The Perfect Run - Chapter 127

By the time Ryan reached Ischia Island, the area had already turned into a warzone.

The Mechron submarine had made landfall before Ryan arrived, unleashing a motley crew of cured Meta-Gang members, Geniuses outfitted with advanced power armors, and berserk Pandas on Ischia Island’s shores. They were welcomed by inactive turrets, Augusti gunners on the walls, and a horde of zombies buried beneath the beach.

Ryan had never seen Mercury in the flesh, only through skulls he used as intermediaries. According to Livia, the old Olympian could infuse corpses with necromantic energy and pilot undead from afar. With Geist out of the picture, the Augusti had decided to raise all his victims: bloated corpses left to drown beneath the waves, skeletons cleaned of all traces of flesh, and the diseased remains of the island’s test subjects. A yellow glow illuminated their eyes.

And who better to lead the legion of the dead than the god of war Mars himself?

Still, this army faced powerful opposition. Vladimir had transformed into a metallic version of himself, and landed first on the shore alongside the Panda. The steel man absorbed Mars’ swords and spears into his body while stomping on any corpse foolish enough to get in his way, quickly growing from three meters tall to four. Suicidal undead tried to climb on his legs with explosive belts, but the Panda quickly swept them off. The valiant bear tossed the kamikaze bombers into the sea where they exploded in fiery blasts.

Mars, after quickly realizing that most of his weapons wouldn’t affect Vladimir, switched from spears and swords to Genius-made weapons. A rain of Vulcan-made bombs fell on the iron giant, each with enough power to damage even Wyvern.

All of them turned to sand in a violet flash, while explosions rocked the Bliss fortress’ foundations.

Mars flinched in surprise, while a blonde woman stepped over the submarine and joined the fray. Acid Rain followed Vladimir and the Panda on foot, and immediately worked to counter Mars’ power. Since she could switch items with those of equivalent mass with a wider radius than the Olympian, she completely neutralized his arsenal.

To his credit Mars tried. Bombs fell by the dozens, only to explode amidst his undead troops; he launched a gas trunk at Vladimir’s face, but it turned to sand midair; he even prepared to fight the giant in close combat with a thermal lance, but it transformed into a severed zombie’s arm within his hands.

In the end, the dreaded warrior that put Ryan and Felix on the run one loop ago could only retreat as a steel giant ran after him. “This is the Bay of Pigs all over again!” Vladimir snarled, as he fruitlessly attempted to catch the wily Olympian. The giant proved no better at the task than abolishing private property, his hands grabbing only sand.

Ryan couldn’t help but smile beneath his helmet, as the scene reminded him of an old Looney Toons cartoon; though he doubted Mars would have Bugs Bunny’s luck. And indeed, when the Olympian attempted to fly away by unleashing pressurized air, Acid Rain switched it with seawater. The helpless Mars stumbled on the ground and was immediately mauled by the Panda.

Livia had been correct. Genome powers were a rock-paper-scissors game.

It didn’t matter how powerful you were, someone out there had the exact ability to counter yours. Through intelligence gathered over multiple loops, Ryan had arrayed the perfect match-ups against the so-called Olympians.

Not that the normies in their employ fared better. Shortie had bubbled a dozen gunners, while a trail of explosions on the beach followed Felix as he blew up undead left and right. The Doll provided suppression fire with a Red Flux minigun, her own Mechron-made power armor shrugging off bullets.

Worse, Vulcan’s security system had failed to activate and intercept the invaders. At first Ryan thought his own Geniuses had done it… before noticing multiple Augusti trapped inside their own power armors, unable to move.

“Livia, you cheeky little spider, that’s who you called!” Ryan couldn’t help but laugh. Still, he wondered how Vulcan had the time to sabotage the defenses. Since the power armor she had created suffered from the same problems as the turrets, the courier assumed his ex-girlfriend had put a killswitch inside her creations since their inception. Insurance in case the Augusti leadership turned against her.

And she had cashed in.

