I stared into the battlefield with overwhelmed numbness. That was a place I was not ready to go, and if Scalovera brought it to us, we were doomed. Something in me just wanted to lie back and let it happen, but an infinitely larger piece of me was too fucking pissed at the bastard right in front of me.

“Why?”

Scaovera flinched at the harshness of my one word, and his threaded tapestry of teleportation faltered slightly. If that was enough to break his focus, then he was even more pathetic than I thought. Just a politician dipping his toes in the ocean of war while he watched all the soldiers he commanded run out to drown in the tides of battle.

Only once he rebuilt his facade of control did Scalovera talk. “For the prosperity of the Staura. We’ve been sandwiched between powerful species for far too long, our lands slowly eroding under the influence of their massive power. Where once stood proud bastions of Stauran pride now stand disgusting filthy abysses of other lesser species and mindless Staura drones living their lives in depravity.”

Well, I hadn’t expected ‘Staura supremacist’ to be the hill Scalovera was willing to die on. But I was more than happy to give him that honour. I scrunched my nose and forced my palm in Scalovera’s direction, though I didn’t put any power behind it in the slightest. He still flinched away like the coward he was, and the picture through his threads almost fell back to square one.

“And you!” He backed up as far as he could until the cold metal wall that had protected him closed him in. Panic seeped in as his breathing accelerated and his body started to shake. “You’re here to corrupt my city! Endra’s city! The only bastion of Stauran purity that’s left on this drowned planet!”

I glanced back at the two supposed powerful Staura and gestured at them with my left hand.

“What about them? Did Endra fuck them up so bad that they just fell apart at the seams, or was that all you?”

Scalovera jabbed a finger at me. …No, not at me. Past me and at the corpses.

“They didn’t believe in our purity. In our innocence! They wanted to withdraw, to regroup, to abandon the city since Endra already got everything she wanted out of it! So I had to do it. Had to!” He spat with vitriol. “If they wouldn’t listen, then they didn’t need ears! They couldn’t see the true vision, so they didn’t need eyes! And their treacherous thoughts brought them further from Endra’s grand goal of squirming purity, so they no longer needed to think. Perfect, unthinking guards acting on perfect instincts from Endra’s gifts.”

He killed them. And he didn’t even realize it. “Disgusting.”

He puffed up a little as if I’d just agreed with him. I got Viri’s attention, then crushed my hand into a tight fist. Scalovera’s right boot shrunk down to the size of a grape in a spray of flesh, blood, and chunks of chipped bone.

“I was talking about you.” I said coldly and slowly walked towards the dead man. “There were so many people like you back on earth. Cowards who hide behind their stations of power and send so many people off to their deaths. Who stir up ideologies that should’ve been long dead just to give your political campaign a boost. Do you even care about the mountain of corpses outside this room? Do you even care about all the children losing parents, parents losing children–PEOPLE LOSING FUCKING PEOPLE–”

I loomed over Scalovera and slammed my hammer down through his right arm and shoulder. He screamed, but not loud enough. This wasn’t anywhere close to the suffering he deserved, but him being gone meant more to me than risking anything happening in the future. Even if it was a fraction of a fraction of a percent that something would let him live, I wasn’t going to take that risk.

“Please. Don’t hurt me.” He babbled incoherently. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

My vision clouded over with hatred. Viri crushed the rest of both his legs without me having to tell her, and the quiet stifled sobs coming through the communicator told me that there was a reason she was so fine with being violent.

I closed my eyes and thought of the Cotabos. Completely innocent people, with no skin in either side of the war, pulled by Endra into the end of their lives for absolutely no reason. There had to be other reservoirs like this under other cities, filled with parasites and unknowing Staura taking their last sips of water before they were called to die on Endra’s behalf.

“No. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

My hammer crushed Scalovera’s head. His tapestry unraveled into nothing, and aside from the copy of his core, I got nothing from the kill. No experience at all. He was just that pathetic.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“You did everything wrong.”

Viri squeaked as brain matter leaked out of the crushed helmet, then shifted to her normal size and stared at his body. She was as quiet as she could be through sobs, but she stood strong for now. I had to give her props for that.

I leaned down and ripped his core from his chest. Three sets of footsteps closed in on us, and I sent the one thing Scalovera had given us into my inventory before I took a deep breath and turned to face them.

Jun kicked a chunk of something away and lowered her gun. “Seb… what do we do now?”

“I… I guess we go back to Okeria.” I said slowly, giving everyone else all the time in the world to chime in. None did. “We might’ve killed the enemy leader, but they’re not the reason the enemy was fighting in the first place. If he was actually the one teleporting people in, that means we won’t have any more parasitic reinforcements. But we still have everyone left in the city to deal with.”

