Only a dozen fighters remained. It was always the same pattern. We shot, he dodged, he fired back, and three more fighters broke apart. Our cannons carpet-bombed the alabaster spaceship floor with salvos of antimatter munition. The projectiles' explosions covered the ground in a blazing tapestry of blinding light. Each time the dust settled, Ay emerged without a scratch. He covered dozens of meters per leap, and always jumped in time to outrun the fireballs. He skipped between our fighters, putting us before a dilemma. If we shot him with antimatter, we decimated our forces in the process.

Ay's fighters joined the scuffle. Their barrage forced us to disperse, and their presence made us shift fire from Ay onto them. His gel bots attacked from the ground. When we shot back, they re-structured themselves on a molecular level and absorbed the damage. Only antimatter bullets killed them reliably.

I tried to play this safe. I flew covered by a fighter and watched Ay's movements. Why didn't he kill us already? Was it because he wanted to keep us alive so that we could experience eternal pleasure in the end? Was he that confident in his master plan?

He shot the fighter behind Crick's. He had estimated the distance just right so that the fireball knocked Crick out of their vehicle, but didn't kill them.

I considered swooping down to save Crick, but maybe that was a trap for me. But what if they died just like Helix?

Ay shot the wall behind a fighter. The building-sized fireball ravaged the surrounding canvas and ate through the nearest crafts. The fighter lost its outermost thruster and parts of its lateral hull. Thanks to the radiation, its remaining thrusters failed as well. The fighter tumbled like a bird that refused to leave the sky. A last desperate exhaust plume prevented a hard landing. Kira and Layla jumped out of it.

I froze in shock. He could kill them any moment if he wanted to, now. Instead, he put his antimatter rifle away and gestured his fighters and robots to protect him from our air support.

Layla and Kira shot at him with blasters and missile launchers. Predicting their movements, he evaded their shots and fired back. Layla used her microbots to shield Kira from a blaster. Unfortunately, Ay predicted that and focused on her instead. A beam hit Layla square in the torso. She staggered, barely keeping herself on her feet.

I had to do something. I failed to save these two back on Earth. Now that we were so close to getting home, I couldn't just let them die.

I maneuvered my fighter around the one that blocked my way to Ay. Spinning, my craft dodged its shorts. I shot a bomb into its heart and watched it explode into garbage.

Distracted by my victory, I noticed Ay's next shot too late. He attacked the fighter closest to me and repeated his previous trick. A fireball larger than most corridors I faced advanced towards me. The moment I noticed it, it had already caught my thrusters. Tesla's portion lost its hull. They hurried towards the wall in the middle.

"Can you control it?" Tesla asked.

The fighter fell out of the air like a dead fly. I tugged the joystick closer to me, desperate to save us from a deadly landing. The fireballs' shockwaves flipped our fighter so that I plunged onto my controls. I felt the impacts' full force as a thruster slammed into the ground.

Above me, Tesla lay on our wall. Slowly, they climbed to their feet and pulled themselves out of the wreck of a fighter we were in.

It took me a while until I could feel my hands and fingers again. I moved them under my belly and pushed myself upward. Then, I used the still-intact controls to dissolve the wall above me. Finally, I jumped out of the fighter.

A scuffle of brawling and firing machines unfolded before my eyes, Ay, Kira, and Layla in their midst. Kira lay on the ground, eyes closed, while Layla still held back Ay. To my horror, I realized I was too late.

Layla stood on her knees with no light left in her eyes and a gaping hole in her stomach. Ay had his hand on her armor just below her neck, touching her plum purple singularity stone. Her stone gleamed in accord with Ay's. Both shone so brightly that their glow even penetrated armor plates. Even from where I stood, one could feel heatwaves emanating from them.

Kira stood up and put out her blaster. Taking this as a cue, I did the same with my Gauss gun. Both of us fired at the enemy in our midst. Then, something unexpected happened.

Microbots coalesced into two tiny floating walls around Ay, one taking the laser and the other taking my bullets.

Ay lifted his fingers from Layla's stone and the glow stopped. Layla dropped onto the ground, her arms splayed out and her eyes rolled back into her skull. Kira watched with tears on her face. I, meanwhile, felt nothing other than the clenching of my jaw. I could have prevented that. Had I been quicker, stronger, and better, I could have prevented that. It was just like with Helix again.

"Worry not," Ay said, "she isn't dead, at least not the way you might think she is."

Kira's blaster twitched. First, she only pointed it. Then, she fired a salvo of shots as if she had a machine gun. None of her beams defeated his microbot wall. I lost no time and helped with a bullet assault of my own. If we attacked him from both sides, maybe we could deplete his microbot supply. I wasn't gonna let Kira die, too. Not after two of my friends had died already.

Ay looked unimpressed. He dissolved his one remaining gel bot and easily replenished the microbots his forcefield had sacrificed.

"Take my action as a warning," Ay said. "If you do not surrender now, I must kill one more of you two."

Kira was the first to quit shooting. I followed with little delay.

While she had stopped the fire, she had not put the blaster down. It still twitched in her hand.

Under her visor, Kira drew in the air and struggled to get it out. "You said Layla is dead, but not the way we think. W-what have you done to her?"

