by Alex Raizman
They both twisted their hands the moment Enki came over the rock, each ripping at his flying modification. It worked - the dual assault caught him off guard, and once again he was plummeting back to Earth, at the mercy of that cruel mistress named Gravity.
He got up, dusting himself off, looking at the three of them. He chuckled, the single most hateful chuckle Ryan had ever heard in real life - a sound utterly devoid of mirth or kindness or warmth, a sadistic, ugly sound. If a wildfire could laugh, it would make this sound.
“So, this is where we are. The Eschaton, the Whore, and the Coward. The three of you against me. The last hero with the balls to stand up to you. I’m going to kill you all, and I’m going to save the world.”
“You’re delusional,” Ryan said flatly. “You’re not the hero, and you’re not going to win.”
Enki grinned broadly. “We’ll see. Come at me. Let’s end this.”
So they charged for the fate of the world.
Chapter 28
Showdown
In a single motion Enki dodged under Crystal’s sword, grabbed Athena’s wrist with one hand - Ryan thought he could hear an audible crack when he did - and brought his other fist up into Ryan’s gut. As Ryan doubled over and went airborne, stars flashing in front of his eyes, Enki’s leg swept out to catch Crystal in the hip, sending her flying to the side. Swinging around, he tossed Athena away with an easy grace.
Enki stood there for a moment, guffawing in what now seemed to be genuine amusement. “Too right, too damn right. Three on one, and I’m going to whip all your asses.”
Ryan rose to his feet unsteadily. Crystal’s own rise favored her right side, the left hip obviously injured, and Athena held her wrist against her stomach. I did hear a crack, he snapped it. Five seconds into the fight, and already Athena has a broken wrist. Panic rose in his throat again, a serpent trying to crawl its way out of his belly. He clamped his teeth to keep from screaming. She doesn’t need that wrist for the plan, Ryan. Calm the hell down, the plan requires Enki to be stronger than you all.
At least Enki was waiting for them to come to him, rather than pressing the attack. They had to attack him again, keep him off balance - if they jumped to the endgame too soon, he’d be suspicious.
Suspicion seemed to be the last thing on Enki’s mind. If anything, he seemed to be having fun. He was grinning, a sick joy flashing through his eyes.
Let’s see if we can’t spoil playtime. Instead of charging as a group again, they began to spread out, taking spots around Enki. Enki stood at the center of the circle, cracking his neck, waiting for them to move.
One at a time this time. Athena went first, keeping the injured hand pressed against her chest. She leapt up in a kick, one that Enki blocked with a thick arm.
Before Enki could counterattack, Athena pushed off that solid limb and sent herself flying back in an arc - right in time for Crystal to come in, her sword strike low and aimed at Enki’s kidney. He brought a hand around and punched the blade on the flat, cracking the metal. Like Athena, Crystal sprung away before Enki could counterattack.
While they had attacked, Ryan had reached into his nanoverse to pull out a weapon. To his relief, he found himself holding a sword - not a fancy one like the one that he’d had from his nanoverse in Texas-oh goddamnit I could have grabbed that from Athena’s staging area-but a simple steel blade. A second after Crystal moved, he did the same, and leapt into to the air for a high strike.
Enki moved again with that inhuman speed, rolling away from Ryan’s blow. Ryan sprung back, and it was Athena’s turn again.
Like they had discussed, the three off them rotated their attacks, dancing in and out. Athena dashed in with a quick blow to the back of Enki’s head as he was facing Ryan. As soon as he whirled to face her, Crystal danced in with a quick cut to his side. Enki hissed, more in frustration than pain as he turned again - this time towards Ryan, anticipating an attack from that direction. Athena charged in again. When Enki turned to face her, Ryan moved in, managing a stab into his leg. None of their blows seemed to have much impact on Enki, but at least he wasn’t landing any more of his own strikes. The veins on Enki’s neck and face were beginning to bulge, his irritation growing at the stinging wasps biting at him.
“Enough!” Enki shouted, and a torrent of wind sent the three of them flying back. They began picking themselves up off of the ground with all the speed they could manage, and once again Ryan felt the fear, the terror, rising. He can do wind, none of us did that trick, the plan- Ryan bit the panic back down. Of course he can manipulate wind. That was the first thing you ever saw him do, force the tornado down against Crystal. The plan’s still solid.
