The laboratory was deathly silent, save for a single lonely heart pounding wildly.
The moment Doctor calculated the truth, his mind went blank. Even the silver characters in his eyes stopped flickering.
He slumped in his chair, his back pressed against the cold metal backrest, yet he felt none of its chill.
Behind his thin black-framed glasses, his pupils contracted to pinpoints. The blood-red deduction on the screen seared itself into his retinas like a red-hot branding iron.
His fingers still rested on the keyboard, the vibrations of typing equations lingering in his fingertips. Yet the strength that had sustained his calculations seemed to have been drained away in an instant.
Cold, numbness, despair...
"So... it wasn't a miscalculation, or even a discrepancy in the data. From the very beginning... I've been living inside a script the Black King wrote."
Doctor laughed silently. Faced with the Black King's godlike power, he understood all too clearly that every calculation, every struggle, every attempt to break free of fate had become a joke within this looping spacetime.
Despair spread through his body like an icy tide, freezing him to the core.
He had no idea how to win. Even if he did win, what would it matter?
If he won this time, time would reset again, and everything would start over. What could he possibly use to resist the Black King?!
He was not facing the Black King, but a god who controlled time-a god who could achieve omniscience and omnipotence within a time loop!
Mortals could not defeat gods...
Profound despair engulfed Doctor. Dense purple vapor spread from his body, clinging to him like maggots gnawing at bone, its wisps winding around him.
Gradually, mysterious, magnificent purple patterns inlaid themselves into Doctor's skin.
"No, I can win!!"
In the silver-white metal