A/N: Aaargh! Sorry I'm late: work caught up with me in the last week or so, and I needed to focus on everything else under the sun for a little while. But, at last I return bearing gifts: the latest chapter - on the home stretch, thundering towards the finish line!

So, no more delays: without further ado, the latest chapter! Read, review and above all, enjoy!

Disclaimer: Gravity Falls and all the other fandoms referenced are not mine. Rest assured, they will be mentioned in the end credits to this story.

Oh, and Ozymandias is not mine either. See the end code for more.

Bill breathed a sigh of relief as the interdimensional barrier finally began to recede into the distance behind him, his body slowly growing back to normal size as his confidence returned. At last, he was safe.

Out here, there was nothing that could hurt him, nothing that could frighten him – nothing much of anything, really. The spaces between realities were largely vacant except for the occasional interdimensional construct like the Neitherlands or the Star Fissure… and, of course, for the Nightmare Realm. But over the course of the last few eons of nonlinear time, Bill had poured so much of his former home into the merger that there was precious little of it left to fill the void. As such, the space he now occupied was empty, a hazy grey nothingness that stretched ever onwards into infinity; this was the substrata of the multiverse, the unending cosmic firmament from which all worlds had been formed, could be formed and would be formed.

Or, as he now thought of it, a nice quiet corner to take a deep breath and think.

Now all he needed to do was to figure out where to go next; even if the zodiac weren't able to follow him, even if they hadn't been faking the sheer scale of their abilities, he'd have to make a decision sooner or later. After all, the nothingness between worlds was perfectly safe, but that was exactly what made it boring as well.

Perhaps he'd head for the Galaxy Far, Far Away. He knew for a fact that none of its inhabitants had encountered anything like him; ever since it had started shedding parts of its timeline, anything remotely eldritch was now consigned to one of its offshoots, leaving the main reality ripe for the taking. Or maybe an evening at Milliways would cheer him up; after all, even if the music grated and the food didn't hit the spot, the sight of a universe collapsing in on itself would be a welcome sight. Or perhaps-

Something blue whizzed past Bill's head.

Bill looked around the void in confusion, scanning the surrounding area for any sign of whatever had just divebombed him. To his annoyance, it was moving much too fast for him to get a bead on.

Another faint blue shape blurred past him.

This time, Bill got a closer look at it as it rocketed across the horizon, and saw that it was actually significantly smaller than his current size, no bigger than a gnat by comparison. Besides, his physical form was shrouded by his own self-sustaining bubble of Weirdness – true, it wasn't all that impressive compared to the power he'd wielded back in his dominion, but it was more than enough to protect him from any puny void traveller.

Well and truly assured that the shape was harmless, he went back to puzzling over his next port of call; maybe Eccentrica Gallubits would be at the restaurant, and with her, a chance to finally settle the long-running debate over the span of her erogenous zones.

Yet another blue blur skidded in and out of Bill's peripheral vision, this one doing a loop-de-loop around his head as it departed. Three of them now? Bill wondered to himself. Either something's buzzing me so fast it's actually started lapping itself, or there's three of the damn things out here. Question is, what-

Something huge and heavy slammed into the back of Bill's head, sending him tumbling away. Groaning in pain, he slowly wrenched the offending object off his midsection, and saw that the thing that had struck him was an asteroid: about five hundred feet across, it was studded with an unpleasant array of jagged-tipped crystalline geodes, all of which were now coated with his blood.

There was a shriek of microphone feedback from overhead, and Bill looked up to see that one of the blue shapes was now hovering directly above him: it was a tall, narrow wooden box, painted blue, with the words "police public call box" emblazoned above the doors. After the Aleister Crowley debacle, Bill hadn't paid much attention to Britain and couldn't have cared less for anything with the words "police" in its title, but after his centuries spent watching the multiverse, he knew how to recognize TARDIS on sight – especially that one.

Also, it appeared to be towing a few thousand tons of space junk behind it.

Bill was already raising his hand to swat the TARDIS from the sky when another asteroid hit him side-on. Dazed, he turned around… just in time to see thirteen other TARDISes zeroing in on him from the side, each of them carrying their own payloads of wreckage and rubble. The PA system on the first TARDIS crackled to life:

"Alright, Bill," a ripe Scottish bur thundered. "WAKE UP AND SMELL THE COCK!"

And then the storm swept over him: attacked from all angles, Bill could only shield himself with his arms as the debris rained down on him, thousands upon thousands of scrap metal and crystal-studded rock bouncing off his head, digging chunks out of his back, wrapping itself around his hat and lacerating his bow-tie.

However, though the TARDISes were untouchable at range, they weren't invincible up close: after about thirty seconds of being battered and bruised by space junk, one TARDIS flew just close enough for Bill to reach out and – with a whiplash burst of speed – snatch it from the sky.

"Got you!" he cackled, menacingly pressing his eye against the windows of the police box. "Now, what the hell are you people-"

By way of a response, the door of the TARDIS opened, and a little man in a white jacket and a straw panama hat peeked out just long enough to take a question mark-handled umbrella and jam it squarely into Bill's eye.

