Ra stands on the rooftop and looks up at the sun. It is starting to fall to the horizon – not in danger of setting just yet, but closing the distance inexorably. He frowns. Nightfall means a drop in his power, and even if it is only a slight difference, with this enemy that might be enough to mean his defeat. It marks a hard deadline into the sky.
His sharp eyes focus in on a couple of points in the near distance, and he nods to himself. It’s time. He takes a deep breath.
“GOD-EATER!” His voice echoes off warehouses and through junkyards, made harsh against brick walls and abandoned scrap metal. “GOD-EATER, I KNOW YOU ARE LISTENING! COME TO ME!”
The echoes ripple out through the space, rebound and repeat and fall silent. The silent seconds stretch out, until he starts to worry that his taunts have failed him. He starts another deep breath – but wait. There it is. Through the quiet, a soft rustling that grows louder, metal clinking against metal as it is pushed aside, and all at once that susurrus is almost a roar as countless tiny worms join together, a form that becomes a mound that becomes a mountain, a manlike figure tall enough to tower above the god standing on the warehouse roof. It looks down at him and laughs.
“You asked for me, little god?”
Ra scowls up at his enemy. “I did.”
“You were bored of waiting to face justice?”
“Justice?” He sneers. “Hunting the innocent to feed your hunger for violence has nothing to do with justice. You don’t know the meaning of the word!”
It laughs again, nastier this time. “A murderous little tyrant dares to lecture on justice? You killed every last one of our people, remember. Killed them for the sake of your pride and fear.”
“Fine.” The god sets his jaw and raises his staff. “You want your revenge? Then fight me yourself. Don’t take your anger out on the mortals.”
“As you demand.”
One arm crashes down, and Ra throws himself out of the way as it smashes through the roof. A second blow takes out the wall of the warehouse, bricks smashing everywhere as the roof crumples inwards, forcing Ra to throw himself across to the next roof over. A desperate blast of fire boosts him in his arc and scorches the monster, but he has no time to get his balance back before another massive blow hits the roof of his new perch and crashes right through into the building’s interior.
(“You’re sure the place is abandoned?”
“Oh, yes, certainly. The whole site is tied up in a rather knotty property dispute, has been for almost a year now, and it’s costing the owners - well, I say owners-”
Haka had smiled as he cut across his colleague’s words: “I believe your ‘yes’ was sufficient, Hugh.”
"Right, of course. Well: yes.”)
Ra spins, striking out with a whip of flame that cracks across the monster’s face. The slash burns black across the thing from one eye down to the opposite cheek – and a moment later the mark is healed, boiled away in a writhe of fresh new bodies. The God-Eater laughs. “Pitiful! You are weak, little god! You have grown fat on worship and let your powers stagnate. More a god of candles than the sun!”
He wants to scoff, to tell the monster how little it knows him, but he is running again, and can’t spare the breath. An arm smacks down beside him, and he dodges the follow-up behind it, then spins and fires a stream as the thing lunges mouth-first, sending his attack right down its throat. The thing squeals and recoils, rearing up over him before crunching back down half-blind, annihilating the spot where Ra had been standing seconds before. He is up and running again, throwing himself across another gap onto the next building, a sturdy old factory building with hard edges and boarded-up windows, and throwing himself up a floor onto a higher part of the roof. Only then does he whirl to face the thing surging up to attack him.
A lick of flame blunts the front edge of the monstrous tide, but again the wound disappears in the flowing mass of slimy bodies, and the limb rushes up at him, leaving him scrambling aside. The edge of the attack clips his shoulder and sends him spinning, spiralling down from the roof and barely catching himself before the concrete.
He floats there, face a hand’s-breadth from the ground, and takes half a second to catch his breath, and the shadow of a cloud passes over him. Behind him is the sound of crumbling brick, and he rises, turns, seeing the God-Eater tower over him, its booming laugh echoing all around.
“I expected you to fail, little god, but not this badly! You have outdone yourself.”
