All The World's A Toybox

by Straightjacketed

The movement to take back the Falls goes horribly wrong, and everyone has to suffer for it. And as Weirdmageddon spreads beyond Gravity Falls, Dipper, Mabel and a few other unfortunates have to face up to the awful reality of spending the rest of their lives as pawns in Bill Cipher's newest games.

44. Thanatophobia

A/N: Aaaaaaaaaaaaargh! Slightly out of my mind with adrenaline, ladies and gentlemen, because I have had a blast writing this chapter. I thank all of you who viewed, reviewed, favourited and followed the last release, and I hope you enjoy this chapter as well!

We are in the home stretch, people: get ready for madness.

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

Disclaimer: Gravity Falls is still not mine.

---

"Go, go, go! All hands to the breach! We need all airships on the ground and all militia troops ready on the double: this is not a drill, people, this is Normandy! Now LET'S GO!"

The inside of the Fearamid was a shambles, its once-proud hallways and chambers left in ruins: between the bombardment, the collision with the Forge and the arrival of every single ship left in the zodiac fleet, the imposing, palatial interior had been reduced to a dust-fogged mess of rubble, wreckage, and corpses. Every now and again, the building would tremble violently as more and more airships rumbled to a stop inside the wrecked hangar bay, sending fresh plumes of dust raining from the ceiling and showering the confused inhabitants with rubble.

As one, the descending fleet immediately began disgorging militiamen by the thousands, accompanied by several hundred rust thralls and a small but impressive auxiliary force of hovering gun platforms: any members of Bill's increasingly depleted army unlucky enough to be left out in the open were immediately cut down in a hail of sizzling energy bolts and explosive shells.

In the lead were Grenda, Candy, and a few hundred heavily-armed soldiers all dressed in McGucket's newly-finished powered armour, eight-foot-tall titans layered in gleaming black-and-purple shells, their gorilla-like arms bristling with missile launchers, flamethrowers, laser cannons, and anything else the Ruinous Toymaker had thought to add to this latest creation. Thundering through the ranks of the enemy defenders, the power-armoured battalion easily dismantled what little opposition remained, hammered their way through the fortified gates, and opened the way for the rest of the army to proceed.

Only once the last of the demons guarding the skies were defeated did the zodiac finally appear, and then only very briefly: all of them were gearing up for great fight of their lives, but the zodiac themselves had the most arduous job of all, and they had to move quickly in case Bill took the initiative and investigated the parade grounds.

In the few minutes they had, Dipper and Mabel took the stage before their army – the latter in her crown and the special war-sweater she'd knitted just for the occasion, the former still sporting the colossal wings he'd arrived upon.

"Right," said Mabel. "You know the plan, folks: you get rid of the runes while we keep Bill distracted. We all know you can do it – you've got the tools, you've got the talent, and you've got the command."

"As much as we'd like to take you all with us," Dipper admitted, "We've only got enough room on the team for a few other helpers: Grenda, Candy, Sev'ral Timez, and the Time Paradox Avoidance Squad have all volunteered, so we're in good hands."

(He'd decided well in advance not to mention Gideon's mother had insisted on tagging along as well; if it became known that one traumatized housewife was being allowed to join the diversion team, everyone would be volunteers.)

"We've all had our chance to shine," continued Mabel, "and now it's your turn, guys: we'll keep Bill off your backs while you save humanity. So let's get out there and be heroes!"

"We beat him once-"

"And we'll do it again!"

"NOW LET'S SHOW BILL WHAT THE HUMAN RACE IS MADE OF!"

There was a roar from the crowd: "THE PYRAMID FALLS!" they howled in exaltation. "THE PYRAMID FALLS!"

But somewhere among the congregation, a few insistent voices were bellowing "ALL HAIL THE ZODIAC!" And as their army marched triumphantly off down the corridor, Dipper couldn't decide if that last warcry made him feel better about the situation or even worse.

---

Not too far away, Tad Strange paused, listening for the distinctive melody of the OneSong as it rippled along the Pattern Web. His scouts had already detected the approach of the zodiac and their army, and it would have been trivial to deal with them… but the Weaver had given very strict orders.

So, as soon as the sound of marching feet began to rumble towards them, the drones slipped back into the shadows of the Pattern Web, cloistering themselves in an isolated corner of the Weaver's makeshift network to observe what would happen next.

As they did so, the rolling tide of Filth quivered as John's disembodied mind recognized the oncoming zodiac; he, too, had his orders and though he had more free will that any of the Weaver's drones, he was in the pocket of someone much scarier. Gathering the Filthy bodies under his command into a single lake of the black fluid, he poured himself through one of the many ragged tears in reality, leaving only a faint sickly residue on the stone floor behind him.

Across the Fearamid, any survivors of the other alien armies to assault Bill before the zodiac's arrival now slunk away, following orders few of them could explain, let alone understand.

And in an isolated corner of reality, a tall, swarthy man in fabrics red as sunset flame held his breath and watched in rapt silence, waiting to see how this latest drama would end. Everything he'd done in this dimension had been leading up to today of all days: here was his share of vicarious entertainment, here was the payoff for a long-running scheme, and here was a chance for a reward greater than any mortal could possibly imagine. All he had to do now was sit back and watch as the fireworks took flight.

"At last," he whispered. "Showtime."

---

Bill let off a string of Enochian expletives as the full scope of the damage became apparent: the Fearamid had looked bad enough on the outside, what with the Forge being crumpled against the side of it like the biggest barnacle in all creation.

On the inside, it was beyond repair. Compressed eons of creativity and cruelty had gone into sculpting his palace, and now it was little more than a few hundred miles of rubble and ruination: his priceless torture artworks had been smashed to pieces, the dungeons busted open, the slave pens open and empty, whole floors buried under ton after ton of shattered brickwork, the hallways fogged with ash and dust, the ceilings cracked and caving in. Plus, from what little he'd surveyed so far, there was no sign of where all the slaves had run off to.

On the upside, the runes hadn't been damaged in the impact, but so far, that looked to be the only blessing this debacle had in store.

By now almost frantic with desperation, Bill ordered 8-Ball and the Creature with Eighty-Eight Faces to keep watch over the throne room with all the demons, golems, and allied rust thralls they could muster, while he began a frenzied search of the Fearamid in the hope of heading the zodiac off at the pass before the cold reach the runes. He had little confidence in the remaining Henchmaniacs' ability to protect anything, but if nothing else, they would be able to buy him some time if the worst came to the worst.

For the longest time, he was too upset to concentrate on taking the next logical steps, and was quickly reduced to zooming back and forth across the now-deserted hangar, searching the deserted ships for any sign of the zodiac. About the only thing he found was that in all the confusion, he hadn't bothered to retrieve the bomb detonator from its hiding spot, leaving him without a hostage.

Bill was already making a beeline for the throne room in a flurry of chthonic obscenities – when he felt his backup phone suddenly buzzing to life: the silent alarm on McGucket had activated, alerting him to an escape from the Forge.

The zodiac were loose in the Fearamid, that much was obvious… but with McGucket's tracking chips now active and broadcasting, Bill knew at once where they were.

Shrieking with glee, he followed the pulsing signal down the corridor at high speed…

…totally oblivious to the fact that, in his excitement and haste, he'd once again forgotten about the detonator.

---

Some distance away, 8-Ball and the Creature with Eighty-Eight Faces waited anxiously outside the throne room: north, east and west of them, the corridor forked away for several thousand yards, most of it occupied by their ragtag army of demons and associated monsters. Behind them sat the throne room itself, its immensely thick doors locked and barred. With any luck, that would be enough to keep the zodiac out if the worst came to the worse.

For the moment, the two of them had little else to do but hope that Bill would meet the zodiac before either of them did; they'd been on the receiving end of the rebels' fury more than once, and they'd been around to see the trail of dead Henchmaniacs they'd left in their wake. After all that, neither of them were in the mood to tackle a full-frontal assault by the zodiac, even if Bill had given them an army to defend the runes with, and the fact that neither of them knew why any of this was happening didn't help.

They didn't understand why Bill had built the runes, who this Axolotl guy was, or even what he was doing loose in this reality; Bill had steadfastly refused to explain himself, his penchant for waxing messianic briefly drying up when the matter of the runes emerged. Come to think of it, they'd no idea why the zodiac had grown so powerful, either. All they knew was that the situation had gone pear-shaped, with all that they'd hoped for in this reality was now circling the plughole: their glorious, eternity-spanning party across time and space was officially FUBAR, and the only thing standing between them and a very painful death were the runes behind them.

Of course, it was anyone's guess as to who'd be inflicting the painful death if they failed, though that would probably depend on who'd get to them first: Bill or the zodiac. In the meantime, they could only hope that the stained-glass mural behind the throne couldn't be breached, because if any ships left outside managed to punch their way through the seventy-foot-thick glass and the forcefield reinforcing it, they'd be able to take out the runes in a matter of seconds.

