Thirty-three fully-powered versions of Anya sprang out of herself, each of them clad in their own armor, with their own weapons, with their own powerful hearts and crowns and grasps of the dominions. And each of them had their own summoning stone, with their own Reggie.

All of the Anyas laughed as the alien horde physically balked at their sudden appearance, and then the area around them all became consumed with light and fire.

The thirty-four Reggies spread out, forming a cyclonic shape of scales and feathers that reached up and up and up and churned the cold vacuum of the space around them into an inferno. Renn, for his part, did as he was asked, and focused all his energy on creating heat to feed to the far more powerful Army of Anyas.

Anya wasn’t connected to her clones like Renn was. But she could tell easily enough what they were feeling. Each of them was grinning from ear-to-ear, their joyous faces wreathed in gold fire and glittering light and wisps of crimson and white fire. And really, she didn’t need Hive Mind to know. They were all just her, after all. And she felt great.

For the first time since she had landed on Willis, the waves of aliens fell back. They had no choice but to do so. Anya’s clones couldn’t go far from her without reducing their numbers significantly, but since she was on defense, it wasn’t an issue.

Anya checked her watch. The rocket was at 60% of the ideal depth required. Just a bit more. Anya took a deep breath and realized she was flagging, faster than before. Her duplicates were only taking a small fraction of her energy, but with so many of them out while maintaining her own offensive output was starting to make her legs shake. She slouched, fell briefly to one knee as she flash-fried a towering centipede-like creature.

“More heat!” Anya shouted.

“I’m at my limit,” Renn said, “and I’m fading too.”

Anya swore. She’d acquired a small fortune in RAC from her thirteen level-ups, and she used it to purchase several of the Star’s Breath crystals. She threw some to Renn, and kept a few for herself. She drained them immediately, sucking the heat out of them and leeching the remnants of their heat to her clones.

It helped, but it was a stop-gap measure. She could spend every single RAC she had on the energy-restoring crystals and it still wouldn’t be enough to top her off, to say nothing of Renn, and even less of their army of duplicates. The flock of Reggies was diminishing in size as their heat output exceeded their input. The aliens were closing ground again.

The rocket was at 65%.

That was when the pharaonic cobra slithered under a number of attacks from Anya’s clones and killed two of them. It pointed its long onyx staff at one, and a beam of murderous red light emitted from it and consumed one clone. The clone screamed and vanished as she was literally torn to shreds by whatever force the red light had. The second clone launched herself at the cobra, her forearm blades shining, and plunged them into the cobra’s side.

The blades pierced its skin, but didn't go in far. It blocked a beam of gold light from the clones hands with its shield, and slashed her to pieces with its curved sword. Too many pieces to regenerate from, apparently, as the bloody chunks scattered away in a swirl of viscera.

Anya winced as she watched versions of herself die so brutally, but replaced them almost at once.

“You don’t have hive mind,” Renn said to her from nearby.

“Yeah, so what?” Anya said as more of her clones closed with the pharaonic cobra.

“So if you, the original, die, that’s it. You don’t transfer to another one, you just die,” Renn said. Anya blinked.

“Ah, shit,” she said. That hadn’t occurred to her. The rocket was at 71%, and speeding up again. They only had to last a few more minutes, and then anything after that was just——

A huge wave of force emitted from the towering gray cobra alien. It flared its hood and raised its onyx staff and Anya, Renn, their clones, and all the Reggies were pushed back by a wave of invisible force that was enough to tear at the ground and send all of them spinning away through the weak gravity of Willis. Anya and her clones and Renn and his used their own Singularity’s Grasp to keep themselves tethered to the asteroid. Anya thought the cobra might have just been trying to blow them off Willis in one go, to end this in one fell swoop, but she was wrong.

It had been to push them away from the rocket.

“No!” Anya said. A stream of aliens dove into the hole the digger rocket had created, swarmed down after it, and destroyed it before Anya could even attempt to get back. A huge explosion blew out of the hole, consumed any aliens near it, and created deep, creeping fissures through the asteroid around the tunnel.

It was a start, it was more than any other rocket had done, but it wasn’t enough. Her watch informed her that the rocket had been destroyed at 75% depth and with only 50% of its maximum explosion. The aliens must have absorbed some of the impact somehow, to keep it from doing much else but making a crack.

That was it.

No more rockets.

