Chapter Text

Many Years Ago

"[The enemy have breached the Greatest Gate! Onward now, blade-bearers! Die in glory or live in victory, but do not let them reach the King's neck--]"

His sword ran through the skull of the guardsman and cleanly out the chitin of the torso. Severed teeth flew out to clatter against the marbled floors before the Greatest Gate, the last barrier between the insurgency and the King. The protectorate were mere grass to be mowed, their golden cuirasses peeled through one half-dozen to a swing. Oh, well. At least they died in shiny armor. Maybe that meant something for them.

Another voice at his side. "[I never thought I would see the Greatest Gate stained blue, General. We've put the torch to everything they once took safety in.]"

"[If you think that's torch-work, watch this.]"

He thrust a flat palm forward and rent ten thousand tons of sanctified metal asunder, the gates of the palace erected as a monument to the eternal blood-rule of the Wartime King. Ten stories high and fortified with the strongest bedrock, all crumpled up like paper before his might. Now they were a monument to these words: nothing ever lasts.

"[Go now, Karthaac. Orgox. Thucydex. Subdue the weaklings in their uniforms. I will personally attend to the regicide.]"

His fellow soldiers were plenty strong enough for the King's gilded guards. He, himself, stormed the royal halls. This was the palace where the slaughterer-ruler dwelled, mighty conqueror, strongest subjugator of their race so given the right to subjugate by this strength. It was a wretched display of excess, he thought. Even the strongest generals of his retinue would take a day to circle it on foot. No matter. He charged forward and raced into the heart of the colossal estate.

The King reserved the finest defenses for himself. Particle artillery divided atoms against his chitin and burst to no effect. Ultramicrowaves melted the flooring beneath him and he waded through it. Chronokinetic grenades detonated in previous time to fray his genetic sequencing before he was ever born, not that he allowed that to stop him. Some guards dropped a really big rock on his head from the balconies. That one was amusing. A slam of his skull against the boulder was all it took to split it into two pieces the size of warships.

"[Fire, fire! Kill the rebels!]"

The guardsmen brought out the most great and fearful weapon of the planet's armory. Twelve it took on each side to carry the tungsten projectile cannon, and twelve more to carry one round, as if cradling crown jewels. An eight-meter 10-cm-thick rod was loaded carefully into the barrel as the electromagnets activated one by one.

"[In the name of the King, ablution at the end of a gun!]"

Aerodynamic design allowed the rod to accelerate to near-relativistic speeds carrying a kinetic payload akin to tectonic movement. The insurgent swatted it aside with one hand, and it tore through the walls of the palace and the city far beneath it and far beyond that in an eyeblink before finally striking the ground directly and spitting a cubic kilometer of dirt into the heavens. He clenched his fist. That ached his knuckles, a little.

They did not, could not, believe. "[I-I-In the name of the King! Ablution at the end of--]"

He picked up the cannon and swung three-hundred-and-sixty-degrees severing every guardsman in his way and separating the upper half of the grand hall from the firmament. "[Useless pests.]" He kicked down the doors and entered the throne room. There was no ceremony. Awaiting him there was the King. No shields or tricks, no security retinue. His allied soldiers had done their work thinning their ranks if they could not spare even a single warrior to defend the King now.

"[Reckless nithing, mud-slave, invertebrate rebel!]" the Wartime King bellowed. Every click of his throat made his face-tendrils writhe with spit-soaked rage. "[A soldier's life made you think you were too good for your station, so-called General! Arrogance, arrogance! Never forget you were born a mere gladiator, destined for a slave's death! You did not deserve to be elevated, did not deserve anything, merely because of your strength of arm! You know nothing of the weight of rulership, the will to conquer, to bear this crown!]"

"[Enough, worthless thing. I let you talk because I thought I might hear you grovel before you die, but it seems you're too stupid and rigid for even that. Unfortunate. I'll have to content myself with the satisfaction of shutting you up.]"

So stood the King up from his throne. His calloused hands took up the ceremonial long-axe beside the throne, which he had not had to raise for one thousand years of Kingship, not when he demonstrated his blade-strength an age before and slew the planet's previous lord. The King raised it in the royal style which he had trained in for centuries.

And the insurgent General brought his fist through the King's body and wrenched his spinal column in one blow. The axe dropped from his useless fingers and he fell to the ground feeble like a cephalopod. Viscera painted the seat of the King.

"[I may die here today, nithing, but you will be the one in agony,]" his garbled voice croaked out. "[Heed well my curse, for it is the curse you place on yourself. Guts will never fill your belly. Blood will never sate your thirst! I was content with the spoils of my conquests, but never you, never you! You will never be satisfied, mud-slave! You will kill and kill until there is nothing left in this universe but you and Eternity, and when there are no more worlds left to conquer you will turn the blade on yourself--]"

The General picked up the axe and cut the breath from the old man's throat. That was the end. The screams of bloodshed raged on in and outside the palace, but they were weak echoes of a conflict that had already ended with that stroke. Wars didn't end even after they ended.

Soon, his allies returned to his side. The lieutenants underneath him who had led the rebel army to the doorstep of the King, those who aided him in securing his new guardianship over the planet.

"[General, you have done what the slings and arrows of the entire galaxy could not do for one thousand years,]" Karlaac said. "[You are supreme.]"

"[Longlegs did it again, eh?]" Orgox jabbed him in the side. "[Not bad, General, not bad at all. Always knew you had it in ya. Just do that ten thousand more times and we might have a proper universal empire going.]"

"[By the Forge, it's the Wartime King. The King who built the empire on the backs of a trillion alien corpses.]" Thucydex knelt before the shattered body. "[The thousand-year reign is brought to ruin. I could not even imagine such a thing done, a-and you did not even imagine, you dared. You have.]"

First, the General took his throne. The stains of battle did not bother him one bit. He was born on the battlefield, anointed in this blood.

"[War-friends. You have done well. You followed me on the battlefield and in the face of death. Now you have charged even the Greatest Gate with me. Now I, the strongest, rule. It is as it should be.]"

Karlaac bowed. "[General--no, that title is beneath you now. What is your first command, Great One?]"

"[No titles, lieutenant. I do not need affectations. For my first decree as rightful overlord, let the public know the name of their new ruler. Melt down the old monuments. Burn the old flags. Declare me everywhere. Vilgax is almighty. Vilgax is inescapable. Vilgax is lord and master of all who draw breath. Vilgax is. Vilgax, is.]"

Karlaac was a casualty in the Long War against the Petrosapiens. He died when Vilgax tired of the conflict and had the planet dusted. He never begrudged his lord for this. It is a disgrace for soldiers to live too long.

Orgox died twice. First when he slew her during her ill-fated assassination attempt. The second when he had every use of her name purged from record. All those who remembered it were exterminated.

Thucydex was suicide. He realized too keenly that water, once spilled, can never return to the cup.

Vilgax continued into perpetuity. His shadow spread over the galaxy, then the local supercluster, then past that. He conquered. He continued. He conquered. He continued. And yet. And yet. And yet.

Some Time Ago, But Not Distant

A familiar sight. The city was in flames. He'd done it before. So many times. The memorials were toppled. The armies were devastated. All the same memorials. All the same armies. One million times in every place in the universe under every star.

This planet was backwater. The dominant species (hominids?) were unintelligent, primitive, and comically weak. A hominid could, theoretically, survive under five hundred meters of water. (He'd tested this. Humans sure did squirm around a lot). Vilgax could walk along the lowermost depths of the darkest trench. One thousand of them could not equal one thousandth of him. But there were unexpected variables. Alien technology they turned against him. There was one thing, specifically, that vexed him... this was really inspired. A wrist-mounted DNA modification device, Omnitrix. With the proper inputs the user could become any species in its vast genetic library. At one point, he'd had pretentions of reverse-engineering the Omnitrix to create an unstoppable army suited to any planetary environment or terrain, the most vicious and terrible beasts in creation. But that was quickly pointless. The universe already bowed to him. There was no point in upgrading an army with no enemy to fight against.

So he thought simply to take it, so his enemies could not use it against him. This was more pleasing to him. One of the hominids on this planet used it to battle him as a peer. It gave him some diversion. It was good. After one trillion worlds the thrill of violence became so fleeting he needed greater and greater highs. There were so few opponents that could put up a good fight. It went by so fast, though. One unlucky slip for his enemy and the victory was his. His foe's name--oh, let's not worry about it now. What mattered now was that he had it. This thing he'd been searching for all this time, the weapon which would not only make him reign supreme but reign eternal, so superior no being could ever come close to his lofty heights.

He looked it over. He stood in the wreckage of their capitol dangling it from the strap (He assumed it was their capitol? Essentially? This species was so backwards they did not have a unified government, just a bunch of squabbling poleis that could not even agree on their own borders). He put on the Omnitrix. It was his. He had the codex of the universe an arm's reach away. It was his. He transformed just because he could. It was his. Pyronite from the star-colony Pyros. It was his. Tetramand from the warchief tribes of Khoros. It was his. Petrosapien from--right. There were none left besides this one. That kind of tickled him. Wasn't it fun, having the Omnitrix now? He had defeated every army. He had slain every foe. Every planet. Everything. Crushed. Destroyed. Killed. All under Vilgax. He'd done in a mere century of warfare what the old King did not do one fraction of in a thousand years. And he had the greatest weapon which could be used against him. Yes, that was something to stir the heart of a warrior. He had completed his life's work. He could feel good about that.

It lasted for the entire span of that sentence. Nothing. He had not felt the glory of conquest for longer than many of his soldiers had been alive. This existence was absolutely wretched. No, he could not be satisfied with surveying a conquered world. The thrill of driving a spear through the gut of an enemy brigadier, the sight of castles collapsed by high-yield radioweapons, noble spirits shattered to dust by the indomitable Vilgax. That was what he lived for. Without it, he may as well fall on his own sword.

No, no! Doubting one's own existence was the high of cowardice. Lack of meaning was a fear held by the weak. If anyone held the power to push down all doubts, it was he, the highest one. But perhaps it was that he was too powerful. Yes, that was why he entertained these uncertainties. He had lost the ability to enjoy violence long ago, once he had become too strong to be challenged. There was no path backwards. He could not weaken himself anymore than a fish could crawl onto dry land and choke itself. And there were no more trials left for him to face, no heroes to fight...

Perhaps he would have to craft them himself. Yes, an obstacle of his own design could be something. It would be the greatest of obstacles, too, for anything he designed would surely be as flawless as himself. There was something in that thought he could build on.

He was a long-lived species. He had plenty of time to ruminate. And already, new and terrible visions of cruelty were forming in his mind...

Now

Six-by-six-foot transport cubes stacked together neatly like Lego blocks. Some fifty or sixty in all held the cargo of Starship 2.41e16, the VES Whiskey Shake. (After their assimilation, the humans were the ones that came up with the idea of naming the Empire's battle fleet. They'd always found it easier to empathize with machines than their own kin.) That cargo was a menagerie. A zoo of humans, creatures, and non-carbon-based lifeforms with various degrees of intelligence and fashion sense. They were imprisoned, but not prisoners. In fact, although few saw it that way, their confinement was a great honor. Only the strongest would ever see the inside of these cages. They were the battle-ready.

Tatsumaki shoved the pillow over her face again. It didn't work. The lights were too goddamn bright to sleep.

Tatsumaki, "The Tornado" (Rank 4)

She got up. It was a mere idiom for becoming alert; she was already standing up. After Tatsumaki made a few choice comments to the jailors about their physical appearance and presumed sexual performance, they put her in a cell half the width that even she could not fully lie down in. Standing wasn't so bad. They could have put her in the cell where you can only crouch.

Whatever she got would have been hell anyway because the ship's lights never turned off. The constant, steady hum of illumination meant her biological clock was shot to hell. She'd like to guess that it had been fifty-something hours since leaving Earth, but it could've been longer. Could've been shorter. And then there was the-

THHHOOOOUUUMMMM!

Tatsumaki was thrown against the sink of her cell-crate as the industrial mechanical claw lifted her cell. All around her, jeers and barking anger. At random but not-infrequent intervals the cells would be lifted up and shuffled around the prison block. It prevented neighbors from growing friendly enough to plot escape through the bars. It was disorienting, but at least it meant people didn't try to talk to her. She wanted none of that. Not with this pounding headache.

That wasn't just the lights and the sleep deprivation either. That was the cocktail full of drugs they shot her with to keep her from using her psychic powers. Really hitting her with the migraine there. Plus the ephemerol made her mouth taste all chalky.

Once the cell-crate settled into its new position, she leaned back against the wall again and put the pillow over her head. Maybe she could finally get some shut-eye before they arrived...

Something knocked hard on the cell wall next to her.

"Hey! Hey. Come over here. Look over here."

Oh, God... maybe if she kept quiet, whoever it was would stop talking.

"Look over here. Look over here! Tell me if you've seen someone who looks like this."

An arm contorted itself awkwardly to fit through the bars, flailing towards Tatsumaki's cell with something in the grip. It was extraordinarily annoying, but she was also extraordinarily bored, enough that she went against her best instincts and gave a look. The hand was palming a mirror. A mirror that reflected a scrawny, gawky blonde brat in the adjacent cell. Must've convinced one of the guards to cough it up. Or smuggled it in under her tongue or something.

"You mean you?" Tatsumaki asked.

"No, stupid! My face!" She pointed at her grimace. "Someone who has the same mug. Family resemblance. You seen 'em?"

Family resemblance. That got Tatsumaki's actual attention, if only a smidgeon of it. "You think you have family here?"

"Nah. Just someone whose ass I have to kick later..." She tilted the mirror to get a better look at her neighbor. "Ah, shouldn't have asked. You're just a kid."

Fucking bitch. She fucking dared to speak the heightist k-slur at her.

"A kid?! I am twenty-eight years old! You're just a teenage brat!" Oh, if she had her powers now she could wring her like a shammy. She should still try it even if using her psychic powers in this fugue state made her eyeballs want to pop. Tatsumaki reached out, pushed through the brain-fog to sense the cell's occupant, a network of bio-signals and heartbeats stretching out before her. Maybe she could just smack her around a bit until she learned her place...

Wait. These energy readings. That wasn't human. No heartbeat. Flesh-prana combinant biomass surrounding a pseudo-draconic reactor core, walking on two legs. She'd never seen it before, but she'd heard about it...

"Hmph. You're not even a brat. You're a ghost liner."

Many on Earth had willingly put their wrists in the fetters of the Vilgaxian Empire, but just as many continued to rage against their control. Military orgs schemed up weapon after weapon to obliterate the Vilgaxian armada, each one failing, each one more evil than the last. It took four months for the Geneva Convention to turn into toilet paper. Nuclear barrages became commonplace. Then bioweapons. Offensive genetic mutation, asteroid bombardments, supernatural assaults, psychokinetic experimentation (the same human experiments that gave Tatsumaki her own powers)... It wasn't long before they started dabbling in time travel, either. Illicit collaboration between the Mage's Association and some CIA spooks in exile managed to reverse-engineer the Throne of Heroes, the divine computer that summons heroes from the past to the present. They had cockamamie ideas of unleashing armies of ghosts on Vilgax, Heracles and Genghis Khan, Sun Wukong and Siegfried, united against a common foe, an unstoppable superpower.

Well, it didn't work. Earth was still a hellhole ravaged by every apocalypse at once, except somehow even shittier, because now it was littered with the restless souls of dead mythology that cannibalized humans for their mana supply, like wretched zombies. Well, not exactly like zombies. The brain-eating zombies on Earth were unrelated and in fact a totally different failed bioweapon project.

The spook grinned at her. Her front teeth were sharper than any human's should have ever been.

"Heh. Haven't heard that term in a while. Yeah, I'm Mordred the Silent. Rightful heir of Camelot. What's it matter to you, shrimp? You afraid of ghosts or somethin'?"

Mordred "The Treachery" (Rank 76)

Tatsumaki scoffed. "Afraid of a shadow? And the shadow of a loser at that. Absolutely not. How did trash like you end up on the path to Battleworld? Did you get lost looking for your daddy?"

"Shut the hell up. You wouldn't get it. I bet you're just here to fight the big squid. What did he do, kill your parents, blow up your planet? And now you want revenge, right? He killed ten trillion people but you'll be the one who takes him down, you're special. Maybe he won't look down and see you coming!"

Every child knew this story. Vilgax, Conqueror of All Worlds, claimed the universe and found it wanting. Nothing could challenge him anymore, no enemy could match his strength. To alleviate his boredom, Vilgaxian scientists developed Battleworld, the deadliest abusement park in all of space. A planet-spanning petri dish designed to forge a weapon that could kill Vilgax and end his ennui. That was why Tatsumaki had been imprisoned here. Because Vilgax saw potential in her. Kidnapped, chained, and brought to Battleworld to defeat all opponents and win the grand prize: a chance to battle Vilgax one on one.

Fifty on the Whiskey Shake. Fifty more on the other ship, the VES Thirteen Orphans. Two teams of combatants, all on the path to Battleworld. It had happened many times before, and so the stories go, only one champion survives. Often not even that many.

Mordred was right about one thing. Tatsumaki was here for Vilgax's head. She had her reasons.

Reasons that this oaf would never understand. "That's right. I'm going to succeed where they've all failed."

"Tch. Your funeral. Just stay outta my way. He's not the king I'm going after."

The airlock doors at the far end of the cell block opened. First came a small cadre of low-rank imperial guardsmen, casing the area for any hint of a threat. That roused the prisoners' attentions. These were the soldiers who walked in front of the emperor... Was he here? Could he, would he? Battleworld was his pet project, but he'd be walking into a room with fifty superbeings laser-targeted on killing him or worse. She knew he thought of himself as a reckless immortal, but how far did that go?

No need to wonder anymore. Emperor Vilgax walked in close behind. Actually him. A figure that Tatsumaki had never seen up close, that almost no one on Earth had ever seen in person, but unmistakably the same green scowl in all the propaganda posters. She'd seen that visage all her life: the indomitable, inescapable Vilgax who held the universe in the palm of his hand. He was flanked by a pair of cloaked figures, his two personal bodyguards always close at hand, highest of the high in the military chain besides himself. The concealing cloaks were to prevent anyone from getting too attached to them; the job position had a notoriously high "turnover rate".

The prisoners shouted, hollered, slammed against their cell bars like animals.

"I'm gonna eat you when I'm done with you! Ahahahaha! Calamari, sushi, teriyaki!"

"VILGAX!! My wife is dead because of you, dead! I'll destroy you!"

"Open these bars, bastard! Let's see what happens when I get my fuckin' hands on your face!"

Her voice was lost in the chaos, but Tatsumaki threw out a few good jeers too. Everyone else was doing it. Might as well.

One of his guards turned to him. "How does it feel, Lord Vilgax?"

"Terrible," he said dryly. "I hate it when people don't like me."

He was led to one of the cell-cubes. A white-haired prisoner with wicked horns glared coldly into his eyes.

"Ah, Rank 82! The Icefire!" The grunt guardsman gestured to their lordly captive. "He was one of the galaxy's most prolific slavers. We lost thousands of lives trying to capture him--his fire magic melted straight through our starships, and his ice magic froze our mechadroids right out of the air. How does the thought of smiting this brute criminal excite you, Lord?"

Vilgax regarded the being behind the bars. He lifted up one gauntleted hand, snapped his fingers, and fired the Ruby Ray of Roleau through his skull. The lobotomized corpse slumped backwards with the cauterized hole steaming, the defiant look replaced with the glossy stare of the dead.

"Thousands died for that?" Vilgax asked. "Embarrassing. Make sure those cowards don't get military funerals."

They opened the cage and quickly moved the failure out of Vilgax's sight. "O-obviously that low a rank wouldn't suit your sophisticated palate," one guard said, quivering. "But there are far greater tastes to sample, far greater."

"Then skip to it." A woman's voice--one of the cloaked bodyguards. "Don't waste his time."

"I can speak for myself, if that's quite alright."

The cold in his tone was more vicious than the icefire. No one was foolish enough to show him a low rank after that mess. They'd have to crack a top shelf bottle.

"You'll like this one, my Lord," the guardsman said, with a shakier tone of voice. "You remember the Saiyans of Planet Vegeta, yes? When you nobly freed their race from enslavement by defeating the tyrant King Cold, and then you nobly enslaved them again?"

"I can hardly remember every species I have conquered, neophyte."

"Of course, great Emperor! Recalling your long list of accomplishments would tax the most wrinkled of brains..."

At times like these Vilgax missed Psyphon terribly. Best groveler he'd had in eighty years. You couldn't teach simpering serfdom like that. The newer generation didn't understand how to grovel.

"Well, this one's quite special. Our intel suggests he may be the legendary Super Saiyan."

The cell contained an apelike brute, wedged comically into a crate too small to contain him. He must have been eight feet tall, and his musculature was swollen to absurdity. A hot snort of breath blew from flared nostrils over Vilgax's face through the bars.

"That's a myth," Vilgax said automatically. "The legendary Super Saiyan is exactly that, a legend. I've lived four hundred years and never seen this so-called Super Saiyan."

"With all due respect, my Lord, you'll have to mark your calendar. Today is the day you met Broly."

Broly, "The Violence" (Rank 10)

"Very well. I've met him." Vilgax tapped the bars, like a curious child peering into a shark tank. "If you think so highly of this Broly, I might be willing to go for a spar. Let him out."

"No! I-I mean--"

"No? Is that what you said?"

"I beg temperance, my Lord. It took the Rank 1 to capture him. I fear we could not get him back in the cage again..."

"What you should fear," Vilgax said, every word dripping with bile and flowing more rapidly the more he spoke, "is that I'll throw you out the airlock and you'll spend the next ten thousand years of your miserable life drifting through space wondering why you couldn't follow a pathetically easy order! Open it!"

Their keyring shook nervously as they unlocked the cell. Broly slid out of his undersized container. This hulking primate would have loomed over the rank-and-file, but it was nothing to Vilgax's towering fifteen-foot stature. The overlord peered down at him. His personal bodyguards stepped aside, while the lower guards watched in anxious tension.

"Alright, let's see..." Vilgax gave Broly a hard shove. "There, that should be a good start. Now you're going to hit me back--"

Broly swung a haymaker directly into his solar plexus and for an instant he was free from gravity. All his organs flew down into his feet. Vilgax hit the opposite wall of cells, crumpling the taydenite-reinforced prisoner crates and wedging him into a perfectly Vilgax-shaped indent.

"Good," said Vilgax. "This is right. Again."

Broly stepped forward and clenched each individual finger into a fist. His other hand held his shoulder, cracking his neck as he wound it through its full rotation, working out every crick. And he gave him what he asked for.

The next punch took him through the metal plate wall and three more walls and into the mess hall where the starship's officers were enjoying their lunch, blowing tables and smaller staffmembers to every corner of the room. Every neatly-stacked column of prison cells toppled calamitously and fell into a pile in the jail area, pulping the guards unlucky enough to be caught underneath them. Vilgax's private bodyguards simply disappeared through superior speed. They were the very best.

Mordred reached an arm through the bars of her upside-down cell and felt through the mush of alien organs until she touched cold metal.

"Yo, sick. I've got the keys."

She unlocked her cell and jumped out, letting her shoes splash in the blue viscera like galoshes in a rain puddle. Grasping hands reached out from bars and clamors echoed out in container cubes, but Mordred wasn't bothered. It's not like she was gonna let them out. She had bigger fish to fillet.

Tatsumaki groaned, half-shuffling half-levitating herself to her feet. Looking at those keys she was much less enervated than she was ten seconds ago. "Give me that."

And it looked like she was actually considering it, too. Mordred held up the keyring, glancing between it and the tempting lock on Tatsumaki's cell. The other prisoners were starting to get agitated now. Everything between them and escape, them and Vilgax, dangled from her fingers.

"Mordred. Give me the keys, now."

"Ask your mommy to let you out," Mordred said. "I don't owe you shit."

The key ring crumpled in her fist and she dropped it to the floor. All the threats, all the slurs and curses screaming out from the prisoners, she let it flow right through her. Forget it. Fuck 'em. She was born a lone wolf and that's how she'd die. Mordred held her head up, and let her honed instincts sniff out her fated enemy. Somewhere. Close by...

There! The draconic blood of her cursed father! All that barely-bottled-up rage overboiled now, vicious, foaming, murderous. "He's here! He's here! You're not going to get away this time, AAARRRTTTHHUUURRR!"

A blaze of blood-red energy ripped her through the air and cracked a Mach cone as she chased her foe's trail. In a flash, she was gone, and all that was left was the leftover, crackling static and the echoes of her bellows in the silence. Someone coughed. "Bitch."

"Fine," Tatsumaki said. "I guess I'll just have to rely on myself. As usual."

Her fingers twitched. A thousand tumblers rolled and clicked at the same time, and the vaults of Hell burst open. The Edge, The Supernova, The Unbowed, The Be-All, The Prince, The Heresy, The Chain, The Wave, The Joker, The Golem, The Shadow, The Rot, The Bulwark, The Senescence, The Phantasm, a night parade of all manner of unearthly beings. Villains, heroes, and creatures of id, those with names and meanings and places in the world that no longer mattered or meant anything. All paradigms had been remolded under Vilgax. Every order they understood before had been flattened under his boot. Now the only laws were two: the will to violence, and the will to destroy their overlord.

Tatsumaki knew them well. The haze of sedation had fallen from her eyes. Her mind was sharp. Now all she had to do was get to that bastard first.

She flew from her cage and onward to Vilgax, the army of the damned behind her.

BRROOUUM! The entire starship tilted to one side, every person thing and mote of dust rolling starboard as two hundred thousand tons swayed. BRROOUUM! Again. BRROOUUM! Again. As if rolling on the waves of a turbulent sea. What natural force, what deity's power could move this great ship of the Vilgaxian fleet so casually?

In the dining quarters, a very big and angry man slammed Vilgax against the wall.

Vilgax was indomitability, the end of history, but Broly was all ogreish strength. His fists had no respect for the blood of Vilgax. They did not fear what he represented. He beat against his body armor like the sound of thunder, pinning him against the wall so the force of his strikes rippled through his flesh and back again. Every hit threatened to split the Whiskey Shake into shrapnel scrap and rend its commander to mulch.

His assessment: Fractured carapace, bruised organs, cracked teeth, blackened right eye, strained musculature, assorted compactions, lesions, contusions, sprains, and aches. There was blood in his mouth and dirt in his wounds. All that from nine, maybe ten blows, mostly punches with some slams and grapples mixed in.

Satisfying enough. This one was worth entertaining.

With the raise of one hand Vilgax activated the Shield of Seagle, a relic of some planet or other he must have conquered at some point. An ugly yellow light coated him before Broly's fist could find its mark again. He didn't much like using the shield, it ached his pride to admit that his body could not resist every attack, but only fools let pride stand in the path of victory.

Broly did not crack any more teeth with his knuckles. It took him a few more swings to notice he was no longer harming Vilgax. He considered this stupidly, like an ape discovering a mirror, then decided his best recourse was to simply hit at him harder. Bare-fisted blows turned to double-fisted slams and vicious headbutts. The metal ground deformed as his feet slowly sank in under the pressure Broly subjected him to.

"Now watch this, Violence. This is how you really--"

His words were interrupted as an armor-clad knight in rocket-propelled feet zoomed through the door and slammed into Broly's back. She bounced off, spun around, and swung her sword to point it directly at her enemy.

"FATHER!"

In a distant corner of the room, at an empty table, sat a lone bodyguard. Eating a sandwich.

The bodyguards of Vilgax had a unique role. They were not designed to prevent assassins, usurpers, and various other foes from reaching the emperor. Their job was to prevent unworthy foes from reaching the emperor, those that were too weak to battle him, that would waste his time. If they were strong enough, she would not intervene.

She took another bite before she stood and drew her blade.

Vilgax turned to look at her. "Praetor, should I know why we are being interrupted by your familial issues right now?"

"It is not a familial issue." She pulled her hood down, and her face was a perfect mirrored image of her opponent. "I can tell you in the strongest possible terms I have no son. Only a mistake I intend to correct."

Praetor Altria, Imperial Guard (First-Class)

Chapter Text

Mordred slumped down to one knee on the rim of a deep dirt crater. She was totally out of breath. The blue sun of Battleworld burned her skin. Long shadows cast over the grass fields. And fifty-five inches of royal silver had just speared through her ribcage at the telekinetic request of the Tornado of Terror.

Tatsumaki thought that skewering that bratty ghost would make her feel better. It didn't. Staring at Mordred's stupid face only made her madder, because it reminded her how she had ruined everything! One hair's breadth from the death of Vilgax and this fool took it away from her. Idiot. Sometimes it felt like everyone in the entire world was a complete moron, except for Tatsumaki. She could not ever remember meeting an emotionally intelligent person in her life; nobody she met had enough tact to keep from pissing her off.

Unfortunately Mordred had the nerve to still be alive. She gripped the handle of her sword Clarent and pulled it out of herself unflinchingly. Then her armor materialized around herself, covering her wound. It looked ridiculous. Bovine horns on the helm and an armored skirt over the greaves. Everything about it made Tatsumaki want to crush her more, and she already wanted it a lot because—because Mordred really made her mad and there was the Vilgax thing and she was stuck on this awful alien planet and, and she was really frustrated right now.

Mordred braced herself on her sword as she stood up.

"Wow," she said. Her breath was ragged from where Clarent gouged her lung. "Such a stubby little body and you managed to pack that much bitch into it."

Thunk~! went Tatsumaki's fingers as she flicked Mordred center mass. The knight projectiled five miles away, out of the dusty grass and towards some far-away mountains. All she could see was a plume of smoke at the point of impact, and the ensuing rockslide "Annoying little gnat."

Tatsumaki was not stubby, or little, no matter what some loud-mouthed vacuous peons might think. But she was strong. She was the strongest psychokinetic in history. Unlike most musclebrained heroes, her abilities relied entirely on willpower. Working out took no skill. Harnessing psychic power required a superior... well, she didn't know what to call it. A superior being, perhaps. A soul with meaning and value. She floated up on a gentle current of extrasensory ability, then took off towards Mordred leaving nothing but the Mach wave in her wake.

The boulders and unsettled mountainside exploded into slag through an eruption of red lighting. Mordred clawed her way out unharmed, only more viciously angry. She slid one foot back. She readied her blade like a baseball bat. Tatsumaki realized she was going to make a swing for her once she got close. Cute, but ultimately foolish. A distance attacker like Tatsumaki set the terms of engagement against a melee fighter. She could strike Mordred any way she wished, but Mordred could not hit her with anything.

Mordred kicked a car-sized rock into the air and spun her entire torso into the follow-up strike, cracking a half-ton home run directly towards Tatsumaki. The psychic was so taken aback she almost let it hit her, but she reached out and julienned the boulder seconds before impact. So the brat wasn't a complete idiot after all.

But she was a copycat. More boulders catapulted towards Tatsumaki, more bullets to be swatted out of her path as she chased Mordred. So much wasted effort to imitate what she could do with a few idle thoughts. All rocks speeding towards Tatsumaki froze in their path, and with the direction of Tatsumaki's malice, shot backwards at tripled speed. Each one that hit Mordred pushed her deeper into the rock face. Deeper. Deeper still. Further opening up a cavity in the mountainside that sprawled and cracked open until it could swallow up the Sydney Opera House, until Mordred was just a miniscule speck in the middle.

Tatsumaki stretched out both hands and made a twist. That was all it took to pop the top off the mountain, as easily as opening a jar. She lifted it up again, saw Mordred as one individual cockroach lying under a forty-billion-ton boot, then clenched her fist and brought the boot down hard. Earthquakes tremored. Deep gouges formed in the dirt, down to ancient inescapable places. It had only taken a modicum of Tatsumaki's effort to crush her.

A single slash cut the whole thing in two pieces.

"Shrimp!" Tatsumaki was impressed that Mordred's bellow could reach her ears from here. She was impressed that Mordred's sword could reach her throat from here. One jump crossed the whole distance in a frighteningly brief amount of time. "You want a fight, you got it!"

She raised a barrier to block Mordred's downward greatsword swing just before the hit. Tatsumaki's body could not actually withstand any kind of attack from anyone whose strength was remotely relevant to her own. She had to rely on her shields, an expression of compacted willpower into a shapeable kinetic field. Her mental state governed her psychic ability. To create a barrier, she needed the conviction that she could, and enough confidence to construct it out of. And she was never unconfident. She had no reason to be.

Hits on those barriers never felt good, though. Stung like someone pressed a raw nerve right under a tooth. She was really, literally, putting herself out there with every fight, and attacks on her psyche ached in a very demoralizing, depressing way. An ordinary person wouldn't have the resolve for battle after a blow like that. But Tatsumaki could only think about how satisfying it would be to shut up that arrogant fool. As much rage as Mordred burned with, Tatsumaki felt just as much vexation. Enough to keep shoving Mordred back with every blow.

Tatsumaki snagged her and flew with her. She used Mordred as a drill to push through the mountain and broke on through to an ocean behind it, sprawling as far as their eyes could see. Nothing but sun above and azure sea below. Tatsumaki scraped Mordred through the ocean without slowing down and sloshed her helmet full of water, forcing her back down again to drown her, then up again, back again before she could really catch her breath, and again up while her legs were still kicking. She didn't stop until her extra-sensory perception stung her in a way she couldn't ignore. Something else. An intruder she couldn't detect before. Had restraining Mordred really used up so much of her psychic energy?

The knight got fished up out of the water. Seaweed and saltwater poured from every crease. It couldn't have felt good on her wounds.

"What was that? What did you do?" Tatsumaki demanded. "You changed something—you awakened something—"

Mordred spat in her face. Or she tried to. The helmet was in the way. "Fuck you. You probably woke something up trying to fuck me around down there. Or I might've zapped somethin' awake while trying to get your grubby paws off me. Hey, by the way."

Three hundred million volts of red prana surged from Mordred's body. The two of them propelled apart like opposite magnets and slapped against the surface of the water, bouncing, rolling over the waves as Mordred laughed and Tatsumaki screamed.

"Ahahaha~! Serves you right!" Mordred got to her feet and gloated. Tatsumaki was much slower to get up. "You little punk, I didn't do a damn thing to you, I'm not your enemy, and you got in my way anyway. You're lucky I'm nice enough to hold back against little kids, because my Noble Phantasm would cook you into..." She looked around. "Into..." Her feet were only a little submerged in the ocean she was currently standing on. "Huh... Didn't know I could do that."

Tatsumaki didn't know she could do that either. She wasn't levitating. She was standing on a shuddering, slimy shag carpet. A quick grope along its skin with her clairvoyance couldn't find its edge. Not a hundred feet out. Not a thousand feet out. After feeling one mile in every direction she was no closer to understanding what she was on top of, except that it was alive. And moving.

She formed a barrier over herself just before it grabbed her. A sludgy, filamentous algae bloom the size of Mallorca glopped up all around them, pulsing, hungry. It was inescapable. It became the sky and ground. Hundreds and hundreds of fish and birds and plants and other creatures she couldn't name, animals that didn't exist on Earth, snared up and dessicated in an aquatic web. They were being eaten. Soon, she would be too.

The algae folded overhead and slurped them down under the water, and the ocean once again went still.

It was one of many traps to torture and torment the warriors of Battleworld. Exactly the way he had imagined it.

Battleworld was terraformed and engineered over a period of decades (an eyeblink to Vilgax) to be the most extraordinary life-purging weapon ever constructed. Its daily high and low temperatures fluctuated between 100°C and -100°C, sometimes within minutes. Its volatile atmosphere generated anything from firestorms to Category 7 hurricanes without notice, and in spots where no storms passed, asteroids bombarded the surface dragged in by mercurial gravitational fields (the size and gravity of Battleworld was more similar to Jupiter than Earth). This planet was populated by hostile, violent extremophiles from the most turbulent death zones in the universe, often genetically modified to be even more vicious, an ecosystem that thrived in a world littered with booby traps and execution devices on dangerous terrain. The grass was carnivorous. The fruit was poisonous. The birds swarmed like locusts, the fish jumped out of the water with teeth like lampreys, even the herbivores were predators and the predators were superpredators. The less said about the insects, the better.

Vilgax's prone form lay in the street. Many of Battleworld's artificial biomes had been constructed theatrically, evoking habitats and cityscapes that would never coexist in nature. This one was an alien metropolis cluttered with glittering skyscrapers and abandoned aerocars. A fictional city like the temporary "war-towns" the Vilgaxian Armada constructed to test new weapons, kingdoms ruled by mannequins. Praetor Altria materialized next to him.

"Your orders, my Lord."

He grunted. "Where's my other guard?"

"Surely he's still alive. Perhaps he is attending to his own matters. You know he's always valued his liberty."

"A useless trait in a Praetor. If I could kill him I'd have wrung his neck years ago." He could wring Altria's neck now, but it would be a waste. Instead, he tapped his communicator and connected to his royal scientist, someone he could abuse at long distance. "Conners, you worthless slop, I'm stuck on Battleworld because your ship designs couldn't withstand a mild impact! Explain why I shouldn't have you executed."

"I am detecting a tremor of anger in your voice," buzzed the synthesized voice of the communicator. "Be mindful that you do not allow your emotions to cloud your actions. It may lead to inefficient decision-making."

Damn Conners. He insisted on maintaining the robot act despite being nothing of the sort. Probably thought it would give him some leeway in managing Vilgax's temper, or even worse, that he was too valuable to the empire for Vilgax to destroy. Vilgax had erased the work of the universe's greatest artists and scientists just to prove the sword was mightier than the pen, and he would not have his researcher believing he was more intelligent than Vilgax could afford to lose—even if he was exactly right.

"Forget it. Give me a status report, what's the damage?"

"We've lost contact with several of our gladiators. The Gunmetal, the Prince, the Phantasm, the Judgment, and the Undying are presumed—well, dead, for a start. But we believe most of the others are alive, including Ranks 1 through 10."

"That is good for your chances of continued survival, Conners. Have the battles already begun?"

"Some have." A holographic projection displayed for Vilgax, and the sounds of battle were all around him. Giant robots clashed and shoved each other through buildings. A short-hilted hammer crashed down over the head of a snarling demon. Playing cards, lightning bolts, tempests, heat vision, chainsaws. "Unfortunately, not all of them are engaging with the enemy team. Some are trying to form allegiances, or struggling with the terrain, or wildlife..."

Vilgax looked past the parade of fighters. One of them was flesh and blood, unperturbed by the virtual violence he walked past. A young boy like a hatched duckling, gawky, pale, glossy-eyed, shuffling the walk of a drunk.

"Oh. Speaking of wildlife, it looks like you've had an encounter."

Altria drew Excalibur. Its true radiance was cloaked by Invisible Air so the blade disappeared into nothingness, a sword impossible to gauge the length of in combat. It was a hidden dagger capable of felling any foe even before she brought out its true power, a power Vilgax had only observed once. She had almost never needed it against the riffraff.

"Stand down, Praetor. Conners, explain this."

"Vilgax," he mumbled. He took a few steps closer.

"That's something our genegineers put together. It's a scientific miracle. We had to disprove the square-cube law before we could draft the blueprints."

"My only mission," he said, "is to destroy Vilgax. I was born to destroy Vilgax."

He walked past Altria's guard. Vilgax could reach out and decapitate him now, but instead he observed. His senses picked up on the irregular heartbeat, throbs of impossible activity beneath a false skin, minute movements too small for a microscope to detect. This was not a human.

"What is it?" Vilgax asked. He wondered when this creation of Conners would show some teeth. "It's shambolic. This is a disgrace."

"So impatient... There's a proverb on Earth that the general makes many calculations in his temple before the battle is fought—"

Vilgax kicked the child and sent it through a building and another building and sheared through the side of another building. All in a row like dominoes skyscrapers crumbled and filled the roads with dust. That provoked a startled gasp from Conners, and Vilgax suppressed his smile.

"I have swallowed the last breaths of gods. I have bathed in blood until I forgot the touch of water. I have chewed the marrow of the devil's bones! Do not tell me to be patient!" Vilgax scraped his sabaton against the street and left a trail of red gunk behind. "On Vilgaxia, this is the proverb: Only the dead strike second!"

"Pardon my impertinence, but before you pronounce any deaths, you should look twice."

A creature was growing in the wreckage. A goliath. Rapidly he grew until his draconic body loomed two hundred feet tall. Drooling sharp teeth, jagged pauldrons, glittering purple shell around its flesh. The boy must have felt stifled in his human form. He was no longer clumsy, but nimble and light, although he pushed tall buildings down with his strides.

"Vilgax! I... am the End of the Endless! I was born to destroy the Last King!"

"Do you like him?" Conners asked. "This is a vital step in our work to recreate the Omnitrix. Instead of a device that alters the user's DNA, this is a species that alters its own DNA to create helpful mutations in real time. Expensive and hard to replicate, but we're inching closer to Azimuth's genius. Kaiju antitheticus... Although, my lab assistants have invented a catchier name."

Anti "The Pursuer" (Rank 33)

Anti blocked out the sun. He moved so fast. Impossibly fast for his size. Like a kineceleran scaled up until the laws of physics were only a fleeting summer passion. This was one of the great slumbering beasts that once ruled the earth... Gojira... Ghidorah... Baltan... and now Anti.

"Vilgax, I can cut him down," Altria said.

"I know you can. But that idiot researcher wants me to give his pet monster a test run."

Vilgax lifted his arm. All those years ago, Azimuth's second-greatest weapon had fallen from the hands of the humans and come into Vilgax's grasp. He did not often use it. Just another toy he had forgotten to play with the moment after he got it. But it would be more interesting to see how the replica fared against the original. Perhaps even amusing.

"I will bring you the murder you ask for. Omnitrix, take the form of 'Way Big'."

He struck the face of the watch and transformed into Grey Matter.

Mordred was in the mouth of the beast. She sank. Greedy, grasping hands of green dragged her down. The water got heavier around her every fathom deeper she sank. She wondered how deep down she'd gotten now, how many billions of tons of water pressed on her. Probably a lot. Her armor was starting to strain under the pressure, and without it Mordred would have been pressed like a flower. The only thing keeping her rooted to the mortal world was the power of her grudge. She would not allow herself to die before her father.

Speaking of sealife, how was the crabby shrimp doing? Was she still alive? Maybe she got squished into a crabcake, ha-ha, how fitting that would be. If there's one thing Mordred really despised, it was self-righteousness, and Tatsumaki had that in abundance.

...Damn it, Mordred didn't really want some random woman to die when she was around to stop it. But what the hell was she supposed to do? She was struggling as hard as she could down here. There was that one secret power left in her arsenal, the unleashed fury of Clarent, but using it completely exhausted her. Even if it destroyed the monster she'd still be miles beneath the ocean and nearly unconscious. Not good. Still, the other option was continuing to sink. It was worth a try. She groped around in the algae for her sword and grabbed the hilt, squeezing it tightly. This would be her last and only chance.

Or not. A lasso of emerald light burst through the plant mass to tangle around her. She was dragged without warning through a hundred foot thick wall of algae and tore through the other side into the absolute darkness of the deep ocean. Another green rope wrapped around Tatsumaki's psychic orb thing and pulled it along, the only other thing Mordred could see even with her superhuman vision. Was this, like, a good lasso? Was it better to be snagged by this than caught by a plant monster? Mordred hacked and slashed at it as the two of them were ripped through the water, but the rope wouldn't break.

After a few nauseating minutes of waterboarding, Mordred's whole equilibrium shifted. Her brain flipped. Instead of being pulled straight across she was getting dragged up, or what felt like up. Her and Tatsumaki splashed out of the water, got yanked through the air without visibility, and were finally pulled upward or forward or something into a blinding expanse.

A vast limestone grotto stretched out before her. Sprawling networks of caverns in astonishing verticality, stabbing in every direction and extending high over her head. The gentle pools of water and the towering rock structures were illuminated by clusters of bioluminescent fungi growing over the stone. Once they were out of the drink and touched solid ground again, the green ropes disappeared and both women fell to the ground coughing up salt water and small aquatic creatures.

"Sorry for the rough landing. Had to put speed over comfort there."

A tall, strapping figure floated down. He had a simple, form-fitting outfit and a domino mask, classically superheroic, and the ring on his hand glowed with energy that cast his body under all kinds of shadows. Instead of making him look sinister, he looked stalwart and knightly. Which made her trust him less. Probably some jerk.

Tatsumaki stood up and berated him on the spot. It was good to know that she did that to everyone.

"You are an absolute OAF! I was perfectly capable of handling that pile of trash before you intervened!"

"I don't doubt it," he said. "You're the Tornado of Terror, aren't you? You were an S-Class hero."

"I am an S-Class hero! Nothing changed!" It only took a few words to work her into a frenzy. "I know what you are, you know. Although I didn't know any of you had managed to survive this long. Should I say you were a Green Lantern, since Vilgax executed the rest of you? Representing an organization that doesn't even exist anymore, wearing a ring that nobody else but Vilgax owns anymore. And I'm the one who 'was' a hero! Give me a break! You're just a play-actor!"

The Lantern stood there through her entire foot-stomping rant, soaking in all of her abuse. He pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed.

"Yep. You're everything I've always heard about."

Hal "The Dauntless" (Rank 40)

Footsteps echoed in the grotto, a heretofore unseen fourth presence. Mordred drew her sword. The foosteps came closer and into the light, and it turned out they belonged to a blonde with a sake gourd. She wasn't as short as Tatsumaki, but annoyingly, she was taller than Mordred.

"Come off it now, Tatsumaki, you're embarrassing yourself. The fussy tantrum act might work on some men, but it doesn't get you very far with me."

Tatsumaki's eyes narrowed. "Tsunade too? Hmph. They've got the whole Justice League down here."

"Hokage Tsunade. Don't shorten it just because you're short."

Tsunade "The Resurrection" (Rank 8)

"Tats, who the hell are these people?" Mordred asked. "Are we gonna have to beat them up, or what?"

She grimaced at the overly familiar nickname, but Mordred wasn't going to stop using it. "We all kind of knew each other at some point, in the Worst War. All the colors in the Lantern Corps fought together against the armada for six months straight... Obviously they failed. Tsunade leads the Hidden Village. They're a gaggle of vigilante ninja hermits from the forest, scarcely better than terrorists. She's a military medical operative who fought Vilgax to a stalemate."

"That's right." Tsunade did not sound too shaken up by the unkind words. "Neither of us knew how to kill each other, so we had to let it be. Just thinking about all those different murder methods puts a shiver in me. Made me into an alcoholic." She took a swig from the gourd. "Just kidding. I can quit whenever I want."

"Seems like we're all acquainted here except for you." Hal looked to Mordred. "You got a name, sir...?"

She shook her head. "'Sir' is fine, whatever. Can we go already? Is there a reason we haven't floated up out of this shitty place?"

"You think we haven't tried that?"

Tsunade reached down and dug a chunk out of the limestone with her fingers. She tossed it straight up in the air, and instead of falling back to the ground, it arced backwards past Mordred's head.

"We're in the middle of a localized gravity anomaly," Hal said. "Don't know if it's natural, or a little prank courtesy of whoever built this place, but in any case, it's impossible to tell which way is up. For the record, we came in from up there," and he gestured towards the ceiling. "We thought we were going up."

There were about a zillion pathways through the grotto and they went in a zillion different directions. Tatsumaki glanced around at them. Maybe some psychic hand was feeling through the creases and edges, plotting a 3D map of the surreal terrain, but if that's what she was doing, it was to no effect. Once she realized that finding her way around was futile, she decided to take it out on the others.

"Did you two just give up, then? Sitting here waiting to die? That's pathetic."

"We've been here for less than ten minutes, kid," Tsunade said. "We've barely been on this planet an hour. A whole swarm of mechadroids swooped down and pressured us into the cave the moment we landed, and it's a hell of a lot easier to get into the cave than out of it. We were going to make another try at it before you two showed up."

Tatsumaki scoffed. "Lazy! I'll get you out, though. Once you see how easily I can solve your predicament, you'll feel absolutely humiliated."

She conducted an invisible orchestra. Cracks hit the limestone and the whole grotto rumbled under her psychokinetic touch. Every wave of her fingers created a new impression in the ancient rock, groping her way roughly through the caverns and making them tremble.

"This is the only pathway with discarded mechadroid scrap" Tatsumaki pointed to one of a thousand other identical holes in the walls. "If you fought them all the way down, that's the way you came in and the way we can get back out."

Hal smiled. "Not bad. See, Tsunade, it didn't take too long to-"

Mordred got tired of all the talking and jumped for the pathway. Her feet dug into the limestone and pushed off to shoot towards the opening, stretching out at the long erosion-carved halls. Finally, freedom was within her grasp!

Gravity reoriented, and Mordred plummeted straight into the cavern passage that had suddenly become a hole.

Anti stomped Vilgax flat. Fifty-five thousand tons of hate and spite crushed down on him so hard every living thing on the same tectonic plate felt the aftershocks. But one mere stomp would have been too merciful for the great tyrant. Anti stomped down again on the atoms, then flattened the neutrons, then obliterated the very quarks. At least, that was the plan, had Vilgax not made himself so small.

Grey Matter, the six-inch Galvan whose DNA was contained in the Omnitrix, was able to wedge into a miniscule fracture in the earth that Anti's fury couldn't reach. When the clawed talon of the kaiju came for him, he hid. It was that roachlike instinct towards life that kept him out of the grave for so long.

Perhaps his memory really had become too overloaded with trivium of a trillion conquered realms. He'd forgotten that most frustrating quirk of the Omnitrix, the one that had nearly given him the victory so many times when it was on the boy's arm: the damn thing never gave you the species you wanted.

"My Lord!" His Praetor lunged into action, sweeping her sword to clash with a lightning-fast claw swipe. A thousand sounds of clangs and shwings echoed in Vilgax's ears, but he couldn't see the battle because Anti stomped on him again.

"Out of my way! Nobody interferes with my fight! If you get close, I'll kill you!"

The foot lifted up again, and thankfully stepped off to more effectively battle Altria. A skyscraper-sized chunk of blunt bone tore out of Anti's wrist and clashed again with his Praetor, knocking her backwards and ripping up a chunk of the street. Vilgax had a Galvan's brain now, a genius that made his own hyper-intellect feeble in its shadow. He could intuit the full truth of this battle. 'Helpful mutations in real time'? Conners created a creature that adapted to anything it fought.

Remarkable invention, A-plus. Too bad Vilgax was going to tear it to pieces.

He struck the watch again and gave the dice another roll. His proteins rearranged in a genetic whirlwind. When Anti attacked again, swinging a street-spanning tail around to crash into Vilgax, Vilgax was ready to catch it. He'd become a much more physically-adept being: Four Arms. (Four Arms was called Four Arms because his arms were four).

"What the-!? Damn you, Vilgax! Stay still and DIE!"

Anti twisted its head around completely. Vilgax watched its lungs bulge, hoarding air before breathing out a tempest of purple flames over the city. Buildings crumbled to rubble, but Vilgax did not let go. Rubble melted to bubbling tar, but Vilgax dragged Anti backwards and spun around to throw him as easily as an Olympian throws the hammer. Fifty-five thousand tons was an unnoticeable weight to a Tetramand. It was a species strong enough to engage Vilgaxians in hand-to-hand combat.

The enormous dragon rolled through blocks of urban jungle without slowing until he adapted. Two more limbs grew out of his flesh, grabbing and scraping at the asphalt to stop his momentum. Anti reoriented itself into a hexapedal formation, unhinged its jaw, and fired a laser beam straight through the ruined city at Vilgax.

Vilgax did what any self-respecting Tetramand would do: he punched it.

The light beam split in two at the point of impact and obliterated everything in its path. Now the tar was reduced to ash in the even more intense rage of Anti's light, and the ash was burned down to even smaller particulate, the stuff at the edges of distant stars. Distant clouds pierced through and generated plasma where the beam hit, atmosphere torn away, laws of thermodynamics suspended. But Vilgax survived. One of his forearms had burned to a stump, but he had survived the blast.

He transformed back into himself just as the spark in Anti's mouth had cooled. That was a foolhardy maneuver... even in my true form I might be troubled by an attack like that.

Anti opened his mouth again and prepared another blast.

Vilgax's sword was in his hand and just barely drew in time to split the second beam, one that laid waste to even further pastures beyond him. This time there was no break to reload. Another bolt of landscape-ravaging energy burned out, and another, each one more powerful than the last. After the fifth deflection his trusty blade was dripping onto the ground uselessly. No matter. His Praetors were his swords, anyway. All he needed were his fists. When Anti fired the next beam, Vilgax met it head-on with a shoulder charge.

The beam must have been primarily composed of heat and radiation. Not as strong as Altria's Excalibur, it didn't feel like a weapon that could split the planet in half, but it still stung like the miniature collapsing star cannons of Sector 7. It must have been at least five digits Kelvin, and the radiation... well, a lot of Battleworld was already radioactive, but this was a dose like swallowing two gamma bombs per millisecond. Fortunately Vilgax was more resistant to radiation than even the sturdiest Earth-based microorganisms. Anti's organic artillery carved a trench into the earth for miles, but it only singed Vilgax. It recognized that too. It never used attacks once they stopped being effective, it iterated on itself.

A new tactic. The beam became an ultra-cold vomit spray of digestive superacids. Two dozen different compounds none with a pH higher than -30, powerful enough to remain a burning haze even at temperatures approaching absolute zero, combined into the ultimate anti-extremeophile flesh-melting concoction. Vilgax resisted it. His cells regenerated at a rapid pace. Fast enough was he that he never slowed his full sprint as the acid attempted to dissolve him.

A mile-long tongue lashed out in a microsecond timeframe and speared his organs. Poisons and toxins poured into him, freshly-brewed venoms that did not exist in nature anywhere in the universe, median lethal dose 3 parts per trillion suddenly swelling and sloshing in his chest. Six hundred different kinds of antibodies swarmed to find the cure. He grabbed the tongue to rip it out and was assaulted by 5,000,000,000 volts of electricity carried at a hundred thousand amps. This was taxing him. His liver, kidneys, and part of his brain had already shut down, forcing his other organs to temporarily take on those bodily processes. He wasn't running as fast anymore.

"Still alive, you bastard?!" It grew another mouth just to keep screaming at him while its tongue was occupied. "I'm going to take you to Hell before I ruin you!"

But Anti didn't twist the knife in further. That must have been its weakness. It was impatient. The moment it didn't get immediate results with one tactic, it adapted to a different method. Sonic beam, psychic beam, neutrino beam, Minovsky beam, even a metaphysical beam that directly attacked his spiritual essence. They dealt cumulative damage, but nothing was able to permanently snuff him. Anti had wasted time with different killing methods not understanding that Vilgax was unkillable. Now Vilgax was close enough to strike it.

Vilgax knelt down and swung an uppercut straight into the softest part of Anti he could reach.

All 55,000 tons of Anti lifted into the air before the percussive force ripped its flesh into just as many pieces. Vilgax fired the Ruby Ray. A flesh-seeking laser rope zipped from point to point, burning through anything still left of Anti until there were no bits left that could be seen without a microscope. The whole cleanup took about four seconds. When Vilgax needed to utterly destroy an opponent, he worked fast.

Altria appeared beside him now that the battle was done. "Vilgax, are you alright? If I'd had Avalon I could have..."

"Don't prattle on about could have. I am fine. I can recover from a single cell if I need to. Do not humiliate me with false pity. The battle is over"

Don't be so sure!

Vilgax looked for the source of the noise before he realized it was echoing from inside his own mind. Then, things got much worse.

Flesh towers erupted from the earth and connected at a singular point to fuse into one Anti. Despite Vilgax having absolutely obliterated it, it grew an equivalent amount of biomass at an impossible rate, regenerating from miniscule scraps. Impossible. That healing factor was only possessed by a scarce few creatures in the entire universe, and Vilgax was one of them...

...so that's where it learned that trick.

"YOU IDIOT!" Anti screamed the moment it got a mouth again. "You let me copy all the abilities I need to destroy you! Now there's no way you can kill me! AAAAAaAhAHAAahaAHAHA!!"

The newly-immortal Anti disappeared into a fog of optical camouflage. It was now invisible.

Vilgax suspected this may be a problem.

"Praetor Altria." He entered an open-hand combat stance. "Two-against-one formation."

Mordred tumbled through a mechanical boneyard. Skeletons of ravaged mechadroids littered the tunnels like insects on flypaper. In the time she'd spent as a scavenger ghost liner before getting captured, she'd seen more droids than she could count. They were the footsoldier drones of the Vilgaxian army. Each one was equivalent in power to an F-16, and they swarmed like gnats in summer, so they had humanity's militaries trussed up in the first few hours of the invasion. For super-tough super-cool people like Mordred, they posed very little trouble individually. But they just. Kept. Coming. Not something she wanted to get in a long fight with, and especially not when she was rolling blindly down a gravity well.

A big green baseball glove caught her in the palm. The other three had met up with her in a hurry, and they were a bit more agile than she was.

"You alright?" Hal asked.

"I'll be alright when I'm out. Let's get moving."

He gingerly set her down on a rock ledge. Here Mordred discovered that whatever gravity tricks were pushing and pulling at her had gotten even stronger in the tunnels. All four of them were oriented onto a different floor. Mordred was the only one unlucky enough to make the pathway a pit straight down. Still, it was better than being a cliff straight up.

Tsunade skipped her way forward (or downward), using a rapid ninja agility to balance delicately on even the most perilous crags. "Don't run ahead next time," she chastised Mordred, before running ahead.

"I'm surprised the mechadroids left you alone," Tatsumaki said. "They aren't known for letting wounded prey escape alive."

"Who said we were wounded? We trashed those scrap piles." Tsunade stopped with one foot on top of a mechadroid skull and showed off a bicep. "Hidden Leaf taijutsu. Licked them bad enough that they had no choice but retreat."

"It still doesn't make sense. I've never heard of mechadroids retreating."

"These ones did. They were smart."

The further down they went, the more remnants of mechadroid activity there were. Metal pieces lined the walls like scales and were occasionally punctuated by severed arms and robot skulls. They must have fought hundreds, maybe even thousands of mechadroids—no, absolutely thousands, and that was just the ones they could see the remains of.

"Let me know right away if you feel any bites from the local insect population," Tsunade said. "There's a parasitic fly species out here that can inject live young into you. Takes five minutes after bite to hatch and start burrowing through your body to get out. Every living thing I've seen on this planet has at least a few ways to kill you and make it hurt the whole time you're dying."

Mordred snuck down another few feet and nearly slipped from her foothold. "How would you know about that?"

"Little bastards stung me. Then the mechadroids attacked... had to do surgery on one arm with the other arm while I kicked 'em away."

"Hold on now. Do you hear that?"

Connected by an emerald string to Hal's hand, a giant, green ear carefully panned around the tunnel. Every time the caves would creak and rumble, the ear would twitch towards the source. "Something's up there. Big monster stomping around, no doubt about it. I've heard it a million times."

"What does that mean, we know which way is up now?" Mordred asked. "If that's it, just let me blow through the ceiling! I'll get us out of here in one strike!"

"Please, for Heaven's sake, don't smash the whole cave down. I just meant my 'up'. I don't know which up is—"

"Hey." Tsunade snapped her fingers. "Hey. Shut up for a second. All these vibrations are causing a stir."

"Huh?"

The hair on the back of Mordred's neck stood up. A jolt shot down her spine moments before she was certain disaster would befall the group. Tsunade's ninja instincts and Tatsumaki's psychic resonance caught it a little afterwards, but the knight was the one who noticed it first. Just two words were necessary. Everyone understood.

"They're coming."

A deep, ugly hum vibrated through the cavern. Cracks formed and stalactites shook. A teeming horde of scarlet-skinned insectoid machines buzzed down the passageway with harm-inflicting devices on every limb, much faster than anybody could have possibly expected. Whatever they'd retreated for, the tremors of the monster aboveground had brought them all back out in a red tide. Gleaming red.

Their armor was red so the blood of their enemies did not stain.

Mordred pushed away from the wall and let herself plummet. Her sword unsheathed in midair. This was the best possible tactical position: her body naturally fell through the mechadroids, making it harder for them to push back her charge. She swept through them. Her feet found purchase on a head, a shoulder plate, any part of their bodies became a step before she carved through them and sent the sparking pieces to every corner of the cavern. Mordred was moving at near-terminal velocity now. There was no way the others could catch up.

She looked to her left. Tsunade was there running down the wall. Her hands moved with the same speed as Mordred's sword, but with even greater surgical precision. She was literally disassembling the robots in midair, piece by piece until they lost structural integrity and fell apart. For her, deconstructing ten thousand little screws and chips was just as fast as Mordred falling through a gravity anomaly and swinging her greatsword like a maniac.

The rain of bolts and washers flying through the air all got snatched up by Tatsumaki's psychokinesis. A snap of her fingers fired them back more forcefully than bullets. Stone shattered. Ultra-hard vibration-absorbing armor ripped to shreds because a few tiny chunks of metal pierced them at high velocity, no stopping. Tsunade fed her the machine scrap, Tatsumaki turned them into railgun shots. It was as efficient as a belt-loader.

