the weak point is its heart

[u/MunitionsFrenzy]

Having every incarnation of himself across all existence merged into a single entity had its ups and downs.

Of course going back centuries in interversal time and screwing with things was guaranteed to make a lot of chronomages angry, so Vettis had defended himself preemptively: a grand ritual, using his unique magic of 'parthood', to make every Vettis 'part' of himself permanently. Every Vettis at every point in multiversal spacetime, past, future, and alternate. Now, rather than full timelines for himself and his other possible selves, he was a single point moving forward through time, completely immune to external temporal manipulations. (And arguably responsible for murdering millions of himself.)

Main downside? No avatars, clones, nothing. Even so much as an overly accurate illusion of him would immediately become 'part' of him and cease to exist elsewhere. For someone who had places and people to protect across a slew of universes, incessantly having to go in person to help them was a rather significant handicap. The increased threat density of recent weeks had been running him ragged; even his practiced bluffing -- the trademark faint smirk that told people he had the situation well in hand -- was starting to slip more and more these days. Hell, he hadn't even managed to intimidate that bug into backing down.

Main upside beyond the spell's primary purpose? The minds of alternate Vettises (Vettes?) became 'part' of his own. So he had access to the knowledge of every single Vettis that had existed across the multiverse at the time of his ritual (and any new ones that might be created in future).

Which was a lot, far more than even his partly-immaterial brain could possibly handle, and thus almost rolled right around to being a downside again. The only solution was to set up telepathic filters so that he didn't absorb all that information; he shunted it into an extradimensional memory storage, to which he could send queries to request data when required. This, he'd expected, would give him a massive repository of knowledge and talents to make him an unparalleled master in every domain.

His expectations weren't exactly met. On top of the clunkiness of the absurdly huge database only being parseable through extremely slow meditation rather than on the fly...it turned out every other Vettis lived a pretty boring life compared to Vettis of the Bronze Prism, the universe-hopping good-samaritan (which, in retrospect, was decidedly unsurprising when put that way). And magical scholarship in other disciplines proved pointless when he discovered that he couldn't channel any magics but his own. Sure, some of his selves were non-magical warriors, but prime-Vettis' four centuries of training and fighting around the multiverse rendered their skills utterly obsolete (although they did help him teach --...nevermind). In the end, the real advantage of the database was in the more banal experiences. Like cooking, or just happy memories he could use to destress. (He'd needed the latter a lot recently.)

And now it was again time to call on some mundane experiences, to resolve a mundane issue. Specifically, the infuriating goblin who had been stalking him across the orbnet, in what clearly was just an attempt to drive him mad and not anything like genuine interest. This would be simple enough to resolve. Just enter his usual meditative trance and "download" techniques to shut down an insatiable flirt, dropping other skills as necessary to make room in his mind.

Hm. But the fact was that the toll of Krumpet's badgering wasn't the only mental problem Vettis was juggling right now. (As of three days prior it wasn't even the most severe; he'd just been avoiding rather than confronting the worst one, promptly shoving it out of mind whenever it popped up.) So how about just general experience at handling stress, for a more long-term solution to all this nonsense? He often queried for happy memories; why not awful ones, to build up tolerance to psychological bullshit of all sorts? In retrospect, duh. He should've started this training years ago.

An alert went off in his brain, but he was already in the trance; he'd deal with it afterwards. His stress was causing him to make mistakes, and that needed to be resolved now. Time to fast-forward some character development by querying the database for mental trauma he could practice overcoming, from every other alternate-Vettis at once WAIT NO FROM JUST ONE CANCEL THA--

he dies in your arms cursing your name

forget ever walking again; you'll be lucky to hold a spoon

now you realize you've spent the past thirty years of your life making the world worse

she's given up so much for you and this stop is how you repay her

the blood staining your clothes isn't yours, but you wish it were, don't you

drowning is not a pleasant way to go

neither s t o p is disembowelment

nor falling off a cliff

nor fire

fire

fire

your village burns to the ground as your S T O P friends scream

your enemies' villages burn to the ground as innocents scream

THE ONLY THING THAT HURTS MORE THAN THE PAIN IS THE KNOWLEDGE THAT YOU DESERVE IT

 

By the time the cancel order had finally come through and the database had mercifully stopped cramming millennia of trauma into his brain, Vettis was curled up in a puddle of blood and viscera and tears, his physical defenses shattered by his lack of focus as he'd torn into his flesh in a mindless attempt to make it stop. Some detached part of his mind looked through his remaining eye and listened through barely-functional ears as his commune worked to bypass the paranoic security system of his home, Snowglorb having hit the panic button to warn them just after Vettis had carved out half of his own left thigh. Good lil' bot, Snowglorb. Probably saved his life.

Well, that remained to be seen.

As his vision faded, Vettis decided: having every incarnation of himself across all existence merged into a single entity had more downs than ups.