A/N: And we're back! A hearty thank you to everyone who viewed, reviewed, favourited and followed.

I... may be slightly out of my mind with adrenaline from the last few hours of writing, so please feel free to correct any typoes that may have crept into the text. Please forgive me, I know not what I do.

Anyway, without further ado, the latest chapter: read, review, and above all, enjoy!

Disclaimer: Gravity Falls is not mine.

For twenty four hours after the party, the zodiac and their allied forces busied themselves with training.

Those of the refugees who'd decided not to leave for the Cookie Jar were drilled and trained in combat as best as they could be – usually with a little telepathic knowledge-transfer from Gideon – then armed with all the firearms that could be spared from their collection of ray guns. And when that stock ran out, the guns they needed were simply stolen from around the city, usually from the long-abandoned headquarters of the city's gangs.

Meanwhile, the zodiac expanded their powers, refining their supernatural gifts through the most strenuous exercises they could think of. Apart from Grunkle Ford, none of them knew if there were any real limits to how potent their abilities could become, and the Fourth Horseman wasn't all that lucid these days; however, one thing was certain: they couldn't afford to settle for less. Sooner or later, they'd be up against Bill himself, and when that time finally arrived, they'd have to be ready for anything he threw at them. So, they squeezed in as much training time as possible as they could into the one day they had to spare... and even with Mabel helping things along with a little amateur time compression, it still felt like the shortest day they'd ever lived.

Once the training was done, they waited just long enough for Gideon to give them a rough prediction of the battles ahead.

Then, they went on the attack.

It all began with a few simple acts of vandalism.

Back when he'd first began sculpting the planet to his morbid tastes, Bill had been particularly fond of turning rivers into blood – partly for the awesome aesthetic value but mostly to deny refugees a chance to find drinkable water. Thousands upon thousands of travellers had died here, gambling everything just to reach the banks of a waterway they'd once known in the hopes of quenching their thirst, only to find that the waters were befouled with foul-tasting blood that only amplified their thirst a thousandfold. More often than not, it was poison as well. And thanks to the signposts and a little rumourmongering on Bill's part, rivers like these were never short on visitors.

Then again, it wasn't as if any of the victims stayed down permanently: up until the Axolotl had crashed the party, Bill had taken great delight in resurrecting those who'd died of thirst or poison, and sending them marching onwards in another futile search for water – repeating the sequence for as long as it remained amusing. By now, about sixty percent of the travellers wandering the wastelands had already died and been brought back to life, but still they marched on regardless of the futility of it all. After all, what else was there to do?

So it came as something of a surprise when one band of refugees had staggered to a halt on the banks of one particularly gory river, ready to die with parched throats and bellies full of poison… only to find themselves staring down into clear, purified water.

For the next few minutes, the group quenched their quenched their thirst, secretly dreading the misfortune that would soon be befalling them; after all, in the wastelands, nothing good ever happened except as the prelude to something absolutely horrific. So it came as something as a surprise when a small, doll-like figure appeared out of nowhere and began hastily shepherding the refugees into a portal to somewhere far more pleasant. The same went for every refugee band to make their way to the river that day, all of them being summarily rescued with a rapid-fire mutter of "Hi, don't have time to talk, come with me if you want to live, let's get moving!"

And the same went for every single river Bill had gone to the trouble of bloodying: every polluted waterway was converted into clean, drinkable water, and ever refugee who stopped to drink was rescued. Later, when an utterly infuriated Bill investigated with his Henchmaniacs in tow, they found a number of small but fiendishly complex water-purification machines sitting just north of the converted rivers.

Attempts to tamper with these devices only resulted in a massive tidal wave washing most of the Henchmaniacs downstream, killing a few hundred eyebats and breaking several of Teeth's molars. Humiliated, Bill destroyed the machines and returned to the Fearamid emptyhanded, too late to prevent the escape of over three thousand refugees. For good measure, no sooner had the crew recovered from Bill's tongue-lashing, a terrified lackey burst in and informed them all that while they'd been distracted, one of their favourite nightspots out in the Radioactive Highlands had been destroyed by two figures that – from the description – could only be Stanley and Stanford Pines.

Bill's enraged screams could be heard on the other side of the galaxy.

Back in Cipheropolis, Pacifica and Old Man McGucket grinned and exchanged high-fives.

When the zodiac weren't away on missions, training continued: there had to be at least a few of the team left back in Cipheropolis to safeguard the refugees that had joined their ranks, and with this proviso in place, the team had every opportunity to refine their strength.

Against all expectations, Robbie took Nyarlathotep's advice and began his first forays into animating not just dead bodies, but soil, rock, and metal. After several failed attempts, he was able to build his first clumsy golems and blend them into his horde. It took some effort before he was able to see through their eyes in the same way he could with zombies, but eventually, he could make them dance to his tune as easily as any corpse.

Indeed, as time went on, Robbie found that the golems could be modified for extreme agility, hopping and bouncing ahead of his zombie army as deadly shock troops. And as he refined his abilities, he soon found his control over each body became so refined that it almost felt as if he could become them. More than once, he could have sworn that one or two of the bodies under his control actually changed, their rotten flesh or clumsily-shaped clay abruptly reshaped into his likeness, until they were completely identical to him. But surely that was just his imagination...

One morning, the inhabitants of the City of the Dead found that the moat of corpses that had previously bordered their prison had been replaced by a colossal lake, vast and shrouded in mist. Those brave enough to investigate found that, beneath those murky waters, no dead bodies could be found at all – as if something had simply drained them away while the water was being pumped in.

Eventually, the noise was enough to get the attention of both the eyeball guards and the lesser monstrosities still partying at the central nightclub – including Keyhole, who'd been hiding from Bill's latest temper tantrum and keeping himself amused by stealing anything that hadn't been nailed down. Bit by bit, the army of demons surged out across the city, shooing the human residents back to their assigned housing as they marched towards the water's edge. By now, they knew that the zodiac had gone on the offensive, and they weren't interested in tackling a potential attack with anything other than their overwhelming force; with several thousand eyeball guards, giant spiders, bug-eyed monsters, squid-wasps, fungus-men, flesh-eating slime moulds and eyebats on hand – plus one Henchmaniac, the city's defenders were prepared for anything.

Or so they thought.

