[Cecil Stedman's POV - 6 Hours Earlier]
I always knew this day would come, but Christ on a cracker, I just didn't expect it to come this fast, or for the chance of our survival to look this spectacularly fucked up.
Standing on the elevated platform of the GDA command centre, I watched the bedrock of global security crumble in real-time. This room was supposed to be the paragon of unwavering discipline in the face of disaster. Now? It was a madhouse. Agents were shouting over each other, frantic fingers flying across keyboards, panic bleeding into every operational channel.
Honestly, I couldn't blame them.
First, we had Omni-Man's little feral tantrum. Then, a supposedly dead alien crash-lands in Night-City. And now, out of nowhere, Nolan returns from whatever deep-space corner he crawled into with three more Viltrumites in tow.
"First, those sidekicks throw a fit, then that alien that Kaisen abducted, and now this?" I muttered, rubbing my temples as a familiar migraine spiked behind my eyes. "What kind of cursed month is this? Do I really need to hire a psychic to read my damn fortune?"
"Sir… Sir!"
I turned around to find Donald shaking my shoulder. His usually immaculate suit was rumpled and his face pale and slick with sweat. "Sir, we need your orders! We can't—"
"Deploy all the fail-safes we planned," I cut him off, my voice sharp enough to cut the hysteria in the room. "Only quadruple them now that we have four Viltrumites to worry about instead of one. Start the evacuation protocols all over the country, beginning with Chicago. I want all Guardian teams ready to intercept and get the Tech Jackets down from their castle in the sky, tell them 'playtime' is over."
I took a moment to heave a sigh but kept the commands going, "We need that depth dweller frequency yesterday. Send the nuclear subs into the city of Atlantis, tell them time for diplomacy is over. And most importantly, get me Kaisen on the line."
Donald nodded sharply, already barking into his headset to relay the priority orders.
Agent Leonard looked up from his console, his face bathed in the blue light of the monitors. "Sir, Teams Two and Three are operational, but Team One still needs time to acclimate to the new gears!"
"Tell them to wing it!" I barked. "It's not like it's their first time fighting for their lives!"
Agent Reeves was frantically typing on the other side of the room. "Sir, the Team Jackets are a go, but… we've already lost Upstate University to the blonde Viltrumite! The New Guardians are mobilising, but they are still too far out!"
"Donald, how are those subs looking?!" I yelled over the din. "Any progress with Atlantis?"
"Negative, sir!" Donald replied, looking stressed. "The Atlanteans are putting up heavy resistance! Now that they know everyone from the old Guardians except Aquarus is alive, they are being incredibly spiteful and refuse to give us the frequency!"
Taking a deep breath, I steeled my eyes, feeling the cold, familiar weight of command settling over my shoulders even harder.
'If I have to play the villain to keep the planet spinning, so be it. This wouldn't be my first rodeo.'
"Launch the nukes," I ordered, my voice dead calm. "As the Head of the Global Defense Agency in a confirmed global extinction event, I give the submarine commanders full permission to glass the city of Atlantis if they don't comply."
Donald stared at me, swallowing hard. "But sir, the civilian casualties—"
BLARE!!!
A massive, red warning klaxon shattered the air in the command center.
"Now what?!" I yelled, slamming my fist on the console. "Don't tell me a whole regiment of these fascist bastards just flew in!"
"Negative, sir!" Leonard shouted, staring blankly at his shifting readings. "It's the Vogtle Plant in Georgia! It just exploded! The core is leaking lethal levels of radiation as we speak!"
"Wait! What about the radiation contamination? The workers and the surrounding civilian population?!" Donald panicked, rushing to the screen.
"According to preliminary reports, all personnel and civilians within a ten-mile radius were given emergency evacuation orders approximately thirty minutes before the meltdown occurred!" Leonard reported, frantically pulling up satellite imagery. "And Sir, evacuation pattern is being reported at every single nuclear facility along the entire eastern seaboard! Multiple nuclear plants are being systematically drained of their ambient radiation!"
Staring at the map lighting up with warning beacons, I realized it wasn't a meltdown but a massive battery drain orchestrated by Kaisen.
'That crazy, unpredictable son of a bitch must be pulling every ounce of juice.'
"Get me Nakime, now!" I ordered. "There is no way that lover boy risks his girlfriend's safety!"
"Sir, there are reports of Nakime's Tatami gates rescuing civilians directly out of the active war zones!" Reeves yelled back. "I don't think she's going to answer our comms!"
