Chapter Text
SpongeBob SquarePants is, at the present moment, doing four things simultaneously, which is not unusual for his job at the Krusty Krab.
He is flipping two patties, monitoring a third, adjusting the grill temperature, and singing under his breath a song with no particular Iyrical content beyond an extended celebration of the current temperature of the grill — all at the exact same time. Despite using a standard Spatula for all of this… spatulations, the Golden Spatula hangs from his belt today — the one he found on his first day working for the Krusty Krab, worn smooth at the handle from the specific warmth of being held by the right person. Today happens to be the anniversary of his employment at the Krusty Krab (or somewhere close — Patrick didn't quite know for sure, but SpongeBob figured it was good enough for the girls he dated), so he decided to bring it to work as a subconscious reminder of his first of what would prove to be countless achievements at the Krusty Krab.
The top part of a figure appears in the service window. He is wearing a hood, and his face is in shadow in a way that shouldn't be possible given the kitchen lighting, but SpongeBob has seen and will probably see more absurd things in this neck of the woods, so he isn't disturbed in the slightest. "Excuse me," SpongeBob says pleasantly, "we're not open for seating yet, but if you want a to-go order, I can—"
"I'm not here for food," the figure says. His statement isn't rude but is factual — the kind that doesn't operate on needless preamble. "I'm here for you."
SpongeBob, his curiosity piqued, decides to give this situation his undivided attention, so he takes the patties off the grill and covers them to preserve them — there's no sense in wasting his hard work. He turns to face the window fully, his expression implying he doesn't see the figure as immediately threatening.
"Okay," he says, his voice brimming with his trademarked, glass-half-full brand of curiosity. "What about me?"
The figure raises his hands into view, which are holding an austere, cloth-wrapped item he proceeds to set on the counter. He unwraps some string tied on one end and pulls back the cloth to reveal its contents: a katana. It has a dark scabbard and hilt, and it is absent of any ornate detailing. The mysterious man wordlessly pulls the sword from its sheathe to reveal the blade, half-drawn to show SpongeBob it was clearly made with finely forged function over facetiously flashy fashion in mind, evident by how it catches the kitchen light and holds it differently than any sort of heartlessly made factory steel should.
"There's a world being destroyed," the figure says, gently yet firmly restoring the katana to its scabbard. His voice is even and direct and carries the specific tone of someone who has delivered this sentence to multiple people across multiple realities and is still uncomfortable with the routineness of it. "A dying place where everything that's gone wrong has already gone wrong and the last thing that needs doing requires someone who can do it." A pause. "I've been watching you."
"For how long?"
"Long enough to be certain."
SpongeBob looks at the katana. He looks at the Golden Spatula on his belt and touches it once with one finger, checking it's there since, for all he knows, he will be gone for quite some time and will not want to be without it — especially not on his special day, of all days.
"Will I be coming back?" he asks.
"That's the goal,"' the figure says. "But I won't lie to you."
"Okay," SpongeBob says, satisfied. SpongeBob, after all, is a simple being who is easily satisfied by rudimentary, essential information. He knows what he is and what he does and what he will do when asked. "Can I leave a note for Mr. Krabs?"
A subtle change figure's posture suggests this was not anticipated, but it quickly adjusts. "Yes."
SpongeBob produces a sticky note and a pen from behind him — from where, exactly, the figure doesn't know, and he doesn't feel it's his place to ask. SpongeBob writes:
Gone to save a dying world with a mysterious hooded person. Back as soon as possible. The patties under the dome are done.
He sticks the note to the front of the grill, thoroughly running his finger alongside its edge to ensure it doesn't easily fall off. He puts the pen back behind him reaches for and almost takes the katana, but then he suddenly appears to get an idea: He reaches for his pen once more and decides to add, right at the end of the note:
:-D
Glad he was able to add this final detail, he restores the pen once more and takes the katana from the cloth with surprisingly great care. He straps it across his back, the hilt rising above his right shoulder. He touches the Golden Spatula on his belt one more time, then does an excited arm pump.