Letting go of the TARDIS with a howl of pain, Bill failed helplessly through the void, blindly trying to swat his attackers away with one hand even as he clutched at his newfound puncture wound with the other. "OH GOD, AGAIN!" he wailed. "WHY DO YOU PEOPLE HATE MY EYE SO MUCH?!"

As he screamed, though, he heard the sounds of orders being shouted and equipment being hauled into position, felt the spark of energy fields rippling out across the void. Too late, Bill realized that he'd just walked straight into an ambush; he'd no idea who'd planned this, how they'd known he'd be coming this way, or why Gallfrey's favourite Doctor(s) would be working with them – and frankly, he was in no fit state to hazard any guesses. All that mattered was getting away from here as quickly as possible.

Then, he heard the Scottish-accented voice shouting, "Give him hell, Liz!"

He forced his eye to regenerate, just managing to get it working again in time to find himself staring into the face of another attacker; for a moment, Bill lurched backwards in terror… only to belated realize that his newest challenger was eighteen and probably weighed about fifty pounds soaking wet; plus, her only support was a pair of bodyguards who looked like extras from Mary Poppins.

"Okay, girl," he sighed. "I don't know what convention you and your babysitters wandered out of, but if you could just get out of my way, I'll let you go back to pretending to be a Disney princess or whatever-"

Without saying a word, the girl in the blue dress smiled and a circular portal opened beneath Bill, discharging a plume of lava, superheated air and smoke – right into his undefended base. His ass aflame, Bill lurched away from the volcanic eruption and began frantically trying to extinguish his smouldering base, only to blunder headlong into a runaway freight train emerging from another portal, knocking him senseless.

Then, while he floated across the void in a tangle of bloody appendages, the rest of his attackers closed in around him, and for the next few minutes, Bill Cipher's world was occupied entirely by the assembled might of the multiverse beating the living shit out of him.

Not for the first time that day, 8-Ball wondered why he'd gotten out of bed that morning.

Once they'd realized that no reinforcements were due to arrive and they really could end up getting killed, he and the Creature With Eighty-Eight Faces had fled the battlefield, pelted by fireballs from Rumble McSkirmish as they fled.

Of course, with three of their available exits blocked by armies, their only resort had been to retreat behind the gate of the throne room to wait for Bill to arrive. After all, it stood to reason – or what 8-Ball considered reason – that the boss would have to show up sooner or later once he realized that the runes were going to be under attack.

However, Bill hadn't shown up: even after the gates had been blasted off their hinges, he'd steadfastly refused to appear; the two surviving pool had shrunk themselves down to roughly human size and took cover under one of the larger blackjack tables, hoping that nobody would notice them – or that their master would come to the rescue before someone found them. But Bill had not appeared, even as the three armies began approaching the runes with explosives at the ready.

In desperation, 8-Ball and the Creature had hurriedly scoured the palace with all the power they could muster, hoping to uncover some sign of their leader, but all they could find was a rapidly-dispersing vapour trail leading off Earth, into deep space and through another rift in the dimensional ether. Even 8-Ball, who freely admitted he wasn't the brightest bulb in the house, could clearly see that Bill had abandoned them to their fate.

Now unable to leave for fear of being pursued by the zodiac and unable to fight back without drawing the ire of an army armed with weapons that might actually be able to kill them, the two Henchmaniacs could only cower under the table, watching helplessly as the rebels began wadding the massive runes with C4 and dynamite. There was nothing left to do except wait until they were finished: hopefully, the two of them would be able to escape and follow Bill's trail once the mob was distracted.

For a few minutes or more, there was silence except for the distant clamour of the army setting up explosives on the opposite end of the gargantuan throne room. Eventually, it became clear that nobody had been left on watch, most likely because they believed that the Fearamid's defenders were all dead or running for their lives.

So, spotting an opening, 8-Ball and the Creature With Eighty-Eight Faces slid out from under the pool table and began tiptoeing hurriedly to the door as stealthily as their misshapen frames could allow.

And then, just as they thought they might actually be able to make a clean getaway, there was a bellow from the army – not in alarm or in anger, but in exaltation. Heart hammering, 8-Ball turned in time to see a victorious-looking Stan Pines phasing through the floor at the head of the army… the perfect position to see the Henchmaniacs' escape in action.

This time, 8-Ball didn't hesitate: he simply put his head down and ran for the door without waiting for any sign that the Creature was keeping pace, forcing every last drop of Weirdness in his body into outrunning Fez.

Less than five steps out the gate, he almost ran headlong into the rest of the zodiac. 8-Ball had just enough presence of mind to channel his forward momentum into a colossal leap over the advancing crowd, narrowly missing the Shapeshifter's grasping claws as he soared overhead. Unfortunately for him, Creature With Eighty-Eight Faces had been moving too fast to change course, and the Ruinous Toymaker brought the full weight of his colossal cyborg body thundering down on him with a bone-splintering crunch.

"You know," said McGucket conversationally, as the Creature writhed in pain beneath him, "I remember the mess you made of my workshop the last time you visited." His centipede-like body whirred, its multiple limbs suddenly glittering with bladed instruments. "Consider this my first and complaint, Mr Eighty-Seven."

"Eighty-Eight!"

"You know, it's funny you should mention that…"

By now accelerating down the corridor at several hundred miles an hour, 8-Ball blocked his ears and did his best not to look back as the Creature With Eighty-Eight Faces was messily divided into eighty-eight separate pieces.

