Rude confirmed that nothing had followed him and Tromell, then ushered the old Guado up the stairs to the platform in the void. Cid was standing there, looking impatient.
"'Bout damn time you got here," the Al Bhed growled. "Giaeggo and I made sure that the four portals are definitely up this weird magic stairway we've found. And we have a theory as to where they came from."
"Elaborate on the way, please," Tromell requested. "If I know the origin of these mystery portals, it may speed my closure of them."
They moved through the door out into the void, where Giaeggo stood nervously by the stairway. "I have traversed some portion of the stairs, Elder Cid," he said. "It is strangely solid, but hot to the touch."
"You had a rope line on yourself in case something went wrong?"
"Yes."
"Good man."
"So, where d'you figure the portals came from?" Rude asked Cid.
"You wouldn't know anything about it, sonny, so lemme give you a little background. For a real long time, the only way that Sin could be defeated was with the Final Summonin'. Summoners would travel here to get the Final Aeon from Yunalesca, the first person to defeat Sin.
"According to Yuna, what Yunalesca did was turn one of the summoner's guardians into a Fayth. That would be the summoner's Final Aeon. Since Sin was killed five times with a Final Aeon, there're five ex-Fayth. Zaon, the stiff you passed by to get here, was number one. Then there were three other High Summoners before my brother-in-law, Braska." Cid gestured up the stairs. "But nobody knew where the Fayth for those Final Aeons were – until now."
"You mean to say that the Fayth of the Final Summoning for every High Summoner after Lady Yunalesca is up these stairs?" Tromell asked.
"Yup. Supposin' that the decay of the Zaon Fayth happened after Yu Yevon absorbed his Aeon to make the second Sin, I bet the Fayth up there suffered the same fate."
"In any event, we've no time to waste," Tromell declared. "If the portals up there remain open, they will provide Sephiroth with a prime escape route. I will see them closed, no matter the cost."
He moved to the stairway and began to ascend.
Even through the flickering light of the barrier that surrounded them, Sephiroth's new body was clearly visible.
What interested Auron was that the young man clearly possessed some measure of an ego image – what he clearly saw himself as in his own mind. The beautiful face and long silver hair were still present, as was the humanoid body, clad completely in black.
But there was more.
The light shifted, and Auron could see a massive, black wing unfurling from behind Sephiroth's body's right shoulder. A moment later, eleven other wings sprang up – five more on the right side, nestled into the greatest wing, and six on the left side. The wings, though large, did not touch the ground, instead arching out far to Sephiroth's sides.
His body hung in midair, motionless, the eyes closed as though in sleep.
"Lulu, did you know this was going to happen?" Cloud demanded. "Is that why you called us over to this platform?"
"Yes," Lulu replied. "The process isn't complete, though. He wants to absorb me as well, and gain control of my magic-attunement technique. Before that, Sephiroth wants to use all of you as guinea pigs to determine whether or not he should absorb my emotions as well, or leave them out of the process."
"How will he use us as guinea pigs?" Red XIII snarled. "And how will we get out of this damn barrier?"
Auron interrupted. "Look."
Everyone turned their gaze to him, then to his hand, then to his extended index finger. They followed the path of his indication and all eyes came to rest on a single pyrefly, floating up out of the portal to the body.
"Can you send it?" Tidus asked Yuna, his eyes never leaving the soul's path.
"I can try."
"Don't," Auron said. "The sending does not require that the unsent be willing to depart for the Farplane, but it does require that the sender have a stronger will than those she sends. If I have at all glimpsed the measure of this man, Yuna, even your will pales in comparison to his."
The pyrefly spiraled lazily up to the body and disappeared.
After five minutes of climbing the stairway, Tromell and his escorts finally found themselves looking out upon another platform in the void.
Set into its stone surface were four large holes. Bits and pieces of rubble were scattered everywhere, in patterns that suggested whatever structures the debris had comprised had been explosively blown off of the holes. Steaming, raw magic boiled out of the Farplane portals, and the sound of the wind was nearly deafening.
