The plant golem flew towards me, and I rocketed towards the golem with two goals in mind—to find the third orb to access my third transformation and get Sunflower to understand Rosalina’s true feelings about the situation. The golem was massive, like the sadness and regret I knew was plaguing her mind, and the only way I was gonna get rid of those emotions was to blow the monster into smithereens. Our fists of desperation collided. It was a destructive clash of determination and rage, increasing the output of our power as we battled to see whose resolve would come out on top. It culminated in a shockwave that blew us both back, but that didn’t stop my body as I propelled back up.

Sunflower seemingly had the same idea, however, once her golem got close to me, when a strange looking plant with a mouth popped out of its chest and sprayed me with a yellow gas. I wondered to myself if she was trying to blind me, which wouldn’t have made sense considering I could still see through it. That question would soon be answered the moment I realized that my skeleton was afflicted by a sudden stiffness, rendering me unable to move my body. Then, the golem slammed its fist against my torso, sending me down to the unknown depths below. I was unsure if there was even a ground to break my fall, or if my paralyzed body would… keep falling.

As I watched Sunflower approach the green orb, a thought entered my mind. While I couldn’t physically move my body, my ability to absorb energy wasn't affected by the paralysis and my fingers were itching for it badly. So that’s exactly what I did, feeling the plant’s gas enter through my fingers and fill me with strength. Once I could move again, I zoomed straight for the golem, who was just about to grab Rosalina’s orb. I fired beams of energy out of all my fingers which were able to block the golem’s hands from the orb.

“Why… do you continue to get in my way?” said Sunflower, a darkness filling her voice. “I'm owed this and you know it!”

“I'm getting in your way to save you. It’s as simple as that!”

Upon hearing this, the golem immediately turned its head to me and shot out a barrage of vines from its body, all with the intent to skewer me. In the midst of zigzagging through the air in an attempt to avoid being stabbed, I felt a hand tap my head.

“Jerome, this is bad,” muttered Sunshine. “You can't let her get that orb no matter what, alright?”

I fired a flurry of bullets in all directions, vaporizing a couple of the sharp vines, but not all of them. “Yeah, I know. I'll lose that transformation and all the powers that come with it if she takes it from me. I don't even know if I'll be able to get it back.”

“Yeah, but I wasn't really talking about that. If that Type Two’s aura is taken out of you, she'll take over your body.”

“Huh!? Seriously?”, I asked, breaking even more vines with my fists like they were rocks. “So basically I’ll be dead?”

“In a way, yeah. It’ll be like she absorbed you instead of you absorbing her. You'll be the orb of aura inside her body.”

“What about the other two orbs though? This place is so damn big that I can’t even see it!”

“Other two?”, asked Sunshine, sounding confused. “You don’t have three orbs of aura in you, silly. You only have two.”

Two? That didn’t make any sense. Jesus sensed three inside of me— mine, Rosalina, and that other Type Two I absorbed. I would’ve asked her to clarify, though I had a fight to deal with first.

“Ok, ok. But how do I find the orb in here if the place is too big for me to see anything clearly?”

“If it’s too big, why don’t you just make it smaller?”, asked Sunshine, who said it as if I already had that plan in mind.

It sounded like a good idea though, and since this place was similar to the state between absorption then I should be able to do that. And I had the perfect place in mind.

“Sunshine, how do you know about all this in the first place? This is my body.”

“You subconsciously think of your daughter as more intelligent than you, so you created me with that opinion in your head. Albeit, just a little exaggerated.”

“Wait… does that mean I think of myself as stu-”

“Who cares about that!? Just get to creating already!”

I waited for the vines to get close to me, feeling the adrenaline take over my feet while I redirected some radioactive energy into my fist. Then, right before they could puncture my body, I darted towards the golem in an instant. I drove a punch straight into its chest, and the golem immediately lit up in a ball of green. The vines and leaves that its body was made up of quickly withered until they eventually turned to dust. Sunflower emerged from the explosion, twisting her body in unimaginable ways.

She whirled her head down to me and a large, pulsating sunflower spawned out of her mouth.

“Jerome, hurry up and do it already!” shouted Sunshine, who actually sounded worried.

I pretended to close my eyes and visualized the place, the environment, I thought would perfectly suit the situation at the moment. A place that would easily grant me the win that I was looking for.

