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]

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.

[u/Cleverly_Clearly → u/Cleverly_Clearly]

He was the man who could meditate at the bottom of a stratovolcano in mid-eruption. Vilgax had survived that.

Who could fly through the cold reaches of space, temperatures so low that light sagged and slowed in the chill? Vilgax had survived that, too.

He had been hammered and forged by infinite war. He had been crushed, impaled, beheaded, disemboweled, flayed, boiled, ground, and exsanguinated. Whole civilizations beat their plowshares into swords, turning their brightest minds to work inventing entire new fields of weaponcraft. All to kill him. And he was still alive.

It was certainly possible to kill him. One would simply have to destroy his body before it could repair. He could have knelt down and allowed himself to be obliterated any time he wished. Why did he not do so? Why did he not bring his endless life to an end?

It was a curse.

The curse was laid when the old Emperor spoke to him.

"You will never be satisfied."

All Vilgaxians dreamed of conquering the universe. The borders of their empire ever shifted. What is the point of conquest? To conquer more. That was all they were capable of.

Vilgax had been the first of them strong enough to achieve it. His purpose was fulfilled. But he could not escape the curse.

"You will turn the blade on yourself."

How dare he? At that time Vilgax thought himself invincible. At the end of his road, when all had been claimed, he would rest on the immortal throne and watch over all creation like a god.

But he could not.

The old king's words had infected him.

Perhaps even Vilgax himself did not know it. He challenged the universe to kill him. "Bring me worthy challengers!" he bellowed. But that was only a veneer, a mask.

The curse inside him was the curse of fear. The fear the old man had been right.

And ever since that day, the fear grew and boiled up inside of him like rising vomit. He just needed to find the thing that would satisfy him! Just one more thing, and then he could withstand this agonizing worthlessness! He wouldn't allow himself to die! He wouldn't die!

His survival instincts mutated. They consumed his every thought. And now that all those thoughts were eaten up, his true self could come out. The self that was only fear of dying.

So Vilgax had withstood the complete destruction of his ego.

Just another thing he had survived.

He dragged his body through the jungle brush and over the rocky crags until he came to the edge of a cliff. The stone was red as blood. Only a few shrubs survived out here. The expanse was breathtakingly huge, but there was little in him to appreciate the beauty. He only saw two things: things that were not threats, and things that were threats. Nothing beyond that mattered now.

Vilgax looked up, and saw the sky was full of starships.

When he saw the ships come, he did not even recognize them. Vilgax took one glance at their bulky and ugly designs that blocked out the stars, instantly analyzed their make, considered all the weapons that such a warship held, and found them wanting. Not a threat, he thought.

The ship blared some ugly staticky noise at him.

"[Lord Vilgax, are you alright? We've brought an extraction team to take you off of Battleworld!]"

He cocked his head. The ship was too loud. It irritated him. What if he picked up a rock and hurled it up there, past the planet's atmosphere? Could he tear straight through the thousand-foot-long taydenite hull of the battlecruiser with a single throw? Most likely.

"[Lord Vilgax, what are your orders? What happened to your Praetors? Can you speak? Can you fight?]"

Maybe he should.

He scraped up a handful of rock with his bare hand, and squeezed its shape into a perfectly smooth ball. Cries of "Lord Vilgax!" battered against his unthinking skull. He tossed the ball a few times in his palm, just feeling out its weight. Every time he let the ball fall back into his hand, it felt as heavy as the footsteps of a giant. Thump. Thump. Thump. A drumbeat steadily growing closer, louder.

One final toss and he caught the ball in his hand. The footsteps continued. Vilgax turned around.

There was a colossal monster colored red-ruby and white-gold. It stood twice as tall as even the enormous Vilgax, who was twice as tall as any mortal man. He had six arms. He had two faces. His head eclipsed a halo that shined like the sun.

"Man, I was worried we were gonna be running around all day looking for ya! Good thing you brought the whole cavalry with you! You're not very good at keeping a low profile, are ya, squidface?"

Threat, he thought.

"Human! Whatever your intentions are, stand down now!" The throaty Vilgaxian language changed to Earthling dialect. "We have enough firepower to obliterate this planet! We will not hesitate to use it on you!"

"If you think you can scare me with the speeches, forget it!" Two arms crossed over the giant's chest, and two more heroically put their hands on their hips. "The only speeches I'll allow around here are the ones about hopes and dreams! I'm the incredible Kamina, heroic leader of Team Dai-Gurren! He is the unbreakable Simon, whose willpower is limitless! Together, we're stronger than the sum of our parts! We're Gurren Lagann, and our drill is the-"

"Engaging 20-kiloton nuclear missiles!"

The underside of the ship opened to reveal a quartet of cannons. Missiles slid easily out of their sheaths and engaged thrusters. From there, Gurren Lagann took a step back and got into a combat stance, palms flat like a sumo wrestler. These missiles weren't intended for interstellar warfare. They were intended for on-planet engagements, to destroy cities at worst. That meant they only traveled at twenty-four thousand kilometers an hour.

Gurren Lagann parried every nuclear missile with its flat-palm strikes. Every one was pushed aside, rocketing off-course and detonating harmlessly beyond the horizon line.

"Whoa! That's sure got a hell of a kick for a warning shot! Hey, Simon, you think you can take them?"

"H-huh? Yeah, I think so. Sorry. I was just surprised that they used the metric system..."

This thing was strong. It was an enemy that could deny Vilgax his immortality. That was not something he could allow, and he wouldn't wait for his useless battlecruisers to pull themselves together.

Vilgax threw the first punch.

Gurren Lagann caught it.

Just the shockwave of his blocked strike sent cracks all down the cliff across the canyon, stretching into the distance. The battlecruisers shuddered from the force.

"Whoa! He nearly caused a rockslide with a single hit!"

"Yeah, and you blocked it, didn't ya? Just believe in yourself, Simon! This is what we've been training for!"

"Right!"