"Hey, Lantern!" Tsunade barked. "Pull your weight!"

"I'm on it."

A glowing green steamroller barreled ahead. Mechadroid chainsaws and high-frequency blades clashed against its surface and bounced off. This wasn't some APC the machines could easily pick apart to chew on the insides of, this was a Lantern ring construct, a weapon that wouldn't break as long as Hal's will held. It turned out his will was a hell of a lot stronger than a bunch of alien robots. The bulldozer turned into dozens of spearguns that pierced through the mechadroids, then turned into drones that blew them apart from the inside.

They were too competent. It was pissing Mordred off. How was she supposed to show her skills if the other three were keeping up?

She'd have to leave them in the dust.

Red flames erupted from Mordred's heels. Prana Burst. It was one of her strongest abilities, the very power that allowed her to fight on even footing with her father. She harnessed the infinite magical energy generated by her dragon heart and channeled it into a sudden burst of lightning, the red fire of her soul made manifest. The mechadroids didn't know what hit them. One moment, they were whole, and the next she was a mile ahead before their severed parts hit the ground.

"Come on... come on!"

The others were catching up to her. Especially that blonde, Tsunade. Every time Mordred skipped ahead, she'd look over her shoulder and see three more chasing her shadow. All she could do was push ahead faster and faster. Damn it, why couldn't they just leave her be? She was like an animal. The more they tried to catch up, the more she rushed to be the head of the pack. She couldn't explain why. Maybe it was the dragon blood in her, but she'd always felt this burning, this uncontrollable urge to be in front.

"Stop!"

She didn't listen. Tsunade swiped at her horn, but she ducked underneath it. A green army trench full of sandbags and barbed wire appeared before her, but she jumped over it. Tatsumaki's mental grip squeezed around her, but no matter! She pressed on against it, although it felt like the weight of the stars were crushing her down.

"Hey, stop! Stop!"

Spiritually, she couldn't. Physically, she couldn't. She was falling and actively boosting her own speed on top of that, the mechadroids offered no resistance now. Mordred moved faster than terminal velocity, faster than sound, so fast she could barely see in front of her, a twirling vortex of robot destruction that ripped them to splinters. She was invincible. She was unstoppable. She deserved to be leader, to be king!

Mordred reached the end of the cavern and smashed full force into a pile of rubble. Her whole body embedded into the stone up to her hips, with her feet kicking wildly to free herself. The others came up behind her. A hard yank on Mordred's leg pulled her out as the rock crumbled, and fresh outside air began to pour through the cracks. They were finally at the surface.

"Idiot," Tatsumaki said. "We were trying to tell you you were about to hit the wall."

"Oh," Mordred said.

Anti was a tornado of violence. It copied Altria's Invisible Air, now microjets in his skin spewed cloaking fog to make himself nearly undetectable. There he was: an ultra-fast, ultra-durable, invisible beast kaiju, a creature who rivaled Vilgax's place on the food chain. And there was Vilgax, weakened by exposure to all kinds of esoteric weapons. How embarrassing. A mere Rank 33 was making him sweat.

Unfortunately for Anti, a desire for brutal combat did not give Vilgax the desire to die. When he was pushed onto the back foot, he fought back twice as hard. He was not above using his retainers in combat; that was what they were for.

Altria locked blades with Anti's bone-sword protrusion. At his size, she could feel the shifts in air pressure to deflect its strikes without seeing them. It was an alteration of her own ability, so of course she could counter it, and Vilgax had spent too much time sparring with her to be flummoxed by it. His fists and her Excalibur obliterated chunks of his body and scattered his blood to the winds.

And he watched as it grew back instantly. It was too late for that now, Anti had already developed Vilgaxian regeneration. The same power that gave him near-eternal longevity was scaled up to a monster the size of a twenty story building. It was impossible at this point. He did not have the power to completely obliterate something that size in one attack.

But she could.

Vilgax charged in close and grabbed it by the leg. His fingers dug into the hard chitin plate with enough force to scratch diamond, enough to give himself an unshakeable grip on a 200-foot beast.

"Praetor! Destroy it!"

Altria knew what to do without his word. A monster like that could only be defeated by a weapon with two qualities: the ability to destroy its flesh, and the ability to kill it all at once without any chance to recover. Altria had one close at hand.

He twisted his entire body and with one heave threw the fifty-five thousand ton beast into the air. She drew her sword. She brought her whole weight into her swing as she sparked her magical energy through the blade.

It was an incredibly delicate process. The attack only came from the very tip of the sword. Everything else was just foundational structure. She moved like she was cutting through a golden sea, parting waves of pure magic, each silken layer peeling apart every split-second progression of the movement, power building exponentially, twice, four times, sixteen times. In the span of her swing its strength was trillions of times stronger than her sword's base form. She turned base metal into gold.

The full motion of Vilgax's throw ended just as Altria activated her Noble Phantasm, and the sky fell to pieces.

"EXCALIBUR!"

Tatsumaki crawled out of the dirt and blinking into the light, finally out from the cold, dark grotto. The rest followed behind her. She put her hand up to shield her face and wondered, for a moment, what could make it so bright out in the middle of the night.

"What... is it?"

Hal squinted. "Looks like an atom bomb."

"It's not a bomb."

Mordred stepped out in front. She clenched her jaw and stared at the blistering golden sunrise. Any weapon that could turn night into day like that would be awe-inspiring in its power, but Mordred looked upon it like an inevitable result.

"You see that?" Mordred said. "That's Excalibur. Greatest sword of all swords, forged by the fairies of Avalon to kill Sefar the god-slayer. A weapon that uses the whole damn planet Earth for a power source. If there's anything that can kill Vilgax, anything that exists anywhere at all in reality or anywhere else, it's the weapon that destroys the planet-destroyer. Vilgax thinks he's keeping his enemy close. As long as he's got my old man at his side, he knows exactly where his enemy is. I bet that bastard has a list of anything that can permanently put him down and knows where every one of 'em is, at all times, so nothing can even get close to killing him."

Mordred drew Clarent from the scabbard and held it up to the light. Through the fading golden aura of Excalibur's release, its brother sword was almost shining.

"Just wait until he finds out about me."

Chapter Text

Hal the Dauntless knelt down on a sandstone outcropping. He looked through green binoculars, emerging from his green ring. Below stretched out ancient, dusty dunes, and pyramids spearing up through them.

"Yep," Hal said. "The man of the hour is approaching. And he's only got one Praetor with him."

Tsunade the Resurrection took the binoculars out of his hand for a closer look. "Thank god it's not the other jerk. The blonde I can actually deal with."

So, that was Vilgax. And the one with the sword. The Guardian couldn't really see them down there in the burning sands and he never had much imagination to visualize them. He could ask for the binoculars and see for himself, but he didn't see a point in the conversation to interject, so he did not. He didn't really talk to people.

"The son of a bitch looks in pretty bad shape, too," she said. "This is our best chance to kill him. Our only chance, before he heals. You all know the plan. Crush, you'll hold Vilgax in place. We'll only have a few seconds, but that's all the time we'll need."

The Crush was a human with red hair and a rough coating over his skin. His eyes were sunken and he had a big heavy jug slung over his back.

"I told you not to underestimate me. I'll bury him." Little sand grains danced on his fingertips, lazy practice for an incoming battle. "He'll see the face of my own Hell."

"Yeah, yeah, okay. Chain, you're in charge of restraining Altria. Don't give her a chance to swing her sword."

Chain nodded. They were a gently swaying being of ultimate serene calm, and Tsunade was much less blunt with them. "I understand my order."

"Good to hear. Bite, you're the most important part of the mission. Once Vilgax is caught, you're going to swoop in and kill him in one hit. Make sure you get every part of him. Don't leave one speck or drop of blood or he might come back. Got all that?"

"Kuu is ready!" said the Bite.

Hal snapped his fingers. "Alright, let's not waste time running through everything. First base."

"That's me," said the Cataclysm.

"Second base."

"I won't fail," said the Reaper.

"Third base."

The Magnificent tightened their bow tie.

"Catcher."

He took a moment to respond, but at last the Fury said "I'll fight."

"Center field."

That was him. He wasn't familiar with the code names. He wasn't much the order-following type, either. Hal and Tsunade were very, very lucky that their plan for him was something he independently wanted to do. Or maybe he was just too obvious of a piece to play. All you had to do was look at him and you'd know what he was good for. Straightforward. All of life's necessities were simple and clear to the eye.

"Yeah," the Guardian said.

"Good. I'm left field, the lady is right field. It's ten against two. I'm not gonna tell you it'll be easy, but we absolutely can win. He's not invincible. He's not a god or a devil. He's an angry alien bug, and no matter how big or how tough he is, we can swat him. Let's go."

All around him the others leapt into freefall. Some flew, or jumped, but others just plummeted knowing they'd be uninjured by the fall. Vilgax would see them coming soon. The element of surprise would be pretty weak. But he wouldn't run from them. He wouldn't run from him.

He knocked his two gloved fists together. No hesitation. He was only going to get one shot. One last chance to make things right. This was the last possible moment he could reclaim everything he had lost in his failure. The distance between him and Vilgax, one leap away.

"Here I come."

He jumped.

Meanwhile...

"I can't believe you're still following me around."

"I'm not following you, dumbass. I just wanted to go this way. And I'm in front of you, so you're following me."

"I wanted to go this way first so you're following me."

Excalibur's smite was easy to track. Where Altria was, so Vilgax would be. However, the flash of its use had covered such a wide area that "where Altria was" could have been plenty of places. They traced the impact to a crater the size of a city, and at the edges of that crater, an environmentally impossible division of biomes. On one side, a tangled and overgrown forest speckled with mile-tall supertrees. On the other side, a sprawling desert of weather-beaten ruins. The grass kissed up next to the sand like the water against the shore, no transition, you could put one foot in one and one foot in the other. Stripes like Neapolitan ice cream.

Tsunade and Hal were familiar with the desert because they'd just come from there. It was close to where the Thirteen Orphans had crash-landed, so several Battleworld participants were loitering around for their own reasons. They had scrounged shelter, a combatant who could abate the steel-shredding sandstorms, food supplies that weren't too poisonous, and plenty of able fighters who could attack Vilgax as a team, not the sloppy bull rush that happened on the Whiskey Shake. Strategically it was the smart choice. The desert promised safety and sustenance. Mordred and Tatsumaki had no food, no water, no place to sleep, and no clue. They didn't even have allies, unless you counted each other, which they did not.

Tatsumaki didn't want to get sand in her shoes, so she didn't go. Mordred didn't have that particular neurosis, but she chose not to follow either. It just felt too rational, too fated. She didn't like feeling controlled by anyone or anything, even if that thing was the natural gravity of common sense.

And Tatsumaki would be helpless without her, anyway.

"Do you see anything?" Mordred asked. Tatsumaki was flying above the tree line. She had the better view. Mordred wasn't actively scouting, just running through the forest chopping though any tree that got in her way, and outside of the bear traps, acidic sap, poisonous butterflies, and killer voles, things were still pretty relaxed with her.

Tatsumaki searched with her third eye. "Vilgax has a specific psychic signature. Like looking into the sun, absolutely unmistakable. If he's anywhere within ten kilometers, I'll—"

Mordred blew past her while Tatsumaki stopped suddenly. She didn't care what made the shrimp seize up, not if it let her maintain her lead in the race (every time Mordred ran was a race), but she sure as hell cared when Tatsumaki suddenly bolted ahead. Mordred had seen this behavior before. This was what happened when you slipped the leash from a hunting dog during a foxhunt.

Ah, what the hell. She skated on through on grind rails of self-made lightning, flash-frying any voles that dared to inch too close. There really was something in the air here. Probably the thing Tatsumaki was sensing. A powerful magical resonance, unfortunately not her father, but something that felt strangely familiar to her. Not in the way that Mordred had felt it before. In a way like her spirit core, her magical origin could feel it, a gingerbread man's memory of the dough he was cut from.

Tatsumaki was not much faster than Mordred. Their destination came up quickly. Tucked into the forest was a glade, and in the center of that glade was one of the giant supertrees among all the lesser, modestly sized trees. A monstrous horned humanoid of incredible height lay asleep against the trunk. Over twenty feet tall, and built wide like the walls of Camelot, one hand holding an enormous drinking gourd and the other clutching a titanic kanabo. Giants. Some of the other Knights of the Round Table had laid low warriors of the mighty giant race. This surely was one of those giant-kin. A lost creature from the Age of Gods, before the world got too big and human imagination got too small, and all the goblins and Grendels crawled back to the Reverse Side of the World never to be seen again.

This was wicked sick. "Yo, Tats!" Mordred, childishly delighted, swung her sword around to indicate the massive figure in front of him. "It's a freaking giant! He looks like he's been in a lot of fights too, he might be totally ancient! This is a damn miracle, the odds of finding a magical creature this old nowadays are like a zillion to one, he's so cool, he's so cool!"

At first she thought he was stirring awake, but on closer inspection his kanabo was moving in his hand independently of him, suddenly animated. Mordred looked up. Tatsumaki concentrated intently as her psychic energy slipped the blunt object out of his grip, lifted it weightless into the air, held it up, and moved it into the position of an ace slugger lining up a home run hit.

With all her might Tatsumaki swung that club directly into his face.

CRACK!

All through the forest, from hill to hill, shockwaves tore clumps of earth and trees and all kinds of other shit and sent it flying everywhere. Tatsumaki knocked his skull concave, as hard as she'd seen anyone get absolutely rocked. That man was dead. Mordred had finally seen her stone-cold murder a man, or at least hit him as hard as you'd expect a swing from a semitruck-sized bludgeon to hurt. If it had not killed him, she had at least tried to kill him in a single strike.

He groaned. The ogre slumped forward, rubbing the spot where he'd been walloped. In a booming and horrible voice, he spoke and echoed through the forest. "Was that an acorn, falling on my head?"

"YOU BASTARD."

More swings assaulted him. Each strike the club split rock and stone, ripped up the ground as easily as old carpeting, there one moment, the next evaporated. Still, the horned giant only grimaced, and not from pain. More annoyance.

"Oh, it's you," he grumbled. "Tornado. Little ant, don't be so quick to die. I'm in no mood to fight today... this hangover is murder on me."

"Huh?" Mordred looked from Tatsumaki to the giant. "Huh? Huh? You know each other?"

"DIE. OUT OF MY SIGHT."

The club swung again and he caught it in both hands. He wrestled it like a toothached crocodile, alive with Tatsumaki's blind fury, a struggle, but not moving.

"I don't have a damn clue what your issue is," he said through grit teeth. "Are you still sore about that beating I gave you back on Earth?" An improvised mordhau knocked Tatsumaki away with the hilt of the club. "Forget it. There's no heroes or villains to play pretend with anymore. All that's left is the strong and the weak. Pirates under different banners."

Tatsumaki didn't listen. She was channeling limitless rage into precise strikes calculated for maximum impact, a sharpshooter lining up one bullseye after another, not from the club still wriggling clenched tight in his hands but smashing whole trees and boulders over him.

"I don't care what you have to say! Cretin! Degenerate ape!" She was huffing and puffing when she finally stopped attacking him. All of her blows amounted to pretty much nil, a few scrapes and bruises maybe. "If you weren't there..."

He chose to ignore her and looked to Mordred. "What of you, are you here to kill me? You should. I'm a slaughterer." He grinned. "The old days... oh, I was wicked. I picked my teeth with children's bones. But now, what does it matter. Vilgax is stronger and crueler, and I'm weaker and frailer. There's nothing for me to conquer, and the sin runs so deep I could never atone, even if I wanted to. Might as well drink until my liver fails." The giant took his giant gourd and chugged it. Mordred watched.

"Yeah, whatever. I'm not here to kick anyone's ass but King Arthur's. Just tell me where he is and I won't have to rough you up too much—"

"IF YOU WEREN'T THERE NONE OF THIS WOULD HAVE HAPPENED!" Tatsumaki screamed, then her voice cracked, leaving her words as an angry hiss.

There was no pause in the drinking. He lifted up one finger, an obvious "just wait" gesture, and he wasn't in any particular hurry to finish drinking. Finally the gourd dropped back down. The weight of it was enough to make Mordred's teeth rattle from the impact.

"I suppose this was coming. You, brat." He snapped his fingers at Mordred. "I smell it on you. My kin's blood. Name yourself, dragon."

Dragons are the greatest of the phantasmal beasts. Their lungs are miniature universes and every breath is pure vaporized mana. The word "beast" itself was actually inadequate. They are black holes of magic so heavily concentrated that all other magic collapsed into them as it returned to its origin point. That must have been the familiarity tugging at her. Dragons knew.

"The name's Mordred. Son of King Arthur Pendragon of Britain. And his father was the Dragon of Albion. That's my granddad."

The name did give him pause, that giant. The Dragon of Albion was a pure-blooded dragon who was 4.6 billion years old. His existence was akin to a god, a dragon that was superior even to the dragons. But Kaido did not cower. He spat.

"Feh. If you were barking at some wyrm or wyvern, that name might make you strong, but not with me. I am Kaido the Beast" He took a deep swig of his booze. And then he took another drink. Another drink. Every sip he seemed to loom bigger and uglier. "My father is the Dragon King! My brothers are the Wufang Longwang!" Glug, glug. "I... I am Qinglong! The Qinglong! I'm the Azure Dragon, damnit!"

Mordred did not "know" this information, but the dragon heart pumping blood in her chest spoke it to her: Qinglong, or Seiryu, was the name of the Azure Dragon of the East. Identified with the Dragon King of China who split himself into five dragon gods, four cardinal directions and the Yellow Emperor at the center, five dragons on par with Albion itself.

Oh, shit.

Kaido, Rank 16 "The Beast"

There. Vilgax. Straight ahead.

He looked fresh from the fight. Red blood painted him, not the blue blood of the Vilgaxians. Underneath that, bits of marbled purpling skin shone through. Obvious signs of a beating. That was an unexpected stroke of fortune. Vilgaxians healed so quickly you never saw an injured one. Just alive or dead. It would be better if the Praetor wasn't there, but they couldn't have all the luck in the world. They'd have to capitalize on their chance.

Vilgax would've only seen six coming. Reaper and Magnificent were approaching invisibly. Crush transported Bite underground through the sand. Dauntless, Resurrection, Rage, Chain, Cataclysm, and Guardian, the ones he could observe, were only there to stall and wear him down. Well, that was fine. Any plan fancier than hitting the guy and he wouldn't have bene able to remember it.

Twin suns cast backlight over the sea of sands. They were lowering. Night was coming. The sunset put dark shadows everywhere, the silhouettes of pyramids and grandiose statues of alien creatures. Guardian hovered over all of them. It took barely any wind for him to glide, easy as the leaves glide on the spring air. His arms outstretched, winglike, he angled his body downward to speed his fall towards Vilgax. Strange feeling. This weightlessness might be the last time he felt free before he died.

"Oh. An ambush." He sounded bored. His eyes crossed chameleon-style to spy his aggressors from multiple paths of attack. "Altria, pick off the weak ones."

"There are none, my lord."

"Take the Lantern then. I'm tired of killing those fools."

"Right."

The Praetor jumped so tall she could've been flying to throw herself at the Green Lantern. Vilgax took off opposite her. Each powerful stride carried him a horse's length across the dunes, totally unhindered by the soft footing. Vilgax had no plan. He was stronger than all of them, someone who could easily wipe them out if they relied on their instincts the way their enemy did. That was why they had to cook up this scheme in the first place, because tactics were the only weapon they had that could pierce his armor. Against that iron defense their plan was kind of like a sharp stick they picked up off the ground.

But a sharp stick still hurts if you know where to shove it.

Across the sand sea, the Crush lazily lifted his open palm towards Vilgax. From the thousand-foot distance he looked like a little ant he could so easily squeeze in one fist.

"Sand Coffin."

The ground came up and showered Vilgax, binding him in a thousand-ton squeeze on every inch of his flesh. His hand had closed around Vilgax, and the sand followed.

Gaara, Rank 44 "The Crush"

Altria would have stopped if she were able. A strong swing could have righted her momentum, or she could have kicked off of Hal to get back to Vilgax, but her movement was completely halted. One chain through the wrist. One chain through the wrist. One chain through the ankle. One chain through the ankle. One king suspended in an instant by golden glowing restraints meant only to bind kings. Any struggle was futile.

Floating overhead, the green-haired weapon conducted the chains. It had no heartbeat. The divine magic that thrummed along the links was its lifeblood. "Sorry, but we can't allow you to intefere," they said. "We're busy killing Vilgax now."

Enkidu, Rank 14 "The Chain"

The ball of sand around Vilgax swelled and swirled. More and more detritus from the desert rippled around him until he was at the center of a giant sphere, bigger than even the pyramids until that pale beige dot might swallow up the whole world. Gaara brought down his hand.

"Sand Waterfall."

At once the sphere squished to conform to Vilgaxian dimensions. Normally anything in that earthen grip would've compressed into a bowling ball sized clump of flesh, but keeping Vilgax contained was the most it could do against him. Still, they didn't need Gaara for that. His job was to hold the emperor in place so their ringer could finish the job, and he didn't have to hold him long, she came in like lightning and they could all barely catch one split-second instant where her mouth stretched out to darken the sun before it snapped shut and Vilgax was gone. The pyramid behind him was gone. Everything in front of her was gone.

She stuck out her tongue. "Bleh... nasty."

Q, Rank 20 "The Bite"

"My lord!" Altria struggled against her confines, but the chains only barely budged, and even that was a miracle. The Chains of Heaven were a binding Noble Phantasm meant to shackle the gods. Altria was a little less than a god, and could loosen out of the restraints to some extent with her A-rank strength. Not enough to reach him in time.

Well, maybe that was the way it went for conquerors. Attila died of a nosebleed. Alexander slipped into a fever. So many countless would-be alien warlords. They all died in mediocrity. Vilgax's passing was just a chomp, then nothing. The darkness behind those teeth was a pit, and nothing could ever survive that fall.

Or nothing had until now.

Q's whole body seized up sharply. Behind her eyes, a sudden terrified confusion. The muscles in her body were not behaving the way she wanted them to, and Tsunade and the Rage hurriedly approached from either side. They were the backup plan. Backups for backups for backups, because even with these able fighters they had no idea what Vilgax was capable of. Even so, they suspected something like this might occur. Just not the extent of the damage.

Clawed outlines of gauntleted palms made handholds in Q's body from inside her skin. Somewhere in that dimension of nihility, somehow, Vilgax had returned, The tips of his fingers pushed past her teeth and forced her jaw open with the steadfast precision of a car jack, and now they could see that those teeth were not in her mouth. She had eaten him from some horrible opening in her stomach. Crack! went the teeth. Crack went the jaw. Her stomach-mouth pulled wide and Vilgax looked out at the warriors assembled to face him. He found them wanting.

"Alright, ugly, you're going back in again," Tsunade said before she punched Vilgax right in the face

Q and Vilgax blew backwards tumbling over the sand before Q righted herself and skidded backwards on her own two legs. Her mouth was mangled, but she was nonplussed. Her arms still worked fine. Vilgax hammered on her skull with his fists, still wedged mostly inside that devouring portal but his hands had come out enough to try and tear her head apart.

^{"insolent child!"} The words sounded strange in her, like wherever he was had an anti-echo. More and more Vilgax dragged himself out until he had finally freed his head and part of his upper body, enough that he could grab her horns and wrench his whole torso out half-hanging from her slackjawed stomach. "Don't think your age will spare you. All you young-life species are infants to me, and I never showed mercy-"

Q's jaw healed enough to set back into place. She simply put two fingers against Vilgax's carapace armor, imitating the barrel of a gun.

"You're a bad man. Bang!"

An ultrasonic frequency noise blew out her ears and blew out Vilgax's ears and eyes and anything soft. He was sent away like a cannonball, a solid wall of force launched him. It went through him. Hell, it would have pulverized any squishy human's organs and if Vilgax hadn't had resistant inner tissues he would have been torn to shreds. And it still hurt him. What hurt even more was flying straight into the Rage who pierced him on a giant sword.

Vilgax looked down. A sword inside his neck. He looked up. There was Tsunade, that damn thorn in his side. She grabbed him by the tentacles and snap-twisted his head the wrong way around.

"Her again... Some people just don't know when to quit." And, 180 degrees away, looming over Vilgax's backwards gaze, was a green giant that made even his green-ness and giant-ness look minute. "I don't know your name, though."

"That's okay," the Rage said, then tore his sword from Vilgax sloppily. "You'll be dead soon."

Hulk, Rank 11 "The Rage"

Vilgax almost never felt the bite of blades. Diamonds couldn't cut his skin. Hulk did, with not much effort. That sword didn't even look sharp. Still, he fell to one knee, clutching his suckling wound to keep his giblets from falling out and staining the sand. He'd asked for the best, and it looked like this Battleworld might have gotten it. That was something Vilgax could be pleased about...

Strangely, it didn't. Knowing these worms could kick him around did not give him the thrill of combat. It was some other feeling. Something that made him want to tear them to pieces.

He reached out his free hand and wrapped his fingers around an invisible neck. The neck turned visible as he choked it, and the rest came into view to reveal a pale-skinned woman in a luxurious dress.

"Ghh... How could you see through my Greater Invisibility?" she choked. "I'd completely erased my aura, negated any sounds, footsteps, or biorhythms, and even falsified the air currents!"

One of those fighters. The ones that had to tell you every detail of everything they were doing while they did it. Vilgax could have explained how thousands of years of combat experience let him 'just feel' an enemy would be there, but he wasn't about to waste his breath on a weak little girl. That oxygen was better used to power his muscles for violence, and occasionally, hateful remarks.

"Fine, don't tell me."

Her slash was almost so quick Vilgax could not perceive it, but he could, enough to just barely move out of the way before she could sever his neck. Instead she cut through the choking arm and fell back, and the hand that once gripped her neck now dangled from it like a necklace. That was her weapon. A scythe as long as tall as her entire body, with a wicked blade. He would admit: that looked sharp.

"Behold!" She grinned with wild, wicked glee. "I am

Shalltear, Rank 37 'The Reaper'

and I dedicate this battle to Lord Ainz Ooal Gown! The one supreme overlord- master, leader, love, and God! Now, let's see how many pieces I can carve out of you while still keeping you alive."

That name, Ainz. That meant she was with Nazarick Guild. They were a vicious gang of space pirates, the worst criminal band Vilgax hadn't eradicated from the universe yet. Arrogant gnats. He was done playing around at this point, he wouldn't allow them to keep introducing more peanuts from the gallery. They had more, too. He knew it. And any one of them would be trouble to fight one-on-one. But they had a glaring flaw in their battle strategy. Their capture-and-eat plan was cute, but once it fell through they had no more synergy. Too much standing around, letting each other toss his body back and forth not wanting to get in each other's way. That was what happened when you had a warband with no experience fighting alongside each other. Not Vilgax's problem. Vilgax never had a lack of experience, in anything. Certainly not fighting alongside a blood brother.

"Praetor!" he barked. "To my side!"

Altria had finally twisted her limbs enough to wrench herself free of the chains, dislocating everything just to tumble loose from the confines and plummet towards the sand. Enkidu fired another volley but Altria summoned Excalibur's hilt between her teeth and deflected each chain as they launched at her with the one movable part of her body. Neat trick. She knew right away that it would've been impossible if Enkidu had been fighting seriously and she angled her torso just right to jolt her limbs back in place the moment she hit the sand, a very Vilgax-like maneuver. She remembered his previous directive. The Green Lantern. Kill him.

Hal picked up on her intent. Multiple green glowing machine guns hovered midair and fired down at Altria, maybe inspired by Enkidu's several-chain assault. She just moved the sword to her hand and parried, impossibly quick movements deflecting every bullet in turn until they were ricocheting violently all over the battlefield. That provided just enough distraction for Vilgax to make his move. Despite being under everyone's eyes, despite his fifteen-foot stature, he moved quickly and gracefully away from Shalltear's next swipe of her scythe and rolled under Hulk's lunging jump. Yes, these were easy prey. He would have no issue picking them off, not when he shook out the rust of fighting so many strong opponents. The real issue was going to be-

The ground swept out from underneath Vilgax's feet and flipped him upside-down. A rope of sand tangled around his leg and lifted him up helpless into the air like a pinata, ready for the pummeling. Right. The one that controlled the sand. Fighting in a battlefield made of sand... What a tactical blunder this had been. The rope transformed into a grasping hand that bound Vilgax in place just long enough for another one of these creatures to sprint up to him.

Unlike those mediocre humanoids (aside from that green fellow), this one had a distinctly alien appearance. He had an animalistic muzzle, bright red fur in primary colors, and a head full of strange hairlike protrusions. Of all the diverse extraterrestrials he'd witnessed in his conquering days, this one seemed especially familiar to him. Why was that? In the span of those few footsteps he racked his brain for who this being about to strike him was...

Ah, he remembered. It only happened ten years ago, nearly yesterday for Vilgax: Angel Island. All those Echidneans from the planet Mobius, a real gory horrorshow of civilization-ruining violence. He'd been younger then, but the face was familiar, and maybe the name was on the tip of his tongue? He must have been a good fighter if he bothered to semi-recall it. What was the word...

That question was the second-to-last thing to go through his mind. That, and a set of spiked, glove-clad

Knuckles, Rank 50 "The Guardian"

Years ago, someone somewhere with deep pockets realized that Japan had too many heroes. Collisions of Kamen Riders, Union Negators, EVA units, Jujutsu sorcerers, and magical girls littered the streets for every kaiju attack and alien incursion. The red tape and paperwork was just ridiculous. You needed different car insurance for Big O stomping on it or All Might throwing it. There ought to be a law.

With the collaborative efforts of some receptive lobbyists and representatives who wanted their name on an exciting superhero bill, the Hero Association was born. Enrollment in this self-regulating body was required to perform hero work in Japan. Vigilantism was criminalized. Every hero was assessed and graded, with the strongest heroes receiving the greatest accolades. Tatsumaki was S-Class. Rank 2! One of the very best! She took to her job with aplomb, crushing every threat from terrorists to monsters. Monsters were her favorite type of threat because she could kill them without press hearings or human rights complaints.

That day was perfectly routine. The mission: hunt and destroy a Dragon-level threat. Among monsters, the Dragon level destroyed cities as easily as a step and they required multiple S-Class heroes to defeat. Annoying, and unusual. But not rare.

He called himself Kaido of the Hundred Beasts. The Hero Association's official monster name was Ornery Drunkard.

When Tatsumaki arrived on the scene the battle was already in progress. She just had to follow the trail of buildings crumbling to find out where the monster had stomped, the pathways of clawed footprints, and he was there. The 20-foot beast with the ogre club, stained in blood, horns in blood, face and mouth smeared in blood. His club smashed down on the street below and he looked up at Tatsumaki-

-there, with Mordred, years later, again the same ugly bastard, alcohol rot oozing from his breath. "Captain Kaido! Captain of the Animal Kingdom Pirates!" He hiccupped. "I'm still... I'm still captain, Vilgax doesn't scare me, damn him all to hell. I'm strong! Rank sixteen, sixty-six, six hundred and sixty-six, I don't care! I'm still the strongest! Me!"

Was he even going to fight? He was so sloshed, she couldn't possibly predict what he would do next. Tatsumaki wasn't afraid to pummel him unprovoked, she'd throw hands with anyone if she thought they deserved it, but she didn't know how wild he was willing to cut loose here. Erratic, unreadable combatants were the most frustrating kind. She couldn't read minds or anything. She'd tried it. All she could do was watch his movements for clues, wait for the right moment to approach. Then she could use her psychic power to pulverize him...

Screw it, she'd just pulverize him now.

The old ancient trees wrenched themselves out of the ground. Each one launched like javelins, bullet speed ready to pierce on through. Kaido deflected them all with his club. They flipped wildly into the air and cratered the earth wherever they landed. Mordred had to chop one out of the way just to keep from being pulped

"Hey, watch it!" Mordred shouted. "I didn't come here to get dragged into whatever the hell her beef is, I just want to-!"

He swung hard at her and broke through her guard and skipped her like a stone through a grove's worth of trees.

Some hopeless B-Class hero splattered against a skyscraper. Just an errant victim of a Dragon attack, totally random. B-Class shouldn't be involved in these fights anyway, but there were too many villains around, the heroes were stretched thin with Vilgax in the western hemisphere and the threat of Sukuna's return getting everyone agitated out here. Well, if he wanted to get his brains dashed out battling a beast five time his size, he could do as he pleased. As long as he didn't get all over her dress. Something that was somehow too difficult for these useless idiots to understand!

Tatsumaki quickly caught the gist of the fight just by scanning the streets below. S-Class Hawk Eyes, S-Class Sky Striker, a smattering of A and B-Class heroes whose names she didn't care to remember they were so expendable anyway, as previously indicated. And she didn't care to remember Mihawk and Raye regardless, those names were information forced on her by endless meetings with her brain-dead colleagues. Forced to bail out those two reckless swordfighters again.

She flew straight on with full supersonic force to crash against Kaido's abdomen-

Some hopeless B-Class hero splattered against a skyscraper. Just an errant victim of a Dragon attack, totally random. B-Class shouldn't be involved in these fights anyway, but there were too many villains around, the heroes were stretched thin with Vilgax in the western hemisphere and the threat of Sukuna's return getting everyone agitated out here. Well, if he wanted to get his brains dashed out battling a beast five time his size, he could do as he pleased. As long as he didn't get all over her dress. Something that was somehow too difficult for these useless idiots to understand!

Tatsumaki quickly caught the gist of the fight just by scanning the streets below. S-Class Hawk Eyes, S-Class Sky Striker, a smattering of A and B-Class heroes whose names she didn't care to remember they were so expendable anyway, as previously indicated. And she didn't care to remember Mihawk and Raye regardless, those names were information forced on her by endless meetings with her brain-dead colleagues. Forced to bail out those two reckless swordfighters again.

She flew straight on with full supersonic force to crash against Kaido's abdomen-

Weak. Even back then. Worse than weak, further back than then, stretching back forever the worst thing she could possibly be.

As a child she was weak, because psychic power equated to willpower, and she had very little. She was a fretful, tender girl who would cry if she stepped on an ant. This state of affairs was frustrating to her parents, who were nice normal people and really would prefer to have a nice, normal child who required less attention, or maybe a purse dog, or a house plant. When she did things in a scary way, like arranging her blocks telekinesis, they would nicely remind her that living with a normal family was a privilege and they could throw her out in the cold any time they wanted. Then she stopped doing it.

One day, although Tatsumaki knew she wasn't supposed to, she tried to get a jar of chocolate chip cookies from a high shelf. Her mental grip wavered and the whole jar shattered with a terrible crash. Her mother ran down and saw the shards and crumbs all over the floor, the cuts on her daughters hands, and just sighed.

"I'm sorry," Tatsumaki said.

"Yeah. I'm sorry I ever had you."

Like that. No hatred. Just passive disgust. A heavy hand pressed down on her head and pressing and pressing until it stamped her flat, and that feeling never stopped pressing her until she started to push against it.

That was his power. And it didn't go away. This was not some temporary burst of strength, it was continuous, it was simply an authority so powerful it had weight and mass. The authority of a conqueror.

No, she hadn't been that soft for a long time. This was how she felt when she first fought Kaido. When she...

...what was she remembering, which fight was this? Had she hit her head? Everything felt so hazy. Tatsumaki gave a psychic massage to her hypothalamus until a shot of adrenaline bolted through her system. City B, battling Ornery Drunkard, a monster had hit her with a disorienting mental attack. Still echoing, too.

Beneath her feet Kaido swung his club and Mihawk parried it skillfully. Raye flew up towards his neck, clashing her blades against him to try and locate some vulnerable point. They were passable. Yet Tatsumaki's abilities were first-rate. With a snap of her fingers the green casket closed around his whole body, and mental fingers wormed in to probe at his organs.

"Is that all?" she asked, though no one was close enough to hear her.

"Is that all?" she asked.

The family psychodrama just embarrassed her. You didn't see Tatsumaki whining about her family every chance she got, it wasn't something she could casually waste her sympathy on. But Kaido was sobbing like a child. The booze made him completely unable to regulate his own emotions.

"It's this damned society nowadays telling children to turn against their parents!" He wiped away his tears and snot. "Why did you have to ruin my mood! You of all people, Mordred Pendragon, the worst kind of betrayer! You just had to twist the knife in! Oh, just kill me! Just go ahead and kill me! I can't live in this horrible world where children HATE their OWN FATHERS!"

With those words lightning blew from his hands. Mordred cut the bolt but Tatsumaki could only take it head on, relying on her shields to insulate her from the shock. Greater and greater explosions of electricity hit, and it frustrated Tatsumaki that Mordred resisted them with an ease she couldn't match. Maybe it was a dragon thing? Made her mad. All she could do was speak her mind about it.

"God. Just shut up. It's no wonder your kid hates you."

Somehow, that didn't improve Kaido's mood.

He stretched out now even uglier. His body twisted into a totally inhuman shape, so long his entire self coiled around the land, and it looked like he might just squeeze the whole planet like Jormungandr. Every blink of her eyes he was bigger. And bigger. And bigger. He craned his neck and lifted the clouds up with him, looking down that dizzying height at two people as small as bacteria to him and about as sickening. Kaido was no longer a huge scary monster. He was now a colossal and petrifying monster, and the weight of his killing intent was like a black hole upon them.

Mordred looked to Tatsumaki.

"Hey, Tats," she said, loud enough to be heard over Kaido's grotesque transformation. "You got us into this shit. You gonna get us out of it?"

"You provoked him." Tatsumaki expertly re-imagined the entire fact pattern in her mind. "What are you going to do about it?"

Mordred grinned.

And then there was VILGAX.

His head had nearly been detached. One arm, thankfully not the Omnitrix-bearing arm, was property of the enemy. All his body was ravaged by sand and various acidic poisons left over from the battle with Anti which happened not long ago. He was surrounded by at least eight powerful enemies, probably one more invisible foe judging by the footprints and his own intuition- not exactly trying to be subtle. And one of them had just punched him hard as a truck in the gut.

There was no use complaining, or justifying his situation. The noose was tight around him, and his Praetor was occupied fending off the chain-wielder and the Lantern. He'd have to twist his way out somehow. Focus. The blow from Knuckles had skipped him clear across the sand dunes, so he had some time before his enemies caught up to him. The sand-controller had the greatest ability to harm him, sand covered everything in every visible direction. He'd have to-

No. Somehow Knuckles was speeding across the desert towards him. Usually larger, stronger opponents traded off speed, but this brute was as fast as any opponent Vilgax had encountered in the past—in terms of pure distance traveled, anyway. Knuckles came in from the center, Shalltear and Tsunade flanking his sides not far behind him. This was his opportunity to deal with several of his pressing matters at once.

Vilgax aimed the stump of his arm towards Knuckles and purged Anti's acidic purple poison from his bloodstream.

A geyser of acid sludge hit the sands and immediately vaporized into a flesh-melting cloud. Even his hyper-optimized antibodies had taken some time to crack the mystery of Anti's toxic compounds, but there was very little in the world that could truly poison him. After today, even less. And if it affected him, then...

Tsunade put her arm up to cover her face. Not much protection, but knowing her impossible medical abilities she was as immunized as Vilgax himself was. Knuckles totally arrested his forward movement and jumped backwards before the rolling poison could touch him. Shalltear twirled her scythe to keep the splatter away from her dress but allowed the droplets to touch her skin. As an undead creature she could not be poisoned by conventional means, there was nothing to poison... but Anti was meant to kill Vilgax, and his toxicity wasn't restrained by convention.

"Gghcchh!" Her face started to melt under the strain. "Regenerate, Perfected Greater Remedy, Panacea, Healing Bell, Perfected Greater Healing Prayer!" Every new spell from her lips purified a bit more of the taint. It was a rapidity even Vilgax could envy. In fact, none of them had been greatly injured by the blast, but it had only ever been to push them out of the way temporarily. His true target was Gaara.

Vilgax took a few steps forward into a rapidly growing soup of purplish muck. He'd already adapted to the poison, it had no fire for him. And, as he suspected, the sand battering him came from outside this puddle, not beneath him. In other words, his sand-manipulator could only control sand if it was dry. And if blood could muddy it...

In one blink Vilgax regrew his arm. In two blinks his fist struck Knuckles hard in the jaw. Tsunade attacked with cranelike precision on one side and Shalltear swung at his vitals with her scythe, and frankly hitting Knuckles was like punching through a mountain with a rubber hammer, but Vilgax deflected and evaded everything that came fro him. The battle's course had already been decided.

"You took too long," he said. "You should have rushed me down at the start."

Fighting against three opponents at the same time, four with the sandstorm that continuously attempted to snare him, would have been taxing for a debilitated Vilgax. Now he was pushing them back with ease. The nicks and tears they opened up with their cutting edges dampened the air, made Gaara's offenses weak. Shalltear backed off. Maybe she sensed what was happening. This wasn't teamwork. This was the clumsy uncoordinated efforts of chaff warriors who had no experience with or connection to each other. They got in each other's way. Vilgax hadn't made that mistake since the gladiator pits. Thousands of years of non-stop combat and he'd made every mistake there was to make. They'd been trained out of him.

Teamwork was something he understood. He simply chose not to do it, because friendship only makes you weak. Relying on the skilled sword of a subordinate was different; it was no different than pulling your own rifle from the holster.

"Now."

The shadow of Altria flew over his head. From above and behind Vilgax's foes, two golden chains shot out tracking Altria's movements. At exactly the right moment Vilgax reached out to grab them out of the air. One hard yank pulled them in, hard enough that the Enkidu attached to them fell down into his reach. One more hard yank tore the chain right out of their arm. It were Vilgax's chain now, or at least he was the one holding the end. Enkidu didn't bleed. They were all clay, struggling to reshape. Vilgax put his whole fist through Enkidu's torso and used them as a shield.

"Good instincts, Praetor."

A flock of clay swords and halberds flew down from the clouds and didn't stop coming. Enkidu still tried to fight even in this precarious position. Didn't matter. Vilgax twirled the chain and knocked them all out of the sky, even this unfamiliar chain was an old ally to him, all weapons were his natural kinsmen. One snap of the chain sent all three of those insects careening in every direction.

All things were going as planned. Naturally he expected some unwanted variable to come in and screw it up.

On schedule, a magically cloaked participant revealed herself flying high above the melee. The flaming red hair and the pint-sized height made vague images of memory flick into Vilgax's mind. Some bounty hunter.

"This is it, my grand debut!" she announced. Her heels clicked on a platform of air as she levitated. "World's cutest sorceress, beloved and respected by all, sending you to Hell with a smile, Lina Inverse!"

Lina, Rank 59 "The Cataclysm"

Normally Altria's dragon blood and Saber-class magic defense made her immune to any kind of sorcery or thaumaturgy. She had nothing to fear from a dubious practitioner of the arcane arts. But there was something about her. Something that put a compulsion on Altria's instincts, something that made her tense up and jump backwards to get out of her range.

Tsunade called out to her. "No theatrics, just kick his ass already!"

"Alright, fine! Geez, this is the moment I kill the supreme evil overlord! You could let me enjoy it..."

She didn't like being told to do anything, but she did it anyway. Both hands clasped together. Incalculable amounts of energy formed in a galaxy between them.

"Darkness beyond twilight, crimson beyond blood that flows. Buried in the flow of time..."

Vilgax had no time to entertain this. Why was he supposed to stand here underneath her with such a lengthy casting time? Unlike with Altria, no kind of hypnosis or mental suggestion could manipulate him.

Better to focus on his more immediate opponents. Those three from before were already coming back. He lashed out the with the chain again, severed Tsunade's head and swung over Knuckles to clash against Shalltear's scythe, watched Tsunade grab her head out of the air without stopping and run with it (damned healing ninpo or whatever you call it). Shoved Knuckles out of the way with Enkidu's repurposed body and bumped right into the woman who had been standing behind him.

What? A tenth person? No, there had only been nine. He would have perceived any additional combatants, or at least felt them. But as if she had come out of an unforeseen blind spot, a woman in an elaborate alabaster-white tuxedo appeared before him. Vilgax was startled that someone possessed invisibility so total he did not detect it. (But she hadn't been there. It was magic.)

Clownmuffle, Rank 15 "The Magnificent"

"I am your superior officer," she said. "Put your weapons down right now."

Oh. This must be his superior officer; she spoke with so much confidence that she could not be anything else. He put down his chain and Enkidu and placed both hands over his head, with complete assurance that the commander would provide further instructions.

(Anyone would've believed her if she said it with enough authority. It wasn't hypnosis. It was magic. It was Derren Brown Mind Control.)

"In thy great name, I pledge myself to something something,* you know the rest, Dragon Slave!"

The sun blotted out under the intensity of a much closer sun. This was beyond inferno, it was planetary collision, the world's largest fireball building over Lina's head. She heaved and tossed it straight down onto Vilgax and anyone else unlucky enough to be anywhere close to him. Everything cratered to oblivion. Glass spires grew fifty feet high, then the glass melted and reformed again as the Dragon Slave pulsed. If it did not eventually evaporate it would have bored straight through to Battleworld's core destroying it in one strike. But it did evaporate. The ruthless aura of the monster it was meant to kill overpowered its might. Dead in the center of the blast radius were three burning bodies, and Vilgax triumphant, skin charred but quickly scabbing over.

He tossed his chain up, now molten hot, to lasso Lina's leg. No matter how much she screamed or struggled she couldn't break free without magic and her magic was not coming to mind right now. There was no fear or regret to cloud it- but she was furious. Hatefully angry that he'd blocked her finishing move. She moved her hands into position to cast another...

"No. Enough of that now."

He threw Enkidu's body towards her at the same time he yanked her back. The mass of misshapen clay struck her head, dazed her, and she did not even notice when he met her forehead with his forehead and pulverized her skull in one headbutt. Two down. Maybe five, depending on how many Lina's errant attack obliterated. That left...

Hal and Q flying overhead. The Hulk jumping towards him. Tsunade pulling her body together as it rapidly regenerated. Shalltear's body melting away, now revealed to be some false milky-white doppelganger, a body substitution. Now Vilgax stood in the center of a glass bowl, spears of jagged material sticking out heavily all around the perimeter. Anyone coming in behind him? Without looking, he could 'feel' Gaara a few miles away. Getting closer, pushing the sand through the cracks. Altria had backed off for now. He had to handle six high-level opponents on his own. Simple enough.

Hulk landed first. Every atom of the enormous crater shattered and launched bullet fragments in every direction. His fist swung down to shatter Vilgax all the same, but Vilgax sidestepped and let him blow a trench in the sand that exposed the rock beneath it. One grab of the arm and one twist threw his giant body easily. No, it should have thrown him easily but Hulk stabbed into the earth with his sword and used that leverage to toss Vilgax instead. Perhaps he was more a warrior than a mere brute. Still, in experience he was hopelessly outmatched. Hal hovered this way and that looking for an opening to strike, but Hulk was so big and bulky he got in the way. Vilgax always kept Hulk between him and harm's way, something Hulk himself realized but could not avoid even with that knowledge. It made him mad. He clenched both fists, raised them up, slammed them down and smashed the entire sheet of land they stood on. Glass and sand, pyramids and cliffs, everything fell into the sinkhole deep into underground tombs. The world was too weak for him. He dropped so suddenly his sword hovered in midair, cartoon-like, and Vilgax snatched it from gravity's grasp as he ran up the falling chunks of earth. Hal was finally unobstructed, able to twitch his fingers and create a giant jackhammer that could split Vilgax like a coconut. Nothing between him and victory.

Vilgax took Hulk's sword while still running across sand suspended in the act of falling, bent it in both hands until the straight edge made an obtuse angle, and with one throw sent it spiraling out into the air. Hal dodged. The thrown sword had been a hair's breadth from his neck. When his improvised boomerang came back the other way, he could not dodge, and Hal split into pieces with the ring-bearing hand still making its phantom twitches.

It returned to his hand just as Shalltear came down to clash her scythe against it. The force was enough to straighten the sword again. Then it bent. Then it straightened. Dozens and dozens and dozens of strikes traded back and forth clashing against each other in an incessant clamor as they both fell into the darkness.

"I never thought I'd see a lower life form than humans, but this has got to take the prize!" She was so casual with her hypersonic bladework that she could taunt him while fighting him, even if her voice was strained. "And your blood is absolutely disgusting."

"If it makes you feel better, I don't much like yours either."

They had both fallen into an ancient mausoleum, marble beneath them, columns reaching towards a roof that no longer existed, sand pouring in with sharp shards like punji sticks at the bottom of the pit. Artificially created ancient history. What bizarre aesthetics.

His back hit the ground first, and Shalltear never ceased the onslaught of attacks. Clashing, brawling, sword against scythe over and over until nicks formed in both blades, then finally with one lucky feint he disarmed her weapon and kicked her feet out from under her. Vilgax pushed her down onto a pile of sand with a few especially large shards sticking out and that was that. Although he kicked her head off while he was at it. Just to make sure.

"Caught you," the Hulk said. Then two hands as big as Vilgax's whole body clapped against him. The all-encompassing force knocked down columns and tore up coffins and blew the sand away like the shockwave of an atom bomb, and Vilgax was crumpled as close as he could get to complete flattening. If Hulk hadn't given away his next move with that ill-timed quip, Vilgax wouldn't have put out his arms to guard against his thunderclap and would have been annihilated.

There were more muffled voices from outside the steadily tightening grip in Hulk's hands. "Do you have him? Keep him closed in, if even a single drop of blood gets out he could come back."

Irksome. As if he couldn't wedge himself out of these confines. Yes, he was in an awkward position where he could not create leverage, but he was still an improvisational genius. Blood from his crumpled body and sweat from Hulk's palms filled his own cupped hands. He could mimic Hulk's stance. Squeezing down on the liquid he held, not letting a single drop escape, maximizing his grip's power until the pressure was absolutely paramount...

He allowed a small pocket of escape between his fingers and let the blood spray out and blow through the Hulk's hands and head splattering green flesh everywhere and the impact created a new whole in the ceiling above them. Vilgax jumped out. A miraculously healed Tsunade and Q were there to greet him.

"Q!" Tsunade put her fists up. "Eat him again! Eat him again!"

"No. He's gross."

Seventy-two. That's how many bones he shattered with one kick to Tsunade's torso. She dug her feet into the marble floor but his strike was still hard enough to propel her away to face Q, preparing that sound-wave attack she'd hit him with before. He could slice her up, but she'd just reform again. Maybe...

He struck the Omnitrix face and disappeared as soon as her sonic resonance passed through him. Hundreds of feet worth of pillar and coffins shattered and even the pyramids above them shuddered, a sandstorm breathed aside by a vengeful god. And Vilgax was gone. She looked around, confused, but decided that her attack had been a success.

After a few moments of quiet, Gaara hovered down into the hole, levitating on a current of sand. His body had partially mutated, halfway transformed into some terrible sand-beast.

"Where is Vilgax?" he demanded. "Did he escape? If you let Vilgax slip out of our grasp I'll kill you myself."

She nodded. Then, her stomach-mouth opened up and chomped Gaara's upper half clean off. No need to even chew or struggle. The magic defensive net of sand that protected him, the Jinchuuriki chakra inside him, none of that mattered. Q completely eradicated him in one blow.

Well, it wasn't really Q. "Lucky I changed into Ghostfreak," 'Q' mused, examining their possessed body. "Fortune must be smiling on me... now, what do I do with this one...?"

Q's mouth stretched open wide, wider than it had been to eat up Vilgax and the pyramid. It stretched out so wide it touched the ceiling, then past that. So wide it folded in on itself so the teeth touched backwards over her body. By then it was so folded out it stretched inward to stretch outward, collapsing into a point smaller and smaller until she was nothing more than a little dot, and then nothing. As Q, Vilgax ate himself.

Vilgax's ghostly form appeared from the ether. He transformed back into his old self and he echoed when he hit the empty floor. Echoing. Empty. All his opponents dead or unable to continue fighting. There was nothing left but to return to his Praetor and put this mess behind him.

Although.

"The show's not over."

A match struck and illuminated that damn magician under the shadow of the sandswept pillars. Clownmuffle tossed it aside and it disappeared into a butterfly.

"Oh, for all the-" Vilgax groaned. "How many of you apes do I have to tear apart before you get the message?!"

She pulled a machine gun out of her hat and fired bullets that turned into bubbles that burst into napalm. Gravity reversed and everything suddenly fell leftward before suspending indefinitely midair. That didn't work on Vilgax. He grabbed a chunk of coffin gold and threw it fastball-style at her shoulder, pulverizing it on contact. He blinked. She had not a scratch on her. He reached her and smashed her face in with his foot and tried not to blink. Flowers grew from the neck stump and covered her up until she was completely healed.

Clownmuffle pulled a card out from behind Vilgax's ear. Then she slashed his eyeball with it. (It was his card.)

Could this be any more obnoxious or tedious? After that abject humiliation she subjected him to, she didn't even care to repeat it? (You never showed an audience the same trick twice). This worm? This worm had the audacity? He would not accept that! Her will was not superior to his! He would bring her to heel!

"Magician!"

She stopped halfway through pulling a sword out of her throat. She pushed it back in.

"I am not impressed! I've seen through every one of your magic tricks thus far. Mere trickery, stage machinery! You're a charlatan!"

Clownmuffle cocked her head so perilously far her neck might twist. "You haven't seen through any tricks. They were magic."

"Of course they weren't. Everything you accomplished was easily replicable with Vilgaxian technology. Utterly talentless and lacking in charisma."

"No. No, no." She shook her head. "That's not true. You're lacking charisma. An aesthetic abortion. Asymmetrical brutalist garbage, all the colors of cancerous vomit. An absolute zero out of ten. Don't tell me I'm lacking charisma. Don't tell me I'm lacking charisma. Where are your clothes."

"This is the uniform of my empire's army. Your clothing implies you are an entertainer. But I've seen nothing of the sort. If you can't entertain me, that outfit is a cheap veneer over a vapid nothing, false advertising, un-representative. And it's tacky."

She fell to her knees. Nothing could have prepared her for being so thoroughly demolished. Being accused of falsity and flaunting a style that didn't represent her, that made her nauseous, because he was right. That was the magician's role.

"Well. Perhaps there is one thing I might like to see."

Clownmuffle perked up and looked at him cautiously.

"I've never seen a magician hold their breath in a water-filled cage for three weeks. If you could stay underwater in a glass cage for three weeks, that would make you a worthy performer indeed."

That was all he had to say. She twirled her cape, blocking herself from Vilgax's vision, and when it fluttered away the case was already there. Clownmuffle suspended upside-down, chained, straightjacketed in a cube of water surrounded by curious sharks. And he didn't even ask for sharks.

He clapped his hands. "Oh, very good. That is impressive. Well, I've got places to be, so I'll see you in three weeks." And he jumped up out of the pit, leaving Clownmuffle alone with the sharks and the bones in the dark, and the sand steadily pouring in.

The sun was declining in the sky by the time he emerged topside, victorious, and Vilgax took a moment to steady himself. A parade of chemical detonations in his bloodstream, all manner of extraterrestrial hormones were hammering him, whether just to inform him of the pain or emotion so great it may as well have been pain.

He sat down in the sand. Vilgax put his hands on his face, rested his head, smearing his skin with more blue. Altria came to him.

"I failed to protect you against the enemy. I won't make excuses for my dereliction on the battlefield. You may judge me as you see fit."

"Don't humiliate me by questioning my tactics. You came when I called you and allowed me to fight on my own when you saw it was necessary. You performed your role to my expectations."

"Then... did it satisfy you, Emperor?" she asked. "Was this the fight you've been searching for?"

It was. But it really wasn't. The battle's outcome had never been in any doubt. While he had been pressed, cornered, potentially moments from destruction at certain points, he hadn't felt the spark of meaning. Just cheap animalistic adrenaline. That didn't make him happy. Nothing made him happy. Hundreds of years pissed away, when was the last time he had truly felt the value of living? Acquiring the Omnitrix? The victory over the Petrosapiens? The moment he was crowned?

From Hal Jordan's severed hand, the ring glowed and slipped from the fourth finger. It floated gently towards Vilgax and stopped in place. Green light bathed him.

VILGAX OF VILGAXIA. YOU POSSESS GREAT WILL. YOU HAVE BEEN CHOSEN.

What a fragile thing. He reached out to touch it, as gently as stroking a rabbit's fur with two fingers. In those two fingers he crunched that ring to pieces and rubbed them close together as the grains fell through and mixed with the sand.

"Praetor," he said. "I am depressed."

"Form a contract with me."

Absolutely alien language. A true ancient dragon, Qinglong, loomed over Tatsumaki and Mordred and shadowed the forest, lightning storms brewed above. And Mordred spoke nonsense. Tatsumaki balked. "What do you mean, form a- what are you asking me to do?!"

"I'm a Heroic Spirit, but I'm running empty on magic. I'll burn out if I don't get a fix soon. If you made me your Servant, that'd patch me up. Easy as. Normally the process is a little complicated, but, heh, maybe you could just use your psychic shit on me and touch base with my Spirit Core directly? Seriously, I'm not doing so hot..."

Tatsumaki looked her over. The way she was favoring her weight on one side, the way she subtly held her arm closer to her torso, the grit in her teeth...

"You're still injured?!" Tatsumaki asked, incredulously.

"Of course I'm fucking injured!" she barked back. "What are you, a moron?! You stabbed me hours ago! Nobody can just walk off shit like that!" For once, Tatsumaki didn't care to correct her.

Did she, really, want to connect her brain directly to Mordred's core? Touch her filthy soul with her innermost, purest being? It went against everything she'd ever stood for. She never relied on anyone's help, never again.

It's not like it saved her from Kaido, right? Back when they fought?

Back then, in the city, he'd never even shown his true power. Partial transformation into his dragon-shape was all he'd needed to fend off the other swordfighters. Raye burned herself out relying on her Shark Cannon and Mihawk folded like a fraud under Kaido's club. Useless. Everybody in her whole damn life was useless. She'd always had to rescue herself.

City blocks twisted with Kaido at the center. She pulled tall skyscrapers out of the ground and lifted them like javelins, and everything converged on the single point of Kaido smashing and bashing into him. But her combat ability was weak against the dragon's Achilles-like durability. Attacking with material objects meant she could not apply her full force directly against him. If she threw a building down upon him, it was only earth and glass, and broke like it. And when she used her mental grip on him, he struggled against it like a starving dog pulling at a bone.

She couldn't even remember. How did she defeat him the first time, when he felt so insurmountable?

Oh.

She didn't.

They stopped when the sun darkened, under the shadow of a sea of starships. Word had gone out to the fleet: ten thousand kilometers away, Vilgax had defeated his hated enemy. There were no impediments to the full-scale invasion. That was the day the Worst War truly began.

And she wasn't even there to see it. Because of that liver-rotted bastard.

She couldn't stay, she left as soon as she could to check on things in Central Park, she had to. It was the last time she left Japan as a peaceful country. The last glimpse she had of her normal world. After Vilgax, everything was stomped into dust forever, and all she could ever think was she should have been there. She should have been there! She would have killed Vilgax before he grew so powerful...

...if he wasn't there.

Well, now he was here, again. She had no excuses. Either she demolished him here or suffered the indignity of running away from a battle twice. Even contracting with this mutt would be preferable to that.

So she swallowed her pride, and reached out her hand. Tatsumaki was no clairvoyant or empath, she could not "connect" to people's hearts like some espers. But whatever she couldn't do naturally, she could brute-force. She found the source of Mordred's rage burning in her core and forced her psychic energy into it like a hammer on a nail. They connected. Spiritual nerves and circuits aligned and supercharged Mordred in a flash of light, and suddenly everything about her was different. Sublime, amplified, more powerful in every parameter that counted. Tatsumaki gave her the power to reach the level of her living, human self. It was the power to activate the full might of Clarent.

She'd never cut down a dragon before. But King Arthur had done it. It couldn't be that hard.

The Azure Dragon, the great chthonic deity of China, loomed over them. Its wide eyes gaped and its tooth-filled mouth drooled lightning. He was the storm-bringer deity, huge, with invulnerable scales and limitless authority over the heavens. Down beneath him, only two women, only one with a sword.

Tatsumaki was drained, she'd been fighting and running all day. She subsisted off nothing but air. And placing her power in Mordred took almost everything she had. But for her new Servant, she used the last of her mental fortitude to grab the mountain-spanning creature by his tail to hold him down. Just for a moment. Enough for Mordred to finish it.

It was an incredibly violent process. The attack surged up from the root of the sword and overloaded it with magical energy it was never meant to hold. Hatred, grief, fury, all the tangled feelings of a child abandoned by their family and condensed into a pure energy, everything that Mordred felt coalesced into a jagged blade. Clarent grew out until the rushing saber of bloody scarlet energy was a mile tall and scraped the clouds.

"A pathetic attack! You won't get the chance to use it!" Kaido breathed in deeply before vomiting out a planet-cracking beam of draconic fire, orbital laser, the devastating power of the dragons brought to bear. "BOLO BREATH!"

