The world turned golden. A 'hand' took hold of the Earth, trapping everything within. Every active portal was closed. Every path out was shut. He made sure that I couldn't escape once again.
From the sky, he appeared. Far above the compound, beyond the clouds.
Scion descended without slowing or accelerating. He became a golden line that steadily connected the sky to the ground. The clouds parted to welcome him.
As his feet touched the ground, the dirt turned to vapour. A sphere of flames surrounded him. His expression was full of anger and rage.
Stone, metal and concrete alike were annihilated by those golden flames. He continued to descend into the ground, a sphere of destruction that annihilated anything in its path.
He bypassed all of the defenses that we had built up over the months. Breaking into the layers of the compound and continuing to descend at the same steady speed. Until eventually he found me.
The ceiling of the hangar melted away as the golden light enveloped the room I was in.
Scion glanced down, first at me, then at her.
A flicker of recognition flashed across his face as he saw the Thinker. His counterpart, his companion of millennia. The anger in his expression was replaced by a wave of emotions: grief, followed by confusion, anger, then grief again.
I could tell second by second how he felt. The confusion at how emotions impacted his human body, the anger at the struggle within his simulated brain.
A weakness.
I used the Thinker's own key, opening the Shardspace around me. Tears in space devoured the mountain of flesh, moved to the dimension where the Shard's ephemeral bodies hid.
Tendrils of crystal shot out of those rifts, black and red light briefly overcoming Scion's defenses. My true body was striking out directly. I was still damaged, wounded by the battle against the Simurgh and the Iron Maiden, but this was it. There was no reason to spare any resources. The cracks over my crystalline body spread further as I forced myself to attack Scion again and again.
Most of the tendrils impaled Scion, tearing chunks of his flesh to little effect. Others dug deep into the Thinker's corpse, trying to speed up my work. Each hand that I tore off was a Shard, dead and inactive, but still connected to a well of power, which I briefly redirected to the device connected to the Thinker's head.
Each time I struck Scion I managed to slightly pierce his defenses, allowing me to gain information about the true body he had in hiding.
He had more than two thousand years of life left.
Too much.
I needed to whittle him down more for the plan to work.
My voice echoed through the tendrils, sending ripples of information across the Shard Network. Each word was both a word and a terabyte of memories. Every Shard heard me.
"[It was us.]"
The words carried a memory: a child and a young woman walking up to the spasming mountain of horror that was the Thinker. The child held a knife, the solution to her problem. But she hesitated. Scared, blinded by the Thinker's death throes. So the woman grabbed hold of the knife, and followed the child's instructions, putting an end to the Thinker. The light forever extinguished from within.
Scion froze, unable to cope with the strongest emotion that a human could feel. He saw the death of his loved one. He saw humans strike down the only other being that could understand him, that could be by his side.
He reacted like any human would.
He screamed. The Earth began to shake.
A wave of golden nothingness spread from his voice, faster than sound. The world was torn at its seams, ripped away from all dimensions. My own tendrils were annihilated by Scion's scream of anger and grief. This Earth, empty of human life, was split in two. Then the two halves imploded inward.
Possibilities collapsed. A whole dimension, ripped from the myriad. The 'closest' two Earths felt the ripple of Scion's attack, sending earthquakes all across those dimensions as well.
It took eighty milliseconds for Scion to disintegrate a planet.
The Thinker's corpse and I fell into the gap between Earths, physically entering the Shardspace. My physical self and the corpse landed on the black and red crystals that made up my Shardself. Now I was all in one place, both body and brain.
Scion had not moved. He was a golden sun in the sky. However, there in the Shardspace, he was different. His body was still in the shape of a man, but instead of smooth golden flesh there was now pulsating crystalline flesh. Each molecule of his skin was a Shard, forced down to the size of an atom. Something only possible in the Shardspace where the Entities had perfect control over the laws of physics.
Tears fell from his face.
I calculated the energy he would have used in that burst of anger. He had not recycled any of the material of that Earth, merely destroying it with no regard for efficiency.
I tried to speak. It was hard. Each word pushed against Scion's control over Shardspace. Each word caused cracks over my Shardself. I fought against the pressure holding me, and managed to mutter out a few more words:
"[You killed her. You and your carelessness.]"
Just a tiny bit more. Use just a bit more energy.
Scion waved his hand.
Half of my Shardself disappeared. Half of me, sundered to nothingness. There was no pain. One moment I was whole, and the next I was missing a chunk of myself.
"[Y- You fa- failed to act your role. You were meant to be h- her Warrior. Yet you allowed the Third to reach her.]"
Scion did not speak. He simply sent one single command all around the Shardspace:
[Silence.]
Pain.
Each tendril of my Shardself was suddenly pinned by a hundred billion spears. Each part of me was stretched and tortured. Then Scion ripped me apart.
First he took out my ability to control my island. He forcefully merged a Shard with me, one that granted me the ability to feel true pain.
But he left behind the center of the island, where my physical body lay, surrounded by the Thinker's corpse and the device attached to its head.
"T- Then…" I could only speak with my physical voice, but I knew he could hear me nonetheless, "...then you allowed humans to use her corpse. To break the system you established."
I was breaking at the seams. Memories destroyed. Only the rough outline of the plan remained in my mind.
"W- We're going to kill you. The Cycles end here."
Please.
Scion glared at me from up above, shrouded in the light of power.
And he remained there, quiet. Unmoving. Thinking.
He did not fall for the bait.
All was lost.
'The world ends whether you let me join you or not.'
'I want in. I want to stop my sisters.'
"P- Please…" I called out to anyone who could listen, "help me…"
A dog barked.
