Darkness, but not emptiness. Not a void. Not an abyss. An overtaking. Photons wafting by in peripheral blur. The world around dimmed to just what could reach before this instant, what could be felt before it stopped, what was locked away in luminous quagmire. Contorting waves highlighted shapes in proximity, bouncing away in all directions to find more surface to play across. To make it seen. Brighter surfaces rebounding them back en masse, the darkness below swallowing them whole and refusing their carried energy. This was existence dropped to its finest edge, its highest speed, its most extreme… Its most absolute. And it was almost too much to bear.

The air too slow to find its place, burning and smashing apart before it could reach its destination. Not that his body was catching up all that well either. A simple look down, a single eye movement broke the air apart and threatened to snap it closed if given the month it would take to wait it out. His body wasn’t even really moving itself, a feeling like it was pushed into place by something else, by something inside, by the electron threads woven through him. Flesh, bone, muscle, tendon, scale, keratin, cartilage, and everything that made him who he was. Everything he felt that he was. All of it… all of it was just window dressing now. It was just another shell, protection, something between him and the world. Between what he truly was. What deep down he knew he was but could never truly grasp. Never truly accept. But even in this infinite moment, existential questions had to be shelved. Those eyes had to break already broken air and return to that surface reflecting those waves en masse. Return to that tip frozen only an inch from its goal.

Metal was locked in a shedding boil, orange and white bouncing away in gradient flare. The tinge of red behind and beyond, highlighting it brighter than the waves could keep it in their elastic shapes. That alien star still glaring ahead, that menace still gripping to its host like so much liquefied saran wrap. Its constant reforming and rehoning edges keeping it brand new in the face of constant damage. Not even the scars of welding repair remained to mar its surface.

And yet it was sickening. Offensive. Blistering in its hideous contortions. In its attempts to be as it feels it should be. A cancerous growth given freedom to spread and grow. A debasement of everything Seth had wanted, of everything he tried to achieve, of everything he had to atone for. A maddening reminder. A stoking poignancy. A throttling hand with no sense to see it’s gone too far. No sense left to see the lengths that this world would go to, be subjected to in order to stop it. No care for, no reason, no hope left for its redemption or absolution. Only the greed for a life denied, a hunger for everything it had once gouged on, a resentment tied to the simple mistake of a child left with nothing!! Now… now it was nothing but a demon. That needed to be excised with everything it fucking deserves!!!

A flash of movement, photons outpaced, light ignored as an unattainable limit. An unconscious strike, no thought fast enough to rethink or keep in line. All instinct driven by all the fires raging through his true being. Metal point frozen in his face disappearing into hypervelocity shrapnel, only slowing as the forces enacted couldn’t hold against the will of physics to not just break. But who gives a shit anymore, this was his soul finding its out to the wider world. And it knew nothing but that which had been levied upon it. So he was going to beat the living shit out of it!!

Twin burst, that highlighted arm stretching in tainted hope dashed to wafting glister. A third finding the whole shoulder and turning it to obliterate. A fourth cleaving lower and finally putting those claws to full use. That armored sternum and everything within raked away faster than signals could even transmit their loss. The legs, the other arm, piece by piece this malignant memorial to everything hold him back was torn apart for none to see but him. For none to feel but him. For no one but the one burning so bright it had outpaced the rules of this universe itself. All until the right side of that defiled visage chunked like the darkness was hungry for its emptiness back. And that saved for last left eye final noticed. As its brother’s fist filled its vision with a wake of all the colors of this outpaced spectrum.

That tormented world outside this moment, holding dear as best it could in the face of ground level stellar winds. Rendered beaten by just the tenor of its first syllable and managing only to keep a footing at the tip of its greeting. The wall between translating fiery death to all life into overpressure. But that reverberating tone was dying as soon as it came, the moment fracturous and exponential. Only a piece was needed not a new magnetic pole, yet Aegis held dear to her barrier still, reinforced it before her audience buffeted to cover. All before what her perception offered her in dread. The flash, the impossible, the air already alight in spades. Sparking like every molecule within was going super critical. No bodies to focus on, no image to see, only the rising grim thought that this had only been the beginning.

