[Earth-M47D, Neo Babylon]

An air of quiet panic hung over the city of Neo Babylon. The streets, normally choked with life, were nearly empty as the Cult of Man marched through instituting martial law with the Mayor’s authority. Jackbooted thugs with skull masked helmets beside tanks the size of small buildings espousing their pro-human rhetoric and promising to purge the alien all the while ignorant of the irony that was their professed loyalty to the most inhuman leader of them all. Today was not the day for second guesses. An alien fleet had been spotted on the very edge of the system and it was massive…

Massive in that way that only the ominous swelling of black clouds on the horizon could be.

And though Earth-M47D had survived several alien invasions in the past they were never pleasant. An emergency summit between the heads of the seven mega corporations had been called but only six of them had arrived at the Morpheus Tower where the Mayors traditionally placed their throne, the Black Dogs normally first to rouse for battle were absent, rumor had it that Rodrigo had suffered more damage during the Battle of Rio than he was willing to let on and was avoiding public appearances until fully recovered. Given the cutthroat nature of his contemporaries, that was seeming more and more like a smart idea the longer the meeting went. The Sapphire Dream was calling for war and predictably enough Atlantis Trading Company wanted nothing to do with it, everyone else fell somewhere between the two extremes until it seemed as though the factions might destroy each other before the enemy reached their shores. Every one of them hated the others, everyone knew that a moment of weakness would lead to the others jumping in like hounds and so everyone was unwilling to be the first one to show their backs save for the Mayor…

Only the Mayor seemed nonplused by the recent turn of events. Seated at the very head of the table, at once presiding over the summit as the city’s democratically elected dictator and set aside from it as a neutral third party to make sure that they did not tear each other apart—unfairly—a grin on her face as she stared out the window and wondered, would today be the day the Eternal Star finally fell?

Seeing the hero win every time was getting boring.

***

[Deep Space, Oort Cloud]

Far away on the other side of the solar system a fleet of Cultivators sailed home with heads held high. It had not been an easy battle but no battle worth fighting ever was. Damage among the lower ranks had been nearly catastrophic but all captains had earned honors and their god was proud of them. The dead would be gathered, and then harvested, and then probably deposited back into the slurry of oceanic flesh that waited for them back at their home or whatever such a brutally alien culture used to honor their fallen. And as per usual WAR was the crown jewel in their victory. This version of him different from the one that had fought in the King of Heaven tournament for unbeknownst to all others he had been swapped with another halfway through after his failure to kill the God of Justice.

Unbeknownst to everyone but the growling serpent.

Unaru’s divine eye for battle was such that even subtle differences between one version of WAR and next were like blaring neon signs, and he said nothing, for the now retired God of War suspected that the Mayor also knew this—her instinct for such things was even stronger than his—but enjoyed her shenanigans enough that she was willing to overlook if they made her event that much more chaotic. And it had. He felt the disturbance that was the Cultivator’s battle against the Infinite One before the fight had been won and even felt a brief flash of presence as the assassin struck his final blow. ‘Curious,’ He thought. ‘He names himself after war and yet seeks to end each one as fast as possible.’ Unaru had encountered many such types in the distant past, warriors proud of their one-hit-kills, and he had also seen them sputter into oblivion when their proposed deathblow failed to do the job. Often he was the target they failed to finish. That is not to say that WAR was weak by any means, whatever Unaru’s feelings on his preferred methods the mission had been accomplished and all eight of Eternal Ones’ souls had been slaughtered at the same time, only that he felt assassination was the lowest form of appreciation one could show for the holy act of war.

And so he decided to make his feelings known.

Likely, the heads of Neo Babylon would entreat him to do so anyways, and though WAR seemed a pleasant enough fellow his god was a known bastard who could change plans on a whim’s whim. Unaru knew this because his own creator was a bastard. And so deep within the old Master’s Dojo, Unaru roused from his meditation, he climbed to his feet with an old man’s groan and stomped a bare foot onto the rotting floorboards until the ground rippled like water beneath him—

***

—When next he appeared it was on the edge of the solar system. For anyone capable of following such things it would very much seem like he had simply jumped from one spot to the next and that’s because he had, appearing on the other side of space astride the serpentine body of a celestial fish, long enough that its slick black-and-white body trailed for nautical leagues behind with wide fluttering fins that stationed every few miles along its body spread out like sails that went on to create gravitational anomalies that demolished small fighters unlucky enough to be caught in its wake. Within a minute of its appearance the thing had already taken out no less than three of what humans would refer to as cruisers, the lesser ships that accompanied a fleet and took fast action, as well as a great heaping chunk out of the battleship they had been guarding before turning upon god himself. It was almost like a dragon, with two spindly whiskers nearly long as its body trailing behind it, almost if not for the stupid puckered mouth sitting at its for or the beady unintelligent eyes sitting above that.

The Great Celestial Koi were not native to this region but Unaru road atop one all the same.

For a moment it seemed as if he might engage Kru in battle too. Stabbing one finger out towards the god’s cosmic throne while every ship in the fleet finally arrayed themselves in their direction, attacking from behind and catching a few weary stragglers off-guard was one thing, facing the might of an entire armada was another but machines—even bioorganic ones like this—would never truly be the equal of nature’s beauty. The koi, its name was Adelai by the way, had been born in deep space treating the vast emptiness as just another body of water and before they could fire it dove again. Disappearing from sight with a ripple that surged through space-time in an omnidirectional sphere in ways that had lesser Cultivators clinging to their hulls and their workstations before it had passed.

Before it winked back into reality right before the mountain sized octopus behind them.

Their prey, the dragon of infinity, was said to have been so large that each of its eight heads could devour an entire mountain whole. That was an exaggeration but not by much. It had in fact nested within the mountains of Old Babylon for quite some time and even now could be seen hanging heavy in the hands of the bloated cosmic mollusk that carried it. Shaped almost like an ice cream cone. How many of the Cultivators scrambled about inside of it even now carving off meaty bits of dragon and wearing their little hazmat suits to protect themselves from heaving spurts of lava that oozed through its veins, gods did not die quickly after all, how many of them were so dedicated to their jobs they did not know that their fleet was under attack by some barbarian god who even now leaped from the brow of his oversized pet fish towards the fluttering mass of tentacles? Right leg raised high so that his bare heel would come crashing own upon its bulbous head. Caving the whole thing inwards and sending a ripple of force through its body that turned any Cultivators in its immediate vicinity to mush and spread out through the rest of the octopi’s bod until its tentacles tensed, clenched, and finally unraveled in one glorious explosion of gore that saw █████’s corpse tumble into the abyss of space only half carved and dumped every hard working soul into the abyss where the koi would dip and out of reality nibbling at them for some time.

And Unaru, rising to his feet, broad body on display in the shifting white monastic robes that themselves seemed vaguely reminiscent of the ones that Alhazred had worn to the tournament. _{Though he was not nearly so arrogant as to strip them off and bare his naked chest to the world. Though he was not nearly so ignorant as to forget to wear anything beneath them.} Black hakama fluttered about his legs and closed in tight around bare ankles and a high-hood hung over his head. Only his arms were truly exposed, sleeves torn straight off like they had never existed, exposing thickly cabled biceps that promised despite their deceptively human appearance to rain destruction down upon any who got in his way. Anyone foolish enough to stand in the way of his duel. They both knew it was coming after all but just in case they didn’t he unleashed a psychic shout into the void:

“WAR, come explain yourself, before I have to come wring it out of you.”