---
Jupiter had become something that didn't have a name.
Not a storm system. Not a gas giant doing what gas giants did. Something else — the accumulated record of the last hour written into its atmosphere in colors that didn't belong to it.
Emerald. Black. The void-color that consumed what it found.
The two figures in the middle of it had been reducing each other to this for longer than either of them should have been able to sustain.
Argon.
What remained of his armor was memory now. The shapes of it present but purposeless. The cursed runes pulsing weakly — the record of every seal that had been placed on him over thousands of years, now just marks on something that had outlasted every attempt to contain it.
Four eyes burning.
Black lightning around him unsteady.
Flickering.
Leo.
The perfected Atomic Awakening holding — not at its peak, not at the height it had reached above Jupiter when he first found it. But holding. The green aura steady in the way a fire is steady when it has been burning long enough to know what it is.
He breathed.
Deliberately.
Each breath a choice.
Leo: "For humanity."
He said it again.
The same words.
The first time had been a declaration.
This time was a promise he was making himself.
Leo: "I will."
---
The primal mode came at him with everything it had left.
Four arms. The full symphony of them. Each one carrying information Argon had been collecting across the last hour — every technique Leo had used, every movement, every pattern that his body made when it was trying to survive.
Leo moved through the gaps.
The gaps that remained.
He found Argon's face with his foot.
Clean.
Full commitment.
He landed.
He waited.
Argon turned back.
The void-eyes.
No mark.
Leo: "I'm using everything."
He said it quietly.
To himself.
To the fact of it.
The two precise punches came from directions he hadn't fully covered.
No shockwave. No announcement.
His pupils went.
The gas clouds below him.
He lay inside Jupiter's upper atmosphere and felt it — the transformation beginning to slip, the green going from his hair, the aura pulling back.
He thought about the voice that had called him a miracle.
He came up.
The kick to Argon's cheek came from below.
Everything remaining behind it.
Argon went.
Venus.
Leo launched after him.
---
The orb between his palms.
Small. Contained. The concentrated version — the dangerous version.
He felt it pulse against his hands.
He anchored himself with one hand back.
The shockwave moving through space behind him.
He looked at Venus.
At the crater.
At Argon emerging from it.
Leo: "The Atomic Wave."
It went.
Clean.
Pure.
The green moving outward from his palm in the shape of something that knew exactly where it was going.
Argon raised all four arms.
The wave consumed them.
It consumed everything he put into the block.
Continued through.
Took him inside the light.
Leo fell to one knee.
The knee found Venus's surface.
He was breathing.
He was breathing.
He smiled.
The original smile.
The comedian's smile.
Leo: "I saved everyone."
He said it to the dust.
To the silence.
Leo: "Everyone is safe now."
---
The hands came from below.
Four of them.
He didn't finish the breath.
They found his legs. His arms.
The ground exploded.
He went — bouncing across Venus's surface, each impact a separate conversation between his body and the rock, finally stopping when he drove his hand into the ground and made it stop.
He looked up.
Argon.
Standing.
The armor gone now — completely gone, the pieces of it dust in the Venusian atmosphere. The cursed tattoos fully exposed across everything underneath. The primal mode not flickering.
Full.
Argon: "Youuuu."
The voice shaking what atmosphere Venus had managed to rebuild in the last thirty seconds.
---
The beating was thorough.
Each punch targeted to the specific places that the last hour had mapped — the patterns of Leo's movement, the ways his body distributed impact, the specific responses he made when trying to protect himself.
Leo had given Argon all of that.
Every dodge. Every technique. All of it had been information being processed by something that learned in real time.
The final punch found a mountain.
Leo found the mountain first.
He came out of the rock.
He looked at Argon.
Leo: "What are you."
His voice hoarse.
Leo: "What are you really."
The aura came back.
Slower than before.
Less of it.
But coming.
He powered up with what remained.
Argon teleported.
The kick aimed at Leo's head was the kind of kick that ended things. Leo could see it — could feel the power saturating it, the energy Argon had poured into it, the intention behind it.
He could calculate the rest of the fight from here if this landed.