Unfortunately, this meant that he didn't notice Stan Pines rocketing after him until it was too late: the man ploughed into him at high speed, tackling him to the ground and dragging him into a vicelike headlock. "You're not getting away," he snarled. "You're not getting away with what you and your pals did to my family."

8-Ball tried to explain that it hadn't been personal, that Bill had been in charge of the festivities, that killing him wouldn't change anything… but of course, Stan's headlock was tightening by that point, and all that emerged from 8-Ball's mouth was a gurgle of "But-urrrrkkkkkkkkkk…"

A moment later, 8-Ball's consciousness gave a terrible lurch as his head suddenly imploded under the sheer pressure of the headlock, sending his eyes flying across the corridor, bouncing through the gates of the throne room, and landing with a clack on one of the nearest pool tables.

The last thing he saw was a haze of green felt and then darkness.

For what seemed like eons, the gathering attacked Bill without mercy, steadily forcing him back to the hole he'd torn in the dimensional barrier. With only a limited reservoir of Weirdness to draw upon, Bill had little means of defending himself, and at any rate, the attacks arrived so swiftly and so brutally that he rarely had the time or the stamina to retaliate. He could only writhe in pain, trapped in a vortex of injury and regeneration as the alliance of gods, demigods, humanoid anomalies and other superbeings hammered him flat.

Dr Manhattan, now twice as tall as Bill and existing in triplicate form, sent a cascade of explosions racing through Bill's molecular structure, ripping his physical body to shreds; any counterattacks either ricocheted harmlessly off the apparition's massive pectorals or passed right through him, and were immediately countered with flexes of willpower that turned Bill's hands to glass.

While the Luteces bombarded Bill with a steady stream of runaway cars and helicopter crashes, Elizabeth studded the void with Tears, each one disgorging a different cataclysm upon the hapless target: dizzied from a tornado, Bill stumbled backwards into a tsunami, bounced off the Tunguska meteor, tripped up on an avalanche, tottered into the path of a nuclear firestorm, and fell under a collapsing mountain.

Sourcery erupted a multi-coloured haze of magical power as Coin drew upon his inexhaustible internal wellspring of thaumaturgical energy: in short order, Bill was set ablaze, disintegrated, partially converted into a mass of frogs, frozen, pelted with hailstones shaped like himself, vitrified, shrunk down, inflated like a balloon, and imprisoned inside a snow globe just long enough to get several large shards of glass embedded in his sensitive organs.

With a snap of his fingers, Q warped reality, tying Bill to railroad tracks in the face of a freight train, hammering him with falling anvils, stuffing his eyesocket with several tons of TNT, herding him into enormous cobwebs to be chewed on by giant spiders, folding his body like paper and making him into an origami chicken that pecked haplessly at the hand grenades Q had strewn around him…

Jessica Sorrow took one look at Bill, and he immediately felt himself begin to dissolve as the full force of the Unbeliever's nihilism began to disassemble his body, his substance, his soul.

A wormhole from Einstein crushed Bill's outer shell and sent him plummeting down through the void, while another opened above the triangular god-king's head and belched forth a solid wave of solar plasma; to add insult to injury, a jerry-rigged fission bomb from Crichton vaporized his hat.

Emma Smith hovered ten feet off the ground, her eyes aglow with searing golden light as the full force of Gaia's wrath swept across Bill in a haze of incandescent Anima. Knocked senseless by telekinetic blasts, burned to a crisp by the light and battered from half a dozen other spells, Bill reached out to crush her… only for Emma's bodyguard to leap into the fray with a howl of rage, slicing his fingers to the bone with a jagged-edged sword and blasting him with lightning bolts – and every time Bill squished her to a bloody pulp, the bodyguard simply reappeared and resumed her attack.

Time stopped as the Ellimist focussed all his reality-warping power upon Bill's body; aware but paralysed, Bill could only look on in silent agony as temporal anomalies exploded across the inside of his body. Organs that he'd added to his physical body's biological makeup for a laugh suddenly aged or regressed out of existence, untold dimensions of time and space expanding across his nervous system as his body stretched between chronological extremes. Just for good measure, the Ellimist also teleported Bill out of his skin as well.

John Murdoch swooped in from above, sending a maelstrom of telekinetic force erupted around Bill, crushing him into a singularity – even as all the debris the Doctors had hit him with now returned with a vengeance, pummelling him from all angles. New tendrils of growth erupted from the debris, pressing Bill flat against a solid plate of corrugated metal and pinioning him to it like a butterfly with a hailstorm of spars.

As the Starchild worked his will upon the battlefield, supernovae exploded inside Bill's head; space-time channels unravelled within his flesh, stretching every inch of organic tissue in his body to breaking point; his blood boiled with the heat of a thousand suns; a black hole blossomed inside his body and tuned him inside out.

Reality oozed into a blazing hellscape of flames and tentacles as Alma Wade charged in, shifting wildly from adult to child form and back again as she assaulted Bill with a monstrous army of conjured demons and other abominations of her mind; battered and torn, Bill tumbled helplessly through scenes from over a dozen disconnected nightmares as Alma herself – now a naked, wraithlike hag – reached for him with talonlike hands and sent a parade of horrors cascading through his brain.

