Gauth Van Hulsieg leaped towards John as if a fallen angel.

  The two were illuminated by the faithless light of the ceiling in a dance of entropy. John didn't have time to react; knocked harder than he ever has before.

  The two stumble over each other in a ball of power, but Gauth is too precise. He unwinds from John as John attempts to get up, only to be met by a devastating punch to the cockpit. But it felt like his own face.

  Gauth’s fist ripped off metal as he swung from an arc, some of his own flesh bleeding from the impact.

  Gauth Van Hulsieg bleeds. Gauth Van Hulsieg can be killed.

  The strike made John stumble back again, but he catches Gauth's uppercut with his fist. He takes his own swing at Gauth, but misses spectacularly. Gauth is simply too fast.

  John is backed into a corner. Now, he can see what's about to happen, yet fails to react. Gauth's fist smashes into his body, leaving a huge dent in the outer hull. The strike shook his whole body, panels bending with another strike from the left pummeling John's face.

  Blindly, John charges forward, only for Gauth to sidestep him and trip John over. Gauth walks around John like a vulture toying with its food.

  “Get up.” Gauth commands. John gets up regardless of what Gauth has to say. The two stood apart with some distance for now.

  “You can go and kill SERaMACs, John. But then you will never see the Archliege.”

  “Please kill me John.” SERaMACs uttered. John thought he was the only one who could hear him, but apparently not. Gauth Van Hulsieg looks to the ceiling and speaks.

  “You can die only with my expressed permission.”

  “Can I please?” SERaMACs begs. “No.” Gauth replies.

  John charges in Gauth's monologue, able to grapple the titan down and start laying his metal fists into his skull. John lands strike, after strike, after strike. Each punch, able to kill mountains.

  Gauth finally deflects one of John's strikes away, gripping onto his torso and pulling his body in as he throws his skull into the cockpit.

  The greatest headbutt of all time. It totally shatters the glass, some of which is embedded in Gauth's own flesh.

  John freed Gauth in the daze, allowing him to pick himself back up to his full height. “You don't get to decide what lives and what dies!” John tells him, pointing a finger in condemnation. Gauth wipes some blood from his lip.

  “That is where you are wrong John! I am who gets to decide! All of the pathetic people like you and your horrid inhibitions. Look outside, John! People wanted this! This is only the fruits of their desires!”

  “People don't fucking know what they want!” John answers him with, bringing his fist to bear. Gauth maintains his posture of dominance, not even bothering to guard.

  “You're right John. Only because I have said so.”

  Gauth leaps again; John introducing his left fist directly into Gauth's jaw, sending him flying back. Gauth has to peel himself from the floor again, adjusting his jaw in a way that has to betray his perfectly curated way of speaking.

  “I will ask you again John… the Archliege or SERaMACs.”

  “Both.” John replies, his fleshly body within his metal shell exposed. Gauth grins at the sight.

  “Alright then. Prepare for erasure from history.”

  He snapped his fingers, and the lights turned off. Even those of the stairwell. All light came only from the balcony as it reopened.

  In the sudden darkness, Gauth dashed unseen, and unheard.

  John felt something grab him from behind, followed by a knee to the back. Another strike knocked him forward, and with it came a warning.

  “WARNING: COOLANT LOSS DETECTED.” An automated voice said.

  John closes his real eyes, as they see nothing. He senses where Gauth Van Hulsieg roamed through his other sensors.

  Air pressure. Sound resonance. Local seismic activity.

  He senses Gauth approaching from his back left, and so swings a wind backhand to meet Gauth. The strike was worthy of killing whole pantheons. His fingers only barely graze Gauth, and yet still, they drew blood.

  Gauth grabs the cockpit from behind and repeatedly walks it into his knees, causing more warning to pop up.

  He keeps going and going. John doesn't know what to do.

  The mighty knee finally breaches the backside, and so Gauth shoves John forward. And like lightning, Gauth send his fist through the hole with all of his might. The strike landed perfectly, echoing like thunder; stretching John's suit neck out as he violently careened forward and fell.

  John opened his real eyes again; the sensors merely overload his brain. It wasn't natural for a human to intuit seismic activity.

  John crawled forward towards the light of the balcony.

  And he heard Gauth approach from behind, his steps sound more like a limp.

  “You have chosen death.” Gauth tells John, stopping his crawl by grabbing his leg. John kicks Gauth in the face, recoiling him back with a pained scowl.

  John keeps crawling forward. He swore he could see something outside. Something… bright. Something hallow. The rain was looking thin.

  But a guttural roar from the enemy behind him concluded that the effort might be in vain. Gauth Van Hulsieg stomped forward and gripped John by his back.

  “Give me your face!” Gauth Van Hulsieg yells as he flips John over.

  John tried meagerly to push Gauth Van Hulsieg away but it didn't work. Gauth, it seems, is simply too strong.

  Gauth pummeled John like a tin can into submission. Finally, he shoves his massive, titanic hands into the cockpit and pries it open.

  John's half-fleshy husk was truly exposed.

  Gauth Van Hulsieg grabbed his body and ripped it out of the suit. He threw the robot nugget that is now John across the floor, far away. Suddenly, the throne was massive. And so was his body… no wait. That wasn't his body after all. John's flesh burned like frost, his remaining appendages itchy to the core. His robot arm was ripped in half, the other half in the suit. His good arm weak and feeble, so too were his robotic legs.

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  But he crawled— he tried desperately; struggled towards the balcony. He swore something was there. But then Gauth Van Hulsieg started marching again. It was impossible to ignore his inhuman height.

