Chapter Seven
Showdown
As Link looked over the army on the morning of that fateful day, he made eye contact with his friends. Yunobo, Teba, Riju, and Sidon. The latter had come despite his father's and Muzu's worries. Behind them, each of their races were arrayed, grouped together by race. Sidon stood at the head of the group of Zora, behind him Link could see Bazz, Torfeau, Gaddison, Dunma, Rivan, Seggin, and Tottika. Among the Rito standing behind Teba, Link saw Harth, Mazli, Gesane, Huck, Nekk, and Verla. Standing with Riju were Buliara, Babi, Lukan, Karsh, Bertri, Barta, Teake, Liana, Dorrah, Katta, Kotta, Lashley, Leena, Marta, Merina, Ploka, Reeza, Smaude, and Ripp. With Yunobo were several Gorons whose names Link couldn't remember.
Finally looking among the Hylians arrayed behind him, Link looked out over the ranks. He saw Brigo, Celessa, Mils, Mina, Tye, Sorelia, Mezer, Botrick, Leekah, and many others. He felt obligated to say something.
"You all know why we're here this morning, and what we're about to undertake. I want you to know that whatever happens next, however this ends, that we did this as one nation! In Hyrule's darkest hour, we came together to rid this land of the shadow that has lain over it for a hundred years. Today, the calamity falls! Now we do this thing!" Link finished his statement by raising the Master Sword straight up into the air.
Everyone raised their fists and cheered, then everyone ran for their horses and mounted them and began to follow Link across Hyrule field as he led the charge. Link's horse Epona raced across the plain like the wind, her rider holding the reigns with one hand and raising his sword with the other. Behind him dozens and dozens of horses thundered over the grass, atop them Hylians, Sheikah, Gerudo, and Zora. The Gorons rolled alongside them, keeping up with the horses. The Rito flew overhead, also managing to keep up.
As the army made its way across Hyrule Field, Link dispatched the occasional guardian that wandered the area. He one-hit-destroyed them with ancient arrows in the eyes. Fortunately, there weren't very many guardians in their direct path. Every so often there was the loud noise of the craft belonging to the travelers firing its weapons at guardians farther away. The craft was hovering high above the area, maybe several hundred feet above the ground. The weapons on the craft were insanely powerful, beams of light and what looked like balls of light. The beams were really powerful but the 'light balls' were something else. They were so powerful that just one of them was enough to basically shatter a guardian.
Upon reaching Hyrule Castle Town Ruins, the army quickly dealt with the malice after the travelers' craft obliterated the guardians there. Upon opening the doors to the castle with magnesis, Link lead the army up the path. Upon reaching the entrance to the some of the interior passageways, the group split in two. One half delved into the castle's interior to begin securing it, the other half accompanied the hero as he continued up the path. Along the way, he took out the guardians that were positioned by the path. Upon coming to the first gatehouse, Link called his group to a halt at the faint sound of a deep huffing breath nearby.
He knew that sound, it was a lynel. He instructed his group to stay put, and entered the gatehouse and saw a blue-maned lynel. The monster noticed him at once and roared ferociously. It drew its sword and shield and Link rushed forward and engaged the monster. He utilized his every skill and emerged triumphant, the lynel howled as it evaporated into smoke. Some of Link's group remained in the gatehouse to secure it. The rest continued onward with Link. After destroying another malice eye on the path, the group split again as some of the people headed off to the right for the path that led to the dining hall. The remainder continued with Link with to the second gatehouse. The two guardian turrets were quickly eliminated as was the white-maned lynel in the gatehouse. The soldiers with Link stayed in this gatehouse, he continued on alone from this point.
He made his way up the path, frantically dodging beams from guardians, and destroying said guardians. Link was quickly becoming very irate with guardian encounters. 'I swear to Hylia. I hate these fucking things! I am going to destroy EVERY SINGLE ONE I SEE!' He thought to himself as he again narrowly dodged a beam. The guardian that almost got him received an ancient arrow in the eye for it. Following the path to the left, he saw one last malice eye, it stared at him with pure hate and…well, malice. He winced at the mere thought of the pun. 'Ugh, why does this stuff have to be called something that makes it both a noun and adjective?' He groaned internally. He flung a beam from his sword at the eye, popping it like an octo balloon. He raced up and stopped outside the sanctum, he took a deep breath, turned and looked behind him at the craft that was hovering in the air above Castle Town.
He pulled out the slate and opened a com link with the people on it.
"I'm at the sanctum and I'm ready to face Ganon!" The rest of the army is securing the castle, how are they fairing?" He asked.