Tromell surveyed the portals. "IT WILL TAKE ME AT LEAST TWO HOURS TO CLOSE THEM ALL SIMULTANEOUSLY!" he roared over the wind. "RELAY THAT TO LADY YUNA AND SIR AURON! THEY MUST HOLD SEPHIROTH IN ONE PLACE FOR TWO HOURS!"
The CommSphere on Cloud's belt began to make a noise. Continuing to watch the still-dormant body and cursing the barrier that kept them from destroying the bloody thing, Cloud grabbed the sphere and hit the RECEIVE button. "What?"
Rude's face blossomed in the sphere, and the sound of screaming wind nearly drowned out his voice. "WE'VE FOUND THE PORTALS!" he bellowed. "CID SAYS HE THINKS THEY CAME FROM SOMETHING CALLED THE FINAL SUMMONING!"
"Of course," Auron murmured. "It makes sense. Every time a new Fayth was created, another hole was opened up in the membrane, further weakening the Farplane. That's why each defeat of Sin preceded a bout of instability and a use of the Rite. That was the key."
"TROMELL SAYS TWO HOURS 'TIL HE CAN CLOSE ALL OF THEM! YOU NEED TO KEEP SEPHIROTH THERE FOR TWO HOURS!"
Cloud stared at the bald man's image in the CommSphere. "You are joking."
"NO! I NEVER JOKE!"
Stepping forward, Tifa took the CommSphere from Cloud. "Just keep Tromell, Cid and Giaeggo safe," she told Rude. "We'll take care of Sephiroth."
With a look of resigned concern, Rude nodded and cut the transmission.
"Uh, guys?" Wakka said after a beat. "Maybe it's just me, but…"
"…the thing up there is moving," Tidus finished.
All of them snapped their heads up to look. Sephiroth was indeed moving. His limbs quivered and he stretched them, inch by inch. His six pairs of wings shivered and then also stretched, arching higher and then outward.
Sephiroth's eyes snapped open, and even from his vantage point, Cloud could see the emerald green irises and slitted pupils. The young man bared his teeth in a manic grin and reached out his left hand in a grasping claw. All the air in front of him buckled wildly and then burst into green flame, dying out a moment later, and Sephiroth was once again in possession of his Masamune. His eyes flicked here and there as he drank in his surroundings, and then he locked gazes with Cloud.
I've been so looking forward to this, Cloud.
The barrier surrounding the party went down, and Cloud had a split-second premonition. "JUMP!"
Nobody hesitated. All of them jumped clear of the platform. In the space of a heartbeat, Sephiroth dove, Masamune held in a reverse grip, slamming the pommel of the sword's hilt into the platform. All the air was blasted out of the space around it, hurling everyone across the room. The thick metal platform buckled inward, leaving a huge crater in the middle. Sephiroth drew the Masamune back and drove the hilt in again, and this time the platform snapped apart into nine pieces.
Cloud managed to turn his fall into a roll, coming up with the First Tsurugi ready. He slammed away a section of the platform which was hurtling at him.
The maneuver left him wide open. Before he knew what was happening Sephiroth was there in front of him, Masamune still in a reverse grip, and the hilt crushed into Cloud's stomach.
Auron landed heavily, resisting the urge to curse. He turned just in time to see Sephiroth collide with Cloud. The blond man went flying twenty feet before finally skidding to a halt on the restored barrier over the Farplane portal. His sword landed a good distance away, clearly out of his reach.
He's down. Sephiroth had obviously not been attacking to kill, else Cloud would have been ripped to pieces. The strength and fortitude and rage of three of existence's greatest monsters had been collapsed into one man-sized shell, and it was terribly apparent.
The silver-haired young man looked around as though surprised that Cloud wasn't the only one on the attack. Then he shrugged, a smug look of supreme confidence on his face, and beckoned them all forward.
Tidus, the closest, rashly rushed in on his own. He leaped forward in a series of dazzling somersaults, terminating in a massive three-hundred-sixty degree midair loop that brought his Caladbolg high into the air to slice Sephiroth in half from head to toe. Sephiroth himself simply raised his right hand.
With a triumphant cry, Tidus finished his Spiral Cut, the Caladbolg whirling in. Sephiroth caught the ancient, razor-sharp blade in his hand, negating all of the blow's momentum. The finely honed edge of the sword bit into Sephiroth's palm, but he seemed not to notice. Instead, he looked down at Tidus, who had been slammed ingloriously into the barrier when his strike hadn't gone through. As the young blitzer began to scramble to his feet, Sephiroth drew back a foot to kick Tidus in the ribs.