Enki had started ranting at them, and in the momentary panic Ryan had missed part of the rant. “-pathetic! Just realize you lost, lay down, and die already.”
I think he said that some other time. He’s running out of things to scream at us. Ryan gave Athena a nod.
Athena shouted, drawing Enki’s attention, “We will never surrender to you, Enki. Not so long as we draw breath.” Now that she had Enki’s attention with a rather cliché taunt, she twisted, forming a pair of gauntlets around her hands.
Making your own weapons was only worth the effort if you needed a particular composition - in this case an alloy of titanium and uranium-238 for most of the gauntlets, besides the palms. Athena nearly staggered from the effort of creating them but stayed on her feet. At least we gave her the gauntlets, Ryan reflected, hopefully it’ll help brace that wrist.
Enki watched her form the gauntlets and answered her taunt with a sneer before charging. On the defensive, she was able to duck under his grabbing hands and land a boxer’s quick one-two punch against Enki’s ribcage - wincing at the pain as she landed the blows. Ryan let out a breath of relief when he saw that the gauntlets worked - the added mass meant even with his enhanced strength, Enki felt the blows, and grunted as they landed. He jumped back, looking comically surprised to have felt that.
Then Enki grinned widely. With apparently absolutely zero effort, he formed a pair of his own gauntlets - identical to Athena’s. Ryan checked, peering with his divine sight, and felt a surge of relief - they were exact replicas, although he’d merged the gauntlet on his metal arm into the artificial appendage.
“You know why we won’t surrender, Enki?” Ryan shouted. C’mon, Enki. I’m over here. Focus on me. It worked, and Enki turned his head towards Ryan, his beady eyes glaring.
“Is it just because you’re too stupid to know better?” But Enki wasn’t waiting for an answer, he was charging in. Ryan desperately threw up the barrier.
The barrier was a work of art, in Ryan’s increasingly-not-so-humble opinion. It compressed a field of air around Ryan, forming a foot-wide field where the pressure became astronomically high - six times more intense than the pressure at the core of the Earth. Enki’s blow slammed into it, and a shockwave erupted from the spot where the two met.
Enki slammed his fists against the barrier a few more times, his face turning red. He started to snarl with each blow. However, even with the added mass of the gauntlets, he didn’t come close to breaking through it. Not that Ryan could maintain something of this magnitude for long. Like flight, keeping this air pressure barrier in place was a constant drain, and as soon as Ryan dropped it Enki would turn him into paste.
But the plan was contingent on the fact that Ryan wasn’t fighting alone. Athena and Crystal moved in and managed to land a couple solid hits before Enki slammed his hands together, creating a pressure barrier of his own - an exact replica of Ryan’s, and one he could maintain much longer than Ryan could.
“Nope!” Crystal chimed in, getting Enki’s attention by continuing the earlier conversation. “It’s because you’re just too sodding ugly to be seen surrendering to, yeah? Just humiliating.” While she spoke, Crystal created her own weapon, a sword with a unique, wavy design. The blade itself was sharpened ceramic.
Enki saw her create the sword and at the same time prove
d he hadn’t gotten so stupid he couldn’t see the basic pattern forming. Instead of charging Crystal, he whirled around to angle his charge towards Athena - who was now helpless against him. Athena managed to slip away from the first blow by mere inches. The second punch grazed her side and sent her tumbling back. Enki laughed as he seized the opportunity, leaping into the air to bring his fist down towards Athena’s head. Athena barely managed to get the gauntlets up in time to block the blow. The sound of their gauntlets impacting rang through the air.
Athena’s leg snapped. Holy shit, Ryan thought, he hit her so hard the shockwave broke her leg.
Can we really beat this?
Seeing his opportunity, Enki raised his fists again, but Crystal had caught up with him and slashed with the ceramic sword. It slid through the barrier like nothing was there and drew a line of bright red blood across Enki’s back. He howled in pain and struck out with a backhand blow, striking Crystal across the face and sending her flying. She landed and didn’t move.
