Chapter Text
“There are no catastrophes that loom before us that cannot be avoided…”
A famous quote by a prolific Russian sci-fi author and maverick of the 20th century, whose books Akane Himejima would often read as a kid whenever one of her dear mamas or aunties wasn’t there to attend to her.
It was a window to the mid 20th century zeitgeist in relation to anthropocentrism and the belief that human beings inherently possessed the ability to handle any obstacle or calamity, as long as they leaned on their foresight and a clearer head and an active body. A warning against the wait-and-see approach that so many pretentious intellectuals would apply.
Akane couldn’t help but resonate with the message now in the throes of a catastrophe she so rarely encountered during her tenure as a High Overseer of the Astral Nexus.
Time, though technically a foreign concept for her, was of the essence and an idle mind did nothing but waste it. Iteration-1984, a timeline she was responsible for monitoring, tipped ever closer to a world collapse event, and she still possessed little to no knowledge of the situation as the entire freaking thing went dark after the initial collision impact. The storyline effectively went “private”, leaving her and the twenty Sentinel operatives of System C44 in the dark.
If it was a case of a clear-cut invasion from outside, Akane would’ve cut her losses and wiped the timeline clean, maybe establish a spatial anchor to one of the Aeons to reset the world. But this was different, this was something that had too many X factors. And Akane hated uncertain variables.
So, after organizing two more teams from Systems C38 and B15 to work together with C44, Patricia’s Team, to establish a triangular workflow procedure and streamline the emergency response plan, Akane came to the conclusion that a direct interference from a higher-ranked operative was required in this case.
But surprise, surprise, all the others were either busy sticking their thumbs up their bums or handling severities in other multiversal cosmologies!
So, who was the only Overseer of appropriate power and rank left to deal with this?
Why, who else but the Lady of the Unattainable Nous, Akane herself!
Even before the sequence of events that would lead to this decision being finalized, Akane already had formulated counter-measures in her head and strategies to spear-head a probe into the invaded world’s “plot”. After all, the most secure way to learn what was going on behind the scenes was to become an actor in the play.
To that end, Akane would need to meet a certain someone whom she, for various reasons, couldn’t directly find by herself. Instead, she needed another certain someone to act as a proxy. And to find that ‘proxy’, she needed to meet him personally.
She stepped out the Metaxic Hilbert Tunnel Quanta-Sinusoidal Resonant Beacon Point Anchor Probe, or as her subordinates and everyone else on the Astral Nexus so diligently abbreviated it to The Rick and Morty Portal, as if they weren’t already dealing with copyright issues no thanks to Aunt Ernestine popping in and out of the Nexus Axis Mundi with references they couldn’t possibly make!
Sigh. Putting that disaster train of thought aside.
The picosecond her feet touched down on a hollow-cracked black surface, she knew she had hit the jackpot. Below her was a vast expense of what might’ve once been a variant of the dust-ball the gravitationally-restricted chordate mammals call their home - “Earth”. The planet was now plastered over a ruined Solar System, just a bunch of desolate rocks cluttered up like piles of trash. Everything solid lacked color, as if it had been drained from it, a strong indication of extreme photonic disruption.
She looked further down the horizon. It was a snapshot of a bygone paradise for humanity, crushed and reduced under forces that the primates could never hope to understand even in a trillion years of dedicated research, like tiny fish in the maw of a blue whale. A picture her multi-dimensional gaze was all too familiar with, like creepy photos she had taken one too many times.
An inverted city, twisted and elongated, rising up and down into a wild U shape in the most absurd geodesic manifolds - a geometric fracturing that was not possible within four-dimensional space unless a higher power intervened and threw every fundamental force and axiom into complete disarray.
Electricity, winds, thermal forces…all put in a blender of utter chaos like ingredients to the most horrid planetary smoothie. Frozen purple lightning shot forth from the ground in waves, gusts of winds moving backwards as if someone had hit the reverse button on the tape of causality and orbs of heat that clamped up like seafoam.
