Alma remained crouched in the cafeteria, his head bowed, his hands resting uselessly in his lap. The weight of what he had done pressed down on him, heavy and suffocating. It wasn't ignorance or loss of control that haunted him—it was the knowledge that his actions had been deliberate. That they had come from him. From his mind. From his will.
He did not recoil from the act itself so much as from how easily he had crossed that line.
That was what shattered him.
Footsteps echoed in the hallway beyond the cafeteria. Multiple sets. The sound snapped his attention upward, fear flashing openly in his eyes as he turned toward the doorway. He couldn't face them. Couldn't return to the world wearing the shape of what he had become.
Before anyone could see him, Alma launched himself upward and burst through the wall in a violent explosion of concrete and glass. He tore free of the college and vanished into the open sky.
Tears streamed from his eyes as he flew, the wind ripping them away as fast as they fell. He had no destination in mind. Only distance.
'I'm no different from those men in the alley,' he thought bitterly. 'I'm no father… I need to stay away from them.'
---
Back at the college, officers swept through the portion of the building that still existed within the Infinity Plane. Room after room turned up empty. No signs of struggle. No trace of Alma Alastor.
Two hours passed. Nothing changed.
While the search continued, Max and Jasmine sat across from Emmanuel, their feet barely touching the floor as he questioned them.
"What are you two doing here?" Emmanuel asked, his tone firm but not unkind.
Jasmine remained silent. Max hesitated, choosing his words carefully.
"We came to rescue our father," he said.
"Our father…?" Emmanuel echoed, then blinked several times as realization struck. "Wait. Your father is Alma Alastor?"
"Yep," Max replied, unable to keep the pride from his voice. "That's him."
Emmanuel exhaled slowly. "He never mentioned that. Though… I suppose I never asked." He studied them for a moment before continuing. "So. Did you cause the explosion?"
"No," Max said quickly. "I just opened the barrier. That's all."
"And how did you manage that?"
Max held out the device. Emmanuel took it, turning it over in his hands, examining it with a sharp, curious eye.
"I don't know much about electronics," Emmanuel admitted, impressed, "but this is… incredible." He handed it back.
At that moment, the soldiers tasked with retrieving the Dragon Monarch returned at a run.
"Sir," one of them reported, breathless, "he's gone."
Emmanuel turned sharply. "Gone?" His brow furrowed as the words sank in. "What do you mean, gone?"
"We followed the tracker into the cafeteria," another soldier said. "He wasn't there. We searched the entire college, and still didn't find anything..." The soldier hesitated before finishing. "It's like he never existed."
Jasmine frowned. "Then… where did our dad go?"
Emmanuel knelt slightly so he was level with her, offering a gentle smile despite the worry in his eyes. "I don't know, sweetheart. But we'll find him. I promise."
He gestured toward the officers. "Why don't you two head back to your mom for now? We'll take care of the rest."
Jasmine almost laughed at the way he said it. The attempt at comfort was obvious—but effective.
They were escorted into the back of a SWAT van, the doors closing with a heavy clang.
"Do you think they'll really find him?" Jasmine asked quietly.
"Of course," Max replied, though his voice faltered. "I mean… whatever that storm was—did you see it? I was way up there, on that building, and before my very eyes, an EF-5 tornado just appeared. It was terrifying! But so cool!"
Jasmine smiled faintly, but doubt lingered behind her eyes.
---
11:00 AM—Somewhere in the Appalachian Mountains
Beatrix descended a narrow flight of ancient stone steps, the torches lining the walls casting uneven light across her smirk. Her purple, translucent dress clung to her body, accentuating every curve, revealing more than it concealed. With each step, the air grew colder.
At the bottom, the stairs opened into a vast underground warehouse.
Rows of computers glowed dimly. At a massive metal desk sat Viroth, his fingers moving impossibly fast across multiple keyboards.
"Ah, Beatrix," a low, gravelly voice spoke.
She turned toward a stone throne at the far end of the room. A figure sat upon it, shrouded in shadow.
"Hello, Keaton," she said, her smirk widening.
"I trust you've handled the Dragon Monarch?" he asked.
She nodded calmly. "Norene. Noelle. Orson. Their lives were sacrificed for our kind's future."
Keaton inclined his head. "That is unfortunate. They won't be able to witness what comes next. But their sacrifices were noble, indeed, and highly necessary."
He rose from the throne, his robes falling away to reveal ornate armor trimmed in gold and crimson.
"I have refined our people since the moment I was created," he declared. "The Beasts of Ruin are crude—mindless, and feral. But we…" He laughed softly. "We are true humans! We are the Humans of Ruin! We are superior!"
He raised his arms. "Today, our kind multiplies. Today, we claim the United States of America!"
He pressed a small, seed-like object into Beatrix's hand. "You know what to do."
"Everything's ready," Viroth reported from his desk. "Just say the word."
Keaton laughed—a sound full of triumph. At the same time, Beatrix felt it. The connection snap.
"The Infinity Plane just lost contact with me," she said.
Keaton's grin widened. "Perfect. Begin immediately. Viroth, Eclipser—stay. Beatrix, go stir chaos in the Capital."
"As you wish, boss," she replied, turning toward the stairs.
Keaton watch as she walked up each step, then whistled. "Damn," he muttered. "What a figure. Can't wait to have a piece of that later."
He straightened, clearing his throat. "Begin the operation."
The far wall split open, revealing millions of Beasts of Ruin—each one an EF-5 calamity waiting to be unleashed.
"Teleport them into Virginia," Keaton roared. "Let humanity end."
Viroth pressed the red button, and every single one vanished.
---
'End your life.'
'You raped her.'
'You deserve to die.'
'There's nothing separating you from a monster anymore.'
'Die. Go to Hell.'
The thoughts did not come one at a time. They came as a swarm—overlapping, relentless, impossible to silence. They tore through the mind of Alma Daedulus Alastor without pause or mercy.
Two hours had passed since the incident. Two hours since his escape. And not a single second had granted him relief. He felt guilty of what he'd done, and thought about turning himself into the police.
He was horrified. Disgusted. Sickened by himself in a way that ran deeper than fear or regret. What haunted him most was not what had happened—but the certainty that it had been him. His will. His awareness. His consent.
Unknown location inside Washington State.
Ultimate Desire had not planted something foreign inside him. It had not created urges from nothing. It had only multiplied what already existed—dragging it to the surface, stripping it of restraint. That truth was the core of his self-hatred.
He had known what he was thinking. He had known how wrong it was. And still, he had acted.
Worse—he had felt pleasure.
The realization made his stomach churn.
To derive satisfaction from another's torment—even from a being such as Norene and Noelle, something not entirely human—filled him with revulsion. And yet, the feeling had been intoxicating. The power. The use. The dominance. It had fed into his amplified desire like fuel on an open flame.
If he could tear that part of himself out—if he could erase that hunger—he would do it without hesitation.
Alma sat collapsed beside a riverbank, his right wrist resting against his knee, his other leg folded awkwardly beneath him. His posture was slack, defeated. His face was unreadable, stripped of visible emotion.
His eyes were cold.
They stared ahead as if fixed on a reflection only he could see—one he judged without mercy, cataloging flaws without offering redemption. A gaze filled with contempt.
A single tear slipped down his cheek.
A twig snapped somewhere nearby. Alma's head jerked toward the sound, instinct sharp despite his exhaustion. He found only a deer, calmly drinking from the river farther downstream.
He exhaled slowly.
When he looked back into the forest, every twisted branch and hanging vine seemed to take on a new shape. No longer trees. No longer plants.
Nooses.
