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“You, solely, are responsible for this.”
Smoke, ash, dust. Vistas of twisted metal and seas of fire array themselves before your eyes, and they blend into a dying sun that only shines for the end as you push forward. Ahead of you, Robin makes a sound of discomfort that is lost to the roar of blood in your ears. Even should you be able to hear, it would not matter.
It would not matter, for there is nothing left to hear.
Your IFF blinks off, then back on. Robin screams as the coronas of several railgun shots cross your HMD, sending a slight burst of static across your vision. The sound dies in her throat as a feeble gurgle while you throw the nose of your craft upward, into a hard stall:
“Monarch—I can’t—I’m sorry—”
Your foe says something; even the roar of blood is gone now, and you cannot hear him. The cordium fires below cannot match one tenth of the blaze tearing through your chest.
Your plane rattles as you push, and push, and push. Trails of heat from the firestorm caught below the clouds trail off your wings, and his paint an image of fire that lives on the back of your eyelids in the split seconds that you blink. A sussurus of gray and black robes you for but a moment as you chase him up, up, up—into the light of the sun.
For a single moment, your breath, and time itself, hangs. There is nothing but this image, a grotesque relief of apocalypse painted against the beauty of the heavens.
Then comes the fury. The shock as you push further, past the sound barrier. The red vise that chokes the edges of your consciousness. Rains of falling stars alight between the clouds, and brilliant nebulas fan out before you while you chase him.
Something builds in you, beneath your eardrums and beneath your teeth. It billows through your mind like ash stirred by a gale, and the scream rips from you, then is stolen by the wind and the stars as the two of you weave together, higher, higher—
Your HMD has been blinking; for how long, you can’t say. A second stretches into infinity as you arch above the world, pulling backward as missiles and railgun shots quietly storm past—the devastation of Presidia expands to fill the whole of your sensorium, and you taste the ash as if you were standing amidst the flames.
That is the blood from your nose. Your consciousness darkens, and for a moment, you believe it will be stolen from you.
Like a star cast from the heavens, you fall; like a kingfisher aiming for its prey, you dive; and like the mortal that you are, as your plane stretches, groans, and screams—as your blood vessels flatten and your brain grasps at the unravelling threads of your consciousness and your heart fibrillates and your lungs empty and your soul roars—you pray.
Your foe rides to meet you on a sea of darkness. You do not twitch, do not speak, do not move as you plunge into the artificial daylight cast across your crown.
Your bones are made of the stuff of nightmares; your skin, of dying dreams. Frost lines your skull and fear billows from your lips as you mouth a prayer only you and god shall ever hear. Crimson I screams a damnation of his own in return as he ascends, his vessel’s nose aligned with yours.
And you fire.
You fire it all. The missiles, the guns, the bombs. You fire the hope, and the regret, and the despair, and the fury, until all that is left in this hollow crown is fuel and blood.
There is nothing, then. Another star fades from the sky, joined with the hells it made, and all is cold, and quiet, and gone.