"Every last one of you. Come at me. I'll show you the epitome of true Fate's might."
The Progenitor's soles touched the blank canvas of a platform below him. His long black hair erratically swaying with the wind like eldritch tendrils attached to his monstrous form, Atlas extended his hand, and with it, the Sword. All the while wide fang-toothed grin whitened by the overwhelming shadows of his darkened attire stained where his mouth should've been.
"Or are you too afraid?"
Eros already finished appearing before his father. His fist, ablaze with Fate, dove through the air and inch by inch, destroyed the space separating the Progenitor from his son. At the last possible second, the original Unconquerable's Fated knuckles produced a stray bolt of lightning and as it enclosed upon Atlas's pupil, he abruptly vanished.
Rematerializing behind Eros with his fingers tight around the collar of his shirt, the Progenitor pulled, watching the Unconquerable fly through the air. Albeit for a brief instance, Atlas could divert his attention from him and scanned the area around him with a glance.
'They're gone. Did they disappear when Eros warped in front of me?' He snickered. 'Of course, they did.'
They appeared from every possible angle. Alora from the left, Talen beside her, then Valentina coming for the middle, followed by the Zolsteins making up the rest of the right and Liliana finishing the row of Eightfold. Their different styles of attacking all reflected in the center of the Progenitor's pupil before a blackened bolt of lightning replaced where he stood and yet again, he disappeared.
Talen was the only one capable of reacting to his grandfather. The Unconquerable's wide green eyes reflected the illusion Atlas abandoned when warping away from where they were advancing toward. Interlocking his fingers, the lawyer's Fate flickered all around him like flames and in what seemed like an instant, the entire sky darkened above Eightfold and the Zolsteins.
'Barrier Deployment.'
Liliana was indeed too slow to recognize Atlas abandoned a visage in place of his true self. However, in her periphery, Talen's fingers were moving at an extraordinary speed. Why? Then, she glanced back at the Progenitor, realizing quickly that just by squinting–it was obvious he was transparent. At that moment, she deduced the same as Talen and quickly, interlocked her fingers. A portal swirled into existence below the domain they were entrapped within. Glancing down at the Celestial signature below him, then Lily, he quickly stopped the seal his hands were forming.
The barrier, moved a few inches to the right, dispelled at the same moment a large shockwave erupted from the center of the crater ground below them. The ranks of Eightfold and Zolstein siblings watched the sky return to its normal bloody red behind the grey smoke produced by Atlas smashing into the ground from the clouds.
"You're smart, boy." Atlas glared at Talen and blitzed past the distance. His face was now an inch away from the Unconquerable's eyes. The lawyer's heart skipped a beat. "I guess I should get rid of you first."
The Unconquerable, green lightning crackling around him, leaned back and wasted no time piercing the air with his fist wrapped in Fate. Atlas caught the punch with the Sword and deflected it with a swat. He stepped back as Talen stomped forward and kicked at the side of his head. Now forced to retreat, Xenos and Alora rushed from both sides of Talen's back, converging on Atlas pushed on the defense.
Xenos slashed at his legs. Meanwhile, Alora hopped and cut the air, hoping to behead the Progenitor in one clean cleave. Atlas leaned back, weaving directly under the blazing blue aura around the Enforcer's blade, before spinning around in mid-air and crashing down on the Warrior's sword aimed for his feet.
Alora fell back from an incomprehensible kick to the bust after Atlas crushed the Warrior's katana under his heel. Illustrious, still backing away from the Progenitor, felt her back hit what felt like a concrete wall. Instead, when she looked over her shoulder, what her back touched had vanished, and peering down, she was met with the Sword pushed through her chest.
She gasped, coughing up blood and as her legs wobbled, she collapsed to her knees. "S-shit…"
Atlas towered over the Illustrious woman, smirking down at her as a mere silhouette—long black strands on his head swaying with the wind. "Your strand of 'Blessed Freedom' is one exclusive to the Illustrious Family. You received your father's absurd physical capability and your mother's recuperating technique. It's a truly superb combination. One I coveted for use at this crucial point and time."
She tried pulling the Sword from her chest. Atlas fell to one knee and, tightening his fingers around the handle, mercilessly tore it from within her. Xenos and Hail rushed at him from behind. His eyes widened.
"You…!"
The missing Rank-0 Fate user dropped from a golden portal spontaneously appearing in the sky. The moment she crashed into the ground under the blood-red sky, Sadie rushed at Atlas like a scarlet rush, who flinched back and turned around to the Zol siblings behind him.
'How did Uriel do that? Isn't he still unconscious from sustaining the full frontal brunt of Unbridled Chaos? Then, how did he…?'
Sadie's technique… is Malodorous Demoniacal Bloodbath. By accessing a Displacement dimension, she can pick and choose between devilish powers. Each one is infinitely different than the last and most of the abilities available are extremely powerful, making them difficult to adapt to. Extremely so. There isn't a person who's gone up against Sadie's demonic technique and lived.