She’s fine, Ryan, she’s fine. I hope.
Ryan watched Enki frown, and then a slow smile formed on the brute’s lips. He’d figured out there was an exception into the barrier, one that allowed ceramics to slip through. He knows how to kill me.
Enki had an opening now, a chance to kill Athena. Ryan struck out, hard and fast with a twist to send a bolt of lightning Enki’s way. The energy dissipated while trying to pass through the ultra-dense atmosphere of the pressure barrier, but it got Enki’s attention. With Crystal unconscious he could stalk over towards Ryan as Ryan dropped to one knee from exhaustion.
“You know, Ryan,” Enki said conversationally, “I’m so sick of you. I should have shot you in the goddamn head that first day. But now I’m going to fix that shit. Ishtar’s unconscious, Athena can’t walk. You’re about to die, you annoying little shit. Any last words?”
Ryan tried to come up with some witty comeback, some action-movie one-liner that would prove his badassery - but at this point, it took every bit of energy Ryan could muster to maintain the barrier. All he could do was glare up at Enki, who was raising his hands. Come on you bastard. Do it. Stop talking and stab me.
“Too bad. Oh well.” And with a twist, Enki formed a copy of the ceramic blade that Crystal had formed, the gauntlets wrapping around it - and as soon as his fists closed, Enki saw the curve of Ryan’s mouth, saw the smile, and knew he had made a mistake.
Then Enki was engulfed in nuclear fire.
“It’s called Californium-252,” Ryan had said the night before. “It has the lowest critical mass of any isotope of any element.”
Crystal nodded for him to go on, but Athena couldn’t contain a sigh. “I know what some of those words mean.”
“Sorry,” Ryan said, unable to stop grinning, “Important version? You only need a little under three kilograms to make a nuclear explosion.”
“We already covered that,” Athena said with a frown. “We can’t create a nuclear bomb. Too much power.”
“Right, I get that,” Ryan tapped his foot eagerly, “but what if we got Enki to assemble the Californium-252 for us?”
“How would we do that?” Athena’s frown was starting to fade
“That’s the part I don’t know. Like I said, only thirty-two percent of a plan.”
Athena sighed, but Crystal practically bounced in her chair. “We show him what to make. Have you all noticed what he’s done since we started fighting him?”
“Uh...chains from the ground?”
“Moloch uses that one when he needs to escape.” Crystal interjected with a motion for Ryan to continue.
“Okay,” Ryan went on, “he fought your tornado, blasted you with lightning, threw me with wind, punched me a whole lot, raised a castle, and did Týr’s solar death beam.”
“Exactly!” Crystal stood up like that explained everything.
“Oh,” Athena said, and Ryan noticed her eyes widening.
“Okay, you two got ahead of me. Bring it in for me?”
“The lightning bolt, the gusts of wind, those are common tricks. Everything special, everything unique? Love, he did that by copying some other god. He can use anyone’s power, but he doesn’t know how to adapt them, so he just copies them.”
Ryan nodded excitedly. “Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. But how do we use that?”
“Sword and gauntlets,” Athena said, joining in the energy that was infusing the room. “How dense is Californium?”
“Pretty dense,” Ryan said, “denser than lead, if I remember.”
“Making our own weapons would normally be a stupid waste of power. But in this case, we show him how to make them, and we wait for him to blow himself up.”
“Won’t need to wait,” Ryan responded. “As soon as he brings two halves a critical mass together, boom.”
“Okay,” Crystal said, frowning. “So we get him to make the sword and gauntlets, yeah? And then...what, we all die?”
Ryan needed a bit more searching to find the answer to that question. The internet was less forthcoming with what would be needed to contain a nuclear blast, since most research into surviving an explosion of that strength was about keeping the blast wave and heat and radiation out, not keeping the entire blast locked in.
“Well, this site says that you’d need pressure orders of magnitude greater than the Earth’s core to hold it in place,” he’d finally said, after an hour of searching.
“And you can trust everything you read on the internet, love?” Crystal’s tone remained upbeat and teasing, but her brow furrowed. “I’m not exactly keen on getting nuked.”
