Thragg caught one variant by the ankle and swung him like a massive club, smashing him into three of his brothers and turning all four of them into a cloud of scattered purple mist, but the mist simply coalesced back into solid forms before they even hit the ground. Another variant managed to slip past Thragg's guard and drove two fingers directly into the Grand Regent's eyes, and while Viltrumite eyeballs were incredibly durable, the sheer force of the strike made Thragg roar in genuine anger as he blindly reached out and tore the variant's arms entirely out of their sockets.
Instead of screaming in pain, the armless variant just laughed and used his powerful legs to kick Thragg in the throat, giving another variant the opening to wrap his arms around Thragg's neck in a brutal sleeper hold.
Thragg launched himself backward and slammed the choking variant into the solid bedrock with enough force to liquefy a normal being, but the shadow just melted into the stone and immediately reformed in front of Thragg to deliver a brutal headbutt.
The battle raged on as a hyper-violent stalemate, because while Thragg possessed the strength to turn planets to dust, the shadows possessed the terrifying advantage of absolute immortality. They didn't need to breathe, they didn't need to rest, and they used their own mangled bodies as weapons, intentionally letting Thragg rip their arms off just so they could blind him with the spray of their own purple blood.
'Do I really need to bring him out already?' John mused as he hovered comfortably far from the apocalypse and watched the horrific cycle of his soilders getting turned into purple mist only to stitch themselves back together and curse Thragg out again. 'Even with infinite health, I can't have all my mana reserves get depleted so fast.'
John floated high above the carnage, calculating the rapid drain on his energy as a sharp, pulsing ache began to throb right behind his temples. The violet aura around him flickered for a dangerous microsecond, serving as a stark physical reminder of the heavy toll this immortality cheat code demanded. As John analyzed the fight and prepared his next move, a soft voice suddenly echoed in his mind, piercing through the deafening noise of the slaughter.
It was Nakime, and her psychic tone was laced with a desperate, overwhelming wave of relief and pure happiness.
'Master, are you back? Are you really safe?' Nakime asked, her voice trembling with relief as she reached across the psychic link that connected John to all his summons. 'I felt your connection weaken, and I was so terrified that you had lost your way...'
John's heart softened for a second as a warm smile touched his lips as he prepared to answer his beloved biwa player and assure her that he was perfectly fine.
'Yo, boss!'
The tender reunion was interrupted by an obnoxious voice echoing through the psychic link, and John recognized the whiny tone of Jason immediately.
"Yeah, glad you're alive and all that crap, but we seriously need to talk about these hazardous working conditions right now! And I demand a much better contract before I get my ass beat by another alien again! I am unionizing the summons, Master! You hear me?!"
John's eye twitched as he roared back through the link, "Shut the fuck up, Jason! I swear to RNGesus, if you complain one more time, I will personally load your ass into a cannon and launch you directly into the Alien armada! You are a summon, you don't get to unionise!"
Before John could finish verbally abusing his complaining summon, the sky directly above them tore open with a blinding flash of light.
A supersonic shockwave rattled John's eardrums as a streak of dented silver and blue crashed into the dirt directly in front of him, cracking the ground and sending a massive plume of dust into the air, and as the dust cleared, only to find Pepsi-Man stood huffing and half kneeling.
The corporate mascot had seen better days. His pristine silver and blue armor was heavily scorched with deep cuts, his left shoulder was severely dented inward as if hit by a meteor, and he was visibly limping while venting hissing steam into the cool night air. His metallic shell was covered in deep scratches and splattered with thick. He looked like a warrior who had just walked out of the deepest pits of hell.
But despite the horrific damage from his apocalyptic clash with Battle Beast, the mascot slowly reached out and opened his metallic palm.
Hovering gently in the center of his hand was a single drop of rich red blood.
"Pepsi," the mascot rasped, his distorted voice trembling with sheer exhaustion but laced with an undeniable pride from avenging his best friend.
John's breath caught in his throat as he looked at the deeply dented mascot and the floating blood, and he understood instantly what it meant. Sebas was safe, and the universe's greatest predator had finally fallen to the power of a goddamn Pepsi.
John gently reached out, carefully taking the floating drop of blood into his own hand, and he looked up at the silver and blue hero with a slow, deeply respectful nod that conveyed everything he couldn't say.
"You did good, buddy," John said softly with genuine gratitude. "Go check on Super Mom and the kids. They must be worried sick."
"Pepsi."
The mascot nodded in acknowledgement, casting one final, lingering look at the bloodbath raging in the sky between Thragg and the constantly cursing Invincible variants, before blurring into motion and running off into the horizon at Mach speeds.
John turned his attention back to the fight, his eyes locked onto the drop of glowing blood hovering above his palm, and he took a deep breath before shouting over the deafening shockwaves.
"Hey! Mustache!"
Thragg, who had just casually punched a hole clean through an Invincible variant's chest while the kid flipped him the bird with both hands, paused in mid-air. He let the purple corpse slide off his arm and turned to hover in the sky, his pristine cape billowing behind him as he looked down at the boy with absolute disdain and barely concealed boredom.
"You know, I'm a pretty chill guy most of the time," John yelled, dropping all the jokes and the chaotic gamer persona as a cold, terrifying hatred flooded his eyes and completely changed the atmosphere around him. "But the guy who shed this blood, he took someone precious away from me today. Even if it was just temporarily, it really pissed me off."
John clenched his fist tightly around the hovering drop of blood, feeling the immense, untamed kinetic energy vibrating within the tiny liquid sphere.
"So, I'm going to take away the one thing he wanted more than anything else in the entire universe," John declared, his voice dropping into a chilling, demonic register that echoed ominously across the battlefield. "I'm going to completely rip away his eternal peace, and I'm going to use him to beat your arrogant ass into the dirt."
Deep within John's soul, a specific trait activated. Rule of Cool
John didn't consciously activate the trait, but the universe bent to his sheer will anyway.
The roaring wind of the battlefield suddenly died to create a vacuum of suffocating, dramatic silence, and the ambient dust swirling in the air froze completely in place as if time itself had stopped. The pale light of the full moon physically shifted in the sky, angling its beams to cast a perfect, cinematic spotlight directly onto John's hovering figure while plunging the rest of the ruined landscape into deep, contrasting shadows.
John raised his hand toward the heavens, his eyes burning with an unholy violet fire, and the drop of red blood floating in his palm began to violently boil and hiss with raw power.
"Arise."
The single drop of blood exploded.
It erupted upward into a massive, towering geyser of liquid darkness that completely blotted out the stars. The ground beneath John violently quaked and split open as the essence of a cursed warrior, who had finally been freed from his endless cycle of violence just minutes prior, was forcibly torn back from his eternal rest to serve a new master.
The geyser of shadows coalesced, hardening and taking solid shape as the darkness rapidly grew into a nine-foot-tall behemoth of pure, dense, violet-black energy, and as the transformation completed, two massive, glowing purple eyes snapped open in the darkness.
[Image Here]
Thragg's eyes widened, and a rare flicker of genuine shock finally cracked his regal composure as an aura of otherworldly bloodlust washed over the entire battlefield, an aura so terrifyingly dense and suffocating that it completely dwarfed the combined pressure of the eighteen Invincible variants.
"Raaaah!"
The shadow of Thokk, the legendary Battle Beast, threw back its majestic mane and unleashed a deafening, soul-shattering roar that shook the very foundations of the planet and promised an ocean of blood.
[A/N]:
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