Alexander

  "Destiny's calling," Lex said, as he punched his over-sized fist through the bark-like creature in front of him. "You're going to be late."

  As the creature toppled over, a clear whole through the center of its figure, Lex’s friend and mentor groaned beside him and her three opponents already broken on the ground.

  “Uhh-If you’re going to become a pro at one-liners, you need to at least work on your language.” Elsie shifted her hands back and forth, “Change it up sometimes. That’s the third destiny line I’ve heard in the last ten minutes.”

  Lex looked at her as he waited for his fist to deflate back to its normal size, “Look, I tried the ones you came up with, but they sucked donkey ass.”

  “Really? Donkey ass?” Elsie replied, calling Chuck back to her hand.

  “Really,” Lex confirmed, eyeing the dangerous weapon. “You’re still using that thing? I thought it was too filled with the blood of the innocent, or whatever.”

  Elsie ran a hand over shiny hair as she surveyed the empty territory before them, “It was. But now, I’m using it to protect the blood of the innocent. I’m taking a bad memory and changing it into something good. Now, how’re you doing with your first evolution? You’ve had it for more than a few weeks.”

  Lex concentrated, pushing the button in his mind that represented his only evolution towards his legs. Rather than all at once, his body slowly grew until he stood head and shoulders over the powerfully built woman. It lasted only a second before he shrunk back down.

  Gesturing around himself, he said, “Much more controlled than when I first started.”

  “I can see that.” She sighed, “Why do you think the monsters changed? We had two years of those shadow creatures, and then it looked like the planet itself was attacking us.” Lex moved next to her as they looked out on the barren land together. It wasn’t long after they’d arrived at New Delhi that the change had come. Now, a green zone teeming with life sat empty before them. They’d just finished killing the last of the tree-people in the area.

  Lex looked at his mentor, “You think it has to do with Nobody?”

  “Who else?” Elsie replied, “When we got here, Kiaan and I shared all of our powers with each other. Nothing in his evolutions or mine had anything to do with making trees attack, or causing Foxes and Rats to grow to three times their size. It’s weird, and weird normally leads me back to my former master.”

  “Kiaan could’ve been lying.” Immediately a small rock bounced off the side of his head, “Ow.”

  Elsie crossed her arms and looked him up and down, “That is not the way to talk about somebody who took us in. This is probably the last bastion of humanity, and Kiaan, Joram, and Li didn’t have to take responsibility for us. I know it’s not fun being out here. It’s hot, and sweaty, and we could be working on better understanding our powers. But it’s also food and shelter for everybody we care about. You need to grow up, Lex.”

  He rubbed the sore spot on his head as it slowly healed, “I know you’re right. But can you blame me for being suspicious?”

  Elsie placed her hand on his shoulder, “You know I don’t. You’ve accepted me into your life, even after all I’ve done to hurt you. I’ll never forget that, Lex. But remember. A little suspicion is good, but a lot of suspicion can ruin your life. Alright? I just need you to remember that.”

  A large Golden Jackal appeared in the near distance as it sprinted down the hill. Elsie looked at Lex and hooked her thumb at the creature, “Go and show me what you can do with your ability. Make it flashy!”

  Lex nodded, picking up his discarded club and jogging toward the animal. It took him waving his arms twice to get the thing to pay attention to him and not the massive city in the distance. When it did see him, its speed doubled, looking like nothing less than a blur. Lex threw his club at its feet hard enough to cause it to leap over the missile rather than dodge out of the way, then pressed his power into his right arm, forcing it to triple in size.

  Cocking back his arm, he tried not to smile as the panicking creature realized it had given up any chance for dodging with its body flying through the air. A colossal fist arced towards the wide-eyed Jackal as a single line was said with gusto.

  “This port of destiny is closed to all visitors!”

  As his fist plowed through the creature, a voice could be heard yelling out, “Terrible!”

  “I know!”

  Nobody

  The figure known as Nobody had not had an easy time of things lately. He’d finally eradicated every living creature on that damnable island. Even with thousands of shades attacking anything that moved, breathed, or soaked in sunlight, it had taken him far too long.

  But he’d finally done it. He’d elevated the Omega Protocol to the second stage; Insurrection. Everything living on the planet was now a weapon for his own ends. A knife that stabbed into the heart of the last survivors.

  Soon enough, it would all be over, and he could finally rest. He’d done his part to the best of his abilities. Now, what would be, would be.

  An army of slithering, crawling, stomping, and flying creatures followed behind him. The Omega Protocol affected each differently, and he’d been collecting them for the last several days; even stopping at a sizeable zoo on the way. Where once his army of personally branded shades had numbered in the thousands, now, he had millions of empowered monsters to follow him.

  Where he pointed, they attacked.