Streets and buildings stretched into filaments, spiraling out in rivets and losing themselves in the event horizon of a super-massive singularity that stood at the center of a dead universe, a single “solid” object in an infinite nothingness, no stars nor cosmic radiation, just a gallery of time fractures. It was like looking at a broken glass ceiling that was suspended right in the instant the glass shattered.
And to call the singularity a “black hole” wouldn’t be exactly accurate. The simplest English terminology Akane could use to label the concentric higher-dimensional ball of erosive energy in the folding skyline, was the “super-daddy of Big Rip Theory”.
Every dead world like this had one, acting as the focal anchor of local space-time in it, both pulling apart the dead world and sewing it together. It was a Decaying Neshamot - a result of a fractured last ditch effort transmigration of souls and history into one last dying branch of the world in an attempt to salvage the timeline right before its destruction. However, when that threshold of inescapable destruction is crossed, the Neshamot becomes incapable of withstanding the higher-dimensional forces that bear down and crush it inward; the transmigration is severed mid-course, the living current of souls and history bent and folded back. This results in a necrotic branch that collapses under entropic forces and becomes this giant ball of echoing sorrow, despair and broken records, all meshed together into a violent singularity.
To lower-dimensional beings, it was an intergalactic well of doom that would insure the total erasure of everything. For the dwellers of the Outer Void and Sitra Achra, like Akane herself, it was like an overheating engine. With the right technology or level of cosmic power, one could theoretically nourish themselves on this Zombified Neshamot Singularity.
Quite the feast you’ve made for yourselves, huh, you mechanic sows?
She internally bristled, commenting in her head about the revolting state of this world. Though it no longer upset her, seeing scenes like this never could stop the bile of disgust she felt towards the Astral Nexus’ eternal enemies. The alien gods from outside the multiverse. The Endless Legion of the Starless Galaxy.
Timelines were a film that never stopped entertaining and a beautiful panorama of different lives and experiences converging into one chaotic but astonishing mess. This world too was probably once a gallery of trifling gods, mortals and beasts. To see it crushed till it was a lifeless husk…disgust could be the only thing she could feel at that moment.
I ran a quanta manifold mapping of this timeline cluster, there were quite a few indicators he is here, so I should be in the right world, just…finding his precise 3D coordinates is a little tougher, especially in a place where the third and fourth dimensions have become meshed potatoes. Oh well…
She glanced at the vast expense of a discordian infinity, her face showing no emotion outwardly, yet several bubbled beneath the surface. Morbid curiosity mixed with a hint of sadness and joy in her eyes, like a pathologist looking at a fine specimen to dissect.
Reshimu. Or a Bubble Universe.
The lingering trace of the divine after the contraction of the Infinite Light. A fading memory of the true state of the universe before the Almighty Creator leaves.
Fitting that it is also a term we, the Sentinel, and the Aeons, use to label such worlds. Dead worlds, whose dimensional walls have been shattered, causality and effect crushed and every single trace of life consumed. It’s an eleven-dimensional snap-shot gallery, faint traces of a world that had either fallen into the Sea of Ayin or been devoured by the Alien Machines.
If I had to use an allegory, I’d say they’re like memories that persist even after the whole universe has been destroyed. The fossil of a dead cosmos. Like the light of a star that can still be observed from afar for many years.
Despite the paradox of an erased world still “existing”, the energies of dying timelines would often leave behind faint traces that’d coalesce and slowly crystallize into a local order of space-time. Their “structure” was as fragile as quantum particles and were under constant threat of collapsing.
As a High Overseer of the Astral Nexus and a Sentinel, one of Akane’s duties, besides monitoring the more stable, extant timelines, was to explore, probe and extract data from the Reshimot (plural of Reshimu). But beyond that, it was also an opportunity to meet one of the “Trailblazers”. Interdimensional vagabonds who hopped between worlds and battled against incomprehensible threats. Legendary figures like the Bloodreaver Shirona, the Sword Hunter Lian, the All-Benevolent Omnipotent Sage Maitreya and-
She heard a resounding boom echo across the twisted colorless landscape, followed by a large swirling pillar of light that sparkled with aggressive energies, bio-electricity arcing off in rows before slamming back down into an intense secondary explosion.
She smirked.
Well, well, did I rub a bunny’s leg today or what? My luck’s been as precise as my calculations!