There would be no rest of the fight.
Leo closed his eyes.
One breath.
In.
Out.
He felt the kick.
He felt the space the kick was not in.
He moved.
The kick found air.
Leo's eyes opened.
Dark green aura.
The lightning version.
Leo: "If strength won't do it—"
He was already moving.
Leo: "Then something else will."
---
The afterimages.
Hundreds of them — not illusions, the genuine residue of his movement through space at a speed that left the trace behind before the trace knew it was being left.
They moved.
All of them.
Argon's lightning found them one by one.
Each time — not Leo.
Argon: "Some ancient illusion technique."
From behind.
Leo's foot on the back of his head.
Smooth.
The specific smoothness of someone who has stopped fighting and started moving.
Argon went down.
He came back up swinging.
Leo watched the swing.
Leo: "Too slow."
Three punches.
The three points — head, chest, abdomen — mapped precisely over the last hour.
Head.
Chest.
Abdomen.
Each one landing with the whole of his speed.
Argon went backward.
Leo was already in front of him.
The kick found the head.
Argon continued.
Planet to planet.
Uranus received him.
Leo stood in the space between.
Breathing.
Leo: "Your adaptation needs my techniques to adapt from."
He looked at Argon on Uranus.
Leo: "I'm not giving you any more of them."
Argon stood on Uranus.
Injured.
He looked at Leo.
He started laughing.
Low.
Then not low.
The echoing laugh — through the void, through everything, the laugh of something that has arrived at the part it had been building toward.
Leo: "What."
He looked at Argon.
Leo: "What's wrong with you."
Argon stopped laughing.
The silence was worse than the laugh.
Argon: "You think you can defeat me."
He said it calmly.
Argon: "Yes."
A pause.
Argon: "You can."
Another pause.
The golden glow beginning at the edges of him.
Argon: "But I will take everything with me."
Leo: "What."
Argon: "Ten minutes."
He raised one finger.
Argon: "That was the timer when I announced it."
He tilted his head.
Argon: "Most of those minutes are gone."
A pause.
Argon: "Galaxy level."
Leo's eyes.
Wide.
The green in them.
The exhaustion in them.
The calculation beginning.
Leo: "No way."
---
Paras City.
The blasts from the solar system's direction had been arriving for an hour as pressure waves — each one carrying the message: something enormous is happening out there and this is its edge.
The latest one hit harder than the others.
Buildings that had held through everything swayed.
Trees decided on new angles.
The temperature spiked.
They had all gathered without planning to — drawn together by what was coming from the direction of the sky.
Blu stood with his arms folded and his eyes on the horizon.
Calculating.
Not liking the result.
Sai beside him.
Sword sheathed.
Hand on the hilt.
Yuki with Astra held against her — his arms around her neck, her arms around him.
Wano with her tail curled.
Aoi.
Standing close to Sai.
She hadn't decided to stand close to Sai.
She had been moving toward a position and the position had been close to Sai and she had not moved from it.
The pressure wave hit again.
Her ears went flat.
She reached out.
Found his hand.
Held it.
He looked at her.
She didn't look back.
She was looking at the sky.
He looked at the sky too.
He held her hand back.
Astra: "What's happening."
He said it quietly.
Into Yuki's shoulder.
She held him tighter.
Yuki: "Something is happening far away."
Astra: "Is it bad."
She looked at the sky.
At the golden tinge at the edges of things.
Yuki: "I don't know yet."
Blu, his voice coming out quieter than usual: "I hope Leo kills him."
He said it to the sky.
Blu: "If he doesn't—"
Sai: "If he doesn't."
Blu: "We turn to dust. All of us. Everything in this galaxy."
The silence after it was the kind of silence that occurs when something has been said that the air doesn't know what to do with.
Astra's small hands pressed harder against Yuki's back.
She pressed back.
---
Seconds.
Leo stood across from Argon.
The golden glow intensifying around the demon king.
Brightening with every second that passed.
He looked at it.
He thought about it.
He thought about ten minutes — about how many of them were left.
About what he could do with the time remaining.
