It was good that I managed to kill Von Jackass without obliterating him in the process, because he ended up being delicious. I had been expecting that, as he was now the first true Star Guardian I'd eaten. This entire incident would contribute greatly to my continued growth.

But the problem of getting out of this situation alive remained. I'd certainly drawn attention at the beginning, when the action was between me and Surfer Dude, but now, I'd become global newsworthy.

If anything, I was surprised that no one had bombed the shit out of me yet, and even more surprised that there was still plenty of power available from the electrical grid. Surely a lot of people are trying to figure out how to stop me—right?

???

The main target was down now. "Big one ate the little one," Major Tomson confirmed.

The pair of F-47s were cruising at low altitude and subsonic speed, and each was accompanied with half a dozen autonomous drones. With the comprehensive, active stealth capabilities of the United States' sixth generation air superiority fighter, no one would spot them if the pilots didn't want them to.

The F-47 had been designed from the beginning as a central unit in a system built to directly match, contest, or even exceed Tier 7 capabilities. Recent action in Nevada had only confirmed its effectiveness in operating at peak threat levels.

This did not remove the need for capable Guardians, or their potential threat. The F-47 was the result of decades of research, a multi-trillion dollar development, and joint research conducted with the defense sector's closest Star Guardian allies.

And, at the end of it, each aircraft came with a two hundred million dollar price tag and equally high operating costs. At present, the Air Force and Navy possessed just shy of two hundred with operational capacity.

The costs of the integrated system within which the F-47 operated were even higher. Each aircraft was optionally manned, flew with up to several dozen fully autonomous drones, and communicated in real time with a planet-wide array of ground and satellite systems and sensors.

It was in this way—with an intense focus on huge data transfer and processing in real time, a new level of human-computer interaction, stealth and anti stealth, optimized autonomous decision making, and robustness against a variety of esoteric threats and targets—that the fighter was designed.

Metrics like range, speed, and maneuverability were critical, but mostly already solved. Reactionless propulsion technology had advanced tremendously from its early experimental beginnings forty years ago—an F-47 could technically warp all the way to Jupiter if a pilot required it.

As such, and as the aircraft was armed with a mixture of advanced esoteric and atomic weaponry, the enormous secondary target posed essentially zero threat—even leaning on the electrical grid as it was, a fully armed sixth generation fighter would rip through the target with contemptuous ease.

He didn't strike because the secondary target showed no signs of intending to do anything beyond defending itself against the primary target. Unless that changed or he received updated orders, the two pilots would remain in the area but not attack.

This wasn't his first time intervening in a conflict like this, and—the major snapped into a sharper combat focus as multiple sensors flared at the arrival of the first and then second real threat.

Alexis "Kaiju Alex" Huntingfield

This time, the shoe did actually drop. Something penetrated my head right between my eyes and exited out the back faster than I could possibly track. Having a giant, half molten hole bored through my head like a cored apple was pretty weird, especially since I was still alive and conscious to experience the aftermath.

Not that it didn't hurt like a bitch. Can I survive this in my normal form? By normal I still meant my giant dragon form—just the way it was supposed to be, not the dozens of times larger, electricity guzzling, crudely shaped abomination I'd mis-healed myself into.

Most of the ejected material wasn't particularly important, being warped hunks of pilfered steel that acted mostly like a substrate for my true metal body. Still, my tissues proper didn't survive entirely unscathed.

A few bits of my proper metal had been—well, they seemed to have just vaporized or something. But even worse, several Adamantite roots had been ripped, cracked, and warped. Von Jackass had never managed to do anything to the bits of me that were composed of an impossible supermetal.

Uh oh.

Translucent, ephemeral streamers of prismatic light lingered in the air in front of me and curled against the molten edges of the hole in my face. They faded to nothing within seconds, but their appearance was so iconic as to be completely unmistakable.

It was therefore with a sense of total certainty and profound apathy that I regarded my imminent death.

