The beam’s contact with Earth F67X shone like a raging quasar; a beacon for the rest of the system to observe that would likely create many more Ayanda’s for every coffin it didn’t.  There was no screaming, no explosion, no sound--only the deafened ringing that accompanied the bleeding ears of nearby soldiers before their brains melted to mush and their bodies sloughed into primordial stew for whatever next iteration of man chaos had planned. 

The surrounding stone, concrete, and rebar the current situation inherited from the previous conflict evaporated into the devouring light.  And the cleansing fire, a machination on the other side of the universe, scrubbed away life at the microscopic level rewriting it anew. Even Max, who was made of sturdier stuff than most, would succumb to the resplendent pillar’s wrath.  The effulgent column’s fury lasted several seconds before it devolved into several shockwaves whose reach spread to unknowable lengths across the surface of the planet.

When the light subsided, and those who weren’t blinded could survey the surroundings, the only thing left behind upon the blasted tarn were equally blasted shadows of those who couldn’t weather its fury.  The fallout from the beams impact would be seen upon the planet for the rest of its natural life, but with its withdrawal another entity traced it back to its nexus. 

Max found himself in a familiar tomb with his consciousness quickly dissolving to an overwhelming will that shattered his sanity and toppled him over the brink into madness.  He was so preoccupied dealing with the present and undoing events of the past that he was blinded to the dangers lurking in the immediate future.  The blade he absently held in his hand had awakened when the Catalyst sparked the malign sentience within.  This weapon, a “gift” from a demon merged with the multitude of different consciousness dwelling within his psyche, and with it brought a new overmind--a new directive.

[b]Convert. Consume. Control.[/b]

A failsafe of a panicked civilization, and a reneging of a deal with another demon.  This consciousness transformed Max, merging his technology with his body.  His hair burned away and tendrils of chitin sprouted from his flesh.  His canister rifle and munitions disassembled and melted into his skin like ingredients into a dish.  He screamed into the emptiness of the Fault as biological and mechanical made foul pacts under his skin. In his agonizing howl, his jaw split and muscle and piston replaced the flesh anew.  Xelas reacted violently with an entity it swore to imprison for the rest of eternity, and a battle waged at a microscopic level.  This was a war the omnipotent arcane project could not possibly win, though.  A voice burned into Max’s pained consciousness with the fire of the primeval creative flames of the universe.

“[B]BEHOLD.  THE DEATH AND REBIRTH OF THE VAL’GARA.  I AM SAL’CHAZZAR, LAST VESTIGE OF THE GOD, IDEA[/B].”

Max’s flesh exploded like someone had pulled the pin on a series of grenades that laid under his skin on every square inch of his body.  He screamed in pain until only blood gurgled from his mutilated trachea.  The voice burned away at his mind, body, and soul with a power he had only sensed once. 

“[B]SHEPHERD, BRING MY WAYWARD CHILDREN BACK AND BRING ORDER TO THIS ENTROPY[/B].”

Another wave of explosions erupted within him, blasting away muscle and machine alike, and reforging it anew, stronger than before.  His body twitched as Xelas’s protective silver membrane that leaked over his flesh bubbled ebony with corruption.  ANITA’s warnings became a dinghy’s blinking SOS beacon during the apex of a category 5 hurricane’s wrath. Gennosuke and Forge’s cries were quashed under an ocean of harvested power.  Max became a gleaming, convecting, accreting star of bioforce that was forcing the entirety of its volume down into a man-sized vessel.  The expectation was impossible, and would force Xelas’s hand.

“[B]GO, AND KNOW THAT IN OUR HAVOK, WE ESTABLISH LAW.[/B]”

[i]Havok,[/i] a million different spirits of a billion different races combined in a harvested star mused,  [i]that name will suit us nicely.[/i]

Xelas pushed back one last time with effort that had only been seen once in its history.  Internalizing all of its power and collapsing the bioforce star into what was instant singularity.   Forming a supermassive black hole on one side of the multiversal fault, a supermassive white hole formed on the other, expelling a supercluster-sized physical being whose mass and density were infinite, and whose power was limitless.  With the expelling of Xelas-comprised energy, a sheet of Bose-Einstein condensate comparable in scale to the Sloan Great Wall, swept across space.  The creature’s mere existence was the onset Big Crunch within the Faultiverse, and began an infinite gravitational collapse of the realm’s space-time continuum.  The arcane project had only one method it could attempt to purge its corrupted databanks.

Max, Gennosuke, Forge, Xelas, ANITA, Havok, Sal’Chazzar, all these entities were housed within the same supercluster-sized entity, whose body was the singularity and whose reach mobilized its event horizon. The existence of GalaXelas and pairing of his arrival after the galactic engine was sure to attract other greater powers, for if it were ignored its reach would extend across the Fault’s dimensional boundaries and consume the rest of the omniverse within its all-encompassing well.  Spaghettification would not be the ultimate fate to await those who perished, instead they would be remade into a newly birthed cataclysm, a new system and a reinvigorated Val’gara. 

Observers only had to witness the stars of the Fault, whose deaths were not slow, cancerous withering, but instead instant, violent obliteration.  But like Idea to Sal’Chazzar, from the ashes of this universe would a new, better one spring forth in glorious brilliance.  The rays its light would scour every corner of the multiverse until all were converted.  It would endlessly consume opposition with a hunger that eclipsed the Great Machine that spurred its rebirth, and it would control the entropy of existence into a new, ordered manner in which all things progressed forth.