“Sunspot!”

A flash of bright light exploded in my face as the world began to change in the way I wanted it to. What used to be a world of darkness began to light up, revealing a sea of flames beneath my feet under the crimson sky that was now above me. Mountains of heated rock towered over me, lava oozing out of the cracks. I noticed there was a sun-like structure right behind the mountains, and hovering in front of it was Rosalina’s daughter. Her body was smaller now—the same size she was when Jason first killed her.

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“A world built around pure heat…” Slowly, she flew as high as the new environment would allow her and touched the sky. Instead of more air, her hand felt a ceiling. “Is this your way of preventing my use of plants?”

“Is it working?” I asked confidently, cautiously approaching her.

“If I said ‘no’, you’d find out I was lying anyway. But…” She slapped her hands against each other. “There are other ways of using plants than just using their bodies.”

The moment she pulled her hands apart, a green flame ignited between them. It grew rapidly, expanding until it was the size of an average car. I was shocked, but mostly confused to see a girl, whose only ability was to create and manipulate plants, suddenly have the ability to create… fire! Now that I thought about it, Sunflower was using the same abilities that Rosalina had. Except that she had a couple new techniques up her sleeve, like a plant golem and now this.

“You know, most plants shouldn’t be capable of releasing this much gas, but that apocalypse changed them—mutated them.” Despite the roaring sea beneath me, crashing into the rocks next to them, her voice was the loudest of them all. “Now they produce all kinds of greenhouse gases. Thanks for creating this place. I needed the firepower.”

“Greenhouse!”

Feeling her ominous words pierce through me, I immediately flew towards one of the giant volcanoes, hoping they would serve as a good shield. Before I could make it, I felt a massive burst of heat erupt from half of my body, the ooze on my bones sizzling before it exploded in my face. I crashed head first through a volcano, landing into a pool of lava.

There were a few things I noticed while I floated on the red, hot liquid, aside from my bones slowly incinerating—my body thankfully immune to the pain. Half of my body was now gone, and the only thing left of my daughter was a single arm left upright in the lava. I knew she was simply a figment of my imagination, so I wasn’t too affected by it. However, what really caught my attention was the sight of a large, blue orb coming out of my body, casting a refreshing glow on a pool of hell.

I tried swimming through the lava, keeping my head up—sure that I finally found what I’d been searching for. Unfortunately, another blast of fire stopped me in my tracks, creating a barrier around the orb.

“I didn’t think you’d be so strong inside of my own body,” I murmured, turning my head towards Sunflower.

“I don’t know how you were able to change the environment, but you won’t be able to do that again,” she said. “I’m the energy inside of your body, so that makes me the owner of the state between release.”

“Well, this place is small enough, so I never really intended to change it if I c-”

“I have a question for you…” She lowered her body towards me, flame in hand. “Why did you want to save me so badly? You didn’t know me, and yet you fought so hard to protect me thinking I was in danger. Why?”

Once again, her voice was filled with conflict, as though she already knew the answer to that question but something within her was preventing her from accepting it.

“Because I wanted to,” I answered calmly. “I didn’t want to see you get hurt, so I did everything I could to stop that.”

“Wh-What!?”

“I’m just the kind of dad that hates seeing kids get killed… especially in a world like this one. Ever since that day I let some young survivor die ‘cause I wanted to ensure my kid’s safety, I realized that I never wanted to be placed in a situation like that ever again.”

“So… you don’t care about your daughter’s safety is what you’re saying.”

“Of course I care. But I wanted the option to save the ones I wanted to save while also being able to protect her. I thought the right answer to raising a kid in this world was to be a father first, and a human being second. That was the wrong answer. What I should’ve done… was to place being a father and being a human being in the same spot.”

Sunflower was speechless for what seemed like forever, seemingly taking in my words. They were words that I truly meant—ingrained into my soul like a tattoo.

Then, she finally opened her mouth. She didn’t speak like I thought she would. Instead, a loud cackle exited her mouth while she clenched her gut tightly.