And then, just as they were beginning to think they were going to wait all day, there was a bellow of alarm from the front ranks, and for a moment, 8-Ball readied himself for a tactical retreat. Then at last he saw what had appeared at the northern end of the corridor, and a thrill of relief ran through him.

It wasn't the zodiac at all, but their human army: frankly, you'd be hard-pressed to find a sorrier bunch of hominids outside the slave camps, because even with all the technology they were lugging around, they still looked utterly pathetic. Dressed in the same ragged scraps they'd worn since their days in the slave camps and shantytowns of the wasteland, the only thing distinguishing them from the average mob of snivelling human cowards was the blue body armour they wore beneath their tattered clothes and the crudely-painted banners daubed with the wheel of the zodiac. Even the sight of the weapons didn't much alarm 8-Ball: they'd only gotten the better of a Henchmaniac once, and that was because said Henchmaniac had been telepathically paralysed by the Gleeful brat – and even then, most of the damage that had killed him had been dealt by War's flaming sword and not the arcane energy rifles this militia were armed with.

True, the soldiers in powered armour looked as though they might give them some trouble, but they were barely a quarter of the zodiac's army, adding up to a few hundred hard targets in a sea of thousands of squishy little meatbags. The Henchmaniacs were stronger than any of them, and the hastily-assembled garrison under their command was bigger than the entire militia force put together. This would be almost criminally easy to deal with.

8-Ball was just about ready to give the order to attack, when scouts on the edges of their western flank sounded an alarm, and he looked up just in time to see another army marching down the corridor to his left. Though the Fearamid's lighting had been left dim and flickering in the wake of its collision with the Forge, even the most myopic of all the demons couldn't have failed to recognize the distinctive crimson shells of several thousand heavily-armed rust thralls, all of them flying the zodiac banner. And behind them, a small but impressive array of armoured vehicles, automated drones and other inventions fresh from the Ruinous Toymaker's workshop were rumbling into place, cannons aimed squarely at the Henchmaniacs.

Okay, thought 8-Ball. A little bit steeper than we were expecting, but nothing we can't deal with. These things were built to deal with jobs too boring for us, after all: they're just tin cans with a few guns, and that's it. As long as we've got an exit available and the advantage in numbers-

"Enemy forces to the east!" shrieked one of the scouts. "We have enemy forces advancing along the eastern corridor!"

Horror-stricken, 8-Ball slowly turned to the right: there, amassing at the far end of the corridor was… well, it wouldn't be fair to call it an army; it was just a rabble, an angry mob armed with shovels and lengths of chain. At first, 8-Ball thought they might be militiamen who hadn't been lucky enough to be outfitted with guns and body armour, but then he began recognizing familiar faces among the horde now advancing on them, and with a thrill of dread, he realized the truth.

This wasn't another branch of the zodiac's militia: this was the Fearamid's slave population, newly-escaped from their cages and ready for a fight. And they weren't just baseline human beings either: here was the freakshow that Kryptos had sculpted from the dregs of his servants, their flaccid tentacles and disfigured limbs clutching a brutal assortment of blades and crossbows; here were the branded unicorns, their wide eyes full of hate and their horns sharpened for a fight; here were the thousands of gnomes that Paci-Fire had used as footballs, now gathered into several furious-looking colossi of interconnected warriors; here were the Lilliputtians reduced to performing manicures to the Henchmaniacs so far from their beloved golf courses, now armed with a brutal-looking arsenal of custom-made nail-clippers; here were the towering Manotaurs, finally escaped from their tailoring duties and hungry for revenge against those who'd dared to make them patch up Pyronica's wardrobe. Even the Multi-Bear had broken out, every last one of its muzzles torn open, its teeth sharp and ready for a fight.

At the head of the army stood ex-Sherriff Blubs, riding on the back of a janitor's cart and armed to the teeth with everything he'd managed to salvage from the torture chambers. If there was any fear in those piggy little eyes of his, 8-Ball couldn't see it…

And even from here, it wasn't hard to see that between the slave rebellion, the rogue rust-thralls and the zodiac militia, Bill's garrison was not only surrounded but well and truly outnumbered.

"THE PYRAMID FALLS!" roared Blubs, and as one, all three armies repeated it. Then they charged, and all 8-Ball knew from then on was complete confusion.

---

"ALRIGHT!" Bill roared. "WHERE'S MY FAVOURITE TOYMAKER?"

There was a pause, as the zodiac steadfastly refused to show themselves.

"COME ON! YOU'VE MADE IT THIS FAR JUST TO SEE ME – COME ON OUT AND SAY HELLO! LET'S GET THIS PARTY STARTED!"

No response.

Clenching his fists in rage, he reviewed the area: he'd found himself in the lowest regions of the Fearamid, just a few floors from the very base of the building itself. Bill had originally built it as an observation deck for visiting dignitaries not important enough to view his atrocities from the comfort of his throne room, but as there were no dignitaries worthy of the name left on the planet, he'd bricked over the windows and converted it into a dumping ground for all the junk he couldn't be bothered to simply abandon in the wastelands; it would have been easy to just destroy them all with a wave of his hand, of course, but then he wouldn't have enjoyed the spectacle of terrified slaves hauling the wreckage away with the threat of death or worse speeding them along. Before long, the trash had spread to the floors above and below it too, until the lower levels of the Fearamid had been reduced to a morass of things nobody could give less of a damn about.

Smashed pool tables, broken slot machines, heaps upon heaps of half-melted rifles, disassembled dinosaur skeletons, dead slaves too boring to be resurrected and other playthings that hadn't survived the rough attentions of the Henchmaniacs had all been dumped down here and forgotten about. Unfortunately, the heaps of garbage made it a very effective hiding place… but so far, even with his vision sharpened to the point of seeing almost clean through the wall, Bill hadn't seen any of the zodiac yet.

And then, just as he was starting to wonder if he'd been lured off-course by a detached tracking chip, there was a deafening bang from somewhere behind him, and he turned around just in time for a barrage of energy fire to sear the skin off his face.

"THE PYRAMID FALLS!" chorused a series of voices.

Howling in pain, Bill managed to recover just in time to see a crowd of mangled-looking figures dressed the uniforms of the Time Paradox Avoidance Squad dashing out of sight. As if to add insult to injury, it was clear that Blendin Blandin was in the lead, gurgling incoherent warcries as he charged away.

It took barely a second for Bill to regenerate the scorched skin, but by then, Blendin and the Time Police had already vanished behind a heap of garbage, and not even the most thorough of searches could unveil them. Had they been teleported away? Had they stepped through a portal? No, Bill would have been able to sense and interdict their escape… unless, of course, the zodiac were powerful enough to stop him from doing so. Or perhaps they were hidden behind another one of Gideon's illusions; it was impossible to tell which was which, even with his senses.

With a snarl of frustration, he turned around to scour the other end of the room – and promptly intercepted a missile to the face. Flailing helplessly in confusion, he wheeled around in a wild arc as dozens upon dozens of warheads exploded against his angular body, each blast sending him spinning helplessly in mid-air. None of these explosions did any damage that couldn't be healed with a moment or two of concentration, but they certainly hurt – a lot.

After several seconds of bombardment, he finally managed to raise an arm to shield himself from the missiles just long enough to peer through the smoke: ahead, Grenda and Candy stood, dressed in suits of powered armour that could only have emerged from the Forge itself.

"THE PYRAMID FALLS!" they whooped.

Before Bill could retaliate, they were gone, propelled out of sight by booster-rockets built into the legs of each armour suit. By the time he had recovered enough to give chase, they had vanished.

This time, he knew for a fact that they were hidden by illusions: it simply wasn't possible for eight-foot-tall rocket-propelled combat exoskeletons to just disappear behind a heap of scrap metal without making enough noise to wake the dead in another dimension. Grenda and Candy were still here, still hidden by another one of Gideon's little tricks.

He summoned up a plume of flame in his right hand, ready to scorch the surrounding garbage pile with a few hundred thousand degrees of compressed heat; either the clowns could stay where they were and roast, or they could run for cover and be cut down.

So it came as something of a surprise when, just as he was about to open fire, the members of Sev'ral Timez suddenly appeared out of nowhere before of him, resplendent in their familiar costumes and unthreateningly attractive as ever. Though all of them were still sporting bandages from their time in his trophy collection, they were all still alive, upright, and clearly ready for a fight – or what passed as a fight in their tiny little minds. All told, this had to be about the least-intimidating thing the zodiac had thrown at him so far.

But just as Bill was about to laugh, he noticed that all of them were wearing microphone headsets… and attached to their belts were the speakers of what appeared to be a highly-sophisticated sonic amplification system. And before he could stop them, before he could launch the plume of flame in their direction, Sev'ral Timez opened their mouths, took a deep breath, and belted out the single loudest song in human history: "THE PYRAMID FALLS!"