"Okay. I'm ready!" he declares.
The figure steps back from the window and pushes through the door leading to the kitchen. Something clicks under his robes, and then a portal opens — pale blue at the edges, not unlike the subterranean expanse of SpongeBob's world — and SpongeBob walks through it into something he has never done before, which is the same as every other morning has been.
…just louder.
The sky, above the Outside World's last battlefield, has been wrong for some time.
The Lunarian light comes down in columns - not natural moonlight, which silvers and softens, but hard Lunarian illumination, flat and cold and certain. The Earth below it has the quality of a photograph of itself. The kaiju battles — Gensokyo's residents transformed by the Moon's rays and deployed for the Lunarians' destructive purposes, only to be hunted systematically by the Watatsuki sisters and their fleet once they outlived their usefulness — have left their conclusions on the horizon in at least three directions. The decadent smoke visible past the silhouette of the Eiffel Tower is a grim remark of the finality of their attack — and the word "attack" is quite an understatement.
What has not yet been finalized, however, is the fate of the figure standing in the center of the burned ground at the approach to the Tower in question.
Watatsuki no Yorihime has not moved significantly in some time. She does not need to. Her sword is drawn. The light of the Lunarians, mingled with the spotlight of the (not very) golden hour seems to agree with her in spite of the chaos not too far away. It picks out the edge of her broken blade and weaponized, lethalized holster, and it accentuates the cold certainty in her bearing, the specific expression of a person who knows the remaining math and is content with it.
She has long since delivered her final speech to her faithful followers. It was something she had been reciting for considerable time — lack of preparation would not stain the Watatsuki name, or at least not her half of the current generation's name on her watch — about their sacred struggle and the filth below that would oppose it. She had spoken it with the grand conviction of a woman whose ideology ate everything that might have restrained it alive and left no scraps. And now she is simply waiting.
Hastening could cost her this carefully composed battle, after all.
Reimu Hakurei and Marisa Kirisame, diminished in strength and in the mental grey area between the sanity of their normal selves and the insanity of their kaiju forms, the last two standing, are forty meters away and looking at each other through half-sidelong glances. No words pass between them. The duo has been through too much for too long for words to be a constantly necessary medium of communication anymore. What moves between them in their silence speaks volumes: We know we're not going to survive this. Let's make it count.
Their combined attack — an all-out charge — is a roar of light and will and the very last of everything two people have. It is the kind of strike that means something even when it fails, that stays in the record even when the people who made it aren't. It is, in summary, their last resort.
They reach Yorihime… and it fails.
Yorihime hardly seems to move. The light breaks against her, and she reaches out with both weapons and does something quick and final and she does not take any satisfaction in it. Reimu and Marisa fall, and the sky does not acknowledge their sacrifices.
She doesn't move to look when she hears their now-lifeless forms hit the ground. She just… exhales a breath she didn't know she was holding, and begins, after a short period of time, to let her mind wander. The battle they had was nothing if not impassioned on both sides; yet the act of actually dealing the killing blow was… anticlimactic.
Yorihime's lips slightly curled upward upon reflecting on this as the wind and the sirens continued their ambience. But of course I won, she muses, looking down at her now-broken sword and weaponized holster, which she holds in a neutral position by her hips. I wage a holy, an honorable, a sacrosanct war. These fools… A small chuckle escapes her lips before slightly intensifying to something more sinister. They were no more than mindless, savage heretics, kaiju or no. If the god of the Hakurei Shrine wanted them to live, they should never have—
A sharp zap sound catches her attention. She doesn't whip around — Yorihime isn't the kind to be easily alarmed — but she pivots slowly and sizes up the newcomer. Standing behind her is a yellow, somewhat shorter, square-shaped, and highly porous person with a katana in his right hand and a gold-colored kitchen implement in his left, and based on the faint, blueish crackling behind him that just ceased to be, he isn't from around here. Though he only just arrived, he appears to have formed his own opinions on her in turn, plausible due to his eyes fixated on a position where she infers the aforementioned "heretics" have landed and have not risen since.
