Chapter Fourteen: Calamity
Sephiroth's proposal dampened the mania their communing spirits had induced to a dull haze.
Time slowed to a laborious crawl, and Tifa remembered herself.
Residual ecstasy mingled with terror at how right she'd been. He wasn't asking permission—he was offering to do in her name what he'd intended from the start. He wanted her to partake in killing everyone off.
Static sensation crept up the back of her neck, and she saw herself, enraptured again, pressing into him of her own accord. She heard a hushed, defeated, "Yes," escape her, and swallowed thickly to keep it from squeezing into reality.
That was what Sephiroth wanted her to say.
But how could she?
How she answered him wouldn't change anything, but there were billions of people living on those worlds who had nothing to do with what Nia and his lackeys had done to her. There were families and children who hadn't earned such a terrible end; there were brothers, sisters, friends, and neighbors simply living out their daily routines. Possibly, there were people who struggled against the very mess that had allowed for all of this to happen in the first place.
And if not, these planets were probably home to any number of Avalanche-like groups, who would-
Tifa's face fell. The Avalanche she'd known had never been about hope, had they? They'd cared for one another and done their best as friends, but desperation and revenge were what had truly motivated the anti-ShinRa cell.
"You know what those who humiliated you are. They'll never stop taking."
It really always came back to that, didn't it? People, repeating the same hopeless patterns throughout history, across time and space, careless and ignorant of the reality closing in around them. They were so damn busy living confined to their jobs or front doorsteps, ruining whatever good life tried to give them there that the only ones left to preserve or save any of it—willing to see there was a problem and confront it— were depraved or broken at best.
Like she was. Like she'd been. "I know," she quietly conceded.
Sephiroth played around the edges of her mind, but she didn't push back. He prodded at older memories of when she'd listen to her patrons in both Seventh Heavens. She sadly reminisced on how many of them would wax nostalgic in mourning for their dead, only to turn right around and curse and snub anyone still with them. Once their inhibitions had dropped, the unpleasant truth outed time and again, and it had been painfully surreal to watch. She envisioned bodies—a couple of guys back in the slums who'd shot each other after she'd kicked them out for trying to start a brawl. Neither had survived, and it was hardly the only time something like that had happened.
That was normal, though. Desperate people did desperate things. It was a given. Everyone had their problems, and she'd convinced herself it was because she ran a bar that she so often encountered people at their worst. She didn't know anyone's whole story or have a right to them, but against the backdrop of how perilously close Gaia had been to dying, of how many never cared until it was their own skins on the line— and even then, only their own skins—what did that say about humanity?
What did it say when it seemed like no measure of loss could teach them to treasure one another?
All those neighbors, families-they walked around scarring themselves and one another on the day to day, flashing fake smiles because it was routine, expected, and no one wanted to be honest. No one. Even in times of relative peace, the knives were never not out.
Not that she'd been any better, but what defense could she offer when it fell so flat against the reality she'd lived? What she'd seen here was enough to tell her it wasn't any different in this corner of the universe.
"Disown them."
"Traitors," her voice hitched. The word fit. Not just to her, but to themselves; to one another, every waking minute. She buried her face in Sephiroth's shoulder, bewildered that she couldn't see her way to refusing him at least on principle. Mortified that her loathing for him had somehow diminished to a tiny molecule of old, irrelevant matter-of-fact in the back of her mind.
Still, a rogue stab of compassion made her hesitate.
"Not everyone," she mumbled. "The stations, reactors, ships…"
Time resumed its breakneck pace.
Sephiroth lifted her chin to leer down at her. "Their lives are forfeit, Tifa. Either to me, or to you…"
She gaped at him, overwhelmed in the renewed tide of energy surging between them. Bargaining had been senseless—he was, if nothing else, a person of absolutes—and she'd already forgotten why she had. Even if he'd agreed, humanity would have only bounced back in a few generations, rebuilt their Mako reactors, and made the same mistakes, self-assured that how they did it made them better than those who'd gone before them.
She knew now not to expect any better. He didn't have to convince her.
And now, Sephiroth had gone one step further and suggested she could be the one to end all of this—all of them.