Bill didn't hear much of the ensuing melody, given that his eardrums were too busy exploding to take in anything other than the first note, but he was dimly aware that almost every single blood vessel in his eye had simultaneously burst and his hat had started bleeding.

Once it was all over and done with and Bill's flesh had stopped trying to take its business elsewhere, Bill hastily peeled himself off the opposite wall, regenerated his burst eardrums and tried to take stock of the situation – but of course, Sev'ral Timez had predictably vanished.

Panting, Bill leaned against the wall as he struggled to regain his stamina, wondering what the hell was going to happen next.

And then a giant pig slammed into him.

A bellowing, roaring primeval mass of leathery grey skin, jagged hooves and bayonet-like tusks, it was the size of an SUV and probably weighed at least a few tonnes. With one charge, it flung Bill to the ground, its tusks ripping open his body and exposing several feet of internal organs as it raked him against the rough stone floor, trampling him into the dust.

Bill healed himself as quickly as possible and hovered upright in readiness for another attack. By then, however, the bloodcurdling roars of the monster had risen suddenly in pitch, suddenly reverting to the oinks of an ordinary pig. And by the time Bill had found the source of the noise, all that was left was Waddles trotting out of sight.

As an afterthought, Mabel's voice shouted, "WADDLES SAYS THE PYRAMID FALLS!"

Either this was another of Gideon's illusions… or Mabel had enough raw power to somehow send her pet pig back through evolutionary history to the form of its primeval ancestors – and back again in the space of a few seconds.

"Have fun while you can, Shooting Star," he snarled. "You can play around with your pet pig's evolution all you like, because no matter how much you want to, you'll never be able to use your powers against ME!"

"Oh really?" echoed the reply.

"We've proved that I'm strong enough to hold back the flow of time if turned against me! No matter what you'll do, you'll never be able to hurt me, even with your magic!"

"I know someone who can, though."

"And who's that?"

"The roof."

On instinct, Bill looked up – just in time for the ceiling, eroded by several centuries of accelerated time, to abruptly collapse on top of him, showering him with several tons of debris and layering his eyeball with dust for good measure.

"SON OF A WHORE!" he thundered.

From somewhere on the opposite side of the garbage pile, Bill heard the distinctive sounds of Mabel and several other amateur warriors laughing at him.

In that moment, Bill's fragile composure finally snapped: tired, bruised, barely-healed and arcing wildly between anger and terror, he suddenly found that he couldn't take another minute of this. "COME ON!" he howled. "ENOUGH OF THIS HIDE-AND-SEEK BULLSHIT! YOU WANT TO TAKE ME DOWN, YOU WON'T GET IT DONE WITH HIT-AND-RUN TACTICS, AND YOU WON'T GET IT DONE WITH SUBSTITUTES! COME OUT AND FACE ME! I'M RIGHT HERE! COME AND GET ME!"

And right on cue, Gideon appeared in the middle of the room.

The boy psychic was every bit as frail and emaciated as he'd been when Bill had last glimpsed his torture in action, a starved, sickness-ravaged shadow of the plump little con artist he'd once been. Since then, though, he'd lost what little remained of his hair, leaving almost shockingly bald; his favourite baby-blue suit was gone, replaced by a ragged grey smock that looked uncannily like a monk's habit; and there was something else about him that made him feel as though ice-cold hands were creeping along Bill's flesh, something that made his eye sting just to look at. He was shrouded in a haze of psychic energies, Bill realized, so saturated with telepathic puissance he seemed almost translucent with it – as if he'd become so powerful that his body was becoming redundant.

"Miss me?" he asked.

There was a pause, as Bill's rage and fear once again reached a crescendo.

"How?" he screamed. "HOW?! HOW ARE YOU SO POWERFUL!? WHO GAVE YOU THIS POWER? WHO HELPED YOU!?"

"Oh, just li'l ol' me," said Gideon with a wink.

Bill roared, and brought down all the fury of a thousand suns on the spot where Gideon was standing – but the little bastard was already gone. Either he'd hid himself with illusions and somehow ducked the titanic conflagration, or he'd never been there at all.

A moment later, Gideon reappeared on the opposite side of the room. Waving cheerfully, he then split into two, forming two identical Gideons; the doppelgangers smiled and bowed to each other, and then divided themselves again, forming two more illusory doubles. Then four, then eight, then sixteen, then…

"PACK IT IN, YOU IDIOT!" Bill shouted. "YOU WON'T BEAT ME WITH ILLUSIONS, AND I KNOW FOR A FACT THAT YOU'RE NOT POWERFUL ENOUGH TO CONTROL ME!"

"Maybe not," said the Gideon duplicates in perfect unison. "Or maybe I'm more powerful than you can possibly imagine. After all, I can already force stimuli directly into your brain, something that shouldn't even be possible on someone like you. Speaking of which, have you met my mom?"

Suddenly, Gideon was nowhere to be seen.

In his place stood a small, slightly-hunched looking woman with prematurely-greying hair, a slack-jawed expression and a thousand-yard stare. She was dressed in rags, and armed only with a mangled-looking lump of plastic that might have once been a vacuum-cleaner.

Not for the first time that day, Bill had the most peculiar sensation of having accidentally turned two pages at once. "What?" he muttered.

And then Bill felt the horrible alien touch of Gideon forcibly implanting someone else's thought processes directly into his brain, and before he could lash out, before he could bathe the room in fire, he found himself suddenly gripped by an impulse more powerful than any he'd ever felt in his entire life: it was stronger than the need to eat or sleep had been, back when he'd been a mortal inhabitant of the Second Dimension, greater than the need for stimulation and entertainment, more powerful even than the survival instinct. It was inexplicable, it was bewildering, and it was thoroughly nonsensical –and not in the fun way, either – but Bill found himself gripped by the unquenchable urge…

…to vacuum.

Unable to control himself, Bill poured raw weirdness into a new shape and sculpting a patch of reality into a giant vacuum cleaner, then began vigorously running it across the stone floor – all while muttering "just keep vacuuming, just keep vacuuming, just keep vacuuming, just keep vacuuming, just keep vacuuming, just keep vacuuming, just keep OH GOD STOOOOOOOOP!"

There was a nerve-jangling crash from somewhere nearby, and Bill managed to extract himself from thoughts of vacuuming just long enough to look up and get punched in the face by a semitrailer-sized fist made entirely of dead bodies.

Towering over him was a colossal mass of reanimated corpses, hundreds upon thousands of millions of them, a horde of the living dead sculpted into an almost-human shape. As Bill looked on in dawning terror, the necrotic mass dissolved, the zombies that composed it shuffling into a new shape at a speed that made his eye water: in less than five seconds flat, the entire army had reformed into a giant octopus of interconnected corpses and begun crushing Bill's body in its stinking tentacles.

Immediately, Bill retaliated, tearing through the tentacles with one almighty flex of Weirdness; sprouting several hundred additional arms, he hammered at the zombie octopus with all his meteoric might, blasting it apart into its component bodies. Again and again, he tore the multi-bodied construct to shreds of decomposing meat – but every time he smashed it to pieces, the scattered zombies reformed into a single mass once again, replacing any lost bodies with new carcasses gathered from the refuse heap. Bill roared in frustration and blasted the horde with a beam of white-hot magic from his eye, hoping it'd be enough to effectively salt the earth, but more zombies simply poured in through portals in the roof – and try as he might, Bill was still too distracted with thoughts of vacuuming to interdict them.

It was then that, as he swept aside another veil of living dead, Bill finally saw what was animating this monstrosity: at the very core of the zombie kraken's skull, upon a throne of undead flesh, sat Robbie Valentino.

Like Gideon, there wasn't much left of old Zits to call a human being: if the boy psychic had looked starved, Robbie looked dead, his body little more than a husk of mottled grey skin stretched taut over crooked bones. He was dressed all in black, his body draped in what looked almost like a burial shroud; his hair was long and filthy, his mouth open in a sickening grin to reveal blackened, rotten-looking teeth, and though his eyes were nothing more than empty, blackened sockets, there was no mistaking the hate in his expression.

And the longer Bill looked at him, the harder it was to tell Robbie apart from the other dead bodies under his command: his flesh seemed more rotten by the second, his face more anonymous, his body more decrepit… and to Bill's horror, the other zombies began to look like Robbie instead. Was this just another illusion… or was the Valentino brat so powerful that he could transfer his mind from corpse to corpse at will?

Was killing him even possible now?

Terror-stricken, Bill turned and fled… right into Soos's outstretched fist.

Dropping from above like a bomb from the rear doors of a Boeing superfortress, the fat handyman ploughed into him, pummelling Bill with a strength that belied his chubby human body. Leaping and bounding across the room, he hammered his outer shell with a devastating series of kicks and punches, none of them dealt with any kind of skill whatsoever – or indeed anything apart from raw, undiluted superhuman strength.

