275 The Battle of Mars
275 The Battle of Mars
[POV: Nick]
I reappeared miles away in a fractured stretch of Martian terrain, the ground jagged and uneven beneath my feet. The air felt thinner here, quieter, like the battlefield itself had momentarily forgotten to breathe. In my hand, I still held Lifeblood’s head, her expression disturbingly calm despite the circumstances.
Her body didn’t take long.
From the severed stump of her neck, flesh began to weave itself back together, tendrils of red knitting muscle, bone, and skin with unsettling precision. It climbed upward, forming her shoulders, her torso, her entire figure restored in seconds, leaving her standing there, completely exposed, as if nothing had ever been taken from her.
“I’ve done my part,” she said, her voice steady.
I frowned slightly, watching her with a growing sense of unease. “What do you mean?”
“Give me the dagger.”
There was no hesitation in her tone, no explanation offered, just expectation. My grip tightened slightly as instinct kicked in, something deeper than logic urging caution.
“No.”
A brief silence followed, broken only by the faint hum of distant destruction.
Then Qilin’s voice cut through the comms.
“He’s dead!”
For a fraction of a second, I wanted to believe that.
Lifeblood didn’t.
“It’s not over yet,” she said immediately, her gaze locking onto mine. “That was just the shell. Give me the dagger, the Source!”
The words pressed harder this time, urgency slipping through the cracks of her composure. I didn’t respond right away. Instead, I shifted the dagger, letting it phase into the pocket dimension within my body, sealing it away where nothing external could reach it.
Her eyes narrowed.
“You’re making a mistake,” she said.
“Good choice,” something whispered.
The voice wasn’t hers. It slid into my ears, quiet, intimate, as if it had always been there waiting for the right moment to speak. My head tilted slightly, instinctively scanning for the owner of the voice.
And then I saw it.
Above us, the void tore open again, expanding in sheer size.
It was the triangle, accompanied by something strange. It arrived, snapping into existence like something had forced it into place. Its edges flickered violently, unstable, and from within it, something began to emerge.
At first, it was indistinct.
Shapes.
Movement.
Then it became clearer.
Tentacles slipped through the opening, followed by dark, writhing silhouettes that seemed to scream without sound. Forms overlapped, merged, and separated. Things that didn’t belong in any single definition of existence. It poured out slowly, like reality itself was being drained and replaced with something else.
At the center of it all was a figure.
A dark silhouette wearing something resembling a porcelain mask, smooth and expressionless, yet deeply wrong in a way I couldn’t fully process.
Lifeblood’s voice broke, sharper than before.
“That’s his true body,” she said. “The Entity. We don’t stand a chance against him. The SRC already determined this outcome—it’s inevitable. Give me the Source, now—”
She never finished.
Something moved and descended.
An enormous hand phased into existence above us, its width spanning an entire city block. It didn’t fall; it arrived in warp motion, already committed to impact.
I reacted instantly.
My body slipped into intangibility as I teleported away, barely escaping the moment the hand collided with the surface. The impact didn’t just shake the ground. Instead, it erased it. The terrain where we had stood vanished under the force, reduced to something unrecognizable.
I reappeared at a distance, turning immediately.
The triangle was failing.
Its structure warped, edges collapsing inward as something from the other side forced its way through, breaking in. The void tore apart under the pressure, unable to contain what was coming.
Then it appeared.
The triangle was gone.
In its place stood something vast beyond scale, a titan whose sheer size distorted perspective. Half of its body disappeared into the dark Martian clouds above, as if the sky itself couldn’t fully contain it. Its lower form anchored into the planet, while its upper half seemed to exist somewhere beyond it, bridging two states of reality at once.
It roared.
The sound alone tore through the clouds, scattering them violently as the sky cleared under its presence. Its form became clearer and worse.
It wasn’t singular.
Its body was an amalgamation, layers upon layers of souls fused together, their shapes barely distinguishable beneath the surface. Faces pressed outward, mouths open in silent screams, limbs half-formed and dissolving back into the mass. The more I looked, the less it made sense, as if my mind rejected the structure even while perceiving it.
