Chapter 40: Mr. Reality Final: Plit, Flung into the Gaze of Destruction Itself

The battle has already been going on for about thirty seconds, and I am currently in the midst of dodging orbs that are being sent my way through the air by the reality bender. I leap back and forth, taking a break between jumps in order to cut some of the closer orbs with a steady swing of my sword. The halves crash beside the ground behind me and create light plumes of smog from the impact, and at the end of my swing I launch out a last minute wave of flame. Mr. Reality weaves his lips around quickly, moving his hands in front of his body and dispelling the orbs so he can grab the flame wave and condense it into a more ethereal form, whipping his hands around his body to guide its path before in a panic he flings the attack back at me as three, shockwave like waves of energy.

I leap over my reflected attack and fly through the air after adjusting my legs, getting in close and attempting to cut the alien across the helmet only for him to use his right fist to strike me in the gut and cause me to recoil backwards for a few seconds while he gets out of range of my recovered counterstrike. As he lands on the ground, he pounds it with the palm of his hands and the sound of an echoing gong rings through the air. Without warning, sound waves break through the air, striking deep into my eardrums the moment I pulled my body up from the previous blow. With the screeching noise of a thousand nails grinding against a chalkboard bombarding my eardrums, I am forced to pound my hands against the sides of my head to prevent the sound from forcing blood out and deafening me.

With my sword away for the moment, the reality bender raises his right hand off the ground, and with a quick few words he increases its size tenfold and launches it out at me in the form of a fist. With a gigantic impact against my entire body as the sound waves break, my body is flung across the room and it smashes into the glass window behind me, cracking the surface but not breaking any further than that. After pulling my body off the wall one arm and leg at a time, I draw out my sword and float across the air slightly as Mr. Reality retracts and shrinks his fist. With a bit of a ring in my ears, I shake my head to try and remove it while planning out my next move.

I brace my body and replace the flames on my blade with a powerful gust of wind that compresses and swirls around the thin, cold steel until I release it all in one arched cut through the air. A whirling tornado flies across the air towards the reality bender, but he merely dodges both it and the range of its suction with a leap. He positioned himself exactly where I wanted him to, and with enough air remaining in my blade I cut the sky upward and send a saw blade of wind towards him. With the attack rapidly approaching his face, he quickly talks to warp reality and clamps his hands against the sides of the windy saw blade to halt its movement. With his gloves glowing with a pale light-green aura that seeps into the attack, it is only a matter of time before the blade slows down and dissipates into nothingness.

Mr. Reality swings his arms out, sweating from the heat of the battle across his forehead as he gives me a calm yet rather arrogant smirk. However, while he was busy floating still in the air I summoned forth vines from the ground with but a thought, and they wrap around his cloak and hands to trap him in place much to his surprise. I then charge forth, ready to cut him while he was suspended, only for him to in turn shock me by detaching his helmeted head from the rest of his "body" without even saying a word. As my attack cuts through the vines and splits his cloak in two, I lift my head up and see the alien saying a few words to himself once more.

In a matter of seconds, a series of sparkles sharing the colors of his shoes, gloves and cloak appear around his body, and within seconds the aforementioned articles of clothing reappear completely restored. "So much for restraints then…" I noted as I turned and swung my sword out to the side of my body while curling my facial features to express annoyance. To bring the reality bender down from the air, I thrust my left hand skyward and called forth a torrent of water to smash the alien against the top of his helmet and bring him down onto the ground, where the water floods over him and spreads across the ground in a puddle for a few seconds until I choose to stop and shoot my left hand out to fire a piercing bolt of lightning to take advantage of the liquid set on top of the alien.

However, though the water kept his body pressed against the ground, thanks to his helmet his mouth was still free to move, as evidence by the sudden appear of magical sparks along a specific portion of the ground and the massive wall of stone that thrust up not a moment afterwards to the absorb my lightning bolt. As the reality bender floats up to the top of his self-created wall, he claps his hands together and begins spinning them around rapidly like a drill. In a matter of seconds their size increases and they fly out towards me in their combined form. With only seconds left until they hit me along with their current momentum preventing me from raising my guard, I dashed out towards the side in hopes of avoiding the hands.