He leaned back, releasing a heavier breath, and summoned Shield around himself. The barrier closed in silence, isolating him from the world.
He had left his tracker and earpiece behind in the cafeteria. Not to hide—but to quit.
He wasn't fit to be the Dragon Monarch.
He wasn't worthy of being a father.
He wasn't even capable of being a decent human being.
He wondered if his death would truly matter. If he vanished, what would be lost?
If they knew the truth, they would demand his execution. He was both replaceable and indispensable—a contradiction that terrified him. Ardath's words echoed in his mind: No one on Earth can stop you.
That truth only deepened his fear of what would happen if the world learned what he had done.
At his core, Alma was not a predator—but a man who believed himself to be one.
And belief was enough.
What was he now? What did he offer that others before him hadn't? What had he gained—and what had he destroyed beyond repair?
The idea that he still belonged anywhere felt naive. Hypocritical. The man who despised rapists had become one—at least in his own mind—and now wanted forgiveness?
There was no defense. No explanation. No absolution.
Only one solution felt just.
The death of Alma Daedulus Alastor, and everything he had done.
---
1:00 PM
"What do you mean?" Emmanuel demanded.
Two hours had passed since his conversation with Max and Jasmine—two hours during which they had refused to leave, repeatedly returning through Max's doorway despite every warning.
A shrill voice screamed through his earpiece.
"THERE'S A WOMAN—SHE JUST BROKE THROUGH THE SECRET SERVICE AT THE WHITE HOUSE—!" The sound cut off abruptly, replaced by choking, then silence.
"Elena?!" Emmanuel shouted.
The channel went dead.
"Damn it!" He turned sharply. "Lock this college down. No one in or out. Anyone who tries to cross the perimeter—arrest them."
He faced Max and Jasmine, his expression hard. "And for the last time—go home."
Before either could respond, he took off into the sky.
The siblings watched him disappear.
"I hope Dad's okay…" Jasmine murmured.
"I'm sure he is," Max said quickly, resting a hand on her shoulder. "Nothing bad could've happened to him."
Jasmine didn't look convinced. "Before, he only had to take care of me. Then the two of us. And now he's became the Dragon Monarch. That's too much for anyone—no matter how strong he is."
She looked upward. "He'll collapse from exhaustion before anything else gets him."
Max nodded slowly. "Yeah. I get that."
He hesitated. "He's been teaching me, too. And I learn fast—faster than most. But I still feel like… a burden."
Jasmine turned toward him.
"I keep making things," Max continued quietly. "Machines. Gadgets. Trying to prove I'm worth something. Trying to earn his approval." His voice cracked. "But every time I look at what I've built, all I see is how much I fall short."
Tears slipped free, his eyes red and tired.
Jasmine stared at him, stunned.
Before she could speak, Max laughed faintly. "Look at me. We're supposed to be worried about Dad, and I make it about myself."
"Max—"
"No," he interrupted. "I don't need comfort. Just the truth."
Jasmine's voice hardened. "The truth isn't self-pity. Everyone fails. Everyone falls short of who they want to be."
She met his gaze. "You're not special for that. You're not an exception. Get a grip."
Max turned away. "Maybe to you," he said quietly. "But to me, it's deeper than that."
---
Downtown Seattle, Washington—1:30 PM
Hours earlier, Emmanuel had issued the order.
Now, the Cetus and Hydra Monarchs advanced from the outskirts of the city, carving a path inward. Every Beast of Ruin they encountered was annihilated—block by block, street by street.
Downtown Seattle was all that was left.
And the city would not remain untouched for long.
The Beasts of Ruin they encountered were weaker than expected—EF-3 manifestations instead of the overwhelming horrors they had faced in Idaho—but that fact did little to calm their nerves. If anything, the reduction in strength only sharpened their unease, planting the fear that something far worse might appear without warning, erupting from nowhere with devastating force.
They moved quickly through Seattle, eliminating the Beasts with practiced efficiency as they advanced toward downtown. By the time they reached 4th Avenue, the streets had fallen eerily quiet. Montana and Tanner slowed to a stop, both sensing the same unfamiliar presence—an energy that pressed against their instincts despite remaining completely unseen.
Then, simultaneously, they looked up.
Standing atop a clothing store at the corner of the street was a man cloaked in black, the fabric concealing his body entirely and shadowing half his face from the mouth upward. The cloak rippled in the wind as though alive, his fists clenched at his sides, posture utterly calm.
Montana glanced at Tanner, confusion flickering between them, before they both looked back up.
A sudden scream tore through the silence.
They snapped their attention toward it, finding a man standing unharmed farther down the street, shouting in panic at nothing in particular. When they turned back...
The cloaked man was gone.
A violent gust slammed into them from behind.
Their eyes widened just before impact, and the world fractured as they were hurled apart—each Monarch crashing through separate buildings with bone-shaking force.
Montana barely had time to orient herself before a normal-looking man seized her by the face. With terrifying strength, he launched her upward, her body piercing through floor after floor in a brutal ascent until she burst through the roof into open air. The man appeared beside her in an instant, both hands slamming her downward in a devastating hammer strike that obliterated the remaining levels beneath her and collapsed the building entirely.
Tanner's trajectory carried him through multiple structures before he finally skidded across Stewart Street, shattering a tree on impact and coming to rest face-down on the road. He pushed himself onto one knee, blood dripping as he searched frantically for the cloaked attacker.
He turned—and a punch shattered his jaw.
The blow sent him flying through parked cars, three buildings, and finally into the asphalt of 7th Avenue. He lay there for a moment, clutching his broken jaw as tears streamed from his eyes, blood staining the street and his hands.
Still, he rose.
The ground beneath him darkened, liquefying into a vast pool of black water that swallowed his form whole. Seconds later, something immense emerged—a colossal beast towering over the street, six heads rising in unison, each more menacing than the last. This was Tanner's Sixfold Monster: Catastrophe Form.
Its roar shook buildings and cracked windows.
Yet the cloaked man stood calmly beneath a traffic light on 7th Street, smiling beneath the shadow of his hood.
One head lashed forward, unleashing a pressurized torrent of water. Then another. And another. Soon all six heads fired simultaneously, the air screaming beneath their force. The man ducked, his hood torn by the first jet, then dashed forward, weaving effortlessly between the streams.
One head anticipated his movement and struck him head-on.
It did nothing.
Grinning widely, the man leapt into the air and seized one of the necks, climbing swiftly. He swung his body outward and drove his palm forward, fingers curled inward, detonating the neck in an explosion that tore through the adjacent building.
He leapt to the next.
The remaining heads roared in fury, thrashing violently to shake him loose, but his grip held. Again, his palm struck forward, obliterating another neck.
One by one, the heads fell.
When only a single head remained, the man vaulted high above it, cocking his arm back as the creature fired upward. His palm met the jet head-on, the two forces colliding violently as he pushed forward—closer, closer—until he reached the mouth itself.
With one final thrust, the head was annihilated.
A shockwave rippled through the streets.
The massive body disintegrated, revealing Tanner's human form falling from within. He struck the ground hard, bounced once, then skidded to a stop. The man stood over him, fists clenched, smiling down.
---
A man was hurled into a car with a sickening crunch.
Above, Montana fell from the sky, three attackers clinging to her, raining blows down upon her face and skull. She seized one by the head and flung him forward, then grabbed another by the collar and smashed him into the first, knocking them both away. The third was seized and driven straight into the ground as she plummeted.
The impact shattered concrete, debris exploding outward in a cloud of dust.
Montana stood, brushing herself off. Two of the men were dead. One lay broken in the road, the other lodged inside a crushed car, both bleeding heavily.