Still, though the attackers were clearing out the beach, the defenders on the fortress’ walls held their ground. Having expected an assault by Dynamis, they had reinforced the ancient castle with anti-air defenses and heavy artillery. Once their allies on the ground were defeated and the risk of friendly fire reduced, they started dropping shells on the beach. Though their projectiles couldn’t hold off Vladimir’s advance—and in fact only fueled his growth—the others had to take cover or run behind the giant.

Some of the Killer Seven were among the defenders, with Vamp and Night Terror using rocket launchers, Sparrow unleashing deadly volleys of lasers from her hands, and Mortimer disdaining the heavy artillery for a subtle but deadly sniper rifle.

Ryan circled the fortress from above, trying to locate the more dangerous Cancel and Pluto. Some Augusti gunners noticed him and tried to shoot him down with anti-air cannons, but the courier froze time and retaliated with shockwaves. Cannons exploded one after another, sending defenders tumbling down the walls.

While he cleared out the anti-air defense perimeter, Ryan noticed a familiar red blur moving around the beach, pushing his allies out of harm’s way whenever projectiles threatened to hit them.

“Mr. Wave?” Ryan shouted from above, his voice echoing over the battlefield. “You were supposed to destroy the Mechron bases!”

“God asked things of Mr. Wave too once,” the Genome replied, as he quickly pushed Felix to the side before one of Mortimer’s bullets could blow his head off. “And Mr. Wave replied ‘say please!’”

The man said it with so much style that Ryan couldn’t hold his blasphemy against him.

Once word of the Carnival’s presence reached Lightning Butt, however…

The appearance of two new figures on the main wall, right above Narcinia’s flower garden, caught Ryan’s attention. They emerged from a reinforced door, the first with the same cheery smile always plastered on her face, the second with a furious scowl.

“Matty, Cruella and her Dalmatian at twelve o’clock high,” Ryan said through the communicator, as the two killers joined Mortimer, Vamp, and Night Terror. No one answered, so the courier guessed the silent assassin was already in position.

“Sweet, I don’t know where to start,” Cancel shouted over the song of bullets, raising a bazooka towards the beach alongside her comrades while wearing riot gear.

Unlike her subordinate, Pluto didn’t bother with body armor. She didn’t need it, or so she thought. “Traitors first,” the Augusti underboss hissed while glaring at Felix. Already, Ryan noticed the sand below the kitten’s feet shifting in strange and dangerous ways. “I should have killed him long—”

She didn’t finish her sentence, as a tranquilizer dart hit her in the neck, and another hit Cancel right below the helmet. The latter instantly turned her bazooka at the attack’s source while Mortimer did the same with his sniper’s rifle, but saw nothing.

Pluto hastily tried to remove the dart, but her hands fumbled before they even reached her neck. The Augusti Underboss who had nearly killed Ryan in the past, and successfully murdered countless others, stumbled and collapsed. Night Terror dropped his cannon to catch his superior in his arms, but Pluto had already fallen into a catatonic state.

Though Ryan knew tranquilizers usually took minutes to affect their target, the Alchemo-made anesthetic spread through the Genomes’ bloodstream and nerves in seconds. The courier had seen Pluto’s power in action enough times not to take any risk with her. She had to be dealt with swiftly with no chance to activate her death curse. Cancel, who was just as dangerous, fell unconscious on the wall’s bricks.

An invisible assassin had taken out Pluto and Cancel before they could even enter the game, and brought a partner.

When Shroud became visible on the walls right behind the Killer Seven with a glass-coated tranquilizer gun in his hands, so did his lucky charm. Ryan had to admit that her glass armor fit her like a glove, especially when she removed her helmet and let her golden hair flow.

“Fortuna?” Vamp choked while drawing a handgun and pointing it at the couple. Mortimer and Night Terror exchanged a glance. “You’re working with them?”

“I am,” Lady Luck replied with a determined frown. After receiving Alchemo’s memory treatment, she had remembered how the Killer Seven had tried to murder her brother in the previous loop… and she didn’t forgive. “Morty, Richie, don’t make this hard.”

