As the beast climbed higher and higher, Cookie was trying to figure out a solution that would save Yggdrasil while at the same time using this opportunity to keep everyone else occupied. While the root system was still expanding, she needed Yggdrasil to be able to grow uninterrupted if possible.
As Cookie's main goal was at the forefront of her mind, she scanned the beast. The scan showed that it only had enough energy to continue its current path for another 30 seconds or so. The unfortunate part was that once it ran out of the energy being used as a boost, it still had its wings. Otherwise, it would crash directly into the ocean. The beast was moving so fast that it was already about three-quarters of the way to Hawaii. Even if it just glided down, it could reach the islands in less than a few minutes.
Somehow, she needed to make it crash into the ocean where she could either finish it off or leave it weak enough that it was no longer a threat to her plans. Although she would prefer for it to be the main distraction, killing it was a better option than having it hinder Yggdrasil’s growth. As she teleported in front of it, she realized a horrible fact about the entire flight. Miniature versions of the beast had been shooting out with the plasma used as a booster. Now, not only were the wings creating these little abominations, but all the plasma released from the beast, from the wings and boosters, created them as well. There were thousands of them now, and they were all flying in different directions.
She didn’t care about most of them. She was only worried about the ones headed back towards South America where the tree was located. She sent mental instructions to the protectors. They needed to know that they would have company soon, and a lot of it. She detailed the abilities and the danger they faced due to its fire affinity.
The dryads were not able to respond, currently lacking any telepathic capabilities, but Cookie could tell that they had received the message and would prepare the warriors based on their actions after delivery of the message.
As she continued to push, the head that she had blinded opened its mouth and shot a slew of dragon breath. The fire wasn’t normal. It had a strange yellow and red tint to it. It was so hot it was almost unbearable. Even with Cookie's fully awakened bloodline and her void abilities, the fire almost disrupted her thought processes. She was barely able to retain consciousness. Attempting to escape the flame, she tried to teleport away. Somehow, the flame had blocked that as well. Next, she attempted to utilize a time dilation field and slow the creature. Instead of reaching her maximum effect of 10,000 to 1, the creature's speed only cut in half. Cookie decided she had dealt with enough and spoke out loud.
“System, you might want to get everyone to help put this thing down before it finds any more mana or goes back into the earth. Its lava ability might regenerate its cores and start producing its own mana again. I can’t beat it on my own, and my dad's busy with his bloodline. I’ll put a mental tracker on it, but I’m done after that. Just follow this signal.”
As she finished speaking, Sim immediately responded. “Thank you, Cookie. I still cannot locate anomalies or the system will not be completed in time. Make your tracker on a mental frequency that any telepath can locate.”
A second later, Cookie started to drop from the sky. She used all of her mental fortitude to create and push a small fireproof tumor into the beast's right head, directly behind the normal location of the third eye. Locating the tumor here created a small signal that activates every few minutes as the beast's mana passed through this part of its channel.
Just as she finished, the time dilation dissipated and the beast was gone. As Cookie continued to fall, she finally regained some of her strength. The further she got from the beast, the more power returned. She teleported back to the mountain range the beast had destroyed. The small versions of the beast were no match for Cookie now that she had regained some of her strength. She focused a small amount of void energy into each one, and they dropped dead in an instant. Cookie had killed over 200 when she realized that there were some headed directly towards the tree. She teleported to the edge of the fog that protected the rainforest and saw a horrific sight. Each one of the beasts that had made it to the edge was dissipating the fog. As they made their way through the forest, each one would leave a flaming rot that started to spread throughout the forest. It was a grotesque flaming puddle of what appeared to be a plasma substance. As it touched the vegetation, it almost came alive, consuming everything in its path while it inched forward.
Cookie went as fast as she could. Slowing time down again, she was able to achieve a 100 to 1 ratio. She teleported all over, hitting each of the beasts with a void tendril. One after another, they disappeared. As each of the beasts succumbed to the void attack, a dryad would appear and immediately start healing the rot. The process was slow but appeared to be working. Occasionally, the rot would dig underground, and the dryad would have to sacrifice a tree by pushing its roots up from underneath to surface the rot.