Not for the first time that day, Bill was left completely taken aback by the ferocity of the onslaught: he could tell that the enchantments he'd placed upon the Road had somehow bled onto Question Mark, but that couldn't explain why he was suddenly strong enough to crumple Bill's bones with a single punch. What had happened to the zodiac? Why had they grown so powerful? Why had the powers Bill had forced on them grown so potent?

Why did Soos smell of the grave? Why could Bill see all the deaths that had befallen him if he looked carefully enough? Why did his body now ripple with Weirdness-fuelled power? And most importantly, why was all this happening to Bill of all people?

In desperation, he lashed out with a beam of energy, and was immediately relieved to see the fat bastard explode spectacularly into electric-blue flames and collapse to the ground in a heap of rapidly-disintegrating bones. Unfortunately, Soos returned even quicker than expected, and actually tackled Bill to the ground before he could even get as far as the door – despite being barely a quarter of his size and mass.

Bellowing a string of hair-curling expletives, Bill hit him with another beam of destructive power; this time, it only set Question Mark's skin ablaze, and it took another hit to eradicate him entirely. Panting, Bill made for the door, only to be stopped by a plethora of obstacles: 1) Blendin and the Time Police shooting him, 2) Grenda and Candy shooting him, 3) Gideon forcing more unpleasant stimuli into his head, 4) Robbie smacking him across the face with a hand made entirely of zombies, and 5) Soos tackling him to the ground again.

This time, Soos didn't even flinch at being hit with the eye-beam.

"Dude, I can do that too!" he exclaimed cheerily, and by way of a demonstration, widened his eyes, furrowed his brow, and blasted Bill with a white-hot lance of energy.

Swearing and screaming at the top of his voice, Bill tried to flee again; he needed time and space to re-manoeuvre, to concentrate on a counterattack, and the aura of death surrounding Soos wasn't exactly doing wonders for his composure. But no sooner had he began picking up speed, something heavy and metallic landed on top of him and began digging razor-sharp appendages into his undefended back; Bill tried to throw him off, to shroud his body in flames, to clear away his attacker with a telekinetic nimbus, but the creature was already in motion again, soaring across the room on impossibly sophisticated jet engines to land in front of him – claws, blades and guns at the ready.

This time, there was no terror or bewilderment over the newest arrival's identity: it was Fiddleford McGucket, the Ruinous Toymaker in person. Nothing about him had changed – his body was still a gleaming cyborg masterpiece, a metallic fusion of lobster and centipede from the waist down and a gloriously monstrous integration of flesh and prosthesis from the hips up. He even had the same array of weapons he'd outfitted his new body with back when he'd been remade all those years of nonlinear time ago… except now they were all pointed directly at Bill. And that cheerfully amoral expression that Bill had liked so much now seemed ever-so-slightly terrifying now that it was aimed at him.

The Toymaker's guns spoke in unison, a devastating chorus of concentrated firepower that tore Bill's hardy physical shell to bloody shreds: automatic turrets, mortars, plasma cannons, flamethrowers, long-range laser cutters, shuriken catapults, hornet launchers, gas projectors, tesla coils, nitrogen sprayers, torpedo tubes, and everything else that McGucket had concealed within his capacious cyborg frame rain down on Bill from all angles. Worse still, thanks to Soos's eye beams, Gideon's telepathic interference, covering fire from Grenda, Candy and the Time Cops, sonic bombardment from Sev'ral Timez, and Robbie seizing Bill by the legs, Bill was left too debilitated to work out where the hell he was – much less retaliate.

It took Bill what felt like hours to recover his sense of equilibrium, but at long last, he took to his heels and blasted clean though the roof – making a beeline for the throne room.

Okay, he thought feverishly. I know what I'm doing now. They had me on the ropes for a while, god only knows how, but I'm okay: I just need a minute to catch my breath, get out of that corner and get into a wide open space where they can't gang up on me. Oh, and the bomb trigger! Yes, yes… as long as I've got that with me, I'll be just fine.

He was still thinking these words when Pine Tree struck him with the force of a derailing train and dragged him screaming to the ground.

"REVENGE!" Dipper roared, his body shifting wildly from human to shapeshifter and back again. His voice was all Shifty, though, a deep, booming bass that sounded all the more unnatural emerging from Pine Tree's mouth. "REVENGE!" he repeated, lashing at Bill's face with needle-sharp claws and flensing away a huge chunk of flesh.

Bill swatted him aside with a single swing of his gigantic arm, sending him hurtling towards the wall with bone-shattering force… but at the last minute, Shifty's body turned rubbery and compact, and he bounced off the brickwork in the form of a tennis ball, reforming back to his lumbering neutral shape in a matter of seconds.

"Is that all you've got?" he sneered.

There was a pause, as Earth's Lord and Master silently struggled to control the two emotions that had briefly hijacked his mind alongside all the talk vacuuming – namely fear and anger. In the end, anger won, but only just: "Alright, you little shit," Bill shrieked, "You wanna do this the old-fashioned way? You wanna make this a proper shapeshifter's duel? BRING IT ON!"

With one almighty wrench of his reality-warping powers, he twisted his shape into three dimensions and sculpted his new body into a levitating black ziggurat equipped with over a dozen arms, a lightning bolt in each spidery hand. Gliding past the lightning, Shifty bulged and expanded into a giant centipede with a head like a mallet and began smashing his way through Bill's masonry. Bill thudded to the ground, and as he did so, his substance softened and warped until he had become a wobbling gelatinous blob of tentacles studded in eyes, his blood-red jelly too tough for the centipede to hammer flat. Unfazed, Shifty shrank down, his insectoid features dissolving into countless dagger-like points until he had become a gleaming metallic sea-urchin – sharp enough to carve through Bill's jelly like a bullet through melting butter. Screaming in rage and pain, Bill's pulped mass gathered itself into a solid form again, extending upwards into a column of interlocking grey pyramids that began to spin, faster and faster until their razor-sharp edges threatened to scythe through Shifty. Without missing a beat, Shifty dissolved into a cloud of mist and poured himself upwards across the spinning body, up to its very apex – where he erupted into a mass of living flame and burrowed down though the pyramid column, melting stone wherever he touched it.

He's drinking Weirdness! Bill thought wildly as he tried to come up with a new form. He's actually fuelling his transformations with ambient Weirdness! How is this even possible? How could he have become so powerful without my permission? Why is this happening to me?!

With a panicked howl, Bill's body exploded with kinetic force, sending the Shapeshifter rocketing away at high speed. When he rose again, he was Dipper once more, and Bill had finally chosen his next shape: crimson with rage, his eye as black as obsidian, his new form towered over the little brat by several hundred feet and pulsated with energies that turned the stone floor beneath it cherry-red.

Faced with such a threat, Dipper backed away, and for a moment or so, Bill thought the tide had finally turned. But then Pine Tree's body became transparent and began to flatten, at once shrinking down to miniscule size and growing vaster than ever. Around him, the accumulated rubbish of the lower floors began to rattle and shake as tremors shook the Fearamid. Bill could only stare in confusion as Dipper's increasingly-abstract form rose higher and higher into the air, slowly changing, slowly becoming...

…a black hole.

Suddenly gripped by the full force of gravity, Bill wailed in blind terror, clawing helplessly at the walls in an effort to escape the void. In that moment, his mind was blank except for the overwhelming thoughts of the black hole that had been conjured against him in Stan's mind during his first visit, the blue flame that had erupted across the mindscape on his second visit, Stan's all-destroying fist looming closer and closer, and the darkness beyond.

But gravity could not be denied. Drawing Bill closer and closer, the black hole pressed down on him harder and harder, until the top of his head, now terrifying close to the singularity, twisted and warped and spaghettified until-

-his eyeball burst.

His socket, crumpled out of shape by the force of gravity, slammed shut on his eye and squeezed it like a tomato in a vice until at last it popped. And this time, Bill couldn't even scream in pain, only exasperation: "THE EYE!" he wailed. "THE EYE AGAIN?!"

In desperation, he summoned up all the reality-warping power he could muster, just enough to break gravity's hold on his body and send Dipper tumbling away, out of singularity form and back into neutral shape again.

It took several seconds for Bill to regenerate his eye, but it seemed that Pine Tree was still getting his breath back, so he at least had enough time to regain his sight. Once he was finished, though, Bill didn't even bother attempting a coup de grace: he was too tired, too scared and too thoroughly rattled by the inescapable thoughts of vacuuming and imminent death to do anything but run. He'd given up on trying to understand what was happening – all that mattered was getting to his throne and finding the detonator. As soon as he had an advantage he could use, he'd turn to face his attackers. But until then-

A bright light split the air, and a trio of blurs rocketed past his vision at roughly the speed of sound, leaving a muffled sonic boom in their wake that nearly burst Bill's eardrums again; a moment later, Bill felt a sharp pain in his midsection, and realized he'd just been sliced horizontally across the middle… and the wound appeared to be on fire.

