Kevin was content to die. He’d been knocked down hard and he thought that he had nothing left, and rather than drag himself up again, as he’s done so many times in the past when he brought his preternatural ability to bear against the dangers of the universe as a corpsman of the Interstellar Panel, Kevin was done.
“Get up!” Alia screamed and her voice raged into the open air. “Get up now or I will kill you myself!”
“You don’t need me,” Kevin moaned. Blood bubbled out of his mouth as he spoke and when he was done talking, he coughed up more blood. He groaned as pain shot through his body. He was sure that he had broken bones and maybe his organs had ruptured because the blood kept coming when he coughed.
“Why haven’t you healed yourself?” Alia asked with disgust. She blasted yellow-white light from her hand at the large herd of bison stampeding in their direction. The eyes of the bison blazed with a black and red flame and their bodies had been corrupted by demon possession. Their horns were black and ragged, twice as long as they would have normally been, and their coats were thick and tangled barbs that made them sharp when they ran their bodies in their targets. They also spoke human language with booming voices that mocked their victims and as they charged at Alia and Kevin on the razed plain that had been a forest before the possession of the Southern Carpathians in Romania by the High Demon Fon, Mbrwiri.
Kevin could have easily healed his body. His time as a corpsman of the Interstellar Panel meant that he spent time assisting in the facilities of the Universal Infirmary on many planets aligned with the IP, and he’d learned things about human anatomy from the nurses there who were fascinated by human biology and Kevin’s abilities. He worked closely with Nurse Sevi Swite on Oin, the home of the first and largest Universal Infirmary facility, to test his ability to create tissue to repair his cells after difficult battles, and because it piggy backed on work he’d done with the CIA years ago, he was a quick learner, and much more difficult to defeat by enemies of the universe’s peace. And the damage he sustained opposing the demon-possessed inhabitants of Romania, both man and beast, should have been easy for Kevin to heal. But it was easier to just cough up blood and wait for the end. The battle would not be lost without him, Mbrwiri would not overpower Alia in the end, Kevin knew that. She had a cosmic power, a yellow-white light that she could focus on anything to be impacted however she dictated. She usually used this light as concussive force, as she did against the demon bison and managed to scatter their stampede sufficiently to save herself and Kevin, but Alia could also wield the light to other effects. Kevin witnessed her reveal ghosts to those who could not see them; she had frozen a large stretch of the Mississippi River in order to prevent an aquatic predator of the planet Druont from escaping into the Gulf of Mexico; and she could even survive the vacuum of space when she suffused her body with the light and attained her Hyperion form. She could blast concussive force beams quickly and increase the strength of them by gathering the light, but to do the other things, freezing water or revealing spirit energy, she had to concentrate for an extended period and this could slow her down in battles with powerful entities when she fought alone.
When Mbriwi attacked Europe, many brought their powers to bear to save the innocent, and the team of Alia and Kevin had traveled to the location where the demon activity was the strongest, in the mountains of Romania. And because Mbriwi did indeed dwell in those mountains, the force protecting him was fierce and pushed both Alia and Kevin to their limits.
The bison raged around them in the ruined forest for a while as Alia defended the two of them on her own and eventually all of the bison had been incapacitated.
“You just left me alone to die!” Alia yelled into his face that was obscured by the blood that spouted from his mouth when he coughed.
“Nothing…” Kevin struggled to say, “…can kill you…”
Alia lifted a hand over his face and as the light of it intensified, Kevin felt heat, and he screamed despite the pain that racked his body when the light blasted off of her hand and into his face. She stood and widened the scope of the light to encompass his whole body, and she made sure that it caused him pain. After more than twenty minutes of Kevin yelling in agony, Alia finally stopped the flow of her power and Kevin was completely healed on the ground, though he still lay on his back, looking up at the sky. Alia staggered toward him, dropped to her knees and then fell on her side next to him. She would be alright soon, the light of the sun replenished her powers quickly, but for the moment, she was spent.
“You should just let me…” Kevin couldn’t say it.
“Are you really this sad?” Alia asked with anger, but there was concern there as well. The two had loved one another for a long time, even if their romantic relationship had been doomed from the start.