Her intended target was found and she didn't even have to tap into her “Laplacian Demon Eye” nor her “White Box State Transcendence Field”. Energy wasted was a win for the enemy, but energy reserved was the enemy’s doom. Not that she often needed to worry about that. Her body could recalibrate and replenish energy so fast it surpassed the concept of energy shortage itself.
Her advanced senses picked up on something through the temporal axis, a dangerous reverberation, that made her shiver. The strange “waveforms” of absolute power that almost seemed to bend the world’s visage under its own immeasurable weight, a singularity much deeper and more ravenous than even the super massive universe-devouring ‘black hole’ at the center of this Reshimu.
No, don't tell me…son of a Gaussian bitch to the power of three fuck-yous! Why is it here?!
A Prime-Class. Otherwise known by a name she uttered to her colleagues once, which she dared not even think of now. Not here, not when her calculations didn't account for it and she didn't prepare in advance. To say the true nomenclature of these entities now was to court an oblivion that even she'd have a hard time escaping.
Its gaze has been cast here…but why? You egregious gluttons almost never go after Reshimot, so what changed?
Questions for another eternity. Occurrences that didn’t fall under her supremely-precise estimations were a greater rarity than a version of Earth where politicians weren’t corrupt pigs. Though she could feel the foreign all-powerful observer from somewhere inside that super massive singularity, she didn't feel that it was focused on anything in particular. She contemplated activating her Laplacian Demon Eye to gauge its strength, but if she stared at that abyss too long the abyss would definitely start staring back at her. And she’d rather avoid facing a Prime-Class without back-up.
It hasn't noticed me yet. That means it's not on a high alert mode. Okay, we still have a window of opportunity here.
Being on a timer was not a concept she usually had to deal with, as a being who naturally existed outside of the space-time lattice, in the safe metacosmic confines of the Astral Nexus where she could sip her quanta-chocolate and read her favourite otome manwhas.
Well it wasn't like she hadn't been trained for situations like this, from birth she could comprehend how to deal with dangerous situations to the best of her capacity.
This however means folding the space-time grid is a no-no and messing with the vector fields is just as risky. Which means…
She breathed, a sigh that reverberated with existence, causing eighteen dark wings to protrude from her back, manifesting as eighteen crystallized kaleidoscopes. The wings spread further out till they were attached to her back by a “data”-link. The wings themselves, although reminiscent of the species her Mothers were originally part of - Fallen Angels - radiated a much greater wave of power and a supremacy that even the God of the Bible would fear. And instead of feathers, it was like folds of the night sky and digital data had been meshed into something that resembles raven wings.
We’re travelling as my primitive grandmother did!
Akane flapped her strange cosmic raven wings once and took off, flying past fractals, avoiding Hollow Dipole Fields and surpassing the ever impossible grid of the Reshimu, where time and space were thrown into a salsa of irregularity and absurdity, where even traveling at light-speed could not get you from point A to B. So she went faster, so fast she surpassed the bending of fractured time and arrived at her destination before the moment she took off.
She looked up and despite her unnatural ability to keep her emotions in check, she couldn't help the jolly smile that graced her cute features. Like a kid seeing that one cool relative they hadn't met in a long time.
Well, not that he was a relative in blood or family relation, but he had effectively been her ‘babysitter’ at one point. She felt a natural attachment to the man.
The man, dark, tall and brooding, olive skin glistening with sweat as he stood at the center of a gulf of death, destruction and ferocity, where one would go only if they courted death with a burning desire to meet a most gruesome end. And there was no shortage of volunteers.
Clank! Clank! Ching!
Metal meeting metal, reality screeching as space-rending blades and astro-shattering blasts met and caused intense reverberations across an area roughly the size of India. A clash of many against one, who stood like an unbreakable pillar.
Akane almost jumped up in excitement, an electric shiver running down her body and an almost heroic worship flaring up in her eyes. It was like when a fan sees one of their heroes up close, they can’t help but see them in a dazzling light. It was a rare sight for a natural-born Sentinel like her, to watch a Trailblazer so close, going in guns blazing.
