The Zenith Watch trembled in sudden dissonance, a low-frequency quake that rattled the endless corridors of crystal and starlight. At the heart of the grand chamber, the living table of worlds erupted in a violent crimson blaze.
Quish strode forward, lightning crackling faintly across his shoulders. The holographic seas of countless Earths writhed and distorted, their tranquil blues and greens seared by a single, searing signal.
A deeper vibration—older than gravity, older than the multiverse itself—pressed against his mind. He recognized the warning at once: the Core trembled.
"Show me," he murmured.
The ocean of light parted, revealing the source: Earth-32718. Its miniature sphere burned black at the center, a jagged scar of red pulsing outward like a heartbeat. Quish reached through the projection, sensing nothing familiar—no Gifted resonance, no layered signatures of cosmic inheritance. Only one point of staggering volatility, a solitary storm of power so dense it felt like a newborn star.
A dimensional rupture. Unnatural. Hungry.
Quish's crimson lightning surged, instinct and duty fusing into a single command. The Ring of Transit floated from his belt, its black-gold veins awakening in a slow, molten glow. He seized the flickering globe of Earth-32718, feeling the strange gravity of its crisis imprint across his palms.
The Watch fell silent as the portal began to form—a vertical tear of lightless fire. Space folded inward, revealing a horizon of unknown storms beyond.
Quish tightened his grip.
"Earth-32718," he whispered to the void. "Let's see what this is all about."
With a final pulse of crimson light, he drove the sphere into the Ring and tore the fabric of reality wide open.
The portal roared like a muted thunderclap, and Quish stepped through into the bleeding unknown.
The capital of Earth-32718 stretched beneath a violet-black sky that twisted like a living wound. Skyscrapers leaned at impossible angles, their foundations uprooted by rivers of inverted gravity. Chunks of street rose like paper torn upward, spiraling into the heavens before splintering into nothing.
Below, the Volts fought to keep the world from folding in on itself.
Daraf absorbed the kinetic shock of a collapsing tower, the navy glow of his gauntlets flaring as he redirected the force into a seismic punch that steadied the crumbling district.
Tess hovered above the debris, her silver exo-suit's violet coils humming as magnetic wings caught entire steel beams mid-fall and hurled them aside like twigs.
Ohmni flickered through phases of solidity, darting through walls to rescue trapped civilians, teal-green armor pulsing with each density shift.
Ampra landed on a broken skybridge in a yellow flash, shock batons spitting arcs as she barked orders into the chaos.
Joule roared across a shattered plaza, his body a blazing orange silhouette as he converted mass into pure momentum, blasting a path through a hail of fractured concrete.
Luxen danced along the rooftops, drawing a radiant bow of hard-light and loosing arrows that became force shields for the wounded below.
Voltair planted his storm-forged staff, lightning booming across the horizon as he called thunder down to shatter falling wreckage before it crushed the panicked crowds.
Around them, Arxen's plasma cannons carved corridors through debris while Gausser's magnetic wings deflected a storm of metallic shards. Cryon swept a hand and froze a collapsing overpass into a glittering bridge of ice; Wattson, a steel giant of loyalty, held the bridge steady as survivors fled.
Capax soared overhead trailing violet fire, gathering stray energy to keep the city's failing grid alive, while Rella's holograms lured civilians to safety through paths of flickering light.
Indar blurred in golden streaks between collapsing avenues, EMP bursts disabling unstable reactors; Ignis burned like a red-gold star, her emotional force shielding entire districts.
Ohmrie's dimensional tethers lanced across the skyline, redirecting detonations into miniature rifts, while Fluxen's neural uplinks flared as she retooled damaged suits mid-battle.
And at the city's dead heart stood Tarragon.
He towered on a dais of shattered concrete, cloaked in writhing stormlight. The Gauntlet of Dominion on his right hand pulsed with a light that devoured color, bending space with every gesture. Streets curled like parchment around him. Rivers of gravity lifted skyward in spirals of molten dust.
Around their master swarmed his alien vanguard—serpentine, plated beings of obsidian bone and molten eyes, the Xytheri, gliding on wings of dark matter. They hissed through the warped air, claws sparking with shards of broken dimension.
A shockwave rippled outward as Quish emerged from the crimson breach.
The sky itself seemed to pause. Lightning froze mid-fork. The alien host stilled. Even the Volts, mid-battle, turned as one.
Crimson lightning wrapped Quish in a living storm, his silhouette a burning sigil of power. The ground steadied beneath his first step, the twisted air snapping back to a brief, unnatural calm.
Tarragon tilted his head, the Gauntlet's black radiance flaring in answer.
"Another pretender," his voice rumbled, layered with echoes from a hundred broken worlds.
Quish met the warlord's gaze, the void reflected in his crimson eyes.
"I am no pretender," he said, his voice carrying across the shattered capital like a quiet thunder. "I am thee who watches all."
The battlefield exhaled as the first bolt of crimson lightning struck, heralding the clash to come.
A violet tremor rippled across the ruined capital as Tarragon turned, the Gauntlet of Dominion blazing with layered suns. His voice cut through the cacophony—low, resonant, steeped in triumph.
"So the Watch still sends its ghosts," he said, flexing fingers that bent the skyline like molten glass. "I crossed blades with one of your kind an eon ago. He swore the multiverse would never bleed again." His smile widened, cruel and knowing. "I buried him beneath a collapsing star."
Crimson Luxium flared along Quish's arms, the air around him vibrating in harmonic defiance.
"Then you know how this ends," Quish replied, eyes narrowing. "Not with a grave, but with balance restored."
Tarragon laughed, a sound that rattled every shard of broken window. "Balance? I make the scales."
