Full Exaltation

Night of the final challenge

December 11th, 2050

Heaven’s Reach Shrine

After the end of Daiki Tennojima’s video message, Rei’s mind became an intertwining mess of his own thoughts and the recollection of the great scientist’s memories.

It was as if he had glimpses of the man experiencing his discovery of alternate realities for the first time, admiring and despairing what he saw, eventually formulating plans and solutions on how to overcome them.

Experiencing another person’s life while they went through an ocean’s worth of emotions was too much for one person’s brain to handle. So Rei simply didn’t. He let the memories flow past him like a tide. It came to swallow him whole, drowned him in complexity, and then let go, retreating until only the sand beneath his feet remained, like small pebbles of information.

One thing became clear. Rei’s power wasn’t an ability to see people’s lives from beginning to end. It was an ability to see adjacent realities close to one’s own.

The Daiki he witnessed was a contradiction. Two different versions, perhaps more, where one did things the other didn’t. In one, he cared for Ruby. In another, he didn’t. In one he took complete hold of his company, in another he let his brother-in-law take the reign. It was terrifying to think how close these realities were to each other. One small difference spelled an entirely different outcome.

When Rei regained his senses, he said as much to Keisuke.

“Trust me, Rei, with the amount the institute has sacrificed… this reality has its fare share of successes.”

Another thing became clear. In this world, Keisuke was the one behind it all. Not just to the pain of others but of Rei’s too. His deductions remained the same.

But then something unexpected happened. It started with a heartbeat. Rei sensed it the moment aether sparked to life inside Hidenori Matsumoto. It was as if the man had mastered completely removing aether from his body and reigniting it in a whim. His contraptions had nothing to do with it.

Hidenori named himself Kisaragi and next thing Rei knew, Keisuke was shot in front of him. Revenge was dealt before he could. Ice shields appeared, and then—

“Ahhh… ahh… it can’t end here…” Keisuke was sprawled on the ground, the light in his eyes struggling to hold on. “I’m supposed to be… the one who saved us all…”

Rei felt pity despite his pain. He knelt down to see the old man breathe his last, wondering if he should use his ability, when suddenly the man’s eyes darted towards him. His hand reached for his pocket and revealed something round.

A familiar sphere-shaped object.

Shinozuka’s invention, but slightly larger.

“Take this…” Keisuke pleaded. “We’ve perfected it… for the sake of the world… ascend higher… peer into other realities for the solution to our plight… and save us from...”

Before Rei could react, the sphere opened and a cloud of gold emerged. It enveloped his body whole.

*

“Ah, crap!” Souichiro yelled. It was as Yukari described on their conversation back at the restaurant. The Tennojima office had artificially exalted humans rampaging about… and now they’re coming for the shrine. That bastard Hidenori summoned his comrades.

Souichiro surrounded himself with aether. “Listen up, everyone!” he shouted to the guards scattered across the shrine. “I don’t care if you work for Keisuke or whoever else! We’re about to be swarmed by anti-exalt goons and monsters alike! We’re all going to die if you don’t fight back!”

The security team didn’t seem like they needed the pep talk. They all saw what Hidenori did, and their radio communicators confirmed the presence of renegades surrounding the perimeter of the shrine.

This contest was fun while it lasted, but Souichiro already exhausted a good chunk of his powers earlier.

“Hey, foreign chick!” he shouted. “Sorry. Ana Lucia. Our goal is to take down Hidenori fast and hard. You feel me?”

The woman coated herself with an aether shield and nodded back.

Souichiro turned his gaze to Hidenori. Or whatever the hell he called himself. The bastard had the gall to smile a toothy grin back at him.

“Oh… you’re going to regret this, asshole.”

The world warped as Souichiro dashed towards his opponent, fists glowing.

*

Rei felt his soul burn with absolute power. Gold covered his skin like a shimmering dust going in and out his body.

“It’s okay,” he heard someone say. The lawyer. Jirou cowered on the ground next to Keisuke's body. “Y-You’re going to be alright! What the Anti-Exalt Faction stole from the institute must’ve been a large quantity of failed doses… the one you got should be from the successful batch… I think.”

You think?

I mean… I don’t feel like dying… right?

I could still think. Shinozuka couldn’t when he did, right? He went crazy.

I could still—

That’s when the gold smoke entered his mind and clouded his vision. It took hold of him completely… and his eyes opened.

*

Lucia blocked Hidenori’s punch with a shield of ice. It cracked her aether creation easily, but it proved a good diversion for Souichiro to land a kick on the man’s back.

“Is that the best you could do?” Hidenori hissed. He turned around and swiped at the speedster, but Souichiro already disappeared in a blur.

Meanwhile, gunfire erupted all over the shrine. The Anti-Exalt Faction revealed themselves, both regular humans in their white uniforms, and monsters whose bodies burst with aether, their skin leaking bronze smoke.

“How the hell are you this strong, dude?” Souichiro asked as he landed another kick that Hidenori blocked with his arm.

“Ironic, isn’t it?” Hidenori replied. “I never wanted this. I hid this disgusting power when I turned all those years ago. I lived most of my life pretending it didn’t exist.”

“That’s not how that works,” Lucia said. “You’re meant to hone your abilities to be this powerful!”

She summoned three ice spears in the air, then launched them in quick succession at her opponent. Two landed directly at Hidenori’s back, exploding on impact, but he caught the third.

Hidenori bared his teeth in anger, then threw the spear back at her face.