"They are faring well, they have made good progress through the castle. No casualties among the ranks whatsoever, now if we're talking among the monsters…." The voice on the other end trailed off and Link smiled at the last part of it, almost hearing the smile in the speaker's voice. He chuckled to himself at the statement, he hoped the monsters were being thrashed like they had never been thrashed before. He entered the sanctum and immediately his gaze went to the ceiling where a massive, pulsing sack hung. It was the most disgusting thing he'd ever seen in his life, easily.
"…"
It was Zelda's voice! His heart leaped at the sound of it, but then he realized it was coming from the sack where a faint golden light was shining through it.
"Link."
"Link!" She sounded desperate. "I'm sorry, but my power isn't strong enough. I can't hold him."
'What?' was all Link had time to think before a massive blue beam sliced out of the sack and carved into the walls and floor. Another did the same along the opposite wall and traced along the floor. Smoke hissed from the revolting bag on the ceiling. He straightened his posture again and looked up at it just as it burst open and something fell out of it onto the floor. The floor cracked and broke into pieces the moment it hit, because of the laser beams.
Link and the monstrosity began falling down a massive shaft under the floor. 'WHAT THE FUCK?' Link thought as he whipped out his paraglider. 'When did this get here?' He was absolutely astonished by this discovery, this structure within the castle that apparently nobody knew about. The calamity fell and slammed into the floor below and slowly swung back and forth on its multiple legs. It was looking for him, and when he landed and it turned to face him, he felt a twinge of fear creep down his spine.
It had a face but it was all wrong, it was warped and distorted, like something made out of clay had been pulled into an odd shape before solidifying. It reared back and roared, its multiple limbs twitching like some demented insect. This was the calamity given physical form. Suddenly there was a huge rumbling noise and both Link and the calamity looked up the shaft to see a huge ball of bluish-white light. The divine beasts! Link realized. The ball shattered into a swarm of small beams of light that barraged Ganon. When it stopped the monster got back to its feet, it was terribly hurt now. It began to attack, Link fought back and the two of them battled back and forth. After about thirty minutes of combat the calamity suddenly generated a burning orange shield around it.
Link quickly reevaluated his opponent at this. He realized that whenever it attacked the shield would drop for just a split second. He could work with that. He perfect dodged an attack and rushed the monster. He hit it repeatedly with the Master Sword. After another fifteen minutes the monster collapsed to the floor.
Malice began to spew out of its body in various places, it looked up at him, shrieking as it reached a hand for him before exploding in a burst of purple and white light. Link shielded his face as the monster evaporated. He looked back to the see the vapor heading up the shaft, he was hit by a sudden certainty that this wasn't over yet. He jogged to the center of the large dome-shaped room. Suddenly he sensed Zelda's presence as she teleported him out like she had with the divine beasts. He rematerialized on Hyrule Field, Epona beside him.
'What?' Link thought, wasn't Epona at the edge of castle town? Link suddenly realized something astonishing, the wisps of malice that had always surrounded the castle were gone. A sudden bad feeling made him turn around and saw a huge dome of it gathering before him on Hyrule Field. 'Oh no.' Link thought as he noticed how massive this dome was.
"…"
Link wondered why Zelda's voice always was so muffled when she started speaking to him.
"Ganon."
"Ganon! Ganon was born out of a dark past. He is the pure embodiment of the ancient evil that is reborn time and time again." She said as two massive cloven hooves appeared out of the swirling malice. "He has given up on reincarnation and assumed his pure enraged form, if set free upon our world, the destruction will be unlike any ever seen before!" The form of the beast became fully visible now. It was a huge…
"HE'S A GIANT FUCKING PIG! Link yelled to no one in particular as he saw the porcine appearance of Dark Beast Ganon. He was honestly surprised by his own outburst as he had heard about this form of Ganon and even faintly remembered it from at least one of his previous lives.
Link quickly realized something that overjoyed him, Ganon was ridiculously easy like this! Link wasted no time laying into him with the bow of light that Zelda had given him a minute ago. As he fought this other manifestation of Ganon he saw something outside the area that momentarily drew his attention. Hundreds of guardians were approaching from everywhere, Ganon must have called for reinforcements, the coward. However, each and every one of them was destroyed by the ship hovering high above.
'Thank you, travelers' Link thought.
