Five seconds after Legcramp had vanished in the speedboat, he reappeared, ten meters tall, riding a quad bike, with thirty Apocalypse Goblins on his back.

‘WHAT THE—‘ shouted Nosebleed right before the 30X Legcramp punched him in the face with the force of a ballistic missile strike.

Armwrestle and Heartburn stood momentarily stunned, trying to piece together how exactly what they were seeing had happened. It wasn’t long before they gave up that idea and just started cheering on the new, giant Legcramp.

Nosebleed quickly reformed all his internal organs and screamed, ‘CHEATER!’

Legcramp replied by stomping him into a smooth paste. Before Legcramp could scoop up the paste and make smoothies out of it, however, Nosebleed snapped back into a solid form and dodged away. Legcramp’s size and strength may have improved, but his speed and reaction time had been hampered by the fact that all thirty Legcramps needed to unanimously agree on what to do next. While Legcramp’s internal brains argued about whether to dodge or block, Nosebleed took advantage of the opportunity by leaping into the air and punching Legcramp’s massive nose in. Legcramp stumbled backward, the ground shaking as he fell to one knee.

‘FOOL!’ Nosebleed shrieked. ‘DID YOU REALLY THINK YOU COULD BEAT ME JUST BY FUSING WITH YOUR ALTERNATE SELVES?’ Nosebleed punctuated every word with another successive punch to Legcramp’s face. Each punch caused a rippling shockwave through Legcramp’s body, forcibly ejecting one of his component Legcramps and making him noticeably weaker. He was less than half his size now. Sixteen unconscious Legcramps lay in clumps around him.

‘Plan B!’ The lead Apocalypse Goblin on his back shouted. ‘PLAN B!’

Nosebleed finally ended his assault with a roundhouse kick that knocked five whole Legcramps out of the fusion.

While the still-big-but-much-less-bigger-than-before Legcramp attempted to climb to his unreasonably large feet, the Apocalypse Goblins clinging to his back initiated Plan B. They dropped onto the floor, then began a precisely coordinated dance number, complete with lyrics and mood lighting. As the twelve-minute long dance neared its end, the fusion began. The Goblins piled together, their sticky green bodies melting into each other like butter left out in the Sahara desert. Soon, they had become an amorphous mass of flesh, writhing and throbbing and trying to figure out which way is up. Then, the flesh blob burst into blazing hot fire. The flesh was incinerated, and from the ashes, a naked man with charred skin and a flaming beard arose, a red-hot sword held on his back in a sheath made of his own skin.

‘Hey, that didn’t happen when we fused!’ the 14X Legcramp complained. ‘We just became a bigger version of ourselves!’

The Apocalypse Goblin, or rather Apocalypse Man, was not listening.

‘Ah,’ he muttered to himself. ‘This is quite convenient.’

Nosebleed, having dozed off during the dance number, awoke, refreshed and ready to continue the battle. Armwrestle and Heartburn sat off to the side, having figured that if their help was needed, it would be requested.

‘WHO’S THIS?’ Nosebleed exasperatedly gestured to the Apocalypse Man.

The Apocalypse Man still seemed to be lost in his own world. ‘I was planning on cracking a deal with that Xiuhtecuhtli creep, but this is much better.’

Nosebleed stomped over to the Man and snapped his fingers. ‘HEY! EYES HERE!’

The Apocalypse Man finally looked at Nosebleed, then immediately tore the glowing sword from his back and sliced the vampire in half.

Nosebleed screeched in pain. ‘HOW DARE YOU! HOW DARE YOU DEFILE THE BODY OF THE MIGHTY NOSEBLEED!’

The Apocalypse Man spat a glob of magma at the ground, then proceeded to slice Nosebleed into tiny, tiny, tiny pieces. Satisfied with his work, the Apocalypse Man stabbed the sword back into his blistered back skin and walked away. Nosebleed, however, was not dead yet. The minuscule scraps of his body inched together when no one was looking, forming nothing more than a mouth and vocal cords.

‘NOSEBLEEDS!’ Nosebleed’s mouth screamed. ‘I AM ACCELERATING THE PLAN! INITIATE COMPLETE PLANETARY ASSIMILA—!’

Legcramp stomped on the mouth before it could get any more words out, but the damage, it seemed, was done. In five seconds flat, thousands of Nosebleeds flooded into the storage vault. They busted through the door, tunneled through the ceiling, and somehow dug through the floor, despite the fact that the storage vault was on the lowest level. The Apocalypse Man drew his sword once again. He chopped through as many Nosebleeds as he could but there were just too many. Legcramp, Armwrestle, and Heartburn fared no better. They could not stop the Nosebleeds as they piled together on top of their leader’s still moving scraps. The Nosebleeds melted together like butter left out in the Australian outback, fusing into a single, massive glob of flesh. Then the glob of flesh sunk into the floor like quicksand, and it was gone.

The vampires and fiery naked man stood in silence for a moment.

‘Well, then,’ said Heartburn. ‘I’m glad that’s over with. Now, back to focusing on how to kill Bodacious Ba...'

The ground shifted, then shook. The walls around them collapsed, as did the entire facility above. The storage vaults were supposed to be deep underground, and yet they could all see the radioactive sky rushing past them outside. Rushing past them very, very fast. The entire landscape, all the way to the horizon, had been upended and was rapidly ascending. The ground rumbled with the intensity no mere earthquake could muster. The sound of the wind and crumbling tectonic plates was deafening. Over the horizon, four equally sized, round mountains began to rise. As the mountains grew taller, they also grew closer. They seemed to be folding in on themselves. From behind them, another solitary mountain was doing the same. The entire continent was being folded in half, crushed between these bizarre structures.

The Apocalypse Man realized it first. ‘…They’re fingers.’

Nosebleed’s six-thousand-kilometer wide hand clenched into a fist, plunging those within into an inky blackness. Then, with an over-arm swing, it threw the tectonic plates it held, and everything on them, far into space. From the flying chunk of rock that used to be the facility, the vampires (and naked man) could see what had become of the Earth. Its radiation-scarred surface was peeling off like dead skin, revealing a fleshy, pale layer beneath. As the dirt and water of Earth floated into the void, Nosebleed raised his head. He hovered in the vacuum, arms outstretched, eyes closed. He was sixty-thousand kilometers tall. A vampire to end all vampires. The comparatively microscopic vampires still clinging to the tumbling pebble gaped in awe. The planet-sized Nosebleed basked in his ultimate power, then suddenly keeled over and wretched. His enormous throat bulged as if something was trying to escape. Then, an arm burst out of Nosebleed’s mouth. An arm made of beeswax. Nosebleed’s entire head exploded in a veritable supernova of blood as the walking hive, now as tall as Nosebleed was, burst out of his neck hole. Nosebleed’s head quickly reformed as the hive floated a couple of dozen of thousand kilometers away and readied into a combat stance.

‘VAMPIRE SCUM LIKE YOU KILLED OUR ANCESTORS!’ the hive roared, its words so powerful not even the impossibility of sound waves transmitting in a vacuum could stop it. ‘THEN, VAMPIRE SCUM LIKE YOU KILLED OUR ANCESTORS AGAIN! AND NOW, VAMPIRE SCUM LIKE YOU DESTROY OUR PLANET! THE BEE EMPIRE WILL STAND FOR THIS INJUSTICE NO LONGER! THE ULTRA HIVE CHALLENGES YOU TO A TRIAL BY COMBAT!’

Nosebleed cracked his mountainous knuckles. ‘Sure,’ he said. 'Why not?'