20.

X

The others should be fine on Krogan, my biggest dimension. It layered above the multiverse and was closer to the fifth dimension, that was mostly now a void, since most of its energy was now in the multiverse. The true void was just beyond that, but this one would do. I could go all out here if I needed to, but I doubted I would. The remaining lifeblood energy shimmered around us as he looked around. “The home of the Ancients... interesting.” He shot a glance at me, still confused why I brought us here, but didn’t ask anything.

“You know, now that you have the Mind, all I have to do is kill you and it’s all over.”  I could sense his energy rising exponentially and his form began to distort. He was sucking in the  lifeblood energy here, to amplify his powers, and it was working. He began to grow in size, his body turning a shade of sickly green. He was soon twice my size and still growing. The energy he was exuding now was enough to push me back, as he kept on getting stronger. When he stopped growing, the entire area around us was lit up by him only. He stood there, grinning again.

“Now what, boy?” he asked mockingly, before firing two galaxy sized beams at me. He closed his palm and I was held in place as the beams got closer to me. I could hear him laughing hysterically now, it was so loud I was annoyed.

“Fall, the first god plane, Nirvana.” The words left my mouth in a whisper as the beams came dangerously close to me. My shield appeared in front of me, taking the double blasts head-on. They weren’t even that big of a deal. Immediately, the entirety of the fifth dimension was trembling as a universe sized portal opened and Nirvana fell through. My father looked up in building terror as the dimension he had invaded and ravaged barrelled towards him with alarming speed. The entirety of Nirvana was out of the portal now and my father tried to move elsewhere but I was already ahead of him. “God hand”, I said as my father got pinned to the spot where he floated. He managed to raise his hands to catch the dimension before it ran him over. His hands were shaking  as be barely kept the whole dimension at bay.

“C... curse you, Xassin!” Even his form was shrinking under the sheer mass of Nirvana. “Oh, you can still talk. Well then, let me take care of that.” I raised my hand and splayed my palm upward. A white light shot out of my palm and up into the space above. A portal opened and  a blindingly white hammer facing downward fell down, to the other side of Nirvana. “God’s Sledgehammer!” In an instant, the hammer grew until Nirvana was like a golf ball in comparison. For the first time, I hard my father groan in pain and exertion as the force increased. It wasn’t satisfactory enough, considering all be had done, but it was a start.

“I know you haven’t really gone all out father, show me more.” I said and squeezed my palm, further intensifying the sledgehammer's force. My father had returned to his natural size now, still managing to hold back both Nirvana and the sledgehammer. “Your mother wouldn’t like to see you like this Xassin.”, he said, with a strained voice. “She wouldn’t want to see you consumed with such anger towards one person. Do t you care about her memory? She wouldn’t want us fighting like this, I’m your father!” I snapped my finger and the hammer disappeared, along with Nirvana.

“You are not my father. You stopped being my father when that monster took you from me. You stopped being my father when you drove that spike through mother’s heart. From that moment, you just became a monster, an evil creature.” I stretched out my hand and the hammer reappeared, small sized. “And you know what I do to monsters?” I raised my hammer up for one strike. “I destroy them, and leave no traces.” The hammer started growing brighter as I raised it. “God’s Sledgehammer: Judgement.” He blocked it, but the hammer just destroyed the idea of anything blocking it’s path and connected my father’s hands, breaking them in the process. “Also stop talking about mother, it’ll hurt you more than it’ll hurt me.”

“What trickery is this?!”, he asked, nursing his shattered arms and healing them. The sledgehammer was an extension of my will, one that allowed me to destroy concepts entirely. He set up a ward, blocking my attack, but the hammer destroyed the idea of being blocked completely and just went ahead as if nothing was there. I swung at him again, but he dodged this time, moving to the left and lunging forward  with  a black orb in his palm, ready to strike me.

“Don’t you get it? My judgement is supreme. No one is above my Law.” He recoils in pain as the impact of the hammer hits him from behind, sending him flying down. I teleported  and hit him upwards with the hammer, with enough force to create a temporal singularity. The force of  the impact ripped him to shreds, but he kept restoring himself endlessly. Even when I erased his entire body, he just seemed to pop out of thin air.  He started grinning again, realizing that I hadn’t figured out how to completely kill him yet. A slight headache was forming  as I kept using the Mind continuously. If this kept up, I would lose control and Ente would take over, but I didn’t want to just kill him like that, I promised that he would be with mother.