As soon as Keyhole had arrived at the water's edge, a sackful of struggling residents slung over his shoulder, the defenders took careful aim at the misty horizon, expecting to see the Four Horsemen charging across the lake towards them. Instead, the attack came not from ahead, but from beneath.

Suddenly, the placid waters of the lake erupted in a series of explosive splashes as several hundred vaguely-humanoid figures leapt from the depths and into the crowd, tearing several eyeball guards apart before they could even react. To the surprise of all, these attackers weren't human or even alive for that matter, being composed entirely of some sickly greyish-green clay… but that didn't stop them from being immediately deadly to anyone in the vicinity.

The defenders did their best to pick off the new arrivals, but their assailants were moving too quickly to be targeted, and most of the retaliatory strikes only ended up carving chunks out of their own ranks; no matter how fast the energy blast was fired, no matter how quickly the truncheon was swung, the target simply wasn't there to be struck. For good measure, the eyebats were completely useless against them: being made of clay, there was nothing about the attackers to petrify, and any attempt to carry them away usually resulted in them getting a ceramic fist to the cornea. Bouncing and somersaulting through the ranks of the defenders, the clay men cut down any eyeball guard unlucky enough to be standing alone, hammered into the ranks of guard platoons like battering rams, swarmed over taller monsters by the dozen and brought them crashing down, and even managed to deal a few injuries to Keyhole before he managed to shake them off.

Worse still, no sooner had the defenders been able to corner the clay men and crush them to potsherds with Keyhole's help, reinforcements erupted from the lake. For every clay man struck down, a hundred more swarmed in to replace them, a colossal grey-green tide surging through the city, cutting down everything in its path.

And then, just as Keyhole had finished growing to the size of a three-story house, poised to unleash a lethal barrage of energy on the incoming horde, something huge and distinctly necrotic lurched out of the lake.

"I'M BACK, BITCHES!" roared a voice. "MEET THE NECROCOLOSSUS!"

It was roughly the size of the Chrysler Building, vaguely humanoid to the extent of still possessing bipedal arms and legs, and composed entirely of dead bodies and clay men, held together by a complicated lattice of Weirdness. And as it thundered onto the shore, it began to grow even further, its vast mass simultaneously inhaling dead eyeball guards and other monstrosities with every step.

"REVENGE!" it roared from two hundred thousand rotting mouths. "REVEEEEEEEEEEENNNNNNNNGE!"

Belatedly recognizing the voice of Robbie Valentino, several eyeball guards began running for their lives, but too late – much too late by far: a fist of ten thousand fused corpses and golems hammered down on a nearby guard tower, reducing it to a hail of debris that cut off the tactical retreat with a resounding squash. The remaining monstrosities tried to fight back, to blast it with magic or to claw away at its body, but to no avail: the wounds they inflicted were needles jabbed in the side of a cliff, and the Necrocolossus absorbed dozens more bodies to replace every corpse the defenders dislodged. Soon, between the onslaught of the clay men and the meteoric impact of the zombie-giant's fist, the garrison was either dead or running for their lives.

None of them noticed how the buildings around them were becoming conspicuously empty. Nor did they notice how certain streets seemed to be closed off, forcing them down certain pathways as they fled. They didn't even notice the strange crowned figure on horseback leading citizens and prisoners alike to safety, for each rescue took place in the spaces between seconds and ended just as quickly.

But then, it wouldn't have mattered even if they had noticed, for by then, escape was the only thing that mattered. It wasn't until they clattered to a stop in an alley that they finally realized that they'd been led into a trap. Two fallen skyscrapers later, and the defenders of the City of the Dead were reduced to a murky stain on the asphalt.

The one exception to this rule was Keyhole, who'd had just enough time to steel himself for the impact and strengthen his body against the falling towers. Unfortunately, he had not time to prepare for what happened next: as he desperately bombarded the Necrocolossus with searing blasts of energy, a thousand-strong hand reached out, grabbing him by the feet, and began dragging him slowly, inexorably towards the lake.

In the turbulent minutes that followed, the few observers left to see what happened next reported that Keyhole was heard to say "But there were so many lockpicks left in the world!" before he vanished beneath the waters.

By the time Bill Cipher arrived on the scene with the other Henchmaniacs, the City of the Dead lay in ruins, its bleak towers reduced to mountainous heaps of rubble, its defenders dead or missing, its inhabitants successfully evacuated, and Keyhole lying in a bloated, waterlogged heap on the shore.

And at the very centre of the fallen metropolis, another piece of graffiti blared THE PYRAMID IS FALLING.

Soos continued refining his power of resurrection into the power of resilience through progressively more cataclysmic acts of self-destruction: he jumped off buildings, he charged headlong into fire, he juggled chainsaws, and even offered to serve as a moving target for the sharpshooters of their growing army – though it took a lot of encouragement before any of them were willing to take him up on the offer.

With every death, he returned from the grave a little sooner, finding himself a little harder to kill: bullets seemed to have difficulty penetrating his skin, his sweat instantly repelled fire, blades snapped in half the moment they touched him, and falls from rooftops only made him bounce like a tennis ball. Eventually, he decided to consult the others on how he could improve on this, listening intently to any suggestions they could make – most popular of them being "blue mage."

For once, Soos didn't need an explanation as to what this meant. After all, he'd played enough video games in his time.

Eventually, he came up with an idea of his own – one good enough to bring to Dipper and Mabel's attention, and (with their permission) to the Ruinous Toymaker:

"Cyborg piranhas with wings, dude. That's where it's at."

McGucket's many eyes widened with astonishment, and he immediately scuttled off to the drawing board in a fit of excitement. In his wake, he left Dipper, Mabel and Gideon, already sketching out the next battle plan.

Out on the sulfuric dunes of what was once Papua New Guinea, Paci-Fire and his army rampaging centaurpedes and albatross-winged gastropods found themselves aimlessly cruising the toxic desert, inhuman senses studying the environment around them on every conceivable level: nothing was spared their attention, not even the tiniest shift in microbial activity, every atom jealously scrutinized for some sign of the zodiac's passage.