Its color…
It wasn’t black.
It was something deeper, something that consumed light rather than reflected it, leaving parts of its form undefined, like holes carved into existence itself.
It raised one hand.
A light formed above its palm.
At first, it resembled a miniature sun, radiating heat and intensity, but as I focused, I saw it for what it was.
A soul.
Massive.
Burning.
A demi-god, or something close to it, bound and compressed into a state that mimicked a star. Fire twisted around it, alive, furious, contained only by the Entity’s grip. Something in my memory stirred, fragments of lectures and brief mentions in history classes.
The Dark Age of Superpowers.
Stories that blurred the line between myth and record.
This?
This was part of that.
In its other hand, it held another soul, this one crackling with blue lightning, unstable and violent. The way it handled them, the precision, and the control? It felt deliberate, like it was demonstrating something only I could understand.
Then it closed its hand.
The lightning soul screamed.
The sound pierced straight through me, high-pitched and endless, filled with something raw and unbearable. It continued, stretching longer than it should have, until…
*Snap.
The soul collapsed and ceased to exist. And in its place, lightning erupted outward in a massive arc, tearing across the battlefield in a blinding surge.
I moved.
Teleportation layered with intangibility carried me away, shifting my position repeatedly as the lightning chased, bending unnaturally to follow. It didn’t disperse. It pursued, creating scorched trench marks on the land.
Qilin intercepted it.
He dove from above, his form cutting through the arc as he absorbed the lightning directly. His body surged with energy, expanding, evolving mid-motion as the power fed into him. For a moment, he held it and then he released it.
The lightning roared back toward the Entity, amplified.
The titan didn’t move much.
It simply waved its hand.
The attack split, redirected effortlessly, scattering into nothing.
I didn’t wait.
My hand snapped to my smartwatch, activating the channel I had prepared as a last resort.
“Fire,” I said.
The response was immediate.
From above or somewhere beyond, space fractured again, but this time it was controlled. Openings formed in rapid succession, and from them, weapons poured out. Missiles. Payloads.
Weapons of mass destruction deployed from another dimension entirely.
They rained down onto the Entity in overwhelming numbers, detonating in rapid sequence, fire and force stacking upon each other in a continuous barrage. The explosions climbed over its form, obscuring it momentarily beneath layers of destruction.
The bombardment barely slowed it.
I watched as the Entity raised its hand again, still holding that burning soul shaped like a sun. Its fingers closed slowly, almost deliberately, as if it wanted us to see it happen. The moment it tightened its grip, the “sun” collapsed inward and then detonated outward in a violent bloom of inferno. Fire did not simply spread, it tore. Space itself fractured along with it, dimensions splitting like glass under pressure. The wave surged upward, tracking the origin of the bombardment I had called in.
Somewhere beyond sight, something was erased.
Before the flames could fully settle, the sky ruptured again.
A massive tear opened above the Entity, far larger than any portal I had seen so far. From within it, a silhouette emerged, vast and branching, its form unmistakable even before it fully descended. An enormous tree, ancient in presence and scale, forced its way through the dimensional wound and drove a crushing elbow straight into the Entity’s upper form.
The impact echoed across the planet.
I didn’t have time to process it fully before the others regrouped around me.
Fuhrer stepped to my left, his massive frame tense, his expression carved with open frustration. “This is insanity,” he snapped, his voice heavy with disbelief. “You expect us to fight that thing. Strategy means nothing here. There is no plan that works against something like that.”
To my right, Gameboy and Tony appeared almost simultaneously.
Gameboy looked from the Entity to me, his jaw tight. “You better have an answer for that monster,” he said. “Because if you don’t, I’m gone.”
Tony was quieter.
“I remember now,” he said, almost absentmindedly at first, though his eyes stayed locked on the Entity. “Everything. The past. Him.” He swallowed, then steadied himself. “That thing out there. That’s my father.”
There was fear in his voice.
But it didn’t stop him.
Above us, Qilin descended, his long serpentine body coiling through the air as he hovered closer, energy still crackling faintly around him from the lightning he had absorbed earlier.
Then a portal opened behind me.
