Kane didn't wait for the Gardener to arrive.
He walked to the front of the bridge, the Void-Steel walls parting for him like water. He stepped out onto the "beak" of the Revenant, his white hair whipping in the static discharge of the Anti-Time field.
"You're not a God," Kane said, his voice amplified by the ship's Void-Steel crown to a volume that shook the hulls of the nearby monoliths. "You're just a gardener who's afraid of a few weeds."
Kane didn't draw a weapon. He drew an Echo.
He reached into the "Timeline-Archive" he had seen in the Aeon-Staff. He pulled out the "Echo" of the 13th Iteration—the warrior who had died before him. For a split second, a ghostly, Rank-10 figure appeared behind Kane, holding a blade of absolute Zero.
"Two against one?" The Gardener paused, his light-body flickering with the first hint of irritation.
"Thirteen against one," Kane corrected.
Twelve more shadows erupted from Kane's soul. The 12th, the 11th, the 10th... every "Glitch" that had ever been "Formattted" by the Hegemony appeared in a ring around the Gardener. They weren't fully alive, but they were Hungry.
"We are the 'Unrecoverable Data'!" Kane roared, his eyes turning into twin singularities.
Kane launched himself at the Gardener, his hand becoming a claw of Void-Steel. Behind him, the thirteen ghosts of the previous Iterations followed, a swarm of black-and-silver death.
The Gardener swung his sickle, but the 13th Iteration's ghost caught the blade, the Anti-Time freezing the ghost while Kane slipped through the guard.
Kane's hand slammed into the Gardener's chest—the "Heart of Light."
[SKILL ACTIVATION: TIMELINE-INFESTATION]
Kane didn't eat the Gardener's energy. He injected the memories of the human race into the Gardener's pure-light mind. He forced the "God" to feel the grief of a mother losing her child, the hunger of a starving city, and the desperate, ugly rage of a species that refused to be "Pruned."
"Feel that?!" Kane screamed, his skin cracking as the Gardener's light tried to vaporize him. "That's the 'Blight'! That's Earth!"
The Gardener's light-body began to crack. It wasn't because of the damage; it was because his "Logic" could not process the chaos of human emotion. His geometric form began to warp, turning into a jagged, screaming mess of colors.
"Sully! Fire the main cannon! NOW!"
The Revenant unleashed a beam of Pure Void-Steel directly at the struggling Gardener.
BOOM.
The explosion didn't make fire. It made a Silence that lasted for a hundred miles. When the light cleared, the Gardener was gone. His monoliths were drifting, their gold-and-white armor turned to dull, grey lead.
Kane floated in the center of the debris, his Void-Steel crown shattered, his breath coming in ragged gasps of silver mist.
[WARNING: RANK 10 ESSENCE DETECTED] [EVOLUTION PROGRESS: 45%]
"We... we did it," Vance whispered over the comms, his voice shaking with awe. "We just killed a Gardener."
"No," Kane rasped, looking at the distant, glowing center of the galaxy—the Hegemony Core. "We just declared war. And they have a million more Gardeners where he came from."
Kane looked at the Revenant, which was already beginning to "heal" its hull using the scrap of the monoliths.
"Sully, set a course for the Lot-09B Jungle World," Kane ordered, his eyes turning cold again. "We've got the steel. Now we need the Venom."