Mortimer immediately dropped his sniper rifle, to Vamp’s dismay. “Mortimer, you coward!”

“They’ve got a living luck charm and K.O.’ed our power-canceller,” he said with utter defeatism, before falling to his knees with his hands behind his head. “Poor ol’ Mortimer ain’t rolling the dice.”

Vamp snarled and tried to open fire at the duo, only to slip on a brick. She barely had the time to scream before she stumbled over the wall and fell on the sand below, head-first.

“See?” Mortimer asked with a shrug. “It’s quicker this way.”

Night Terror glanced at the unconscious Pluto, then at Shroud’s tranquilizer gun. “I surrender,” he said meekly. The sun was still up, and so he couldn’t use his power.

“Good,” Shroud replied before knocking him out with a dart too, just in case. Only Sparrow remained, and she was too busy trying to keep the giant Vladimir away from the walls with suppression lasers to interfere. “This leaves only Mercury and Bacchus inside.”

“I’ll deal with them,” Ryan said while landing on the walls and blasting the nearest reinforced doors with shockwaves. A faint mist slipped inside the fortress, almost invisible. “It’s been a while since I’ve attended mass.”

“No way, my sister is inside and they confiscated her phone!” Fortuna complained. “I’m coming!”

“Sorry, he has range and your lucky charms won’t work on Bacchus. He did take an oath of celibacy.” That, and Fortuna’s power wouldn’t protect her from a telepathic assault.

“You’re sure?” Shroud asked while keeping Mortimer at gunpoint. “Your power won’t protect you.”

“And that’s where you’re wrong, my friend,” Ryan replied, before stepping through the blasted doors and into the fortress. “I have a guardian angel too.”

Though Bacchus would probably consider it a demon.

The courier walked into a steel hallway, the shadows of Shroud and Fortuna vanishing behind him. All guards had moved outside to defend the perimeter, so nobody dared to stop the courier’s advance.

None but the voices.

“Coming inside alone was a mistake.” Though Bacchus’ voice echoed in the corridor, Ryan didn’t see him anywhere. Nor did the armor’s sensors pick up a sound. The words existed only in the courier’s head. “Despoiling this holy ground was a sin.”

“Can I confess my sins while hauling you out of here?” Ryan remembered the fortress’ plans from his previous visit, and suspected that the priest awaited him in the Bliss production center. “This place is lost, Father.”

“All you sinners did was invoke the Wrath of God. I already sent word to Augustus.”

Which meant Ryan had no time to waste. “I should have called myself Joan of Arc,” the courier said before smashing through a blast door blocking his path with shockwaves. The steel doors fell on the ground with a loud noise, though only darkness awaited beyond the threshold.

The courier suddenly realized something was wrong with the architecture, though he couldn’t put his finger on what. The corridor’s angles looked perfect, too perfect, the ceiling too smooth…

“All spirits are linked, by the grace of God, yet you have turned away from It.” Bacchus’ voice sounded almost warm and soothing. “This place is a temple to Its glory, which your mere presence desecrates.”

“Good, just let me grab Narcinia and bring down the roof, and you won’t have to suffer my wits anymore.” Ryan briefly froze time, the world turning purple. The darkness in front of him vanished, a wall of dented steel standing up where the blast door should have been. The real blast door had been to his left, and intact.

“I won’t let you,” Bacchus said as Ryan let time resume and unleashed a shockwave to his left, dispelling the illusion. “She is a bridge between us mortals and my God, too precious to be sacrificed to the likes of you.”

“She is what, thirteen? Fourteen?” Ryan snickered before continuing his progress. Lamps in the ceiling flickered, and shadows shifted all around him. “That’s like five years too old for you.”

“I see that even my salvation cannot reach you now.” Bacchus’ voice let out a sigh, and the blast door magically reformed behind Ryan. “But all sins are forgiven in death. Once I have peeled away your mind to nothingness, your corpse will bolster the cohorts of the risen.”

And Bacchus attacked.

