen consequences, please do not disturb this universe's timeline."
"Living beings are free. They should have the right to choose the future they want." Datch slowly raised the hand wearing the Infinity Gauntlet.
The six Infinity Stones on its knuckles flashed for an instant.
Datch had noticed the Ancient One's subtle hand seal. This was his warning.
If she chose to make a move, he would show her why the Fourth Calamity was called the Fourth Calamity.
Believe it or not, I'll stuff you and Dormammu into a Master Ball and make you roommates!!
When the Ancient One's gaze fell on Datch's Infinity Gauntlet, her pupils widened in surprise.
The Time Stone…
A Time Stone was set in his gauntlet, fitted into the socket at the index-finger knuckle.
The Ancient One instinctively reached up and gripped the Eye of Agamotto on her chest.
It was a white-magic artefact reserved for the Supreme Sorcerer, able to dispel illusions, track magical creatures, and observe space-time.
This treasure had been left behind by Agamotto, the first Supreme Sorcerer and a descendant of the ancient gods.
It was an oval amulet wrapped in two layers of special alloy.
A vivid green gem was set at its centre.
Feeling the power of the Time Stone still dwelling inside the Eye of Agamotto, the Ancient One felt a faint sense of relief.
But confusion arose in her heart. If her Time Stone hadn't been lost, why did he have another one?
"Are you from the Time Bureau?" the Ancient One asked warily.
As the guardian of the Time Stone, the Ancient One also bore the heavy responsibility of protecting Earth and preventing the mysterious Dormammu from invading from the Dark Dimension.
Along the way, she had naturally come into contact with the Time Bureau.
She knew that the organisation managing the sacred timeline possessed Time Stones from other timelines.
If the strangely dressed man before her was a Time Bureau agent, that would explain the Time Stone in his hand.
Before Datch could answer, time around them suddenly stopped.
Concrete fragments blown loose by the blasts hung several metres above the ground.
The flames of the explosions froze into motionless rings of light, and smoke and dust hung in the air.
Several golden portals opened nearby.
A squad of fully armed Time Guardians stepped out of them.
They wore matching dark-grey tactical armour and carried an assortment of weapons designed to restrict the flow of time.
Holographic tactical displays showing live data were built into their helmet visors.
"Team One has located a dangerous anomaly unaffected by temporal constraints."
The leader was a Black woman.
Her epaulettes bore one more thick red stripe than those of the other team members, marking her clearly as the commander of this capture team.
Her gaze flicked back and forth between Datch and the Ancient One, and then she nodded to the Ancient One.
The Time Bureau agents clearly recognised the Ancient One and didn't bother the Supreme Sorcerer who protected Earth. Instead, they quickly spread out and surrounded Datch.
Each of them drew a baton from their belt. Those batons had the power to send a target to the end of time.
Anyone struck by one was banished to the terminus of the timeline.
"Restrict his time flow and banish this dangerous entity to the end of time!" the Black woman shouted.
As soon as she finished speaking, the agent beside her took out a special device that looked like a walkie-talkie.
The Time Limiter was one of the Time Bureau's proudest technological achievements.
It could forcibly extract a blank time branch from the underlying structure of the sacred timeline,
trapping the target in a loop that endlessly repeated the same meaningless moment.
The Time Guardian raised the Time Limiter, aimed it at Datch, and pressed down hard.
A strange temporal force took hold of him.
It was a power that bound the entire sacred timeline, trying to use him as an anchor and sever him from the flow of time.
The next instant, that power simply vanished.
For Datch, as he was now, time alone was no restriction.
Datch held out his hand, a faint smile on his lips.
He clenched the hand wearing the Infinity Gauntlet, and all six Infinity Stones blazed with dazzling light at once.
An invisible shockwave burst out from him in an instant.
The Time Guardians were swept away like withered leaves torn from the ground.
They spun through the air several times before slamming hard onto the asphalt.
Some crashed into the bombed-out wrecks of taxis along the roadside, and others rolled, dishevelled, into the rubble at the subway entrance.
The Time Guardians relied on Time Bureau equipment to catch criminals, and their own combat ability wasn't particularly high.
Once their temporal restraints were ignored, they were nothing but a bunch of cowards.
"This guy's too strong. Fall back." The Black woman at the front crawled out of a pile of rubble, looking thoroughly bedraggled.
The holographic display on her helmet visor had briefly malfunctioned in the shockwave.
When it finally came back, the screen was flooded with warning messages.
Realising she was no match for him, she firmly ordered a retreat and led the Time Guardians back through the time gate.
The whole thing was over in a few minutes, and it was a laughable sight.
Time began flowing again, and the superheroes went on fighting the invading aliens.
Datch turned back to the Ancient One.
"Sorry, we were interrupted. Let's continue."
"First, to answer your question, I'm not from the Time Bureau."
"I'm also against the idea of people living on a predetermined timeline. They have the right to choose their own future."
The Ancient One watched Datch with extreme wariness.