By my estimate…I should have a ten Earthen minutes window of opportunity to do nothing.
Meaning, she had the chance to enjoy the show for a bit. Her eyes glowed in hyper-chromic hues, a pulse of unnatural electricity passing through and coalescing into buttery popcorn that popped into existence. She sat down on the verge of the country-wide crater where the battle raged on.
The man, her target, stood at the very epicenter of this crater. Posture balanced and relaxed, his meridian aligned perfectly, the sign of a true warrior who’s been hardened through ages of battles.
Across from him, in every direction, rows upon rows of slain enemies, their bodies slashed or riddled with bullets to a point where even regeneration could not keep them going. Beyond the fields of the fallen, stood their still-functional brethren.
Biomechanic abominations and beasts of crystallized primeval discordian energies, whose form and physiology didn’t follow the laws of any world, encoding themselves from an outside source like malware bits onto a software system. Their outer shell had a lining of crackling space, tiny fractures as if even this dying world was rejecting their presence here.
They came in various shapes, sizes and forms, modules Akane had analyzed to death and understood inside out. She saw Slashers, Brawlers, Armillaries, quite a few Centaur Commanders, as well. Akane counted about eight thousand, six hundred, forty-five total units that remained intact, though there were probably a few thousand more the man had just cut down before she arrived.
Hmm, I sense nothing stronger than a Commander-Class. I don’t need to interfere. And knowing that guy, this is going to be quite the warm-up.
It was as if everything was frozen in a single frame, and Akane worried she might’ve hyper-accelerated her perception to levels where any action they take would be seen as an eternity for her. However, that was not the case. The man and the legion facing him were simply locked in an evaluation process. A wait to seize the vanguard of the moment.
The moment came in the form of a stray dead leaf from a rotten tree, falling down slowly and landing on a puddle of some god-abhorred purplish substance. The instant the first ripple from the leaf’s falls spread across the puddle, the attack began.
One of the weaker entities, a Slasher-type, jumped high in the air, blade-arms shining with dangerous light.
BAM!
It never landed, its cranial apparatus eviscerated by a precise shot. The others narrowed their optical sensory modules. In his left hand, gloved fingers grasped the wooden handle of a customized revolver handgun.
Magnum 44. ‘Warchild’. One of his go-to ranged weapons. Not impressive aesthetically, though it does possess a case-hardened finish with a ten inch barrel, making it more efficient than most of its kind. The true kicker is the sixth ace shot.
Four more biomechanical fiends jumped or flew down, each vaguely resembling an animal or a chimeric mix of a few. Their physical attributes scarcely made a difference.
Second shot. Second one down.
Third shot. The third mechanical being's skull split apart in the middle.
Fourth shot. The fourth one lost its optics and crashed into ten other entities.
Fifth shot. The fifth resounded across the area with a distorted gurgle as the supernatural bullet tore through its bio-cybernized insides.
A sixth entity came in, bulkier and faster than the last five, carrying a strangely-shaped warhammer with a glowing core of quanta energy, which sucked the residual power from its fallen allies, empowering it and causing it to grow significantly till it towered over the rest with a height of fifteen meters.
It raised the glowing hammer high, enough potential energy stored in it to smash a city to pieces.
But the man simply lowered his head as if noticing a coin on the ground, a gesture meant to almost mock the beast’s attack. Right as the hammer of doom came down to turn him into a two-dimensional stain, a myriad of light spears, each glowing with intense golden radiance, manifested into reality, stacking by the dozen until there was a spinning umbrella made of hundreds of light spears.
The mechanical behemoth’s body clicked and screeched with obvious effort, straining its turning joints as it struggled with all its might to crush the light-spear umbrella, yet it did not budge. No, quite the opposite, the man’s ever-growing number of light-spear-stacks started pushing the thing back.
The man simply coughed and the light spears converged into a singularity before exploding, violently shredding space and the glowing hammer along with them.
The behemoth stumbled forward from the lost leverage of the hammer’s weight and the man spun ‘Warchild’ and fired right as the barrel faced the behemoth’s head. The bullet glowed so bright it was like a comet until it collided with the giant’s robotic skull and exploded into a bright flash that reduced it to a half-torn/melted torso, which promptly crashed into the ground after a seconds delay.
