Meanwhile, Bill Cipher tried to juggle both Gaster and the Godmodders at once. Bill continually popped in and out of reality’s focus, giggling and laughing, attempting to trick the Godmodders to fire swarms of banhammers at Gaster, and attempting to trick Gaster to summon a skeletal demon and blast the Godmodders into vapor. Yet these shots seemed to only fly every which way, serving no purpose but to clutter the battlefield. The Godmodder army, although numbering in the thousands upon thousands, noticed that they were running low on weapons. As they all retreated to the edge of the field, Gaster’s skeletal jaw cackled, cracked, and unhinged, his two specks of eyes burning with hatred. NEVER HAS DEATH. FELT MORE ALIVE. MY SPITE FUELS ME. RECLAIM WHAT WAS LOST. RETAKE WHAT WAS STOLEN. Gaster’s head swiveled around to find Bill, whose laughter echoed around the world. GEE, DOC, IF YOU WANTED YOUR REST-AURANT’S LITTLE TOYS BACK SO BADLY, ALL YOU HAD TO DO WAS ASK! IN FACT, LET’S MAKE IT A GAME! Gaster’s head cracked, turning directly upwards. He saw Bill floating hundreds of feet above the field, juggling a series of incredibly large objects in his hands. PLUS TWENTY POINTS FOR EVERYTHING YOU CATCH! MINUS YOUR LIFE FOR EVERYTHING YOU DON’T. LET’S... Bill flung his arms downwards. PLAY!
Gaster’s husk of a body clicked and shuffled. With millions of tiny, coordinated clacks and manipulations of his fingers, multiple fortress of bone jutted out of the black earth around Gaster, with eight shifting sign-language hands rising up around it, prepared to catch. The Godmodders all ran out, armed to the teeth with what seemed like Relish Nuke Launchers, raring to fight Cipher once more – but what they saw defied every expectations. A veritable hailstorm of forks, sporks, spoons, carving forks, tuning forks, knifes, steak knives, spifes, knorks, sporfs, and other utensils from thousands of other dimensions rained from the heavens, pointy ends down, gleaming with the light of amethyst thyme and holy white anger. The Godmodders all gulped, readying battle formations as their capes billowed in the wind.
What followed was absolute, utter hell. Forming rows and columns and preparing themselves for the worst, the Nine Oh One Army fired nuke after nuke, delicious relish spilling in all directions, “condiment clouds” rising through the heavens and shattering, vaporizing, or melting the stainless metallic cutlery. But there were only so many nukes to fire at once, and the cabinets of the Restaurant at the End of the Internet were nigh-bottomless. Wave after wave of metal rain cascaded onto the Godmodders and Gaster. Thousands of Godmodders’ eyes and arms were impaled at once, but it didn’t really bother them, as they’d sustained injuries there anyway. Gaster’s calcified reinforcements were torn through and shattered hundreds of times over, but with his weaving arms, broken across time and space, he managed to block nearly incoming utensil, while catching many more. Bill watched from above, floating on nothing and kicking his legs leisurely. He turned to look at Flumpty, who was still engaged in a fierce and epic war with the Logic Gatekeeper. Bill called from above, his eye turning into a screaming mouth. YO, FLUMPTY! YOU STILL HAVE SOME GOODS FROM THE RESTAURANT, RIGHT?? Flumpty screamed back with fury and power. YES! Bill called back down. JUST THROW SOME BEHIND YOU THROUGH HAMMERSPACE! TRUST ME! Flumpty sounded like Atlas carrying the world on his shoulders.