Simon slammed forward on the throttle and Gurren Lagann hooked a punch right into Vilgax's stomach. And Vilgax broke through the clouds.

He impacted against the outer hull of a battlecruiser starship and crumpled the metal plating like tinfoil. None of his momentum slowed. Vilgax only ricocheted off, and the backlash rocked the entire cruiser until it scraped against the side of its ally ship thousands of feet away in space.

Below him was Battleworld. He was so far above his atmosphere that gravity had no effect, the world's curvature was clearly visible. Above him and around him were the stars. Everything within his sight belonged to Vilgax. All of those twinkling galaxies were his to rule over. The only thing that would not obey was Gurren Lagann.

It would have to be destroyed.

First he had to free himself from the vacuum of space. The lack of pressure and oxygen were negligible concerns for Vilgax, but the lack of gravity was not. He didn't have the power to fly unassisted. Or, maybe he had, and he had discarded it...? Irrelevant. What he needed was to get himself to a more advantageous tactical position, on the ground.

He dug his teeth into his arm and tore until the hand and bone ripped away entirely, spraying cerulean blood into space to drift eternally. It was hardly an injury to him. The fibers of his muscles were already starting to regrow. All he needed was a projectile.

Every forward force has a corresponding backward force. If he reared back and threw his severed limb away from the planet, in a pure vacuum the force would launch him back to Battleworld!

Vilgax burned from the air friction. The skin melted off of him and bubbled up in new layers, cycles of regeneration. This wasn't the first time he'd gone through atmospheric reentry. He'd long ago evolved beyond the need for pain receptors. For him, being on fire was only a benefit. One more time he broke through the clouds, and angled himself down towards Gurren Lagann for a fire-blazing divekick.

BANG! His foot cracked against the robot's metal head with enough force to nearly tear it from the neck. Vilgax expertly transitioned into a combo, relying solely on the strength of his blazing kicks to keep himself in the air.

"Grrr! Simon, can ya do something about the toasted marshmallow up here?!"

"Don't worry, I've got him!"

Vilgax's next kick whiffed. Lagann detached from its base on Gurren's neck and bounced back at the last possible moment. He still had quite a bit of destructive power without jacking into Gurren's power source; after all, his drill was the key that kick-started the divine motor. That was the same drill Vilgax stared down now, a bit the size of his entire body that rotated hypnotically at an impossible RPM. Lagann charged forward to rip Vilgax to shreds, but Vilgax squatted into a power stance and reached out to embrace Lagann-

-and caught it.

[u/Cleverly_Clearly → u/Cleverly_Clearly]

He'd reinforced himself against Gurren Lagann's strikes. It was the natural evolutionary instinct in his body, the same kind of stuff that Anti kid was spliced with. If he was too light to withstand their punches, he would bloat his chitin until his muscle mass was heavy enough to crack the earth.

That was the only reason Simon didn't splatter him with his Lagann bull rush. The point of the drill gouged through his armor, but it was only able to break through a few inches of his musculature. Vilgax's clawed hands were even capable of halting Lagann's spin through brute strength alone.

But he was not capable of stopping Lagann's flight. He wasn't heavy enough for that. And if Lagann couldn't move forward as a drill, it moved forward as a battering ram, slamming Vilgax down into the rock and scraping him straight over the canyon down the cliffside. Its speed compared favorably to Vilgaxia's quickest aircraft, double-digit Mach numbers, tearing tunnels through solid rock until the insides of the cliff were as holey as an ant farm. Vilgax's skin was hard, and his bones were harder. Being slammed through thousands of tons of stone wasn't much of a beating for him. The plan was more to tenderize him, soften him up with constant persistent damage so they could weaken Vilgax for a super-strong finishing move.

Lagann breached the cliff face once again, spraying rock chunks like seafoam, and flew directly towards Gurren with Vilgax still impaled on the front. Gurren cocked its arms, shotgun-style. The several mudra-performing hands of Gurren transformed into a mess of drills.

When Vilgax was about to slam into Gurren, Kamina crashed every drill into Vilgax at the same time, combining the force of Lagann and Gurren's drills to compress Vilgax from every angle! This was the finishing move that they'd just come up with, the deadly pincer attack- Brotherly Claw!

The current form of Gurren had six arms. Each arm ended in one hand, which became two drills apiece. Combined with Lagann's sole giant drill, that was an unlucky total of thirteen drills all spearing into Vilgax at the same time. Together they'd reduced Vilgax to the status of a pincushion, achieving one of the highest echelons of performance for all warriors he had ever faced. Out of hundreds of thousands of venerable heroes, less than ten had ever subjected him to such humiliation.

Even worse for Vilgax, the damnable Vilgaxian armada chose that moment to act. Until this point, they'd been too fearful of damaging Vilgax to take decisive action. Now that there was no choice, their commander chose that moment to order another launch. The earlier missiles were merely Class-2 weaponry. The Legate Commander gave the order to authorize Class-7 weapons immediately.

"[Deploying rapid-loader tungsten rod launcher!]"

One hundred miniature tungsten rods per second launched from the Vilgaxian magnetic miniguns. The landscape was shredded to pieces in less than even that second. An entire cliffside carefully constructed as the setting for large-scale Battleworld conflicts, completely deleted, mile-sized chunks eaten out of the rock with every bullet when every bullet was followed by thousands more bullets. Simon, Kamina, and Vilgax, all of them were caught in the rain of metal which could chew apart a mountain range.

The Legate Commander had no time to call off the barrage. They planned to give the order after at least thirty seconds of sustained fire, enough to be sure the enemy was dead. The poor bastard never even had time to swing their hand down before the impact.

KRA-KOOOM!!

Gurren and Lagann smashed Vilgax against the side of the Mostly Harmful and flipped the entire ship upside-down as easily as a pancake on the griddle. Vilgax was still pinned between the two of them, trapped between a terrifying array of drills, but the force of the blow against the starship was enough to tear him free of them. His body was a terrible sight. It was all torn-up, ragged, full of holes and fissures. Some of those holes went through his head. Somehow, impossibly, he survived. The will that animated him was far stronger than mere brute force. That thing had become antithetical to life.