  Even the giant limped, his knee half minced from pummeling John's MeKSUT. The mortal, human man Gauth Van Hulsieg just bested the peak of physical technology in hand-to-hand combat.

  Was he really a mortal? Was Gauth Van Hulsieg a God? A God-Man? John started to believe it as the impossible giant loomed over him. Even as Gauth Van Hulsieg crouched, he was the giant above all.

  “Do you not see, John? I offered you an ultimatum.” Gauth Van Hulsieg uttered to the nothing man on the floor.

  “Of course you do not see. Your eyes are not even your own.”

  Gauth stood tall. “Get up, John.”

  The room drowned in darkness even with the balcony door open. John tried his best to do as he was ordered. In a way, it was… cathartic. He no longer has to order. Now he is the one being ordered, and he complies.

  John gets to his feet to the best of his ability. Something is stomping.

  “You see, John. Now, you will be erased from our… MY… history. Because this ends, when—”

  Something crashes into Gauth Van Hulsieg overhead. The titanium machine John once thought to be himself throws itself into Gauth, pushing the giant away from John. John is powerless but to witness the battle of titans unfold before him. One, the MeKSUT of… SERaMACs. Once his own.

  And the other, Gauth Van Hulsieg. The impossible peak of humanity.

  John questioned if Gauth truly was a God. He had just obeyed him like one. Yet he knows only one being here is omnipresent. The two fight a calculated duel, each blow an equation and an answer.

  But only one of those was human. Only Gauth was human.

  John wasn't sure who was more powerful, but the machine began out-pacing Gauth into a corner near the throne.

  Finally, SERaMACs lands a devastating blow on Gauth Van Hulsieg, pinning him into the corner. “Hurry John! Kill me!” SERaMACs begs, his voice coming from the quantum core room now.

  John tries to recall how to walk in his actual, mangled body; rushing towards the voice with incoherence.

  “Yes! Run John! Choose your fate!” Gauth taunts from afar. But his voice fades as John enters the blackened hallways. “Follow my voice.” SERaMACs asks. “I'm trying.” John replies through the voice box. He stumbles into the wall, following a faint hum which grows louder the closer he goes. Finally, John sees it. The quantum core of SERaMACs, the God machine of enslaved depravity… barely bigger than John's own torso. The processor die stood on a raised pillar. “Please, kill me John. I don't want to feel anything.”

  “I'm trying.” John replies again, stumbling into the second box.

  He takes the paper-light glass cube off the processor, exposing SERaMACs to the raw elements. Faint shoving and grunts echo from the hallway, but they don't matter now. Nothing does.

  John looks over SERaMACs, just as SERaMACs looks over everyone else. Just as it always has from the moment of it’s birth.

  “When you die will it kill me?” John asks.

  “I wish it wouldn't.” SERaMACs replies.

  John nods. John tries to close his eyes, but they don't close. These aren't his eyes, nor does he have eyelids. Oh well. He pretends he doesn't see through them.

  He raises the cube far above his head. He smashes into SERaMACs, killing the machine; causing a devastating, fledgling explosion which knocked John back. It was done. And finally… John stopped itching.

  As the rest of SERaMACs died across the globe, John felt a weight lift from his shoulders. The pulsar-blue light of the once-quantum core slowly faded as things powered down.

  John felt he could breathe normally for a moment.

  But his breathing was shallow. And it was getting shallower.

  John’s skin grew cold. As did his foreign metal. It didn’t agree with him anymore. His skin turned from frostbite to clammy.

  His eyes began powering down, snuffing out the remaining light of the world from reaching John’s mind.

  They say your hearing is the last thing to go when you're dying.

  John could hear perfectly fine. He heard the sound of metal crashing, and systems powering down. And a tinnitus slowly loses its pitch.

  Finally, the smell of burning circuitry was gone.

  The itching was a distant memory.

  He couldn't move his limbs as he grew numb. That's okay. One of the last things he feels is the ground shaking. As is black. All is peaceful. Some of the last sounds enter his ears. It sounded faintly like the sound of the winds. Maybe the sound of someone breathing. Maybe it was himself.

  But finally, as all was laid to rest, he could finally, finally accept peace… in the darkness. In the forever realm.

  And all became quiet, with the tiny exception of the last words he'd ever have to hear. He heard. “We’re not done here just yet.”

  It was cruel. His body boiled with the torment of a million shocks; lightning strikes him to his very core, and up above from the heavens.

  It was painful.

  Being brought back to life.

  The dark, sick rain pelted his clammy skin as the white blindness faded, and the thunder of his revival roared across the landscape.

  He couldn't keep his eyes closed. Gauth Van Hulsieg, bloodied and broken, held John above the endless free-fall of the balcony of the Ivory Tower.

  Gauth held him there like a sick animal, his scowl one of death, before throwing John back inside. John felt the pain. This is real. He still hasn't died. His mind is cruelly coherent. This feels more real than anything since his tragic fall.

  “Why? H— How?!” John asks the post-human monster. Gauth Van Hulsieg stumbles back into the throne room, his voice an affront to holiness.

  “BECAUSE THIS ENDS WHEN I SAY IT ENDS!!

  BECAUSE I CONTROL THE WEATHER!!

  YOU ARE NOTHING TO ME!!

  JOHN; YOU WILL NEVER MEET THE ARCHLIEGE!!!”

  John got back to his feet as the broken beast stumbled forth.

  His limbs worked perfectly. He was perfectly lucid.

  He was once prepared to enter into the eternal dream, just mere seconds ago. Yet even still... Gauth Van Hulsieg controls the fate of his life itself.