Octothorpe, Pilcrow, Asterism, Ampersand, Backslash, Obelus, Caret, Dagger, and Lozenge had quite literally shed their human skin, which seemed to be a mixture of a mockery of flesh and fabric. They had been discarded on the ground, left to rot. Standing above them, at easily over ten feet tall, were the nine Advanced Superiors. Slithering, pulsing tendrils of darkness wrapped in hard scales with kaleidoscopic sheens, they blurred the line between man and demon. Snake-eyes flittered in and out of awareness between their scales, and where their heads should have been, there was tumultuous blinding light, similar to the impassible aura generated by a Denizen. If there was anything behind them, it was completely hidden. They turned to look at Bill, their cursed gaze piercing through his triangular body. Bill felt a stirring inside of his chest, and his eye toiled with kaleidoscopic energy for a moment. A closer look revealed Interrobang standing beside the nine altered beasts awkwardly; though he was a maelstrom of every color and power in existence, he was only a man. Interrobang whistled nervously.
Bill gulped, laughing hysterically at Flumpty to hide his fear. OH, NOTHING! JUST A SNEOPLE INFESTATION. WHAT??? SAY, UH, HOW ABOUT TOSSING THOSE CONCEPTUAL FOOD ESSENCES BEHIND YOU! The serpents wound ever closer. NOW! I MEAN IT! RIGHT NOW! Flumpty groaned with a horrendous sound that shook the heavens, a crack like one so often seen in an eggshell running through reality in front of him. Shooting like the winds from the tear in space were twenty shimmering orbs, each emblazoned with accompanying images. They rolled along the ground, blazing to life after several feet. Like a demented cornucopia, towers of various foods began frothing forth from the orbs. Pies of every flavor and type, pizzas with as many toppings as you can possibly imagine, eggs served fried, scrambled, hard-boiled, deviled, rotten, sunny-side-up, with fetus still inside of them, bread at every level of the toasting process, including many, many burnt beyond recognition, and even more barrelled straight at the Advanced Superiors faster than sound. Despite Asterism being a god-tier manipulator of sound, none of the Superiors had any such defense. They coiled helplessly in knots, carried away by the flood of foodstuffs, and their divine power slammed eternal into Gaster’s rock of ages, shattering it into billions of individual bones. Gaster tumbled through space, threatening to slip back into the formless void from which he had been cast years ago.
The Army of Nine Oh One took several huge steps back, gazing in total reverence at the slithering Advanced Superiors. However, they did not seem to be surprised at all. They muttered about how they’d called it, years ago, and then charged forwards once more. The men at the frontlines tossed their nuke launchers to the row behind them, and so on and so forth, until the army’s entire stock of Relish Nuke Launchers had become a precariously immense tower of firepower balancing in the hands of a single Godmodder Decoy at the very back. The Godmodder Decoy grimaced intensely, crushing his hands together. The mile-high load of launchers instantaneously condensed into an impossibly compact ball. Molten metal, bubbling relish, crackling and popping gunpowder... All of this collapsed into a single orb of totality. A multicolored beacon shimmering with the image of relish. The Godmodder Decoy in the back chuckled, handing the orb to the soldier in front of him – and so the conceptual food essence of relish traveled up the line. A chorus of “
Bill balked as nuclear explosions rang out in what seemed like every point of time and space simultaneously. Wrapping himself in the Zodiac, he prepared to jump to another point in spacetime to continue the fight, but before he could, a tendril of darkness wrapped itself around his leg. Bill turned to look, and saw the Advanced Superiors’ serpentine bodies taking hold of him. He was pulled down to earth, rushing downwards like a comet. The Zodiac dissolved into pieces around him as he touched down, and Bill’s body shattered into bricks. The Advanced Superiors wound their way around him, watching the white flames within him cool into embers. They chuckled, a horrifying guttural noise, and then slunk away to the Logic Gatekeeper, staring down Billy Mays — or, rather, the spot where Billy Mays should have been. The nine snakemen stared each other down with blinding rhinestone eyes, Ampersand twisting and turning around himself as an {&} blared to life in the middle of his head. A cyan hologram of Billy Mays shuttered to life where he once stood, showing his immediate past in fast-motion. Billy Mays’ limbs twitched and spasmed, and he floated upwards, his eyes shining with a cosmic gold, as he took out a book with a cross on it and read every page in quick succession. He then vanished. The Superiors slithered in fear, not exactly knowing what to do as the symbol burned itself out and a table was flung at full force at Octothorpe’s head, tipping him over slightly and cracking the table into several pieces. The nine Superiors turned around, incredibly annoyed.
