Chapter One Hundred and Eleven - The Last Battle of Emperors

They battled.

If words were spoken still, they were drowned in a tempest of roaring energy, in a deluge of plasma, in screams not unlike the howl of a sun being compressed into the seed of a supernova.

The Emperor of Earth reached out to Ivil Antagonist with a million million beams of searing light, and she twirled away from them.

First, he chased her across dimensions.

Metal formed of stardust and imbued with the ability to cross realities clamped at her like bear traps with teeth like supertankers. Raw, scintillating beams of magnified starlight painted sparkling rainbows across space, each one curving in towards her. Projectiles no bigger than lonely hydrogen molecules ripped across space at speeds that made light envious, and in their wake ripped tears into causality.

Ivil Antagonist danced through it all. The teeth clicked shut where she'd been, the beams of light and energy burned past her, and she spun around the rents in reality, weaving them around herself like Salome with her seven veils.

Second, he tried to trap her. Cores spilled out of dimensional pockets and were instantly activated. Probability calculators, scanners, sensor suites that could count the grains of sand on every planet in the solar system all at once. They spun, and aimed themselves at her.

In an instant, the Emperor of Earth thought he knew everything there was to be known about Ivil Antagonist.

He redoubled his efforts. No longer chasing, but attacking.

An armada's worth of firepower was levelled at her, and he struck out with it, knowing that he would hit.

And he did.

Ivil caught his attack like a tango dancer grasping a reaching wrist, with a slap that echoed through space. There was, for just a moment, a silent surprise.

Had they eyes left, they might have met across the void between them, but the time for such inefficient biology was long past.

To onlookers, it would seem like space had torn itself apart and vomited a million scrapyards' worth of steel and polymer and illogical, un-geometric stuff. Billions of tons' worth of it, in two indistinct entities frozen in place for an interminable minute. The entities outweighed moons. Already, the gassy tides of nearby Uranus were shifting ever so slightly, and the fleet of ships were scrambling to adjust.

And then the moment broke. The two forms snapped back into smaller, more compact non-shapes. One bubbled over with organic, biological sludge, the other folding into itself with engineered precision down to the micrometre.

Third, the Emperor of Earth, in his endless arrogance, tried to bargain from a position of perceived power. "You are what I feared all this time?" he asked. He challenged. He insulted. "You? You're weaker than I thought. You can barely dodge me, barely block my blows!"

Ivil Antagonist had no lips to smile with, but she had never had more teeth. "Perhaps. Maybe I've grown soft these past few weeks. I've found something that finally interests me more than power."

"You're an idiot too, then," the Emperor said.

"Maybe. An idiot in love. Here, let me show you what that means."

First, she caught him.

It was the gazelle feeling the cheetah's claws biting into its flank, the orca breaking the ice under a stranded seal, the running hare discovering the closing shadow of a chasing bear, the lone surviving planet of a once bountiful solar system, gently, but impossibly, being dragged into the maws of a supermassive blackhole, its survival impossible, its remaining time a stick of incense next to a blowtorch.

Ivil Antagonist wasn't kind.

She was discovering that she could feel love, that she could feel gentleness, from others and towards others, and she enjoyed it. But above all else, she knew herself. If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles, and it had been ages since she'd last felt true fear. The recent scares, of love and passion? They were tantalizingly dangerous to her, and she found that she could well live with that.

A moment of admiration for kindness was not a weakness. Nor did it make her gentle as she gripped onto the Emperor of Earth.

Claws like jagged mountains sank through dimensions, ripped through reality, and burrowed themselves into titanic flesh birthed by a thousand cores.

Anchors of probability, tethers of causality, braces holding up reality to be what she wanted it to be, formed around the Emperor, and he soon realized that his earlier dance was merely him stepping into her parlour.

Second, she met the eyes of his soul with her own. A soul made weighty by ten thousand cores, by a million simulated years, by the impossibly solid knowledge that she was the Empress of Mars, the Ivil Antagonist, speared down and crashed into the mind of a little pissant of a man called Humphrey.