About what he couldn't.
He was faster than Argon now.
Stronger in certain exchanges.
He could land hits.
He could not land enough hits in the time remaining.
He could not end this.
He could not outrun an explosion that moved at the scale of a galaxy.
He could not protect Earth from something that covered everything.
He could not —
He stopped the thought.
Started from a different direction.
Not what he couldn't do.
What he could.
He could take it somewhere else.
He could be where the explosion was.
He could put something between the explosion and Earth.
He could put himself there.
He stood in the space between Uranus and what was left of the fight and he held the weight of that thought.
It sat in him.
Quietly.
Without drama.
The way true things sit.
He looked at Earth.
Small.
Blue.
The specific small blue of something he had been carrying with him through all of this.
He breathed.
In.
Out.
One last breath.
The whole of it.
He let it go.
---
He turned.
Base form.
The aura quiet.
Not gone.
Just — not performing.
Just him.
He looked at Earth.
At the small blue of it.
At what it was.
At what it held.
At all of it.
He smiled.
Not the godlike smile.
Not the comedian's grin.
The original one.
The one from before the hammer and the techniques and the coat and the fart jokes and all of it.
The one that had always been there underneath.
The true one.
Leo: "Goodbye."
Quietly.
To the small blue.
Leo: "Everyone."
---
Argon looked at him.
At the base form.
At the smile.
At the direction he was facing.
At what was not happening — the powering up, the attack, the continuation of what had been continuing.
Argon: "Wait."
He said it.
Argon: "What are you—"
Leo turned.
Put his hand on Argon's shoulder.
Teleported.
---
The dark between galaxies.
No stars near enough to light anything.
No reference points.
Just the void — the genuine void, the space between the Milky Way and Andromeda.
Far enough.
Leo held Argon's shoulder in the dark between everything.
He looked at the demon king.
At the four eyes.
At the golden glow that was almost at its peak now.
Argon: "No."
His voice.
The first time it had that quality — not cold, not ancient, not commanding.
Just: no.
The voice of something that has understood what is happening and does not want it to happen.
Argon: "You can't—"
Leo looked at him.
Then past him.
At the Milky Way.
A smear of light from here.
An entire galaxy from here — small enough to see the whole of it.
Somewhere inside it.
Earth.
Too small to see.
Not too small to know.
He looked at it.
He smiled.
He kicked.
One more time.
The last time.
Because it was the last honest thing he could do and he was going to do it.
Because that was who he was.
Argon went backward.
The golden glow peaked.
---
Leo closed his eyes.
The warmth of it already reaching him — the specific warmth of something that was about to arrive.
He stood in it.
He felt it.
His hands at his sides.
His eyes closed.
One tear.
Moving down his face and then gone — taken by what was coming.
Leo: "I saved everyone."
He said it to the dark.
To the void.
To the voice that had called him a miracle.
Leo: "Everyone."
The smile.
Still there.
Still the true one.
The blast took him.
Not slowly.
There.
Then not there.
The green of him — the atomic aura, the true version — for one moment part of the explosion, adding its color to it.
Then just the explosion.
Just light.
Just the specific enormity of a galaxy-level force released in the dark between galaxies.
Moving outward.
In every direction.
---
The edge of the Milky Way felt it first.
The outer stars registering the shockwave as it arrived — the farthest ones first, then the closer ones, the wave moving through the galaxy at the speed of light carrying the announcement: something happened out there.
Something very large.
The announcement reached Earth.
---
The sky went white.
Paras City.
Not the dawn white. Not the storm white.
The white of something that had no category in the language of things that had happened on this planet before.
Absolute.
And then the force of it.
---
The wind came first.
Sai drove his sword into the ground.
Both hands on the hilt.
He leaned into it.
The angle of the wind extreme — not the usual wind, the wind of something moving the air everywhere simultaneously.
Aoi found his back.
Both arms around him from behind.
Her face pressed into his shirt.
Holding on.
He held the sword.
He held the ground.
She held him.
Yuki pulled Astra under her — both arms around him, her back to the white, the position of someone who has placed themselves between something and the thing they love.