I turned as Cordelia stepped through.
She looked different. The Victorian dress was gone, replaced by a sleek exo suit that clung to her frame, its surface shifting faintly with embedded systems. It was practical, built for this kind of battlefield rather than ceremony.
She didn’t waste time.
“The Entity you’re seeing isn’t singular,” she said. “It’s an amalgamation of souls. The real one is somewhere inside that mass. If you want to end this, you have to reach it.”
I nodded once, then asked the question that mattered.
“How’s the SRC? Their stance? Lifeblood?”
Cordelia’s expression didn’t change.
“The SRC has withdrawn observation from this zone,” she said. “Lifeblood is dead, I have her soul with me. I managed to snatch it, before she truly perished. Before that, the SRC isolated this reality from external interference. Escape is no longer possible.”
I exhaled slowly, eyes returning to the battlefield just as the tree entity fully engaged.
Huston.
The massive tree being moved with surprising speed for its size, branches shifting and reforming as limbs. Biomass expanded and retracted constantly, cycling through different configurations. Vines lashed outward, striking the Entity’s surface while bark hardened into armor and then reshaped into weapons.
Seeds scattered across the battlefield.
When they hit the ground, they split open into small rifts, each one birthing lesser tree constructs that surged forward in waves. They moved like an army, coordinated and relentless.
The Entity answered in kind.
Its body split in places, birthing creatures of its own. They were wrong in every sense, formed from combinations of abilities that shouldn’t coexist. Limbs fused with energy, faces layered over each other, powers overlapping in unstable ways.
They collided.
Chaos spread outward.
“What’s the plan?” Gameboy asked, his voice cutting through the noise.
“I can use the souls that perished here,” Cordelia said. “Turn them into more golems. Reinforce our numbers.”
I remarked. “I need a path.”
Fuhrer let out a sharp breath that almost sounded like a laugh. “Then I’ll make one,” he said, his tone edged with arrogance. “I’ll take point and break whatever stands in the way.”
Before I could respond, more portals opened.
One after another.
Figures stepped through.
Spoiler. Dragoness. Shadow. Keegan. Abner. Others I didn’t immediately recognize followed behind them, each carrying their own presence, their own weight.
Gameboy actually laughed when he saw them. “Now that’s a lineup,” he said. “Didn’t expect this many colors to show up.”
Abner moved to my side, calm as ever despite everything unfolding around us. “Most of the major threats back home have been handled,” he said. “Though Paleman is still active.”
I nodded once, then raised my voice slightly.
“The SRC isn’t watching anymore,” I said. “You can come out now.”
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then the ground trembled.
A sound followed, something between the cry of an eagle and the roar of a lion, echoing across the horizon. It grew louder, closer, until the source revealed itself.
Another massive form burst into view.
Griffin.
She didn’t hesitate. The moment she cleared the horizon, she lunged straight at the Entity, claws extended, wings cutting through the air as she joined the clash.
Everything was in motion now.
Everything.
I reached into my pocket dimension and pulled the dagger free. The same one I had used to reclaim the Source. For a brief second, I held it there, feeling the weight of what came next. Then I drove it into my own chest.
The blade pierced cleanly, and the reaction was immediate.
Power flooded in.
Not gradually, not controllably, but all at once. The Source surged through me, filling every layer of my being with something vast and overwhelming. It burned and expanded, forcing my existence to stretch just to contain it.
I exhaled through clenched teeth, steadying myself as the energy settled just enough to move.
I looked at Tony.
“You’re with me,” I said.
Then to Fuhrer.
“Clear the way.”
He grinned.
Ahead of us, the creatures born from the Entity surged forward, their forms reminding me of something I had seen before. That endless dark, that place I once thought was the afterlife. The shark that moved through it.
These things felt the same.
We moved anyway.
Fuhrer charged first, smashing into the front line with overwhelming force. The others spread out, each engaging in their own way, powers colliding across the battlefield as the newly arrived capes joined the fight.
I stepped forward, the Source burning within me, and raised my voice just enough for those near me to hear.
“Today,” I said, my gaze fixed on the titan ahead, “we kill a god.”