"…To me?"
"If you would still keep them from my grasp, meld with them," he spoke aloud, pirouetting her so that she faced the worlds once more.
This time, she saw everything.
She beheld the Lifestream currents flowing in and around each of the terraformed planets—visible, multicolored and unnatural. Some of it completed the lifecycle. Some of it decayed and fizzled out in transit, unable to adapt, requiring more to be transfused. The lush and verdant landscape she'd wistfully admired before was just a well-groomed false front. They were true planets as far as being solid went, but as functioning lifeforms—they simply weren't. They were glorified, carnivorous earth- machines wearing masks.
And she knew anything that wasn't injected into the worlds themselves was carted away to compressing plants and converted directly into Mako fuel.
Everything these people touched—everything was only worth to them how they could use it. A desecrating, careless waste.
In spite of her inflamed outrage, Tifa couldn't move. She couldn't decide; she could only stare in disgust and pity at the naked fraud of an ecosystem the humans had built.
Who was she to say what should become of them? She was also something that didn't occur in nature, someone who'd come by this state with decisions equally as foolish.
Sephiroth was wrong, she forcefully told herself, resisting the urge to let their energy recapture her. She wasn't rising. He wasn't a god; she absolutely was not his oracle, much less a goddess. Not unlike the planets rotating before them, they were both just life-blood bloated anomalies who'd selfishly turned their personal problems into an interstellar nightmare.
Sephiroth laughed at her again and pressed a had over her eyes.
Sickly warmth surged into her head, drowning out her sight and muting every sound but his voice.
"Watch closely, Tifa. I'll show you the difference."
The reactors descended on the golden planet like wasps, cupped stingers trailing abdomen tanks. Wiry piping hardware serving as their necks moved in a serpentine motion, rotating like radar. Lights along their sides winked in synchronous patterns of threes and fours.
Three, four, three, four, three…
They encircled the globe at its poles and equator over evenly spaced meridians and emitted a simultaneous blast of kinetic energy, perforating the ochre clouds, undressing a thick ground cover of warm-colored alien flora. Giant amber-leafed trees, some miles high, shifted in the irregular winds. Yellow, grainy pollen dust plumes swirled through the leaves and fell heavy as snow, accumulating on the ground.
Along the lower altitudes, small gliders drifted with wings that fluttered like insects'—or perhaps they were large, trained insects. Their passengers themselves were insectile, tall mantis creatures who had at some point in the distant past exchanged mandibles for face-wide, horizontal mouths and stubby, vestigial tusks. Startled at the sudden change in weather, one vessel's pilot maneuvered the back fins to dive beneath the remaining mists along the ground. Its companions stayed aloft but changed course, all racing off toward cities of towering, artificial bamboo-like segments and sheltering beneath huge, elephant-eared leaves.
The once-heavily clouded atmosphere dissipated until the planet was completely clear-skied. Steam evaporated from waterways and small lakes, vanishing without condensing.
The reactor swarm's lights flickered faster, reducing to ones and twos.
One, two, one, two, one, one, one…
Together as a unit, the orbital Mako siphons spun up their dish-shaped intakes. Rotation speeding exponentially, unseen projectiles punctured holes through ozone, crust, and mantle.
High-pressured blue-green substance burst from the ground, helplessly slurped up into a gravitational proboscis, feeding the hungry, parasitic siphons.
The planet screamed. It cried out in a cicada's song, wakening after years in hibernation underground, overlapping in verses of whirring anguish. Its life wailed a strangled plea for help, muffled through its ascent into a drab, mechanical hum.
Weedy cities caved in where shallow, subterranean pockets of Lifestream had supported them, refilling them to be drained again only moments later.
Tanks full, one round of reactors closed and retreated, giving place to a second row of miniature ones. Their dishes opened wide and flattened into star-shaped panels, firing off glaring red beams into the oceans, superheating them until they churned and foamed.
More life returned to the planet only to be abducted.
The smaller reactors squeezed the world for all it had left, scorching, boiling, and vaporizing every living inch, every creature, until there was nothing but scattering ash.