However, with a light tug the gloves moved apart, the backside of the left glove smacking me mid-flight as it continues to spiral through the air and sending me hurtling into the ground below. After tearing apart and leaving a gash in the floor, the only signs of harm present on my body is the dirty scrape marks across my elbows. With dirt threatening to infect the wounds, I quickly work to pull it out with a thought after raising my body up slightly. I stand back up and look towards the reality bender as he pulls his hands back into his body, and with a narrowing glare I take some of the debris and dirt on the sides of the chasm and fling them through the air like a rain of needles.

All of these projectiles collide with the front of Mr. Reality's helmet, spreading out as a thick, obstructive layer that prevents him from seeing what is directly in front of him for the time being. I jump into the air, rapidly creating slabs of dirt for me to kick off of to reach the alien at a swifter pace. After a zig-zagging series of movements across the air, I take my right elbow and hit the alien straight in the helmet, breaking apart the dirt and hitting the glass hard enough to crack it and send him flying backwards until he crashes against the front of the container of light in the back of the room.

However, with the back of his helmet to protect him, the alien only suffers a mild feeling of distortion before he pulls himself off and looks over at me, his breathing become rampant and heavy all of a sudden as blood flushes into his eye and he looks in horror at the cracks in his helmet. With a rapid series of lip movements between breaths, the reality bender causes the cracks to seal up and makes it so he breathes at a normal pace once more, letting out a relieving sigh before he looks towards me in anger. As I floated in place and noted his sudden change in behavior after I cracked his helmet, I came up with a simple conclusion that I stated in my head with my eyebrows piqued in curiosity "I guess the air around here is toxic for him…"

After locking that information in my head so I remember that weakness for later, I draw out my sword once more and charge forward at the alien. As I do so though, he moves his lips and moves his hands around slightly. Without warning, my body freezes in place, not because it has been bound by any force, but because it instinctively recognized the changing environment around us. Everything began to distort, the walls, floor and ceiling becoming blurred until the colors are all that can be recognized of the room around us. That mixture of textures swirls around rapidly, eventually creating a gigantic, neverending vortex of dark purple, blue and red. Mr. Reality floats away from me, re-appearing above the center of the vortex while I am a bit dazed by its sudden appearance.

After raising his hands into the air, he launches forth a barrage of distorted reality lightning bolts, each one striking the ground around me randomly and causing the struck spots to no longer exist in a matter of seconds. Considering the randomness of the bolts, it was clear that he didn't intend to erase me from existence intentionally, and that these bolts were just obstacles for me to be wary enough so I don't end up running into them as I fight against the alien. I try a long-range approach at first, swinging my ignited sword outward to create a wave of flame that flies through the air to try and strike the reality bender. But with a snap of the fingers one of the bolts is re-directed, where it proceeds to collide with my attack and destroy it with ease.

With a bolt nearly smiting me across the front of my body, I leap back and pound the ground with my right fist after grasping the sword. The flames in the blade transfer downward past the handle, causing no scorch marks on my hand as it seeps through and between the fingers enter a crack in the ground I just made. With the flames traveling through the floor in secrecy, I quickly lift my body up and attempt to distract the reality bender on the off-chance my assumption is wrong and he did notice my movements. After flipping my sword counter clockwise by loosing my grip, I grab it and coat the blade in solid ice, turning it into a pseudo-icicle that I prop above my right shoulder and ready to toss at the reality bender.

I narrow my eyebrows and try and look through the lightning bolts, thinking about just what part of the alien's "body" I would strike, even if it was very likely that my attack would be dodged with how long it was taking me to focus. After five more seconds, I just said to myself "Screw it" and threw the icicle-covered sword of mine straight through the air like a gilded lance. With my body leaned forward I could only rely on the mental connection with my blade to know where it was going. When it fails to connect with anything silky and I hear an impact with a solid wall amidst the crash of thunder, I pull my head up and see that my sword has struck the wall that exists at the illusionary end of the vortex, the ice having broken off and fallen to the ground one chunk at a time.

Mr. Reality has risen higher up, smiling towards me after turning his head away from my blade. But I met his grin with one of my own, subtly alerting him of the ulterior motive behind my attack and getting him to widen his eye and remove his smug expression long enough to look down and see the glowing, magma crack spread across the floor. With the fire mixing in perfectly with the rock, I snap my right fingers and cause the mixture to erupt out of the ground in a perfectly cylindrical pillar. As it rises high into the air ready to consume the alien whole, he is forced to move his lips in a furious panic, creating a sphere of energy around his body that the magma wraps around and solidifies into a dark brown, crispy layer.