While Bill busied himself with the hunt for the Axolotl, the Henchmaniacs were combing the wastelands for any sign of the escaped prisoners, each one of them accompanied by their own army. Paci-Fire had been given the largest army and the best trackers, but after several hours of soaring across the sickly yellow sands, boredom had set in set in: had there been any people around, he would have shredded them into wafer-thin gibbets of ex-human being; if he hadn't been worried about losing the trail, he would have set the entire desert aflame, and probably massacred his own army as well. It had been almost a hundred and eighty straight minutes without partying, drinking or killing something, and he was almost at his wit's end with the entire search.

He was on the verge of giving up, when a ripple of sound echoed across the dunes, too loud and too coherent to be the howl of the wind. Among other things, the wind didn't usually sound like this kind of music with these kind of lyrics.

"…Am I blanchin'/Yeah we blanchin'/I live up in a mansion…"

Standing on a faraway dune, a lonely boom-box sat, belting out Lil Bigg Dawgg's last masterpiece at a volume that would have made the deaf wince.

Behind it, Soos danced with all the coordination of a drunken three-legged horse, singing tunelessly along with the music.

Paci-Fire grinned with both mouths, all four eyes narrowing in delight. Taking careful aim at Soos, he let out a bolt of pure, unadulterated heat and sent it shimmering across the dunes: the fat little human was instantly roasted from head to toe, every last inch of flesh immediately consumed by flame and swiftly melted down to bubbling juices, his charred skeleton gently clattering to the ground in a heap.

There was a cough from one of the giant spiders opposite him. "Um, Paci-Fire, don't you think Bill would've wanted us to keep him alive? Just for information, I mean."

"Shut up, or you're next."

"You always know how to motivate us, man."

Ignoring the subordinate, Paci-Fire stomped over to the scorched bones, and crushed Soos' skull under his heel.

"…Eat your own pants/Eat your own pants…"

As an afterthought, he kicked over the boom-box, silencing its atonal warbling forever.

"Hey, not cool, dude! You really shouldn't have done that."

Paci-Fire looked up in confusion just in time to see Soos striding over the dunes towards him, apparently none the worse for wear and seemingly oblivious to the fact that Paci-Fire was standing on his scorched skeleton.

"…why the hell are you not dead?" Paci-Fire snarled.

"Oh, dude, I dunno if I can stay that way anymore. I always seem to have an extra life on hand."

Paci-Fire scrutinized the fool's body with senses too refined for any human intellect to cope with, and realized that Soos was slightly different now: his body glowed with an inbuilt resistance to fire, along with falling, drowning, multiple calibres of gunfire, and… something vaguely toothy and metallic.

"Very well, human," he snarled. "If you really can make yourself stronger with every death you suffer, let's put this to a proper test. I know ways of killing dead people, little man, and if you think I'm impressed, you'd best rethink your pathetic life." He raised his arms to the horde behind him. "Alright, boys: rip him apart – and if that doesn't work, we'll petrify the bastard and call it a day!"

"Aw, dude, I said you were cuter before you started talking, and I meant it." A smile crossed his chubby face. "Still, I did say you shouldn't have broken my boom-box. I mean, that CD was a present from Wendy and everything – and the boom-box was built by Old Man McGucket as well."

There was a horrified pause, as all eyes slowly turned in the direction of the broken stereo. From beneath its shattered casing, there was a rattling of metal rasping against plastic, followed by a loud, abrasive hissing sound.

"What… the hell… is that?" Paci-Fire demanded slowly.

"Like I said, you really shouldn't have broken my boom-box, dude," said Soos, ever-so-slightly smug.

And then the stereo exploded, unleashing a vast cloud of hissing metallic shapes upon the surrounding army. Whatever they were, close examination revealed that they were small cyborg constructions, piscine yet winged, and equipped with a spectacular set of jaws… and though they were no bigger than fleas, there were billions of them – and more were emerging from the wreckage of the boom-box every second.

Immediately, Paci-Fire's soldiers tried to blast the cloud apart with magical blasts, but the swarm of cyborgs were too quick to target and too small to hit, and most of their shots only ended up tearing through their allies' flanks. By the time the army had recovered from all the friendly fire, the swarm was already upon then. Suddenly, the once-glorious army of monsters was reduced to a panicked rabble, howling in agony as the tiny cyborgs gnawed and bit at them from all angles, shredding skin, burrowing through flesh, rendering down bone, until they were slowly reduced to organic slurry oozing along the ground and still struggling to scream… and from their pulped remains, thousand more cyborgs emerged.

And in the midst of all this, Soos stood calmly atop the dune, untouched by the swarm and at peace with the world.

Sighing in frustration, Paci-Fire brought his fist slamming down on the human's head, squashing him into a heap of pulverized meat and bone. He turned to leave – only to be brought up short by a newly-resurrected Soos. With a howl of rage, Paci-Fire swung his fist around in another deadly arc, but though Soos' skull cracked like an egg on impact, the blow didn't land with the same weight as it had the first time. By now, it was clear that Soos was developing a resistance to superhuman strength, but Paci-Fire didn't care: all that mattered was getting away. So when a freshly-revived Soos took the next skull-crushing blow like he'd been thumped in the head with a plastic baseball bat, the Henchmaniac didn't even bother feigning surprise; he just raised his other hand to swat the blubbery pissant aside, ready to take off running as soon as he had the chance…

…only for Soos to grab his fist in mid-punch.

For a split second, Paci-Fire could only stare uncomprehendingly at his captor, the pacifier dropping out of his second mouth in bewilderment. In that moment, he was twice as tall as Soos and weighed over eight tons… and yet Soos was somehow grappling with him with almost contemptible ease.

"I think you might have hit me a few too many times, dude," he remarked, casually.

"Oh. Um… Errors have been made?"

And before Paci-Fire could grow any taller or grow any stronger, Soos swung him around by the arm and flung him headlong into the cloud of flesh-eating cyborgs. The last thing Paci-Fire heard, before the cyborg piranhas started eating his brain, was Soos muttering, "Dude, I didn't even think that'd work!"

The cyborg piranhas continued rampaging for another three weeks before Bill was finally able to get a fix on the swarm and annihilate every last one of them, and by then, the zodiac had already staged another series of lightning raids, rescuing hundreds upon thousands of slaves and laying waste to some of Bill's favourite playgrounds.