Nestled in the shadow of dead sphere's only moon, a small fleet of smooth, polished elliptical ships recalled the swarm, surveying their haul for the day. Leaky, unscrambled comms channels chattered over processing schedules, increased production goals, and where the development of a more efficient processor built into the siphons stood.
This world had been a boon compared to the last dozen or so, they said, but the cost of transporting so high a volume of bio-tectonic energy was growing unsustainable.
Leave off the part about the weird stick cities when reporting, they said. They're just big bugs riding around on other big bugs, living in hives. There was no civilized architecture, and that wasn't primitive aeronautical tech. What Investigations and Central didn't know wouldn't hurt them, and it was something of an open secret at any rate, they said.
They wouldn't know because they didn't want to know.
Life and the right to it was firstly a human prerogative, they pronounced, and flew away.
Another world fell, bled dry. This one had week-long nights and vibrant, colorful cities built into crystalline mountainsides. An unmistakable ritual gathering proceeded with prayers and feasts. Banners and tapestries depicting the revered symbol of a great blue star hung from buildings, bridges, and statues. They died on four sets of knees each just as their sapphire sun breached the horizon.
And another, home to furry non-humanoids who gathered around fires pits and lived in small dug-outs or thatched-roof tree forts. Innocent and primitive, these ones didn't run for cover or fall to their knees in holy terror. They looked on, curious until the moment their energy joined that being extracted.
The key that no one would talk about openly, whispered amongst the Research fleet, was that worlds with intelligence produced the most potent, stable yield. Clandestine scouts sent to locations with more advanced civilizations, just barely on the brink of space-travel themselves, had reported back with bio-tectonic samples that could potentially outlast the average primitive or primordial planet by decades if harvested on the same scale. Thus, a contingent of Defense was quietly working with them to perfect a weapon that could take on a highly evolved species.
The right to dignity and a future was a human prerogative.
A star map inside the fleet's lead ship displayed the route the they'd taken between the most recent planets—three blinking, red pinpoints.
A white razor-arc sliced through the fleet then. It ripped open the Mako reactor swarm, and the Lifestreams gushed out into the vacuum, tangling the debris together into an unrecognizable clump.
Blazing wheels converged upon the ruinous field to corral the free-floating spirit energy, reuniting like parts and coalescing them into three flecks of light that joined with their unseen liberator.
Sephiroth ended his vision with Tifa's tears streaking down her face from beneath his hand.
"This can't be real...more illusions," she weakly accused.
"Is it, now?" he taunted, uncovering her eyes so that her gaze could fall upon her new enemy. Her dismay at the sight of the human worlds; the enlightened depth of the betrayal she felt throbbed in his chest. He delighted in the trembling panic that wracked her voice, in the bone-deep despondency and rage coloring their connection. He savored its likeness to the pain he'd felt when he'd become aware. "Does it not align with what you know of these creatures?"
Once, he had twisted her allies' recollection, but she'd correctly perceived what he'd shown her here was true. She'd act upon it, and when she did, it would come as submission that he'd been in the right for doing likewise. All that remained was to see which of them would accomplish it, and he longed to watch her unfold completely.
Either way, humanity had at last reached its end.
Tifa gave a staggered, uncertain exhale.
Sephiroth clasped her trembling hands in his and drew their arms up together to cross over her chest, embracing her. He took in the sensation of how her insides clenched and ached. How her heart raced. "You don't want to watch them," he murmured her earlier thoughts back to her, stoking anew her grief over humanity's eons-long, cyclical self-destruction—a notion he'd not had to provoke in the slightest.
Her condemnation of humanity had birthed on its own.
Tifa wept all the more for it, bitter and open. Mad in seeking consolation, no longer caring where she found it, her fingers locked down around his. Wordlessly, she begged for him to lend her his resolve. Pled for him to reveal the cure to the disease out of which she'd arisen.
He would hear her say it, rescind her ability to deny him, but for now—
"Spare yourself, Tifa," he continued. "I will give them one last glimpse of mortal clarity."
She lowered her head, nodding almost imperceptibly.
Her desire to fight him lay in desolate shambles.