So weird. I didn't expect it to feel like this. I'd only truly felt the grasp of death like this once before, and my reaction had been fairly different. I was bleeding out from a gunshot wound that time. I recalled a similar sense of indifference, yet that time, it had been of a more delirious, almost manic nature.

This time, I felt more dazed than crazed.

Ha, that rhymes!

"You know," I rumbled, "I don't want to die, but it's neat that I get to know it took you to kill me."

I still hadn't spotted my attacker, but that rainbow energy had been so aggressively recognizable that there was no room for doubt. Like seriously, it's way better to get taken down by the most iconic Star Guardian of all time and not some random no name team.

There were only two Tier 9s in existence. It was honestly more than overkill for the more combat oriented to handle a 'threat' with an effective tier three times less than his own. And then the shoe dropped.

A bright white energy beam tinged with rainbow hues around the edges carved straight through my center of bass from above and behind, putting my own previous display to shame, already moving position as if to cut me in twain—and then it stopped.

Well that fucking hurts.

There might have been a loud shockwave of some kind, but it was a little hard to tell when I'd nearly been vertically severed and all the electricity stopped flowing, sending me tumbling hundreds of feet into a partially melted, completely immobile, and near-fatally-eviscerated scrap heap.

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There wasn't much to do at that point other than play dead, shove aside the agonizing pain, and lock the fuck in. If I could extricate myself from this grotesque meat-golem equivalent quickly enough, maybe—just maybe—I could become tiny again and escape.

Saber

Ana, kata, ana, kata, twist, strike, carry, drop, bounce, strike, twist,

Kill?

No

Hit, hit, hit, thrust, ana, dodge,

Far, far, far, far, far, grab, kata twist down around throw thrust up flex dodge

Far

Good now

Keep far, strike, strike, wait,

Hurt?

Could

Should

Maybe

No

Keep far, ana, kata, ana, kata,

All she needed to do was keep him busy for a moment. Maybe let him cool down. Think it through. No one was hurt. At least no one who mattered. Hurt maybe but not dead. Probably.

The most powerful Tier 8 Star Guardian was one of the few beings capable of hurting Aurora. She could have done so even before breaching beyond the usual limits of Tier 8, and if she finally made a Choice and let her tier increase like it had been trying to do for months, it was likely she would pose a dire threat should she decide on killing him.

Saber had always been uniquely powerful at any given tier, even by true Star Guardian standards, but her advancement had been comparatively slow. Not by absolute standards—even absolute Star Guardian standards—reaching Tier 8 in the time she did was impressive enough alone.

Her advancement was slow in the sense that it seemed wildly incongruent with her own strength and the frequency and intensity with which she engaged in combat.

But the truth, known to her and inferred by only a few others, was that her advancement had never been slow at all. The speed with which she had advanced from the bottom to the top of each tier was astounding.

Perhaps more astounding was the real reason for her apparently 'slow' progress—that after reaching the cap of each tier, she just kept going, holding in a growing storm of power for months or even years at a time.

When she did finally allow herself to ascend, so much extra power had accumulated that she tended to end up already halfway through her new tier from the very start.

Such a thing was unthinkable to—well, essentially everyone else. It shouldn't even be possible, but Saber did it anyway.

But none of that was the worst part. The worst part was that she did this insane, impossible, and life-threatening thing not because she was a silent genius who discovered a tortuous technique to methodically build a better foundation for her future strength.

It didn't work that way. There was no such benefit, at least not that Saber herself knew of. Instead, her reason for doing it was as ridiculous as it was simple: she was just putting it off. She struggled to actually sit down and Decide.

Ana, kata, ana, feint, cut, hit,

Alive?

Dodge,

Safe?

Fragments of thoughts, images, words, and all other forms of sense and concept flitted through Saber's mind as she battled Aurora farther and farther out over the Pacific.

