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Chapter 167 - Infinity and Finality
🕑 Added 2022-03-15 18:06:30 +0000 UTC"Time to do that, huh?" Asoko nods in approval with her arms crossed.
"I see you know what I'm thinking." I grin in satisfaction.
"Who do you think I am?" My other half grins in return and asks in a rhetorical tone.
"What is it?" Uten and Saten don't understand our conversation and glance at us in turn. They're not on the same wavelength as Asoko and I, owing to their different personalities from my original one.
"You know what it is." But I cross my arms to match Asoko's stance as we look at Uten and Saten. They stare at us for a moment, blinking their eyes in lack of comprehension. Then they look at each other, and it begins to dawn on them. Their faces light up in excited smiles.
"Let's do it!" I declare in a booming voice.
"Do what?" Senka asks in my mind in a doubtful tone, and I blink in surprise. Suppressing the urge to ask how she's talking to me here in another dimension, I gather my thoughts and maintain the tension of the moment.
"You know what." I reply in my mind and extend my limbs. First, Uten and Saten wordlessly latch onto my right and left arm each. Then, Asoko comes from behind and grabs my waist.
For a moment, there's only silence as we float in space in all of our ridiculous glory. Then, I hear Senka sigh in my mind and nearly burst out laughing. We're here, far beyond the edge of reality, facing a being that could be considered a true god. I'm sure even Mataku is watching with a figurative eyebrow raised.
Suddenly, Flann disappears in a vortex like her father did moments earlier. Then, I feel the life energy and emotions of my split half and my two children. We never did it before, but we all somehow understand what to do.
Uten and Saten wrap around my arms and lose their shapes while Asoko covers my legs in the same way. Our minds meld together, and we let go of the borders of our existences. But I sense Flann's presence in our midst to catch us so that the individuals named Asoko, Uten, and Saten don't disappear into my larger consciousness. We become one in body and mind, but we all exist together simultaneously. When a Crawling Chaos is involved, it doesn't have to make sense; when multiple are involved, they break through sense.
The feelings of my lost parts reconnecting with my soul give me a sense of completeness, even though I know it's only temporary. I never knew that I had been missing something since that day they split off from me. But now that we are whole again, we can tell that this is what we should have been all along.
"Combine!" We declare in a booming voice, echoing through this vast space of infinite potential and the dead end of the cosmic consciousness that inhabits it. Our fused body shifts and grows, taking in the surrounding universe as matter for ourselves. We turn into an amalgamation of all our individual appearances, clad in a veil of galactic matter.
"What are you doing?!" Mataku's voice, serene and superior until now, sounds surprised, even panicked. "How can you so easily take a part of me?"
We wouldn't be able to explain it, but we just feel like we could do anything now. But there's a hint of a foreign will within this space that is neither Mataku nor us. It connects us to the Primordial Terror, much like how Flann holds us together while keeping us separate.
"Mithra!" In a roar of anger, Mataku exposes the one responsible to the mind-bending space that is the Outer One's realm. A part of the universe backdrop shatters, and the gatekeeper in his dark blue robes appears from within as if thrown out of a window. His bandages have disappeared, revealing his true appearance for the first time. He's a living field of stars, like a cutout from space itself.
"I have leveled the playing field as best as I could. The rest is up to you." Mithra's voice shows true emotions for the first time. It sounds as if he's...
Before I can finish the thought, the gatekeeper's body dissipates and becomes one with Mataku's realm. His robes float in place, the only evidence remaining that shows he existed at all. We can feel that he is well and truly gone without a trace, his sense of self melding back into the Outer One he was created from so long ago.
"I expected his betrayal, but not in this form." Mataku's voice sounds composed once more as the universe continues to come down on us from all sides. "To think he would give up his life for you, sister."
We don't respond and take in the feelings of Flann, whose emotions flow into us. Our very souls have been fused, even if she's the one actively keeping our senses of self intact. But in doing so, we can sense her thoughts as keenly as if they were our own.
Mithra gave up his life for nobody else but his daughter. We don't know if it was part of his plan or a desperate last-ditch effort when he saw that Mataku had assimilated the Outer One. But the truth remains that he made this conscious decision at the very end. We have to honor his final wish.
