The night sky erupted into a red haze of destruction as Dashuan and Ultress rocketed towards the metamorphosing Derek in a plume of ocean spray and coning the smoke around their velocity The once-human Armistead contorted and expanded with a heavy sound of grating metal and audible snapping bone, his skin hardening into crimson plates that resembled his former power armor’s casing but much bulkier and dripping with dark blood. Veins of pulsating energy coursed through the fissures as they pressed their way to the surface and suddenly burst rapidly, his eyes blazing with blaring white light that could only be one thing as the most of spinning ocean1 and blood subsided between the sinking battleships.

"He's become what he hated most," Ultress shouted as she tapped a device tightly strapped to her forearm and banked left toward a group of Lessers. Dashuan had no time to process her words as Derek, now easily twice his original size, let out a deafening roar that caused the water around him to push outward despite the coming waves and reversing their momentum. The shockwave alone shattered the remaining windows on the nearby doomed ships and sent lesser Aberrants tumbling through the air like dolls along with soldiers.

With impossible speed for his new bulk, Derek launched himself at Dashuan as energy blasted from his bare armored ankles and rocketed him toward the young Aberrant at insane speed. The impact sent both combatants hurtling towards a nearby destroyer with a loud smack that could shatter eardrums. Dashuan barely had time to erect a gravitational field around them before they crashed through the ship's blazing hull, emerging on the other side in a shower of metal and oil as the waning moon bore witness to their struggle.

On the deck, marines scrambled to regroup with screamed orders, their weapons trained on the battling titans but not firing. A young soldier, eyes wide with terror, fired his rifle at Derek in a panic. The bullets ricocheted harmlessly off his armored hide and sparking wildly. Derek turned within a second, his gaze falling on the hapless marine with cold indifference. He bellowed inhumanly with an agaped maw, his voice a monstrous growl instead of English spewing something beyond Understanding. With a casual backhand, he sent the soldier flying off the ship and splattering into chunky bits in the night air, his body’s components disappearing into the churning waves with slow plops.

"No!" Dashuan cried out in anger. He locked eyes with Derek as he viewed Ultress furiously fighting to regroup the Lessers only a few hundred feet away. "This isn't you! Fight it!" Dashuan pleaded again, buying time. Derek's response was a blast of crimson energy from his gaping mouth, carving a molten trench across the ship's deck and killing all in sight with an instant flash of blazing energy. Dashuan dodged early, the heat singeing his hair and cheek and the force sending him lifted off his feet into the air once again.

Above the deck, Ultress weaved through anti-aircraft fire with two child Aberrants in hand, her circular machine leaving contrails of shimmering energy as more destroyers mustered their way through the smoke and fired on their location. With a held fist, Ultress signaled Mina to open a dozen portals around the fleet. From each emerged another group Lesser Aberrant, their powers unleashed in a furious assault onto the crew of each ship that wreaked havoc on the newly embattled ships. Mina, her rose-gold hair whipping in the wind like short strikes, manipulated the very ocean itself with a large glittering portal that strained her deeply. Massive cascades of water rose from the depths summoned to the sky, warping warships and crushing them under the weight of the ocean. The screams of trapped sailors echoed across the battlefield but were drowned out quickly by the sounds of more explosions.

Arc, crackling with electricity from every inch of her being, became a living lightning rod that doused buckets of sparks in every direction. She zipped from ship to ship, short-circuiting systems and electrocuting anyone unfortunate enough to touch metal as she cut the atmosphere with cyan plazma. Entire vessels went dark in moments, their crews plunging into panic as life support systems failed and sat waiting for their deaths at the hands of impending Lessers. The remaining military answered with overwhelming firepower. Missiles streaked through the night, finding their marks with unerring precision as they peppered their own ships with explosions. Lesser Aberrants, their powers no match for military-grade explosives much like the soldiers, were vaporized mid-air or sent plummeting into the unforgiving ocean as RedRevolt Members took their place and fired back on the Army with strange technology that cracked Lazer fire through the bridge of a parallel ship.

A squadron of jets crashed in overhead, their payloads unleashing hell upon the island behind them. Massive explosions lit up the horizon, and blanketed the entire Island in a terrifying inferno. The sandy beaches were turned to molten glass, and lush vegetation was reduced to ash in seconds. Dashuan, now trading blows with Derek, felt his heart sink. They were losing, and losing badly. They had disturbed a colony of ants, the worst of it being Derek seemed to be growing stronger.

"You see now?" Derek growled, his massive hands wrapped around Dashuan's throat after ducking a sloppy punch. "This is the true face of Aberrant kind. Destruction. Chaos. The monsters that deserve to ALWAYS be feared!"