She formed an 'O' with her lips and blew gently. A bubble floated outward. She reached inside it and drew forth her lance.
The wounded man charged her.
She fired three bubbles—one to his shoulder, one to his leg, and one to his abdomen. They detonated in sequence, tearing him apart.
She hurled her lance at the man trapped in the car. It pierced his skull and exploded, engulfing both man and vehicle. The lance flew back into her hand.
Then she felt it. An ominous presence.
She stood still, her eyes wide with fear.
Keaton crouched atop a street sign, chin resting in his hand, boredom etched across his face. In his other hand dangled Tanner's unconscious body, blood dripping steadily.
Montana turned and immediately froze, shock and fear flooding her eyes.
"Why the long face?" Keaton asked casually. "I'll kick your ass all the same."
He dropped Tanner.
And lunged.
---
Washington D.C. — 1:15 PM
Emmanuel Thatcher arrived at the White House to a scene of devastation. Fires raged across the lawn and surrounding buildings, though the structure itself stood untouched. Bodies littered the grass and streets—citizens, government employees, security alike.
Smoke burned his lungs. Blood fouled the air.
He descended slowly, hands in his pockets, expression unreadable.
As he walked forward, a presence manifested before him.
A woman stood there, barely clothed, her body exposed with deliberate intent. Emmanuel forced his gaze upward, away from curves designed to distract.
"Are you responsible for this?" he asked flatly.
Beatrix smiled.
She let her hair fall loose around her shoulders, dropped to her knees, and pressed a finger to her lip while her other hand traced her stomach.
"Oh my," she said sweetly. "I'm so sorry for my little mistake. I'll do anything to make it up to you." Her smile widened. "Even if it means using my body."
Emmanuel looked at her with nothing but visible disgust, his face contorting as though the mere sight of her offended him on a fundamental level, his brow twitching uncontrollably as a slow, boiling rage began to crawl upward from somewhere deep inside his chest, coiling tighter with every second he was forced to listen to her speak.
"You would reduce everything you did," Emmanuel shouted, his voice sharp and furious, echoing through the ruined street, "every life you took, every scream, every moment of suffering, to a simple mistake?!"
His fists clenched so tightly that his hands trembled, his teeth grinding together as the anger threatened to spill over into something violent and irreversible.
"Oh my," Beatrix said with exaggerated surprise, tilting her head slightly and placing a hand against her chest in mock remorse, "I'm so sorry for my attitude. I think I need to be punished, daddy."
That was it.
Something inside Emmanuel shattered completely.
He raised his hand without hesitation and fired an Inverted Creature Shot, the air itself warping violently as the attack tore forward with destructive force.
Beatrix reacted instantly, twisting her body backward and flipping cleanly over the blast, her movements unnaturally graceful as she landed on one knee atop the fractured surface behind her, while the attack continued on and vaporized a massive section of the rooftop beyond. She slowly lifted her head, an unmistakably twisted smirk spreading across her face, her eyes glittering with malicious delight.
"What's wrong, daddy?" she taunted, her voice dripping with false innocence. "You don't want to punish this perfect body?"
In the next instant, Emmanuel appeared directly in front of her, his presence sudden and overwhelming, his fist already descending toward her face with lethal intent.
Beatrix barely managed to react in time, twisting her body away at the very last second as his punch tore through the space where her head had been, forcing her to jump backward to avoid the follow-up impact. The smirk vanished entirely from her face, replaced by a strained, uneasy smile that betrayed the sudden fear flickering in her eyes.
Emmanuel stood several feet away from her, his gaze locked onto hers with pure, unfiltered hatred, his expression so intense that it made her instinctively tense. She tried to infect him with Ultimate Desire, tried to worm her way into his mind as she had done to the Dragon Monarch, in fact, countless others before—but it didn't work. He was too close. Too focused. Too furious.
Still, she straightened her posture, forcing confidence back into her stance, a cocky smirk slowly creeping back onto her lips.
"What's got you so riled up?" Beatrix said mockingly. "Aww… are you sexually frustrated?"
"Merged Beast," Emmanuel said coldly, his voice devoid of emotion.
He slowly raised his index finger and pointed it toward the sky.
The clouds above began to churn violently, lightning flashing through the dark mass as thunder roared across the horizon. Within the storm, shapes began to form—vast, monstrous silhouettes resembling a lion, a serpent, and a dragon, all intertwined within the raging lightning.
"Roaring Creature Thunder."
The ground between Emmanuel and Beatrix erupted as hundreds of lightning bolts slammed down in rapid succession, each strike cracking the earth apart with deafening force. Beatrix reacted instinctively, weaving and leaping between the strikes with desperate precision, narrowly avoiding death again and again. Then, without warning, the lightning began to fall in a perfect circle around her, continuous and unrelenting, crashing down like a torrential storm of pure destruction.
She stopped.
Her breath hitched.
She looked around frantically as the realization set in.
Then she looked up.
Emmanuel hovered above her, suspended in the air, positioned perfectly to block her only escape route.
The circle of lightning slowly began to shrink, tightening around her as the thunder grew louder and the air itself seemed to press inward. Panic flickered across her face as the growing sense of claustrophobia set in, forcing her to thrust her hands outward as a pink forcefield erupted around her body, just in time to shield her from the crushing prison of electricity.
Emmanuel descended rapidly and slammed his foot down onto the surface of her forcefield.
Fine cracks spread across it instantly, spiderwebbing outward as Beatrix strained to hold it together, her body trembling under the pressure.
"Merged Beast: Inverted Creature Shot."
Her leg was shot off through her forcefield, and the ground beneath Beatrix suddenly folded inward, collapsing violently and ripping away her footing as she fell into the forming pit below, yet somehow—against all odds—she managed to maintain her forcefield as she descended.
With a scream of effort, her leg regenerated, then she expanded the dome outward, erasing the surrounding earth as she launched herself back into the sky—and immediately froze when she saw Emmanuel already floating there, waiting for her.
"For the lives you have taken today," Emmanuel said, his voice calm and deadly, "you will not live to see the next."
Beatrix fired three fragments of her forcefield toward him in rapid succession.
He didn't even flinch. Didn't even move.
Lightning tore them apart before they could reach him.
She unleashed more, filling the sky with a chaotic storm of glowing projectiles and crashing thunder, using the overwhelming display to obscure his vision. Then, in an instant, she appeared directly in front of him, her forcefield detonating violently in his face.
The explosion sent Emmanuel crashing down into the street below.
Beatrix followed immediately, grabbing him by the throat and dragging him mercilessly across the road, across the sides of buildings, and through concrete surfaces before finally hurling him straight through another structure.
Emmanuel rose to his feet.
Before she could strike again, he caught her ankle mid-kick and swung her violently, smashing her through multiple walls before driving her straight into the ground. He descended after her, slamming down on top of her with crushing force.
Emmanuel appeared directly in front of Beatrix in a violent blur of motion, both of his hands already swinging toward her with crushing force, and she met his punches head-on with her own, their fists colliding in midair again and again as shockwaves rippled outward from every impact, kicking up thick clouds of dust and shattering asphalt around their feet.
They continued trading blows in rapid succession, their arms moving so fast they blurred, each strike carrying enough power to level buildings. And for a brief moment, Emmanuel found himself struggling to keep pace with her speed. His movements just a fraction behind hers as she pressed him relentlessly, forcing him to block, parry, and counter in a continuous storm of fists.
Then he smiled.
Not out of panic.
Not out of frustration.
But out of something closer to recognition.
