Last Survivor (Final)

I had long parted with reason, though I think through Instinct, it guided me still. I was speaking a language that was all action, guided by scientific and religious principles I could barely comprehend.

I physically divided myself from my 'all-terrain' Vessel, and for the first time, like the Fury before me, stepped out into true dusk. The shadowman Omen stood before me, at the ready in some kind of psychopomp salute. Even as my jet churned stars into liquid daylight and we fast approached a speed beyond time, he motionlessly kept pace. With nothing to measure distance with, the picture of us facing off, never moved, the world reduced to a mere gif.

Omen stood so still, standing in the empty hills of his black soiled homeland, that it felt like everything was coming to an end. Against that great and terrible darkness, the All-Land beneath my feet -my hypersonic mecca- felt like the last grain of sand tumbling through the vast reaches of an empty hourglass. We stood mirrored, speed and stone, gunslingers facing each other from opposing sides of the Quantum DMZ.

I longed to draw. God, I wanted it bad. I could see it now...

"Ladies and Gentlemen may I have your attention! Last Survivor, the final magician and pioneer of stagecraft, will show the audience the greatest magic trick ever conceived; by turning a clown into a *dead-man*"


I had it all figured out. I figured that, 50/50, if I really, really tried...

If I gave it every last bit of 110% and set loose the chains of screaming lightning...

I truly, honestly believed that it would be possible to {kill Space.}

I really did.

But there wasn't a single chance of that happening. I knew it the moment I stepped out.
Even when I saw Omen a second time and promptly blew a vein.

Even when I moved and rejoined with my Vessel in one seamless movement, taking hold of that incredible tension and flinging it wide open. It was the stretch that had been building up since I had become Last Survivor, a yawn that opened me to the very core of my being and gave teeth to a holy Messiah of Destruction.

The great deserts of the All-Land flash cooked into two Olympus sized halls of mirrors, fractal igneous phoenixes dying and rising in sequence, until the gates of heaven opened and the very flesh of God shone in front of me, through me, so that all things in this charnel house of death became blessed by the Blinding Eye, the all-searing, all-burning, heart stopping, soul popping, ozone strangling, dick cindering power of yes dear God yes THE LIGHT!

THE LIGHT!!!

...even then...that twisted smile never left Omen's face.

It was the look of a man who thought that he already won.

When I had to squint to see him, I realized that I could still see the shot I had fired at him earlier, burning in the distance.
Behind me, my phantom projectile still relentlessly pursued me. How faded it looked, compared to when it started.

My thoughts at this point were moving faster than I could keep up with. Multiple recursive AI processes fighting each other. It was a damn nuisance. I checked my remaining mineral components, and ran an old assembly printing program. Five minutes later, I hit my brain with an Everest sized chunk of Adderall.

Gradually, my brain reoriented to the new flow of chemicals; I stopped twitching and started thinking. The problem was clear enough... There were too many inconsistencies. Fist sized holes peppered the premise of this reality.

If the Light was embodied as the purest shining incarnation of the element, wouldn't the same be true of Cold Still Death? Why would elemental absence require a form? Why THIS form? The tree horns, the gun, the clothing... The components of Omen were anachronistic.

What, Cold Still Death's omen just "happened" to be a duelist, since before the times of man. What's more, his use of my lingo seemed crafted, specifically made to piss me off.

...Why wasn't he moving? Here I was, drugged, open, defenseless. No attack. Not even a feint. Nothing.

How would he attack anyway? How could a bullet made of darkness harm me?
It didn't make any sense. If he had wanted to beat me, all he would have had to do was run, disappear forever to a place where I could not follow, until the light had faded entirely. But he had approached, constructed this whole scenario, made it so that I would...

What? Shoot him?

I pondered the bolt I had fired, and the near perfect way my enemy had dodged. It flew on aimlessly, without a target, burning bright in the distance, fading.

How close had I just been to wasting the rest of it in one last blind attack?

The bolt behind me followed still, the one that had wounded me to the point that I could perceive Cold Still Death...so I had assumed. Was there something else going on here? Some factor inherent to the very nature of my near obliteration that forced Death out of hiding, for the first time in one trillion years?

A picture began forming on my head, like a blood stained roadmap to Valhalla. It was gut instinct, fortified by a rational drive, that at it's core began to fuel something unfamiliar: a pure, human craving.
All our life, there is one thing that drives us, one thing that causes us to rise from the ashes, again and again.

We seek to obtain and leave a legacy.
A little something for you to remember me by. A little weathered plaque in the desert.

It was never any of my business to desire a legacy. I was to be the guardian, the ultimate waldgrave to the mountain, where the ancient dead worshiped. I'm sure my brethren would have preferred a craven coward than a suicide bomber.
Yet... What about you? You who have yet to shirk Deaths chains, and open the doorway and step into the Light? With your demise so close that you can see it smiling at you, would you have hesitated to lay it all on the line?

Well.
What's one last

-Everything-
    or
-Nothing-

moment in the lifetime of the compulsive gambler, the race known as Humanity?

Fortuna throws the coin down from heaven, and time and time again, we never fail to flip it.

My turn had come.

I decided to allow poor Omen a small victory. I cut power to my systems, just long enough to confuse the shit out of him. Then I floored it in the opposite direction.

The result was me instantly crashing into my pursuing laser almost as fast as it had been chasing me. The dog that had pursued for years finally returned home. I guided it directly into my core, but once again it seemed to hardly need prompting. It traveled on, guided by some mystic force.

As it entered my soul, it seemed to pass *beyond,* vanishing for a moment before reacting with...whatever was inside. Some small mysteries still remained, it seemed.

There was a sense of elation, just before reality cooked off. Really was just the biggest, jerry-rigged IED I ever created. The explosion that resulted was beyond any that I had ever witnessed. It was MASSIVE, all capital letters. Everything that was could have fit inside this thing, this... force.

Where there was dark, there was now light, and it seemed to me to be truly infinite.

I suppose, in a way, there was a certain degree of certainty to the decision. What with all the energy and matter in the universe in the same place, theoretically anything should be possible. Kick starting a second Big Bang was just a matter of picking up the pieces and then putting them in the right order.

Hell of a jigsaw puzzle.

Someone else would have spent their last moments differently, perhaps wondered at the fate of the new universe, spent some time considering the fate of those who had to come from this.
Not I.
The look of despair on Omens face filled me with such orgasmic bliss that I barely felt my total annihilation. I was on a high that only ended when I ceased to exist.
It was like a infant's first laugh. It was that pure.

Dance skeleton! Hahaha!

I had killed Death's grin and now I took it with me, when I went off to enter Final Heaven.
To a place beyond death.