The day of the godless lightning
Kari Zel enters the engine room of the Twin Dragon, where Noriko has been busy since they took over Demeter's mothership.
The young Asian-American is busy building…something. Kari doesn't have the slightest clue about what she's looking at: it's a mess of wires, bronze transistors and godstones.
And it's connected to the main engine, the massive glowing sphere that is currently keeping the ship floating above the wasteland that was Null City.
Noriko takes off her welder mask, then flips a switch. Her invention siphons energy from the main engine, slowly giving off the same eerie green glow.
Noriko wipes the sweat from her forehead, leaning over her masterpiece.
A crater several miles away
Demeter has rarely been this angry in the last million years. Not only her stupid sister and her pets are attacking her, they are hurting her. She hasn't felt pain for ages, and she doesn't like it.
Quantum returns to his human form, exhausted. Demeter just took a nuclear explosion in the face, without her telekinetic shield. He just put everything he's got in a blast that could level an entire city and all he did was piss her off.
Her body is still glowing green, barely containing the power inside. Cuts and bruises are quickly healing, and even her dress is stitching itself back together.
Demeter watches as Vesta and Torn land beside their ally, the latter attempting another attach unleashing a storm of red energy swords. They all break like glass on her perfect skin.
All four of them disappear in the rapid flash of the teleporter.
Null City
Demeter isn't used to disorientation. It takes her a few seconds to adjust her godly senses to her current situation: she's back into mortal-infected territory, where the flesh crops are watching her with religious terror.
These Myridians have never seen her before. They've heard about Demeter all their lives, how they should respect her every wish unless they wanted to be slaughtered. The first thing they do is fall on their knees and pray for her forgiveness.
The Myridians look at her with a mixture of respect for the girl that crushed the former regime and fear of Demeter's wrath.
Noriko answers by pulling her gun and shooting first; the pure kinetic energy hits Demeter with the force of a freight train going five hundred miles an hour, and her body is thrown back by the impact.
Noriko jumps off the rubble, walking towards the pile of dirt where Demeter has landed. The Myridians step aside, not wanting to be mixed up with the 90 pound teenager that just smacked around their goddess.
When Demeter tries to stand up, a shot to the knee forces her to fall into the dust again. She lets out a scream of pain and rage, but her voice has lost some of the power behind it.
The hell I can't. You've killed millions of people, destroyed an entire civilization, elevated misery into worship of your petty ego. Somebody has to stop you.
Noriko answers, throwing the Genius Gun away and opening her arms.
Demeter doesn't understand, and looks around with a puzzled look on her face…until she looks up.
There's an immense dark cloud in the sky, gathering the total sum of all the knowledge of Myridia.
Static electricity fills the air. All over Myridia, every single mortal brain is downloading everything into the cloud. Demeter feels it, the same way she feels Noriko is somehow acting as relay for the three hundred million brains on the planet through the God Eraser's power.
She also feels what's in that cloud. Three hundred years of hatred for her.
Demeter has experienced fear before. Tired, dirty, bleeding, with no one to come to her rescue, she now knows what it means to be terrified.
Noriko is now at the center of this planet's mind. And for a moment she feels the same thing she felt the day that Athena granted her the knowledge of Earth.
The feeling that nothing is impossible. That nothing can stand against her.
The cloud discharges all of its power with the most powerful lightning strike this world has ever seen. Three hundred years of death and destruction hit Demeter's mind; the God Eraser forces them to her very core, embedding every single image into her dark soul.
She sees the last memory of every man, woman and child she's killed. Her immortal mind, once capable of lifting mountains, is melting like snow. Feeling every moment of it.
Noriko is watching her, in front of the raging electrical storm. But in the last moments before Demeter's mind drifts into oblivion, she can see her not like a eighteen year old human girl.
She sees her negative image, silver eyes replaced with black, with black tendrils that link her brain to a magnificent web spanning thousands of years of knowledge.
That dark voice echoing every word that's ever been spoken on Earth is the last thing Demeter will ever hear.
When the electrical storm passes, Noriko is standing on top of the motionless body of Demeter, the wind blowing her horribly green leather jacket.
Thanks to the link to the Myridian collective consciousness that just ended, no one alive today on this planet will ever be able to forget this moment.
That's when Noriko passes out.
Later
Noriko opens her eyes with a splitting headache. Her silver eyes shine when her superhuman mind races to assess the situation, escalating it to a migraine.
She's in a bed. She tries to sit down, but two duplicates of Kari prevent her to move.
<"AL"?> Noriko repeats, attempting again to sit down. She has to hold the sheets against her breasts; she's not wearing any clothes.
<"After Lighting"…that's what people call the day when you killed Demeter.>