“You fuckers are really stupid, y’know that?” Anya growled.

“That’s it then…damn,” Renn said.

“No,” Anya said while her clones kept the horde at bay. Another four of them died to the cobra, but one of them managed to wound it. She was more than a little proud to see one of them blasted it in its eye and partially blinded it before it obliterated her with the red light of the onyx staff.

“You’re going to get as faraway as you can, use your RAC to buy a ship, whatever you can afford, and get back to Earth. Help them there,” Anya said.

“What are you——ah. That thing, in Hawaii,” Renn said.

“Yeah.”

“Willing to die alone rather than trust a stranger,” Renn said and shook his head. “Disappointing.”

“No, willing to die so you don’t have to rather than open myself up to control,” Anya replied. “Now go.”

Renn said nothing, just condensed his clones and flew away at speed.

Anya turned to face the hole the rocket had made and the pharaonic cobra that loomed over it. She used her dwindling energy to replace the defeated clones, and then focused her concentration inwards.

Anya took a deep breath, and then flicked her Battle Aura switch.

And upon seeing her do it, all of her other clones did the exact same thing.

Willis lit up like a new sun, a star being born from the dark nothing around it. The resulting explosion of power, of fire and light and the well of gravity was enough to shake the surface of the entire asteroid as thirty-four Anyas exponentially raised their power.

Then all of them dove into the huge tunnel created by the rocket and sped down, down, down. They fired as much heat and light as they could, tearing at the stubborn rock. The explosion caused by the rocket hadn’t done much damage to the asteroid itself, but it had done enough to weaken the rock in the immediate area. It crumbled and melted to slag beneath the combined force of the army of Anyas. The cyclone of Reggies covered their backs, coiled tightly within the tunnel and snapping and roasting at the horde that poured in after them.

Anya didn’t have a read-out for how far she was going, how much further she needed to go, or anything. She just knew that more was better, and she would go until the aliens were upon her or or Battle Aura was going to quit.

“Felix! Let me know ten seconds before the Aura runs out!” Anya said.

“You got it!” Felix said. “Looks like this is it, huh?”

“Yeah, looks like,” Anya said. Another chunk of the tunnel ahead turned to molten goop and was blasted away. Anya winced as she heard several of the Reggies behind her scream as some new horror killed them.

“I’m glad I got to be your AI,” Felix said.

“Me too,” Anya replied and smiled at him.

“Ten seconds,” Felix said. As soon as he said it, Anya felt something, a spike of black and deep red in her mind as her Reggie was slain, and the last scrap of his essence returned to her summoning crystal. She spared a glance behind her and saw the ruby-eyed, skull-faced cobra at the head of a wave of aliens more monstrous than anything she had seen yet.

Now or never.

While she didn’t have mental communication with her clones, they were her. They thought as she did, and they all knew what the plan was.

Anya and her clones spent the next eight seconds charging as much energy as they could, until each of them turned into a being a pure light. Anya had a glimpse of the cobra, its eyes widened in anger and maybe, she hoped, fear, and it fled as the other aliens closed in.

“Kaboom,” Anya said.

She and her clones all exploded with every drop of energy they had. The resulting waves of fire and force and gravity and light crammed into the cracks made by the rocket, spread through them, and made a lattice of destruction through Willis. The Australia-sized rock fractured, held for a moment, and then burst into millions, trillions of pieces. The force wave of light and heat could be seen from Earth less than a minute after it happened.

Aliens across the surface were caught up in the explosions and their bodies ignited and charred to bone and cinder. The following explosion burst more of them apart, scattered their freakish bodies into dust along with the rock they stood on.

The exception was one massive chunk of the asteroid upon which the pharaonic cobra stood. The chunk was still miles upon miles long, surrounded by that aura of sickly red light that emerged from the onyx staff. Millions of aliens still crowded together on the final fragment of Willis.

Anya saw the huge chunk of rock, but only a sliver compared to what it had been, fly away from her at speed. Toward Earth.

“Lucky fucker,” Anya said as she floated in the void. There was nothing around her now. She had blown even the dust away into the endless dark. Her clones had all vanished back into her, and she drifted alone in space. She figured it was only a matter of time before the vacuum killed her, even with her bonuses from Cosmic Warden. But that was okay.

She had done what she came to do.

The others could handle the rest.

Anya closed her eyes, and drifted in the dark.