Mordred aimed true. Whatever Kaido felt for being rejected by his son, it was nothing compared to the other side. Nothing at all.

"CLARENT, BLOOD ARTHUR!"

His Bolo Breath beam split in two. Kaido split in two, lengthwise, and the clouds behind him, and the mountains below him. Someone had taken the world and pulled the flash, drew a big line through the middle and separated those pieces forever. A weapon that could match Excalibur. A weapon that could kill Vilgax. It had been in Mordred's grasp all this time.

Well. In her opinion, she'd softened him up for her. But still, with power like that, it was a wonder she hadn't defeated her father—

Mordred's armor disappeared and she collapsed to the ground exhausted.

Oh. A weapon she can only fire once. That was the trick.

Tatsumaki did not find it much easier to stand. Emotionally she felt stymied and confused, not the kinds of feelings that bolstered her powers. And she'd used up too much of it. She was sore all over and could barely move. It really, honestly sucked. At least she had finally gotten her vengeance on Kaido, which was basically a warmup lap for her vengeance on Vilgax, and he had no power to harm her again.

Although, it was a bit worrying how Kaido's sky-darkeningly-huge body was unsupported and falling towards them. And Mordred was not getting up. At all. So it pretty much looked like the two of them were about to be crushed to death and die messily. Tatsumaki could run and abandon Mordred to her fate... or she could concentrate all her remaining, limited psychic power to try and shift the dragon's corpse before it all fell apart...

She lifted a hand up and brought all the power she could muster up against Kaido's body. Nothing. Not one bit of movement.

All things considered, leaving Mordred to die didn't sound so bad. Unfortunately, Kaido was falling so fast that Tatsumaki couldn't even run sideways to escape him. They were both completely screwed. Better to stare down the end defiantly then lie down and await it, or at least they could hope that something conveniently helpful for them would happen and spare them an unexpected and painful end.

Just then, conveniently and helpfully:

BAM!

Something had jumped over their heads, a red blur at supersonic speed. With one punch it struck the left side of Kaido's corpse and knocked the dragon's flesh away.

POW!

A second punch delivered rapidly after the first. The right side of Kaido's corpse twisted and fell apart from its twin, creating a sort of gorge with Kaido's halves, Tatsumaki and Mordred in the middle. And the red blur that saved them touching down shortly after.

What looked at them now was a weird alien freak, a ridiculous-looking cherry-red creature with big shoes and huge fists. He looked wounded, a little singed, but not in pain, and his gaze was like... well, the gaze of an animal that wasn't afraid of humans but didn't think too much of them, either.

The exhausted Mordred just gawked at him. "Why... huh? Why'd... you do that...?"

"Because it was about to fall on you," he said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. And he walked away between the two severed halves of Qinglong without looking back.

Tatsumaki and Mordred looked at him, then at each other, then back at the red guy.

Then they walked after him.

Chapter Text

What is required for two beings to communicate?

Imagine you are in an enclosed space. A. Imagine another is in a separate space. B. You wish to hear a message from B. The contents of the message do not need to share your language, or even be comprehended as language. You simply wish to hear the word of B. For this, you need only two items.

A TRANSMITTER to speak it.

A RECEIVER to hear it.

You can see why both are necessary. Intuitively, you can see that a missing RECEIVER is in effect identical to a missing TRANSMITTER. If one is missing, it is impossible to tell if the other exists.

However, this is only a purely logical system. In a behavioral sense, there is an additional element: the necessary provocation for the TRANSMITTER to speak. Perhaps B does not want to respond. In this case, A must first prompt B. Now we see that both A and B must have TRANSMITTERS and RECEIVERS. If all four are in place, any A can provoke any B.

It's been one thousand, eight hundred, and twenty-five days since my first steps in this research station, and for all these years I have studied Subject One. Until I had a matched TRANSMITTER and RECEIVER it was impossible to tell if One was either, or all of the above. There's some scientific principle about not knowing what state a being is in until it's examined, but it's not important anyway. Nothing else is important.

He heard her. One of the Battleworld combatants I designed, the simpleton, actually heard her. She, a TRANSMITTER. He, a RECEIVER. Transmission received.

I'll have to keep him. Vilgax knows I'm the smartest man in his entire Empire, he wouldn't punish me over one mediocre human. Besides, my Rank 1 is much finer work. Fine enough to distract the Emperor for sure. His capture of and victory over Broly was extremely impressive.

Five years of research, and I am ready to open communications with B. I am not an excitable man, but in this instance I cannot restrain myself. If there is any lackluster element of the discovery, it's the mundanity of our first recorded telepathic communication.

I asked the RECEIVER what Subject One said to him.

He said it was crying for help.

Round 3: My Body Invincible, My Lifespan Inviolate

They ate dragon meat. The forest's other offerings were poison-soaked or otherwise inedible, so once they'd found shelter for the night Mordred made the suggestion. "We shouldn't let him go to waste." Perhaps, like the Viking berserkers of old, the blood of this creature empowered them in some way. Enhanced their magic auras. Or something.

It didn't matter to Tatsumaki. Magic was untrustworthy. She could not disbelieve it, but its flighty nature irritated her. She wanted nothing to do with it. How the hell did she get so caught up in this Servant-binding farce, then? Tatsumaki did not like Mordred, and she didn't care about her sob story. Mordred was thoughtless, ill-tempered, and narcissistic, everything that disgusted her. And some force of absurdity, some divine Satan, had made them partners! Together on the ship, together when they crashed, now bonded souls together. It was maddening.

And there was that other matter to consider. The newcomer.

They'd huddled in a cave (caves again!) to protect from the night's acidic rain-showers. Tatsumaki put up a barrier to keep the cold out. Mordred, who never got tired, stood guard. That meant Knuckles stoked the cooking-fire, rubbing his hands together until friction igited the air molecules. It was the only source of light. Their shadows cast over the cave walls, and together the three of them looked so dark and grim it was hard to tell what was the shadow and what was the true form.

"Uh..." Mordred was the first to break the silence. Even as a champion of brooding darkness, she wasn't comfortable with all that gloom. "Thanks for saving our asses back there."

"Yeah."

"You said your name was...?"

"Knuckles."

"Right. You got something you're going after out here, Knuckles? You got it out for Vilgax too?"

"No."

"Oh my God, enough! Enough already!" Tatsumaki snapped. "This is asinine! I have no desire to entertain conversation with this awful thing unless it can tell us where Vilgax is and how we can crush him like the worm he is."

Mordred stood up, grabbed her sword and slammed it halfway down into the dirty cave floor.

"Hey! Excuse me? The fuck did he ever do to you?! Seriously, what's your problem? You have been a non-stop cunt the whole time, you insulted everyone we met." She pulled Clarent out of the ground, swung the blade straight for Tatsumaki's head so close the very tip of the sword scratched the tip of her nose. One half-inch closer and she would have gotten the Sphinx treatment. Yet she was not scared enough to flinch. She wasn't even scared enough to prevent the injury completely.

"Don't forget," she said. "You need my energy to survive, but I don't need you."

Mordred scraped her teeth together. She knew that she was right. Friendship didn't amount to anything out here, especially not here. Funny. Mordred postured like a brutish rebel anti-hero, but her morals betrayed her at every step. Tatsumaki was experienced enough to understand the truth: when the strong rule, the only virtue goes to the strong. Mordred didn't get that. Without her sword she was just some brat in armor, and weak. Weaker even than Knuckles, who had done in two blows what Mordred burned out her whole body to do. Dead weight on her team. But she'd made the contract, so she was stuck with her.

WHOMP.

Knuckles thumped his fist into the dirt loudly. Once he'd gotten their attention, he grabbed a twig from the firewood pile and scrawled out some more detail onto the indentation. An amorphous blob took shape into a brilliant-cut gem.

"On Angel Island, there's a temple to the Master Emerald." So that was the gem. He sketched out some architecture around it, some sky. Rough work, but clearly drawn from memory. "With seven smaller Chaos Emeralds. As long as I can remember, I guarded this place." He drew in himself, and if it was anywhere near close to scale, the Master Emerald must have been sizeable indeed. "I don't know why I had to do it. I just did, for as long as I can remember. A long time."

"Yeah?" Mordred squatted and leaned in. If this topic could get Knuckles to produce sentences longer than one word, it must have been important. "What happened next?"

He took a big fistful of dirt and slowly dragged it across the floor, uprooting everything he'd just created.

"Vilgax. I never knew there was anything outside of my home before he arrived. We—my people—we wanted to protect the emeralds. Vilgax only wanted control over us. They resisted. He killed us. We surrendered. We negotiated the terms. He learned about the emeralds, and he wanted to take them. I don't know why. He already owned us and everything we had. Maybe when he found out how important they were to us, that's why he didn't want us to have them. They couldn't accept that. They'd rather be dead than give it up. He made that choice for us. I was the last one left to guard the Master Emerald, and I lost. Then he captured me. Wanted to keep me around for the next Battleworld."

He didn't even know what his purpose was and he mindlessly followed it? His whole culture was willing to die for a few jewels? Incredibly stupid. Fighting to the death for your principles when you weren't nearly strong enough to protect them. As far as she was concerned, that was inventing an excuse to fail. 'At least I kept my principles'. If you lost, those principles would have been all for nothing. And he didn't even know why?

He must have picked up on those thoughts himself. "I was glad to do it. They all relied on me to guard the Emerald, so I was doing something good for them. I didn't need to know my role, as long as I had it."

"Do you know if, like... the Master Emerald has some kind of crazy superpower or something?" Mordred asked.

"I've heard that it does. If you put together all the Chaos Emeralds, you could do something amazing. But I wouldn't know what it was. Doesn't matter."

Mordred looked a bit frustrated. She flopped to the floor and rolled like a bored cat, groaning at how anyone could be so incurious. "Alright, whatever. How long have you been guarding this thing, anyway?"

"Only a few hundred years. The emerald guardian is supposed to protect them forever. As long as they exist, I'm bound to them."

"Oh. Alright." She did not take long to process it. After all, Sir Galahad himself became immortal from the wine of the Holy Grail. Still, that topic unnerved her. Her eyes turned to Tatsumaki to change the subject (amazing how she looked displeased, merely to look upon her new Master). "What about you, shrimp? You got any stories about what you did before the war, what your powers are all about?"

The laboratory. The surgeries. When her parents got tired of her they sold her off to Tsukuyomi, some unlicensed psychotherapeutic research center. Every day, all kinds of disgusting experiments in extreme emotional stimulus. Blundering with a bludgeon to strengthen her ESP, years of imprisonment. It was a miracle they didn't ruin her. Most of the other kids didn't take it. She wanted to tell Mordred all about it, rub her face in it. All she ever did was bitch and whine about her worthless father, and if she knew what real agony was like maybe she'd learn some gratitude! Just get her to shut up, stop talking to her, forever.

But she didn't.

"No. I'm going to sleep."

And she did.

HELLO. CAN ANYBODY HEAR ME.

Tatsumaki woke up startled. It was that jolting feeling of coming out of a nightmare, experienced while still aware. Goosebumps, bristling, complete disorientation. There were thoughts in her head that were not hers.

She was receiving telepathic transmissions. Telepathy was a power even Tatsumaki did not possess.

PLEASE, IF ANYONE IS LISTENING. THERE'S A LOT OF PEOPLE HERE THAT NEED HELP. WE ARE TRAPPED IN HERE.

Her eyes looked to Knuckles. Asleep, contemplative by the fading fire. Mordred? Somehow she'd gone to sleep too, even though she didn't need to. Maybe she was just lazy like that. No sign that either of them had experienced the revelation-from-God that appeared in Tatsumaki's mind.

Tatsumaki had no need to reach out for this voice, whatever being signaled her on the other end of the line. But... it was another psychic. She had never met another psychic. As far as she knew, psychic powers were an invention of Tsukuyomi, the paranatural experimentation lab her parents sold her to as a kid. There were plenty of psychics in that facility, dozens. And then it was attacked. Razed to the ground by a mutated man-eating monster. Including Tatsumaki, there were only two survivors.

There

was

one

other

person

that

survived.

It was impossible. It could not be. It could have been a lure, bait on a fishhook, or it could have been hallucinatory whispers in her own mind. There was no reason to investigate this call for help. There was no way the voice on the other end of the line was who it sounded like.

But just as much as she could not believe it, she could not ignore it. I can hear you, I can hear you, she thought. Can you hear me?

CAN ANYBODY HEAR ME? WE'RE UNDERNEATH THE VOLCANO. FREE US.

They couldn't hear her. All they could do was repeat the distress call endlessly over the sixth sensory channel. No matter. Tatsumaki had seen a volcanic mountain in the distance, during her spar with Mordred over the ocean. It wasn't far. She could come.

IF YOU'RE A HERO, PLEASE HELP.

She really wasn't.

IF YOU ARE GOOD AND KIND, PLEASE HELP.

She really wasn't.

IF YOU CAN SAVE ME, PLEASE HELP.

She didn't even know that.

Still. She had to find what was on the other end of this hook. She had to.

Even if the line pulled her into hell.

"I need to be alone," Vilgax told her. Then he was. After that brawl he had to let his mind wander, and as action followed thought, his boots wandered. The thing he was looking for was buried somewhere in his consciousness. He needed a shovel to dig it out.

At one edge of the desert, the biome transitioned again, this time into a densely-packed jungle, a shore that touched a sea of grass and foliage. He'd been on many planets like this. Side by side with comrades cutting down entire armies, burning villages, smoke in the palms. That was before he outgrew his soldiers. Then he fought those armies by himself.

Vilgax trod through thick underbrush just as the stars came out in the night sky. It wasn't as colorful as it was in his memories, though. Nothing was. He pushed aside curtains of of flowers to make his way, and their bulbs oozed venom and diseased ticks over him. Bear traps, spear-pits, and automatic blowguns activated against him. An environment this hostile would have been troublesome even for one of his footsoldiers, but for Vilgax it seemed uncomfortably tame. A fierce jungle felt lacking without some predators to hunt him. Their absence unnerved him more than their presence. And the jungle green itself, the footpaths felt too natural. His ability to move relatively unimpeded through the plants suggested someone had cleared this hiking trail before him. Who would bother to make a hell like this more palatable? No one who walked this way would ever come through again.

A red-eyed frog leapt in front of him. He stepped over it and moved on.

He pushed down a tree, triggering a rope trap he simply allowed to snap around his muscular neck, and entered a hand-cut clearing. And here, there was a profusion of frogs. The constant noise of croaking numbed his ears, there were so many they could not jump without stupidly flailing on top of each other. In the middle of this frog conclave, there was a hut with a grass-thatched roof and smoke rising from the chimney. Behind that hut, a fifty-foot tall pile of twigs, fronds, vines and frogs.

Someone had been living here. No, someone was living here. Who could possibly make a home out of this despicable wasteland, where all organisms existed to kill each other? Whoever it was, they were still inside. Vilgax knew, his battle-instincts knew something terribly dangerous was behind that hut's door.

And he could sense something coming up behind him, long before they knew of his presence.

"Prisoner! I know you're sleeping in again! Wake up now and help me cut the meat for our next... meal..."

Vilgax turned around to see a sallow-skinned, knife-toothed alien, a bipedal cross between a shark and a hunting dog. One hand clutched a huge cleaver. The other dragged the corpse of a hideous monster, bovine but with a millipede's long body. That's why there were no animals around besides these damn frogs. This creature hunted them.

The alien stared at him. Vilgax stayed his hand; he felt no killing intent from the beast-man.

He saluted.

"My Lord, the day has come. We've culled the greatest of one hundred foes for you, a Battleworld champion. The fight is over."

Over? In one day? That was possible, but... "State your name and rank, soldier."

"Sir."

Viral, Mechstrider Legionnaire Optio

Hmph. Optio was hardly a rank to boast about, but the Mechstriders were a good unit. Their mechsuits outmatched even the greatest pilots in Zeon's army. "Why are you here?"

"Protecting your subject. She is a Battleworld victor. I was assigned to safeguard her until you could return to measure her compatibility."

Compatibility? This wasn't right. Little of what he said made sense. But why was it wrong? If Viral intended to trap him, he would have used more honeyed words. This was too obscure, it sounded like he was talking about something completely different. He would play along for now. One opponent, or even two, would not pose trouble for him, no matter how dire the situation.

"Very well. Bring her to me."

Viral tossed aside the bull-pede and knocked on the hut's door. "Prisoner! It's Lord Vilgax. You'd better be dressed."

"Buh..." A yawn from inside the old hut. "Yeah, I'm ready. I got my hoodie on and everything. This Vilgax guy better be worth it..."

Behind the door, plodding thumps of footsteps. Just from the sound, he had a mental picture. Short-statured, non-human, cold-blooded, most likely female from the position of her organs. She was reaching for a weapon... a spear. No, a trident. And she opened the door. A miniscule blue-haired goblin with too many teeth. The three-pronged weapon was in her hand.

"Oh. Hey, stinky." Not even remotely intimidated. "You look kinda goofier than I was expecting."

Gura, Former Rank 1 "The Deluge"

Vilgax swung an uppercut into her chin to knock her through the hut and one mile up into the air.

Inexplicably, Viral looked shocked that he would do such a thing. "My Lord! Was this really your plan?!"

"Yes. Give me your weapon."

The hesitation on his face did not extend to his hands. He gave his cleaver readily. "If you feel this is the best way..."

Vilgax jumped. The ground disappeared, the mysterious fifty-foot leaf pile disappeared, he flew so high he perceived the curvicature of Battleworld. There in that thin atmosphere was Gawr Gura, rotating in near-zero gravity. She was a little annoyed.

"What the heck's your problem?" she complained. "We're gonna fight to the death and you're not even going to say howdy?"

She clashed rapid-fire with the blade of the cleaver, machine gun blows with such quickness neither fighter could see their weapons move, they could only feel them. Hundreds of blows in seconds where any single misstep would have split them in two.

"What an idiotic question." One handed, with no effort, Vilgax could parry a thousand world-class spear thrusts and banter. But Gura used just as little effort to counter him. "Do you greet your food before you eat it? You're as childish as you look."

Gura rolled her eyes. "Yeah, okay boomer."

Suddenly he sensed an impossible strike from behind. An attack that didn't originate from his opponent? No, the flow of energy—the water molecules in the air combined together by her will, created a bubble of water, then a whole mass of it, shaped in the form of a shark. How to dodge it? Nothing to push himself off of but Gura herself, he'd lose a limb trying to touch her, but he had to avoid it somehow. What if—?

His next swing aimed for her eyes and Gura blocked high. In that very slight moment between thousandths of a second, Vilgax dropped the cleaver so fast gravity did not move it one atom downward, and grabbed her under the arms to twist her around and block the hit. The water shark snapped its jaws around them. It reformed into a building-sized orb squeezing on both of them with rapidly increasing pressure. 8 tons per square inch, 16, 32 as the ground approached. Did that slow him down? No! He spun both of their bodies in midair, twirling drill-like towards their inevitable seismic descent. He caught the cleaver, clenched the hilt between a chink in his sabatons and fought with his feet. Gura parried the cleaver strikes expertly with her own feet, which will not be described in detail here. The frog-covered earth came closer and closer and they all leaped away croaking. He planned to slam all of his weight and force directly into the ground through her head! This was the unparalleled ninjutsu technique, the Izuna Drop!

"Oh nyo," Gura said.

Water everywhere! Waves crashing, every single droplet shooting off like railgun bullets to vaporize trees in their path, cataclysmic cratering, Biblical havoc all concentrated on Gura's skull. The hut was destroyed in one blow, the frogs blew upwards like reverse rain. Vilgax and Gura both collapsed in this newly created valley. The aftershocks still shook. Everyone on this planetary geographic plate would feel the impact of his skull-crusher move. But she did not die. The water reformed again as catfish, safely snatching up every frog in midair. Not one of them was injured. There, laid out on his back watching the aquatic performance, Vilgax knew Gura still held more power.

A twist of his neck and he saw the remains of the leaf pile. Where the leaves had once been, a metal giant stood, all gleaming silver. Enki. Of all the Mechstrider combat units, he remembered this name, Enki. But he did not remember Viral. Why, when his past was so hazy, did that name Enki come back to him?

The faces. That design with two faces, one in its chest. He'd seen it once. He thought it was funny at the time.

Vilgax and Gura started to stand. Over her head at the rim of the crater, he saw Viral. Still alive after the impact. Barely. His flesh had been stripped, the meat grew back rapidly over his skin. Superfast healing. One of those 'negligible senescence' types, that made sense for a front line footsoldier. He would serve Vilgax well. Not standing gawking and unarmed. He'd work from a higher position.

"You." Vilgax pointed at Viral. "Go pilot that thing and try to kill me."

Viral was aghast. "My Lord! I knew you were battle-hungry, but this is foolishness! Gura is easily strong enough to defeat you already, you'd ask me to intervene? Against you?"

"Yeah, I'm kinda kicking your butt right now, bingus." Gura knocked on her noggin as a taunt. "You just want it two-on-one so you have an excuse when I beat you!"

"I am your Emperor. Don't make me ask twice. I may finally get a rush going."

Viral grimaced. A row of thin teeth bristled in his mouth like the fibers of a horsehair brush.

"...As you command."

Tatsumaki did not have to worry about waking her companions. She left no footsteps or trace. With her speed, the speed of thought, she only had to think take me there, and she would go. One blink, miles and miles behind her, the next, across the forest, over the ocean, Mach cone breaking. Heading towards a soot-belching ugly volcano in the center of a tropical island ring. Vilgax liked to shape his Battleworld into ridiculous setpieces. The rocky crags of the volcano's outer shell resembled a hateful face, and magma drooled from the eyes and mouth. If this were an old sentai special, the villainous overlord would fly their mecha out that aperture. It was as good a place as any to make her entrance, though she did not know the path to what she sought.

There was an aircraft hangar built into the oral cavity (as she'd suspected) with canals funneling the lava to create that blood-dripping effect through its stalagmite teeth. At the opposite end of the hangar was the throat of the monster, and there was the first vault door. It crumpled with one finger flick. Behind it was another vault which she compressed to the size of a marble, and behind that was an elevator shaft she floated down. Only harsh fluorescent lights illuminated her when she entered the deep floors of the laboratory.

This was her homeland. She'd been in it for so much of her life, these brutalist aesthetics she hated. Half her childhood she'd spent in the clutches of Tsukuyomi and their scientists. The sterile smells and machinery hums were her white noise. What kind of thing were they studying down here? Why was Battleworld the place to study it? Was this another artificial setting, a theme park dark ride through a familiar locale? Or could it be some genius was actually mad enough to make this place their home?

The hallways were cold and stretched on long with doors to all kinds of testing rooms. PARAGERONTOLOGY; KALANTAKA; NEIDAN PHILOSOPHY. The more she went on, the less scientific the names sounded. Tatsumaki was highly tuned to psychic resonance, and the energies given off by the laboratory was repulsive to her core. She refused to believe the voice she'd heard was in any of these places, she wouldn't stop until she found some phrase she recognized.

At the end of the hallway, she found this door:

PSYCHOACTIVITY DEVELOPMENT

That's the one.

Buzzing Tesla coils. Tubes with creatures inside suspended in slime. Tatsumaki had stepped into a weird science chamber straight out of a horror movie, everything from exposed wires to beakers on the tables, and the creatures in those tubes were just as horrific. A pink spider with humanlike eyes. A fang-toothed vampire in funereal clothes. One had dragons tearing out of his shoulders, like the Zahhak of legend who ate children's brains every morning. All kinds. Monsters. Ugly. She just wanted to stomp them.

Those were just idle distractions, she couldn't get mired in it now. Losing to Vilgax, fighting with Mordred, those heroes, Kaido, everything that reminded her of her past had left her mental state in awful flux. She'd had barely any sleep, either. Her powers, which heightened with extreme emotions, encouraged her to stoke her most negative feelings. Put up emotional barriers to guard against all enemies. And she needed her powers to be at their height, to listen for those echoing whispers. CAN ANYBODY HEAR ME. Yes, I can hear you.

She floated through this wide room until she came to the largest and sturdiest door yet. This one was unsmashable. One-way psychorejective lodestone lined the door, and a quick search revealed, the entire room it led to. She gave it a push. Nothing. Tatsumaki's full strength was softened and dulled by the material, but the voice on the other side could speak in her ear as clearly as ever. Like she was still here now, as if they'd never been separated.

She couldn't give up. The closer she got, the more it had to be her, it didn't matter she'd never heard her telepathically before it was her it was HER. She just needed a key or a keycard or something. She reached out and scanned the whole room, lifting everything bigger than a penny into the air to feel its edges. Tatsumaki's mental energy conformed to the very edges of the laboratory, but she felt nothing that could open it. There was no keypad or keyhole. There was nothing.

Can anybody hear me? Can anybody... The noise steadily got fainter, and Tatsumaki panicked. Some other powerful psychic wave was cancelling out the pleading voice. Extrasensory signals that were even stronger than the ones she was receiving. She had to destroy it, quickly. Where was it? What was it? It was getting closer...

A shooting star crashed through the roof, bounced off the cold floor on his belly and did a quadruple somersault directly onto his feet. With both legs firmly planted, he stuck one pointed finger up to the sky and the starlight shining down illuminated him magnificently.

"TRA-LA-LAAA~!!!"

He was fat, pig-nosed, pasty white, wide-grinned, and hairless all over, like McCarthy's Judge. The only difference was the clothes. In a caricature of superhero costuming he wore nothing but a red cape and briefs. Just stupid. Like all the stupid costumes her coworkers wore because they thought saving lives was a joke and a celebrity job. She would have told him off, but this intrusion in Tatsumaki's already fragile state offended her so badly that she couldn't. She just gawked at him.

"Not to worry, citizen!" he said. "It is I, Captain Underpants, defender of truth, justice, and all that is pre-shrunk and cottony! Were you the one trapped under the volcano? I heard your call, and I'm here to help!"

As the world's most powerful psychic she intuitively understood him. This man was as strong as she was. Like her, a frail human underneath a shell of willpower, but that willpower was strong enough to crack the planet. He was, himself, another psychic.

Captain Underpants, Rank 3 "The Hope"

How. How was there another psychic?! She could not deny it but deny it was all she could do, how could this happen. Had another person survived Tsukuyomi's lab? No, impossible, it was just the two of them, she'd seen the bodies of the others. Could you replicate her psychic abilities somewhere else? No, there could not be other psychics in the world, because... because—Why had they been so alone all their lives, if there were people like you?

No. That was not the reason. There could not be people like you, because then it was not only that she was alone, she had to be alone. Because these were those magical people she wished she could meet since she was a child. An actual joke.

"Where did you come from?" she asked.

"I don't know," he said confidently. "A strange robot gave me this cape and this underwear, and when I put them on I had the power to be a superhero! I made a lot of friends down here, too, with other people the robot granted powers to... But then he put me to sleep for a long time, and I only woke up yesterday. I heard a woman calling for me, in my mind, and it sounded familiar, so I came as soon as I could! That's what a hero would do. Leaping tall buildings without getting a wedgie, more powerful than a pair of boxer shorts, faster than a speeding waistband! That's me, Captain Underpants!"

The third psychic she'd ever seen in the world. Please, no. Not this fast. He couldn't do this to her now, not after everything. Not after she'd finally heard her voice.

"Did you hear that call too? You're a psychic like me. Aren't you?"

A psychic like me. That's what he called her.

Aren't you like me?

No. No one is like me. My parents weren't "like me." I don't want that little shit in the room with us. I know she's inside my head somehow, listening. I can't sleep at night. I'm sorry. I never listened. I never had the power to read your mind, but I never would have listened. What should I have done different? Cry louder? Cry quieter?

Those heroes weren't "like me." Everybody thought I was the problem. I worked harder than everybody else, ten times harder, boiled my blood vessels popped my eyeballs out stinking in monster blood to get that S-Class spot. Still treated like some dirty executioner. Tornado of Terror, that's me.

Oh, maybe that was the problem, I was too mean. Bossy bitch. Cunt. Quit your whining, you'll never get a man like that. Aren't you almost thirty? Time to grow up, act your age. Maybe she doesn't even like men, you know how much time she spends fussing over her sister, ha ha. Hey, lighten up. See, this is the problem with you. You can't get along with anybody. Take a joke next time.

FUCK YOU.

You should be in HELL.

There was only one person like me and she's GONE, Fubuki's fucking gone, they took her away. My baby sister. Hated and sold together, at Tsukuyomi together, escaped together, heroes together. She went away to fight Vilgax with the others and she never came back. Tatsumaki stayed behind and fought Kaido. What do you mean they took her away, where did they take her? Why would they kill the rest and only spare her, what were they doing to her? Everything I ever promised her. I'll keep you safe. I'll never let you get hurt again. It was for HER. I failed, I fucked up, is that what you wanted to hear? I was at his throat close enough to feel his heartbeat and I failed, I failed TWICE.

You weren't abandoned, you didn't get forceps in your skull you didn't get electrodes and clamps you got nothing! You didn't deserve that. You just had to SHOW UP. Did you think she didn't notice?? "You aren't that photogenic. Accentuate yourself a bit more. Give me a smile?" JUST SAY IT. I know what you mean. These chemicals stunted my growth, I look a bit young, don't I? I'm so scrawny my little sister looks like the older one? You're right, that is funny! Sorry, I tried to change for you, I couldn't eat the right things for you to get on those fucking magazines in spandex for you. It was NEVER ENOUGH.

But look at you. You have no shame. You had no reason to have shame, your will was bedrock forged by God, it came so easily you thought it was natural for you? And they didn't torture it out of you? And you were the same? The same?? Those powers at the core of my soul which embodied me, Tatsumaki, the entirety. It was MY LIFE. Shared tragedy, sibling rivalry, struggling, evolving, everything. I turned that into power, I made that my strength, I used that to fight back. You, fat and proud, stupid smirk, no hardship, no talent, absolute unearned power, why are you doing this, why are you making fun of me. I suffered enough. ENOUGH.

The Captain didn't understand why tears came to her eyes. It had gone beyond his comprehension now. He was just some ordinary man, playing a silly role. And he'd never meant to hurt anyone. Too late, now. No reason could have possibly reached her. He could not stop a maelstrom with his empty hands.

"Please... don't be sad. I don't know what I did." He undid his cape for her, offered it to clean herself up. If that was all he could do to help, that's what he would do.

Tatsumaki did not take that cape.

With her psychic power, she lifted him up, and threw him through a hundred feet of solid steel laboratory walls straight into the darkness.

Does that answer your question, she thought.

Tatsumaki had gone missing, which really sucked for Mordred because she was her life-giving mana provider and also Mordred was supposed to be on guard the whole time. It was snowing. Mordred and Knuckles were both extremely cold now that Tatsumaki wasn't keeping the chill out, the temperatures on this planet were beyond fucked so this blizzard was probably well below zero at least. She could kind of feel where Tatsumaki was based on the mana connection they'd forged. Kind of. The one thing she could tell was a general direction, and the fact that she was very, very far away.

That was the best they had, so that's what they had to work with. They walked out into the blizzard. Mordred's dragon blood and Knuckles's warrior spirit kept them warmish. For a while. Probably not a good idea to stay out here for long. It would've been nice if she could actually see anything, everywhere she looked was pure white and eye-blinding.

"Man, god damn it. I'm sorry, Knuckles, I didn't think she was going to ditch us like that."

"It's not your fault. You couldn't know what she'd do. Just focus on finding the way."

She could've circled the planet. Her newfound link to Tatsumaki had supercharged her. At this point most of her 'stats' as a Servant were A-Rank, and that included her endurance. Even better, she was fast. Fast enough that, when Knuckles ran alongside her, he didn't act like he was struggling to match his super-fast speed to the slowpoke. They could cover a lot of ground this way. The snow was no impediment to them, and even fighter jets couldn't have caught up to them at their pace. What was disorienting was not knowing where they were, or how far they had to go. They could have been standing on solid ground, or seas covered in ice covered in more snow. No idea.

"...I don't like this," Mordred said. Her ears twitched. Natural instinct. "Something's coming. From a lot of directions, I don't know." God, was it the fucking algae monster again? Their path might have taken them back towards the ocean they came from.

"What do you mean a lot of directions, is it an army?"

"Army of one. Lotta bloodlust though. It's kinda..."

Mordred's skin felt weird and prickly all of a sudden. A small, almost imperceptible grain landed on the outer edge of that twitching ear and rolled in. Then more. Mordred clapped her hand against her head, trying to stop it, but they just rolled through her fingers, crawling into her inner ear and boring its way deeper. "Shit! Shit, it's trying to get in!"

"What's getting in?"

Knuckles couldn't see clearly through this snow, that was something the enemy counted on, they could hide behind the snowflakes. A blizzard of sand that carefully maneuvered around the snow to attack Mordred. It tried every opening, eyes, nose, open wounds, suddenly this flurry was trying to muscle in. Felt like sandpaper sawing at her bones trying to rip her apart from the inside. If she were anyone else, the sandstorm would have eaten her alive. But this was Mordred Pendragon. Such meager attacks couldn't destroy her, she was the one that destroyed the destroyer.

She concentrated on her burning mana and let electricity crackle from her fingertips. The voltage covered her head to toe, turning her armor into a battery that glowed like iron from the forge. She could find each sand grain in her system and fry it. Evaporate it. It didn't harm her, it was her lightning, but the invading sand cloud was stung by it and it pulled away in pain.

"Yeah! Fuck you, sand! That's what you get!"

The sand all swirled together in response to its injury. Its silhouette took human shape. Different colors for each grain suggested skin texture, clothing, even a cigar in the mouth. Only a few seconds passed and it was inarguably a man. A grimacing, hook-handed, and freakishly tall man. Listen, Mordred wasn't a coward, she never backed down from a fight, but this guy's bloodlust was on another level. She'd faced down knights of the Round Table that showed her that same killing intent on the day she toppled Camelot. This guy wanted to kill her that much and he'd only just met her.

"Pathetic. Too foolish to stay inside, too foolish to lie down and die when you're supposed to," he said. "Someone had to teach you the way the world works one of these days. Looks like it's up to me."

Crocodile, Rank 27 "The Thirst"

Knuckles stepped back and put his fists up. "We don't have to do this. We're not your enemy, Vilgax is."

"I don't see him around. Am I supposed to wait for him to show up before I get to work? My edge will get rusty."

He hit Crocodile with an uppercut that made Mordred's lightning look slow and his head burst into a million individual pieces. He powderized his torso with the next hit, he split his legs with the third hit. No effect. Crocodile's upper body reformed and he swung a gleaming hook towards the echidna's eyeball. Almost grazed him. But it didn't hit.

"Sables."

All the sandy air spun into a tornado in his hookless hand. He conducted it. The twirls of his fingers guided whorls of sand to slash at Mordred like blows from a swordsman, and Mordred only barely blocked them one after another. Then her sword cut through. His sandstorm blew past her guard and struck her in the chest, sending her skidding backwards across the ice with more blood in her mouth. Shit. He hit like a fucking cannon.

Okay. So he could hit them whenever he wanted, and they couldn't hit him at all. That was pretty what kind of bullshit they were in here. No, wait, she hit him the first time with that mana burst trick! She could do that again, she just had to catch him. Mordred let Clarent conduct all her blood-soaked energy, red and angry, all the mana that built up in her throat like words you want to scream out when you're crying. It was too risky to use her Noble Phantasm so far from Tatsumaki, but the same principles had to apply here, right?

She fired the lightning down through her blade like the barrel of a gun. Crocodile would have no chance to catch it. This was the actual speed of lightning here, 270,000 miles an hour, not something a big guy like Croc could dodge easily.

He caught the lightning with one hand and it evaporated harmlessly in his touch. Okay, whatever. Fuck.

"Knuckles!" Mordred yelled. "Don't let him touch you!"

"I won't!"

Easier said than done, Knuckles only had his fists to fight with. Crocodile was his worst kind of opponent. Could he really think his way out of this fight? Mordred couldn't do it, that was never her specialty. What else was there to hit him with?

The snow??

Knuckles fluidly scooped up a fistful of packed snow and snapped it towards Croc's face with the force of a cannonball. Croc moved to block it once again. That snowball was followed up by a rain of snowballs, all of which disintegrated in Croc's hand, but he didn't phase through them. It was something he had to evaporate. Like the lightning. Physical force wouldn't work.

Clarent lashed out, Mordred's downwards golf swing shredded through the snow and kicked up a white flurry fifty feet high. She could see the bottom of the snow blanket and it was all ice. Were they actually over the ocean like Mordred guessed? Were they actually that lucky? All they had to do was drown him to defeat him. Was he really dumb enough to engage them in a battlefield surrounded by his own weakness?

That was Knuckles's cue. Crocodile was in the rain of snow, pummeled by frozen water, and Knuckles could charge him with Croc's vision obscured and throw a haymaker punch into his chest. All the snow blew away in a perfect hemisphere of force, the exposed ice underneath them cracked, everything centered around the shockwave of one single perfect brutal strike. Crocodile staggered a little bit, like anyone would when hit by a sucker punch. But it didn't destroy him.

It just got him in close so Crocodile could grab him by the arm.

"I knew you'd grow overconfident if I fought you here. You thought I was dumb enough to engage you in a battlefield surrounded by my own weakness?" he taunted.

Mordred couldn't look at him. "T-that wasn't what I was thinking..."

The punches came rapid-fire, less heavy but much quicker body blows that struck at everywhere Knuckles could reach. They weren't exactly effective. Those hits would have crunched a lesser foe, but Crocodile was too sturdy for anything less than a true heavyweight strike to buckle him. He was shrugging them off. Hell, they cracked the ice under his feet more than they cracked his guard.

Wait. The ice! Duh! Mordred slammed Clarent blade-first down into the ice, like burying Caliburn in the rock. She put her foot down on the guard of the hilt, and with one mighty stomp—

A city-sized sheet of ice cracked off and flipped into the air like a pancake.

Crocodile and Knuckles and an entire glacier flew upwards. The glacier cracked apart under its own weight, splitting into chunks the weight of cars, and Mordred jumped between them faster than gravity itself could pull them down. Crocodile only took a moment to adjust to the lack of solid ground. With a cry of "Desert Spada!" he threw out blades of sand that Mordred expertly parried. Each deflected blast of boiling-hot sand hit the ice and the temperatures blurred into lukewarm water. Mordred couldn't jump between the chunks anymore, she swam through pockets of water and lunged between them like a breaching dolphin. She was climbing higher and higher, but Crocodile never seemed to get closer. He could fly. The bastard could actually fly.

Fuck it, she wasn't going to let him fly away with Knuckles! If he could fly, she'd do it too, she'd fucking fly. Lightning thrusters burned from her heels and she streaked red up through the water that evaporated at her mana's touch. That made her quick. Quicker than even Crocodile could easily escape.

His grip tightened on Knuckles. Red fur dried out, eyes wrinkled from lack of water, blood grew thick and glutinous. It was moisture. He was sucking the moisture out of his body, and Knuckles didn't even slow down those punches.

"Hey, fuckface! Down here!"

Crocodile knew that Mordred was "down there" and dodged her the moment she blew past him on her rocket-feet. Her blade's edge wasn't even close enough to give his face another scar. It was effortless. Easy. Crocodile was smarter than her, she knew that he could out-predict her, but he was too smart. Smart enough that he thought an idiot like her could never out-think him. Mordred wasn't a moron. Croc's right hand was busy holding Knuckles. When Mordred swung her sword down, his left hand caught it, his hook hand. He could only disintegrate things in his right palm. And that meant she could go back to her original plan.

Three billion volts of mana lightning blew a hole through Crocodile's chest. He was already soaked with water, salt water even. It kept him from phasing through their attacks, but more than that, it made him conduct electricity incredibly well. That was something he had to feel. His eardrums burst. His tongue sizzled. She'd probably short-circuited his brain with how bad she cooked him, but just to finish the job, Mordred swung her sword through Crocodile's hook and two inches deep into his neck.

It didn't work.

A knifeblade flicked out of Crocodile's broken hook and he shoved it into Mordred's sword shoulder. Sinews wrenched apart like chewing gum string as he twisted, the wicked sneer on his face never fading. How the fuck was this guy still alive? He was just SAND. He was covered in WATER. And the TWO of them were about to die because of Mordred's mistake. Only one more turn of the knife and Mordred would lose her arm entirely. She'd done her best, and it wasn't enough.

So Knuckles did his best. He punched. He was weak and withered from Crocodile's draining hand, but Mordred had dug her sword in for him, gave him the opening he needed. All of his deteriorating strength he put into one powerful jab, one he suppressed all his survival instincts to deliver directly against Clarent's edge. Flesh met steel met flesh. The weaker flesh yielded. Crocodile's head severed from his body, and everything, hair, clothes, hook, and the sneer turned back into sand. Silt for the bottom of the ocean where it belonged.

Mordred and Knuckles hit the water with a splash. She needed a moment to catch her breath, especially when the salt water soaked her wounds. That fucking hurt. Knuckles let her cling on in the water while they rested for a moment, while Knuckles allowed the water to rejuvenate him. It didn't take Mordred too long to bounce back.

"Knuckles, that was awesome!" Mordred cheered. "You were a freaking hero, dude! That was some Round Table-worthy shit."

"I didn't want you to get hurt. I was just doing what anyone would have done."

"See, right there, the being all humble thing. Gawain would've totally said something like that." Remembering Gawain gave her a sting of sorrow, for a little bit. There had been so much ugliness after she left Camelot... but it was all Arthur's fault. She tried to hate her, but that hatred had a sadness to it. It wasn't cathartic to think about. Just made her feel sick. "Nevermind. Let's just go. Tats probably got way far away from us by now, and I can't swim with my arm all fucked up."

"Don't worry. My arms are always ready to go. Just don't think I'm gonna keep carrying you around after this."

Knuckles kicked his legs, swung his arms, and took off like a motorboat with Mordred hanging off his side.

"So, I'm like this Gawain guy?"

"Nah, not really. You're kinda more of an Agravain. Super serious."

"Who were they?"

"Oh, uh—they were my coworkers, I guess. I dunno. I don't even really want to think about 'em anymore... just brings back a lot of bad memories. Well, I guess I can tell you just one story. Or a few."

Mordred talked his ear off all the way to the volcano.

Gura was willing to wait while Viral climbed into his mech. Whose heart would not stir to see the great war machine in use? That was why the mechs were built in this shape, why Vilgax suspected the humans did it for their own: because they were colossi, not impersonal tanks or warships. They projected onto them. The fights were spectacular. It had been too long since he really got the chance to battle one.

Viral's voice spoke from inside Enki's cockpit. "Emperor, I won't hold back. I'll fight to kill you."

"Rid me of this dull world, soldier."

The first attack came from Gura. She'd been waiting for the fight to recommence, her trident was primed and aimed directly for the back of his neck. Vilgax parried the actual heft of the weapon without looking but it came with a wave that pushed Vilgax upwards anyway. He twirled weightlessly for a moment, directly in the path of Enki's humungous fist.

Five titanium knuckles SLAMMED into Vilgax, bounced him off the ground to crater even deeper into the rock and bounce him into the air again. Vilgax was prepared for the next blow from Enki and deflected it with a kick, but Gura had already jumped up to meet him again and threw out a thousandfold flurry of jabs that Vilgax carefully maneuvered around, searching for an opening.

"Viral! Hit 'em with the sashimi cut!"

"Don't try to give me orders, brat!"

Still didn't stop him from drawing his swords, yes, the giant robot had giant swords to go with it, fine long blades too like a samurai uses. They must have been at least twenty feet from hilt to tip but the edge was so fine it disappeared if you looked from just the right direction. See? What was the point of that, militarily? They didn't want tanks, they wanted big soldiers. Viral attempted to hit him with the "sashimi cut," and the two blades slashed down.

Vilgax caught the right sword. Vilgax caught the left sword. Unfortunately, as impressive as it was to catch them in his bare hands, he had no leverage to impede their motion, all he could do is swing along with them. And it was swinging him right into Gura, who was preparing her own spear to strike him unimpeded.

Oh nyo.

Gura struck him with full force in the back just as Viral's swords slammed down on his arms. Three building-shattering hits all concentrated on the same body at the same time. By all rights he should have been split to pieces, but luckily, he wasn't a squirming worthless weakling. The blades didn't sink in more than an inch. His flesh was too tough to be seriously injured by such trivialities. Still, it wasn't the kind of blow he'd want to keep taking as quickly as his foes could dish it out. He needed a proper shield. And with the prongs of the trident stuck fast, he had the grounding he needed to get it, to grab one of Enki's swords and wrench it away. Grabbing it right by the edge was no trouble. It was harder for him not to snap it in half than to slash his hands with it.

Enki's mechanical fingers nearly tore apart from how furiously he stole that blade away. One quick flip and a twirl brought the hilt into Vilgax's grip. It was over twice his size and weight. Even if he could wield it, and he could, one-handed, it was so big as to be clumsy and oafish anyway. No swordsman but himself could use it at this size. The moment he picked it up, he was master-class.

He slashed for Enki's chest! Enki blocked deftly, even with one sword missing, but even so, Viral was far less adept than Vilgax in combat. Without that damnable Gawr Gura behind him, he could have torn apart the mechanical monstrosity and been done with it. But she was behind him, and her talent was no joke. Ninety-six percent of his brain space was occupied anticipating what Gura would do next. Four percent was all that dog soldier Viral was worth.

Blast it, at the exact moment he realized Gura was making her move she'd already started her kick. She nailed Vilgax in the back and launched him off of her trident to rebound off of the faceplate in Enki's torso. Then she jumped up to meet him in midair. If piercing was ineffective against him, Gura had already realized it. But she could still hit him. And Vilgax's sword was so big that by the time he swung it around to meet Gura, Gura could strike him with her own trident. The sprinter and the tortoise: no matter how fast Vilgax was, Gura had the head start and the distance between them was infinite.

He was getting hit a lot. Gura's baseball swings launched him back to Enki. Viral caught on and returned him to sender with his own sword. Gura hit him to Viral with a colossal water-shark. Viral hit him to Gura with a barrage of missiles. Gura hit him to Viral with a fist made of pure liquid. Viral knocked him back with a punch of his own. Fighting a regenerator was already annoying, but fighting a juggler was even moreso. Especially when they wouldn't shut up.

"Crazy!" Gura called out. "Badass! Apocalyptic! Savage! Sick Skills!!" Gura laid out a sixty-four-hit combo on Vilgax before sending him up into the air like a hole-in-one drive. "S-S-S-SMOKIN' SEXY STYLE!! Aaaaand..."

"JACKPOT!"

Enki's headpiece turned into an energy condenser that fired a plasma-melting heat beam. Gura twirled her trident to create a fan of water that pushed Vilgax forward even as the laser pushed him back. Now this was a bit of a challenge. Deep-sea pressure couldn't hope to compete with the kind of force those two were crushing onto him, never mind the temperature difference. Was this the kind of thing he was hoping to achieve with Battleworld? To make himself feel again, live again?

No.

Of course not. He'd known that for a while. Life had nothing to interest him, and even this fleeting feeling of predator becoming prey was just an idle curiosity. Why had he felt he'd needed it so badly? Was this really the meaning of Battleworld, the crown jewel of his evil empire? Frustrating. Tiresome. Something on the tip of his tongue, something he didn't understand about it all.

Vilgax allowed his whole body to become limp. His heartbeat slowed to an imperceptible nothing and his brain activity was nonexistent. He could only, barely, in some limited non-sensory way, perceive that they were no longer hitting him and allowed him to fall to the ground. Finally. Gura was approaching him. No more games, no more kicking him around like a balloon. It frustrated him to know end knowing he'd been denied one good strong attack when that was all he needed.

The moment Gura saw his arm move it was too late. He grabbed her by the ankle. Vilgax spun around, whipped Gura like a blackjack and smashed her straight through one of Enki's legs. When it toppled over it tried to prop itself up with its sword. Vilgax didn't let it, Gura swung through that too and snapped it easily. His grip crushed her neck and lifted her up, slamming her repeatedly into that metal face on Enki's body. Again and again. Until he smashed so hard it broke the whole thing into pieces.

He was the Emperor. There was not a thing in his empire he could not unmake with his own hands.

Viral crawled out of Enki's mangled body. He was in worse shape than the mech. His immortal body would not let him die even with most of his inner workings exposed, too much bone visible, too much red. For some reason, he was still clutching a computer display from Enki's cockpit with a trail of wires like guts leading from it back to the robot.

"This is insane! There's no point to any of this! We're unkillable! We'll just fight and claw at each other forever, is that what you want? That's not the leader I served under! "

Vilgax kept his grip on Gura's throat. "Bite out your tongue! You live to serve me, that's as good as you deserve! If you can't even do that, what use are you? Your sole purpose is to fight me! That's the reason this planet even exists!"

Viral just panted as his wounds regrew around him.

"All this time, I waited for you! I thought you were different stock from soldiers like us! But you can't even remember the purpose of your own creation. You're embarrassing! You're a disgrace!"

The nerve of this mange-riddled dog to speak back to him. "Why should I remember what evolutionary trash gets sent to Battleworld? You think too highly of your own worthless existence."

"I thought you'd understand!" Viral staggered closer, broken bones un-twisting. "I thought you weren't fragile and flimsy like we were!" His limp transitioned into a steady shuffle. "But you're too weak, Emperor! Too weak to handle reality anymore!"

He was getting close now. Vilgax raised Gura like a shield in case Viral tried one last-ditch-effort strike at the King's head, but that wasn't what he got.

"This is the truth, Vilgax! Look!" And he thrust the cracked screen into Vilgax's face.

It was nothing. Just schematics of the Enki mech, detailed readouts, specifications. Loads of useless data. Trillions of different parameters rapidly scrolled before him, each one describing the disrepair of the mangled machine. Numbers. An uncountable amount of digits. Vilgax did not consciously regard those numbers, but he perceived them, and somewhere in his mental storage bank, he filed it away. What was he intending to do? Confuse him? The cognitive capacity of a Vilgaxian was far beyond his feeble...

Far beyond... his...

What... what word was he...

Viral watched in disbelief. Vilgax watched himself in disbelief, as if trapped in his own body. Somehow he was standing there confused like an old man. Processing everything he had seen made him feel foggy. Aged. But why had... what had he done to him? Gura slipped from his hands, coughing and clutching the welts on her throat.

"I can't believe it. You're sick too. Just like the rest of us."

Vilgax should have crushed his head like a grapefruit, but something extremely alarming was happening in his mind. "You wretch... what are you... driving at?"

"Lord Vilgax. How old do you think you are?"

"I have no need to recollect it. The only date that matters is a man's death." He forgot useless information all the time. The names of peons, the planets he'd conquered. His rule was total and would last forever, that's all he needed.

"That sounds like an excuse to me, bingus," Gura said, still rubbing her neck. "When did you become the king?"

"Why should I care the day or the hour? You've wasted my time with these irrelevant questions, I've had enough of you!"

"Of course you'd get angry. I'd bet your mind is thinking up all kinds of excuses right now, just to protect you!" When did you build Battleworld?" Viral asked.

"Recently enough! It doesn't matter!"

Viral's expression grew very grave.

"My Lord. It's been a thousand years."

No.

"A thousand—no. I remember now, I remember. When I defeated that boy in Central Park, once I finally conquered the universe, I began—"

"When Battleworld began you had not nearly conquered the universe. You've probably had this idea several times, after you'd forgotten it," Viral said. "You're losing basic memories, time is slipping away from you. I know what's happening. It's the same thing that happened to myself and Gura, century after century passing by. I just showed you a long string of junk data to overwhelm you. Why do you think that would have any effect on your brain? Do you even understand the level of trouble you're in?"

But. The implications of forgetting. "Impossible." His breath was growing ragged now, though the fight was long over. "I... I am Vilgax. My body invincible, my lifespan inviolate..."

"It was never your body, Lord." Viral put two fingers against his own skull. "It was your mind. We can only hold a certain amount of memories. That's it. And when we learn more... something has to get written over." He pulled the trigger, tilted his head back. "It shouldn't have been a problem for fighters like us. We'd die before we ever hit the limit. But we kept on winning. And living. And learning..." Viral started to laugh. "I just can't believe... All that talk about how useless we were, and you were as useless as the rest of us! A thousand years for your return and you come back senile!"

Vilgax smashed his fist through Viral's grin and teeth and meat and those brains he talked so much about splattered everywhere all red and mush. "How dare you! Y-you maggot, know your place! I could crush you like an insect! I could have everyone you've ever even spoken to hung from the gallows by their entrails! How dare you?! How dare you?!"

But the grin grew back. And the teeth, and the meat and the brains. He couldn't stop it, or stop him from talking.

"I bet you've forgotten why you were fighting so hard to kill yourself this way."

What.

"That's right. Your original idea for Battleworld. Don't you want to know?"

It had to be a bluff. If he were not in such an irrational mental state right now it would not have worked on him, but that state was evidence it was the honest truth. If there was one thing Vilgax valued over everything, it was his ego. Any self-doubts had to be ruthlessly sterilized in him, and he could not just kill this rat without conceding he had caused the great Vilgax to doubt. He could not longer hide it. His fists squeezed furiously as he imagined them crushing Viral's lungs.

They both knew they had him. "Alright, come with us," Gura said.

She opened a chunk of the door remaining in the wreckage of the hut and gestured for him to step through. He allowed it. There were very few furnishings that were still whole despite their battle, mostly a single chair that Vilgax was directed to sit in. He stood. Viral faced him.

"It's the job of the legionnaires to support the Emperor. Seems like no one's given you the 'support' you've needed for a long time, Lord. But I'll remind you who your true enemy is."

"Enough of these games! Who do you dare to tell me I should be killing, ahead in line of a worthless walking evolutionary abortion like you!"

They couldn't destroy him, even with all the time in the world to pull him apart. Physically he had no weaknesses. But there was one weakness that Vilgax could not erase: his pride. It was impossible for him to tame, because he lived for his pride. If that was threatened, he would set aside everything to stomp that threat out. They'd gotten him now. They'd gotten him because he knew that his brain was deteriorating, he'd known for a long time. He knew it was possible for his body to long outlive his conscious mind.

He never feared death. Those places that death did not reach. That was his fear.

Gura knelt down and pried open one of the ruined floorboards. From a hidden compartment, she produced a handful of syringes loaded with blue liquid. Top shelf, black label: Watson Concoction.

"It was my dream to see you conquer the universe. It was every Vilgaxian's dream. But you declared your victory before you laid your flag in the final territory! I can't imagine what your people would think of you to know there is a kingdom left unconquered, unless your advisors went to great lengths to shield them from your dementia!"

His fury could have set him ablaze like kindling. "NO SUCH PLACE EXISTS! I control everything! The stars, the planets, and the moons that circle them, I laid my name to them all! Not a single being disobeys me! They all hail Vilgax! There is no kingdom that does not rightfully recognize me as their supreme ruler!"

"The kingdom of God, Lord Vilgax."

Gura injected a handful of syringes into Vilgax's neck.

Destroy him. Twist him, tear him apart, break him like an egg. Her brain was burning. Her heart boiled with hatred. The only thing in this whole miserable universe she hated more than him was Vilgax. This was close. Very close. Never in her life had she been so despicably disgraced. She wished death upon him. Unending vengeance on Captain Underpants.

Tatsumaki smashed him again through the steel and tungsten supports of the underground lab. Behind the metal were layers of obsidian. She smashed him through that too. The volcano base yielded to her strength, and cracks formed in the walls letting molten lava pour through onto the floor. Fuck it, break it all. If it could just sate her hatred for just one second she would destroy the whole world.

The Captain pulled himself out of a crater. Magma poured down on him and he hardly noticed. It didn't singe his cape.

"I'm sorry. I don't know what I did wrong. If you calm down, maybe we can talk about—"

I WILL NOT CALM DOWN

THIRTY YEARS OF CALMING DOWN FOR NOTHING

I SHOULD HAVE FUCKING HATED MORE

She raised one arm. Twenty thousand cubic miles of rock tore out of the ocean like some great giant hand scraped it out and pulled it up, the whole volcano breached Battleworld's atmosphere. It went that quickly. Quicker than an airplane taking off. Cap didn't flinch. Not even when they lost gravity completely. Both of them could fly.

"Are you..." Cap put his fists up, hesitantly. "Maybe you're a bad guy?"

AM I EVIL

IS A DOG EVIL TO BITE WHEN IT'S WOUNDED

NO

IT'S EVIL TO LIE DOWN AND TAKE IT

"You're a villain you piece of fucking shit." He was wrong to be stronger than her because it didn't even MATTER to him. THAT WAS HER LIFE.

The magma-heat and the pressure change must have done something to the tubes, because they were all cracking, and the things in them awakened. The spider, the vampire, and the dragon-shoulder crawled right out. Immediately, something—

—all the color—

—what was happening?

The magma parted and grew cold. Everything lost its brilliance when the dragon-shoulder crawled out, holding his spear. Even her psychic barrier dampened under a white wall, and the fires of fury dampened with it. She was getting chewed on from every direction. It was coming from her insides. It was killing her everywhere.

Cap was not perplexed. None of them were fazed. He waved to them.

His fucking lab rat friends.

"Well, it's good to be out again! Although I daresay I wish it were under cleaner circumstances." Slayer snapped his fingers, and all the laboratory slime and broken glass repulsed from his suit. "Where's our Crocodile, did he finally make it out? It's almost a reunion."

Kumoko made a disgusted face and some spider-leg gestures.

"Now that's uncalled for. I certainly don't hope he's dead. If that's even possible."

Tian moved very little. He slightly tilted his spear towards Tatsumaki. "That one. Who is she, Captain?"

"I don't know. I didn't get her name before she started fighting." He scratched his head. Cap was not the type who gracefully handled complicated moral quandaries. "You shouldn't kill her, though! I think she's just upset. You have to hold back your Monochrome."

"This is as weak as I may have it, friend. I wouldn't use my full strength against some fragile weeping woman."

YOUR PITY MAKES ME SICK

BETTER TO DIE IN THE WOMB THAN LICK BOOTS AND COWER

Anger was purely a rush of chemicals in the amygdala. There were hard biological limits on how angry one person could become. An overload of norepinephrine and adrenaline would burn her brain out. She already felt at her limit. She couldn't feel worse. But this was all she had. This world belonged to the strong. She had to be strong to live in it. Those feelings MADE her strong. She spit at evil, she put her middle finger up at the whole world, she did it all to protect herself and her sister. Tatsumaki couldn't be constrained by anything. She was psychic.

Back on Earth, there was a certain man who surpassed his limits. Diminishing returns did not exist for him. Anything that existed from here to eternity could be destroyed in a single punch. That man's fate will be revealed at a later date.

The truth was this: those things people call limits were just a construct of human imagination. Tatsumaki didn't have to break them. She only had to realize they never existed at all.

Her hand reached out. She clenched it into a fist. All test tubes, trays, papers, specimens, counters, equipment and everything swirled around her in a furious F5 tornado. Any barrier between the white fire in her heart and Tian's white Monochrome was null. One willpower against another.

The white wall ebbed.

Look at that. That got his attention, huh?

"Oh, what's this?" Slayer asked, one eyebrow quirked over his monocle. "Though she be but little, she is fierce, eh?"

Tian expressed momentary surprise that Tatsumaki overcame his Monochrome, but it was only momentary. His power only intensified. Even the color itself was stripped away, and the pressure broke down everything except for Tian's three allies who were already used to his force. Tatsumaki had to hold her bones together. Knit her blood vessels back in place. If Tian would try and rip her apart, her own will would bind her tightly.

Her other hand squeezed, and deep indentations of small fingers dug into Tian's neck.

"Hey, wait—"

Cap tried to stop Tatsumaki but nobody could stop them anymore. Not her, not Kumoko who lunged forward and slashed out with a poison leg, not Tian who thrust his great Blood Spear towards Tatsumaki's heart. Futile. The moment they got close to her barrier a screaming green wave of psychic energy detonated around her blowing both of them back. As if that garbage could actually hurt her.

"Stop!"

Finally Cap was fighting back. He tried to grab her wrist, maybe wrestle her down, but Tatsumaki sidestepped him and threw him forward towards Slayer. Slayer caught him with one foot as he rolled through the antigravity space, then started bouncing him from foot to knee to head like a soccer ball.

"Sorry about this, old friend," Slayer said. "There are times when a gentleman must fight, even when he does not wish to do so."

A boot to the back sent Cap flying towards Tatsumaki. Again she focused. Imagined ripping his head from his body and declaring herself the true strongest psychic hero. She grit her teeth and pushed him back, each shove exerting less and less force on the almost nude Captain confidently walking through it all. Tatsumaki called on even greater energy no matter how rapidly her body was deteriorating—

She locked eyes with one of the eight faceted pupils of the giant spider, swinging out of the shadows with web propulsion.

No!

<Evil Eye of Curse>

No! She felt herself wearing down even faster than before. Kumoko combined her power with Monochrome to rot Tatsumaki away no matter how viciously she clung on. Cap threw her towards Slayer, who posed as if casually sitting in a chair, then just as easily landed a blow to her gut that she could feel through every layer of her psychic protection. Cap was holding back not to hurt her, Slayer was holding back because he was just too strong for this world.