For what is the opposite of life? Not death, which is a natural stage of life, but eternity, which denies meaning to life. He was supreme and master to it. Kalantaka - that title which had been given to Shiva when he killed Yama, the embodiment of death, now belonged to Vilgax. 'He who ends time.' I am become Shiva, I destroy the destroyer of worlds.

Gurren backflipped through space and landed on the back of another starship. Simon flew to his brother's side, reconnecting Lagann to its seat of command on top of Gurren. This was the true strength of Vilgax's near-immortality. Even Kamina had to admit it was impressive.

"Think you can handle it, Simon? The fight's gonna get a lot harder from here."

Simon nodded his head in the cockpit, and Gurren Lagann nodded to mimic him.

"I'm not afraid. Those ships might look like a lot, but they're just Vilgax's shadow. He's the only one we've got to worry about. If any of them get in our way... we'll drill on through!"

Kamina grinned. "That's the spirit! Let's go, we'll take him on together-"

"A-actually... I'm going to split up for a bit. I just had an idea. But I'm going to need you to trust me on this."

Simon didn't usually ask to take the lead, so the unusual request gave Kamina pause. But if that's what he wanted, there was no way he was going to say no.

"Give 'em hell, Simon!"

"Right!"

Lagann separated from Gurren. While Gurren gunned it straight for Vilgax, piloting through the barrage of laser fire and intergalactic artillery that the armada volleyed at him, Lagann made a sharp turn. Its drill revved, green sparks erupted like a firework, and it drilled straight into the impenetrable hull of the VES Ungovernable.

Beyond the mechanical workings of ancient alien technology. Beyond the boundaries of common sense and reason. Lagann, and Simon by extension, was capable of tapping into a fundamental energy of the universe, spiral energy. It was the energy of evolution, change, ego, and struggle, the very same force that Vilgax attempted to harness to summon God to Battleworld. The power to harness it, control it, was what allowed Simon to perform the feat he was about to accomplish.

His hands gripped the throttles, pressed the triggers, and slammed it down.

Veins of spiral energy snaked through the Ungovernable, slipping into every wire and circuit across the entire ship within seconds. Inside, the Vilgaxians only saw the lights go out and heard the ship groaning. Outside, the brutalist grays of the warship transformed, taking on the same heroic red-and-gold metal of Lagann's chassis.

This was Lagann's greatest strength. It had the power to subsume any vehicle it could embed its drill into, the same way it had combined with Gabriel. And now, Lagann had combined with the battlecruiser.

At the same time that Gurren collided with Vilgax, smashing him down into the hull of another warship in an enormous crater, Simon was reviewing all the weaponry he now had access to. Most of these were words he'd never seen before, words he could barely pronounce. What was a "Bremsstrahlung missile"? Was that any stronger than a "microscopic black hole injection"? He had to think it over carefully. This was a life-or-death situation where even the slightest misstep could cause a catastrophic-

Ah, forget it. Simon hit full throttle.

One hundred different cannons, rifles, lasers, launchers, evaporators, generators, incinerators and decapitators emerged from every free inch of the warship's body like the quills of a porcupine. Kamina, busily slugging it out with Vilgax on the side of a warship, saw Simon's armory of annihilation, knowing full well that any shots fired at Vilgax were guaranteed to hit him as well.

He gave it a thumbs up. Kamina had absolute faith that he could handle whatever Simon was going to throw at them. And Simon had absolute faith in the Kamina that believed in him.

Every kind of weaponry the Vilgaxian empire had dedicated themselves to perfecting activated and detonated at the same time, on top of Vilgax. He wiped out huge swaths of their deployment in an instant. Heat beams sliced, microwaves zapped, atoms combusted, particles ultra-accelerated, and giant vacuums vacuumed. The explosions of the battlecruisers were like a localized galaxy of supernovas.

The crew of the Ungovernable were in a panic. Even for these trained soldiers, a total hijacking to manipulate them against their supreme leader was unprecedented.

"[Stop firing! Stop firing now or I'll have you all thrown into a black hole!]"

"[We can't! We've been locked out of every system! They've got complete control of our weapons, they're launching everything!]"

"[VES Radio the Universe is down! VES Possibility One is down! VES Caracal is down! The regiment is taking heavy losses, Commander!]"

"[Look! It's Lord Vilgax!]"

Despite the shellacking Vilgax was taking from every weapon of war under the sun, or any star's light, he was still fighting. His was a body that only existed to fight. His sheer agility and strength allowed him to jump from ship to ship, avoiding the majority of Simon's attacks. Anything he couldn't avoid was neutralized by his regeneration. Even when Vilgax was seriously, grievously wounded, even when his limbs or head were gone, his body set the bones and grew the organs back into place before he landed on his newest platform.

[u/Cleverly_Clearly → u/Cleverly_Clearly]

Kamina never gave up.

Wherever Vilgax fled to, his drills and his fists were there to meet him. He didn't have Vilgax's regeneration. Whatever atomic explosions or collapsing stars crashed into his body, he had to bear those injuries. But he weathered them like Achilles. While the army of spaceships ripped to scrap metal before him, Gurren only took superficial damage from Simon's barrage. After all, Simon trusted him to survive his attacks. Kamina could never let his brother down.

Simon only stopped firing when he heard the click-click-click of a hammer pulling with an empty chamber. It took him less than a minute to tear through the Ungovernable's ammo reserves for everything it had. Had he at least weakened Vilgax? He couldn't even tell.

Lagann uncorked from the Ungovernable and left its power-drained carcass drifting in space before flying towards Gurren once more. The hole in Gurren's neck was still open for him.

"I'm sorry, bro," Simon said as he connected to Gurren's port. "Anything I throw at him, he just shakes it off!"

"Then we just gotta hit him back ten times harder! Don't give up now, I know you're wearing him down! Whatever barriers stand in our way, we've just gotta drill on through!"