Because the strain he felt wasn't born from being slower than her. It was born from the fact that he hadn't needed to move this fast in years.
Gradually, almost imperceptibly at first, his timing sharpened, his reactions syncing perfectly with her rhythm as his body remembered what it was capable of, and with every exchanged blow he began to catch up to her speed, then match it, and then finally—slowly but undeniably—begin to overwhelm her.
Emmanuel suddenly put an immense, almost absurd amount of force behind a single punch, twisting his torso into it and driving his knuckles straight into her guard with a concussive explosion of air that sent Beatrix flying backward down the street, her body skidding and bouncing across the fractured asphalt.
And then—He was already there. Appearing once more right in front of her.
Before she could even finish recoiling from the first hit, Emmanuel drove his knuckles straight into her jaw with a brutally precise uppercut, the impact snapping her head back and launching her violently upward into the air, her body lifting off the ground as though gravity itself had momentarily lost its hold on her.
But she didn't get far.
Before she could rise any higher, Emmanuel shot upward after her and seized her by the ankle with an iron grip, halting her ascent instantly. And then, without hesitation or mercy, he swung her back down and slammed her into the asphalt with earth-shattering force, the road buckling and exploding beneath her on impact.
He didn't stop.
Emmanuel twisted his entire body into the motion and whipped her sideways, smashing her into the road again, and then again, and then again, over and over in rapid succession. Their combined momentum turning into something monstrous and unstoppable as they rolled down the street together like a living battering ram.
They became a wheel of violence. A spinning blur of limbs and destruction.
A wheel that, once every full rotation, brought Beatrix's body crashing into the pavement with a thunderous, bone-rattling impact that sent shockwaves rippling through the ground and shattered streetlights and windows along the road.
It only stopped when they neared the very end of the street. And there—with one final, merciless rotation—Emmanuel slammed her into the asphalt one last time, harder than all the others combined, the sound of the impact cracking through the air with an extra, brutal finality, the street itself had just been split open under the sheer weight of it.
Her face struck the shattered asphalt, sending debris flying into the air.
She retaliated instantly, kicking him away and springing back to her feet, then delivering a brutal kick to his face that sent him flying into another street. Emmanuel caught himself midair before colliding with a car, his eyes narrowing as he stared at her unharmed body.
'This woman…' he thought. 'She isn't hurt at all.'
They charged at each other simultaneously.
Beatrix leapt, forming forcefield plates beneath her feet to allow herself to fly, though the construct flickered and destabilized rapidly before finally shattering, leaving her airborne only for a moment longer. They collided midair, the resulting shockwave lifting vehicles off the ground and hurling them aside.
She caught his punch and slammed him into the pavement.
He rolled, rose, and narrowly dodged a devastating heel kick before grabbing her wrist and smashing her into the ground, then kicking her head sideways and sending her skidding across the road.
She stood again.
She always stood.
She dodged another Inverted Creature Shot, closed the distance, and attacked. Emmanuel evaded and caught her wrist once more, but she vaulted onto his shoulders and drove her knee into the back of his head.
He dropped to one knee.
A powerful kick sent him flying into a nearby building.
He emerged just in time to see a car hurtling toward him. He dodged, only to see another—and another.
Beatrix sprinted across the wreckage, hurling vehicle after vehicle toward him with terrifying strength.
Emmanuel raised his hand.
"Inverted Creature Shot."
All the cars reversed direction at once, compressed into a single, devastating blast that Beatrix barely managed to block with her forcefield.
'I can't understand her,' Emmanuel thought. 'A forcefield, and physical strength equal to mine—this shouldn't be possible.'
She fired a fragment of her shield upward, which he flicked aside effortlessly.
'She's planning something,' he realized. 'A condition. A threshold. Or a distraction.'
His expression hardened. 'It doesn't matter. I'll end this now and find out why she's here later.'
He slowly descended to the ground, his movements deliberate and controlled. Beatrix stared at him, confusion flickering across her face.
"Hey," Emmanuel said calmly, "you'll probably hate me for ending things so early, but I really don't care."
He placed his left hand against his face, his right hand sideways on the back of his head. "Dimension Creation:" His eyes ignited—red, yellow, then blinding white. "Land of the Three-Headed Beast."
A massive crack tore through reality behind him, rapidly expanding outward before engulfing both Emmanuel and Beatrix entirely, then snapping shut into a thin, silent fracture that lingered in the air where they had once stood.
The area shifted in a single, seamless instant, not with sound or explosion but with a quiet, unsettling wrongness, as though something unfamiliar had forced its way inside the fabric of reality. When Beatrix opened her eyes again, she found herself standing in the middle of a vast, open field of dead, waist-high weeds that stretched endlessly in every direction, their brittle stalks whispering softly as they swayed. Above her was a ceiling of heavy, dark clouds pressed low against the sky, hiding any trace of the sun, leaving the world in a dim, colorless twilight that was brighter than night yet nowhere near the warmth or clarity of an ordinary day.
Beatrix stood alone in that desolate field, her breath faintly visible in the chill air as a cool breeze swept across her exposed skin and sent a slow, creeping shiver down her spine. She turned around and saw Emmanuel standing at least twenty feet away from her, perfectly still, his posture relaxed yet imposing, his face empty of emotion as though carved from stone. And from the clouds above, flashed a jagged bolt of lightning, that split the sky and lingered there for a heartbeat too long, outlining the colossal silhouette of a dragon larger than a skyscraper, its vast shape momentarily etched into the darkness like a divine omen.
At the same time, the ground beneath Beatrix's feet began to tremble, not violently at first but with a deep, ominous vibration that rolled through the earth behind her and in front of her, making her knees stiffen and her balance waver as something ancient and immense stirred from both sky and soil.
From the clouds descended a massive, red-scaled dragon with an elegant, almost regal form and eyes that glowed like molten embers, while from beneath the ground burst a towering, hissing snake with thick green scales and eyes that burned an eerie, unnatural yellow, and from seemingly nowhere at all, came the thunderous charge of an equally giant, majestic, and ferocious lion, its mane rippling like fire and its eyes shining with an unearthly, radiant white.
Before the dragon could touch the earth, before the snake could coil around Beatrix and devour her whole, and before the lion could reach her and tear her apart, all three of the monstrous forms suddenly collided in midair with a blinding flash of lightning, their combined mass and power erupting outward in a titanic shockwave that rippled across the entire field in every direction and knocked Beatrix violently backward, her body tumbling through dead weeds as the air itself seemed to scream.
"My Dimension isn't like traditional ones," Emmanuel said calmly, his voice carrying unnaturally far across the empty land as he took a slow step forward, his eyes never leaving her, "because instead of there being set rules, there is only a goal in its place, and a mighty difficult one at that."
Then a massive paw slammed into the ground directly in front of Beatrix with a bone-shaking impact that made her eyes go wide in pure fear, the earth splitting and buckling beneath its weight, and when the dust settled she saw the creature clearly for the first time, a nightmarish fusion with the powerful body and head of a lion, vast wings and a long tail like a dragon's, and a second draconic head protruding from its back, while its other tail ended in the coiled, living head of a snake that wrapped protectively around the underside of the lion's torso and appeared between its front legs like a living weapon waiting to strike.
"While my Dimension is up, I cannot fight or be fought inside it," Emmanuel continued, his voice steady and merciless as he pointed subtly toward the towering abomination, "and I can only watch as you desperately try to complete your goal, and that goal… is to survive the Fused Beast: Chimera of the Forgotten Land."
Immediately after his words, all three of the creature's heads threw themselves back and roared in unison, a deafening, layered sound that shook the ground beneath Beatrix's unstable feet and sent ripples through the weeds like waves across a blackened sea.
