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CHAPTER 11:
WAVES OF PHOTONS AND MISTS OF OPAQUENESS
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Author's Notes: The compositions for this Chapter are, in order of scene: 'Unrestrained Struggle,' from the VALKYRIE PROFILE 2: SILMERIA Original Soundtrack, Volume Two ~ Silmeria Side; and then 'The Truth Revealed,' from the FINAL FANTASY X Original Soundtrack, Disc Three; and then 'How Wicked Ruler,' from the VALKYRIE PROFILE 2: SILMERIA Original Soundtrack, Volume Two ~ Silmeria Side; and lastly 'Original Sin,' from the FINAL FANTASY X Original Soundtrack, Disc Four. The second and fourth MP3s, however, can't be found in KINGDOM HEARTS Insider's MP3 section.
The Angel of Sin brought up Deifacted Selection and cut it into Bifrost's shaft above its point, holding it back, and then he twisted to the side to let Hercules' sword slice harmlessly in front of him and lashed out with his right foot and smashed it into the back of Hercules' right knee.
Hercules clenched his teeth in what Kairi could tell was an expression of pain, staggered, and then stumbled to a halt and turned.
Great.
Kairi had been afraid of this.
The Angel of Sin had enough power to directly break through a God's indestructible golden corona and hurt a deity.
The Angel of Sin could still kill Hercules, or take his heart.
Hercules shrugged and forced a smile.
"Immortality isn't all it's cracked up to be, anyway," he commented.
The Angel of Sin grinned viciously. "I disagree. What use is fine food and drink, or any other pleasures, if you can't enjoy them forever?"
He swung out with his left leg faster than Kairi had anticipated and cracked it into her knees, and she stumbled forwards, off balance enough that the Titan collective was able to disengage Deifacted Selection without leaving himself open and slash at Kairi's lower chest.
Anguish detonated in all directions inside her chest and she staggered back herself, but when she steadied herself she could breathe without too much pain.
No ribs felt like they were broken.
By this time, Hercules must have decided a direct approach had a better chance of catching the Titan collective off guard, for he lowered his head and charged the other deity with his sword forward as though he were a bull.
The Angel of Sin's eyes widened and he raised Deifacted Selection vertically before him as a shield, but Hercules just kept coming and rammed it back into the dots surrounding the Titan collective and then back into his chest, and threw him backwards to smash into the floor of the semicircular stage.
Blood trickled down from the Titan collective's mouth, and Kairi sighed in relief.
As she'd hoped, Hercules' physical strength was a lot mightier now, so she now assumed that it was on par with what Zeus could do with lightning bolts and physical stellar matter.
Maybe they really could win this if they kept their wits and worked effectively enough as a team.
A gold aura of the Angel of Sin's own shimmered into existence around him, and Hercules held his hands out before him and fashioned a gold sphere.
The Angel of Sin held out the fourth finger of his left hand and did the same.
"Once a brute, always a brute, I see," the Titan collective said.
"Says the hulks who love throwing around giant boulders of rock and ice, and flooding their surroundings with huge torrents of lava and wind. Judging from what you said before, I'm sure your flab was equally as barbaric."
"Har har," the Angel of Sin commented sarcastically, and fired his own aura negating sphere.
Kairi tossed Bifrost through it, dispersing it in wisps of mist and opening up a path for Hercules to fire his own sphere and neutralize the Angel of Sin's own indestructible curtain.
But before Hercules or Kairi could move in once more, the Angel of Sin crossed his arms over each other so Deifacted Selection was pointed at Kairi and his free palm was aimed at Hercules.
"Rings of Gaia and Uranus," the Angel of Sin said. "Surtur's Conflagration."
A phantasm of incandescent flame, in colors ranging from purple to red, in the form of a sword, appeared in a corona around Deifacted Selection and then tore off of it to head straight at Kairi. At the same time, a series of rings of gaseous clouds the color of grass in front of each other coalesced before the Titan collective's palm and launched at Hercules.
Kairi grabbed onto the hilt of Bifrost with her free hand and swung it into the inferno blade, knocking it away, and Hercules performed a spinning kick that smacked the rings aside.
"Egg of the Turtle's Shell," the Angel of Sin continued. "Blood Gouts of Shiva."
Two phantom turtle shells joined together right side up and upside down at their bottoms fired from the tip of Deifacted Selection at Bifrost, and a horizontal geyser of crimson steam ejected from the Angel of Sin's palm at Hercules.
Kairi held Bifrost's tip horizontally and sliced through the turtle shells at their equator while Hercules held up both his arms before his upper chest to block the geyser, and when Kairi had dispersed the shells she continued the motion into a swing that caught the Titan collective off guard and passed Deifacted Selection.
The Angel of Sin pulled back, but not quickly enough to prevent the tip of Bifrost from scoring a slice of red in his mid-chest.
Kairi forced a confident smile.
She, at least, could hurt the Angel of Sin.
The Titan collective shifted the dots of hovering black between him and Hercules to serve as a shield and then aimed both his palm and his Keyblade at Kairi.
"Statue of the Atman," he spoke next. "Pillar of Nirvana."
A silhouette of rippling air with two arms and hands joined together and pointed forward in a double fist launched in an upright position at Bifrost, and a horizontal pillar pointing forward with globes at the end comprised of forward flowing waves of glimmering light fired at Kairi's left instep.
Kairi kicked the Pillar of Nirvana away and rammed the tip of Bifrost into the statue, shattering it into flakes of energy.
But then the dots of dancing ebony were in front of the Titan collective's Keyblade and palm, preventing Kairi from seeing what was coming next even though Hercules now had the chance to attack the Titan collective.
"Seven Day Genesis," the Angel of Sin said. "Apocalypse of Jasper."
So Kairi went on the preemptive offensive.
She slid into a Sonic Blade and rocketed along the floor of the stage at the dots, forcing the Titan collective to give up many of the angles that he could attack from so Kairi would be partially ready for the twin strikes. As she reached them seven globes composed of tumbling cloudy white and black energies burst out of the dots at an angle extending from the Titan collective's hand in the direction of her heart, and the apparition of an arcing and tumbling plain throne launched out of the dots from the direction of Deifacted Selection at Kairi's face below her visor.
Kairi lowered her head and suppressed the urge to wince as pain detonated through her skull at the impact of the Apocalypse of Jasper as she freed herself from the Sonic Blade and hit the seven globes away with the rear end of Bifrost.
Hercules flew backwards through the air from past the wall of the black dots as though he was rebounding from something, and Kairi knew that his assault had been deflected when it had been about to impact by the Angel of Sin's gold corona.
They needed to discover a way to hurt the Titan collective without needing to cancel out the aura first.
But, before Kairi could pull back far enough that she could see whether the Angel of Sin was now aiming at both of them once more, just Hercules, or just her, the Titan collective spoke, "Expansion of the Big Bang. The Big Chill of the Big Crunch's Big Rip."
Hercules leapt straight upward as a funnel of air that widened more the further it extended from the Angel of Sin roared in his direction, but the Titan collective must have anticipated this, for a globe of pale white ice that contracted together as it moved and shed crescents of itself in all directions as it moved soared at Hercules.
Unprepared for this, Hercules didn't react in time to keep it from catching him in the stomach and sending him tumbling backwards over and over head over heels to land hard enough face and front first on the stage that it sent large cracks ripping out through its surface.
But then, to Kairi's surprise, all of the golden aura adumbrating Hercules coalesced into a marble above Hercules' hair, and then it shot forwards in the Angel of Sin's direction.
The Angel of Sin snarled viciously and savagely.
Hercules picked himself up off the stage floor, his corona now fully gone and blood flowing from a massive gash in his forehead.
Kairi refused to worry that Hercules was no longer a full God. She trusted that he knew what he was doing.
"You're correct," Hercules said anyway, obviously seeing something in her face or body language. "I was a Demigod once, so I can return to being a half-human if I want to, but for now I'm still a God.
