CHapter 6 : Hero Time (1)

Chapter 6

Atomix's nuclear cyclone roared as he ascended to meet Hades' avatar head-on. "Bring it on, ugly! Atomic onslaught!"

He launched a salvo of nuclear fission explosions, the blinding detonations rippling across the hovering dreadnaught. Hades' eldritch construct weathered the barrage, extending crackling tendrils of mystic force.

"Pitiful insect!" The Arkhon's voice was a well of damned souls given form. "You wield the primal fires of creation like a mere candleflame!"

The tendrils lashed out, their touch burning away at Atomix's nuclear form. He retaliated with an atomic reconstruction beam, separating the bonds of matter itself surrounding Hades' avatar.

The two titans clashed in a cosmic vortex of metaphysical and thermonuclear energies. Continents were scoured from Xundar's surface from the mere shockwaves of their exchanges. One minute Atomix seemed to be forcing Hades back through sheer power, the next the Arkhon's will reasserted itself like the tides of Armageddon.

Finally, Hades took the offensive, his avatar's massive fist swinging in an arc of pure oblivion that smashed through Atomix's buckling energy form. The nuclear maelstrom destabilized, reverting to Ben's human body in a concussive shockwave that leveled the remains of the city around him.

Ben hit the ground hard, dazed and wheezing. Looming over him, Hades' hateful visage split in a fanged sneer of disdain.

"A human child?? This is what pierced the defenses of Excelsor Ezekiel?" The Arkhon's rumbling laughter shook the shattered plain.

"You are an insult even to your wretched kind's memory!" Raising a clawed hand that eclipsed the sky, Hades prepared to obliterate the stunned Ben Tennyson.

At the last instant, the Omnitrix blazed with brilliant emerald light. Ben's eyes widened as he recognized the silhouette rapidly taking shape.

"No...this is what beat your goon! Alien X!!"

In a cosmic flare, Ben assumed the plane-striding form of Alien X, his human aspect contained within the mighty entity's semi-biomechanical battlesuit. Power radiated from him in scintillating waves of emerald force.

Hissing in synchronous surprise, Hades' avatar drew back fractionally. "What devilry--"

"I call upon the Celestialsapien protectors of light!" Ben's voice echoed across realities, infused with the authority of the cosmos' mightiest race. "As the Conquering Sun burns away the darkness, so shall I burn you!"

Beams of searing emerald plasma lanced from Alien X's hands and eyes, their intensity scouring away at the shrieking avatar. Hades retaliated by summoning the totality of his eldritch energies in a spiraling force of pure entropy.

The unimaginable powers clashed like celestial phenomenons finally reaching their cataclysmic conclusion. Waves of distorted reality rippled outward, unmaking and remaking the substratum of Xundar with each exchange of metaphysical blows.

King Bo and the Evolep could only watch in stunned silence from their shelters as the very firmament was transformed into an impossibly-hued hellscape of nuclear fury and warped chronologies.

Alien X pressed his assault, raw determination blazing in his eyes as the light of a trillion suns built to unimaginable intensities. With an explosive retort, the beams lashed together into unified spear of emerald plasma that lanced through Hades' defenses to spear his dreadnaught itself.

For a frozen nanosecond, stillness reigned across the cosmos. Then the Arkhon's massive ship detonated in a thermonuclear implosion that tore open a wound in the fabric of reality itself. A voracious singularity yawned open, hungrily devouring the crippled Arkhon vessel into its oblivion beyond comprehension.

As if realizing what was occurring, Hades unleashed one last agonized roar of fury that shattered the stars themselves before being consumed by the event horizon. His voice lingered in an ethereal wail:

"IMPOSSIBLE!! NO CHI--"

Then, silence, as the singularity shuddered and snapped closed like a flesh wound sealing itself.