The more of the beasts that she destroyed, the more of her power returned. She was able to slow time even more now that she had killed over 1,000 of the monster's smaller versions. She continued to slaughter them one by one. After she had gotten down to the last one in the area, she was back to full power. She decided to run a test on the last one. She slowed time to her maximum of 10,000 to 1. As the world froze, she slowly approached the final monster. With each step, her time dilation was less and less effective. Once she was within a few feet, it was down to a 10 to 1 ratio. Each step she took backing away slowed time even more. As she stepped back to about 50 feet, she was at full dilation again.
“So the closer I get, the more it messes with my powers. I wonder if it’s just mine or all mana powers?”
Cookie sent out a mana bolt, striking the creature in the center head. She slowly allowed time to increase and watched as the head expanded and eventually exploded.
“Okay, so mana bolt still works just fine.” She said out loud, “Why does it mess with my powers?”
As she tried to think, she remembered a detail about hers and the only bloodline not currently active. The missing bloodline carried parts of purple mana. It had two other components, but that information was not given to her. She had deemed it unimportant. The purple mana had the ability to nullify other forms of mana. The only one it couldn’t nullify was origin mana. It was the most feared of all the bloodlines due to its ability to make the others obsolete and nullified. Most universes did not have origin mana, or their reserves were almost gone. This was due to abuse and the destruction of anything that produced origin mana due to jealousy and greed.
As the information resurfaced, she recalled the beast. The head on the left had two glowing purple eyes. “Damn it, I blinded the wrong one. What was the middle head supposed to do?” she said to herself.
As she scanned the beast, she realized that it had three forms of mana running through its channels: purple, red, and origin. Attempting to reassure herself that she was correct about the purple mana, she let time speed up to a 20 to 1 ratio. She watched as the beast's channels flowed with red mana and then purple. The purple immediately nullified the red, causing it to disappear. She then decided to test one more theory. She used a void tendril and hit the beast in both of the purple eyes. This didn’t just blind it on that particular head but also stopped the production of that form of mana.
“The beast's eyes glow because that’s where the mana’s created. Oh crap,” she said. She didn’t want to give Sim any further help, but she knew that if the creature made it back into the earth, then Yggdrasil would have trouble completing the root system needed. With both purple eyes still producing mana, she knew she had to act.
She teleported to Oahu. The beast had already landed and was attempting to pound through the top of Ko’olau, a dormant volcano. Cookie started to power up two of the most powerful void tendrils she had ever created. She knew the second she got within range her power would start to be nullified. Just as she reached full power, she pushed for the most powerful time dilation she could. Because of her proximity to the creature, she was only able to achieve a 100 to 1 ratio. She teleported up in front of the far left head and attacked. The beast immediately started to speed up, the nullification process already taking effect. Knowing it would be finished if it lost its nullification, it lifted its arm to block and closed both eyes.
As the eyes were almost closed, both tendrils were able to sneak through, and the creature let out a deafening scream. Both eyes were destroyed. As it flailed around, smashing everything within reach, Cookie felt her power returning. She could easily destroy the beast now that its nullification mana was almost gone.
She decided to make sure it could never recreate the purple mana production no matter how much origin mana it accessed. She powered up an origin mana tendril and sliced off the far left head. As soon as the head fell, she hurried and teleported back to her compound.
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“That should keep 'em occupied for a while,” she said as Hannah ran over and started inspecting her for injuries.
…
On the other side of the galaxy, I appeared in the middle of an unknown solar system. This particular system of planets contained multiple ice giants that rotated around a protostar, still gathering materials from a gigantic molecular cloud.
My power was pulsating in an ever-increasing pattern. Tendrils of each type of mana shot out at random intervals. I was still in my gigantic form, growing larger and larger every second. As I closed my eyes and focused on my core, I could see miniature cores forming inside of it. “Wait, this looks just like Peaches' core does, but mine has more types of mana,” I said out loud. It was strange. I could hear myself, but my voice was distorted and almost sounded like it boomed from within the universe itself. One mini core for each type of mana had appeared. They began pulsing in a geosynchronous cycle: Red, Blue, White, Green, Peach, Yellow, Pink, Purple, Void, and then Divine. As soon as the void cycled, it appeared like it wanted to consume the others, including the purple, but it stayed on course due to the divine keeping it in line, pulsing directly to the center sphere. As soon as the divine hit, the cycle started again. Over and over, this continued, getting faster and faster, until they were pulsing so fast that they were solid streams of light, beaming directly into the center sphere. A perfect cycle of endless power.