"I've been meaning to try what I just did on Dad, with his permission, for a long time, and it looks like it worked. By giving up all of my divine armor and applying the astral tapestry correctly, I can cancel out all of the divine armor of another God.
"Since mine isn't working that well here, it's a good trade."
"I don't need it," the Angel of Sin said dismissively, though he couldn't fully hide his anger at having been genuinely upstaged for the first time. "You won't be cancelling out my darkness. Black is still a shade. That's why darkness is an energy form of its own. It's not the absence of all of the shades of light. It's the opposite side of the spectrum."
Kairi's eyes widened.
She hadn't thought of that before.
But the Angel of Sin was still thinking about the concept the wrong way. He was seeing it as though light and darkness were equal, and that was wrong, because if they were, the brightest light couldn't hold back all of the darkness.
"So you're one of those clueless idiots who believes that darkness is inferior to light because it's supposedly a lack," the Angel of Sin remarked derisively. "Wasn't your late father a scholar? How is it, then, that you didn't inherit the brain to be able to process that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only changed?
"Furthermore, darkness supposedly can't fully swallow light, so that's another reason why darkness is inferior," the Titan collective now added sarcasm to his derisiveness.
"Wake up. The true Kingdom Hearts of this tapestry of realms can be completely obliterated."
Kairi had considered that it was possible, but hearing a reliable source who might not be lying potentially confirm it sent shock and horror and terror flooding through her.
"Kingdom Hearts is light, that's true.
"But it can't just be destroyed, it's a thing of sticks before the darkness.
"Black isn't just a shade, it devours all colors."
Frozen frigid ice and whirling blizzards of horror and terror consumed all of Kairi's being, and she couldn't breathe.
That couldn't be true.
"It's obvious that you two need to learn your place, so the cocktails are over. It's time for the main course."
Kairi pushed her shock and horror and other emotions away as far as possible and assumed a defensive position. She knew what that meant, and she also knew that attempting to defend herself had as little of a chance of enabling her to endure what was about to happen as going on the offensive, so going on the offensive might be the best choice.
She might at least be able to inflict wounds of her own that way.
Now that she could trace hearts more precisely as Valkyrie in Rainbow Bridge, she could tell that Leone had had reasons of her own for naming her sword Empress Massacre.
"So I'll demonstrate what I mean," the Angel of Sin finished. "Extinctionza."
Kairi opened her mouth.
"Empress Ma–"
"What is going on here!?" Yuna's familiar voice interjected from above and to the side.
The Angel of Sin smirked with vicious, savage triumph, interrupted his assault, and before Kairi was able to process what he had in mind, he was jumping through the air to her left in the direction of Yuna's voice as another apparition of rainbow followed by afterimages, and Kairi whipped her head after him to see him land to the side of Auron and behind him where he stood at the edge of the amphitheater atop its wall, spin, lock his free arm around Auron's throat, and pull Auron back against him with Deifacted Selection at his throat.
Kairi couldn't breathe once more, Yuna gasped and whirled in his direction, Paine and Rikku, who were there with her, doing the same things.
"It's over now!" the Angel of Sin crowed. "If I devour Auron's heart, I can trace the connection he once had to the Styx Maelstrom and devour the hundreds of billions of dead hearts who have died on Olympus since Hades became the God of Death as well, and while even that number of hearts is still a small piece of a world heart, I can metabolize them enough to boost my powers a good deal further!"
That meant nothing to Kairi, whether or not it ruined their chances of defeating the Titan collective. What she could care about now was Auron's danger.
"Let the banquet start! Come to my feast of plenty!"
"That won't happen!" Tidus cried, Kairi's heart stopped, and reality fled anew.
She turned in his direction, pleading with everything that she knew that she wasn't going to see what she was almost sure that she would, but she did.
Tidus had his right hand extended in the Angel of Sin's direction, hand and arm and body shaking extremely violently, but his grip closed in preparation to call Deifacted Selection to it.
The Angel of Sin stopped moving, as did Kairi, and tears clouded her eyes.
The Titan collective knew that there was nothing he could do physically to defend himself now, but a similar matter was true for Kairi.
Even if she was willing to turn Bifrost on herself, tore her own heart out, and sent it into Tidus' as Dad had done to Terra and Riku, and attempted to seize Tidus' hand away from him, she wouldn't be quick enough.
"I'm not going to let someone else die in my place!" Tidus shouted, tears streaking his face and falling from his eyes. "I'm putting an end to this, and myself, here!"
Hercules was now looking at Tidus with an expression of horror.
"Don't discount how I just became a true hero!" he implored Tidus. "If you give your life, you'll betray Kairi's and Wakka's and Selphie's feelings and leave them behind!" Tidus cringed, and further tears appeared in his eyes and fell, but he didn't lower his hand. "This isn't the answer!"
"Can I sign a contract with you and bring Tidus back like Meg did?" Wakka asked Hades, Tidus looked at him in horrified shock and agony, and Kairi wasn't even sure that she knew what breathing was now.
Now even Wakka.
Hades grimaced. "As much as I'd like to take you up on that offer, hearts from off Olympus need to spend the length of a season here before I'm given jurisdiction over them when they die. That's not a law that Zeus has woven into Olympus' astral tapestry, that's an overriding mandate of the astral tapestry of the realm of light."
"Then we're out of options," Tidus said. "Hercules is right. I am betraying everyone's feelings if I do this. I know that it's selfish. But this isn't a matter of answers or choices any longer. I don't have any choice now."
Xion, tears of her own now spilling down her face as Roxas looked at both of them in terror and horror, took a step forward and reached out her free hand. "Don't say those words," she pleaded. "They're not the magic that you believe they are. That's how I felt when I discovered that I was draining Roxas' energy. I gave up on searching for the answer that I wanted myself, concentrated on what I should do, and gave my life to protect Roxas.
"But that didn't make anything better, and it just hurt both of us a lot more.
"The magic never works, no matter how many times we repeat those words to ourselves. The sole feeling that we're left with is regret."
Tidus' hand weakened slightly, but then it reassumed its original resolved position, though Tidus' entire body, arm, and hand were shaking even harder now.
Lea looked as though he wanted to sprint forward, grab Tidus, and shake him physically harder than Tidus was shaking, but it was Roxas who spoke next.
"I was the same," he attempted to reach Tidus himself. "It feels like the only right choice that's left when you have nowhere else to turn, but what we're really feeling is that we can do whatever we want."
Lea's eyes widened, and he gave Roxas a grateful smile.
Kairi needed to ask what that exchange had been about, but now wasn't the time.
Tidus smiled painfully and with broken sadness. "Thank you," he responded. "What you and Xion said are among the reasons I've wanted to bridge yours and Xion's and Roxas' own dreams of pain with my own of kindness, in a lot of ways even more than Kairi's and Sora's and Riku's.
"But it looks like the time for dreaming is over. It's time for the ace to make the winning play, and fall into a slumber that not even dreams can release you from."
New tears pushed forwards into Kairi's eyes, so thick that she could barely see through them.
No.
She hadn't stopped waiting for Sora and Riku, left Destiny Islands for Twilight Town, taken up a Keyblade, and gone through months after months of severe emotional and mental and physical torment and hardship to try to love and protect and care for and cherish Sora and Riku just to lose Tidus.
But even now, even after what she'd learned from Platina, it still hadn't been enough.
She was still helpless and powerless to protect the people who she loved, and dead weight.
"Please don't leave me and travel where I can't follow you, too," she begged Tidus.
Tidus turned his head in Kairi's direction and gave her another painful, brokenly sad smile.
"Thanks a ton," he responded. "Because of you, at least I know that I'm not dying alone and forgotten.
"I didn't once fall for you like Sora has and as Riku did. No offense, but you're not my kind of girl. As much as you refuse to hide what you feel and laugh and cry for others, you and Riku don't give it your all and go for the win. But I do love you a ton, though."
