He woke up in his bed with a strong pressure building in his chest, the pressure never got better...Always building up...Always screaming for release...
He had learned to live with it, of course, one of the perks of having a wife that could open doors into other barren worlds so he could [Release] some steam...
His [Wife]...
He still could remember the first time he had seen her, a woman dressed in robes with a gaggle of teenage girls dressed in frilly clothes, detaining a group of criminals with brilliant bolts of Mana, he had half a mind to scream at them for attacking civilians...And another half to try and recruit them into the army...
But the way Catherine had looked at him made him halt, she had the eyes of a seasoned war veteran, and even then with his skill in the initial stages...He could feel the intensity of the raging mana coursing through her veins...
So he reported it to Ethan and they tried to talk it out, but it didn't work, he still laughed when he remembered how much Ethan had complained about the extra work from that new type of [Powereds] running around, only that they all had the same [Power] and that wasn't possible.
It took them almost a year to get Catherine to spill it out that she was teaching those girls [Magic]...If not for the fact that they held superpowers no one would have believed it...But after they ran all the spies in the city through all the girls of the same age that her gaggle of subordinates...
They had to admit that there was [Magic] in the world, of course, it took more time to come to terms with the fact that they couldn't find the identity of those girls...And that even when they did find the identity of one of the girls anyone that found out ended with memory loss...
The higher-ups took the hint and stopped going after the students of Catherine. They ended up fighting against each other a few times and she was a monster, even while she was sandbagging...
Of course, he was more powerful than her nowadays, but that was part of his [Skill] at work...
The reason he managed to survive when [Ethan] got consumed by his [Skill]...The reason he was still alive even though he was just a farmhand who joined the army to follow his dreams of freedom and justice...
[The Seed] that rested in his chest, [The Hyperion Enhancement]. The [Skill] that had whispered into his ear the plans for his future, how it would grow...And how to grow it.
As far as he was aware, only he had a skill that could show his user with such precision its workings, at the beginning he doubted of course, but with each training session, he became aware of how it was the truth...What he could achieve with a week of training others took months if not years to match.
He was able to speed through the training thanks to this...He was able to match the mightiest heroes thanks to this...And...No matter what someone threw his way, he could overcome it after enough training.
Thunder? He sat in live cables for a week and they wouldn't hurt him as much by that point.
Fire? That was the first resistance he got thanks to sunburns from training camp.
Gunshots? Funny how fighting a war gives you plenty of opportunity to get shot at.
Knives? That one was harder to train up since they started taking his knives after a nurse asked how he got the wounds in his arms.
But that was the thing, wasn't it?
If you could get stronger just by training...Why wouldn't you? Anything he got closer to and could affect him in any way helped him grow, helped him be [More]. So when his [Skill] whispered to him to stick close to Ethan he took the advice.
And then...It started ramping up, his body started growing by bounds and leaps, he made it all the way to a spot in [The Twelve]'s...Training group, they would be the extended iteration for more miscellaneous work they said, right under the command of Ethan whose skill was deemed 'Not combat capable'.
Of course that was till they made that goddammed experiment to release more power out of Ethan's skill...Then everything went to hell, he had barely managed to survive the first expansive wave of shadows that tore through the city...
People got dragged into their own shadow screaming for help, and if he hadn't been around Ethan feeding [The Hyperion Enhancement]...He had been too, a few of the [Twelve] had died that way too.
The storybooks like to tell a fancy story about how they had died one by one at the hands of Ethan to give him the chance to strike at him...But no, the first of them to go down had been a sweet young girl who was with them only to be a medic, she didn't have enough mana to defend herself...
And the little she had she had used it to try and save everyone else, she died without saying a thing, unlike everyone else who got dragged into the shadows screaming, she instead went down giving instructions and directing people to give first aid.
He only noticed she was gone because her voice got cut down.
After she was gone they noticed how much she had given to them...And that she may have survived if only she had focused on herself because without her [Skill] helping them, three more died one after the other.
The Engineer of their team was the first one to go, then their scout...And the quartermaster...
Like that they lost the support staff, of course, the ones remaining were the sturdier of the lot, so they managed to leave the area of effect of the tide and tried to report to HQ, it wasn't till they left the city that they noticed how no one else had made it.
Not the refugee they rescued, not the rescue forces they called for...Instead, they found death and ruins...And in the middle a grim reaper.
His former boss...Cackling like a madman surrounded by Puppets, he had spoken about his puppets before.
How every single one of them was a facet of himself, how his skill let him imbue his feelings into them to animate them, and that he might be able to use the emotions of others if he was more powerful, but that he didn't want to do that since bad emotions were easier to use than good emotions, so he would need plenty of suffering to fuel his skills to a level that was combat acceptable for his position.