Then the God of Destruction descended from above, and all the magical mayhem Endiness could devise hit Bill at once: in short order, he was half-strangled with tentacles, alternatingly scorched and frozen by magical fire and ice, crushed under thousand-foot columns of rock, lashed with razor-sharp winds, dazzled from blinding displays of coruscating lights, shredded across the back by living shadows, electrocuted with thunderbolt after thunderbolt, and mangled by at least a dozen different godly avatars.

And while Morty cut off Bill's escape attempts with force field projectors mounted on the back of the flying saucer, Rick sliced off Bill's hands with his portal gun and bombarded him with a cataclysmic array of weapons powerful enough to eviscerate a god.

In the end, Bill was left a gasping, wheezing mess splattered across the void, struggling to regenerate. "Come on, you people," he groaned, as some semblance of a physical body began to reform. "Give me a break. I'm operating at barely quarter power; if you wanted a fair fight, you should have asked me back when I was on home turf."

"Funny thing," said a familiar voice. "I seem to remember that you don't have a home anymore, not after what you did to it."

Bill looked up in horror, eye bulging in disbelief.

"You?" he gasped. "But… I thought you couldn't ever leave your mountain! I thought you'd given up on violence and warfare!"

Jheselbraum smiled mirthlessly. "I made an exception for you, Bill. After what you did to Stanford, to his world, to the future of literally everything – and your attempt to escape the consequences of your action… well, I think it's safe to say that you and I have unfinished business."

"Uh… look, Jess, I know we've had our differences over the years but… okay, just put the staff down. I… I can see what that's made of, you don't have to actually use it. Please, hear me out: I've got something really important to OH GOD! OHMYGODOHMYGODOHMYGODOHMYGAAAAAAAAARGH!"

Jheselbraum's staff had been forged of arbiterium, purest order made manifest as one of the rarest substances known to the interdimensional sciences: only a hundred pounds of it had ever been found in the multiverse, and though it existed in potential form throughout the most rigid societies of the infinite realms, it was easily dispelled by errors, obsessions, foibles and random chance; most of it never gathered densely enough to condense into its physical form, despite the best efforts of entities like the Weaver and the Auditors of Reality – for though they would never admit it, even they made mistakes. When the substance did become corporeal long enough to be mined and utilized, arbiterium pulsating radiation stultified disorder by presence alone, withering wild magicks into calmer, more usable forms of thaumaturgy.

Only the most potent, undiluted forms of chaos could overcome the might of the staff: had Jheselbraum taken it to the world gone mad and exposed it to the full force of the energies unleashed by Weirdmageddon, it might not have been able to resist Bill's strength. But up here, in the space between worlds, there was no ambient Weirdness to support him, and Bill's portable reservoir of power wasn't enough to leave so much as a dent in its surface.

To a being like Bill – with a body made of Weirdness and a mind devoted to his own selfish brand of chaos – the slightest touch of the gleaming blue crystal was agony.

Being struck with it very nearly shorted out his entire nervous system.

For the next few minutes, Bill could only cower in a near-foetal ball as the staff rained down on him, his powers sparking painfully with every impact; his outer shell fractured, his bones shattered, his blood sprayed in all directions, and organs that had only just regenerated began to fail. In the end, he could only crawl away, leaving a trail of luminescent blood across the void.

"Okay, I'm going home!" he groaned. "You've made your point, all of you! Nudists, Disney princesses, kids from the fucking Twilight Zone, giant foetuses, living planets and my least favourite oracle in the multiverse – I get the message, now just stop hitting me! I'm going, I'm going, I'm going!"

And with that, Bill flung himself back through the rift he'd torn into the dimensional fabric, vanishing back into the world he'd fled from.

Across the throne room, between the throne and the colossal stained-glass windows, the Cipherous Runes hovered against the wall in malignant near-silence, broken only by the faint bass throb of their power rippling across reality.

Even now that he was standing before them, Dipper found that they were difficult to describe: yes, they were ten-foot-tall granite slabs carved with incandescent symbols, but the symbols themselves were so intricate, so arcane and so saturated with purified Weirdness that Dipper could barely discern a recognizable shape among them. The symbols seemed to move and change as he looked at them, often shifting configuration entirely the moment his back was turned, and at times, Dipper swore he could feel the runes reaching for him, actually see them extending graven talons towards him – if only out of the corner of his eye.

Nor was Dipper the only one to notice this: a good many of the army were actively shying away from the granite engravings, and could only begin planting bombs with a little assistance from the more overtly supernatural among them. Most of the zodiac were staring uneasily at the runes too, almost imperceptibly shuddering at the sight; even Wendy looked disturbed at the sight. Only Grunkle Stan and Grunkle Ford could look upon the runes without cringing.

At the moment, there were ten runes, and only one of them had been readied for detonation, but with spare munitions and the power of the zodiac by their side, it looked as though they might be able to finish the demolition in a matter of minutes. Certainly, Ford's scythe could easily slice through even the Weirdness-enforced granite.

And then, just as Dipper was starting to feel vaguely optimistic about the situation, a flash of light lit up the sky beyond the stained-glass window. A moment later, the radio crackled to life as the sentries their fleet left behind began reporting in: "Incoming! We have one enemy force approaching from above!"