Kairi forced herself to smile. "I love you a ton, too," she responded.
Tidus' smile temporarily became less broken and painful and sad.
Kairi didn't let herself feel enough at the rest that she could tell what it was. That was wrong at this time.
But she did need to ask, to try to better connect with Tidus, though she refused to accept that these were his final moments, and for Sora and Riku and the others, as well.
"What are you talking about?" she questioned.
Tidus was no longer smiling.
"When Sora and I talked when he came back to Destiny Islands before he left for what I now know was the Second Keyblade War," Tidus elaborated, "I could tell that Sora was learning to give it his all, but as much as you and Riku have attempted to do the same in the over a year since, even though you slept for around a year for Sora, I still don't think that the two of you fully understand what it means to go for the goal.
"First, you didn't care about finding out where you came from, while Sora and Riku gave up on Destiny Islands. The way I see it, you should have seen all places as wonderful and worthy of exploring.
"Then you came home and Sora didn't, when you should have stayed with him from the get go, rather than tossing it away needlessly and trying to recover it later. That's not how blitzers, especially not aces, know to do it. They keep the ball with them unless they know that they can trust the team to take one for them without getting tackled in the process.
"Even now, you don't know what it takes to score. You and Sora and Riku are stuck in a ridiculous way of feeling and thinking where you're proud to be a small piece of something much greater.
"I see that as fumbling. It's well and good that you're a player in a team, I understand that, but the three of you are focused so much on that that you've forgotten that you need to blitz your own path through the pool, yourselves. Riku used to get this, but then he took it too far in ways that I now understand, and turned into you and Sora as a result out of guilt.
"If you don't care about your own feelings as well as those of the people who you love, you still don't care about the people in your presence or elsewhere with all your heart, because you're a person as well, and like Lezard and Hercules are saying, the people you love love you back, and they don't want you to be hurt for them.
"Don't be weak and look to others to give you strength and wings so you can fly through the sea of cerulean together, be a wimp and look to others to put you in shape so you can soar through the ocean of stars together."
Lezard nodded in agreement and puffed up his chest proudly, but Hercules frowned.
Kairi took that to heart, but that meant that Tidus wanted to live, and didn't want to die, immeasurably more than anyone else here, with the possible exception of Lezard.
Go for the win, huh?
Very well, then.
That was what she would do.
She would love and protect and cherish and be there for Tidus.
And then she would defeat the Angel of Sin, and save Zack and Meg and Phil in the process, regardless of the odds.
And she would not be a deadweight any longer.
That was how it was going to be.
"You forgot Sora, too," Tidus went on. "While I didn't."
Kairi was too surprised to suppress the surge of surprise itself.
"Like I said, I go for the win. I don't lose sight of what it takes to score. I did, once, when Mom died, and you know what happened then." Kairi pushed away her guilt at how she'd failed, then, too, and her guilt at still not being able to understand how Selphie and Wakka had been able to reach Jecht when Sora, Riku, and she hadn't been able to. "Selphie and Wakka needed to talk Dad out of turning to drinking in his grief because my eyes were too clouded by my tears to do so myself. That's never happening again.
"I didn't say anything about how I still remembered Sora, however, because I didn't want to risk making things worse. Selphie and Wakka didn't believe you when you weren't sure whether or not you remembered Sora, so I was afraid if I said that he had been real I'd drive a wedge between the two of them, and you, if they didn't believe me. And I was scared that I wouldn't be able to enable you to remember, or not fully, so I'd end up hurting you.
"So I kept my mouth shut.
"I could tell, too, when Riku came back home the first time himself, that Riku was forgetting the person who I now know is Xion."
Bifrost slipped out of her fingers and clattered to the stage, though it didn't revert to Destiny's Embrace and she remained Valkyrie in Rainbow Bridge.
She hadn't lost her determination to win, but that was far too much.
Tidus would have remembered Xion, and now Kairi was in danger of to lose him just after she'd learned this?
Xion's mouth had dropped open and she now looked like she couldn't breathe, Roxas appeared sick with guilt, and Lea clenched his free hand so tightly his nails drew blood.
"Even though I didn't know who Xion was myself then so I wasn't in a position to remember her," Tidus continued.
Tidus turned to look at Xion, and gave her an even more painful, broken, sad smile.
"I'm sorry that I didn't see you the day you came to the Destiny Islands yourself, since things might have been a lot different then if I had. Roxas, Lea, I'm sorry to you, too. At worst, I'd have remembered who you were, Xion, when you returned to Sora, realized part of what your death had meant, and while Sora had come to terms with Roxas' death, he wouldn't have tolerated what yours had cost, and then he would most likely have gotten you and Roxas out of his heart a lot sooner."
Xion was crying much harder now, and Roxas was struggling to keep tears brimming in his own eyes from spilling over.
"It's fine, Tidus," Xion said, and she sounded as though she meant it. "Because we didn't meet, I got to spend longer together with Roxas in Sora's heart. It wasn't that bad."
Tidus' expression turned even more broken and pain and sad, and Kairi practically lost sense of how she needed to retrieve Bifrost, because though Tidus didn't love her like Sora did and Riku had, he now was looking at Xion the same way that Roxas did.
"Don't try to kid yourself," Tidus reproved her gently. "You deserve fathomlessly better than that.
"You're not Kairi, or Sora, or Riku. You understand what it means to care about everyone, including yourself. You and Roxas and Lea all do. You don't just live in kindness and pain and connect the two worlds by spending equal amounts of time eating sea-salt ice cream and wielding Keyblades, you strive for yourself as well as the people around you, and you treasure both home and adventure. Even when you do sacrifice yourself, you still hurt horribly because you can't live on and keep enjoying the wonderful World with the people who you love, and your friends, beside you, yet though you're torn in countless directions you keep your eyes on the goal and go for the win anyway. You weren't just willing to die forgotten, when push came to shove you actually did it.
"So I know that you care about yourself the same way.
"I wasn't willing to say this before, because it's obvious that that would cause you and Roxas a lot more pain than you're already going through, but I've been getting sick and tired of how Roxas is unwilling to get too close of you because he's afraid that he'll hurt you again. I understand why, now that Kairi told me what happened before Invi faced us, but as far as I'm concerned, that doesn't justify keeping your connection severed."
Roxas' face became a mask, and Xion composed hers into a neutral expression.
"So you need to know this before you lose your chance to know how strong a connection I'm willing to extend for you."
Xion's eyes flew wide, and Roxas' mask became even more set.
Tidus smiled once again, and this time it was even less pained and broken and sad than it had been after Kairi had told him that she loved him.
"That's wonderful. You know what I'm going to say.
"But you need to hear it.
"I don't love Kairi the way that Sora does.
"I love you that way.
"I'm sorry that I didn't tell you this until now, of all times."
Xion opened her mouth and raised her hand and reached in Tidus' direction, but she dropped it and closed her mouth, obviously not knowing what to say.
She attempted to restrain her tears, but then she must have reconsidered, for she let even more tears tumble down her face.
Tidus next looked at Lezard, who looked torn between wishing to strangle Tidus with his bare hands and understanding acceptance, since Tidus had made it clear that he was aware of what Hercules hadn't been.
"I won't say this to Alicia or Rufus, for reasons that are self-evident, but I am sorry, to you."
Rufus shrugged and forced a smile. "After what the Angel of Sin is trying to pull, I'm sure now. I wouldn't break my promise to Hades if I could. I don't break promises. But once I've stayed true to my word, if I'm alive after it, I'm getting as much out of this as I can without it damaging my ability to be there for Alicia. I'm sure now. Gods and people shouldn't associate with each other at all."
Lezard's eyes flashed with hate and fury, but Alicia started violently and, surprisingly, looked incomprehensibly relieved and elated.
She turned to Rufus.
"Are you sure that that's what you want?" she asked him.
Rufus' face became emotionless, and he nodded. "I'm sorry, but yes. I know that's not how you yourself feel, but we'll need to agree to disagree."
