One by one, portals of every shape and size began to open as creatures began to step out into the dusty wasteland, their attention focused on two tiny men brawling in the center.

Alicia blinked the gum out of her eyes, her head feeling much better after a full night’s sleep. In front of her Mrs. Banyan was watching the TV with rapt attention.

“That’s umm…” Alicia said, her jaw dropping as she watched the chaos unfold on the screen in front of her. That was more non-human creatures than she’d ever seen. The sky and land were being torn apart by the arrival of these godlike beings dressed in living armor, stepping onto Earth as if they had simply walked through a door.

“That’s not a movie, is it?” She asked,

“That’s Garth,” Mrs. Banyan said without looking away. “He’d never admit it, but he enjoys chaos.”

Mrs. Banyan changed the channel, showing a burning mountainside, where hundreds of Mrs. Banyans raised their arms to weave thick clouds out of thin air, drenching the sudden fire with a torrential downpour. Seconds later, trees with dark blue-green leaves began to sprout at astonishing speeds, replacing every inch of the mountainside’s flora with Laser Trees.

“Keep your interference discrete,” She muttered to Grass.

I HAVE RECENTLY MASTERED SUBTLETY. FAIL TO WITNESS MY HIDDEN PROWESS. Grass mentally shouted in their ears.

***Garth***

Garth was walking back toward Jim when the Shinta with the shimmering robe lunged at him with his liquid metal sword, robe fluttering behind him as he tore through the air.

“No part of that man’s foul legacy will taint the land!” he shouted, bringing his blade down toward Garth

The guy’s sword looked like a combination between a lightsaber, a lava lamp, and the T-1000 liquid metal terminator.

Garth created a wooden buckler on his palm that generated its own repulsing force and tried to catch the blade before it gained momentum.

It worked at first, but an instant later, the sword seemed to adjust to the buckler’s defensive properties, beginning to slide through at an exponential rate, reminding Garth of the borg.

The shinta’s finger burst into flames. He shouted in pain and staggered back.

Garth used the moment of distraction to make a branch shoot out of the shield and pierce the Shinta’s brain. He fell over, twitching. Garth didn’t know if this guy could come back from a wound like that, because at the higher levels, all bets were off. Garth just resolved to put some distance between the two of them and kept walking back toward the center of the chaos.

Garth glanced over at the distant snowcapped mountains that wrapped around his city. Mrs. Banyan had already replaced the fire with a new, more dense artillery support structure.

He hadn’t seen the beam. The lasers had been modified?

I ADDED A MANA SHELL TO THE BEAM THAT KEEPS IT INVISIBLE AND IMPROVES OUTPUT.

Goddamn, good job Grass.

THE REQUEST FOR SUBTLETY WAS BANYAN.

Of course it was. Keep it up, but let me talk to dick-face for a while.

OF COURSE.

Garth began running toward the center of the melee, where the Pan Ua clan had begun throwing down with Jim’s army, who were unwitting extensions of the Dan Ui, causing Garth to suck air through his teeth.

I hope those clans are goooood friends, because this might just cause a little incident. Matter of fact, this whole planet is under their jurisdiction. Uh-ooh. Wonder how they’ll respond to this?

“You!” Jim shouted, backhanding a robed clan member out of his way as he approached.

“Hey, just the guy I wanted to talk to-“

Jim swung down with his Shortsword before Garth could lure him into a conversation. There was an explosion of heat and light, and the blade of Jim’s sword flew off into the distance, leaving a smoking metal stump in Jim’s hand. He stared at it for a moment, stunned.

“I was wondering if you knew anything about a carnophage succubus named Sandi being executed about…forty-two years after the – “

Jim threw a hand forward and a tidal wave of red mana tore through Garth’s meager mental defenses, and turned the world pitch black.

When Garth opened his eyes again, he was tied down in a spread eagle to a cold steel cross. He was in a dingy dungeon with stuffy, rebreathed air, thick with the smell of blood.

A cenobite lookalike loomed over him with a menacing grin, his lips stapled back in a horrific grin. It wielded a shiny scalpel taken from a tray of torturous implements beside it.

“Welcome to Endless suffering. You’re going to spend the rest of you short life here, deep under the earth, begging me to end your suffering.

“It’s an illusion.” Garth said with a shrug. “Red mana? This is obviously in my head.”

