While Joaquim hugged Renée and Gabe among legions of hand-angels and explosions in the skies, Wexil slit the throat of the existing horror even higher above and vanished. Binary code and hexadecimal code bound together like liquid spurted out.

"Why..." Yaw yelled with a glare under his sunglasses. "Why did you allow that to happen?"

Sins of the father, the existing horror replied, his voice echoing down to them. I forgot that my hand of letters brought him to me, and thus it was only fair.

"... fair this, fair that. Gods do not have to be fair or forget things!" Yaw yelled. "They can literally do anything they want!"

Even just like unspeakable horrors... we existing horrors are beholden to narrative forces too.

"... what do we do?" Joaquim asked. The existing horror, unlike all the human soldiers attacking him, did not strike any terror in the boy that was in a carbon body that suited him better. Out of anyone that felt familiar... the gargantuan four-dimensional being felt the most familiar of all.

"You... you look different," Gabe whispered to him while Joaquim smiled back at him. "You seem even happier."

"We have to split y'all into two groups," Yaw explained. He paused to take turns locking eyes with Gabe and Joaquim. "Renée, take your sons and Spiderland with you to her head. Spiderland may turn invisible but ve will always be with Joaquim. The rest will go into the Spider God's head."

"Aren't they the same person?" Private Borrys asked. It seemed he was in Joaquim's boots too; trying to put all the pieces among all the fractals of reality and time. He was already cracking even though he was pretending otherwise.

"Yes and no," baby Spiderland said. Ve hovered closer to vis carcass on the desert while still staying on the existing horror's hand. Ve looked like a cartoon ghost with vis bottom half of vis onesie kindling. "Remember kids, we are dealing with a master esper here. There is a reason we have all been given little information."

"... isn't it kind of fucked though?" Joaquim asked. "We are on a mission and we don't even know what the briefi–"

"Where did you learn to talk lik– ... psh. Why did I even bother asking?"

Renée interrupted him by resting a hand on his shoulder. She let out one chuckle, most likely recalling an old memory of Iker's. "Trust me... I would have made things different. Even for a long time... I resisted and questioned Alice. I even despised her for keeping so many secrets. It took me a long time to realize, and even longer to accept... she had no other choice."

Joaquim glanced over to Gabe, his gaze already going along with what she said. He then locked eyes with Renée again. Her frown made it clear that she was not happy about Joaquim's confusion about the situation.

"Nimbus!" Yaw commanded. "I think we will need your airships for battle instead."

A flying cloud spawned in front of the Wamis.

"Zinnia... are you just bad at knowing everything?" Yaw asked her. Joaquim resisted his incoming laugh from how direct Yaw was, but Gabe did not. He earned a gentle shove from Renée.

And while Borrys seemed panicked about not knowing things, this seemed to be the first time Zinnia was tasked with knowing everything. With shaking lips, she was dealing with fear too.

"Yea..." Corporal Woo murmured. "This is just a lot of responsibility."

"You got me as back up," Lucia said with her Ember Tree camouflage wrapped around her neck. She marched on her paws closer to Woo to reassure her.

A see-through blue cube spawned to envelop the monkey king, the cube quarantining him to deal with the malware that spread throughout half of his body. "You will be fine."

You can't even follow your own advice, the existing horror echoed from the high atmosphere. Joaquim wondered what he was referring to.

"Hah! Gods can definitely be hypocritical!" Yaw yelled back. "They may even be known for that!"

Renée hopped on the cloud. "We may already be wasting too much time with the banter."

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

The 0 or 1 trojan corrupted the existing horror's neck and tie, and when Joaquim noticed it he ran with Gabe to hop on the cloud. Renée wrapped her arms around both of them, and even though for some reason Joaquim knew they would be fine on the cloud... she probably just wanted to feel a little safer.

"An influx gate will spawn in Ember's scalp when she enters her velvet and scarlet form," Yaw said. "You three will go through it. Think of the influx gates as malware of our own."

"I know time works in strange ways, but in a way... Iker is in his hacker timeline isn't he?" Renée asked.

"Indeed," Yaw replied. "You three will be tasked with stopping Ameen by travelling back in time to Menouthis. He will be able to destroy both Fornia and Ember Tree City by destroying Menouthis. Two birds with one stone."