GOD DAMN THEM ALL

I WON'T LET YOU LOOK DOWN ON ME

I WILL TEAR THAT EGO APART

Every moment of anger she'd experienced in her entire life buzzed in her ears. Blood pooled and sizzled in her eyes. ALL her hatred wrapped the Captain, infiltrated every cell of his being, all his organs, and her telekinesis did the work. This was something she'd been too afraid to ever try. No matter how much she HATED her parents or Tsukuyomi or the pigs at work, she was afraid for herself to control them because it would mean the human body was just some meat. She never had the power of mind control. But the mind only moved the pieces. That was something she could do.

Captain Underpants stiffened up. His motions were uncanny jerks. "I'm not sorry," Tatsumaki said through Cap's mouth; all she had to do was play the strings in his voicebox. "But you might be right. I play a better villain than a hero."

Slayer flew on leathery wings despite the lack of air, and Tian moved on his own power. Kumoko had to pull herself with ropes of webbing. Her eyes split in different directions, one to maintain the curse on Tatsumaki, one to paralyze the Captain in place. Tatsumaki didn't care if his muscles locked up, she broke him in the right directions anyway. That got the spider to avert her eyes real quick. Every swing maneuvered her through the lab, trying to get to Tatsumaki past her bodyguard, but she couldn't move fast enough. The puppet strings pulled, and Cap smashed her with hammer blows every time she was unlucky enough to get in close.

Slayer walked across the ceiling. Down below her feet, Tian loomed, dragon heads snapping, spear's edge jagged.

Two were occupied. Two more left to take care of.

They lunged for her. The Blood Spear reached her just before Slayer's polished dress shoe could, but only just. Tian's polearm nearly caught her dress, could've gored her if she'd been one inch closer. Next Slayer threw a kick towards her teeth and she caught it on the edge of her fingers. Damn, there really was a power difference there. Tatsumaki's effort was all mental. A full-body block and deflecting with her pinky finger took the same amount of exertion. Slayer, he really was toying with her. She couldn't keep a steady grip on either of them enough to throw them or crush them. She couldn't even pull the spear out of Tian's hands.

"It's rare to see a human keep pace with a Nightwalker," Slayer commented. His claws, wings, legs, a cape that sliced on its own, every part of him was a bloodthirsty weapon. "Whenever I see one, I wonder how much you sacrificed to get here. You carve away chunks of finite life," he threw a punch that Tatsumaki blocked with the shielding around her hair, "Devote yourself to violence and hatred, anger leads to high blood pressure, shortening your lifespan even further. You and everything else in this world erode all the time. Only to achieve this standard of excellence." A rush of hypersonic jabs that Tatsumaki could only barely parry, all she could do was nab the fingernails in the split second they came close, and they regenerated in the next split second anyway. "For long-life creatures, this is just one ephemeral flake of snow in the snowglobe. I appreciate that."

Tatsumaki didn't give a shit about whatever he was saying to her anymore she just needed to put him down. Fortunately, at that very moment her puppeteered Captain managed to grab Kumoko while she was webswinging around. He grabbed her by the thorax and tossed her discus-style, shearing straight through a metal load-bearing pillar. That worked. She tore the rest of it out and dragged it over to her side, an oversized bludgeon to keep Tian and Slayer at range.

Mere metal wasn't resistant enough though. Even with her power backing it, Tian and Slayer's strikes broke the pillar to smaller pieces after every kick. Moving herself, moving Captain Underpants, balancing exponentially increasing metal shards was overtaxing the blood in her brain. Every time she reached what should have been her capacity she simply pushed through it, no matter the cost. This strategy was working. Raining jagged metal chunks down onto their bodies was steadily wearing them down, at least enough that Tatsumaki could catch a breather.

Kumoko suddenly appeared in front of Tatsumaki's face.

She could TELEPORT?!

Impossible, why did she—had she been withholding that power this entire time just so Tatsumaki would let her guard down? Was that thing actually intelligent?

Her teeth sank in. Tatsumaki expended so much energy on so many fronts that the barrier could just barely protect her from the chomp of the mandibles, if any of that venom had seeped in she would have died in seconds. She still felt her skin tear and bones break around her midsection. Motherfucker! At least she finally caught that spider, let's see how she liked this.

Tatsumaki mentally reached into Kumoko's insides. Just flesh. Whether it was a monster or a person. All she had to do was sweep her hands aside and the damn spider split into a thousand chunks that splattered chitin everywhere. Still the legs twitched. Immortal beings all of them. Unlike her, the one unlucky human that would feel this savage bite for months.

One twitch of her index finger brought Cap back to attention. The second twitch and Cap flew to Tian's side, smashing both legs into his spine. All one thousand metal pieces of the pillar were at her command. They swarmed like birds on Slayer, shoved him back at Tatsumaki's command, biting at him and slicing off pieces. Even that didn't work in the short term. He could move any piece of himself. His blood sloshed in midair, sentient. She'd have to try harder. Go in harder.

The metal crushed in around him. These weren't swarming individual buzzards anymore. At the speed of thought they became whirring blades in a blender. Mulched from the feet up, hacked to bits crawling towards his head and an arm that gave a farewell salute before being split into hundredths. Once again all those bits started to slouch back together. One severed hand even crawled on its fingers to assist Kumoko in her own repair. So that left... that bloodless deity, Tian.

Her and Cap could focus him down now with all their ability, but it was still not enough. Even though they outmatched his Monochrome, Tian's spear was too dangerous for them. He had complete control over it. All their strikes were ungainly and weak compared to his expertly-placed attacks. She could not disarm him or overpower him. The only reason he would drop that holy weapon was if...

Tian thrust straight and true towards the Captain. A glancing blow meant only to bat him aside, of course. Tatsumaki nudged his body just enough that his Blood Spear would pierce right through his heart.

Of course that didn't happen. Tian didn't want to hurt him. With nowhere else to move he dropped the spear at the last moment, because Tatsumaki created the one situation it was optimal for him to release it. Bullseye. Tatsumaki grabbed it and knew from that moment she would never let Tian hold it again. She reached back and cast it towards him, right between those wretched serpents.

"It can't end like this again," he said.

The spear went through his head and slammed into the psychorejective doors behind him. On touch the shockwaves cracked through the walls, more magma leaking like blood, jostling and vibrating the entire lab. The damn doors that had been in her way this whole time. Psycho-resistant. Fuck that. She thrust the spear against the metal doors again. And again. And again. Each time harder, quaking this floating rock even more chaotically, until something had to give way. With one final strike, her psychic power broke the doors down and the volcano erupted.

Lava and smoke ejected from the summit crater. Newton's third law pushed the island down out of space, hurtling downwards, breaching Battleworld's atmosphere once more. Even through her shield Tatsumaki felt her ears pop. Everything hurtled downward and the rock ignited before the volcanic meteor finally crashed into the water again. The tidal waves kicked up to kiss the clouds.

Only one more left standing now.

Him. The hated one. The scumfucking trash Tatsumaki wanted to destroy all along, the fat stupid fool with the big mouth. Cap was in her complete control. She felt the curves of his aorta and the lymph nodes in his neck. Every wrinkle in his brain was there to be pulled apart. It was all so disgusting. Like a frog dissection. Finally, not like those other creatures that regrew like worms, like Vilgax, she could finally just kill him.

...kill him?

No. She'd never killed a human before. What had she been doing?

That realization snapped her out of it. All her power left her, the light switch turned off. Tatsumaki almost slipped out of the bare minimum shielding she needed to keep pressure on her wound. She floated down and sat in the carnage. Slayer collecting his pieces, dabbing away splotches on a completely blood-soaked suit, phantom pains. Kumoko's body steadily pulling itself together. Tian's dragons sniffing at himself like mournful dogs at their master's feet. Cap was the only one unharmed. Looking down on her, now the sole judge of her fate.

She looked away. She didn't want to see what his expression was. All she knew was that he spent a moment in thought, in the dark of that room and the blood.

He flew up and out of the laboratory, through the ceiling, and was gone.

Tatsumaki was alone.

The one source of light she hadn't shattered were the bright halogens behind what had once been the broken-down doors. Behind those doors. The place where she had feared to go, because she did not know what to say to the voice inside.

She pulled the spear into her hand, and disappeared into the brightness.

Chapter Text

Once upon a time, an ugly little monster swept the floor in a witch's hut. The monster knew it was ugly because the witch told her so. And it knew she was a monster because she didn't have a soul. It was a homunculus: a creature made of mud and magic, shaped like a human.

She did chores for the witch. She studied literature. She practiced the sword, and learned the secrets of magic. But she could not go out among the humans without her cloak to conceal her, because she was unlike and anathema to humans. The eyes of God did not look upon a lowly monster. But she did not need that to be happy. She was content to look upon the world of humans from afar, because there was nothing she loved more than watching the King and his knights.

The King was magnificent. The King was kind and graceful. The King was all. The King's knights were renowned throughout the world, clad in the most glittering armors and acclaimed for the most chivalrous deeds. And the King led at the front with the most glorious valor of all. There was nothing the monster wanted more than to be a knight, no matter how impossible. She read the tales of their deeds until she memorized the words and fell asleep on the pages, dreaming.

One morning, the witch revealed something to her.

"It is time you knew the truth of your parentage. Your father is King Arthur of the Britons. Sir Gawain and Lady Gareth are your kin. You are his only natural progeny, the only one who is fit to succeed him."

Even in her wildest fantasies she dare not imagine she deserved such happiness. For the first time in her life she did not hate her ugly body, because it brought her closer to the King she so admired.

"Take this armor and this sword, and go to Castle Camelot. Never take your helmet off. Not until the time is right. Once you reveal yourself, the King will know your face and know you will replace him. Not until you are ready."

Away she went at once to Camelot. As a monster, her strength and talent were beyond any human's, and her noble spirit shone as brightly as any knight's. Quickly she became a Knight of the Round under the name Sir Mordred, for King Arthur was the King, and the King was a man, and Mordred would have to be a good man to be a good king. Lancelot was the bravest, and Gawain was the most chivalrous, and Tristan was the most beautiful, but Mordred was the most passionate and tireless by far. She slew the most barbarous barbarians, protected the most pitiful peasants, and rescued the most distressed damsels. Her gleaming greaves smeared with dirt. Delivering calves. Fixing wagon axles. Until she had become the hero of the people, one of the greatest of King Arthur's knights, she was not worthy to call herself his kin. When that day came, she proudly removed her helmet before the court. She bore the countenance of the king in every way, shape, and form, identical.

She'd never seen such disgust in her king. So sudden. Lower your head, and put your helmet on. You are not my child. I will never accept you. The celebrations stopped cold. They'd expected dancing, embracing. They saw their knight in tears. Humiliated. Her brother, her sister! Lancelot, her mentor! All of them saw her clinging to her father's leg begging her not to throw her away. It would have been better if they'd laughed at her. If they all hated her, at least she could have understood. She was the monster from Morgan's womb, she should have never dreamed of more than sweeping those floors. But those looks of shock and shame... she couldn't bear it, knowing she caused it, that she'd ruined it all.

Mordred was banished from Camelot that night. Nobody knew what had made the king react this way. Tristan lay down his bow and harp. The king does not understand human feelings, he said, and left the walls forever. The people protested for love of Mordred. Her own siblings had to quiet them. Guinevere grieved. Lancelot comforted her.

It all felt like a dream. Nothing seemed real. Every night the same replay. How could she have done it differently, made herself someone worthy of affection?

Why did he reject her?

Why didn't he love her?

She had done everything to please him.

Was it because of Morgan? Had she failed him somehow, not lived up to the title? She didn't care if she was a prince, or an heir, or a regent. She could have lived in the mud if she had her family.

Maybe she was cursed from birth. Children can't choose their parents. They can only live with their lot. But it couldn't stop them from wanting better.

She never forgot that night. She obsessed over it as she did the great histories of the Round Table's knights, until those happy memories were forgotten under a flood of bitterness.

And she did not return until her army broke through the gates on the day she drove her sword into her father's heart.

This really was Hell. Behind those doors was a long tile hallway, blindingly bright, bulbs at every inch as if afraid the dark would sneak in. Tatsumaki felt like she was in an incubator. Her... feelings were all muddied up after that fight, her psychic strength wavered. Indignation was a good emotion to power herself with. Embarrassment wasn't. Tatsumaki's current level was serviceable enough, but she wished she had that fearless, mountain-moving force guiding her again. Serviceable wasn't going to cut it.

For now, she kept the xian's spear at her side. It was so heavy she could only drag it along, and she had no skill with a polearm anyway, but it was comforting to have something to defend herself with in case she couldn't ignite that pilot light in her again. The point of the spearhead left long, curving grooves on the floor behind her. Strange, thinking she could get attacked at any moment and those tracks would come to an abrupt stop.

The hallway was broken up by a series of security doors, without anti-psychic measures. They were simple for Tatsumaki to dismantle. If she were less fatigued, she might have adjusted the tumblers from the inside, but she really didn't care about being fastidious right now. She just crumpled up the barriers like tinfoil, and the last door came down as unceremoniously as the first one. Behind it was a garage with a sliding door for a back wall. Every side was cluttered with machinery. At the other side, there lay an armored vehicle of enormous size, a cross between a tank and a space shuttle. There were no tires. It was held up by quadrupedal legs, and rocket thrusters lined the back. Bronze humanoid drones passed boxes of files between each other and threw them inside efficiently.

One of them held a hand up before Tatsumaki could speak. "Please, don't intervene. Transporting a live specimen is a delicate process." She instantly dismantled it and flung all eight thousand individual pieces to their own corner of the room, but it didn't dissuade the robots. "I understand that you're upset, but violence is an ineffective method of-"

She tore the rest of them into scrap. Every solitary circuit that composed their beings was splattered, crushed, atomized. There was no time to waste listening to their prattle. Fubuki was in there. Whoever locked her up had to be in the driver's seat. She had to get inside.

Unfortunately, the compartment the drones were loading the papers into did not connect to the rest of it. Her psychokinesis wrapped around it, prodded at every joint and opening for possible leverage. No luck. There was an apartment's worth of space she couldn't access.

A scratchy, electronic voice echoed from the vehicle itself. "Please, don't try to touch anything! You're that other psychic sister, aren't you? I am on the cusp of a Copernican breakthrough in our understanding of reality. I can't allow you to see the specimen until my work is through." The entire time he spoke, Tatsumaki wrestled with the doors. They were only partially made of a psychic dampening metal. Mostly, it was hard to crack because it was impossibly sturdy. That meant Tatsumaki could defeat it. If it involved brute force, she just had to focus harder, twist more intensely...

The loading doors slid open, and the cold night air stung Tatsumaki. Engines thrummed. The jet thrusters sparked. She only blinked once, and with a deafening roar the legged transport became a rocket that launched through the air at supersonic speed. One moment by her side, next a dot on the horizon piercing through the clouds. Tatsumaki cursed and flew after them.

Even her speed struggled to keep pace with the rocket. Endless miles of ocean streaked by underneath her, islands flew past in milliseconds. She'd gone beyond anything easily measurable by Mach levels. Tatsumaki ignited against the air and burst into flames like re-entry, only kept protected by the barrier she always formed around herself. Forget about the wind resistance. Forget about the cold and the heat. Every time she got closer, the rocket would shift into some new gear and shoot forward, and Tatsumaki would grit her teeth and force herself to fly faster, again and again. But she got further and further every time, and they reached speeds so great even lightning itself could not touch them. They no longer looked like shapes of anything, just comets black and green chasing each other's tails.

The escape rocket could not fly any faster. Tatsumaki could. She threw herself forward and glared until the vehicle crunched and crumpled. An entire side sheet of the rocket broke open and a flurry of charts and diagrams and drafted data all flew out. Everything hidden inside, the mad doctor's secrets, cracked open like a treasure chest for Tatsumaki.

There she was. Finally. So many years struggling without her sister, fighting the losing war against Vilgax with nobody at her back, thinking over and over again she was weak, she'd failed her sole task- no more. She'd found her. A six foot tube full of translucent blue slime, laying in the storage of the car, the prison of the Blizzard of Hell, Fubuki. At last.

It was eerily quiet; at these speeds, no sound was able to reach her ears. Tatsumaki gently floated down, landed inside the car, and pressed her hand against the glass walls of the tube.

She tried to pull her hand away. She couldn't. It was stuck fast.

Fubuki was completely rooted to the inside of the car. Even trying to wrench her hand or the glass coffin away from their positions was impossible, and she couldn't understand where this vacuum was coming from. Any and all force was completely negated, violating every law of physics and thermodynamics. What the hell was this? Some kind of anti-psychic trap? She'd been overpowered before, but being overpowered in such a precarious position made her panic. Let her go, let her go, let her go!

"That's as far as you go, huh? I didn't expect the Tornado of Terror to be such a half-assed hero."

That voice- Tatsumaki tried to respond but the sound didn't reach. Was it speaking to her telepathically? No, the sound waves had been brought to her ears somehow, so they were crisp and clear when the rest was silence. From the other side of the case, a pale hand scraped up along the glass, carefully pulling a scrawny kid up to his feet. Probably just a teenager. He was so fragile she could actually see the veins underneath his skin, and around his throat he had something like a dog collar clinging to him. A red light blinked.

Get away from her, she mouthed. He shook his head.

"It's not that easy." She got it now. The bones in her inner ear were being vibrated directly to broadcast his voice. "Dr. Conners was very insistent that his precious subject go undisturbed. He's trying to talk to God or something... and apparently this lady makes a hell of a megaphone." He stood up, not all the way, a little hunched, leaning part of his weight on a cane and the rest of it on the glass.

"Really, though." He grinned. "All that self-righteous bullshit doesn't matter to me. The only thing I care about is being the strongest. That means putting trash like you in your place."

Okay. Tatsumaki was getting the impression she was not going to be able to negotiate with this guy. That's fine. Teenager or not, she didn't mind roughing him up. He had a punchable face, anyway.

She thought about throwing him against the wall. The floor dented under his feet, but he didn't budge or even resist. He took careful, hobbled steps towards her, moving through continuous diamond-crushing force, completely unaffected even as it started to rend the metal of the rocket cabin. Tatsumaki swung the spear at him, but he simply blocked it with his hand and the whole thing twisted out of her grip and flung itself to get buried in the interior wall. And he leaned in and gave her a flick with two fingers, dead center.

The good news was that she was not stuck to Fubuki's case anymore.

A projectile formerly known as Tatsumaki tore through three feet of tungsten ceiling and breached the stratosphere. If she hadn't kept up her barrier she would have been obliterated the moment she was touched, but as things stood now, she was only roughly bruised. That was horrible. It didn't feel like raw strength. Something had concentrated pulverizing power into her body and released it to launch her twenty miles up into the air. Brutal. Completely unnatural. ESPer work. Another one. Just like the last time.

Yeah, she was pissed. Mad at him, mad at that bastard doctor, mad at herself for breaking her own concentration earlier so she wasn't in a brawling mood now. Not as angry as she was in the laboratory. But good enough.

They'd gotten a lead on her, but that extra burst of fury was enough for Tatsumaki to close the gap fast. The boy hung carelessly out the side entrance, hair not even blowing in the slipstream, looking at her with cold contempt. He snapped his fingers. Bolts of cutting wind flew at her, shearing through clouds. Tatsumaki swept through, up, down, through hoops, dodging a barrage of air blades that cluttered the sky, never slowing the chase. Looked like he couldn't directly affect her without touching her.

"Tch." He allowed her to enter the cabin, but she couldn't pull Fubuki away from whatever psychic grip he had on her, and she couldn't crush him into a cube either. He diverted or neutralized all the pressure. "I'll try to keep you closer next time. Don't want you to waste my time crawling back for a second helping." Ugh, this guy... this wasn't a good place to fight him. The rocket was too risky, especially with Fubuki on board, and every time she tried to ground it he pushed back and resisted her. He was an immovable mountain. Going through him wouldn't work. She'd have to go over his head.

There were still some boxes of files or laboratory notes that had not been torn away during the commotion. Not exactly as effective as a spear would've been. But they were easily overlooked by her white-haired enemy. So much so that, when she flipped the box and let those papers spill out the rocket's side into open air, he ignored them. He kept his focus on the psychic in front of him.

Tatsumaki telekinetically snagged about a hundred papers outside the rocket, dragged them to the front, and pasted them all over the windshield. Dr. Conners, no matter what drones or experimental freaks he hid behind, was a mortal man. He could not blindly pilot a supersonic vehicle. One minute adjustment to the steering shot all of them at a breakneck angle, faster than the kid could even react, crossing the blue ocean and veering downward to crash straight into the ground. She had no idea where she landed. Didn't matter. She snatched the coffin and opened the back of the rocket like a tin can before she flew out.

Something stopped her and nearly dislocated her leg in the process. That kid. Tatsumaki didn't even need to look, the kid had done something. She fought furiously on the other end of his line. Fubuki slowly rotated in midair, sleeping beauty, unharmed, just slight cracks in the glass.

They were in a swamp. No, they were in a graveyard. Old willows sank their roots into murky water covered in lily pads. Marble markers and crypts intermingled with the marsh, sometimes half-buried. Bleached bones bobbed at the surface, disturbed by the shuttle crash. It was a horror movie. Another of Vilgax's disturbing artificial landscapes, designed to torment anyone unlucky enough to be prisoner on this planet.

Lightning flashed and illuminated her captor's wicked grin.

"So, what do you think of the one way road to Hell?"

BEYOND RANK 1, THERE IS ACCELERATOR

The last thing Mordred remembered was that damn wave. Miles high, omnidirectional, an unavoidable wall of water. One more Battleworld trick to fuck with them when they tried to chase after Tatsumaki. Everything went black. She saw azure flashes, the Sword of Selection she envisioned every time she closed her eyes. Some hazy memories cobbled together into fever dreams. When she woke up, she was lying in the sand, stars above her. The tides came in and lapped at her armor.

Man. This was bullshit. Nobody had it worse than Mordred right now.

She groaned and rolled onto her side, and all the ocean water logged in her armor sloshed along with her. Knuckles had already gotten up. At least he'd washed up too, although it kind of pissed her off that he'd recovered quicker.

"Are you hurt?" he asked.

"Pshh, it was one little wave. You think that was going to stop me?"

"I guess I did. You still want to search for that lady? 'Cause she's got to be long gone by now."

Did she? Tatsumaki had been nothing but awful to her the entire time she'd known her. She could respect her strength, and she needed her alive to maintain her connection to this world, but did she have a reason to rescue her besides that? She could handle herself.

"...I don't know. Maybe we should try find some other survivors. Some that are more worth saving. Does that bother you?"

"You need to do what you want. I'm just focused on protecting what's in front of me."

Damn. What a cool guy. This must've been that clarity of mind that Japanese philosophers talked about. He didn't even have to think about it.

Mordred finally stood up, although the wet sand made it difficult. Now she could finally see... where... she'd ended up...

Was this view even real? The stars twinkled millions of years away. Auroras in colors that didn't exist wreathed around crystal spires floating in the sky, and beneath her feet the sandy shore met a field of flowers. Every kind. They all bloomed over each other, stretching into a flat horizon. This was an impossible place. That is, it was a replica of a place that did not exist in their reality. Mordred had never been, but she knew of it from her mother Morgan. It was the origin of human magic, the concept of paradise, the Garden of Eden, the world her old man called Avalon. This was mimicking the Reverse Side of the World. Her old man must have told Vilgax about it...? No, any other explanation didn't make sense. Unless the two of them were dead and made it there on their own, wouldn't that be a laugh.

Far in the distance, silhouetted against that impossible sky, were the spires of a castle.

She pointed towards it. Even Knuckles couldn't see the thing, but her ghost liner eyes could. "There."

"There what."

"King Arthur is there. He's gotta be. Why else would they build it like this. They're... they're trying to mock me. I got so close and they're trying to goad me on now."

"Right. Your father's out there waiting for a rematch." Mordred had gotten around to explaining all that during her lengthy Arthurian dissertation on the way to the volcano. He probably listened to most of that. Why wouldn't he, when it was the world's most interesting topic? "Are you going to go?"

"I have to. I have to do this, man. This is my whole life. It's what I was raised for. The only reason I'm a hero is 'cause I killed Arthur." Her hand clenched Clarent's hilt. "I'm the only one that can do it again."

"Do you want me to go with you?" Knuckles knocked his fists together. "Sounds like a tough fight. If you want me to be with you, I'll go. But if it's something you have to do alone, I can-"

"Let's do it. I'm gonna need someone to witness the moment I crown myself."

They cut through the flowers on the long trek towards the castle. No waves to push them off course this time. It was all so coincidental, designed just for her, that it couldn't have been anything but kismet. The closer they got, the clearer the details came into focus. This castle had the same rough stone edifice and thick walls as the Camelot Mordred remembered, just different, hazily remembered from some dream. And the further she walked, the more convinced she was. The more her heart raced. She was here. She was absolutely here! She could smell that accursed blood, the parent that betrayed her, and every particle of her spirit core reacted. Even her sword Clarent buzzed with energy. It could sense its previous owner.

Mordred kicked down the portcullis. She stormed into the foyer, tromped mud on the rug, slashed down tapestries just for the hell of it. She'd never actually sieged the castle Camelot itself. When Arthur abandoned them, the people let her in to sit the throne. But in some other world, she could have. If she were the one who had the kingly right, and her father was the usurper she had to smite down...

She entered a throne room, an original design full of stained glass windows depicting Vilgaxian conquests. Altria stood at the end just in front of her seat. Light filtered through the windows and lit her up in that angelic way it always did. Mordred always hated that.

"How long have you been standing there waiting for me?" Mordred joked.

"Lord Vilgax suggested I take my leave," Altria said. "I thought I should attend to this matter."

"Yeah, yeah. Because you're Vilgax's little lapdog now and you do whatever he wants."

"Always the same grievances. I have nothing to say, you're irredeemably warped. The only thing that will finally quiet you is killing you."

"Got that right, old man."

The two of them drew their swords. Merlin's magic covered Altria's blade in invisible air. Mordred forced her mana into Clarent until it bled scarlet lightning. Their styles had diverged significantly from the days they'd trained alongside each other. Mordred's stance had only gotten rougher over time. Compared to her tutor Lancelot, who already fought brutishly, she was low to the ground and almost animalistic.

Mordred didn't waste her chance. Before her father made the first move, she shot forward and-

Someone broke through the stained glass windows from the outside, distracting Altria, unluckily distracting Mordred too so Altria could deflect her strike, landing roughly, rolling through the shattered glass before righting himself and skidding to a complete stop.

"I made it! Hey, it hasn't been a whole day yet, right?" This guy was in pretty rough shape. His clothes were all dirty, and there was something wrong with his teeth, they were chipped and jagged like he'd been chewing on rocks. "That means I've never missed a day of work, right?"

"So." Altria clenched her teeth. "Of all possible times, this is where you decide to show your face?"

"Gimme a break! I had to put myself together after that ship crashed! I didn't even know where all the pieces were supposed to go, either. So I think some of 'em might be in the wrong places."

"The hell's this supposed to be, Arthur?" Mordred asked. Altria clashed blades with her, knocking her back just a bit before she dug her heels in and held her ground. "A setup? Did you plan-" She just stopped talking. Maybe she shouldn't have walked in with zero idea how she was going to handle this fight.

Altria looked pained. "Denji, leave us. This isn't your fight."

"Hey, scruffy, what's your damage? Are you running with Vilgax, or do you have some shit against me too?"

Denji glanced between Altria, and Mordred, who looked exactly like Altria. Maybe he suspected that there was some previous history here, but he did not look like it was clicking for him.

"It's nothing special, lady. I don't even know who you are. I just wanna sleep on a real bed and eat real food! And as long as I work for Vilgax, he lets me get it whenever I want! Shit's got more benefits than a government job, and all I gotta do is kill whoever he points me at! Actually, I'm kind of a big deal."

He started unbuttoning his shirt for some reason. The buttons stuck past, so he just ripped the rest of it away and exposed his chest. There was a strange mechanical piece dangling from his chest. Like, a pull cord on a chainsaw.

Praetor Denji, Imperial Guard (First Class)

All the commotion must have reached outside. Knuckles walked in with a chainmail helmet draped over his head, which did not fit, and a halberd on his back, which he could not use.

"Hey, Mordred, did you win yet?" he asked. "I couldn't find any Chaos Emeralds around here, but they have some pretty neat stuff."

"Who is that?" Altria asked, levying her sword at the red interloper. "What the hell is that thing, Mordred? What's this... ugly red creature?"

Mordred looked at Denji. "What's that ugly red creature, huh? You afraid of me, you need backup just to discipline your kid?"

"I've told you a thousand times, but you never got it through your skull. This doesn't mean anything to me." Altria scowled. "You aren't my child, or my rival, I want nothing to do with you. Just looking at you disgusts me. However much you hate me, it is nothing compared to the regret I have for the day you were born, and if I'd been there I would have cut you out of the womb and stomped you onto the cobblestones. Why are you still here? Why do you insist on fighting a battle you lost a thousand years ago?"

"I'm gonna keep fighting until you answer me, goddamn it! Why did you throw me away, huh?! Why wasn't I good enough for you? Why couldn't I rule, huh?!" Mordred spat at the ground, face red. "What do you mean I didn't have the capacity? What do you mean?! Huh? You thought you were so great I was worthless compared to you? When you were the one that fucked up your whole kingdom? You pushed away everyone that cared about you, let them die one after another! Why can't I be the child you wanted, why?!"

Her voice cracked, and echoed in the throne room. For once, Altria didn't look on her with contempt. If anything, she pitied her. It was the only expression Mordred would have hated more.

Denji picked some wax from his ear. "Man, women are complicated-"

"Mordred," Altria said. "The king must be someone who can cast aside their feelings. Everything that makes them a human. They must sacrifice everything and give everything for the people they serve. You, Mordred, are a selfish, arrogant, envious, prideful, temperamental, and completely uncontrollable woman. You could never draw the Sword of Selection. It's not in your character. You are too human, Mordred."

"That's bullshit! I-"

"Why doesn't Clarent shine for you, if you are worthy to use it?" Altria asked, talking through Mordred's rant. "Isn't Clarent the sword that celebrates the rightful king of England? Why is it weaker in your grasp than mine?"

"SHUT UP!" Mordred clasped her gauntlets over her ears. Her skull was pounding. "Shut up, shut up!"

"Look at you! You whined and screamed about wanting the truth, but I spared it from your ears because I knew you wouldn't accept it. Well, listen to this. You aren't my son. You're a violation of my body. I never wanted you. You were the one who destroyed Camelot, you were the one who slew your brother, you were the one that ruined it all. This is your one chance to fix your mistake. Do the honorable thing for once in your life, and kill yours-"

CLUNG! Knuckles struck Mordred hard. Her whole armor rung like a bell, chattering her teeth and snapping her back to attention. She didn't know where she was going. At some point the words all blurred together and she'd been drifting far, far away.

"Are you really going to let her talk to you like that?" he asked.

Mordred shook her head, thumped her gauntleted fist against her skull a few times. Yeah, alright, she wasn't too fucked up. She'd known that was how Altria felt about her for a long time. It was just something different to hear her say it out loud. Kind of a lot.

"No. Hell no I'm not! I don't have to think about this shit, I just have to get mad about it!" She donned her helmet. "I'm mad, and I deserve to be mad, and I deserve to be here! And I'm gonna take my birthright, old man!"

Altria just sighed.

"Alright. Denji, you can pull that cord."

Denji was all too happy to comply. His fingers wrapped around the triangular metal tab and gave it a rough, jackrabbit start. His heart purred. Veins started to pump like a V-12 engine, steam hissed, suddenly-

Chainsaws tore through his head and arms splattering blood. He seized up like that was the climactic finish, like he'd activated some ability whose sole purpose was to kill him, but he recovered quickly and halfway transformed into a mechanical monster. The blades whirred hungrily.

"Hey, Knuckles," Mordred said. "Keep this guy off my back for me, will ya? This is family business."

That was the last thought she paid to him before she attacked again, didn't even wait for the go-ahead. She slashed right for her father's neck. Altria ducked the strike, let Mordred slice through the throne behind her and swung at her chest. The force rocked through her armor to break the stone underneath her. Shit, that was brutal. This was the first time she'd seriously fought against Altria as a swordfighter. When they'd bloodied the fields of Camlann, she was using the holy lance Rhongomyniad. They only ever crossed blades during simple sparring matches to train her sword arm. This was Altria's true strength with her favored weapon. This hurt.

At least she was able to block the next strike. This one came from the chainsaws. Denji's whirring chains couldn't scratch the magical metal of Clarent, although they could push her back. Just fighting Altria took everything she had. Denji didn't have the same skill, but his power was only a little less, and he was damn persistent. Even worse, he didn't give a shit if he got hurt. Altria deflected every blow and stepped back before it could get close. That was a fight she'd need one decisive blow to end. Denji, she gouged his guts and cut through his neck, he healed in seconds and kept on slugging. Mordred had to fight just as recklessly to counter. She used her armor as a shield, taking hits when she thought she could handle them, focused on trying to get a swing past Altria's guard. It put extra strain on her, but she wasn't trying for a battle of attrition. That wasn't her style.

CLANG! Clarent crossed with sword and chainsaw. The weight of both opponents pressed Mordred's blade backwards until the edge was at her chest. Mordred kicked Altria in the stomach, knocking her back, but even without the added pressure she had a hard time leveraging herself against Denji in such an awkward position. That meant she'd have to rely on her backup: Knuckles coming through with a sucker punch to Denji's head, bouncing him off of the floor and cratering stone. One punch flipped Denji completely over backwards, sending him right to the ceiling, but he caught the roof's underside on one of his chainsaw-arms and dug in to hold himself up on the rafters.

Even though he had a similarly aggressive fighting style, Knuckles had to play it more conservatively. All he had to defend himself were his boxing gloves. Both of his opponents had bladed weapons. They were much more likely to land fatal blows, and much more likely to go for the killing strike in the first place. Mordred was already a little bit disfavored against Altria, but the two-against-two match was particularly lopsided against Mordred. Figured that her old man would resort to unsavory tactics like this. If she'd been honorable enough to fight one on one, she would've kept Knuckles out of it, but now-

Their swords crashed and clashed together. The room's dust swirled like a tornado and mixed with the copper in Mordred's mouth. None of these individual blows could be seen. They could only be predicted, the same way a dog could sense a coming storm. Mordred blocked them, Altria evaded dextrously, even though her Excalibur had the shorter reach by far. The gap in skill was obvious.

"If only that fish fuck could see you now," Mordred said. "You can't even beat some trash you threw away!" Denji dropped down again and sliced through the horn of Mordred's armor before she dropped to one knee and caught his chain with Clarent, just in time to shove him back off. "You threw your dignity away for nothing! You call yourself a hero? You aren't even fighting for humans anymore!"

"I am fighting for humans!" Altria lashed out with her blade and gouged a deep gash through the walls. Blades of solidified air carved holes to the outside so deep that the upper half of the throne room slid down the slant. "You don't know how bad things really are! Do you know what happened to the world after Vilgax invaded? Humans destroyed each other! They went feral! They bombed themselves trying to defeat him, burned their skies!" Every shout was paired with another dozen swings that Clarent could not reach past. "There's no more Britain to rule over! The ocean swallowed it all!"

"So what? So what?!"

Mordred got kicked hard against her guard. She couldn't even dig her feet into the floor. She launched diagonally upwards and tore through brick and mortar before crashing into another room entirely. "So what?!" she continued to gasp out, angrier every time. "I don't care how bad humans screwed it up, you think Vilgax would do it better?!"

Another human shape crashed up through the floor to follow Mordred. She slashed at the figure of what she thought was Altria, but three chainsaw blades caught her sword instead. The next swing clanged against her helmet and cracked her tooth. The strike after that nearly toppled her over. Shit! There was no way this could happen, she couldn't let it happen. This one guy was going to get in the way of her thousand-year revenge! She'd rather die victorious than let Altria get away again!

She called out.

"Knuckles, switch in!"

It was all a dream. Cave wall shadows, play-action. Fish in a tank, thinking this castle and seaweed were the boundaries of the universe. Vilgax knew now. It came back to him suddenly with the injection. Every part of his brain lit up at once, multiple lifetimes flashed before his eyes. The stimulation would have killed any ordinary being. For Vilgax, it was cold water. A reminder to remember what he'd forgotten he had forgot.

In his mind, he was staring at his own reflection in the window glass. Outside was a field of stars and planets. He'd already conquered half of them. This was a laboratory on an imperial warship, but somehow the hut at the same time, with those two hovering over him. One reality overlaid over another.

"So many soldiers," Vilgax said. "Squadrons. Armies. Calling on aid from some god or another, praying before the battle. Cursing when they fell. It never worked. Divine intervention never held back my fists. Where are all these gods, neophyte? Were they too weak to stay my hand?"

There was some fussy researcher behind him, one of those military rejects they stocked the research departments with. This was long before Robot. "It's not a matter of strength, Lord. These beings are in a dimension we have no power to affect. A drawing could not reach out into three-dimensional space. It's the same with us. A storybook can't see beyond its own pages, it can't touch its reader. They are the ones who decide to open the book."

"What is it that calls them?"

"It is violence. The struggle for life, the clashing of egos. When two strong forces meet and one prevails, the difference in pressure creates a spiritual reaction. That expenditure of energy is what they respond to. Upheavals in culture and politics can cause it. Evolution itself can cause it. Even, well... war."

Vilgax reached out his hand and clasped it, as if he were wrapping his fist around the planets in his view. (In reality, his arm followed his imaginary motions. "He's like a dreaming dog or something," Gura said.) "This is not enough?"

"This is nothing. That power suffuses their world, but we can only emulate it. We might catch their eye if we're interesting enough for them. That's all. They do not ever visit our domain, and we cannot ever visit theirs. It's just... impossible."

"Impossible?" He squeezed tight. If he wished to, he could have those stars and planets crushed in his grip. "What you mean is that it's never been done before."

"Well, theoretically it's possible," the researcher stammered, "But it's not... even unleashing Ascalon did not call them! I cannot imagine what kind of brutality would be required. It would be massacre on an industrialized scale. War on an assembly line! There would be oceans of blood and mountains of bodies. There isn't a planet in the universe that could host so much death."

Vilgax smiled.

"So it can be done."

That memory was clearer than the others. It was the first time he invented Battleworld. His mind was sharp then. He took time to supervise the construction of the artificial planet, away from his galactic conquest. When he discovered some new deadly species or dangerous terrain, he'd order the labor camps to reproduce it on Battleworld posthaste. Uncountable lives were expended building his monument. It was as dangerous to its creators as it was to its captors. In time, it drew more blood than Vilgax's own imperial sword. He held Battleworld as one of his greatest achievements, and he always kept a place for it in his memory, even when the space in that memory became precious.

Vilgax reached the threshold of his neurology long ago. He could not retain new information without discarding some old. His psyche was able to filter out "junk" memories first, useless chaff, but the process overtaxed his neurons. He was running new software on outdated hardware. He started to forget. He started to falter. At first, only his closest advisors were aware of what was happening, and they did not even understand the scope of the issue. Soon it was obvious to anyone in his retinue. Vilgax deteriorated, became even more aggressive, if such a thing were possible. Rumors spread, and social climbers snitched on the rumor-spreaders. The penalty for insulting the Emperor was execution. Vilgax called out for generals who had already met capital punishment.

The news never spread to the common workers. In another time, perhaps discontent would have spread in the empire, and another would have claimed the crown by severing the head that wore it. But the time for that had long slipped past. They were afraid of him. As he grew more violent and irrational, he gained only greater talents in combat. Perhaps these were things he did not keep in the mind, but taught to his body. He got stronger. So strong that no one could challenge him the way he had challenged the king. Soon no one even dared to try, and he faded further away, smaller and smaller into himself. Battleworld became the only kind of world that he could thrive in, because it was the only one that would permit him. Even when he wallowed in suicidal madness, subconsciously he clung to Battleworld. He would call the gods. He would pass through the gate to the forbidden garden. He would find new lands to conquer.

He had to return to the last time he felt he was himself. He would kill for that.

Accelerator's psychic powers didn't operate the same as Tatsumaki's. She could convert mental energy into force, that's how she moved objects. Like an invisible hand emerging from her body. Accelerator needed a medium to transfer energy through. He stomped the ground, and the bones in the swamp all stood straight like tin soldiers. Another flick of his foot launched them at Tatsumaki.

"Come on, come on!" he taunted. She could pilot herself through the gaps easily, but maneuvering Fubuki's container was more of a challenge. He must have realized that she'd put greater effort into protecting her sister than protecting herself. "How long do you think you can play hero before I catch you?"

Tatsumaki put some distance between herself and Accelerator, hundreds of feet away in a long muddy field of gravestones. Their sole illumination was the moon, the stars, the lightning that flashed in the rain. Accelerator moved closer with every flash. Every tick of the clock. If the match wasn't so perilous she would have rolled her eyes. Villains always cared about pomp and circumstance.

She stretched out her hands. The gravestones tore from the earth. Long marble crosses, obelisks and menhirs, statues of saints with octopus heads. She formed them into a phalanx and concentrated the shield around Fubuki.

"What? What are you running away for?" Accelerator let out a kind of gagging cackle. "Are you afraid of me? My dear, we've only just met." Tatsumaki launched a crumpled sphere of a thousand tombstones. Accelerator held out one hand and caught the ball before it burst into stone chunks, flying all directions. "At least give me a chance to make an impression!"

He lifted his walking stick into the air and twirled the other end. Was he trying to send another burst of wind at her? Tatsumaki reinforced her psychic barrier and focused completely on protecting herself. One spin, then another, then a third time...

Lightning flashed. The bolt caught right on the edge of Accelerator's cane. He parried it with a single stroke, sent the lightning hurtling towards Tatsumaki. She cringed and curled up—

CRACK!

She skipped off the surface of the swamp, bounced a mile away, tore a deep gash through a muddy hillside. Tatsumaki picked a piece of grass away from her face. If she'd been a little more careless, she would have been meat paint. She floated up, then realized suddenly she'd lost her grip on Fubuki. Where did she go?! Tatsumaki panicked. Had she casually tossed aside her own sister? No, that was impossible, right? She wouldn't lose her grip on the coffin like that—no, she shouldn't think about it like a coffin, that was bad luck for sure. She floated up, got herself a higher view of the landscape. She'd carved through a path that went up the hillside, and at the top was a stone memorial, a mausoleum. Fubuki's containment unit was embedded in the roof. Tatsumaki watched it slowly slide in before it crashed to the ground.

She looked across the graveyard. Accelerator bounded towards her with giant steps. Each movement propelled him across even longer distances. Tatsumaki quickly flew inside and scanned for Fubuki. She looked unhurt, maybe a bit bruised, but the glass had been cracked and some formaldehyde-type liquid was pouring out. Even the frame was dented. It's not so bad, she told herself, I can come back from this.

Then the entire mausoleum shuddered, and Tatsumaki flew out with Fubuki before she knew what Accelerator was trying. She had no time for that. She absconded through the hole in the roof and saw Accelerator below her, lifting the mausoleum with no effort at all. It was lightweight to him. He spun it casually on one finger and tossed it a few times.

"Come on, fight back! I dare you." He hurled the entire structure overhand like a shotput. Tatsumaki caught it and threw it down in an eruption of muddy earth and swamp grass. "It's no fun if they run away. Actually, I like it when they struggle. You can scream, if it'll make you feel any better."

She was this close to killing him, this close. If she didn't have a sister to protect she could throw everything she had into wearing him down, but if she put her aside, he'd take her away again. There was no good strategy here.

Forget it. If she couldn't defend Fubuki and fight Accelerator at her current level, she'd just push past 100%. Give more effort. More effort! She raised her arms up, and with a gesture all rain stopped midair. Each individual droplet was carefully suspended like jagged diamonds. Accelerator had to push through them to get to her and sweep them all aside. When she snapped her fingers, they all darted towards him and bounced off of his body violently. They didn't even slightly faze him. The energy passed through his body and emanated from the soles of his shoes, tearing through the ground when he walked.

"Is that really the best you can do? I have to say I'm disappointed. If telekinesis is your only trick, I can accomplish everything you're capable of a hundred times over."

He slid his foot forward and everything lurched sideways. With that one movement, graves and bones and rubble and the rocket ship all the way from the crash site rolled towards her in a wave. She tried to push back. The moving wave became a solid wall that couldn't breach her barrier, kept trying to spill over the top and around the sides as she formed it higher and higher. Accelerator kicked at the wall himself, like a petulant child, but each strike had the force to rumble the entire facade. Where was he getting this power from? How did this brat have more of it than her?! Shouldn't she have been more powerful than she was before? She was defending Fubuki, wasn't that a stronger emotion than just being angry?

Her psychic barrier started to weaken. No matter how much she strained, Accelerator had an edge on her. Eventually she had to relent so he wouldn't shatter her psyche. She released all her force at once and let the wall tumble down, only using her force fields to redirect the piles of garbage away from the case. The rocket crashed to the ground, and its spider legs started kicking like the last twitches of a dying animal. Accelerator jumped to the top of the pile. He looked down on Tatsumaki.

She threw the rocket at him. Accelerator punched the rocket and it split in two pieces. A side door cracked open, hissing steam, and a bronze-colored machine man kicked down the door before rolling out the side and down the pile of rubble. Actually, not a machine. A human in a robot suit. Was this it? Was this the doctor behind everything, was that really supposed to be it? Why was he still alive after that crash?!

"Accelerator." His voice ran through some kind of digitized filter. "We have to return immediately. The subject may already be compromised."

"Relax. I didn't break the merchandise. It's just a bit of harmless fun we were having, I didn't want to cut our playtime short." He slid down the rubble. Tatsumaki rocketed towards him but she bounced away from his frail body without causing him any injury, only rattling her own brain in her skull. "In fact, why stop now? I could settle this five-year problem you've been working on with a single touch."

"Her brain wave readings are completely abnormal, almost silent. This could be a sign of severe blunt force trauma."

"What a third-rate scientist. I can sense her brain waves far more precisely than whatever monitors you're using, and I can tell you straight out she's faking. Your subject has been awake for this entire match. Should I demonstrate it?"

He tapped his cane. Fubuki's case flew into the air, glass cracks spiderwebbed all over the surface until she burst out. The shards swirled around Accelerator. They were frenzied. Sharp edges whipped up into a blender, a tornado with teeth, a dizzying assault that would have pureed any living being in seconds. Accelerator didn't lose a single strand of hair. With only a nod from him, the storm collapsed into nothing but lifeless fragments.

"There. See?" He pointed to the woman hovering even above Tatsumaki, the one Tatsumaki couldn't take her eyes off of. The ghost who disappeared five years ago and had never returned. Just like out of her dreams. Preserved in ice, never aged, never left.

"Fubuki?" Tatsumaki asked, cautiously.

She looked down at her sister. Then, she averted her eyes.

Fubuki, Blizzard of Hell

He could predict their every attack. The barrage of rubble they threw at him were easily dodged, or ricocheted off of him. Every bit of rock or glass was a stepping stone for Accelerator. He would step off the ground and onto a piece of debris before shooting himself to the next target, propelling himself towards Fubuki.

"You should have let me out earlier. All you need is enough energy, right?"

Tatsumaki and Fubuki latticed their own psychic barriers together to create an even stronger wall. Accelerator undid those knots with one tap of his knuckles, diverted their psychic strength in all directions proving he could have done it any time he wanted to, and swung that fist down to sock Fubuki in the face. There was no stopping this. Any attempt to directly interact with Accelerator could not function, not unless he wanted it to. He surfed her all the way to the ground in a cloud of dust too fast to be intercepted.

"Doctor?" Accelerator grabbed her by the hair. "Were you looking for something like this?!"

He scraped one foot back against the earth, and the earth shuddered. Everything ground down like rusted gears. A sharp jolt, a sudden stop. A complete violation of the laws of physics. Just by touching the ground, he was able to affect, somehow, the scope of everything it was connected to. He could steal energy from the entire planet's rotation.

Then, he forced that energy into—

A SQUEALING NOISE DEVASTATING TATSUMAKI'S INSIDES. THERE WAS NO PHYSICAL FORCE, NO SONIC WAVES TO RUPTURE HER EARDRUMS, BUT IT EMERGED IN HER PSYCHE SO LOUD ALL SOUND DISAPPEARED AND SHATTERED. HER NOSE BLED. SHE COULD NOT SEE OR FEEL OR THINK. IT BURNED IN HER SKULL LIKE FILMSTRIP MELTING THROUGH, LAYERS AND LAYERS REACHING REPEATEDLY DEEPER LEVELS OF AGONY. WHEN SHE came to her senses she still saw traces of white. That scream still echoed. Accelerator and that robot were unfazed. Fubuki collapsed to one knee and felt at her throat, surprised that it was all in her mind, that a dream could really hurt that badly.

It just made Tatsumaki angry. Now Fubuki looked tougher than Tatsumaki even though Tatsumaki was the one who fought across Battleworld to get to her.

Some strange feeling tickled at her temples, and now that she was aware enough to be angry, the rest of her synapses remembered awareness. She was being directed. The night sky was lightening. Accelerator, Dr. Conners, Fubuki, and Tatsumaki looked up at the same angle at the same time to see exactly what monumental shift was occurring.

A radiant image appeared. Above their heads, far in the distance but so bright it lit the cemetery fields, a procession of golden stairs constructed themselves. It was not simply alight, but pure light, as if the world were a backdrop and someone had taken scissors to it, cut out the shape of stairs in a perfect golden ratio, all emerging in dizzying spirals. A color equal in radiance to the stairs emerged, only separated from it by its hue, and landed on the railing. It skated the rails. It was on a skateboard and grinded down the stairs like Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2. His board left the railing and he pulled a trick (Christ Air) and her twirled over her and Accelerator and everyone else. He never had to touch the ground. Great angel wings emerged from him and he simply floated, image shifting, two wings becoming six and four and back again, face changing, body inconstant like fire. One flickering divine flame.

hey. he said. sup.

Metatron, Angel of the Veil

The robot-armored doctor didn't hesitate to act. He hefted one metal arm with a mounted cannon and fired. A trail of green light blazed, emerald ignition, something plasma-like shot towards the angel being. The angel reached into his chest and withdrew a flaming longsword, slicing the beam into two long streaks that tore through everything in the path. A V of destruction with the burning sword at the center of the storm.

He hovered in front of a mile-deep canyon. His sword glowed with heat, or maybe it corrupted with heat, and the edge blackened and the upper half fell away. The angel didn't look angry. Only depressed.

"Anti-Elohim weaponry. The barrel's interior is lined with part of Leviathan's intestinal tract. I haven't gone without it since I started researching divinity."

really man. really. i said like two fucking words to you. and they were completely non-confrontational innocent words. racially profiling those words like officer dictionary pulling them over for doing fifty-five in a fifty-four. i know i shouldnt be saying this but jesus christ. try some communication. like i just got here.

Tatsumaki was dumbstruck. She moved her mouth, but she wasn't able to make the words come out. Fubuki acted first.

"You! What are you, an angel, a god or something? You need to fix this right now! There's this monster called Vilgax that's kidnapped-"

He closed one hand and Fubuki stopped talking. Actually, she was put in chronostasis. Put on pause. Tatsumaki could have strangled her for putting herself in danger like this. She was always like that. That's how she got herself captured last time.

No matter how mad Tatsumaki was, she was going to keep herself scarce here. She would lie low. She closed her eyes, curled up, and focused.

i think i have a grasp on the cliff notes. its kind of hard not to. like. im not going to bury the lede here you really fucked it up. i mean we had a really good cosmic ballet going here. fourteen billion years setting up galaxies and stars and planets and creatures and molecules. and you made vilgax king of everything. do you realize what a cataclysmic disaster that is. michael bay directed box office smash hit disaster flick. roger ebert gives one and a half stars-

"Are you going to keep yapping?" Accelerator yawned. "If you want to fight, fight. If you have something to say, then say it."

The doctor lifted his other arm and fired a set of metal handcuffs like bolas, inscribed with flaming sigils. Metatron flash-stepped out of the way. A vinyl record appeared under his hands, and he scraped it with his nails. His opponent went all static and disappeared. Faded away. Channel changed. Just like that.

okay. i just needed some room to breathe. that asshole rumpus was getting too crowded. alright. well you know how there is a harrowing and an end of days coming. its in this thing called the bible. which you may have heard of. and it pretty much caps off a colossal period of fuckedupedness. which is what's happening. yall have really pushed the big guy to his last nerve. the whole choir is out of harmony. everyones arguing over whether we should reap the humans and drop the curtain on it. start over later. but this battleworld shit really pushed it over the edge. theres only so much we can take before we hit the big red button that says ARMAGEDDON.

Accelerator grinned. "That's some pretty tough talk. Wonder if you can back it up? Or are those wings just for show?"

Metatron swung his broken sword for Accelerator's neck. Accelerator clashed with his bare arm and sparks flew. "There we go!" The angel attacked rapidly, and Accelerator parried some of the strikes, but it was just theater. He blocked them no matter where they hit. "Just so you know, my ESPer ability allows me control over anything with a vector. No, I'll dumb it down for your sake: I can manipulate any quantity with a direction and a magnitude. You could do anything you want to me and it wouldn't break through my vector shield."

He pulled a six-foot granite cross from the mess of gravestones and brought it down over Metatron's head, but it never landed. Accelerator suddenly found himself far in the distance. Back where he had started. Like he'd been rewound to a previous moment.

time is a scalar quality. not a vector quality. everyone knows that dumbass.

Accelerator had an incredible talent for movement, he could manipulate and adjust himself with precise ultra-fine techniques anywhere he was, convert energy to propel him any way he wanted. But Metatron could move him just as easily. He just couldn't touch him. They teleported across the graveyard, or appeared to teleport through sheer speed, bouncing to and fro. To Tatsumaki's eyes it almost looked like Metatron split into multiple afterimages. No, definitely separate copies. Metatron A, Metatron B, Metatron C, six wings separated into three angels with two wings apiece, all chronologically split from the other. All they had to do was scratch on their timetables and it would drag Accelerator backwards or forwards however they wanted it. Was any of this supposed to be in the Bible?!

They clashed across hills, dales, and valleys. Every time Metatron struck Accelerator the force dispersed into an earthquake rumbling the cemetery. Every exchange they went faster and faster. Tatsumaki could not longer easily follow the action. Sometimes Metatron slowed Accelerator down to a crawl, or shifted him backwards or forwards in chronology, but he would recover from it and he always seemed to be recovering from it more easily as if he was adapting to changes in the timestream. He might have found a way to overcome the angel if he had no interference. But that's not how the fight went. Somehow, Accelerator began to slow down. Yeah, something was definitely wrong. Something only Tatsumaki knew the true reason for.

She'd developed the idea once she saw how she was unable to hurt him with any physical attack, but learning exactly how his power worked was what pushed her over the edge. As Tatsumaki lay in the mud, playing possum, she had, very carefully, very delicately, created a large psychic box around their battleground. Spread so thin as to be almost invisible. Airtight. She'd put both of them in a space where their air supply would steadily decrease, especially with Metatron's fire reacting to the oxygen, and she slowly and imperceptibly made that box smaller and smaller to tighten them in. He had to conserve more of his energy. He was getting worked up. He panicked and used up even more of his oxygen. Metatron didn't falter. The angel might have even realized what was happening, but he didn't acknowledge it. It wasn't affecting him any. Maybe divine fire worked differently, burned on some other source. It kept burning when Accelerator started to slacken. The tides were about to definitively turn in Metatron's favor, if Accelerator couldn't hold his breath for long enough.

He stomped the ground, and the handcuffs Dr. Conners had dropped flung themselves at Metatron to snap around his wrists. The fire burned out instantaneously and he collapsed to the ground, looking like a plucked albino avian. FUCK oh goddamn it that one actually worked. youve got to be fucking kidding me dude whose asshole is this one made out of. FUCK.

Accelerator swooned a bit. He looked nauseous in his low air environment, and fighting Metatron had really run him down. He tapped his cane against the dirt. Tatsumaki had put the lower boundary of the box underneath the mud, but if he really looking for it, he could find it. All it took was one more tap and the box shattered. A third tap, and he appeared at Tatsumaki's side.

"I've got to admit... I'm almost impressed..." He coughed, and his metal collar beeped. "Damn... looks like you've got the devil's own luck. If I had a few seconds longer to use my power, I would have annihilated you. But I'm still alive, so you might be in the same boat, is that right?"

It was right. That trick with the rain had really drained her, and she'd been pushing herself to the limit for longer than she ever had before. This fight with Accelerator was just the latest she'd worn herself out. She couldn't keep doing this. She couldn't have even moved him now. At this point, she was just a short, weak woman against a man that, while frail himself, was taller and had more reach than her.

"That's what I figured. At this point I can't manipulate your vectors, but I can still accelerate your death."

Accelerator pulled out a handgun. Tatsumaki dove for it, just barely avoiding a bullet that whizzed past her ear. This was different from that noise from before that was only in her brain. This one really had her ear ringing. She grabbed the gun, tried to wrestle it out of his hand, but all he could do was engage the safety before he kicked her away. Shit, she wasn't used to taking direct blows. Even a weak one. She felt that right against her ribs, she was going to have a sneaker-print bruise running down her chest after that one. Physically, he might have been slightly superior to her. She had to fight dirty. When he reached out to smack her away again, she bit down hard on his fingers so the gun fell out of his grip. Accelerator cursed, started pounding on her head with his available fist, but she just kept grabbed on gnawing at his hand until blood streamed down her face. She kicked the pistol away. When he finally kneed her in the gut and knocked her down she could see the bones in his right hand.

He got down with his knee on her stomach and one hand around her neck and his other arm pressing on her neck because he couldn't squeeze with his bad hand anymore. She flailed and kicked him between the legs, he recoiled and bit his tongue hard but he kept on trying to press down on her throat no matter how badly she scratched at him with her nails. She got a good scrape in right across the face so he slammed her head down to the earth, loosened a tooth. Then he thought better of it. Tried to go for the gun. It had fallen somewhere in the mud and by now it was so dark neither of them could even find it again. Tatsumaki grabbed onto his leg and tried to twist it away from him but he just kicked her in the chin and knocked her off of him. He grabbed her by the dress and flung her like a sack of potatoes so she landed on her back and all the air burst out of her lungs in a sudden violent exhale. Accelerator could leave her gasping there while he searched for the pistol again. Without Tatsumaki distracting him, it was much easier to find. He grabbed it, stood up, adjusted his footing in the rain-slick earth, aimed at Tatsumaki and pulled the trigger. Nothing. Gun jam. He just threw it at her head and let it split her skin before he stomped over through the puddles.

"You've got a hell of a survival instinct, for a brat." Tatsumaki tried to crawl away, but Accelerator lurched over a bit faster than her and grabbed her by the neck of her dress. He brought his fist down and bashed her over the skull, knocking her down to chew on grass. "It's not often I get an opponent that manages to survive this long. For that, I have to commend you. But that's as far as I'll go. Don't expect me to sing your praises. Clinging to life is something that even an amoeba can do. There's a world of difference between doing anything you can to win and actually winning." He knelt down by her body. "That's one of the benefits of this body. I don't even have to try that hard."

Tatsumaki rolled over. Rainwater dripped onto her face and mixed in with the blood and the mud. Her face felt all swollen. One of her eyes wouldn't open right. She could mostly see him through her left eye, though. Accelerator. That smug fuck. It just wasn't fair. People like that kicked Tatsumaki around all her life. The only thing she had over them was psychic power, so they just invented people who could outperform her in even that. Now one of those overachievers was going to kill her. The last thing she was going to see before she died was that stupid smile. If she could just summon a bit more energy, that same fury she tapped into back at the volcano, she could just, she could just...

She reached up and gave Accelerator a weak slap in the face. Accelerator smashed his fist into her nose right back. "Hey, nice try!" he laughed. "That's just the kind of thing I'm talking about, that desperate struggle to survive. I already told you it's not going to help against me. It got you this far, but now you're facing a true villain, Accelerrarrer!" He stopped, composed himself, and tried again. "Accelerrurr. Accerrurrorrrurr. Accuurrroouhhhh..."

One side of Accelerator's smirk drooped downward. His pupils narrowed, panic suddenly shooting through his brain as he slipped and slumped down onto Tatsumaki. She had been able to summon up a little bit of psychic hatred. Just enough, even though it made her ears bleed. Enough to make a tiny little bubble of ESP at the end of her fingertip. One that she could transfer into Accelerator with a bit of light contact. All she had to do was make that bubble in one of his major blood vessels and cut off oxygen access to the brain. Accelerator was having a stroke.

It kind of felt like he already had some brain damage in there, so it wasn't that difficult to accomplish.

"Nnuuhhh..." He tried to get up, but his strength was failing him. Maybe he realized there was no point in dragging himself away at this stage. He couldn't get any help. Accelerator used the last of his strength to roll over, face down, so Tatsumaki wouldn't see him struggling. Wanted to go out on his own terms. A few exhaled bubbles popped out of the mud, but that was it. Eventually, those stopped too.