The rest of the magma sinks back towards the ground as the distortion in the area finally dies down due to Mr. Reality breaking all of his focus to deal with his current problem. The lightning bolts also fizzle out of existence as we return to the real battlefield. As I take a moment to call my sword into the grasp of my right hand and swing it beside me, the dried up cracks in the surface of solid magma begin to fracture, glowing neon energy seeping through them until the fragments are scattered across the room in one fantastic explosion, many of them cracking upon impacting with either the ceiling or walls as the reality bender has his right hand swung out beside him.

As I take a couple chunks of rock hard magma to the face and barely flinch, I watch as Mr. Reality curls three of his fingers into his glove and takes the remaining ones out in front of his body, pointing at me as the broken energy from his shield twirls towards the tips and condenses into a more spherical form. With a single thrust of the glove upwards the energy is fired out in the form of two intertwining beams of neon energy, which spirals every closer like a cylindrical drill until it gets close enough for me to dodge it at the last second by ducking under it. As my body laid close to the ground I failed to hear the beam's impact behind me and immediately grew suspicious. After I lifted back up and turned my head slightly my suspicions were confirmed as I was suddenly grabbed from behind by the energy, which had spread out to become a hand that is pulled back by a tug of the reality bender's pinched right fingers.

When I'm close to him the alien flings his left fist out infused with energy, which I defend against by recovering from being grabbed and holding my sword with one palm leaning against the dull side near the tip to brace myself as the fist collides with the center of my blade and the glowing fist behind me disappears. After breaking through the attack by stamping the air with my foot to summon a lightning bolt that smites the reality bender and forces him to back away as smoke seeps out of his singed helmet and cloak. With my body freed I waste no time in taking my sword and raising it above my head, bringing it down like a fervent axe to try and break through the glass helmet and expose the alien to the planet's toxic air.

However, once again the alien feverishly moves his lips around and bends reality, making it so my attack is stopped in place by a glowing wall of energy. But this guard only lasts for a moment as I increase the ferocity of my flames and burns into the surface of the wall, melting it apart to the point that a pull back of my blade and the ensuing collision of it afterwards breaks the defense in two and causes the halves to crumble into nothingness and neon dust as I lean my head forward with my eyes flaring rampantly with determination and my glare piercing straight into the panicking Mr. Reality's face. With my sword held lightly at my side, the alien is only given a moment's reprieve to retreat and try to strike me with another attack.

With his left hand held back he stretches his right one out and increases its size tenfold, hoping to grab me and restrain me with all of his might. Those hopes would soon be dashed though, as I pound the ground with the sharp side of my blade and create a lashing wave of fire, electricity and wind that flies forward and slams into the palm of the glove, igniting it across the entirety of its surface and forcing it to retract so the reality bender could dispel the flames with but a few words. With his concern becoming more prominent, Mr. Reality leaps into the air above me and throws his hands down, spinning them rapidly around me and creating a centrifugal motion that drags my body into it and spins it around violently against its will.

Feeling as though I was being bombarded against the sides of a blender with each passing second, I try to brace myself as friction and momentum keeps the hands spinning and work on creating a counter force with a simple concentration of my mind towards the center of the two hand's movements. With a release of my thoughts a burst of air breaks through the force around me and pushes the hands outside, freeing me and leaving the reality bender stunned and frozen in place as his hands swing through the air to return to his cloak. As he floats in place I take my sword out beside me, panting visibly before I sudden charge forward and swing my sword above my head.

Without much pause in my motions I bring the flaming blade down across Mr. Reality's body diagonally, creating a visible, melted gash through his helmet and burning through parts of his cloak before his body is swung against the window in front of me and he falls to the ground "stomach" first. After being battered by my attacks, the reality bender slowly lifts his body up and violently gasps for air as he tries to work his powers towards fixing the damage to his helmet and body. As the tear in the glass is sealed tightly and his breathing becomes less erratic, I land on the ground in front of him and glare down at him condescendingly, my sword still held at my side as the alien stares up at me and says with hit teeth grit in anger "How dare you! How dare you stare at me with those eyes after all that you've done!"

