Universe's End

“Alright, let’s have some fun,” Rory said. “Hard Light Cannons, spooled.”

In truth, there was no one that Rory was speaking to; the rest of the Founders were sprinting along the cloud islands toward Phosphorus, fighting off hordes of descending Tianlongs as they attacked.

Leaving the rest to Rory to handle, all on his lonesome.

Not that Rory was that upset. What boy didn’t once upon a time imagine themselves in aerial combat, a dogfight against some dangerous opponent? Perhaps never quite in this fashion, but hey, Rory wasn’t going to discriminate.

The sky lit up with the hardened light projectiles, tracer rounds in the truest sense of the word.

Hundreds of tongues of lightning ripped through the air toward Rory as he yanked the handles this way and that, his entire sense of equilibrium disconnected while he was ‘wired in’ to the oversized aircraft. Without directly having come up with some merging or drift system, it was about as close to being one with the aircraft as was possible.

Tianlongs were, from a quick examination, tier-eight alpha-variant monsters, and there were thousands of them.

But with as much firepower as the SFAH, even an alpha variant was torn apart within seconds of taking fire from thousands of Hard Light Cannons, a constant brtttt as they fired endlessly.

Shredding them by the dozens, Rory’s eyes widened as he saw entire ‘squads’ of Tianlongs suddenly held midair in a circle, a single Tianlong within the center.

Uh oh.

Ritual magic.

Working together, the groups sacrificed the centermost Tianlongs as they turned into living lightning before chasing Rory.

Shit, shit, shit!

Yanking the handles skyward, Rory climbed as fast as he could, trying to gain as much space as possible from the literal homing missiles.

Eyes drifting toward what looked like a radar, Rory watched as the lightning dragons gave chase, closing in rapidly.

New plan!

Slamming another switch, all power dropped from the fly rotors as the SFAH dropped like a brick, spinning as Rory yanked the handles around, the hard light cannons already growling with their brrtttt as he unleashed hell.

If he couldn’t outrun them, then he would outgun them.

If he’d been firing purely physical ammunition, it would have been a foolish tactic, but doing his best not to whoop, the hard-light ammo tore apart the chasing lightning dragons.

“Gotcha, fuckers,” Rory cackled as the SFAH continued to drop. “Also, locked on.”

With systems currently powered down, there was just enough energy to route toward one of the Big Mommas, the name of the pseudo-nukes that he’d named in honor of the original Big Momma railgun that had allowed him to punch outside his weight class.

Punching one of the few actual buttons nearby, a pair of doors opened beneath the SFAH as an oversized tube was dropped, a magic circle igniting as several magic circles appeared directly in front of it, locked in place for a second longer as Rory punched the button a second time after he’d ensured the attack angle was correct.

With the confirmation sent, the tube vanished as it passed through the acceleration gates and warped past the speed of sound like a cheetah lapping a turtle.

Phosphorus, who’d been simply enjoying watching the invaders attempt to deal with his spawn, was suddenly reeling through the sky. The bad news was that the Big Momma missile failed to damage Phosphorus directly. The good news was that, for a brief instant, a green barrier that had become visible around the massive flying serpent shattered, the power of the targeted pseudo-nuke enough to destroy the shield.

Interesting.

Suddenly getting a hint of how Phosphorus’s incredibly weird level worked, Rory didn’t have much time to consider it before the lesser dragons swarmed him.

Alright, power back to flight systems.

The horde of dragons never lessened; Rory was already evading another wave of attacks.

And yet, there was no hiding the slight grin on his face.

Yeah, dogfights really are cool.

“Holy shit!” Eric shouted as he saw the massive explosion shatter some barrier around Phosphorus, the sheer force of the impact sending the flying dragon careening through the air as if it had been struck.

“He wasn’t kidding about those bombs,” Zoey muttered.

“Focus!” Allison shouted from the front. With her Aberrant-grade armor, she was by far the strongest of them, but there was still a limit to how much one person could handle; if thousands of alpha variants managed to swarm her together, even she would be in trouble.

While it wasn’t super visible at a glance, if one paid attention, they would have noticed that the cloud islands all seemed to converge onto a single spot, a spot that the Founders had rather wisely assumed was important.

