[MV] The Super Wizard From Space #64: Demolio, part 4

[wilalambre at gmail.com]

# THE SUPER WIZARD FROM SPACE, #64

## DEMOLIO, part 4

Consciousness returns without light, and with crushing pain. Sharp,
constant pressure, from every direction. Bending and compress,so violent
that it feels his skin might rupture.

But it was _there_. It was _real_. With direction and dimension and mass.

He taps into his fusion with instinctual science-sorcery. Burning starlight
rolls off his body, sliding over dried blood and torn uniform and encasing
him in a contiguous bubble. He flexes the bubble outward, expanding it into
a spherical shield. The surrounding bedrock protests. Screeches. Screams.
The shield holds. The compression relents.

His light reveals dull grey stone streaked with yellow pumice and iron
pyrite. From vast jagged cracks bleeds ruby-orange magma, glowing hot and
smelling of burning honey. He pushes out his shield, increasing the
pressure against the molten magma. The burning liquid squeezes through
fissures, searching for release.

He pushes harder, harder, _harder_, raising its temperature to a furious
boil. Inevitably, the bedrock cannot hold the terrible forces, and it
erupts! Up! And out! Boulders, debris, burning rock; he batters it all
aside.

Up here, in the open. Black rolling storm clouds and saccharine atmosphere.
All around him, the same radiated ions clinging to the air, the same
expansive field of blasted black glass. And standing there, the animated
avatar of Genovefa Buzz.

"Boorish and myopic," she mumbles under her breathe, the storm echoing her
with thunder. She wraps her arms tight around herself, bares her teeth in
frightful anger. Her wax-honey shape ripples and bubbles as she shudders.
"No thought in your actionz, no care for the consZzequencez. You've no idea
what you've done."

The wizard pulls himself up onto his knees. He breathes through painful
tightness, sight marred with red scratches, a bitter copper flavour in his
mouth. He touches his forehead. _His_ forehead. And _his_ pain. "You'll not
browbeat my mind like you do your drones. I've suffered worse monsters than
you."

"MonsterzZs? Ignorant termite! You've not yet _met_ the monstrouz. You've
only woken it."

"...sammaelle...?" He still had a sense of it, a fleeting idea his thoughts
desperately were forgetting. Of an incomprehensible abhorrence that
blanketed everywhere and forever and inward.

Genovefa hisses, as if trying to drown out the word with impulsive frenzy.
"You should have left well enough alone. You should have turned back. You
should have known enough to _die_, to _end_ thizs, like your impetuousZz
precurzor."

Precursors. The Schrivener. And the Stringer before him. Dead, thanks to
this madness. The last remnants of their unique starlights still folded and
carried within him. He stands, wiping mud and blood off his face. "I _do_
plan on ending this."

"Fah! You've no idea what The End iz. You've only juzt a _word_. You've
only had a glimpZse." She backs away from him, turning up her nose at him.
"We were right about you. We were right all along. You are _death_."

"Enough. This is _over_." He holds out his hand. "Return me my Crown and
surrender your Feather."

Genovefa's expression turns cruel. "A queen doez _not_ zubmit," she snarls.
The temperature chills around him. The ions crackle with sudden
anticipation. Storm clouds clamour together. Genovefa jabs a finger toward
him. With a single baleful scream, a bolt of lightening explodes down at
him!

Electric fire shoots through his bones. Every nerve is a knife is being
thrust. Rubble and glass detonate under his feet, flying shrapnel that
bursts with a million vehement volts. He crashes down, registering the
impact before realizing he was knocked off his feet.

The sky grinds its teeth and howls again. He barely has time to throw up
his hands, blocking the second lightening bolt with a sheet of fusion.
Electricity erupts in blinding fireworks.

Genovefa's voice echo with thunder cracks, "You think you'll bully Uz with
bluster alone? We've watched you, We've _sztudied_ you for thiz entire
Tournament!" A third jab of the finger. Another _spear_ of lightening
crashes against the wizard's shield! "Without your cosZzmic weapon, you're
no threat! None at all! You're little more than a ztubborn _nail_ for me to
hammer down."