And there in the heart of the ruined city?
It was a legion of puppets, he remembers to this day the fear he had in his heart when the realization hit him, these puppets had been created using the fear and suffering of the city...
What happened next he isn't sure, and even though his wife Catherine had said she could probably pluck that scene with magic...He didn't want to see it.
He didn't want to know...
He didn't want to know if Ethan had Evolved or not his skill to allow him to puppeteer other powereds and use them against him...Or if he had used his former teammates as fuel to evolve his own Skill.
What he remembered for certain was that Catherine had arrived when he was alone and almost dead, giving him just enough time for [The Seed] to evolve his skill to Unique and grant him the strength needed to kill Ethan.
Of course that only served to spill his [Madness] over the world creating the Tainted, but that was still better than letting him go after what he had done...
And besides, not everything was bad, thanks to that he managed to get quite close to Catherine, when the fight had started she apparently deceived her students to cast High Tier Ritual Magic that wasted most of their mana and then teleported them away to a safe spot.
She stayed and helped him fight off Ethan of course, but risked much in doing so, those pictures of him guarding her while she slept from Mana Drain were among his wife's favorite pictures.
It still took him almost 100 years to convince himself to date her, but that had been worth the wait......Which made their next discovery more painful for them, he already suspected it, of course, he knew his body the best thanks to his skill.
If he could rip away his [Seed] he would have done so in a heartbeat if only to give Catherine the child she wanted with him, no one should ever need to go through something like that.
[The Seed] had changed his body in many ways, some wonderful that allowed him to be above and beyond what a mortal should have...Others allowed him to adapt to any environment, he was nearly immortal in some aspects...
But others...Others meant that his body was no longer [Human], he...He couldn't have children with normal people anymore. He suspected this, as his [Skill] claimed Catherine wasn't [The one], but if she wasn't who would be?
Catherine was the most powerful woman in the world, the most brilliant star in the sky...And the woman he loved, so he squished the grumblings of his skills and started to make his skill [Evolve] in a way that allowed his body to be more [Human].
He even investigated how the [Taint] had affected his body when Ethan's mana spilled over the world, recruiting the help of a girl whose skill was also [Shadow] aligned. The heir of the Windsor family, Eleanor Windsor.
When his skill seemed to want him to stay extra time around her he ignored it and only took what was needed and carried on, they both experimented with different types of skills and spells to affect their bodies.
In the end, Catherine decided to make her own body similar to his, breaking down her flesh into mana and molding it to imitate his, this was an extreme variation of the normal [Shift], to rebuild the body in the image of something else...
This proved the mastery Catherine had over mana, the human body, and her own [Soul], the effects speak for themselves as her body stopped rejecting his, and with some acclimatation to the change and their mana's synching up...
She finally got pregnant, their own little star growing in Catherine...The fruit of almost 45 years of effort...That was the happiest moment of his life......
And [The Seed] had quieted down too!
The weeks and months next were full of activity, as [The Twelve] ramped up activities to make sure they could handle everything without him and Catherine around.
The Magical Girl Council mostly settled for magical threats as they called them, something about rifts? He didn't pay much attention to that, Catherine said that they would handle it and she left it at that, most magical users, girls or boys tended to work as [Heroes] too, so if it was something they needed to deal with they would in that facility.
No, the problems started around the end of the first trimester, by the twelfth week of pregnancy Catherine started to present symptoms usually attributed to a high-risk pregnancy...
Only hers were more...Extreme...
Her mana oscillated wildly from time to time, she would in one morning start siphoning mana at high speeds only for her mana to go nowhere and burst out, most of the time he could help her by feeding her his mana of course...
But he wasn't able to be 24/7 with her, that was the first time he had a serious talk with [Villains], it helped that Eleanore (Now Echidna) called in the favor...
They grudgingly accepted a temporal cease-fire till Catherine's pregnancy ended...Most of them, the only ones that didn't seem to want to accept...Well...They never found his body, nor did the others find out what aspect of his [Skill] he had used.
By the second trimester of pregnancy, the symptoms started to get worse, and Catherine said she could feel herself going into mana deprivation...But that was dangerous as her body was made mostly of mana, this would mean that she needed to return to a more [Human] body...
But that would risk their daughter's health, he made a call to arms for [The Twelve] to find a solution, and even promised to help any [Villain] to conquer any nation in the world should they find a solution.
But...No one could, no one dared to give a half solution even...Catherine's health started declining and the chances of their daughter's coming to this world got less viable by the minute, at some point no doctor, healer, or even mage dared to accept his calls.
His world was about to end.
"We have an option..." Had said Catherine bringing back hope to his world.