Also, for some reason, he was two-dimensional again.

As he collapsed onto his back like a baseless cardboard cutout, his new attackers zeroed in on him: from his position, he recognized at least three of his Horsemen of the Apocalypse, all of them riding the horses prepared just for them and all armed with the gifts he had arranged for them. One by one they tore at him, with Mabel in the lead, Wendy in second, and Pacifica bringing up the rear as they bombarded him with their powers.

While Bill slowly forced himself upright, Mabel turned the full might of her powers against him: she might not be able to loosen his grip on his personal timeline, but she was definitely strong enough to knot time in all manner of unpleasant knots. All around him, chunks of the roof rained down on Bill's head as their support columns eroded away, windows shattered against his face as their frames briefly ceased to exist, and any projectiles flung in his direction accelerated to such a pace that even the smallest fleck of paint hit him like a hollow-point bullet. Plantlife took root in the ground beneath Bill, sprouting up to strangle him with hundreds of thorn-tipped vines and highly-aggressive creepers; inhaled seeds grew to full size inside his body within seconds, bloodied clumps of grass bursting out from under his skin; mushrooms erupted in clouds of stinging spores that reduced Bill to writhing fits of pain as several hundred species of parasitic fungus began colonizing his body, leaving him spitting lumps of cordyceps as he struggled to free himself from the infestation. In a rage, he split the sky with a hailstorm of lightning bolts, but no matter how carefully he aimed each bolt, Mabel simply wasn't there by the time it landed: either she'd sped herself past it, skipped through stopped time, or simply rewound the lightning back into the stormclouds.

Meanwhile, Wendy pelted him with wads of acidic saliva, raked his skin with metallic talons, sliced him open with her sword, and sent wild brushfires raging across his body. More than once, she leapt off the back of her horse and flung herself onto his back to stand astride his apex, stabbing him over and over again, plunging her sword ever deeper into any flesh that offered purchase and slowly roasting it to a crisp with all the hellfire contained within it. More than once, she bit him, tearing off huge chunks of meat off his bones with her sharklike teeth, chewing it up and spitting it back in his face. And from time to time, Bill saw her using powers even he couldn't remember giving her – at one point almost seeming to scuttle across his face like a spider with inhuman grace, and at another, breaking his fingers and shattering his wrists in a display of strength that should have been impossible even for her. In a frenzy of terror, Bill turned every element at his command against her, but Wendy was too swift and too tough: whatever she couldn't dodge, she simply soaked up and resumed her attack. At one point, Bill was so overwhelmed by his emotions that he went so far as to shroud himself in a colossal sphere of water, at once trying to extinguish the fires and drown Wendy… only to belatedly remember – as a gaping maw ripped his eyelid off – that one of the earliest presents he'd left for her had included gills.

And Pacifica was a living maelstrom of telekinetic force and sparking portal activity: around her, every stray object, every lump of garbage, every broken pinball machine, every collapsed blackjack table, every stuck roulette wheel, every corpse, every golf cart, everything became a missile launched squarely at Bill. And unlike Mabel, Pacifica could use her powers on Bill, a discovery that left him struggling to extract his head from the crater it had left in the opposite wall. As if to add insult to injury, she was also in the habit of batting away incoming energy blasts like a tennis champion, resulting in several large and unsightly holes in Bill's hat. As if that wasn't humiliating enough, ramptals portals sheared off his fingers and sliced through his limbs, opening up his body from the inside, and even allowing pyrokinetic blasts to hit him squarely in the back; more than once, Pacifica even used her portals to fold space, squishing Bill into two dimensions or destabilizing walls so that they collapsed on top of him… and by the time Bill had recovered enough to retaliate, she was already gone, vanished away into yet another portal.

Bill tried to convince himself that he was safe, that as long as he was infused with the power of the Nightmare Realm, nothing the zodiac did would matter: no matter how badly he was hurt, he could just keep regenerating and wait until his attackers finally ran out of steam. After all, they weren't inexhaustible, not like him – and most of this attack seemed based on shock and awe tactics anyway; they were just trying to intimidate him, trying to get him to drop his guard and do something stupid, ganging up on him so quickly and so brutally that he didn't have a chance to think about his next move. Surely he could withstand them if he only stood his ground.

Unfortunately, this was far easier said than done: even if he hadn't been smarting from the aftershocks of several hundred extremely painful injuries, even if his pride hadn't been pureed in a blender, even if the constant refrain of "just keep vacuuming" hadn't been drowning out coherent thought, the sight of his attackers was enough to silence even the most rational of his ideas.

Pacifica, dollike and almost too cute to be threatening, was shrouded in an aura that flooded Bill's head with a sense of overwhelming worthlessness, of starvation, poverty and sorrow. Just looking at her made him feel as though everything he'd ever owned had been stolen from him, and though Bill realized that this was clearly a psychic impact of the crown she wore, no amount of rationalization could get these impulses out of his head.

Wendy stank of blood and death, her body reeking with the scent of slaughter from a thousand different battlefields across history: mud, decay, molten metal, gunsmoke, napalm, mustard gas, and over it all, the metallic stench of blood. And the more he looked at her, Bill found his vision blurring and warping – until at last he saw that he wasn't being attacked by an individual, but by an army, a horde drawn from every single conflict to ever have occurred from the moment humanity had first invented war. Again, knowing that it was merely the spectre of Wendy's power playing havoc with his mind could not dispel the illusion… or his terror.

But worst of all was Mabel: looking up at her in disbelief, he saw the air around her seemingly crack and split into multiple facets, leaving her seen as if through a crystal… and every facet showed her differently: from one angle, she was herself, thirteen years old and far more confident than any human should be; from another, she was ancient, a hag of a thousand years or more, her skin as dry as parchment and her face twisted into a gargoyle's sneer; from another, she was an infant; from another, she was a corpse, decayed almost beyond recognition; from another, she was only a blur of possibilities as yet unborn, shifting wildly from one future form to the next. She wasn't just wielding time: she was Time itself, advancing on Bill… and bringing entropy with her.

Nor was she alone: all around her, the other zodiac were arriving on the scene, forcing their lone target into a corner. Bill took a deep breath he probably didn't really need, and drew himself up to his full-colossal height, inflating himself with bravado. Once again, he was vivid scarlet with rage, his eye pitch-black, his body ablaze with power. He was ready for them; he would show them who was really in charge of this dimension. He would show them all.

And it was in that moment, just as he was gathering his strength for a counterattack, that someone tapped him on the shoulder. Suddenly leaking bravado like a cracked mug, Bill turned and found himself staring into the glowing eyes of a face that had escaped from his worst nightmares.

"Miss me?" said Stan.

Bill had just enough time to let out a strangled yelp of terror before Stan's knuckle-dustered fist shot out at blinding speed and sent him hurtling through the wall behind him. Landing heavily in a pile of rubble, he struggled back into the air, but Stan was already hovering over him: the next haymaker caught Bill square in the apex, rocketing him across the room and into a heap of mouldy books.

"And the undefeated heavyweight champion of the world is back in business!" Stan cackled.

Flailing helplessly, Bill launched a few wild energy blasts in a frantic attempt to swat him out of the air, but Stan was flying too fast for even these hastily-targeted barrages to make contact.

"Can't hit what ain't there, lugnuts!"

A moment later, he'd grabbed Bill by the bow-tie and brought his head smashing down on his undefended eye with a concussion that left Bill embedded in the floor.

Bill groaned, and in desperation tried to signal his remaining forces for assistance – only for Stan to deliver a vicious kick to his side that catapulted Bill clean through the ceiling. Briefly too disoriented to concentrate on even the simple act of levitating, he soared upwards through at least three more ceilings before Stan abruptly materialized above him and brought his heel down hard on Bill's top-hatted point, sending him crashing back down to the lower levels.

He landed heavily in a pile of wrecked cars, all the breath knocked out of him – not that he really needed to breathe. He was dazed, bewildered, and even more disoriented than ever before (Gideon showed no signs of letting up either), but try as he might, he could barely manage to rise above three feet in the air. Punch-drunk, he collapsed back into the heap of debris.

"Get up!"

Stan's foot hammered down on Bill's undefended left foot, crushing it to paste and prompting a wail of undignified agony from its owner.

"Get up and look at me, ya one-eyed demon!"

Oh god, it's happening again!

Mind suddenly alive with recollections of blue flames and impossibly-powerful punches, Bill launched upright, hundreds of fists swinging wildly at Stan.

But every single punch was either blocked, dodged or countered: Stan was untouchable, a blurring hurricane of pugilistic fury, one moment ducking under an incoming fist, swatting the next attack aside a split second later, then knocking Bill flat with a right cross. Stan wasn't interested in playing fair or in playing nicely: quick jabs, headbutts, kneecapping, haymakers, eye-gouging, elbow-dropping, below the belt – whatever technique inflicted agony and suffering, Stan used it and did so gleefully, rejoicing in every crunch of bone and howl of pain.