The many bricks composing Bill’s body were charged with white fire, floating haphazardly in the air. Bill’s arms and legs each held an assortment of tables and windows, and then his ‘head’ — the main triangular part of his body with his eye — drifted into view, laughing with glee and examining his broken-up appearance. I KINDA LIKE THINGS BETTER THIS WAY! NOW I REALLY GET TO BE IN A BUNCH OF PLACES AT THE SAME TIME! NOW, WHY DON’T YOU PESKY SNAKES HAVE A SEAT. Bill’s arms and legs began rapid-fire throwing tables, yet not at the Superiors, but at the ground in front of him. The Superiors watched as the tables stacked themselves into feet, then legs, then a spine out of table legs arranged around a torso and chest. Upper arms attached themselves, with blades of broken glass attaching themselves to those. The head, formed from ceiling fixtures, spun with the power of seven fan blades. BEHOLD, MY GREATEST CREATION! MAYBE! Bill shouted with glee. IKEA 2.0! One of Bill’s arms touched Ikea 2.0, and his body went rigid with red and blue light. Flames engulfed his wooden body, yet he did not burn. The heat merely energized him, making him, quite literally, alive. Bill’s eye shone with radiant white light, and as he moved both of his arms, the Superiors felt the totality of reality quiver and shake to his will. The light obscuring their heads sputtered for a brief instant. Ikea 2.0 roared, sounding like a tree falling in the forest. In several steps, he clunked up to the Superiors, slicing through Backslash’s body. Backslash roared, toppling backwards, but his scaley body seemed to reform itself before long. The nine Superiors hissed and shouted, retreating slowly as Bill reformed his body with a hiss of flame. His cancerous old eye seemed to take in the chaos around him with glee.
Ikea 2.0’s body charged through the Advanced Superiors, slicing through their hide like a whirlwind of broken glass. They surged across him, charging through the battlefield and firing beams of ink, of darkness, of light and sound, and of all the elements combined. But no matter what damage Ikea 2.0 sustained, the white light burning inside of him seemed to keep him going. Bill reached to his side, as if to grab his cane, but he couldn’t find it. Blinking in confusion, he stumbled, looking around him until he found Billy Mays hovering at the far end of the battlefield, framed in front of the decaying storm of relish that had demolished the twenty food essences. Mays held the cane outstretched in his hand, pointing it right at the Logic Gatekeeper and the Superiors. It surged with red and blue fire — cleansing fire, straight from the OxiClean. Bill rolled out of the way, a meteor of flame curling from his eye that knocked into the nine Superiors, destabilizing them and sending them sprawling, right as Billy Mays fired a bolt of flame from Prometheus’ Cane that rang straight and true. It pierced through the middle of the field in a single blazing line, striking near the center of the Logic Gateekeper.
An explosion of the original fire, given to mortals by Prometheus, rocked the Logic Gatekeepers’ armored body. The superlaser of light shining from Flumpty’s vertex flickered and sputtered, giving Hard-Boiled Flumpty’s beam of amethyst absolution enough power to overtake the Gateekeper. Its pristine white form became riddled with cracks as Hard-Boiled Flumpty’s power reached an apex, a bona-fide explosion erupting on its chestplate. Heavily damaged, the Gatekeeper’s engines faltered, and it crashed to the ground. Exhausted, Hard-Boiled Flumpty rattled his head, pink blood dripping from his eyes as he breathed heavily. He turned to look at the other end of the field, where Bill was forming huge copies of himself, folding geometry in on itself to try and crush large groups of Godmodder Decoys at a time. Their relish essence was still hard at work demolishing anything produced by the twenty other conceptual food essences, which seemed to be running low on fuel. Flumpty hissed, teleporting over and scooping the essences up. He then laughed hysterically, whipping out about a hundred cylinders with narrow nozzles — condiment dispensers. Arranging them like machineguns, Flumpty aimed them at the Nine Oh One Army, firing every one in sequence.
