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Nothing is permanent, including the gods. They are usually the first to fall.
-saying of the Serpent's Hand.
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Thurrius raged against the howling miasma of undead warriors, while also absorbing hundreds of attacks from the fighters on the ground. Where were his uvanimor? The blasts and energetic impacts of the strikes were being cast back and forth between Thurrius and the rift he commanded with increasing speed and strength.
A bright yellow bast excoriated Thurrius's head as the air filled with multicolored flashes of energy, moving from attacker to defender, ground to sky to tree. A Hand thaumaturge screamed as she went down from one of Thurrius's pulse blasts. Clay and his Excadrill were sucked into the floor by a gargantuan earthworm. Tess managed to run haphazardly out of the way, retreating to the forest border, from where she watched as the robot lit up with the red colors of battle.
Cobalion struck the mech again, and L.S hurled the Spear.
Thurrius's servo hand grasped for the Spear, but it just barely missed his swipe and dented his leg. Thoughtrodes and gelcircutry innards spilled out like blood, and the world began to go very, very dark...
...
The oblivion went away. Tess was on a grassy surface by a forest, with a tranquil lake only a hundred feet from her. Jake, L.S, and Hopper were there as well, hapless at what had just occurred and where they were. Tess's synthsuit was malfunctioning for some unknown reason, likely due to the sudden and unnatural shift in setting.
Hopper pointed to a crater at the base of a tree, and everyone gasped. Thurrius was there, but his body was ruined. The verbitiobrain was exposed through the shattered flowmetal skull, and all four luminous eyes were dark. The greatsword lay broken, and the scrapped robot's legs were nowhere to be seen.
"Did we...win?" Tess tentatively asked. "Is that thing gone?"
"I am not sure," L.S presently said, her photon disperser activated. "Keep an eye out. This could be an illusion of some kind..."
"No, fools. Just another realm."
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Above the corpse of Thurrius another creature hovered. A towering monstrosity, it was in the shape of some horrific half-avian creature with dead black eyes and fetid, rotting flesh. Tess could see through the thin, rotting feathers to within the thing's body, where a swirling mass of dark faces howled and cursed, each pressed against the side of their container as if it was about to burst. When the creature opened its foul beak to communicate, Tess could hear the Shadow's voice echo throughout her mind a million million times, each a sinister cacophony of misery and pain.
"Well met, at last!" The Shadow croaked. "You four, faithless, graceless, ungrateful waifs, thralls of Elyon! Do you not understand that if you were to join me, I would give you life everlasting? I would give you freedom! Tess, I would give you your parents! L.S, I would give you your family! Hopper, the Foundation would fall at my hand, you know I can do such a thing! Jake, I have not lied in saying that I would spare those who you love...and lift the curse of woe that rests upon you."
Bird-Shadow cawed, seeing the looks of utter disbelief on the faces of the four present. "No matter. I will leave you here. The Spear has driven me into this land. But I can return! Your world will burn, Jake, Tess. It must!"
As the Bird-Shadow began to fly away, L.S heard a voice in her mind again. "Look behind you. Quickly."
The Spear was there. Without thinking, L.S threw it again, causing a brilliant white line to burst out of the tip and sink into the avatar's flesh. The line of energy went taught, and the world went purple and fell away.
...
When he opened his eyes, Jake was standing on the deck of a wrecked and ruined ship with the others. Through a cavernous and bottomless hole, the Shadow-Avatar emerged and spilled onto the deck of the ship with a wet, crunching sound.
"What?!" The Shadow said, fumbling up onto its wings and talons, a scar visible where the Spear had stricken it. "Where is this?! This isn't where I was supposed to go-"
The creature was interrupted with a sound like a clinking pocket of coins as Jake hit the thing over the face with his pulsesword, and Hopper and Tess fired their dispersers into the body of the demon. The impact points erupted in feathers as the avatar roared in pain, and the Shadow suddenly realized the disadvantage of being in an organic body.
The Bird-Shadow spread its wings and took off over the Plutonian sea, and L.S used the Spear once again, the line piercing the avatar's hide. The sky went purple, and the scene changed again.
When the haze cleared the five were in a building engulfed in chaos. Klaxons were blaring and massive red breach alarms pulsed rapidly in the massive antechamber they were standing in. Many white-coated personnel raced for emergency exists, and from a lone hallway came a roaring sound. Tess took a glance at the source of the noise, and her eyes grew very wide.
"Oh."
Bursting out into the chamber came a reptilian monstrosity similar to the one Tess had seen Emrett fight against during the confrontations with the fleshbeasts, only smaller and bristling with razor blades. It was different, but the eyes...the eyes gave its true nature away.
