Chapter 1
"So, this is spiral power, huh?" Kittan mumbled, feeling it rage through him, through his veins, his bones, his very being.
The King Kittan was breaking apart at its very seams. The pressure from the compressed space was crushing his gunman into scrap, when it gave out he was done, as simple as that. Whether he succeeded or not, he wasn't coming back from this one. How did things get this far.
Thinking it over, he had come a long way to die here.
His village was destroyed by the beastmen, only he and his beloved sisters escaped alive. The Black Siblings turned to marauding to survive, until they met that loudmouth idiot and his group, who did what he thought was impossible: stealing a gunman. That guy was dumb but he could hold his own in a brawl.
Back then, Kittan had a simple idea: if that idiot could pull it off, then why couldn't he?
How he acquired his gunman was a brave tale of kicking ass, and soon he gathered together a gang of morons with the same bright idea. Together with Kamina, they took over that beastmen HQ. At the cost of Kamina's life though.
Kittan never expected that small brat to pull himself out of his funk. Nor did he expect him to kick the ass of the next beastman general, leading them to the Spiral King's doorstep. But that was Simon the Digger's thing. Doing the impossible.
Creating a new civilization on the surface, creating a whole city out of ruins and dirty pit dwellers just like them. More of that had been, admittedly the work of that prick Rossiu than he felt comfortable admitting. That backstabber threatened to fire the entire old crew, then at the first opportunity he threw Simon in jail. He still had no idea why Simon let him off for that, but they had bigger problems. Literally, the moon was falling.
He just became an uncle, like hell he would let it all get destroyed!
The Anti-Spirals. Aliens who destroyed Earth a long time ago, and now they were out to finish the job. Starting with dropping the moon on Earth, only it turned out to be a gigantic battleship. Simon led the way in fighting back, leading to here. Trapped in a death spiral device that was going to destroy the ship, and all of them with it.
There was only one way to stop it. Only one person could pull it off.
He reached out for the generator that was the reason for this death zone. His gunman´s fingers and hands cracked and broke, were crushed into nothingness by a weight that could have turned whole planets into pebbles.
He forced more of that strange power into his crushed limbs and pushed onwards.
Heh, he had gotten a kiss from Yoko even, right before he had departed. Felt about as good as he had imagined it.
"Once I see Kamina I'm so going to rub that in." He laughed at the blaring alarms. "That perpetually horny idiot isn't going to believe the outfit she is running around in now." Seriously, what possessed Yoko to wear that thing?
She had to secretly like it, for all that she liked to act proper. He really should have teased her more over that… he kind of regretted not taking a chance earlier.
More of his gunman broke, the space King Kittan ripped at more and more places leaving only the good old king kittan.
He had at most a second or two, he knew that.
Space King Kittan disintegrated completely. Launching from the cockpit was the King Kittan itself, tiny in the face of all this danger. But just big enough to propel the spare drill towards the target.
He reached out for the generator.
Their missiles had not been able to break it, so a mere punch was probably not gonna do it. He was also not dead yet, probably because of spiral power shielding him.
Ah what the hell. Shame that he never got any further with Yoko, he sure would have liked to kiss her a second time.
Perhaps even hold hands as well.
He channeled all his spiral power into King Kittan´s fists and punched out.
There was an incredible crack and everything went white.
000
Beneath the behemoth formerly known as the Cathedral Terra, the Death Spiral machine had been destroyed. But the pull sucking the vessel into the depths had not stopped.
Engines that carried the power of stars burned, genius level intellects using every trick, every move possible to steer the four thousand kilometer long ship away from the hole in existence. And it was all for nothing.
The stern face that made up the brow of the ship turned, plummeting towards the hole. Its expression was unchanged, being a metal sculpture as large as entire nations of Old Earth, but if it could show emotion it would reflect the grimace of its crew, unwillingly diving into what seemed to be doom. If they had more time, seconds even, there could be a way to avoid it. But there wasn't any.
The massive bulk of Super Galaxy Dai-Gurren plunged into the blinding light that was the rift, vanishing from this universe.
And then everything went white.
ooo
In a corner of folded space hidden from the universe, Nia gasped. She struggled against her ethereal restraints, throwing her head back to scream. The black bodysuit she wore was evaporating, taking her flesh with it.
Nia hadn't stopped struggling since she regained her will, breaking free of the mental bindings this thing had placed upon her, starting from when it took her from Earth. She had to, before Simon could rescue her. He was coming for her, but until he arrived Nia couldn't stay here and let this monster destroy her.
"This is most irregular. Why do you continue to resist us?"
Its black form shimmered with a billion flickering lights, flickering every second Nia looked at its body, the outline resembling a smooth humanoid. There were no eyes and no mouth, just swirling white holes. Both gazed at her, featureless yet unnerving.
