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"Being lonely is more painful than getting hurt."
– Monkey D. Luffy, (One Piece)
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It was pure destruction what Jean was doing with her powers. She had stopped caring and holding back. Everything around her was starting to break into dust made of countless atoms and molecules. The dark phoenix was going for pure unadulterated annihilation now.
"Jean for the last time stop. Stop before you get hurt." Rudeus warned Jean again as he slowly began to float towards her. Hurting her was the last thing he wanted to do but she was really pushing him into a corner. His low-tier spells and abilities won't have much effect on her but his strong ones might seriously injure her.
"Who's gonna stop me? You? The boyfriend who didn't even try his best to search for me after I went missing? The boyfriend who got a new weather whore as soon as I was gone? The boyfriend who screws every other female out beside his own soulmate? No, I won't stop until I make sure that I cleanse this world of all evil, of all corrupted life." Jean shouted like a maniac as she had tears leaking from her eyes.
She looked to be in pain, suffering. Although she seemed strong from the outside, Rudeus could feel the real suffering on the inside, waiting to be rescued, pleading for someone to help her, the real her caged under the Dark phoenix's powers.
"Then I guess it leaves me no choice but to do this the hard way." Rudeus finally made up his mind as he sighed and began to advance towards her with determination.
He was gonna end this Phoenix drama today once and for all, one way or the other.
As he got close to Jean, he could feel her powers, her immense telekinetic strength trying to rip him apart, trying to reduce his physical being into atoms and molecules. However, he didn't stop and continued forward while quickly casting a spell to make a magical forcefield around them to contain the molecular destruction she was causing. After all, he didn't want the city to just disappear by the time he 'cured' Jean, did he?
As the destruction was temporarily controlled, he continued to advance toward her without worrying about others being affected by this. But right now, he couldn't worry about them, he had to worry about Jean instead.
Although Jean's attack was still far from coming close to truly killing him, it still gave him a hell of a sting like little ants trying to bite him. God, he was truly beginning to hate insects.
'After I am done saving you, I am going to make you pay me with your body, you little redheaded minx.' He thought annoyed about the extra drama and work he had to put in just after he came back from such grueling training. 'Even Naruto didn't have to work the first day he came back at the start of Shippuden.'
Rudeus had gotten pretty close to Jean at this point. He didn't stop and reached out his hand to grab her. Of course, there was supposed to be a pretty much impenetrable forcefield there to stop him from doing that but strangely nothing got in his way from touching her.
It was like she was welcoming him, allowing him to get close to her, permitting him to do what he must.
As soon as he got in physical contact with her, he began to absorb the abundant, almost infinite nourishing cosmic energy from her using his Rinnegan trying to weaken her but again her energy almost seemed to be infinite, no matter how much he absorbed from her, she didn't seem to weaken at all.
Rudeus knew by this point that she was much more powerful than she showed previously but she was severely holding back. She could have just destroyed the planet from space without even coming close but the Jean Grey inside her was making damn sure that didn't happen. Maybe it was because of her love for him or maybe it was because she was truly a kind person.
Rudeus however wasn't curious of the reason for her holding back. He had to urgently do something to end the threat of the dark phoenix before shit got out of hand. Rudeus though sure that the new him would not lose against a full-powered blood thirsted dark phoenix wasn't so sure that he would also simultaneously be able to save his planet if that happened.
He quickly generated some black receivers from his hands through the use of his Rinnegan. He had found out earlier during his training that his black receivers worked much like those of Naruto except he could not absorb and resist the flow of chakra but almost all energies of this universe including universal, cosmic, and dimensional energies. But of course, how much they could resist depended on the strength of the target.
Rudeus shaped his black receivers into makeshift handcuffs to forcefully bind Jean's arms so that he could continue to weaken and absorb some of her energy while strengthening himself for what he was about to do.
"Divine domain," Rudeus said in almost a whisper. As soon as he uttered the magic words, a thin layer of energy seemed to emit from him and cover their surrounding. It was only a meager hundred meters for now but within those hundred meters, Rudeus felt like a true omnipotent god.
His cosmic awareness for the first time seemed to work at full throttle as he became aware of everything in the radius of those hundred meters. He knew the total number of molecules in the area, how many bacteria and viruses there were, the different types of energies existing in that space, and even Jean's current strength which was comparable to a well-fed Galactus at the moment but as he guessed before, something was desperately trying to suppress her powers than what should have been able to use.
Inside his own domain, he had also doubled in overall power, even his level of existence had seemed to increase like he was ascending from a new god to... something else, something which was similar and connected to his current godly race and yet completely different.
'Maybe, this is a taste of the power of what I would be able to achieve in my godhead true form.' Rudeus thought as he immediately remembered about True form Darkseid from the comics.
Of course, he was not the only one affected by his own domain, even the Dark Phoenix Jean seemed to be affected as well. Both her power and madness seemed to go down a little as she got back a sliver of her original personality.
"Rudeus, you have to kill me before she takes back control. She is not me. She is just my desires given a twisted form. She is not gonna stop until she kills everyone and destroys everything. Please, make it stop. Kill me. Only you can do it." Jean pleaded with tears in her eyes, begging for her death, hoping that her death would save everyone else.
"No" Rudeus simply replied with a straight face.
"What? B-but you have to, otherwise..." Jean started.
"Because this is not some movie Jean. It doesn't end with your death giving others a happy ending. No, this is real fcking life. Your death means you are gone forever and no matter what happens you won't come back. You probably won't even have a next great adventure, no, it will just probably be an ever-lasting sleep in infinite darkness under the cruel rule of a sadistic death. And I won't let that happen. You deserve to live just like anybody else I love. I won't lose anyone ever again, and definitely not to a stupid mentally ill bird today." He blurted out as he held both of her cheeks with his hands.
His words seemed to have come out of his heart on their own. It was like something like this had already happened to him once like he knew what it meant for him to lose a loved one.
"You will regret that." Jean was unable to hold back her tears, terrified of hurting the only person she had ever loved because of her lack of control over her own powers.
"Maybe... but I don't fcking care. I'll leave tomorrow's worries to tomorrow's me." He snorted as he went ahead and kissed Jean activating Rinnegan's mind manipulation abilities.
He knew he wasn't powerful enough to mind-control Jean directly. He was neither an expert in that nor did he have any hope of winning against the dark phoenix in a battle of psychic might even if it was in a weakened state. But what he could do was go inside Jean's mind using his direct bond with her. He could send his astral psychic self inside her and destroy the dark phoenix from within.
'At least that way he would have a fcking chance.
As Rudeus concentrated, he found his bond with Jean pulsating like never before. As he tugged into it more and more trying to follow it, he began to get pulled in by the bond itself as he spiraled into a seemingly never-ending darkness.
The next moment he opened his eyes, he saw a familiar scene again. He was back in the white room again, only this time it was extremely hot, it felt like he was standing at the center of the sun. The temperature and pressure here were beyond enormous.
"Hello, my son." A voice suddenly came from behind him.
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