She spoke of a [Clan], her [Clan]. A clan that ruled in secrecy in her former world, she claimed this one didn't exist in this world, but that in her former world, they were almost 200 hundred years ahead of everyone else...
And they didn't even have access to mana!
She spoke about how before coming to this world she had stopped by there and left them a sample of a mana crystal to work with, so now...Almost 130 years later they should have some good understanding about [Mana].
But that the leader might ask something of them, "He can ask me the world and I will serve it to him if he can save you both." That was what I said to her before she grimaced and opened a portal.
What we found on the other side...Wasn't promising, I was expecting a world of high-rise buildings, maybe one of those spaceships they use in TV series, instead...
We found ruins of a dead world, "This...This isn't possible!" Screeched Catherine, this world...
Was dead.
The sky was ripe with cracks in the air from where huge streams of mana leaked into the world, the floor behind them was brittle, the trees were deformed by huge amounts of mana, and it was only his own mana that kept the monsters at bay.
Catherine quickly summoned a few magic circles to cast spells, but after summoning them she spit blood and started coughing, so I fed them my own mana while carrying the woman.
I recognized the design of those, "[Tracking Spell]" mumbled Catherine while I kissed her forehead as she fell asleep, the spell was active and pointing in a direction.
Whoever it was that she had come to find I would find.
The sake of my wife and daughter at risk there wasn't any other option, the portal behind had closed and in the distance, a high-rise building stood with the emblem of an eagle with a scroll in its claws.
"Saintsworth's Conglomerate?" Said at the side of the delirium building, the spell seemed to point that way.
What he found in the building wasn't that impressive all things considered, a big reception area with a statue of what looked to be a missile, an elevator on the opposite side of the doors, and a hidden plate on one side of the reception desk.
Catherine's spell pointed downwards so he searched for a lever or a device to feed his mana to activate something...But when he found nothing he just kicked the floor and collapsed it to jump down.
At the bottom of the travel he found a blonde kid sitting in a station near the dead body of a girl that looked like him, probably his twin sister, the only difference between both was that the girl was dressed in a white dress and the kid in a pair of jeans and a shirt.
"This area is restricted, go and die elsewhere." Said the kid in a tired tone. He felt bad for the kid, but Catherine's Spell was pointing at him.
And after he spoke another one of her spells woke Catherine up, "We need help Clan leader...I need help..."
"The clan is dead, the world is dead...The saintsworths are no more...I...I made a mistake...It was a misunderstanding..." Said the kid, and then he started laughing "IT WAS ALL A BLOODY MISUNDERSTANDING!"
He turned around and he could see the similarities, he could probably pass up as Catherine's cousin, the only difference was that his eyes were yellow while Catherine's were blue.
"You shouldn't have brought mana here, no. We would have probably done the same even without it, we had the crystal already anyway..." He said before narrowing his eyes, now that he was seeing them he seemed to notice Catherine's belly.
"...Goddammit Catherine." He spat before turning to see the little girl on the floor, her blood was still fresh, but her legs were turning...Gray?
"Fine, but it will cost you. What do you need?" Asked the kid.
He still found amusing how that kid was the hope Catherine was searching for, how could a brat not older than 7 years be their hope?
"I want my daughter to live...I will open a door to our world and allow the Saintsworths to live there, will that be enough Alexanders?" Said Catherine, he still didn't understand why she held so much belief in that brat, but he would trust the woman he loved.
"Hmm..." Mumbled the brat while a yellow shine in his eyes seemed to scan her wife's body, his [Seed] recoiled at that but he grumbled and stood still. "Yeah, I can work something, you did a number on your body there, but nothing that can't be solved...I can't do anything about the scars, but the girl will live."
Huh?
"You muscle head put Catherine in that pod." And what followed was the most bizarre thing he had ever seen.
His wife's body was dissected open without a single drop of blood flowing, she was awake while her body was re-designed in real-time, and his eyes he could see how the mana stream was being tweaked in real-time...By the end of the surgery, Catherine's body was full of wounds, but her face held a smile that he hadn't seen since the first symptoms showed up.
"A deal is a deal, where are the rest of the clansmen?" Said Catherine with a chirp in her voice.
The face the kid did...That face still haunts him to this day.
"Here." He said throwing a crystal towards his wife, "Eat that thing and our deal will be fulfilled, when you land in your world it should teleport a clone of the top sons and daughters of the clan, they will settle and work in their own, if you end up seeing one of me give him some help."
And then he returned to the same spot near the girl's body where he sat in silence.
"What happened?" Asked his wife while swallowing the crystal, he saw for a small fraction of a second a mana pulse resonate from Catherine to the small mana blob that was his daughter.