Auron winced as he saw Tidus go flying in a perfect parabolic arc and crash into part of the old metal platform. He slid back down to the barrier, insensate.
Vincent and Paine were mere seconds behind Tidus, attacking together. Vincent triple-tapped three-round bursts at Sephiroth's head, while Paine continued forward, her sword ready to gut Sephiroth. Emerald eyes focused on the bullets as they flew through the air. The Masamune came about in a great and terrible arc, broadsiding all the small metal projectiles at once and sending them shooting in a completely different direction. Paine's charge was stopped dead when Vincent's bullets went screaming through her legs, sending her crashing to the ground.
Before Vincent could fire again, Sephiroth was stepping in, the Masamune shooting up right through the red-eyed man's gauntlet and out his elbow. With one great heave, he ripped Vincent's forearm clean off. Crossing his right hand over his blade, he backhanded Vincent across the face, sending him skidding across the shimmering barrier until he rolled to a stop, motionless.
Auron had long since begun his own charge, and fortuitously enough his timing coincided with Barret's, Yuffie's, and Wakka's. Barret fired off an energy bolt, Yuffie hurled her boomerang-shuriken, and Wakka leapt into the air and sent the World Champion spinning in.
Sephiroth battered Barret's energy bolt away with the Masamune, deflected Yuffie's weapon with a sharp upward kick that sent the weapon fifty feet into the air before it began to fall again, and merely ducked Wakka's World Champion. Auron read his opening and took it, swinging his own Masamune into a clean collision with Sephiroth's torso. The blade bit deep into the young man's body; Auron could hear bones and cartilage cracking as black blood spewed from the wound.
His gaze met Sephiroth's. Auron saw nothing but manic, wild glee in those emerald eyes.
Sephiroth ripped Auron's Masamune out of his body and swung his own weapon. Auron managed to raise his bracer in time to take the blow on that. The impact staggered him; his bracer cracked and fell to the ground in pieces. Knowing he was completely open from any angle of attack, Auron tried to assume a defensive stance, but Sephiroth blew right past him, knocking him to the ground. Three distinct yells of pain told Auron all he needed to know about what had happened to Barret, Yuffie and Wakka.
The old guardian managed to roll over on the floor to get Sephiroth in view again. Tifa and Reno moved in on the attack, Tifa with a lightning-fast series of blows that Sephiroth took without staggering and a kick that began over her head and landed squarely on the young man's left shoulder. As he moved to grab her leg, Reno leaped in and bashed him across the face with his riot prod. When the rod came away one of Sephiroth's eyes was gone, with nothing but black blood showing in the socket, but he kept going, grabbing hold of Tifa's leg. He broke it with a casual, almost contemptuous twist of his arm. Auron staggered to his feet and charged again, the young woman's scream ripping through him and making him see red. Tifa went flying when Sephiroth's closed fist landed in her gut. Reno tried another strike, this time looking to see how vulnerable the young man's new body was to electricity. Before he could even make contact, Sephiroth snatched his riot prod, bent it to a forty-five degree angle, and then smashed the Masamune's pommel across Reno's face.
Again, Auron timed his strike to coincide with his allies' attacks. Cid and Red XIII both went in at the same time. The scruffy pilot leaped high into the air and speared Sephiroth right through the face, just as he'd promised to do, while Red XIII slashed into his enemy's vulnerable torso. Sephiroth, even though Cid's lance would have been stabbing into the cortex of a normal humanoid's brain, reacted to both attacks at once. A sharp kick sent Red XIII careening into a piece of the platform. His impact left a dent in the metal; he didn't get up. Cid was landing when Sephiroth pulled the lance out of his face, then gave it a hard yank. Cid stumbled right into a strike from the Masamune. At the last moment, he managed to twist the shaft of his lance around to block the strike. The blow sheared right through the metal shaft and cut into his ribcage, but penetrated no deeper thanks to its diminished power. As it was, though, it still blew the pilot away, the cigarette flying from his mouth.
