The sun was setting.

Lumia nervously glanced at it as she was splashed by The Great Mother’s blood, surrounding her in what seemed like an empty expanse of stars. Inside, it briefly seemed almost as if she were truly the sun in the great expanse of space, but she quickly dispelled the effect with a blast of light and sighed.

The Great Mother smiled, stepping back from the sun god. “Has your flame almost burnt out, little one?” she asked impatiently as Lumia nervously chewed her cheek.

“Plasma,” Lumia corrected her with annoyance. “The sun isn’t a flame.”

The colossal god chuckled. “Fire is plasma, too, fool.”

Lumia looked at the god like she was an idiot. “Only certain flames are plasma at certain points...”

“Oh, well, aren’t you such a scholar, Miss Sun?” she mocked the kid. “I imagine you’re not very popular in school.”

“What are you, the stupid bully?” Lumia asked with exasperation.

“I’m no living cliche like you,” The Great Mother argued. “The kid with immense power; oooh, so unique!”

Lumia rolled her eyes. “I’m surprised a living fossil like you knows a thing about cliches. Go find a Godzilla to fight or something.” She shrugged.

The other god chuckled, then held out her planty hand. “I wasn’t aware you had some wit about you, kid. Perhaps we could take our place as the world’s rulers together, hmm?”

“Pfft,” Lumia held in a laugh. “You’re just saying that cuz’ you know I’ll win.”

The Great Mother glanced at the setting sun. “I’d give you a minute or two before the sun sets, child. I’ve fought the sun god before, I know you lose form when the sun sets.”

She smirked. “Is that so?”

The other god’s expression grew concerned at her expression of confidence. “What do you mean?”

“Look up.”

Her robotic eye flicked up to the black sky. “Is this some excuse for a surprise attack? There’s nothing to see up there but the stars and moon.”

“Correct,” Lumia said, crossing her arms confidently.

She had tried her best to drag the loose god westward, but the god of life, while perhaps not as bright as herself, had been smart enough to notice her trying to extend the definition of a ‘day’ and fought against it. In the end, they had battled for about ten hours, leaving them near the edge of Canada.

“You see,” she continued, “The sun is setting. In ten seconds, I’ll go poof.”

The Great Mother cocked an eyebrow. “So there never was a point to your gusto. Hmph.”

“Ten. Nine...” Both gods remained still, waiting for the end of their fight with mutual respect. “Eight. Seven Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One.”

Lumia suddenly flashed a dim green, along with the sun’s last instant on the horizon.

A deeper, serious voice said, “Zero,” as the green faded into a deep, calming blue.

Standing in Lumia’s stead was a woman in her twenties wearing black and blue ceremonial robes, a shining moon illustrated on its chest piece. While her serious expression showed how uncertain she was, her determination was obvious.

“Hello,” she said, looking up at The Great Mother.

“Who...are you?” she asked with confusion.

“You can call me Lunaria or Luna. I don’t think I need to explain who I am.”

After observing the still, calm woman with confusion, The Great Mother laughed. “Ahh, I see. The moon god. The pathetic whelp. I was wondering why I couldn’t hear you speak.” She pointed her cannon at Luna. “But it isn’t as if I need to hear you to kill you.”

It began to glow red, charging into a powerful blast.

Luna glanced up. A half moon...it could be worse.

Just before it could shoot, Luna calmly raised her hand. Suddenly, the god was enveloped in a sphere of blue light, which then collapsed in on itself, causing her to dissapear.

“That...that should keep her sealed away for now...” she said, sweating as she slowly lost altitude. She took deep breaths in and out. She could hardly keep the loose god sealed for long, and she couldn’t even fly. Contrasting her own power to Lumia’s, Luna could be called an ant. Heck, she was more like a tardigrade in comparison, microscopic by comparison.

Thankfully, that didn’t apply to her seals. She had the power to seal away a person for varying periods of time, regardless of whether they were a god or ant. She wasn’t sure exactly where she sent her sealed foes, but it was a dark, lifeless place empty of anything but stars.

As she touched down to the ground, a thought came to mind. While Lumia’s memories were vague to her, she vaguely remembered the god’s blood doing something similar. Stra-

A void of darkness suddenly seemed to crack reality where The Great Mother had stood. Then, a robotic arm crashed through the void, and the god stepped out, cackling. “Oh dear goddess of the moon...” she glanced about the forest. “You’re hiding now? Pathetic. I bet that killing you would end that bothersome sun god’s life as well.” She smirked as her cannon pivoted upward, then clicked into place. It began to glow red once more. “Seal me away again, little one. Just try it.”

Lumia, too small and innocuous for the god to see, stepped back as the cannon suddenly shot upward, then the god dashed away as the lasers it fired arced far into the sky, then crashed down toward the ground.

Just before the area was turned into a nuclear hellscape, Luna banished herself, disappearing in a flicker of dim blue light. She had done all she could do to stop the god. This was where her battle ended.