Dashuan struggled against Derek's grip with his left hand pressed between his large spiked fingers, his vision starting to blur as he punched into unmoving layers of skin-armor with his right; his bones shuddering with each attack. With a desperate surge of welled up power, he increased the gravity around them a hundredfold. The deck beneath their feet buckled and gave way, sending them plummeting into the ship's interior as Dashuan's nerves blasted pain from the exertion of energy. They crashed through metal layers, Derek's new form shrugging off impacts that would have pulverized a normal human into a pink puree and laughing loudly as they fell. They finally came to rest in the engine room, surrounded by hissing pipes and confused engineers that ran in fear. "Everyone out!" Dashuan managed to choke out as he broke free of Derek's grasp with a double kick to what used to be his crotch. The engineers didn't need to be told twice, fleeing through emergency hatches before he even spoke.

Derek rose to a staggering 12 feet tall, his head scraping the ceiling and breaking pipes that screamed as steam cascaded out. "You still try to save them," he sneered in the glow of the red lights . "Even as we hunt you down like animals..."

"Because it's the right thing to do," Dashuan shot back, gathering his strength for another attack that manifested in a deep lilac glow around his hands. "Because we're better than this!" With a roar of rage, Dashuan manipulated gravity around his fists and swung, each punch landing with the force of a kamikaze jet and in quick succession; purple energy wrapping Dashuan with each second. Derek staggered back, caught off guard by the ferocity of the assault and spitting black blood all over the engine room along with human teeth. Yet Derek's new Aberrant physiology was adapting rapidly. His armored skin began to absorb the kinetic energy of Dashuan's blows and morphed blunted, glowing brighter with each impact and swelling with energy. With a flex of his massive arms, he released the stored energy in a devastating electric shockwave in all directions.

Dashuan was sent flying sideways, crashing through the ship's hull and out into the open air once again. He tumbled end over end, struggling to regain control in the smoke covered atmosphere. As he finally stabilized, he took in the full scope of the battle.

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The sea was littered with burning wreckage and bodies, both human and Aberrant. The sky was crisscrossed with tracer fire and energy blasts with no signs of stopping. Rising from the sinking destroyer like some eldritch horror was Derek, his body now easily the size of sedan and trailing smoke. "I will end this," Derek's voice boomed across the battlefield. "I will end all of you!" Energy began to coalesce around Derek's massive form, building to levels that made Dashuan's hair stand on end and teeth rattle as the molecules deformed around the beast. He realized with horror what was about to happen; remembering Arc's full power when used in the cornfield like second nature.

"Everyone, fall back!" he screamed into the fray. "He's going to--" Everything went searing white. The blast that erupted from Derek's transformed body dwarfed anything Dashuan had ever seen. It was as if a small sun had been born and died in an instant. The shockwave flattened everything in its path. Ships were vaporized, their steel hulls turning to superheated plasma and engulfing any still aboard. The ocean itself parted momentarily, creating a massive steam cloud that blotted out the stars and hazed the area in more fog which left jets plummeting out of the sky along with molten slag that used to be aircrafts.

When Dashuan's vision cleared, he found himself floating in a sea of devastation and burning oil. The fleet was gone, replaced by a churning maelstrom of debris and sludge of bodies. The island, once a lush paradise, was now a smoldering ruin. At the center stood Derek, his massive form not even heaving as he let out bellowing laughter. "Do you see now?" Derek's voice was quieter, almost sad as he settled down. "The power is too much for any to safely bear–anyone infected must die.”

Dashuan looked around desperately for survivors. He spotted Ultress, her mask cracked, struggling to stay afloat as her device smoked and sputtered electricity. Mina's unconscious form bobbed in the waves nearby being held up by her sister's grasp. Of Arc and Air Force, there was no sign. Unlike the Lessers, Dashuan could see many of their dead faces and shorn parts littered among the humans…no difference could truly be seen in death. With a heavy heart, Dashuan realized the truth. There were no winners here. Only survivors as Derek began to gather energy for another blast, Dashuan knew that even that was in question. In that moment, surrounded by the consequences of their actions, Dashuan wondered if it had all been worth it. As he prepared himself for what might be his final stand, he silently vowed that, win or lose, he would find a way to end this cycle of destruction even if it killed him…He knew he had made that promise time and time again, but this time, he had a clear enemy to peace seething in front of him clearer than day itself.

Derek's bulging eyes locked onto Dashaun’s, glowing with white malevolent energy. "Still got some fight left?" he growled as he slammed his fists together.

Dashuan set his jaw, fists clenched at his sides. "Round two, you son of a bitch." he confirmed without pause, rage boiling over into the immense lilac glow of his eyes.