Soon Link was aiming an arrow at Ganon's eye from the ground but he kept closing it up before the arrow could hit. There was only one thing to do about this. Soaring into the air with Revali's gale he prepared to fire again, but as he did so he saw thousands, no hundreds of thousands of monsters coming across the fields, bokoblins, moblins, lizalfos, hinoxes, taluses, and lynels. A sudden certainty filled Link, a seemingly out of place hope. Rather than despair, he was gripped with the certainty that if Ganon were to be killed it would take everything connected to him, in essence all the monsters. And why? Because they all carried malice in them, and the source of malice was Ganon. Take out the source and…it all falls apart. Link fired the arrow and Ganon's eye popped. He roared and staggered, he went through his death throes and when Zelda emerged and sealed him away, Link felt weak with relief. When the sky returned to its normal blue and Zelda turned to look at Link, the two rushed to each other and embraced.
Suddenly remembering the horde of monsters, Link turned to look at the closest ones. They were standing frozen, like statues. However, now their eyes were completely vacant and lifeless. A few skywatcher guardians hovered above them. Then as if on a signal, all the monsters and guardians left began falling to the ground. Link's hunch had been right, with Ganon dead, the whole army of monsters fell. It was astonishing to behold, all the monsters, even the incredibly powerful lynels, hinoxes, and taluses falling over dead. The skywatcher guardians fell to the ground and burst apart on impact with the ground.
"Link? What was that?!" Zelda asked behind Link.
"I think Ganon was the source of their entire existence. Sort of like the queen of an ant colony or beehive! Take out the source of the commands and the entire order collapses!" Link said in astonishment as he kept his gaze on the horde of monsters as the wave of collapse spread through the ranks until the last of them finally fell in turn.
It was over, it was really finally over. Ganon was dead and the monsters all across Hyrule had clearly meet a similar fate. Over the next couple weeks as reparations began it was made clear that what happened that day had indeed been nationwide. Everywhere in the kingdom, monsters had all died where they stood when Ganon was destroyed. All across the land, the dead bodies of the monsters lay where they fell. Hyrule Field looked like a massacre had happened with the thousands of bodies littering it. There were so many that they were having trouble cleaning them all away quickly.
In the Gerudo Desert the four moldugas lay lifeless in the sand, their carcasses covered in birds that gathered to them like seagulls around a carcass on the beach. A month after Ganon's destruction the complete destruction of all the monsters was confirmed when Purah managed to upgrade the Sheikah sensor yet again, allowing it to sense for monsters across the entire nation and tell the exact location if it found anything. It gave no sign whatsoever, Hyrule celebrated for real now. Hyrule was saved and everything was fine now.
Zelda made it clear to all of Hyrule that she did not intend to rebuild the monarchy, declaring it defunct and a thing of the past. She respected the independence that Hyrule had achieved without any involvement. Everyone was amazed and grateful, reparations were nonetheless planned and started to be initiated. Throughout all this celebration, nobody questioned the closeness between Zelda and Link. The two had settled down in Link's house in Hateno. They travelled regularly though, the travelers from another realm checked in from time to time, assisting where they could, but as time went by they began to take part in Hyrule's activity less and less. They now mostly remained in their vessel, everyone suspected that meant that they would be leaving soon.
Link and Zelda were slightly troubled by this. When the leader of the travelers next met with them, this time in their house, they asked him how much longer they would be staying. The man sighed, and then replied that they were no longer needed here, and they hadn't been since a month prior. It would indeed soon be time for them to leave, Link was troubled by this slightly, and he thanked them for all their help. Zelda concurred, and the man nodded humbly.
"It has been an honor meeting you, your people, and assisting your land. We are leaving tomorrow." He said.
"Goodbye, friend, you will always be welcome here." Zelda replied.
"Your kindness is appreciated, but we won't be coming back, we've been a large enough influence on your culture as it is." The man inclined his head.
"But what if something happens again and we need help?" Link said, unable to ignore the worry due to the fact that the Great Calamity had occurred.
"If something like that happens, on the off chance, then we will help again. But that won't happen." The man smiled.
He started to head out the door, then stopped and turned back.
"Oh, and one more thing. I know you're not rebuilding the monarchy, but you might want to survey the area under the castle." He said cryptically.
"Huh?" Link asked, confused.
"You have accomplished much friends, but your task is not yet complete, for now though rest and take some time to yourselves, but know that you will soon have to delve into the caverns below the castle." The man said, still cryptic.
Then he was gone and Link and Zelda looked at each other in confusion. What did he mean? Their job wasn't done? What was under the castle? They felt a slight unease begin to manifest deep in their beings. The next morning the ship that been hovering over Hyrule slowly ascended into the sky, picking up speed as it went. Then it shot off so fast that it blurred into a streak before disappearing in a flash of light.