"But it is useless." The Primordial Terror's declaration pulls us back to the situation at hand. We don't know if he said anything else before then, but he continues in a self-confident and level tone. "You are merely a fraction of me. And when we both possess a consciousness, the one with more mass wins."
"You will not swallow us." We speak with our voices combined and extend our arms. Mass doesn't matter in this realm when we have every possibility at our fingertips. It comes down to who has the stronger will now, and we believe that we win over Mataku. "We will drag you down to our level."
The universe around us bounces back, and we sense the Primordial Terror's confusion. Although we can't see him, we can tell that anger wells up within him when he realizes what we have done. The surface of our celestial body is covered in black armor that shines like metal.
"You would bring that curse into this realm?!" Mataku bellows in rage, and two vast spirals appear in the celestial tapestry that look like eyes filled with wrath.
"We consider it a blessing!" With our arms crossed, we declare in a defiant tone. This causes the Primordial Terror's anger to well over, and he gathers many stars into balls of superhot cosmic matter with a thought. These spheres, each larger than the entire Solar System, come down on us from all around.
In space, without any points of reference, size doesn't matter. Nobody could tell how large we have become after Mithra gave us a fraction of the Outer One's mass. Thus, we gather the balls of star matter with a wave of our hands and crush them between our palms.
But Mataku isn't done. He gathers entire galaxies into their central supermassive black holes and arranges them around us like a shooting array. Their mass is brought over the brink, and they contract and spill their contents over the event horizon, turning into jets of mass and energy coming straight at us.
Still, Korenga's invulnerable skin deflects these attacks rivaling the energy used in the genesis of entire galaxies. Mataku made a mistake in creating the Black God; it came back to bite him in the ass in the most important moment of his life. I'm quite glad for it, though, since this could be considered Korenga's revenge.
"That is impossible! In here, I am absolute!" He's increasingly losing his cool. Even though we can tell that he's still confident in his victory, the cracks are beginning to show.
"We break through the impossible! We don't care about your absolute!" With these words, we pull back an arm and throw a punch between Mataku's two spiral galaxy eyes. Even though it shouldn't be physically possible due to our distance and size difference, it connects with space itself. The dimensional façade cracks, and we shatter Mataku's mask to reveal the truth beneath the Outer One's universe-like appearance. It's a vast being made of countless tentacles that hold together the borders of this entire dimension.
"How dare-" He begins, but we grab his tentacles and pull him out of the void into this space. Even though he should by all accounts be invincible within his own dimension, we somehow manage to move his infinite real body with our finite mass.
As we thought, the power of will rather than physical properties matter more in a battle between cosmic beings. But with the five of us combined into one body and soul, there is no will more powerful than ours in this dimension right now.
A club-like arm the size of the Local Group knocks into us and sends us tumbling through space, and our grip on Mataku slips. We notice that Korenga's armor has cracked from the impact. To think that a physical attack with the Outer One's own mass is more powerful than multiple supermassive black holes exploding simultaneously. Truly, cosmic horrors operate apart from common sense.
Mataku seems to recognize that he can damage us with his tentacles without suffering the backlash from the Black God's curse. Several dozen massive flails emerge from the hole in the celestial tapestry and swing away at us.
We face the onslaught with our fists, blocking and striking at the incoming bludgeoning attacks in retaliation. Pieces of our armor break off, and our fists crack, but rather than being pushed back, we advance on Mataku's real body peeking in through the crack in the façade we opened.
Suddenly, one of the Primordial Terror's tentacles is scattered by the impact from our right fist. It causes him to shy back in surprise, upon which he discovers that our right arm has turned into Kamii's crab pincer. We exchanged many strikes already, each on the level of galaxy-ending proportions. The combo counter has reached a level beyond what his otherworldly body can withstand.
"Child's play!" He dismisses Kamii's curse while gathering all his exposed tentacles into a battering ram the size of our whole body. If he wants to measure raw power, we will take him up on it.