"Nothing that your little head needs to worry about, it's Saintsworth's problem and you aren't one anymore." He said in a cutting tone, "Now leave...This world will not hold much longer, your daughter will be fine, I left a program to monitor her health, it should turn itself off when she is safe."
And like that, they returned home, Catherine didn't fix her appearance till she gave birth to a lovely girl, afterward, she made a habit of always using a [Shift] to look normal, mostly so Elizabeth (Their daughter) never had to see the gruesome appearance Catherine had after that surgery.
And they lived happily ever after.
Till Elizabeth was five...Then [Fate] played their cards on them, it wasn't enough that Catherine had to remodel her own body...It wasn't enough that they had to travel to a dead world to find help...
It wasn't enough that the clone of the kid ended up as an adult and wanted to take over the financial world and he couldn't stop him because he owed him (And the clone somehow knew it).
No...
His daughter [Triggered]...And she somehow was [Tainted], but that wasn't the normal variation...No... She...She had the same look as Ethan when he was fighting them as [The Stygian Bane]...
And she spoke in a mechanical voice, the [Taint] receded when they came close to her, and what was worse was that Catherine's spells returned that she had a [Soulscape] forming already!
That meant she had talent as a mage...A powered mage, "MOTHER WILL HAVE ITS DUE!!!!" Raved the [Villain] in the background, he couldn't be bothered with that so he threw it into the sun.
The UN complained about this later, but since they held no power and not a single member of the [Twelve] was dumb enough to do something about it they let it go. But this meant that Elizabeth's future was set in stone before she could even make a choice...
She would need to train her mana, be it as powered or mage...She wouldn't even get the choice to live a normal life...This...This hurt him way more than anything else before.
Time moved on, and he learned to cope with it, so when a morning he was waked up by an alarm "What is that?" Said Catherine while he rushed to open a drawer.
"The alarm of my old team." He answered an alarm that very few people could trigger...John was one, the man he had put to train Elizabeth, Eleanore was the other...
This was a priority alarm "[Priority Black, rendezvous at this coordinates.]" He ordered into a secure channel before turning to the bed only to find Catherine standing in full magical girl regalia already.
"There are two people that can trigger that alarm, the first is John..." He started saying.
Catherine caught up on it "And that would mean Eli-Eli is in danger." She narrowed her eyes focusing on something "The monitoring spell is gone." Said his Wife while her face blanched, something that should be impossible since that was a body made of mana and didn't have blood vessels...Not like normal anyway.
"And the second is Eleanore..."At this, his wife narrowed her eyes, "I mean [Echidna], but that is less likely since no one should be able to harm her anyway."
Catherine seemed to think that Echidna liked him...And while she did (He wasn't that dense), he never reciprocated the feelings, even with all the grumbling [The seed] did about it.
No... He had Catherine and Elizabeth, that was enough for him.
"Ready for teleport?" Said his wife while she summoned a magic circle, "[Suit up]." He commanded and a body armor flowed into his body, giving him his dark blue suit while his body transformed into the mass of muscles that the world knew as [The American Crusader].
They disappeared in a flash of light only to reappear on the roof of a building, at the distance they saw the flare that had called for them "[ETA 5 minutes.]" Came the voice of [The Tinker] into his ear.
They must have been quite far away to not answer in less time, it mattered not.
"Let's go." They would be able to deal with it fast enough.
He probably didn't even need the other 10 members of the twelve...
But when he arrived at the scene...
He found [Something] his daughter in her school uniform held by the neck by [Shadow Pact], the son of Eleanore...Elizabeth's cheeks were red and her eyes almost turned white when he spoke, his voice icy.
What surprised him more was that Maximilian didn't let go of his daughter and instead called her a pretender, his senses told him that was his daughter, he knew Maximilian was aware of this...
He turned to his wife who also confirmed she was their daughter, at least till Elizabeth spoke "It is her, but something is going on, my defenses are gone and her [Soulscape] seems fractured.” And she was frowning as if something was going on that she didn't know how to explain.
This...This was going to be complicated, something within him stirred when Elizabeth spoke, something...
Something he hadn't felt since [Ethan], and for some reason, his [Seed] was sending him a feeling of [Smugness] his way, "Either way Maximilian Windsor, release the Civilian. Since she has no mask or body armor she isn't a powered in combat...Since she is not leaking mana signals she isn't a Magical girl, as such...You are currently assaulting a civilian." He would deal with this as a [Hero] while his wife used her magic to scan.
"Oooh yeah, assault me Max " Came the voice of his daughter in a purr...She was purring?
He knew she had a thing going for Shadow Pact...But something about how she was talking just gave him shivers, it was like if you found your old army pal and he was different from how you remembered.