"...Did you just kill them?" SpongeBob musters.
"Reimu and Marisa opposed the Moon Descent Ceremony," Yorihime says. The courtesy behind her explaining it is genuine.
"Did you just kill them?" he says again, his words gaining more weight and, with it, more certainty that makes the question not one Yorihime necessarily has to answer for him to know the truth. His voice has moved somewhere Yorihime half expected yet half didn't from someone with his appearance and perceived nature — neither elevated nor theatrical, but low, quiet, carrying a weight that is, in a way, still trying to find its footing in SpongeBob's headspace. It is the voice of someone stepping out of denial and coming to accept an unpleasant truth as what it is: reality.
"You are an aberrant," Yorihime concludes, reading him with the professional assessment of someone who has faced many things. "Not of this world. You have no place in—"
"Be quiet." The warmth that is usually SpongeBob's defining characteristic — his calling card, even — has stepped aside and what is filling that space is not merely described as pure rage nor absolute grief but certainty — a determined confidence in the competence that makes him the best fry cook in Bikini Bottom, the knowledge of his job and the intention to do it.
She stops. Something in her seems to flicker, perhaps annoyance. It would seem she has just classified him with her latest victims: impurity incarnate. Her grips on her weapons don't get suffocatingly tight, but they certainly have lost some of their momentary looseness.
He brings the katana up, which suddenly begins to hum slightly, its blade glowing a sky blue like a pond of pure water. "Let's go," he challenges, twirling the Gold Spatula in his offhand.
Yorihime does not wait for him to attack. A mere sponge could not be taken seriously, she assumes, regardless of whether or not it possesses a sword. She has slain people — things in general — far more fearsome in appearance and nature than him.
This is her first error.
She lunges with a grunt, crossing meters in only a second, and attacks with her broken sword, employing the measured ease of someone doing administrative work — efficient, not effortful. SpongeBob instinctively responds, catching her strike on the katana and redirecting it as their blades sing, SpongeBob's sword's energy flaring from the impact. The redirect has no particular power behind it, but it's there.
In the time it took for SpongeBob to realize he wasn't quite dead yet — he didn't expect his karate practice to pay off so well, to be honest — Yorihime's muscle memory from thousands of hours of swordplay practicing has moved her sword to a striking position again. Her next blow drives into his left side with the force that ends things. In her wrath's wake, he compresses — the sponge geometry absorbing, distributing, not dispersing the hit so much as disagreeing with it at the cellular level — and pops back into shape with a grunt and an expression of mild annoyance.
Utterly bewildered, Yorihime pauses, briefly trying to compute the fact that a sea sponge is withstanding her for… well, any period of time that isn't five seconds, frankly. SpongeBob uses the pause to get inside her reach and bring the Golden Spatula up from the low left, catching the edge of her buckler from underneath and wrenching. She doesn't drop it. But she steps to compensate, and having stepped, she leaves herself open to a low kick to her left knee, followed by a switch kick to her right hip that, surprisingly enough, sends her staggering.
This… This power! How— Yorihime's mind is able to produce in the face of her newfound inability as she postures herself, and for a moment, her mask of certainty wholly betrays her thoughts before slipping back on under a newfound sense of defiance. In miliseconds, her battle-minded psyche catches and translates the grammar of the strike and understands what this duel shall be: not a power contest, seeing as how SpongeBob's power level is apparently enough to give an admittedly fatigued Yorihime (fighting Gensokyo's resident exterminator and her mischievous gremlin of a friend and coming out on top is no walk in the park) a run for her money, but a technique contest, and more specifically a durability contest, and in durability contests, being made of sponge is a structural advantage that Lunarian swordsmanship traditions did not account for.
Nothing she can't adapt to in her mind's eye.