"It's him," Gideon whispered.

Outside the window, the light in the sky grew ever brighter: something huge was hurtling towards the Fearamid like a comet, bringing with it a coruscating nimbus of lighting and fire.

Almost in perfect unison, Dipper and Mabel screamed at the demolition crew to detonate the runes, but their orders were lost in the roar of the approaching meteor and the alarmed yells from the crowd; it took a good five seconds for Amanda to hear them and begin relaying their orders, and by then, the light was almost upon them.

A split-second later, the entire stained-glass window – all eight hundred and fifty feet of it – exploded apart, sending a deadly hailstorm of jagged shards cascading into the army below; dozens fell in droves, impaled and pincushioned by spearlike lengths of stained-glass.

But that in itself was nothing compared to the shape that had torn through the window itself: a billowing triangular tangle of flailing limbs and screaming mouths, it ploughed through the abandoned throne like a wrecking ball, spraying lumps of calcified corpses flying in all directions, leaving a broken husk of tumbledown masonry like a felled skyscraper in its wake. For another few hundred feet, it thundered across the throne room, finally burying itself in the floor at the heart of the chamber in a massive eruption of floor tiles, bricks and dust.

There was a deathly silence, as the zodiac and their army hastily began struggling to their feet.

Then, from the massive crate he'd dug in the floor, Bill Cipher arose. He was battered, bloodied and scarred from head to toe, but he was very much alive… and judging from the deep crimson skin, the pitch-black eye and the dozens of clawing limbs that now sprouted from his tooth-studded body, he was very, very angry.

His gaze very slowly flicked from the zodiac to the demolition team clustered around the first of the runes. Even without Gideon's help, Dipper could already tell what he was thinking: their ruse had officially expired, and Bill was no longer fooled… but even if he was, he was probably a lot more scared of Axolotl than he was of them.

With a howl of mingled rage and fear, Bill surged out of the crater. He couldn't bombard the demolition crews from afar, not without hitting the runes, but he could definitely tackle them at close range – and now that the shock and awe had worn off, he was in the perfect mood for it. Galloping across the throne room like a mutilated spider, he swatted aside Robbie's necrocolossus (burying Wendy and Gideon under a tide of zombies), stomped Soos flat, and flicked Pacifica out of the air.

Dipper caught her just before she hit the ground; then, pausing only to hide her behind a shield of bone and keratin, he lashed out at Bill with a barrage of bladed limbs, but the target was ready for him this time: parrying the blades with one colossal arm, Bill brought his fist hammering down on the floor less than a few feet away; the shockwave sent Dipper tumbling helplessly away, still instinctively shielding Pacifica as he did so. He landed heavily in a chaotic heap, too disoriented to untangle his limbs. All he could do was sprout a few extra eyes in an attempt to see what was going on.

By now, there were only three members of the zodiac left on their feet: Mabel, Stan and Ford; the latter two were clearly trying to make up their minds on whether to attack Bill or focus on the runes… but Mabel only smiled.

She was holding a small glass jar behind her back, empty except for a few particles of swirling dust. A shape was subtly forming amidst the dust, slowly taking on an almost familiar form as Mabel worked her magic on it; oblivious, Bill thundered closer – and just when he was about to bulldoze over her, Mabel threw the jar at him.

The jar shattered harmlessly against Bill's angular forehead, but Bill stopped nonetheless, amused more than anything else. He didn't see the dust cloud swirling behind his back, growing bigger with every second.

"Was that supposed to do anything?" he sneered. "Or was that just another one of your pranks?"

"Nope," said Mabel, grinning broadly. The dust cloud was almost as vast as Bill by now, and getting steadily larger. "Just calling in a little help from an old friend."

"Oh really?" Bill chuckled, not noticing that the cloud was swiftly coalescing into a solid form. "That's good. So, what's the name of your new friend? It wouldn't be 'Please Help Me, Mommy, Bill's Going To Torture Me To Death' would it? Or maybe something a little more lyrical like, 'Oh God, Bill's Gonna Do Things That Will Make My Parents Cry Over My Desecrated Body'? Or maybe-"

"AHEM."

Bill froze, suddenly realizing that he was now standing in shadows, and very slowly looked upward.

Time Baby glared down at him, his brow furrowed with rage. "IT'S BEEN A VERY LONG TIME, CIPHER," he thundered. "AS I RECALL, I GAVE YOU A CHANCE TO RETREAT OVER A HUNDRED MILLION YEARS AGO, BACK WHEN LINEAR TIME STILL EXISTED. NOW, THE TIME FOR SUCH COURTESIES IS OVER."

For a moment, Bill could only stare.

"Nope," he said flatly. "Not falling for this shit again. This is an illusion: I'm calling it right now – this isn't real. I don't care how powerful you are, Shooting Star, you're not strong enough to have put Time Baby back together ag-"

Time Baby's reply tore clean through Bill's upper body, bursting his point like a melon stuffed with gelignite. There was a pause, as Bill's eyeball detached from the ceiling and hit the ground with a wet splat.

"DID THAT FEEL ILLUSORY TO YOU?" Time Baby retorted.