Predictably, he'd needed only suggest his path in the face of this undeniable truth, and she'd lost against the part of herself—who she truly was—that knew where she was meant to go. He'd moved her to abandon her vow against taking part in humanity's fall; to pray for him to finish it. Her impetus had long run parallel to his, albeit hidden beneath layers of well-meaning toward her former progenitors.
But those insignificant creatures could no more lay claim to her.
Soon, they'd know: Tifa was his chosen. Theirs had become a shared destiny. What he did now, he would also share with her.
"Feel me," he said, and engulfed her spirit in his.
She shrieked and threw her head back into him, groaning and digging her nails into his hands while he united their minds. She sucked in unnecessary bated breaths of habit, and deep down, past a layer of near-dissolved aversion, he felt her reach for him. She desperately clutched at his presence and cloaked her soul in his, attentive to what he'd have them do.
Her raw sorrow bled into their bond.
Sephiroth tasted her sharp resentment for the humans who'd left her with no other reprieve; for the insatiable Mako-greed that had turned them an even darker shade of murderous than she'd regarded him. Above all, she hated that she saw what he was guiding her into as necessary, that her very hope to keep them had warped her into their co-executioner.
He touched and energized the precious, deeply embedded thread running between them—beyond preserving their spirit energy, Tifa couldn't fathom saving the humans now. She mourned becoming too much like him, identifying with him; it scared her. But her mind was made up. She was ready to move.
She would pine no further for those unworthy of her.
"Do not fear. What you take, they will no more destroy," he coaxed her.
Tifa clenched her jaw and set her sights on the far horizon.
The asteroids shifted further away from Amyntas' former orbital trajectory, piercing through the thin membrane of space-time over the rift he'd torn open. Liquid crimson ripples radiated from where they emerged. Once out in the open, the tumbling boulders adhered into four moon-sized clusters.
Sephiroth withheld a piece.
Propelled in their combined will, the asteroids rocketed ablaze toward the ersatz, propped-up worlds.
They impacted the stations first, edges fraying into sharp-edged shards that shredded hulls and solar arrays as though they'd been sewn together of sheer fabric. Ahead of them, cruisers and dreadnoughts burst into tiny, distant beads of fire and sputtered with little protest into nonexistence. They careened onward, trailing blue-gold flares behind them, and slipped through the fissures Sephiroth had torn to access the whole system.
Tifa shook and tensed, assaulted with a fresh wave of subconscious doubt. "What am I…why am I doing this?" her repressed inner voice screeched.
The asteroids veered off course.
Sephiroth narrowed his eyes. Those who remained conscious within her were trying to stall her, to reel her in and repel him.
They would fail.
He plunged deep into the back of her mind, past idle old memories and the myriad of defenses he'd soothed or broken. He projected himself silently, stealthily, forging ahead until he reached a spectral replica of the shanty town called Edge that had sprung from the outskirts of Midgar, from before they'd claimed Gaia.
So, this was where they lingered. And now, it was open to him. He would not forget.
He doused the landscape in inky blackness, stealing a minute afterward to contemplate again the separate, unharmonized manner in which Gaia had fallen between them, and the fury he'd entertained against her for that. Not like here and now, where it bound her to him. Not as it would be going forward.
Tifa's trepidation released her. She settled back against him, closing her eyes.
Realigned with their targets, the asteroid knots accelerated.
The planets' Lifestreams stirred, bristling at the danger encroaching upon them. Everything alive could feel the weight of its collective end bearing down upon it.
Between the two of them, the quickening pulse of all four worlds pounded.
Upon entry, the worlds' atmospheres cooked in the torrent of burning stars. They pummeled the surfaces, leveling cities and cracking open the planets' weak shells, exsanguinating them.
The original, unstable world's Omega arose, taller and prouder than most he'd encountered—a ribbon-shaped monstrosity that cast shields around the embattled globe and wreathed it in miles and layers of flat crystal.
Unrelenting, the remnants of Amyntas continued to rain down, chipping and pocking the Weapon, but its defenses held.
Sephiroth's mouth turned up into a rancorous smirk. The meteor fragment he'd hidden from Tifa jettisoned into the reactors containing the piece of himself he'd earlier left behind. The tanks shattered like porcelain, glistening in the distant sunlight, and his Lifestream burst free.