We throw a punch with the cursed arm and meet the battering ram directly. The crab pincer crushes through in an impact of the eons, and the shockwave rips through his entire visible part and shatters it into pieces. They are quickly sucked into the hole in space where they came from and reabsorbed into Mataku's mass.
"Fight and die with the vestiges of humanity you have left!" We declare in a thunderous voice that shakes the very corners of this dimension. "A god stands no chance against us!"
"So be it!" Mataku responds, and the universe around us crumbles, starting from the hole we punched into it. From within emerges his full size, gathering into a humanoid shape to rival our own. Glaring us down is a monstrous Crawling Chaos mixed with fleeting traits of a human. Patches of human skin cover parts of his arms and legs, and he has several pairs of eyes misplaced on his face.
It's as if Mataku has already mostly forgotten the form he took while on Earth. He has lost touch with imagination and is beginning to act on the instincts of a Crawling Chaos. Meanwhile, we are in the form closest to what Chaos used to look like. We remain human despite our overwhelming existence under which a civilization like that of Earth would barely register as a speck of dust on our skin.
After all, we have a world to protect, promises to keep, and we each have people waiting for our return. We aren't like Mataku, who had no connections to Earth and merely wanted to see its destruction as a pastime. It's the reason why his consciousness was fading into the Outer One. He's an empty being, the only thing left on his mind existence itself until even that disappears into the monotony of infinity.
"What now, sister? Will we fruitlessly punch each other for all eternity?" The Primordial Terror's face splits into two grins, revealing the abyss of reality in his mouths. "You should know that physical attacks against our kind are useless. Moreso now that we have reached infinity."
"Eternity. Infinity. Those things don't matter to us." We crack our knuckles before pointing at Mataku in a challenging gesture. "We have somewhere to be after this, so let's make this quick."
Those outside the rift in space have escaped from the tesseract and reached the elevator to the transportation circle. Rolan looks back in worry as the platform descends, seeing the violent storm induced by the gateway to another world whipping through the space still folding away into the distance.
"Be safe, Chloe." He mutters to himself as his view is blocked by the elevator shaft. Although it shouldn't be his place to fear for her life since he couldn't even fathom how powerful she has become, he can't help but worry for her. He knows that the false gods and Mataku had their hands in intertwining their two fates. If not for their interference, he and his party would have never met the princess of the Dominion.
In fact, if not for their meeting, the Old Humans would have never turned him into the chosen hero. It's that thought that causes him such grief to let her fight alone now, at the end of everything. But he also understands that his existence is insignificant before the true gods that Chloe and Mataku have turned into. All he can do now is pray for her to return.
Everybody else appears to think the same. He finds solace in the fact that even the Golden Queen and the God of Storms understood that they would have merely held Chloe back if they had gone with her. But at the same time, he doesn't have the mental fortitude to be confident about her return like they are.
"This is where I'll leave you." Senka suddenly says when they reach the bottom of the elevator shaft and step off the platform. Before anybody can argue with her, she quickly explains. "I'm staying here to repair the tesseract and undo Shelnir's actions."
For a moment, there's only silence. Nobody knows how to respond to the doll girl, especially given the unpredictable nature of the tear in space. But Senka herself breaks the silence.
"Come on, it's like you're thinking I'm going to die while holding the door shut for you to escape." She tilts her head and remarks with a sarcastic grin. It causes Exla to flinch, which the doll girl takes note of with grim satisfaction. She then continues with a shrug. "That's not gonna happen; I'm already dead."
"You will return, right?" Kamii asks in a surprisingly unsure tone, ignoring Senka's quip about her undead status.
"I'm not a hopeless optimist like Makoto, so I won't promise anything." The doll girl shrugs once again. Then she grows serious. "There's no time left. Get going already. Leave this to me."
With these words, and before anybody can protest, Senka activates the elevator to go back up. They watch her until she disappears from view, then exchange anxious looks with each other before silently running down the hallway toward the transportation circle.
Senka can feel Makoto and Asoko's presence within the tesseract even though they should be in a different dimension. She can see through their eyes and witness their actions as if they were playing out right before her eyes. In fact, her connection with Makoto is so strong and stable that she can even sense her emotions.