A godly terror landed in the gardens of The Black House. She rose to her full height, now only five and a half feet tall, then stepped forward, her robotic eye landing on the person who stood in front of its doors.

“Hello,” The Great Mother said as she stepped in front of him. “And you would be?”

“The father of the person you’re hunting,” the entity said simply. “I have no intention of allowing you in here.”

She laughed at him. “Really now? And with what army will you stop me?”

“With what army?” he responded with indignation. “Do you have any idea who I am?”

“As though I have time for weaklings. Stand out of my way, Eldritch.”

“Greta. Now.”

The God had time to react to the command but simply waited for whatever he had planned. She couldn’t have predicted what happened next.

In an instant, she was turned into a black hole. Even with only a split second to react, she tried to escape the attack, reaching and leaping to escape, but it ended suddenly and calmly, her entire body being sucked into a floating, all-consuming black singularity.

“Do you think she could escape?” someone said as they drifted down, landing by Gau’s side. Greta was a woman in her forties with silver hair and black, practical clothes.

“I wouldn’t ever jinx it,” Gau said. “But it seems like a fine way to take out an immortal.”

“If she really can’t escape it, then we can consider ourselves lucky she reverted to her smaller form on the way here...and stood still to let me do it.”

“No.” The Edritch being shook his head. “It hardly matters. If she had escaped, I would have simply teleported Drade somewhere safe.”

“So you called me in for something you see as this trivial?” Greta asked with annoyance.

“Please. Drade’s life, maybe even the world, is on the line. Must you be such a stranger?”

“I live on the moon for a reason.”

“Oh? And here I thought it was for fun.”

“I can’t tell if you’re being serious or not...”

“Serious?” Gau tilted his head. “Why would you think I wasn’t?”

Greta sighed. “Whatever. I’ll ensure that she remains sealed away. You-”

Suddenly, Gau was cut to shreds. What remained of a body fell to the ground as Greta froze in confusion.

The Great Mother had suddenly appeared behind him, her annoyance obvious. “Idiots. You think it would take so little to defeat me?”

A low, gurgled chuckle came from the dying Gau. “You...” he began, speaking slowly. “Think you ever stood...a...chance. My kids don’t...die on my watch.”

“Would you just die already?” She blasted him with a laser, incinerating what remained of the eldritch being’s torn corpse, then cleared her throat. As she did, Greta snapped a finger, turning her into another black hole.

A moment later, Greta was impaled by a number of planty tendrils and fell to the ground.

The god sighed. “I can traverse all planes of existence, fool. A physical barrier in this world is but air to another.”

She stepped over the corpses, then leaped through the building, crashing through walls at hypersonic speeds. For just a moment, she saw her mark, sleeping in a room, but as she reached a tentacle out to grab them, the room suddenly disappeared.

Once she landed, she rushed back to where she’d seen them, only to feel the presence of Drade move...beneath her. Far, far beneath her.

She leaped a mile into the air, then blasted a beam of plasma the size of the black house into the ground, boring another mile into the earth.

When she finally fell to the bottom, she understood what had happened.

“He’s...on the other side of the world...” she muttered. “No! NO! You can’t just do that! There...there’s got to be some way to make it there...”

She roared, then suddenly enveloped the world around her in an invisible spiritual aura. As she shifted into a spiritual plane, she aimed her laser at the sky. “You won’t get away!”

As it blasted, she was propelled far beneath the earth, burrowing her way to its center as an incorporeal being.

“You...you won’t escape me!”

Fifteen minutes later, she found herself soaring into the earth’s core.

She flew through then past it in just a minute and burst into the outer core, smirking with certainty that she had outsmarted her foes.

Then, something grabbed her leg.

Even for the half-machine, it took a moment to understand what had happened.

Something...something hadn’t just grabbed her, it had stopped her in her tracks.

The god felt an abject sense of dread.

She could feel the power of what had caught her. It was so enormous, so powerful, that she felt like an ant.

She didn’t want to look back. She wanted to cry she was so scared.

She struggled with everything she had. She hurriedly tried to switch between planes: the organic plane, the artificial plane, each plane of spirit, the astral plane, then lastly...she reached out as she was dragged back into the center of the earth like a fly caught in a web, and shifted her body into the far realm.

She took deep breaths in the empty space around her, finally free of the entity. “I...I’m free...” she said, her eyes dilated with horror. “What...what was that?”

The presence was gone only from this world, a place without life. She didn’t understand how or why such a being existed in the center of the Earth, but she had never experienced such a sensation of terror for many, many years.

“N-no matter. I’ve escaped, for now. I’ll simply continue from here.”

She blasted forward through the far realm, yet still aiming for the holder of Chaos. Nothing would stand in her way.

Nothing stood in her way, but unfortunately, nothing needed to.

The room in which Drauko resided teleported away each time she found her way to them, and there was simply nothing she could do. After another five hours of hunting them down, she finally realized the truth.

They were gone. She would lose at the day’s end.

She looked to the sky, standing inside a crater.

But what, precisely, defined a ‘day’?