The ground collapsed beneath Ryan’s feet, making him stumble into a black abyss with fangs and teeth. The courier activated his jetpack, but a serpentine tongue caught his ankle and dragged him into the darkness.

This is all in my head, Ryan thought, but his own brain wouldn’t believe him.

When the fangs closed around his stomach and tore him in half, the pain felt veryreal.

Ryan immediately activated his time-stop, and when the world turned purple, the courier stood inside a security checkpoint room with only computers for company.

He hadn’t even activated his jetpack.

When he had fought Night Terror in the past, Ryan had noticed that his time-stop briefly dispelled illusions. The courier suspected that telepaths worked by ‘broadcasting’ thoughts through Blue Flux, and they couldn’t do so in a frozen world.

Unfortunately, the illusions reasserted themselves the moment time resumed. The next telepathic attack took the shape of a tide of blood swallowing Ryan and seeping into his armor. The courier instinctively held his breath, but the red liquid bypassed his lips and started filling his lungs. His vision blurred as he drowned into the red ocean, the laughter of Bloodstream resonating with the waves.

Ryan knew this was all an illusion, and unlike Night Terror, it didn’t look like Bacchus could inflict real damage through hallucinations. However, the priest didn’t have to harm the time-traveler, only to delay him. If Augustus fell on him while blinded by illusions, the courier might as well be a sitting duck.

Another time-stop dispelled the red flood, and Ryan used shockwaves on the floor below his feet. The ground collapsed when time resumed, but when the time-traveler fell the hole went on and on forever. A hideous alien cacophony erupted around him, as strident as the scream of children. The twisted illusion made the courier’s ears bleed and his vision blur.

No, Ryan realized as the cacophony became deafening, not illusions.

Insanity.

Bacchus could degrade an individual’s sense of reality like advanced schizophrenia or other mental illnesses, destroying the victim’s very identity. He peeled someone’s mind away like an onion, until nothing remained.

“You did this to Giulia Costa,” Ryan realized in horror, his voice somehow cutting through the alien cacophony. The courier had grown used to pain through centuries of time-looping, but a normal mind would have shattered under these psychic assaults. “You tortured her, until she forgot who she was.”

Human mouths opened on his armor, to taunt him with ten thousand voices in one. “Some in the Holy Church believed that only through pain and flagellation could one become closer to God.”

Ryan choked, as tendril-whips sprung from the darkness and hit him in the chest and back. Though his armor should have stopped them, they flayed the skin beneath the steel. Their kiss felt like sharp blades cutting him up.

“Is that the best you can do?” the courier said with a grunt. “My girlfriend scratches me harder!”

“Giulia Costa died on the altar, only to rise again, a holy maiden and a tool of the one true God,” Bacchus replied softly. “It took days for her to accept this divine grace, but in the end, she opened her heart to me.”

“Yeah, I’m going to martyr you too as soon I reach your hiding room!” Ryan activated his power again, finding himself facing a steel floor with four animated, putrid corpses striking his back with pickaxes.

Mercury.

Bacchus cloaked his undead thralls with illusions, allowing them to strike him by surprise. They’re trying to find a joint or weak point in the armor, Ryan thought, as he blasted the undead to pieces in the frozen time. They wouldn’t find one, but might damage the circuitry or the helmet’s lenses.

He managed to rise back to his feet before the time-stop’s duration ended, but the courier already felt mentally exhausted as if he had overslept. The repeated mental assaults couldn’t harm him physically, but they taxed his brain.

If this lasts too long, I might pass out from the sheer headache, Ryan realized, as he tried to remember his current location inside the maze-like facility. Thankfully, his enhanced timing let his body continue walking towards its destination.

Time ran out, and the psychic assault renewed.

Nails impaled Ryan through the hands and the feet, impaling him on a Christian cross overseeing Ischia Island. The Plushie was crucified to his left, a half-rotten Len to the right. Bacchus stood in front of the naked courier with a sharp spear, while New Rome burnt beyond a bloody horizon.