Glancing off to the side, Eric whistled lowly. The flying brick was literally fighting off what seemed like two-thirds of the thousands of flying serpents all on its own, a beauty in action.

Almost makes me feel bad for making fun of it.

But even if it were fighting off two-thirds of the thousands, one-third of the thousands still left a fucking lot of thousands.

“Singularity,” Eric called out as his daggers transformed into a rifle that had never properly existed, formed by Eric’s own intuition and intent rather than by principled design.

The weapon cracked off rounds, the sheer firepower behind a Primal Night bullet enough to drop an alpha variant so long as they were well aimed.

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There was a reason he was, on average, considered the Founder with the highest single-strike attack potency.

The Vanguard, meanwhile, couldn’t do much other than draw the swarming Tianlongs’ aggression toward her, as she still lacked long-range attacks.

Which was fine with her; being bait was a valuable job in the end.

The Monk lashed outward, hands held like blades, crescent slashes of frozen stillness striking the Tianlongs. While they didn’t have the sheer attack potency of the Rogue’s Singularity shadow weapon, they did carry their slowing effect and, more importantly, were massively spammable.

Good job, Eric, putting the team on your shoulders.

Which wasn’t really accurate, but when half the team couldn’t do much against anything flying beyond a certain range, it did feel just a teensy bit like that.

Of course, he wasn’t able to get too big an inflated ego, as one glance off to the side gave him a clear view of Mr. Maverick slaughtering dozens of Tianlongs every few seconds.

Sprinting across several more of the cloud islands, the group suddenly halted as a twin-headed creature emerged from the center of one of the islands, looking as if two Tianlongs had been fused and then fed mutant growth hormone.

Cracking off several rounds into its face -faces- Erick frowned as the bullets passed through, their heads distorting into cloud-matter before reconstituting.

The Spear next attempted to handle the strange twin-headed cloud Tianlong, but her spear, much like Eric’s attempts to harm the ‘monster,’ did nothing more than temporarily distort the twin-headed serpent that seemed to be made only of clouds.

“Right, this is painfully obvious. I’ve got this one,” The Vanguard said. “Y’all go ahead, I’ll catch up.”

Unlike in a corny action flick, where the group would protest, proclaiming the need to stick together, the other Founds raced past as the Vanguard’s aura spiked, forcing the twin-cloud Tianlong to focus solely on her while the others made their escape.

What exactly the cloud-monster was about, Eric could only guess. Perhaps it was an endlessly summonable or replenishable minion that would endlessly return so long as Phosphorus lived. Or perhaps it was a matter of figuring out a secret way to hurt it.

Either way, they’d all recognized that speed was of the essence. As if to prove the point, Eric briefly saw a group of Tianlongs latch onto the SFAH, igniting themselves in a lightning explosion as the aircraft momentarily spun through the air before righting itself.

The Vanguard ensuring they weren’t delayed when she had the least to offer directly for the time being was only logical.

Continuing to race forward, the group, now reduced by one, moved as fast as they possibly could. Their destination was about a hundred miles away, a distance that felt far less daunting when you remembered they were all tier eight.

The next interruption, because of course there was another interruption, was when they crossed onto a particularly large cloud island. The minute all three of them touched down, they fell to their knees, the force of the heavens themselves grinding them down.

“S-shit!”Eric grunted.

Off in the distance, it appeared Phosphorus had decided to pay them attention, his gaze alone preventing them from moving on.

“I- I might be able to... break free!” The Spear grunted.

“No,” The First Monk forced the words out. “Don’t burn it up yet. Let…. Me!”

Positioning his hands upward like he were trying to lift something heavy, the weight pressing down on Eric and The Spear suddenly lifted, enough that at least they could move on. The Monk’s entire aura seemed to rise skyward, halting the pressure bearing down on them.

Oh, I see.

Even Eric could see what was happening. They were being peeled off one by one, forced to handle the situations independently.

Eyes piercing forward, Eric noted at least two more platforms likely to contain those challenges, and with only two remaining, that would be a problem.

Unless.

“Glider,” Eric shouted, waving his hand toward The Spear. He’d peered into her inventory earlier, something he could do with his own special talents to everyone except Mr. Architect and his super-inventory, and he’d noticed that the Architect’s favorite flying glider was there, as if forgotten.

