The triformal vortex of Chaos cast carnelian clouds over Union Square. Cloud and Tifa approached with a sense of forlorn doom.
There, hovering in a schism of rage winds, the daemon Sephiroth held his hands out to the world.
"Mother. The dawn of our reckoning has come to pass. The age of adamantine darkness is upon us. Into thine hands I will bring about Meteorfall…becoming one with the Planet."
Cloud stepped into the fray.
"Genesis! I know who you are now!"
That name triggered a twitch behind black eyes, and nothing more. Sephiroth flipped his hand in an efflorescent flourish, sending a wave of sheerlight streaking for Cloud. It slammed into the ground flinging him and Tifa across the blacktop.
They could do nothing but watch the metamorphosis in horror.
"All this time we were trying to kill Jenova. We just set her free."
Sephiroth summoned a spire of light from the cataclysmal sky, illuminating an eclipsing shadow that overtook the sun. The Meteor answered in its own holy aura binding to Sephiroth's flare.
Stats, max. Health, max. Barrier, max. Magic, max. HP, max with Regen. There was no hope.
Cloud hauled Tifa to her feet.
"We need to kill him before he fuses with Jenova, or Meteorfall will destroy the world."
"Look!" Tifa pointed to a bursting conflagration exploding like a celestial boxing match. "B Unit is fighting Jenova in the sky."
There! That was how! Cloud drew his Buster Sword.
"Let's buy them time!"
He rushed in, slash meeting Sephiroth's daikatana in a straypattern crossbeam. He parry-whipped Cloud aside, but Tifa was already there throwing double-wood sword chops to the creature's torso. Her edges slammed against an invisible barrier protecting him in flash-sheen. Tifa ducked to let Cloud leap over. He plunged his sword clear through the shield, straight into the winged monster's chest.
Sephiroth—the carapace of a tortured daemon named Genesis—writhed in off-schematic roaring agony. It was time to end the suffering in his serrated soul.
The Buster Sword flared in a hyperphonic Octaslash. Cloud shot across his body in eight flowing leylines that vibrated reality, filleting Sephiroth's figment to puzzle pieces. The body slumped in grey matter as his HP fell, but stopped. Sephiroth's hit points rose back to triple digits, then to an unmeasurable number. His body resurrected.
Level Up.
"WHAT THE—"
Tifa and Cloud exchanged panicked glances. This was not good.
Sephiroth's wings caught fire, flaring hypernovas. They shot startails at Cloud and Tifa, who dodged without time to think. A whipping blade flicked Cloud's hair inches from his eyes, slits and slashes contorted him into interpretive dances moves evading. He ducked rushing in, sweeping his blade across the gravel, shooting a slashing uppercut against Sephiroth's down-thrust to knock the monster back in a spiderweb of blood.
And there it was, the philharmonic choir of dark angels sounding prophetic doom. Sephiroth's wings flared dark violet flame, and his eyes were embers of rage.
"Everytime I kill him he just gets bigger and meaner!" yelled Cloud as Tifa picked him up sweat-drenched by the arm.
Through the thermal belt connecting the Planet to the Meteor, a small sprite tumbled to the ground in an acrobatic crouch.
"Cloud!"
"Yuffie?"
"She says to kill Sephiroth at the same time they kill Jenova, or they both come back stronger."
"Who's She?"
"The assassin from the Don's mansion, remember?"
"What's she doing here…Oh SHIT!"
A fire specter slammed into Clouds blade, and Yulan leapt back up through the thermal belt.
"Wait for the signal!"
She shot back up, and Cloud shot back in.
The string-line of slashes was like tangled wire in a dust plume to a terrible techno track. Tifa couldn't even do anything but stand on the side in bewilderment waiting for an opening. Cloud's Buster Sword flared to once again push the creature back by a hair.
This was the last time he could do this song and dance. Cloud was dangerously low on HP with enough magic points for one last Hail Mary.
He looked skyward. No signal. But Sephiroth was down, red smoke pluming from bloody gashes exposing his black beating heart. His intestines were splayed in his fingers, blue lips frothing in a grey gooey brine.