He woke up in his bed with a strong pressure building in his chest, the pressure never got better...Always building up...Always screaming for release...
He had learned to live with it, of course, one of the perks of having a wife that could open doors into other barren worlds so he could [Release] some steam...
His [Wife]...
He still could remember the first time he had seen her, a woman dressed in robes with a gaggle of teenage girls dressed in frilly clothes, detaining a group of criminals with brilliant bolts of Mana, he had half a mind to scream at them for attacking civilians...And another half to try and recruit them into the army...
But the way Catherine had looked at him made him halt, she had the eyes of a seasoned war veteran, and even then with his skill in the initial stages...He could feel the intensity of the raging mana coursing through her veins...
So he reported it to Ethan and they tried to talk it out, but it didn't work, he still laughed when he remembered how much Ethan had complained about the extra work from that new type of [Powereds] running around, only that they all had the same [Power] and that wasn't possible.
It took them almost a year to get Catherine to spill it out that she was teaching those girls [Magic]...If not for the fact that they held superpowers no one would have believed it...But after they ran all the spies in the city through all the girls of the same age that her gaggle of subordinates...
They had to admit that there was [Magic] in the world, of course, it took more time to come to terms with the fact that they couldn't find the identity of those girls...And that even when they did find the identity of one of the girls anyone that found out ended with memory loss...
The higher-ups took the hint and stopped going after the students of Catherine. They ended up fighting against each other a few times and she was a monster, even while she was sandbagging...
Of course, he was more powerful than her nowadays, but that was part of his [Skill] at work...
The reason he managed to survive when [Ethan] got consumed by his [Skill]...The reason he was still alive even though he was just a farmhand who joined the army to follow his dreams of freedom and justice...
[The Seed] that rested in his chest, [The Hyperion Enhancement]. The [Skill] that had whispered into his ear the plans for his future, how it would grow...And how to grow it.
As far as he was aware, only he had a skill that could show his user with such precision its workings, at the beginning he doubted of course, but with each training session, he became aware of how it was the truth...What he could achieve with a week of training others took months if not years to match.
He was able to speed through the training thanks to this...He was able to match the mightiest heroes thanks to this...And...No matter what someone threw his way, he could overcome it after enough training.
Thunder? He sat in live cables for a week and they wouldn't hurt him as much by that point.
Fire? That was the first resistance he got thanks to sunburns from training camp.
Gunshots? Funny how fighting a war gives you plenty of opportunity to get shot at.
Knives? That one was harder to train up since they started taking his knives after a nurse asked how he got the wounds in his arms.
But that was the thing, wasn't it?
If you could get stronger just by training...Why wouldn't you? Anything he got closer to and could affect him in any way helped him grow, helped him be [More]. So when his [Skill] whispered to him to stick close to Ethan he took the advice.
And then...It started ramping up, his body started growing by bounds and leaps, he made it all the way to a spot in [The Twelve]'s...Training group, they would be the extended iteration for more miscellaneous work they said, right under the command of Ethan whose skill was deemed 'Not combat capable'.
Of course that was till they made that goddammed experiment to release more power out of Ethan's skill...Then everything went to hell, he had barely managed to survive the first expansive wave of shadows that tore through the city...
People got dragged into their own shadow screaming for help, and if he hadn't been around Ethan feeding [The Hyperion Enhancement]...He had been too, a few of the [Twelve] had died that way too.
The storybooks like to tell a fancy story about how they had died one by one at the hands of Ethan to give him the chance to strike at him...But no, the first of them to go down had been a sweet young girl who was with them only to be a medic, she didn't have enough mana to defend herself...
And the little she had she had used it to try and save everyone else, she died without saying a thing, unlike everyone else who got dragged into the shadows screaming, she instead went down giving instructions and directing people to give first aid.
He only noticed she was gone because her voice got cut down.
After she was gone they noticed how much she had given to them...And that she may have survived if only she had focused on herself because without her [Skill] helping them, three more died one after the other.
The Engineer of their team was the first one to go, then their scout...And the quartermaster...
Like that they lost the support staff, of course, the ones remaining were the sturdier of the lot, so they managed to leave the area of effect of the tide and tried to report to HQ, it wasn't till they left the city that they noticed how no one else had made it.
Not the refugee they rescued, not the rescue forces they called for...Instead, they found death and ruins...And in the middle a grim reaper.
His former boss...Cackling like a madman surrounded by Puppets, he had spoken about his puppets before.
How every single one of them was a facet of himself, how his skill let him imbue his feelings into them to animate them, and that he might be able to use the emotions of others if he was more powerful, but that he didn't want to do that since bad emotions were easier to use than good emotions, so he would need plenty of suffering to fuel his skills to a level that was combat acceptable for his position.
