Ariock blinked around the galaxy faster than he had ever teleported before.

He allowed nothing to distract him, aware that the cost of failure was everyone he cared about. His galaxy armor solved his mortal concerns, allowing him total focus. He chased locations on Thomas’s cosmic map.

It was impossible for him to defuse the ultraheavy meteoric payloads. He couldn’t figure out how to do that. The best he could do was use his brute strength to punch the deadly meteors off course. They were still lethal to stars and planets, but at least they would never hit a temporal gateway and balloon in destructive potential.

He figured he would team up with Thomas to do a more thorough job later on, when they had leisure time.

For now, Ariock could only hope that he wasn’t knocking the death meteors onto trajectories that would bring them into contact with some delicate ship, station, inhabited moon, or inhabited planet.

It was a good thing that Thomas had burned Ariock’s retinas with painful precision. The cosmic map slowly faded from his vision. His eyes healed, and the map was gone by the time he finished with the tenth payload meteor.

Fortunately, Ariock recalled where to find the eleventh and twelfth payloads. Sveg. Cygot. He could find them.

But he was running low on time.

The doomsday trigger meant that each payload was sent simultaneously, giving Ariock less time to work with. The first few were missile swarms. But his final targets were already supermassive lethal meteors on the verge of becoming black holes.

Ariock saved the Sveg solar system. One left to go.

He threw himself across the galaxy in search of Cygot.

He found devastation. An entire star was destabilized, sucked towards the ever-increasing mass of the meteoric payload. Planets and asteroids followed in its wake. Ariock could sense the temporal gateway, a rift in space-time opening to welcome the deadly mass.

He went titanic.

He sped across the cosmos. He was the size of a star, with all of its power.

But all his size, power, and strength wasn’t enough. Ariock tried to pull the nascent black hole off its deadly course. It pulled him instead.

Ariock leveraged himself away from the lethal pull of intense gravity—just in time. The temporal stream swallowed the payload. It flared with sickly radiance, as if delighted by the destructive poison it now carried.

Ariock was left alone in a void of defeat and failure.

Earth. Hadn’t Thomas said something about saving Earth if he failed?

Ariock downsized from a cosmic titan to a puny mortal. As always, the shock of the change left him reeling.

He was getting better at ignoring that, though. Some part of his mortal self remembered that he was, in fact, a giant. He didn’t get knocked down easily. He supposed that someday, if he lived long enough, he would be stuck halfway between being a mortal man and being a colossus. He should enjoy being small and delicate and young whenever he had the rare opportunity to feel that way.

He went into a clairvoyant trance and teleported to the outer orbit of his home solar system.

Safely ensconced in his armor, Ariock floated in deep space. He flattened himself across the equivalent of a parsec, netlike. He sought—

A temporal stream erupted, splitting open wider than any gateway should.

It vomited destruction.

Ariock’s core of a human body gritted its teeth while the cosmic titan version of himself pushed back against an unending storm that wanted to destroy everything in existence. He swept titanic arms of protection over Jupiter and Saturn and their moons and rings. He had to protect the entire solar system.

He could guess why the Death Architect had programmed her doomsday to destroy this supposedly primitive backwater as one of the first targets. She wanted her enemies to grieve. She claimed to lack emotions, but it seemed that even the consummate Torth felt no hypocrisy about being vindictive.

The pressure of what spewed from the temporal gateway was becoming too much to bear.

Ariock hammered back at it with all his strength, trying to beat it. He was packing up a black hole. He was containing a quasar.

He was losing strength.

He hated his own uncertainty and weakness. He was barely holding back the storm of destruction, and if he gave up even for a microsecond, that would be the end of humankind.

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Ariock gazed at the blue and white marble that was planet Earth. At his current size, it was smaller than a marble to him. It was a speck. He could reach out and squish it between his cosmic fingers.

Was the temporal stream network delivering death to multiple solar systems right now?

No.

This could not be happening across the whole galaxy. Thomas would not have told him to protect Earth if there was no hope. Ariock must have stopped enough of the payloads to prevent the whole calamitous chain reaction. The Death Architect had tried her best, but she had been unable to outwit Thomas.

And she had better not try again.

Ariock blasted power against the endless void that wanted to swallow every planet in sight. Head down, he barreled into it and forced the void back. He would protect Earth even if it killed him. No excuses. He could not return to Vy with the blood of all humans on his hands.

The barrage was scouring him away.

As he struggled to maintain his solidity and size, he thought of Vy. He had to stay strong for her.

They were getting married.

Family meant something to Vy, just as it did to Ariock. They had a future together. It didn’t matter what fate preferred, or what the Death Architect planned, or what obstacles got in their way. Ariock was not going to give up.

Never.

He would not let billions of humans die because he was too weak.

He was the cosmic storm. He was countless space rocks and ice and radiation and power. He was unstoppable. If he wanted to form planets, he could do so. If he wanted to orchestrate orbits, he had that power. He could create or destroy stars. And he could damn well shield any habitat he chose, even if it was a planet.

