The sky was red the day everything ended.
It wasn't a poetic crimson, nor a gentle sunset hue, but a violent, searing red that devoured the heavens like a festering wound. Ash rained down on scorched cities. Entire dimensions bled into one another, collapsing like faulty equations. The Citadel was in ruins—rubble scattered across infinite timelines, broken beyond recognition.
Rick Sanchez stood alone.
His lab coat, torn and bloodied, fluttered weakly in the scorched wind. Singed hair clung to his forehead, and his portal gun—once a symbol of his mastery over reality—hung useless from his belt, its last charge long spent. The universe he had known, the infinite possibilities he once danced through with mockery and genius, was gone.
The Council was dead. Morty was gone. Summer, Beth, Jerry—all gone.
He didn't cry. Not at first. He just stood there, in the center of all that broken brilliance, and let the silence deafen him. This was not a grand battle lost or a noble failure. This was entropy. This was inevitability.
It had all gone too far.
They warned him—others like him, even versions of himself—about meddling with primal forces, about chasing answers to questions that shouldn't exist. The last experiment hadn't just torn holes in space-time. It had drawn them—the ones who fed on chakra and devoured dimensions, who whispered in numbers and bled starlight. They came from somewhere beyond logic, feeding on energy he didn't understand. Even he, Rick Sanchez, had limits.
The portal gun blinked one final time.
A soft, green pulse.
One last jump.
One last spark.
With a grunt, Rick slammed the emergency sequence, feeding the last quantum charge into the cracked core. He didn't even know where it would take him. He didn't care. The universe was ending, and he refused to end with it.
The air snapped.
Color twisted.
And then—
A scream. A blur of trees. The scent of blood and smoke.
Rick fell through the sky, crashing hard into an unfamiliar forest. Bones cracked. He coughed, spat blood, and for a brief moment, considered just… staying down.
But then he heard it—children.
Two voices, panicked and afraid.
He dragged himself forward, broken ribs screaming. Through the underbrush, he saw them: a boy with wild black hair and eyes like an abyss, his arm bleeding from a kunai wound. A girl, clutching his side, her lavender eyes wide and desperate, trembling as she pressed glowing hands to his wound.
They were just kids.
And bandits were closing in.
Rick groaned, half-smirking through the pain.
"Great," he rasped. "Even in backwater ninja hell, kids still get screwed."
His hand trembled as he raised the broken portal gun. Not to escape—he couldn't. But there was enough charge left for something else. A directed burst. A warning shot.
He fired.
Green light ripped through the trees, melting a hole through one of the bandits. The rest scattered, screaming about jutsu and spirits.
The children stared at him like he was a ghost.
Rick collapsed.
The girl ran to him. Her chakra felt strange. Soothing. The boy held a kunai, defensive.
"…Who are you?" the boy asked.
Rick coughed again, coughed up blood this time. "Just… a scientist," he muttered. "From a stupid place full of stupid people."
He looked at them—really looked—and something stirred. Something ancient. The boy's chakra was off. Wild. Familiar in a way that made his ruined neurons itch.
The girl placed her glowing hand to his chest.
"You're hurt."
Rick chuckled, eyes fluttering closed.
"You don't say."
And then, darkness.
He didn't know it yet, but this was not the end.
This was the beginning.
---