Ra answers with a blast of flame which barely marks the monster’s chest, but at least wipes the smug expression from its face.
“Very well then. Since you seem so eager to die…” Both arms sweep forward, too wide to dodge around, too high to vault over, much too fast to escape. Ra murmurs something and closes his eyes a moment before impact. The surging sea of bodies closes over him, crashing into the wall behind him and smashing it to brick dust and shards of glass, and the bodies churn, countless dripping jaws seeking flesh and power to sate its endless hunger. The mass seethes…but it seems as if something is wrong. A look of confusion crosses the God-Eater’s massive face, and after a few more seconds it pulls its arms back to inspect its prey.
The ground is a crater, oozing with yellow-green bile and scattered with tiny pebbles that used to be solid concrete. Obviously, nothing mortal should have survived such a thing. And yet right in the centre is a figure, standing as confident and strong as one at the height of their strength. Golden knightly armour wraps his body, a golden helmet on his head and a bright shining khopesh in his right hand, balanced against the shining staff of Ra in his left fist.
The god grins up through his helmet’s visor and scoffs at his towering enemy. “You didn’t think I would be arrogant enough to come here without allies, did you?” And he laughs.
With a roar, the monster whirls, seeking out the little points where the other heroes hang in the air. His gaze finds the Adept, Tempest, and finally Captain Cosmic, his arm outstretched and shining with the same golden energy that makes up the god’s armour and weapon. It screams again in anger and hate, surging at the little mortal target, rushing over buildings as every step crushes walls and rooves, closing in, closing in –
And suddenly meeting resistance as out of nowhere a buffeting, whirling wind knocks it back. It hisses and tries again, and meets the same force, and now that it looks, it can see the little bits of dust and water caught up in the gusting wind, marking out a circular wall around the little industrial arena. The monster turns its face back to Ra, who is still standing in the same place, confidence in every line of his body.
“What are you going to do now, monster? You can’t touch me to drain my power, you can’t attack my friends, and there are no mortal victims here to feed you. You can’t even escape into the ground.” He swishes his blade through the air, and when he speaks his grin is audible. “Are you so eager to die?”
No snappy answers this time – the massive monster rushes at him like a freight train, absorbing blast after blast as it comes, worms crisping and falling away but doing little to diminish its strength, and the blow lands hard. It throws Ra up into the air, then another massive arm swings up and over and down, smashing him into the ground with a force that ought to be lethal. The fist recoils, revealing a blackened slash as Ra flourishes his sword, its edge glowing with sunfire.
(Later, Blake says: “You know, a khopesh is actually a little late for Ra, if you were aiming for thematic appropriateness.”
Hugh smiles and shrugs. “I also put you in mediaeval English armour. Call it artistic license.”)
Ra adjusts his stance and raises his weapon again, then charges forward with a jet of flame, carving a path through the thing and out the other side before hurling fire behind him and soaring into the air and away. There’s another groaning rumble behind him, but he makes sure to put a little more space between himself and the monster before landing and taking a look.
What he sees is not encouraging. The monster is hunched forwards, hands on the ground, mouth snarling, and as it groans and growls Ra can see its body bulging, uneven lumps rippling out of its flesh and it grows and grows, taller and taller, stronger and stronger. It stands slowly, steps forward, its massive footfalls cracking the concrete as it moves. Ra darts back from roof to roof as the thing sweeps forward with deceptive speed, pulverising all in its path. Ra sends a few blasts into it as it approaches, and still it grows, the fire disappearing in slimy whiteness. One more dash backwards – but the thing closes in, its hand sweeps out and seizes him in a massive fist and raises him to its face. Then it scoffs and slams him straight into the ground – once, twice, three times, each one strong enough to turn bones to powder. The indestructible armour protects his flesh, but even so he’s rattled and dazed. When the monster laughs again, it feels like the noise is coming from everywhere around him.