“Y-Y-You… care about your daughter?” she hissed, breathing in and out. “Protect your daughter? You expect me to believe a fucking lie like that after you fed her all those… drugs for years and years… You didn’t stop, you just kept giving it to her till it sped up whatever was killing her.” She aimed her hand at the volcano I went through and somehow lifted a piece of debris from the ground. Rosalina’s orb was amongst the wreckage, nestled between two rocks. “It’s February now, right? She only has eleven months left and you’re spending it on some stupid race instead of finding a cure for your only child? What could my mom have possibly respected about you? I don’t get it!”

I remained silent.

“Oh yeah, and don’t get me started on all those scars she has. She’s only nine—younger than me. She shouldn’t have all those goddamn scars on her body. And did you seriously leave her alone with a man you only knew for a day!? What the hell is wrong with you? How can you call yourself a perfect father if all you make are bad decisions?”

I pointed two fingers at Sunflower. “I would never call myself the perfect father ‘cause being perfect makes parenting pretty boring.”

“Huh?” she muttered in disbelief, her lips quivering. The flame began to grow once more.

“Yeah, I did all those things, and you know what? I’m glad I made those mistakes ‘cause it helped me learn from them. Making mistakes is one of the first steps in being a true father. Do you wanna know what the first step i-”

“Shut up!”

Flames of green erupted from the spot in front of my feet, sending me spiraling through the sky until a large stone broke my fall. I slid off the rock and back to the ground, as drops of lava rained down on the area. I tried to regain my footing, though it was no use. Half of me was still gone and I was unsure when it would regenerate back. I shifted my attention to in front of me, and I saw that the blue orb was still intact—just a couple meters away from me.

I stretched my hand out, clawed through the ground, and pulled myself forward continuously. The ball was nearly within my grasp till Sunflower’s foot stepped on my hand.

“This isn’t my mother’s aura,” she said. “Who did you kill this time to get this?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You don’t know?” she laughed. “Of course you don’t know, old man. Hurting people is in your nature. You're a zombie, after all. The same things that killed my mom the first time…”

“Zombies finished it, but it was that Corleone guy that started it all,” I asserted. “I know you don’t want to talk about him since the only reason he put your mom in that shed was ‘cause you-”

“I told you to shut up!”

She gritted her teeth and stomped on the orb, shattering it entirely. My mouth gaped as I watched the pieces dissipate into the air, a sense of dread filling my bones once I realized that I was on the verge of losing.

Sunflower laughed tiredly. “Now… you have nothing left to keep you alive. Now… I can finally save my m-” Suddenly, she shrieked, holding her skull as her body began to convulse. “Wh-What the hell is happening to me!? I see… you. Is this your… past?”

My past? What the hell could she mean by that? I sensed that the aura in that orb was from the same transformation I had back in the Underground City, so why was Sunflower seeing my… Wait! I understand it now.

Jesus sensed three kinds of aura within my body using that technique of his, but he didn’t take into consideration that Sunflower wasn’t just energy I absorbed—she was living energy. Which meant that she herself was the third piece of aura. There were three auras within me, but not three orbs which was why my daughter corrected me earlier. No wonder I couldn’t find it anywhere even when I transformed the space. No wonder the orb emerged from my body…

“The orb is me!” I shouted, aiming my palm at the twitching girl.

In that instant, a blue light burst out of Sunflower and washed over my body like a raging tsunami. A ferocious level of intensity surged through me, grabbing my soul and loading it up with a fierceness only a radioactive beast would have. The half that was taken from me healed up in seconds while a massive flame of aura surrounded my body. I felt everything I needed to feel at that moment. The need to push past my limits. The strength to shatter all the guilt I’ve been feeling. The will to keep being a father.

Everything about the orb represented Jerome Hunter, and I didn’t need to absorb any of it. It was already… me.

The aura lifted me off the ground, like everyone who had ever supported me placed their hands on my back and pushed all together. Energy shaped like fire erupted from head, calves, shoulders, and elbows.

Finally, I regained my footing, and I immediately noticed that my height had grown by a couple inches—possibly the same height as Jason. I caressed my face and was relieved to feel the cracked smile was still there.

I looked over to Sunflower, who was in the middle of regaining her composure. “You didn’t let me finish my earlier sentence, so let me say the rest.”

She raised her hand, scowling at me.

I pointed a hardened fist at the girl. “The first step to being a father… is to love her with all your heart.”

“Nuclear Fist.”