Dragon War Complex 11: Apocalypse

by Mike Steele

Following the departure of Goku and the dragon balls, a new era of peace settles upon the Earth. This era, however, will be dead before dawn, and a nightmare will replace it as the ruler of the world.

1. Prologue: Cleave

Dragon War
Complex 11: Apocalypse
Prologue: Cleave

To say that all was right with the world always had been to promulgate falsehood, but the most recent clump of decades had done more to disprove such assertions than any other period in Earth's history; to say that all was right with the world during this time had been to label the sky a meaty soup, to liken a mountain to a socket wrench, or to enumerate the nutritional values of fire.

Yesterday had been an era of legendary clashes between parties both demonic and angelic, an outright war between the Knights of Evil and the Knights of Good; the Knights of Evil had been known to frequently suspend the whole universe very perilously over a gaping, growling chasm that plunged straight down into the most unpleasant abyss in the darkest void of the realm of utter doom, and the Knights of Good had been known to keep that chasm from ever having a hearty meal.

During that chaotic time, all had certainly been very, very, very wrong with the world; the era of legendary clashes had been ripe well beyond the point of rancor with episodic despair and apocalyptic onslaughts.

The towering enormity of the peril that had ravaged the world with such phenomenal endurance, however, simply could not augment itself to any higher degree, and had it thus found itself wholly unable to match the rocketing achievements of those who would oppose it; the most heinously malicious forge of consumptive scourges could no longer contrive feats to trump its own carnage-spewing pawns or the benevolent forces that would topple those pawns, and it therefore found itself to be an obsolete relict.

The era of legendary clashes had thus taken its final bow and honorably departed from the smoldering universe, and this allowed a new age of endless potential to cascade thunderously in through the breaches in existence itself that the retired era had feverishly torn agape in its epic twilight; hope, maddened with joy, was cavorting about wildly, and this was a good thing.

To say that all was right with the world was now a blatant disservice to the splendor frolicking in every pore of the cosmos; wickedness itself gave the carcass of yesterday a loathsome kick in the side and then proceeded to skip pleasantly away into nothingness while whistling a giddy tune and smiling at the streams of splendor splashing underfoot.

There was, however, a titanic price for this new harmony, and that price was for both those who had fanned and those who had starved the wretched flames of cataclysm—both those who had brought to birth and those who had brought to extinction the era of legendary clashes—to be eternally without that which was most cherished: the Knights of evil were to be forever without the starry globes that had been at the heart of the whole war, and the Knights of Good were to be forever without the valiant heart that had employed those starry globes to win the whole war.