“RrrrAAAAAGH!”

Ariock roared, his chest and mouth wider than the sun. Solar flares snarled and died in concert with his voice. The barrage of matter curled backwards—into the temporal stream.

He wasn’t sure what triggered the obliteration event. Perhaps his assault pushed the black hole against the temporal stream, and maybe it struck the gateway at a certain angle. All he knew for sure was that his struggle ended in an abrupt explosion of radiation.

It probably had astronomers on Earth worried sick.

But it wasn’t going to kill them.

Ariock went small, and nearly threw up in his helmet. He was so tiny! It was one thing to go from a storm titan to his normal size; it was another thing to downsize from a stature that made the sun look delicate. He needed a few seconds to acclimate to a whole different scale of existence, and then more seconds to readjust to having a heart and blood vessels and lungs.

He wasn’t sure he had enough wherewithal left to teleport right now. His body tumbled through space. He felt battered.

Ariock cleared his throat, knowing that his voice would activate the supercom embedded in his helmet. He told it to activate the command channel for the heroes. Then he said, “Can anyone hear me?”

Thomas should hear him. Garrett, too. And Evenjos, if she was wearing her supercom.

Silence.

“Anyone?” Ariock repeated.

He needed Vy to be safe. Surely she was among heroes and well-protected? What could go wrong?

Other than the prophecy of the Lone Survivor?

Vy was unarmored, without any supercoms. The only way he would speak to her was in person.

Ariock closed his eyes and struggled to recall the cosmic map. After so much rapid journeying and so much moving of supermassive objects, he was close to depletion. He had enough air to last an hour or so. If not for his worry for Vy, he would have rested in his galaxy armor, floating haplessly through space.

Instead, he stretched across countless light-years.

He found the Araya Moon Belt. Vy must still be in the Death Architect’s lair, where he had last seen her, but the asteroids all looked alike to him. He had no clue which one had an embedded fortress.

He would have to perform a closer inspection once he was on location. He teleported.

And reeled from exhaustion.

Teleportation usually cost him nothing, but he definitely felt weakened. He had the beginnings of a headache.

Warriors claimed that this feeling was a warning to stop using one’s powers.

Ariock did a barrel roll, straining his eyesight to see every dim rock. He unfurled his awareness. Mirrors would confound his clairvoyance, but they had no effect on his actual awareness. If he encompassed every icy rock, he should be able to detect life sparks.

His widened consciousness encountered…

Nothing but frozen rocks.

Ariock fought an urge to panic. Maybe he had arrived in the wrong part of the asteroid belt?

He propelled himself elsewhere and tried again. And again. He tried several more times before he encountered the vast thrum that was Evenjos.

Not that he could pinpoint her center. Evenjos had always been too powerful for him to locate her center.

He did, however, see debris.

Lab equipment. Pipes. Cratered ruins. Fractured rocks.

A headless corpse dressed in Garrett’s armor.

Ariock recalled the prophetic painting, but he wanted to reject the proof of it. He had assumed that he would be close enough to save Garrett, or at least make an attempt, when the time came. This wasn’t fair! He hadn’t had a chance to say goodbye.

A broken wall of rock floated aside and revealed another body. This one wore a suit of dragon armor. It seemed to be standing upright, space surfing on a fragment of metal floor.

“Thomas?” Ariock said.

The boy moved his arms in some kind of greeting or “help me” gesture.

Their supercoms weren’t working. Ariock supposed that made sense, since no one had responded to his earlier attempts to communicate.

Ariock jetted closer, putting himself at eye level with Thomas’s helmet. He enveloped both of their heads in a flexible bubble of artificially created atmosphere. It wasn’t perfect, but it would keep them alive for a few minutes.

As soon as they were encompassed, Ariock retracted his visor faceplate. Thomas did the same.

“Thanks for stopping doomsday,” Thomas said. “Supercom network is down. I assume—”

“Where is Vy?” Ariock broke in.

Thomas made a vague gesture in a direction. “That way, maybe?”

Ariock swore.

“You’re dangerously depleted,” Thomas said. “Find her, but then rest. Don’t teleport her until you’ve rested for thirty minutes.”

Ariock gave him a look.

“Prioritize rest,” Thomas emphasized. “Otherwise—”

Ariock didn’t want to hear it. He was well aware of risks and dangers. Thomas was depending on him. Whatever. Ariock slid his faceplate closed and waited for Thomas to follow suit.

Then he let his air bubble evaporate. He rocketed away in the direction that Thomas had indicated.

He saw more frozen corpses. Battlebeasts. The Death Architect. But no sign of Evenjos or Vy.

Ariock cursed whatever calamity had happened while he was gone. He cursed Evenjos for failing to protect Vy. He cursed Thomas for losing Vy.

Most of all, he cursed himself.

He stretched his awareness outward, searching for life in the frozen void.