"Heh." The doll girl can't help but chuckle when she feels no fear in her mind. Makoto is filled with such infectious determination that Senka wonders if her still heart could start beating again from basking in it. "Maybe I was hasty in calling you a hopeless optimist."
Even though their opponent is a cosmic horror with the power of a universal god, Makoto and her kin face him down with unwavering conviction in their own victory. If that doesn't inspire greatness, nothing would. Senka will have to fulfill her part and keep this dimension safe by stopping the collapse of the Imagination Engine.
The elevator reaches the vast open space housing the tesseract once more. The platform with the tear in space is nowhere to be seen, and neither are the walls folding into the distance. But Senka doesn't stop to take in the atmosphere and steps away from the elevator before turning around.
Before her is the wall of the cube-shaped central section of the Rhodos station. Putting a hand on the relief of controlled chaos on its surface, the doll girl turns back to peer into the distant darkness. The expanding core is still nowhere to be seen, but she can't tell how long she has from that alone.
When Senka looks at the wall again, a door is right before her. She places her palm on the console next to it and uses her strange ability to open any lock regardless of how sophisticated or otherworldly it is. Beyond is a small room with a simple elevator platform and a stairwell.
Thinking for a moment, she decides to take the stairs rather than wait for the elevator. Something tells her that it's faster as long as she goes about it the right way. And as she expected, when she rounds the corner to the first floor, she's already at the exit. Time and space have no meaning here, and it didn't take Senka long to grasp how to utilize it.
She soon finds her way into a large room that looks like a command center on a ship. There's no hint of life in here, showing that everything about the Imagination Engine must have been automated a long time ago. The doll girl quickly seeks out the most important-looking console and gets to work. When the screen flickers to life, so do all the others in the entire room.
"That won't work. The Imagination Engine isn't something you lesser creature could hope to comprehend." Shelnir suddenly appears in the air before Senka and declares in a haughty tone. But the latter doesn't even look up from the screen and continues to tap away on the surprisingly analog keyboard. She has no time to waste paying attention to a holographic recording or memory imprint of the Guide of Tomorrow. But Shelnir doesn't seem to mind, quite unlike how her living counterpart would have reacted, and looks at the big screen showing many warnings with grim satisfaction. "Soon, the first cracks in reality will show."
Exla leads the others out of the teleportation chamber close to the command center of the Rhodos station. Chaos said that she cleared it out earlier to stop them from attacking the Queen Pelomyx on her approach, so she hopes that they haven't returned yet. It would complicate matters.
As they leave the hidden passageway and enter the military complex, they encounter workers and soldiers running through the corridors in a hurry. There is no audible alarm, but it would seem that they have been alerted to something occurring within the Imagination Engine.
"Let's hope they are already preparing to detach the colony section." Exla remarks with a wry smile, knowing that it would be too good to be true.
As they step out into the open and head for the command center on the fastest path, the humans stop and stare at them. Although these members of new humanity have been sheltered from Earth for many generations on this space station, they know about the demi-humans that inhabit the planet they originate from.
Before they can react, Rolan knocks them out with his blinding speed and clears the way for the others to follow. With Exla pointing them in the right direction, they quickly make their way for the command center while leaving behind countless unconscious new humans. An audible alarm sounds now, and opposition grows quickly.
"It will be increasingly difficult not to kill somebody accidentally." Aurelia comments while her golden weapons fly about her as if they had a mind of their own. She has turned the blades into bludgeoning tools instead, using them to knock the humans out rather than slash them into pieces. Chaos didn't want to kill a single new human, and she will honor it until the end.
Rolan rounds the corner to the corridor leading to the command center and finds it barricaded with several gun emplacements. A storm of plasma bullets comes his way, but Sintress raises a Perfect Sanctuary in time to shield him.
"We don't have time for this." Exla mutters and performs a pushing gesture into the corridor. An invisible force blasts apart the metal barricades and slams the soldiers into the walls. The others use the opening to overwhelm the rattled new humans and take away their weapons before shackling them.
