It made sense; this was, after all, the Marvel universe.
And while the TVA wasn't the most prominent organization, it was a powerful one, that, if it were around, would for sure want to deal with me.
"I see," I said aloud, my voice calm. "You're from the TVA."
My words seemed to break them out of their thoughts. They seemed surprised that I knew about them.
The one with the cracked gold visor tilted his head, just slightly. "That information is not supposed to be available to you."
I raised an eyebrow. "And yet, here I stand. Knowing it."
"Well, I guess we will have to find out how you knew about that. Nonetheless, you are coming with us." The one in the rear said as he pushed a few buttons on his wrist device. "Alright, they are ready to be bagged, let's clean up and get out of here."
Bagged.
I blinked slowly.
Did they truly think it would be that easy? Did they think that they, mere mortals, could beat me? I was divine; I was the Goddess of the Tower of the End, eternal and unbeatable. And here, they considered the act of taking me down, something so simple?
The one in front stepped closer, raising his pruning rod. "Don't resist. It will be painless."
That made me smile.
"Nothing about this will be painless," I said, and reached out.
Caliburn came to my hand with a shimmer of gold—graceful, inevitable. Its edge glowed like the sun filtered through memory. This was no battlefield, no war-torn field of screams—but Camelot's high tower still knew the sound of steel being drawn in judgment.
The agents flinched.
"Hostile action confirmed," one of them muttered. "Escalate to neutralization."
The one in the back once more clicked away on his device, and I felt a wave of temporal energy spread out. And as it did, the other two moved to attack.
The first agent lunged, his baton crackling with energy.
I narrowed my eyes, and raised my arm, placing my free hand in the way. I did so slowly, and he seemed pleased with himself as his stroke hit my palm.
"What!?" he asked, confused and shocked as nothing happened.
I kicked him in return, hard. His body immediately bent in a very unhealthy way before he shot backward like a cannonball. Disappearing back inside the square portal.
The two remaining agents stood frozen.
Not by hesitation.
By raw disbelief.
"She caught it," the second agent whispered. "She caught the strike—with her hand."
The operator in the back staggered back a step, jabbing at his device. "No, no—there's no precedent for that. That's not supposed to be possible!"
I took one step forward.
That was all it took to shatter whatever remained of their composure.
"Execute temporal stasis field!" the operator barked. "Zone lockdown—slow field at maximum compression!"
His device pulsed, and I felt it—a strange shiver in the air, like reality tightening around me. Time crawled. The wind stilled. Dust froze midair. Even the flickering flames of the torches far below stopped dancing.
Everything slowed.
Everything—except me.
While gods in the Marvel universe were often little more than powerful aliens, long-lived beings of great power. I was different.
My divinity belonged to the FATE universe, and the rules there were very different.
As a divine spirit, and a high-ranking one at that, as someone representing both the anchor of reality, and the End, I was beyond time.
Time held no meaning or power over me.
The TVA could speed it up, slow it down, freeze it, stop it, control it, and play with it. But time did nothing to me, for I stood at the End, the End of the world, the End of time itself.
I was on the second agent before he could so much as raise his baton. To his eyes, I would have appeared as a golden blur—an afterimage of something divine, merciless, and incomprehensibly fast.
Caliburn cut through the frozen air, and the poor man who thought to detain me and destroy my timeline.
The man never even had a chance to react before he was cut in two.
The last person, the one playing around with their tech, screamed.
"She's outside the field! She's outside the field! She's moving through the compression!"
I turned to face him, one step at a time, deliberate, even as the entire world lagged behind me.
He raised the TemPad again, desperately.
"No—no, no—this isn't possible! You're breaking the frame rate—!"
I reached him before the word ended.
One hand closed around the front of his suit. I lifted him, effortlessly, until his feet dangled over the edge of the tower.
"Fool, playing god, but you are but a man, flesh, blood, life and death." I said quietly, merely a whisper, before I released him.
And as expected, the next moment, another golden square portal opened under him, catching him and taking him back to safety.
I knew that the TVA was more than just three people, they could and would send hundreds after me. Because I was the pillar, my lance anchored this reality, making it impossible for them to erase it while I still stood.
So, to deal with my timeline, they had to deal with me, and I didn't want them coming after me all the damn time, which meant I had to deal with them once and for all.
So I let him run, knowing that he would soon be back.
And I was soon proven right.
After all, they controlled time itself, so they were able to show up the very next moment.
They came in force this time.
Not three.
Not ten.
Thirty.
Golden doors tore open in the sky like seams in parchment, spilling agents in every direction, forming a perimeter that encircled me, like they were hunting a cornered animal.
They didn't understand.
I was the beast they should've fled.
I opened my eyes.
One of them—higher-ranked, maybe a commander—stepped forward. His armor was more ornate, lined in red. "Arthur Pendragon. You have resisted correction and initiated lethal force against the Time Variance Authority."
"No," I said, "I am a king, I am the law, it is you who have sinned, and for that, you must face the king's judgment, my judgment!"
The commander hesitated.
Just for a breath.
And in that breath, the entire weight of Camelot bore down on him.
The ground beneath my feet shimmered, no longer just ancient stone—it was the myth of Albion made manifest. The wind howled through the pillars like a choir, and even the light bent toward me, as if memory itself stood at my back.
He raised his baton anyway.
"Engage."
The first agent came from behind. I didn't even look. I reached back and shattered his weapon with a flick of my wrist, the force of the impact sending him tumbling into another golden portal that had only half-formed.
Another rushed me from the side, baton drawn high. Caliburn sang. His weapon and body split in two as he crumpled to the floor, adding another puddle of blood to the ground.
I turned through them like a storm dressed in gold.
Their technology flickered. Their synchronization failed. Their breath caught in their chests as they realized—none of them could see me move.