"You thought you'd killed me, didn't ya?" Stan snarled.

A left hook sent Bill spinning away.

"You thought you'd beaten us for good, right?"

A rabbit punch caught Bill in the back, toppling him to the ground almost as soon as he tried to rise.

"But I've got news for you, pal…"

Bill had just enough time to realize that Stan had just grabbed him by the foot, before he found himself being flung the length of the room, ploughing headfirst into a heap of broken glass.

"You can't keep us Pines down forever. It'll take a helluva lot more than the end of the world to stop us, Cipher!"

There was a pause, and Bill had the distinct impression that Stan was grinning.

"You listening in there, or do I gotta repeat myself? I haven't even used half of my new powers yet, buddy."

In spite of himself, Bill actually managed to summon up enough stamina to claw his way out of the pile of glass. "And you won't," he snarled, gathering all the power he could muster. "You know why? BECAUSE I'M JUST GOING TO BLOW UP THIS HALF OF THE BUILDING!"

He raised his hands, now aglow with power, gathering enough force to punch through the stone walls and tear open the Fearamid like a tin can. He was past caring about his creation, past caring about protecting his work so far: all that mattered was eliminating the zodiac once and for all.

Seeing the alarmed expressions on the faces of the zodiac closing in on him, his confidence briefly rallied.

"LET'S SEE IF YOU CAN COME BACK FROM THIS!" he roared.

But just as he was about to unleash the energies, there was a muffled whistling sound from somewhere close by, and something faintly metallic sliced the air in two.

At first, Bill had no idea what had just happened: he could tell at once that he'd been hurt very badly because the lingering pain from the battle so far had skyrocketed, but looking down at himself, he couldn't find any wounds on his body.

And then his hands detached from his wrists in a spray of luminescent blood, still glowing with Weirdness even as they fell.

Howling in agony, Bill poured all his power into generating new hands from the ragged stumps, desperate to patch himself up before the zodiac could take advantage of his distraction. For some reason, healing himself took a lot more effort than it usually would: either he was too confused to focus on what he was doing… or they had a weapon that could nullify his ability to regenerate.

As new fingers began to slowly sprout from his bloodied wrists, Bill looked up at the zodiac, hoping that he could find their secret weapon and destroy it immediately. Instead, he found his eyes instantly drawn to the opposite end of the chamber, where a warped, inhuman voice was issuing from the gloom:

"We'll meet again… don't know where… don't know when… oh I'll know we'll meet again some sunny day…"

And then it emerged from the shadows.

The creature now gliding free of the darkness was still vaguely recognizable as Stanford Pines, in the sense that it had a full complement of human limbs, a somewhat distinctive face and the sixth additional digit on each hand; it was even dressed in the black cloak of the Fourth Horsemen and armed with Death's great scythe, just as he'd intended (though he obviously hadn't been intending it to be still dripping with Bill's blood).

Any resemblance to Fordsie ended there. Bill had meant him to be intimidating once he'd claimed the mantle of the Fourth Horseman, yes, but not like this! He was supposed to be frightening to humans, not to everyone! He wasn't supposed to have that awful expression on his face, wasn't supposed to have those horrible eyes…

Bill's intended design for Ford as Death had been very specific, incorporating elements from the Grim Reaper myth celebrated and feared throughout human culture from the Dark Ages onwards, along with a few things borrowed from psychopomps he'd seen across the multiverse. His version of the Reaper wasn't supposed to have skin or eyes at all, just an expressionless face woven elegantly onto a skull with only empty sockets behind the eyelids; Bill had wanted people to see that aged countenance under the hood and feel a tiny bit of relief that this ominous stranger at least had a face they could talk to… only for their relief to turn to horror as the cloak parted, and revealed that Ford was nothing but an animated skeleton wearing a mask of human skin. At least, that was how it should have gone.

Little of his original blueprint remained: Stanford Pines had become something quite unlike what Bill had intended.

Unlike the design, Ford had skin – withered, pale and diseased-looking as it was. Bone had fused with flesh, layering it on the outside of his body in some places, leaving him with monstrous armour-plated arms terminating in clawlike fingers. It looked nightmarishly wrong, even to Bill.

Also in defiance of concept, Ford still had eyes… if you could call them that. When those pale eyelids slid open, Bill found himself staring into pitch-black orbs dotted with dying stars and decaying galaxies, eyes that seemed to see right through him as Ford approached. Try as he might, Bill could not meet that hellish gaze, not without immediately being consumed by terrifying recollections of the memory gun's flames bearing down on him, of Stan's fist hurtling towards him.

And Ford's power… those awful screaming faces that writhed beneath his coat, the ice-cold shroud that followed him into the room, the rippling aura of nightmares that billowed and oozed across the chamber…

The Fourth Horseman had been meant to remind humanity of death; it hadn't been meant to remind Bill of his death, but somehow it did. It had never been meant to be a rival to his own earthly power, but for some reason, it was. How could his perfect design have gone so very, very wrong? Was this unconscious self-sabotage? Had Bill been doomed from the very beginning?

"Hello, Bill," said Ford, his voice a rasping, sepulchral whisper. "It's been too long. Things have certainly changed in the last few months, haven't they?"

Bill realized with a thrill of embarrassment that he was beginning to instinctively shrink, his physical form growing smaller and smaller as Ford drew steadily closer: already, he'd gone from the size of a six-story building to roughly the same height as Wendy, and he was getting steadily smaller as his terror grew. He blushed, and tried to make it look as though he'd meant to shrink all along, but he could tell from the smirks on the faces of the zodiac that it wasn't doing any good. He hadn't involuntarily changed form in eons, not since he'd first seized control of the Nightmare Realm, and seeing unintended shrinkage now with his age and mastery was almost unthinkable… and yet here he was, shrinking down to four feet tall because he couldn't keep his fear in check.

"What…" Bill swallowed hard. "What are you?"

"Exactly what you intended. I am your creation. I am the Fourth Horseman. I am Death."

"But… b-but… you weren't supposed to be… I thought you'd be-"

"I know, it's shocking. When last we met, there was almost no basis for comparison between us. I was a child in the shadow of a giant… but now I've changed. Now the giant no longer seems so tall… and the child casts a shadow that devours all before it."

In that moment, Bill's terror briefly peaked; suddenly oblivious to anything except the bomb trigger, he turned and fled at full speed towards the gates, hoping against hope that he could make it to the throne room before anyone could do anything unspeakable to him. He'd barely travelled five feet when a bolt of telekinetic force struck him full in the back and sent him crashing to the ground.

"Where are you going in such a hurry? You really should take better care of yourself, Bill. Here, let me help you up…"

Ford's silhouette blurred and oozed, forming shapes that carved unpleasant designs on Bill's brain and brought forth all the fears he'd tried so hard to banish from his mind. A moment later, a wave of searing darkness swept across the room, a mass of shadows shaped into screaming, sharp-fanged mouths. Bill tried to float away, but the black tide moved too quickly to be evaded; by the time he was halfway to the door, the shadows had already caught up with him. In less than a second of white-hot agony, he was tossed aside so violently that he found himself flung against one of the broken-down slot machines, crumpling it like an empty can of soda and spraying its contents far and wide..

Bill rose, disoriented, spitting coins, his arms and legs livid with burns from where the shadows had touched him; in desperation, he flung the world-destroying fire of a supernova at the advancing monstrosity, only for Ford to slice the oncoming blast in half with one swing of his scythe, dispersing the dwindling remnants with a wave of his hand.

"Pointless, Bill. You wanted me to reap stars, remember?" Ford shook his head disapprovingly. "What makes you think you're any different from them? What protects you from the entropy that governs the stars?" He leaned forward, his eyes aglow with dying constellations. "What makes you think you're exempt from the reaper's list?" he purred menacingly.

This time, Bill could only cringe in horror and slowly back away as Sixer slowly advanced on him.

"Why so shy? This was what you hoped for all along: you wanted your chosen few to discard their humanity, and we have. You wanted me to accept your offer to ascend, and I have. You wanted to create the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, elevate them beyond the human norm and empower them with the strength of demigods, and thus we are. Your masterpiece stands before you, a greater success than you could ever have hoped for. I am as you wanted me to be: one of the Henchmaniacs, all-powerful, greater than anything I'd imagined. So why aren't you happy?"

Bill floundered for a moment, finally rallying as he realized he knew exactly what to do next. If he couldn't reach the throne, the runes and the detonator, he had one last trick up his sleeve. He'd been keeping it in reserve for a while, now, ever since he'd arrived in this dimension, but he'd never thought to use it until now: he'd always been saving it for a rainy day, loaded and ready to fire just in case Shooting Star ever got too rebellious for her own good. Well, the rains were here and had brought the hail with them; it was either now or literally never.