“Give it up, Xassin. You can’t kill me, not here anyway.”  With that, he created a rune array around himself, shielding himself from further attacks. I swung my arm and the space around him rippled and shredded, like the pages of a torn book.  He reformed and kept grinning. “Told you.” And broke into a fit of laughter.

“You have another shard, don’t you?”, I asked, cutting in. He stopped laughing, looking at me with wary eyes. “What makes you say that?”, he asked carefully, making sure not to show any emotion. “Well, it all just makes sense now, for a man with multiple shards, it’s only natural that you would have one hidden away in some other dimension, as a tether. It’s genius, I would do it if I had a more than one shard.” He smirked and looked at me with a neutral gaze, devoid of anything that would give him away. “That is just speculating, son. Brilliant speculation, but speculation nonetheless. I don’t have any shard any–” He gasped as I stretched my hand outward into thin air and pulled his shard out.

“You’re a bad liar, father, just worse at masking your energy.” His brown face looked drained of life as he watched me inspect the shard he had tried so hard to hide. “How did you...” he faltered halfway, not knowing what to say again. “Oh this? I started suspecting when Astaroth used the Flame of Naught on your body. The effects should have erased you immediately, but you just came back, like you had a save point somewhere. Same thing when I used the hammer on you. You didn’t regrow those limbs, they just appeared in place. Your broken arms were broken in one instance, and in the next, they were good as new. So, when I erased you completely, I searched for any specific energy increase, followed it to the source, and voilà, I found this.

“Why you little..!” He roared in anger and lunged at me, firing every single offensive spell he knew. Time to end this. I put my palm in front of the attacks as they were incoming. “Mind of the Protector: Purge” A white wave of light pulsed through my hand, tearing through, and erasing all the attacks simultaneously. It passes through my father  and he stopped dead in his tracks, and started falling down. I teleported and caught him in my arms. His face that was a mask of fury just a few moments ago was now peaceful and calm and for the first time in a long time, he was smiling. Not grinning, or laughing, but smiling peacefully, his smile devoid of any madness. He was going to die anyway, now that I purged him of all the Chaos Shard’s energy, since it was fused to his soul.

His eyes fluttered open and I was looking at those brown eyes again the same ones I saw in my vision with Ente. The ones that I looked into when he taught me mage arts, the ones that I always felt calm looking into. “Xas”, came his frail voice. I fought back tears at hearing him again, after all this time. “Yes father, I’m here” I replied, holding him tighter as we floated. “Thank you for freeing me from his grasp...thank you...thank you...” his voice seemed to get fainter with each word he spoke, but I was able to hear everything he said clearly.

“It’s fine father...I just did what I had to do”, I replied, my voice breaking as I struggled to stay calm. “I know I’ve caused you pain beyond measure, and I can never make up for my many sins, but I hope you forgive me, son.” He fell silent as I assured him that I had forgiven him, and didn’t say anything else for a few moments.

When he did speak, it was with urgency, as if he knew that his time was almost up. “Be careful my boy, he is angry, you have foiled his plan and set him back. He will be back with another plan sooner than later. Be vigilant and ready at all times. Worse things than I reside in the void, and they are coming. But there is hope. In the void, there are others that fight for this world against his minions. They are beings of immense power, that even the  Ancient himself is wary of them. Find them, become allies with them, and all worlds will have a fighting chance. Good luck, my boy, trying times are ahead.”

And with that, his body was gone. I stayed there in the fifth dimension for a while, recollecting myself and then I teleported back to Krogan. Tony was standing and waiting for me, while Míriel and Zeus were still passed out, although immediately I got back, they both woke up.

"Is it over?", Zeus asked, his jaw clenched in anticipation. I walked and sat down beside him and sighed. “Yes, the threat is destroyed.” Zeus went back to sleep immediately, a content look on his face. I lay back and watched as the portal to the fifth dimension closed, leaving us alone. I closed my eyes and drifted into a deep sleep, dreaming of my childhood memories.

It was finally over.