The center sphere grew and grew. My body expanded with it, correlating in size to the center core.
Planets seemed small in comparison to my newfound nature. The larger I grew, the more pressure I felt from my core. I had to stop. I didn’t know how much further I could go. I applied all the willpower I could, compressing down onto my core. The lights pulsed brighter and brighter. The harder I pressed, the harder each core pushed back.
I finally relented. I let go of all desire to keep the power contained. Each pulse of light released an astronomical amount of power. Releasing astronomical force waves, the solar system I was in was destroyed in mere seconds. As the power continued to grow, I could sense that the waves became stronger and more destructive. I could feel each power trying to perform its correlating function. When blue was pushed out, it attempted to repair the damage to the celestial bodies. When green reached the remains of the planets, plant life would grow and die off instantly due to no environment or atmosphere. This went on for what seemed like ages. With every pulse, the power became stronger, and my body, still growing, became a catalyst of destruction.
All of a sudden, I felt a dip in power. When my peach core attempted to unite the others, I could feel solar winds pushing and pulling. All of a sudden, the power was gone. My pink mana was unavailable. It came back an instant later, but for a moment, there was nothing. I had lost a huge chunk of peach mana.
With my consciousness wavering and all coherent thought dissipating, I focused as much as I could on containment. I decided right then that this power would not control me but that I would control it. With my desire locked in, I pushed. Deep down inside, I could sense the only way to avoid my ultimate disintegration was to lock the power to each core and only release what I wanted when I wanted it.
I pushed and pushed on the first core. As I contained the Red core, it cracked. I felt agonizing pain and almost released it, but then the pink core released some mana and healed the core. The more I pushed, the bigger the cracks, but pink mana immediately came and healed it. After multiple attempts, I finally found the perfect position and pressure and locked the core in place. Red mana began to slowly condense, and the production slowed to a crawl. “I can control it like this,” I thought. So I moved on to the next.
The blue core was not as difficult. The red must have been harder to control due to its intrinsic nature. Blue was a repairing and fixing mana. As I condensed it, the core only cracked twice due to the pressure of so much mana being contained in such a small space. Every time it cracked, the pink was immediately available to heal the problem.
As I went through each core, condensing them one by one, the only problems I ran into were with the purple and void cores. The purple core was almost destroyed because every time the pink mana was released to heal the cracks that appeared, the purple nullified it. Eventually, enough pink mana was released to heal the cracks before it could catastrophically explode, which would have removed all ability to utilize that type of mana.
When I started condensing the void core, the divine mana had to surround it nonstop. The void core has a never-ending hunger, and the only thing that can prevent it from completely taking over is divine mana. The void core did not crack the entire time I pushed. As soon as it tried to fight back and start devouring, divine mana would encompass the core and slow down the process.
When I was finally at the last miniature core, the divine core, all the others began to pulse. Their lights began linking with the main central core, then shooting to the divine core. As they all pushed into the core, the divine core compressed itself and locked away the excess power. It was almost as if it had its own consciousness, like it knew what needed to be done and just did it. The main core was the focus now. It was what produced and allowed usage of origin mana. All the other bloodlines required Sim to facilitate their origin mana use. The cores only produced their particular type of mana.
Peaches was the only exception. Her bloodline was multi-powered and could produce origin mana as well. Mia was able to as well now due to our bond, but her core was not designed to produce origin mana originally.