BOOM, JACKPOT! Hahaha!
The deadly sixth shot, where the man would store a large amount of holy power and release it as a miniature bomb. The deadliness came from the precision and combination of a bullet’s penetration with a bomb’s dispersive power. It was a skill the man had fashioned specifically to destroy big, hulking brutes like this. Or…dragons that needed a good shot to the head to stay down.
After the hulking monstrosity fell, the man’s enemies abandoned all pretense of caution and chose the blunt certainty of overwhelming force. They surged in from every direction, weapons humming and glowing at frequencies that did not belong to reality itself.
Behind the advancing line, ranged units and support cadres activated their designated protocols. Cannons roared to life. Paracausal rockets shrieked through fractured air. Fields of otherworldly energy unfurled across the battlefield, cascading over the front-line fighters and layering them in overlapping shields of luminous force.
The army moved as one unit, with one purpose and one strategy. The man had an unreadable expression, only tilting his head a little as if to say: “But that’s also why you clowns are so predictable”.
He threw his hand up, summoning some kind of contraption, a heavy weaponry - a gorgeous, god-forged mix of a ballista and a railgun, spliced together with the force of a hurricane and the most precious gems in Svartalfheim.
“The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light…”
Akane’s attention immediately perked and she observed more vigilantly, a popcorn falling off her lips as she was ready to munch it down.
Is he…no way, that’s so cool! I’ve never seen him do that before!
The dust gathered like an unwitting audience, swept up into a siphon that soon formed into dark thick clouds, heavy with crackling power inside.
“Se'arah!”
The clouds expanded further out, exploding into a gaseous giant of turbulent rage, a storm with the convective wind-force and buoyancy of a typhoon that could annihilate an island in mere minutes. The storm roared and the world blinked with a volley of golden flashes, so radiant their collective shine could’ve been mistaken for a new star being born if observed from the other side of this broken Earth.
The lightning strikes, further enhanced by the man’s nigh-unending holy power and the rune-etched ballista whose energy proliferated into the dark storm, colliding with the supernatural electric field and intensifying its charge and potency by a factor of millions.
Þrumaglóðr. The Clarion of the Polar Peaks. The Belcher of Thunderbolt. Inscribed with the runes that call on the might of the thunderstorm and fitted with antler material from one of the Four Stags of the Yggdrassil. Its firing rate and armatures are pathetically basic to me, but they still pack a mean punch! I figured he’d resort to it, since its light-speed electric barrage is efficient against armored-types, but to combine it with a Miracle for a doubly-explosive effect offset my predictions by a margin! He’s so freaking cold!
Akane ate her popcorn even more enthusiastically, her usually cold and dispassionate eyes sparkling with wonder, looking more the child her physical form should suggest she is. The Astral Nexus did have something akin to TV series and observatories, but watching the real stuff from up close was a trillion times better.
The army of biomechanical monstrosities groaned and crackled as the divine storm tore through their ranks. Wave after wave went dark, lightning spearing their cores and processors, punching through the triple-layered Discordian energy fields and frying them from the inside out.
Backline support units spasmed and dropped into temporary shutdown, while artillery platforms toppled from their perches—some discharging blindly into the ground as they fell, annihilating themselves and a dozen nearby constructs in the process. The vast organism that had moved as one now collapsed like a sandcastle struck by a rising tide, dissolving into thousands of scattered fragments.
Farther back, the units that had kept their distance—and the Commanders directing them—watched the anomalous storm with cold, analytical focus. One stepped forward: a chimeric construct of polished metal and exposed circuitry, welded into a shape that vaguely resembled a humanoid cockroach. It drove a sleek, futuristic rod into the ground.
An electromagnetic pulse detonated outward—then inverted. Instead of dispersing, it manifested at the storm’s heart, converging inward upon the Belcher of Thunderbolt. The weapon shuddered violently. Its golden brilliance drained to a pallid blue, and the runes etched along its length darkened, twisting into harsher, more chaotic forms.