The fight displays the facts unanimously and unambiguously. Yorihime is faster, stronger, and more technically refined, unleashing strikes handed down to her from a tradition so old that one could assume some of the oldest mortals of this generation have never heard the names of the people who constructed the art itself. She hits him more than she misses, and each blow is a devastating condemnation of his existence if not more. His form shows the damage — deformation under repeated impact, the sponge structure compressing in ways that need more recovery time than the fight is giving him.
And because of these advantages that are so alien to this royal figure of the moon, he is able to keep coming, constantly forcing Yorihime to give him no room to breathe. But perhaps greater than that is his desire in the face of this great evil: he has looked at Reimu and Marisa on the ground and he has decided that the math is not the relevant variable.
Only justice is relevant to him now.
The fight crosses fifty meters of burned ground, their weapons singing a high-emotion, high-speed, high soprano-pitched dirge for the fallen princess of the Moon and the risen servant of a crustacean. And in spite of all the composure she had against the guardians of Gensokyo, Yorihime is actively losing her cool against SpongeBob, the remnants of her sanity being consumed not by the rays of the Moon, but the fact that her theology is being legitimately challenged by what looks like the lowest lifeform she has ever had to stomach looking at — and it's challenging her through the very art she thought she had mastered: that of a warrior engaged in passionate swordplay.
Though her strikes are becoming more more irate, reckless, more arrogant — causing her to whiff strikes here and there — SpongeBob's apparent skills, while formidably adaptable and durable and apparently enhanced by the blade he was gifted, do not allow him to presently close the gap formed by her unchecked emotion. Yorihime drives him backward steadily, a sustained offensive formed by her dual-handed techniques that has SpongeBob constantly having to replace pressure with pressure.
But even royalty of the Moon need rest. Yorihime's assault begins to tire her out emotionally, but more importantly, it spends her physical and mental capacity. Seeing his advantage, SpongeBob unleashes a desperate sweep attack from his right with both his sword and spatula, and Yorihime, realizing her error, grunts in exertion and frustration as she seals the entanglement in which all four weapons are fighting for supremacy — and this, somehow, seals her ability to fight wisely.
She has, in her mind, already won this and has moved on to the next fight, and she wants to know why this fool has not figured that out. "You have no understanding of what this ceremony means," she growls at SpongeBob, her gaze flashing with hatred as her face screws up into something prideful. "The Earth, the Moon — they will be reunited. Humanity will evolve into something glorious without them, and now, it will be without you."
"Those two people," SpongeBob says behind his locked-blade strain as his emotions start to manifest in earnest, "tried to stop you from hurting everyone else!"
"They were sacrifices, you naif — offered in the name of divinity you know nothing of!" She presses him harder, and her weapons shift — the angle changes ever-so-subtly, yet she didn't notice it in her mad rage.
SpongeBob, somehow, does. Grunting, he pushes back against the impending pressure, crying out in heroic retort, "They were people!"
He shifts his footwork by only two inches, redirecting the locked angle, and the Golden Spatula comes up from the low left at the exact moment she adjusts her grip for the follow-up, and she overextends by an inch. A quarter second passes, and in that moment, she finds her sword has been knocked clean out of her hands by a kitchen utensil. It's flying now, well beyond her reach — and so is the victory she thought was hers only seconds ago.
Yorihime's gaze widens in horror as SpongeBob steels himself in another fraction of a second. He doesn't quite understand at the moment, but she does — she had triggered something in him, and the fact that his blade is glowing even brighter than when he had started this fight, its humming now the sound of raw energy ebbing and flowing, was proof.
The katana finds the opening, and it punctures Yorihime's solar plexus with unfettered force.
SpongeBob's execution is not clean, and he does not feel heroic about it, yet he doesn't look away from it. The blade goes in, and Yorihime drops her offhand weapon roughly and lets out a grunt that turns to something slightly more desperate before diminishing to shuddering breaths as he grips and holds the sword's blade like a lifeline. Seconds later, SpongeBob regains enough control of his faculties to make a conscious decision to pull out the blade, and Yorihime crumples to her knees as the crimson stain on her red garb blossoms, all while SpongeBob steps back and holds the katana with both hands to keep them steady.