“I’m not sad at all,” Kevin said and looked her in the eyes. He loved her eyes. It was like arriving to a familiar place after wandering in strange territory for a long time. He wanted to live there, to have everything else disappear around them. “I’m just…” He was thoughtful. “I just wish things were different. And no matter how far I go, no matter what alien world I go to, the stuff I’m trying to escape always find me. This thing in my fucking head, it doomed me. All I ever wanted was just a normal life. Imagine if things had been different for us? We could’ve had kids that were going off to college by now. We could be on vacation in Hawaii.”
Alia nodded at him. “You know I done seen those realities before. We always look real good together, like a movie or something. But you know movies ain’t real, Kevin, and you shouldn’t waste your energy wishing you lived in one. You think if you had just died out here, you would’ve woke up in a movie? No, you would still be doing the same thing probably, but just as a ghost. You thinking about it wrong and that’s draining your spirit, I see that now. But don’t you ever pull some shit like that with me again, you hear me?”
Alia was closer to full strength by that point and she sat up, looking down at him. He still hadn’t moved.
“If you want to kill yourself, don’t do it out here when I’m depending on you!” Alia was on the verge of tears, but she spoke forcefully and it roused Kevin from the position on his back and they both sat with their legs crossed before one another.
“I’m sorry, it just hit me all at once. I know that ain’t an excuse, but it won’t happen again.”
“Will it?” Alia asked, looking him in the eyes and even when they were angry at him, he wanted to live inside them, cozy up next to her rage; she was always better than anything else the world had to offer. “I’m sure Mbwiri is somewhere around here, but we have to be sure before we call everybody else off they search. So that mean, we might be about to face him. Are you ready for that or should I get Tin to finish this with me? Wendy and Aile said he stayed back to help keep the shield over North America, but Kyrie can do that on his own. If you would rather be dead, I’ll let you go die.”
“That’s not what I want,” Kevin said, looking down at his crossed legs. “I just want to know that when this is over, there’s more than just another big fight waiting for me.”
“Come stay with me,” Alia said. She said it quickly enough that he didn’t doubt that she meant it. “Ivan and Clay would be so happy to have you. You need a family, Kevin. You can’t walk this world alone. Or you can, but then you end up pissing off the person in the world who loves you the most.”
Kevin laughed. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “And I think I will come live with y’all. That’s something to look forward to.”
“Let’s go shut this shit down,” Alia said as she stood, swiping at the dirt on her pants, then she offered a hand to Kevin to help him stand. “There are a bunch of Clay’s cookies waiting for us at home.”
Uneb is an elegant whirl of aggressive force and Kevin worries for everyone. Her tendrils are thick and long, and they move through space at a speed that defies her size, even if Kevin and the forces supporting him are small enough to be quicker than her. Nebuchad had been badly injured and was on one of the Oin medical ships hovering in the space just beyond the scope of Uneb’s deadly reach, that has only grown over the time the battle rages. The Queen Ravelith has gone completely berserk after she tried to connect to Uneb’s mind. A Kazi of Eel monitors her on an IP ship to keep her from hurting herself, though he knows that she maintains enough control to avoid hurting others with her extensive capacity for telekinetic and telepathic attacks, but it seems that Uneb managed to influence her to harm herself. She has calmed and currently, she pants with deep breaths and insists that she has regained herself inside of the ship infirmary as Kazi Lograt floats next to her bed.
“I saw something,” the Queen Ravelith says.
“What did you see?” Kazi Lograt asks with concern.
“I saw her, I saw Une,” Ravelith says and a shiver shakes her body when she says the name. “This is just a puppet she pilots. She is rooted in existence itself, rotting it out and she has only just now reached us. Other existences have not been so lucky. What we face, Lograt, is not even the tip of the iceberg, that raging monster is but a grain of sand that threatens to ravage our reality from a vast sandy coast of death and destruction.”
“What are you saying, Queen? This thing we face is not the greatest threat?”
She shakes her head slowly. “She has summoned something dark and it will be upon our existence soon. Where is Alia? There has never been a greater need for her presence, her power.”
“She is nowhere we expected to find her. Some of the Kazi worry that she is lost in the Cavern of Tranquility, and if that is the case, we can only hope that she will find her way back soon. There are Kazi keeping watch in the Cavern.”