Oh. She killed him.

Tatsumaki had- well, she'd fought- sometimes there were casualties in fights but she'd never directly- that is, it was self-defense but- she'd fought so many monsters but she'd never actually- it had never happened with a human before, she'd never taken a person's life like that directly. The rest of them were just monsters. They were animals, or they could regenerate. Tatsumaki hadn't actually.

Whatever. Whatever, this was fine. She did what she had to do.

Tatsumaki stood under the rain and washed the mud out of her hair.

Fubuki was suspended in a moment in time. The angel of fire had stopped struggling, but was still very much alive. Apparently taking away his powers or whatever didn't negate anything he'd already done. So. Tatsumaki had some stuff to deal with here. Sorry. She couldn't stop thinking about what just happened. Now that the adrenaline was wearing off her body was really starting to hurt. But she had to do something to fix this situation.

Okay, she thought. Maybe this would be like the lion with the thorn in its paw. Or maybe she would get her head chopped off. She'd find out.

She was in a good enough state to stand up, mostly, and hobbled her way over to the fallen angel. The cuffs on his wrists burned black, although the fire didn't hurt her, and they whispered profane heresies as she tried to undo them. They must have only worked on whatever type of thing elohim were. That meant for a human, the lock was easy to undo. Metatron sprung himself out, ignited, and flourished back to his full six-winged glory.

hey. thanks, he said. sucks that im going to have to end your world later but the help is appreciated. actually since youre the only human here that didnt bitch at me yet maybe you can point me in the right direction on something. just mapquest me here. theres a few things that belong to my boss. a few baubles. moms jewelry box. you know how it is. do you have any leads on finding seven ish soccer ball sized jewels. and one really big ass one.

Something clicked in Tatsumaki's mind. She was still a little rattled, but one particular piece of information floated up to her mind and she could not stop herself from asking what she wanted to ask.

"You mean the Chaos Emeralds?"

yeah. from angel island. hence the name. do you have em.

Tatsumaki blinked.

"If you let my sister go I'll tell you where to find them."

oh, thats how it is. you couldnt just trust me to do you something nice. we have to go tit for tat here. cant even trust a literal angel without a favor involved. you know, these racial tensions didnt exist back in the obama administration.

He snapped his fingers and Fubuki went right back to talking. "-people from all over the..." She did a double take. "What happened? What did you do?!"

"Vilgax has your Chaos Emeralds," Tatsumaki said. "I don't know where he has them, but he has them. He's after their power." She only kind of remembered that dull speech Knuckles gave, she mostly remembered the drawings.

got it. He sighed. well. i already pretty much knew the deal but it looks like human civilization has gone to shit huh. im going to report back to the chayot ha kodesh and we can bang out a plan to kibosh this shit. in the meantime, peace. ill be back. The angel Metatron grabbed his skateboard and ollied upwards, floating back into the heavens, where he disappeared above the clouds. That left just Tatsumaki and Fubuki, standing alone in the ruins. The first time they'd been reunited after all this time. They hadn't even properly spoken to each other. Tatsumaki needed to say something appropriate. Something that properly communicated her concern.

"I can't believe you provoked him like that. You need to be more careful."

"It's been five years and that's what you say to me?!"

After the last battle with that child, whose name he'd forgotten about, and that psychic woman he'd captured for Robot's transmitter-receiver research, Vilgax had been forced to battle a procession of heroes each more annoying than the last. Earth was absolutely lousy with heroes. He never understood why. What was so worth defending about those hairless apes? He contended with so many... the worthless Green Lantern Corps for one thing, he thought he'd eradicated them all over the universe but for some reason Earth's sector had about ten different Green Lanterns... but the one that came to mind most hatefully was that one woman. That awful drunk was the first time he met something he couldn't destroy.

The memory was coming on strong to him. (He stood up in his seat, making both of his observers stand back cautiously. His past overtook everything. It was much harder to see the present than his recollection of it.) They were in a city in Japan, a tiny archipelago. The area had been sloppily evacuated. There were many civilian casualties. A blonde human woman was the last line of defense between him and the seat of the country's power. Tsunade. That was the name. Had he seen her recently? It was hard to recall.

They were at opposite ends of an avenue, surrounded by glass buildings, telescreens with flashing lights and advertisements. Tsunade cracked her knuckles. "Damn, you're even uglier in person."

Both of them ran at each other. Tsunade was faster to start, but Vilgax had been adjusting to that trinket he'd acquired, the Omnitrix. It allowed him to transform into all kinds of alien creatures, and it was always an extravagant way to strike fear in the heart of an enemy. He struck the face of the watch, and he devolved into a quadrupedal, particularly animalistic form. What was this one called, Wildmutt? Yes, that was the one. He pounced with concrete-cracking force, lunging, jaws wide, ready to bite down. Tsunade met his snout with his fist before it snapped shut. Faster movement speed, slightly slower reaction times.

He was still green. He had much to learn, even still. But his ability to learn and develop increased exponentially. In a few years, he would take on ten times as many opponents of this grade at one time. But for now, there was struggle. Vilgax-Wildmutt whipped his tail around to strike Tsunade (he grabbed Viral suddenly. Gura stuck her trident into his back, but it had little effect). She blocked it. Still bruised her. That strike could have stopped a speeding train, it was shocking she hadn't been pulverized. He continued to thrash around, and Tsunade continued to parry his mad blows with precise, careful strikes, although the sheer speed and force of his attacks put pressure on her. (Vilgax used Viral as a cudgel to strike Gura over and over. She couldn't maneuver around him to get the trident out of his shoulder).

Tsunade kept getting pushed back by Vilgax's violence. He adjusted to her technique, got a feel for it, what parts she favored in defending and where he could bite. But she adapted to his skills in turn. Her punches weren't just tenderizing his flesh. They were learning his pressure points. Feeling where to strike to make his tendons seize up under his skin. She wasn't a vet, but a muscle was a muscle no matter what kind of species it was sewn into. She knew how to disrupt it. There were actually a lot of ways to alter flesh, manipulate organs, trick the body.

He had to surprise her to get the upper hand. His body was far more adaptable to the Omnitrix than that other user was, he could cancel out of its transformations more quickly, change into something different. Hopefully something good. The Omnitrix's choice of species was entirely random, and it was capricious at the best of times.

Heatblast. A Pyronite from the star-civilization, Pyros, this one was useful. Its ranged attacks and high-temperature abilities made it a powerful general-use offensive transformation. It melted everything around it, asphalt bubbled, concrete boiled. Tsunade couldn't get close without injuring herself. When she wouldn't get close, Vilgax launched fireballs in her direction, condensed heat that could have vaporized her if she mistimed a single dodge. (He was thrashing wildly. His mind retreated further into fantasy, his body exacted all the violence it remembered how to inflict, and no coaxing could prevent his rampage).

But Tsunade did not relent! She was a strong opponent, back then he enjoyed the thrill of strong opponents, or he believed he did. Her hands twisted, made strange gestures, dark signs formed on her body. And when the fireball finally hit and burned half her body away, Tsunade's flesh wasn't cauterized. It healed itself back to a perfect pre-injury state.

Seal Release - Creation Rebirth!

This was truly reckless. Surely it must have been painful even if she could repair those burns, but she never hesitated, continued to throw out an elegant waterfall of fists and palm strikes. She fought up close despite her hands melting away with every blow, returning fully-formed for the follow-up punch. Vilgax barely had the advantage in close-quarters combat, that's how exceptional her regeneration really was. It put his own healing factor to shame.

When Tsunade landed a solid kick on him, no blocking, it was enough to propel him directly through one of those towering buildings and out the other side again. Vilgax flew back, remembering with some annoyance that Pyronites were capable of flight and he really should have been leveraging that ability sooner. Seemingly it didn't even matter if he flew or not, Tsunade used every possible vector of attack to reach him. She tore chunk from the ground with her bare hands and threw them at Vilgax, she leaped between buildings trying to reach Vilgax for a lucky strike. It was thrilling. He actually fought sub-optimally, flew closer than he normally would just for a chance at those exciting hand-to-hand engagements. His martial arts rapidly improved just in those brief clashes, to the point he started to overwhelm Tsunade. Burn her more rapidly than she could injure him. Even when he transformed back into his Vilgaxian form he continued the offensive. It was hard to tell where his fists ended and her body began.

It was the same with his memory. These were the thoughts his psyche valued, the combat-fury, the destruction. They simmered to the top. All else sank into the dream. This had gone all wrong. He was forgetting too quickly. The stimulation Viral and Gura had inflicted on his brain had caused him to remember, but it overclocked his memory. He was never intended to recall all of these things at once. Now his forgetting only accumulated, discarding all useless information for the sake of his combat ability. How much had he already cast aside? More than other organic beings discovered in their lifetimes, infinite amounts of knowledge and culture, all fed on the pyre. Everything was going.

Karlaac.

Orgox.

Thucydex.

Vilgax.

What did those things mean to him?

Somehow, he couldn't recall.

Hmm.

Well, if he had forgotten, it couldn't have been that important anyway.

Vilgax, or the thing that had been Vilgax, stepped out. His greaves stepped in some blood or viscera from something he once knew the name of. There was a part of him that had been pushed away, buried and forgotten, but it wasn't important now. The deepest, truest part of him, his bloodlust, that remained. Perhaps this was his most evolved form. The one that discarded all his frailties. Arrogance, insecurity, simple emotion.

So the old man's curse had come true. But now that it was too late for a cure, he didn't much see the use for it, anyway. He felt the pull of a strong enemy, and he acted in accord with that basic instinct. He left. The final trace of Vilgax, the shed skin, was long behind him.

"Knuckles, switch in!"

He switched in.

Mordred was on the floor in one corner of the tower. Denji stood over her, chainsaws revved. It was the perfect time for her second to make an appearance, the ringer who was rougher than the rest of them, Knuckles the Echidna to jump up from an entire story through the floor to land a punch on Denji's balls. That happened to be his weak point.

"Hey, nice work!" Mordred said. Knuckles made a motion like a thumbs-up, but couldn't really do it very well due to the gloves. Before Denji could recover, the two of them went on the offensive. He fought each of them one-handed. Knuckles carefully parried the flat side of Denji's blade with every strike. Mordred just had to get at his damn neck, just one strike and she could get this asshole out of the way! Then she could focus on-

There was a muffled shout from below her feet. She could feel an incredible amount of mana rapidly condensing on the lower floor.

"EX-"

"Oh, shit-"

"-CALIBUR!"

Mordred only barely had time to roll out of the way. She snagged Knuckles by one of his hair-tendrils, pulling him aside just as the golden light pulsed through. The entire castle split in half vertically. Fields of flowers tore into a shower of petals to fill the skies, each one shimmering, an artificial rainbow of tulips, roses, daisies, blossoms that didn't even exist. Altria wasn't going easy on her. A strike from Excalibur's unleashed power was superior to a localized nuclear blast. Mordred was lucky she'd directed it upwards, a slash at the ground might have wiped the castle off the face of the earth. Shit, and Altria was still connected to Vilgax's mana supply. With that kind of energy she could probably fire off more than one Excalibur. Mordred exhausted herself every time she used Clarent Blood Arthur, she could only save it for one precise strike. She was at more of a disadvantage than she'd ever anticipated.

At least there was one piece of good news. Denji didn't get out of the way. Not entirely. It missed his upper half. It struck his lower half. Everything below his waist had been vaporized.

He struggled into some kind of half-situp and pulled the ripcord on his chest with his teeth. Just as quickly as it had disappeared, his injuries healed in a spray of blood. You've got to be kidding, Mordred thought. Can everyone here just do that?

"Man, that hurt!" was all he said. He slashed at Mordred's neck, Mordred blocked once more, and that entire half of the castle collapsed in on itself. Chunks of stone and broken wooden beams crashed down, fortress spires slipped away and toppled down. There was a giant gash ripped through the building and straight through the clouds, as if they were simply tattered curtains. Hundreds of thousands of tons of stone were nothing compared to Excalibur's fire.

The floor, tattered and broken, gave way underneath them. Mordred and Denji were only able to trade a few blows before they both hit the ground hard. The next hit from his chainsaws smashed through one of her armored pauldrons. She got Clarent in between the teeth of his chainsaws, struggled with Denji, strained her legs, tried to keep the whirring blades away from her throat. Knuckles got in from behind and grabbed Denji's head with his big fists.

"Knuckles, what are you-"

Mordred watched boggle-eyed as Knuckles ripped Denji's chainsaw head right off his neck. His body flailed headless, making erratic chopping motions at the air as he flopped to the ground. His head, meanwhile...

"Damn it! Graaaaahh!" The chainsaw on his head revved violently. "I can't believe I screwed it up. And I was this close! Now I'm gonna have to eat straw for dinner again. Damn it!"

She looked at the still-jabbering chainsaw head, and looked back at Knuckles, who shrugged as if to say hey, I knew he wouldn't get hurt. Mordred took him by the handle in her free hand, dual-wielding.

"Hey, if you stop trying to kill me for a sec, I'll give you some meat to chew on," she said. She revved the engine a few times. "Can you handle that?"

"Sure! Wow, I don't even get meat from Vilgax! If I help you out, would you get me a girlfriend too?"

"Yeah, uh, definitely. Later." She glanced over at Knuckles, then away again. "Let's go."

Mordred stepped into the throne room one more time. "Alright, dad, I'm ready to-"

CLANG! She blocked a cut that would have shaved a few inches off the top of her head. Altria had been ready to attack for a while. She looked like she wasn't expecting the second sword, though.

"No warmup, huh?" Mordred brought Clarent down heavily on Altria, and her feet dug into the ground when she caught it. "Out of lectures? You were so wordy before, what's with the silent treatment?!"

"Two traitors working together. I should have guessed."

Mordred was able to press the offensive more with the chainsaw-head in her other hand, but fighting with twin weapons wasn't her style. It was only kind of offset by how much it threw off Altria. "You were always like this! Everything you said I did, you did it right back to me! You betrayed me from the moment you said I wasn't yours! You said I wasn't worthy of being king! Then, what, you decided that Vilgax was better than me? Was that it?!"

The chainsaw's edge scraped against Excalibur. Its cutting power simply couldn't compete with the fae-forged golden blade. Mordred watched with some trepidation as the demon-chainsaw-sword-thing started to crack under it.

"Vilgax kept more humans alive than humans would have managed themselves! At one time, I thought..." Mordred only barely blocked that one with Clarent's guard. "I was told once that a hero should try and save everyone. Do you see the results, Mordred? It was my responsibility to make the difficult decisions! You couldn't understand that kind of sacrifice!" An upward strike scarred Mordred's helmet and nearly took her eye. "I knew from the moment I drew that sword I would forsake being human. I gave up my soul to be a king! Do you yourself believe you would be capable of a thing like that?" A low sweeping slash launched Mordred twenty feet, rolling until she hit the back wall. "You held onto your petty grudge for one thousand years!"

"You think this is petty? You took everything from me!"

Altria lunged. Her and Mordred met blades one more time, and the chainsaw finally shattered with an awful scream. Mordred just tossed it aside before blocking the follow-up. This fight wasn't going Mordred's way. She had to chance it on one last strike. Maybe Altria was weakened after using Excalibur, and she just wasn't showing it. Maybe the force of her anger could overwhelm Excalibur. She had to do something. After she used her trump card, she wouldn't be able to fight back, and Altria knew that as well as she did.

Red lightning burned from the hilt of her sword up through its veins and raged out in all directions like a firework. Altria only had a moment to catch it. Her greatest holy weapon shined forth in an arc of light to take Mordred's head. And it crossed paths with Mordred's sword of anguish, thirsting for her blood. This would be the last time these swords ever clashed.

"EXCALIBUR!"

"CLARENT BLOOD ARTHUR!"

Rose red met rarified gold. The colors bled together into orange, then purple, pink and black, infinite shades, plasma boiling at the intersection between Altria's enchantments and Mordred's fury. The ground cratered. Tremors rocked the earth from the castle on the hill to the beach below, and rippled far beyond it. The sky parted for them. Everything above and below had been burned through, the night sky looked like the day, the cold air was blazing.

When the light faded, both their swords were locked together. Neither one could overpower the other, in the end. They'd reached an equilibrium.

Mordred pushed her back. After unleashing their Noble Phantasms, at the brink of exhaustion, with their swords connected, the one who was able to make the first strike would finish it. Altria defended. She must have anticipated Mordred would be the one to make the first attack, it was her nature. When Mordred didn't strike that vulnerability, she assumed it was an instant of weakness and lashed out with her blade. When she opened herself up for the strike, Mordred stepped forward and brought the sword Clarent through her chest.

They held there, for a moment, before Altria's knees buckled and she fell. Blood dampened her breastplate and dripped down over the both of them. After that there was no more fight in her. Altria wasn't her enemy anymore. She was a body whose warmth was slowly fading. Mordred thought she'd be able to stomach it, but seeing it before her now, she couldn't. She just couldn't.

"I'm sorry." She wrapped her arms around Altria. A thousand years ago, her father pushed her away to die alone. Now, she was too weak for it. It was a false kind of familial love, but Mordred was so desperate she was even willing to accept that, knowing she would have been rejected if she could. "I'm sorry. I didn't want to do this. I didn't need the crown, or the gold, or any of it. I just wanted you to accept me. It wasn't hard. Just a few stupid words. I just wanted your love."

Altria leaned in to speak a few weak words into her ear. "That's the only thing I wouldn't give you."

Mordred froze, and she slipped out of her arms to hit the floor. Excalibur was at her side. She had enough time to grab it and slash Mordred's throat just before the life faded out of her. But she didn't. Instead, with the last of her strength, she speared Excalibur into the stone ground, almost down to the hilt. That was enough. She knew she'd done all she had to do. Mordred reached out for her, but her hand passed through glittering golden air. "No! Stop!" Of course it didn't make a difference. It was a futile gesture. None of her words had ever gotten through to her.

The holy sword remained, lodged in the stone.

Altria had channeled her body's condensed mana into Excalibur. It wasn't precisely the sword in the stone, that was Caliburn, her father's old sword. But it was still the sword that signified kingship. Its legend had merged with Caliburn's over time. Stabbing it into the stone ground had significance, her father must have known that. Why did Altria do it? Did she forgive her at the end, was she giving her the chance to prove herself worthy of Camelot that Mordred always wanted? No, it was more likely that she did it as a curse. She was so sure Mordred was unworthy that she sealed the sword away under Merlin's old spell, so Mordred would never become king, even after she had no homeland to rule over. She would never know for sure now. There was no closure with her father. She was never going to get closure with Altria, ever. But she had this.

Mordred knelt down and put her hands around the hilt of the sword. Before she pulled, something occurred to her. Was this really what she wanted? This exact moment had played out in her mind so many times, but now that it was in front of her she was forced to see it as real, something that would finally end the long road. If she tried to pull it out, and she couldn't, she'd know her father was right about her. That would be unthinkable. But if she pulled it and succeeded, that was unimaginable. What followed that? All that hatred and desire for vengeance in herself, where was it all going to go?

She closed her eyes. She could've looked to Knuckles, she knew he was standing by, she could've gotten support from someone that she was doing the right thing. But she really wanted to do this on her own. Mordred took a deep breath, and clenched the hilt.

Yeah. Change kind of scared the shit out of her. But it had to happen. Otherwise, what was she living for?

Mordred yanked hard, and with no friction or resistance the blade Excalibur withdrew for her. She stood in the wreckage of the former castle, and gripped its hilt tightly as its magic blessed the homunculus girl. It would not allow her to be the Knight of Treachery and possess the Sword of Promised Victory. To hold the sword, she would have to be something different. Altered. A version of Mordred that could not otherwise exist. The cleansing power of the fae ran through her sword and traveled up her body through her arm, draining the ichor of red anger into a pure sky blue.

She'd fought for that crown. Now, she had to carry its weight. She was not the same Mordred, and she could never return again.

God save the king.

Chapter Text

This was the end. Not only this end, the end of Battleworld, but the end of history itself. Vilgax had conquered the universe. He was immortal and undefeatable. Culture and struggle were locked into a permanent stasis, one where Vilgax would never be deposed, and while he sat the throne there would be no war against him. This was the moment when every natural progression met its conclusion, when Vilgax triumphed over the last unclaimed territory.

Twenty-four hours after the great Battleworld brawl had commenced, Vilgax's army had finally arrived to watch it take place.

Battleworld was surrounded by warships, one hundred thousand in the fleet, a small retinue for the Vilgaxian armada that conquered the universe. They had all been packed in front of this patchwork planet in this obscure solar system in a far-flung corner of the cosmos. Splotches of clashing colors lined every inch of the sphere. These represented the various artificial biomes that had been constructed to torture the participants of Battleworld. Some of them had been made red by the violence, blood-splattered turf now visible from space.

Commander Gurgox stood in the command deck of the Vilgaxian battlecruiser VES Mostly Harmful. They had as many scars on their face as medals on their chest, and neither of them were few. Gurgox and the Mostly Harmful had been through scores of battles in their three hundred and thirteen years of life, including the battle to capture the Icefire. All for Battleworld. All to break down Heaven's gate, so that they could plant their flag on the corpse of God.

Now, they had come to rescue their stranded emperor.

"[Legate! Be my eyes!]" Gurgox gurgled, in that chittering Vilgaxian tongue.

These battlecruisers were manned by Legates, the second-highest rank of soldier beneath the Praetorian Guard themselves. They were the warband battalion chosen to directly assist Vilgax on missions such as rescue operations. For all their Emperor's powers, he could not travel unassisted through outer space. Well, he could, but starship travel was faster.

Legate Drexx addressed Gurgox. Though they were both part of the Legate brigade, Gurgox was a Legate Commander, making them an even more superior micro-niche within the Legate rank, and although the subtleties of the Vilgaxian army's military rankings were quite fascinating, there was unfortunately no time to discuss that when the Hour of Revelation was approaching.

"[Vilgax vital signs confirmed!]" A flurry of clawed green hands tapped away at ten thousand computer terminals, all flashing sound and fury, constant overwhelming data. "[Heart rate, respiratory activity, and body heat are normal! However, Vilgax is experiencing little to no brain activity! It's almost totally dormant!]"

Someone stifled a chuckle. Gurgox drew their Agonizer Ray from their holster and immediately had the jokester's flesh incinerated where he sat. "[If he's still alive, we can salvage him. Identify potential threats!]"

"[We have identified twenty to twenty-five distinct sapient life forms remaining on-planet! We have not been able to identify Praetor Altria's signature, presumed dead! We have not been able to make contact with Praetor Denji, presumed rogue! Of the rest, they are most likely hostiles! How do we engage?]"

"[Fah!]" Gurgox scoffed. "[Twenty enemies! Among a hundred thousand warships, we are a billion soldiers strong! They are no threat to us! Were the enemy unassailable, we have weapons to destroy this galaxy and everything in it! Our armaments are chronokinetic cannons, genetic destabilizers, gray goo payloads, nuclear railguns, and black hole bombardments!]"

Drexx scanned the relevant biosignatures. "[The remaining life forms pose no threat to our military. One keystroke would be enough to eradicate them. Should I, Commander?]"

"[Not yet! We cannot risk angering Emperor Vilgax by damaging Battleworld unnecessarily. Send an extraction team to his location, we can-]"

All screens on the command deck flashed red and orange, with many Vilgaxian symbols to the effect of exclamation points. The typing was fast and frantic now.

"[What is that?! Legates, what do you see?]"

"[Three high-energy readings approaching Battleworld from the East, the West, and the North, Commander,]" Legate Loughx said. "[They are cruising at a speed of c, request to parlay yielded no response. Your orders?]"

Gurgox was livid. Their veins bulged. "[This is Vilgaxian airspace! If they won't comply, shoot them down! I won't allow any ship to defy the Boundless Navy and get away with it!]"

"[Commander, they aren't ships.]"

Some approximation of the shapes of the attackers appeared on holographic display, although they were inexact. Quettaflop computers ground to a halt in their feeble attempts to depict their adversaries. All they could do was construct a visual identity based off their idea, a conceptual costume.

These were the shapes of their enemies:

The enemy of the east was METATRON, the Voice of God. He cast aside his humanoid shape to evince something closer to his true shape, if such a thing existed. This was the halfway stage between a bird and a non-Euclidean geometric formation, all made up of clockwork gears and wings. The gears should have meshed in such a way that they would not turn, yet they turned in a beautifully simple way and the more easily it was comprehended the more your eyes and ears bled.

The enemy of the west was AZRAEL, the Angel of Death. They took the form of a boundless womb, and their concept was "finity", because all that is born tends towards death and only the unborn escape mortality. Their umbilical cord connected into itself like a Klein bottle, the shape that has only one side, so they perpetually ate of their own flesh to avoid their birth, a perpetual state of nonexistence.

The enemy of the north was GABRIEL, the Announcer of the Will. HE is the one who reaches into the Tree of Life and pulls the souls from the Guf, the great sea. HE had no head, and appeared in the form of an akephaloi, a giant whose face stretched across HIS chest. HE had many arms to withdraw the most worthy souls of God's beloved, and in one hand HE held the universe and one HE held with HIS palm out and HIS thumb and index connected, the wish-granting mudra.

Gurgox's tentacles all unfurled straight.

"[WHAT. WHAT IS THAT?! WHAT KIND OF MONSTER IS THAT?!]"

"[It is not a biological organism! It is not an inorganic machine! None of these readings align with anything we understand about how living creatures operate, their atomic composition, their genetic material, none of it!]"

"[Our automated targeting systems are failing to aim for the enemy! It's as if our artillery is refusing to fire!]"

"[Switch to manual control and fire anyway, damn it!]" Gurgox roared. "[Fire, and leave no enemy alive!]"

Three streaks of blinding white dragged along the computer displays. These were the representations of the warrior angels, the highest elohim, at the moment they collided with the circular sea of warships surrounding Battleworld. Three white dots met a hundred thousand massed black flies on the screen, North, East, and West.

They didn't slow for a second.

"[VES Armada is down! VES Weregild is down! VES Past Lives is down! VES Pretty Ugly is down! VES Diviner is down! VES Ride Blue is down! VES Invincible II is down! VES The Agony is down! VES Horns Of The Bull is down! VES Anur Phaetos is down!]"

"[We've lost contact with the western flank, the enemy is generating some kind of electromagnetic interference! Our recon satellites are getting scrambled!]"

"[VES Imperial Green is down! VES Solar Storm is down! VES King Of Thieves is down! VES Velvet Steel is down! VES Ready Aim Fire is down! VES The Maximum is down! VES Victory Or Suicide is down! VES No Exit is down! VES Fight Songs is down! VES Universal Diplomacy is down!]"

"[Lightspeed infinite mass projectiles have been deployed against the northern insurgency, there is no effect! Reporting no effect against the northern enemy!]"

"[The eastern front is a nonlinear dead zone! Fourth-dimensional readings are off the charts, we've got four thousand ships totally unmoored from linear chronology! They're all unstuck in time!]"

"[VES Bring Me Everyone is down! VES Killer Edge is down! VES Justice is down! VES Grail Receiver is down! VES Son Of The Gun is down! VES Overlord is down! Commander, we're losing them faster than we can even count them!]"

Vilgaxian technology could end engagements faster than their foes could comprehend the ion beams burrowing through their brain matter. Their weapons were powered by particle physics or gravitational slingshots, the fastest destructive devices physically possible. Against enemies that were not constrained by physical laws, they were like cavemen with wooden spears. Three white stripes tore through a hundred thousand Vilgaxian battlecruisers and burned into the screen.

"[We're down to forty thousand ships, no, thirty thousand! The battle is a complete rout! All of our weaponry is useless!]"

"[They've just entered the planet's atmosphere! They'll reach the planet's surface in less than forty-seven seconds! What do we do, Commander?! The Emperor is still down there!]"

Commander Gurgox only watched the blinking dots that represented a billion soldiers. Scores and scores of them continuously fed into the war machine. That was the risk of being a soldier. Only one in a trillion had their names remembered. The rest were nameless, dead in some battle or another for some general or another, and even those generals would be forgotten in time. But these were the ones that had proven themselves. Only those greats were Legates, and only the finest ships were Legate ships. Ergo, the strongest of their army was destroyed by the simple act of these Angels moving.

Gurgox signaled for a drink. One of their flunkies brought it for them. They drank it and smashed the cup on the ground, and after that they felt a lot better.

"[Order all surviving ships to congregate on the southern edge of the planet with us,]" Gurgox said. "[For now, we'll regroup and monitor the situation as it develops! If we are to destroy the divine enemy, we'll attack when they're exhausted from battle. We'll wait for them to diminish their own strength.]"

There was some obvious discontent among the Legates. "[Commander, nothing in our arsenal could scratch a single one of them! Our battalions were completely dismantled, or defenses useless! What in Battleworld is possibly capable of waging war against such an enemy, let alone weakening them?]"

Gurgox's reflection stared back at them from the glass. Behind the window screen was Battleworld, and between them, white lines carved into electronic displays like a target reticle.

Who is like unto the Beast? Who is able to make war with him?

Between Heaven and Hell, stretched across the endless Vilgaxian empire, there was one such person. Only one.

"[Vilgax can.]"

"I can't believe you provoked him like that. You need to be more careful."

"It's been five years and that's what you say to me?!"

SMACK.

Tatsumaki had never, ever been slapped before. She really couldn't believe it. She'd wrestled in the mud with that horrible man, gotten beaten and kicked and had her teeth played like a gong, all for Fubuki. As long as she could protect her and make up for her failure five years ago, any amount of pain would be worthwhile.

She did not do any of it to be subjected to the indignity of being slapped in the face

by

her

OWN

SISTER

For a SIMPLE, perfectly reasonable comment, just telling her she should have exercised more caution. It was an outrage.

"I didn't even want to see you," Fubuki said. "Do you know that? I didn't care who saved me, but I didn't want it to be you. Even if, even if you finally flew all the way out here someday and broke me out of that coffin, I thought maybe, maybe, this time would be different! She might have one nice thing to say! But you couldn't even give me one!"

What. What. What. What was happening. How could she say all that? Where did it come from? "What- what on earth are, what are you saying to me? I rescued you..."

"You put me in this situation! You were the one who told me fighting Kaido would be too dangerous, you thought it would be safer to fight with those other heroes in New York! It was always your advice, your way, well, guess what! You aren't some infallible oracle or something, you're a human being! And my feelings are just as valid as yours! They always were!"

"You're misremembering. I wouldn't have told you that."

Fubuki huffed. "Ugh! Of course you don't remember it, you never remember anything that makes you look bad! You don't notice it because you've always been controlling my entire life!"

Tatsumaki didn't understand what was making her sister so upset. This all sounded like some ridiculous exaggeration. Yes, she'd been protective of her sister, she would admit to that. They'd been exploited ever since they were children, mistreated by their parents, by Tsukuyomi, by everyone that tried to capitalize off the incredible Psychic Sisters and their tragic backstory. Someone had to protect Fubuki, and that was Tatsumaki's job. They were the only people in the world who understood what each other had gone through.

Now Fubuki was trying to throw all that back in her face. This wasn't the first time, either. It was so... well, Tatsumaki couldn't get too mad at Fubuki, that was her being childish. It wasn't a real thing to be upset about. It didn't make any sense to her. They'd just met. Why did she have to be like this now? Shouldn't she have been happy? Wasn't Fubuki always happy to see her?

"Forget it, we can discuss this later," Tatsumaki said, although she had absolutely no intention to. "This whole planet is a death trap. Anyone who's still alive will be far too dangerous for you. Disaster Level Dragon at least, maybe even God level. It's no place for a B-Class hero. If you stay close to me, I'll-"

"I don't want to go with you! What part of that don't you understand?!"

"The part where you get yourself killed. Quit acting like a child. I'm the only person here that can help you."

What was her problem? What was her problem?! The only thing preventing Tatsumaki's anger from boiling over was just how shocked she was. Fubuki had argued with her before, but she'd never been this belligerent, she always backed down when she saw she was wrong. So why...?

"You didn't protect me!"

Tatsumaki didn't flinch.

"You have no idea how much I gave up for you! I let you push all my friends away, even when we were kids! I let you push me around and keep me stuck in this B-Class job when I could've been A-Class, S-Class, I could have been anything! I let you dictate every way I lived my life, and you know why?"

"Fubuki, stop. We can't do this right now."

"It's because I actually believed all that junk you fed me about wanting to protect me! I didn't want anybody to hurt me anymore! I never wanted to go back to that lab... every little thing I let you micromanage for me, I did it because I thought you'd keep me safe! And you didn't! Five years, I lost five years of my life because you failed me! Do you understand that? Can you possibly understand that?!"

Why did everyone here want to screw around with her? Why didn't Fubuki see that this was the wrong time, that they were in the middle of Hell right now? Maybe she was just trying to exploit her leverage over Tatsumaki, her own desire to keep her sister safe, to try and win some inane argument. But it didn't explain the vitriol. It was too raw and hurtful to come from nothing.

"We can make up for it. As long as you're still alive, we can make up for five years-"

"It wasn't just five years. It was every year. I threw it all away, not living the life I wanted to live because I believed in you. You were supposed to save me and you didn't! What was I living in a cage for?!"

"You weren't in a cage!" Now Tatsumaki was finally starting to let herself be angry. "You don't know how many things didn't happen to you because I was there. Monsters that could have eaten you, men that could have taken advantage of you, I kept you away from them! You were the one that kept trying to put yourself in danger!"

"You didn't even give me the chance!"

"You shouldn't have ever had the chance! You shouldn't have been a hero at all!"

That finally quieted Fubuki. An argument like this, they were never going to see eye to eye on it. Tatsumaki had hoped that when Fubuki was a little older and a little wiser, she'd appreciate how much harm she'd put herself through for her sister's sake. But maybe not. They could have talked around it, yelled back and forth at each other, but now they felt like they'd cut through to the heart of it. Neither of them could find the words to start the talk again.

"What are you going to do now?" Fubuki asked, quietly. "Are you going to make me come with you?"

"Yes. I will."

"How are you going to do that?"

"...I'll force you."

Fubuki laughed suddenly. It was sudden, but it felt weak, exhausted. "Wow. I thought you'd say that, but hearing you say it is just..." Fubuki didn't finish her thought. Tatsumaki had never used her powers on her sister, ever. She didn't even know if she would've followed through on it. "No, I shouldn't be surprised. That was always your way."

She bathed herself in a freezing zephyr, and it pulled her into the air. Tatsumaki had no power to follow her. She'd burned out fighting Accelerator and smashed up her whole body doing it. She couldn't have levitated a spoon. Fubuki, whose psychic powers were formidable in her own right, could have crushed Tatsumaki like a car in a compactor.

But she didn't have to. She could do it with a look.

"I'm sorry, Tatsumaki," Fubuki said. "I know you aren't going to get it, but I still love you. I just won't put myself on a shelf for you anymore. I have to treat myself better than that. Goodbye."

Fubuki continued to lift herself up over Tatsumaki's head. Some kind of reverse deus ex machina, where the deity disappears into the sky only to make things worse. Three pinpricks of light pierced the cloud cover and Tatsumaki had to cover her eyes. It was a grand crescendo to match the grand escape. Psychically sensitive as she was, Tatsumaki knew that these were the same kind of lights that brought forth Metatron. No, the golden stairs she had seen were mere shadow play compared to this brilliance. This was the true and overwhelming power of the enemy Tatsumaki had to face, the enemy called God.

Between God and Vilgax, she did not know who to fear.

Fubuki accelerated rapidly until she left Tatsumaki's sight. Tatsumaki couldn't catch up to her. There was too much emotional noise in her psyche, and she was exhausted, she couldn't call up the sort of speed she was used to. She could barely levitate her feet off the ground, and she only did it because her legs were too fucked to walk.

She had to go after Fubuki. She wasn't safe out there. She had to go out and fix this. She had to. She couldn't leave it like that.

It was the only thing she had left.

In ancient times, in the darker reaches of the cosmic ballet, eight planets aligned. The inventor Azimuth saw the straight edge outlined in the heavens, and he thought, "I can do better."

He made a sword that would never fail at the first stroke. That peerless edge was Ascalon, and it was used only once. One strike was all it took, and a planet fell apart, dashed to bits.

In ancient times, in the heart of the planet Earth, six fairies fretted. A terrible monster had come to swallow the world and devour its gods. This monster was called Velber, or Sefar, and their mighty blows found no equal in the weapons of man. "What can we do? Even the walls of Atlantis fell before her. What force can we bring to bear, to kill that enemy the gods fear?"

In that moment, a new star shined in the nighttime sky. It burned brightly, just once, only glimpsed by a miracle to those that looked up to see it, and never again. Those fairies knew that the star was not a star. It was an explosion. A detonation of power magnificent enough to accomplish an impossible feat and create an everlasting myth, destroying a planet. That was Ascalon.

The fairies saw the light of a world snuffed out before them, and they thought, "We can do better." And they made Excalibur.

A nameless hero cut down the titan. The sword returned to the sea of ether, and came to the hand of the Lady of the Lake. She gave that sword to King Arthur. King Arthur made that sword a legend.

All this happened, more or less. Nothing can be done to change it now. That sword Excalibur was in the hands of Arthur's great enemy Mordred, scion of Morgan. That sword was asked to resolve the paradox: The one fit to wield me is the rightful king of England. Sir Mordred of Logres wields me now. Who is Mordred?

It was not the sword, but history itself, that answered: Mordred is your king.

So it goes.

King Mordred looked at herself in the blade's reflection. Her whole body had changed, or more accurately her concept had changed and her body followed suit. Her history had severed at the moment she drew the sword. Maybe at that time she died, instantaneously replaced by the new Mordred. A Mordred who had evolved along a different path, one who defeated Altria at Camlann, or one who was accepted by her. Maybe her body had adapted to her newfound magical strength. After all, she was a homunculus, clay made to be shaped into the crafter's ideal form. She was taller, and broader in the shoulders, and her eyes were more tired and weathered. Her hair had grown out wildly. She took Excalibur and slashed it short again. The first thing she used the great holy sword for now that she had drawn it. It felt good.

"How do you feel?" Knuckles asked.

She twirled the sword, assessing its weight and handling. Even though she had never wielded Excalibur in life, it felt more natural to her than any weapon she had used before. Every atom of her body was alive with mana. Her physical abilities and skills had increased tremendously, and she assumed control over her father's Invisible Air Noble Phantasm. Even her Clarent bore more magical energy. Its abilities had been dulled previously because it was meant to be wielded by the king, a king she had now become.

Before, she had only just managed to defeat her father. Now, she was sure the battle was in her favor, without contest.

"I feel like I just jumped into the deep end." Her voice surprised herself. Even that was different. "Damn. I can't even celebrate yet, there's too much work to be done. Now that I'm holding this thing, I think I've figured it out. It's just the first step. Until I kill Vilgax, Excalibur is just a hunk of metal."

"Do you think you can do it?"

Mordred gave it a few practice swings. First with Excalibur, then with Clarent in her off hand. She grimaced. She swapped Clarent back into her dominant grip. Something about using Excalibur as a secondary weapon struck her as sacrilegious, but discarding the blade that had twice cut down King Arthur would have been traitorous.

For now, she'd go with both swords at once. This was a combat style none of the Knights of the Round Table had ever utilized. In fact, it was more like the self-taught style of a certain Japanese vagabond than any knightly method of swordplay.

"I don't know," Mordred said. "Want to go a round and see what I've learned?"

Knuckles tapped his fists together, and grew a cocky smirk on his face. "Good to see you didn't change too much."

They were still in the wreckage of the castle. Rubble and stone were strewn about open space which had once been a throne room. The damage Mordred had inflicted left cracks that made the flooring uneven. That was precarious terrain for any combatant, and Mordred worried that Knuckles might gain an advantage over her in her ungainly sabatons, before she remembered that Knuckles ran around in huge ass sneakers. An even fight, then.

The first step in sizing up her opponent was determining how she was going to get around Knuckles's fists. His gloves were big enough to act as a shield, and they were rock solid. Mordred didn't know if she could cut through them. Also, she didn't really want to cut through them, because Knuckles was her friend. So that was out. She would either have to strike with the flat of the blade, or-

She blinked. Knuckles disappeared.

Without conscious thought Mordred brought her swords up to block his attack. Shit! She forgot that he wasn't just strong, he was incredibly fast as well. He was so fast that she wouldn't have normally been able to intercept him without using a Mana Burst, a bit of that electric juice. That must have been her Instinct skill. It had been heightened to the point that her body moved on its own to defend from Knuckles's attack before he even made it. Mordred realized right away, with increasing dread, that the only way she would be able to keep up with Knuckles would be to perform every one of her actions in advance.

Knuckles threw out a vicious rapid-fire series of boxer's jabs. Mordred could only deflect or divert them one-handed, to block them she had to cross both swords and these were jabs. A full hook might have laid her out, and for a moment she was jealous and indignant that he was so superior to her in physical abilities. Then it occurred to her that she could have cut him down whenever she wanted, that their fighting styles led to her instinctively handicapping herself against him and adjusting the fight into a mode that inherently favored him, hand-to-hand combat. It was while she was considering this that Knuckle slipped past her guard and punched her in the face, straight through a pile of rubble.

She dragged herself up. Knuckles walked over to her. "Come on, I could fight better with two swords than that."

"What was I supposed to do? Slash your head off?" Mordred wiped some dirt off of her face. "Fuck it, I'm all pumped up now and I've got nobody to fight. Tch, this sucks..."

Her gauntlet was smeared with blood. Oh, was her face busted up from that hit? That was gonna suck for a while. At one time, Excalibur bore a magic scabbard that could heal any injury, Avalon. But King Arthur lost it long ago, so the legend said, and Altria certainly didn't have it when she fought her. Mordred kind of wished she would have gotten it back when she drew Excalibur, but it wasn't meant to be.

"...Do you think that maybe my dad-"

The sky opened up in a shower of radiant light, to the point the sun of Battleworld would have only been a shadow against it. This light's source was three beams of atmospheric pressure that intersected at a midpoint. If there had been a fourth beam from the South, these lights might have forged an ersatz cross. Instead these stripes carved into the atmosphere without purpose.

From three cardinal directions, each patch of sky was pockmarked by red splotches, the coronas of destroyed battleships.

The two of them both at once were so overcome by a strange feeling of cosmic unsettling that they asked, simultaneously, "Did you feel that?"

"Oh, I... I don't know if it was because of Excalibur or what, but..." Mordred looked up. The fireworks didn't end. Each splash of color was just more death, more finality. "I can feel it. There's an enemy to test these swords against, and now I know where they are... is that what you were feeling?"

"No. I felt the Chaos Emeralds arriving on this planet."

It took Mordred a moment to register what Knuckles was talking about. "Those things you were looking for! Wait, do you have some kind of psychic connection to 'em? How did you know they showed up?"

"I know that it's here. I can sense it in my feet." He tapped his shoe on the ground. "There's a kind of wavelength they give off. I've spent so long with that hum under my skin that it feels like I can't breathe without it. Now they're close enough that I can trace their energy."

"That's great! I hope you find them." Mordred had a hunch that the great enemy she had sensed and the arrival of the Chaos Emeralds were related, and she didn't like it. It was not a happy hunch. She knew it was important to Knuckles, though. Reuniting with a stolen birthright. Wasn't that what she, Mordred, had suffered through? "I think we'll be splitting up for that one, but we'll meet again. At the end of the road, you and I are going to kick Vilgax's squid ass together."

Mordred and Knuckles dapped their fists together. The journey would be perilous; this was their solemn vow that the two of them would emerge from that lake of blood alive, whatever battles they faced.

"I'll see you," Knuckles said, and that's all he said before he sped away. He was nothing but a red streak dragged through the field like a painter's brush. Even Mordred's eyes could not track him easily now.

Mordred looked up into the clear white sky and donned her helmet. It was like a continuous supernova that branded the heavens.

That sun would not set until Mordred had Vilgax's head.

At that time, three elohim stepped down onto the surface of Battleworld. This was one: METATRON.

The arrival of the angel on the planet's surface distorted everything. The shape of gears and wings interlaced, white and orange, colors of a miniature sun. Metatron was not easy to describe, but it was somewhat like a human in design, just made of different matter. Time distorted in its field. Chronology was loosened. Grass grew down, birds curled into eggs back in their shells. Everything Metatron gazed upon was, then wasn't, or existed in a fluctuating in-between.

Metatron saw that there were survivors on the land. Dragons and monsters, giants in metal masks, all manner of creature as tall as he was, they emerged from behind cliffs or mountains. This was only a hindrance to Metatron. He was tasked with reaping the souls of those who must be judged, not weeding the wildlife who could never enter Heaven. So tiresome.

He put on his sunglasses. Pure light that could not be absorbed by any color reflected off of vantablack lenses. He extended one limb and swung that hand to the side as if he were scraping his nails across some ringed Saturnian turntable, and all the kaiju before him began to unwind. His other hand withdrew a two-bladed sword from his chest, the dragon-slaying weapon that Christian once used to behead Apollyon, and cut through the beasts. It only took one stroke. With their chronology altered, none of them had the will to survive against him because their deaths occurred before the blow was ever given.

The corpses were uncool, so Metatron moved them forward until their mountainous carcasses seeped into the ground and became oil wells. Now that they had been dispatched, there was one enemy remaining that Metatron had not seen, small enough to be beneath his notice. It was a human in metal armor and some wrappings. Even for the standards of humans, degenerated as they were compared to the angelic choir, this was a nasty small soul. To Metatron's eyes it looked as if it had been gnawed, like bitten nails. What kind of sinful life had this man lived to create such discord in himself? Where had he come from?

"Angel, I am not afraid of you," he said.

<span class="dave">well it doesn't really matter if you're scared or not.</span> spake Metatron. <span class="dave">i'm not going to give you a fuckin scooby snack. king or pauper, everyone sees the same edge of the scythe at the end.</span>

"How bold. Go ahead and strike me down, if you're so sure that man can't move back the hands of the clock."

Metatron's next actions were not the calculated perfection of the angels. He did not strike down that man and split his neck with his sword. It was not that hand that struck, but the turntable-mixer hand which altered the ebb and flow of time. The arrogant mortal struck at something in Metatron. He irritated him. It was enough to make him move out of irrational emotion.

That was his fatal mistake.

The angel flexed his fingers and he exerted his power over all in his domain. Time could be molded like clay in his palm. This human's history was pathetically short, nothing compared to the infinite life of an angel. He assumed that his time would win out over the peon before him. But it did not. The human didn't turn into a mess of cells or a prehistoric creature. He did not age into dust or suffer some worse fate. The more Metatron sought to crush his soul, the more vibrancy the soul held.

Beneath him, the human held out both hands as if in supplication, and a cube rotated gently between them. The cube glowed azure. It had six faces, sort of, but did not have twelve edges and some unknown number of vertices. Even Metatron had difficulty discerning the true shape of the thing. He could comprehend everything in creation, but this artifact was outside creation. It was a speck of dust beyond God's design that had slipped in through some crack.

Metatron realized too late that his power had never reached his enemy. His power had only reached the cube, and the cube absorbed it and him. He couldn't withdraw. The angel's divine ichor was pouring out of him like a fountain of blood. His wings lost their feathers, his gears ground to a halt, it all happened too fast... or maybe his perception was slowing down... he could no longer tell, or even care.

The shell of his mechanical body cracked and the flaming winged form of Metatron fell out. That shell cracked, and a pathetic humanoid form of Metatron fell out. The human drew his sword from its sheathe. It was the long and ugly hand of an ornate clock face. With a rapier-like thrust he suddenly and efficiently lunged forward, and pierced the angel through the stomach.

It coughed up blood. Real blood. His color and energy totally drained from him as it dripped down the edge of the blade.

<span class="dave">dumbass... you don't even</span> know how bad you've got it..."

He slumped down like a puppet with snipped strings. That was it. The human pushed him off the sword and sat down, admiring the shimmering facets of the cube in his hand which had now absorbed the entire vitality of an indomitable angel.

He scoffed. "Still not enough."

Nox "The End" (Rank 6)

The second of the enemy angels was GABRIEL. HE was the thirty-foot thousand-armed magnificent giant. Each arm made a different gesture, or held a different golden weapon. Every movement was accompanied by the twisting and gyrating of ten more arms. Anything HE could observe was HIS enemy, and HE attacked without a second thought, because HIS actions were not conscious, but preordained. Gabriel was the angel of victory.

Every enemy HE was unlucky enough to face was crushed by overwhelming certainty. The only foes that could withstand HIS passive aura were enemies of demonic blood. There was a tall, strapping hero that deflected HIS strike with an unholy sword, and a bearded patriarch that blocked HIS blows with punches of his own, and a one-horned satyr that burned HIS immaculate flesh with crimson energy. They could not destroy HIM, but they were strong enough to delay HIS charge, prevent HIS feet from leaving more craters in the earth. That was the best they could do.

Five thousand feet away, a man held a set of binoculars up to his glasses. He saw the brutality unfolding before him, and the violent hammering of fists and swords against the warrior angel, and he grinned. It wasn't because he was one of those mad men that enjoyed the reckless bloodshed. He was mad in a totally different way. He saw the face of the world-ending elohim and thought it was cool.

"Alright, Simon, I've decided!" He reached to his belt, grabbed the hilt of his katana, and withdrew it from its sheath. The point of that blade aimed squarely at Gabriel. "That right there is gonna be my new ride!"

The pilot next to him was huddled in his stubby robot-headed mech. He squinted. At his distance, the people fighting the angel looked like specks. One of them got flicked even further away and he could only track the trajectory by the subsequent impact cloud when he hit a far-off mountain. The mountain split in half.

"Um... what are we supposed to do against that thing?" he asked, none too confident.

"The hell do you think we're gonna do? We're gonna combine, of course!"

Simon, "The Drill" (and Kamina) (Rank 100)

Simon and Kamina were adoptive brothers. It was very easy to tell them apart: Kamina was the big loudmouthed idiot, and Simon was the one that sat in the giant robot head. "Come on, we're going!" Kamina said, and he pulled himself into the cockpit before Simon could protest.

"Hey, what are you-?!"

It was a tight fit in there already, and Kamina didn't make it easier. Simon was the only one that could control the Lagann—the robot head—as far as he could tell. He guided it more by gut instinct than anything. Still, when Kamina got too fired up he had a tendency to grab for the controls. It was pretty easy to get him fired up.

"Come on, come on! Let's get moving!"

Kamina had one leg out of the cockpit and the other shoe was pressing against Simon's head as he leaned over him. No matter how much he protested that he couldn't see, Kamina was too excitable to restrain himself, not when a bonafide fighting colossus was right there for the battling. Simon gripped the console tight. Displays swirled, overloading with spiral energy. Lagann shuddered. It levitated. Then, it suddenly drilled down into the earth.

Up above, Gabriel rampaged. HE held one hand upraised in abhaya before HE brought it down on the devils below. The great demon king and the one-horned one were nearly crushed flat under the unbearable weight as they had been during the great rebellion. Anyone could have seen that HE would defeat the devils. Their strength had gotten them this far defending against HIM, but all they could do was defend. HE pulled away HIS palm and lifted it up once more, ready to slam it down again.

Lagann's whirring drill tip tore out of the ground and spewed rock and dirt into a cloud. The hand slammed down as Lagann slammed up. Drill met divine flesh. Gabriel was not composed of the same tissues and organs as a human being had. HE was immutable. HE embodied God's will and supremacy, which was ordained at the beginning and could not be challenged. That drill could not harm Gabriel any more than a picture book could spit in the eye of its own author. HE was of a higher plane of reality itself.

Yet the skin cracked.

"Listen up, big ugly!" Kamina shouted. "I don't know what kind of phony-baloney god gave you the right to push us around, but when you push Team Dai-Gurren, we push right back! Simon, full throttle!"

"Right!"

Gabriel closed HIS fist around Lagann and covered it up whole. A second hand placed down over the first fist and squeezed even more tightly. Extreme compression pushed into the center, cosmic heat, the kind of conditions that created diamonds or stardust, pressure enough to cause chemical reactions. Gabriel pressed with all HIS might. HIS actions were not out of emotion like his partner Metatron. HE acted without emotion, only guided by foreknowledge of an absolute victory. Not even the great demons could overrule HIS will. No human was capable of comparison.

Yet the skin cracked.

Lagann tore through both hands and birthed out the other side covered in ichor. Gabriel looked down at HIS palms. Two hands bore the stigmata.

This was unpredicted. None of HIS foreknowledge matched this outcome. It did not even compliment the simple truth of God's superiority over man. The twirling, flying drill of Lagann whistling through the air was an attack on HIS authority.

Neither Simon or Kamina really understood the gravity of what they'd done. It didn't matter to them, anyway. When they saw a guy throwing HIS weight around hurting other people, they had to step in and kick HIS ass. That's the way Team Dai-Gurren rolls.

Gabriel's hands thrashed and swatted at Lagann, to no avail. The thing was as agile as a housefly, easily avoiding Gabriel's grasp by leveraging its small size. Something about it confounded HIS powers. No matter how certain HIS victory was, there must have been some miniscule chance of failure, so small that HE could not even perceive it as a possibility. That was the needle's eye that Lagann threaded. Even if the chance to win was almost zero, Lagann would pierce right through it.

"Aim for the top, Simon!"

Two-four-eight-sixteen pairs of angel hands clapped together. Each set produced a shockwave of a different resonance, chimes in disharmony that unleashed sonic cacophony. Lagann was knocked around by the blows, but not enough to deter Simon. He flew straight on through. He was going right for the headless shoulders of the giant.

Lagann hovered just above Gabriel, dead center, drill bit angled down. It spun like a dreidel. All of HIS hands converged at once to try and snatch Lagann out of the sky, but it was impossible. Their fortunes had reversed. HE was the one whose defeat was certain now.

The drill dug down and buried into Gabriel. In that instant everything changed.

Whatever ancient technology composed Lagann melded with the flesh of the angel. HIS body of marble reforged. HE took on the shape of the thing that became HIS head. Instead of the headless giant and the giant head, the complete angel now took the appearance of a giant mecha. The pure white colors of HIS flesh bruised into red metal, and a halo formed around HIS head. HE was now it, for it had been totally subordinated to the will of man.

This was a forbidden union. The angel that represented infallible victory had merged with the drill that made the impossible possible. What they had become, no one could fully understand, except that now it had really cool sunglasses.

The survivor demons beneath them looked up thirty feet into the eyes of Lagann. One of them, the sword-bearing demon with the countenance of a king, asked: "Who are you?"

That was Kamina's cue. When Lagann drilled into Gabriel's body, it transformed its insides somehow. Kamina fell through into the chest. Its ribcage became reinforced armor, its organs became a complicated network of targeting guidance systems and weaponry. Kamina admired his new artillery for a moment before he found the most important button on his console, the one that activated the microphone.

"Behold, and lay your eyes on that duo deemed the manliest of all men! Behold, our combining robot whose name is only spoken in hushed whispers among our adoring fan club! Gurren, meaning 'scarlet blossom'! Lagann, meaning 'all-encompassing face'! Together, Team Dai-Gurren pilots Gurren Lagann, the fiery red drill that will pierce the heavens! To destroy Vilgax, we brothers will descend to godhood!"

Simon was rattled by the unexpected fusion, but was still aware enough to be impressed that his big bro had improvised that whole speech.

GURREN LAGANN (Rank ???)

The one horned demon clapped. "Impressive. You really think you can handle Vilgax all by yourself? That's a tall order even for a bruiser like you."

"Like hell it is! You saw how my bro handled the big guy, so beating Vilgax has got to be a piece of cake!"

"It looks like more of those monsters have landed on the planet's surface," the swordsman said. "If you think you can defeat Emperor Vilgax on your own, we won't stop you from trying. Until then, we'll recover Solomon and look for any survivors that need protection. I doubt that our companion would be laid low by something as meager as a mountain."

"Yeah! Yeah!! That's the spirit!" Kamina nodded, even though nobody could see him inside of Gurren. "There's gonna be a lot of people out there who could use your help, so get out there! We're gonna be counting on you!"

The two demons teleported away. Gurren Lagann did not have such a useful ability. Instead, they were going to have to walk. Its long strides crossed long distances and left craters where its footprints landed. Each step brought them closer and closer to Vilgax.

"Come on, Simon! Vilgax is straight ahead, and he's gonna regret ever crossing paths with Gurren Lagann!"

The last angel was AZRAEL. Their domain was death. They possessed everlasting life. The alternating states of dead/alive were in their full control, and in fact they knew both states to be the same side of one coin, with the other side being ETERNITY. They were one of a few in all of creation that understood the dichotomy, and with this power they could fluidly move from one side of the spectrum to the other and anywhere in between.

They were dead.

Their body lay in the middle of a lake. Azrael's corpse did not sink in the water. It floated delicately, despite its size, as if it would not allow the water to profane its skin. Their blood did not mind intermingling. A red film developed over the water as their veins poured out.

Azrael's killer stood in the water. She was not like Azrael. She could not float gracefully. Instead, she was simply so tall that her feet trod on the bottom of the lakebed.

Against another opponent, Azrael may have triumphed. All beings fear death. Even those beings that suffer immortality fear the possibility of death. The enemy Azrael faced, however, was an enemy Azrael had no power over. They were encased in a psychic armor that rejected all interference, physical or mental, devilish or divine.

Evangelion Unit 02. Pilot Asuka Langley Sohryu. Certified angel hunter.

Asuka "The Unbound" (Rank 2)

Years ago, EVA units were deployed by the international organization NERV against an invasion force of prophesied alien god-beings, the Angels (not to be confused with these lowercase angels). However, the Vilgaxian takeover of Earth cut the prophecies short. Vilgax beat up all the Angels single-handedly. This had a depressive effect on NERV's funding.

Before Vilgax, EVAs were the only thing that could combat the Angels. They were cumbersome, expensive to manufacture and maintain. They expended energy equivalent to an entire metropolitan city, or one bitcoin farm. Yet, despite all their shortcomings, they were superior to entire militaries in that one regard. EVAs could generate AT fields. Metaphysical phenomena rejectors. Invincible shields.

Azrael could not break through that AT field. Asuka destroyed them.

The dead eyes of the EVA watched Azrael bob in the water. Why did angels take on such bizarre forms? Just to terrify mankind? Azrael was a colossal baby in an amniotic sac. If their image was beatific or divine, it was only in its perversity and ugliness. If angels didn't sexually reproduce, then this angel was deliberately shaped after a human child. For no reason at all. Just to hurt the people they'd created, maybe.

Asuka kept staring at it. She couldn't do much else. Her EVA was running incredibly low on power. She'd exhausted that energy in an unexpected fight against the angel. Not much she could do now except simmer in her cockpit and wait for the life support systems to run out. Some irony for you. Defeating Azrael and "winning" the right to die on some stark, lonely alien planet away from everything she'd ever known. And honestly, there wasn't much back on Earth that she'd care to revisit, anyway. Kill her anywhere. She didn't mind. It would be better than going back home a failure.

The only thing that kept her company in that sensory deprivation tank they called a cockpit was her two-way audio connection with NERV. It was a miracle of science that they could monitor her from light-years away. Even she could not understand the method, and she was a genius. They'd made all kinds of fancy and extremely costly modifications to her EVA, including a "portable" nuclear reactor for a battery. All so she could be deployed remotely on Battleworld. In the absence of Angels to fight, her goal was to kill Vilgax.

All useless now. She'd burned out almost her entire power supply defeating Azrael. At best, she had ten minutes left, and that was if she devoted the bare minimum electricity to life support operations. After that, she'd be stranded on a dangerous planet with no combat capabilities. She didn't even have the ability to get down from her EVA safely. She just had to sit back and listen to the NERV feed. Talking about her like she was already dead.

"We know that the modified EVA units are field ready. Even if it wasn't used against the correct target, the combat data was more than worth the price. Next time we can send out the Third Child, see how well he fares."

"There's no way Commander Ikari would allow that. We can't treat our pilot resources like toys we can throw away."

"The mass-production models are coming along smoothly. In a few years we could send out a squadron of quality EVA units. We could even send one to recover Asuka's body, or at least 02."

"Don't bother. Not like she has any family left. It's more unnecessary expenses."

It was strangely serene. Asuka had no more obligations. She had no expectations. All she had to do was sit and pass the time until her death. Azrael had won. With no power source, she had no way to sustain herself or her EVA any longer.

Asuka could only look at Azrael. That giant sack of angelic blood. That concentrated corpse of pure divinity.

She still had a little bit of juice left.

"Our first course of action in a case like this should be... wait, what's she doing?"

"The EVA is moving!"

"Is she trying to kill herself? She'll drain the life support systems."

"She's going for the power cable!"

"9 seconds until battery depletion!"

The EVA's charging cable was still in her back. She grabbed it and pulled hard to yank the other end into her grip. The prongs on the plug were as long and sharp as swords. She raised it up, overhead, clutched in both hands. And she slammed the plug down deep into the flesh of the angel.