"I copied her dying brain at its final information-theoretic state," he explained. "I copied her singularity stone's AI, too. Both of these duplicates are now stored in my stone. I had to do the same to my precognitive alien before you arrived. It deeply pained me to do so, but as you can see, my new ability to predict your movements has served me well."

"If this pains you, why don't you bring her back, monster?" she asked.

"Well, she will not be in my stone forever. Once Götterdämmerung is free and I have entered its heaven, it will recognize Layla's consciousness and take her to it. I would never kill one of you, at least not permanently, as that'd slam the doors to your salvation shut.

"What I am most interested in, Kira, are the reasons behind your recent change of heart. I understood why Layla grew disappointed after our last trade. However, as far as Layla told me, you used to sympathize with my goals until recently. What changed your mind?" He pointed at me. "Was it him?"

A fighter shot down another. Only one machine remained standing and, luckily, it fought for our team.

The surviving fighter hovered over Ay's head. By now, Crick and Tesla had come, too, completing the noose that encircled him.

"Don't shoot yet," I transmitted, "Kira is talking to him."

After a brief pause, Kira took the word. "You are right about one thing. I used to think like you. Layla told me about your background and how you lost your team to the Plague in Antarctica. She said you couldn't stop talking about it. It was this despair that made you feel hatred for our world. You wanted to change it."

"It was this despair that made me realize the threat of the Plague and why our current technological stagnation is harmful," Mustafa added, "but in essence, you are correct."

"Whatever. The thing is, you tried to drag me down to your level. You made me feel as miserable as you did. You can't justify your pathetic, nihilistic philosophy otherwise. Lucas didn't buy it despite everything you did to him."

"My philosophy is just the opposite of nihilism. But if you wish to oppose me, I cannot change that. Are you ready to continue this fight at the risk of death?"

Kira nodded.

I grabbed the holster of my Gauss gun. I expected the fire to start immediately, but to my surprise, Kira and Ay still looked at each other.

"Just a question," I said, "why the long talk? Couldn't you have used your singularity stone to predict her rough answers?"

Ay didn't look at me. He pretended I hadn't even asked a question at all.

"Layla told me why Fountainhead's bodyguard destroyed your whole fleet," I said. "You had Precog and they helped you a lot. However, all those predictions needed a lot of processing power. It overheated eventually. The singularity stone you copied is exactly the one Precog used.

"If my hypothesis is correct, your singularity stone just overheated. Again. You held this whole conversation so that you could cool it down, am I right?"

For the first time, I saw Mustafa show genuine unease. His limbs twitched. Only through a conscious effort did he make them relax.

"You either overestimated your capacities," I said, "or you thought we could never see through your bluff."

Before he could grab his blaster, Kira shot him square in the chest, followed by a shot in the knee. I and the Seizers followed with a volley of bullets. By now, he had reacted and formed walls of microbots all around him. However, we shot from all sides, forcing him to spread his shields thin.

"Pilot, out of the way!" Crick transmitted.

Tesla ran away as Ay tanked shots from all sides. He didn't understand the reason until Crick pointed their antimatter rifle at him. Ay dodged the bullet. However, the cartridge hit the wall and produced a detonation whose shockwaves sent the scientist flying. The radiation roasted his microbots whist the heat melted his antimatter rifle's barrel. After being knocked back two dozen feet, Ay crashed down, his white coat burned and his blue armor scorched.

"Let one thing be said," Crick transmitted, "I am the greatest exobiologist of the observable universe," they fired another shot at Mustafa who, back on his feet, jumped out of the way and evaded the fireball, "and I will not surrender to a pseudo-intellectual who wasted his mind on despair and destruction."

We didn't give him a second to breathe. Every time Ay dodged another shot, we followed up with three more until his singularity stone reached its breaking point. However, he was quick to react and shot two blaster shots at Crick and Tesla. Let's hope they weren't lethal.

I, Kira, and the remaining fighter kept up the pressure and forced Ay behind one of the pillar-shaped computers. They gave him cover and made us play a game of hide-and-seek with him. More time for him to cool down his stone.

"I can take care of him alone!" Kira shouted. "You go to the magnet room!"

The magnet room. I had almost forgotten that we weren't primarily here to kill him, but to make sure the Cipher didn't fall into Götterdämmerungs hands.

I turned away from the battlefield and hurried to the bronze-colored control panel as fast as I could.

When I arrived, the first thing I noticed was the labels. Layla had left little English words all over the various buttons and levers that dotted the surface of this soft, box-shaped machinery. It made sense given how, without the tech knowledge of Layla's stone or the translator of Iris, Ay would have been lost otherwise. The joystick had a "WALLS" label while the word "MAGNETS" sat right in the middle of a field of blue buttons. Before I could press them, the screen flashed before me.

It had the words "GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG HAS RECEIVED THE CIPHER" written over it in red caps. The Cipher was highlighted in gold on the video feed of Götterdämmerung's cube. Zooming closer, I realized it indeed already touched the cube.

I slammed my hands onto the panels. His discussion didn't just serve to recharge his singularity stone. He also tried to buy more time for his magnets to get the Cipher where he wanted.

I couldn't believe that Ay won our little battle of wits. When I thought I had him, he remained one step ahead of me as usual.

At this point, there was exactly one thing I could still do to turn the tide. I had to follow Iris' advice.