"Well, there's actually a real good reason for that, Sixer," he began, trying to make himself sound concerned rather than terrified. "I mean, you've made it this far and none of you know you've got a traitor in your midst!"

Some of the faces around him furrowed in confusion, but Ford's face remained as impassive as ever. "Oh really?" he whispered. "Do tell."

"Come on, Sixer, think!" Bill's voice was stronger now, a bit of the old iron returning to his voice as his speech continued; he was on familiar ground again – all he had to do was keep the audience listening until he had them hooked."You and Pine Tree had just survived a UFO crash! After everything you'd been through that day, do you really believe that the Rift was just gonna break by accident? No, it was broken deliberately – by someone you thought you could trust, someone all of you looked up to, someone who betrayed you all!"

With a dramatic flourish, he turned and pointed in Mabel's direction, and a thrill of delight ran through him as he saw the little brat's expression freeze in horror.

"She gave me the Rift!" he cackled. "She gave me the key to enter this world and doomed you all to an eternity of suffering, just so she could have just a little more summer! Seriously why do you think I gave her a paradise when everyone else ended up in hell on earth? We were simpatico, Mabel and I: I wanted to make this world a happier place, and all she wanted to put time on pause because she didn't want her happiness to end! You're here looking for revenge? Fine! But if you want to punish someone who really deserves it, just look at the traitor you've been dragging along with you – and realize that she's responsible for everything that happened to you!"

There was a pause.

Then Dipper began to laugh. "Is that it?" he asked. "Is that really all you've got to say, Bill?"

"Wha-"

"I've known about that for months: Mabel told me all about it when I was still the Shapeshifter."

"Same here," added Wendy with a smirk. "I was there when it happened."

"Ditto," said Gideon.

"And your friend Pyronica told me about it back in Endless Summer," Pacifica chimed in. "She was trying to break us apart as well: it didn't work then, and it won't work now."

Bill floundered, the confidence he'd recovered slowly seeping away like air from a punctured balloon. He looked around for some sign that people might be turning on Mabel – but to his disbelief, people were actually rallying to her side. Grenda had a hand on her shoulder, for crying out loud.

"Oh come on!" he shrieked. "You can't all know the truth! I mean… you just can't! I mean… I saw how Mabel got when I brought it up! She can't have told everyone about it!"

"No," said Stan, ashen-faced and angrier than ever. "She didn't tell me or the others. But it doesn't matter."

"Doesn't matter? What?!"

"She saved us, you idiot!" Grenda boomed. "You think you could just make us forget that?"

Candy nodded in concurrence. "You put us in prisons, and she rescued us from them!"

"And so what if she screwed up?" added Robbie. "That only happened because of you."

Gideon laughed. "Funny thing, Bill: you didn't mention that you were possessing Blendin Blandin at the time. I mean, it's really hard to buy the moral posturing angle when this supposed alliance only happened because she thought you were someone else."

McGucket, clearly not remembering enough to be outraged, shrugged and nodded in tentative agreement.

Desperate for some kind of response in his favour, Bill looked over at Soos, hoping against hope to find a hint of anger and betrayal in his eyes. But to his utter astonishment, the handyman only yawned.

"No offence, dude," he said at last, "But I kinda stopped listening the moment you started trying to make me think there was someone worse than you."

"But-"

"Give it up, Bill," said Stan. "You tricked her, just like you tricked my brother, just like you tricked Dipper, just like everyone else you've done business with for every year of your worthless life."

Stan's voice was deathly quiet, but even Bill couldn't keep himself from shrinking backwards at the sheer hate in that glacial whisper.

"You're a con artist, Bill, a loan-sharking rat from hell: you show up when people are at their lowest, you offer them what they think they think they need, and then you screw them over from beginning to end. You cornered my niece when she was alone and miserable, you made yourself look like someone she could trust, and you convinced her to make a deal without giving her the real terms. And now… after you've tortured her and made her life a living hell for god only knows how many months or years it's been… you're trying to make her foot the bill for everything you've done?"

Bill turned to the one option he had left: "Fordsie, please, just try and make them understand! You can't tell me you're not angry about this: Shooting Star ruined everything for you! Without her, you'd have been happy – you'd be exploring mysteries with Pine Tree as an apprentice until the day you died! She spoiled all of it! You can't just forgive her! She-"

"Was only in that position because of my thoughtlessness," Ford finished. "I've known all about Mabel's troubles for a long time, Bill – from the moment I ascended, in fact. There's nothing for me to forgive: Mabel made a mistake. Nothing more, nothing less. So once again, the only one to blame for this is you and you alone."

He took a step forward, the bottom dropping out of Bill's stomach as he did so.

"I… you don't have to get any closer, Fordsie… I mean, I can see you're clearly angry, but-"

"What makes you think I'm angry? I'm not angry, Bill. I'm not sure if I'll ever be able feel that way ever again: the gift your little game bestowed upon me has ruined so much of my brain, left so many thoughts and memories and feelings consigned to oblivion. I can barely remember what rage feels like. Hatred is… a phantom itch. Bitterness nothing more than an echo of amputation. Jealousy is vagueness and little else. I'm not angry with you, Bill." A horrible smile spread across Grunkle Ford's pallid face. "As a matter of fact, I don't think I've been happier in my entire life."

Bill was in a blind panic now, his heart hammering at a speed that would have been fatal to mortals, his angular brow awash with cold sweat. In that moment, he wanted to launch another attack, to see if he could erase Ford from existence with enough effort and energy, but he couldn't muster up the will to do so: every time he tried, the sight of his one-time partner slicing his best shot in half sprang unbidden into his head – followed by a glut of other images he'd tried so hard to repress – and his confidence wilted at the thought.

"F-Ford," he whimpered, "please, don't do this… we're friends, remember? We've been friends for thirty years!"

"Friends?" echoed Ford.

"Yes!" Bill almost screamed. "Friends! I mean, who else but a friend would have helped you the way I did? I mean, your confidence was at rock bottom when we first met! I gave you the answer you'd been looking for: I gave you a purpose in life! You'd have killed yourself years ago if I hadn't helped your little theory along – I saved you! And as for McGucket, well, you can't say he didn't know the risks – play with matches and you'll get burned, right? If you think about it, it was his fault! Sure, things got a little tense out there in the multiverse, but can you blame me for being a little angry with you for reneging on our partnership? A-a-a-and everything that's happened since the rift opened, I mean, you can't tell me that you didn't secretly want that to happen! I got Shooting Star out of your hair for a while, I revealed the supernatural to everyone in town, and I got rid of your idiot brother for you! Don't pretend you didn't want that to happen! Those weren't real tears, Fordsie, those were just social reflexes, nothing to do with the real you… and that's what everything that happened afterwards was about! You read my note! I was only trying to bring out the real you!"

Frantic, he turned to the others, trying desperately to edge around to the door as he addressed them. "The same goes for all of you!" he shrieked. "I was trying to make you better people! I was doing you all a favour! Can't you see that?!"

In the back of his head, the lone voice of reason left in Bill's brain was insisting that he was panicking over absolutely nothing, that however powerful the zodiac were, they still weren't as powerful as him. Right now, they were bluffing for all they were worth, inflating their power through illusions and trickery: the only reason why Bill was being kicked around so easily was because he'd let them intimidate him – after all, it wasn't as if he was shrinking because he was weak, was it?

No, he was letting his fear control him. If he just fought back without hesitation, he'd see that they were still miles away from his level of power, that all of them could be destroyed if he just had the will and the courage to act.

But that was the logical perspective, and right now, Bill was too scared to even think about being logical – not that he had much occasion to do so at the best of times. At that very moment, Bill's mind was hijacked by a nightmarish collage of nerve-crumpling stimuli repeating endlessly across the inside of his skull: the thought of vacuuming becoming the only thing between him and doom, Dipper's black hole, the sight of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Ford's all-consuming darkness creeping closer and closer, Stan's fist shattering him out of existence, the blue flames rising through the room to lick greedily at his defenceless body, and that terrible moment when all he knew was infinite nothingness. And as his terror grew, he found himself carrying on his little speech even as he tried to edge towards his throne, at first merely trying to buy enough time to find a gap in the zodiac's circle so he could escape to the throne room; but as they closed in, he found himself pouring and more energy into placating them in any way he could, no matter how little sense it made – until at last it was all he could think about.

