Xiong Huang exhaled her breath as she floated down from the sky, landing on the very tip of Mount Everest. Her journey back from the heavens was complete. She stopped and took another breath.

Ok.

Just another breath.

And then she’d go see…him.

She had a lot to say after all.

And he had a lot to answer for!

A lot!

So…

Maybe just one more breath.

As Xiong Huang was breathing, a massive beam of light shot from the sky straight into her. She continued her breathing, stretching a bit as the light began to demolish the mountain around her, leaving a person shaped protrusion where she was blocking it.

Ok, she think she had it. What she was going to say when she saw that…that idiot again.

With that, she took one more breath and vanished.

And then reappeared in the air some distance away, a cloud of purple blood exploding from her outstretched fist.

The other figures hovering in the air gasped.

She barely flicked her eyes to them.

“I’m not in the mood today, so can you just die?”

She directed her intent at them.

Their eyes widened and then moved no more, their corpses still held in the air by the automatically adjusted thrusters.

Some sort of vehicle materialized in the air some distance away from her, an even larger beam of light than before illuminating her.

Xiong Huang yawned and casually waved her hand.

A massive gust of wind slammed into the craft, smashing it into the mountain below. She saw a small ball of fire in the distance where it landed.

She frowned…and then gulped.

“M-Maybe I should check on the sect first…I AM still the Mistress after all…”

And then she slapped her face.

“Come on, Xiong Huang, what are you doing! I don’t care what your cultivation is now, don’t you dare be a coward.”

A purple sphere of light slammed into her and exploded.

The captain floated up in the air. He grinned as the light faded.

The girl was completely unharmed.

“Now this looks like a fig…”

He vanished in a cloud of purple blood, a small puff of smoke rising from a mountain in the distance.

Xiong Huang raised an eyebrow.

The man reappeared in the air, laughing with blood dripping from his mouth.

“Yes! This is it! A real, serious fight! You know how long it’s been?”

“No, and I don’t care.”

She appeared before him and swung a fist at him, not even looking in his direction. A hole opened up in his chest to avoid being struck by her fist.

He was blasted away anyways, blood splattering as the mere shockwaves from her blow crushed his body.

He spun around several times in the air before coming to a stop, his flattened body slowly re-inflating. All the while, the grin never faded from his face.

A small vein bulged on Xiong Huang’s forehead.

“Great, just what I need. A cockroach who won’t die. You know what, fine, I’ll warm up first. You are going to pay for getting in my way though.”

She finally turned to face him, slamming her fist into her palm. The shockwave from that act blew the man back even further. She glared at him with all her intent.

He gasped as his body froze.

And then he let out a yell, bursting with an aura of purple flames. He let out a raucous laugh.

“Amazing! This is amazing! You’re strong! Truly strong! I can’t remember the last time I felt real fear like this!”

“You’re going to feel a lot more than that.”

Xiong Huang kicked off the air, launching herself at the man. He mustered up all his psionic strength just to keep from being blown away by the air rushing at him, firing countless purple spheres at the approaching girl.

She ignored them as they struck her head on, and swung her fist at the man’s face.

He vanished in a flash of light, reappearing a short distance away…

Only for Xiong Huang to smash his face in, destroying his head.

“All of existence belongs to me wherever I stand. Did you think you could move through my space unseen?”

Xiong Huang sighed as the headless man took distance from her, glowing fibers growing out of his neck and twisting into a new head.

“Not the brain then. Should have guessed that when you dared to appear before me.”

His grin grew wider.

“Wow. I poured everything into boosting my physical body and I still can’t hold a candle to you! I can’t remember the last time I was overpowered like this.”

He sneered at her as his whole body began to glow.

“But there’s more than one theater to fight a battle!”

The world pulsed once. Xiong Huang blinked and found herself in a world of pure white. In front of her stood a veritable mountain of purple flesh.

“My species is a multitude in one! Each of us is a colony of sentient, psychic fungi, united into a single organism! Every single one of my cells is a tiny mind with its own psionic power! Your body is strong, but your single mind cannot stand against the might of trillions!”

Xiong Huang yawned and swung her hand. A gust blew and wiped away the white, returning her perception back to the physical world.

“You are realms below me, boy. It matters not if there’s one of you, or trillions. I defied the heavens through the force of my will. Compared to the tribulations of heaven, you are nothing, no matter how many of you there are.”

And yet, the man continued to grin.

“Yes! That’s it! You are truly worth defeating!”

The man burst into purple flames, covering every inch of his body. His eyes became purple stars, burning bright amidst the inferno. He rushed forward pulling back his fist. He struck a blow with all his psionic might, assaulting both body and mind simultaneously.

Xiong Huang just caught it with her hand.

And returned one of her own.

Her fist passed through him as he turned his body intangible, phasing through reality.

Xiong Huang frowned and struck him again, covering her fist in her qi.

The man coughed up blood as the blow connected.

“You think this is the first time I fought a ghost? Please.”

She pulsed her qi, sending him flying away. She appeared before him and kicked him down, smashing him into a mountain below. She then dropped on top of him, destroying the mountain utterly.