Alicia smiled widely, walked up to him, wrapped her arms around him and held him close and tight, and as Lezard's face lost all its emotion, she kissed him warmly, approvingly, and reassuringly on the lips.
Then she ended the kiss, let him go, and stepped back.
"Then you can walk on your own legs now, and it won't hurt you that much to lose me like when you lost Artemis."
Lezard's mouth fell open, Rufus set his jaw, and Kairi's eyes widened as she at last realized what was genuinely going on with Lezard, Alicia, Rufus, Platina, and Lucian.
A tiny amount of relief filled Kairi.
Alicia had connected romantically with Rufus because she understood pain and hurt far more than Platina, so she'd been willing to do for him what Platina had been too pulled in a number of directions to do for Rufus.
Alicia clearly still had a lot of pain to work through, because establishing a romantic bond with someone when you didn't intend for it to last if that person stopped needing that kind of love severely betrayed someone's feelings in its own ways, but Kairi was now confident that Lezard could enable her to pull through it.
She didn't need to do that much other than to defeat the Angel of Sin and rescue Meg, Phil, and Zack to give them a happy ending.
Platina smiled in immense relief of her own, took Lucian's hand, and rested her head on his shoulder.
Lucian's eyes widened as he realized what this meant, but he didn't smile. What Tidus wanted to do was clearly preventing him from being willing to do so. He raised his free hand and began to stroke Platina's hair with it to try to comfort her, but he didn't smile.
"I'm still very sorry to leave you, though," Alicia told Rufus.
Rufus' face didn't become less of a mask, but he nodded.
Alicia sighed with resignation.
Then she turned to Lezard and gave him an uncertain, but still confident smile.
"I'm mostly better from what Rufus did now," she spoke. "I didn't lose confidence because I might lose him. I lost confidence because I was worried that, because Rufus had sacrificed himself, I'd failed to live up to what I learned from you about caring about other people's feelings. But it looks like I was wrong.
"Thank you very much for all that you've taught me."
Lezard's mouth was still hanging open, but then he closed it and gave an arrogant grin that was mostly forced. "Did you believe that the brilliant beaver dam head who I am was capable of anything less?"
Alicia giggled in delight. "Of course not," she grinned.
She looked as though she wanted to say something else, which Kairi assumed was that she'd never not believed in Lezard, but Alicia appeared uncertain and then chose not to say it.
Kairi reminded herself that patience was a virtue.
Tidus sighed heavily in relief, and then he looked up in the direction of Yuna, whose face was a mixture of agony and anger.
Yuna blinked in surprise.
"I'm sorry that I didn't even get a chance to get to know you," he said. "Lezard said that you feel and think like Hercules does, and I should have made it obvious by now how I think about that.
"Though, due to how I hear that you're an eager treasure hunter, it sounds like there's a lot more hope for you than there was for Hercules." Tidus forced a smile. "It's too bad. I don't just want to befriend you because you need a friend. I'm not just saying this because Xion's not available." Yuna's eyes widened. "I don't do rebounds. But you go back and forth between caring about others and yourself and you obviously give a lot of your heart to both mindsets, so I also wish I'd had the chance to befriend you to find out, in time, if we could date."
Yuna's face became a mask, at which Rikku sighed and Paine looked away, but then she forced herself to smile. "I've never thought of dating a human, but what the hey? I'm all for befriending you partially to learn that."
"Thanks," Tidus said, and then he looked back to Kairi.
"I guess that's it, then," he said.
But Kairi didn't tense.
She could tell.
She knew now what Tidus needed to hear, though she wasn't consciously aware of it, and she looked into her heart and traced it.
Hercules sighed heavily and looked exhausted. "I guess Hades was right after all, then," he spoke, his voice consumed with anguish. "True hero or not, you still can't protect and save everyone."
Kairi jolted violently, and smiled.
Yes, you could.
"You're wrong," she told Hercules, and then she faced Tidus.
"Tidus, please, tell me something," she requested. "Betraying some people's feelings while staying true to the feelings of others is one matter, but if you go through with this and die, you won't just betray some of us. You'll betray everyone's feelings."
Tidus resumed shaking violently, but his expression hardened.
"I mean literally everyone's. Your own feelings as well.
"Is this what you truly want yourself?" Kairi asked. "Do you truly want to betray everyone and die? Doesn't this cause you to hurt, as well?"
Tidus' mouth opened, but then he dropped his right hand firmly and determinedly to his side.
Kairi sagged, relief consuming everything that comprised her heart and her existence.
And Auron moved.
Auron twisted in the Angel of Sin's grip enough to aim his water jug up at the surprised and off guard Titan collective's mouth, and then he shifted his arms and hands around enough to yank the cork off.
A ruby mist coalesced between the rim of the jug's neck and the Angel of Sin's mouth, and then it fell open and two ethereal shimmering hearts shot out of it to soar through the air and into Meg's and Phil's torsos.
Both of them jerked violently and Phil began to cough violently while Meg started sputtering, and Hercules ran over to them.
"I have a limited connection of my own to the Styx Maelstrom," Auron said, using the Titan collective's further distraction to now slip free of his hold, after which he ran to the side, spun in front of Yuna, Paine, and Riku, and drew his broadsword.
Hades looked as though he couldn't decide whether to grin or scowl.
Kairi sagged further.
But the Titan collective's mouth was still open, and ruby tongues of dancing, writhing lightning began coursing out of his maw and striking randomly over the benches, the staircases, the floor of the amphitheater, the stage, and the walls.
"What's going on?" Hercules asked.
Alicia opened her mouth, but when she talked, her voice was deeper, and Kairi knew that she was meeting Silmeria.
"Auron isn't skilled enough with tracing his connection yet," Silmeria replied. "He disrupted the balance of the astral tapestry bonding the Angel of Sin to the world heart, and that connection has now gone out of control. Sora locked Olympus' Keyhole, but that makes no difference when the Angel of Sin himself is the world heart. If this isn't stopped, all of Olympus and everyone and everything upon it, including the hearts of the dead inside the Styx Maelstrom, will once more fall into the darkness, and with the Door to Darkness closed, Olympus has nowhere to go. That a world has been eclipsed with the Door to Darkness shut will disrupt the balance of light and darkness so severely that it will send a tsunami of darkness washing through the realm of light for around two hundred fifty million light years in all directions, the size of the whole Big Dipper Galactic Supercluster that Olympus is part of, and this will shatter the walls of all of the worlds of the Big Dipper Galactic Supercluster and drag those worlds and the hearts upon them, living or dead, into the darkness along with Olympus.
"But with the Door to Darkness shut, they cannot form a third artificial Kingdom Hearts, much smaller than the one that Sora and Mickey separated. They'll just vanish wholly into The Final World, and the power of spectral cannot revive the hearts of worlds or people who have been lost when worlds fade away. Not even recreating the realm of light, as the Dandelions accomplished after the First Keyblade War, can resurrect a world heart that has disappeared into The Final World or those lost with it."
Kairi jolted and pushed her horror and terror away as far as possible, and she bent and picked up Bifrost as quickly as she could, while Hercules turned to face the Angel of Sin.
Even Hades had gone fully pale at this.
"If the Angel of Sin isn't defeated quickly and the heart of Olympus separated from Zack, hundreds of quintillions of worlds or more, and most of the hearts within them, alive or dead, are about to vanish entirely beyond all recovery."
Kairi adjusted Bifrost into a better combat stance.
"I've got it!" she spoke. "Leave this to us!"
Alicia's head nodded with Alicia's demeanor, and Kairi was aware that Alicia had regained control of her own body.
Before she could move, a ruby current arced in Lezard's direction.
He swore and hurled himself into a roll out of the way, but a second current coursed at him while he was rolling.
Hercules, Platina, Leone, and Lucian were running in Lezard's direction, but Alicia was closer.