"Sir, you might want to see this!" another agent interrupted, pulling a live feed onto the central screen.
It was a direct feed from Bulletproof's suit camera.
And there, right in the middle of a massive smoking bomb crater in the Cook County Forest Preserves, was Brit.
The one superhero I thought I never had to worry about babysitting.
He was butt-naked, actively making love to the female Viltrumite invader, while his traumatized teammates watched, trying to get away.
I stared at the screen for three seconds before I realized what in the holy hell I was watching.
"Motherfucker, what is with today?!" I groaned, dragging my hands down my face as I wished for a cigarette or better yet, a coma.
"Sir, according to the Secret Guardians, Brit has the situation... under control," Donald said, clearing his throat awkwardly, refusing to look at the screen. "At least for now. The team is requesting an immediate port back."
"Tch. Get them back here, but keep an eye on Brit. Godspeed, you crazy old bastard," I sighed. "And get Hail Mary into the intensive med-bay. That Kaiju has done more work today than half my roster."
"Sir…"
"Now what?!"
"The New Guardians have engaged the blonde Viltrumite at Upstate University, but there are no signs of Tech Jacket. They are getting slaughtered!"
"Contact Atom Eve! ASAP!" I barked. "And what about Nolan?"
"The Father-Son angle we hoped for with Invincible didn't work, but The Old Guardians are handling him, sir!" Leonard reported. "It's a brutal meat grinder just to keep him pinned down!"
And so, the surveillance, the micromanagement, and the exhausting, desperate struggle to keep humanity from being wiped off the galactic map continued, stretching on agonizingly until the first rays of the sun finally began to rise over a burning Earth.
[Nakime's POV - The Infinity Castle]
The calluses on my fingertips split and healed in a continuous, bloody rhythm against the heavy strings of my biwa, perfectly matching the frayed nerves I'd been suffering from since the moment Master forced me back into the safety of the Infinity Castle.
He was a normal human before coming to this world, just a boy turned eighteen. Yet in barely a month, he has faced life-and-death situations more times than any soul should have to endure in a lifetime.
And now, he was out there fighting a monster. A Viltrumite named Conquest, whose suffocating power dwarfed even Nolan's.
The fear settled as a cold, suffocating weight in my chest.
But I couldn't let it paralyze me. I steeled myself, forcing my shaking hands to remain steady.
I immediately ordered the Mauler Twins to patch up the severely wounded Allen, the Alien. Master had expended precious gold healing him earlier. I refused to let his efforts go to waste.
TWANG.
Taking my seat in the center of the grand hall, I struck the strings of my biwa and sent my eyeball familiars scattering through the gates, pouring into Chicago, and slowly branching out across the entire country, all I could see was destruction and fires.
I poured every ounce of my demonic strength into playing the Biwa. The song that echoed through the shifting wooden halls became a desperate, weeping plea of my weakness. A prayer for my Master to return home safely.
For hours, I kept opening gates that swallowed the civilians in danger and sent them into one of the many separate halls, away from the possibility of any crowd-related injury that could happen in a panic.
Suddenly, one of the gates I had opened for evacuation was violently intruded upon. Through my familiars, I saw the blonde Viltrumite step through the threshold, intending to slaughter the huddled refugees inside.
I quickly struck a harsh chord on my biwa, instantly shifting the spatial coordinates of the gate's exit point and dumped him unceremoniously into the center of the Mauler Twins' laboratory.
"Make yourself useful and pull your weight!" I snapped at Allen with unjustified anger born purely from overwhelming fear.
Allen, who was in the middle of getting patched up by Mauler I, still recovering on a medical slab, was also being told about the invading Viltrumites.
Allen, seeing the blonde Viltrumite, roared and rushed forward to defend the castle and send him out the gate he came through, but the Viltrumite violently flung the Unopan backwards, sending him crashing directly into the Maulers' delicate cloning vats in a cascade of sparking wires and amniotic fluid.
As alarms blared over the ruined, glowing fluid of the primary tank, a nearly completed clone of The Immortal fell to the floor.
The clone's eyes snapped open. Filled with incomplete memories and unadulterated rage on just dying from betrayal, the newly animated Immortal let out a primal scream and went on a mindless rampage, thrashing through the lab.
"WHERE IS OMNIMAN?... WHERE IS HE?"
I quickly strummed my biwa.
TWANG.
Another gate opened directly beneath the rampaging Immortal, dropping him out of the sky right on top of Omni-Man's ongoing battle, where his rage would be useful.