Bill groaned, hastily reassembling his skull into a recognizable shape. "You know what?" he snarled.
"BRING IT ON! I killed you once, you oversized brat, and I can do it again! One snap of my fingers and you'll be vaporized along with every rebel in this room!"

"MAYBE SO. BUT CAN YOU DO THAT WITHOUT DAMAGING THE RUNES?" Time Baby's chubby face twisted into a malignant-looking smirk. "I DOUBT IT. NOW FACE MY TANTRUM!"

And as Time Baby threw himself at Bill, Dipper unfurled himself as best as he could, and shouted "Everyone! Rune demolition – now! Give it everything you've got, people – bombs, guns, missiles, magic, anything! It's now or never!"

Time turned inside-out.

Effect preceded cause; minutes turned into seconds and hours turned into days; one moment of time extended into millennia of compressed history; erosion ate away at the ground beneath their feet and spat it back out again as time rewound itself; the centuries spun backwards, and suddenly, Bill found that he had always been fighting Time Baby and yet had never been fighting Time Baby. Within the confines of a tiny bubble of space, all the constraints of time were flung to four winds and folded over each other as the gargantuan infant bashed the living bejesus out of him.

Bill fought back as best as he could, but the fact that he needed to hold back to preserve the runes limited the amount of power he could safely utilize, and so he could only fall back on his age-strategy of flailing wildly with a million giant fists… and worse still, Mabel's overwhelming presence was still blocking his own powers, leaving him barely able to concentrate on the temporal warps around him even as Time Baby's energy-projecting eyes carved him up like a Thanksgiving turkey.

From the other side of the throne room, there was a muffled explosion as the first of the ten runes exploded in a shower of shrapnel, courtesy of Gideon's demolition team. Bill let out a piercing shriek and threw himself at the army, only for Time Baby to grab him by the arm and drag him back to the fight; all he could do was watch as Grenda, Candy and the other power-suited volunteers zeroed in on the next rune.

"Let go of me, you idiot!" Bill wailed. "You realize what I could do for you now that I'm god of this dimension?! You understand what I could give you?"

"I UNDERSTAND THAT YOU DESTROYED THE FUTURE THAT I WORKED SO HARD TO BUILD," Time Baby replied. "I UNDERSTAND THAT THE TIME I EMERGED FROM IS GONE AND I EXIST ONLY AS A HISTORICAL ANOMALY."

By way of emphasis, he lashed out with a thunderclap of kinetic force that folded Bill's outstretched arms backwards until they snapped at the elbow.

"Aaaaaargh! Well, it's not like you can't have it back, right? I mean-"

A duo of explosions split the air: two more runes had been destroyed, one hammered into oblivion by a barrage of missiles from Grenda and Candy, the other crushed under the collective might of Rumble McSkirmish and the Manotaurs.

Bill was nearly transfixed by the sight, but a chubby fist to the face sent him hurtling back to reality. "Listen to me, Time Baby," he babbled urgently. "I can give you back the world you came from! I can give it all back to you – if you help me!"

"I SPENT EONS BUILDING THAT WORLD, CIPHER! CENTURY AFTER CENTURY OF EFFORT WENT INTO CREATING MY PERFECT SOCIETY, AND YOU SWEPT IT AWAY AS IF IT WAS NOTHING! DO YOU REALLY THINK I WOULD BE CONTENTED WITH YOUR CLUMSY REPLICA OF IT? DO YOU HONESTLY BELIEVE I WOULD ACCEPT AS YOUR GIFT WHAT WAS ALREADY MINE?!"

"But-"

Another explosion, this time from Ford shredding the next rune to wafer-thin chunks with his scythe.

Six to go, Bill realized.

"AND EVEN IF YOU COULD OFFER ME WHAT I REALLY WANTED, I WOULD NOT ACCEPT IT-"

"But-"

"MY SOCIETY WAS BUILT ON PRESERVING THE SANCTITY OF TIME, CIPHER. I EXIST AS A TEMPORAL ABERRATION; YOU HAVE TURNED ME INTO WHAT I PLEDGED TO DESTROY! YOU HAVE RUINED ME AND EVERYTHING I STOOD FOR!"

Time Baby's rage erupted across the cosmos, searing away layer after layer of Bill's flesh until his spirit itself threatened to bleed out of his physical form altogether.

"You can't be serious!" Bill shrieked, as he hastily pulled himself together. "I could give you anything? Do you understand that? Anything! You're just like me, Time Baby: you want your own kingdom, you want the world to follow your rules – how can you turn down an offer from me? I mean, your pride and principles can't be worth that much! I mean, just take a bribe this once – it's not as if it'll kill you!"

"ALL THIS TIME AND YOU STILL KNOW NOTHING."

In the background, another rune vanished as Dipper – now a living mass of flame – engulfed it, reducing the granite to molten slag. Five.

"YOUR GIFTS ARE WORTH NOTHING. YOU DRAW FROM A POISONED WELL, CIPHER. YOUR KINGDOM IS BUILT OF DUST AND COBEWEBS."

"What the fuck does that mean?!"

"YOU WILL LEARN. I WILL SHOW YOU."

Time-Baby's eyes blazed, and in that moment, Bill gave up on holding back: he sent out a kinetic pulse that catapulted the titan away just long enough for Bill's follow-up to catch him off-guard; by that point, Bill was facing away from the runes – just safe enough to let a beam of solid energy blaze forth from his eye, just powerful enough to send Time Baby away, alive but punch-drunk.