She was the strongest sorcerer on Earth and held the white-magic artefact, the Eye of Agamotto,
yet the man before her was far stronger than she had imagined.
Neither the alien invaders nor the Time Bureau's elite capture team had lasted a single exchange against him.
"Order binds people, yet without order the whole world would fall into chaos."
"I don't know where you came from, but please do not disturb the stability of this world. Keeping the timeline stable is the only way to prevent something even worse."
Hearing the Ancient One's words, Datch shook his head.
"People should have the right to choose for themselves, not leave the choice to others."
"You can't execute someone in advance because you think they'll commit a crime in the future."
"If you do, the order you're talking about is just dictatorship in another form."
The Ancient One stared at him and stayed silent for a while.
She knew very well that she couldn't persuade him.
"I hope we do not become enemies."
The Ancient One chanted a spell, and golden sparks appeared out of nowhere, spinning endlessly until they formed a portal through which she left.
After seeing the Ancient One off, Datch looked up at the New York sky and felt the urge to bring Old Huang along to broaden his horizons.
While I'm at it, I'll summon a hundred thousand original Astartes and conquer this universe's galaxy.
Before, I thought I was only playing a game and didn't take a lot of things seriously.
Now it's confirmed that I really time-travelled.
The Imperium of Man he had been supporting all along really existed, and the battles he had fought alongside so many heroes had really happened.
His thinking changed too. The rotten Warhammer universe needed fundamental reform.
The Emperor ought to be encouraged to travel to other universes and learn how to build a rational civilisation, rather than constantly reinventing the wheel.
Datch took Rick's portal gun from his game inventory, set coordinates in the Warhammer universe, opened a portal, and headed for Terra, the holy world of the Imperium of Man.
"Where did he go?" Stark and the officer, who had watched Datch and the Ancient One talking, were both completely bewildered.
That mysterious man had suddenly appeared and wiped out the Chitauri with a mere snap of his fingers.
Why had he suddenly left again?!
At that moment, the Emperor was strolling through the palace gardens with Valdor and Malcador.
After the Pantheon was established and the authority and power of faith in the Warp were divided among the newly canonised gods,
the Master of Mankind was freed from the Golden Throne and regained his freedom.
"I never imagined a day like this would come. A day when I could walk freely."
The Emperor gazed at the fairy-tale Terra in the distance, his voice full of joy.
When Horus rebelled and the Webway project failed, he had been gravely wounded and forced onto the patched-together Golden Throne.
Back then he had been on the brink of despair.
No matter how hard he tried to foresee the future, all he could see was darkness and despair.
With the Nameless One's help, the Imperium of Man had not only defeated the Warp gods and founded the Pantheon,
but it had also defeated the Tyranids and many xenos civilisations and brought the entire galaxy under control.
The Imperial fleet was now expanding into other star systems, and the Tyranids had gone from predators of the universe to the Imperium's most capable gardeners.
The Necrons, the Eldar, the T'au, the Squats, the greenskin Orks, the Kroot, and even the C'tan had become vassals or allies.
Without doubt, this was humanity's golden age.
"As Your Majesty says."
Malcador and Valdor agreed.
At that moment, a portal opened out of thin air.
The next instant, the Nameless One stepped out.
Just as the three leaders of the Imperium were about to greet him, Datch reached out and grabbed their hands.
Like ripples from a stone tossed into a pond, an invisible spatial force wrapped around the three of them and dragged them, along with the Custodes beside them, into the portal.
When their surroundings settled, the Emperor and his party found themselves on an unfamiliar battlefield.
Looking up, they saw a blue beam stabbing into the sky and tearing a gigantic wormhole open in the heavens.
Despite enormous losses, the Chitauri kept sending troops to Earth on Thanos's orders.
Stark and the officer, who had been completely bewildered just moments ago, stared at the mysterious man who had suddenly reappeared.
This time he had also brought a group of hulking giants clad in heavy golden armour, which left them even more dumbfounded.
The Emperor looked around, and ancient memories welled up in his heart.
He seemed to remember this scene. It came from an enormously popular franchise that had lasted from the dawn of humanity's information age all the way into the age of the stars.
"Is this the Battle of New York?"
The Emperor looked at the Nameless One. "You've taken us to another universe?"
Datch nodded. "That's right. Broaden your horizons, poor Old Huang!"
The Emperor: "…"
The first half of that sentence would have been plenty. The second half was completely unnecessary.
"What do you want us to do?" Unlike the Emperor, Malcador didn't have a perfect memory.
Besides, by the time he was born, humanity had already gone to the stars.
"Wipe out the enemy, of course." Datch pointed at the wormhole, from which alien invaders were still pouring out one after another.
"Let's do as the Nameless One says," the Emperor said, looking puzzled.
We've already been dragged onto the battlefield. How could we refuse?!
Valdor and his Custodes activated their weapons and formed ranks.
Datch glanced at the Custodes he had brought, levelled Rick's portal gun, fired, opened a portal, and summoned the original Astartes.
…