She picked up his battered corpse, frowning as he regenerated.

“Colony of fungi was it? So no organs or body to destroy, I need to obliterate every last cell to kill you?”

The man replied not with his voice but his mind.

“That’s…right…”

“Hmph, I’ll do that then.”

She tossed him up into the air and pulled back her fist. Her hand began to glow as bright as a star, the qi so dense it grew visible.

She swung her fist.

A massive cone of fire, wind, and light blasted into the sky, cutting through to the very edge of the atmosphere.

Leaving no trace of the man.

And then Xiong Huang sighed.

The man began reforming out of thin air before her eyes.

“Something only the strongest of us can do. Once our psionic might gains critical mass, we begin developing our own pocket dimension. We start to store our excess cells there, so that we can shrink our bodies to a more convenient size. It’s a bit boring being the size of a planet you know? So you’re fighting the entire weight of my existence, a being that has never stopped growing for all my many years of life.”

Xiong Huang sighed.

So he planned to annoy her to death by making this take a long time. Great. Just wonderful. Why today, of all days?

“Look, pal, that’s nice and all, but you can’t lay a single finger upon the hem of my robes. I have things to do, so you have a once in a lifetime chance to receive temporary mercy from the Murderous Bloody Fist. So hurry up and see Mount Tai and get out of here then, unless you want me to kill you slowly. You aren’t going to win a war of attrition.”

The man grinned.

“But I can lose! Again, and again, and again! Learning from each loss! Growing! Until one day I overcome you, or my chances are spent! That’s what it means to have a real fight!”

Xiong Huang sighed.

And began punching him as fast as she could, obliterating him the moment he reformed.

“Have it your way then. Whatever, more time for me to think then.”

As she continued to wail on the creature, Xiong Huang didn’t even spare a glance as a group of figures floated down behind her.

She heaved a sigh as they fired a beam at her.

Until it struck, that is.

Her eyes widened.

She flared her qi.

But she was already halfway in the other dimension and being pulled inside. She could delay it…but at this point even she couldn’t stop it. She’d have to break through from the other side.

The man sighed as he reformed.

“I’m truly sorry. If I had my choice…I would have liked to finish our fight the right way. But orders are orders, even for me. And the emperor has a pretty strict policy about beings like you, sadly.”

Xiong Huang grit her teeth and glared at him.

“Don’t think this will hold me. I broke through the heavens! I’ll find a way to break through your little prison. And then you, and your ‘emperor’ will pay dearly for this insult.”

The man grinned at her.

“I sure hope so. But you’d be the first person to do so, ever. The Dimensional Rift Projector creates something like an energy vacuum based off the energy it encounters. In other words, the stronger the target, the harder it is to escape. So good luck.”

The man turned to one of the other armored figures, heaving a sigh.

“That settles it. The last major threat on the planet dealt with. At least the last one worth my time. Tell the High Admiral I’m done here.”

Just then Xiong Huang began to snicker, even as her body began to fade.

“What’s so funny?”

“Oh it’s nothing, it’s just…”

She smiled.

“You might be surprised at how dangerous a minor threat can be.”

And with that she vanished.

Bob froze as he held the phone up to his ear.

The call eventually went to voicemail.

Cikizwa burst into the room.

“Bob…I think you need to see this.”

She turned a television in the room, cycling through the feeds of various spy drones and the news.

Bob’s eyes narrowed when he saw the feed from the Himalayas.

He slowly lowered his phone.

Later that night, a single crow flew into an open window of Nemesis HQ, carrying a letter…

The next day all of Nemesis HQ gathered in the command center. All the staff were glancing at one another, speaking in hushed whispers. Nemesis stood in silence in the corner. Saydaa’s eyes were still red, and she was clenching her fists. Kiyosuke pat her shoulder.

On several large monitors on the wall, video feeds came in from Bob’s contacts around the world. Markus, a bandaged Ivan, Kanna, Klara, Arachnalich, and many others appeared in them. Everyone was waiting.

Bob entered the room, walking to the center of it. He held up his hand to quiet the room, all eyes turning to him. He took a deep breath.

“As of this moment, we are at war.”

He pressed a button. A wall size screen lowered behind him, displaying a dozen different feeds of recent events.

“As you can see, unidentified attacks struck at all the most powerful people in the world. The Mistress of the Eternal Night Sect and Baba Yaga have fallen, as well as many others.”

The views changed, focusing on the attackers.

“These attackers struck without warning, with precision, and then left the moment the job was done. This leads me to believe this was a preliminary surgical strike, meant to take out any potential threats before the actual operation. Which means…a full-scale army is likely on the way.”

Bob’s eyes narrowed. His heart pounded as he thought of his friend. The friend he had let go off alone because of his own pride.

The friend he might never see again.

“We’re going to be ready for them, and make them regret their choice of targets. We’ll be pulling out all the stops for this one, holding nothing back. So prepare yourselves, we have a lot of work to do.”

And so the Faceless Minion prepared to go to war.