With a raise of the eyebrow, I tilt my head slightly and say to the reality bender "Its not so fun when you are the one who has been rendered helpless, is it now? You know, I am surprised that you were still able to use some of your reality bending powers, but you can't do too much with them without giving me enough time to pull out the Time Stone. To be honest, I didn't expect to beat you so easily after all this, but I guess I have no right to complain about the length of our fight." After mocking Mr. Reality for his weakness, the alien pounds his right fist against the ground, showing the will to fight as he tears his head away from the ground and scowls with his eye twitching in fury.

"This battle isn't over yet you arrogant miscreant! I refuse to let you win this game!" With his bravado being responded to with but a single scoff from my mouth, I twirl my eyes around and kneel downward, leaning forward as I dig into my left pocket and pull the Time Stone right out, holding the object in front of the alien's face for but a few seconds until his prying hand makes me retract my limb and chuckle at how desperate the reality bender is to stop me now. "Face it, its over no matter which way you paint it. You can't do anything to stop the Time Stone, and without your stronger reality bending feats I am definitely more powerful than you. Hell, I didn't even need to use my forms to beat you."

"You bullheaded human!" The alien blurts out to me in vain anger, his blood pressure rising as indicated by the reddish glow in his face as he looks straight at me and says with furious disbelief in his voice "Do you not understand what you are messing with there? That Time Stone of yours is a volatile relic! You need to discard it right now before its too late!" Though there was a hint of a warning via the tone he took against me, I merely looked past it and raised my eyebrow in surprise over the excuses Mr. Reality was trying to make to get me to remove my advantage. "You take me for a fool? I won't give you a chance to restart your game. Especially after everything that everyone has had to suffer through…"

I lift my body up, turning my head around to get a full view of the monochrome effect that has plagued the citadel and upon bending my head downward I grinned and came up with an interesting notion. As I kept my right arm beside me while raising my left one high into the air, I said to the reality bender as I slanted my eyebrows downward "Speaking of which, I worked hard to remove the Midnight Channel from this world, and with one whim the Time Stone will wipe out the last trace of it from the citadel. You've lost, Mr. Reality." As I closed my eyelids and prepared to concentrate on the Time Stone, the reality bender spoke quickly and I ended up thrusting my eyelids back open as a sharp pain creases across my left wrist.

Looking up to the source of pain, I see a golden chain wrapping around, squeezing itself tightly to try and apply pressure to the muscles and force my fingers to unravel around the stone. The reality bender keeps his right glove floating as far as he can above the air as I look down at him, and with some grunts intertwined in his voice he says to me "I refuse to let you use that! Do you not understand the consequences of your own incessant behavior?! Upon seeing that wretched stone, I remembered more details about the previous cycle…And if you use that Time Stone now, you'll doom everyone you know and love! I know I've said and done many things up until this point, but I'm begging you now young Overlord…DON'T DO IT!"

The alien's desperation was pitiful, and as he cried out to me to avoid using the Time Stone I refused to ever listen to anything he had to say. He was a villain through and through, the "Taking upon that role for the game" excuse be damned. Without much of a care for his plight I tugged on the chain wrapped around my armor, each link breaking apart with ease due to their strength being relevant to that of its user. With the chain broken into pieces that fall to the ground with light sounding chinks, I grasp the stone in front of my chest and release a pale light throughout the room. Within seconds the monochrome color scheme vanishes from the room, as an eerie silence fills the area and the reality bender raises his twitching left hand one last time in desperation as the flash fades into my stone.

"Why…Why did you do this?" The alien's voice cracks and slips into a state of disbelieving madness, and as I looked down at him his pupil shrinks immensely as he goes insane and begins laughing like a madman. With his hands resting flat against the ground he bends his head forward slightly, saying between his crackling laughter "We are all dead now…It will all happen again…" And then things started to get weird. Without warning, Mr. Reality's body began to spasm, his cloak twisting back and forth across the air as he floated higher upwards against his will, his hands reaching for the crease in his helmet and digging through to choke him. His eye bulges outward, his body thinning entirely until the line convulses back and forth and explodes into a series of dark speckles that floats upward and seeps into the ceiling cracks above.