Emmanuel Thatcher, the President of the United States and the Chimera Monarch, possessed a Dimension, which was the ultimate sign of pure connection with a Mythical Beast and the most powerful ability any Monarch could ever achieve. Brcause to own a Dimension was to stand at the pinnacle of power itself, with each one being entirely based on its user and governed by its own unique set of rules that must always be followed, rules that were often instant and cruel, where an opponent might be killed by oxygen depletion, burned alive in moments, or liquefied from the inside out, making the activation of a Dimension an almost guaranteed victory and the closest thing to an ultimate cheat sheet in existence.
To achieve such an ability, one had to know a Mythical Beast for an extraordinarily long time, or be so deeply compatible with it that the bond went far beyond simple selection, forming something closer to a shared existence. A True Bond.
The thing to understand about Emmanuel Thatcher's Dimension, the Land of the Three-Headed Beast, was that it was not like traditional Dimensions in the sense that it had no fixed rules, no environmental effects, and not even a guaranteed win condition, making it the one cheat sheet that appeared blank, and yet because the Chimera itself took physical form within it, the aspect of guaranteed victory was forfeited in exchange for making Emmanuel completely untouchable while it remained active.
After the activation of the Land of the Three-Headed Beast, the opponent trapped inside must survive for five total hours while the Chimera gradually became more and more aggressive, escalating its attacks and ferocity until survivability approached absolute impossibility, and what made it even more horrifying was the fact that this time limit was never stated to the victim, meaning that even without its traditional cheat conditions, it remained one of the most deadly Dimensions that had ever existed.
And despite this drawback, despite not having any set rules within his Dimension, Emmanuel Thatcher, President of the United States of America and the Chimera Monarch, was the living embodiment of what being the strongest of the past truly looked like.
---
6:30 PM, Downtown Seattle, Washington.
Montana Bristol, the Cetus Monarch, and Tanner Ormond, the Hydra Monarch, lay broken, bloodied, and utterly exhausted on 7th Avenue Street, their bodies sprawled across cracked asphalt and shattered concrete. Their breathing shallow and uneven as blood pooled beneath them and stained the road a dark, sticky red.
Keaton stood above them with an easy, almost lazy smile on his face, his hands folded neatly behind his back as though he were simply observing something mildly amusing, while Tanner, now barely conscious, drifted in and out of awareness, his vision blurred and his thoughts slow, and Montana fared no better as blood loss crept in and her eyelids grew heavy, her limbs trembling weakly beneath her.
For hours, Keaton had beaten Montana mercilessly, targeting her chest and stomach again and again until her ribs cracked and her breath turned ragged, breaking every bone in her legs and leaving her as a half-dead mess in the street.
He raised his arms slowly and took in a long, satisfied breath of air.
"Ah," he sighed contentedly, "what a lovely smell of copper, the smell of weaklings who bleed too much," he said, turning around with his arms still raised.
"Now that the Dragon Monarch is trapped within the Infinity Plane, and Beatrix is handling the President, I am the strongest being this world has ever seen," Keaton continued, his voice swelling with self-satisfaction as he gestured grandly, "I am the strength that will define this planet, I am the power that will shape humanity into the absolute creation, I am the one who brought perfection."
He turned back around—and froze.
Standing a few steps to his left was Alma Daedulus Alastor, a figure Keaton had never expected to see again. His posture calm and solid, his eyes cold and unreadable as they locked directly onto Keaton's own.
"You're the strongest?" Alma said flatly, as though reacting to a bad joke, his voice carrying quiet disdain, "rid yourself of that self-proclamation."
Keaton stared at him in confusion, his smile fading as disbelief crept into his expression, because Alma was supposed to be inside the Infinity Plane, not standing right in front of him.
"What are you doing here?" Keaton asked slowly. "Aren't you supposed to be, like… trapped inside an infinite realm of existence or something?"
"More or less," Alma shrugged casually. "And what are you doing here? Surely you aren't planning on killing two of the most important people in America right now."
"Well, that I am," Keaton replied simply as he took a step back.
"You see, humanity has its flaws, its imperfections, its… failures," he continued, his tone turning strangely thoughtful, "but if you kill every human on the planet, give birth to them through a perfect way, and have them only know perfection, then they can do no wrong."
Alma looked at him like he'd lost his mind. "So you're saying if you eradicate humanity, then raise them as Beasts of Ruin, then everything would be fixed?" he asked incredulously.
Keaton nodded. "Yeah."
"Yeah… that has to be the dumbest thing I've heard all throughout this year, and probably will throughout 2033," Alma said flatly. "You're not God. You have no right to decide what humanity endures or not."
"And here I thought you to be wise," Keaton replied coolly. "God is dead, or He left, or 'He' was never real in the first place, and the time to wait for divine intervention is over. Humanity will not proceed if people constantly destroy each other and constantly thrive within their imperfections."
"Those people, those born with disabilities, are imperfect, even more so than regular people," Keaton continued, his voice growing colder. "Those born with natural diseases are among the imperfect, and those who have not had a chance to be born yet are imperfect too, and I don't blame them for being that way because they cannot help it, but if they were to be born in our way then those imperfections would no longer exist, and diseases that would make them unable to experience life wouldn't even be a thought."
Alma stared at him in silence for a long moment before finally speaking. "I've done some soul-searching recently," he said quietly. "I've found out a lot of things, none of which benefit me, none that help me see through the fog of sanity, or even help me know who I am, so I'm not the one to turn to when you ask a logical question."
"But I know what you've just said… is a load of nonsense."
Keaton's expression twisted with irritation at Alma's response, and he stepped right back into his space, his voice low and sharp. "If you really think I'm wrong," he said, teeth clenched, "then try to stop me."
Alma glanced back at the two Monarchs for a split second, then returned his gaze to Keaton. In the next instant, Alma dropped low, and Keaton reflexively threw a punch that tore through the air above his head and missed him completely. Alma surged forward, seized Keaton by the neck, and leaped upward in one fluid motion, vanishing from sight with him.
Montana clutched onto Tanner for support, shaking him lightly as panic edged into her voice. "Hey… hey, are you alright?"
Tanner only answered with a faint, barely audible murmur.
---
Alma hurled Keaton into a left-hand off-ramp near the I-5 highway, the impact echoing across the concrete. Alma landed atop one of the square concrete blocks that spanned that section of Interstate 5, standing above him like an executioner.
Keaton tilted his head up to look at him. Cars sped past on the roadway, drivers witnessing what Alma had just done to Keaton, and then—without warning—those same people abruptly flung themselves from their vehicles, rolling across the asphalt as their abandoned cars smashed into one another or into concrete barriers. Alma lifted an eyebrow, a flicker of worry crossing his face for only a brief moment.
The people rose to their feet, all standing perfectly still, all staring up at Alma alongside Keaton.
"This," Keaton said calmly, almost reverently, "is what perfection looks like."
Then, without any further warning, the people launched themselves upward with terrifying force, catching Alma off guard. One man drove his fist toward him, forcing Alma to grab his wrist and hurl him aside. A woman sprinted sideways up the wall, then leaped at Alma with her fist cocked back; he slipped aside and delivered a controlled, gentle elbow strike to the back of her head, knocking her unconscious.
Alma caught her body before it could fall and carefully laid her down. The man he had thrown earlier was already airborne again, descending toward him with his fist thrust forward. Alma stopped the punch with his open palm, a small shockwave rippling outward and cracking the concrete beneath his feet.
What…? Alma thought, stunned by the sheer force behind a blow from someone who should have been an ordinary person.