As I focused on the main core, the sphere began to spin faster and faster, producing an increasing amount of origin mana that was extremely hard to control. On multiple occasions, a gigantic shockwave of origin mana pulsed out. The effects of these waves were completely erratic. One wave changed a destroyed planet into a double star, rotating around each other in perfect synchrony. Another wave altered the path of an asteroid and changed its structure to solid origin mana, flying off towards another galaxy. After hundreds of waves, I had finally found a way to compress it enough to lock the core and give me complete control. With one final explosion of all the cores, I pushed every bit of excess mana into one final explosion of light. Stretching millions of light-years in all directions, I was finally able to shrink back down to normal size.
“MIKE!!” I heard in the back of my mind. It sounded almost like a whisper. “MIKE!!” I heard again. As I tried to focus on the sound, I finally heard it as clear as ever. “MIKE!!” Sim yelled.
“What?” I responded annoyingly. “Why are you screaming?”
“Mike, you’ve been gone for almost two full years! You wouldn’t answer when I called, and your power blocked any attempts at finding you or bringing you back.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“The only reason I found you is because I just finished the system and devoted all my processing to looking for anomalous mana production.”
I almost didn’t believe her. Why would Sim say it’s been almost two years? I just barely teleported here.
“Sim, are you sure? It feels like I just got here.”
“Peaches has been traveling all over the galaxy looking for you. I am ready to release the system. We have less than three months before total shield failure and need to finalize the hero candidates. What’s left of them.” This made me pause in confusion, but before I could speak, she continued. “Peaches evolved to her ultimate form but left Earth as soon as she finished.”
As soon as Sim completed the last sentence, I felt a pressure building. I could tell an incoming teleport bubble was trying to appear, but my core had stopped it. I allowed it to come through, and Peaches appeared.
“DADDY!” she screamed, and I immediately felt her pushing against my face, licking me nonstop. She had me held in place, but it felt different than normal. Almost like she had... As I looked down, I could see that her entire body shape had changed. She was now in an almost human-looking dog form with real arms and hands. She was holding me with her arms in a gigantic bear hug. This was the weirdest thing I had ever felt. She still had her normal head and big disgusting tongue, but a human-like body.
“Peaches, what did you do? You have arms? And legs? Where’s your…” I didn’t even get a chance to finish my sentence, and she teleported back about 50 feet. She exploded in light. Her wings were more majestic than ever. The inky black was gone. Each feather had a full symphony of colors embedded into the design. The wings extended out 25 feet on each side with runes of the most intricate design—runes that I had never seen and had no idea what their purpose was. Behind her extended 11 fox tails full of a beautiful rainbow of colors. Each of them swayed in a synchronized pattern.
As she stood there puffing her chest out as if she was posing for a picture, she appeared next to me, and in front of me, and then more and more of her appeared all around. As they all looked at me, the one next to me began to speak.
“Daddy, don’t you ever leave me again. I missed you so much. I’ve gotten really strong now. I’m the strongest ever. I did what Sim said was revolving, I think. I don’t know what revolving is, but I did it two times. When I woke up, you were gone. But then, after I beat up some bad guys and ate the weird fire mountain man, two new colors were in my belly and I had to sleep again. Sim said I revolved again. What is revolving? Did you revolve? Did you do the color thingy too? I can see your colors and you have the same as me. Sim said she didn’t know about those colors until one day she just knew all about the colors. But I’m so strong now. I found the bird. I ate it. But then it was there again a million days later. I had to eat it again. How does it come back after I eat it? I missed you so much, Daddy. Can we go home now?”
As I sat there listening to Peaches ramble on and on, I couldn’t help but smile. The reality of how long I had been gone still hadn’t hit me yet, but I had a strange feeling.
“Yes, Peaches, let’s go home. Could you change back to normal, though? I think you were perfect how you were.”
She looked at me with a fake shocked look on not just her face, but all of her clones' faces as well. It was very disturbing. “You don’t like me with people's arms?” All of her clones said in unison. I just stood there trying not to laugh. As she stared at me, I was about to speak again when she beat me to it. “I know, this is weird, huh, Daddy.” All of the clones vanished, and she was back to her perfect little puppy form. The only difference was the increased number of tails, and her wings were still the vibrant multicolored majesties with numerous new runes inlaid in the feathers.
“Perfect,” I said right before I picked her up, wrapped her in a hug, and teleported us home.