Back in Cipheropolis, Wendy honed her strength and borrowed abilities until solid rock parted like sand beneath her crushing grip; she pushed her speed and agility to the very limit, both on and off horseback; she even refined her acid glands, building on the potency of the vitriol within through techniques that only the oldest and most extreme members of the Society understood.

Much like their revolutionary army, the Society itself was growing in number, too, for among the slaves and refugees they'd rescued, mutants and unwilling monsters could often be found – and though some wanted a chance for peace and safety in the Cookie Jar, many more wanted revenge against Bill.

Meanwhile, up in the Forge, while Stan and Ford honed their powers through methods best left unexplored, Old Man McGucket toiled ceaselessly upon one deadly machine after another – this time built not from prisoners, but raw materials stolen from across Bill's kingdom. As the only one who couldn't leave, being still bound to the Forge by countless alarm systems, ne never once lapsed from his work. Nor did he desist in his efforts to make his inventions simpler and easier for the growing army on his doorstep. Bit by bit, step by step, a fleet was taking shape in the skies above Cipheropolis.

And, as it soon became apparent, air superiority fighters were to play a key role in their nascent armada…

One hellish afternoon, beneath a sun as red and bleak as Mars, a different kind of swarm descended upon the ruins of Las Vegas: here, amidst the colossal remnants of dazzling neon signs and outdated casinos that had been due for a crowd-pleasing demolition long before Weirdmageddon, stray demons partied and cavorted freely. These were the lucky few that had been declared exempt from Bill's search for the zodiac, and in their case, only because Bill was keeping them in reserve just in case he needed them to deal with any of the other threats that had been menacing his dominion.

None of these demons were expecting to see combat that day, and thus amused themselves like any other tourist let loose upon the gaming tables and exclusive clubs: they drank, they gambled, they made idiots of themselves, and nursed monumental hangovers. They were even accompanied by a private workforce of slaves, all exclusively recruited to serve as croupiers, waiters, dancers and entertainers for the army now garrisoned in the otherwise-abandoned city. With so much fun being had by all – except the slaves – it wasn't much of a surprise that Wendy's attack caught them completely off-guard.

From above the city, there was a sound like the buzzing of a million flies, a roar of countless wings slicing through the air loudly enough to draw blood from unsuspecting ears. Then Wendy descended on horseback, backdropped by fire from Khan's mane and her own blazing war-sword; behind her, a hundred vicious-looking aircraft rocketed through the sky, bug-eyed canopies gleaming in the sunset as they zeroed in upon the city. These were the Plagueflies, McGucket's newest creations, each one piloted by a cybernetically-modified soldier from Cipheropolis' growing refugee army; while mounted on the back of each vessel was a member of the Society of the Enduring, crackling with their own arcane powers.

As the swarm of Plaguefly fighters scythed through the ruined skyline, the Society members jumped down to the streets, and immediately began tearing their way through the disorderly ranks of the startled demons – even as Wendy led the Plagueflies themselves on a vicious charge against any demons stupid enough to try and mount a defence of the city. Again and again, the Rider of War swept across the city, flaming sword in one hand and an axe in the other, scything through group after group of demons, slashing them to burning ribbons even as her fighter escort bombarded the survivors with incendiary gunfire. Occasionally, one of the bigger tentacled horrors among the army tried to swat Wendy from the sky, but the fire of Khan's mane scorched their hands bloody and the rider's riposte left them chasing their own severed heads down the street.

Within seconds, the demon army was routed, its soldiers either dead, dying, or running for their lives; once again, the defenders were too preoccupied to notice the rescue of their former workforce, and definitely too afraid of Wendy to pay much attention to the portals opening across the city – through which the newly-liberated slaves were being hastily evacuated through.

And once again, by the time Bill arrived on the scene, all that was left was Robbie's now-infamous tag: THE PYRAMID IS FALLING.

Time passed, and Dipper's grasp of shapeshifting expanded to more and more unusual forms: he'd been the size of a skyscraper before, but now he became as small and all-pervasive as a microorganism, becoming first bacteria, then viruses, even prions. He'd already mastered the art of elemental transcendentalism, of taking on shapes of sculpted flame or pure light, but now he took on the elemental form of poison, refining himself into a terror of bubbling green putrescence.

And once he'd mastered the form of purest disease, there was only one logical step to take next. He didn't know how the idea occurred to him, but it sounded good…

"How many?!" Bill roared.

"About fifty thousand dead at last count," said 8-Ball. "We're bringing out extra monsters from the furthest corners of the Nightmare Realm and creating as many new ones as we can manage right here in the Fearamid, but with all the recent attacks, we're still having staffing problems."

"But how are they getting sick? They're Weirdness-formed demons! They don't get sick!"

"Don't ask me how, boss, but it's definitely happening. I mean, just look at this guy!"

Bill stared down at the pitiful remains of the minion slumped before him: it had been a militaur at some point in the not-too-distant past, but after an hour of infection, there wasn't much left of the damn thing; its normally-pallid flesh had turned a putrid shade of green and begun gently oozing off the bones, the chitinous exoskeleton layering its lower half sloughing off to reveal huge patches of liquefied internal organs. Its mouth was awash with vomit, its eyes were little more than maggoty jelly, and its brain had more holes in it than a well-matured rind of Swiss cheese. By all accounts, it had been a very messy death, not that the other forty-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine had been any gentler.

For a minute, Bill's eye swept the decomposing corpse up and down, scrutinizing every layer of its disintegrating cellular structure. "We made the damn things too fleshy," he sighed at last. "We gave them a digestive tract and everything, just so they could eat humans… and he exploited it. Argh, we should have just made them purely inorganic, and this would never have happened."

"He?"

"The Shapeshifter. Shifty. Pine Tree. Dipper. Mason the Mentally-Challenged. Whatever you want to call him, he's back with the zodiac and transforming into diseases."

Bill tore his eyes away from the molten corpse and cast his eyes over the balcony railing, peering down at the pestilential carpet of dead bodies far below. Not too long ago, this had been a slave labour camp, an amusement park where Bill, the Henchmaniacs and their underlings could indulge themselves on any humans who'd been unlucky enough to get caught on the way to Cipheropolis. Now, it was a charnel pit, a diseased embarrassment that would have to be scorched out of existence before it could infect anyone else… and just to add insult to injury, none of the corpses below were human: every last slave had been rescued long before Bill had arrived to investigate.

