In the explosion of molten metal, I lost all my senses. My eyes burned out of their socket and I felt my biological failsafe’s kick in. My lungs clamped shut to keep the liquid from pouring in and cooking me from the inside out. My skin was barely holding together, and for the first time in a long time, I was completely blind. Not a single eye along my hide had survived.

Yet, I could still barely feel when pressures changed on the surface of my skin. It was a dull sense located deep in the tissues, where nerves still functioned. By that route, I could feel as an iron grip fell over my throat. I was lifted higher and higher until suddenly, the air was bitingly cold instead of hot.

When my backup eyes finally broke through the charred surface of my stomach to have a look around, what I saw was a vast expanse of land. Through the rush of wind, I could hear the titanic sounds of the Iron Tyrant’s home collapsing. Mountains of metal that had previously been held up by his Power were now subject again to gravity, and they fell with such a thunderous crash that the earth rippled like water. Black metal and white snow mixed with glowing magma, and the whole thing churned and bubbled for miles.

It was staggering.

I could see that Seraph was the one who had pulled me from the Keep and brought me up towards the atmosphere. He had a look of joy on his face, and his eyes were cast up towards the depths of the sky. In the distance, the sun was just barely beginning to peak. Dawn was coming.

He could still psychically project his voice, and so it was crystal clear as he thanked me. “Because of you, they just gave up. You can’t imagine the fight as it might have occurred between the three of us, the Logician, Heinrich, and I. It seems you did what I never could, dear Walter. You broke their spirits. Thank you.”

I looked around. “Where are you taking me?” I asked. We had started to turn South on our path, back towards the city. We were moving at a blazing clip.

“You can witness as I finish growing my Power. Very soon, I will be able to control reality itself,” Seraph told me. "When I am the only Super remaining and all the rest are consumed, I will be able to choose which universe to manifest on a whim. There will be no one to contest my manipulations. I will be God himself."

Where my hand hung limp at my side, I began to feel a tingle. Slowly but surely, a change was happening in the flesh. Bone was shifting, and the cells stirred from their sleep.

Nice to have you back, Creep, I thought.

Before Seraph could react, I drove the newly formed carbon blade that I had created up and through his gut. Blood spurted out, and his look of pleasure turned to shock. His grip released on my neck then, letting me free to fall.

We had already covered such a distance that the wreckage of the city was clear in my sight. I stared at it as I tumbled until at last, I met the earth. I cratered into the permafrost there, but I was down for less than a second. I was brimming with such Power that my ribs exploded open. Out of the depths of my body, new limbs bubbled up. Eyes and teeth and claws exploded onto the icy ground to erect an eldritch abomination.

Seraph merely hovered above, watching while my body morphed. I had my Power back. I could command my cells to do anything now. Still, he wasn’t impressed.

The hole I’d pierced into him had already healed, and he outstretched his hand.

I bellowed defiantly. “Just try it you ugly son of-!” In a single blink, I was vaporized along with a hundred acres of the Siberian tundra. He only had to think about it for it to happen.

Without losing a beat, however, I was back just as quickly. Though the rocket ship had been converted into a Scarab walker, they had left some of my backup pods just sitting out in the snow. I could see up ahead that the Scarabs hadn’t gotten far after I flew off in my jet. Sol and all his fighters had been killed earlier by Seraph as he had been on his way to the Iron Keep, I saw.

Nonetheless, there was enough workable biomatter for me to salvage, here. And so, I began gathering it all up, including the wreckage of Dawn’s corpse, and when the Seventh King grew near, I was a hundred times larger than before. In my leviathan form, I roared to shake the heavens.

Seraph simply rolled his eyes.

“You’re more trouble than you’re worth,” he sighed. “Even as a symbol of my triumph.” This time, when his hand outstretched, I felt my body pulled towards him, despite how enormous I had become. In a flare of blue light, he drew streams of energy out of me. Even when my thousands of claws and tentacles rent his skin away, it did not stop him. I escalated to a frenzy, but it was too late.

The blue energy he was stealing from me worked just as fast to repair the damage, and I could feel myself growing weaker. I screamed with a cacophony of vocal cords. “I’m going to end you!”

I was becoming too weak to move.

“I’m taking your Power,” Seraph said. “Try coming back from that. Actually, let's just be frank. This is goodbye.” He was utterly bored with my attempts to kill him. He had only to send back a fraction of the energy he had stolen, and every ounce of my body was completely incinerated. Even with my tenacity, there was no way to survive that.

For a moment, there was silence.

I was dead. But only for a moment...

I was shunted into the invisible channel. There, I was surrounded by darkness, and I began to hear voices. As reality started reforming around me, I could make out thousands of them. Hickory was there, as well as Daniel and all the souls I had picked up in Central America. Even Dawn was there. But there were so many more.

"We finish this now!" I announced in triumph.

Millions upon millions of grey figures joined these voices in the glossy plane, where dreams rose and fell. I smiled, and suddenly all of it started to fall together into a physical form. I had come back into a body on the Martian surface, and the supplies in my reach were limitless. Every single Martian that Creep had been creating for the second wave of attacks on Earth suddenly felt a shift taking place in their bodies. Their DNA was changing to my command.

My smile exploded into laughter.

Once and for all.

“This is it,” Hickory realized as he came to join me at my side. He was faced with a full view of the army I was raising, and he couldn't stop his jaw from dropping. "We really did it."

Unlike the Logician, I had perfect control over what I was creating, and all the forms that I had learned. And so, I knew exactly what I was working with, down to the most minute detail of the genetic codes. Though I did not understand how they did what they did, I knew what steps to take to bring them to the fight. And my fighters were loyal.

Portals opened, hundreds at a time, and I could see the Earth waiting for us on the other side.