The man looked up with curiosity that turned into horror as his weapon was turned on him, firing lightning at lightspeed, forcing the man to buckle down and encase himself in a quadruple-layered holy barrier. The man grit his teeth, as though his immense reserves of holy power could withstand the onslaught, the constant barrages of photonic-shattering lightning propagated cracks throughout his barrier.
Akane looked on in silence, analyzing the situation.
Huh, a Flux-Flow Hijacking. You don't see that everyday! Meaning that thing is probably a Reality Hijacker-type. It's weak as tofu physically but its ability to mess with the energy flow of other beings is pretty scary…for a mere Commander-Class, that is.
The man’s feet dug further into the blackened earth, his barrier on the verge of cracking. The entities, who felt that the opponent was compromised regardless, felt confident in dashing forth to further insure his demise. However, this caused a contradiction in the ranks, as to preserve the troops, the Reality Hijacker-Type was forced to reduce the output of the Belcher of Thunderbolt.
“Heh…” the man’s struggling expression turned into a snide smirk, as if to say ‘I got you’.
He turned off his barrier and the ground exploded with a rapture as the remaining lightning bolts razed it with obscene force. However, the man was gone and by the time the enemies followed his movements, he was halfway carving a canyon of bodies, wielding twin swords in both hands while firing a line of light spears that created a sort of race-track leading directly towards-
The Reality Hijacker sent an alarmed beep towards the heavier units, but they were too slow to act, the speed of the signal not matching the ferocity with which the warrior spun wildly like a beyblade of doom, landing with a squelch mixed with a tearing sound on the Reality Hijacker as one of his blades firmly latched into the thing’s alien skull.
「Gyuuuuuuuagh!」
The Reality Hijacker let out a scream through an artificial vocal module, the searing hot passion of the man’s killing intent seeping into his sword in the form of holy flames, his control over his angelic core so precise he could manifest his holy power in the form of a holy element. The holy flame melted through the thing’s internal bio-circuitry and synthesized tissue.
“Onigari-Ryuu: Gotamashiki!” the man growled as his hands became a blur and a second later the Reality Hijacker was cut into fine slices like sushi, before the man spun once again, his muscles bulging from his tight shirt as his breathing pattern changed.
“Hinogami-Kagura: Shiranui!” the man shot past the falling pieces and incinerated them out of existence before it could regenerate with a single flame-coated slash.
Akane’s eyes exploded with giddy excitement.
Ooooh, a Furude technique followed by one of my family’s arts! Now that’s a world-class warrior for you!
Due to his insane velocity, the drag force itself failed to keep up with him, letting him whizz past hundreds of the entities, his movements like a fire dancer’s who has practiced the moves enough times to do them without thinking.
Left swing, right swing, his hands spinning and slashing like tornadoes as he cut down hundreds of the biomechanical entities.
“Ngh!”
Before his feet could touch the ground, a crushing force slammed into him from the side. Horns punched through the skin of his chest and bicep as a bison-like juggernaut barreled into him, its endoskeleton and massive joints humming as it leveraged its colossal frame and herculean strength.
He was sent rocketing across the battlefield toward a jagged outcropping that would have skewered him outright—had he not recovered mid-air. Twisting sharply, he flipped himself upright and unfurled his Fallen Angel wings.
Though their coloration followed the common hues of their kind, and their aura seemed like that of a termite beside Akane’s blazing presence, they carried a mystifying majesty—one rivaled only by the ancient Governor-General of the Grigori.
The man shot upward just in time to avoid another bison-like construct hurtling toward him—then another, and another. It became an apocalyptic bullfight in the sky, except these bulls were engines of incomparable destruction, their hooves fitted with jet propulsors that let them carve impossible curves through the air.
Even so, he outmatched them in aerial maneuverability. He wove between the charging biomechanical titans, evading by inches, waiting for the moment their trajectories aligned.
His wings flared wide, catching drag—then snapped inward. Riding the gathered pressure, he launched himself straight at them.
“Hinogami-Kagura: Shugetsu!”
His blade flashed in twin arcs, like the jaws of a raging tiger snapping shut. The slashes carved a vacuum through the constructs’ midsections. A heartbeat later, holy fire followed the cut, and the bisons detonated from within.