“I don’t-”

“You do,” Eric cut her off. “Quick.”

A moment later, and with a slightly puzzled look on her face, The Spear kicked the floating glider over to Eric.

“Great. Keep up.”

Kneeling on the glider with the scope of his shadow rifle raised to his eye, Eric zipped forward, his shadows slowly seeping downward as the glider turned inky black.

Sure hope this works.

Nightfall: Singularity could coat a weapon in shadows, granting it the aspects of the Primal Night.

The thing was that, by pure technicality, the glider was also a weapon if he stretched his imagination.

Now, had Eric tried coating two weapons at once before with Nightfall: Singularity?

No.

Was that going to stop him?

Hell no. After racing through the shadows lurking beneath reality itself, chasing down the impossibly fast shadow to locate the World Crucible, Eric felt a stronger connection, his own understanding deepening.

So, while he might not have ever dual-cast the shadow skein, that wasn’t to say he couldn’t.

Plus, he was a Founder. Wasn’t their entire schtick being freaks who could turn the impossible into reality?

Only one way to find out.

Stretching the skill as far as possible, Eric felt something inside him tear in two, but he wasn’t the Eric from those first few years. Maybe it was the other Founders rubbing off on him, but the chance to prove himself excited him.

So, Eric let the tearing continue, splitting entirely in two, relishing the pain because he would be damned if he couldn’t succeed where he knew the others would have succeeded as well.

There was a sort of ‘ding’ in the back of his mind, and instantly the glider became a flying shadow. There was no way of knowing what had changed in the skill; he was a little preoccupied after all, but the success was undeniable.

Reaching the next trial area well before Allison, the glider, now covered in shadows, had hit the metaphorical gas as its speed increased severalfold.

“Alright, let’s get on with it,” Eric muttered, as from the third cloud island, a metal worm erupted from the ‘ground’ covered in oscillating segments.

No idea how that relates to any of this, but I’m not going to fucking dig into it as some nerds might.

Primal Night bullets tore out from his rifle, slamming into the oversized worm, as the hard light cannons within the glider also erupted to life.

Except, rather than hard light, they were more like hard shadow cannons now, calcified darkness striking the oversized worm by the hundreds.

“Oho, I see the gimmick,” Eric grinned. The more the worm was damaged, the more the island shrank, but the worm itself seemed to have an attractive pull that only weakened when it was directly hit.

In other words, one person would have to beat up the worm so that the others could escape its pull. The issue was that it could be only one person, or the shrinking island would prevent them from moving on afterward.

“Hah!” Eric laughed. The worm’s pull tried to reach him, but the shadow glider was so fast it was like gravity itself was on the back foot.

Assuming it was gravity, technically, it could have been any number of conceptualized attractive forces, but that was something the Architect would probably waste his time figuring out.

Eric? All Eric needed to know was that he could outrun it.

The Spear had finally reached the island, and Eric simply shot past her, flicking two fingers from his forehead to the next island, the message clear.

Keep going.

The Spear nodded once, then entirely ignored the weird gravity worm as she sprinted toward the end of the island and leaped to the next.

Perfect.

Keeping up the onslaught for only a bit longer to ensure there was absolutely no shot that she would somehow still be within its range, Eric finally turned his attention, angling the glider after the fleeing Spear as he made to catch up.

Whoa!

As if sensing the intent, the worm’s pull began to draw him backward, but, grunting with effort, Eric flowed his aura downward, the glider beginning to pull away from the gravity worm.

So, it had a second gear to its gravity. Well, let’s see about that.

Eric didn’t like snakes.

And worms were, in a way, a lot like snakes.

Using that simple disdain for the worm, Eric let his stubbornness take hold.

I’m not letting some god damn worm- snake hold me back!

With one final burst of shadow speed, the glider lurched forward, phasing out of the worm’s range as he raced in an instant.

“Hah!” Eric shouted in triumph.

Catching back up with The Spear only a few seconds later, Eric glanced down at the sprinting woman.

“Good job,” The Spear said, as if she’d known exactly the effort that he had pushed himself through, the test to prove his own worth.

“Of course,” Eric answered. “I’m the mother fucking Primordial Rogue.”