They wouldn't get this chance again.
"NOW!"
The Black Materia in Cloud's sword flared darklight. An infernal aura glared from his blade to summon a specter of cosmic rays from the stratosphere. Azure Chaos swirled in a fulminating cyclone on high as imperial wings shot out from the dark, and a metalythic dragon burst forth from the smoke.
Bahamut thundered into the sky a phatasmic daemon shrouded in fire, and from the embers he drew in a power to his gaping maw that culminated in a charging ball of flame. A ray of hellfire shot to the earth, slamming into the form of Sephiroth in a hypernovic crash. But a translucent shield met the beam head on.
Reflect.
The teraflare ricocheted off the impenetrable barrier reversing trajectory, straight into Cloud in a hyperphonic explosion.
HP: Zero.
"CLOUD!"
Tifa's voice became liquid, vibrating in a lulatone of muffled wisps as Cloud's spirit left the living realm.
Cloud fell into an azure sky, whirling headlong into darkness. He tumbled through time and infinite space up and yet down into an aschematic void. Confounding colors and cutouts of reality streaked by in leylines of light and solipsism, melding into a mindless disorienting void.
When his body hit bedrock, he found himself in a craggy desert of sand with no sun. Floating columns of rock suspended in animation around him ascending upward, but he had no way to get to them. His sword was gone from him.
The Abyss was all around him, engulfing him, abandoning him from substance. An empty wind blew for no reason, taking all his sense of self with it. The vastness of open space was crushing in its enormity and finality, talking in wisps of open sand that stretched forever and for nothing, where all had come to a standing stop.
And the waves of sadness hit.
Cloud stood alone in the sand, imagining his body sinking into the dunes, and knew why.
Angeal had told him to do whatever it took to keep Jenova sealed, and there he was, the last carrier of Jenova Cells. Dying in the dust was something he had to do, for the good of all, for his friends. He would do terrible things to them if he were allowed to live. He'd already done terrible things to them.
His story would be finalized in fine particles of glass, and this demented fantasy would find a fitting end, the way it was supposed to end, at last.
"But that ending sucks!"
Cloud kicked crystalline sand as hard as he could, threw his arms wide and screamed at the sky.
"This is bullshit! Is this what the world wants? This trash ending to a crap adventure? Is anyone listening? Who are you? You who are turning the pages of my life, I need you now! Don't you care? Aren't you outraged? Is this how you want this to end? I'm not just some exploded pixel in a videogame. This isn't some stupid fantasy, and I have the final say! If anyone is there, anyone who has ever told a story, or waited for a SOLDIER to come home, please…"
He fell to the his knees upon the fine sand.
"Let me go."
He clasped himself into his chest, clutching the last remaining bits of his identity before the sand would surely sweep it away. But a disturbance hit him, a soft rumbling that grew greater into rolling and undulating tremors. The sand shifted, suddenly falling away like a waterfall that left Cloud suspended in animation. A force lifted him upward and outward, into a cessation of existence.
But the dark wasn't empty. The abyss was kind.
He pummeled upward into a chasm of blinding light that went black, save for a thin curtain of white. All was quiet in the stillness, and Cloud heard the crisp ring of bootfalls on floor. Something soft slipped across his cheek, around him falling feathers brushed his skin. From the line of light appeared the silhouette of seven angelic wings, flowing from the strong form of a man with silver hair draping to the ground.
In tourmaline darkness, he was fully illuminated.
His eyes were a cool blue neon, that soft Mako Infusion dulled only by time. But Cloud hesitated, angry and still.
"I've been betrayed by everyone I've ever loved, hurt beyond measure of pain. How can I know for sure who you are, if you're even real?"
A soft smile, small smirk, and the man spoke with his hands.
"My youngest."
Cloud gasped! His feet moved for him, his heart way ahead of him. Flying forward, he fell into the silver man's arms with phenomenal sobs. Sephiroth stood unmoving, and let his arms fall around his last son.