"All this is Pine Tree's doing," he snarled. "Plague Number Five: the Great Pestilence."

"But why the Ten Plagues?" queried 8-Ball. "Why are the zodiac so obsessed with it all of a sudden?"

"Because that was MY next big idea, you moron!" Bill roared. "I included it as one of those upgrade packages Fordsie picked up while he was still trapped in the dome, and he must have spread it to the rest of the zodiac without even meaning to! The stupid old bastard has gone memetic and HE DOESN'T EVEN KNOW IT! And I tell ya, this is just salt in the wounds, you know that? The Ten Plagues were supposed to be part of the big biblical gimmick for universal takeovers: I'd already made the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, so the Ten Plagues of Egypt was the next big step; after that, I'd have done Sodom and Gomorrah, and after that, Babel, the Opening of the Seals, maybe even a Great Flood! I was even gonna do a special on Norse mythology, just to give the next star system in line a Ragnarok to remember! It could have been perfect! But nooooo, the zodiac just had to take the gimmick I could have done real justice to AND GODDAMN PLAGIARIZE IT!"

8-Ball's brow wrinkled in confusion. "Aren't we plagiarizing human religion, though? No offense, boss, but don't you think we'd have been better off making up our own mythology?"

Bill sighed and drew a pool cue from the ether. "8-Ball?" he asked quietly.

"Yes, boss?"

"Corner pocket."

"Uh, what do you mean…? Oh god, not again-"

WHAM.

Guided by Jheselbraum's soothing mental instructions, Gideon expanded his growing web of psychic activity, his telepathic reach encompassing not only Cipheropolis, but the playgrounds beyond. In meditation, his predictions of the future grew more accurate, the forking paths of possible futures gradually drifting into view as he cast his vision ever outwards… but as always, the difficulty lay in navigating the labyrinth of alternates. So, for the time being, Jheselbraum advised him to focus on the present.

As such, Gideon began fine-tuning his ability to influence the minds of others. He had already grasped the capacity to alter human emotions, so he took a step further by adjusting brain functions. As always, test subjects were limited to volunteers, but given the fervour of the growing revolutionary army, Cipheropolis never lacked for enthusiastic volunteers; however, Gideon also tested his powers on domestic animals and some of the new mutant forms of life wandering the wastes. With their permission, he even tested his powers on Soos and Robbie – reasoning that members of the zodiac were the nearest thing he'd get to Henchmaniacs, at least as far as these tests went.

Eventually, he took his powers a step further, and moved on to altering the brain's perception of reality. In a way, it was fitting: before Weirdmageddon, he'd been a con artist; as it happened, telepathic illusionism wasn't that far removed from the old tricks of the trade.

Once he'd gotten the hang of that, it didn't take much brainstorming with Dipper and Mabel to come up with the next move. And their army was all too happy to be of assistance…

"It's not real, you idiots! It's not real! Get and fight, you cowardly shits!"

But of course, nobody listened: the demons were too busy collapsing to the ground, clawing at their skin, writhing in pain from bulging, livid, necrotic boils that only they could see. It didn't matter that their symptoms weren't real, or that Kryptos had been telling them that for the past minute; for now, his army was effectively useless.

This morning, this had been the best and brightest of all the armies Bill had sent to hunt for the zodiac. Among other things, they'd been created with a built-in immunity to the pestilence that Dipper Pines had spread among the last fifty thousand minions, having no digestive tract, glands or internal organs for the disease to attack. All they had were functioning minds – that and several hundred tonnes of bulletproof hide, concrete-crushing claws, and pressure-propelled spines sharp enough to puncture solid steel. For good measure, they'd been taught how to spot the flying cyborg piranhas. Bill was taking no chances this time: he wanted the zodiac caught at any and all costs.

And if Kryptos had been assigned the job of leading this particular army, Bill also wanted the escaped prisoners to suffer for every last breath of their capture and imprisonment – a task that Kryptos had solemnly promised to relish. He'd even brought his torture kit along for the job, complete with the freshly-made thumbscrews he'd picked up last week.

Of course, it had gone a little downhill in the hours since then.

One minute, the army had been marching through the Razor Canyons and surveying the area for any trail the zodiac might have left; the next, they'd been screaming in agony and toppling to their knees as boils erupted from their skin like rising bread dough. None of them had responded to any of Kryptos' orders after that: either the pain had shorted out all their other senses, or someone was actively futzing with their sense of hearing. One way or the other, the army was officially useless.

And then, just as Kryptos was starting to wonder what he was going to tell Bill, he caught a gleam of silver from one of the cliffs overhead, and looked up just in time to see a tiny figure hobbling out of sight. In the last few months, Gideon Gleeful's once-glorious pompadour to a sparse fringe of hair coating the back of his head, but there no mistaking that stark white hair or that diminutive build. He knew that Gideon had only been given basic telepathy for the purposes of the game, but after all the impossible evolution the powers of the zodiac had undergone in the last few months, there was no ignoring the evidence: Gideon was responsible for this – and the bastard was within reach.

Rocketing into the sky, Kryptos soared towards the nearest peak, arriving just in time to see Gideon vanish behind an outcropping as he went sliding down into another one of the labyrinthine trenches that cobwebbed the region. But Kryptos was much faster than the human could ever hope to be, and he had the advantage of being airborne; soaring skywards once more, he looked down on the canyon below, and soon picked out the familiar shape of Gideon scrambling for safety.

"Keep running, you little shit!" he yelled, as he zoomed after him. "It's going to make the payoff even tastier!"

Up ahead, a pass through two high cliffs loomed over Gideon, and he made a beeline for it, ducking gratefully into the shadows of the spacious alleyway. A vicious grin slid across Kryptos' diamond-shaped face: having helped build this place as a hunting ground for terrified human playthings, he knew that the pass looked wide and accommodating from the outside, but narrowed to a crevasse barely three inches across, either cornering potential escapees or getting them wedged to the point of helplessness. And though Gideon had clearly lost weight, he wasn't that thin.

Laughing, Kryptos zoomed towards the pass, readying himself for a glorious festival of torture and slow, slow murder. "Oh yes," he cackled to himself. "You're going to suffer with every last breath, and I am going to make you enjoy it, you little-"

There was a pause, as it slowly dawned on Kryptos that he may have just made a very serious error.