  And what mattered most right now was the last large enclave of survivors. The people of New Delhi, and the five champions it held. Their deaths couldn’t come soon enough.

  Cresting a hill, he looked down and found two people standing outside of the gates.

  With a finger raised, he called down the attack.

  Alexander

  Lex had just reached Elsie when a loud noise began to rumble behind him. In the back of his mind, he thought it sounded like a deep rolling growl coming from the barren hills. Turning around, he felt his heart skip a beat as an army of giant monsters ran full speed towards them.

  He knew from the second he saw them that counting wouldn’t make a difference, there were just too many. Their sizes and species were as varied as the stars in the sky. For just a moment, as his brain disconnected from what was about to happen, an errant thought planted a flag.

  Another and another jackal, some big fuckoff cat, an antelope or gazelle. That makes sense. But why is there a black bear there? We’re in India, right?

  He hadn’t known he was speaking out loud until Elsie yelled at him. “Worry about where they came from later! Just fight!” She heaved a spinning Chuck into the crowd, “I sent a message to the city, the others should arrive here soon.” Her morningstar slammed into a six-foot-tall cobra, bowling it over and doing severe damage before she brought Chuck back to her hand.

  This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  The faster of the monsters reached them quickly, as a leopard hungrily leaped for his face with a wide open mouth. Instead of gnawing on skin, muscle, and bone as expected, a large piece of wood jammed itself deeply within its throat, pivoting its body as it was slammed into the ground.

  “You’ve bitten off more than you can chew!”

  “Not right now!” Elsie yelled as she swung her weapon in a circle, connecting and shifting with the stalled momentum as she moved into another step, “Focus on killing as many as you can, as fast as you can. We need to slow down the tide!”

  Lex pulled his weapon out and bashed the leopard’s rigid skull as hard as possible. As it went down, he finally noticed what Elsie had seen before him.

  The two of them were only getting a small percentage of the tide approaching, creatures that were breaking away from the majority of the pack as they found an earlier fight to be had. The rest, the greater majority, were going for the city and its people.

  Images of the friends he’d made since first finding the last refuge entered his mind in the blink of an eye. Visions appeared of all his friends, his people, and the survivors of the apocalypse, being torn to shreds by creatures as they screamed in powerless terror. With a roar that started in the bottom of his chest and seemed to extend well past the bounds of his throat, Lex lifted his club and went to work.

  Elsie knocked back a leaping baboon close to twice her height, so Lex followed that up by cracking his club into the creature's elbow, disabling its arm and further slowing it down. A long-snouted crocodilic creature tried to snap his leg, but instead found his size ten boot stomping its face into the ground, quickly followed by two swift punches before he had to roll under a diving bird with talons as large as his head. He came out of the roll fast enough for Elsie to throw a massive lizard in the air, so he followed it up with a leap. The lizard’s legs scratched at the air as Lex lined up his attack with a large tortoise below them. Lifting his club high overhead, he brought it down with all of his fury as it was smashed into the lizard, transferring the momentum into the shell beneath it and leaving a fissured crack as the creature's legs gave out.

  The fight became a blur of movement, desperation, and lost thoughts as there simply wasn’t time for more. A dodged claw quickly followed by clubbing the creature in the face. A slide to get away from a pack of three, then a speedy nutshot to an oversized dog waiting at the end of his trail. Lex stood up quickly, grabbing a rat with incisors longer than its body before the change, and throwing it high into the air for a moment to recover.

  Already, his lungs heaved, his body shook, and he could feel a twitch edging at the corner of his mouth as warm drool leaked uncontrollably. But that wasn’t going to stop him.

  Enlarging both of his hands, he dropped his club as he clapped them over a peafowl’s neck, cleanly ending its life before he uneasily lifted it and threw it at the next in the crowd, knocking the legs out from under them and granting him another short reprieve. The same bird from before tried swooping in on him, but he was wise to the act, twisting his body and hardening the bones in his hand as he slapped one of its wings. It quickly went down, roughly stomped over by the slowly lessening herd of creatures still running by on their way to the city. He was balling up a large fist when he felt the wind knocked out of him by a large armored ball rolling down the hill and into his chest.

  Kicking it away with the flat of his foot, his mind went into overdrive, This isn’t enough. I’m not doing enough!

  He hadn’t had a chance to glance at Elsie during all of this, and what he saw sent a twinge through his heart. The woman was covered in wounds and blood, a ring of dead animals piled around her in a blood and gore-filled circle. Despite the pain, she leaped high into the air using her evolution, flinging her morningstar back before dropping it down with the impetus of a meteor. Dozens of creatures stumbled as her attack created a second circle around her, knocking all the carcasses into the distance. But not before she fell to her knees.