Her cable reacted to the magic present in Azrael's body. It didn't matter if it was made for electricity. The EVA unit seemed to instinctively understand what to do. Once the cable was embedded in Azrael, it suckled at them like a mosquito. Greedy gulps of blood traveled down the cable, quickly feeding in through the charging port and flooding in.

"I don't believe it! These readings shouldn't even be possible!"

"Battery life 30 seconds... battery life 6 minutes... battery life 28 minutes... it's converting it to electricity somehow!"

"It's contaminated the LCL! I don't know how she's still breathing in there!"

"Synchronization levels rapidly fluctuating! A completely different cognitive signature is creating interference! It's trying to break in!"

Asuka held the throttles in a death grip. She slammed them forward over and over again, each slam coinciding with more lights flickering to life inside her pilot's chair. This was working. There was a new kind of aura surging through her, one that tasted funny in her lungs, one that she didn't quite understand, but one that she liked. This was the kind of power she'd deserved all along.

She grinned.

"Vunderbar. You can go ahead and cancel that funeral. The mission to kill Vilgax is going to proceed on-schedule."

Chapter Text

Mordred's path, guided by instincts, hunches, and sixth-sense feelings, led her far away from the flower field's castle. The light of the descending angels had faded away, leaving the skies black once more. She came into a dark forest. Her eyes could see in the nighttime, yet she still used the radiance of her swords like a flashlight.

It was completely impossible to tell where you were going in conditions like this. Sometimes Mordred wondered how anyone was supposed to find each other on Battleworld to fight each other. Maybe she was lucky. She was from a time when knights met on coincidence, or their clashes were fated long before they were born.

"Come on," she murmured. Mordred had felt an incredible aura of power here before. It was similar to, but not quite like, the authority she felt in the presence of other dragons. That must have been whatever turned the sky all white earlier. Now, that power had faded. It was still present, but strangely muffled, as if it had been bundled up in a cloak. Whatever enemy was so strong, they no longer felt the need to flaunt their ability. They were happy to lie in wait for unsuspecting victims. If Mordred's senses weren't so keen, she wouldn't have even been able to detect her opponent.

In fact.

She paused.

Mordred had reached a dark crossing on a cobblestone path. Trees surrounded her. Their leaves were in all kinds of autumnal colors, and the air had that chilly Samhain atmosphere to it too. The path split ahead. A signpost named the places those paths led to, but they were too old and worn to read, and they might not have been in a language she understood anyway.

Something was wrong. Her ears twitched. The hair on the back of her neck stood up, and not just because of the temperature. Her battlefield experience was calling to her. This was the feeling she got just before a sword lashed out to take her head. And- it was going to come from just above her.

That was her Instinct skill. It wasn't that she was literally seeing the future play out in front of her, but more that she understood the natural results of the present before the future could occur, understood it so vividly that it was similar to clairvoyance. It was nothing special. To be one of King Arthur's knights, you had to be able to do at least this much.

Excalibur swung out. CLANG. The edge of her sword met the old, weathered metal of a large clock hand.

The hand was held in the hand of- nevermind, just call it a sword. Another armored warrior held the sword, although their armor didn't much resemble Mordred's knightly attire. It was all made of copper. The helmet was built with lenses for the eyes, and they glowed azure, the color of magic.

He said... something. It sounded familiar to Mordred, but she couldn't place it for the first few words. That's when she remembered. When she'd been exiled from Camelot, she fled to France and recruited her army from mercenaries there. She'd had to pick up the local dialect. That's where she remembered it from.

This guy was French? Go figure.

"Impressive. You'll do nicely."

They crossed swords again. Clarent struck the sword's edge hard enough to draw sparks, enough to illuminate more of the weather-beaten armor that covered her opponent. He looked scrappy, but his strength was no joke. And he was aiming for a killshot.

Even though she could predict his movements, his blows were so strong that she had to slowly walk backwards, even while blocking. She focused on defense. Wielding two swords made that easier. Behind the cross of Clarent and Excalibur, Mordred could learn his style. She got a vague idea in only a few seconds.

He was trying to cut off her head. A few of his blows were specifically targeted to lead her blocks, get her swords positioned somewhere more favorable to him, but the blows he intended to actually damage her were aiming for her neck. That was something of a flaw in Mordred's armor. The gap between her helmet and her breastplate was the largest gap in the metal, and if she tilted her head in just the right way it created a chink big enough to swing a sword through.

It wouldn't be easy. The gap was only just barely large enough, and Mordred had fought in her armor enough to compensate for it. A trick like that would have required a particularly skilled swordsman. Was her enemy that talented?

She'd have to find out.

"Aren't you going to ask me why?" he asked. His next swing, heavy overhand, was caught between Clarent and Excalibur. This was definitely one of those "guiding" attacks. It left Mordred vulnerable. "Why I'm fighting?"

"Why, does it matter?" She pushed him back with both blades, staggered him just enough for a follow-up swing, her first of the fight. She missed. He disappeared, like a blink, and her autonomic system screamed a warning at her: BEHIND YOU. Clarent blocked his next strike without her even having to look. "I was planning on kicking the ass of the first guy I saw, anyway. I don't care if you're a hero or a villain. You were just unlucky."

"Refreshing! I was worried I'd get some speech about justice and righteousness out of you."

"Gross."

What was this guy's angle? Just another battle-crazed Battleworld battlemaniac? That didn't seem likely. Maybe he'd tell her if she plied him with a little banter. She'd been coming up with a fun idea while she was evading his sword slashes, maybe this would surprise him...

Mordred feinted like she was going to make one of her usual blocks, baited him into another slash at her throat. Then, instead of trying to shield herself, she ducked in low and swung horizontally at his legs. The way she imagined it, he'd be too quick for her to land that strike, but she anticipated him dodging it. He was going to have to jump. And once he was in the air, she'd reverse on a dime and swing her sword up for an unexpected power slash!

That was how she thought it would go, and it went pretty well up until the jump. Instead of falling down, like every other thing in the universe that was subject to the pull of gravity, the swordsman stayed up in the air. He hovered just above Mordred's head, where she'd bent down to deliver the sweeping crouching blow. And when she looked up to see what the hell was going on, he cocked his leg back and delivered a kick right into her face.

Mordred had a split-second to comprehend what just happened before she tore a clear line through two dozen trees behind her: Oh. He can fly.

That was a strong hit. Even with her helmet on it rattled her teeth, and she hated to think how she would have taken the blow before she became King. Now, she was able to roll with it, dig her heels into the dirt and stop herself from smashing through even more of the forest. She had to smile. "Damn, were you holding back on me?"

"Of course I am. How much effort do you use to swat a fly?"

Mordred only had to blink and there he was again, teleporting right in front of her before slashing at her again. She barely had time to duck. The trees behind her with their thick trunks all fell to pieces. It occurred to Mordred now that with flight and instant transmission, this guy had basically unlimited mobility.

"I bet that's not all you're hiding either," Mordred said, parrying another strike with Clarent. This guy was pretty chatty. He was sure to reveal more secrets if she kept this up.

"What about you? What are you hiding, with those hidden swords of yours?"

Hidden swords? Oh. He meant Invisible Air. It was a magic technique that Merlin had taught to her father, a technique that used wind to make her blade invisible. Obscuring the length of her sword made it that much harder to defend against. Funny, she'd never used it before today, and now it was simply second nature to her to activate it the moment she drew her weapons.

The time for its usefulness may have already passed. He'd already crossed blades with her tens of times, that was usually enough for a skilled knight to get the idea of how far her reach extended. Still, she wasn't about to show off Excalibur to everyone she met. Its radiance wasn't meant for the likes of him.

She liked the way that sounded in her head. "Their radiance isn't meant for the likes of you."

He laughed. It wasn't really the effect she was going for. She grit her teeth and slashed for his throat, tried to cut the noise out of him, but he disappeared from out of the path of his swing whenever she tried it. Now that he'd revealed his teleportation ability, he wasn't shy about using it. In fact, now that he was adopting it into his fighting style, she was starting to plan around it. She could guess where he was going to appear, and be there to catch his sword. Her intuition was telling her he was going to teleport behind her right... about...

She channeled mana into her feet. Red lightning crackled in her sabatons, scorching the dry leaves she trod on. Just before he attacked, she slid backwards, moonwalking at breakneck speed to suddenly throw an armor-clad elbow into his throat. And it hit. She could hear him gagging on impact. Man, if only she could see the look on his face...

No time to muse about it, she had to capitalize on her opening! She twirled to face him. He barely had time to block the hits, and only with his own body. Clarent slashed across his chestplate. Excalibur struck him square in the head. That was payback for the kick.

"Well, well!" He'd regained enough composure to start blocking her hits with his sword instead of his face, but now she was the one putting the pressure on. "You aren't so tough now that I've softened you up a bit!"

"You're a proud soul, aren't you? I should have expected as much from a dragon."

Shit. He must have been saving that one for a moment like this, when he needed to get out of a bind. It surprised Mordred enough that he could disappear again, re-materializing up in the branches of a tall tree to catch his breath. It was so surprising that she almost asked him how he knew that, but she caught herself. She didn't want to give him the satisfaction of the exact response he wanted.

"Well... I should have expected as much from..." She squinted up at him. Ugh, she couldn't even see his face and his mask still looked like he was smirking at her. "From... a dumbass robot."

"Is that what I look like to you?" He sat down on the branch, relaxed. This guy was really starting to piss her off. "You can call me that if you like. But I'd prefer Noximilien."

"Maximillian," Mordred repeated.

"It's Noximilien. Nox."

"Noximilien isn't a real name, though."

Nox clicked his tongue. "It's a good thing I don't need you for your intelligence..."

There! He needed her for something. What was his goal? Was he working for Vilgax? He could have been, these skills were easily Praetor-class. Now that she had that thought, she felt pretty good about it. Praetor-class and she wasn't struggling to keep up with him. That meant she'd become even stronger than she thought.

He disappeared. In the dark light, it took Mordred a second to trace him again. It was the eyes. Those blue glowing eyes were the quickest visual stimulus she could react to, peeking out from between the gnarled old trees. What direction was he going to come from now? Behind, like usual? Directly in front, just to throw her off? Maybe... up?

Mordred had a terrible feeling that she was a rat under the crushing bar of a mousetrap. That feeling got worse the further up she looked. She had found Nox. She did not want to have found Nox. He hovered above the tree line, faintly glowing blue, illuminating everything that surrounded him. The light didn't extend too far. But it extended just far enough.

Behind Nox was a giant clock.

"I think I've gotten a grasp on you now," he said. "Effective range, combat style... quite a bit of useful information. A shame I had to spend so much Wakfu on teleportation, but your speed is a little much for me without it. I'm sure you'll understand. The alternative would have been even more of a drain on my reserves. Anyway, now that I have you figured out, I've gotten a bit tired of you."

He snapped his fingers.

The clock hummed with gear-grinding noises, mechanical activity. Heartbeats of energy pounded inside the machine, and Mordred realized that this was the powerful aura that she'd been trying to follow. It wasn't Nox himself that bore this power. He commanded the power.

An orifice on the clock face opened up. Three masked figures started crawling up the side and easily demonstrated just as much agility as Nox himself as they scaled the sheer surface.

"Do you like them?" Nox said. "These were a few of the competitors whose souls I managed to drain. It's only taken a fraction of my power to place them in these puppets. More economical to fight this way as well, don't you think?"

On closer inspection, they weren't people. They were three lifelike mannequins. Their design was similar enough that it was easy to tell they were part of a set, but each one had been lovingly individualized. There was a shorter one, whose head was topped by a comical beret. A taller, more broad-chested one floated next to it, with a cape fluttering behind it in the forest breeze. Another of the bulky ones took the other side. That was the only one of the trio that carried a visible weapon, a longbow. None of them had faces.

"What are you, a coward?!" Mordred shouted. "Come down and fight me like a man!"

"What are you, a coward?" He mimicked her voice. "The last pathetic resort of the loser. No one will tell from our corpses which of us was the honorable one."

Nox lifted up his hand, and pointed down at Mordred, a small dark silhouette hidden in the woods.

"Let me ask you something, nameless knight. If you knew it was possible to erase every wrong you'd ever committed, wouldn't you do anything to turn back the clock? That wouldn't just be the honorable thing to do. It would be the only thing you could do. Isn't it?"

Mordred opened her mouth to say something, but closed it again. She realized that she actually didn't know how she wanted to answer such a strange question. It was so straightforward she had to wonder what the trick was.

A sigh escaped him.

"Forget it. This isn't something you'd be able to understand. Maybe next time..."

The archer drew back his bow. The string was so taut that Mordred could hear every creak in the distance. Even in the dark, she could see how large the arrow he was loading was. It must have been the size of a jousting lance.

He let go. The leaves shredded from the trees in an exact circular cone around the path of the arrow. Mordred moved to deflect it, like she would with an ordinary archer's arrow, but thought better of it and dodged instead. It hit the ground behind her and cratered the earth like a landmine. Shit. That would have been rough if it hit her. And she didn't have much time for a breather because when she looked up again he was loading three more arrows while the other two flew down at her.

The first one to reach her was the one with the cape. Like Nox, he could fly unassisted, he moved through air as freely as a swimmer in water. Almost faster than Mordred's own eyes could track he threw a jab at her chest, one she diverted away with her swords before having to deflect another and another and twelve more in the next twelve milliseconds. She only barely managed to bash him in his faceless head with Clarent's hilt before the next few arrows fired and detonated all around her. It was too much to keep an eye on all at once. Mordred had to rely on her instincts to manage everything, the raging brawler slugging it out, the sniper arrows, and that beret-wearing puppet. Slowly heading towards her. Clearly not in any hurry.

The caped one grabbed Mordred by the horns on her helm and slammed his knee into her gut. She grabbed him, trying to force his leg down, but just keeping him in position was an enormous struggle. Mordred could kind of wrestle with him, maneuver with him to block the arrows the archer fired. He didn't even try to avoid his fellow puppet. Wherever the arrows landed, that's where they landed, and if they hit they just bounced right off his armor.

Nox just sat down on the upper rim of the clock and watched it all. Seriously. Mordred couldn't wait to pop him in the mouth.

Alright. The one with the arrows, call it Archer. The raging warrior, call that Berserker. The one with the beret? Well, she didn't know how it fought yet. Whatever. She'd figure it out. Did Nox really think this would stop her? Mordred, who killed so many at the Battle of Camlann? Was it more of a challenge than slaying King Arthur twice?

She adjusted her grip on Berserker, and got into a half-crouch. She focused. Her heart was a reactor furnace, the dragon heritage inside her converted her blood into pure electricity. Her muscles seized and jolted. Then, with a burst of mana fueling her, Mordred lunged forward with Berserker in her clutches, using him like a battering ram as she headed right for that other puppet. And, just as they were about to collide-

It was like she'd struck a wall. No, a blow from her would have torn down castle ramparts, this was more than a wall. There was no give at all. Mordred hit some invisible field of stop and could not go any further. All the force of her strike was reflected back into her arms. It hurt.

Shielder? Huh. At least it was better than calling them "Beret".

Berserker's metal hands suddenly clutched around her throat. Damn it, she really thought that hit did him in. Instead it only made him angrier. If she didn't have that armor on, the way he squeezed at her neck would have crushed her windpipe easily. He dragged her through a few more trees, snapping them like twigs before pulling her above the treetops into the air. Berserker tossed her up, threw a punch into her gut to launch her even further up, rocketed up to greet her and held his arm out to arrest her flight like a lariat and let her keep spinning upwards wildly.

If only she could fly. Below her, Archer pulled the string back and fired. His hands blurred as he rapidly nocked arrows into the bow and loosed them again, launching them at the rate of a machine gun. Mordred had to twist wildly in the air to smack them away, but without any surface to ground herself on they just pushed her aside, sent her careening off.

No, they should have sent her careening off. Something grabbed her out of the air, and for a moment she thought she couldn't see it, that it was too dark, but she looked down and felt the way her feet brushed against it. It was an invisible hand. Invisible like that damn barrier Shielder put up. Struggling against it was impossible. She only had a little bit of wiggle room to grab her sword, but that was it. She couldn't move her arm enough to fight against it, and even if she could, she probably wouldn't be able to affect it anyway. There was only one thing she could do now.

Mordred drew Clarent. In that moment, she dispersed Invisible Air and unsealed the true brilliance of her swords.

The light of their reveal was blinding, an imitation of the angelic illumination that filled the skies earlier. Nox had to shield his eyes. The puppets mimicked him even though they had no eyes to blind, or maybe they were mimicking the actions of their deceased selves. Mordred felt the grip of the invisible hand slip around her, and she fell.

She only had one chance to finish them off. How much power could she afford to expend here? What she was about to try was something that always devastated her afterwards. But this was a new her, one with the full power of a king guiding her actions. Her father didn't exhaust herself when she unleashed Excalibur, not the way Mordred did using Clarent. If she didn't finish it in one strike AND she burned out after that one strike, she was totally dead. No question about it.

She'd just have to hope this worked.

Mordred clutched Clarent in both hands. Her heart ignited. Lightning balled up in there and passed through her veins, going straight up her arm into the hilt of her sword like the axon of one long nerve. It was all there. All the energy she was used to, just waiting to be unleashed.

Although the words were new and unfamiliar to her, she recited them as if by heart. They were taught to her by the sword itself.

"I have walked on the king's path!"

Clarent Blood Arthur had been powered by hatred and grief. She didn't know if she could summon that kind of anger anymore. Not when she'd seen her father crumple before her. What she was channeling into Clarent now was something totally novel.

"This sword that has destroyed an empire,"

She spun as she fell. Mordred put her whole back into swinging her blade as if it were the last strike she would ever accomplish.

"Will build strong walls once again!"

The flames that built in Clarent weren't the same shade as before. This red was deeper and richer than even the fires of her resentment. This wasn't some blood-curdling power suited for a villain. It was red as velvet, with flecks of gold in the tongue of the flame, the same gold as Excalibur. It was the power of a hero.

Mordred felt very unsuited to it. Maybe she'd have to start carrying herself like one.

"CLARENT CAMELOT!"

The whole forest rippled. Her blade crashed down like a wave, drowning everything in its path with all of Mordred's glory. If Clarent Blood Arthur was the concentration of all her anger as an unwanted child, then Clarent Camelot crystalized her confidence now that she had accepted herself. It took all of her untamed angst and sharpened it, until that anguish became a blade of pure light. Not like Excalibur, the sword fueled by the hope of the planet itself. But somehow, the willpower of a scrappy homunculus girl came damn well close to it.

Her red light burned through Berserker, melting its cape away into ashes. Her red light burned Archer's ashes before incinerating the body itself. Even the impenetrable barriers Shielder put up couldn't resist and crumbled away. With one strike, Mordred was capable of this much. It tore a trench through the ground and chewed up all the grass and dirt in its path before the wave cut straight through the clock face and the enemy sitting on top of it.

Nox reached out his hand.

His eyes gleamed blue.

Everything

seemed

to

be

moving

very

slowly.

He held Clarent Camelot rooted to the spot. All Nox needed to do was reach out, and all of that energy she'd been so proud of was totally halted. The colors changed. Her scalding red was polluted by blue and blurred together into an unfamiliar purple.

"What a waste." Nox said.

It was like a cartoon. The moment Mordred realized she should have been falling was the moment she hit the ground. All three puppets were obliterated. She'd lined them all up with one use of her Noble Phantasm. Mordred felt... pretty good. Not great. Exhausted, but not completely enervated like she was after every use of Blood Arthur. She really had improved.

The bad news was, that was one of the strongest weapons she had in her arsenal, and Nox clearly didn't even give a shit. Her slash, tilted diagonal and melting the ground into magma, hung in the air as Nox called his clock to action. She could see now the clock wasn't just a clock. It was a clock mech, with arachnid mechanical legs to lift its stout body into the air. Moving with a quickness that Mordred didn't anticipate for such a gangly contraption, the clock skittered out of the path of the slash. Once it and Nox were in the clear, Nox released it, however he was doing it, and Clarent Camelot moved again, carving a path clear through to the horizon.

"Do you realize how hard it is to part with any of this energy?" Nox said. He jumped down to where Mordred lay in the dirt, and she quickly rolled back to her feet. "Every bit of that Wakfu was painstakingly harvested! If I didn't have the power of that angel Metatron, you would have set me back a hundred years."

"Why should I care about your stupid Wakfu? I don't even know what that is! You killed innocent people to get all these powers, you piece of shit!"

"Innocent? Perhaps," he said. He drew his sword once again, pointing it towards Mordred's helmet until the tip brushed up against the metal. "But they were necessary sacrifices. I bear those sins for a higher cause. What of all the people you've killed?"

She spat at him. She forgot that she was wearing a helmet. "You don't know anything about me!"

"You think so? You're the one swinging Clarent around, screaming about Camelot. And that dragon heritage. I can absolutely smell it on you. There's no mistaking your identity now, knight. I've suspected it since this battle began."

"Oh yeah?"

"Of course. You're King Arthur."

Oh, hell no.

Mordred launched herself back a few inches with Mana Burst, just enough that Nox couldn't react in the few milliseconds she was moving, then activated it again to launch herself up over his sword. She brought Clarent down as heavily as she could and in the moment she was about to slice it through his head, he just barely managed to block it. Mordred slashed at him violently now, with hurricane strikes. Nox kept his guard up, not allowing Mordred's swings to get past- it probably helped how aggressive and sloppy they were- but not able to do much beyond defend himself.

"You're even more irritating than I'd anticipated!" Nox said. It sounded like he had no idea where Mordred's ire was coming from, something that infuriated her even more. "If you want to see my full strength so badly, maybe I should be less conservative with my Wakfu! After all, you'll provide me with plenty of it!"

The next time Mordred crossed swords with Nox-

THWOOOUUM!

It didn't just block her blade. It repulsed her. The force of his magic threw her backwards, and the resulting shockwave blew the leaves and branches from the trees along with it, swirling into a maelstrom she could barely hold on against. Wakfu illuminated everything. Mordred saw the colors of the leaves, a rainbow of reds and golds and bronzes, swirling and sticking against her armor in the light of the rising sun.

The... sun?

Night had suddenly skipped into day. For the first time, Mordred was able to clearly see the forest around her. She had thought she was trodding in an autumnal wood, with orangish leaves falling from the boughs, but that was not what she saw in the light. She was standing in four inches of snow. The trees were all bare, and Mordred's breaths of exertion were visible in the cold. But it was the same patch of forest. Nox stood before her still. Over his shoulder...

Past a long stretch of snow-dappled trees, she saw that dark wood again, and the flurry of fall leaves. Only the patch of ground they were standing on resembled a forest in winter.

No, in this hundred-foot span of forest, it was winter. Her clash with Nox was enough to cause time to distort itself into an entirely different season.

Changing the seasons. Slowing down Clarent Camelot. The giant clock. She understood it all now.

Mordred shivered.

Nox rushed forward in the fresh snow. The flurries he kicked up weren't subject to gravity, but remained suspended in time like three-dimensional snow angels. His sword swung up, Mordred attempted to block again and suddenly found Nox speeding up- no, she was probably just slowing down while time moved at a normal rate- and he reversed course to twirl around and clap her head with the edge of his sword. The blade hooked her horn and pulled the whole helmet off. She tried to reach for it. Nox kicked it away, past the winter barrier into the autumn nighttime.

That was the first time he looked and really saw her face. Instead of following up with a thrust through her newly exposed head, right when he had the advantage, he accidentally looked right into Mordred's eyes. He paused.

Any ordinary person would hesitate if they locked eyes with the one they were about to kill. The eyes were the window to the soul. Only soldiers like Mordred whose souls had already been stained in soot could hurt others so easily. Nox hesitated. That told Mordred he was not as much of a monster as he'd attempted to be.

Too bad for him. Mordred couldn't spare the sympathy for whatever his story was. All she wanted to do was capitalize on it.

Her heels sparked again with lightning. Nox raised his arm, expecting Mordred to fly backwards and put more distance between herself and him, but instead she snapped fifty feet sideways into a thicket of snowy trees. It was just in time. A beam of blue erupted from Nox's outstretched palm and burned through the space that Mordred occupied a split second ago, vaporizing everything in its path.

By now, Mordred knew to watch for that little cringe he did when he revealed a new ability. She'd never met someone so thrifty with his powers. Really, despite the threat of death at any wrong step, it was fun. There was something thrilling about watching your opponent one-up himself over and over again, revealing greater and greater obstacles only to triumph over them.

But it was starting to get old. Now she just needed to push him that last bit over the edge. She wasn't leaving this fight until she saw him in his final form.

Nox teleported in front of her again. Either he'd decided to throw caution to the wind on his power usage, or simply decided that she was too big of a threat to hold back against. His body was imbued with that same unearthly glow, and when Mordred crossed swords with him-

THWOOOUUM!

A corona of light burned under their feet and created a circle of summer grass underfoot. This patch of earth was six months in the past. Mordred bent backwards under Nox's next swing and clipped his throat with a jab. One moment he was there impacting Mordred's fist. The next, three seasons over, torn through an orchard's worth of apple-bearing trees. That was a clean hit from an A-rank Servant, a punch that could send a man packing for a mile.

And he appeared in front of her again. She couldn't help but grin. How lucky was this? She got to fight someone who she could keep on hitting no matter how many times she knocked them back.

THWOOOUUM!

Their blades met again. Cherry blossoms blew in from a blotch of pink springtime branches and froze when they crossed the winter threshold. Mordred and Nox leapt across the forest, their slashes carved chunks from the trees and left stumps and kindling passing through time zones. Every exchange of swordsmanship was an explosion of paradoxes.

Nox had obtained mastery of time from Metatron. He could withstand the to-and-fro pull of the timestream, and the raging rapids he had placed in them. A lesser opponent may have been crushed or rewritten out of existence. But here he faced King Mordred, someone who had never existed and could never exist. What did she have to fear from paradox, being a paradox herself?

THWOOOUUM!

THWOOOUUM! THWOOOUUM!

"Damn you!" Nox was applying more consistent pressure now. When Mordred was swinging for his head, or jumping backwards to evade his blasts, he would raise a hand and slow her down. This was the only way he could land hits on her now. Mordred was too sharp, too adaptable. The more she fought, the more comfortable she felt wielding the power of Excalibur, fighting with dual swords. In the span of that one fight she had surpassed Nox's base level. That was why he had to spend his precious Wakfu locking her in place.

The first time, she only just managed to contort herself so the flat side of his blade hit her exposed head instead of the edge. A tooth knocked out of her mouth. The second time she caught it on the collar of her chestplate and she nearly felt the bones break underneath. She was really kicking herself for losing her helmet now. In her current state, so far from her mana source Tatsumaki, she couldn't just recall it back onto her head.

This was the third time. Mordred was suspended across multiple overlapping rings in midair. She had one limb in a different month apiece and her body was fluctuating between chronological states that didn't have names. This time Mordred had no chance for a miraculous evasion at the last moment. Nox carefully lined up his blade and even gave it a practice swing to make sure that it would carve through her neck on the next strike, or at the very least, cut off a decent portion of her head.

He was foolish. He should have beheaded her the first time he caught her. In the time it took him to work up the nerve, she'd figured out how to get around his time distortion. More or less.

Nox didn't freeze her in time. He merely slowed her down until her movement was nearly negligible. She could still move. All Mordred had to do was make herself go really, really, really fast, enough that she could evade his blow normally while slowed to a crawl. Her muscles seized. Tension like static electricity built up in her body, traveling down through her legs to her feet. Here's the windup...

And the snap!

Nox's swing met nothing but empty air and dirt. Mordred had combined her own strength with a Mana Burst to augment her movement on an entirely new level. She didn't even need a platform to kick herself off of. She skipped through the air, using Mana Bursts like stepping stones to shoot herself upwards when she was about to fall.

In a way, it was like flying. She wasn't going to let Nox have all the fun there.

They both upped their speed. Soaring across the forest, sparks from their clashes going backwards weeks or months, snapshots of other times, skipping Sunday through Saturday in a few short steps as their blades clashed again and again. It was a beautiful view. Mordred fit in here. She was her own snapshot of another time. Maybe that was why she was so valuable to Nox. Or maybe that was why Nox was so furious with her.

One more time she felt her perceptions slowing down. By now, this was easy. She built up energy in her body and surfed the lightning out of his path-

(path his of out lightning the surfed and body her in energy up built she)

When she blinked she realized she had never dodged at all, and one of Nox's energy beams was bearing down on her. She couldn't dodge. Mordred took the blast dead-on and crashed into the clock mech with enough force to smash a crater into it, sent the building-sized mechanical beast toppling over. Mordred fell face-first into the grass.

Nox floated down to see her. "Rewinding time is the most expensive use of Wakfu there is. I wasted thirty people's lives for just enough energy to do this to you. Don't you care about that at all? Don't you realize what you're throwing away every second you don't lay down and-"

He was interrupted by Mordred lunging forward to headbutt him square in his metal stomach.

Nox gasped. His cuirass cracked open. Mordred could have easily smashed her skull open if she didn't have such a hard head. She swung wildly at the damaged part of the metal, trying to dig in and carve out even more. The bandages underneath were already visible. If she could just get her sword to dig in-!

"NO!"

The next blasts he fired weren't angled at Mordred. They aimed straight down at the ground. Blue fire tore into the earth and ripped it open, throwing trees high into the air. The whole chunk of dirt Mordred was standing on blew up like a geyser. Fires raged in out in a circle from where Nox stood, until the snow melted, until the trees turned to ashes and those ashes rained down everywhere.

"No, I can manage it, I can manage it!" Nox yelled. "I can salvage this! I just need that core, that damned dragon core! A net positive! Then I'll finally have enough!"

He flew up towards the rock she was standing on, flew straight through it to smash it to rubble and grabbed her by the neck of her armor before smashing his metal fist into her face. She careened backwards. Nox caught her in midair with his Wakfu, rewound her in time, sent her straight back into his fist for yet another punch. Launched away, pulled back, launched away, pulled back. He turned her into a paddleball.

"Just give up already! You pathetic wretch!" Nox suspended her in midair just long enough to slam both of his fists down on her head to smash her back into the ruined ground. "You don't know what it's like! You only live in the past! Us humans, we're the ones time moves on without! We're the ones that suffer, grow old and die! You've always been there! You don't know how hard it is to go back! I want to go back!"

The body of his clock-mech was starting to morph. Its illusion was wearing off. The true form of the thing, the form that could no longer be suppressed, was a mess of interlocking gears and wings that crumpled into each other like the corpse of a slaughtered machine god.

His hands channeled so much Wakfu that the bones started to crack. From one palm Mordred was frozen in time. From the other palm, Mordred was reversed in time. At that moment it almost looked like Nox had wings himself.

"WHY DID EVERYTHING HAVE TO CHANGE?!"

The force of Nox's Wakfu had been like a waterfall, but now it fell on her like a meteor. This wasn't a carefully-budgeted use of power, this was purely out of anger now. He wasn't just trying to hurt her. He was trying to unevolve her. If he couldn't kill her now, he would have to kill her at an earlier state of being, when she was weaker, when she was less experienced. Before they met in the woods... before her spar with Knuckles... back to the moment Excalibur was drawn...

But he could go no further.

No matter the power, no matter how he twisted her chronology into knots, that moment was an impenetrable barrier and he could not break it down. The moment she became King, she accepted the responsibility of a King. It was not an authority that could be abdicated, deferred or denied. She had killed her father for it. She had thrown away her pride as a knight for it. No matter how much she regretted her past, she could never change it.

She could only change herself, and move forward.

Nox stopped. The both of them fell down to the ground, although Nox landed more gracefully than Mordred did. It was only natural for him to stop an attack once he realized it was ineffective, but after that he stopped fighting altogether. His body went slack. It was for a brief instant, but it was enough.

Mordred crossed Excalibur and Clarent, and slashed straight through Nox's chest. His armor burst open. He collapsed into the dirt, in the shadows of the fallen trees, in the puddles of ashy snow.

"Man. All of that effort, all of that Wakfu, all of that bullshit. And I didn't even need Excalibur's full power against you."

She had won.

"I don't... know why..."

The slash cut deep. Clarent had punctured his lung, and he could only hold it together by keeping it partially in chronostasis. He wheezed.

"You of all people should have understood. Wanting to fix what's been broken... if you had my power, you would have-" Nox coughed horribly. "-done the same! Saving Camelot, rebuilding your family, wouldn't you have gone to any length to change that past? Wouldn't you, Arthur?"

After everything, he still thought she was King Arthur.

Maybe she was. Mordred had gone to such great lengths to kill her father, or love him, or become him, or something. She engraved herself in the Throne of Heroes as nothing but a hateful claw to gouge her father's throat. How many people had she killed to make that dream a reality? Nox said holding her in place took thirty people's lives. How many of her own kinsmen did she kill when she marched on Camelot? It was so much more. Scores more. All to settle some ancient rivalry. All to challenge fate.

So was there any difference between her and Nox? If she could go back, charm her father, become prince Mordred Pendragon and get everything she had ever wanted, wouldn't she? No matter what she had to do?

No, she realized now. She wouldn't. She'd just never found the right words before.

"Even if I went back, even if I fixed all the mistakes I wanted to make... I couldn't. Because I'm me. And that includes all my mistakes. I wouldn't just be changing the parts of myself that I didn't like, but everything that came after it."

A cursed gunslinger with the ferocity of a lion. A stitched-up monster who had a gentle heart. A brave young magus who was crazy about robots. She only vaguely understood it. A Servant couldn't really remember the other times they had been summoned. But Mordred knew, somehow, that she could feel the past lives she had lived. And she remembered all the friends she had made.

"I'd never want to change the good things that happened to me since then," she finished.

Mordred thought, to her surprise, that this was an idea she'd never had before. That was why she'd been willing to say all those personal things to Nox. Really, they were what she had wanted to say to herself.

"Was that really it?" Nox asked. "Everything I've done, every sin I stained my hands with, was it all completely pointless in the end?"

Mordred thought about it.

"Well... we're all gonna die someday. So really, everything is pointless in the end. That's why we gotta make the most of what we have."

"...Oh. Don't tell me that now. That's too sad. That's too sad to bear..."

Nox slumped down to the ground, and he never moved again. Whatever dream he had to accomplish died with him. Even Mordred didn't know what it was, but he'd been willing to kill and die for it. Everyone she'd fought, Kaido, Crocodile, Denji, they all had their own hopes and desires. She'd stomped on all of them to get her way. She'd gotten what she wanted, and they didn't. She was the privileged one who had gotten away with everything.

She was just going to have to live with it.

The embers of Nox's Wakfu started to fade. The time distortions burned out like film in the projector, and all the patches of wintertime and sunlight in the forest faded away. Mordred was left in the gloom of the dark woods, alone in the dark again, leaves crunching underfoot. Everything that had belonged to Nox had reversed as if it had never happened. The only thing that remained now was the experience she'd gained from fighting him.

"I'm ready." She rolled her shoulders back and cracked her neck. "I've never been stronger than I am right now."

Chapter Text

When they'd split up at the cathedral, Mordred had gone right. Knuckles went left. He never had the chance to put his skills to use, but he was an incredibly adept tracker. His traversal skills were pretty good, too. Knuckles could climb up any surface and glide for miles. That wasn't an echidna trait, that was just a Knuckles trait.

He'd learned a few things from this little excursion. The most important was that the Chaos Emeralds were not on this planet before. If they were, he would have felt them the way he was feeling them now. It was a powerfully-felt pull that brought him exactly where he was needed to be. Knuckles was great at getting to places. Not to brag, but his speed was almost as good as that other guy's. Almost. But close. He could cross vast distances before the dust had cleared where he kicked his shoes off the ground. If he covered as wide of an area as possible, there was no way he could miss it.

All he needed was ten minutes to find his prize.

It was a crashed Vilgaxian starship. Knuckles recognized it at a glance from his homeland's invasion, and even if he'd never seen one before he could have recognized the aesthetics. The ugliness of Vilgaxian technology reflected the ugliness in their hearts. All of their ships were designed for the sole purpose of function, with no beauty or soul in them. The armor-plating of the ships was first-rate. Supposedly their metal was tempered inside of Dyson spheres, so no force existed that could break them again once forged.

But it did lay broken. The entire ship was balanced precariously on a sandstone rock fixture, occasionally teetering its million-ton weight with an echoing creak. A gargantuan gorge had been gouged down the side of the ship. Presumably, that was the injury that knocked it out of the sky. That... was a sign that something very big and dangerous had come into contact with it.

Knuckles also saw that the ship wasn't a combat cruiser. It was a treasure carrier. A waterfall of gold coins was spilling out of the starship's gash.

He sprinted towards the rain of gold. Knuckles had no use for money. What could he possibly get out of it? However, a laden treasure ship was the perfect place for Vilgax to store his Chaos Emeralds. He never cared about their significance to his people, or even the power they could potentially wield. He was a monster of avarice. He just wanted them. Well, Knuckles wanted them too. He wanted them enough to run straight up a waterfall of coins.

At his speed, the liquid-like motion of all that individual currency was like a solid floor to him. Up! Up until Knuckles could no longer see the earth below him, up to the dizzying heights of that rocky pillar where the ship swayed, like the angel that danced on the head of a pin. The gouge through the metal was just wide enough that he could slide through under multiple layers of metal protection.

Inside there was a lake of money, enough that the coins moved like a liquid. Knuckles nearly sank up to his knees in all the gold. Fortunately, he was able to tread the surface if he moved carefully. Knuckles had many talents, but none of them were swimming. He focused on crossing to the other side of the room... very slowly, which wasn't his style... walking as if he were wearing snowshoes... until he reached the opposite wall.

He tapped one of his spiked fists against it. Mostly solid steel and tungsten, maybe some other materials from other planets Knuckles didn't know about. From the sounds of it, probably five... ten meters thick, and bolted. Fitting for a treasure ship that had to ward against thieves. A wall like this could ward against anything from lasers to explosives.

Knuckles punched a hole through it. Another golden wave poured out of the breach, which was big enough to drive through, and this time Knuckles allowed himself to be carried by it. This opening was smaller than the one on the outside, so there wasn't nearly as much spillage. Knuckles held back there. He didn't want to be tripping over these things during his whole search, he was cautious like that.

It was surprising to see how ornate the interior was, compared to the prison ship he'd been transported in on. He found it hard to believe that Vilgaxians would attempt to create beauty for any reason. Even the way they demonstrated luxury was intimidating. The hallway he stepped into was as tall and wide as a ballroom, and everything was colored gold or champagne. And the walls were full of... objects. Display cases, featuring unusual relics or artifacts.

He had no doubt that this was where the Chaos Emeralds would be. The only thing that bothered him was that he didn't know why they would bring a treasure ship here. What was their goal? Or did Vilgax really need to bring his... (Knuckles glanced at one of the cases) set of mummified fingers with him? Wait, fingers? Really? Weird.

Knuckles just pushed the display case aside and smashed the wall down behind it, only to step into another, identical hallway with even more displays. A quick jump over to the opposite wall and another punch led him into another similar hallway. He could already tell that this ship would have been a maze to any other thief. A confusing labyrinth of twisting paths, something meant to host guided tours or monitored by security staff, not anything an interloper could search through easily. Knuckles had the advantage here. He could cut the shortest distance, casually guided wherever he needed to go through his natural connection to the Chaos Emeralds.

And, more importantly, he wasn't a thief. He was returning stolen property to its rightful place. That must have given him some kind of advantage. Maybe it would make him fight harder.

Carving a path straight through billions of dollars in wall furnishings led him to one barrier that was even more reinforced than the last twelve. Instead of blasting straight through the side, his fists only dented it inward. The more safety they needed to protect it, the more likely they had something valuable enough to protect. So he punched it again. Not a whole lot of give. That meant he would have to use one of his strongest techniques, something even more powerful than his punches.

He backed up, prepared himself to strike, and then looked slightly to his left to see the door.

After walking through the door, Knuckles entered an even more expansive vault. It was a library of filing cabinets that stretched up farther than Knuckles could see. They were erratically sized. Since the ship was very slightly tilted to one side, many of the rightmost drawers slid out partially. Some of them had already fallen, leaving a pile of junk at the bottom of the vault, a pit of discarded treasures. That must have been what the drawers contained: treasures.

All of the disarray was ignored by the buzzing drones in the vault. These were mechadroids. Common Vilgaxian helper tech, he'd punched his way through plenty during the Vilgax-Mobius war. Those were more heavily armored than the ones he saw now, though. Not enough big, obvious energy guns, either. These were probably just menial laborers. Not meant for combat.

It made sense to him that they used robots as part of their filing system. No organic brain would be able to make heads or tails of this nonsense, especially when physically sorting the treasure was a full-scale mountain climbing operation. This had to be a machine's job. Now, those machines flew from drawer to drawer, mindlessly rearranging objects of unfathomable value with no audience at all.

There were so many drones, like swarming locusts, that Knuckles almost missed the climber. He really blended in with his jet-black outfit. Plus, Knuckles had to really look up to see him. The guy was almost eighty feet in the air. It was rare in life that you had to look up.

He'd rappelled up the wall of ten thousand filing cabinets using a grappling hook that was mounted to his... wrist, apparently. That was the only thing he was using to support himself at this height, without even a foothold. His arm strength must have been truly enviable. The man's other arm was busy pulling out drawers, which he would examine briefly, then pull out and toss to the ground before opening another one.

One of those discarded drawers clattered to the ground right in front of him. It held an old, dusty oil lamp. Knuckles gave it a rub. Nothing. It was worth a try.

"Hey!" Knuckles yelled. No response.

He yelled louder. "Hey!"

Knuckles was so far away that the rappeler couldn't hear him. If he wanted to catch his attention, he was going to have to get closer. That's where his natural climbing skill came in handy. He could jump onto the wall and climb up almost as fast as he could run, making his own handholds by crumpling the metal in his grip. The mechadroids didn't get in his way. They were too absorbed in their own mysterious schemes to care what he did, even as the cargo they looked after fell into a pile.

Once he'd closed the distance to his satisfaction, maybe about twenty feet away, Knuckles tried again. "Hey!" That startled the hell out of the other guy, who slipped and dangled from the rope upside-down like the Hanged Man. It was even more surprising to him than the fact he was staring at an upright bright red echidna-resembling creature.

"I'm right here, you know," he said when he finally caught his breath. He swung towards the wall a little to pull out a drawer with his foot and stood on it. It would have been harder to support himself by one arm after that stunt nearly amputated it. "There's no need to startle me. If I fell, the dry cleaning bill on this suit would be murder..."

This was one of the most impeccably-dressed men Knuckles had ever seen. He was a natural fit for this bourgeoise environment. For one thing, he was the only person Knuckles had seen on Battleworld, and probably the only person on the entirety of Battleworld, who was wearing a business suit. This was because Knuckles had not been with Tatsumaki when she met Slayer, who had been wearing a tuxedo.

"What are you doing in here?" Knuckles asked. "This place is dangerous. I've seen it from the outside, it could fall over at any minute."

"Appreciate the concern, friend, but I can look after myself fine. I've got a friend downstairs that can handle almost anything. As for what I'm doing... I could ask you the same question."

"I'm on a galactic quest to find and recover the Chaos Emeralds which were stolen from my people," Knuckles said, totally stone-faced.

He took it in stride. "That's great. You can call me Roger. I'm a negotiator. Here's my card."

He reached into his suit pocket and threw out a card. Knuckles almost let go of the wall trying to catch it, but instead he reached out with his clumsy gloved hands and let it float down to the floor a world below them. He'd just have to assume that the card said he was Roger, a negotiator.

"So, Red. You made much progress on finding those Chaos Emeralds?" Roger asked.

"Yeah. I can feel that they're somewhere in this room. All I've got to do now is find which one of the drawers they're kept in."

Roger looked down. There were hundreds of thousands of individual drawers in the vault.

"Ah. Well, the galaxy is a big place. You must be really good if you've narrowed it down that much."

"I know. I think the emeralds are very close. They have an aura that I-" Knuckles stopped himself. He didn't need to explain all of that. "I can feel them."

"Right. Let's keep moving."

For some reason, even though Knuckles only went up there to warn him to be careful, Roger was tagging along to find the emeralds with him. It was probably fine as long as he wasn't getting in the way. Knuckles had to slow down his climbing to give Roger a chance to follow behind him, but it's not like he was in a hurry. And, impressively, he didn't have to slow down too much. A combination of deft acrobatics and his grappling-hook wristwatch let Roger swing behind surprisingly fast for a human that didn't have super-speed.

"Do you think they'd have a special container for it?!" Roger asked. He had to shout to be heard, with Knuckles so far ahead of him.

"They'd have to!" Knuckles said. The Master Emerald negates and balances the energies of the Chaos Emeralds. Without it, their power would be totally unleashed. It would cause a catastrophe."

"How big of a catastrophe are we talking about, here?!"

Knuckles pulled over for a moment, stopping on a half-open drawer containing comically large spoons. He closed his fists and held them together. Suddenly he pulled them apart, opened his fists with a solemn "Phouw! This would be the planet."

"Ahh. Don't separate them. Got it."

Most of the drawers were special containers. Some of them were chained up and thrashed against their locks. Some of them dripped sparkling fluids, burned white-hot, or sang dissonant chords. There must have been a reason these things were kept in a vault and not in the myriad display cases. This was the room for objects too dangerous to leave lying around.

If there was anything particular about the emeralds to guide Knuckles, besides his affinity with them... that would be their size. The Master Emerald was bigger than Knuckles himself, and it couldn't be stored in any ordinary container. If he kept moving in the right direction, he'd have to look for something large.

Once again, Knuckles didn't find it until he looked up.

It was a metal crate the size of a trailer home suspended on a chain from the ceiling. A gentle glow emanated from the cracks between the metal plates. Even though it had been so long since he'd last felt it, there was no mistaking it for Knuckles. These were the Chaos Emeralds.

Occasionally, the cage would swing violently all on its own, shifting the weight of the entire ship slightly. The way they reacted was if the emeralds were alive, not something Knuckles had ever seen in them. It was almost like they were trying to go somewhere... but where, Knuckles did not know. It wasn't towards Angel Island, or towards him.

Maybe these where what had pulled the ship down to earth, just to get to whatever they were trying to find... no, Knuckles didn't want to think about that. That was just too strange for him.

Roger could tell what they were just from the way Knuckles looked at it. "How are we going to get it down?"

No need to answer with words. Knuckles jumped off the wall, bounced off a buzzing midair mechadroid, used that as a springboard to get to another Mechadroid, then another. Once Knuckles was close enough, he leaped from his improvised platform and severed the chain with a single kick. Before the crate could fall, he caught the other end of the chain and swung the entire crate up into the air so he could grab it overhead. When he landed, the weight of the crate slammed him flat into the floor, as heavily as a boot stomping on a roach. But he didn't get squished. He got to his feet, lifting the crate up without his arms shaking.

Knuckles set it down carefully. "No need for applause."

Roger made a leap of faith to grab onto one of the mechadroids, and its buzzing propellers along with his added weight allowed him to use it like a paraglider to gently float down to Knuckles's level. "Don't worry, I wasn't planning on it. Good job, though."

"Yeah. It was a good job." Knuckles pretended to dust his hands off. He was actually really proud of himself for this. His mission was finally over. Once he had the Chaos Emeralds, he could take them back to Angel Island and... watch over it for as long as he naturally lived.

That was a strange thing to think about. Was that his plan for the future, to protect the emeralds now that there was no Echidnean culture left to revere them? He never had a problem with it before, and he still didn't. But now that they were in front of him, now that he was confronting the end of his journey, it surprised him how... neutral he felt about it.

Maybe that wasn't such a terrible thing. Neutral was better than bad. It was a bit of a disappointment, but maybe disappointment was a part of life.

"So, what is it you were really looking for?" Knuckles asked. "You never really told me back there. I can't guarantee I could find it, but I could help."

"Actually, I was going after the Chaos Emeralds too," Roger said. "It was a commission for a client of mine. Took me a while to get my hands on it, but I thought Battleworld would be my best chance. Turns out, the gamble paid off."

"Oh. I'm also looking for the Chaos Emeralds," Knuckles said blankly.

"Yeah, you just told me. Bit awkward, huh?"

What... was going on here? What was Roger going to do now? Knuckles had his emeralds. Their obligation to each other was over. So... if both of them wanted the Chaos Emeralds... and Knuckles had them... then Roger... got nothing?

"So... what happens next?" Knuckles asked.

"My friend, what happens next is that I wish you good luck. This is the moment we part ways."

Roger spoke into his watch, which until now, Knuckles thought was solely a grapple-rope-ejection-device.

"Big O! Showtime!"

The floor ripped up like tinfoil. An immense jet-black head shoved through the hole, followed by the shoulders, then the bulk of a ten-story robot whose crown scraped the ceiling. Roger was whisked away by the robot, disappearing from view because Knuckles could not pull himself away from this metal monster, the golem that had to be the thing Roger called "Big O".

One of those mighty hands snatched the crate away, dangling it from the chain as easily as a pocket watch. When Knuckles saw the behemoth fully upright, saw how the Chaos Emeralds were in its grasp and he was down on the floor looking up at them, Knuckles finally figured it out.

That's my enemy.

Roger "The Colossus", Rank 5

One of Big O's internal pistons fired, and its arm smashed downward hard enough to slam open walls of drawers from the shockwave of the impact. All kinds of sealed-up suppressed things burst out. The mechadroids, formerly lethargic, running through their idle routines, finally sprung to life now that enough havoc was breaking out. By then, it was too late. This kind of havoc spread out exponentially.

Knuckles only barely juked out of the way to avoid a falling jar almost as big as he was. The vessel shattered and spilled out waves of gloppy, sanguine fluids, more than should have even been able to fit in the jar, and the air around it chilled to temperatures lower than the Antarctic. That chilled the metal, the metal cracked, the supports weakened and more drawers started to lean forward under their own weight which opened those up and let those contents spill out. Knuckles was quick, and any vertical surface may as well have been a floor to him. He was able to outrace the consequences as the freezing demon blood spilled. Big O was made from sterner stuff. It could just walk through the mud.

What could Knuckles do here? His combat style never involved the most brilliant tactical planning. Just punch the Big O? That was something he was good at. That's what he'd go with.

It was just a bit dicey to get close to it right now. Those mechadroids were swarming like locusts, or maybe it'd be more accurate to say they swarmed like white blood cells around a virus. They identified Big O and Knuckles as hostile, and although they weren't equipped with weapons, they could still smother the both of them. And the Big O was too heavy to be simply pulled away by them. Knuckles wasn't.

Even worse, they seemingly identified that Knuckles was an easier target, one he couldn't just walk through like a black cloud. A lot of them were peeling away from Big O and going after Knuckles. He had to avoid that and the spreading spill of cold freezing anything that touched it. Don't touch the ground. Got it.

Knuckles was running along the wall, evading drawers that opened in his path like they were sandworms bursting out of the floor. Mechadroids tried to cut him off, even going as far as to dive-bomb him, but he was far faster than their motors could ever clock. The only advantage they had was numbers. They couldn't actually catch up to him as long as he didn't slow down or change course. But he was running away from Big O. He needed to run to Big O if he was going to catch those Chaos Emeralds, and that would be throwing himself into a tornado of them. He'd also have to make a U-turn to accomplish that in the first place, which would be a bit of a challenge.

That is, it would have been a challenge for anyone else. Knuckles was HIM. He bounced right off the wall and glided skillfully, pulling a sharp veering turn around until he was speeding towards the Big O. That momentum was all he could rely on to push him through the mechadroids. He just had to hope he'd flung himself hard enough.

He didn't. There were too many mechadroids in the way, they formed a wall of steel to keep him out. Each time they crowded around him Knuckles punched them away, juggling himself in the air while the pieces scattered, but it didn't get him close to Big O. He couldn't fly independently like those mechadroids. He could only glide.

The masses of mechadroids grew so intense that Knuckles could barely see Big O in front of him, black on black camouflage. Any initial inertia he had from launching himself had been totally lost. He was keeping himself in the air by bouncing between mechadroids, and the only way he could tell which direction Big O was in now was that he could still sense the Chaos Emeralds he was carrying.

That was pretty much the one thing he was fantastic at sensing. It was just the Chaos Emeralds. For example, he couldn't sense the two grappling anchors that fired out of Big O's hips directly at him. He couldn't see them until it was too late.

The first one launched through a cluster of mechadroids. It was a spearhead on a harpoon line with a blade much larger than Knuckles' own body. He didn't get much time to avoid it. Just brushing against this thing could split him in two, but what was he supposed to do about it? Sure, he was fast. His casual running speed was best measured in Mach, and his reaction times were good enough to keep himself from crashing headfirst into everything else when he ran. Swinging his whole body out of the path of a car-sized harpoon without anything to push off of was a whole different ball game.

He only managed to pull his legs away and evade it the moment the blade was on him, almost brushing against him. It sheared some of his fur away, too. The blade continued unimpeded before it speared into the ceiling, and Knuckles landed with both feet on the wire like it was a tightrope. It wasn't perfect footing, but it was close.

Unfortunately, that was just the first one. Which was immediately followed up by the second one.

The second harpoon shot was easier to evade than the first, since Knuckles could jump off the first one's line. It slashed straight into the ceiling just like the one before it.

Big O pulled back. The ceiling collapsed. One gajillion Lantern rings poured down like technicolor rain.

This was part of the bounty Vilgax had stolen when he exterminated the Lantern Corps, and it probably wasn't all of it either. He'd taken everything. Red rings, orange rings, yellow rings, green rings, blue rings, indigo rings, violet rings, black and white rings, and even the dreaded Phantom Ring... oh, and those staffs the Indigos used. There were so many individual rings that they moved like a liquid, like sand. When the magic of the rings hit the floor and combined with the magic of the ice-blazing demon extract, the whole thing caused an unexpected chemical reaction. They popped.

If every individual raindrop burst as violently as a grenade, that might have been an appropriate comparison for the magical maelstrom raging underneath them. Now Knuckles really couldn't touch the floor. Even the floor itself couldn't hold up. Big O had already weakened it crashing through before the fight started, and every stomp it stomped only weakened it further. Nothing slowed its pace. It just kept coming.

There were shelves in the middle that were tall enough for Knuckles to leap to, so he could (mostly) evade the cataclysmic fireworks and sparks blasting down below. Knuckles took that opportunity. He touched down and took a moment just to steady himself, come to grips with all the layers on this collapsing cake. Big O walked down the vault room moving unceasingly towards Knuckles. The air was glutted by mechadroids, although they'd gotten busier dealing with the mess beneath them, and also, that mess was still happening. It was an amplified version of pouring soda into Pop Rocks. The reverberations from the explosions were enough to make the whole ship shift and sway, and that reminded Knuckles that the whole thing was balanced extremely precariously on top of a pillar and it was liable to fall off given the slightest provocation.

That was one thing Knuckles wanted to avoid, if possible. It would be extremely dangerous. What if it broke the emeralds?

Big O continued to march closer, and finally got close enough to Knuckles that he was willing to risk a running jump. First Knuckles had to run away. He sped backwards, running along the tops of the filing cabinet island in the middle of the room, using it like a racetrack. When he hit the end of that track, he made an incredibly sharp hairpin turn, banking himself to maintain as much speed going into it as possible.

One punch. That's all he needed to land. Preferably to the head, but the chest would be fine if he couldn't reach it in a single jump. The force he needed to knock over a metal giant of this size wasn't more significant than the force he'd used against Kaido's body. One good hit.

He jumped and launched himself with extraordinary speed and force towards the Big O. The mecha could do nothing to evade it. That was one of Knuckles's clearest advantages over the Big O. He was faster. He was so much faster he could dance circles around Big O, and all he had to do was hit him once. So Knuckles wound his fist back, and just as he was about to collide with the Big O's chest he snapped it forward and released all that built-up potential energy.

It hit.

Big O rocked back.

A noise like a gong echoed from an impact that left a Knuckles-sized dent in the ultrasolid metal.

But it didn't fall over.

Oh. Right. He needed leverage.

Knuckles could not hit as hard as he wanted to. A full-on, peak performance Knuckle haymaker required solid footing, leverage he could use to strike with his whole body. Without that, Knuckles was only using the muscles in his arm to punch. His midair hooks were weaker than his grounded jabs.

That's fine. He accounted for that. And what he'd done there was definitely a strong hit, it caused some visible damage. But it wasn't really what Knuckles was hoping for. Especially because now he was plummeting to the floor of exploding death. Really, it wasn't just that Knuckles was lacking leverage.

Big O was just a lot more durable than he'd anticipated. That was going to be a problem.

The falling-to-his-death part was a bit more of a pressing issue, though. There was no way he could avoid hitting the floor, he'd already fallen to the point that there was nothing left for him to glide to. Maybe he could try to- no, wait! There were two platforms left! They were easy for him to land on as well. He just hadn't thought of them at first. They were particularly risky options.

Knuckles took the chance, and landed on the one thing that would keep him away from the magical ice and exploding Lantern rings below him. That was Big O's foot.

Even better, it gave him that leverage he wanted.

He threw a proper punch right into Big O's leg. That felt solid. That caused a few cracks. It nearly dropped to one knee just from the force of that single punch. That punch was followed up by a second, third, seventh punch, a whole barrage of punches trying to damage Big O's leg enough to knock it down, aimed at a single weak point.

It didn't work. It did provoke the Big O to do something about the irritating opponent that was hammering on its shin. The robot lifted its leg up, until its knee was cresting over its thigh, and slammed its foot down onto the floor. Fissures opened up in the ground that spread from wall to wall. It didn't break just yet, but this casual step akin to knocking mud off of a boot almost broke through the steel underneath and nearly dislodged Knuckles. He couldn't focus on punching when he had to focus on hanging on.

Big O could have stomped again, but sending the both of them through the floor probably wasn't in its best interest. If it fell on its stomach, it wouldn't be able to pull itself upright again. Instead, it went for the next best thing and kicked straight through a wall with Knuckles still attached.

The impact of being smashed through so much metal forced Knuckles to let go. He went flying, smashed through the wall behind that and rolled into another of those ornate hallways. Big O followed right behind him. It walked straight through the wall, no need to punch it. The ceiling was a little lower here, so Big O's head wasn't even visible, it scraped through the roof and broke off chunks with every movement.

Knuckles looked at the Big O, and he imagined the Big O was looking back at him, although he couldn't see its face. Then Big O's chest opened up and started firing missiles directly at him.

Even Knuckles didn't know if he wanted the Chaos Emeralds this badly. At this point, his primary motivation for beating down the Big O was that this Roger guy was a jerk.

Each individual missile that shot from the Big O's torso was capable of punching a six-foot hole in any surface it was aimed at, and they were launched indiscriminately. Knuckles was able to avoid the missiles themselves. They didn't even reach the speed of sound. Avoiding their blast radius was a bit harder. It's not like he could calculate it on the fly. He zipped around the missiles as best as he could, running along the floor and the walls and even the ceiling upside-down while the bombs burst around him, but he couldn't keep himself totally unscathed. A few of the explosions caught his skin, burned his fur.

One of the missiles got a little too close and knocked him off-course, bounced him into a wall and left him spinning in midair. He was lined up perfectly for another shot from another missile. But that trick wouldn't work on him twice. He was prepared. When the next missile flew for him, Knuckles grabbed it out of the air and used his upper body strength to swing it around until it angled right at the robot that fired it. Knuckles let go at the last moment and was left behind as the missile hit center mass and exploded against Big O's torso.

He didn't need to use a missile. Not when his fists could hit harder than any explosive device the Big O could muster up. The missile was just a cheeky distraction. Something to make the Big O recoil a bit before Knuckles slammed into its leg once more.

Knuckles wasn't much of a tactician, but he wasn't an idiot either. He knew enough about fighting to know that legs were a weak point, and knees hurt a lot if you banged them on things. That was life experience talking. That was part one of his brilliant plan: beat on the Big O's leg that he had already been beating.

His rapid-fire punches softened up the leg to the point the sleek black metal on its leg was crumpling. Just as Knuckles had expected, the Big O was forced to kneel, although only for a moment. He had to take advantage of the moment while he could. His eyes were on the prize, the big box dangling by a chain from the Big O's hand. All he needed were the Chaos Emeralds. If he could snag those, all he needed to do to stop the Big O was knock this ship over and send him tumbling while Knuckles escaped, an easy victory.

He'd need to break through the containment crate in a single shot. Plus, while it was dangling in midair, he wouldn't have access to that all-important leverage Knuckles needed to stay comfortable. To get back the Chaos Emeralds, he was going to have to use his special technique. It was a really good one, too. The only reason he hadn't been using it up until now was that it needed a lot of windup. And what better place for that than a long hallway?

Knuckles revved his whole body up like the wheel of a Formula One race car. This was an almost impossible biological feat. He couldn't explain how it worked, he only understood through performing the trick himself. He turned himself into a rapidly spinning ball. This ball form launched even faster than Knuckles could run, scraping across the ground and burning a path through the floor.

This was Knuckles's most powerful move. One he'd copied from someone he once knew. Not as fast as the original version, but one that had a lot more oomph behind it.

This was the spindash.