For a moment, they both breathe laboriously, and the distant, persistent ambience of screeching sirens and softly caressing wind reclaims its place as the battlefield's most prominent sounds. Yorihime, coughing up blood and too weak to move her shaky hands to apply pressure to her wound, says with the last of her conviction, "The ceremony will still… My sister — Toyohime — will complete it." She sputters and coughs before taking in an agonizing breath and growling in defiance — or perhaps outright denial — of her fate. "You can't stop what is already—"
"Maybe," SpongeBob says quietly, tears beginning to form in his eyes. "But you won't be the one to do it."
Yorihime doesn't finish the sentence she had started. She looks at him with eyes that seem to now show some form of mysterious pity as she sucks air through her teeth and grunts quietly, and her last breath silently escapes her lips as her head tilts forward, and she falls to her side, dead.
The first monolith of the conspiracy has fallen.
With a sense of exhaustion yet quiet accomplishment in the face of his fulfilling what he imagines the two, SpongeBob falls to his knees, and he, in spite of his desire to give up right here, merely… sighs before using the sword to steady himself to his feet once more. The weight of the blade and spatula in his hands, the latter of which has almost lost its glow, is now much more real to him than it was many minutes ago, and his arms and legs are shaking in protest. In short, he is exhausted.
Then he looks up, because a new sound — one decidedly more difficult to pass as background noise — has started: Moon Rabbit auxiliary forces, dozens of them, have rushed to the scene, likely to check on their (soon to be discovered as late) general. SpongeBob quickly understands, despite his exhaustion, the impending futility of his situation in the face of the sheer number of soldiers. The katana's energy that he borrowed for the fight has largely spent itself — the specific quality of the blade that gave him access to something beyond what he should be capable of is almost completely silent. And in spite of everything that allowed him to best Yorihime, his form has not fully recovered, and he is unable to continue.
He is doomed.
He looks at the approaching Lunarians, who he can assume — he's only now processing his head is throbbing, and his hearing isn't doing so great, either — are realizing their princess is dead, and he is to blame. One of them, apparently possessing authority enough to order the others around, says something unintelligible but nonetheless understandable given each of them are pointing their ranged weapons — danmaku projectors — at him.
With nowhere to go, he raises his left index finger —still clutching his prized Golden Spatula nonetheless — and points it at them. They seem momentarily startled as a group, which is surprising, but they don't relent at his attempt to bluff that he somehow has more strength in him than he actually does.
"Bang," he says. His voice doesn't quite carry.
But his finger does the job for him.
A small blast — think along the lines of a static shock scaled up by at least ten times or so and turned into a small beam — and the nearest Moon Rabbit's forearm catches it and she makes a face that implies pain and stops to clutch her arm. She's not dead, nor is she even seriously hurt. But upon removing her hand, SpongeBob realizes part of her dorearm has a cauterized mark across it, and everyone in the front line has seen this.
SpongeBob blinks at his own hand. He blinks at the Moon Rabbit. He blinks at the front line. "Whoa," he exhales.
The front line exchanges glances. They advance anyway, their resolve returning.
SpongeBob says, "Oh, no," breathily and, dropping his weapons, falls forward — but not before a portal opens right in front of him with another sharp shocking sound, and a pair of hands clothed in a black jacket catch him. He looks up slowly, and before him is a massive man, probably at least 10 feet tall, with the smoothest bald head he has ever seen. And… Golly, if that nose isn't pointy, he thinks.
What follows is something that SpongeBob doesn't get to fully see due to his fatigue, as the man — Felonious Gru — sets SpongeBob on his side in one smooth motion and, in the same fluid movement, has already reached into his jacket and has his signature gun — his freeze ray — pointed at the Moon Rabbits, each of which look apparently bewildered by Gru's having suddenly appeared to save a sentient sea sponge. He surveys the situation in two seconds and decides it's time to also pull out his other gun — a prototype rendition of the shrink ray, miniaturized for more portability. The production of a second firearm somehow puts the Moon Rabbits even more on edge — an effect Gru does seem to mind based on his grin.