Gurren Lagann was significantly stronger than Gurren solo. Even a Vilgaxian warship couldn't compare to the multiplicative power of their brotherly spirit. All the bizarre esoteric space-age weaponry Vilgax had been blasted with left him less dazed than the drill-augmented punches Gurren Lagann was slamming him with now. It was most likely a matter of simple force application. Temperature, radiation, poison, disease, and many other attack vectors had little to no effect. Just punching or stabbing him, that caused visible injury to Vilgax. It threw him through wreckage fields of unwrapped starships and alien corpses.

But even that was not enough to destroy Vilgax. He used the corpses like stepping stones to maneuver in zero-gravity, he grabbed chunks of spaceships bigger than Gurren Lagann and hurled them towards the giant robot. That was not enough.

Any remaining spaceships fired on them with laser weaponry and turned the starry skies into a lightshow. They weren't fretful about destroying their own ships any longer. None of the damage they could do was worse than the damage Gurren Lagann and Vilgax could accomplish simply by brawling. That was not enough.

"Damn it... damn it, damn it!" Simon kicked the console fruitlessly. They kept struggling, but they made no progress. Any time they pierced through Vilgax's skin, it was only temporary, an illusion of success. "Come on, come on! I just need more power!"

"This guy's seriously a monster. There's barely any soul left in him at all, just a sack of flesh shaped like a living thing! But we've made him bleed. And you know what that means? If it bleeds, we can kill it!"

Vilgax crashed his foot into Gurren Lagann's body, something that might have broken its nearly invincible armor if it hadn't blocked. The force rippled through to Kamina. All those heroic platitudes choked in his throat. But he kept going. It wasn't that easy to shut him up.

"Simon, do ya know what we do if we can't win the fight the way we are now?"

The smart answer would have been 'retreat', but Simon knew better. "We just get stronger!"

"Then call on that manly fighting spirit of yours! Let the flames of passion ignite your soul! If you fight for it, Gurren Lagann is sure to hear your call!"

Was that really true? Simon had no idea how the mysterious Lagann operated, and even less how to use this dead angel, Gurren. Just fusing together with it had granted them so much power. Was there even more power locked away in there, waiting to be unsealed? How could he find out?

He had to think, and he had to think fast, because Vilgax was only getting stronger. The longer they fought, the more he adapted. His muscle tissue strengthened. His joints developed a greater range of movement, his heart became more efficient at pumping even more nutrient-rich blood. Now that none of Vilgax's brainpower was being spent on thinking or sentience, the flesh that composed his body could focus on evolution.

Maybe fighting harder instead of smarter wouldn't work here. Maybe this was something only Simon could do...

He tried to breathe and still his heart, even in the fury of battle. It went against every survival instinct his body had; he had to suppress all those fears and let himself go slack. Simon attuned to his spiral energy resonance. He forgot his physical form. While Vilgax destroyed his psyche to become nothing more than a sharpened blade, Simon was willing to destroy everything but his psyche, his appetite, his emotions, his vulnerabilities and passions. He felt the natural flow of Spiral Energy that coursed through Gurren Lagann, and for a moment, became as much a part of it as he was a pilot. And only after this, when he searched the soul of Gurren Lagann, could he find its core. HIS core.

Simon's soul was like a candle to the solar flame he cradled now. This thing... Was it really divine? Was it simply another kind of alien, one that took a religious form? Or was the word "divine" an attempt to confine an impossible concept in an unsuitable container, to make the incomprehensible real in the petty imagination of small minds? How could he ever explain its terrifying beauty? How could he control it?

He would. Even if it was impossible, he'd go beyond that impossibility and kick reason to the curb.

Listen. I know you probably aren't my biggest fan right now... but I'm going to have to borrow this power. It's the only way we can defeat Vilgax now.

The core didn't respond in words. Its language was a series of wavelength changes and serenades, but no less communicative.

LIFE IS STRUGGLE UNENDING. DEATH IS NOT AN ESCAPE. LIFE AND DEATH ARE A DENIAL. THE TRUE PATH IS ACCEPTANCE.

Simon's soul entwined with the core, and Ideas outside the human scope filtered into him. In less than the blink of an eye a mortal man was given knowledge of the Akashic record, all knowledge that was, is, and is to be. Simon understood that there was no return. He understood that all existence was suffering, and that freedom from that suffering was possible. He understood the nature of the Spiral Menace and the Anti-Spiral, and he even knew that Kamina's greatest strength was not in his confidence, which was shakeable, but his compassion, which was infinite.

Above all he knew the truth about this universe: that ultimately, finally, the material world was nothing. Whether Vilgax won or lost this day wouldn't matter any more than a single drop of rain.

KNOWING THIS NOW, WILL YOU STILL FIGHT?

Of course he was going to fight.

Simon would never lose his will to move forward.

It only took on a different form.

With this knowledge, Simon embraced the angel, and Gurren Lagann was enveloped in light.

[u/Cleverly_Clearly → u/Cleverly_Clearly]

They transformed. They expanded. Gurren Lagann stretched out like the Big Bang, encompassing everything. Even the Mostly Harmful and the rest of Vilgax's worthless subordinates were swallowed up by it, killing them instantly. It grew larger. Much larger, so large now that Vilgax could not see the entirety of it anymore. So beatific in size that it threatened to obliterate Battleworld, until it grew large enough to take the planet itself carefully into the palm of its hand. So many hands, each one forming a different mudra, achieving a different purpose.

That... was decidedly not Gurren Lagann anymore.

The gold in its color scheme had become much more prominent. There were many more arms, more than Vilgax could count if he tried, and the halo of light around its head was blinding. Vilgax could sense that this new, evolved form of Gurren Lagann had unfathomably more power than the one he had fought. A hundred, no, a thousand times more magnificent- no, numerical values had no meaning in the face of such strength. This was the factor that made Gurren Lagann such a threat, the ability to achieve this form in the face of adversity.