Once he felt the crack of the sonic boom around him he knew he'd built up enough energy for what he was planning. He bounced off the ground, angled his body towards the crate, and burst it open in one strike. Shredded chunks of metal shrapnel flew everywhere while the chain jangled wildly in midair, now connected to nothing. And there were the Chaos Emeralds.

Red, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet, White. These were the seven jewels that tempered the world-shaking power of the magnificent Master Emerald. Knuckles had to juggle them a bit, but with quick thinking he was able to scoop up all seven of them, land on his back, and catch the Master Emerald with his feet.

Finally. The Chaos Emeralds, the last remnants of his people's culture, the things he was sworn to protect. They were in the proper hands now. Someone who appreciated their value, not for material gain, but for what they meant to those who were no longer here, who had come before him. After all this time, was all that trouble truly worth it? Yes, it was. He'd doubted at first, but now that he actually had what he'd been searching for, it was pretty terrific.

The Big O put its hands down on the ground. It used the pistons in its arms to try and shove itself upright, back on both feet despite its weakened leg.

That was the moment the ship veered starboard into empty air and completely tipped over off of the pillar.

Gravity flipped sideways, then ceased to matter at all. Everything floated. Even the ultra-heavy metal bulk of Big O flew to the ceiling, or the opposite end of the room that had now become the ceiling. Knuckles didn't mind. With the sudden loss of weight, all these emeralds had suddenly become a lot easier to carry. He just had to take them all and run out of here, and he'd be good to go.

Wait. How was he supposed to escape from the falling ship again? Knuckles had vaguely thought he could glide down, somehow, but it suddenly occurred to him that nothing he could do would actually decrease his speed here.

Knuckles was starting to suspect that maybe he couldn't prevent himself from splatting against the ground at terminal velocity. Would that kill him? It would probably hurt him really very badly.

Oh, yeah. Maybe he should brace himself for how much this was going to injure him.

He braced. He kept the emeralds close to him, as many of them as he could hold. The foremost thing on Knuckles's mind wasn't his safety. Even at the end, he had never feared death. The one thing he concerned himself now was preventing the emeralds from separating. He could at least prevent anything from happening to the others on Battleworld after he fell.

That could have been what the Chaos Emeralds reacted to, that unselfish desire of his.

Or it could have been his connection to the emeralds, as their guardian for hundreds of years.

It could have been a twist of fate. A random interaction of quantum particles influenced by cosmic rays, or even the divine. After all, the gemstones of Angel Island had a mysterious history. They may have, as Metatron suggested, been placed by a supreme creator.

Whatever the cause, the Chaos Emeralds activated in a way Knuckles had never seen before and could have never predicted. They glowed and came alive. As they fell, the power of the Chaos Emeralds moved towards him and flowed into him. They became a part of him. And everything that made up Knuckles shined a little bit brighter, became even more "Knuckles".

He became super.

Knuckles broke through the hull of the ship.

The path around was easy. He no longer had to worry about balancing all those individual emeralds. All he had to do was focus directly on his goal. That was the underside of the treasure ship.

Before he even knew what he was doing, he lifted his hands skyward and caught the thing. That Knuckles was even able to do it was surprising. The ship was several hundred thousand tons itself, never mind all the things they stashed on it. This new situation was so astonishing that it took Knuckles a second to notice something even more astonishing, how he was able to get around to the ship and hold it up in the first place.

To his pleasant surprise, he could now, in fact, fly. Not glide.

He gently lowered the ship to the ground and laid it flat. If he had Tatsumaki's psychic talent he could have peeled it apart like an orange, but instead, even with his newfound power, he had to inelegantly punch it open.

This was just the courtesy of cleaning up after a party. He didn't want Big O to be trapped in there or anything. Now that the heat of battle was over, Knuckles really didn't feel any hatred for him. That is, he was mad about trying to blow him up with missiles and all that, but they'd really only been thrown into the fight by circumstance, so he didn't have some deep-seated moral conviction against him or anything.

None of it ended up mattering in the end. When he opened up the outer barrier of the ship to look at its insides, Big O wasn't even there. The only thing he could see in that torn-up hall was... Roger. The suited guy. And a giant Big O-sized hole behind him, like it had tunnelled away somewhere.

He looked right up at him as if nothing about their circumstances was even remotely unusual. "Oh, hey there. I lost track of you for a bit."

Knuckles didn't know what to make of it.

"...What are you talking about? You were in the robot."

"I wasn't. That robot caught me completely by surprise. Came right out of nowhere, really. I had to rush to safety."

"But you said 'Big O, showtime'," Knuckles said.

"I don't think that happened. Are you sure I didn't say something else?"

He was so straightforward it was almost impossible to doubt him. That's how cool Roger was playing it. So cool that Knuckles decided he wouldn't press his luck with him.

"What about that client of yours? They wanted the Chaos Emeralds." Knuckles gestured to himself. "Are you really going to leave it like that? Are you going to try and fight me for it?"

Roger lifted an arm and fired his wrist-mounted grapple gun at him. There was no killing intent behind it. The grappling hook bounced off Knuckles's forehead harmlessly, without even registering as an attack. Then it pulled awkwardly back into Roger's watch.

"I think it would be a better idea to cut my losses. Some gambles just can't be won, I'm afraid. Besides, those gems seem much more comfortable by your side."

That last part was true, but it felt like the afterthought it was. Roger had already explained his entire side. When he'd fought Knuckles to take the emeralds, he thought he could win. Now, he knew he couldn't.

"You don't need to worry about me. I can take things from here," Roger said. That also sounded a bit like an afterthought. More likely he just wanted to be rid of Knuckles, to not be reminded of that loss. That suited Knuckles just fine. He didn't want to spend much time dwelling on that fight either.

At least there was a relieving sense that everything was back in its right place. The Chaos Emeralds and their protector had been unified, and now, he could protect them wherever he went. And he could go anywhere.

Still, that was only part of the story. Mordred's part, a part he was still entwined with, hadn't finished yet. That was something he had to see through.

When they reunited, it would be the end of them or Vilgax.

Chapter Text

This was the first time in fifteen years that Fubuki had managed to slip out of her sister's grasp. Fifteen years of effort to keep her reckless, hot-blooded sibling from getting into trouble and getting herself hurt. That was the burden Tatsumaki had to shoulder all this time, in addition to working twenty-four hours a day as one of Japan's top heroes. And this was the thanks she got.

Yeah, Tatsumaki was pissed. She was so mad that it made her tired. She was tired of being mad, and everything she saw made her mad, and the world was shit, and it was all just shit. There was nothing good in her life anymore. More and more as she fought on Battleworld, it made her wonder why she was bothering to fight Vilgax.

To save the Earth? Save a pile of bombed-out ruined rock and its low-intelligence citizenry, the people that bitched and moaned about every little thing she did, her height, her looks, how she didn't smile enough? Maybe they should have been culled, just a little bit. Just enough to make them remember how much they missed her.

Revenge for her sister? Well, her sister sure as hell seemed fine to her. Fine enough to go out on her own and say she never even needed Tatsumaki! Turned right around and hit her with that garbage about how horrible she was and how much she hated her, and didn't even care how much of her own life Tatsumaki had put aside protecting her. She wasn't just going to abandon Fubuki, but she was going to have to make her think about what she'd done first.

Something to soothe her own pride and prove she was the best?

Maybe that would help.

Still, bringing Fubuki back was Tatsumaki's top priority, so she had to follow her trail before she could think about defeating Vilgax. The only thing she could do was move in the direction she last saw Fubuki moving in. She was cutting her out of her thoughts, so she couldn't try to read her mind and track her movements that way, and anyway Tatsumaki didn't even really understand how that ability worked... or whether it was truly her power of listening, and not Fubuki's power of projecting.

Whatever. She could only hope that Fubuki would keep flying the same way, and wouldn't pull a U-turn just to shake Tatsumaki off her trail.

She'd fought Accelerator on an island chain, which she quickly left behind to cross over the wide oceans. Passing over water made her nervous now. Tatsumaki always had to check if some monstrous algae blob was about to rise up and drag her into the depths. She could have flown faster, but she couldn't muster up the effort to go past the speed of a typical boat, which said something about how exhausted she was. Tatsumaki was a sprinter, not a marathon runner. Battleworld was the first time in a long time she had pushed herself to the limit over and over and over.

There was no algae monster. There were some sharks, sea serpents, naval mines, whirlpools, and other traps laid out in the water, but Tatsumaki could fly high enough to avoid them. Who would actually try swimming on Battleworld? You'd have to be a complete idiot.

The ocean was not endless, and Tatsumaki eventually reached another shoreline, or something like a shoreline. There was no sand. The waves crashed onto a mass of rock that looked like marble. It was a marble beach decorated with faux-ancient columns, Ionic and Doric, built into classical architecture. No signs of life. There were some pools of water that weren't able to rejoin with the surrounding ocean, but that was it.

She kept moving. The further away she got from the shoreline, the more water she saw. Tatsumaki had assumed the scattered pools were from the ocean's waves, but she started to think that wasn't the case. You couldn't trust anything on this planet to follow nature's laws.

Eventually Tatsumaki could fly no further. She'd run into a hurdle. Ahead of her, Tatsumaki saw a wide lake, so wide she could only barely see the edges of it, at the foot of a mile-long waterfall. One thing that didn't help her vision was the thick mist that blanketed the lake, courtesy of those falls. Finding Fubuki in a fog like this was going to be impossible.

So her sister was dead serious about running away after all...

Unbelievable. Unbelievable. Fubuki must have gone insane in that tube all those years ago. She didn't just decide to cut her own sister off and leave her all alone. She couldn't just abuse her like this. Fubuki was the only one that went through the same pain Tatsumaki did. That wasn't her choice to make.

God damn it. It was all totally hopeless.

Tatsumaki crossed her legs and hovered in the air, considering her fate. Could she return to Mordred and the others? No, abandoning Fubuki would be madness. Was there anywhere else she could turn, could she expand her psychic senses to cover as much territory as possible? That might burn her brain to cinders. Was there anything she could do?

She should at least check a little bit. Feel out the fog, see how much of the lake she could cover, hope Fubuki hadn't gotten far. That's what she'd do. Use the strength she had left to case the lake, sense it by touch...

Well, she was going to try it, but it turned out there was no need. Out of the mist, she saw the long jaws of a terrifying shadow, illuminated by the light of the full moon.

Tatsumaki blinked. She tried again. It was no use. The thing was still there.

This monstrous vessel, well over two hundred feet tall, struggled to drag along a bloated corpse that was even larger than itself. Actually, it must have been even taller than Tatsumaki first thought, since it was standing up to its knees in the water.

Was it organic? No, it couldn't have been, it was bright red and covered in armor plating. But it was forged in such ghastly shapes! It wasn't Vilgaxian style, and it was hard to believe a human would have designed something so devilish. And it was attached to that thing... no, it was draining the fluids out of it like a liposuction tube.

She'd have to keep her guard up. Nothing good could come from spending more time with the monster than she needed to.

"You. Can you understand me?" Tatsumaki asked. The red beast crouched down a bit, acknowledging her question, but did not speak.

"Nothing? You wouldn't mind if I twisted your head off like a bottlecap, then?"

It didn't respond at first, but eventually some kind of crackly noise blasted out of it from hidden amplifiers. So it was a robot after all. A robot with a fetal attachment.

"Yeah, I hear you," it said. Tatsumaki didn't like her tone. "Before you say anything, let me say this. I'm an EVA pilot, so you'd better not look down on me just because I'm not from the Association. I've got the full backing of NERV behind me."

Great, didn't ask. Remind her what NERV was again? Tatsumaki remembered something about that, some news from a long time ago, but Vilgax invading pushed any of that off the front page. So that thing was an EVA Unit. Tatsumaki heard these things cost taxpayers 2.2 trillion yen per year. Per unit.

"As long as you understand my status. Now, listen to me. Have you seen a woman with dark green hair and pearls around her neck? She might also be-"

"Quiet. I wasn't finished talking."

No, she didn't hear that correctly. There was no way. Who did this sassy lost child think she was?

"You're going to tell me exactly what your intentions are before I even think of wasting my power to help you. I can't waste my time on small fries. I'm going after the biggest catch on the whole planet. You do know what I'm talking about, right?"

Tatsumaki cut in. "Hello, repeat that for me again. The last thing you said."

"Are you deaf? I'm talking about Vilgax. Are you planning on taking him on yourself? If you are, you'd better back off. I'm in the top 2 out of 100 here, and everyone says you don't work well with anybody. I don't need any dead weight getting in my way."

Okay, that's it, that's IT. She was going to twist this thing into scrap metal. She stared it down right into its sightless emerald eyes and imagined flattening it, rearranging its shape, molding it into an aesthetically satisfying cube.

All she had to do was will it, and it would happen.

Just a bit more.

Any minute now.

Right about to happen.

Tatsumaki thought that she'd completely rotted her psychic abilities, and that's why nothing was happening. A quick test of her skill on the water proved that wasn't true. She could still ripple liquid, still make huge waves that splashed at the EVA's torso. It wasn't that she was weak, but that her enemy had a barrier against psychic interference. Every time she attempted to manipulate the mechanical monster, a shield of intricate diamond patterns shimmered over its skin.

Was there any other way she could affect it? If this thing was a manned mecha, maybe she could try and get into the pilot's head? It was worth a shot. Tatsumaki sent out psychic feelers so small that it could sneak through the particles of the barrier, too small to emit actual force, but enough that she could look for extrasensory signals coming from the cockpit.

The results weren't promising. could hear one thing in the cockpit: radio waves. She thought it was a radio signal, anyway, but it could have been something else that only vaguely resembled it. It probably wasn't radio waves coming all the way from planet Earth, and yet she had all sorts of aggravating chatter buzzing in her ear.

"Unusual spikes in the AT field readings... Looks like something's trying to force entry, I'm detecting outside interference."

"I'm not seeing anything on my end. Jacking into that Angel put so much noise in the data I can barely make heads or tails out of it."

"It could be the Tornado. She's a psychokinesis user."

"Damn, she's already made an enemy out of an S-Class hero? That's Asuka for you."

"Unit 02's AT field has been unusually stable since establishing the connection. Current assessment suggests Tatsumaki poses no threat to the Second Child. Should we engage?"

"Not without the Commander's orders. We can argue self-defense, but sparking a conflict between NERV and the Association isn't something us operators can do unilaterally."

Asuka tuned out the blather, almost like it wasn't even happening.

"Hey! Are you ignoring me? This isn't some cushy hero job anymore, this is a battlefield! Whoever's strongest gets to make the rules! And I'm giving you ten seconds to answer my question before I stomp on you! Are you going to get in my way or not?!"

It all faded into a noise for Tatsumaki. Just a sea of bullshit she could sink into. She'd heard an American saying once about the straw that broke the camel's back. Tatsumaki had been in that very situation many times. Every time she thought, if I can just push through this, that's all I have to do, right around the corner was another straw.

By now she was lucky to get the straws. Sometimes she ran straight into a chisel. Her whole life had been nothing but a long string of chips and cracks designed to wear her down.

But she'd never been broken.

She didn't change. When they pushed her, she pushed back.

"What if I was going to get in your way? What would you do then?" Tatsumaki asked.

Asuka was taken aback, for some reason. If she thought Tatsumaki was going to let Asuka put her feet up on her back, she didn't know her at all.

"I- you- I'm Rank 2! I'm stronger than you! I wouldn't let you throw yourself at Vilgax just so he can smack you away! Yeah, that's right, I know what happened on the ship! I was there! I could have beaten him! And if you show up to ruin everything next time..."

The right words were so obvious they released from Tatsumaki's mouth as if by magic.

"You'll force me?"

Unit 02 was standing in deep water. At least fifty feet deep. And its legs were tens of thousands of metric tons on their own. The force required just to take one step would have been like a supernova.

None of that mattered. Tatsumaki knew that she was much more powerful than she appeared at first glance, that her size disguised her strength. But she didn't think it would be true for the EVA.

The thing fucking howled at her. Its jaw unhinged. It crouched forward, and that was all the warning Tatsumaki got before it jumped.

It was fast. A hell of a lot faster than it should have been. The EVA unit moved like there was no water at all, its agility was extraordinary. So extraordinary, in fact, that even though Tatsumaki had full powers of flight, the ability to move anywhere in three-dimensional space, Asuka almost caught her with one leap. It helped that each one of Evangelion's fingers were bigger than the woman they were trying to crush.

Getting involved in this fight would be a huge mistake. Everything favored Tatsumaki abandoning it. It would have been easy for her. She could fly away, and the EVA wouldn't get far running after her. The bloated corpse at the center of the lake anchored it. Its maximum reach wouldn't go past that umbilical cord, unless she dragged it behind her, which would give Tatsumaki even more time to escape. The EVA appeared to have no ranged weaponry at all. Finally, and most importantly: Tatsumaki did not have any reason to fight. Let Asuka rant and rave. The one who'd defeat Vilgax in the end wasn't settled by words. It would be whoever got to him first.

Tatsumaki didn't want to get stuck in some lengthy engagement, either. She was seriously hurt. She'd put some psychic reinforcement into holding her body together, but she couldn't dampen the pain when she was busy fighting. The injuries from her fight with Accelerator were coming back to her. The ache in her jaw, the bruise on her stomach, every hard knock she'd gotten.

So why didn't she run?

Was it really just her pride? Tatsumaki wasn't the type to flee a challenge she thought she could win, but she wasn't an idiot, either. She wouldn't bang her head against a brick wall. Not when she needed to conserve her strength for the battle against Vilgax. But there was still a chance that Fubuki could be here. She didn't know where else she'd look for her. If she abandoned that now, her miniscule chance of reuniting with her sister would be reduced to nothing.

She wouldn't do it. She couldn't do it.

Letting that go now would almost be like admitting her sister was right to say all those things about her, and Tatsumaki wouldn't be able to handle that.

If this fight would be her last, then let it kill her. It would be Fubuki's fault anyway for trying to hurt her own sister like this. Maybe then she'd learn to appreciate what she had before it all disappeared.

But if Tatsumaki did win. If she pulled this thing off and wrecked that EVA. Wouldn't it be spectacular?

Nothing could be a more fitting prelude to her victory over Vilgax. That small, weak woman, Tatsumaki, would topple a giant.

So she didn't escape when Asuka gave her the opportunity. She counterattacked. Her powers couldn't directly affect Asuka through her AT field, but she could alter the terrain just fine. The water Asuka stood in became a weapon. Waves rose up and became liquid hammers to crash into the EVA's body.

It swayed a bit. The machine was surprisingly resilient. Every one of those hits created ripples that spread across the whole lake, but there weren't any visible signs of damage.

Was that blasphemous organic power source Asuka had jacked into boosting her abilities somehow? Tatsumaki couldn't begin to guess.

"I won't ever let you face Vilgax," Asuka said. "That's my right you're talking about! My right! Everything I've lived and trained and burned for! I made my body into a gun to kill Vilgax. I'm not letting you take away what I deserve!"

"Deserve?!"

The EVA splashed at Tatsumaki with a cupped hand. A single arm movement's worth of force was enough to make the droplets hit her psychic barrier as hard as cannonballs. If she kept herself up in the air like this, Asuka had limited options, and using the water like rocks from a sling was the EVA's best bet... but Tatsumaki couldn't do much to injure her, either.

"A brat like you doesn't deserve anything! I need this more than anyone... I've given up everything just to be here! I'm going to be the one who takes his head, because I want it more!"

"No, I want it more!"

EVA-02's shoulder split open. From the sleeve of its joint it unsheathed a knife with a vibrating blade, large enough to hold Tatsumaki's entire body in the reflection. It gave Asuka just a bit of extra reach by her standards. Maybe fifty feet or so. Tatsumaki already had a handle on EVA's range, she was used to fighting giant monsters and she knew to stay away from their grabby hands. She evaded the knife's edge easily, staying a car's length away from the flat tip.

Tatsumaki didn't expect the blade to extend.

It was just enough to reach Tatsumaki, more by coincidence than planning. She threw up a psychic shield. The high-frequency progressive knife melted through that shield like snow in summer. Tatsumaki was only just barely able to keep herself distant enough to save her head from a carving, but she still got scraped across the cheek for her trouble.

The high-speed molecular vibration on the knife's edge kept the wound from bleeding. It was almost like it had been cauterized. An instant scar, left by a phantom claw.

How long had it been since she'd really gotten hurt through her psychic shield? Tatsumaki couldn't even remember. And this one, random fight had suddenly left her with a personal injury, just like that. She didn't accept it. There was no way she was ending this without leaving that EVA with some of its own scars.

The only problem was she couldn't touch it directly with its own barrier up. Really, it wasn't much of a setback. Her AT field wouldn't allow their barriers to touch directly. Any intermediary would work. She already knew water did the trick. Something more solid might cause even more damage. There just wasn't anything around but water and that wretched corpse, one she couldn't lift either because the amniotic sac was coated in its own buzzing AT field, like an electric fence.

Underneath the deep lake, all Tatsumaki had to dig up was the ground itself. It was all pure marble the entire length of the water, for as far as she could scan, and she could scan it pretty far. That worked for her. She didn't have to move her hand or twitch one finger to shift the ground under its feet. Huge cracks opened up like jaws filled with white teeth, multiple plates of rock scraped to different elevations. The water was starting to drain. EVA-02 kept its footing.

Tatsumaki clapped her hands together. Two enormous sheets of marble mimicked her motion and slammed against the EVA, pinning it in place. That worked for about four seconds. Asuka's mech had enough strength to move its right arm a bit despite being squeezed against the rock. That was all it took for her prog knife to dice up a hundred cubic meters of solid marble like soft cheese.

It was fast. Not as fast as Tatsumaki was herself, but it was fast enough to keep her on her toes, and that was despite its size. Pillars of stone as tall as ten-story buildings shot out at her. EVA-02 grabbed the first column out of the air and twirled it like a polestaff, striking away the rest until the projectiles and the staff crumbled into dusty chunks, dancing through the holes that Tatsumaki had carved into the ground.

If Tatsumaki could just get that knife out of the way, she'd have a much better chance at landing a clean blow on the EVA. The problem was the cutting edge. Asuka had a high-frequency knife. Its molecules vibrated rapidly, allowing it to shear through essentially any material. She didn't have access to something that would blunt it.

She had to catch her out somehow. That EVA was incredibly agile. Despite how viciously Tatsumaki ripped up the lake, Asuka guided her robot through it with leaps and even flips. Nothing she threw at her was fast enough to touch her. It was completely unexpected, and humiliating for a veteran hero like Tatsumaki, but Asuka was too fast to be hit. An almost fifteen-year experience difference and hundreds of feet of size difference meant nothing. The only way she could overcome it was throwing even more at her. All she could do was fight harder. More rock pillars, more heavy stones, flowing marble like water in huge waves.

She finally hit the flat side of her prog knife with a Sisypheanly huge boulder. Half the blade of the knife snapped off. It spun in the air as a huge, flat sheet of metal before Tatsumaki caught it. Asuka just extended the knife some more, until it was back to its original height. She didn't know what she expected. At least she had something Asuka couldn't cut. That would be her shield for now.

Tatsumaki flew in close with the blade shard. It was a suicidal tactic, but it was her best chance of landing a strike. She had to get around the EVA unit's arms to strike it. Otherwise it would just deflect whatever she attacked with. Asuka guessed her plan the moment Tatsumaki dived, tried to catch her, but Tatsumaki just barely slipped between EVA-02's fingers and almost got her hair snagged on a ridge of the unit's hand. There was less than a quarter inch of difference between life and death for Tatsumaki in that moment. The coin flip went her way. She got close enough to swing the blade shard and slash the EVA's throat.

Tatsumaki didn't even know what she was looking at. Scarlet ichor was splattering out of its neck. How could a machine have blood? No, did it really belong to the EVA? It had connected to that angel fetus, connected its cable and sucked up its juices, was that what was spraying out of it? She didn't know, and she didn't want to know.

Shit, it got in her mouth. She must not have perceived it as an attack, so the splash slipped through her barrier. It was even more disgusting to her because of her sudden realization, just on taste, that the red fluids pouring out of its wounds weren't blood, or even some kind of oil. There was a coppery aftertaste to it, but Tatsumaki knew full well that this flavor was alcoholic.

Its blood was wine. And that was the stuff that filled the cockpit Asuka was stuck inside, stuffing her nose and mouth and lungs and stomach. She was screaming. Even though it had only happened to the robot itself, not the pilot, she was screaming and clutching her throat. The EVA's hand clutched at the metal throat of the machine. Haptic feedback.

The other hand, its free hand, snapped shut around Tatsumaki.

It was no use fighting. Whatever AT field suppression technology it was built with prevented Tatsumaki from wrestling out of it, and now it was squeezing the life out of her. She could barely maintain enough of a barrier around her body to keep herself alive. Its grip strength could have turned coal into diamond. That was the kind of power being pressed down onto her lungs, and EVA-02 snarled at her with red leaking from its jaws like foam from a slobbering rabid dog.

She was really going to die, now. She would never even reach Vilgax. Tatsumaki had started a fight when she thought she was perfectly advantaged and ended up completely at her opponent's mercy, and they had none. Her fate was inevitable. But she didn't stop struggling. She kept pushing back.

Back at the volcano, Tatsumaki had pressed up against a barrier. It wasn't a physical shield. It wasn't something that materially existed in this world. It was only a conceptual stopping point, but nevertheless, she'd crashed right into it headfirst.

Whether it was her body, mind, or soul, there was a limit of power she couldn't surpass. Tatsumaki was as strong now as she could ever become. In the future, as her brain aged, her abilities would only deteriorate.

Tatsumaki didn't know that back on earth, there was a certain man who had destroyed those limitations (and, as said before, that man's fate will be revealed in due time). He'd achieved strength enough to best any enemy in a single punch. But that wasn't the kind of power any human could just achieve. It was theoretically possible for anyone that invested the effort. So was winning the lottery. What mattered were all those inscrutable little checkboxes you'd have to tick to accomplish what he did, unlocking the alchemy that led to infinite growth.

It wasn't for lack of trying. No one could ever say that Tatsumaki didn't try as hard as she could. It wasn't about effort. It definitely wasn't worthiness, or virtue. Maybe it was about mentality. Or maybe it was all luck. Tatsumaki had been such an unlucky woman that this may have been the moment Fortuna's wheel spun in her favor, for once in her life.

Maybe she had to exhaust every last resource and burn every last wick before she could find that last extra bit of strength.

But something happened. That strength existed. Tatsumaki found it and pushed it out, and then in the blink of an eye EVA's hand was gone, shattered into one million metal splinters.

She picked up EVA-02 and smashed it into the ground. The splash alone was enough to kick up skyscraper-sized waves. Yes, it had an AT field. Nuclear missiles or conventional weaponry would have had no effect, the same way they had almost no effect on Tatsumaki herself. But they were both made out of the same "material", if it could be called a material. If Asuka could break through Tatsumaki's barrier, then Tatsumaki could break through hers. And once she was underneath the skin, all she had was metal. It may as well have been made of paper.

Now that she was strong enough to crack EVA-02 open like an egg, the giant golem was nothing more than a doll. Its joints could be snapped. Its armor could be crumpled. Tatsumaki kept shoving the thing so hard against any available surface that its head started to tear further and further at its neck injury until it finally tore off roughly, sinking underneath the lake's surface. That didn't stop EVA-02 from thrashing around as wildly as ever. Apparently losing its head did nothing to stop it. That wasn't where the pilot was located. Honestly, she didn't even give a damn about the pilot right now, and she knew if it were her in that seat and Asuka crushing her like a tin can she wouldn't give a second thought to finishing her off.

And she slammed it back down into the water again, landing it right on its feet. The impact would have been enough to shatter its legs if it were a human, probably even snap its spine. Everything went back to Asuka. The damage wasn't physically reflected, but she could feel every bit of damage to the EVA. She felt her body falling to pieces, her head coming loose, the sensation of death again and again. Only madness stapled her together in that cockpit.

The blood of the divine washed over her. Asuka was numb. She could only make out two things in the night on the lake. She saw the light of the moon. She saw Tatsumaki, her destroyer, shadowed in front of it.

Asuka's left arm was limp. She lifted up her remaining hand in the cockpit, and the EVA followed her actions. It reached out to the light.

The light reached back.

Somewhere far away, so distant it was in another galaxy entirely, illuminated by a different star, there was a modest blue planet surrounded by space junk. Most of that junk was composed of satellites. One of them was a spear.

This ruby-red bident, over two hundred and fifty feet long, was not of terrestrial origin. It had been created by an ancient alien race and imbued with godlike power, designed to seal away that which could not be sealed. To those progenitors, it was a mass-production item as common as a firearm. To the humans who witnessed it, it was a weapon to pierce the divine. And those humans gave that weapon a name to match their awe: the Lance of Longinus.

It had been thrown once. Asuka had seen its casting, a throw to spear through an avenging Angel. Thrown once and never again. After use it flew off into space and joined the rest of the low-orbit junkyard, laying dormant. It had been asleep for years.

Now, for the first time in a long time, the Lance of Longinus twitched to life. It started to move.

Battleworld was an unfathomable distance from Earth. Faster-than-light travel was a necessity to make that voyage by starship, and even then, the journey took days. The holy lance only had a few minutes to reach its destination. That was fine. That was achievable. The rules of physics that humans allowed themselves to be restrained by were all things they'd invented. Angels were not so easily shackled.

It accelerated until it reached the speed of light. At this point, its mass was theoretically infinite.

The lance breached the speed of light. At 186,282 miles per second, it would take a beam of light approximately twelve and a half minutes to reach Mars from Earth. The Lance of Longinus raced by with ease.

Since the rule of lightspeed was already shattered, there was no harm in breaking it a little further. A beam of light from the Earth to Pluto took almost four hours at their closest point. The Lance of Longinus surpassed even that.

These were small numbers. Those planets were only billions or hundreds of millions of miles away.

The holy lance would have to reach far beyond that. It accelerated to the edge of the galaxy. It crossed lightyears in the blink of an eye. Hundreds, millions, trillions. The impossible spear blinked right past Messier 31. As it continued to accelerate limitlessly, galaxies themselves disappeared into a garbled palette of molten colors.

That spear had heard the call of its destined owner. The one who was meant to hold it now, at this one perfect crystalline moment. It would come. It would make it to its wielder's hand even if it had to cross the universe.

It would part the skies, as suddenly as the gods revealing themselves to man, and it would appear.

And that weapon, the lance of legend, came down like a bolt of lightning to land in the palm of EVA-02's hand.

Asuka and Tatsumaki both stared in wonderment. Asuka may have been even more amazed than Tatsumaki herself. She was the only one who knew how glorious this miracle truly was.

"It's really mine..." She laughed, and the sound was rugged and raw from her injuries, like her lungs were scraping together. "You finally chose me! I was the one that was supposed to have that lance, it was always supposed to go to the best! I was the strongest, I was the smartest! But you were the only one who rewarded me! Ahahahaha! I see it now! I see everything now! Everything you took away was just testing me! Now I'm finally going to get everything I deserve!"

Unit 02 pulled its arm back. The Lance of Longinus was angled right for Tatsumaki. That spear was so gargantuan in size that even the point eclipsed Tatsumaki's entire body, and the spear-shaft grew backwards until it disappeared over the horizon line.

"Gott in Himmel, I give myself over to you!"

She pulled her body forward, and with its last act, EVA-02 cast the spear.

This was a suicidal attack. Now that Asuka had launched it, there was no chance of her surviving. She was putting more than one hundred percent of herself into that blow. Once she'd expended that, there was nothing left. Already the only remnants of Asuka in the cockpit were fading embers, the sparks after the bullet had already led the chamber. This was it. That's how much Asuka had sacrificed for her pride. She had given absolutely everything, in her totality, just to kill Tatsumaki with this.

Tatsumaki could not even attempt to evade.

She could not even attempt to counterattack.

There were no other options for her. The lance itself was not so wide or so fast she couldn't avoid it, but the pressure surrounding it was a thousand times more vast. The impact was what was unavoidable. Any attempt to do anything at all would see Tatsumaki liquefied into a rain of blood, and then those droplets would be evaporated into nothingness.

She'd have to put everything into defending. This was the metaphorical unstoppable force. It was a weapon beyond anything operating on scientific principles. A spear like that could only be countered by an immovable object, a wall so mighty it could challenge the lance of God. Tatsumaki had to create that.

It was a daunting task. But ultimately, it was just a stronger version of something she'd been doing all this time. Creating a psychic barrier. An AT field.

She didn't try to cover a large area. She didn't even try to cover herself in a bubble, a flat wall was all she needed. Minimizing coverage, she focused solely on its capacity to protect.

The force of the air it was displacing hit the shield long before the spear itself. Even that was nearly enough to break down the wall Tatsumaki had built. The wind currents created by the throw were enough to rip the water away in tidal waves, exposing the bare ground underneath, which was ripped away too as if by great clawing hands.

Asuka hadn't even thrown the thing that hard, even though EVA-02 had thrown it as hard as its body was capable of. The EVA unit's arm strength was a microscopic fraction of the actual physical force it was exhibiting now. Seemingly the lance was generating kinetic energy from nothing at all. It accelerated entirely on the will of the one who had thrown it, in some new kind of transference that was outside the laws of thermodynamics entirely.

Tatsumaki, who had broken into the realm of the infinite, was almost blown away by that spear.

Two indomitable forces clashed. Tatsumaki's willpower ground against the eternal lance like a dental drill digging into a raw nerve. The Lance of Longinus hammered her psychic barrier until she started hallucinating, until she imagined her blood boiling and her hair falling out and eyes bursting out of their sockets. Colors drained out of her vision. The world narrowed to a single point leaving only Tatsumaki and the spear with no room for anything else that collapsed around her.

She found herself being pushed back, slowly and steadily, and she strained to keep the Lance of Longinus at bay. There were cracks in the wall. If she thought it would break, she visualized it breaking, and that vision became reality. Thinking about it made it worse. Telling herself not to think about it made it worse. Tatsumaki began to imagine herself breaking like the shell of an egg with cracks steadily going through her skin, and her psychic abilities risked making it come true. No matter what happened, she held fast. She did not let her power waver. She resisted the spear even as her body threatened to wither away under its pressure.

It had not been enough. The wall would break. No matter how strong Tatsumaki was, that lance was on a higher level of authority. This wasn't some common projectile weapon that operated on comprehensible laws. It was a divine weapon connected to an ancient divinity, or a simulacrum connected to a simulacrum. Tatsumaki couldn't do it. She'd given her best possible effort, but it was impossible alone. She was going to die. When she saw the wall crack, she'd already lost faith in her ability to maintain it, and that trust in herself was impossible to reclaim.

Victory was impossible alone.

Defeat was inevitable alone.

But Tatsumaki was not alone.

Tatsumaki's strength had reached such impossible heights of mathematics that any additional power, no matter how much, should have been an almost unnoticeable difference. You cannot add to the infinite. But something was added. Tatsumaki could sense a shift from something outside her view, something that reinforced her psychic barrier to keep it from the brink of shattering. It was that single push from an interloper that spared her life.

She could not look up. No matter how terrible the spear that descended upon her, it was even more frightening to look away and see what invisible hand aided her now. She already knew who it was. She knew there was only one person who could sync with Tatsumaki's power like this. On every logical level, it had to be her. But as long as she didn't look, there was still a miniscule chance it wasn't her. And she needed that chance.

If she'd been the one to step in and save Tatsumaki, she didn't think she'd be able to take it.

Despite everything, despite throwing the sum total of her power into her barrier, even power she never knew she had or was capable of, despite that one last nudge from someone who'd been watching over her and was probably giving it all she had as well, despite all of that, Tatsumaki had not been able to halt the cast of the Lance of Longinus. The only thing she'd been able to do was deflect it. She pushed it just slightly to the side, and let it fly past her.

Tatsumaki had at least managed to slow it. She'd dampened its force enough that it wouldn't pulverize her even if it missed. But she'd only dampened it, not negated it. Its weakened aftershocks were enough to throw her violently, like a car crash on a race track with no seatbelts. The G-forces were skull-shaking.

Tatsumaki skipped the ground hard, only managing to keep herself upright in the air at the last possible moment. The diverted lance moved so quickly that Tatsumaki couldn't have hoped to follow it with her eyes. She could only guess at its trajectory by watching how the clouds overhead parted as easily as the Red Sea for Moses, forging a clear line towards the lance's destination. But what was its destination? She only had a second to comprehend it. The deflected Lance of Longinus was heading directly for the most visible landmark on Battleworld.

The moon that shone over Tatsumaki was bright and full.

The moon was full.

Tatsumaki saw the moment the lance broke through. The air cone around the Lance of Longinus pushed downward into the lunar sphere before the point even hit rock. Its structural integrity collapsed almost instantly. That single throw cratered the moon, crumpled it inward as cracks spread out across its surface and shattered it all into pieces too fine for Tatsumaki to see individually, only as a mass cluster of fine sand-like particles. And that crumpled scrap of red metal kept on going, further beyond even that., sending the former Lance of Longinus deep into the darkest darkness to be forgotten forever.

Tatsumaki could not join it no matter how much she wanted to.

She slowly, unsteadily, floated downwards until she was only barely keeping herself above the blood-tainted water.

They'd done it. Tatsumaki had parried a bullet to kill the moon.

It took a moment for her body's mechanisms to kick back in. Her heart had to remember how to beat again. Her eyes, more like passive receptors than part of a cohesive body, scanned over the body of EVA-02. It did not stir. The pilot inside it was unresponsive.

She was dead.

It didn't take Tatsumaki long to comprehend it. Not like with Accelerator. She'd already sort of accepted it. No moment of chill or shattering terror. Just numbness.

Tatsumaki didn't even want to justify it. There was no reason to be in that fight. She could have run.

What did Fubuki see?

No. It must have been everything. Had she watched the entire time? Had she really not lifted a finger to help? But why would she help, anyway? Tatsumaki was the one that always told her to stay out of it. She'd pushed to keep her sister in a cushy public-facing position at the Hero Association, away from any rigorous work. She'd screened everyone her sister came in contact with to make sure she didn't get hurt. Was she supposed to throw all that away now? Just because she needed that help? Of course Tatsumaki thought that Fubuki's powers could be useful, she knew how strong her sister was, but she'd never done it for her. That was for Fubuki's own good! Was it supposed to show her some kind of hypocrisy, the way Fubuki was behaving? Fine! Whatever! This didn't prove anything!

Go ahead.

Go away. If you want to throw all those years in the garbage and treat Tatsumaki like trash, do it.

The only thing Tatsumaki regretted about the way she'd lived her life was that she'd ever allowed herself to get her heart broken.

Somehow, she felt that this was an ending, that Fubuki would not cast her eyes this way again, not in the same way she used to, that her sister had proven all she needed to and that was it. Tatsumaki was now useless to her. She was low, and worthless and nothing.

And nothing was changing. She couldn't wake up from this horrible dream, couldn't reverse it. That was life for you. Time's arrow only ever flew in one direction.

Destroying Vilgax was all she had left now, and there was no way for her to alter the course.

She was really dreading coming back to Mordred now. No matter how strong she'd become now, Tatsumaki had the feeling she had turned into something she did not want anyone else to witness.

Chapter Text

He was the man who could meditate at the bottom of a stratovolcano in mid-eruption. Vilgax had survived that.

Who could fly through the cold reaches of space, temperatures so low that light sagged and slowed in the chill? Vilgax had survived that, too.

He had been hammered and forged by infinite war. He had been crushed, impaled, beheaded, disemboweled, flayed, boiled, ground, and exsanguinated. Whole civilizations beat their plowshares into swords, turning their brightest minds to work inventing entire new fields of weaponcraft. All to kill him. And he was still alive.

It was certainly possible to kill him. One would simply have to destroy his body before it could repair. He could have knelt down and allowed himself to be obliterated any time he wished. Why did he not do so? Why did he not bring his endless life to an end?

It was a curse.

The curse was laid when the old Emperor spoke to him.

"You will never be satisfied."

All Vilgaxians dreamed of conquering the universe. The borders of their empire ever shifted. What is the point of conquest? To conquer more. That was all they were capable of.

Vilgax had been the first of them strong enough to achieve it. His purpose was fulfilled. But he could not escape the curse.

"You will turn the blade on yourself."

How dare he? At that time Vilgax thought himself invincible. At the end of his road, when all had been claimed, he would rest on the immortal throne and watch over all creation like a god.

But he could not.

The old king's words had infected him.

Perhaps even Vilgax himself did not know it. He challenged the universe to kill him. "Bring me worthy challengers!" he bellowed. But that was only a veneer, a mask.

The curse inside him was the curse of fear. The fear the old man had been right.

And ever since that day, the fear grew and boiled up inside of him like rising vomit. He just needed to find the thing that would satisfy him! Just one more thing, and then he could withstand this agonizing worthlessness! He wouldn't allow himself to die! He wouldn't die!

His survival instincts mutated. They consumed his every thought. And now that all those thoughts were eaten up, his true self could come out. The self that was only fear of dying.

So Vilgax had withstood the complete destruction of his ego.

Just another thing he had survived.

He dragged his body through the jungle brush and over the rocky crags until he came to the edge of a cliff. The stone was red as blood. Only a few shrubs survived out here. The expanse was breathtakingly huge, but there was little in him to appreciate the beauty. He only saw two things: things that were not threats, and things that were threats. Nothing beyond that mattered now.

Vilgax looked up, and saw the sky was full of starships.

When he saw the ships come, he did not even recognize them. Vilgax took one glance at their bulky and ugly designs that blocked out the stars, instantly analyzed their make, considered all the weapons that such a warship held, and found them wanting. Not a threat, he thought.

The ship blared some ugly staticky noise at him.

"[Lord Vilgax, are you alright? We've brought an extraction team to take you off of Battleworld!]"

He cocked his head. The ship was too loud. It irritated him. What if he picked up a rock and hurled it up there, past the planet's atmosphere? Could he tear straight through the thousand-foot-long taydenite hull of the battlecruiser with a single throw? Most likely.

"[Lord Vilgax, what are your orders? What happened to your Praetors? Can you speak? Can you fight?]"

Maybe he should.

He scraped up a handful of rock with his bare hand, and squeezed its shape into a perfectly smooth ball. Cries of "Lord Vilgax!" battered against his unthinking skull. He tossed the ball a few times in his palm, just feeling out its weight. Every time he let the ball fall back into his hand, it felt as heavy as the footsteps of a giant. Thump. Thump. Thump. A drumbeat steadily growing closer, louder.

One final toss and he caught the ball in his hand. The footsteps continued. Vilgax turned around.

There was a colossal monster colored red-ruby and white-gold. It stood twice as tall as even the enormous Vilgax, who was twice as tall as any mortal man. He had six arms. He had two faces. His head eclipsed a halo that shined like the sun.

"Man, I was worried we were gonna be running around all day looking for ya! Good thing you brought the whole cavalry with you! You're not very good at keeping a low profile, are ya, squidface?"

Threat, he thought.

"Human! Whatever your intentions are, stand down now!" The throaty Vilgaxian language changed to Earthling dialect. "We have enough firepower to obliterate this planet! We will not hesitate to use it on you!"

"If you think you can scare me with the speeches, forget it!" Two arms crossed over the giant's chest, and two more heroically put their hands on their hips. "The only speeches I'll allow around here are the ones about hopes and dreams! I'm the incredible Kamina, heroic leader of Team Dai-Gurren! He is the unbreakable Simon, whose willpower is limitless! Together, we're stronger than the sum of our parts! We're Gurren Lagann, and our drill is the-"

"Engaging 20-kiloton nuclear missiles!"

The underside of the ship opened to reveal a quartet of cannons. Missiles slid easily out of their sheaths and engaged thrusters. From there, Gurren Lagann took a step back and got into a combat stance, palms flat like a sumo wrestler. These missiles weren't intended for interstellar warfare. They were intended for on-planet engagements, to destroy cities at worst. That meant they only traveled at twenty-four thousand kilometers an hour.

Gurren Lagann parried every nuclear missile with its flat-palm strikes. Every one was pushed aside, rocketing off-course and detonating harmlessly beyond the horizon line.

"Whoa! That's sure got a hell of a kick for a warning shot! Hey, Simon, you think you can take them?"

"H-huh? Yeah, I think so. Sorry. I was just surprised that they used the metric system..."

This thing was strong. It was an enemy that could deny Vilgax his immortality. That was not something he could allow, and he wouldn't wait for his useless battlecruisers to pull themselves together.

Vilgax threw the first punch.

Gurren Lagann caught it.

Just the shockwave of his blocked strike sent cracks all down the cliff across the canyon, stretching into the distance. The battlecruisers shuddered from the force.

"Whoa! He nearly caused a rockslide with a single hit!"

"Yeah, and you blocked it, didn't ya? Just believe in yourself, Simon! This is what we've been training for!"

"Right!"

Simon slammed forward on the throttle and Gurren Lagann hooked a punch right into Vilgax's stomach. And Vilgax broke through the clouds.

He impacted against the outer hull of a battlecruiser starship and crumpled the metal plating like tinfoil. None of his momentum slowed. Vilgax only ricocheted off, and the backlash rocked the entire cruiser until it scraped against the side of its ally ship thousands of feet away in space.

Below him was Battleworld. He was so far above his atmosphere that gravity had no effect, the world's curvature was clearly visible. Above him and around him were the stars. Everything within his sight belonged to Vilgax. All of those twinkling galaxies were his to rule over. The only thing that would not obey was Gurren Lagann.

It would have to be destroyed.

First he had to free himself from the vacuum of space. The lack of pressure and oxygen were negligible concerns for Vilgax, but the lack of gravity was not. He didn't have the power to fly unassisted. Or, maybe he had, and he had discarded it...? Irrelevant. What he needed was to get himself to a more advantageous tactical position, on the ground.

He dug his teeth into his arm and tore until the hand and bone ripped away entirely, spraying cerulean blood into space to drift eternally. It was hardly an injury to him. The fibers of his muscles were already starting to regrow. All he needed was a projectile.

Every forward force has a corresponding backward force. If he reared back and threw his severed limb away from the planet, in a pure vacuum the force would launch him back to Battleworld!

Vilgax burned from the air friction. The skin melted off of him and bubbled up in new layers, cycles of regeneration. This wasn't the first time he'd gone through atmospheric reentry. He'd long ago evolved beyond the need for pain receptors. For him, being on fire was only a benefit. One more time he broke through the clouds, and angled himself down towards Gurren Lagann for a fire-blazing divekick.

BANG! His foot cracked against the robot's metal head with enough force to nearly tear it from the neck. Vilgax expertly transitioned into a combo, relying solely on the strength of his blazing kicks to keep himself in the air.

"Grrr! Simon, can ya do something about the toasted marshmallow up here?!"

"Don't worry, I've got him!"

Vilgax's next kick whiffed. Lagann detached from its base on Gurren's neck and bounced back at the last possible moment. He still had quite a bit of destructive power without jacking into Gurren's power source; after all, his drill was the key that kick-started the divine motor. That was the same drill Vilgax stared down now, a bit the size of his entire body that rotated hypnotically at an impossible RPM. Lagann charged forward to rip Vilgax to shreds, but Vilgax squatted into a power stance and reached out to embrace Lagann-

-and caught it.

He'd reinforced himself against Gurren Lagann's strikes. It was the natural evolutionary instinct in his body, the same kind of stuff that Anti kid was spliced with. If he was too light to withstand their punches, he would bloat his chitin until his muscle mass was heavy enough to crack the earth.

That was the only reason Simon didn't splatter him with his Lagann bull rush. The point of the drill gouged through his armor, but it was only able to break through a few inches of his musculature. Vilgax's clawed hands were even capable of halting Lagann's spin through brute strength alone.

But he was not capable of stopping Lagann's flight. He wasn't heavy enough for that. And if Lagann couldn't move forward as a drill, it moved forward as a battering ram, slamming Vilgax down into the rock and scraping him straight over the canyon down the cliffside. Its speed compared favorably to Vilgaxia's quickest aircraft, double-digit Mach numbers, tearing tunnels through solid rock until the insides of the cliff were as holey as an ant farm. Vilgax's skin was hard, and his bones were harder. Being slammed through thousands of tons of stone wasn't much of a beating for him. The plan was more to tenderize him, soften him up with constant persistent damage so they could weaken Vilgax for a super-strong finishing move.

Lagann breached the cliff face once again, spraying rock chunks like seafoam, and flew directly towards Gurren with Vilgax still impaled on the front. Gurren cocked its arms, shotgun-style. The several mudra-performing hands of Gurren transformed into a mess of drills.

When Vilgax was about to slam into Gurren, Kamina crashed every drill into Vilgax at the same time, combining the force of Lagann and Gurren's drills to compress Vilgax from every angle! This was the finishing move that they'd just come up with, the deadly pincer attack- Brotherly Claw!

The current form of Gurren had six arms. Each arm ended in one hand, which became two drills apiece. Combined with Lagann's sole giant drill, that was an unlucky total of thirteen drills all spearing into Vilgax at the same time. Together they'd reduced Vilgax to the status of a pincushion, achieving one of the highest echelons of performance for all warriors he had ever faced. Out of hundreds of thousands of venerable heroes, less than ten had ever subjected him to such humiliation.

Even worse for Vilgax, the damnable Vilgaxian armada chose that moment to act. Until this point, they'd been too fearful of damaging Vilgax to take decisive action. Now that there was no choice, their commander chose that moment to order another launch. The earlier missiles were merely Class-2 weaponry. The Legate Commander gave the order to authorize Class-7 weapons immediately.

"[Deploying rapid-loader tungsten rod launcher!]"

One hundred miniature tungsten rods per second launched from the Vilgaxian magnetic miniguns. The landscape was shredded to pieces in less than even that second. An entire cliffside carefully constructed as the setting for large-scale Battleworld conflicts, completely deleted, mile-sized chunks eaten out of the rock with every bullet when every bullet was followed by thousands more bullets. Simon, Kamina, and Vilgax, all of them were caught in the rain of metal which could chew apart a mountain range.

The Legate Commander had no time to call off the barrage. They planned to give the order after at least thirty seconds of sustained fire, enough to be sure the enemy was dead. The poor bastard never even had time to swing their hand down before the impact.

KRA-KOOOM!!

Gurren and Lagann smashed Vilgax against the side of the Mostly Harmful and flipped the entire ship upside-down as easily as a pancake on the griddle. Vilgax was still pinned between the two of them, trapped between a terrifying array of drills, but the force of the blow against the starship was enough to tear him free of them. His body was a terrible sight. It was all torn-up, ragged, full of holes and fissures. Some of those holes went through his head. Somehow, impossibly, he survived. The will that animated him was far stronger than mere brute force. That thing had become antithetical to life.

For what is the opposite of life? Not death, which is a natural stage of life, but eternity, which denies meaning to life. He was supreme and master to it. Kalantaka - that title which had been given to Shiva when he killed Yama, the embodiment of death, now belonged to Vilgax. 'He who ends time.' I am become Shiva, I destroy the destroyer of worlds.

Gurren backflipped through space and landed on the back of another starship. Simon flew to his brother's side, reconnecting Lagann to its seat of command on top of Gurren. This was the true strength of Vilgax's near-immortality. Even Kamina had to admit it was impressive.

"Think you can handle it, Simon? The fight's gonna get a lot harder from here."

Simon nodded his head in the cockpit, and Gurren Lagann nodded to mimic him.

"I'm not afraid. Those ships might look like a lot, but they're just Vilgax's shadow. He's the only one we've got to worry about. If any of them get in our way... we'll drill on through!"

Kamina grinned. "That's the spirit! Let's go, we'll take him on together-"

"A-actually... I'm going to split up for a bit. I just had an idea. But I'm going to need you to trust me on this."

Simon didn't usually ask to take the lead, so the unusual request gave Kamina pause. But if that's what he wanted, there was no way he was going to say no.

"Give 'em hell, Simon!"

"Right!"

Lagann separated from Gurren. While Gurren gunned it straight for Vilgax, piloting through the barrage of laser fire and intergalactic artillery that the armada volleyed at him, Lagann made a sharp turn. Its drill revved, green sparks erupted like a firework, and it drilled straight into the impenetrable hull of the VES Ungovernable.

Beyond the mechanical workings of ancient alien technology. Beyond the boundaries of common sense and reason. Lagann, and Simon by extension, was capable of tapping into a fundamental energy of the universe, spiral energy. It was the energy of evolution, change, ego, and struggle, the very same force that Vilgax attempted to harness to summon God to Battleworld. The power to harness it, control it, was what allowed Simon to perform the feat he was about to accomplish.

His hands gripped the throttles, pressed the triggers, and slammed it down.

Veins of spiral energy snaked through the Ungovernable, slipping into every wire and circuit across the entire ship within seconds. Inside, the Vilgaxians only saw the lights go out and heard the ship groaning. Outside, the brutalist grays of the warship transformed, taking on the same heroic red-and-gold metal of Lagann's chassis.

This was Lagann's greatest strength. It had the power to subsume any vehicle it could embed its drill into, the same way it had combined with Gabriel. And now, Lagann had combined with the battlecruiser.

At the same time that Gurren collided with Vilgax, smashing him down into the hull of another warship in an enormous crater, Simon was reviewing all the weaponry he now had access to. Most of these were words he'd never seen before, words he could barely pronounce. What was a "Bremsstrahlung missile"? Was that any stronger than a "microscopic black hole injection"? He had to think it over carefully. This was a life-or-death situation where even the slightest misstep could cause a catastrophic-

Ah, forget it. Simon hit full throttle.

One hundred different cannons, rifles, lasers, launchers, evaporators, generators, incinerators and decapitators emerged from every free inch of the warship's body like the quills of a porcupine. Kamina, busily slugging it out with Vilgax on the side of a warship, saw Simon's armory of annihilation, knowing full well that any shots fired at Vilgax were guaranteed to hit him as well.

He gave it a thumbs up. Kamina had absolute faith that he could handle whatever Simon was going to throw at them. And Simon had absolute faith in the Kamina that believed in him.

Every kind of weaponry the Vilgaxian empire had dedicated themselves to perfecting activated and detonated at the same time, on top of Vilgax. He wiped out huge swaths of their deployment in an instant. Heat beams sliced, microwaves zapped, atoms combusted, particles ultra-accelerated, and giant vacuums vacuumed. The explosions of the battlecruisers were like a localized galaxy of supernovas.

The crew of the Ungovernable were in a panic. Even for these trained soldiers, a total hijacking to manipulate them against their supreme leader was unprecedented.

"[Stop firing! Stop firing now or I'll have you all thrown into a black hole!]"

"[We can't! We've been locked out of every system! They've got complete control of our weapons, they're launching everything!]"

"[VES Radio the Universe is down! VES Possibility One is down! VES Caracal is down! The regiment is taking heavy losses, Commander!]"

"[Look! It's Lord Vilgax!]"

Despite the shellacking Vilgax was taking from every weapon of war under the sun, or any star's light, he was still fighting. His was a body that only existed to fight. His sheer agility and strength allowed him to jump from ship to ship, avoiding the majority of Simon's attacks. Anything he couldn't avoid was neutralized by his regeneration. Even when Vilgax was seriously, grievously wounded, even when his limbs or head were gone, his body set the bones and grew the organs back into place before he landed on his newest platform.

Kamina never gave up.

Wherever Vilgax fled to, his drills and his fists were there to meet him. He didn't have Vilgax's regeneration. Whatever atomic explosions or collapsing stars crashed into his body, he had to bear those injuries. But he weathered them like Achilles. While the army of spaceships ripped to scrap metal before him, Gurren only took superficial damage from Simon's barrage. After all, Simon trusted him to survive his attacks. Kamina could never let his brother down.

Simon only stopped firing when he heard the click-click-click of a hammer pulling with an empty chamber. It took him less than a minute to tear through the Ungovernable's ammo reserves for everything it had. Had he at least weakened Vilgax? He couldn't even tell.

Lagann uncorked from the Ungovernable and left its power-drained carcass drifting in space before flying towards Gurren once more. The hole in Gurren's neck was still open for him.

"I'm sorry, bro," Simon said as he connected to Gurren's port. "Anything I throw at him, he just shakes it off!"

"Then we just gotta hit him back ten times harder! Don't give up now, I know you're wearing him down! Whatever barriers stand in our way, we've just gotta drill on through!"

Gurren Lagann was significantly stronger than Gurren solo. Even a Vilgaxian warship couldn't compare to the multiplicative power of their brotherly spirit. All the bizarre esoteric space-age weaponry Vilgax had been blasted with left him less dazed than the drill-augmented punches Gurren Lagann was slamming him with now. It was most likely a matter of simple force application. Temperature, radiation, poison, disease, and many other attack vectors had little to no effect. Just punching or stabbing him, that caused visible injury to Vilgax. It threw him through wreckage fields of unwrapped starships and alien corpses.

But even that was not enough to destroy Vilgax. He used the corpses like stepping stones to maneuver in zero-gravity, he grabbed chunks of spaceships bigger than Gurren Lagann and hurled them towards the giant robot. That was not enough.

Any remaining spaceships fired on them with laser weaponry and turned the starry skies into a lightshow. They weren't fretful about destroying their own ships any longer. None of the damage they could do was worse than the damage Gurren Lagann and Vilgax could accomplish simply by brawling. That was not enough.

"Damn it... damn it, damn it!" Simon kicked the console fruitlessly. They kept struggling, but they made no progress. Any time they pierced through Vilgax's skin, it was only temporary, an illusion of success. "Come on, come on! I just need more power!"

"This guy's seriously a monster. There's barely any soul left in him at all, just a sack of flesh shaped like a living thing! But we've made him bleed. And you know what that means? If it bleeds, we can kill it!"

Vilgax crashed his foot into Gurren Lagann's body, something that might have broken its nearly invincible armor if it hadn't blocked. The force rippled through to Kamina. All those heroic platitudes choked in his throat. But he kept going. It wasn't that easy to shut him up.

"Simon, do ya know what we do if we can't win the fight the way we are now?"

The smart answer would have been 'retreat', but Simon knew better. "We just get stronger!"

"Then call on that manly fighting spirit of yours! Let the flames of passion ignite your soul! If you fight for it, Gurren Lagann is sure to hear your call!"

Was that really true? Simon had no idea how the mysterious Lagann operated, and even less how to use this dead angel, Gurren. Just fusing together with it had granted them so much power. Was there even more power locked away in there, waiting to be unsealed? How could he find out?

He had to think, and he had to think fast, because Vilgax was only getting stronger. The longer they fought, the more he adapted. His muscle tissue strengthened. His joints developed a greater range of movement, his heart became more efficient at pumping even more nutrient-rich blood. Now that none of Vilgax's brainpower was being spent on thinking or sentience, the flesh that composed his body could focus on evolution.

Maybe fighting harder instead of smarter wouldn't work here. Maybe this was something only Simon could do...

He tried to breathe and still his heart, even in the fury of battle. It went against every survival instinct his body had; he had to suppress all those fears and let himself go slack. Simon attuned to his spiral energy resonance. He forgot his physical form. While Vilgax destroyed his psyche to become nothing more than a sharpened blade, Simon was willing to destroy everything but his psyche, his appetite, his emotions, his vulnerabilities and passions. He felt the natural flow of Spiral Energy that coursed through Gurren Lagann, and for a moment, became as much a part of it as he was a pilot. And only after this, when he searched the soul of Gurren Lagann, could he find its core. HIS core.

Simon's soul was like a candle to the solar flame he cradled now. This thing... Was it really divine? Was it simply another kind of alien, one that took a religious form? Or was the word "divine" an attempt to confine an impossible concept in an unsuitable container, to make the incomprehensible real in the petty imagination of small minds? How could he ever explain its terrifying beauty? How could he control it?

He would. Even if it was impossible, he'd go beyond that impossibility and kick reason to the curb.

Listen. I know you probably aren't my biggest fan right now... but I'm going to have to borrow this power. It's the only way we can defeat Vilgax now.

The core didn't respond in words. Its language was a series of wavelength changes and serenades, but no less communicative.

LIFE IS STRUGGLE UNENDING. DEATH IS NOT AN ESCAPE. LIFE AND DEATH ARE A DENIAL. THE TRUE PATH IS ACCEPTANCE.

Simon's soul entwined with the core, and Ideas outside the human scope filtered into him. In less than the blink of an eye a mortal man was given knowledge of the Akashic record, all knowledge that was, is, and is to be. Simon understood that there was no return. He understood that all existence was suffering, and that freedom from that suffering was possible. He understood the nature of the Spiral Menace and the Anti-Spiral, and he even knew that Kamina's greatest strength was not in his confidence, which was shakeable, but his compassion, which was infinite.

Above all he knew the truth about this universe: that ultimately, finally, the material world was nothing. Whether Vilgax won or lost this day wouldn't matter any more than a single drop of rain.

KNOWING THIS NOW, WILL YOU STILL FIGHT?

Of course he was going to fight.

Simon would never lose his will to move forward.

It only took on a different form.

With this knowledge, Simon embraced the angel, and Gurren Lagann was enveloped in light.