Kairi clenched her free hand into a fist so tightly that her nails drew blood as Alicia jumped in front of the current and raised Randgrid's Blade to try to block it.
Alicia knew as well as Kairi that the block would almost certainly be meaningless.
The bolt ripped through Randgrid's Blade and shattered it to fragments before striking Alicia in the chest above where her heart was.
"No way!" Lezard, now kneeling, cried in horror.
But Alicia's heart wasn't ripped out of her chest.
A rough crystal of ruby began to grow around her from above her head and feet.
She turned to Lezard and smiled at him. "Thank you very, very much for everything," she said. "I love you, and I don't mean that as a sister or as a friend."
Then the ruby crystal finished encasing her.
Lezard was no longer moving, and was barely even breathing, and his mouth hung open while his eyes were wide.
Aqua had reached the other Einherjar and Rufus and now had a clear shield of interconnected hexagons up around all of them, but still now, even after she'd just actively and successfully loved and protected someone for the first time in her life, Kairi had been too late once again.
This, now far more than at most, if any time, before, wasn't the time for that, though.
Innumerable lives and hearts and worlds were now unimaginably immeasurably more at stake than they'd even been during the First Keyblade War.
"Can I break Alicia free?" Hercules questioned Aqua urgently.
"It won't work," Hades answered for Aqua, and for the first time he sounded genuinely worried for his nephew. "Alicia isn't a Heartless and a Nobody now, or even dead. The Angel of Sin is a God and the world heart, Gods can shape the astral tapestry of the realms themselves, and world hearts are directly connected to Kingdom Hearts. Alicia's heart has become solid Dreamstone, a mineral deposited by Kingdom Hearts itself in many worlds of the five realms of each worldline, as the world hearts deposit the mineral of Gummi blocks as walls around each world. Physical Dreamstone can be broken or separated as Gummi blocks can, but a Dreamstone heart can't be broken in any way.
"Alicia is part of the astral tapestry of reality now. The only way someone could conceivably set her free is if Kingdom Hearts itself were obliterated."
Kairi refused to believe that as much as she was determined to defeat the Angel of Sin without losing the ability to call Zack home sweet home.
However, Lezard jolted violently, and familiar black and purple flames began to rise up around him.
A second failure.
He turned, stood up, and faced Hades. "Then I'll do that."
Hades glared, and ignored the glare of undiluted, unrestrained hate that Lezard met Hades' with, of such distilled purity in its epitome that it didn't just defy all potential comprehension and all potential incomprehension, it defied the concepts of conveying emotion themselves, even the concepts of saying that they couldn't be conveyed.
"Get a grip, kid!" Hades snorted. "Kairi's father and an entity that had separated from him tried that. It can't be done, and even if it could, if you did, you'd take everyone and everything else save for Gaes and Domain of Tales down with you past salvation, and you and Alicia would be the sole hearts left in our astral tapestry."
"That's the idea," Lezard hissed hatefully through clenched teeth. "Alicia will get the peace and the eternal calm that she needs then. Gaes and Domain of Tales are going down themselves.
"You and Hercules and Zeus, especially, are going to die beyond death. None of this would have happened to her if it weren't for m– you and Hercules and Zeus."
Maybe it wasn't too late to reach Lezard.
"Lezard, listen to me," Kairi said. "I've been through this. I'm still going through this. I can feel your pain."
Lezard whirled on her. "Shut your revolting lies up!" he snarled with unrestrained viciousness. "If you can feel other's pain, why did you abandon and betray Sora's feelings as you said that you did before we met Invi, and then just decide to consider them after Platina slapped sense into you?"
Kairi suppressed the urge to wince.
"You're as bad as Hades and Hercules. You're all treacherous entities of death and despair and pain and torment who should be condemned to everlasting oblivion beyond emptiness.
"I will see that happen.
"This is Alicia's fairy tale, and you're not part of it."
"Hold on a second, Lezard!" Mystina interjected, sounding as furious as she was agonized and worried. "Are you seriously not including me in her story!?"
Lezard's expression softened slightly. "I'm not including you because you're better off far away from me, and Alicia. Get lost as far away from the both of us as you can, Mysty, or I'll make you get so far lost in the realm of light that you'll never be able to find yourself once again, much less me or Alicia."
Mystina's snarled viciously and began to stalk forward, fury and terror and concern and anguish in her eyes and on her face, but then she appeared to have second thoughts and halted.
"Fine, be that way," she spoke guardedly, tensely, and stiffly. "I know by now that there's no stopping you once your heart and your mind are made up." Kairi had a different opinion about that. "Do what you want. See if I care."
Lezard nodded at Mystina once, and then looked away from her.
The dark flames coalesced around Lezard and refined into robes and a mask as ebony as the Foretellers' were white, with a beaver's face centered at the core of the mask's brow.
Hades crossed his arms. "Good luck. As far as Kairi's dear old dad and his cronies plunged into the darkness, plummet too far and you'll become darkness itself and a Heartless. Not even the Foretellers, who I've been hearing a lot more than I prefer to about lately, can do that, with their brilliance at maneuvering and their eons of experience. There are depths that you can't sink to without losing yourself in the process. It's not possible."
"You forget who you're talking to," Lezard hissed back. "I'm not an egghead. I am Lezard Valeth, the brilliant beaver dam head and the pinnacle of all research into magic and the astral tapestry for untold millennia since the never beginning inception of Domain of Tales and the World itself.
"I am no mere magician or sorcerer or mage. I am wizardry itself.
"If I am wizardry itself, I can become darkness itself to its uttermost depths, without losing who I am."
Kairi felt sick once more.
She knew what Lezard's feelings had spurred her to do without knowing it in the Keyblade Graveyard, and Maleficent hadn't transformed into a Heartless even though Dad's Heartless had stabbed her with the Keyblade of Hearts, and Maleficent was driven by devotion to the memory of her late daughter.
There might be a very minuscule chance that Lezard could become the deepest darkness itself without turning into a Heartless.
"Even if you can, do you honestly believe that we'll just let you walk away?" Aqua was standing outside the hexagonal shield and now had Master's Defender aimed at Lezard in a combat position.
"An omen chimes!" Lezard responded, unsheathing his staff and aiming the tip at her in one fluid motion. "As hymns peal, thou shalt be sacrificed as a burnt offering upon the festival of insanity! Carnage Anthem!"
Aqua raised Master's Defender to block, clearly unsure whether or not this was a feint.
It wasn't.
A geyser of crimson blood erupted horizontally at Aqua, spraying drops of crimson from the front of the geyser in wildly and chaotically dancing spiraling fountains forward.
As Aqua interposed Master's Defender between her and the geyser and fountain and shielded herself, Lezard threw himself forwards into the geyser and called a roughly oblong dark corridor out of the air in front of him before he'd traveled far into it.
At least the Angel of Sin's destabilized connection had broken the wall Invi had erected around Olympus.
Lezard sailed into the corridor of darkness, it closed and dissipated, and he was beyond their reach.
Kairi clenched her teeth, but Olympus, the Big Dipper Galactic Supercluster, her friends, and she herself, were running out of time.
They'd call Lezard out of the darkness and home sweet home later.
Hades was looking down at his right hand and flexing it, as though trying to decide whether or not to fist it.
At last he snarled and took a single, deep breath, and then faced Hercules.
"Fine," he said. "I surrender." Kairi couldn't breathe. Was Hades lying, or did this mean–?
Hercules' face was a mixture of skepticism and doubt and hope and relief of his own.
"Happy?" Hades asked.
"How do we know that you're not talking out of both sides of your mouth like you usually do, chump?" Phil questioned, standing now with his arms crossed, though he looked a small amount unsteady.
"I'd offer to sign my name to one of my own contracts, but since I can release those bound to them if I choose to, that'll prove nothing," Hades spoke back angrily. "So I swear on Persephone's and Cerberus' hearts that I'm not lying."
Kairi let herself sag slightly again.