And there in the heart of the ruined city?
It was a legion of puppets, he remembers to this day the fear he had in his heart when the realization hit him, these puppets had been created using the fear and suffering of the city...
What happened next he isn't sure, and even though his wife Catherine had said she could probably pluck that scene with magic...He didn't want to see it.
He didn't want to know...
He didn't want to know if Ethan had Evolved or not his skill to allow him to puppeteer other powereds and use them against him...Or if he had used his former teammates as fuel to evolve his own Skill.
What he remembered for certain was that Catherine had arrived when he was alone and almost dead, giving him just enough time for [The Seed] to evolve his skill to Unique and grant him the strength needed to kill Ethan.
Of course that only served to spill his [Madness] over the world creating the Tainted, but that was still better than letting him go after what he had done...
And besides, not everything was bad, thanks to that he managed to get quite close to Catherine, when the fight had started she apparently deceived her students to cast High Tier Ritual Magic that wasted most of their mana and then teleported them away to a safe spot.
She stayed and helped him fight off Ethan of course, but risked much in doing so, those pictures of him guarding her while she slept from Mana Drain were among his wife's favorite pictures.
It still took him almost 100 years to convince himself to date her, but that had been worth the wait......Which made their next discovery more painful for them, he already suspected it, of course, he knew his body the best thanks to his skill.
If he could rip away his [Seed] he would have done so in a heartbeat if only to give Catherine the child she wanted with him, no one should ever need to go through something like that.
[The Seed] had changed his body in many ways, some wonderful that allowed him to be above and beyond what a mortal should have...Others allowed him to adapt to any environment, he was nearly immortal in some aspects...
But others...Others meant that his body was no longer [Human], he...He couldn't have children with normal people anymore. He suspected this, as his [Skill] claimed Catherine wasn't [The one], but if she wasn't who would be?
Catherine was the most powerful woman in the world, the most brilliant star in the sky...And the woman he loved, so he squished the grumblings of his skills and started to make his skill [Evolve] in a way that allowed his body to be more [Human].
He even investigated how the [Taint] had affected his body when Ethan's mana spilled over the world, recruiting the help of a girl whose skill was also [Shadow] aligned. The heir of the Windsor family, Eleanor Windsor.
When his skill seemed to want him to stay extra time around her he ignored it and only took what was needed and carried on, they both experimented with different types of skills and spells to affect their bodies.
In the end, Catherine decided to make her own body similar to his, breaking down her flesh into mana and molding it to imitate his, this was an extreme variation of the normal [Shift], to rebuild the body in the image of something else...
This proved the mastery Catherine had over mana, the human body, and her own [Soul], the effects speak for themselves as her body stopped rejecting his, and with some acclimatation to the change and their mana's synching up...
She finally got pregnant, their own little star growing in Catherine...The fruit of almost 45 years of effort...That was the happiest moment of his life......
And [The Seed] had quieted down too!
The weeks and months next were full of activity, as [The Twelve] ramped up activities to make sure they could handle everything without him and Catherine around.
The Magical Girl Council mostly settled for magical threats as they called them, something about rifts? He didn't pay much attention to that, Catherine said that they would handle it and she left it at that, most magical users, girls or boys tended to work as [Heroes] too, so if it was something they needed to deal with they would in that facility.
No, the problems started around the end of the first trimester, by the twelfth week of pregnancy Catherine started to present symptoms usually attributed to a high-risk pregnancy...
Only hers were more...Extreme...
Her mana oscillated wildly from time to time, she would in one morning start siphoning mana at high speeds only for her mana to go nowhere and burst out, most of the time he could help her by feeding her his mana of course...
But he wasn't able to be 24/7 with her, that was the first time he had a serious talk with [Villains], it helped that Eleanore (Now Echidna) called in the favor...
They grudgingly accepted a temporal cease-fire till Catherine's pregnancy ended...Most of them, the only ones that didn't seem to want to accept...Well...They never found his body, nor did the others find out what aspect of his [Skill] he had used.
By the second trimester of pregnancy, the symptoms started to get worse, and Catherine said she could feel herself going into mana deprivation...But that was dangerous as her body was made mostly of mana, this would mean that she needed to return to a more [Human] body...
But that would risk their daughter's health, he made a call to arms for [The Twelve] to find a solution, and even promised to help any [Villain] to conquer any nation in the world should they find a solution.
But...No one could, no one dared to give a half solution even...Catherine's health started declining and the chances of their daughter's coming to this world got less viable by the minute, at some point no doctor, healer, or even mage dared to accept his calls.
His world was about to end.
"We have an option..." Had said Catherine bringing back hope to his world.