"Think about it! Just think about it!" he continued desperately. "You're all so much better off than you were before you met me! Question Mark, you were a loser who could barely tie his shoes without Fez's approval; now you're the Handyman of the Apocalypse! Gideon, you've got more followers than you could have ever dreamed of, and the kind of superpowers you'd have killed for back in Gravity Falls! And what about you, Zits? What would you have been without me? Another angsty teen! Now you're a necromancer – because I gave you that power! Red, you didn't have a chance of surviving the wastelands; the only reason you're even alive right now is because I left those gifts for you to find! Uh… Llama Girl, you're in charge of the family now – you'd still be at the beck and call of the bell if I hadn't kicked your dad off the throne! You ever think of that? Toymaker, you were an embarrassment to everyone who ever knew you: your wife hated you, your son couldn't stand your face, your best friend forgot about you, and the town had you declared a laughingstock! I got rid of all the hurtful memories you rediscovered, and made you a respected part of my empire! Shooting Star, I gave you a paradise! Remember? I took steps to make sure you'd have the will to be stronger! And Shifty-"

"My name is Dipper," said the Shapeshifter icily.

"You wouldn't even exist as you are right now if it weren't for me! You'd still be an ordinary human, no confidence, no powers, no real prospects in life; I gave you strength, I gave you something worthwhile to live for, I even gave you a better past! And Fez, I, um… well, you obviously made it out of the Museum – so if you think about it, I helped you overcome all those childhood traumas! You wouldn't have ever seen your brother again if it wasn't for me! You'd be dead by now! You'd be rotting in a shallow grave outside that motel! You owe me! All of you! You owe me everything!"

He'd meant it to sound imperious, but with his fear having peaked, it sounded whiney and pathetic more than anything else.

Worse still, the zodiac weren't even reacting to it: he'd hoped some of them might have been confused or angry enough to step out of line and give him an opening, but right now, their expressions were cold and unresponsive: not a trace of anger could be found in any one of the unsympathetic eyes that stared back at him. He was nothing to these people, Bill realized with a thrill of horror; not a hated enemy, not a menace to the human race, not even an opponent, just an annoyance. A minor obstacle on the road to power, an insect underfoot.

"And believe it or not, we're grateful for everything you've done," said Ford, smiling with all the sincerity of a fleshless skull. "In fact, we have a gift for you, Bill."

"Really?" Bill laughed nervously, a ghost of his old cackle.

"Yes. You see, my transformation taught me much: my sight has shown me the answers to mysteries that even you could not reveal. You were my muse for many years, Bill, my teacher in every way that mattered… and now that my knowledge has surpassed yours, I will now be a teacher to you."

He held out a stark-white hand: nestled in his palm was a sphere of swirling inky-black nothingness, darker even than Ford's eyes, which at least had the light of a few million dying stars to illuminate them. The shape in his hand, however, gave off no kind of light whatsoever; in fact, the more Bill looked at it, the more it looked like a hole cut in the world to reveal the unending emptiness beyond.

"This is your gift, Bill, your lesson. Stanley and I built it just for you, to help you understand the great truth that I have seen."

"But…" Bill's breath caught in his throat. The sight of that yawning abyss in Ford's hand was bringing up more unpleasant memories, and it took all his remaining self-control to force them back down again long enough to continue speaking. "What is it?"

"It's your destiny, Bill. It's what you've yearned for and strived for all these eons, the goal you've desperately hoped to achieve without ever knowing it. It's a tragedy wrought in dead universes, decaying realities and heedless ambition. It's everything that's been staring you in the face from the moment you stepped into the Nightmare Realm, and everything you've overlooked since then. It is inevitability, Bill. It is the end. Come closer, and I'll show you your future. Listen, and I'll tell you the truth you don't want to hear."

As one, Stan and Ford took a step towards him… and in that moment, Bill's composure cracked noisily. Suddenly, the tide of raw terror he'd been just barely holding at bay for the past few minutes overflowed: all he could think of was the nothingness, the void that threatened to consume him, the shadows looming closer, the fires distorting his being even as they erased him, the fist looming closer and closer, his body shattering into oblivion. And compressed into every second was his own last terrified scream, echoing across his mind over and over again.

They're going to kill me! He thought helplessly. They killed me before and they're going to do it again! And I can't do anything about it and I tried to kill the idiot but he came back stronger and I tried to make Sixer just like me but he came back even worse and I can't do anything about it and this shouldn't have happened and I did everything right I DID EVEYTHING RIGHT-

"Screw it," Bill whimpered, and with that, he fled in the only direction the zodiac hadn't covered – downwards.

Travelling vertically at thrice the speed of dark, he punched clean through the floor, through the next fifteen floors after that, through the Fearamid's base, into the bowels of the earth and out the opposite side of the planet, headed straight for Earth's tattered ionosphere.

He didn't care about stopping the zodiac from destroying the runes anymore; he didn't care about the Fearamid that he'd worked so hard to build; he didn't care that he was abandoning his dominion; he didn't even care that his dream of making this reality into a never-ending party had failed, or that he'd have to start all over again in another dimension. All that mattered was getting the hell out of dodge before the zodiac decided to follow him, and nothing he'd seen so far indicated that they couldn't.

Soaring into space, he burned a path across the solar system, bypassing the warped remnants of Mars, Neptune and the Sun, before punching through the candy-coated shell of strychnine and bursting into the curdled ruins of the Milky Way galaxy, then out, out into the wider reaches of universal deep space… until at last, the dimensional barrier neared.

He wasn't going back to the Nightmare Realm, not in a billion years. He was going to pastures greener and hoping that the zodiac wouldn't be able to follow him. With one almighty flex of his powers, he tore another rift in the fabric of the dimensional barrier, and flung himself out into the multiverse.

Safe at last.

---

Back down in the Fearamid, the zodiac finally relaxed and began the slow process of collapsing to the ground. For a while, they could only pant in exhaustion, overwhelmed by the sheer scale of what they'd just accomplished.

Then Grunkle Ford took a deep breath, and shuddered dramatically. "Ow," he said. "R uvvo z orggov nliv orpv wvzgs gszm fhfzo. That took a lot out of me. Just as well Bill ran when he did: I don't know how much longer I could have remained lucid without screaming."

Grunkle Stan looked him up and down with undisguised concern. "It really hurt that much?" he asked.

"Almost as much as that time I tried to explain quantum physics to Crampelter. If there was ever an occasion where human brains required a trapdoor and a parachute…"

The expression froze on Stan's face. Very slowly, he began to shake with silent laughter, his entire body quivering with the effort of holding back his mirth, until at last he could restrain it no longer: with a rhinoceros-like snort, he crashed against the nearest pillar and fell to the ground, chuckling like a lunatic. And before long, most of the zodiac had joined in – not because they'd found the statement particularly funny, but because their relief was beginning to give way to hilarity as they slowly realized what they'd just done.

Bill was gone, and they were responsible.

"He bought it!" Robbie whooped, left spread-eagled on the ground by a helpless attack of the giggles. "He actually bought it!"

"And the others haven't even finished blowing up the runes yet!" cackled Mabel.

There was a pause, and then Gideon began to laugh even harder. "They haven't even started!" he howled.

"You're kidding."

"No, really! They haven't even triggered the first detonation yet!"

Everyone fell about laughing: somehow, they'd done even better than they could have possibly imagined. The goal had been to keep Bill distracted while they blew up the runes, and none of them had truly expected the triangular nutjob to remain intimidated for very long; they'd all been bracing themselves for the moment when Bill had finally spotted the trick and gone racing back to the throne room, forcing them into a desperate time-wasting battle to keep him from making his way back to the runes before the rest of the army was finished.

But instead, he'd not only failed to see through the ruse, but he'd actually fled – and in record time, too.

Eventually, Soos managed to stop guffawing long enough to ask, "So now what do we do now, dudes?"

Mabel shrugged. "I guess we destroy the runes. If this Axolotl guy can help, why not bring him in?"

"Besides," Dipper added, "We don't know if Bill's going to stay fooled forever: once he's had time to settle down and think, he could be right back here in a few minutes."

"Or he could just keep running," said Wendy. "I wish we'd followed him when we'd had the chance, because we'll never be able to catch up with him now. If he doesn't stop, we'll probably never see him again."

There was a dull, hollow growling sound like the erosion of mountains and the grinding of tectonic plates: Grunkle Ford was laughing, his face split open in a monstrous grin.

"Oh, we will," he chortled. "We will. If Bill's running, there's only one place he'll run to… and the way has been prepared. He'll run there… and he'll run right back to us. He has no idea what awaits him!" He laughed hideously. "Ls Qsvhvoyizfn, R xlfow prhh blf, blf'iv hl xolhv! To the runes, the runes! We'll have a surprise prepared for Bill when he returns!"

---

A/N: Any guesses on what'll happen next? Any translations to offer? Feel free to have your say!

The soundtrack for this chapter is The Last Stand (from Farscape!) by Guy Gross.

Up next, the Grand Finale!

Gsv yvoo szh gloovw, gsv vmw rh mvzi
Zmw zoo gsv nlmhgvih jfzpv rm uvzi
Yroo szw gsv xszmxv gl hsrip srh xirnv
Gsviv'h ml vhxzkrmt qfhgrxv gsrh grnv