"How are we doing this?" Chaos-Juzual asks with an amused smile on her lips. "A battle within the Imagination Engine is pointless as we are now."
"The bigger Crawling Chaos swallows the smaller one." Mataku replies with a shrug. They're discussing how to kill each other in such a casual manner that I can feel the tension drain from me.
"Is this a joke to you?" I gesture at Earth, or, more specifically, the gigantic Tokomaha covering most of it up with her naked form. "We're talking about billions of lives here."
"Infinite lives." The Primordial Terror corrects me, causing me to furrow my brows in skepticism. He ignores me and turns to Chaos-Juzual. "Shall we start then?"
"I am not abiding by your little scenario. You will have to take me by force." She speaks in a defiant tone as the smile on her lips fades away. Then her entire body begins to swell up from the inside. Her clothes melt into the expanding blob in midair, which soon reaches the ground and keeps growing from there. The amorphous being keeps swelling, and soon occupies our entire field of view. Over twenty years on the moon hasn't significantly diminished the mass of the Primordial Crawling Chaos, it would seem.
"How did you do that?" Mataku asks, his nonchalance replaced by visible anger. "Did you not hunger up here?"
"Have you, of all people, forgotten what imagination can achieve?" A nerve-grating voice that causes Aurelia to fall to her knees replies to the Primordial Terror's resentful question. So she was able to do what I couldn't, huh?
I remember training transmutation with the golden girl when we were last here. Turning rocks into gold is a neat trick, but I aimed to generate organic from inorganic matter for me to consume. That way, I would have never needed to kill again, and transmuting a barren desert like the one in the Khurut Sultanate could have allowed me to gain immense mass.
"Were you a Crawling Chaos when we last met?" I ask, as Chaos-Juzual has yet to come down on us in a tidal wave of black flesh. Why did she help us out instead of consuming us back then? Why did she wait all this time to drop the moon? Why did she even stay on the moon in the first place?
"Maybe." Is all I get in response. "Does it make a difference?"
With a shudder that was most likely meant as a shrug, the Primordial Crawling Chaos finally begins to move. Aurelia gets up on her feet and transmutes a massive blade of gold that rises out of the ground below the mass of black. It cuts the Crawling Chaos in two, but myriads of tentacles quickly bind them back together in the wake of the sword.
I raise my arms and create a giant ball of plasma that I intend to throw at Chaos-Juzual. But before I can do that, Mataku grabs Aurelia and me from behind and tosses us backward across the surface of the moon. The landscape flies past us, but I extend an arm at the golden girl, hold onto her, and stop us abruptly. The plasma ball I left behind in the distance fizzles out.
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
That's when a massive finger comes down from above and squishes the Primordial Crawling Chaos underneath it. Looking up, I find that Tokomaha seems to have either seen the giant black mass against the grayish-white moon soil or noticed the light from my plasma.
A moment later, the shockwave from her finger's impact travels across the surface of the moon, blowing up dust and rocks that fly toward us. I erect a barrier of light around Aurelia and me to weather the deadly storm.
When I look up, Tokomaha is already drawing her finger back and spreading her hands to catch the falling moon. That was the only help she could afford to give us, but I appreciate it. I just doubt it was of much use against an amorphous blob that won't die from being compressed. At least I think I could survive an impact like that without much trouble.
"Mataku, are you there?" I don't really care whether or not he's dead, and I would prefer it if he were, but he saved us from that impact just now. At least that's the only way I can interpret it, though I don't know what for. He should know that none of us could have died from that titanic poke.
"Yes, but feeling flatter." Comes the response in a dry tone. He must be feeling absolutely fine if he can crack a joke after that.
"Thanks for saving us." I force myself to say. It's not just because of my pride but to let him think that we're weaker than we actually are. "But how do you suppose we can fight that one?"
Mataku made it sound like he had more mass than Chaos-Juzual and would swallow her earlier. But judging by his reaction to the revelation that she still had all of the mass from before being sent to the moon, it's safe to say that his plan won't work anymore.
As Chaos-Juzual said, a fight between us within the Imagination Engine is a waste of time. Neither of us possesses the piece of technology that Zenlith used to erase parts of me from existence, so all that's left is hurling the most powerful abilities we have at each other. Considering we most likely all have some form of imagination about shielding, that's only going to destroy the landscape around us.
Before Mataku can reply, the ground shudders. I look up to find that Tokomaha is bending her head down to catch the falling celestial body on her shoulders. What we just felt was the impact from her hands touching the moon's surface. The next one will be far worse, as it will serve to slow down and eventually stop the moonfall.
"We'll be flung off." Mataku states in a worried tone. I look across the plains with Hestia's eye template and find him staring up toward the fast-approaching shoulders of Tokomaha. "It may look slow to you, but we're traveling faster than the moon's escape velocity. Inertia will-"
"Behind you!" I shout in my mind, causing Aurelia to hold her head in pain. From the crater behind the Primordial Terror, a massive black hand has risen into the air and is now coming down on him. The only reason I care about his safety is that I don't know how to take on Chaos-Juzual on my own.
Mataku turns around and looks up, but doesn't do anything to dodge. It's just like when I first met him; he would take everything without a care in the world and tank it through his sheer mass. Maybe he has forgotten how to dodge after millennia of living like that. It was the same earlier when he tossed Aurelia and me back but didn't try to run himself.
"Watch and l-" His voice is cut off when the hand slams onto him. I'm far more worried about him now than I was when Tokomaha's city-sized fingertip squished him. He was in his humanoid form when the palm of another Crawling Chaos came down on him. That means the black tentacles are surrounding him now, and he will get pulled inside Chaos-Juzual's body.