Coming in just as Cid took the blow to his chest, Auron whirled around on his heels in a Shooting Star, hoping to take Sephiroth's head off, but when his Masamune connected it felt like hitting a stone wall. Sephiroth's head angled sharply forward, his chin pressing into his chest, but he snapped his neck back up and grabbed Auron by the collar.
For a moment, Auron's gaze flicked around, looking for anyone still on their feet. Crouching behind a piece of the shattered platform were Yuna, Lulu, and Rikku. Rikku was staring in concentration at the collar around Lulu's neck, working at it with what looked like –
A lockpick.
The collar fell away. Yuna and Lulu both opened up full-blast at the same time. Lulu opened Flare vortexes all around Sephiroth, trying to incinerate him, while Yuna sent in the more accurate slashing beams of Holy to spear the enemy through the chest. For a moment, Auron felt Lulu's presence in his mind, and he knew the Flares would not affect him.
He lifted the Masamune high above his head and brought it down on Sephiroth's arm at the elbow, hard. It cut deep into the extremity but ground to a halt against the bone, which itself snapped out and protruded through the skin beneath, spraying more viscous black fluid everywhere. Thinking that he'd been able to distract Sephiroth for long enough, Auron looked down the length of the arm still holding him up by the collar and felt despair wash over him. Sephiroth was paying him no attention, but instead was waiting for the Flares to burst forth and for the incoming Holy strikes to hit.
In a flash, the barrier rose up from beneath Sephiroth's feet and absorbed all the magic fury directed against him, then collapsed back down into itself. Auron saw the barrier twist the energies and hurl them back toward Yuna, Lulu, and Rikku. Before he could shout a warning, the energy beneath their feet exploded in a massive gout of white flame and sent them flying, unconscious.
At long last, surrounded by the crumpled bodies of his enemies, unaffected by his mortal wounds, Sephiroth spoke.
"I have more than enough material here," he said to Auron. "Die."
Auron tried to defend himself, but Sephiroth moved too fast. His left hand came up, the Masamune level, and speared Auron through his left eye.
Red XIII came to quickly, only to be nearly struck unconscious again by the immense pain in his chest. He'd had broken bones before, but never had it been this bad.
Levering himself painfully into a standing position, he focused on Sephiroth just in time to see him stab Auron through the left eye.
"NO!"
Sephiroth took no notice of him. His wings pulled back, quivering as though with anticipation. He retrieved his Masamune, and Auron's own blade slipped from dead fingers to land on the barrier beneath him.
"We never even got to have a contest of blades," Sephiroth sighed. "Pity. Still, efficiency before enjoyment."
His wings struck.
All eleven lesser wings leapt forward at once, slashing into Auron's limp body with razor-edged feathers. The great wing drew further back and then drove forward, spearing what had once been a man on its wingtip and then tossing it away to land with a sickening, wet thud.
Sephiroth turned about. Before Red XIII's eyes, the young man's grievous wounds began to disappear. The bone of his right arm seeped back into the flesh and the flesh knitted itself. The stab wound in his head closed up and a new eye grew into the socket where Reno had dashed it out. The slash wounds in his abdomen disappeared. The great, bleeding chasm in his chest leading up to what passed for a ribcage sealed itself shut with a loud sucking noise. Even the wound on his right palm that Tidus had inflicted knit itself back together.
"Splendid," Sephiroth said aloud. "Could that weakling Kadaj ever have stood up to these wounds? One attack from Cloud was all it took to render him useless to me. This body, however, has proven itself." He sighed, and his wings shivered slightly, the light skittering over them.
Red XIII's eyes widened when Sephiroth turned his attention to him and returned the Masamune to his belt. Not good.
Slowly, Sephiroth stalked over to where Red XIII was struggling to his feet. He'd nearly managed it when Sephiroth grabbed him by the snout and hauled him up, kicking.
"This does look rather familiar," Sephiroth hissed. "I believe this is what the situation was the last time I was bent on killing you." He leaned in close to Red XIII and added in a low whisper, "However, I must say I'm pleased you survived. While you are not technically human, you share some of their emotional tendencies, and it will be enlightening to compare other results with your own."
His eyes flashed. The world went dark.