For half an hour, there was nothing but the empty tundra. The trees gave way to barren white and as my engines roared, I was carried along through this lonely void. Without any signs of life or even the great conflict I had come from, there was an oppressive emptiness to it all. Out here, there was nothing but ice. Meaning was for things that strove, and the ice did not. Here, I was an anomaly trying to save the world.

Before too long, I saw the edges of my destination. It began in the form of many small fragments of crude iron, then it quickly escalated in size. First came the frozen, half-buried blocks that measured the size of a car. Soon enough, they were swelling to the size of a house. Then, a mansion. Big black pyramids dotted the landscape.

Before I knew it, the ground was no longer natural in its topography at all. It was a jagged black and white landscape of geometric forms. Most predominant was the cube, and at every turn, they were larger than a stadium. They swelled to be the size of a small city, all on their own. Shapes upon shapes.

I was flying high to avoid any sudden attacks, but that didn't help me for long.

Very soon, the nighttime sky was no longer visible. I had to slow my engines down considerably as the next transition in the Keep came upon me. The iron took to the sky, hovering weightlessly there like some M.C. Escher-nightmare. Now all that remained was a mad fractal of darkness.

Using the full spectrum of my vision, I could still manage to see and navigate, but it was difficult. The air had filled to the point that it formed a deep cave, and I had no choice but to fly inside.

This was the Iron Tyrant's Power, I knew, and it was localized entirely to this one area. Here, he was a metal god. His domain was hundreds of miles deep and miles thick. All the atomic bombs in the world could not delete this black continent at the world's pole. Even Seraph's most powerful attacks from the Alchemist were just a drop in the big, black bucket.

Worse still was his level of control over the area. At any moment, a spike could explode forth from one of the constellations above me and I would meet my fiery demise. Still, I flew on through the unfathomably large cave.

Over the years, Seraph had tried many attacks, but all the cave had to do was clampdown. No amount of superstrength or firepower could extricate itself from hundreds of trillions of pounds of metal.

"Give up now," I heard a voice in my head. It was Seraph again, warning me off my path. "Unlike you, Walter, I can stomach to deliver on the promise of punishment. Every second you fight against me is a year in torment, therefore. Believe me when I say it. You will thank yourself for giving up."

"I made that threat from a place of strength. I thought the battle was certain to go in my favor. What about you?" I asked.

He laughed. "You want to know how certain I am? Allow me to show you a vision."

"Not while I'm flying!-"

Before I could stop it, he was already taking over my mind. I could only pray that I didn't crash in the meantime, because he was going to show me whether I liked it or not.

What I saw was the ruin of the city where we had previously been fighting. It was as if I was floating behind Seraph as he walked. All around him, Heroes and Martians alike lay dead on the ground. These piles of bodies even included the Class One Heroes I had seen before, which I thought for sure could never be brought down. Not by Dawn and certainly not by my forces. But they hadn't been killed by anything so paltry. It was Seraph himself.

Out of the rubble, a Hero stumbled. He was confused and covered with dust, looking around at his fallen teammates. I didn't recognize his uniform, but I knew he must have been strong to make it this far. That was when Seraph merely outstretched his hand and did as he had to Ironbolt. He pulled them in and, in a blaze of light, the Power was drained from them. After that, he just stomped their head against the pavement, killing them instantly. One by one he had done this, and none had escaped.

All the Power was his.

He had taken it from so many Class One Heroes, making him something beyond Class Zero. As he flew up into the air, I could see Dawn still fighting in the city. She had shrunk down to a singular roaming body, like a giant elephant covered in tendrils, striking madly at anything she saw. Yet, he only had to curl his fingers, and I watched as the area around her was engulfed in blue flames. The heat intensified until half the city around that point was liquifying.

Her consciousness would survive, but her main body was annihilated.

He flattened his hand out and with a sweep of his arm, the whole city was dashed to pieces. It exploded like a tossed chessboard, millions of bodies lost. The chaos was so intense that I lost track of everything, and my head spun.

"I'm coming for you," he said to me, staring off in the wind towards the North. "And I'll be there in five minutes. Think about that, Walter. Think about Hell."

He blasted off, and the vision ended. I had to swerve to dodge the mountains of metal around me. My subconscious had done well enough piloting without my intervention, but as control came back there was a disconnect. In the few seconds it took me to regain my senses, disaster was unavoidable.

My wing clipped the corner of a stalactite and I entered a violent tailspin. I was beyond lucky that instead of a place where many corners met, forming a pit of spikes, my jet spun out along the broad, flat surface of a cube's surface. There, I could lose my momentum, burning up along my bottom side as I came to a whirring stop over miles of distance.

I settled in with a heavy crash at the bottom of its incline, where another solid mound of iron began.