“Nor am I. Especially since you, Ryan, wouldn’t come back. You’re still Nascent. Enki would likely reform before we did, given his new strength,” Athena added.
Ryan shrugged. “But it gives us the last piece of the puzzle! He’ll make the gauntlets to show off to you, Athena. He’ll mimic the barrier because it’s a damn good barrier, and then we build in an exception...it’s the only thing we have that’s even remotely workable”
As Ryan watched now, the nuclear explosion expanded in a bubble of plasma and heat and radioactivity. The high-pressure barrier bulged out, and for one horrified instant Ryan thought it would burst, that he’d done the math wrong or Enki hadn’t made it strong enough, and he was about to find out first-hand what it felt like to be disintegrated by a nuke. No no no. Ryan threw out his hand like anything he could do would stop it.
Thankfully, the barrier held, and the explosion was reflected back in. It started to pulse there, the force ricocheting back and forth. Almost...there, Ryan thought. Without Enki maintaining it, it was easy to open a tiny hole in the top of the barrier, changing it from a nuclear bubble to nuclear rocket.
The effect was instant, and Ryan was thrown back as the bubble slammed into the ground. It shot down into the last part of the plan, a chasm they had dug before the battle had started. Ryan peered over the edge to see the sphere had already vanished into the darkness below, punching through the thin layer of rock and then again into the bedrock beneath that.
The island shook again as the last explosion went off, the barrier finally failing. It worked, Ryan thought, flopping onto the edge of the pit. It actually worked.
Athena’s leg was broken. Crystal was unconscious. And now, next to the hole that marked Enki’s radioactive tomb, Ryan’s Hungers overtook him, and he fell asleep.
Chapter 29
A Foul Device
Ryan woke up bit by bit, his consciousness piecing itself together as something shook him. He swatted his hand at the source, a pathetic blow that carried as much force behind it as the beating of a gnat’s wings. “Five more minutes,” he muttered, rolling over. The motion shifted the rocks that were stabbing into his back. They were now stabbing into his side instead, which wasn’t much of an improvement. The pain forced his eye open.
Athena was looking down at him, her normally olive skin the sallow color of a dried corpse. Given her injuries, it was frankly amazing t
hat she’d managed to crawl over here to wake Ryan up. “Get to your feet, Ryan Smith.” Her words were hissed between teeth clenched in pain, and Ryan had to fight the urge to throw up when he saw the bone poking out of the skin of her leg.
“Athena.” Ryan fought the exhaustion clawing at him. “Crystal?”
She nodded at the question. “I think she is alive. Ryan, you have to get Enki’s nanoverse. We need to destroy it.”
The statement was so ludicrous, Ryan felt a flash of annoyance. “We nuked him, Athena. I’m sure it’s shattered into dust by now.” He studied her face for a moment, saw the genuine concern that lurked beneath the pain, and felt himself grimace. “Right?”
“No.” Athena was swaying where she stood, and it dawned on Ryan that he was not the only one clinging to alertness. “We have to take it into one of our nanoverses to destroy it. Where we’re omnipotent. Nothing else will do it.”
Ryan groaned in frustration. We won, he thought, knowing that it was stupid and childish, but he couldn’t shake it. We won. I’m supposed to be able to rest now.
He looked again into Athena’s eyes, and there he saw the response to his unvoiced complaint. No, Ryan. We haven’t won until the nanoverse is destroyed, until we can be certain he will not return. He found himself nodding, both to agree with the thought and to prevent himself from dozing off. He rose to his feet, swaying drunkenly. He activated his divine sight, which was still working - he hadn’t succumbed to his Hungers yet. “Keep an eye out. I’ll go get it.”
She gave him a weak thumbs-up, and Ryan walked to the edge of the pit that had swallowed Enki. It was a yawning abyss, far too deep for the faint light that managed to slip between the clouds to provide any illumination. He reached into his nanoverse, groping for a light source.
Thankfully, Daasti’s utopia had plenty of light sources, and he pulled out a small orb. When Ryan activated it by giving it a solid squeeze, the light shone with the brightness of a high-end flashlight and the surface became sticky. He pressed it to his shirt, right over his heart, and when he pulled his hand away it stayed in place.