His pupils shrunk into pricks. The claws replacing her nails at the end of her fingertips sunk into the base of his eye. Backed into a corner like this, he couldn't run away. And so, the Sword sliced—cutting through Sadie's wrist like paper to split the hand from the rest of her arm. Sadie's pink Fated aura, erratically bubbling around her like inextinguishable magma, abruptly switched colors.
'Aamon.'
The hand Atlas disconnected from the rest of her limb flawlessly regenerated without even requiring a Restoration technique. Widened eyes reflecting her recovery, not even a second after he cut her to the bone, Atlas raised the Sword, preparing to stroke it again and cleave her head clean in half this time.
'Beelzebub.'
Sadie's pried-open jaw revealed the depths of darkness trapped inside her throat. Just when Atlas found himself losing his focus—gazing into the abyss—his eyes widened. At the end of the endless tunnel her open mouth served as was an inexplicable light. A flickering luminosity unique only in the way the brightness was colored. Like fire.
The demoness roared like a dragon. Unable to move, Atlas raised his arms. He was much too slow. The flaming beam released from the innate demon hidden within her engulfed the Progenitor's face in its heat, twisting his pretty white features into a charred resemblance. Sadie grabbed both sides of his head and guided his face into her knee, shattering his nose before disappearing from in front of him.
The Sword tight in his right hand pierced through her chest the moment she rematerialized behind him in mid-air. Atlas glared at her reforming image and, turning around, tore his blade from within her, spraying the air with her innermost gore. He spun around and smashed his leg across her face, launching her from in front of him to send her bouncing across the widespread crater.
'She's tough.'
Atlas looked up. Talen fell from the sky and crushed the ground under his fist. Rushing at the Progenitor retreating from his falling strike, the Unconquerable glanced at Alora and Valentina coming from behind him. Instead of throwing something predictable like a punch at point-blank range, Talen aimed his hand while charging ahead and altered the aura around it into the shape of a cannon.
Lightning burst out of the cannon's barrel with a shockwave. Crackling while traveling erratically through the air, Atlas ducked under the bolts and spun, swiping the feet of the women running behind him. Alora jumped back, but Valentina hopped over, kicking up at the Progenitor's chin while briefly afloat in mid-air. He stumbled away from the heavy blow crushing his jaw under her foot and fell back into the full-blown force of Talen's enhanced punch.
His conscience hazed from the barrage of blows one after another, Atlas blinked through bloody vision, watching Alora rush in front of him and slash her sword up at his head. He caught the edge of the blade, crushing it the same way he did to Xenos earlier. Then, inexplicably, she smirked.
"Made you look."
Lora vanished. The moment her solid build of flesh and bones slipped from his grasp, a binding sensation wrapped around the Progenitor's throat. At first, the cold and hard sensation made him believe his neck was entangled by chains, but by simply glancing up—he noticed he was wrong. Hail had fallen from the clouds and sat upon his shoulders, wrapping her legs around his throat and using her technique's unparalleled strength to make Atlas collapse to his knees.
"Hurry!" Hail strained. "I can't… hold him…"
Eros leaned forward. Detonating the aura on his soles one last time, the original Unconquerable burst through the air like a blazing remnant lightning bolt straying from a thunderstorm. Just as he was soaring above the ground, his head turned, watching Liliana rush in beside him while holding an ax over her shoulder.
"You're fast. Really fast." He squinted. "Are you–?"
She nodded. "Yup!" She beamed at Talen's father. "Let's talk about it later."
Lily and Eros closed the distance between them and Atlas. As she stroked the ax, Amit aimed his hand forward—intending to shove the fingers intended for a chop straight into the Progenitor's heart. When their environment rushed past them and the duo ended up behind the enemy pushed to his knees, they assumed they won. Talen, Valentina, and Alora watching from afar could confirm it too.
When Lily cut Atlas and Eros pierced him in the chest, Atlas stopped moving. It made sense. The Progenitor was dead. They won. But Talen wasn't that naive. Hail relinquished the hold her legs had over their enemy's neck and made Atlas's corpse splat on the ground. The second his carcass touched the ground was the same instant he abruptly vanished. The only ones unsurprised out of everyone there was the Unconquerable Amits, who looked up the second a maniacal cackling filled the air.
'He abandoned another double there and warped into the air the second their attacks hit.' Talen sucked his teeth, staring at Atlas encased in a see-through black sphere above them. 'How the fuck are we supposed to be this guy?'
Eros aimed his finger and blasted at the domain Atlas hid within. The Fated beam unleashed from the Unconquerable's fingertip spread over the barrier like trickling water falling from a showerhead.
Amit chuckled, closing both eyes and waving his hand. "Spare me. I have no desire to fight anymore. I was only stalling until Moloch and Raven came," he said.
The Displacement siblings arrived on the scene scattered with Eightfold's ranks. Apollo lunged Aella from his arms and sent her to Atlas standing in the barrier, allowing her fingertips to just barely scrape the exterior of the domain.
'The Key.'