As the Shadow hesitated, Jake cut the thing's body once, again, then several times in quick succession while the others rained blasts into its torso. Each time, more and more feathers burst from its hide, and the swirling mass of souls within it shouted and recoiled. As the beast came closer, knife-teeth clashing, L.S activated the spear again and pulled everyone into the ether once more.
...
Tess crashed into the dirt, and not far away from where she heard the Shadow do the same. When she stood up, she saw that they were standing in what might once have been a field of grass, but the vegetation had long since died off. In fact, it didn't seem as though anything was truly living at all except for the five. The sky was overcast and stormy, but they heard no birds, no insects, and nothing man-made. The synthsuits flashed red, warning them of a biological hazard that was attempting to harm them.
L.S was distracted momentarily when a drone buzzed overhead, its motor the only sound piercing the silence except for a light wind. When she turned the Shadow-avatar was there, swiping furiously where she had been standing. Steadying herself, L.S brought the Spear down on the side of the demon's beak. The appendage crackled and splintered along hairline fractures, but it pressed on in its fight, regenerating its lost feathers bit by bit.
Suddenly, there was a flash of light on the horizon. In the far north a mushroom cloud was forming, a fireball that stretched into the heavens. The five watched it rise and rise, and then saw the approaching wall of heat and death. The Shadow took two steps backward, L.S launched the magical line, and they were gone.
The five did not land immediately. As Tess screamed for dear life as she fell, images of places that she had been in before passed through the luminiferous void. She saw Rosecove, and her heart jerked for home. She saw a sky with seven moons and a golden archway. She saw a Foundation site covered in snow disappear in a blast of blue light, and then the scene was gone.
The swirling haze subsided and the five crashed into a hard concrete floor. A massive, immensely complex machine composed of several interlocking rings exerted heavy pressure through the shaft that everyone had fallen into. The walls were lined with dusty machines and panels, hoses and brackets, banks of light that extended upward to the dizzying heights that they had come from.
And then she saw the Shadow-avatar, rising up from a pile of debris. Flapping its wings furiously, its dull eyes fixed on its hunters. "Why are you doing this? You cannot follow me forever."
"None of this is right," Hopper said. "We've had enough. Nothing that you have done is right. Nothing has helped us. By killing you with that Spear we will hurt you in a way that no one else has ever done before."
"What do you mean 'not right?'" Bird-Shadow snarled. "How can you not understand any of this? I can offer you anything you want! A life worth living, a death worth dying, anything in between! You could be gods!"
"It isn't natural. None of you is natural. You are a mistake."
The Shadow reared up in front of Tess. "Natural?! Death is natural! Misery is natural! What I offer is an escape-a existence that isn't abject horror. What else could you possibly want? I spoiled Elyon's intentions, that is true. But I can give such things that are greater than what Elyon has designed."
L.S was silent.
"In that case, I am sorry, Little Sister, Tessa Woodhall. I am the Nuclear Sultan, and I cannot be defied or killed. Your Spear has only caused me a modicum of slight pain. You cannot destroy me. Even with that Spear, I can replace my consciousness with an infinite amount of copies."
"We know," Jake said. "But you aren't infinite. Not quite."
With a running start, Jake crossed the platform and took aim at the avatar's center, striking it with an even more solid and resounding crack. The creature heaved and creaked, and stumbled backward into the swirling rings of the machine. It grabbed the edges of the rings with its talons and gripped them, causing the superheated metal to bend and twist. The ground beneath began to shake and groan, and the steel walls of the tunnel shook.
The room vibrated, and Tess heard something like a voice, booming and encompassing, echoing in the air around them. It was eerily similar to the voice of Arceus, but so much harsher, dripping with judgment and hot wrath.
"Dark One..." Yahweh said from the depths of the machine. "Are you...the Dark One?!"
"YES!" The Shadow screamed. "I order you to release me!"
The voice became horrid to listen to, burning with piercing holiness, only barely restrained by the greater Willpower of Elyon.
"Crimes...innumerable, immeasurable crimes! Traitor! Usurper!"
"What crimes?" The Shadow scoffed. "I have only ever given rational beings a choice between myself and Elyon's ways!"
"NO!" Yahweh roared, the light from the machine almost blinding. "This is the only choice for you!"
...
Yahweh's hand appeared, clothed in gold and composed of white aetheric membrane, or 'angel stuff.' He closed His hand, and the Bird-Shadow seized in constriction. There was a rush of air, and Tess could feel the breath being pulled from her chest. She leaned forward just in time to see the Spear being thrown, and the avatar sizzled into a single superheated point and vanish out of existence.