From the ground — two claws.
Honokage's.
Not attacking.
Holding.
One on each side of her — driven into the earth, anchoring.
She felt them find her and held on.
Wano curled.
Her snake form — the ninety feet of it, the scale of her — taking the wind across the full length of her body, tail wrapped and head down.
Blu spread his cape.
One edge in each hand.
Using it as a shield — for the others, for the city behind them, the cape that weighed what it weighed placed between them and what was coming.
The temperature climbed.
Not slowly.
Forty degrees.
Eighty.
The river at the edge of the city beginning to consider its options.
One hundred.
Higher.
Blu: "Hold on!"
His voice over the white and the wind.
Blu: "Everyone hold on!"
The buildings groaned.
Some of them decided.
Went.
The ones nearest the exposed streets.
The ones that had been rebuilt once and were being asked to survive this.
Some held.
The temperature peaked.
Then — the edge of the blast had passed.
The white began to fade.
The temperature began to drop.
By degrees.
Slowly.
Unevenly.
The wind lowering from howl to gale to something that was still wind but was no longer trying to take them with it.
---
Silence.
Paras City.
What remained of it.
They straightened.
One by one.
Sai pulled his sword from the ground.
He looked at it.
Re-sheathed it.
Aoi's arms came loose from around him.
She stepped back.
She looked at her own hands.
At his shirt where her face had been.
She looked at the sky.
He looked at the sky.
Neither of them said anything about what had just happened.
Neither of them needed to.
Yuki loosened her arms.
Honokage's claws withdrew — back to where he lived.
She looked at Astra.
He was still pressed against her.
Face in her shoulder.
Not crying.
Just — there.
Very still.
She put her hand on the back of his head.
He didn't move.
Wano uncurled.
Slowly.
Her purple eyes found the sky.
The specific part of it.
The direction.
She looked at it for a long time.
Blu stood.
He looked at his cape.
At the city behind it.
At what the last ten minutes had done to the last ten years of his work.
He was very quiet.
He pulled out his phone.
Called.
Blu: "Start reconstruction. Tomorrow morning. Everything."
He hung up.
He put the phone away.
He looked at Andromeda.
Visible from here.
Always visible from here — the smear of light that was an entire galaxy seen from too far away to see any individual star inside it.
He stood looking at it.
He thought about a comedian with a green hammer.
About a coat over underwear.
About the specific ridiculous earnestness of someone who had decided that this was who they were going to be in the world and had been that person consistently, even at the end.
Especially at the end.
He stood looking at Andromeda.
He said nothing.
There was nothing adequate to say.
---
Astra lifted his face from Yuki's shoulder.
He looked at the sky.
At the white that had been.
At the ordinary dark that was returning.
At the direction of Andromeda.
He was quiet for a long time.
Long enough that Yuki didn't rush it.
Long enough that the city around them had started the specific process of assessing itself after something — the sounds of that, the distant voices, the structural settling of things that had been stressed and were now reporting back.
Astra: "He went far away."
He said it to the sky.
Yuki: "Yes."
Astra: "So the hurt wouldn't reach us."
Not a question.
The understanding of it.
Yuki: "Yes."
He was quiet again.
His eyes on the sky.
On the direction.
Astra: "Did he know what would happen to him."
Yuki: "Yes."
Astra: "And he still went."
Still not a question.
Just the fact of it.
Placed carefully in the air.
Yuki: "Yes."
The longest silence.
When he spoke, his voice was different.
It was the voice he used for things that mattered — the serious voice, the one beneath all the wonder and the curiosity and the nom nom and the crawling and all of it.
The voice of whatever he was underneath all of that.
Astra: "I want to be like that."
Yuki looked at him.
At his face.
At the silver eyes on Andromeda.
At whatever was sitting behind them — old and certain and very, very young all at the same time.
She didn't say anything.
He kept looking.
At the galaxy.
At the place in the dark where something had ended tonight so that everything else could keep going.
He looked until he couldn't see any difference between where it was and where it wasn't.
He kept looking anyway.
---