Achieving and rejecting godhood, Simon had abandoned nirvana for the sake of humanity. If Vilgax had become a god above death, then Simon and Kamina had become humans beyond death: a bodhisattva. One who leads others to the path they have already walked.

Kamina was stunned... at first. He was never slow to bounce back. "Nice~! I don't get what's going on, but it's totally badass! Guess I'll have to let you take the lead for this one!"

This new form of Gurren Lagann crossed its arms in a heroic pose. Gurren Lagann was still Gurren Lagann, even as the edges of its sunglasses scraped the sea of stars overhead.

"Our planet rotates on its axis. And that planet spins around the sun! Our solar system, our whole galaxy, everything keeps turning, moving forward into eternity! It's just like our lives. We're born, we live, we age, we die, and our souls are born again! Always fighting, changing, improving, building, to make life better for those that come after us! Vilgax, you're a part of this cycle! No matter how hard we cling to life, everything has to end! Happiness never lasts! Sadness never lasts! That's the beauty of living! The more you push against time's waterfall, time will wear you down! Only by riding the current can we grow strong!"

Simon reached out and caught those stars. The celestial furnace that nourished the life of an entire planet, he could hold between his fingers as easily as marbles. All one thousand hands of the supreme Gurren Lagann cast those stars down on Vilgax, faster than the light could reach his eyes. There was no defense. The enemy he faced did not even resemble an enemy, but a wall that reached in every direction infinitely. And Vilgax was crushed under the weight of endless stars.

Only one thing kept him alive. It was simply his will. Today is not my day to die. And he did not die.

"This is why you fail, Vilgax. You’ll never be some immortal god! You’re a mortal like the rest of us! You’ve got the same weaknesses as all us ordinary humans! And if you still won’t accept it…"

Vilgax emerged from the unlimited light of a sea of stars only to be blinded by the even greater light of Gurren Lagann itself.

"This drill is going to break right through those delusions of yours!"

Those hands that formed the mudras became planet-cracking lances. All of them converged on a single point, and Vilgax saw that there was no avoiding them, because they attacked in the present, past, and future. Every possible probability was attacked simultaneously.

Vilgax was at the center of a confluence as violent as the Big Bang itself.

"OUR DRILL IS THE DRILL THAT DESTROYS THE HEAVENS!"

If Vilgax controlled the universe, there was only one way to wrest control away. Gurren Lagann would have to become one with the universe.

"RIN'NE KAIHOSHA GURREN LAGANN!"

<[SAMSARA LIBERATOR GURREN LAGANN]>

RANK 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

[u/Cleverly_Clearly → u/Cleverly_Clearly]

Limitless numbers of drills eradicated his flesh, and when his flesh had been entirely destroyed they drilled through each other. Vilgax, or what once was Vilgax before being crushed into a point smaller than a quark, was surrounded by an ever-condensing array of spears. The greatest and largest drill of them all only drove into the whole after Vilgax had become the densest material in the universe and the tip pierced through him dead-on to rip him apart.

But cracks started to form.

A hand burst out from the mass of drills and peeled them apart like a can opener. He pulled himself out of the chrysalis, his body hulking, veins and sinews rippling as he healed from it all. Vilgax truly had become a monster, or even an asura. No living creature was capable of persisting under the boot of a wrathful God. Already, his skin was being coated in bone plating, hardened to protect him from further drilling. Already, Rin'ne Kaihosha Gurren Lagann burned its spiral energy to create even greater and more magnificent drills to destroy that armor.

"I knew it wasn't gonna be that easy! We're gonna have to turn up the heat!"

Spiral energy was created by powerful emotions. For a long time, Simon had thought that only a passionate fighting spirit could awaken the true strength of Lagann. He'd learned how wrong he was. Anger and fury were no longer in his heart, but his blows were stronger than ever before. Those fists were filled with love for all mankind.

"ABANDONING DESIRE FOR PLEASURE AND AVERSION TO PAIN PUNCH!!"

Vilgax was obliterated by a fist that moved beyond the speed of light. His atoms were not capable of moving fast enough to be pushed out of the way of this blow. Instead they melted into plasma and detonated in a cosmos-rocking explosion.

Vilgax reformed.

"MEDITATION AND MINDFULNESS LEADS TO THE ONE-POINTEDNESS OF ALL THINGS KICK!!"

A foot impacted Vilgax, shattering him through a planet, deep into the molten core, out the other side as the rest of the planet burst apart. Asteroids scattered in every direction and broke apart more moons and planets, causing a chain reaction that pinballed across the solar system.

Vilgax regenerated.

Every time Gurren Lagann destroyed him with a new attack, he grew more resistant to whatever they'd tried to kill him with. But each and every time he spent a little more energy, got a little closer to death. He wasn't inexhaustible.

Its next attack had no fancy name to accompany it. Gurren Lagann only had to reach out and close its hand around Vilgax, and when it opened again, he had fallen into an endless white desert. There was no concept of distance to run to, no concept of outside to escape to. He couldn't even see the sky. The only existence in his prison, besides himself and eternity, were five great mountains across an impossible expanse.

"Hey, Vilgax! Think you can leap out of our palm?"

If Vilgax had any consciousness left, he would have bristled at his enemy's taunting. That pride was a weakness, so his body destroyed it. It concentrated fully on fleeing the desert. He shed excess weight like a snakeskin, got onto all fours, his hands mutated into legs and he ran. This form of Vilgax, adapted to escape, looked more like Wildmutt than the warrior he used to be. But he was fast. So fast that the drills that burst out from the ground only had time to catch his afterimage as he raced towards the mountains. Each bound crossed entire miles, yet the mountains were so vast in scale that they never seemed to get any bigger. He had no conception of how long he was running for. Still he ran. Vilgax ran, and leaped so far he could have escaped orbit, until he came to the mountains at the very edge of the domain.

And he saw that those mountains were not mountains.

And he saw that those mountains were fingers, tall enough to press into the ceiling of the universe.