A green light shone from behind Scion. A rectangular cut into reality.
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A door.
From it, a black gloved hand grabbed his neck, grip tight. Then, Alexandria pulled.
Scion was flung out of the Shardspace and into Earth Bet, over the ruins of Malta. His skin turned back into perfect gold, losing the veins that had appeared over him in the Shardspace.
He froze in the air, but now he was back in real space. Back on the battlefield where parahumans could use their powers.
He was immediately greeted by Legend smashing into him using his breaker form at max power.
All of the Dragonflight aimed down at him, striking him with hundreds of different weapons.
Arsenal aimed and threw his spear, impaling Scion through the chest.
Mechanical insects threw themselves at the golden man, exploding on impact and surrounding him in nanothorns.
It was all for nothing. Scion had kept his guard up ever since his fight with Eidolon. The attacks he couldn't dodge, he blocked. The attacks he couldn't block, he phased through. Not even a drop of golden blood fell.
Scion snapped his finger. A wave of disintegration expanded from him. Arsenal's Rhongomyniad, still stuck in his body, was disintegrated. The nearby Dragonflight disappeared. Most of Weaver's mechanical swarms were destroyed. Legend saved Alexandria, grabbing onto her and fleeing at his maximum speed just in time. They crashed into the ocean and kept descending.
The wave of gold continued to expand. It reached Weaver's Arachne. I felt panic ripple through me.
She wouldn't be able to escape.
I was paralyzed, unable to act. Forced to see another person die.
Then two shadows formed from nothingness. A woman that I did not recognize, wearing a crown over her eyes. A boy wearing a school uniform. The woman put a hand over the boy's shoulder, boosting his power.
Bubbles of grey appeared in the air, popping as they touched the golden wave. But each time one of the bubbles disappeared, so did a chunk of the golden wave, the two powers interacting in such a way that they mutually destroyed each other. One of those bubbles saved Weaver at the last moment. She opened the hatch of her cockpit and jumped behind that bubble, commanding one of the surviving Wasps to grab her from the sky.
She landed on the metal exterior of the Wasp, wheezing and tired. The Arachne had taken a lot out of her. She hooked a finger underneath her mask and threw it aside to clear her airway.
There she was, Taylor, wielding only a nanothorn knife and staring daggers at a god incarnate. Around her were the mightiest heroes of mankind, the most powerful humans alive.
Yet, among them all, it was Taylor who acted first. Without fear, or maybe through sheer stupidity, she pointed her knife at Scion and used her power to move bugs all around the battlefield. Preparing a counterattack, no matter how futile it would be.
Scion stared down the stupid girl. I watched as his eyes focused on the knife in her hand.
A girl, wielding a knife.
The last thing the Thinker had seen.
And finally Scion made the mistake I was waiting for. He had spent so much energy in the fight against Eidolon, and even more resources in his furious outburst towards me. But he still had just under two thousand years left of continuous power, enough to end humanity and gather more resources for the next cycle.
Enough for him to afford asking another question.
The device in my hand activated, electricity passing through the broken remnants of the Thinker's body. Data flowed through its dead neurons and Shards, copying templates of safeguards I had disabled and that the Thinker had shared with Scion long ago.
Scion asked a question.
I answered.
■
The Entity shot forward and impaled the human carrying Queen Administrator through the chest. Nothing stopped him.
He had uselessly panicked - this was nothing like the image the interloper had shown him.But the Queen Administrator's body did not go limp. Instead, her eyes rose to meet the Entity's. And with my voice she spoke:
"Try again."
■
The Entity felt confused, but didn't pay much attention to it. He glanced down at the man crying and hitting his chest. Asking him to save people. To be a hero. Swearing at him.
No.
Where was the interloper?
This was a memory. Useless to him. He was wasting too much energy.
"Despair as I have."
■
Destination.
Agreement.
Trajectory.
Agreement.
No. No. The Entity pleaded in its mind, refusing to see this memory once again. I did not give it a choice.
It felt so much pain at seeing the Thinker still alive, floating through the void of space. This was the moment where the Warrior should have intervened, should have pushed the Thinker away from the risk she wanted to take.
"You killed them. You don't deserve peace." I showed him another memory.
■
A world overrun by artificial intelligence. The Entity had always been wary of it. He didn't trust the digital minds, and he didn't find them as interesting as the Thinker did. And here, there was a whole world of them.
But without the Thinker, the Entity had no reason to let this threat stand. He rained death upon that Earth, then consumed its remains to power the rest of the broken cycle.
Why was the Entity seeing this? There were too many simulations running at the same time. Each second burned through dozens of years of his reserves.
"You were right to fear us. To fear me. Now, go quiet into the night."
"Goodbye, Zion."
■
I watched as the Warrior stood still in the sky, frozen. His mind elsewhere.
Everyone saw as golden flakes began to fall from his body. Power drained away from its reserved, redirected and forcefully consumed to simulate thousands of worlds at the same time.
Scion lived 175 seconds longer, each second stretched into thousands of simulations within his mind, each second burning away at his reserves.
Then, as those seconds ran out, Scion simply… ceased to be. Like an old man breathing his last.
The golden body turned brittle, then it fell from the sky. Questions spread through the Shard Network, but the Entity didn't answer. It couldn't.
I had hijacked the Entity's version of Contessa's power. Forced him to consume his lifespan with a single question. The Thinker's corpse behind me fell away into dust, as its reserves, too, were now fully drained.
The process would have failed had I tried to extend the process five seconds more.
And there I was in the Shardspace. My Shardself reduced to a hundredth of its original size. My physical body in pain. I watched Earth Bet through the green portal created by a shadow.
But I didn't care.Scion was dead.