Mortician patted me on the shoulder without saying anything. They tilted their head to the side, as if to ask if I was okay. I appreciated the gesture and nodded slightly, but the truth was that I… wasn’t really fine. Somehow, I’d thought this would be the end of Endra. With this, she wouldn’t be a threat anymore and that I could live a semblance of a normal life.

That obviously wasn’t the case. She was stirring up a shitstorm of epic proportions, and eventually, everyone on the all-world would be swept up in it. Even if she decided I wasn’t a problem anymore, and that she’d already gotten everything she needed out of Rainbow Basin, I couldn’t just avert my eyes and pretend like this was the end.

Acasiana led the way back through the facility, and all the way until the teleporters blinked back on, I couldn’t find a perfect answer. Hell, I couldn’t even decide on what I was going to tell everyone. Ambus would be beyond pissed, and righteously so. All the citizens of Rainbow Basin had gone from a bloodless takeover to an extremely bloody one in a relatively short time, and I wasn’t innocent enough to think that this wouldn’t leave massive scars in the public trust. If Scalovera had actually taken over with isolationist sentiments, then… well…

I guess I’d have to leave. Go… somewhere.

The walls of the lit facility appeared in a flash of electricity. Okeria stared at all of us the moment we appeared, but didn’t say a word. He just took in the gore on my armor and nodded solemnly, then got right back to giving orders to everyone who was still fighting. This was the end of the war. It lasted less than a single day, but I had no idea how long the cleanup would take. Okeria’s kids were coming over terrifyingly soon, and Annette’s group had to be somewhere on the horizon. We had to make the city safe for them.

“Seb. Sit down. You’re shaking a little.” Jun insisted and brought a folding chair over for me. I looked down at my trembling hands as I involuntarily fell into the chair, all the while she looked at me with concern. She’d taken off her armor at some point, which I hadn’t even noticed.

Okeria handed me a bottle of normal water while Acasiana and Mortician walked off somewhere. They were talking about Scalovera, and how the city could recover–along with what would happen if everyone was actually infected with Endra’s parasites. It was the kind of thing I didn’t expect Mortician to be in the thick of, but they were also the expert on being forgotten.

I really hoped it didn’t come to some of the extremes I heard before they got out of earshot, but I readied myself for them anyway.

“So… he’s dead, huh.” Okeria said awkwardly as he stared at the model city. “Ya know, I kind of thought he would put up a little more of a fight. Then again, I also expected this from what I knew about the man. I guess… drown me, I don’t even know what I’m tryin’ ta say here.”

“It’s technically over. But it doesn’t feel like Scalovera should’ve been able to do all… that.” I gestured at the model with disdain, then took a long drink from the bottle. It definitely wasn’t water, but the burn helped remind me I was alive. “We just cut off one diseased bran from Endra’s rotting tree. And right as it fell off, we got a look into just how fucked up the reality of the situation actually is.”

Viri looked around awkwardly, then took a chair from the table and pulled it over to a corner. She sat down and turned away, but didn't make any effort to look like she wasn’t intently listening to us.

“We always kind of knew, though, didn’t we?” Jun sighed and pulled a chair next to me. “Scalovera was just Endra’s goon, but it was a surprise that he was working with her for so long. Plus, I really doubt he was the only one. How many other cities have someone like Scalovera secretly helping Endra in the shadows? Or… what about other Embodiments who’re trying to do something like she was? They could pull our entire species into an all-out war.”

“Not just our species.” Okeria said grimly. “Just got news from some of my contacts that there are incidents like this poppin’ up all over the all-world. Treaties are bein’ broken, Embodiments manifestin’ on the ground in so many different ways, and old resentments gettin’ opened up almost like they never healed in the first place.”

Fuck me, of course they were. This was what The End was scared of in the first place–that Endra breaking the rules would lead to everyone else breaking the rules. What I hadn’t expected was for it all to happen so quickly. And… fuck me, it really didn’t feel like there was anything we could do about it.

So we all sat there in silence. Victory hung over our heads like a single sunbeam after the clouds had lifted, yet there was still a hurricane on the horizon. I could tell there was a common sentiment we were all struggling with. Was this actually our problem? It felt so far above our heads and skill levels, and honestly, if we tried to do anything right now it would just lead to a few more casualties in the wars to come.

My chest burned at the thought. Something in my core told me that I wasn’t allowed to wash my hands of this and just walk away. But I couldn’t do anything about the Embodiments the way I was now. And as an errant message crackled to life in my communicator, I remembered what one part of the plan had been in the first place.

Dee’s voice came through loud, crisp, and clear. {We’re here for Sebastian Cormier. We want to help.}