“I now realize that the Gnosticism heresy had the truth of it,” the priest said, as he stabbed Ryan in the chest. The courier clenched his jaw not to scream as the spear’s tip twisted between his ribs. The illusion was so vivid that it fooled his nerves. “This world, this crooked reality, is a prison for souls. A cosmic trap of monstrous proportions, keeping us from divine unity with the Ultimate Ones.”

“I know what Eva Fabre did to you, Andreas,” Ryan said in between grunts of pain. He hoped using Bacchus’ real name would unsettle him and dispel the hallucination, but it only made the priest stab him harder. “She wrecked your mind when you gained your powers. If there was ever a good man inside you, he’s probably weeping.”

“The Alchemist awakened me,” Bacchus replied, his face twisting into a skull with a blue, alien light peering out of the eyes. “She was a prophet, and I followed the wrong path.”

“She was mad, and now she’s dead.” Or she wished she was.

When Bacchus opened his ghoulish mouth, Eva Fabre’s voice came out. “Does it matter if the carpenter dies, so long as the house stands?” The spear in his hands turned into an Elixir needle, oozing a blue oil from its tip. “The Lord of the Scriptures to whom I dedicated half my life was a lie, an illusion. There are no other gods than the Ultimate Ones.”

“Geist saw heaven,” Ryan reminded him. “A bright Yellow realm of light and angels.”

“Yes, he did.” The universe turned a blinding Yellow, the courier’s eyes burning from the light. “What of it?”

“You don’t get it. If he saw a heaven with angels, maybe your old God exists in the Yellow World. You got the color wrong!”

Ryan froze time again and collapsed into a bed of flowers. Their petals were blue, their cores yellow. The courier noticed a hole in a glass ceiling above his head, and two undead with welding sticks surrounding him.

The courier quickly rose up and rushed out of the glass garden, punching the corpses out of his way. He had somehow made his way into the Bliss labs in the facility’s heart, and quickly guessed why.

His enhanced timing sense. His body had kept moving towards its destination like a sleepwalker, even if Bacchus assaulted his mind.

Unfortunately, sleepwalking wouldn’t save Ryan from physical attacks.

An old hunchback stood near the drug assembly lines, surrounded by a group of ten undead bodyguards all equipped with submachine guns. The fossil dressed astonishingly well, wearing a cashmere back suit and a bowler hat, though he needed an ugly wooden cane to stand. His white beard couldn’t cover all his face’s warts and wrinkles, and his tiny eyes squinted at the glass garden with fear.

Mercury.

Unfortunately, time ran out before Ryan could unleash a shockwave at this geriatric disaster. The entire facility turned bright blue. A psychedelic lightshow blinded the time traveler to reality, the assembly lines turning into streams of shining data, the ceiling into the water, and the floor into an empty sky. Rain fell down on the courier, but the raindrops turned into blades when they hit his flesh.

Bullets, Ryan thought fearfully, before suddenly remembering he had his armor on. Or at least, he knew he still had it, even if his senses told him otherwise.

The longer Bacchus’ hallucinations affected him, the harder it became to remember what was real or not.

“Your faith wasn’t all that unshakable, wasn’t it?” The time-traveler taunted his tormentor. “Or maybe it was just a disguise, easy to trade away when it didn’t fit you anymore?”

“You don’t know what you speak of.” The pale blue world shifted into a spiral, a whirlpool sucking Ryan’s very soul. “Don’t you see that my work is for the good of all?”

“It’s never going to work by torturing people,” Ryan replied, an idea crossing his mind. Bacchus believed himself the tool of a higher power, chosen to fulfill a purpose. There was an opening. “You need wisdom and compassion to ascend. I know because they told me.”

Bacchus’ resolve wavered. For a brief instant, no longer than a second, the blue spiral turned into the face of Andreas Torque, his eyes ablaze with madness and fury.

And so Ryan delivered the coup-de-grace. “I guess you were too much of a protestant to enlighten!”

Strong blue hands grabbed the courier’s throat and started choking the life out of him. The hands grew a body, and then a head.