Their normal tactic was using their technology to mess with time. Yet doing so wasn't easy. What they seemed to be doing, was freezing time entirely, stopping the entire timeline.
This would let them do pretty much whatever they wanted, given that everyone would be frozen in time. Perhaps the Ancient One could deal with that, given she had the Time Stone, but everyone else was bound by time.
So, against me, someone who couldn't be affected by time. They were reduced to normal humans, and normal humans were frankly nothing in front of me.
You cannot slow what does not move in mortal rhythm. You cannot pause a myth mid-sentence.
And so their weapons sparked against empty air.
For a while, they could only move at human speeds. I could move at speeds far beyond normal humans thanks to my Agility A, and that was before using any skills.
So I was a blur, and my blade moved the reaper's scythe as it effortlessly cut through them.
"Target is unaffected by compression!"
"She's outside the temporal field!"
"How?!"
"She's not in the timeline! She's overwriting it!"
A dozen golden squares opened in the sky above.
Reinforcements.
More TVA agents poured through—some with longer rods, some with field projectors the size of suitcases strapped to their backs. One even carried a reset charge large enough to take out a city block.
I raised my free hand.
"Excalibur Vivian!"
Water can be deadly, not enough water means death, too much, and you drown in it. Those are the most common ways to die from it.
Yet it wasn't the only way, another was cutting, putting enough pressure behind water, and slicing through steel like a hot knife through butter.
And Excalibur Vivian did just that.
With a light spin, I cut straight through all of the latest wave of attackers. Even their gates didn't get spared, as the powers of my weapon cut through time and space itself, it was a Noble Phantasm after all.
The agents fell in heaps, halved or flung like dolls into the night sky. The one with the city-block-sized reset charge had his containment pack carved open mid-jump—the volatile device exploded behind him in a shower of golden sparks that didn't even touch me.
They couldn't.
The water kept flowing.
Ribbons of liquid death danced around me, each movement of my blade refining the storm into elegance. It wasn't just power. It was art. The kind of terror only grace could instill.
They kept coming.
They kept dying.
Another gate opened—five more emerged.
Gone before they took two steps.
Another portal—this one opened sideways, low to the ground, trying to catch me off balance.
I spun and drove Excalibur Vivian downward—cleaving through the gateway as if it were a puddle, shattering the horizon with the crash of myth crashing into law.
One agent turned to flee.
I didn't chase him.
The tide did.
Water coiled through the tower like a serpent, caught him by the waist, and dragged him screaming through the air before smashing him into a collapsing timefield. His scream distorted as he vanished, broken and folded into static.
All around me, hundreds of bodies lay all over, most cut in half, some crushed, some pierced by highly pressured beams of water. It was total devastation, except that the tower itself was unharmed.
I waited, though not for long.
Next, portal after portal opened up all around me, trapping me in a tight circle with no gaps. Even above me was blocked.
I was trapped.
I had no doubt they tried to put one below me, but my feet couldn't be removed from my tower against my will.
They didn't let that stop them for long. Within moments, their attack came from all around.
Hundreds now.
Hundreds.
Temporal anchor-jammers.
Compression fields.
Null cages.
Reset detonators already armed.
I heard the whine of energy winding up, the hiss of rods being primed, the calculated cadence of their assault—synchronized down to the nanosecond.
To them, it was a trap.
To me, it was a gift.
They surrounded me to contain me.
But all they'd done was gather in one place.
I let them come.
I would teach them a lesson they would never forget, I would put the fear of the divine into them.
Letting both Excalibur Vivian and Caliburn dissolve into golden motes of light, I raised my hand—and summoned the one weapon that could answer this arrogance.
"Rhongomyniad: The Lance that Shines to the Ends of the World"
The air trembled.
Reality shuddered.
The very concept of distance warped around me as the golden pillar took form—taller than a man, vast as a monument. It did not gleam; it radiated—not with heat, but with order.
"O tower eternal, spine of the world—
O pillar divine, forged from light and will.
Let thy unyielding radiance declare my rule.
From sacred Camelot to the stars unseen—
My law is stone. My word is steel.
Reality itself bows before the throne."
"Come, Rhongomyniad—
Split the sky.
Banish the false.
Let none deny the right of kings."
The words ignited the storm.
The glyphs along the lance's shaft burst to life, ancient and divine, each syllable of the chant echoing across the fabric of space. The TVA agents froze—not in time this time, but in awe. In terror.
Through their gates, their portals, I sent the light of the end, I brought the very end to their base, for distance meant nothing before my lance, and with their portals to aid me, I had an easy target.
As the light came to an end. The portals were gone. And as I stood waiting, no new ones opened up. With a sigh, I dismissed my lance and finally allowed myself to relax a little. "Well, that wasn't too bad."
And honestly, it hadn't. They couldn't do anything to me. Not because they were weak, honestly, to toy with time like that was bullshit.
They were just unlucky to meet someone more bullshit than themselves.
Slowly, I bent down and picked up one of their little toys, a TemPad. And I almost immediately got a headache, I didn't understand it at all.
It wasn't as simple as a smartphone, it was alien. Sure, it was made by humans, for humans, but it was so far removed from current technology that it might as well be alien.
Not to mention, how the fuck do you open a portal through time and space? Like… sure, a space portal is one thing, just put in some coordinates, and it should be good… but what coordinates? How do you find those on a universal scale? Surely X and Y aren't good enough, and throw in time as well?
It would likely take me a while to figure out how to make it work.
(end of chapter)
So, not much of a fight. But then again, the people fighting weren't on the same level at all. only real powerhouses gets to go toe to toe with heroes of legend.
also, once more I used Caliburn over Excalibur, that is because I see Calibur as more of a one handed weapon, while Excalibur can be used in one hand, its best used in two.