The door to the command center appears to have been cut open with plasma cutters. Chaos did say that she sealed the doors from the inside after she scared everybody out of the room, but it would seem they were able to enter after all. Kamii peeks inside, only to be greeted with a barrage of shots which she quickly avoids by pulling her head back.
"They are converging on us." Sigurd comments, his hearing allowing him to pick up the footsteps of many soldiers heading their way from both sides of the corridor. He isn't too worried considering their lineup, but all of this delays what they came here to do.
"I will clear out the room." Aurelia steps forward with the countless golden weapons swirling about her as if mirroring her impatience.
"There is no need for that." Gram argues while taking the massive shield from his back. Its force field has already proven powerful enough to block even an Oinos clone's attack, so it will work against anything the new humanity can throw at them.
The Golden Queen narrows her eyes but nods in agreement. She would tarnish her name if she insisted on wanting to let loose against powerless humans merely to fend off her frustration at being unable to help Chaos in her final battle.
The big man deploys the energy shield and steps into the doorway, closely followed by Exla and the others. As they pour into the command center, Sintress erects the Perfect Sanctuary behind them and covers the door right in time to block a flash grenade exploding in the corridor outside.
"Who's in charge here?!" The cloud girl demands to know in a booming voice that causes the new humans to hold their ears. It wasn't exactly meant to elicit an answer but to gain everybody's attention. And it worked, as the soldiers stop shooting while staying ducked behind their cover. "I am Exla, the Guardian of the Soil. I need to speak to your commander."
She isn't too keen on using her title as a false god to get ahead among the new humanity, but now is not the time to choose her methods. They need to start the detachment procedure as quickly as possible before the influence from the other side spreads to Rhodos city.
"I am General Willis, commander of the Rhodos station garrison. You are the intruders who caused a mess in hangar seventy-three and crashed a city-ship into the outer shield. Why should I believe anything you say?" A middle-aged woman stands up from behind cover, holding her chest out in unwavering steadfastness. The soldiers surrounding her keep their weapons trained on Exla and the others to lay down suppressive fire when needed.
"Because if you don't, there won't be a Rhodos station soon." Exla steps forward, and Sintress lowers the Perfect Sanctuary to make way. The Guardian of the Soil has been walking on her own two feet for a while now, but she begins to hover and creates a cloud under herself that she sits down on. It's solely to show off her divinity before the skeptics, even if many may think it nothing more than a trick.
"This is a waste of time. Onee-sama and Senka are fighting for all of us right now." Hestia walks through Gram's energy shield and spreads her metal-covered wings. Her appearance mesmerizes the new humans in the command center, but General Willis only narrows her eyes. "Hear me, humans. I am a Fata, messenger of the gods."
Unlike the cloud girl's roar earlier, which was a purely physical noise, Hestia's voice echoes into the listeners' very minds. She doesn't need to raise her volume to reach even the last corner of the large room. Even if the general isn't quick to believe her, some of the soldiers show signs of hesitation. It would seem they were indoctrinated to recognize Fatas since the new humans here could potentially be told to work with them when on Earth.
"The Primordial Terror has killed Lady Shelnir and damaged the Rhodos station's center section. Lady Areteniha demands that you initiate the procedure for detaching the colony section right away as she fights the monster from the stars!" Hestia lies with absolute conviction. It's a calculated gamble considering Korenga is carrying the listless Elaine wrapped in a sheet of cloth under her arm only a few steps behind her. But not one new human would think that she's the God of the Sun, if they even know her real appearance, that is.
For a moment, there's only silence in the command center. But be it due to Hestia's voice being so convincing or the new humanity's indoctrination to listen to Fatas, General Willis falters. She orders her soldiers to stand down before stepping forth from the rows of consoles.
"Then you are the real Lady Exla?" The general asks cautiously while looking at the girl in question floating on her cloud. It's understandable that the new humans would be skeptical about a child like her being one of their gods.
"We have no time for introductions." Aurelia demands in a cold tone that leaves no room for argument. With the many golden weapons still floating around her, she has as much of a divine presence as Exla does, if not more. "The fate of existence itself is on the line."