She hadn't done it herself, and it had been accomplished in one of the worst possible ways, but Hades had been called out of the darkness and home sweet home.
Hades wouldn't use Persephone's and Cerberus' names in an oath.
Kairi knew that Persephone and Cerberus would follow as soon as Hades saw them again.
Furthermore, as soon as Kairi defeated the Angel of Sin, the Second War of the Gods would be over, then.
Hades snapped the fingers of his left hand, and green mists flew up off of Rufus. "I just released Rufus from fulfilling his contract. That should further vouch that I'm honest for once."
"I won't protest," Meg walked unsteadily up to Hercules' side, and from her expression, she appeared as convinced of Hades' honesty as Hercules and Phil now were. "But why are you surrendering now? Isn't a World of endless and eternal death what you wanted?"
Hades scowled blackly. "You've worshipped me all this time, and, even after all these years, you still didn't have enough faith in your God to understand his feelings?
"This is one of the polar opposites of the World that I wanted.
"I wanted a World of imposed stability and order where I was worshipped as the one God, and the pinnacle of power, so no one would worship or obey any other God or Goddess, and I could thus compel people to care for their loved ones and friends in the ways that I saw as best for them. As well as a World where I could hurt or kill those who violated my edicts however I needed to, and then keep doing so while they were alive, or while they were dead and portions of them remained in the Styx Maelstrom that I could restore them from if I felt that they merited it, until I'd broken through their thick skulls and made them be decent people that way, or in a culture of death in the Styx Maelstrom.
"I didn't want a World of unfettered chaos where people, alive or dead, are here in the World as nothing more than food to make the one God greater, and those who violate those mandates are condemned to a death beyond oblivion where no part of them remains and from which there is no return.
"Kairi was correct. Alicia was correct. All paths in war lead nowhere. I didn't know what was best for the hearts of Olympus, or for the rest of the cosmos."
Hades turned to Hercules.
"You were going to tell me that, because I'm a God and separate from people, I'm as lonely as the members of the first Organization Thirteen were, so that's why I don't understand people's hearts, weren't you?"
Hercules forced a smile and nodded, though Kairi saw no reason to.
"I can tell that now.
"You and Kairi were going to point out that my refusal to break my end of a contract is proof of this loneliness, because it's one of the few sets of ways that I'm willing to connect without threatening my ego. I can see that, too."
Hades grimaced and shrugged. "You two were right about me. Go figure."
Hades extended his hand. "Can we negotiate terms for my surrender, or are they unconditional?"
Hercules pressed his lips together.
"To be on the safe side after all that you've done and for how long you've done it, I'd prefer that they're unconditional," he spoke. "But I'm not in a position to have the last say in that. Dad is. So while I'd like them to be unconditional for now, keep in mind that Dad might be willing to renegotiate."
Hercules extended his own hand to Hades. "Do we have a compromise, Uncle Hades?"
Hades' hair rose into flames before resettling.
"I'm surrendering, but do not call me that another single time. I still can't stand you and Zeus, and Poseidon and Hera."
Hercules sighed slightly and nodded.
"Are we in agreement then?" he questioned.
Hades' visage shifted into an expression concealing all of his emotion.
"We are." He extended his hand, shook Hercules', and then withdrew it and held it to his side, though not far enough away that he didn't appear as though he didn't want to touch himself with a hand that had shaken Hercules'.
Hercules turned to face the Angel of Sin, who was standing where he had been before and letting more ruby currents course from his mouth and strike haphazard locations.
In the skies above the Angel of Sin, familiar dark storm clouds had formed and were swirling and turning and whirling tumultuously.
"Now, let's deal with the God who sees the surrender as illegitimate," he spoke.
The Angel of Sin finally stopped the ruby bolts from coursing, and a single angelic wing with feathers of flowing green mist broke up and out from the Angel of Sin's right shoulder. Kairi clenched her teeth, knowing that meant that the Titan collective had devoured the dead hearts of the Styx Maelstrom through another method.
"If you're prepared for nothingness, give it your best shot," the Titan collective spoke back. "Now that my tie to the world heart is unstable, I could just trace that and assume the dead hearts of Styx. Now I'm massively stronger than before."
"You're thinking in terms of the size of your strength, not the strength of your heart," Hercules rejoined. "It doesn't matter how strong you are, if you refuse to account for that, strength won't make a difference."
He repositioned his blade.
Kairi held out her left hand, palm forward, though.
"That's my fate," she told him. "This is a destiny that I'm willing to fulfill. You already fulfilled yours when you defeated the elemental Titans separately.
"You and Hades are better equipped than anyone else here to get as many people off of Olympus and to a world named Twilight Town as you can," Hades opened his mouth at her assumption that he'd help protect the people who he'd just been waging war on, but he closed it and nodded stiffly, "And the people in Thebes, if not all of Olympus, won't trust Hades if you don't vouch for him.
"You need to leave this to me."
Could she do it?
She'd just failed Alicia and Lezard as well, now.
But she'd just intentionally loved and protected one of the people who she loved the most for the first time in her life.
She'd protected Sora and Riku many times before, but none of the times that she'd accomplished that had been active. She hadn't known what she was doing when she'd given Sora back his human form in Radiant Garden, or when she'd sent the letter in the bottle into the ocean around Destiny Islands. She hadn't known how to keep Sora safe from her Demon Tide and her Lich. If she had, she wouldn't have been satisfied with just believing in him.
She'd intentionally resurrected Sora from The Final World, but that one didn't count because she'd been the reason that he'd died in the first place, and she'd just been cleaning up her mess and mistakes.
But she just had intentionally loved and protected and cherished and been there for one of the people who she loved most, and called him home sweet home.
Kairi could tell now that, even after what Platina had taught her, she still hadn't been able to believe in herself, but she could now.
She wasn't, and never had been, useless baggage and deadweight.
And, as she'd realized before, this wasn't a matter of could or couldn't.
It was a matter of going for the score.
She would have even if she hadn't been able to believe in herself once again.
Sora and Riku and Tidus and the others needed her, so she needed to go for the win.
It was that simple and clean.
And that complex and dirty.
And that was final.
"I'm a true hero now," Hercules objected. "Heroes protect people. That's all that there is to it."
"Heroes can call the winning play without making it themselves, as well," Kairi disagreed. "You're the one who taught me that I was still sacrificing myself by chasing after the Demon Tides and the Lich. You're the one who taught me how to accomplish this form."
Kairi turned and smiled at Tidus, who had a mixture of emotions on his face, though he wasn't crying as much now.
"You did make a difference yourself," she reassured him. "You didn't just stand back and let people get hurt or die. You taught me that I need to win."
Tidus sagged, an amount of the anguish and agony left his expression, and he smiled, not a broken one, though it was sad and pained, but a slightly happy one.
"You and Hercules will still be fighting at my side, though. As long as you keep me in your hearts and think about me, and don't forget me, we'll be fighting as a team and scoring a goal together.
"You and Hercules called the winning play."
Kairi turned and faced the Angel of Sin, and once more moved Bifrost into a dueling position, midway between defense and attack.
"It's time for me to make that play."
"Your points are taken," Hercules replied, and then he turned, picked up Meg carefully under one arm and Phil under the other, and sprinted up the central staircase of the amphitheater.
The others moved to follow him, even Tidus, Wakka, and Selphie, the Einherjar and Rufus repeatedly looking at the suspended Alicia as they did so with differing mixed expressions.
Now that Kairi was his sole enemy, the Titan collective evidently believed it was more fun to take the battle to her this time, for he leapt back onto the semicircular stage and approached her slowly like a predator about to pounce.
"Dinner for two is good enough for me," the Titan collective remarked. "Black swallows all colors, whether they're a few or many.
"But you do know that that means that you can't defeat me, right?"
Kairi had no answer to the Angel of Sin's claim that black swallowed all colors, but she needed to keep her eyes on the blitzball and not worry about that now.