Thurrius, the Shadow, was gone. A stream of malignant essence crackled in midair and then vanished down an impromptu wormhole, screaming with the force of a jet engine as it fled. The Spear followed the being, pulling the other four along with it. Yahweh and the machine vanished into purple, and then the entire party returned to their own world, where the battle had nearly ceased, with only a few uvanimor left to fight.
The essence conglomerated itself back into the form of Thurrius, only spectral and half-crafted. It raced to the brink of the rift from whence it came-
-and the Spear pierced it squarely in the middle, the combined force of all four present throwing it far more potent that L.S or Hopper alone.
Time stopped as spacetime boiled away.
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The Dark One was annihilated, the bit of essence that was destroyed irreversibly gone and unregenerable. The loss of that fraction of the Shadow's power resounded throughout the entire Kingdom of Darkness...
...and the Shadow screamed as never, ever before.
In separation, Qlippoth was damaged beyond comprehension. Torn from the Shadow was a multitude of its power, the strength that had once sustained its Will. What was once whole had been unevenly severed and warped, even as scalding viscera poured from the Nuclear Sultan's weeping wounds.
And the Shadow howled, for its lifeblood had been lost. This loss would take aeons to fully repair, and the power vacuum would give added ground to the Forces of Creation for uncountable generations...
But the Shadow could still think. It could still feel. It could still hate.
And it poured all its malice, all its Willpower and Ambition, all its lust for destruction, all its hatred for creation into a last attack on the world that it had hated oh so much.
...
The scream started softly, like the calm before the storm. A whining electronic feedback here and there, coming from some malfunctioning speaker or device. Then it grew and peaked in crescendo, turning into a grinding cacophony of disordered and pointless NOISE, blasting out of every single piece of technology on the planet.
The noise blasted down the slopes of the Frostveil Mountains to the cold wastes of Souther Roria. The Great Sea was alive with the echoes, and Alola was a fourfold megaphone for the hateful scream. It echoed down the plains of Unova and the forests of the Alpha Continent. It breached the hallowed ruins of Hisui and Logaria in its blasphemous song. People all over the world fell to their knees and covered their ears in a futile attempt to rid themselves of the unending nightmare of a howl.
Kalos was awash in the discord. The Tower of Ecruteak City bent in shock. Hoenn's deep forests were disturbed by the screech coming from the mainland. Nowhere wholly escaped the saraband of ecclesiastical melody, the thin, fluid piping of the maddening flute and drum of the Shadow's voice. Inescapable, penetrating, maddening.
And then the body of the Shadow burst into light as the luminous rift collapsed forever. The beams of light separated into individual shards of brilliance, with hundreds and hundreds of glowing objects soaring up into the sky, before tearing through the cloud cover and forming curiously round holes in their wake. They shot upward to Cygnus and Deneb, before passing into the spiraling wheel of stars.
Wishing Stars!
Before Tess was overwhelmed and lost consciousness, she swore that she saw a few dozen of the Wishing Stars...fall into the southwest horizon...
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I MUST AWAKEN.
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Eternatus was confused. He had heard a terrible scream that had jolted him into a state of consciousness. Where was the Master? Why did he not feel the Mbelekoro's presence? Had he been...no. The Great Djinn could never have been defeated!
But he was gone. Eternatus shifted and moaned in despair, realizing how weak and feeble he was. So long had he slept without a dream, in fear of the Blessed Sword and Shield. The Powers had cast down the Great One, but Eternatus was still undiscovered, hidden within the roots of the Earth.
He remembered the terror he had felt when he fled from the Sword and Shield of the Two and hid away at the sound of their roaring and laughter. In a cavern inaccessible, he had hidden from the gaze of the Original One's judgment. He had heard the terrible shaking and ruin of the War of Wrath, before falling into a deep slumber at last.
He wished that he could awaken fully, follow in his Master's footsteps and become the Second Dark Lord. Surely, he would face no foe so terrible and fell as Logaria or Hisui as his Lord had. Arceus must have abandoned Earth to its own devices, and the Powers were growing weary. If he could arise, another Darkest Day would cover all the lands in an unending shadow.
But he was frail. The greater part of his strength was gone. If only his spirit would regenerate in proportion to its original greatness! Nasty furtive feeding and sleeping in the dark, beyond light or hope. Perhaps if he was given something full of the Power of Spirit, of the Heavens that he had descended from, he would rise once more.
It was not to be, at least for now. Eternatus fell asleep again, but did not descend into the same torpor as before. No, he went to a lighter slumber, full of dark dreams and plots.