He turned, in time to see that the backlash had actually cracked one of the runes, enough for Soos to shatter it with a single punch.

Four.

Screaming from an eye that was suddenly a gaping void ringed with teeth, Bill threw himself at the zodiac – only for Ford to suddenly stand in his path, supernovae blazing in his eyes.

Those horrible eyes…

Instinctively, Bill reared back in horror, unable to resist the thought of the inescapable void, and in that moment, Ford tackled him. For thirty-five nerve-wracking seconds, the two of them fought: Ford might not have been able to match Bill in sheer strength, but he knew that their proximity to the runes gave him the advantage, and the terrible thoughts that Ford's presence stirred made it almost impossible for Bill to maintain composure. Back and forth, the rocketed across the throne room, Ford matching him move by move, countering every blast of energy with one of his own, every warp of reality with his own disturbing manipulation of local reality. More than once, Bill tried to dive past him, only for Ford's scythe to practically disembowel him with a single swing.

And then Time Baby finally recovered and hurtled back into the fray, and the fight grew even more frenetic.

Elsewhere, Robbie, having finally recovered, gathered the assembled bodies under his control into a single limb and reduced one of the runes to airborne shrapnel with a single crushing blow. Pacifica focussed all her power on the rune ahead of her, telekinetically crushing it to dust, while Wendy drove her sword deep into another - the rising heat from the sword accelerated with a little help from Mabel's powers.

One left, Bill realized.

"No, no, no!" he screamed. "Stop this, STOP IT! Ford, make them stop! Don't you realize what you're throwing away? I can give you your life back! I can give you back the life you had before you met me! I can make you instantly respected in the scientific community! I can make you an icon! I can make it so that Stan never screwed up your science project if that's what you want – just stop them!"

Ford looked impassively down at him.

"You made a deal with the wrong twin, Bill," he said coldly. "New life, same mistake."

And with that, he threw the scythe – not at Bill, but to Stan.

Bill saw it gleaming as it soared across the sky, and with the ponderous roar of tectonic plates grinding together, reached up to grab it… but Time Baby seized him by the bow tie and dragged him out of reach. He could only watch helplessly as Stan caught the scythe in both hands, his eyes aglow with the shared power of the Reaper.

Then, with one almighty swing, Stanley Pines brought the scythe slashing clean through the rune: there was a whisper of displaced air, the granite split in two, divided by a perfectly even vertical cut… and as the power of the rune collapsed, so too did the stone that had contained it, disintegrating into dust.

And then…

Somewhere in the far-off reaches of reality, a dam that had been stretched close to bursting point by forces beyond its ability to restrain let out a final groan of protest; it cracked, it crumbled, and finally shattered. And the force it had held at bay surged inwards, billowing across the chaotic wastes of the world gone mad and zeroing in on the Fearamid; the zodiac and all their forces stumbled backwards in shock as they felt a new presence rippling towards them; across the length and breadth of Bill's kingdom, demons and monsters fled in all directions, baying in terror as they instinctively recognized the threat that their master had feared for so long.

Bill felt the force drawing closer and closer, and found himself doing the same: he knew he should be trying to mount some kind of a defence, or at the very least to struggle out of Time Baby's grip and flee for his life… but he couldn't. Horror had frozen him in place, left him a deer in the headlights of the oncoming nightmare; he couldn't see it yet, but he could sense it approaching – and all he could do was scream and holler and sob in terrified denial.

"NO!" Bill screamed helplessly. "NO! IT WAS PERFECT! EVERYTHING WORKED OUT! I DID EVERYTHING RIGHT THIS TIME! I DID EVERYTHING RIGHT! I DID EVERYTHING RIGHT! I DID EVERYTHING RIGHT! I DID EVERYTHING RIGHT! I DID EVERYTHING RIGHT! NOT LIKE THIS, NOT LIKE THIS, NOT-"

Light blossomed across the multi-coloured sky, plunging him into horror-stricken silence.

When it faded, the sky was still a blinding white, shrouding the Fearamid in a glow too pure to belong to any normal dimension. Hovering outside the shattered wreckage of the stained-glass windows were a huge crowd of figures, some humanoid, others barely that… but all of them were clearly members of the alliance that had barred his escape from this dimension.

And sitting on the ruin of Bill's throne was a single figure.

He wasn't an impressive sight, to say the least: scrawny, underfed, and bleary eyed, he was dressed in the ragged top half of a formal suit, a mayor sash, a trucker hat, one gutted cowboy boot and a pair of short shorts.

"Mayor Cutebiker?" Mabel blurted.

Tyler Cutebiker smiled, waved, and promptly fell asleep…

But hovering above him was something else – something Bill had lived in fear of from the moment he'd retreated from the edge of failure, something he'd done everything he could to shield himself from. Like Cutebiker, he might have looked a little silly at first sight, even cute… had he not been a hundred feet long and aglow with extradimensional power.