With silence returning to the area I couldn't help but blink in bewilderment at what just unfolded before my eyes. Was Mr. Reality truly dead, or merely taken away by an outside force? Either way, his ominous final words struck a cord inside of my heart as I took the Time Stone and placed it into my left pocket. As I began to loom on the issue, I heard a voice calling to me in my right eardrum. "Mew…Mew…Are you still alive up there?" It was Alpha, whose tired yet concerned voice brought some relief to my troubled heart. There was a bit of crackling in the background, but I chalked it up to the fires of the Commander's battleship beating behind him.

"Yeah…Yeah…I managed to defeat Mr. Reality…What about you guys? I saw the battleship crash, but if you made it out then I would assume that-" "No need to finish there Mew. Yeah, everyone managed to survive, though its a miracle as to how that happened…After the laser blew a hole in our ship, a light-blue flash of light came out of nowhere, and the next thing I knew me and all of my crewmates were on the ground completely unharmed. As for everyone else, well, they made it through the Heartless safe and sound, and now we are just-Bzztt- zzzzzzzzzz" Alpha begins to break up on the outside, and though he was still speaking he was blocked out by an array of static.

"Alpha?" I said out of concern and confusion, and as I turned my head slightly to the right I heard a mighty roar coming from the outdoors. It was violent and otherworldly sounding, and within seconds the glass window in front of me shattered and my skin nearly became bombarded with its shards before I leaped backwards to avoid them. As I bent and leaned my body forward slightly I looked on in utter shock as the sky quickly became filled with pure black clouds, and lightning bolts began to rain down at a rapid pace. Their pale white form was surrounded by a ghastly neon aura not unlike that of the attacks Mr. Reality threw my way. As I regained my balance and ran forward to look past the edge of the windowsill I was horrified by what I was witnessing.

As each lightning bolt struck the ground, large portions of the ground were instantly erased from existence. There was no process so to speak, it was just as simple and quick as blinking one's eyelids. The vast holes in the ground, at first few in number, quickly multiplied much to my shock and disbelief. As I focused for what seemed like an eternity on this desolating spectacle, Alpha reconnected on the communicator and called out to me in nervous horror "M-Mew! What the hell is that on the citadel's rooftop?! And what is going on with this sudden storm?!" As soon as Alpha mentioned something appearing on the rooftop, another roar struck out across the air, rupturing it permanently as the building trembled in fear of the sounds it heard.

With one quick hand placed on my right ear lobe as I tried to regain my balance, I said to Alpha "Just calm down and try to avoid the bolts for now. I'll go and investigate the roof!" I then leaped out of the window, taking flight with urgency and curving upward until the rooftops were in side. I was surprised by the size of it, which vastly rivaled the area of two football stadiums. However, my surprise towards that was quickly focused towards the being standing atop the roof. As lightning bolts blasted the pristine surface and tore it out of existence only for the holes to be sealed in with pure light every time they were removed, the being noticed my presence and raises its head to glare at me with its ethereal dark red eyes.

It was a dragon, but not one that had a natural appearance like one would expect it to have. Its pitch black body had an oval-like shape to it, and it was devoid of any legs at the bottom of its ghastly, glowing, grey-green underside. There were still four five-pronged, scaly yet spiked claws standing on the ground detached from the rest of the body, and the head shared the same feature of gravity defiance as it was devoid of any neck. Speaking of the head, it shared the long, venomous fangs of a basilisk while the structure of the head itself looked similar to that of a komodo dragon's. As the beast stares at me with its bleak eyes it spreads its mouth open wide and reveals three rows of fangs teeth behind his two snaky fangs while his prehensile tongue drips acidic saliva onto the ground below, his back splits apart at the skin, revealing three pairs of wings that each have a rather thin, devilish brown membrane to them that pulsates rapidly with glowing energy as a roar breaks through the back of the beast's esophagus.

As the sound waves from its roar ruffles my body hairs and starts to cause my heart to beat rapidly in an unknown sensation of fear, I look down at the beast as it lowers its wings and bends its head down without caring anymore about my presence and at that point I realize something right away just because of its lack of legs. "Could this be…Mr. Reality?" There were many questions to be asked just from my unpleasant observation, but I couldn't spent any time answering them as I looked down at the beast that was once a sentient alien and knew that he was the source of the rampant destruction and slow erasure of the planet around me. With my blade held diagonally out in front of me and my body continuing to float in mid-air, an abject feeling of fear crept into my mind and made me say with a certain amount of timidity… "What am I supposed to do about this?"

Next Time: All Shall En