The Progenitor's dull black gaze watched uncaringly. While everything brightened with a red glow from his shelter's inner darkness being destroyed, he leaned forward and thrust the Sword, letting its length stab through the air. Raven raised her hand, reinforcing the palm with Fate to stop the tip from reaching the rest of her body. She grabbed the dark and curved steel of the Sword stuck through her palm.
'The Key.'
The Sword, and the Celestial signature dormant within it, shattered. But Atlas kept moving. He punched Raven square in the face, sending her from the air to slide to a halt on her back beside Talen. The Progenitor lowered from the sky, feeling his soles sink into the hard concrete ground and opening his left eye.
"Like I told everyone else…" Apollo appeared behind Atlas and threw his leg at the back of his head. The Progenitor glanced over his shoulder, caught Moloch's leg, and thrust his hand through the Displacement's gut. "...I have no desire to fight anymore."
Atlas tore his fist from the experiment as he fell to the ground, barely breathing through the slit between both rows of teeth. He stepped over Moloch's body and smirked, turning around to stare at the rest of them before his eyes.
"If even one of you moves an inch, I'll kill Moloch. It should take him another three minutes to heal the wound I inflicted on him, considering how much Fate he used up when killing the Gate Families. Speaking of which—" He looked down at Apollo's head crushed under his boot. "--I never got to thank you for that. So thanks."
The Displacement breathed carefully. The slightest wrong move and his insides spill out. All he could do right now was glaring up at the black-haired Progenitor responsible for so much evil in the world.
"Who cares about Apollo?" Talen asked. "I'll kill you in a single hit."
"Don't be stupid, boy. You couldn't before despite the plenty of times I intentionally stood still. What makes you think you'll be able to now? It's simple. I'm strong. Stronger than all of you. Well, besides you, that is," Atlas said, nodding at Eros. "I knew they'd come and unseal you. That's why directly after exiting the Imprisonment technique, your Fate was set to waver. All of your energy must be spent on recovering. Wasting excess aura in an attempt to slaughter me… don't you know what that means?"
The wooziness plaguing his son the Unconquerable's head enclosed. Unable to move after wasting so much Fate, Eros fell over, unconscious and snoring into the hard crater ground below him. Valentina ran to her husband and lifted him into her lap, glancing at the drool dripping from the side of his lip, then back up at Atlas across from them.
"The Gate uses a Zolstein to produce roots from their aura that sink through the whole of the Earth and penetrates its core. As you know, Zols react differently to Fate than regular humans, so the unique properties of their technique allowed the energy from the Gate to flow differently. In the beginning, the Gate siphoned off the energy of the City it was placed in, but when I recovered that specimen, I deduced they could be used to heighten the scope of my scheme. Now the whole planet was getting its energy siphoned. And the best part about it? They didn't even realize it. But that wasn't all. I needed something else." Atlas looked at Alora. "I coveted your father and manipulated his life so he'd meet your mother. In the end, you were the byproduct of their relationship and so, you were born with Blessed Freedom. A Blessed Freedom capable of breaking through the boundary of injury and heightening the user into an unrivaled state of being. With that ability, you can perceive the souls of others and even strike them. A sample of your signature… was the finishing touch."
Xenos and Hail couldn't believe what they were hearing. Their missing brethren? Being used as a battery to power the very thing responsible for this apocalyptic scenery. And Alora? Atlas was the puppeteer. For every horrible thing in her life that occurred–he was the source. The Amit Progenitor. At the sound of such a revelation, her heart could only… skip a beat.
Atlas bent over, pressing his palm against the ground. "Blessed Freedom."
The bloody color scheme the Progenitor infected the sky was instantly dismantled. Replaced by the usual azure vastness coloring the heavens, Atlas stood under the vibrancy—shaded only by the darkness as he stood before the sun and the Northern lights spreading over the clouds. He stood upright, glaring through his flowing black strands at Eightfold and the Zols banded together.
"I used your technique on the planet. Everyone whose Fate was absorbed by the Gate and shot into the atmosphere will have their bodies returned to them. Now, they will possess Predestined Powers. And even more so than that? A number of them will be Monsters. Ones akin to the Disastrous Monster God himself. Of course, you all know now that Monstrum was the beginning. The coming Beasts possess much more dangerous techniques and overall, they're much smarter. I'll be making them and the Monsters made by the Gate's refinement fight to the death. What lies beyond that is for you to deduce. Unfortunately, though, as all of those plans enact in reality—I won't be around to see it."
Talen's eyebrow raised. 'Huh?'
"You're asking yourself why I'd say something like that. It's because I'm not here. I'm…" Atlas slit his throat. "…already dead."
The sky was blue again. Nobody died but those who needed to. Monstrum, Atlas, Enma, Anna, Muhammad, Anthony, Archer. And all those innocents. Was it worth it? None of them knew. After all, the Progenitor was dead. Shouldn't they feel at least a bit more accomplished? No. Talen's bright green eyes reflected the only true thing about the Amit Progenitor's suicide. Their loss.
The Reckoning Arc - Fin.