She spoke of a [Clan], her [Clan]. A clan that ruled in secrecy in her former world, she claimed this one didn't exist in this world, but that in her former world, they were almost 200 hundred years ahead of everyone else...
And they didn't even have access to mana!
She spoke about how before coming to this world she had stopped by there and left them a sample of a mana crystal to work with, so now...Almost 130 years later they should have some good understanding about [Mana].
But that the leader might ask something of them, "He can ask me the world and I will serve it to him if he can save you both." That was what I said to her before she grimaced and opened a portal.
What we found on the other side...Wasn't promising, I was expecting a world of high-rise buildings, maybe one of those spaceships they use in TV series, instead...
We found ruins of a dead world, "This...This isn't possible!" Screeched Catherine, this world...
Was dead.
The sky was ripe with cracks in the air from where huge streams of mana leaked into the world, the floor behind them was brittle, the trees were deformed by huge amounts of mana, and it was only his own mana that kept the monsters at bay.
Catherine quickly summoned a few magic circles to cast spells, but after summoning them she spit blood and started coughing, so I fed them my own mana while carrying the woman.
I recognized the design of those, "[Tracking Spell]" mumbled Catherine while I kissed her forehead as she fell asleep, the spell was active and pointing in a direction.
Whoever it was that she had come to find I would find.
The sake of my wife and daughter at risk there wasn't any other option, the portal behind had closed and in the distance, a high-rise building stood with the emblem of an eagle with a scroll in its claws.
"Saintsworth's Conglomerate?" Said at the side of the delirium building, the spell seemed to point that way.
What he found in the building wasn't that impressive all things considered, a big reception area with a statue of what looked to be a missile, an elevator on the opposite side of the doors, and a hidden plate on one side of the reception desk.
Catherine's spell pointed downwards so he searched for a lever or a device to feed his mana to activate something...But when he found nothing he just kicked the floor and collapsed it to jump down.
At the bottom of the travel he found a blonde kid sitting in a station near the dead body of a girl that looked like him, probably his twin sister, the only difference between both was that the girl was dressed in a white dress and the kid in a pair of jeans and a shirt.
"This area is restricted, go and die elsewhere." Said the kid in a tired tone. He felt bad for the kid, but Catherine's Spell was pointing at him.
And after he spoke another one of her spells woke Catherine up, "We need help Clan leader...I need help..."
"The clan is dead, the world is dead...The saintsworths are no more...I...I made a mistake...It was a misunderstanding..." Said the kid, and then he started laughing "IT WAS ALL A BLOODY MISUNDERSTANDING!"
He turned around and he could see the similarities, he could probably pass up as Catherine's cousin, the only difference was that his eyes were yellow while Catherine's were blue.
"You shouldn't have brought mana here, no. We would have probably done the same even without it, we had the crystal already anyway..." He said before narrowing his eyes, now that he was seeing them he seemed to notice Catherine's belly.
"...Goddammit Catherine." He spat before turning to see the little girl on the floor, her blood was still fresh, but her legs were turning...Gray?
"Fine, but it will cost you. What do you need?" Asked the kid.
He still found amusing how that kid was the hope Catherine was searching for, how could a brat not older than 7 years be their hope?
"I want my daughter to live...I will open a door to our world and allow the Saintsworths to live there, will that be enough Alexanders?" Said Catherine, he still didn't understand why she held so much belief in that brat, but he would trust the woman he loved.
"Hmm..." Mumbled the brat while a yellow shine in his eyes seemed to scan her wife's body, his [Seed] recoiled at that but he grumbled and stood still. "Yeah, I can work something, you did a number on your body there, but nothing that can't be solved...I can't do anything about the scars, but the girl will live."
Huh?
"You muscle head put Catherine in that pod." And what followed was the most bizarre thing he had ever seen.
His wife's body was dissected open without a single drop of blood flowing, she was awake while her body was re-designed in real-time, and his eyes he could see how the mana stream was being tweaked in real-time...By the end of the surgery, Catherine's body was full of wounds, but her face held a smile that he hadn't seen since the first symptoms showed up.
"A deal is a deal, where are the rest of the clansmen?" Said Catherine with a chirp in her voice.
The face the kid did...That face still haunts him to this day.
"Here." He said throwing a crystal towards his wife, "Eat that thing and our deal will be fulfilled, when you land in your world it should teleport a clone of the top sons and daughters of the clan, they will settle and work in their own, if you end up seeing one of me give him some help."
And then he returned to the same spot near the girl's body where he sat in silence.
"What happened?" Asked his wife while swallowing the crystal, he saw for a small fraction of a second a mana pulse resonate from Catherine to the small mana blob that was his daughter.
