Thor's grief did not make the storm kinder.
Rain hammered the crater while agents closed around Thor. Michael remained phased beneath the mud, watching through the surface and trying not to mistake pity for an invitation to intervene.
Thor had crossed an armed perimeter and put men on the ground. The agents had no way to know whether his lost power might return.
Michael's Nakfoji antennae registered another presence where his eyes found only rain and floodlights. A man stood beyond ordinary sight, lean and still, amusement folding into something less readable as Thor was led away.
Loki.
The horned silhouette was difficult to confuse with anyone Michael remembered, even when the man altered his appearance to resemble an agent. Michael withdrew deeper into the ground.
He had no interest in inserting himself between two Asgardian brothers. One could hide from an armed camp; the other had arrived inside a thunderstorm.
Loki approached the hammer after the site began to thin. He reached for its handle.
It refused him too.
His expression changed for less than a second. Then he was gone, leaving no evidence Michael trusted himself to collect.
Michael rose through the soil until one phased hand reached the metal. He did not wrap his fingers around the handle. He had watched two gods test that question already, and neither result encouraged a third attempt.
"Can you detect biological material?" he asked the system.
Two genetic signatures detected. Collection available.
"Collect both."
The answer came before he could wonder how anything biological had survived on the weapon.
Collection complete.
No names followed. Michael knew better than to supply them himself. The hammer had passed through too many hands, realms, and battles for proximity to count as proof.
He sank away from the crater and accelerated through the earth. Only after the restricted zone lay behind him did he remember Tony. His phone vibrated inside the transformation.
"Sir," JARVIS said when Michael answered, "Mr. Stark has asked whether abandonment is one of your new abilities."
Tony took over the call. "You turned into a blue ghost, flew into a federal operation, and left me standing in the rain."
"You have transportation. The turtle on my face canceled any duty to wait."
Tony sighed. "You owe me dinner and an explanation."
"One of those is possible."
Michael ended the call before Tony could negotiate which one.
***
The system spoke again during the flight home.
A new species has reached the inclusion threshold. Iktori registered.
Information opened behind Michael's eyes. Assimilation. Phasing. Possession. Mind control. A species born from the accumulated resentment of a battlefield, capable of rebuilding itself through surviving genetic material and incorporating other life.
The list read like an explanation for every compromise he had watched inside the sandbox.
Nakfoji extinction complete. Recycling of Iktori material is recommended.
Michael kept flying, but the rhythm of his wings changed. He had left the Nakfoji gathered beneath their last tree. The system now reported their extinction as a completed process and offered him a useful new entry.
The Iktori had survived by turning every encounter into more of themselves. In the same environment, they would do it again.
Registration meant the system had found enough consistency to preserve an Iktori pattern for him. It did not preserve the people who had produced it. Their civilization had become a template at the same moment the Nakfoji became an extinction notice.
Michael had built the enclosure to discover what selection could create. He had also made himself the only witness to everything selection destroyed. The system offered the results without grief and waited for another instruction.
"Recover the Iktori spores," he said. "Reset the environment. Then introduce fresh spores with the two signatures I just collected."
Confirmed. Warning: one detected signature carries an energy structure beyond the stable range of the current spores. Hybrid populations may lose cohesion. Auxiliary genes are recommended for dilution and structural support.
"How many?"
Stability can be maintained with as many as five auxiliary lines. Exceeding that threshold risks premature cognitive emergence.
The warning deserved more suspicion than he had energy to give it. The system described cognition like contamination, yet intelligence had appeared in the previous environment because survival rewarded manipulation. Avoiding it was not as simple as keeping beneath a numerical limit.
Still, he could reduce obvious instability. He chose crocodile for endurance, eagle for flight, snake for flexible structure, deer for terrestrial mobility, and carp for adaptation to water. Five functions, none exotic, distributed across the new spores rather than forced into a single design. You are reading on novelping.com, the official source.
The sandbox accepted the instruction.
At the manor, Michael released the Nakfoji form and nearly collapsed beside the new pool in the underground lab. The sealed chamber sat beneath the grounds, separate from the original lawn enclosure. He verified the reset, watched the fresh suspension take on the faint color of active growth, and set the time differential.
Two divine signatures were present. He still did not know whose.
He locked the chamber and went to bed before curiosity could become another night without sleep.
***
Inside the accelerated enclosure, selection began without him.
One population answered cold. Its members remained small and angular, gathering into living blocks that drew heat from their surroundings. Individual bodies joined until the colony resembled an iceberg: not a single creature, but a structure built from many.
The other divine line failed more violently. Spores carrying its energy collapsed as their inherited structures pulled against one another. Their bodies hardened into stone-like remnants that retained only traces of the force they could not control.
Attraction at the genetic level drew those remnants together. Layer accumulated over layer until a mountain rose from the floor of the enclosure.
Outside, rain swept across the manor. Lightning struck the barrier. The protection closed around the breach almost at once, but a fraction of the discharge crossed into the accelerated world.
It found the mountain.
Stone burst into dust. Charged particles rose instead of falling and spread through the upper atmosphere into a dark bank of cloud.
Surviving spores lifted with it. Some failed and became part of the storm. Others held their shapes long enough to change. Flight favored the eagle line; flexibility kept the snake line from breaking under the charged currents.
In the denser cloud below, aquatic and serpentine forms persisted where the other auxiliary traits thinned away. Above them, a smaller population reached a bright layer that resembled a sea made from cloud and electrical force.
The enclosure divided itself into climates Michael had not designed: ice below, storm above, and a high country sustained by the remains of the dead.
The cold colonies expanded by joining. The storm populations survived by separating, each failed body feeding an environment that favored the next attempt.
Neither branch understood the other, yet both had begun with material collected from the same weapon. Whatever identities the signatures had carried before the sandbox, evolution was already making the question less useful.
Evolution slowed there.
It did not stop. Nothing in the sandbox ever truly did.