He descended and skidded across the ground, posture settling into perfect balance.
The counterattack came instantly.
He tossed his swords skyward and leapt as a storm of blades erupted beneath him. Twisting midair, he began to spin, unleashing holy bullet after holy bullet in a relentless cascade. The barrage did not narrow—it expanded, spreading outward like a widening halo of annihilation.
They fell in sequence. Twelve. Twenty-four. Forty-eight.
By the time the count reached one hundred, the falling blades had descended low enough for him to snatch them from the air. With both weapons reclaimed, he unleashed a series of omnidirectional slashes that erased three more advancing waves in bursts of searing light.
Then the aerial units arrived.
Bird-like drones screamed overhead at near-relativistic speeds, mounted gatling guns blazing as they circled him in tightening spirals. At the last instant, he substituted himself with a clone of condensed holy energy.
The real warrior reappeared atop one of the drones, driving his blade into its neck joint. Seizing control of its mounted weapon, he turned it against its own formation, shredding several from the sky.
The survivors shrieked like metallic pterodactyls—only to be answered by descending spears of radiant light.
They manifested above each drone in perfect alignment.
They fell.
Each spear pierced clean through its target— and then exploded, reducing the machines to burning fragments that rained to the battlefield below.
The warrior barely deflected a beam-like attack that vibrated with abnormal frequency, a discordian symphony that worked to bring down the cosmos. Three of the Commanders jumped in the air and slammed their weapons down on him. An energy axe, quantum blade and a scythe.
The Commanders were hulking monstrosities, their frames ever-shifting and their optics blinking as they adapted to the man’s power and fighting style. All the while, their minions continued attacking in droves from all sides.
The man sucked in a breath as his muscles strained against the heavy blows of the Commanders, while his body was continuously grazed by the smaller enemies.
Though from an outsider’s perspective, the situation might’ve looked hopeless, Akane could only smile in anticipation.
Aaah, that’s why the Lower Caste soldiers are so fun to bully. How long till they realize this is just another ruse?
The man’s expression, which gave off nothing but the feel of strain and effort a moment ago, morphed into a sardonic smirk as he flipped, rapid-firing ‘Warchild’ to temporarily leave the Commanders with damaged sights and propelling himself a kilometer into the air, where he had a nice, bird’s-eye view of the army of thousands and their commanders. An army that had ganged up on him and now stood clamped together like a useless mass.
“Time to end it…” the man uttered his first words, his voice gravelly and carrying an edge that promised inescapable finality to his foes.
He swung his left hand and a golden trail followed that crystallized into a bow. The bow shone with the brilliance of a star, its design intricate and gorgeous with molten gold that retained its form despite its liquidity.
He outstretched his right hand and lightning struck his palm, but instead of searing it, the electric charge focused and condensed into a peculiar blade that shimmered with immense power. The power of a heavenly king.
Upon sensing the frequencies, Akane immediately discerned the nature and identity of these artifacts, her expression revealing the slightest hint of shock before it fell into a look of pristine amusement.
Hooo, so he had those in his arsenal? The Bow of Apollo and Indra’s Vajra. Interesting, that’s not something the Astral Data Vaults have recorded. Must be a new addition to his arsenal. You never cease to amaze me, Uncle! Now show me how the thunder roars!
The man nocked the vajra’s end onto the translucent stellar bowstring of Apollo’s Bow, pulling as far back as he could, the veins of his biceps practically throbbing with fury under the skin as he accumulated as much potential force as possible. The fire of the Sun collided with the lightning sparks of the vajra, overlayering it with a kind of flaming-lightning arrow that danced in his hand with anticipation.
“Indra’s Sun-Destroying Arrow!” the man roared as he unleashed the divine arrow of ravishing destruction, the concentration of energies falling down like a comet that promised the enemies’ extinction.
The Commanders and their minions attempted to put up a last resistance, firing their own concentrated beams of discordian energies, but compared to the descending power of two mighty gods coupled with the man’s own immense holy energy, their attacks might as well have been fireworks trying to halt a nuclear blast, only slowing the arrow a little before it fell down on them with a force potent enough to silence a star and exploding in a world-consuming flash.