She balls up her hand into a tight fist and pulls her arm back. The ground
quakes under him. Bedrock wrenches with deep underground rumble. On the
horizon, a mountain range pulls away into the distance, as if the landscape
were mirroring the Queen's movement!

She thrusts her fist at him in a mimed punch. The surface of the planet
yells in avalanches and landslides. A tidal wave of molten crust leaps back
over the horizon at him... and riding it, the massive tumbling shadow of a
_tectonic plate_! Its massive size and colossal scope blot out half the
sky! A crashing wall of granite and andesite, _dozens_ of miles tall,
riding _explosions_ of magma!

The wizard calls out the fusion fire within him. White hot plasma rolls
down his arm. He snaps his wrist at the oncoming landmass, whipping out
energy as a billowing solar flare!

Fusion plasma lashes out in an enormous arc, colliding with the planet's
crust! Energy detonates rock and stone! Molecules burn, atoms smash,
billions all at once! The edge disappears in a chain of nuclear infernos!

The atmosphere turns crimson. The sugar sweet air catches _fire_. The storm
explodes into a caustic, conflagrant hurricane!

Mountain ranges melts and tumble out of the sky. The rushing landmass slams
into the ground thousands of miles short... still enough to cause the
ground to heave at the sky. The wizard is sent spinning chaotically into
barbarous heavens. Below him, endless fields turn into blacken rubble. Hot
blistering lava seep from a million scattered fissures.

A vast, fiery wound, scarred with newly opened canyons, stabbed with newly
jagged peaks. An atomic devastation that carries over _millions_ of miles,
in every direction.

As he struggles for control against the hurricane's ferocity, the raging
winds carry Genovefa's words to him. "How many civilizZsationz have you
brought down with thisz power? How many thought you a _god_, flinging
ruination with a wave of your hand? You'll not find Uz awed by your
_fireworkzZzz_. Throw all the szolar flarez you like..." the landscape
ripples, as if the Queen were rolling her knuckles. "SzcratchezZz on Our
szkin, little more."

The wizard doesn't answer. His bones still rattle with electric pain,
catching stray jolts from the storm's mad lightening. Movement feels
laborious and acrid.

"You've been fearful a shadow over Our thoughtz..." the winds shift,
curving and pulling away from the wizard until he's left in the hurricane's
calm, empty eye, "...but We retain the ultimate advantage againzt shadowz."

The clouds pull away, revealing a brightly lit sky. Poisoned sunlight
floods his body, seeping into his skin like boiling molasses.
Instinctively, his body tries to fight the toxic light, but by doing so,
draws in _more_ power. He doubles over and _screams_.

He can't stay. He can't possibly win. Here, Genovefa is both the opponent
_and_ the battlefield. She's the air and the ground. She's every size and
every scale and every direction. And his only weapon is a _sabotaged_ sun.
He needs to get out of her field of influence, to get away from this star
system.

The wizard cuts under reality's skin and opens a warp tunnel. With a burst
of speed, he leaps into the hyper-dimensional capillary and launches toward
another part of the galaxy.

He doesn't get far.

A herculean amount of gravity _crushes_ his tunnel. The sides collapse like
a paper tube squeezed by impossible amounts force and physics.

His tunnel shreds apart. Space-time crash back at him. He rockets out of
the torn remains at half the speed of light.

He's hit by the friction fire of reentry. Then by abrupt impact.

He loses consciousness for a few seconds... a rushing cold startles him
back awake. He's crashed onto an ice planet. Continents of frozen water,
ammonia, and methane. His impact has blasted a crater a hundred miles wide.
Waves of liquid nitrogen was already flowing, threatening to flash-freeze
him in the hole.

An eclipse spreads out over the glacial horizon. Genovefa's planetary
shadow looms upward and forward, growing and expanding in the frigid
heavens. And peaking out behind her... the same sharp, stinging, _biting_
sunlight!

She curls radio waves around her gravity well, throwing her voice at the
wizard. "No, no, no. No tunnelling under gravitiez. No szcurrying beneath
the floorboardz. Only here. Only now. Try to run away and We will stamp and
stomp and _force_ you back out.

"We will overcome you, and szo once again become _deathlezZz_, _endlezZz_
and _infinite_!"
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