But as I resumed my rescue efforts, watching the battlefields through my familiars, my fingers faltered on the strings as the music subsided by the agonising sounds of humans flooded my mind. I heard the pain, the suffering, the weeping of civilians either hurt beyond repair or others mourning the loved ones they had just watched die.
Through our mental link, I reached out to my Master. I did not want to burden him on top of his struggle, but the screams of the damned were too much to handle.
He knew what needed to be done.
"Polymerization!" Master breathed over the link.
But instead of focusing the spell on himself to fight Conquest, I felt a massive surge of positive energy tear through the dimensions. A glowing orange symbol flew up and branded itself onto the massive form of the Round Deer Shikigami, while a bright purple symbol glowed to life, burning itself gently onto my forehead.
He was fusing the Round Deer and me, causing the massive beast and its healing aura to abruptly vanish from the reactor hall where Master was fighting.
'Master, why?!' I asked, panicked and confused by the sudden, overwhelming surge of pure energy flooding my veins. 'You need the healing!'
'The stat boost from the True Hero trait is worth more than regeneration. I saved my assets just for situations like this,' Maste replied, his voice devoid of emotion.
Looking down at my hands inside the Infinity Castle, I saw that the transformation was absolute: a thick, ethereal white fur coat now draped elegantly over my black kimono, majestic branching antlers grew from my head.
But most surprisingly... I blinked.
Another eye had blossomed on my face. For the first time in centuries, I wasn't a Cyclops. I had perfect binocular vision after so long I had forgotten what it was like to see the world so fully, so deeply.
I embraced this new, purifying power even though it was the complete opposite of the bloodthirsty darkness that usually ran rampant inside my demonic biology.
[Image Here]
'I will make sure to save every human in need, Master,' I promised fiercely, gripping my biwa. 'I will turn you into the greatest hero this world has ever seen! That is my word!'
With these new feelings of purity and light surging through my soul, I struck the strings of my biwa again. The tune transformed. It was no longer a song of sorrow and desperate pleading.
It was a song of hope. A song of the love Master had shown me, and the newfound joy I had experienced ever since the day I met him.
As I played, small, glowing deer made of white light materialized in the halls and bounded through the resting crowds, phasing through the civilians to instantly mend broken bones and seal ruptured flesh. Healing the broken humans completely.
I didn't even have to pace myself. The negative aura, the depressing energy, and the traumatic thoughts radiating from the terrified civilians powered the Shikigami side of my new form. The light creatures consumed that negative energy, converting it into a Reverse Cursed Energy with miraculous healing output to bring even the near-dead cases back from the brink.
But even as I healed them, I checked Master's status through our link.
My breath suddenly hitched seeing his reserves of Gold were burning at a terrifying rate. I couldn't even begin to fathom the excruciating pain he had to be putting himself through to maintain this desperate clash against that monster.
Seeing the level of agony he was enduring to protect this world... to protect me... I made my choice.
I quickly reached into the folds of my kimono and fished out the glimmering paper made out of hard yet flexible diamond.
It was the very same ticket Master had given me as a gift of absolute trust on our first date in the park.
My hands trembled violently. I hated this. I hated the concept of gambling. It was the disease that had rotted my late husband, Kaito, from the inside out. It was the poison that had forced me to cave his skull in with a blacksmith's hammer.
But I would do it. To save Master, I would face my darkest trauma.
I quickly tore the ticket in half.
Suddenly, a glowing blue screen popped up in front of my newly restored eyes as a transparent wheel materialized, filled with countless symbols and text. It spun rapidly, the clicking sound echoing mockingly in my ears, before it finally slowed and landed on-
[Diamond Draw]
|Epic Ability|
Allows you to temporarily summon an item from the Diamond Item Gacha that lasts for 1 hour before disappearing (You roll the gacha). The item given is random as the user is given a temporary ticket to roll. This ability starts its 8-hour cooldown the moment it is used. If the item pulled is an elixir, the effects of the Elixir are made temporary.
As I read the text displayed in front of me, a bitter, involuntary curse slipped past my lips.
"Why? God of Chaos..." I whispered, hot tears welling in my eyes. "Giving me a power that forces me to gamble again? It's… It's just too cruel."
But my hand was already moving despite my hesitation as I instinctively reached out to the transparent wheel floating in front of me and grabbed the edge.
I pulled down hard, spinning the wheel of chance once more, praying to whatever deities were listening for a miracle that could save my Master's life.
[A/N]:
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