“You made one mistake, Ming,” Flash said, tossing the shard from hand to hand. “You assumed thinking and doing are different things. On Mongo, maybe. But on Earth? We call that play action .”

“Ming,” Flash said, swinging himself upright and landing softly on the crystalline floor. “You’re right. I can’t compute the VPX’s frequency. But I know someone who can.”

He tapped his temple. A tiny blue light flickered—a synaptic uplink that Dr. Zarkov had installed hours before, just in case. “Zarkov,” Flash murmured. “Now.”

His fingertips brushed the surface of the VPX Core.

The screaming had stopped. That was the worst part.

From the shadows, a slow clap echoed. Ming stepped out, his cloak woven from living shadow. His fingernails were razor shards of obsidian.

And as the emergency alarms of Ming’s palace wailed like dying beasts, Flash Gordon grinned, fired his boot jets, and blasted out into the stars—leaving the VPX’s shattered ghost behind him, a quiet monument to the day he out-thought the universe.

Ming stared, his composure cracking like cheap porcelain. “Impossible.”

Flash’s vision turned into a wireframe. The VPX Core’s resonance pattern appeared as a cascading waterfall of numbers. He didn’t need to understand them. He just needed to touch them.