It was weird not to breathe but he hadn’t brought any oxygen with him into space and there was no point in making any. He was just fine.

The stars were so clear. Without the atmosphere in between they didn’t flicker. Millions of dots, sprinkled along a broad banner stretching all around. Accessing knowledge from humanity told him so many things at once.

His surrounding was barely above absolute zero. The sun’s light however hit him with enough radiation to wreck each one of his cells many times over. He told his own molecular structure to stop carcinogenesis and just like that everything was fine. The only sound he heard was his own blood pumping since nothing reached his ears in total vacuum.

Minhyun left through the Van Allen radiation belt and sped up further. It had been broad daylight when he left. The sun was up ahead, blinding him.

The boy changed course and flew around the earth from higher up than any satellite. The moon came into view over the horizon. He accelerated further – to one percent the speed of light. It took him less than two minutes to pass the moon. Seeing the white sphere in its three dimensional glory was a vastly different experience than looking at it from afar on the surface of a planet. It seemed so much more real.

Then he was further away from earth – from home – than any human had ever been. Nobody in history had been as lonely as Minhyun.

***

There were machines.

Ugly like the eldritch devices but the size of oil tankers. The vaguely cylindrical and conical shaped un-things pressed onward through some ragged line gleaming with harsh light – the rift.

The invasion force amounted to a dozen ships – assuming those were mere space ships and not far more ominous technology.

Around each fluttered a swarm of ghouls in a lose cluster, their flimsy, shimmering non-bodies moving chaotically across and between ships.

Whatever they were made of, their matter did not sing for Minhyun. They were aliens not only to humans but to the universe itself. And they were only the Void’s vanguard.

Beyond the armada – deep inside the rift – was a presence lying in wait. So strong, so malicious, Minhyun filtered through all the worlds languages and yet found no description. They were a drain – everything they touched wilted. Onward they pressed, to ever more Rings in the Hierarchy. There was no coexistence with the Void.

He had the element of surprise. He had one free move. After that the battle could turn. How to use his advantage?

The supercharged dream-walker consulted the collective knowledge of mankind, filtering through state of the art research on the nature of matter and the tactical understanding of every war ever waged.

Then he tried everything at once.

***

The reigning Prince of Luck took all thermal energy at his disposal. The ship furthest ahead experienced fifteen million kelvin – the temperature inside the sun. Back on earth the light from the explosion would greatly outshine everything else in the sky.

Through all the light it was impossible to perceive what the ships were doing but Minhyun recalled their exact locations.

Ship number two was hit by lasers – non-thermal radiation energy – at unprecedented concentration. Ten bundles of photons near the breaking point of excitement danced along the distorted hull. Those were as many as Minhyun could make.

Within the same microsecond he focused all gravitational energy he could muster and sent it towards the nearest ship. Warp ripples traveled at light speed and hit the construction with tidal forces that would have torn a planet asunder.

Next was ship number four which had just fully exited the rift. Minhyun wrapped it into a bubble of temporal energy, concentrating the flow of time within the eldritch invasion vehicle. Inside the bubble, millennia passed within the blink of an eye.

Atomic energy he hadn’t used yet. And he had a lot of it at his disposal. Courageously, he split it among ships five and six which, out of all of them, were closest to each other. Nuclear detonations to rival the death of a star went off in between them. The radiation was so plentiful and so deadly, Minhyun had to redirect it away from his home world or risk damaging the atmosphere.

His last trick was matter itself. He inverted the polarity of any particle in the vicinity, creating uncontrollably high amounts of antimatter. The moment any of these particles met a hull they set of a small detonation that should tear apart and eat through all they touched.

The battle’s first microsecond passed. The light subsided. The silent explosions dimmed. He could see again.

All ghouls were gone. The ships were unharmed. Minimal damage was visible along their hulls, some burned and some charred, some oozing and some forming blisters. But they had not been destroyed.

It wasn’t enough.

Then the ghouls rose from the ships anew. They had not been destroyed either, merely scared off. Minhyun had no way to fight them all at once.

***

It was a complicated process. At first he considered cloning but it was clearly simpler to duplicate himself with a mixture of molecular level scanning and multiple simultaneous reconstructions from template matter teleported in from earth biospheres. Yeah, simple.

Ninety-nine new Minhyun’s opened their eyes for the first time.

The boy-swarm took course to intercept the ghoul swarm rushing his – or their – way.

Since Minhyun was able to enter Twi in his current supercharged state he only had to let a ghoul possess himself, or rather one of his selves, and then other Minhyuns could drag the possessed one into Twi. It would be a war of attrition but he intended to waste no time getting started.

A few people on earth dropped from his link. Then some more. It was difficult to keep the terrestrial net going while linking with several versions of himself out in space. He didn’t strictly need a whole continent in his web of minds but it was disconcerting that he was already stretching beyond his intrinsic limits.

Then Minhyuns dropped from the net. The ships had opened fire. Two boys went down in a ragged ray of red, zig-zagging through space at light speed. Two more. Four more. Other ships joined in until it was impossible to act on the ghouls without opening up to attack.

Minhyun – the original one – sped out of the cross fire and dismissed all copies. He couldn’t fight the ghouls and he couldn’t fight the ships. He had to delay them until somebody come up with something.

There was a change in one of the space crafts. Some contortion in its force field that the boy couldn’t interpret. It had been going on for a while and now as he was out of immediate danger he had the time to notice that it was only one ship showing this behavior.

Space swelled and dilated, rose and fell.

Ship number one warped past him and jumped to earth. Its speed would let it close the distance within a minute. There wasn’t enough time to engage it. Only one thing stood between the Void transporter and humanity’s home.

Minhyun bent space with all he could and redirected the warp field’s trajectory onto the moon.

Soundlessly, the vessel impacted on the dark side of the gray celestial body. The enormous space ship was utterly dwarfed by seventy-three quintillion metric tons of rock and ore.

Tears and cracks sprang up from the crash site and extended outward more and more. From the distance they barely looked noteworthy though Minhyun knew the crater had to be the size of a city. With their local source so suddenly devastated, the ship's ghoul swarm faded.

It had worked.

The ship was badly damaged, broken in half, squished at the front. Its hull was almost peeling itself off the interior structure.

Behind Minhyun all ships went to warp at once. He had enough energy to stop one of them. Ten of originally twelve invasion transporters would make it to earth.

He needed more power.

The boy sent into his network. “Lady Luck, are you there?”