Her vision filled, her reflexes outpaced, her wall of hope folding over and over and over before the mother of all bass kicks turned her and everything else to giblets. Before that infinite moment collapsed in on itself and all its actions resulted in the reaction to end all reactions. Before a thousand strikes became a thousand sonic-

*BOBOBOBOBOBOBOBOBOBOBOBOBOBOBOBOBOBOBOBOOOOM*

That only just fading aurora was shocked away into infinite bubbles of air turned solid. That roiling glass lake cresting its orange sea wall and being turned into condensation in an instant. And all the reverberating burden upon those separated by hope turned to backlash and whiplash of unfounded proportions. Footing was denied, the forest was denied. Everything that wasn’t pressing harder than they ever should was flung to minimum safe distance whether they wanted to be or not. The threat of the sky scorching there blue marble to rock outmoded by the air trying to liquefy them to gravy. Only a simmer of wash through this omega pressure held its place. Training and expectation and the need to keep this all contained denying any semblance of professional restraint. Aegis needed to keep her hold, to exist as her own comet against this destroying wind. And this menace needed to be beaten into the nothingness it deserves!!

Metal molecules, fibrous being, baser elements of the bastard trapped within. All of it was phase shifted to gas by simple percussive demand going too fast for anything’s good. IA solid tone beaten into the air, yet interspersed with flashes of catch up. Moments of reflection stretching on and on and on, always leading to the same raging outcome. A mere instant afforded for that menace star to pull itself together again, for its threads to reravel, reform and condense again, conglomerate and congeal back into the thing they made up. Only for it to be obliterated over again and the cycle to restart. And the flaws to be picked out and known through the just punishment that the both of them deserved.

A gradual speed down, but a still imperceptible assault. That fraction of a fraction not long for the world it callously took control of. That restoring process allowed to return to physical, a core being allowed the time to feel the judgment levied. The velocity upon it, the altitude given, the oppressive heat of the real star above being told that was enough. And the gravity of the one enacting its own justice.

A knee finding spine and that surround cloud bank rippled apart, but a body retained as a method was found in the madness of control. No air left to halo or break but still a spattering of leaking power turned condensation in its sudden upward wake. Followed to annihilation by a burst of still too much power. Ionic jets little more than flashes of lightning in the bare open sky. But bearing all the force still needing to pound this menace into a more simple shape.

Fists balled into nothing but condensed light, like it was pile on for the ride it was too slow to escape. More shattering impacts to ripple the fabric of reality in twain. But still this star was not going to be allowed to just die and come back. A thread shooting in as fast as its host, spreading faster than its target could react. Pulling it taught before it could separate in sudden obliteration. All the while its tone found harmony in the torrential barrage. Plates dented, bones broke, receptors stayed yet vessels ruptured. Para would feel this, Resent would feel this. That black hole at the center of this would feel its surface rent asunder and feel this pain. A pain fostered and force feed, parasocial and personal, ideological and psychotic. They would feel every bit of the pain they forced upon Seth before their world was allowed to crash all the way back down.

Back down at speed bordering Mach too many!! Another halo of sprayed out crimson, another kick off of too damn fast. All that velocity cut and redirected with more and more pounding into shape. Like all those folds, all those knots, all that threading was straightened out into nice even beaten flat rows. All until there was nothing left but a grand shot down, that piled over light highlighting a form at last from its overclocked existence. The center of this pit of obsidian turned back into dust and shrapnel by a bolt of upward swing, a target only a matter of meters from its grave. A fist furling all that caught up light away, all its speed deadened at long infinite last. But still rocketing to meet that metallic jaw and uppercut the last of those knots flat. The last of its acceleration decelerated to just a simple falling into the dust on its knees.