Two hundred and fifty hard-faced men and women stood in the pass before him, all of them armed with a vicious assortment of impossibly-advanced weaponry. Alongside them, a hundred and twenty rust thralls aimed their specially-designed cannons with mechanical precision. And scattered among the crowd, thirty members of the Society of the Enduring leered up at him, their bodies crackling with arcane powers.

At the head of this brutal little army stood two familiar figures: one was a distinctly smug-looking Gideon; the other was Wendy Corduroy, armed with the flaming sword of War. Kryptos didn't know what those alien weapons would do to a Henchmaniac, or if the Society's esoteric powers had grown enough to stop his wounds from regenerating, but he knew for a fact that War's sword had been built to outdo any mortal weapon ever conceived.

"Ah… damn."

Kryptos turned to flee, to soar away as fast as his ethereal powers could carry him across the horizon, readying a blast of pure Weirdness to throw over his shoulder to dissuade any pursuers. But nothing happened: his body refused to respond to his commands, instead remaining locked in the air above the revolutionaries.

By way of an explanation, Gideon smirked and tapped the side of his head.

For good measure, the open canyon behind Kryptos was promptly replaced by a solid rock wall – another illusion, but this one powerful enough to work on both Henchmaniacs and demons. Even if his army did recover from their imagined boils, they wouldn't find him until it was too late. The trap had been sprung and he wasn't going anywhere anytime soon… and given that he'd made himself the size of a greyhound bus for the sake of intimidation, there was no way in hell any of his assailants could possibly miss.

Realizing that he was probably going to die in the next few seconds, Kryptos tried to think of something profound and meaningful to say, but in the end, all that came to mind was, "I didn't even get to use those thumbscrews…"

And then all he knew was gunfire and soul-consuming flames.

By now, the Throne of the Northwests was an afterthought. Pacifica doubted Bill had ever intended for her to grow this strong with barely half of the throne's barbs still in her back, but then, his intentions were immaterial by his stage: for all she knew, she had eclipsed the power she would have wielded even with all the barbs in place.

Sometimes, she still reflected on those barbs, wondering if it was safe to use their power to make herself human again: after all, the pain would be nothing short of incredible, wouldn't it?

Right now, the barbs that had sunk into her back were painless, only becoming noticeable due to the unearthly sensation of hooks working their way through her porcelain flesh, without pain but not without sensation. It was rather like the dental work she'd undergone when she was younger, and every bit as unnerving. Could she exchange that disturbing sensation for excruciating pain, and if so, how long would it last?

Invariably, she realized she couldn't afford to think about things like that – not when Dipper and the others were depending on her. So, she continued training: by that time, she was already used to moving weights of up to five tons through telekinesis alone, and the fire she could conjure with pyrokinesis burned hot enough to melt stone. So, she decided to experiment: using her psychic radar in conjunction with telekinesis, she soon found that she could levitate or harm living creatures without even seeing them. Inspired, she combined telekinesis with portals… and soon found herself folding space, stepping across rooms without even moving, expanding rooms beyond the boundaries of exterior dimensions, and even reducing entire buildings to life-size cut-outs.

And then she combined pyrokinesis with portals… and the germ of a new idea sprung to life.

Saturday night was usually a fun time for Bill and the Henchmaniacs: there was drinking, gambling, and ritualistic terrorization of unsuspecting humans; there would be all manner of games, films, music and entertainment for the party guests to enjoy, and often the best slaves as well. From time to time, there would even be the occasional contest of power, in which the many and varied beings under Bill's command showed off their abilities just to prove which of them was the best at bending Weirdness to their will. Admittedly, Bill winning the contest was something of a foregone conclusion by now, but it wasn't as if any of the others were going to tell him that.

Plus, given that linear time had been abolished, Saturday could happen whenever Bill felt like it.

However, in recent eons, the fun had very slowly leaked out of Saturdays: Bill's slowly-escalating bad mood had led him to put a moratorium on any further official celebrations until Axolotl could be found and executed; the stress over the escape and rebellion of the zodiac had led him to cancel the parties outright. The deaths of more than half of the Henchmaniac population put a significant dampener on any private attempts to seek amusement, and the fact that Bill had seemingly lost control of his ability to manipulate time didn't help the Saturday night parties much either.

This Saturday night was particularly dire, in that it rained fireballs.

All over Bill's kingdom, portals began suddenly opening in the sky, some remaining open only for a few short seconds, others for hours on end: one way or another the heavens opened, letting loose a colossal barrage of searing flames, incinerating everything beneath them: buildings exploded, vegetation was scorched to ashes, and eyebats fell from the sky in droves. Armies vanished in gouts of fire, their bodies reduced to charred meat and scorched bones, thousands upon thousands of Bill's best demons, monsters and other creations being reduced the kind of barbecue that even the most ravenous cannibal would have rejected out of hand. Slave camps, casinos, bars, arenas, torture parlours, victim galleries, and countless other venues were burned to the ground in a matter of minutes, leaving the Henchmaniacs deprived of some of their most promising forms of entertainment for the time being.

Quite apart from the blow to the Henchmaniacs' morale and the loss of mostly-valuable personnel, it was abundantly clear that the attack had been very carefully targeted: survivors reported seeing fireballs actively swerving away from human captives, avoiding buildings where prisoners were being held, even taking a ninety-degree turn to blast an eyebat in pursuit of a fleeing slave. For good measure, no human bones could be found anywhere in the ruins thereafter, nor had any of the inmates of the fallen venues been recaptured.

Of course, what with all the confusion, none of the Henchmaniacs had noticed the human captives being spirited away before the flames could spread; nobody had noticed the girl with the crown appearing and shepherding the slaves to freedom in the spaces between seconds…

"I don't get it. What's so scary about locusts? It's not as if the Henchmaniacs have any crops or gardens. Do they even need to eat?"

"That's the twist," said Grunkle Stan with a grin. "They're tarantula-locusts. With hornet stingers."

Dipper's brow wrinkled. "…where did you get this idea, exactly?"

"Oh, I've been trying to put them together for years: I thought they'd make a really great exhibit at the Mystery Shack, but it turns out that putting them together is a lot harder than I thought. I mean, just getting the hornets nearly landed me in the hospital. But now that you're a shapeshifter, I'm thinking you can do a lot more with the concept than I could."