And he saw that defeating Gurren Lagann truly was impossible. No, his failure was impossible, but he was facing an enemy whose strength overturned even the impossible. They rose to any challenge and defeated any enemy. How could Vilgax have ever entertained the idea of victory? He slammed his head against the strongest of all fundamental laws: the hero always triumphs over the villain in the end.

That was what crushed Vilgax when Gurren Lagann's other palm dropped down on him.

Ever more hands closed in and wrapped around the enclosed Vilgax, forming an eggshell stronger than diamond. One thousand hands in lotus-like arrangements, their fingers wrapped together, created an impenetrable prison.

"We've got him! I think we've got him!"

Defeat! Rejection of the inevitability that made Vilgax what he was! This was inconceivable. He could not allow it, even if it was not physically feasible to reverse his situation. Only Gurren Lagann was the one that could make the impossible possible.

To win, he would have to overturn the overturner. His body required a new alteration, one that wasn't corporeal, but conceptual. Only Vilgax could possibly achieve this power.

Vilgax began to pry apart the hands of Gurren Lagann. The shifting of a single knuckle sent ripples through the galaxy, and Vilgax wrenched away entire limbs through sheer brute strength. It wasn't his muscle that made Gurren Lagann buckle at the elbows. His whole being had undergone an impossible adaptation. He so loathed change that the fundamental force of change itself, spiral energy, was negated by him. He had developed a resistance to evolution itself. This was the closest a living creature could ever come to the Anti-Spiral.

For the first time, Vilgax was able to land a blow on Rin'ne Kaihosha Gurren Lagann. He could have struck whenever he wanted. The mecha was so big that it was nearly impossible to strike anywhere but there. But Vilgax did not wish to attack until he knew his attacks had effect. Now, and only now, would his punch drive home. The undefeatable Gurren Lagann cracked. The Spiral Bodhisattva was made to recoil from a creature smaller than a speck to it.

That was not to say Gurren Lagann made easy prey. They had one thousand times as many hands and endless strength to attack with. For every hundred punches Simon landed on Vilgax, Vilgax could sneak in one kick, one thrust of his palm. Vilgax couldn't even hurt them as much as they could hurt him. Every one of their blows annihilated his physical form in new ways, to the point that even his regeneration struggled to cope with it. His punches caused the equivalent of bruising, dents and cracks in the armor.

But that was enough. No matter how many stars or planets Gurren Lagann broke him through, he could still repair. And Vilgax wore down Gurren Lagann, eating away like a worm in bark. Softening its joints. Fracturing its body. Until it had weakened just enough that he did not have to be ripped apart by Gurren Lagann's thousand arms. When the next hand like a drill moved down through pace to flatten him, he caught it. They tried to pull away. Even though their arm spanned light years, Vilgax used nothing but his grip and upper body strength to root that limb in place.

He did the impossible. He ripped that arm right out at the shoulder, and held it like a kanabo. It was surprisingly light, far lighter than when Vilgax had been destroyed by it. But who was he to say what pure, solidified will should feel like? All that mattered was that it was a weapon. He took the great arm of the monster and dashed it down through Gurren Lagann's stomach. The entire arm pierced clear through to the other side, ending in a hand like a halberd's point, throwing up the horns.

Vilgax twisted-

-and he ripped the entire arm vertically through its torso, leaving a gaping hole. Its hips were connected to its chest by a fragment of what had once been its belly. If Vilgax had been just one inch closer, Kamina would have been vaporized in his seat.

"Shit! It's getting dicey out there!"

Simon's voice came from higher up, in the head.

"Bro, I don't think we're going to win if this fight goes on any longer! We'll have to finish this off in one strike!! Can you handle it?"

"Handle it?! Just who in the hell do you think I am! Performing daring feats, staring evil right in the face without blinking... that's the Kamina way! And I got to do it all with you, Simon... You turned out to be a real man!"

"If you're standing behind me, then I've got nothing to lose! Let's do it!"

Simon made a drill. That drill, once forged, grew larger than a planet. It grew to cast a shadow over the sun. It grew until it was larger than Gurren Lagann itself, and then grew larger than that. That drill was the physical manifestation of Simon's will, and even this shape it took on now was a weak approximation of it, for even the universe itself could not contain Simon's bravery.

Before Gurren Lagann broke down, Simon was going to smash that drill right into Vilgax's stupid face.

"GIGA..."

"DRILL..."

"REBIRTH!"

[u/Cleverly_Clearly → u/Cleverly_Clearly]

Simon brought down the full might of Gurren Lagann's drill, and Vilgax dashed his fists against it in turn. That drill spun eternally. Halting its progress would be like halting the flow of time itself. But if anyone could stop the world, it was Vilgax. Every punch chipped away a little more, another piece, scraping through, like an ant carrying away a mountain. The drill didn't halt. Vilgax would not stop. Giga Drill Rebirth created its own gravitational field, a concentration of spiral energy so dense it was equivalent to a black hole. But Vilgax never wavered. His fists continued to crack it, digging deeper cavities even as the radiation of its spiral energy seeped into him. Vilgax would out-drill the drill.

Even then Gurren Lagann did not give up. It pulled energy from every part in its once-whole body to rejuvenate the drill and keep it eternally driving onwards. Its legs disappeared, and so did its torso. One by one, all of its endless arms blinked out of existence like fading stars, more fuel thrown on the fire to halt Vilgax's furious fists. Still more fissures formed in the drill, trailing up the arms. He carved a tunnel through. He beat his own path into the drill. Once Vilgax emerged out the back, all of Gabriel's power had been spent, and only Lagann itself was left.

Vilgax swung his fist forward and broke through that drill, too. Kamina wasted no movements. He jumped from the cockpit as it was destroyed, before Vilgax could even pull back his arm, and planted both feet on the skin. With his last vestiges of being, his last moments in this world, Kamina drew his katana and slashed Vilgax down the middle. His cephalopod body unfolded into blue-green layers like rotten ham, exposing his blue beating heart. The katana snapped in two, and Kamina's job was done.