He thrust the Gauntlet forward. Reality folded in concentric spirals, streets snapping upward into floating monoliths. Time eddies coiled like serpents, tugging at past and future.
Quish answered with a surge of scarlet lightning. The bolt struck the warped currents head-on, red meeting prismatic distortion in a detonation of soundless light. Entire city blocks sheared free and hovered, frozen mid-tilt like toys abandoned by a careless god.
Below, the Volts scattered to shield panicked civilians, their suits flashing with individual color-flares—violet coils, teal pulses, golden arcs. Through the maelstrom they stared upward, awestruck at the lone figure holding ground against a living cataclysm.
Quish stepped forward, each motion a countermeasure to unraveling reality.
"You faced a protector before," he said, voice steady amid the chaos. "But you have never faced the multiverse itself."
The Gauntlet's glow deepened to a blinding white. Tarragon's grin sharpened.
"Then show me its strength."
And the sky split again as power beyond worlds collided.
The ruined capital could no longer contain them. Tarragon vaulted into the upper air on a cyclone of warped light, and Quish followed, a crimson flare spiraling after him. The planet groaned beneath their ascent.
With a single sweep of the Gauntlet, Tarragon sent a shockwave racing across continents. Oceans heaved into walls of water; mountain chains rippled like silk. Beams of hardened radiance pierced the sky, each a lance of star-hot gravity.
Quish split into a dozen after-images, speed phantoms flickering in and out of existence. Crimson blades flashed in their hands, carving the spears apart before they could touch the surface. He inverted the shockwave's pull, twisting it into a harmless vortex that vanished into the stratosphere.
Reality itself began to fray. Rifts yawned like wounds, flickering with glimpses of alien seas and burning suns. Quish darted through the chaos, sealing each tear with a whip of crimson energy even as he fought, the pulse of the multiverse hammering through his veins.
Tarragon laughed, his voice echoing across worlds. "Patchwork tricks," he taunted. "You're stitching a dam in a rising tide."
Far below, Ignis led the Volts into the maelstrom. Ampra's gauntlets snapped with lightning as she leapt between collapsing spires, stunning the alien vanguard. Tess dragged entire towers of debris aside with magnetic force to clear escape routes. Joule, glowing like a miniature sun, charged through the invaders, his booming laughter masking the strain. Their combined onslaught forced Tarragon to glance down, a heartbeat of distraction Quish seized.
The Gauntlet answered with new terrors. Streets folded into glass plains, the sky bent into jagged prisms, and the horizon wavered like a mirage. Quish met every distortion head-on, crimson lightning cutting through impossible geometry, sealing each new rupture as quickly as it formed.
At last Tarragon raised the Gauntlet high, and the air warped as if the planet's Core itself might tear free. Quish steadied in the violet storm, energy burning brighter than the fractured sun, prepared to unleash the full force of the multiverse.
The capital still reeled from the clash—buildings half-suspended in mid-air, rivers snaking upward into torn clouds—when Quish let the Core's resonance pour through him unchecked. Crimson lightning crawled across his arms and out into the wounded sky, a soundless tremor that made even the alien vanguard falter.
Tarragon staggered but raised the Gauntlet high, its black surface boiling with stolen starlight. "You think you can unmake what I have claimed?" His voice warped across dimensions, echoing from a thousand unseen worlds. The Gauntlet drew those worlds closer, folding the city into a maelstrom of bending streets and splintered horizons.
Quish advanced through the chaos, twin blades bright as collapsing suns. Each step pulled more of the Core's infinite hum into his body until the air itself quivered. When he struck, crimson arcs met the Gauntlet's swirling lattice and the night erupted in a light that blinded mortals and aliens alike.
Tarragon countered with a gravity spike that split the clouds, hurling Quish across a canyon of fractured space. Quish spun mid-air, a phantom afterimage trailing, and returned with a downward slash that cleaved an entire district's floating debris into harmless dust.
They collided again and again—light against light, the city a kaleidoscope of warped matter. Each blow opened rifts that revealed flickers of other universes: oceans of emerald fire, endless black deserts, stars burning backward. Quish sealed each rupture with a flick of his will even as he fought, refusing to let their duel unravel reality itself.
At last he sensed the Gauntlet's flaw: a spatial node pulsing like a false heart. He drew every fragment of his speed, and in a single motion drove both katana-bones deep into that point.
The Gauntlet screamed. Crimson lightning threaded through its core, overloading the counterfeit multiversal signature. Cracks raced across its surface, light bleeding through like dawn through shattered glass. With a thunderclap that rolled across continents, the artifact exploded outward in a shockwave of pure force.
Tarragon crumpled, the dominion he had stolen collapsing in a cascade of falling light. Entire blocks settled back to the ground, rivers resumed their course, the sky unknotted itself from impossible angles.
Below, the Volts surged into action. Ignis led with a flare of red-gold, her voice carrying calm authority as she ordered containment. Tess and Gausser wove magnetic shields to catch debris; Cryon dropped the temperature, freezing unstable structures before they could fall. Joule, Arxen, and Wattson corralled the alien vanguard, their unified energy cracking through the dusk like a single, defiant heartbeat.
Citizens emerged from hiding, blinking at a city that should have been dust but still stood. They looked up to the crimson figure descending through the cooling air.
Quish landed amid the shattered avenue, silent as the first stars blinked through the dispersing clouds. The Volts formed a wary half-circle around Tarragon's unconscious body, eyes never leaving the stranger who had turned the tide of their world.
He gave them only a single charge, voice low but carrying across the hushed city.
"Guard your world. Balance is yours to keep."
Before questions could rise, the Ring of Transit flared to life around him. Crimson light engulfed his form, and in a breath the Protector was gone—back to the infinite watchtower—while Earth-32718 exhaled, its hard-won peace settling like the first calm after an endless storm.