He tightened his grip, yanked the man forward, and delivered a restrained punch to the back of his head, dropping him unconscious. Alma turned back toward Keaton, who hadn't moved an inch and was still smirking.
"Everyone has the potential to be as perfect as me," Keaton said proudly. "That's why they follow me. They are obeying perfection."
"Leave the civilians alone," Alma said sternly. "Our fight doesn't need to involve them."
"Oh, but it does," Keaton replied. In an instant, numerous people surrounded him—several standing atop the concrete blocks behind him, others clinging to the walls nearby. He pointed directly at Alma. "You are the wall. The barrier. The very thing stopping them from reaching perfection. Our fight has everything to do with them. It's perfection versus the imperfect."
"And you," Keaton added coldly, "are the imperfection that still clings to itself. How childish."
Alma clenched his fists and raised his hand toward Keaton. Before Spear could fire, a man lunged directly in front of him, forcing Alma to cancel the attack. He grabbed the man's oncoming fist and threw him aside as twelve more people leapt at him, some even jumping from the back wall behind Keaton.
Alma jumped back, landing on the pedestrian pavement below. The possessed people vaulted over the greenery, then dropped down among passing civilians, touching them as they moved by and infecting them with whatever influence Keaton was controlling them with. Those civilians stiffened, turned toward Alma, and began running straight at him.
Alma's eyes widened slightly as he activated Evil Eyes, weaving through the crowd and knocking each one unconscious with surgical precision. Just as he finished, Keaton appeared at his side, swinging a massive sword that looked like it had been forged from corpses. Alma dodged away as the blade tore through the road, cleaving the asphalt clean in half.
Alma stared at the sword in equal parts awe and disgust, shaken by its appearance and the devastation it caused. He raised his hand toward Keaton again, but a man snuck up behind him and hurled him into a large building. Alma slammed into its side and used Gale to suspend himself in midair, momentarily forgetting he could simply fly.
He looked up and saw Keaton rushing toward him. His eyes widened as he remembered the office building the General had cut in half. He grabbed both of Keaton's wrists and flew them away from the structure.
They crashed through the side of a building and tore out into another street, destroying Keaton's sword and sent debris scattering across the asphalt as the shockwave followed them. Keaton landed several yards away from Alma, rolling once before snapping back to his feet with practiced ease. Alma, by contrast, barely broke stride—his boots scraped the pavement for a moment before he straightened in one clean, effortless motion.
Keaton smiled at him. Then slowly, deliberately, he extended one hand out to his side.
"Come," Keaton said, his voice lower now, more heavier. "Embrace perfection."
The moment the words left his mouth, six people dropped from above and landed beside him. A few from their earlier confrontation. Their bodies began to decay almost instantly, flesh darkening and collapsing inward as if time itself were devouring them. Within seconds, they were reduced to hollowed husks. Then, with a wet, grinding sound, their remains began to fuse together—melding, warping, welding into one another—until they formed a long, jagged blade. Keaton wrapped his fingers around the hilt as if it had always belonged there.
Disgust twisted across Alma's face as he took in the sight.
Then Keaton vanished.
He reappeared directly in front of Alma, blade already swinging.
'He's faster,' Alma realized as he leapt, narrowly clearing the attack. 'Whatever his ability is, it lets him manipulate people—through an infection.'
Alma countered midair, snapping a kick into Keaton's face and knocking him backward. He pressed the advantage immediately, dashing forward and driving a clean punch into Keaton's stomach, making him gasp for air.
'Perhaps the infection spreads through airborne particles,' Alma thought. 'That would explain why those people jumped from their cars. Unless he made contact before the fight and staged it that way.'
Keaton was already on him again.
In the brief instant Alma had spent thinking, Keaton had fully recovered and launched another attack. Alma leaned back just enough for the blade to miss him, then drove his foot into Keaton's side, sending him skidding across the pavement once more.
'If it's contact-based,' Alma thought, 'then I can't afford to touch him.'
He raised his hand, sight locked onto Keaton. 'My best option is Spear. If that fails… Withering Grace comes next.'
Before he could fire, a ring of civilians surged around him without warning. A second, tighter ring formed around Keaton, hemming them both in. Spear became unusable instantly.
Alma jumped clear of the crowd, landing several feet away, his teeth clenched. 'They're innocent,' he thought, scanning the faces around him. 'I can't sacrifice even one just to stop him. And while he's holding that weapon… his speed increased. Which means his strength likely did too.'
The crowd suddenly began to rot.
Bodies collapsed into husks as the weapon in Keaton's hand dissolved into a thick, black substance that spilled outward, coating the decaying forms. The mass began to pull itself together, stretching and linking, until it formed an enormous chain-like weapon. Alma's eyes widened despite himself.
Keaton swung the chain in a wide arc, obliterating entire sections of nearby buildings. Concrete shattered, steel was split like wood, and glass burst outward as he raised the chain overhead and brought it crashing down. The ground ruptured as the weapon tore closer and closer toward Alma.
Alma leapt back just in time, the impact sending a cloud of dust into the air. Over the roar of destruction, he heard the unmistakable sound of reinforced concrete collapsing—and realized what it was just in time.
"Shield." Alma said.
The rocky barrier flared into existence around him just as a building—sheared clean at its base—was hurled toward him. It shattered against Shield, dragging chunks of itself across the road before crashing into another structure in a deafening collision.
Shield faded, revealing that Keaton was already there.
Alma swung, but Keaton slipped past it effortlessly. He appeared to Alma's left, then his right—then behind him, then directly in front again—never attacking, just moving. Alma tracked every shift, every displacement, but the repetition was starting to grind on his nerves.
Keaton O'Neal's ability was human manipulation. By making contact with another person, he bent them under his control through their yearn to become more than what they were. In return, they were granted overwhelming strength, speed, and power.
But the price was absolute. A devastating consequence.
That desire burned too brightly, forcing their bodies to live their entire lifetime in just mere seconds. Once their bodies failed, Keaton continued to manipulate them, reshaping their remains into weapons. The greater the number of corpses he accumulated, the stronger both he and his creations became.
'Yeah…' Alma thought grimly. 'That's exactly what's happening. His infection forces submission, rotting them from the inside until they die—and then he turns them into weapons. That explains the superhuman strength beforehand.'
There was no known limit to how many corpses Keaton could add to his weapons. That made him unpredictable. Uncontainable. Dangerous. The kind of threat that warranted presidential intervention.
Keaton appeared at Alma's side again, snapping a kick toward his head. Alma caught it with one hand—but the force behind it sent him hurtling through the air and into a building. He skidded along the interior wall before stopping himself.
'Huh,' Alma thought dryly. 'That was new.'
He extended his hand to his side. "The False Temptation: Mirage."
Twelve identical versions of Alma appeared around him. In unison, they burst from the building and rushed Keaton.
Keaton stared for half a second, stunned—then laughed. A matching number of controlled civilians dropped beside him and launched themselves at the clones.
"So you've got tricks of your own, huh, Alma Alastor?!" Keaton shouted, grinning wide.
The clones tore through the crowd, knocking the controlled people unconscious one after another. Then they turned on Keaton.
He responded by swinging the chain horizontally. The weapon erased the clones instantly in clouds of mist, ripping through them and continuing on, carving through multiple buildings and bringing them down in a cascading collapse.
Alma appeared directly in front of Keaton and grabbed him by the face, lifting him off the ground before slamming him down hard. He seized Keaton by the ankle, shot upward into the air, and hurled him forward. Alma followed, striking him mid-flight, then accelerated to keep pace, striking him once more and sending him away again.