“I think you would have done a better job with a dentist’s office,” Garth said, giving the cenobite a raised eyebrow as he looked around the room. “Dr. Olsen was scary as shit. Little Chinese woman? She absolutely violated your mouth with her steel-like fingers.”

“What’s the time dilation anyway? One to a hundred, one to a thousand? What are we talking here?” Garth glanced around. Maybe Jim would be helpful enough to put a clock up somewhere. “I’m picking up kind of a Naruto vibe from this. You know the scene.”

The cenobite morphed into Jim, giving him a thoughtful look.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Garth, obviously.”

“Garth is dead.”

“Garth was dead.”

Jim watched him for a little while, frowning. “Prove it.”

“You cried when I stopped you from putting toothpicks on mom’s birthday cake to make up for the missing candles. I drove you to your first date in middle school, and she stood you up so we watched Saw instead.”

Jim’s eyes narrowed.

“It seems like you really are him.”

“Right, so can we talk about Sandi – urk.”

A shortsword manifested out of thin air and plunged into Garth’s chest.

“You’re far too willful to be left alive.”

“Wow, Jim, dark. So about Sandi, I heard you had something to do with her death, just trying to get testimonials, make sure Leanne was telling me the truth. Only problem is it’s kinda your word against hers since everyone else died a long time ago. I don’t wanna do that tropey thing where I mindlessly destroy you on someone else’s say-so, and surprise, surprise, Leanne was lying all along because eight hundred years roaming the earth has turned her into an unfeeling sociopath. You know, the usual.”

“You’re just as annoying and talkative as I remember.” Jim said.

“Takes more than a shortsword to the chest to shut me up.”

“How about one through the eye?” Jim asked.

“Yeh, yeh, that’d do it, but first, did you kill my wife?”

“Her death demoralized the resistance, and saved thousands of lives that would have been lost pointlessly trying resist the Dan Ui. I did what I had to do.”

“Aaaahhh,” Garth relaxed back into the frame beneath him. “The old ‘did what I had to do’ excuse. I feel so much better about killing you now.”

“Goodbye, Garth.” Jim said, brandishing a long dagger and bringing it down on Garth’s face.

The entire room exploded with white light.

Garth opened his eyes.

Still in the desert, still midday, everything was still complete chaos around him.

Jim staggered back, dropping the dagger in his hand and clutching his blackened eyes where Grass had fried them.

“The Divine Lantern Technique will be mine!” A corio shouted, leading a group of six or so toward Garth and Jim from behind him.

I really just wanted a little time to talk to/kill my brother in peace. Is that so much to ask?

Garth turned around, raised a hand and made a gun shape.

“pew, pew, pew.”

After Grass exploded three of their heads from behind their shields, the other four turned around and ran the other direction.

Garth turned around and picked up Jim’s long dagger, eyeing his brother, who was wiping away his scorched-out eyeballs with some high-level healing magic, revealing perfect new blue eyes glaring at him in fury.

He’d even gotten rid of the dick-face, which was a bummer. Getting rid of scars implied a rather high level of body control.

Garth created his Lantern and drew the mana void around himself like a cloak, putting more sophistication into the absence of mana around him than the mote of light itself.

Controlling the void of the Lantern was one of the secrets of the Divine Lantern, apparently. Garth hadn’t seen this many Lanterns in one place before, and now he knew his was something special.

Garth forced roots through the ground beneath his feet and had them erupt directly underneath Jim. He wanted to beat the shit out of him first, but sometimes you just gotta put the sad old dog down.

Jim’s eye twitched and he leapt out of the way of the roots faster than they could spear him, snapping up a rock and throwing it at Garth in one fluid move.

The rock shattered against Garth’s eyebrow, about half an inch above his eyeball.

“Ow.”

Jim clicked his tongue. “So close.”

Fusillade.

Thousands of spores changed into self-propelled rocket arrows, forcing their way into Jim’s Lantern, then blasting forward when his void indirectly lit their fuses.

Jim tucked his arm over his eyes and created a vortex of air around himself, causing the majority of the unguided arrows to miss over the last ten feet, turning the dirt around him into a pincushion. There were a few arrows in his armor, but the damage was minimal.

“I remember that spell,” Jim said with a grin. “Let me do you one better.”

A net of hair-thin wires with about an inch between them launched itself toward Garth, propelled by some strange glowing from behind them.

