Character Scramble Season 18 Finals: Secret Wars

[u/FreestyleKneepad]

Click HERE to cast your vote for the winner of Season 18! Voting will remain open until 11:59 CST on July 29th.

Excelsior! The Thrilling Conclusion to the Scramble Wars writing competition is here! With the fate of the world on the line, /u/Cleverly_Clearly and /u/Ragnarust will duke it out for ultimate supremacy. But who will come out on top? You'll just have to read and find out!

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The Character Scramble is a long-running writing prompt tournament in which participants submit characters from fiction to a specified tier and guideline. After the submission period ends, the submitted characters are "scrambled" and randomly distributed to each writer, forming their team for the season. Writers will then be entered into a single-elimination bracket, where they write a story that features their team fighting against their opponent's team. Victors are decided based on reader votes; in other words, if you want people to vote for you, write some good content. The winner by votes of each match-up moves on to the next round. The pattern continues until only one participant remains: the new Character Scramble champion, who gets to choose the theme, tier, and rules of the next Scramble!

The theme of Character Scramble 18 is Secret Wars. Round prompts will be based on scenarios and setpieces from the original Secret Wars comic, as well as some other classic Marvel stories and scenarios, but will primarily be flavored by each participant being placed on one of two massive teams that will battle it out for supremacy.

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Round 5: Secret Wars

As the combatants dwindle and the war winds down, one last showstopping event occurs to draw everything to a close.

Somewhere, fundamental to the designs of this battle lies a source of ultimate power. Whether it is God Himself, a vast font of power capable of rewriting the world, or merely the very powerful creator of this war, the curtains can't be drawn on Battleworld before its' source is dealt with.

And it really is dealt with. Almost as soon as ultimate power appears, it is seized by a member of one of the two remaining teams. And although it may seem impossible, in order to truly end everything, God must die.

And you must kill them.

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Round Rules:

• Behold, The Foundations of Eternity: This gist of this round is this, either ultimate power or the creator of the war appears, has its power claimed by a member of one of the two remaining teams, and then they are defeated and the war concludes. Any way you want to interpret those conditions is up to you

• God Saves, Man Kills: Although the power in question may be fit for a God, it is not entirely fit for a man. Although one of the characters that have made it this far acquire unlimited power, there is a limit to mans ability to wield such power. This human flaw is how it will be possible to defeat them.

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Normal Rules:

• The Grand Finale In A Twelve Part Crossover Series: Although the Guest Pool on the roster only includes unscrambled characters, you will, at all times, be allowed to write any characters in your pool as guests for the round, including characters on other people's teams. Full lists of characters on Team Secret and Team Wars can be found... on those links.

• The Marvel Way: It's a comic book, the good guys always win out in the end, or if your team is the bad guys, they'll get to win out in the end, just this once. Even if your characters have only a small chance of victory, write that small chance happening!

• In an All-New All-Different Costume: You are absolutely encouraged to write your characters gaining or losing equipment/abilities/injuries/sanity. However, your opponents are not expected to keep track of these in-story changes and vice versa.

• Amazing! Astonishing! Uncanny!: Give a brief summary to introduce your characters at the start of your post. Be sure to mention things like powers, personality, history, just stuff that the average reader should know before reading.

[u/Cleverly_Clearly]

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.

[u/Cleverly_Clearly → u/Cleverly_Clearly]

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.

[u/Cleverly_Clearly → u/Cleverly_Clearly]

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."

[u/Cleverly_Clearly → u/Cleverly_Clearly]

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.

[u/Cleverly_Clearly → u/Cleverly_Clearly]

"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

[u/Cleverly_Clearly → u/Cleverly_Clearly]

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.

[u/Cleverly_Clearly → u/Cleverly_Clearly]

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.

[u/Cleverly_Clearly → u/Cleverly_Clearly]

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.

[u/Cleverly_Clearly → u/Cleverly_Clearly]

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.

[u/Cleverly_Clearly → u/Cleverly_Clearly]

"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.

[u/Cleverly_Clearly → u/Cleverly_Clearly]

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.

[u/Cleverly_Clearly → u/Cleverly_Clearly]

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.

[u/Cleverly_Clearly → u/Cleverly_Clearly]

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.