Dozens of differently-colored liquids sprayed out of the immediate area surrounding Flumpty, arcing across the sky. Ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, peanut butter, all sorts of jellies, all kinds of jams, marmalade, marmite, soy sauce, Worcestershire sauce, salsa, horseradish sauce, wasabi, sriracha, and even more. Yet, unsurprisingly, the container for relish seemed empty. All the others had limitless potential, and only seemed to be intensifying as time went on. Before long, the waterfall of condiments overpowered the relish conceptual essence entirely, causing its nuclear power to totally backfire. Flumpty stowed the condiments away and saluted the Nine Oh One Army, who ran right towards him, having reforged new Banhammers. Yet as they came close, the conceptual essence of relish cracked and shattered, folding in on itself and creating a conceptual singularity. A large portion of the Nine Oh One Army was completely vaporized on every level, as was the surrounding environment, and — most importantly — relish ceased to exist. The very concept of relish was abruptly purged from reality, with everyone involved in the battle, and everyone else in existence, not remembering its existence. Relish is no longer relevant. Let’s just forget about it.
But then, everyone involved in the battle saw a twinkling white light coming from outside of space. Bill turned his tumorous eye into a telescope, examining the disturbance closer and then blinking with shock. NO ONE INVOLVED IN THIS STUPID FINAL BATTLE CAN STAY PUT FOR LONG, HUH?? For surging into the battlefield, cracked and broken, was Gaster, who had returned from the voided limbo that he’d called home for an eternity — and he was carrying with him the concept of relish, saved from the brink of oblivion. Throwing relish through the field, Gaster was able to perceive the entire battle with a solely objective eye, a determined gaze empowered by flickering flame. His projectile — a seething ball of relish — nailed Interrobang in the head. Interrobang, who had been powering up for the past several minutes and attempting to call upon the power of the names of God to obliterate everyone on the field, was knocked clean backwards. The kaleidoscopic light in his lands went wide, shooting across the field and hitting the Critic, dislodging the multicolored spike in his heads so it fell into his hands. The Critic, who had been able to think but not act, immediately knew the correct course of action to take. A silver mask of a face flipped into his head as he yelled, “IT’S NOT A MYTH. IT’S MEGA,” and chucked the spike directly at Ikea 2.0, who was busy aggressing the Advanced Superiors. Ikea 2.0 turned to look in horror as, while he watched, the spike grew and grew, chunks and pieces assembling themselves from nowhere and taking on radiant kaleidoscopic hues. Before long, the comet known as MEGA was sailing towards Ikea 2.0. Ikea 2.0 ejected his bladed hands, cannibalizing portions of his body to form giant fists. With a mighty grapple, he held onto MEGA, attempting to slow it down. Yet MEGA kept pushing, and as Ikea 2.0 dug into the ground to try and apply more force, a large line was carved into the battlefield.
Before anyone could help stop the comet, it shone with a brilliant white light and shattered into millions of pieces. Ikea 2.0, who was at point-blank range, was impaled thousands of times instantly. The fire in his heart was snuffed out, and he was flung into some of the remnants of the Nine Oh One Army, crushing them before exploding. The other shards cascaded in all directions, piercing through the Advanced Superiors and the Logic Gatekeeper, but Billy Mays had a defense, Hard-Boiled Flumpty shrugged it off, and everyone else dodged. A column of smoke was left at the impact point, so dense and thick that the Advanced Superiors could see nothing. They attempted to slither through it all, but promptly fell to the ground, writhing in apparent pain. Interrobang blinked several times, running to the column of smoke but then backing away suddenly. He cursed — more precisely, he yelled
< 2.1: TO SEE SHED BLOOD | 2.2: AN OBJECTIVE EYE | 2.3: THE APOCALYPTIC CROWD >