Seraph was floating exactly where I had left him, not minutes before. His eyes widened in horror when he beheld the scale of what I brought against him.

He thought that he had taken my Power, but I had not even scratched the surface.

In the split second that the Logician’s body had boiled, his blood flowed into me, and I had taken in the information he intentionally stored in his genes. Every single unused Power was latent there, stronger than anything which he had released up to this point. As the Logician himself had said, he saved the best for last.

I was his successor, and all the wisdom of the cycles now belonged to me.

Millions of Martians had now been granted Powers of their own, and among them, I had found the ability to open unlimited gateways through space and straight back to Earth. I opened them inside the atmospheric domes on Mars, so as not to cause a disruption. We marched into the tundra by them, and no one could stop us.

For my own body, I took a form that dwarfed even the largest of Dawn’s constructions. I stood thousands of feet tall. I was a dark carbon machine; the ultimate manifestation of what life could ever be capable of. Nothing could possibly be stronger or smarter within the limits of engineering. It was the greatest design that I could possibly summon from the realm of Forms.

Moreover, my hide was laden with the starfish-shaped Martians, clinging on and lending me their nervous systems. They were allowing me to directly control their Powers. I had networked them together, choosing the greatest abilities of all, and making of them a superorganism. Together, we could blot out the heavens.

This time, when Seraph blasted out a ray of light strong enough to vaporize a city, it bounced off my surface. It scattered over the tundra, igniting trees and ruins, but doing no damage.

It was my turn to attack then. Using a combination of Powers, I let loose a torrent of effects so dense that space warped around it. A fractal of color and blades tore through the air towards Seraph, and the shockwave it released flattened the wasteland. The Martians had to hunker down just to keep from being blown away.

Seraph was fast enough to dodge the center of the blast, but not all of it. Half his body felt the annihilating force of my attack, and he spiraled helplessly to the ground.

When he landed in the rubble and ice, he was barely alive. I could see everything with my enhanced sense. I could even see the different possibilities of this fight, splitting like the branches of a tree in every direction. Down every path, Seraph had only one choice. He had to go nuclear.

Using pure energy, he reformed his body out of hardened light, releasing a shockwave of nuclear force. Regular flesh would no longer suffice. He had to shed his human form entirely, burning away the last of his face with one great scream of pain. All that remained was a blue fire burning hotter than the sun and shaped in human form.

He flew forward so fast that my precognition could barely keep up after that. His aim was to rampage amongst the Martians I had empowered, going from fighter to fighter and tearing out their life-force. He was a blue streak and every time that he killed it increased his momentum.

I had to put a stop to this, I decided.

All the millions of lights that covered me blinked in unison to deliver a message. “Join me!” It called.

Not one more of my friends would be allowed to die.

All of the Martians that still lived rushed to crawl up and join their brethren on my hide. They had only to draw near for my tendrils to unite them with my mass and bring them into my shielding. Once joined to me, they were safe.

With my fingers, I sent out snaking beams to hunt Seraph down. Ten in all.

The blur was caught by them as he continued his spree, and the force of their explosion knocked him off his flight path. He sputtered and crashed over the wasteland, settling into a large crater just on the other side of the city’s ruins. A cloud of ash followed in his wake, blue fire spreading everywhere he touched.

When he pulled himself up, he allowed his form to revert back to human. He was burning Power so fast that, without a constant supply, he would quickly fade to nothingness. I could feel his utter despair, and the anguish on his face was the result of centuries of planning, dashed before his eyes.

He was at the end of his road, staring face to face with a Power that could dwarf his. He’d had the fate of the entire universe in his grasp. But now... it was in mine.

He turned to fly away. He was going to flee, running across the world in search of more Power, hoping then, just maybe he could gather enough energy to kill me. He'd try anything.

Yet, both of our fates were sealed.

In the depths of my chest, a thrumming arose, and the air grew hazy. A deep vibration sounded out, and the space around me began to warp. I lifted from the ground, shaking it with my departure, and moved in the blink of an eye to transport myself in front of him. All that teleported mass displaced the oxygen, causing an eruption of fire.

At last, my own Power was accelerated from the countless Booster Types I had added to my compendium. This allowed me to command the cells at an uncanny speed. They could multiply from an almost endless well of matter, generated at will to create new designs from thin air. Suddenly, I began doubling my size.

Seraph was flying away, but all around him, a sea of flesh erupted over the landscape. Its nightmarish sprawl consumed everything it touched, covering tree and tundra alike; growing into ever taller mountains and leaving him no other option than to fly straight up. Huge tendrils shot out from the sea of blood, though, moving past him to the edge of space and forming a net above.

As Seraph looked on, my body extended to the horizon and vaulted through the firmament. Its gaps closed over him until there was nothing left but an endless cathedral of blood and flesh enclosing the world. Bioluminescent lights pulsated along with his frantic heartbeat to light its depths.

He fired outward into the all-encompassing breadth of my being, yet his beams of energy reflected uselessly, no different from before. They ricocheted before quickly dying off.

The space around him was rapidly shrinking, and his attacks went from mad to wild. The infinite maw was collapsing down as Seraph panicked against it. “This isn’t right," he said. Then louder, he pleaded for me to stop. “You can’t do this!”

I plunged out all the lights. He was nothing but a drop in my ocean, then. He lashed out and thrashed violently, but when I closed the gap, he was hopeless to push it back.

He might have had enough energy to level a continent and boil the seas. For a moment, he might even have been a god. But it was not to last.

When the sun finally rose over the horizon, there was only me. A new day dawned on the Earth and for the first time in hundreds of years, there was no one pulling the strings.

Everything was as it should be. Life would go on and the cycle would end.

Always, life would go on.