"That's all I've got, bro! I'm leaving it up to you, now..."

As soon as Kamina began to fade, Simon burst through him with his old drill necklace wrapped in his hand. In his heart, that drill was the fulcrum of the universe. In his heart, that drill was as powerful as all the meaning and memory he'd attributed to it. That was the weapon that, with his final act as bodhisattva, Simon speared into Vilgax's heart. And he turned the key in the ignition.

From there, Vilgax fell out of orbit, down towards Battleworld. That bloodied planet had been protected by Gurren Lagann's hands from the beginning. Now it was the only thing left in a lonely galaxy whose cosmic bodies had been reduced to ash.

The battle was over. Vilgax had lived. Simon would die. Vilgax had won.

Simon the Digger was not long for this world. No human vessel could handle the pressure of universal oneness. This frail body was not meant to become a bodhisattva, not even with the strength of Gurren Lagann holding him together. He had destroyed everything down to his soul, just as Vilgax had.

It should have been meaningless.

Why had he fought to save this world, knowing life only begets pain? Why did he fight Vilgax one final time, after experiencing firsthand how insignificant everything was, from his bond with Kamina to the entirety of human history?

It was because Simon thought the Buddha was wrong.

This world was not something to escape from. This life was not useless. This time had some value.

Humming a song.

Lying in bed.

Making a friend.

There were so many things that Simon had regretted, time he had wasted, experiences he had never experienced. When Vilgax took over, he regretted his lost time even more. He didn't know how valuable it was back then. But... had his life really been a waste? Was all this only a stepping stone, a search for some higher purpose?

No. All those things had meaning to him. Each moment was the most important thing in the world for him. Everything he had done had dug the foundation for those that would follow behind him. And he couldn't give a damn what God or the Buddha had to say about that.

As suddenly as a snap of the fingers, Simon was gone.

The drill was all he left behind.

So Vilgax fell. He who had once attained the peak of physical excellence, like a Muramasa blade, had been dulled and rusted. Once again he was only an ugly, frail, mortal creature.

"No... NO!"

Those were the first thoughts to return to him, as his flesh ignited in Battleworld's atmosphere. Grief. Anger. Fear. He'd finally escaped it all. He'd become a truly limitless king, something that defied the old emperor's curse, something that could never die or grow unsatisfied! Those bastards had pulled him out of his euphoria! They made him less than a weapon of war, they made him think again! He'd failed to reach godhood, failed to conquer the heavens, failed everything.

No. The world had failed him. Nothing in this universe was built for a conqueror of Vilgax's brilliance. Its laws and guidelines conspired against him. Honestly, what had he even been trying to do? Conquer every planet and civilization? What for?! They all hated him! Even his own people surely looked at him with disgust! They all thought he was mad with age and his brain was full of sores, yes, he remembered now, whatever that spiral energy had done to him allowed him to remember those scornful moments very clearly.

Ruling over subjects who loathed him. Gathering wealth that brought him no joy. The world tried to move on without him and pretend he was some object to dust! That was what was really sickening about it all, those were the feelings he'd bottled up for ten thousand years that all came vomiting out at once.

It might have been better if Vilgax gave up everything. That festering boil called freedom would surely flourish in his absence. That would give them all some temporary solace, before they started butchering each other in the power vacuum. But he'd never let them think they were right all along. No, he'd rather live a million years of suffering before he made the king's words true!

That was when the Great Thought occurred to him. It was at the moment he smashed into the earth like a meteor and gouged a crater one hundred miles wide onto the planet forever. It was almost like the idea was knocked into him by a sudden impact.

Conquering was not what he'd wanted to do. A conqueror was supposed to nurture his spoils. He'd only ever made things worse. That was his true nature. What he wanted to do was destroy.

He should just kill it all. That would be a nice diversion. It would show them all for thinking they could get by without him. And once he had finally wiped away every trace of life in the universe...

Vilgax stood up in the crater. His flesh was still blackened and smoking. That natural healing factor of his was still present, enough to keep him alive, but it was nowhere near the heights he'd reached fighting Gurren Lagann. Forget it. He didn't need to be perfect. Just as long as he was superior. Soon, he would be the most superior being by default.

Once he'd destroyed everything there was to destroy in this life, who knows what he'd do?

Maybe he'd just enjoy the silence for a while.

[u/Cleverly_Clearly → u/Cleverly_Clearly]

There was only one thing left that Tatsumaki could follow, however slight. It was her connection to Mordred. It faintly tugged at her whenever Mordred drew on her energy, which lately happened way too often. Whatever she'd been doing for the past hour made her feel sick and ragged. And worse. And significantly worse. And atrociously worse.

Tatsumaki had tied her psychological and physical strength together for so long she'd forgotten what it felt like to have them out of balance. She had the power to fight, but she didn't know if she had the will anymore. All she could tell herself was, this will be the final battle, you only have to push yourself until it's finished. But what would happen after that? Her body was in the middle of a meltdown. What happened if she finished the fight, and closed her eyes, and never opened them again? She'd told herself that she would sacrifice her own life if it meant defeating Vilgax. Did she really mean it? Would she have to find out?

She hoped she'd find her. She wouldn't say this to her, but she really hoped she found Mordred. Tatsumaki just needed something she understood. Something that wouldn't pull the rug from underneath her. She didn't care if she hated her or what, or chewed her out for running away. Even abuse could be an anchor sometimes. At least it made you feel like you deserved to feel bad, like it wasn't just meaningless suffering inflicted by a dice roll. She learned all about that, right?

Forget it. Maybe she shouldn't even think about it anymore. Everything that tied her to that old life was gone. Her parents, her sister... even the Earth wasn't the same way she left it, was it?

The only thing she had left of back then was Tatsumaki. And she didn't know what 'Tatsumaki' was anymore.

Whatever string of fate connected them brought her to a devastated clearing. The ground was black. It looked like cracked charcoal. There was no plant life to be seen outside of a few scraggly shrubs and whatever lichens could grow after a forest fire. This damage was probably from something more exotic in nature. That was if it was natural at all. The burn crept right up to the boundary of a forest and stopped at an exact boundary line.

