Chapter 9: Fear

“You’re weakness is that you are afraid.”, said Laura.

Etsu cocked her eyebrow.

“Me, afraid?”

She transformed back into her normal university attire. School jacket. Skirt. Black socks and brown loafers.

“What do I have to be afraid of.”, said Etsu. “I’m omnipotent.”

“It’s a specific thing.”, said Laura. “An issue only you would have.”

“Spit it out, then. I’m curious.”

Laura debated stringing Etsu along, but it didn’t seem like too good an idea. She would have to say it soon enough anyways, and better to do so now on her own terms than after being subject to some sort of reality-warping torture.

“You’re afraid of advancing. You’re afraid of becoming an omniscient, all-knowing being of bliss. You don’t want to lose the novelty of things, sure, but you’re afraid of losing something else.”

“And that is?”

“You’re afraid of losing yourself. What if you like being a ‘light-blob’ so much, that you never go back. You never want to go back. Maybe simply knowing everything changes you in some way. Your personality shifts enough that you’re not the same Etsu anymore.”

Etsu seemed a tad unamused. Laura continued.

“You’d be out in your own bubble of existence, while the universe, no, all the universes go on without you. They’d be just fine. It’d be better, even, as unfair as it’d be for everlasting pleasure to be felt by a sadistic woman like yourself. It could better for everyone, but you would never know unless you let yourself know, and if you did, you might not want to come back to how you do things now. Is that right? A forbidden fruit that you banned yourself from tasting, even though you’re the only one who could pluck it in the first place.”

Etsu chortled softly. The people on the street disappeared, as did all the cars. She clapped softly.

“Wow, bravo, you are the greatest detective on the planet or something Laura! So I’m a little timid about ascending to some higher state of intelligence. So what. Fear is a part of the platter of human emotions that make life so sweet.”

Laura just smiled smugly, treating this as a little victory for herself. She found it hard not to savor it a little.

“Satisfied?”, continued Etsu.

“I suppose you would be. You need to cling to moments like these right? After all, there’s not a villain you’ve fought that I can’t defeat with a snap of my fingers or a dash of my toe. I could fix them, too. For all your wasted efforts on trying to redeeming literal monsters, I could just clap my hands and you could have a clay woman passing out free food at a shelter, and a plant man tending the flowers of the city park with something other than blood.”

“But you won’t, of course.”, said Laura. “I wonder if there’s something you’re afraid about there too.”

“No.”, said Etsu. “It’d just be boring. You know what’s interesting though?”

“What?”, said Laura.

“What *you* are afraid of. Let’s take a look!”

Etsu disappeared. Past where she had been standing, Laura saw Margret, her maid, standing on the sidewalk.

“Mistress Laura?”, called out the older woman. “What is going on? Why am I here?”

“Margret!”, shouted Laura. “I thought you said you didn’t read my mind, Etsu!!!”

Etsu came into vision, looming over the city. Margret seemed startled, and her footing trembled. The Leopard held her ground, though.

“I didn’t read your mind, but I know your secret identity, and I helped myself to every bit of info on you that ever existed. Assimilated by me, in one big gulp, and people know who Laura Yeal’s maid is.”

Laura looked up at the towering purple-haired woman.

“So, once again, you’re big?”

“For you? Of course! You deserve a spectacular view of yours truly. Now then, onto your fear: losing the things and people you love~”

Etsu reached down from the sky with her finger. Margret was easily snuffed out beneath the divine digit along with the surrounding block.

Laura winced a bit, but then just sighed.

Etsu cocked her eyebrow.

“Not the reaction you expected?”, said Laura.

“I figured you’d be more afraid. I can feel your pulse as your blood vessels bulge against the air around you. It’s not that heightened.”

Laura shrugged.

“You’re right, I’m afraid of losing the ones I love. I’m afraid of losing Kramston. But, that’s not what’s happening here. That’s the real Margret, sure, but you’ll bring her back. You’ll bring the city back.”

“And you’re sure of this?”

“Yes. You wouldn’t want to live in a world where the consequences of your actions was never having toys to break again. Sure, you might kill a few people in this universe, your ‘home’ universe I imagine. I bet you have. I bet you’ve permanently killed thousands in this world like that. But a modern city? No, that’s why you bring all this stuff back instead of hopping between universes forever. You always come back here, don’t you? There’s a perverse sentimentally to it, I imagine.”

Etsu leaned down. Wind buffeted as her face drew closer to the city and her voice bellowed.

“You would dare presume so much about me?”

It startled Laura, which made Etsu quake the city with a chortle.

“Kehehehe. Don’t worry. It’s fine. This just means I’ve won, in a way.”

“How’s that?”, asked Laura.

“Because you admit this doesn't matter. You’re detached from the destruction, the death, and suffering. Since it can all come back, there’s nothing too much to worry about, logically, right? Now you know how I feel. How a ‘god’ feels.”

Etsu snorted.

Laura’s eyes widened, then her expression calmed down. She chuckled softly.

“You’re right Etsu. You’re 100% right, but I’m gonna win in another way.”, said Laura.