“I will try to reach out to her through the mental plane,” Ravelith says earnestly. “Join me, Lograt.”
He agrees and they both sit to attain the mental realm.
Kevin and Yuri can’t create constructs fast enough to do a dent in Uneb’s tendrils and Yuri has taxed the machine in his brain that allows for his ability. He is lucky that Desperation Jackson and Kal Qor are raging against the tendrils in his vicinity. Yuri’s nose starts to bleed as he floats space in the suit with jet boosters and eventually he loses consciousness and the functions of his suit cease, causing him to fall down where he is slapped around by the tendrils before Kal swoops in to save him. And Kal only brings Yuri safely to a ship because Desperation Jackson is strong enough to grab a tendril and he plunges his fingers into the muscular trama of it, digging into its fibers and ripping them apart.
The Druintes arrive and they transport the fight far away from Earth and other inhabited planets, which give them all solace, but the ships do not follow Uneb enthusiastically through the wormhole created by the Druintes because of the grueling battle they had already endured.
Kevin can’t help but feel the faraway feeling of defeat. The feeling that regardless of the outcome, he is still doomed and it might be best to just die and leave the fight to others who are not doomed and actually have a stake in the future. But seeing what he has seen so far, he knows that he has never experienced anything like this before. This thing that threatens them is from the nightmares of his worst enemies sent to finally end everything he loved once and for all, and the feeling of defeat are subsumed by the resolve to ensure that everything isn’t destroyed. He is not sure where Alia is, but he knows that she will eventually come home and she deserves a home to come back to. He would not falter like he had in the past, there was no time for it.
Kevin imagines a large bear to match the size of Uneb in space and he imbues it with the strength of mountains and boulders, and the swift and disciplined battle techniques of the Kazi, and the large construct alleviates the assault on his allies for long enough that all retreat for rest to spectate Kevin’s assault and plan their next move.
Thomas Eakran, as e is known on Earth, Eakran 15 to eris fellow Druintes, watches the battle aboard an IP ship where many of the strongest combatants have come to recuperate. The Druinte Halgod stands next to erim.
“Are we doomed?” Halgod asks Eakran who never takes eris eyes from the scene through the windows.
“We are not doomed, God. This is not over until that thing is dead or we are no longer able to fight against it.”
Halgod nods and chuckles. “No one has called me God since I landed on Earth. Pegraf said the humans would be offended by the name given to me by Falstraq.”
“Really?” Eakran arches an eyebrow and e looks angry for a moment. “Humans still indulge in religion? Is it still a widespread practice?” Eakran hadn’t been to Earth in a while, but e eagerly joined this conflict once e received word of it.
Halgod nods.
“Shame, that’s the worst part about Earth,” Eakran says. “Even the most rational and intelligent among them take part in the shared delusion.”
Halgod shrugs, “I don’t really care. Pegraf and I have found a home that we love and won’t let this monstrous thing take it away from us.”
Eakran watches as the large bear construct that Kevin had created, slashes its impossible claws through the void and manages to separate many of the tendrils from Uneb. Some cheer, but Eakran does not.
“Kevin is formidable,” Halgod says, curious why Eakran doesn’t share their enthusiasm.
“Celebrating prematurely only makes defeat sharper, harder, and more difficult to reverse.”
Kevin arrives at the ship to the cheers of his compatriots. They know that his construct will fight until it no longer can and while it does, Kevin will rest and recoup his strength. Eakran follows him to his quarters and the two talk alone inside.
“You are our best hope,” Eakran sighs. “What are our chances?”
Kevin falls back on his bed as two more enter his private quarters, Kazi Lograt and the Queen Ravelith.
“There are so many more coming,” the Queen Ravelith says urgently and she and Lograt explain what they discovered.
“How long do we have?” Eakran asks, not doubting the duo for a second.
The Queen shakes her head and looks down at her feet.
“Not long at all,” Lograt explains. “Soon, a wall of dark power will be upon this existence and it will move across it until everything in its wake is infected by Une.”
Kevin seems alert and listening, nodding along to plans and suggestions, but it is a facade. Deep in his mind, Une welcomes him to a place of tranquility and he can’t stop himself from enjoying it.
PRL Serials 