  A winding up Macaque had the back of its head crushed by a club as Lex made his way to her. He took a knee beside his friend so he could lift her up, when he noticed something new coming their way.

  It looked like a boiling shadow, making a sound that he knew required a tongue.

  “Tsk Tsk. Elsie. Elsie, dear. You never should have left me.”

  The monsters had reached the city as screams began to come from behind, but Lex couldn’t take his eyes off the figure before them.

  “You could have stayed as MY champion, but instead, here you rest. On your knees before the power of the Omega Protocol. My power, taken through My strength. My planning.” The boiling shadows parted, showing the face of an old, bearded man looking down at them from his tall height. The lines criss-crossing beneath his eyes were deeply and firmly entrenched. “I would have taken you all the way with me. Back to Symphony and the glory that is sure to come. But instead, you’ll die with all of your fellow Earthers. Pathetic, low-tier versions of who you were always meant to be. Champions? Really?” He sneered as he pointed at her, the boiling darkness gathering on the tip of his finger. Lex wanted to get up, to fight, but deep within, there was an overpowering feeling of helplessness. A crushing vortex of impending loss and approaching failure that dragged him down into the dirt.

  It was moments like these that a person discovered who they were, deep within. Lex did not like what he found.

  But the old man, staring at Elsie’s face with power mutely shining on the tip of his finger, seemed to have a change of heart. Blinking twice, his sneer fell away before angling it towards Lex, “Perhaps it would be better if I leave you to live. Let you see what it is like to watch those you care about perish before you. I spared you of that before. But not this time. Learn what I’ve experienced countless times before.”

  The shadowy darkness grouped on the tip of his finger until it fired out. The only thing moving through Alexander’s head was that he’d wished he’d done more, the thought passing just as something powerful knocked him to the ground.

  Rolling off the pain in one side of his ribs, he looked back only to find Elsie lying on the ground where he had just been. Elsie, the woman who had murdered his family, but then saved him. Elsie, the killer of champions and likely the most powerful human being on the planet. Elsie, missing an entire arm, the beginning of it stopping as if a knife had just sliced through butter.

  “You have changed.” Lex heard, but didn’t see, as the look on his friend’s face shifted from agony to something else.

  She looked up at the man who’d saved her with veiled eyes and clenched teeth, the muscles in the sides of her cheeks distending. “I’ve only become who I would’ve been without your kidnapping, Nobody. You don’t deserve to win here.”

  The sounds of further screaming were now punctuated by the sporadic and halting sounds of something fighting back. The ground shook, knocking Lex back to the ground as he wasn’t prepared for the sudden vibrations. A flash of orange and yellow lit up the area as pea-sized fireflies landed on a few of the slower creatures passing them by, conflagrating them instantly.

  Nobody glared at the crowd of people now intermixing with the animals, pitchforks and carved spears the weapon of choice as they fought back against the things that seeked to end humanity. His right hand lit up in darkness as he pointed all five fingers in their direction, “If you do not want to go quickly, then I’ll just have to send you on your way with great violence.”

  Lex snorted, How is dying like this not violent?

  The boiling darkness gathered on each finger before sputtering for a moment. Nobody shifted his glare to his hand, shaking it as the darkness returned, before it sputtered again.

  “What now!” He yelled out.

  The air bent only a few feet away. That was the only way Lex could describe it. As it bent, it seemed to twist on itself, a rip opening up in its place. A small girl and a slightly larger boy leaped through the portal, rolling across the dirt before stopping and coughing roughly as they sucked in air. Immediately, they began to vomit, black sludge leaking out of them and mixing with the brown earth below.

  Nobody seemed to be reading his screen before he screamed out, “What!”

  The boiling darkness sloughed from his skin into a pool on the ground, draining the gathered power from the tips of his fingers. He threw his hand out, over and over again, but nothing seemed to happen. Grabbing both sides of his head, he screamed out to the sky, “What have you done! First stage! First stage! How did so many people arrive on my island! This isn’t right. It isn’t fair!”

  Lex had no idea what the man was talking about, but he knew there was something he could do right now. With Nobody so distracted by whatever had happened, he picked up his club nearby, quickly grew his arm to the maximum size and strength he could make it, then swung with all his power just after performing a slight whistle.

  The tall old man turned at the sound, only to have his head severely knocked back as his body spun in the air. Dust rose from his body as he collapsed into the ground, landing only inches away from a one-armed else giving him a smile. With her only remaining hand, she gave him a thumbs up, “Go ahead and say one, you earned it.”

  Lex looked at her, at the club, then at Nobody on the ground. “That was an apocalypse foul.”

  “Meh.”

  “Excuse me,” The young girl said, raising a small hand in the air, “My name’s Sky. Can you tell me where we are?”

  Lex looked at her. With a shrug, he said, “Welcome to Earth.”

  Link

  Link