She could feel it. Through the very connection it forced into her, she could sense it´s feelings. Just a tiny bit of it and it was already enough to overwhelm her to her near entirety.
It was….not even angry really. At most irritated. At her continued battle against being absorbed. Against team Dai-Gurren´s survival, about Simon´s resistance. It did not have emotions like a person. Not like her, whenever Simon was on her mind.
Even in this state, her heart thumped with warmth at even just a thought at the man.
He was alive, she knew it. Even if whatever trap the Anti-Spiral had put him in, he would break out. He would save her.
Because he was Simon.
It was a truth as fundamental as 2+2 being 4.
Still, the Anti-Spiral was incredibly powerful. The mere bits she glanced at whenever some part of her was dragged into it to be absorbed…. It went beyond what she could even imagine.
The ability to shatter galaxies, no, universes like mere toys.
It was a power that should have horrified her. Should have left her in despair.
But it didn´t.
Because she believed in Simon.
"Hmmm?" The Monster looked away from her for a moment. "What is this? Are they breaking the Death Spiral Machine? How unusual. Never has any spiral race ever succeeded in -"
The next words she could not understand, mostly on account of the pain she was in magnifying a dozen fold.
Nia let out a high pitched scream as the entire space, the whole dimension they were in warped, her body phasing and twisting from the pure shockwaves that burst through the pocket universe they were in.
And for a wonder, the Anti-Spiral looked just as perplexed as she was.
It…. it had said that never before had anyone broken out of it´s trap. Could that mean that it itself had not foreseen this?
"These fools." It angrily mustered. "They broke the space time continuum and have induced a false spatial collapse. They have torn down the very walls between universes apart!"
She could see it. From the edges of her eyes - or was it the Anti-Spiral's eyes?- a wave of universal scale was racing towards them. Moving at a trillion times the speed of light, it was rapidly engulfing the whole universe, ripping through it´s innumerable dimensions in the process.
They had at most picoseconds till it reached them.
The Anti-Spiral rose its arms and called upon power, unfathomable power. The universe they were in expanded a hundred, a thousandfold as it created new universes out of nowhere, forcing them into this one while accelerating the expansion of the universe to the same amount.
"How…. how… you can create universes?" Her voice or rather her thoughts stumbled over itself as it connected with it. "How is the Spiral Nemesis even a threat?"
The spiral nemesis. The creation of ex nihilo mass as Spiral warriors grew infinitely, creating ever new mass until it all collapsed into a super massive black hole.
That piece of information was implanted into her the second she had been hijacked to deliver the Anti–spirals message.
Its justification to commit countless atrocities, wipe out civilizations across the universe. More sentient beings than anyone could ever count, dead and buried and wiped from existence, for one reason only. The irony that it was trying to save the universe by destroying all spiral life, it was almost maddeningly amusing.
"Because for all that I can create an infinite amount of new universes, it is impossible to move mass from this to those! Only the transfer of minds is possible!" It yelled out in anger. Not at her, more its own frustration at its inability to fix the nemesis, even with the might to create whole new universes.
It acted ever more rapidly as it created new spaces between it and the wave. She could see massive rifts being torn open around the anomaly, quintillions of light years in volume. The anti-spiral was destroying the new universes it had temporarily forced in this one, creating negative spaces to contain the anomaly Team Dai-Gurren had made.
Was this the Spiral Nemesis? No.
It was something else.
Information, the own considerations of the Anti-Spiral flow freely into her own mind. They had not created new mass to force a big ripp event, no, they had torn open the walls separating this universe to another. Not one of the infinite universes it had created, no, an older one.
For all its terrible implications, how fascinating, could this perhaps be used - no.
Even from such a small tear, it produced devastation that would in the end be functionally the same as a spiral nemesis.
This was no solution.
By its own estimate, a whole fourth of the universe had been affected by this rift alone.
How typical of the foolish endeavors of the Spiral Warriors.
It began to push back, seal, to contain…. And-
The anti-spiral realized too late what Nia had been doing, so focused had it been in stopping the catastrophe.
It had continued the absorption process the whole time, the gain of information crucial to defeat this latest patch of spiral warriors, who had proven themselves so much more formidable than the usual bunch.
Not enough to be a threat, but still.
So it had not noticed when she had slowly lowered her resistance to the absorption.
She had struck out right when they began to merge, using what little power she had, both as an Anti-Spiral and the own spiral power of her own compassion.
It had broken the Anti-Spiral's attention for all of one pico-second.
But that had been enough.
The seal of this rift of breaking down between universes cracked and the wave of their collision flooded out, catching the Anti-spiral just as it had been forming a new barrier.
Nia smiled even as she felt how she was smashed into the Anti-Spiral, as it was torn apart.
And then everything went white.