"So, we have a swarm approach, so that's one phase of the attack. What about the second phase?"

"Well, they won't be expecting you to have backup, will they? The Plague of Locusts and One Pissed-Off Grunkle!"

"OOOOOOOOOH GOD THE BURNING! WHERE ARE THE PESTICIDES?! WHERE ARE THE PESTICIIIIIIIIIIIIIDES?!"

Bill groaned and hid his eye behind his hand. "The goddamn bugs aren't even on you anymore, 8-Ball! Stop writhing around like an idiot and talk to me!"

"AAAAAAAAARGH! MOMMMMMMYYYYYYY!"

"Screw it. Teeth, you're up: how many soldiers did they kill this time, how many slaves did they steal, and why are your incisors chipped?"

"What the hell do you think happened?"

"Teeth, I've got four Henchmaniacs left including you: one of them is currently out of his mind from hornet stings, one of them is an idiot, and one is a virtual non-entity. Of them, you're the only one who can tell me what the hell happened. Get on with it!"

"…okay, I'll bite: who's the idiot and who's the nonentity?"

"Here's a hint: one has a skull shaped like a mouldy loaf of bread with a party hat stuck on top, and the other's sat on his ass doing sweet FA since Weirdmageddon."

"HEY!"

"Oh you know it's true, you eighty-seven-faced asshole…"

"Eighty-eight!"

"Does it look like I give a shit? Teeth, give me the rundown."

"Fuck you, Bill! Ever since you brought us to this dimension, we've had nothing but trouble!"

"Do not start with me, you little bastard-"

"Or what? You'll kill me? I've got more to worry about the goddamn zodiac than you: you can't even find these people, much less stop them! Hell, you killed one of them! You erased Dipper from existence and you couldn't even make it stick! What the hell are we supposed to do to these people if the almighty Bill Cipher can't make them stay dead!?"

"I'M WITH TEETH ON THIS."

"Nobody gives a fuck what you think, Xanthar. Teeth, back off and explain what happened or I'll make that bout of gingivitis look like a vacation."

"No! You know what, fuck this dimension, fuck this whole stupid plan and fuck you, Bill! We're on strike until you decouple the Nightmare Realm from this shithole reality and get us the hell out of here!"

"I'm with Teeth on this as well!"

"YEAH, FUCK YOU, BILL."

"On strike? Ooooh, bad idea, you three. I'm one of the few employers who doesn't need strikebreakers…"

And for the next five minutes, the Fearamid resounded with the sounds of Bill laying down the law in the most petulant fashion possible.

Bit by bit, Mabel's powers grew, thanks in part due to several generous volunteers: after some cajoling from Pacifica, Preston Northwest had volunteered to serve as a test subject for Mabel's time experiments, either because he hoped that she might be able to eventually undo his regression or simply because he felt that aiding the zodiac was the best route to recovering his fortune – though Pacifica had warned him that this would have to wait until they had stopped Bill once and for all.

Once she'd well and truly mastered the art of controlling the flow of time on human terms, Mabel moved on to more extraordinary uses of time manipulation, moving on from the commonplace procession of years and months to entire centuries – even millennia. She learned how to compress time, squeezing months of training into the space of a single afternoon without ever aging. She rerouted rivers, practiced selectively accelerating plant growth to lethal extremes, and even enacted the forces of geological erosion on any unwanted houses that were available, rendering them down into featureless dust.

And eventually, she was strong enough to alter even the weather of Weirdness…

Sometime later, night blossomed across Bill Cipher's kingdom, black and impenetrable even to the senses of the Henchmaniacs: only Bill's godlike power could penetrate the shadows, and there were only so many places he could be at once. In his absence, slaves began going missing – along with their handlers. The handlers would be found again, dismembered and often still alive. As for the freed slaves, most simply vanished, but a few would occasionally reappear in later raids by the zodiac, armed to the teeth and high on revenge.

Out in the frozen peaks of Endless Despair, Teeth shivered to himself. Ever since the failed strike, he'd been sentenced to punishment duties, condemned to live out his days scouring the most unforgiving hellholes in the kingdom for the zodiac – even though the conditions in places like these would have made habitation impossible for them long ago. Plus, the sudden loss of light only made things worse.

Oh well, at least he had an army… but that didn't save him from those quiet, nagging doubts.

"Something's up tonight," he grumbled to his lieutenants. "I can feel it in my gums. See if you can get that bioluminescence fixed, okay? We're in the perfect spot for an ambush or someth-"

The rest of Teeth's sentence was lost in the deafening rumble of something large and distinctly geological falling to the ground.

When the night finally ended, Teeth was found in a sorry, pulped heap beneath several hundred thousand tonnes of roock, every last perfectly-whitened crown shattered to pieces under the weight of a mountain large enough to flatten him and most of his army. Most unusually of all, close examination of the fallen mountain revealed no sign of sabotage or tampering – at least, not in the traditional sense: as far as the remaining Henchmaniacs could tell, it appeared to have been the victim of natural erosion.

Not long afterwards, Mabel found Grunkle Ford sitting alone in the bowels of the Forge, scythe at his feet; he was shaping something in his hands, something that looked like shadows but moved uncannily like smog. And all the while, he was muttering to himself.

"It didn't have to be this way, Bill," he whispered. "How can I make you understand this? Dsb xzm'g blf hvv gszg blf'ev wllnvw blfihvou z gslfhzmw grnvh levi? Blf xlfow szev zxxvkgvw gsv yzitzrm zmw yvvm ivylim gl z szkkrvi oruv. But instead, you chose damnation."

He sighed and shook his head. "The only answer is entropy. You must be made to understand entropy. I have to show you the truth of entropic principle. But first… you must see the final plague, the final insult before the ocean rises and falls: blf nfhg hvv blfi ezmrgb tilfmw rmgl gsv wrig, zh nrmv dzh. Kirwv xlnvgs yvuliv z uzoo, zmw blf zmw R szev hl evib uzi gl uzoo…"

After five minutes of consideration, Mabel realized she had no idea how she could possibly respond to this: there were simply too many questions occurring to her in that moment. So, she simply turned around and left Grunkle Ford in peace.

Bill could only stare in disbelief at the ruins of the laboratory.