When the cacophony of noise and brightness concluded, the country-sized crater had quadrupled in diameter, only limiting its destruction to the size of a France-like country due to the man’s precise control over his own energies.
The man looked on in solemn silence. The enemies had been wiped out, down to the last number. Not a trace of them had been left behind. After what felt like a silent eternity, his body untensed and he slowly descended on the ground, collapsing on one knee, his breathing uneven.
“Huff…huff…”
Using power borrowed from two high-ranking divinities ensured the total annihilation of entire armies, but it came with a great cost, lashing back at his body with an almost equal force that did a number on his stamina.
But when things appeared peaceful, he felt the ground rumble, like an earthquake threatening to split the already broken planet further apart. But this wasn’t a geological occurrence. No, it was the effect of something insanely heavy crashing down.
He looked back and he felt a tightening knot at the back of his throat. Gigantic wasn’t even a word that could do justice to the living mountains that fell down from the sky, like dark raindrops that shook the broken Earth and nearly threw him off balance. They were absolutely gargantuan, standing hundreds of miles away from him yet he still had to crane his neck to look up at them. And there were seven of them, each one exuding an aura that dwarfed the entire army of enemies he had been facing.
“Damn…guess they’re done playing around and sending in the big boys.” the man said outloud, his voice laced with a kind of exhausted sarcasm that hid his actual anxiety well. Though he had faced worse odds, without Indra's Sun-Destroying Arrow, even defeating one of these mountain-like colossuses would wear him down. Best case scenario, he spent days hacking at them until they fell, worst-case scenario…no, there was no worst-case scenario. He’d break the tides of causality again and force his way forward, as he had done hundreds of times already.
His shoulders tensed, hands itching to summon his long-gone beloved’s prized sword, his ace in the hole that had gotten him out of many tight spots before.
“Well, ‘Via’, I hope you’re ready for a long dance-”
“Ten minutes have passed. This was fun, but it’s time to end the show.”
A girl’s voice reverberated from everywhere, echoing from every twisted crevice of the land and the hairs on the man’s arms stood up like a cat’s. He turned and saw her pass him in silence, levitating, crowned in an aura so absolute that the only image his mind could summon was the Dragon of Infinity.
She flickered in and out and was surrounded by an odd deep blue-ish aura, her power extending out in massive waves like the spiral arms of the Milky Way and for a moment the man swore he saw an infinite expense of a kind of computerized boundless field, like a universe functioning as an autonomous being.
CLAP!
Her hands came together in a resounding smack,.as heavy as a supernova as an immeasurable charge of power was released in an omnipresent pulse that froze everything, the entire broken world, covering it in a kind of ‘digitalized’ effect. Everything except the man himself, whose mouth gaped a bit in shock.
He saw them, the mountainous behemoths from the other side of this piece of the shattered Earth, now rigid as if someone had turned them off. A few trembled and vibrated slightly, the faintest sign of resistance, but against the tiny goddess’ power, they remained locked like flies on a web.
The girl chuckled, extending one hand forward as if to ‘grasp’ the faraway titans in her palm and the world itself responded, manifesting a sapphire digital hand of 0s and 1s crystallized into a gigantic lattice of energy. The girl’s hand clenched into a fist and the digital higher-dimensional hand clasped the titans, the 0s and 1s breaking apart and fusing back into cerulean sparks of light, right at the centers of these mechanical behemoths before-
SNAP!
Exploding like septuplet supernovas, breaking down the titans into baser material and wiping them clean off the face of this broken Earth.
The girl giggled about the matter, as if she had just toppled over a rival’s lego set and dusted her hands off casually.
The warrior stood in complete silence, his body feeling the cosmic tremors from the titans’ destruction even from afar and gulping, uncertain if what he was facing was a threat. His instincts flared up as he sensed the tiny goddess moving until she turned around and his eyes went wide in recognition.
“You are-!”
Akane smiled, reeling her real power back in and mirthfully tip-toeing through the air toward the man. She had been eager to reveal herself to him all this time. But the heroine had to make a grand entrance.
“Heya, Uncle Purge!” she said. “Let's catch up, shall we?”