Mordred was so close now that Tatsumaki could feel out the exact direction she'd be approaching from, and how quickly. She wasn't in a hurry. Now that she could tell that Mordred was ambling towards her, it really got on Tatsumaki's nerves. It reminded her she still had nerves to fry.

It only got worse when Mordred stepped out of the trees and Tatsumaki finally saw her face.

There was Tatsumaki. Beaten, muddied, drenched in blood. No matter how strong her psychic abilities were, she could never manifest that power on the outside. Her body was frail. After twenty-four hours of unceasing violence, screaming her throat hoarse, bruising and being bruised, losing her hair, Tatsumaki looked as ragged as a dying calf, or one that had survived a miserable birth.

Then there was Mordred. When she'd left Mordred last, she was a weasel. Hers was the body that prioritized survivability, nothing but lean meat like a predator animal. She was nothing, and would have stayed nothing without Tatsumaki. Now she was beautiful. How very like a king. She didn't know whether Mordred would knight her or chop off her head.

Mordred looked at her with pity. Pity. That snapped Tatsumaki out of whatever self-loathing she was feeling. Only she was allowed to feel sorry for herself. She wouldn't accept that from anyone else.

Tatsumaki had to say something first. She didn't even want to know what Mordred would say to her if she didn't initiate it. The first thing she was able to blurt out was "You've changed."

That was visibly surprising for Mordred. Tatsumaki was sure she was going to respond with something like, "so did you," but she didn't.

"Yeah, I changed, Tats. It's been a while. A lot's happened since then. Are you holding up okay? I still don't know why the hell you even left."

Nothing was okay. How could anything in her world be okay? There was no chance of healing. It was just stitching up a wound with packing tape and glue. But Tatsumaki couldn't put those feelings into words. It embarrassed her now. She knew she should have said something to them.

"It's... nothing. It's fine," Tatsumaki said. "I'm ready for Vilgax. That's the most important thing."

Mordred was not satisfied by Tatsumaki's answer, but she knew Tatsumaki was right about one thing. Vilgax was more important than anything else right now. That meant she was going to have to hold off on it until a better time. If that better time ever happened.

Tatsumaki knew she was right about something, too. Something Mordred didn't even know about. It's nothing. The whole reason she went out on her own was moot. Fubuki was over. Stupid. What a horrible mistake.

"Yeah, I figured you'd say somethin' like that." Mordred was probably just trying to placate her. Normally Tatsumaki wouldn't take it, but at this point she just wanted to conserve her energy.

Speaking of energy.

Knuckles was the last one to join them. It didn't improve her mood. Somehow, he appeared flying, surging with a powerful enough signal that she could feel it from a distance. Even Knuckles looked radiant now. Knuckles, that oversized red rodent that Tatsumaki resented, even he had more dignity than her now. It upset her to a point that embarrassed her. For a moment, at least a few seconds, she really wanted to seize his head and smash it in.

If he noticed Tatsumaki stewing in her own emotions, he chose not to say anything about it. He looked very calm. Mordred, by comparison, was pretty enthused.

"Knuckles! Hey! You look great!" She fist-bumped him. "How'd you get so swole all of a sudden, man?"

"I found the Chaos Emeralds. They're a part of me now. I don't only have access to their energy, but also the history of my people. I understand the fate of the Knuckles Clan and the sacrifice Tikal made for our survival. It's a heavy burden to carry. I really felt, for the first time, that I am the last of the echidnas. But for the first time I think I'm prepared to decide what to do with that legacy, the good, and the bad."

"Sounds great!"

Oh, so he found what he wanted too. Wasn't that just great. Fantastic. And she wasn't stupid or anything. She could see that second sword on Mordred's back. Excalibur. She didn't know how it changed Mordred's body, but it couldn't have been a coincidence.

They couldn't have been more prepared. There was just one thing missing from this scene.

"So... where is Vilgax? How are we going to find him?"

"He'll come," Mordred said. "There's nothing left for him to do. He'll be brought right to us."

"Wha- what makes you think he's going to arrive just like that?"

Mordred tapped her head with her finger. "A-rank Instinct."

Knuckles nodded. Yeah. Okay. Everyone just decided on that. Great.

The sun was just starting to come up. Light that should have been warm felt stark and cold. It crawled across the ground, exposing a lot of black ash, cracked earth, and ruin. The glare felt blinding. Up over their heads, the shattered remnants of the moon were plainly visible and even beyond that the sky was empty. This place couldn't have been more desolate.

Vilgax didn't show up right on their cue, so they spent some time making whatever preparations she could. Tatsumaki and Knuckles dug up earth to give her plenty of ammunition to throw, preferably harder materials underneath the dirt. Mordred brought over some trees she'd chopped down. Really, she wasn't doing much. Mordred needed to conserve her energy. On the other hand, Tatsumaki needed to keep herself busy. She couldn't allow herself to rest.

It was only when the sun was at its highest point that they saw him.

He looked like he'd been through his own violence. Vilgax was unnaturally weathered, and swollen. His skin had thickened. They could see the muscles shifting and rearranging underneath, the way he fluctuated and altered. He wasn't solidified yet. Something was wrong with him.

They didn't realize that his exposure to Spiral Energy had poisoned him. This was Vilgax. The omega, the end-of-it-all, the stop at the close of the sentence. He was fundamentally incompatible with change, and he had been irradiated by a supernova's worth of condensed physically-actualized change. It probably wasn't reacting well with the genetic mutation device on his wrist, either. His whole genetic code was hesitant and inconclusive now.

That was not to say that Vilgax was weak. This had only dragged him down from the realm of the gods. He was still superior to the three of them. That wasn't in question.

It had only put in doubt whether they could defeat him at all. If it was possible for any chance to exist of victory, a chance to end the eternal reign of Vilgax, it could only be here in this moment when he was at his lowest.