"Nothing that your little head needs to worry about, it's Saintsworth's problem and you aren't one anymore." He said in a cutting tone, "Now leave...This world will not hold much longer, your daughter will be fine, I left a program to monitor her health, it should turn itself off when she is safe."
And like that, they returned home, Catherine didn't fix her appearance till she gave birth to a lovely girl, afterward, she made a habit of always using a [Shift] to look normal, mostly so Elizabeth (Their daughter) never had to see the gruesome appearance Catherine had after that surgery.
And they lived happily ever after.
Till Elizabeth was five...Then [Fate] played their cards on them, it wasn't enough that Catherine had to remodel her own body...It wasn't enough that they had to travel to a dead world to find help...
It wasn't enough that the clone of the kid ended up as an adult and wanted to take over the financial world and he couldn't stop him because he owed him (And the clone somehow knew it).
No...
His daughter [Triggered]...And she somehow was [Tainted], but that wasn't the normal variation...No... She...She had the same look as Ethan when he was fighting them as [The Stygian Bane]...
And she spoke in a mechanical voice, the [Taint] receded when they came close to her, and what was worse was that Catherine's spells returned that she had a [Soulscape] forming already!
That meant she had talent as a mage...A powered mage, "MOTHER WILL HAVE ITS DUE!!!!" Raved the [Villain] in the background, he couldn't be bothered with that so he threw it into the sun.
The UN complained about this later, but since they held no power and not a single member of the [Twelve] was dumb enough to do something about it they let it go. But this meant that Elizabeth's future was set in stone before she could even make a choice...
She would need to train her mana, be it as powered or mage...She wouldn't even get the choice to live a normal life...This...This hurt him way more than anything else before.
Time moved on, and he learned to cope with it, so when a morning he was waked up by an alarm "What is that?" Said Catherine while he rushed to open a drawer.
"The alarm of my old team." He answered an alarm that very few people could trigger...John was one, the man he had put to train Elizabeth, Eleanore was the other...
This was a priority alarm "[Priority Black, rendezvous at this coordinates.]" He ordered into a secure channel before turning to the bed only to find Catherine standing in full magical girl regalia already.
"There are two people that can trigger that alarm, the first is John..." He started saying.
Catherine caught up on it "And that would mean Eli-Eli is in danger." She narrowed her eyes focusing on something "The monitoring spell is gone." Said his Wife while her face blanched, something that should be impossible since that was a body made of mana and didn't have blood vessels...Not like normal anyway.
"And the second is Eleanore..."At this, his wife narrowed her eyes, "I mean [Echidna], but that is less likely since no one should be able to harm her anyway."
Catherine seemed to think that Echidna liked him...And while she did (He wasn't that dense), he never reciprocated the feelings, even with all the grumbling [The seed] did about it.
No... He had Catherine and Elizabeth, that was enough for him.
"Ready for teleport?" Said his wife while she summoned a magic circle, "[Suit up]." He commanded and a body armor flowed into his body, giving him his dark blue suit while his body transformed into the mass of muscles that the world knew as [The American Crusader].
They disappeared in a flash of light only to reappear on the roof of a building, at the distance they saw the flare that had called for them "[ETA 5 minutes.]" Came the voice of [The Tinker] into his ear.
They must have been quite far away to not answer in less time, it mattered not.
"Let's go." They would be able to deal with it fast enough.
He probably didn't even need the other 10 members of the twelve...
But when he arrived at the scene...
He found [Something] his daughter in her school uniform held by the neck by [Shadow Pact], the son of Eleanore...Elizabeth's cheeks were red and her eyes almost turned white when he spoke, his voice icy.
What surprised him more was that Maximilian didn't let go of his daughter and instead called her a pretender, his senses told him that was his daughter, he knew Maximilian was aware of this...
He turned to his wife who also confirmed she was their daughter, at least till Elizabeth spoke "It is her, but something is going on, my defenses are gone and her [Soulscape] seems fractured.” And she was frowning as if something was going on that she didn't know how to explain.
This...This was going to be complicated, something within him stirred when Elizabeth spoke, something...
Something he hadn't felt since [Ethan], and for some reason, his [Seed] was sending him a feeling of [Smugness] his way, "Either way Maximilian Windsor, release the Civilian. Since she has no mask or body armor she isn't a powered in combat...Since she is not leaking mana signals she isn't a Magical girl, as such...You are currently assaulting a civilian." He would deal with this as a [Hero] while his wife used her magic to scan.
"Oooh yeah, assault me Max " Came the voice of his daughter in a purr...She was purring?
He knew she had a thing going for Shadow Pact...But something about how she was talking just gave him shivers, it was like if you found your old army pal and he was different from how you remembered.