The fuel of my ship was on fire and it was spreading towards the tank. The eject function was not responding to my commands, so I didn't have much time. I had to use what brute strength I had to tear myself out of the fleshy interior of the ship. Sinew and bone snapped. Air flooded into the cockpit and I managed to unhook the tendrils from my body that connected my nervous system. I was able to frantically wriggle out and pry myself free just as the tank went up.

I fell down against the freezing cold iron and covered my head as pieces of carbon and bio-metal ricocheted across the flat black landscape. When I looked up again, there was only the fire to see by. Its orange light was cast in ghostly shapes over the strange interior of the cave. The size of the shapes had grown so large that their faces became monotonous plateaus, stretching into obscurity.

Seraph would be here soon, so there was no time to waste. Even after my tailspin, I had an uncanny sense of direction. Creep had given me that. And so I continued on, sprinting as fast as possible towards the center of this place.

I knew I had to be close.

Through the black inky nothingness, I could already see the hints of light up ahead.

After I mounted the next hill, I came around the edge of an enormous wall from my perspective and could see what was casting the hint of illumination I had detected. I still had to sprint for several minutes just to get close to it, but I made out six figures standing underneath the light. It was cast by a lamppost.

It was a decorative wrought-iron gaslamp, and at its foot was a single hatch door. The figures were all clad in black, with faces covered, and they protected this entrance. They did not react, however, on seeing my approach. They unleashed no attacks. They simply waited for me to join them at the threshold.

This was not what I had expected. Every report that came out of the Iron Keep described it much like any other King's hideaway, with vaulting palaces and grandiose parties. This was more like an austere end to the world. The last stop before total oblivion.

I supposed that the Tyrant had no more use for such things. He did not need to court anyone from the outside world, as they had all been turned against him. Only the loyal remained.

The figures were silent as they stepped aside, giving me a clear path to the hatch door beneath the lamppost. At last, one of them told me. "I don't know who you are, but the Master has told us what must happen."

"And what is that," I asked?

"We will die shortly to the one you call Seraph. Nothing else can possibly happen. Then, you will make your choice. Hurry now, the outer Iron is already falling to him." With that, he knelt down and opened the hatch. Inside, not even my super-senses could penetrate. It was as if all matter and energy stopped cold at the gate. Like reality was beginning to break down.

The Logician is close, I thought.

I nodded to the figures. These must have been the Iron Tyrant's inner circle. They'd held the line against Seraph for decades, long before I ever came around. They knew the secrets of this conflict that not even I understood. No fairweather friends were these.

I jumped down into the pit without saying goodbye. I left the normal world behind.

Instantly, I was bombarded with cold. Without my momentum, I might have frozen to the surface of the iron and felt the heat sucked out of me. But the pit was on an incline, and it took me deeper and deeper.

Casting my eyes back up, I saw the light disappear. Yet, it was not because the hatch had been closed. Rather, the iron had sealed itself behind me, reformed by the Tyrant's Power back into a solid block. After falling for some time, I began to gain a sense of the enormity of the metal surrounding me. It must have been that his Power extended just as far in every direction as it did across the land, and so I had miles to go into the surface of the world.

When I did finally land after so much time, it was on a gradual slope that brought me to a gentle stop. I skid and kept moving so that I did not get too cold, as I somehow knew the life would be sucked out of me. The air was stagnated and old, but my biology could keep me running, despite the low oxygen content.

This place had been sealed for hundreds of years.

The tunnel I was in opened up into a larger room. By this point, I could feel the oppressive weight of the world over top of me. I was so deep in the Earth, with no path back up, and the effect was worse than anything I had felt on the tundra. No one was ever supposed to come down here, and that was the way it was designed.

Up ahead there was an old vault door. The material composing the walls around it had turned from iron to solid rock, and the walls moved up into a dome above my head. When I entered down into the next room, I came upon a deep pool in the ground, in whose hollowed center the water lay perfectly dormant.

This was the dead-end my journey had brought me to.

Surrounding the pool was a narrow ledge of rock, and at the opposite side of its circumference, a man sat. His skin was made of solid iron, and there was no sign of life in him. He was cross-legged with his head bowed. He did not move, but he gave me just one command, spoken directly into my mind.

"Enter the pool," the Iron Tyrant said.

I didn't think he was really alive anymore. Just like the man on the moon, he was more of a corpse. Only, his prison was note bone, it was metal. To me, he was nothing more than a statue.

Finally, I stepped down the pool and into the waters. They were deeper than expected, and as I slipped into them, I began to sink. My head submerged, and I drifted down into the abyss. There was no telling when I would hit the bottom, but I could feel the cold intensifying. It was a supernatural cold, and it penetrated ounce of my being.

At the very bottom, he was there.

The Logician was waiting for me.