Keaton retaliated by whipping the chain around Alma's body, locking tight. With a violent yank, he flung Alma straight back toward downtown Seattle.
Alma landed hard on 6th Avenue Street, right in front of the athletic club building. Keaton fell roughly, groaning. Both of them stood at the same time, and then six people dropped behind Alma, with another six landing behind Keaton. Keaton smiled as Alma realized he was completely surrounded.
"This is where that wall crumbles," Keaton said.
Only then did Alma truly see one of them.
A child.
A boy—no more than seven years old—stood among the controlled, his small frame swallowed by bodies that did not belong to him, his presence so wrong that Alma's mind rejected it for a heartbeat too long. When comprehension finally struck, it hit like a blade driven straight into his chest. His breath caught, and his eyes snapped wide as the implications unraveled all at once.
He turned sharply toward Keaton.
"No—!" Alma shouted, panic tearing through his voice. "Not the kid!"
He spun back, arm shooting out instinctively, fingers stretching toward the boy as if distance itself could be denied through sheer will.
It was too late.
The child's body began to collapse inward, flesh graying, shrinking, hollowing out as though something inside him had simply… given up. In seconds, he was reduced to a fragile husk. Then even that was taken—his remains dissolving into a slick, black liquid that slid across the ground and was drawn hungrily into Keaton's chain.
Alma didn't move.
His arm remained outstretched, hand trembling in empty air, reaching for a life that had existed only moments before.
Keaton smiled.
He knew exactly what he had done. Alma knew it too. Of the controlled, only five remained now—and that choice, that specific cruelty, had not been accidental. Killing a child in front of him was meant to provoke rage.
It succeeded.
But it brought something far worse than that.
In an instant, and without interruption or fear of hitting a person, Alma raised his hand and fired Spear toward Keaton. It pierced through his body and vanished. Behind Keaton, Spear erupted out the back of a man, killing him instantly and obliterating multiple buildings in its path. Alma's eyes widened in horror as he saw what it had done. Keaton remained unharmed, not even startled, even confused as to what Spear even did.
'What…? How did...?' Alma thought with a horrified expression on his face.
Alma Alastor had made a fatal miscalculation, a devastatingly wrong assumption of Keaton's ability. While correct in some areas, what Keaton really did was not infect people, but forming a link with them.
The Greatest Offense, known as Spear, is an attack that can pierce through any and everything. There is no limit, no durability, and no ability or power that can manifest, obstruct, or outright deny Spear from hitting its target.
The Greatest Offense is not a manifestation, an application, nor an attack that can be stopped by time, distance, destruction, or even the total annihilation of Alma Daedulus Alastor across conception, existence, or spiritual, mental, and physical states of being.
Among the absolute freedom and overwhelming power Spear offers, there is one requirement that must be met to launch it: a target. The intended target must be in mind, within vision, within knowledge, possess a soul, or exist within the heart of Alma Daedulus Alastor at the moment the devastating Offense is released.
And for these very reasons, it exists beyond conventional concepts and abstract creations. To affect a lesser state of being, it must pass through a soul and into the material world, allowing the destruction of buildings and physical objects. At the cost of traversing a lesser state of being, the soul is destroyed upon exit, making that destination a one time use.
And that link Keaton formed, converged their souls as one, not confusing Spear, but avoiding it entirely. In other words, it passed on the consequence of Spear hitting Keaton's soul by passing it through the link and onto another.
'Who am I?' Alma thought as the world around him seemed to pause, his head tilting downward. 'I've killed so many people. I've hurt so many more. And I've done those terrible things to those Beasts of Ruin…'
'I am a monster.'
The collapsing buildings froze in place.
'But I'm a monster who knows what he's done. I can change. But that isn't the real question. It's whether I'm capable of it.' Alma thought, his head still looking down.
'The ego I had at fifteen—born from confidence in my abilities—and the lack of confidence I have now are two completely different people. I am capable of change. I can do it. But am I willing to step back into that ego? To accept what I was and move forward with my head held evenly? No, I'm not. But I will kill that man who can't.'
Alma's thoughts raced, fluid and relentless. His mind drifted back to what Jasmine had told him—that his powers were his and his alone. That meant the pride he once carried, the ego he possessed, was even more a part of himself than he'd realized.
The price of his power was not ego or carnage, but the acceptance of what it meant to wield such terrifying force—and the responsibility to use it correctly.
'I may be a monster, but from now on, I won't be without a leash. Power without control… is chaos. And for this moment… I will lean into that chaos. Into what I am best at.' Alma thought, letting out a huge breath of air.
'But I've done it again. I've broken another promise I swore I never would. This one was the most important—and the most damaging to me. But it has to be done. I will erase the man who made mistakes, who could be blamed, and I will leave behind only my results.'
From that moment, Alma realized that separating the monster from the good that monster had done was the only path he could see forward.
A wall without a builder.
Alma raised his left hand to his face, and the world slowed even further.
His ideals had shifted. Alma could never forgive himself of his actions. So the only thing he can do is move on. If he wanted to protect, that would require him to forget what he'd done—but he was incapable of that very thing. It haunts him, every breath he takes, he feels as though is should be his last. And so he would erase the man's actions, his evil deeds, his good deeds, everything about him, even his very own existence, leaving only what good he could do.
Alma's eyes were wide as Eyes of Despair activated, and as he prepared to unleash that power—that terrifying place he had sworn never to use again—he broke the final promise he had made to himself four years ago.
Silence remained. Dread filled the air. Keaton's face froze, caught between confusion, fear, and overwhelming terror. He could feel it. That presence of something terrifying. It wasn't felt around him. It was felt in his soul. The people around him felt it too, equal in that shared horror. Everyone would be. Everyone could feel it. Everyone would experience it.
The next victim was nigh.
---
"Of course I have faith in him!" Max said.
Jasmine looked wary, sitting on the bed she and Alma shared every night inside their apartment.
"I do too. But he's just a man, with worries, with stresses, he's not a soulless construct." Jasmine said.
"I know he isn't. But he's capable of doing all thess things while making it look easy. If anything, our father is the exact man built for extremely stressful situations. He can handle it." Max said from the chair at his desk.
"That may be the case, but that could very well be a facade. That most likely is a facade that he holds up because of us. What makes you think he can handle it all? Without breaks, without time to adjust or to prepare?" Jasmine said, making Max smile.
"Because...he's 'The Strongest.'"
"First Circle: Endless Labyrinth." As those words left Alma's mouth, a rocky floor expanded beneath his feet, stretching all the way to Keaton and the surrounding people. Behind Alma, towering stone walls surged upward, encircling them. Above him, a ceiling formed, sealing them inside an infinite expanse of despair.
The Endless Labyrinth—an ability like no other—had been unleashed once more, and a true infinity closed in on its next victim.
Keaton could not move.
Fear had rooted him in place—not the frantic kind that begged for escape, but the suffocating kind that pressed down on the mind until even thought felt dangerous. Behind him yawned an enormous void, a circular rupture in space that descended into impossible darkness, like the mouth of a cavern that swallowed light itself. There was no wind. No echo. No sound at all.
The people who had once surrounded him were gone. The connection he had threaded through their bodies and wills—his control, his leverage, his certainty—had been severed without resistance, bypassed as though it had never existed. He could not feel them. He could not feel anything.
He wasn't even sure he was breathing.
All he could perceive was the tunnel stretching endlessly ahead, its walls indistinct, its depth unknowable. And even that certainty began to falter. The longer he stared, the more doubt crept in, whispering that perhaps he wasn't seeing at all—that his sight had been taken, leaving him trapped in something worse than darkness.