Sora and Riku and Tidus and Selphie and Wakka and her other friends were in trouble, and she needed to love them and protect them and keep them safe and help them.
That was what was important.
Compared to that, light and darkness were intangible abstractions.
"You're right," Kairi replied. "I will defeat you."
"And murder Zack when you do?" the Angel of Sin retorted.
Kairi rolled her eyes. "I was wondering if you were going to play that card. You're wasting your breath. You know that I'm not willing to do that, so reminding me of that won't damage my will to combat you.
"Your will to fight is in question, though. You're pretending otherwise, maybe even to yourself, but you wouldn't have played the Zack card if you weren't at least a little worried and scared that you're not as indestructible and immortal as you claim that you are.
"So, for your own sake, because that's all that you care about, I advise you to surrender."
"That word doesn't exist in my vocabulary," the Titan collective responded, snarling viciously and savagely that she'd said that he was afraid of her. "You're the predator, or you're the prey; the devourer or the carcass. There's no such thing as compromise in the current World, or in my World. I won't stop battling as long as I'm alive."
Kairi took a deep, steadying breath, and then another and another, and then several more until she'd steadied herself.
This would be the first time that she'd killed someone who wasn't already a Heartless or Unversed, or sent his or her or its heart into the darkness, and she didn't want to do it with everything that made her up. She'd avoided murdering a single Nobody until now for this reason. Murder was the ultimate way of causing someone pain and rejecting someone else's feelings, and while you could restore hearts and bring the vanished home, true death was irreversible, and Kairi knew for a fact that Hades would never let the Titans, in whatever form they joined the Styx Maelstrom, out of it.
Additionally, the part of her that still wanted to laugh and run like the wind through the breeze with her arms spread wide and the sand tickling her toes didn't want to cross another horrific line separating her carefree childhood from a reality of hurt and pain.
She'd crossed that line in Radiant Garden when she'd murdered the Shadow Purebloods while calling Sora home, or, at least, at an unknown time later, because, while all of the Shadows might have had Nobodies and might have been able to be recompleted, Kairi knew that all of the Heartless who she'd murdered hadn't been able to be recompleted. There was no way to cross back over that line, but murdering someone who hadn't lost his or her or its form as a person was a lot different, in many ways, than murdering someone who wasn't actually a person.
But if she didn't go for the win in every way possible, Tidus might still die, and innumerable other hearts and worlds, maybe including Sora and Riku, depending on where the Big Dipper Supercluster was located in the realm of light.
She had no choice about this.
Kairi took one last deep breath. "To the death, then," she said, keeping her emotions out of her voice.
"To the death," the Angel of Sin nodded with a vicious smile. "Yours.
"The smoke of your burnt offering has reached my nostrils, and it is well pleasing to me. Yours shall be the first sacrifice that I partake of from the abattoir that is now being prepared as a dwelling place for me. This is the festival that I have made, so I shall rejoice and be glad.
"Let the carnival begin!"
Kairi knew that the Angel of Sin wouldn't listen, but he needed to hear it anyway.
If he did, maybe once what remained of him was in an afterlife and he'd had a lot of time to think about it, one day, sooner or later, he might understand and come home sweet home from the darkness in one small sense or more.
"You do believe in something," she spoke back. "Your own feelings. As sad as your way of tracing hearts is, even you want to be happy and live on.
"But because you have no regard for anyone else's feelings, you're a danger to Sora and my friends, and maybe even my surrogate parents back home. If you just wanted to live by your selfish beliefs in a way that didn't hurt anyone else, that would be your choice and I'd accept that. Everyone has the freedom to choose his or her fate.
"But I won't accept your choice when you want to bind other hearts and their feelings to your fate when they don't want to be connected to you in those ways.
"So, I'm very sorry.
"But I reject your feelings, and I'm going to sever the connections that you want to extend to other hearts and other people, divine or a different form of person.
"I won't forget you, but this is goodbye."
Kairi broke into another sprint at the Angel of Sin, and this time, he raced at her himself.
"Sora, Riku, stay at my side!"
"Zeus' Thunderbolts, Angel Assault!" the Titan collective shouted, and Kairi's eyes widened, but she knew that she shouldn't have been surprised.
Once predators stopped toying with their prey, they went for the kill.
The Angel of Sin wasn't holding back in any way whatsoever now.
Two huge discs of whirling electric light shaped similarly to the spiral maelstrom at the core of Xion's best Limit Break assault, that she was still trying to surpass, manifested, one above Kairi and one below her feet, and they started sending out conflagrations of coursing lightning from above and below all around her.
But by then Kairi was moving even faster.
The Angel of Sin likely believed that she'd try something new to account for the possibility that he'd sensed the strings of Empress Massacre during her aborted first attempt to unleash it, so Kairi did the precise opposite.
"It shall be etched into your heart!" she shouted as she brought all twelve of her own angelic wings up above her head, altered their outer edges, and curved them into a compound circle of sickles of colorful energy far sharper than razors. "Empress Massacre!"
Even moving this quickly, lightning bolt after lightning bolt ripped into her from below and above, searing parts of her armor into her skin and shattering others into fragments, but she clenched her teeth another time, pushed the screaming agony shrieking through her entire body as far away as she could, and spun around the Angel of Sin and his dancing dots and one wing of deathly green mists; alternating her height and whether she was crouching and pivoting on one or both feet or one or both heels, jumping into the air and twirling and vaulting, or spinning and whirling on the surface of the semicircular stage, the entire time cutting and slicing and cutting and slicing into the Angel of Sin and his dot corona and his wing much faster than the Titan collective could move Deifacted Selection to block, deflect, or parry.
Kairi struck with blow after blow, electric current after electric current sending anguish ripping through her until she was in so much pain that she wasn't fully aware when the bolts at last ceased, until all forty consecutive cuts were over and she could somersault backwards through the air and land unsteadily on her feet.
Blood was now flowing from the left side of her forehead where a sizeable portion of her helmet had been broken into her left eye, but she could still see that the Angel of Sin was bleeding badly from gashes that appeared to extend very deeply in many places all over his body.
The Titan collective drew himself up and snarled viciously and savagely.
"You did hurt me," he spoke. "That was a humongously bad idea!
"Become God's banquet! Extinctionza!"
A giant, circular, incredibly thin sheet of molten, flowing sheens of silver expanded out around him so fast that Kairi knew that she couldn't throw herself fully back out of its range in time, so she brought Bifrost in front of her, planted her feet against the floor and braced them, and responded, "Recollect your childhood! Apocalypseza!"
Twelve compound circular arrays with countless contorting and swirling and curving and arcing colors within arranged in a dizzying tapestry of diagrams appeared in a vertical circle around Kairi at all the hours of the clock and each one fired a thick beam of dark purple and light orange threaded with wide lines of light red and light green forward at the Titan collective.
The sheet of silver struck Kairi and cut into her midsection and she staggered back slightly, but she clenched her teeth yet another time, held her position, and maintained the spell.
This time he brought his dots in front of him as a shield, but though the beams pushed against the dots for a large number of seconds, they then surged and tore the storm of writhing dots apart and continued to rush at the Titan collective.
The Angel of Sin brought up Deifacted Selection and blocked the beams aimed at his head, but he couldn't prevent the other ones from striking him, and he wobbled slightly.
The sheet of Extinctionza was still there when the Apocalypseza ended and Kairi was already injured, so rather than pull back, she hurled Bifrost directly at his right shoulder with all her might.
Taken off guard, it tore into the Angel of Sin's shoulder, and when Kairi could tell with her ethereal senses that it wasn't going to go any deeper she called it back into her hand, coils of rainbow light swirled around it, it disappeared, and then it reappeared in Kairi's hand in more coils.
The Extinctionza at last ended, and Kairi's legs gave out beneath her and sent her to her knees.
She put her left hand on the floor of the stage beneath her and attempted to push herself up, but her legs wouldn't move.
The Angel of Sin, however, was just breathing a little unsteadily.