“I need to get out!” The illusory Bacchus screamed, and as he spoke his visage twisted into an abomination with four eyes and two mouths. “I need to escape! I need to be free!”

Ryan attempted to activate his time-stop, but his brain hurt when he tried to. His vision blurred, as fingers tore into his skull to rip open his brain matter. And Bacchus kept ranting, his eyes dividing into a nightmarish kaleidoscope. “I can’t stand this reality!” he shrieked. “It’s all wrong! It’s all twisted and broken! Somewhere in that brain is the key, the door, the way out—”

The illusion flickered into nothingness, and Ryan didn’t even need to stop time.

The courier awoke to reality slammed against the Bliss assembly line by a group of undead, two of them trying to remove his helmet with welding tools. Mercury observed the process from a safe distance, still believing Ryan to be under his colleague’s influence.

The courier stopped time, forced the undead off him, and charged at their necromancer.

“Boo,” Ryan said as time resumed, Mercury’s eyes widening in terror.

He punched the old man in the face with enough strength to break his jaw. The ancient Genome dropped his cane and fell on his back, completely still. His undead collapsed at the same time as him, the yellow light in their eyes vanishing.

“One less pension to pay, I guess,” the courier japed, before almost stumbling from the mental pain. A Green Flux flash blinded him for a second, as the armor tried to heal him. It helped a lot with the exhaustion, but little with the headaches.

Ignoring the pain wracking his skull, the courier checked the unconscious Mercury’s pulse, confirmed his survival, and continued his journey deeper into the production center. He eventually made his way to the room where Bacchus kept the captives of his experiments.

Ryan found the priest wriggling on the floor, scratching his neck as a sentient mist filled out his lungs. The time traveler’s eyes wandered at the cages around him, where drugged-out test subjects with hollow gazes waited in their own feces. One pair of eyes looked towards the courier with intelligence, and a great deal of fear.

Bacchus’ eyes looked up and vanished behind his eyelids, but when the mist exited his throat, the courier could still hear him breathe. “Took you long enough,” Ryan complained, as Bianca reformed next to her unconscious victim.

“Give me a break, it was hard to find him.” His former vice-president squinted at him. “You’re alright?”

“My head hurts like hell, but I’ve felt worse.” The plan had been for Ryan to act as bait for Bacchus’ attention while Bianca crept up on him. The courier had suspected, correctly, that the telepath would have a hard time noticing a creature without a brain.

But still, he hadn’t expected the experience to be so harrowing.

“You’re not alright,” Bianca said with concern, before glaring at Bacchus. “Why did you want him alive? I could have burst out of his lungs easily enough, Alien-style.”

“I promised I would bury him along with this place.” A part of Ryan still wanted to pull his gauntlet’s trigger. “But unlike some ivory madman I know, he didn’t choose to become a monster. If Alchemo can cure his broken psyche like he did with Helen…”

That, and since Ryan might not have a do-over this time, he didn’t want to regret anything down the line. A part of him would have always wondered if he had condemned a sick man to death when other alternatives existed.

“That’s awfully optimistic.” Bianca shrugged. “But I would have said the same of me.”

Ryan looked in front of the cages, stopping in front of one with a terrified teenager inside. “It’s alright,” the courier tried to comfort her, as he tore off the metal bars with his bare hands. “We’re here to help.”

Narcinia didn’t make a move to escape her cage, keeping her arms around her knees in a fetal position. She looked at her rescuers with terror, a red mark on her cheek. Someone clearly slapped her not too long ago.

It almost made Ryan regret sparing that sorry excuse of a priest.

“Bacchus and Mercury are neutralized,” Ryan told Shroud through his armor’s intercom, the Green Flux finally removing his headaches. “We’ve got Narcinia and the test subjects, but she’s… not well.”

The answer came swiftly. “Put on the loudspeakers.”

When Ryan obeyed, it was Fortuna’s voice that came out, brimming with concern. “Narci, are you alright?”

“Sis?” Narcinia’s eyes lit up with hope. “Sis, is… is that you?”