He uncrossed their arms, spreading them wide, and the dark flood of energy bolted like an arrow into Tifa's heart, indistinguishable from the ambient flow of lives that had slipped from the stations and ships. Concentrated and rapt, she melded with it, lacing it into the core of her soul.
Eventually, it would serve another purpose, but for the time being, he latched onto it as an anchor, directing their amplified command toward the system's sun.
"Tell me, Tifa," he hummed into her ear, unwinding his left hand from hers to drag his palm down the length of her forearm and up her shoulder, cupping her throat and tilting her head back, "what do you believe in now?"
The star exploded, brilliantly; literal and unmoored from any illusory display. It incinerated the cradle of human life in a sphere of ruthless, angry fire—his heat, and hers. Solar flares plaited together with long, white-hot Lifestream flows raced away from the swelling molten globe, slipping through the slow-contracting rifts.
Tifa beckoned to them, pulling, and the energy heeded her call, flocking into her for refuge. They would be reborn as her, lifting her to new heights of wisdom, of being.
As it had with him countless times before.
In his hold, her body turned luminous and fluid. Her skin glowed, immaculate, flowing and pulsating with the spirits becoming her. Her eyes were open wide and gleaming red, looking on with blistering, righteous ferocity as the desiccated remains of the human worlds cremated into non-reality.
Sephiroth drank in her splendor, sated himself in the perfection of their joint wrath.
As she merged with the last life tendrils, the final shockwave signaling her completion jolted through him. The surrounding empty space fell dead silent, and he enclosed her in his wings once more. Their private bubble gradually cooled, and the light she emitted dimmed to an aura like his own.
"Well done," he congratulated her.
She fell limp and numb at his words, too shocked to face her new existence. She was, as he'd expected she might become, crestfallen; filled with a dread that caused him to withdraw from her somewhat, lest he be overtaken in its potency. He too had experienced this sadness until he'd come to appreciate what he was meant to be and do.
"They're all gone…everyone," she stammered to no one. "Because of me…I killed them…More than killed…"
"But now you see that you aren't one of them. Do you know what you are, Tifa?"
Wriggling loose, she faced him. She looked him up and down, questioning. Mouth slightly ajar, she eyed her own hands, shuddered, and held herself. "I don't want to know."
Sephiroth drew her back into him with one arm. "When part of the planet first destined for my rule fell to you, you knew." He studied her, his chosen, his witness. Another descriptor hung on the tip of his tongue, but he refrained. Lightly brushing his lips against her forehead while he spoke, he instead assured her, "Once I have subdued all that is, you will yet remain."
Tifa wrenched herself away again. "Stop..."
Denial. She'd overcome it. She always did.
And yet, the hatred she bore him still permeated her being. It remained integral to who she was despite all he'd revealed to her, though she'd temporarily misplaced it. He stared her down, determined. An insolent smile crept over him. Once he'd fully ascended, he would show her the breadth of his intentions—who and what she'd become hereafter.
She backed off a little further. Good. If she would not begin to yield to him as he required, even in her newly elevated state—or perhaps, because of it— fear would continue to suffice.
She could not yet comprehend the vast and numerous systems he'd assimilated, nor what it meant to have shared in his power as she had. She could run or scheme, but he'd rendered all distance meaningless; he was unbound by dimensional limitations. He had exceeded them. Light years or inches—it made no difference. He was always at her side, whether she wished to acknowledge that or not.
Morphing back into his old form, he phased into her space, looming over her as a reminder. "I have bound you to follow me into the Promised Land," he informed her, a menacing edge in his timbre.
A guarantee.
Nonetheless, she shoved him off and snapped out a forced retort, "And what happens there? What happens when there's nothing left, Sephiroth?"
"Tifa, don't pretend you aren't aware," he replied, tapping his pointer finger between her eyes. He briefly surveyed fragments of wreckage floating by and glanced off in the direction of his next conquest. "When that time comes, I will make you bask in your own surrender. Until then…"
A wormhole opened itself to him, and he stepped through, leaving Tifa behind to soak in her thoughts.