This had once been one of his best-kept secrets: not even the Henchmaniacs knew of this place, and any slaves who'd learned of its existence were either killed or silenced in creatively gruesome ways. Hidden deep within a pocket universe accessible only by the Fearamid and a few discreet back doors scattered across reality, it was here that one of Bill's newest fascinations was being readied – a special birthday present to himself, a toy he'd been longing to get his hands on ever since he'd thought of possessing one.

Except now the present was ruined, and with it, his best chances of escaping.

This had once been a cloning lab, built specifically to craft humanoid bodies for Bill's personal amusement. He'd once intended to use it as a means of replacing his slaves if they ever grew too uninteresting for his tastes, if the human race as a whole ever grew too inured to torture to interest him. Then, as time went on, Bill had begun to imagine new possibilities for cloning: what if it could be possible to enjoy life as he had when he'd been possessing Pine Tree – but without all those annoying bodily functions and matters of health that had to be attended to? What if he could create a body worthy of housing his consciousness, one that could allow him to enjoy all the benefits of eating, drinking and fucking the human way without having to give up immortality and omnipotence? What if this could allow him to walk among his human slaves in disguise, filling them with incalculable dread that he might be listening to every word they said?

Thus had been born Project Joan Osborne, a secret project to develop and refine the perfect humanoid body, one in which Bill Cipher could interact with his servants on a new and terrifying level. It had been uphill work, and none of the faces he'd built had been to his liking at first, but he'd persevered, meticulously sculpting one feature at a time until he was satisfied with the output. Eventually, after centuries of nonlinear time, he finally had about fifteen prototype bodes ready to go, along with thirty more under construction: all of them were handsome, of course, but all in different ways and all paused at different stages of development – ready to be worn for different occasions like tailored suits.

Lately, though, these bodies had taken on a much greater importance in the wake of the Axolotl's attack on his kingdom: Axolotl had most likely been able to escape notice by hiding in the body of a human vessel, so what if Bill could do the same? What if he could escape whatever cataclysm was being brought down on his head by seeking refuge in the body of one of his clones?

Gleefully, he'd began preparing his masterpiece for deployment scant weeks ago.

And now all of them were ruined.

Every single cloning tube had been smashed to pieces, the bodies he'd worked so hard to create now slumped across the floor, cold, grey and dead in every single respect. Worse still, they couldn't be revived or even restored to a semblance of their former functionality, for whatever had killed them had sterilized their cellular structures so thoroughly that not even Weirdness could restore them to life. They were husks – totally useless for Bill's purposes.

Oh sure, he could start again easily enough, but he'd just be repeating the same century-long pattern of struggling to get his work refined to the point where he was totally satisfied with it. Worse still, he didn't have time for it anymore, not with the zodiac waging a guerrilla war on him and the Axolotl probably closing in for good measure.

But worst of all was the graffiti: as expected, THE PYRAMID IS FALLING was daubed on the wall in clone blood.

Below it, though, another message read IT DIDN'T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY, BILL.

This time, Bill couldn't scream. He couldn't even cry. He could only stare and stare and stare until the clone lab burst into flames and dissolved back into the fabric of unreality around him. And in the end, he was so enraged that he completely failed to notice that one of the clone bodies was not dead in its tube or slumped on the floor, but curiously missing…

"Well done, boys and girls!" Nyarlathotep cackled. "Well done indeed! Truly a show of blockbuster proportions: a spectacle to dazzle the eyes and delight the spirit, a masterclass of destruction, devastation and despair wreaked upon Bill's kingdom!" He laughed and clapped his hands. "So, what do we have planned next?"

There was a pause, as the zodiac shifted uncomfortably beneath Mr Carter's piercing gaze. They were still a little iffy about trusting him, but something about his unsettling presence and equally unnerving stare seemed to flick override systems in their brains.

"We're going after the high-profile prisoners next," said Dipper. "Up until now, we've been making sure that we don't set off too many alarm bells before we work out where they're being held and how to access them. Now, we know how to portal in and rescue the most important of Bill's captives without getting caught. Time Baby, Rumble McSkirmish, Blendin Blandin, the Time Paradox Avoidance Squad-"

"-and Grenda," Mabel added pointedly.

"After that… well, we've got maybe two or three Henchmaniacs left, so we've only got a couple more missions to go before we might be ready to take on Bill at the Fearamid."

"You don't think you're ready yet?"

"Hey, the Henchmaniacs are easy to deal with when they're alone," Mabel pointed out. "In groups, not so much. The less defences Bill has at the Fearamid, the better."

"Very well. And what are you working on over there, Ford?"

Ford was once again shaping a sphere of darkness in his hands, manipulating it like a Rubik's cube in his six-fingered hands. "The truth that Bill Cipher does not want to hear," he whispered. "The truth of entropy, the meaningless of resistance, the horror he cannot face: Dvriwmvhh rh vmgilkb, zmw vmgilkb rh gsv jfrmgvhhvmxv lu xszlh, nzwmvhh, wvzgs. Zoo gsrmth holdob drmw wldm rmgl vmgilkb: mlgsrmt ozhgh ulivevi. I must make him see this."

"Good, good! Everything is going splendidly!" Nyarlathotep sighed contentedly. "Things are coming very nicely to a boil, I'd say… and I feel more than comfortable in leaving these matters in your capable hands. Especially you, my little shoggoth," he added, playfully ruffling Dipper's hair.

As he vanished swiftly into the darkness of the Forge, Dipper could only stare at the Outer God's retreating back with a mixture of confusion and growing suspicion.

Little shoggoth?

What did that even mean? He'd heard Nyarlathotep use the word before, but what did it mean? And why did it fill Dipper's mind with dread?

A/N: Any guesses as to what's gonna happen next, folks? Feel free to furnish me with your theories and guesses!

The soundtrack for this chapter… well, there's only one song that could fit the subject matter. Yes, it's Rally And The Plagues from The Prince Of Egypt. A little on the nose, yes, but a helluva song!

And now for the code:

Rg hvvnh gsv girxphgvi'h kozbvw z tznv
Srh hvxivg'h rm z xvigzrm mznv
Xzm Hslttlgs gifhg lfi lmob uirvmw
Dsvm sv yilftsg srn gl gsv vmw?