“Oh?”

“That’s right. I know how to bring this game to an end.”

“Oh really now?”

“Yes. I’m just gonna stop playing.”

“Stop playing?”, said Etsu. “You realize you’re in a city I control right? Everything here bends to my whims, and you’re in it.”

The streets warbled and shook. The buildings Etsu had crushed rebuilt themselves after the crater the digit left refilled.

“Yes, but I don’t have to do anything, and you’d have to deal with that. A limp toy, strewn on the floor. You could mind control me, sure but, as you say, what’s the fun in that?”

Laura smirked.

Etsu squinted.

“We’ll see how long you hold up.”

She snapped her fingers and Margret returned.

“Perhaps a bit of vehicular trauma might shake you up.”, said Etsu.

While Margret got her bearings yet again, a speeding car drove down the street, and veered of the road. It slammed right into Margret, crushing the older woman against the wall.

Laura felt sad, but true to her word she just stood there, unmoving.

Etsu grumbled. She snapped her fingers again and more cars showed up. They piled onto Margret. A helicopter fell out of the sky to join the stack of mangled vehicles. A plane came down, too. A subway train ripped out from underground to mash into the mess. Each vehicle was packed with a person that Laura could tell was another Margret: either the same one or plucked form another dimension. She saw the family friend die over and over.

But, the heroine held her ground. She didn’t fall to her knees and cry, nor rush towards the giant monster with rage pumping through her like blood.

Etsu then summoned a blimp to crash down on the piled mass of metal and scrap. A satellite fell from the sky onto it.

She chortled.

“Kehehe. This is stupid. Stupid.”

Laura felt her body levitate of the ground. She felt a burning sensation over her skin that made her grit her teeth.

“I could make you move through sheer agony. I could torture you in a time bubble for 10,000 years and have it be one second in the real world. Then you’d be real eager to participate in things like this. Things like this, they’d be a cakewalk compared to what I could do.”

Indeed Laura couldn’t help but fidget her arms and legs in the air as an injury-less pain wracked them.

“Y-you could”, stammered Laura. “You could probably break my mind with enough time and torture. B-b-but, then what? Them I’m hardly different from that living footstool you made earlier. Or, you wipe my mind after so I’m back to normal but, then, what was the point of it? I wouldn’t remember the torture, as horrible as it might be. You wouldn’t have punished me in a way I remember.”

Etsu ramped up the pain a good deal, enough for Laura to scream a tiny bit. All the while, the city dissolved as though hit with a nuclear blast, only to come back, again and again. Each time, the flames rose higher, adding to Laura’s agony.

Then, after a few repetitions of that, Etsu stopped. She eyed Laura who caught her breath, but then raised her head back up, coyly smirked a moment, then went back to her stoic expression.

“Kehehehehehehe. You’re good at this. Fine, fine, you win.”

She let Laura fall back to the ground. The super heroine rolled forward to break the fall, then slowly stood back up.

“But, don’t think you’ve humbled me much here. For even trying, I should return the favor. Yes, we’ll end on my terms. I’ll show you something that will help you realize, fear or no fear, just how insignificant you are.”, said Etsu.

The purple-haired woman grinned, then grew up and outwards across the horizon. Her body was expanding rapidly: exponentially.

Laura found her senses hijacked about the time that Etsu had grown big enough to loom over the continent. She saw the purple-haired young woman expand past that, looming over the planet as it hovered between her hands. Her view was as though a far off agent, an observer that watched from afar at a hovering view.

The hands moved away as the 20 year old kept growing. She saw the sun loom above Etsu, briefly, before it became the size of a pea.

Soon the galaxy itself came into the perception of Laura's senses. She saw from the front Etsu growing out of it, then wrapping her hands around it in turn. Etsu’s fingers closed in on billions of stars.

After that, there were the galactic clusters, made up of hundreds and thousands of galaxies in their own rights as a massive, super stellar construct that burst against Etsu’s burgeoning body.

The edge of the universe was upon Etsu’s form. Laura could see it strain against the purple-haired woman’s body: almost like the university student was trying to break out of plastic wrap.

Etsu did, of course, break out of the universe. The thin film-like exterior of it simply snapped back to place without any tears. Etsu now hovered in an endless field of weight where the universe bubble hovered. There were universes just like it, stretching across the stark white expanse.

Etsu expressed that the post-universe area wasn’t actually stark white. She conveyed, wordlessly, the idea that it was a far more chaotic and different place than that. She conveyed without words how in trying to show it to Laura, she’d break the heroine’s mind with just a glance--at least without any extra omnipotent fiddling on the purple-haired woman’s part.

Grinning, chortling, the godlike woman in the university uniform closed her hands around the universe. At the same time, every other universe also had its own Etsu body, acting the same. The white expanse of this post-universal realm was filled with the light skin of Etsu’s palm as she closed around that too.

Complete and total darkness fell across Laura, and the planet, and the universe and every single ‘thing’ or ‘being’ in all of existence.

Except for Etsu, of course.