Her thoughts were usually like this—choppy, superficially disorganized, and exhibiting a curious hybridization between sharply focused and deeply lazy.

Ana, kata…

Aurora

It was infuriating.

Saber wasn't even trying to fight him. Her attacks lacked ferocity, at least by his standards for her, and all she accomplished was placing him farther and farther out above the ocean.

That was the point, and it was maddening.

The Tier 9 Star Guardian found himself thinking back to that panda cartoon he saw at an event so many years ago. The name and details escaped him, but Saber's tactics dredged up the latent memory.

The cartoon panda hero was fat, slow, and lazy, yet he learned to weaponize those attributes against the—Aurora couldn't remember the other animal. Something predatory, that much he recalled. But the panda drove the antagonist mad, rendering the opponent's attacks no more effective than pounding sand.

Worse, really. Like a child flailing against a quilted waterbed.

Saber was neither fat, nor slow, nor lazy—but Aurora's growing frustrations were similar. Even calling it a fight was a stretch—but despite how little interest she showed in actually fighting him, she flowed around his own underpowered attacks with ease, and he inexplicably landed farther and farther from the shore.

It was maddening.

Thus, when a gash of violet light appeared and projected a Tier 8 aura, the Tier 9 was completely unsurprised. He expected reinforcements to arrive after facing such blatant stalling tactics.

What he absolutely did not expect was for Eigenmach to immediately attack his—partner, if you could really describe the pair like that.

"Basta."

Aurora found himself listening. Likewise, Saber didn't make any moves to resist. On the contrary, she grabbed onto Eigemacht's shoulders, forcing the man to adopt a floating princess carry.

"¡Mírate alrededor!" Eigenmacht jerked his head back. "Do you even see what's happening?"

Aurora frowned, only realizing then that the Red's technical leader had first spoken in Spanish—his own native tongue.

"You're a damn Tier 9. Technology is not yet so advanced as to elude an entire aircraft from your senses."

Aurora blinked, and then realization dawned. Both the United States and China were now finally producing weapons that could operate at the level of a Tier 7, and several other powers were not too far behind. The stealth of the newest fighter craft alone was remarkable, but not so remarkable that they could hide from his aura.

There were two such weapons in the area with them now. Each one could have annihilated the Anathema a hundred times over—but they hadn't. And while Aurora was likewise aware that the same two superpowers had deals with the Red Faction that included harboring the hybrids—this was surprising.

Harboring was not the same thing as universally tolerating. Both powers had experienced their respective lines being crossed before, and had not hesitated to respond swiftly.

"And they aren't attacking," Aurora finally acknowledged. "Why?"

"Because she's not the damn enemy," Eigenmacht answered, with more intensity and emotion in his voice than Aurora was used to. "The damn Black Faction is at it again. She defended herself in the way she knew how, and she won."

The Tier 8 took a breath. "I won't stop you. Go finish the job if you want to. Before you ask, no—no one else has agreed to this. I haven't had time to ask. But if you want to go finish things, I won't stop you, and I promise you I will tell everyone I made this decision and gave you the option."

Aurora clenched and unclenched his fists. "But."

Eigenmacht nodded. "But you need to understand the whole context. If you go kill her—if you go through with it, you're committing an attack on an immensely valuable military asset of a sovereign state—that the state chose to spare—that acted defensively against a rogue, genocidal terrorist."

"I won't stop you," Eignemacht reiterated, "and I'll take my own fall for that—but they will know."

Aurora clenched his fists even harder—hard enough to deform Adamantite. But he wasn't angry with Eigenmacht or Saber. His anger wasn't even directed at the hybrid, or the state that desired to use her.

"Thank you," he eventually ground out. "Thank you for that." Then, after a long pause—Aurora made a decision. "Take me somewhere private. I don't care about your hybrid anymore. She can live. There's a bigger problem here, one that we've all tolerated for too long.

"We need to act, and for that, I think we'll need an alliance."

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