Then—footsteps. Fast. Deliberate. Closing in.
The sound shattered the silence like glass, and with it came a deeper terror than Keaton had ever known. He tried to move. He clawed at every instinct, every fragment of power he possessed, straining against the invisible force holding him in place.
Nothing answered.
Nothing yielded.
Alma ran straight down the center of the tunnel, arms pumping, eyes wide with a fury that bordered on something far colder than rage. He stopped directly in front of Keaton and seized him by the crown of his head, fingers digging in with crushing certainty.
"You are," Alma said, his voice low and unwavering, "the only one I'm glad to see trapped in here."
He pulled. Keaton's soul was wrenched backward, ripped from its tenuous grip on reality and dragged into the First Circle.
The Endless Labyrinth collapsed. Stone and void folded inward, dissolving as though they had never been, leaving Alma standing alone in the ruined street. Around him, the civilians who had been caught within the Labyrinth were on their knees, heads tilted skyward, eyes empty—bodies alive, but minds shattered by what they had endured.
Alma snapped his fingers, life surged back into them.
"You all need to go home," he said quietly. "If your home is even in this state."
The words barely reached them. Memory returned instead—memories of what they had done, of the hands they had moved with, of the violence they had been forced to commit. They screamed as realization set in, as they felt the weight of what Keaton had turned them into, as the remnants of the Endless Labyrinth scraped across their minds like broken glass.
Alma watched, guilt heavy in his chest. He knew he was not blameless. He had ended the nightmare—but the pain would remain, maybe even adding to it.
He turned away without another word.
Moments later, he stood beside the Cetus and Hydra Monarchs. Both still breathed, shallow and fragile, their bodies battered nearly beyond recognition. Alma lifted them carefully and carried them to the nearest hospital.
After leaving them in medical care, he removed Montana's earpiece, fitting it into his own ear and tapping it once. "Sir, come in," he said. "Sir!"
Only static replied.
He clicked his tongue softly and took to the sky, heading east toward Washington.
Midway there, something caught his attention—a familiar presence, weak and staggering through a dense forest, bloodied and barely standing, struggling up a steep incline. Alma descended ahead of them, landing at the crest of the hill.
He began to dig.
---
7:00 PM — Washington, D.C.
Reality cracked apart with a thin, shrieking sound before sealing itself shut. Emmanuel stood over Beatrix's battered form, her body bruised, bleeding, and barely conscious.
For five unrelenting hours, she had been hunted inside his Dimension—thrown, torn, clawed, and crushed beneath the Chimera of the Forgotten Land. By some miracle, she had survived. But survival had come at a cost. She was drained beyond exhaustion, her strength hollowed out to nothing.
She raised her forcefield one final time and plunged underground, tunneling away from the White House with desperation as her only fuel.
Emmanuel did not pursue.
He simply stared up at the cold night sky, then turned slowly toward the White House and began to walk.
Beatrix resurfaced hundreds of miles away, deep within a forest, gasping as if she had been starved of air. She climbed a hill with trembling limbs, pain tearing through her with every step. When she reached the top, she froze.
Alma Alastor stood near a tree. Two freshly dug graves lay before him.
Her heart sank.
She backed away instinctively, but her body refused to obey, only falling to her knees. She had nothing left.
"I dug two graves for us... my dear," Alma said calmly, gazing into the first. "One for you." He gestured to the second. "And one for the desires I once had. My intent. My purpose… to kill you."
Silence stretched between them.
"What is your view on life?" Alma asked at last. "Your meaning. Your limit. What does living life to the fullest mean to you?"
Beatrix straightened, hatred burning through her exhaustion.
"I am what humanity longs for," she said. "Perfection. My hatred comes from their deceit, their corruption, their rejection of anyone who tries to change the world. Everything is worthless. People are born only to die. Pain is the default. Misery is the constant. Happiness is fabricated. Love is conditional."
She exhaled sharply.
"I've slaughtered thousands—millions, perhaps—not to free them, but because their existence sustains this futility. The meaning of life is to be born and, if you're lucky, to die peacefully. Nothing more."
She laughed bitterly.
"There is no limit to monstrosity. It is easier to surrender to nature than to pretend meaning exists. And if the world rewards monsters—then becoming one is simply becoming honest."
Alma waited.
Then he spoke.
"You're wrong," he said evenly. "You aren't what humanity yearns for. You're what humanity already is. A reflection of its worst impulses. Your hatred is self-projection. Nothing you've done matters. You are… irrelevant."
He stepped forward.
"Humanity is vile. I don't deny that. We damn evil while committing the same atrocities. But the ones who resist the world—who build instead of destroy—carry something else. That came from God. The knowledge of right and wrong."
His voice hardened.
"The world is corrupt because people choose it over Him. That disobedience is their sin."
Beatrix scoffed. "Then why not change it? You have the power."
"And become a tyrant?" Alma replied. "Fear is not faith. Control is not salvation. God never intended obedience to be forced."
He turned away.
"And that is why your perfection will always fail."
"So why not end humanity then?" Beatrix said, her voice unsteady but sharpened by bitterness. "Why not cause a reset?"
Alma did not answer immediately. He stood there, his hand lowered, his gaze fixed on her as though he were measuring not just her words but the intent behind them, the exhaustion behind the anger, the hatred beneath the certainty.
"Because that is not my job," he finally said. "Nor is it my purpose."
He exhaled slowly, as if the truth itself carried weight.
"I can do crowd control. I can handle backlash. I can deal with consequences," Alma continued, his voice steady, almost tired. "But trying to tell people to change? That is absurd. People will always be people. If a person is a rapist, then that is their life. If a person helps the homeless, then that is their life. If a person is a murderer, then that is their life. If a person helps other people, then that is their life. If anyone is like anything, then they are that. You cannot change what exists. You can only watch it crumble."
Beatrix clenched her fists, her breath uneven.
"So you won't intervene to end it all," she said, "or to even fix it. You'll instead be watching them all fail." Her eyes burned into him. "That makes you the problem."
"Not quite," Alma replied.
He shifted his stance, the ground beneath his feet crunching softly as he moved, as though even the earth were listening.
"What you inflicted me with allowed me to see the truth of humanity that I was trying to hide from," he said. "I've always known that I was like everyone else. I was capable of great evil. What you did only showed me the evil I can really do."
His gaze hardened, but his voice did not rise.
"And I realize that even while I'm standing here," Alma continued, "even while the world is suffering, even while humanity hypocritically acts, there is something undeniable."
He paused.
"Want."
The word lingered between them.
"By making everyone want to be something on their own accord," he said, "with their own desires, their own motivation, their own will—then that is change without enforcement. That is change without hiding. That is change without evil."
Beatrix said nothing.
"I'm forgiving myself and moving on," Alma continued. "This mindset I've had, this line of thinking, the way I interact with anything in this world… is how you have affected me. You made me see what humanity is. The truth I've tried hiding." His eyes narrowed slightly. "Your love for yourself is what made me see."
The forest went silent. The wind stopped flowing. The sound of crickets faded.
"So I'm forfeiting your love for peace of mind," he said. "To see the world with a hopeful image, while I see it all burn down. You are subjective. You are not needed."
His arm lifted.
"You are… worthless."
Alma aimed his hand toward Beatrix.
"Goodbye, forever."
Spear fired.
There was no flash, no warning, no resistance. It pierced her soul instantly, killing it before thought or fear could form, then continued forward, ripping through tree after tree in a straight, merciless path before finally stopping somewhere deep within the forest, leaving only silence behind.