The moment of resolution to an end was short-lived. A deafening roar shook the air around them, and from a smoldering wreck of the dwelling that once stood, far off on the beach emerged AirForce, his body slightly damaged and engulfed in a blazing yellow inferno that pushed out from his body, but very much alive and screeching. AirForce's eyes snapped open, glowing with an eerie yellow light which dwarfed a lighthouse's luminance. He rose from the beach with pulses of force emanating outward that pushed the sand out in a blinding wave of particles, hovering in place as he stared at Ultress in the distance.

Dashuan looked down to see if he could make out her words from the fracture in her mask–she only mouthed the words

“No…”

A grin spread across AirForce's face, his mouth, nose, and eyes aglow in Aberrant energy. "ENOUGH BULLSHIT!" he shrugged off the flames with a single flick of his body fifty feet forward, and then flashed toward Derek in a flight that only revealed his afterimage. The immense sonic boom of his departure created a tidal wave that swamped what remained of the shoreline behind him. In the blink of an eye, he was there, hovering before Derek with an impassive face as the shockwave of the sonic boom echoed around him and caught up to them with a thundering roar. "I still need round one…bitch-boy" AirForce sneered, cracking his knuckles still covered in yellow flames that continuously burned in the pouring rain.

“Gladly.” Derek answered with a simultaneous energy blast that came from both hands. AirForce dodged with a split second reflex, the beams harmlessly heating the upper atmosphere into a blazing light show behind his body.

"Cheap shot," AirForce said with no visible outline, he was moving faster than even Dashuan could comprehend. AirForce became ethereal, unleashing devastating a strike directly to Derek's jaw, the blow powerful enough to trigger earthquakes below and send tsunami sized waves to crash over the island. Dashuan watched in awe and horror like a child, struggling to keep up with the fight but weathering the massive shockwaves that sent instinctual fear through his bones. He manipulated gravity to bring Ultress a raft of ripped tarping and coolers.

"Don't just float there," Ultress shouted over the ocean as she clasped her sister. “They're both unstable! We need to end this before they–" A shockwave sent a wave crashing over Ultress before she could finish that made her brace her body as a large wave overtook her.

Dashuan focused intensely, creating localized areas of intense gravity and trying to pin down Derek. The monster began to stumble mid-air, momentarily caught off guard by the sudden shift of momentum. AirForce seized the opportunity, landing another strike that completely unhinged Derek’s jaw and left it hanging from sinew. After swinging behind him mid-air with another sonic boom, AirForce grabbed both of Derek’s arms, one in each flame engulfed hand. "FUCK YOU ARMISTEAD!" he screamed manically, and with a display of strength that boggled the Dashuan’s scrambling mind, he ripped Derek in two from the center with a massive splurt of ebony blood that sizzled the ocean.

For a moment, silence fell across the battlefield as the two chunks splashed into the waves below. Dashuan frantically flew toward them but was instantly sent aback; to his horror, the two halves of Derek began to reform and grow in a flash of red light from just below the ocean's surface. "You fool," the Dereks spoke in unison, their voice shaking the heavens above the water. "You've only made me stronger!" The twin Dereks, now freed from the limitation of a single form, shot out from the depths with ankles flaring energy. AirForce buckled, taking hits in every direction as the forms heightened their speed and landed strikes in unison before he could attack. Dashuan watched in despairful fear as their strongest ally was now being beaten back.

He looked up at the star-filled sky, and an idea struck him. A terrible, possibly suicidal idea. "Ultress," he called out, his voice heavy with the weight of his decision. "I need you to calculate something for me. My plan is to create a gravity well powerful enough to lift Derek into space, is that possible?"

Ultress's eyes widened as she realized what he was planning. "Dashuan…the strain would kill you…your power takes too much of a toll on your body."

"But would it work?" he pressed pleadingly as he watched AirForce be snapped back and forth between the Dereks’ now glowing forms.

Ultress hesitated, then nodded slowly. "Theoretically, yes. But Dashuan, you can't—"

"We don't have a choice," he cut her off. "It's the only way to save what's left of our own kind...maybe even the entire world!" As AirForce continued to battle the twin Dereks, buying them precious time while being beaten severely, Dashuan grappled with the enormity of his decision.

He thought of all he'd be leaving behind—his hopes of being a hero, his dreams of finding his place among the originals, the possibility of a peaceful coexistence between humans and Aberrants that he seemed the only one to truly care about. But as he watched the devastating battle unfold, as he saw the broken bodies of humans and Aberrants alike strewn across the ocean, he knew what he had to do. "I won't let Derek win…" he said to Ultress, his voice filled with a grimness that almost seemed to calm the storm around.

Ultress, approval in her shining pink eyes, began to explain the calculations and where he would need to position himself. As Dashuan listened, preparing himself for what might be his final act, he knew that he would succeed no matter what the cost.