“Look at you. Even with your little friends, you had no chance against me.” It bends over him, smiling with a mouth wider than he is tall. “You’ve stopped me from getting at your flesh, but all you’ve done is made sure this hurts more. I’m going to crush you, little god, and if there’s any power left in your corpse when I’m done, I’ll satisfy myself with that.”
It raises a foot and stamps down, and again, and each blow pounds him further into the concrete. He pushes himself up and rolls out of the way, gets a few steps before massive fingers wrap around him and throw him across a ruined building, tumbling and skidding and rolling to a stop in the rubble. His vision blurs as he shakes his head, focusing in on the approaching monster, not knowing if he can survive another hit.
And distantly, over its shoulder, the Argent Adept catches his eye and nods. Just once.
The clouds part, the sun shines down through the dust and gloom, and he stands. Slowly, with flesh bruised and shining armour battered, he stands. And he smiles.
“Satisfy yourself, God-Eater? You will never be satisfied. You gorge yourself on power, monster, you take life and energy and corrupt it to serve yourself. But I am too much for you! Mine is the endless fire of the sun! You want to steal that power?” His hands ignite, and the smile is a vicious grin. “THEN TAKE IT ALL!”
The blaze that ushers forth now is nothing like those that have come before. Those were hot, they were strong, they were deadly, but they are nothing at all compared to this unspeakable torrent. The sun-god glows brighter and brighter as his endless power pours into the God-Eater. It still steps forward, closer, closer – but it stumbles. Something is wrong. It takes another step, but its legs are mismatched, its arms uneven, and the worms that turn to ash under the burning onslaught are no longer being replaced. It reaches out for its power, and finds nothing.
It is cut off. Weakening. Dying.
The thing screeches in hate and desperation, thrashing around, and too late it sees the trap – the magical circle glowing a faint silver, hidden underneath the whirling winds and keeping its power contained. No way out.
It screeches, thrashes, throws itself desperately at its enemy and meets a redoubling stream of blazing energy. Its body is flaking away, and still it pulls itself forwards, arm over arm, closing in as it loses mass to the flame. One arm comes loose from the body and a sweep of the flame finishes it, forcing the God-Eater to drag itself one-handed. Another sweep of flame, this time over its face, leaving it blackened and cracked, and still it comes. One last heave brings it almost in reach before its other arm dissolves, leaving just a disconnected head slumping almost at Ra’s feet.
It sneers. “This isn’t over!”
The answer is a blast of flame, washing over the head, tearing it apart, turning little bodies into dust and ash and blowing them away until at last, at last it finishes and there is nothing left.
Ra gives the ashes a cocky little smile. “It’s over.”
The three Prime Wardens float in and land, all of them staring at the mounds of monster ash. Captain Cosmic is the first to break the silence. “So it’s, ah, it’s dead?”
“I killed it.”
The Adept makes an uncertain noise. “Well, perhaps.” Ra scowls, and he clarifies. “Just before you finished it off, I thought I felt something – a little flare of energy. It might have been nothing, or maybe-“
“It was nothing,” says Ra, hard-edged. “The thing is dead.” And he stalks off.
“Well then!” The Captain claps his hand together. “I suppose we should check in on our comrades, and see how they are recovering. And then perhaps a drink?”
His friends nod agreement, and they take off into the air.
Somewhere outside of our universe there lies a dead world. It is a place of silence and emptiness and stillness where nothing moves.
Almost nothing.
In the dust writhes a creature, a ghost-monster, a hand-sized mass of wriggling worms. It can do nothing, but neither is it patient. It reaches its tendrils, searching desperately for any crack between the worlds, any way to reach its enemies. And it finds nothing.
The thing screams out, a chorus of tiny mouths joined in hate and rage: “Ra! I will find you, do you hear me? I will find you and I will destroy your whole world! Fear the return of the God-Eater!”
[Thanks for reading! If you liked this, let me know, and check out my other stories at Ao3: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SaneCharlie]