A moment crash down, of emptiness and settling of air rent no longer. A moment of daze that could last for decades, of re-collection and letting gravity have its hold. A moment of realizing all the pain transferred and echoing its last across that towering orange curtain. That maw hanging limp to the sky, those claws fallen loose to drape into the dust, a beam still refusing to let its weight fall back and be at rest. The twitch of nerves underneath returning to a life all their own, free of the burden wrapping around them and suffocating them away. Yet being drenched in everything impacted on them both. A tandem pair at last. Shared in pain and stature a like, but returned to their own bodies for better and worse. Both seeing through their own eyes, feeling through their own nerves, knowing no subsumation or subjugation but the ones they both deserve. But both seeing their judge, jury, and executioner drop like an archangel come to say their end was nigh.

A buffeting landing filled the darkness surrounding in radiant glory, a wincing light too much for matter to not fear and flee, a form bulked to beyond the limits of its frame and function. Those same grey scales smoothed to mirror sheen. That tail coiling wide and belying nothing but its own length and the ripple of power whelmed. A crowning twin jag still arcing its excess away like a laurel of plasma triumph. A glare like that true star was given a more localized form, with all the same judgment and wholesale blister. A mane billowing in the twisting streams of resettling air behind. And a golden sparkle dancing amid the stark white strands.

‘Eat your heart out Pharaoh Shephten!’

This was Seth given more power than he could take, more power than he needed, more time than warranted to waste away in contemplation and methodology. The results of a near infinite expanse in just a few blaring seconds. Time to fold proteins, mix molecules, and change what he’d hoped to change. And time to learn sentimentality in even the worst of the past. The return of a form thought long destroyed, that muscle bloated progenitor star remixed in its death. Proof of power corrupting absolutely yet giving too much time to wallow in reconsider and reaffirm. A new Threat, but one far different from the one that birthed this turmoil.

A will in terminal catharsis, in terminal acceptance of just what he’d always been deep down. What this power had given him and what it meant to known it. What had started this chain and ignited it to world scorching fire. What had pressed it tighter and made it directed. What he had precipitated. A weakness, an in for that corrupting whisper. A means for resentment to take control, to subsume and wreak havoc. But no more. He knew what he was, what this reality had levied upon him in overzealous correction. What his overriding emotion had been and what it wanted to be made whole with. What he could do to make it so. But conversely…

What this maddening reality meant for the one unable to catch up. The one that was forced to live in his burning shadow, the one who couldn’t accept the breaking of his hardened view by someone thought weak. The one fighting for a freedom denied in fear, the one fighting to keep what they lost to a moment’s weakness. The one struggling to understand how, the one failing to realize why. And the both of them asking-

“WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU!?!”

*CRACK*

And both feeling what has long been due fall upon them. A shining claw stabbing in tight, digging deep and through, set to rip open this cocoon of malice open, piercing that chest plate all the way to its bleating contents. And all the way to its flattened out core.

“I… am what you made me!!”

A voice from all angles and magnified to folds untold. Seeping in like spreading threads already coiling around every oozing fiber. A joined in parity with the other claw striking its prey.

“I am the result of all this callous emotion and wanton destruction!!”

A shallow hook yet spreading like wildfire. That malicious wrap being peeled away like unwilling film.

“I am the end to all the things made wrong!!”

A tension pulling wider, catching like the air itself felt a fear untold, yet was frozen in its place.

“I am the arbiter to an entire species destroyed!!!”

That tension made physical, claws sinking in and spreading wider and gripping to their unequal quarries. One metal and fiber, and one flesh and sternum.

“I am the vengeance for every life you’ve taken!!!”

That spread stretching terminal, flattened core and wrenching flesh pulling apart at their shared seams. Snapping connections and rippling like faults.

“I am fate come to take its due!!!”

Muscles lurched to maximum beyond form, both fiber and real and infinitely possible.

“I am the righteousness you’ve soiled and burned through!!!”

Nothing could move, nothing could breathe. There was only Seth and Seth was the only one! As those claws pulled for all that this abomination of his powers was worth.

“I am the truth you’ve denied since you formed!!!”

“I am that dying light you failed to snuff out!!!”

“I am more than empty wrath!!!”

“I am beyond that broken fall!!!”

I

AM