The net was about twenty feet by forty, gaining momentum at incredible speeds, and obviously tracking Garth. He could tell just by looking at it that it would cube him into tiny little pieces if he didn’t come up with an answer to it.

Now or never, you son of a bitch.

Garth created a lotus in his hand that pushed away reality, stretching the fabric of space around them. He watched the approaching net shift and warp, one of its gaps widening drastically to slide around him.

The net warped around Garth and hit the ground, burying itself so deep he couldn’t see it, possibly not stopping at all. He felt like sagging to the ground in relief. He’d never been able to push away space to the same extent that Cass had. This was practically a fluke. Garth wasn’t even sure he’d be able to do it again.

“I can do this all day,” Garth said with a cocky grin as Jim frowned at him, trying to piece together how he’d done that trick.

“You know, I remember something about turning you into a deer and hunting you for sport.” Garth said. “Maybe that would be a good way to end this fucking farce of a brotherhood.”

“A tier three isn’t capable of it.” Jim said “You’re like a child,” he glanced over at the distant mountain that kept sniping him. “With a gun.”

“I’m a tier two, numbnuts. You kill my wife, shit all over my legacy, enslave my children and you think I’m going to meekly say ‘Oh, I guess since my power level is lower, I’ll just accept everything you’ve done on faith because I can’t beat you in an arm wrestling contest’?”

“Your uncreative ass couldn’t stop me while I’m two tiers behind you, and when I catch up? I’ll tear everything you’ve created down. You can rest easy though, I’ll simply scrub you and the Dan Ui from the history books, like you never existed at all.”

Jim’s eye narrowed.

“You weren’t there. You didn’t face the choices I had to.”

“I don’t really…care? I assume all your choices to betray the Earth were motivated by threat of death, so you could have chosen to die, let them pick someone less competent than you at the very least.”

Jim’s lips drew back in a feral snarl, and he charged forward.

His leg burst into flames and fell away beneath the knee, distracting him long enough for Garth to catch the faster man with a counter to the face, shoving his engineered knuckle bones into Jim’s nose and breaking the shit out of it.

Jim tumbled backward, spewing blood from his nose and lips, catching himself in mid-fall with Fly and rushing toward Garth at near sonic speeds.

End this for me, will you? Garth thought to Grass.

Garth felt a sudden heat and his chest burst into flame, a huge, wonky cut carved through it.

Grass, what the hell!

HE HAD SOME KIND OF REFLECTIVE DEFENCES ON HIS VITALS!

Garth hadn’t even seen him do it.

Guess that’s what I get for overusing the lasers.

Garth tried to raise a hand, but his pecs were severed, allowing Jim to pierce through his defenses, tugging the blade out of Garth’s hand in the process, stabbing it down toward Garth’s eye.

Garth tucked in his chin and turned his head to the side, catching the blade on his forehead in a fast twitch that nearly snapped his muscles. Jim impacted against the rest of him, tumbling the two men through the desert sand.

Garth landed face up with Jim on his chest, dagger poised to end his life.

Win some, lose some. He struggled to raise his arms, but his chest was too damaged.

Once Garth was in his new body, he’d have to apply some of the lessons he’d learned today to the new design. That and do his best to survive stage 2 of the plan.

“He’s mine!” A corio woman wielding a fiery glaive shoved it straight through Jim’s chest, tearing him off of Garth and tossing him aside, tearing the flaming spear out sideways with a spurt of gore.

Garth glanced over and saw his brother gurgling on his own blood, looking down at the wound in confusion.

What the fuck?

“Now, apprentice of Castavelle, you will tell me everything –“

Grass popped the woman’s head like a balloon.

Garth flopped onto his side and crawled over to where Jim was bleeding out, trying to heal himself. Garth telekinetically seized his brother’s blade and rammed it into Jim’s heart, just a few inches above the glaive’s wound.

Jim coughed up a mouthful of blood and chuckled spitefully, looking at him.

A complex strand of black mana that looked like some kind of tapeworm wriggled its way out of his ear, disappearing into a tiny fold in space.

Jim locked eyes with Garth.

“Mar…ker.”

Garth’s brother died, his eyes wide.

Okay, now I’m seriously creeped out.

“Who is responsible for this challenge to the authority of the Dan Ui?” A voice shook the very earth.

But, not a lot of time to think about it.