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The Emperor of Earth thought he knew everything there was to be known about Ivil Antagonist.

Ivil Antagonist knew everything there was to know about him, and she found it pitiful and lacking.

"Blind fucking luck, arrogance, and sycophantic fear," she snarled. "That's all you are, and all that caused you to be what you are now."

Third, the Empress of Mars set down the rules and created the laws. The primordial law; thou shalt have no greater fear than Ivil Antagonist. It was carved into him without bargain or right to appeals. Because as she willed it, it became so.

"What are you doing?" he screeched.

"Winning, mostly," Ivil replied.

She reached a metaphorical hand into the Emperor's guts and started to rifle around.

In reality, this battle was far from over. She had him in the equivalent of a headlock for the moment, but he would break out of it. Not without harming himself, and he would be at a slight disadvantage, but... battles between entities like Emperors were not started and won in a single engagement. They were more like wars between nations. A powerful blow could hurt, yes, but complete annihilation took time.

So, instead, Ivil started to pluck out cores like a carrion bird going for the juiciest morsels. A few mechanical cores here, some small utility cores there.

She was a fair maiden, cutting flowers out at the stem to create a beautiful bouquet. A few hundred cores, freshly ripped from the writhing body of a mutual enemy... was anything more romantic?

She made sure to think of what Aurora and Twenty-Six and Pixie would want, but that hesitation cost her.

The Emperor of Earth slithered out of her grasp, then shifted away from her, making space.

She allowed it.

Soon, they were facing each other again. One a sleek mass of interlocking metals and fractal shapes, the other a mass of biological organisms pinned together and bleeding.

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" he asked.

Ivil Antagonist shifted from side to side and hoped that her blush wasn't so obvious in this form. "I'm just a woman in love," she said.

The Emperor's confusion bled off of him like heat off of a fire. "You're insane," he said.

"I won't deny it," she said cheerfully.

She took a half-step forward, and though her form didn't move, space did. It bent under her, coiled around her, a throne of dark matter and golden light birthing itself from the background radiation as if summoned by her sheer, imposing will on reality.

"You could've been someone," the Emperor tried again, his voice a little less grand, a little more shaken. "You could've ruled beside me. We would've been gods."

"You're still doing the recruitment pitch?" Ivil asked, sounding genuinely disappointed. "This is why no one comes to your birthday parties."

"I'm Emperor of Earth!"

"You're barely tolerated on Earth," Ivil replied. "I may be an irredeemable monster, but at least I'm loved. You're kept around because... honestly, I don't know. You're not even halfway competent."

The Emperor of Earth bristled. "You're not even taking this seriously!"

"You launched torpedoes at a fleet of barely-armed civilians and somehow still lost. I'm taking it just seriously enough to laugh at you."

The puppet he wore twitched—anger? Humiliation? Some deep-seated recognition that he was being clowned on?

"You don't understand what I've built," he snarled.

"Oh, I do," Ivil said sweetly. "You've built a little dollhouse and convinced yourself it's a palace. Filled it with yes-men and screens that only show you what you want to see. I bet your war room has inspirational quotes printed on the walls. 'Shoot for the moon, even if you miss, you'll still commit a war crime.'"

"You think you're above me?" he shouted.

"I am above you," she shouted right back. "In strength, intellect, fashion, and romantic prospects. I have three beautiful women waiting for me on my ship. You have an army of asskissers primed to kiss the behind of the first person to take your place. You want to know what's really wrong with me?" she asked, stepping forward, her voice quiet now, but sharper than the blade that had split his flagship in half. "It's that I looked at the entire solar system, at war, at death, at power... and decided the thing I wanted most in this life was a slow morning in bed with my girlfriends. Do you understand how insulting it is that you think you can threaten that?"

The Emperor, for once, had no words.

"Go ahead," Ivil said, stepping back into a more relaxed posture. "Call me insane again. It'll be the last lie you ever tell with teeth."

The Emperor of Earth trembled. He was starting to understand the truth of things.

This was not a battle between rival powers. This was a god, furious that a rat had touched her shrine.

***

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