They transformed. They expanded. Gurren Lagann stretched out like the Big Bang, encompassing everything. Even the Mostly Harmful and the rest of Vilgax's worthless subordinates were swallowed up by it, killing them instantly. It grew larger. Much larger, so large now that Vilgax could not see the entirety of it anymore. So beatific in size that it threatened to obliterate Battleworld, until it grew large enough to take the planet itself carefully into the palm of its hand. So many hands, each one forming a different mudra, achieving a different purpose.

That... was decidedly not Gurren Lagann anymore.

The gold in its color scheme had become much more prominent. There were many more arms, more than Vilgax could count if he tried, and the halo of light around its head was blinding. Vilgax could sense that this new, evolved form of Gurren Lagann had unfathomably more power than the one he had fought. A hundred, no, a thousand times more magnificent- no, numerical values had no meaning in the face of such strength. This was the factor that made Gurren Lagann such a threat, the ability to achieve this form in the face of adversity.

Achieving and rejecting godhood, Simon had abandoned nirvana for the sake of humanity. If Vilgax had become a god above death, then Simon and Kamina had become humans beyond death: a bodhisattva. One who leads others to the path they have already walked.

Kamina was stunned... at first. He was never slow to bounce back. "Nice~! I don't get what's going on, but it's totally badass! Guess I'll have to let you take the lead for this one!"

This new form of Gurren Lagann crossed its arms in a heroic pose. Gurren Lagann was still Gurren Lagann, even as the edges of its sunglasses scraped the sea of stars overhead.

"Our planet rotates on its axis. And that planet spins around the sun! Our solar system, our whole galaxy, everything keeps turning, moving forward into eternity! It's just like our lives. We're born, we live, we age, we die, and our souls are born again! Always fighting, changing, improving, building, to make life better for those that come after us! Vilgax, you're a part of this cycle! No matter how hard we cling to life, everything has to end! Happiness never lasts! Sadness never lasts! That's the beauty of living! The more you push against time's waterfall, time will wear you down! Only by riding the current can we grow strong!"

Simon reached out and caught those stars. The celestial furnace that nourished the life of an entire planet, he could hold between his fingers as easily as marbles. All one thousand hands of the supreme Gurren Lagann cast those stars down on Vilgax, faster than the light could reach his eyes. There was no defense. The enemy he faced did not even resemble an enemy, but a wall that reached in every direction infinitely. And Vilgax was crushed under the weight of endless stars.

Only one thing kept him alive. It was simply his will. Today is not my day to die. And he did not die.

"This is why you fail, Vilgax. You’ll never be some immortal god! You’re a mortal like the rest of us! You’ve got the same weaknesses as all us ordinary humans! And if you still won’t accept it…"

Vilgax emerged from the unlimited light of a sea of stars only to be blinded by the even greater light of Gurren Lagann itself.

"This drill is going to break right through those delusions of yours!"

Those hands that formed the mudras became planet-cracking lances. All of them converged on a single point, and Vilgax saw that there was no avoiding them, because they attacked in the present, past, and future. Every possible probability was attacked simultaneously.

Vilgax was at the center of a confluence as violent as the Big Bang itself.

"OUR DRILL IS THE DRILL THAT DESTROYS THE HEAVENS!"

If Vilgax controlled the universe, there was only one way to wrest control away. Gurren Lagann would have to become one with the universe.

"RIN'NE KAIHOSHA GURREN LAGANN!"

<[SAMSARA LIBERATOR GURREN LAGANN]>

RANK 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

Limitless numbers of drills eradicated his flesh, and when his flesh had been entirely destroyed they drilled through each other. Vilgax, or what once was Vilgax before being crushed into a point smaller than a quark, was surrounded by an ever-condensing array of spears. The greatest and largest drill of them all only drove into the whole after Vilgax had become the densest material in the universe and the tip pierced through him dead-on to rip him apart.

But cracks started to form.

A hand burst out from the mass of drills and peeled them apart like a can opener. He pulled himself out of the chrysalis, his body hulking, veins and sinews rippling as he healed from it all. Vilgax truly had become a monster, or even an asura. No living creature was capable of persisting under the boot of a wrathful God. Already, his skin was being coated in bone plating, hardened to protect him from further drilling. Already, Rin'ne Kaihosha Gurren Lagann burned its spiral energy to create even greater and more magnificent drills to destroy that armor.

"I knew it wasn't gonna be that easy! We're gonna have to turn up the heat!"

Spiral energy was created by powerful emotions. For a long time, Simon had thought that only a passionate fighting spirit could awaken the true strength of Lagann. He'd learned how wrong he was. Anger and fury were no longer in his heart, but his blows were stronger than ever before. Those fists were filled with love for all mankind.

"ABANDONING DESIRE FOR PLEASURE AND AVERSION TO PAIN PUNCH!!"

Vilgax was obliterated by a fist that moved beyond the speed of light. His atoms were not capable of moving fast enough to be pushed out of the way of this blow. Instead they melted into plasma and detonated in a cosmos-rocking explosion.

Vilgax reformed.

"MEDITATION AND MINDFULNESS LEADS TO THE ONE-POINTEDNESS OF ALL THINGS KICK!!"

A foot impacted Vilgax, shattering him through a planet, deep into the molten core, out the other side as the rest of the planet burst apart. Asteroids scattered in every direction and broke apart more moons and planets, causing a chain reaction that pinballed across the solar system.

Vilgax regenerated.

Every time Gurren Lagann destroyed him with a new attack, he grew more resistant to whatever they'd tried to kill him with. But each and every time he spent a little more energy, got a little closer to death. He wasn't inexhaustible.

Its next attack had no fancy name to accompany it. Gurren Lagann only had to reach out and close its hand around Vilgax, and when it opened again, he had fallen into an endless white desert. There was no concept of distance to run to, no concept of outside to escape to. He couldn't even see the sky. The only existence in his prison, besides himself and eternity, were five great mountains across an impossible expanse.

"Hey, Vilgax! Think you can leap out of our palm?"

If Vilgax had any consciousness left, he would have bristled at his enemy's taunting. That pride was a weakness, so his body destroyed it. It concentrated fully on fleeing the desert. He shed excess weight like a snakeskin, got onto all fours, his hands mutated into legs and he ran. This form of Vilgax, adapted to escape, looked more like Wildmutt than the warrior he used to be. But he was fast. So fast that the drills that burst out from the ground only had time to catch his afterimage as he raced towards the mountains. Each bound crossed entire miles, yet the mountains were so vast in scale that they never seemed to get any bigger. He had no conception of how long he was running for. Still he ran. Vilgax ran, and leaped so far he could have escaped orbit, until he came to the mountains at the very edge of the domain.

And he saw that those mountains were not mountains.

And he saw that those mountains were fingers, tall enough to press into the ceiling of the universe.

And he saw that defeating Gurren Lagann truly was impossible. No, his failure was impossible, but he was facing an enemy whose strength overturned even the impossible. They rose to any challenge and defeated any enemy. How could Vilgax have ever entertained the idea of victory? He slammed his head against the strongest of all fundamental laws: the hero always triumphs over the villain in the end.

That was what crushed Vilgax when Gurren Lagann's other palm dropped down on him.

Ever more hands closed in and wrapped around the enclosed Vilgax, forming an eggshell stronger than diamond. One thousand hands in lotus-like arrangements, their fingers wrapped together, created an impenetrable prison.

"We've got him! I think we've got him!"

Defeat! Rejection of the inevitability that made Vilgax what he was! This was inconceivable. He could not allow it, even if it was not physically feasible to reverse his situation. Only Gurren Lagann was the one that could make the impossible possible.

To win, he would have to overturn the overturner. His body required a new alteration, one that wasn't corporeal, but conceptual. Only Vilgax could possibly achieve this power.

Vilgax began to pry apart the hands of Gurren Lagann. The shifting of a single knuckle sent ripples through the galaxy, and Vilgax wrenched away entire limbs through sheer brute strength. It wasn't his muscle that made Gurren Lagann buckle at the elbows. His whole being had undergone an impossible adaptation. He so loathed change that the fundamental force of change itself, spiral energy, was negated by him. He had developed a resistance to evolution itself. This was the closest a living creature could ever come to the Anti-Spiral.

For the first time, Vilgax was able to land a blow on Rin'ne Kaihosha Gurren Lagann. He could have struck whenever he wanted. The mecha was so big that it was nearly impossible to strike anywhere but there. But Vilgax did not wish to attack until he knew his attacks had effect. Now, and only now, would his punch drive home. The undefeatable Gurren Lagann cracked. The Spiral Bodhisattva was made to recoil from a creature smaller than a speck to it.

That was not to say Gurren Lagann made easy prey. They had one thousand times as many hands and endless strength to attack with. For every hundred punches Simon landed on Vilgax, Vilgax could sneak in one kick, one thrust of his palm. Vilgax couldn't even hurt them as much as they could hurt him. Every one of their blows annihilated his physical form in new ways, to the point that even his regeneration struggled to cope with it. His punches caused the equivalent of bruising, dents and cracks in the armor.

But that was enough. No matter how many stars or planets Gurren Lagann broke him through, he could still repair. And Vilgax wore down Gurren Lagann, eating away like a worm in bark. Softening its joints. Fracturing its body. Until it had weakened just enough that he did not have to be ripped apart by Gurren Lagann's thousand arms. When the next hand like a drill moved down through pace to flatten him, he caught it. They tried to pull away. Even though their arm spanned light years, Vilgax used nothing but his grip and upper body strength to root that limb in place.

He did the impossible. He ripped that arm right out at the shoulder, and held it like a kanabo. It was surprisingly light, far lighter than when Vilgax had been destroyed by it. But who was he to say what pure, solidified will should feel like? All that mattered was that it was a weapon. He took the great arm of the monster and dashed it down through Gurren Lagann's stomach. The entire arm pierced clear through to the other side, ending in a hand like a halberd's point, throwing up the horns.

Vilgax twisted-

-and he ripped the entire arm vertically through its torso, leaving a gaping hole. Its hips were connected to its chest by a fragment of what had once been its belly. If Vilgax had been just one inch closer, Kamina would have been vaporized in his seat.

"Shit! It's getting dicey out there!"

Simon's voice came from higher up, in the head.

"Bro, I don't think we're going to win if this fight goes on any longer! We'll have to finish this off in one strike!! Can you handle it?"

"Handle it?! Just who in the hell do you think I am! Performing daring feats, staring evil right in the face without blinking... that's the Kamina way! And I got to do it all with you, Simon... You turned out to be a real man!"

"If you're standing behind me, then I've got nothing to lose! Let's do it!"

Simon made a drill. That drill, once forged, grew larger than a planet. It grew to cast a shadow over the sun. It grew until it was larger than Gurren Lagann itself, and then grew larger than that. That drill was the physical manifestation of Simon's will, and even this shape it took on now was a weak approximation of it, for even the universe itself could not contain Simon's bravery.

Before Gurren Lagann broke down, Simon was going to smash that drill right into Vilgax's stupid face.

"GIGA..."

"DRILL..."

"REBIRTH!"

Simon brought down the full might of Gurren Lagann's drill, and Vilgax dashed his fists against it in turn. That drill spun eternally. Halting its progress would be like halting the flow of time itself. But if anyone could stop the world, it was Vilgax. Every punch chipped away a little more, another piece, scraping through, like an ant carrying away a mountain. The drill didn't halt. Vilgax would not stop. Giga Drill Rebirth created its own gravitational field, a concentration of spiral energy so dense it was equivalent to a black hole. But Vilgax never wavered. His fists continued to crack it, digging deeper cavities even as the radiation of its spiral energy seeped into him. Vilgax would out-drill the drill.

Even then Gurren Lagann did not give up. It pulled energy from every part in its once-whole body to rejuvenate the drill and keep it eternally driving onwards. Its legs disappeared, and so did its torso. One by one, all of its endless arms blinked out of existence like fading stars, more fuel thrown on the fire to halt Vilgax's furious fists. Still more fissures formed in the drill, trailing up the arms. He carved a tunnel through. He beat his own path into the drill. Once Vilgax emerged out the back, all of Gabriel's power had been spent, and only Lagann itself was left.

Vilgax swung his fist forward and broke through that drill, too. Kamina wasted no movements. He jumped from the cockpit as it was destroyed, before Vilgax could even pull back his arm, and planted both feet on the skin. With his last vestiges of being, his last moments in this world, Kamina drew his katana and slashed Vilgax down the middle. His cephalopod body unfolded into blue-green layers like rotten ham, exposing his blue beating heart. The katana snapped in two, and Kamina's job was done.

"That's all I've got, bro! I'm leaving it up to you, now..."

As soon as Kamina began to fade, Simon burst through him with his old drill necklace wrapped in his hand. In his heart, that drill was the fulcrum of the universe. In his heart, that drill was as powerful as all the meaning and memory he'd attributed to it. That was the weapon that, with his final act as bodhisattva, Simon speared into Vilgax's heart. And he turned the key in the ignition.

From there, Vilgax fell out of orbit, down towards Battleworld. That bloodied planet had been protected by Gurren Lagann's hands from the beginning. Now it was the only thing left in a lonely galaxy whose cosmic bodies had been reduced to ash.

The battle was over. Vilgax had lived. Simon would die. Vilgax had won.

Simon the Digger was not long for this world. No human vessel could handle the pressure of universal oneness. This frail body was not meant to become a bodhisattva, not even with the strength of Gurren Lagann holding him together. He had destroyed everything down to his soul, just as Vilgax had.

It should have been meaningless.

Why had he fought to save this world, knowing life only begets pain? Why did he fight Vilgax one final time, after experiencing firsthand how insignificant everything was, from his bond with Kamina to the entirety of human history?

It was because Simon thought the Buddha was wrong.

This world was not something to escape from. This life was not useless. This time had some value.

Humming a song.

Lying in bed.

Making a friend.

There were so many things that Simon had regretted, time he had wasted, experiences he had never experienced. When Vilgax took over, he regretted his lost time even more. He didn't know how valuable it was back then. But... had his life really been a waste? Was all this only a stepping stone, a search for some higher purpose?

No. All those things had meaning to him. Each moment was the most important thing in the world for him. Everything he had done had dug the foundation for those that would follow behind him. And he couldn't give a damn what God or the Buddha had to say about that.

As suddenly as a snap of the fingers, Simon was gone.

The drill was all he left behind.

So Vilgax fell. He who had once attained the peak of physical excellence, like a Muramasa blade, had been dulled and rusted. Once again he was only an ugly, frail, mortal creature.

"No... NO!"

Those were the first thoughts to return to him, as his flesh ignited in Battleworld's atmosphere. Grief. Anger. Fear. He'd finally escaped it all. He'd become a truly limitless king, something that defied the old emperor's curse, something that could never die or grow unsatisfied! Those bastards had pulled him out of his euphoria! They made him less than a weapon of war, they made him think again! He'd failed to reach godhood, failed to conquer the heavens, failed everything.

No. The world had failed him. Nothing in this universe was built for a conqueror of Vilgax's brilliance. Its laws and guidelines conspired against him. Honestly, what had he even been trying to do? Conquer every planet and civilization? What for?! They all hated him! Even his own people surely looked at him with disgust! They all thought he was mad with age and his brain was full of sores, yes, he remembered now, whatever that spiral energy had done to him allowed him to remember those scornful moments very clearly.

Ruling over subjects who loathed him. Gathering wealth that brought him no joy. The world tried to move on without him and pretend he was some object to dust! That was what was really sickening about it all, those were the feelings he'd bottled up for ten thousand years that all came vomiting out at once.

It might have been better if Vilgax gave up everything. That festering boil called freedom would surely flourish in his absence. That would give them all some temporary solace, before they started butchering each other in the power vacuum. But he'd never let them think they were right all along. No, he'd rather live a million years of suffering before he made the king's words true!

That was when the Great Thought occurred to him. It was at the moment he smashed into the earth like a meteor and gouged a crater one hundred miles wide onto the planet forever. It was almost like the idea was knocked into him by a sudden impact.

Conquering was not what he'd wanted to do. A conqueror was supposed to nurture his spoils. He'd only ever made things worse. That was his true nature. What he wanted to do was destroy.

He should just kill it all. That would be a nice diversion. It would show them all for thinking they could get by without him. And once he had finally wiped away every trace of life in the universe...

Vilgax stood up in the crater. His flesh was still blackened and smoking. That natural healing factor of his was still present, enough to keep him alive, but it was nowhere near the heights he'd reached fighting Gurren Lagann. Forget it. He didn't need to be perfect. Just as long as he was superior. Soon, he would be the most superior being by default.

Once he'd destroyed everything there was to destroy in this life, who knows what he'd do?

Maybe he'd just enjoy the silence for a while.

Chapter Text

There was only one thing left that Tatsumaki could follow, however slight. It was her connection to Mordred. It faintly tugged at her whenever Mordred drew on her energy, which lately happened way too often. Whatever she'd been doing for the past hour made her feel sick and ragged. And worse. And significantly worse. And atrociously worse.

Tatsumaki had tied her psychological and physical strength together for so long she'd forgotten what it felt like to have them out of balance. She had the power to fight, but she didn't know if she had the will anymore. All she could tell herself was, this will be the final battle, you only have to push yourself until it's finished. But what would happen after that? Her body was in the middle of a meltdown. What happened if she finished the fight, and closed her eyes, and never opened them again? She'd told herself that she would sacrifice her own life if it meant defeating Vilgax. Did she really mean it? Would she have to find out?

She hoped she'd find her. She wouldn't say this to her, but she really hoped she found Mordred. Tatsumaki just needed something she understood. Something that wouldn't pull the rug from underneath her. She didn't care if she hated her or what, or chewed her out for running away. Even abuse could be an anchor sometimes. At least it made you feel like you deserved to feel bad, like it wasn't just meaningless suffering inflicted by a dice roll. She learned all about that, right?

Forget it. Maybe she shouldn't even think about it anymore. Everything that tied her to that old life was gone. Her parents, her sister... even the Earth wasn't the same way she left it, was it?

The only thing she had left of back then was Tatsumaki. And she didn't know what 'Tatsumaki' was anymore.

Whatever string of fate connected them brought her to a devastated clearing. The ground was black. It looked like cracked charcoal. There was no plant life to be seen outside of a few scraggly shrubs and whatever lichens could grow after a forest fire. This damage was probably from something more exotic in nature. That was if it was natural at all. The burn crept right up to the boundary of a forest and stopped at an exact boundary line.

Mordred was so close now that Tatsumaki could feel out the exact direction she'd be approaching from, and how quickly. She wasn't in a hurry. Now that she could tell that Mordred was ambling towards her, it really got on Tatsumaki's nerves. It reminded her she still had nerves to fry.

It only got worse when Mordred stepped out of the trees and Tatsumaki finally saw her face.

There was Tatsumaki. Beaten, muddied, drenched in blood. No matter how strong her psychic abilities were, she could never manifest that power on the outside. Her body was frail. After twenty-four hours of unceasing violence, screaming her throat hoarse, bruising and being bruised, losing her hair, Tatsumaki looked as ragged as a dying calf, or one that had survived a miserable birth.

Then there was Mordred. When she'd left Mordred last, she was a weasel. Hers was the body that prioritized survivability, nothing but lean meat like a predator animal. She was nothing, and would have stayed nothing without Tatsumaki. Now she was beautiful. How very like a king. She didn't know whether Mordred would knight her or chop off her head.

Mordred looked at her with pity. Pity. That snapped Tatsumaki out of whatever self-loathing she was feeling. Only she was allowed to feel sorry for herself. She wouldn't accept that from anyone else.

Tatsumaki had to say something first. She didn't even want to know what Mordred would say to her if she didn't initiate it. The first thing she was able to blurt out was "You've changed."

That was visibly surprising for Mordred. Tatsumaki was sure she was going to respond with something like, "so did you," but she didn't.

"Yeah, I changed, Tats. It's been a while. A lot's happened since then. Are you holding up okay? I still don't know why the hell you even left."

Nothing was okay. How could anything in her world be okay? There was no chance of healing. It was just stitching up a wound with packing tape and glue. But Tatsumaki couldn't put those feelings into words. It embarrassed her now. She knew she should have said something to them.

"It's... nothing. It's fine," Tatsumaki said. "I'm ready for Vilgax. That's the most important thing."

Mordred was not satisfied by Tatsumaki's answer, but she knew Tatsumaki was right about one thing. Vilgax was more important than anything else right now. That meant she was going to have to hold off on it until a better time. If that better time ever happened.

Tatsumaki knew she was right about something, too. Something Mordred didn't even know about. It's nothing. The whole reason she went out on her own was moot. Fubuki was over. Stupid. What a horrible mistake.

"Yeah, I figured you'd say somethin' like that." Mordred was probably just trying to placate her. Normally Tatsumaki wouldn't take it, but at this point she just wanted to conserve her energy.

Speaking of energy.

Knuckles was the last one to join them. It didn't improve her mood. Somehow, he appeared flying, surging with a powerful enough signal that she could feel it from a distance. Even Knuckles looked radiant now. Knuckles, that oversized red rodent that Tatsumaki resented, even he had more dignity than her now. It upset her to a point that embarrassed her. For a moment, at least a few seconds, she really wanted to seize his head and smash it in.

If he noticed Tatsumaki stewing in her own emotions, he chose not to say anything about it. He looked very calm. Mordred, by comparison, was pretty enthused.

"Knuckles! Hey! You look great!" She fist-bumped him. "How'd you get so swole all of a sudden, man?"

"I found the Chaos Emeralds. They're a part of me now. I don't only have access to their energy, but also the history of my people. I understand the fate of the Knuckles Clan and the sacrifice Tikal made for our survival. It's a heavy burden to carry. I really felt, for the first time, that I am the last of the echidnas. But for the first time I think I'm prepared to decide what to do with that legacy, the good, and the bad."

"Sounds great!"

Oh, so he found what he wanted too. Wasn't that just great. Fantastic. And she wasn't stupid or anything. She could see that second sword on Mordred's back. Excalibur. She didn't know how it changed Mordred's body, but it couldn't have been a coincidence.

They couldn't have been more prepared. There was just one thing missing from this scene.

"So... where is Vilgax? How are we going to find him?"

"He'll come," Mordred said. "There's nothing left for him to do. He'll be brought right to us."

"Wha- what makes you think he's going to arrive just like that?"

Mordred tapped her head with her finger. "A-rank Instinct."

Knuckles nodded. Yeah. Okay. Everyone just decided on that. Great.

The sun was just starting to come up. Light that should have been warm felt stark and cold. It crawled across the ground, exposing a lot of black ash, cracked earth, and ruin. The glare felt blinding. Up over their heads, the shattered remnants of the moon were plainly visible and even beyond that the sky was empty. This place couldn't have been more desolate.

Vilgax didn't show up right on their cue, so they spent some time making whatever preparations she could. Tatsumaki and Knuckles dug up earth to give her plenty of ammunition to throw, preferably harder materials underneath the dirt. Mordred brought over some trees she'd chopped down. Really, she wasn't doing much. Mordred needed to conserve her energy. On the other hand, Tatsumaki needed to keep herself busy. She couldn't allow herself to rest.

It was only when the sun was at its highest point that they saw him.

He looked like he'd been through his own violence. Vilgax was unnaturally weathered, and swollen. His skin had thickened. They could see the muscles shifting and rearranging underneath, the way he fluctuated and altered. He wasn't solidified yet. Something was wrong with him.

They didn't realize that his exposure to Spiral Energy had poisoned him. This was Vilgax. The omega, the end-of-it-all, the stop at the close of the sentence. He was fundamentally incompatible with change, and he had been irradiated by a supernova's worth of condensed physically-actualized change. It probably wasn't reacting well with the genetic mutation device on his wrist, either. His whole genetic code was hesitant and inconclusive now.

That was not to say that Vilgax was weak. This had only dragged him down from the realm of the gods. He was still superior to the three of them. That wasn't in question.

It had only put in doubt whether they could defeat him at all. If it was possible for any chance to exist of victory, a chance to end the eternal reign of Vilgax, it could only be here in this moment when he was at his lowest.

They watched him watching them. He recognized each one. Those memories had returned to him with clarity, as if his death and resurrection was the jolt he needed, more than Viral's scheme.

These were all people he had easily swatted aside before. They'd improved a little bit, but a little was all it was. Only individual stairsteps, taken on a staircase far longer than the one Metatron walked down. He had lived far longer than all of them. If experience was the deciding factor, they would have no chance.

He took one step. The ashen land crunched beneath his feet.

"Did ya miss my old man?" Mordred asked. Her voice carried across the barren field. This plain, which had been scorched by fire and scarred by battle, was going to be the last place. "Yeah, I bumped into her, and she's not gonna make it. Hope you don't mind if I take her place today."

Vilgax eyed Mordred, and the blade Excalibur strapped to her back without a sheath. Then his gaze turned to Knuckles. It was obvious he was using the Chaos Emeralds. That was another memory Vilgax recalled: the Chaos Emeralds were an artifact with a connection to the heavenly realm, something he may have intended to use in his scheme at some point. He'd cast them aside. Threw them into a vast pile of ill-gotten gains, just one fraction of all the treasure he'd plundered over the years. Really, he'd taken them only because he saw how important they were to Knuckles's people. Just to get the satisfaction of hurting them.

"Do you really think those things will protect you? They're just tools your disorderly, tenderfoot species made to compensate for your own weakness," Vilgax said. "You're no better than monkeys digging at anthills with their sticks. You should have accepted your lot. There's no shame in bending the knee to a superior specimen. It would be far preferable to the indignity you'll suffer when I-"

Snap. Tatsumaki flicked her fingers and a fifty-foot wave of ash smacked Vilgax between the eyes.

"God, you're so annoying," she said.

That was the first blow landed. It didn't injure Vilgax, and it wouldn't have even moved him under different circumstances. But the ground beneath him wasn't stable. He was pushed straight through the crumbling dirt sliding backwards. Mordred and Knuckles moved in the moment Tatsumaki acted.

Of course, Knuckles was far faster than either of them, even when Mordred used her Mana Burst. But the distance Tatsumaki had created with her attack put them at a disadvantage. He could perform short, small actions faster than they could close the gap.

"Behold, the mightiest DNA in all of the Omnitrix! The awe-inspiring power of the Celestialsapiens who make reality their plaything! Become... Alien X!"

Tatsumaki was prepared for this moment. All the boulders and logs she had assembled were thrown violently into the air without a single tell from her body. They were all simultaneously directed at Vilgax.

She never intended it to be a decisive blow. The only thing she hoped was that it would slow him down, catch him off-guard. Whatever Alien X was, she had to stop him before he became it. If he considered it superior to his true form, there was no way they'd be able to win against him.

So the trees and boulders flew. They hit the earth with enough force to uproot hills. Craters like the surface of the moon dotted the ground everywhere the boulders struck. Even if it was a mere warning shot, it was still a carpet bombing of artillery fire powerful enough to shake the land for miles upon miles upon miles.

And yet she could not prevent Vilgax's metamorphosis.

Tatsumaki was too late.

Vilgax struck the face of the watch and transformed into Gray Matter.

He recalled, with some bitterness, that he had never been able to control which alien he turned into.

It was an extremely dangerous stroke of luck, but that luck may have been more good than bad for Vilgax. He was extremely vulnerable in his Gray Matter form. He was also extremely small. So small, in fact, that with the dust cloud of a thousand trees launched against the ground like a meteor strike, nobody could spot him.

Tatsumaki was the one in the group that could easily attack over a wide area all at once. Mordred could have done it, but she was cautious about using her Noble Phantasms wastefully. It fell to her partner. She created a flat, circular barrier of psychic energy, as big as she could make it without getting too close to her allies, and slammed it down flat on the ground. That should have killed him. She compressed the dirt three feet deep. Even germs that could survive in high-pressure environments would have been killed with how hard she crushed it.

She lifted the barrier. No sign of Vilgax.

Mordred startled like a dog. "He's still alive!"

"What?! Huh?!"

It was Knuckles. Mordred could sense that something was wrong, that Vilgax was nearby, but she couldn't put her finger on it precisely. Knuckles solved that mystery for her. He suddenly started jerking, scraping across his own back with his big gloves and twisting around wildly. Vilgax had gone for the one place Tatsumaki wouldn't be willing to crush. In fact, he'd gotten on top of him.

Was Tatsumaki's control of her power so fine that she could pull Vilgax off of Knuckles without crushing him? She didn't know. Should she do it? Look how far she'd come. She destroyed everything to get to this moment, she'd killed people to get to this moment. But could she do it now, deliberately, at no immediate threat to her life? Could she crush everything into a ball, Vilgax and Knuckles together, when it might not even kill her target?

Maybe she should.

She reached out and could have closed her hand, but in a flash of red lightning there was Mordred a foot away from Knuckles. Her swords lashed out. They were so incredibly fast, so close to his skin, that patches of fur were shaved away from him. This was an exercise of the highest realm of swordplay skill. Tatsumaki, who had seen Atomic Samurai in battle, thought it was some of the finest sword work she had ever seen.

But she didn't get Vilgax. He slipped out of her swords' reach, easily. And now she was in too close for Tatsumaki to do anything about it. Mordred had gotten in her way. Again.

That moment of hesitation allowed Vilgax to transform once more. His growth was incredibly rapid. Too quick for Knuckles to easily shove him away. When Mordred brought her sword down on the spot where Vilgax had been, where there had once been flesh, she found nothing of the sort. Clarent only scratched at the icy blue silicon crystal that Vilgax was composed of now.

Gray Matter had jumped onto Knuckles, but Diamondhead was the one that stepped away.

There was a terrible scraping noise when Mordred struck again. It was like hammering a knife against a rough stone. Hell, that was exactly what it was. Clarent and Excalibur were reduced to blunt weapons against Vilgax in his Petrosapien form, a crystalline being nearly immune to cutting attacks of any kind.

They could still hurt, though. Vilgax grew clusters of crystal spikes at his feet to keep himself from being thrown aside by Mordred's swings. Knuckles got up, rolled away and started throwing out punches, keeping to Vilgax's back while Mordred took his front. He was better suited to it than Mordred. Vilgax's crystal body could fracture and crack. Just a few hits from Knuckles caused fissures, spiderweb threads from his neck down to his thighs. But they fused back together. This was another one of those species with regenerative abilities.

Unfortunately, those weren't the only abilities he had, either. Vilgax was able to string together waves of crystal spires that shot up from the ground without even trying hard. He could fire bullets with diamond-like hardness from his hands and keep Mordred and Knuckles at a distance. It was quite convenient. He was facing off against the two of his enemies that had limited ranged ability, in one of the alien forms that had excellent range. He was lucky that he hadn't been using it against Tatsumaki, someone who was a bit more capable of countering him.

Where was Tatsumaki in all of this, anyway?

Vilgax did not notice that the sky went dark. He merely assumed that a cloud had passed over the sun. In fact, Mordred was the only one of the three to realize what was about to happen. She did not try to block Vilgax's next swing. She dodged it. Her next course of action was immediate evasive maneuvers, launching herself backwards with lightning on her heels. Vilgax wondered what she could have seen to flee so suddenly, and turned around only to get a big glove-clad Knuckles fist slammed into his throat.

Neither of them noticed until it was too late, although it was Vilgax who noticed first. He could feel a rush of air from over his head. He could feel an oppressive darkness, as if the day was turning to night. And, when he looked up at last, he could see nothing. A pure sky of murky black.

Tatsumaki had been busy. She'd been busy flying off to find a mountain she could drop on his head. Lucky for her, there were some mountains available only a few hundred miles away. She'd uprooted whichever one looked the largest. That was the one heading straight for Vilgax's face. All of his pillars and crystal spike bullets could only chip holes in the underside, and none of them could do anything to halt its fall. It landed.

By all rights, Diamondhead should have been squished. The impact would have been enough to crush even a Petrosapien to dust. That is, it would have crushed Diamondhead. This was a seismic crash, one that completely covered the battlefield they'd chosen, a blow comparable to the Chicxulub impact. It should have crushed anyone.

But not Vilgax.

The mountain landed on his back like Atlas carrying the heavens. It was a struggle to lift. Even for someone as mighty as he, Vilgax was weakened. He couldn't easily shoulder hundreds of billions of tons. It kept him completely pinned down. It also totally restricted his vision. He could see nothing but the sliver of light in front of him, the gap between the mountain and the ground. Knuckles wasn't there. He'd probably escaped from underneath the damn thing while Vilgax was holding the mountain up. Foolish. He'd handed Knuckles his own escape route.

The one before him was Mordred. She was holding that damn holy sword that his Praetor used.

He should have known. This was the absolute best time for her to use that Noble Phantasm, when he had no way to defend or even reach the Omnitrix to change into something else.

Excalibur's blade gleamed. Mordred planted her feet firmly on the ground and twisted her whole body, like an Olympic player ready to throw the discus.

"EX-"

Vilgax threw every muscle in his body into defending, as much as he could spare while still shouldering the mountain. He flexed his chest, widened his stance, all instinctive actions. Excalibur had a wide enough range that dodging was impossible, even for Vilgax, even without the restraints he was under. If the only useful way he could counter it was blocking it, that was what he had to do. He would face it head-on the moment those last three syllables left her mouth.

But they didn't come out. Mordred halted her swing as if inertia didn't apply to her, and she smiled madly like a feral predator.

"Gotcha!"

It was a feint?! He didn't even know she could cancel the incantation! Wait, if it was a feint, what could possibly be the counterattack they were trying to fool him into?!

Vilgax had experienced many things in his many lifetimes of battles. He could even say this was not the first time he had dropped a mountain on his head.

But now, he could say it was the first time he had two mountains dropped on his head.

The first mountain was already having some difficulty being supported by a single point, Vilgax underneath it, but the second mountain crashing onto it really didn't do it any favors. Its structural integrity completely collapsed, and Vilgax was squished under double the weight. There was no more mountain. It could be generously called the galaxy's largest pile of rocks. His mutilated body was trapped underneath at such an awkward angle he could not possibly shift himself out of it.

That was when Mordred struck for real.

This was the very first time she'd truly used Excalibur's full power herself, and even though it had recognized her, she didn't know what would result when she activated it.

Excalibur was a Noble Phantasm of extraordinary strength. While most Noble Phantasms could only kill a single enemy, or even an army, Excalibur was capable of destroying an entire fortress with a single slash of the blade. Her father had a particular technique to release that energy. She swung upwards, with both hands, almost like she was swinging a golf club. It was necessary. Altria had to aim for the clouds lest she split the land into a canyon.

This time, she couldn't afford to be cautious. Mordred brought down one hundred percent of her fury on the mountains, and Vilgax underneath it.

"EXCALIBUR CAMLANN!"

All of the hundreds of billions of tons of rock and rubble were incinerated in a flash of light. It was a new kind of brilliant illumination. It wasn't the holy gold colors that Altria's Noble Phantasm was wreathed in, although there were hints of it. It wasn't the furious red of Mordred's Noble Phantasm either, although there were hints of it too. She wasn't either of those people now. This Noble Phantasm was a burning orange color, halfway in between, a hue that reminded Mordred of the rising sun. This sword was a new dawn.

When the smoke cleared, there were no mountains. There was no battlefield. The clouds in the sky had been completely split, and the trench in front of her dug deep into the crust of the earth. She'd given Battleworld a rough and deep scar with a single stroke, as easily as an author's slash of the pen.

Vilgax wasn't dead. But he wasn't much that could be called alive, either.

He was a shattered tenderized corpse. His bones barely held together. In most places it was his muscles that forced them to imitate the correct shapes. His torso had sunken in. His head flopped, his skull had been reduced to the softness of an octopus. As for his outward appearance... there wasn't a lot of it. A lot of his spare flesh had been burnt. His ribcage was totally exposed.

Mordred took a step forward to finish the fight, then took another step, and fainted over herself faceplanting into the ground. Shit. That had taken way more out of her than she'd thought. And she hadn't even been thinking about how much she'd exhausted herself using Clarent against Nox. Adrenaline made it difficult to tell that her body was pushing up against its limits.

If she was at her limits, Vilgax was beyond his limits. He couldn't blink or breathe. He could move a little. Knuckles and Tatsumaki had gotten out of Mordred's way, and Mordred was incapacitated, if only temporarily. That allowed him time to leave and recover. Hell, if he could just reach over to his wrist, he could tap the watch and become something else that could give him a fighting chance. That was all he needed. Enough time to touch his wrist. He just had to reach over.

But something caught his hand. It was a heavy pull, squeezing at his muscles, forcing his wrist away. He'd become too weak, and Tatsumaki was strong enough to overwhelm his anti-psychic defenses.

She was before him now. Hands outstretched, ready to burst his brain and tear him to pieces.

Vilgax looked straight into Tatsumaki's eyes. At that moment when he was most vulnerable, he must have sensed something about her that only operated on that deepest level. His voice came out as a rusty croak:

"You. Why shouldn't you want to destroy it all?"

Those words wouldn't have really meant anything to someone else. For every other person in the universe, that question had a self-evident answer. To Tatsumaki alone it made her hesitate. By all rights she should want to break it all down. Tear it apart.

Mordred was already starting to slump her way to her feet, using her sword as a support. If Tatsumaki could keep Vilgax worn down, she would have been able to follow up, something that would probably destroy Vilgax. If Tatsumaki would just keep him in place for one second. Just a bit longer, until the finish.

But for what?

She let go of him.

Vilgax took that one second of opportunity to slap the Omnitrix once more, and he was already running and stumbling over himself as his body mutated. Burned-away skin turned to orange fur, his neck elongated, his eyes congealed over replaced by oversized nostrils. A Wildmutt transformation. Out of every single possible alien, he managed to roll one that was as useful to his escape as possible.

Tatsumaki couldn't even move to catch him. The moment he slipped out of her grasp, she couldn't undo it. It was like she disassociated. She was watching herself watch him run away and she had no control over the actions of that other selfish person in her skin.

She only snapped out of it when Mordred grabbed her shoulder and socked her jaw. It didn't really hurt, through her shielding. Not like Accelerator's blows or Fubuki's slap. But it was enough to shake her out of her shock.

"Now we're even," Mordred said, curtly. Her fist balled up the fabric of Tatsumaki's dress, lifting her up off the ground in case she needed to hit her a second time. "Are you going to help me now, or am I going to have to kick your ass first?!"

Mordred was really going to do it. She'd been sick of Tatsumaki's shit ever since she got here, and after all the abuse and all the beatings and stabbings she just wanted to let her have it. Her gauntlet only hesitated when she saw the look on Tatsumaki's face.

It was the first time Mordred saw her with tears in her eyes. It was the first time Tatsumaki had slipped enough for that to happen since she and Fubuki were taken from the laboratory, twenty years ago.

"I can't do it anymore," she said. "I've had enough. Kill me."

Tatsumaki slipped out of her grip and she didn't land on her feet. She just collapsed backwards. Mordred could only stand there flexing the hand she'd held Tatsumaki in feeling like an idiot.

Vilgax was a distant speck. Knuckles was nowhere. They were alone.

Shit.

Mordred didn't know whether it would be more awkward to stay standing or to squat down to Tatsumaki's level. She went for the squat. It wasn't like they were in a hurry anymore, they'd already blown up their own plan to kill Vilgax.

"I don't care. I don't have a life anymore. I don't have a family anymore. I don't even know how I made everything worse, but I did. I can't keep it up now. I wasted everything. I ruined my only chance at being alive. If everyone hates me so much just kill me and let me go to hell."

"Jesus, Tats..."

Tatsumaki didn't have any kind of regeneration. The scars and bruises she'd gotten from Accelerator were still there. It was impossible to ignore. She'd used some of her psychic energy to suppress her pain response and adrenaline took care of the rest, but now she just didn't want to put in the effort. She would rather be hurting.

This kind of thing was too heavy for Mordred, who was never really the best at talking someone up. Nobody had ever really done this for her. When she tried it with Nox, she only made it worse, and that was a situation where she didn't have to try and be delicate. Or maybe she shouldn't try to be delicate, maybe she should just be direct. She didn't know what to do.

She'd just have to do her best.

Mordred put her hands on Tatsumaki's shoulders and told her straight.

"You're the one who decides what you want to be. Not anyone else. It doesn't mean it's easy. It doesn't mean the world's gonna roll over before you. But you can change. You don't have to be the person you were, a year ago, a day ago, a minute ago, whatever. That ends the moment you say you're gonna be different. So, I don't know if you want to be Vilgax or what. But that's a decision you have to make for yourself. What kind of person do you want to be?"

"I don't know. I don't know," Tatsumaki said. "I just thought, for a moment, everything would be better if Vilgax killed us. I don't have anything. There's nothing good anywhere for me. I don't think there's anything good in the whole world anymore."

"Then you'll have to put that good in the world yourself."

She could have kept on babbling. It's not like she knew where to stop. But when Tatsumaki didn't have anything to say, when there was a pause where they weren't sniffling or speaking or doing anything but staring at each other expectantly.

It didn't seem like it had really given her the emotional release she needed, and she didn't want to put off her feelings any longer after she'd spent so long bottling it all up, but at least she wasn't fully catatonic. She still looked like a wreck, though. Her voice had really wavered on that last part.

Mordred hoped that what she'd said was alright. A lot of that was how she'd felt when her father kicked her out a thousand years ago.

At long last, and not particularly confidently, Tatsumaki spoke. "I think I know what we can do. It would only work once. It'd be dangerous. And... I don't know how much you'd be willing to give up. But whatever the cost is, I'll match you. Even if it's my life."

"Yeah, don't throw your life away, okay? Try to stay alive for ten minutes. After that, we can figure out what'll happen next."

Tatsumaki was clearly still hesitant, but she nodded.

"We'd need something that will hurt Vilgax as badly as those mountains did. Something that will open him up so he'll be weak for the final attack. Do we have it?"

At that very moment, a red blur swept by, with its feet carving a trail in the ground underneath him. Mordred smiled. She was a bit of a red devil herself.

"Knuckles will handle it."

Knuckles was handling it. Maybe he'd been a little overly cautious when he knew Mordred was about to use Excalibur, maybe he'd backed up a bit too far. Hey, you couldn't blame him for being so fast he ran too far away. He'd seen what Clarent could do, he'd seen what Excalibur could do. He didn't want to get in Mordred's way. He'd also thought that Excalibur would finish the job.

Hey, he didn't blame her. Knuckles had never been in a fight he finished with a single hit either. That's why he was there.

The moment he realized Vilgax was fleeing, Knuckles chased after him right away. It took him a while to pick up the pace. He couldn't get to his top speed in a single step or anything. Vilgax kept increasing the gap between them. But that gap increased at a smaller and smaller rate. Then the gap started to shrink. Vilgax looked at him when they were running side by side, and pushed himself to run faster, going at Wildmutt's maximum speed.

And Knuckles ran away from Vilgax as fast as he could.

Knuckles was fast, and this was him moving as fast as he was able. It was faster than he'd ever thought he'd be able to run, period. Every step pushed him further on the Mach scale, crossing miles in single strides while his legs turned to blurry wheels underneath him.

Knuckles was fast. He could skim across water just by running. Mountains and valleys passed by in the rearview mirror, things it would have taken some time just to drive by, merely window dressing, gone in an eyeblink.

When he sped by Vilgax again, in the opposite direction, he realized that Knuckles had crossed Battleworld itself. Wildmutt wouldn't cover it. He had to be something else, something with an even greater speed. Whether it was luck, or whether he desired so fiercely to transform into the one alien that could help him the most, when Vilgax hit the watch again he turned into XLR8. Relative to Wildmutt, he moved so fast he seemed to disappear. Gone with the wind. He was so fast that people like Tatsumaki and Mordred wouldn't even be able to perceive him at this speed.

That was fine. Knuckles was fast. If he had a long enough straightaway he could build up speed almost without limit. He could circle Battleworld. He could circle it twice. All he had to do was keep increasing his momentum. His feet made paths everywhere around the circumference of the planet, so fast he doubled back on himself, so fast he was almost in two places at the same time, and then he was in two places at the same time, four, twelve, more, faster and faster free from physics and limitation. Knuckles was so fast he was almost everywhere. Free and unlimited.

And there was a simple principle about speed. Mass times acceleration equals force. What would happen if he collided with something going that fast?

What would happen if he hit something moving just as fast going the other direction?

That was what Knuckles wondered. Would he die?

Would it even matter? He'd done all he needed to do.

That was more than almost anyone got in this life.

Knuckles curled his whole body into the roll. Now he wasn't just running at blistering near-relativistic rates, he was spindashing, he was speeding like lightning. Vilgax might have been fast, but Knuckles had better fine control. He was going to roll himself directly into Vilgax, straight ahead, a dead-on collision.

At this rate, neither of them were able to move out of the way in time. And when they crashed, the impact shattered an entire tectonic plate.

There was the second strike. There was the opening.

The one blow Knuckles dealt to him was powerful enough to knock him out of his transformation. It had to knock him out of it, it would have pulverized him otherwise. It almost did. Knuckles bounced backwards and crashed into the dirt a mile away from the contact site. Rings flew out of him.

Vilgax could not move.

He wasn't XLR8. Or Diamondhead, or Gray Matter, or Alien X, or anything else.

He was shattered and split open and broken again.

He'd been there many times before. He'd been in the worst scrapes. He'd crawled out from underneath piles of corpses whether they were made by his own hand or not. He'd been reduced to even smaller amounts of flesh than now. But his condition was bad. The damage from Excalibur had only barely healed. The hit that tore him out of his alien transformation only made things worse. Now his head barely held on, opened like a piñata. He didn't need it. His other organs could take over for the function of his brain if they needed to, but those were in heavy disrepair as well.

Knuckles disappeared. He reappeared again, after a few days' worth of scanning the planet's surface for Mordred and Tatsumaki, which only took a few seconds for him.

This time, Tatsumaki tried to hold him, only to find that she couldn't. Maybe his body had adapted far enough, or his AT field had been amplified by the extinction burst of a mind knowing it's on the verge of death, or both. They'd have to hurry. They had no more chances. If he transformed again, he could become Alien X or anything else, and this was a plan that they could only accomplish once before it was over for good.

Mordred drew Excalibur one more time. She put both hands on the hilt. And so did Tatsumaki. Knuckles put both hands on Mordred's shoulders, and the circuits of Excalibur's mana, the skeleton of its power source, lit up like Christmas lights.

It was something Vilgax couldn't have accounted for. It went against all knowledge of their character, intelligence, and battle strategy. Performing an action like this would have required them to be mad, a truly suicidal gambit.

All three of them were going to pour their energy into Excalibur, all at once.

It went without saying this was a risky maneuver. Forcing that much energy into Excalibur was more than even the great fairy vessel could take. It would erupt in one single, resplendent outburst of supercharged magical energy, and then no more. That was the whole tradeoff, creating an even more powerful version of the Noble Phantasm by overclocking its magic circuits.

In other words, Mordred would shatter Excalibur. The last remnant of her father's legacy in this world would be destroyed.

Was that something she was willing to do? Did Mordred even know the answer to that question?

Hell, she was absolutely going to do it. Not in the footsteps of King Arthur, but a hero forging an entirely new myth and carving her own path.

Plus, someone really needed to put Vilgax in his place. Might as well be her.

Even now, even despite his condition, the battle was on Vilgax's side. He was still simply stronger. He had the unlimited adaptability of the Omnitrix. If he ran now, he would heal, and he would develop a greater immunity to what had injured him before. He would grow one step closer to immortality as soon as he escaped the battlefield and the Noble Phantasm about to delete him from the universe. They had to charge up Excalibur. They couldn't move while they were doing it. And he only had to make one motion, to move his arm, and he could act again.

When he made that motion, the pain of a heart attack seized him.

Something was lodged into his aortic valve. Every time his heart tried to beat, it struggled achingly to grind past this painful foreign object piercing into the tissue. What was halting him? Why?! He pounded his fist into his own chest, trying in vain to force the blockage out of him to no avail. Get it out! Get it out! It was some kind of barb, a claw scratching at him from the inside-

The drill. It was the damn DRILL that Simon stabbed into him. His flesh must have regrown around it! The spiral energy burned into that keepsake had poisoned him, it still contained the embers of that brat's lingering will! He couldn't move! He couldn't move an inch!

All three of them together weren't doing much better with Excalibur. Mordred had never found it hard to lift before, but with the three of them overcharging it with so much magical energy, it developed its own unbearable density. It was almost impossible to hoist it overhead even with their combined efforts.

Tatsumaki knew that this wouldn't fix things with her sister, or put her life together back on Earth, although she wished it would.

Knuckles knew that fighting Vilgax wouldn't bring him happiness if he had nothing afterwards to strive for, although he was still looking.

But they'd still do it. They had to. Nothing would get better if they didn't. Nothing would get worse if they didn't. Everything would stay the same if they didn't, for eternity.

The clock had to start again.

Excalibur's blade scraped against the sky, reaching miles overhead, cutting through the clouds before it was even swung. Its fiery colors painted the horizon. Everyone on every side of the planet could see how night turned to day and the day burned even more fiercely than ever before.

Roger saw it, from the safety of the Big O's cockpit.

A trio of demons saw it, hoping the two brave idiots had made it out okay.

Denji saw it, and he waited patiently for Mordred's return that would never come.

Viral and Gura saw it, healing in the ruins of their hut, tending to their frogs.

Slayer saw it, as he tidied up in his volcanic home, gathering together the friends he had left for their next adventure.

Tsunade saw it, digging herself out of the sand in the ruins of an artificial tomb.

Broly saw it, wandering through Battleworld's cold and treacherous places alone.

Even Fubuki might have seen it. Wherever she was.

They were all there to see the moment the world moved forward.

Closest of all were Mordred, and Tatsumaki, and Knuckles. All three of them brought it down at the same time, although only Mordred spoke the words. They just came to her.

"EXCALIBUR LUMINA!"

That light crashed down in a wave that shook the stars, and Vilgax looked into it with his final gasp. He looked until his eyes burned blind in the glory.

I never had enough time to-

That was the last thought that ever passed through his mind. His brain and his body extinguished simultaneously, leaving no trace. There wasn't even a cell sample. Every bit of his being was annihilated, until the only vestige of Vilgax left was the Omnitrix itself.

The Omnitrix's creator had once forged a monstrous weapon of war. When he saw the devastation Ascalon had wrought, he swore to create technology that would undo the evil he had created. It was a device that could allow any species to transform into any other. It would shatter all barriers of race, nation, or even language.

Vilgax recognized a potential its creator didn't see. He had so deeply committed to casting aside his past that he couldn't recognize the Omnitrix for the weapon it could become.

Perhaps it was fitting, then. When the Omnitrix became a weapon, Excalibur, a descendant of Ascalon, became a tool for peace. Under Battleworld's sun, the final remnant of Vilgax faded away and burned into nothing.

Vilgax was, physically and spiritually, dead.

The end.

This time Mordred collapsed and she didn't get back up again. Knuckles had a bit more energy. He was at least able to take a step back and faint in the opposite direction. Tatsumaki wasn't as lucky and slumped over on top of Mordred's armor, barely conscious.

Mordred felt like there was nothing in the world that could move her. She did, unfortunately, still have to move. Tatsumaki was lying on her face and it couldn't have been comfortable. Mordred pushed her onto her back so she could stare up at the sky, devoid of all clouds.

"We did it," Tatsumaki said.

"Yeah," Mordred said.

"I don't know how I'm supposed to feel."

"Then don't worry about it."

Tatsumaki could kind of roll over, but not really. She was trying to look over at her other collapsed partner. She couldn't twist her neck enough to see him. It turned out she didn't have to. He was already standing up.

"Why did you help us? You got what you wanted, didn't you?"

Knuckles laughed. It sounded more relieved than happy. "I don't even think I knew when I did it. I just think... man. I can do whatever I want now. Nothing's going to hold me back, and I don't even know what I want to do with it all. Do you feel that way too?"

"I don't know. I can't feel anything except my broken bones right now. Ask me later."

Tatsumaki was able to lift herself up, despite her splitting headache, solely with her powers. She couldn't move her joints much. Mordred was already trying to stand up herself, and she helped Tatsumaki support her body while she was levitating. They were all upright again.

"We won. We're still alive."

"Yes," Tatsumaki said.

"We did it."

"We did."

Mordred looked up at the sky, and the shattered moon. It was a color she'd never seen before.

"I don't think there's a way off this planet or anything, though."

"Yep."

She sat right back down on the ground. "Great. So, do you think we're going to have to wait for a ship to pick us up?"

Knuckles nudged her shoulder.

"Or do you think nobody's going to- hey, what is it Knucks?"

Knuckles rotated her one hundred and eighty degrees to see what was off in the distance in the other direction.

Vilgaxian starships. They might have been stragglers that survived the angelic incursion, or they might have been the first scouts of a second wave when the first fleet failed. Nevertheless they were here. You couldn't really fire off Excalibur twice without attracting attention.

Mordred slowly lifted her hands to the sky. Then she gestured very suddenly, like an orchestra conductor, with Clarent as her baton. The ships entered into formation.

Of course they would. She'd killed Vilgax. She was their king now.

"I guess they came at just the right time," Mordred said.

"A lot of the people we met on our journey just showed up at a convenient time."

Mordred considered the army once more, the starship armada of the universal empire she was now in control over, and sheathed her sword.

"Well, that's fate for you."

A few weeks ago, an alien being descended on Japan. That was Israfel, the angel who blew the trumpets and warned all of the Qiyamah, when all people would be held to account. That day had passed. Four heavenly elohim had appeared to scrub the world of the living, starting with its humans. Three came to Battleworld. Only one was given the task of mopping up Earth's wretched survivors.

The angel had arrived, but the bell had not been tolled. Its terrorization was incomplete. Normally, this would not have been the case. Vilgax had decimated the world's hero population. While some had remained active years into his reign of terror, such as Tatsumaki, their lives were in constant jeopardy and few had the confidence to show their faces. The elohim had otherworldly strength. It was unlikely anyone on Earth would be strong enough to stop Israfel.

But unlikelier things have been known to happen. Vilgax had been defeated, Mordred was ruler of the universe, and Israfel was dead.

That was frustrating for Tatsumaki, because its body was almost four hundred feet tall. She was thankful it didn't rot. The damn thing was in the middle of the commercial district, and she was right there with it trying to rebuild. She gave it another look-over. She had to see if the problem was more manageable from another angle.

Its chest had been crumpled inward heavily. If it was a human, its entire rib cage and all of the organs contained inside would have been pulverized in a crater. There were no other signs of lasting impact. That suggested that Israfel's death was due to a decisive strike.

Something had defeated him in a single punch.

It was concerning to think there was a monster out there that could do such a thing, but Tatsumaki paid that no mind. She'd cross that bridge when she came to it. In the meantime, she threw herself back into her new job: reconstruction work on the cities destroyed during Vilgax's rule. It was steady work, because almost all cities had been destroyed in something or another, and there was always something that needed to be built back up, even if there were far less people to live in those places anymore.

It was also a nice thought, to think about building the world better than the one she'd grown up in.

She threw herself into her work. Only a very small fraction of her brainpower was required to move thousands of tons of girders and cement simultaneously. She was doing it now while she surveyed Israfel's corpse, almost subconsciously. It took her mind off of things. When she came back, everyone was enthusiastic. The people treated her like a hero. Honestly, it was embarrassing. She should have shouted down those hypocritical dogs for praising her now when they spent so much time smearing her before. But she kept her cool.

The anger issues were something Tatsumaki had been working on. She'd finally gotten some time for a therapist (under Vilgax's regime they were heavily booked). That was going well, sort of. It was in the early stages. She was willing to admit that she had adopted certain abusive modes of thinking from her parents. That was hard for her to say. But it was the first step in a long crooked stairway. There was a lot she had to sort out.

Fubuki hadn't spoken to her since Battleworld. She'd wanted to approach her, or maybe send her an email or something, but her therapist advised her against it right now. It was too soon. Her sister wasn't under any obligation to accept Tatsumaki as she was now, or at any time in the future. Just another missing stairstep.

"Are you feeling alright? You looked real pissed off all of a sudden there."

Oh, right. King Mordred was still there, and still king.

Her visit to Earth was one of the earliest steps in her tour of the domain she now ruled, her authority that put the whole universe in a personal nutshell. Perhaps it was selfish to prioritize Earth, but that was where she was raised, and she needed to mourn Camelot before she could set things right elsewhere.

Tatsumaki was the closest link she had to this place, so they'd hung out, and talked. The sheer amount of information Mordred had to handle as ruler was impossible to conceptualize. Even the task of splitting it up into manageable zones was a Herculean undertaking. It would take a long time to even begin to untangle the knot.

Fortunately, Mordred had plenty of time.

"I was just thinking," Tatsumaki said. "About how strange it feels going back to normal. I don't know if we can go back to normal again."

"Well, what the hell is normal, anyway." Mordred was right there in the streets lifting girders with the rest of the construction crew. It wasn't really efficient for a king, someone whose work was done on the most macro scale, but it was just the kind of knight she'd always been. She liked to hold onto that part of herself. "My idea of normal is swords and sorcery. Knuckles's idea of normal is... I don't know, I guess that's what he's figuring out. I guess the point is, if everything's going fine, maybe we shouldn't worry too much about what 'fine' is? Does that make sense? We're the ones that choose what the status quo is."

Knuckles hadn't come back. The last Tatsumaki had heard, he'd gone on a "vision quest" in a far-off galaxy, to actualize some deep inner peace and understanding or something. He sounded happy for the opportunity. After hundreds of years of guarding colored rocks, he needed a vacation.

Maybe Tatsumaki needed a vacation...

"I mean, look at some of these other guys. They're taking the opportunity to make a clean break. Doesn't matter what they were like before, they're picking their own path. Look at Broly!"

Mordred pointed across the way. Broly, the tenth-ranked warrior known as The Violence, was disposing of hundreds of tons of rubble he had precariously balanced on top of his shoulders. He was wearing a hard hat.

"Woo!" Mordred cheered. "Go Broly, go! That guy's cool. Did you know he's the legendary Super Saiyan? And he's out here helping out everybody. Do you think you've figured out what you want to do now? You don't need to rush it or anything, I'm just wondering."

You're the one who decides what you want to be, Tatsumaki thought. She'd caused a lot of harm trying to do good. Even before Vilgax invaded. She wasn't sure if she'd be able to do enough to make up for the harm she'd caused in the first place. Or if she should be trying.

But maybe she shouldn't think about it, either. She didn't have to prove anything to anybody but herself. She'd never been a hero for accolades. She had only been a hero because she wanted to save people who were hurting like she was. And if she hadn't done it before, she was going to make up for it now. That change started today.

"I think I'd like to go back to doing hero work," Tatsumaki said. "Not this kind of work. Fighting monsters and villains. That's always been the kind of work I'm best at."

"Hey, nice. The world's still a pretty dangerous place. Zombies, climate disasters, rogue Servants. I hear those guys in Nazarick made it off of Battleworld, heard they're tough. People are fragile right now. They could use some heroes."

Tatsumaki scoffed a little, but not out of annoyance. "I don't know if anyone's desperate enough to try anything with us after what happened to Vilgax."

"Just wait. Something's going to happen. Right now."

"That's that instinct of yours talking?"

Mordred put a hand up in the air, gesturing for Tatsumaki to wait. Then, at just the right moment, she snapped her fingers.

In front of every citizen of the city, from the soldiers enforcing martial law in a Vilgax-less power vacuum to the average pedestrians pointing up to the sky in panic, to the lowliest vigilante heroes waiting to come out of retirement, to the surliest villains and criminals ready to make a name for themselves, to Fubuki, to the bald and unassuming man currently haggling for discounted daikon at a convenience store, everyone, the body of Israfel disappeared.

Just vanished. Gone. Like those fairy tale stories of yokai spiriting away those humans unlucky enough to draw their attention. Out like a candle. Even Tatsumaki and Mordred were astonished.

No, more than a fairy tale, it paralleled some things Tatsumaki had seen in real life. Video of people who were able to make objects disappear, in their hands or on a stage. One man had even made the Statue of Liberty disappear with a bit of skillful maneuvering.

Any traffic stopped dead. The whole city could not continue operating after what had occurred. A wrench had been completely and utterly thrown into the works.

A woman appeared on top of one of the stalled cars in traffic, right in the middle of the street.

She was wearing a white suit and a white top hat with a gemstone in the band. She held a hand of playing cards in her left grip. The right arm was too busy to be holding cards. There was a shark clamped down into the flesh, with its tail thrashing around wildly now that it was no longer in water.

"Vilgax is dead. Are you the one who took his place?" the magician asked.

Tatsumaki and Mordred looked at each other.

"I'm the one in charge now, yeah," Mordred said.

"Okay. I wanted to tell you that my three weeks are up. I wasn't sure what else I would follow it with. I thought I'd keep trying to kill you and improvise the rest."

Neither of them knew what was coming next. They didn't know what this battle would affect. Things could've gone well. Things could have gone much worse. Everything that happened from here on out couldn't be predicted, even by Mordred. It might not have even been in their control.

But their actions now were fully in their control. From here on out, they decided where their story would go.

Mordred drew Clarent. Tatsumaki flew into the air, and every part of her body came alive with extrasensory power.

It was electric. The world was going to change.