"Right," he says, in the tone of a man accepting an unpleasant task with all the seriousness he can while deciding to not treat it like a funeral march. "Let's do this."
The first blast from the freeze ray sweeps the front rank — six Moon Rabbits arrested mid-step in a single left- to-right arc — and he is already moving, three steps right, the shrink ray targeting the weapons of the next cluster of troops. With each blast of the prototype, their spears and danmaku projectors contract to useless inches in their hands, leaving them to charge him head-on — an unwise move for someone attacking a man who stands at 14 feet tall.
He flips over a staff that swings from the right, kicks its holder while midair, rolls upon hitting the ground, and, upon reaching a crouched position, slams the barrel of his freeze ray into the sternum of another trooper who had her weapons rendered useless, stunning her while putting her in a headlock and spinning, freezing four more before grabbing his hostage trooper by the back of her jacket's collar and slamming her into three more. Only then does he stand and continue moving, proving his ability to be an onslaught of one against an onslaught of many.
He is not elegant. He is effective. Thirty years of professional villainy, followed by a handful more in the Anti-Villain League, has produced a man who knows how to overwhelm numerical opposition through constant, targeted disruption, moving fast enough that the formation's response always lags behind his last position in spite of his formidable stature.
A Moon Rabbit Captain — which rank she likely achieved partially by being larger and faster than her comrades, meaning she's better equipped than them on a fundamental level — intercepts him from the left with a combat and she catches him with a strike that opens a cut across his cheek. He doesn't stop. He holsters both weapons in his jacket because both hands are now needed, and he's at the right distance from the others at the right time — something he's learned to keep track of in any fighting situation. The Captain expects him to keep his distance, but knowing that wouldn't be the right distance, he steps inside her weapon's effective range and — at the right time — makes it a leverage problem, and she has been gruesomely thrown over Gru's hip and is on the ground before she finishes recalibrating.
He steps over her and shouts, across the formation:
"Sponge!"
"Over here!" SpongeBob calls back, from where he is now getting to his feet once more. Gru's intervention has given him the time he needs for the energy he needs.
"Can you move?"
"Yes!" SpongeBob responds and stands, picking the katana and Gold Spatula back up as quickly as his slightly recovered but still wounded body will permit.
"Then move!" Gru hollers — not rudely, but certainly urgently given he has fully dropped any sort of exaggeratedly jovial expression. "Toward me!"
Gru sweeps a freeze-ray arc cutting a channel through an impending Lunarian formation — not killing, just arresting — and the shrink ray follows up on a sole Moon Rabbit that closes the gap, miniaturizing her and essentially turning her into a very pouty inchling. SpongeBob moves through the channel Gru has cut, limping slightly, and arrives at his side.
Gru is quick to look SpongeBob over for anything that requires immediate attention. SpongeBob, however, looks at Reimu and Marisa, his earlier sorrow seeming it was only so far before it returned with a vengeance.
"Can we—" SpongeBob starts.
"No." Gru does not respond dismissively but rather firmly yet quietly. "Some things—" He kneels and puts one hand briefly on SpongeBob's shoulder. "Some things we cannot go back for. Today, we leave."
SpongeBob looks for one more second, then looks down at his feet, then looks back at the bald giant.
"Okay," he says and sniffs, wiping away a tear that threatens to fully form.
A new portal opens up as an exit, and without wasting any time, they posture up and go through. The portal then quickly closes with a few sparks marking its ever having been there, leaving Moon Rabbit reinforcements to arrive only to find empty air, the battlefield's silence, the three people on the ground who will not be getting up, and no one to bring in to pay for their leader's death. One of them— the one with the cauterized mark on her forearm, who was since broken from the ice by her fellow soldiers — whispers to herself through shivers, "Wh-What w-was u-u-up w-with th-those g-g-guys?"