"I'd like to say that it was a good hunt, but we both know that would be a compliment to a resource," the Titan collective spoke. "So I'll just finish this."
It was now or never, then.
If she didn't score the goal now, she wouldn't have another chance.
Kairi refused to let herself have any last second doubts.
She'd decided to go for the win, so she would win.
The Angel of Sin held Deifacted Selection point upwards over his head in a position similar to the one Tidus used when he was about to begin the Jecht Shot, and innumerable multicolored gases of all colors whirled and coalesced together that Kairi knew, though they were being contained to keep them from vaporizing all of Olympus and much of the surrounding region of space, were literally the same as the flames of stars themselves.
For the first time since she'd realized that she'd created the vast Demon Tide, Kairi was once more consumed with unease about how much power she was wielding. She still had her human form, and Sora had defeated Hades, the Rock Titan, and the Ice Titan before he'd fully grown into his own as an apprentice Keyblade wielder, then Hades multiple times after Roxas had returned to him and enabled him to start to reach his full potential as a wielder, and then all four of the Titans when he was just beginning to recover from the drain of having fallen into darkness in the dream of The World That Never Was, but the vast Demon Tide, the one she'd forged in Arendelle, and the Valkyrie in Rainbow Bridge Formchange were immeasurably more deadly and potent than Sora had become at his most skilled and strongest.
Kairi knew that Valkyrie in Rainbow Bridge couldn't annihilate whole worlds by itself unless it could somehow corrupt a planet's world heart, but she could still battle extremely slightly on the level of someone who could, and unimaginably fathomlessly more than that, and not just obliterate planets and worlds, but create not merely constellations, but legions of stars.
Kairi knew that it didn't matter, though.
Protecting others had nothing to do with the size of your strength, and everything to do with the strength of your heart, so the reverse was also true.
Power was power, nothing more, and nothing less.
What was important was what was in your heart.
Then her eyes widened at she at last realized one of the Angel of Sin's vital weaknesses.
The gases finished gathering above Deifacted Selection and the Angel of Sin's head into an enormous sphere of differently colored stars that Kairi knew was, as Zeus could fashion genuine constellations of real stars, a literal reduced scale globular star cluster.
The Angel of Sin swung his arm down and launched the stellar phantasm of a blitzball diagonally down at Kairi, and howled the triumphant roar of a carnivorous beast.
"Now I will dine on your flesh and heart! Ultimate Star Ocean Shot!"
Kairi didn't wince.
She opened her heart and traced her connections to Ven, Aqua, and Terra, and from them as far as she could to wherever Zack was imprisoned within the Angel of Sin.
She knew that her legs still hadn't recovered enough for her to stand on them, but she didn't need to.
That was what her wings were for.
She spread them, shot up into the air, and aimed Bifrost down at the Angel of Sin.
Dizziness and lightheadedness stole most of the sight from her eyes and much of the breath from her lungs, and from what Kairi could feel inside her own heart, she now realized that, though she had regained control of the powers of the Demon Tides and the Lich and their light panorama, and she wasn't a Demon or a Lich but a Valkyrie, she still wouldn't be able to wield that power regularly until she became much more experienced with her abilities as a Princess of Heart.
If she attempted to activate the Valkyrie in Rainbow Bridge Formchange for a second time, before spending days or weeks letting that energy replenish itself, she'd stop her lungs from breathing or her heart from beating, and die.
But she'd loved and protected Tidus, she was about to love and protect Zack, and though all her power came from Sora and her friends as much as all of Sora's power came from her and his other friends, she was about to defeat a very deadly opponent by herself for the first time.
For now, in the present that she had once cherished so dearly and still did hold close to her heart as precious, that was enough.
The Ultimate Star Ocean Shot curved up in her direction, howling at her with all the tempestuous fury of nature, space, the skies, the land, the ocean, and the world beneath, but Kairi wasn't worried.
As the Titan collective had said himself, energy couldn't be created or destroyed, just changed, and the Angel of Sin possessed measurelessly more dark energy than any dark entity that she'd met so far in all of her adventures, both when she'd been one with Sora's heart and when she'd journeyed herself.
She couldn't outwit, match, or overpower such a mammoth amount of energy, but she didn't need to.
All that she needed to do was change it.
Opalescent white and iridescent light blue coalesced around Bifrost in a multi-layered corona far larger than Bifrost itself, in the shape of a giant lance.
"Catch the tears of the heart!" she shouted back. "Photon Lance!"
She paid as little attention to the conflagration of nature's rage ascending in her direction as she could afford to safely do, and hurled the lance of pure light and Bifrost diagonally down at the Angel of Sin.
He raised Deifacted Selection to intercept it.
But it made no difference.
Whether black swallowed all colors or not, darkness was the same energy form as light, and light was both a particle and a wavelength.
Even Photon Lance wouldn't be able to do this to ethereal, physical, or data hearts with a lesser amount of dark energy.
It would just create ripples in that energy that very badly wounded them.
But the Angel of Sin possessed all the dark energy of the heart of Olympus.
The Photon Lance impacted against Deifacted Selection.
"Now, Zack!" Kairi shouted. "I opened the door for you to come home sweet home!"
The Photon Lance directly connected with the threads of light and darkness inside the Angel of Sin's heart and world heart, and with the energy of the heart of Olympus at its disposal, changed all of the photon particles of the Angel of Sin's heart into insubstantial wavelengths.
The Photon Lance dispersed in all directions into white and light blue silhouettes and faded away, and Bifrost clattered to the surface of the stage.
There was no release of dark energy.
Deifacted Selection vanished in intertwining spirals of coral colors, most likely not destroyed, but maybe no longer a threat to anyone for the time being.
The Ultimate Star Ocean Shot dispersed into mists and then disappeared.
And a second skin of green water the same color as the Styx Maelstrom burst out from within all of the Angel of Sin's body as it became Zack's once more, the Angel of Sin's one angelic wing turned into similar colored water, and the water splashed down onto the floor of the semicircular stage of the amphitheater into a puddle that dried up and vanished in around a second.
As the storm clouds above dispersed, revealing the blue sky once more, Zack staggered forward and raised a hand to his forehead, and then he lowered it, looked up at Kairi, smiled exhaustedly, and gave her a thumbs up.
"Thanks," Zack grinned. "Having friends like Ven, Hercules, Phil, Aqua, Terra, and you was awesome from the start, but this takes that coolness to a whole new world of awesome."
Kairi smiled back, relief engulfing her entire being that Tidus and Zack and everyone else and Olympus and the whole Big Dipper Galactic Supercluster were now safe, and, unimportantly, that she'd at last defeated a very deadly opponent on her own.
She raised her right arm and fisted it the way that Sora did when in a slightly, partially, or mostly similar situation.
Zack staggered again and almost fell to his knees. "But if you don't mind, whether I'm wielding the darkness myself or not, harnessing it still feels like a knock out.
"So I really want to take a nice, long nap."
Kairi smiled, drifted down to the surface of the stage, and alighted on it, but she didn't recall Bifrost, or Formchange herself back into her regular form, or Bifrost back into Destiny's Embrace.
She needed to conserve as much light and darkness as she could at this point, and as exhaustion flooded up to send night rising around her and clawing at her awareness, she knew that she and her Keyblade would revert shortly without any conscious effort on her part.
"Go ahead, then," Kairi reassured Zack. "You've more than earned it."
"It's good to know we agree," Zack spoke back, and then he sat down, brought his arms back behind his head, interlocked his hands behind them, laid down, looked up at the now fully clear sky, smiled, and closed his eyes.
Now that Kairi was certain that Zack was okay, she let the night close around her, and she knew no more.
.
"You think you're allowed to do anything you want if you think it'll protect someone's life? That it's all right to ignore the Chief's feelings? I refuse to accept that way of doing things!"-Allen Ridgeley
XENOSAGA: Episode 3:
ALSO SPRACH ZARATHUSTRA