“Of course it’s me, silly!” Fortuna marked a short pause. “What happened to you? You sound so…”

“It’s… Father Torque, he…” Narcinia suppressed a sob. “When Mr. Geist vanished, he wouldn’t let me leave and took my phone. He didn’t even let me see Dad. When I tried to go back home, he… he…”

Her sister’s voice turned reassuring and affectionate. “It’s alright, Narci. I’m here, we’re all here. We’re getting you out of this cursed place.”

“But Dad—”

“Dad is an asshole,” Fortuna cut her off. “Felix and I will show you.”

“F-Felix came back?” The poor girl couldn’t believe it.

“For you, Narci,” Atom Kitten’s voice came out of the loudspeaker. “I came for you.”

“They’re all waiting for you outside,” Ryan said with kindness, extending a hand to the child. In that moment, he was brought to the day when Len found him under his house’s wreckage, like a light in the darkness. “I’ll show you.”

Narcinia hesitated, but eventually took his hand.

It took Mr. Wave’s help and a few minutes to evacuate the factory. Bacchus and Mercury were sedated, joining Sparrow, Pluto, and the rest of the Killer Seven. Vamp had broken her neck, and Mars had been bubbled. Narcinia gave her adoptive father a worried glance as Ryan surrendered her to Fortuna, who hugged her sister tightly. Felix watched on for a while until Narcinia started crying, and then awkwardly joined the group hug.

Ryan glanced at the Bliss Factory, at this industrial facility of death and destruction, and gave the fateful order.

“Tear this place apart!”

The giant Vladimir immediately punched the fortress’ stone walls with his bare hands, while Bianca assisted him with shockwaves. The building collapsed on itself, its evils buried for good.

“Riri,” Len said, her voice heavy with worry. “He’s coming.”

He was. The Saturn Armor’s sensors had noticed a spike in electromagnetic activity near the island. The air itself was choked with electricity, and red lightning coursed through the clouds above the island.

Shroud put a hand on the courier’s shoulder. “Ryan—”

“You killed me more than he ever did,” the courier quipped, before activating his jetpack. “I’ll be alright.”

The vigilante watched Ryan go without a word, but even though the courier couldn’t see through his friend’s glass helmet, he sensed the worry behind it. He wasn’t the only one. Shortie, Bianca, the Doll, Felix, Mr. Wave, Fortuna, Timmy, Helen, and all the friends he made across almost two dozen loops… they looked at him and prayed without a word.

They thought he wouldn’t come back.

And they might be right.

Ryan gathered his breath, swallowed his fear, and ascended higher and higher, until the Bliss factory’s rubbles looked no bigger than his hand. Smoke rose up below him, while crimson lightning tainted the blue skies red. Thunder echoed all around the courier, booming and dreadful.

A thunderbolt coursed through the heavens right above his head.

“I love the dramatic tension,” Ryan said, looking up. “You sure know how to make an entrance.”

An ivory statue slowly descended from a cumulonimbus, shrouded in a crimson, electric aura. It would have hurt to even look at his face, but Ryan’s lenses allowed him to see the furious, murderous scowl behind the crackling lightning. Streams of ionized, whitened winds swirled below the discount deity’s feet, allowing him to fly.

Instead of stopping at the courier’s level, Augustus floated a few meters higher to better look down on him. “Who are you?” There was no fear at all in his voice, but his clenched fists betrayed his anger. “The architect of all of this, I presume.”

“My name is Ryan. Ryan Romano.” The courier heard a scratching sound from within his backpack. “I’ve been called Quicksave, but for you?”

Ryan raised his fists and adopted a fighting pose.

“I guess King Saturn will do it.”

“Is this my Titanomachy?” His eyes squinted at Ryan with contempt and arrogance. “This did not end well for your namesake the first time. Today will be no different.”

“Well, the good thing about do-overs,” Ryan replied. “They can turn failure into success.”

“We will see how brave you are when nailed to a cross, bearing witness to the death of these fools who followed you here.” Augustus’ voice deepened like thunder, his gaze brightening. “Let’s go.”