"Can't we stop him here?" Gabe asked as he pointed to the desert. The brothers glanced down to find a younger Ameen in the desert running back into the quantum mainframe beneath the razed town.

"There is no timeline where that ends well," Yaw said. "You could say... that is why you three are here."

If Joaquim's primary task was to stop Ameen... that actually explained a lot. He was connecting events together; but the nimbus cloud hovered higher. He turned himself to find Ember quarantined herself by shapeshifting into her gargantuan velvet form. Her face and crown were in shadows in storm clouds in the sky while the train of her dress stretched into the cosmos. In the shadows of her scalp, Joaquim spotted a glowing spiral.

Renée wrapped them both in her arms a little tighter.

"Do not look back," Yaw said. "Do not look back until you three fly through the portal, and even then, I would suggest not looking back either."

"Why?" Joaquim asked.

He glanced back at Yaw to discover that the quarantine was failing. Yaw's lower jaw leaked plasma and data.

"Do not look back."

Without Joaquim realizing that Corporal Woo already left with her group, the cloud they were on was already en route to Ember's brain simulation.

It has to be the game Big Satan Under Your Pinky Toe, Joaquim thought.

The magical cloud gave him no more time to ruminate as it picked up speed. It took effort to stay balanced, but not so much that they would be in danger of falling. It swayed to avoid drones and fighter jets shooting down angels fighting amongst shockwaves and smoke clouds.

And to describe the sound behind Joaquim... which made it harder to not look back...

It was the humming of thousands and thousands of time loops closing, being severed, and computer terminals trying to fix errors. Joaquim imagined it as armies of time travelers in battle.

Hah!

Ez.

How dare you?

Behold Sancho!

Is yo mama real?

Erica... are you following me?

I am... the gold that was boosted!

We need to run to the end of time!

I am sorry, I am a language model and I cannot assist you.

Really?

Excalibur!

And I oo-

To try and find time paradoxes and logic holes as thousands of voices and attacks from different simulations and spacetime poured into the desert would be the height of human hubris. To attract the attention of the foundation, the House of Felix, and the House of Seraphis, along with all the multiversal heroes trying to hop in to stop the so called prophet... Ameen and his allies must have really been trying to destroy all the data that ever was and ever will be.

If anything... Joaquim realized that engagement was a power source for them too in this simulation war. Whoever said the most offensive thing in the battle among angels, demons, and unspeakable horrors... Joaquim could sense energy moving to them as he flew closer to Ember with his brother and his mother. However, Joaquim grew weary of those seeking engagement, and decided to forget whatever they said as soon as he heard it.

You might as well have one wing too.

Didn't even buy me a drink.

Indescribable silence other than deaths no mortal could comprehend.

Do not look back.

Joaquim kept facing forward as they entered the black clouds touching giant Ember's crown and her face. He glanced side to side to find that Gabe and Renée were checking on him.

Screams, gasps, the clinking of swords, gunshots, death wails, magic spells, bombs, bellows... the multiversal battle behind them was forming to a deafening cacophony. The millions of voices could no longer be told apart.

And even before the Wamis passed through the gate into a tunnel made of light...

Dead silence.

Joaquim could not resist glancing back when they made it.

...

The atmosphere-touching corpse of lightly olive skinned teenage boy glitching with bloody lips.

A smile of desecration.

The force of gravity from space held up his very dead arms.

In his hands were a phone and a laptop while terminals and word processors ran on both.

His shattered skull leaked out superclusters and nebulae, forming a simulation of their own, and in between his split neck were tree branches wrapping around an exposed spine. His eyes in shadow looked like it was in a monochrome television simulation of their own with the occasional static line flickering in. A glitchy clown spawned on his shoulder, siphoning resources and energy from the decaying corpse.

Beneath the cosmic corpse was the adult Prophet Ameen, Dem1urge, Feechi, and Farouq from the future standing and slithering triumphantly. Farouq from the future was the third inquisitor that kept his identity secret all the way back then with the sown together Arab scarves.

And beneath all the streams of data crashing into each other in between the spaces of the biological computers... all of it appearing to be some kind of simulated hacker battle in a simulation far far away...

Dem1urge, the Alkrezian prophet and inquisitors all stared with bloodlust at Joaquim in the distance.