Boss Battle
thestrexfiles:
nospaceofregret:
If Sara had been anything else than what she was, it would have been the end of her.
“Oh, you’re going to regret doing that, dears.”
Her voice rang out, savage and clear, from every one of her sparks as they were stalled. But instead of washing away, she only grew brighter, blindingly so.
“You never did think things through. I always warned you”
For Sara was sustained by what energy she could leech away from elsewhere, and just before starting this conflict, she’d done away with her own restrictions in that regard. She could draw directly from her environment, and 805 had just presented her with an all-you-can-eat buffet.
“Now it’s time for you to die.”
The last few shreds of her terror fell away, and the force of the energy flowing through her forged her fury into steel. Her thoughts came clearer now as the connections between all her parts were strengthened to the point of visibility. She emerged from 805′s attack as a brilliant net, and launched herself at 805 to wrap tightly around them.
A hundred trillion years of dread and terror left un-felt screeched out as Sara wrapped around 805′s cosmic bulk. They twisted and writhed in and out of time, over untold leagues of space, whole universes birthed and destroyed where they interacted with the fields of matter they had been wrapped in since their inception. Shuddering shocks vibrated through the Mudwomb as Department 805 tried to escape the pocket dimension, to call the whole thing off, but it was no use. They inverted themselves, tried to invert Sara, unable to shake her off.
“INSOLENT! INSOLENT!”
She didn’t need to leech any more strength from them, didn’t need to tap directly into the core of all they were and suck energy from them as they struggled. But she had always been thorough, and she wasn’t going to chance any part of them getting away.
For one glorious moment, Sara was in control of most of the energy that existed in this pocket dimension.
“This is for Jim.”
And then she pulled the proverbial trigger, and together the entity known as Department 805 and the ghost of Sara Pauline Hamilton lit up like a supernova.
Most people don’t notice when reality breaks.
The truth is, what humankind considers the laws of physics change all the time, as the entities responsible for them shift around, awakening and falling asleep, killing each other and giving birth to new ones. Somewhere past the stars and sideways all of this happens, and most of the resultant changes are small enough to escape the notice of scientists. Like the movement of tectonic plates, they might be eventually detected and understood, and at that point, perhaps humankind will be a little bit closer to understanding the situation it’s in. But like the world of particle physics, these interactions are so minute that they go unnoticed. They heal and scab over and that’s the end of it.
Maybe someone felt it when Department 805 died. Maybe someone’s soup stayed warm a little bit longer, or someone who should’ve passed on one day instead, against all odds, lived another two weeks. But Department 805 wasn’t Entropy, as close as the two were, and their influence on reality - aside from their agenda on Earth, and the cruelties they had personally imparted onto so many captive worlds before - was small.
When Sara, bursting with energy, so different from what a human was supposed to be, said those words, Department 805 didn’t feel anything. It wasn’t their job to feel things, the same way it’s not a bird’s job to go into space. But it did finally occur to them, solidly and without any doubt, that this time they were well and truly fucked.
And then they burst, the whole of them, planets catching fire and crumbling, planar rifts fusing and fragmenting, leaving Sara - their first and only true friend, their last and greatest enemy - in the dust that was once something unfathomably powerful and malevolent.
Somewhere, in Earth’s orbit, the Moon was whole. Which was good, because it had an eclipse to do.