The being now hovering over the ruined throne and the slumbering mayor was a giant pink axolotl floating through the air as if it were water; his face bore a faint smile, as if at peace with the universe and everything in it; his six scarlet rami curled like fern fronds in an invisible breeze, forming arcane patterns in the sky; his eyes gleamed with ancient knowledge and benevolence as they looked down upon the world… but as they focussed on Bill, they tuned as black and cold as the void from which Bill had narrowly escaped so long ago.

Bill swallowed, his throat suddenly Sahara-dry.

"Um… hi, Axolotl," he said nervously. "Now, I know this looks bad, but-"

The light blossomed, bloomed, burned-

Bill screamed.

Every cell in his body was on fire, every particle of his spirit smouldering beneath the merciless incandescence.

When it faded, Bill was back to his normal size, lying on the floor at the foot of the throne. The pain was gone, too, but in its place, Bill felt a terrible sense of ice-cold emptiness sweep across him: he could no longer feel Weirdness as he once had, could no longer manipulate it as he'd once done. The power was still there, but chained so tightly he couldn't use it.

His powers were blocked.

And yet, the detonator for the nuke was lying there before him. If he could just reach out and grab it-

"DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'VE DONE, BILL?" Axolotl demanded, in a voice that echoed across the dimensional divide and back again. "DO YOU KNOW THE DAMAGE YOU'VE CAUSED? DO YOU KNOW HOW MUCH EFFORT I'VE GONE TO CLEAN UP YOUR MESS?!"

Bill whimpered in the negative.

"OF COURSE NOT. YOU ARE A CHILD, FOREVER IGNORANT OF THE CONSEQUENCES OF YOUR ACTIONS. I WAS TOO LENIENT WITH YOU THE FIRST TIME, BILL. NOW YOU WILL SUFFER."

"Please!" Bill wept. "Please, just give me another chance! I made a mistake, I know, but-"

"I GAVE YOU A CHANCE TO TURN YOURSELF IN WHEN WE FIRST MET. I GAVE YOU A CHANCE TO MAKE AMENDS ON OUR SECOND MEETING – AT YOUR OWN REQUEST, I MIGHT ADD. I DO NOT GIVE THIRD CHANCES, LEAST OF ALL AFTER YOU BETRAYED MY TRUST SO EGREGIOUSLY."

"Does anyone know what he's talking about?" Mabel asked. "Grunkle Ford, do you know what's going on?"

"YOU SQUANDERED EVERY OPPORTUNITY YOU WERE GIVEN," Axolotl plunged on. "YOU RUINED WHAT COULD BEEN THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE FUTURES. AND NOW YOU MUST PAY THE PRICE…"

There was a pause, as Bill tried not to imagine all the horrible things that might be in store for him, and failed.

And in that awful silence, someone began to applaud.

"Bravo! Bravo! Bravissimo!" cackled a triumphant voice. "Oh a second curtain call, if you please! Truly a performance for the ages, a blockbuster production with a fiendishly engaging plot only rivalled by its cast: Bill, the tragically doomed villain, raging futilely against his imminent damnation and begging for one final stay of execution! Almighty Axolotl, the wrathful god on high, ablaze with judgement and righteous fury! The colourful side characters he summoned! And who could forget the true heroes of tonight's drama, the zodiac?! Great Azathoth, what skill, what intimidation, what inspiration, what emotional depth they have displayed tonight! I may need to wipe away a tear. Oh, this is the best entertainment I've had in centuries! Truly, the ostentatious delights may become tiresome if repeated to excess, but in once-in-a-lifetime spectacles such as this are not to be missed…"

Bill looked up in bewilderment, recognizing the voice of the man that had taunted him over the phone and the monster that had attacked him outside Cipheropolis… but soon realized the figure striding towards him was utterly unfamiliar. Tall, slender, swarthy and dressed in a scarlet coat, he looked even more out-of-place than Mayor Cutebiker – and yet Bill could sense the raw power oozing from the grinning figure, and knew at once that he was every bit as dangerous as Axolotl himself.

"NYARLATHOTEP, COULD THIS WAIT UNTIL LATER? WE'RE ALL A LITTLE BUSY DEALING WITH BILL AT PRESENT."

"Oh, I can see that," said the scarlet-coated stranger. "But given that I played a very important part in what just transpired, I think I deserve front-row seats to what happens next… along with the boon I've earned, yes?"

Axolotl sighed heavily. "VERY WELL. YOU MAY REMAIN. NOW, AS I WAS SAYING-"

"Excuse me!" Dipper called out. "I hate to interrupt, but some of us would like to know what's going on and what'll happen now."

"I WAS JUST GETTING TO THAT-"

"You don't need to shout, you know," said Mabel helpfully. "I'm pretty sure we can all hear you if we all move in a little bit."

Axolotl sighed. "Is that better?" he asked at a significantly lower volume.

"Much better, thanks. So… now that Bill's been defeated and he's due for some kind of punishment, everything's going back to normal, right? I mean, without Bill, all this Weirdness will fall apart and everything will go back to the way it was, right?"

Mabel's expression was hopeful – too hopeful… and Nyarlathotep was laughing quietly to himself, an awful, awful smile spreading all the way across his face.

Axolotl coughed uncomfortably. "Uh, yeah, about that: there's a few things you need to know before we wrap this up…"

A/N: This chapter's soundtrack is A Contest of Aeons from Final Fantasy X.

Feel free to theorize what happens next, folks!

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