How Cloud wailed, wrapped in a tight embrace that soothed and warmed with possessive finality, casting a protective veil around their familial forms. He could have stayed like that forever, bawling his life into the clutch of a seven-winged angel whose silver hair wafted around them like smoke.
But an urgency seized Cloud. The man pulled him back to look on him with a familiar seriousness in his neon eyes, and flew into signs that brought Cloud's mind back into focus.
"Listen to me. You are out of time. Your friends will die. The world will perish. Jenova has broken through but you can seal her back in the Crystals if you reclaim your family's honor."
"But I don't know what that means," Cloud spoke both in signs and aloud. "What is honor? I know you told me, but I've forgotten everything."
"Honor is the one thing you have that no one can take away. It is different for every person. For some it is family, their accomplishments, or their morals. For others, their possessions, or the things they've built. It is that which you would sacrifice all for without hesitation, never relenting, even in death."
"But how can I be sure I have it? How can I know…?"
"You cannot. Nothing in life is certain, and truth changes with the wind. You must find what honor means to you, and fight for it with all you hold dear. In the end, all that matters is the people you love, and what they taught you. Now go. The world needs a new hero. But for you to be one, you will have to be braver."
The man waved his hand in a specter of light, flaring up the abyss. He disappeared in the billowing glare with the feathers of a Phoenix Pinion as Clouds health bar regenerated and his stats regained strength.
Rebirth.
Cloud felt the upward rush out of the time warp and back into the battle above. He crashed through the wall between worlds in a plume of blinding radiance over Union Square, and the light he brought forth grew into an aural umbra. Two gargantuan pearlescent wings fanned out over the arena in phenomenal power, towering higher than the cityscape to wisp the cold clouds. Their presence swept the Chaos back in a rush of revenant wind, reviving fallen allies and maxing stats.
The Holy Summoning of Alexander.
The castlesque Eidolon bent to Cloud's will as Aerith's white Materia orb hovered before him. With a wave of his hand Cloud commanded the accumulating power to target Safer Sephiroth. It had to be timed.
But what was the signal? How would he know?
He got his answer in a thundering roar skyward. A sheer explosion of neon blue lit up the stratosphere, enflowering shards of ultramarine charging and gathering strength, the meteor quaking and calving in combined retrograde.
"CLOUD! NOW!"
Judgement.
Alexander's wings flared in a prophetic blaze to shoot shards of straylight. The beam strafed for Sephiroth in a screaming aural penumbra, impacting in a crystalline supernova that gleamed in enflowering solaris. The hyperphonic destruction of the Meteor on high melded in mass calamity, raining down chunks of rock and refuse onto the world and into the fray. Sephiroth's form fulminated in fiery light, and disintegrated.
The cataclysmic explosion broke the sound barrier, flinging Cloud like a ragdoll into oblivion that he accepted as his sacrifice. But something caught him like a silk net, stopping his trajectory into space mid-flight to hold him high in the stars.
Cloud hovered in the rift between Chaos and peace. In front of him, in shards of luminescence, a small sprite appeared in stardust. Lithe and airy with hair like ivy vines and eyes of clear quartz, she flowed before Cloud like a floating flower, lowering him gently to the ground. She seemed so familiar, like a girl he'd loved in a past life.
Aerith? No…
He gasped.
"Ifah!"
She smiled, and darted away into the sunrise. In a rain of cherry blossoms, he felt her soft voice in his heart.
Even at the world's end, I will be with you, always.
His eyes pulled skyward shed a tear, but something else tugged at his psyche.
Another voice, cocky and familiar, spoke to him.
Not bad. Not good, but not bad either.
Cloud cocked a huge smile.
"Shut up!"
Tifa stood by his side as Reno, Rude, Vincent, Scarlet, and Tseng joined him in the ruined square. Yulan appeared from the dust and took Tifa's hand. Cloud looked around at them all, and they in turn at him.
Together they stood strong in a rain of falling flower petals.
[Received Alexander Summon]