Lucia dodged her own weapon as she rolled on the ground. When she stopped, Hidenori was suddenly in front of her ready for another strike.

That was when Souchiro came down at the man with a heel drop to the head. “And here I thought, you used one of those drugs to transform yourself!” The speedster shouted right as the blow connected. “But I guess that would’ve turned you into a bigger freak than you already are!”

Souichiro pushed off his opponent, then spun mid-air for a follow up kick. What he found was air.

Hidenori disappeared into a blur and dodged the second attack, his body glowing intensely.

“Not cool, dude,” Souichiro groaned. “Come up with your own moves!”

“You have to forgive me,” Hidenori said, cracking his neck. “I have little experience using aether. That being said… it’s not very hard to do. I just flex the energy like this, right?” he disappeared again and landed a punch on Souichiro’s face. The man flew backwards like a ragdoll.

Lucia created a shield of ice to catch Souichiro in the air before he crashed on the ground.

“That one seems a lot more difficult to copy,” Hidenori said. “It requires imagination, correct? How does it work…”

“Asshole!” Souichiro pushed himself off Lucia’s shield, disappeared in a blur, then landed a punch that Hidenori blocked easily. This time with Lucia’s ice shield. It was a cruder design, like an icicle with no particular shape, but it did the same job of protecting him.

Hidenori laughed. “I admit, this is kind of fun!”

“How… are you doing that?” Lucia asked in disbelief.

Hidenori shrugged. “I guess I’m just talented? But I apologize, I suppose I should come out with the truth. Souichiro was correct. I did take one of the institute’s drugs. I had to, in order to convince my comrades it was safe.”

All around them, gunfire and fighting intensified as more of his ‘comrades’ clawed their way into the shrine.

Hidenori spread his arms wide as if to take in the chaos he caused. He summoned aether all over his body, sparking into life like Ruby’s crimson fire.

“Of course, what I took was slightly different from theirs,” Hidenori continued. “It was my late father who left it specifically for me. I think he wanted to turn me exalted... the fool. I would’ve thrown it away if not for my comrades. In the end, all it did was amplify what I already had!”

Hidenori shimmered with malevolent golden aether. He coated himself with ruby’s fire, summoned Souichiro’s wings of light, and created a jagged sword made of Lucia’s ice.

How the heck were they supposed to fight him now?

*

Rei Tsukihara swam in a current of still images and moving pictures. The full power of his Alter Eyes was in complete display as he navigated hundreds if not thousands of other realities flashing before him.

Daiki’s power was never this strong. Shinozuka’s drug must’ve amplified his abilities and made him ascend further. In fact, as he moved around this weird dimension, white wings had sprouted from his back.

What an odd sensation.

I don’t have time to worry about this, Rei thought. This ability might not last long. Either that or my mind collapses from all this information.

He saw what Daiki claimed in his video. A spectrum of infinite worlds. There were two main branches that collided with his timeline. The one to the left sprouted from when the world diverged eons in the past, brimming with a nebula of bronze where life didn’t exist, bringing with it pure destruction. The one to the right sprouted similarly from a distant past, an earth that evolved differently, full of magic powers and teeming with life. These two realities where so far removed from Rei’s timeline, but somehow, they made their way here and brought their otherness with them.

Why?

“I don’t know,” a voice replied. A vision of Daiki Tennojima. “All I could gleam was that somebody wished for it. Somebody wished for the world to end, while another wished for magic.”

“That's it?” Rei said. “Don’t you have a theory, at least?”

In another vision, another Daiki replied. “Perhaps an entity from both branches heard the call. They had powers in their worlds, after all, exalted in either bronze or gold. Perhaps they used their powers to come to us. But this is just a theory.”

It was interesting, but Rei supposed it didn’t really matter. Trying to prove it now would be a waste of time. His goal was to find a solution—a way to stop these realities from breaching theirs. Particularly the destructive one.

Rei swam forward in adjacent histories to his world. There he found realities with no bronze sky or magic. It was brimming with human ingenuity and technological marvels. What could have been.

He wished he had time explore these other worlds. See what they were like. Learn from them.

But for all his searching, he found no solution to the threat of the bronze sky. Because of course there wasn’t. these adjacent worlds did not have their problem.

Rei turned around to the left side of the spectrum. Desolate worlds and wastelands. Some never had the ascension and fully succumbed to bronze as Daiki described. Others had more magic than they did, but bronze took it all the same. It always happened just as the land reached the clouds.

So that was it, Rei confirmed. When the ascension reaches the bronze sky it’s game over.

The peak of Shinjuku was high, but not that high. Not yet. They probably had another fifty years give or take.

But then there were these other worlds where the bronze sky rapidly multiplied, far outpacing the ascension until everything was devoured. The possibility of that happening to their world existed too.

Dammit, it was impossible to tell. They probably had years to prepare, or they had until the end of the year. Great. Rei completely understood Daiki’s anxiety. And perhaps, Satoru Hijiyama’s too. The more Rei searched alternate realities, the more he realized the weight of despair the Alter Eyes brought to its user.

There was nothing. No other world had an answer he could find.

To add more pressure, Rei learned in another reality, that while Shinozuka’s perfected drug wouldn’t kill him, it was a one-time deal. After this fun little ride into peak ascension, he’d turn back to how he once was, and a second dose of the drug would simply end his life. He needed to make the most of his time while he had this power.

Rei explored and explored and explored. All while time ticked at the back of his mind.

But no matter how long he searched and how hard he tried, there was simply no answer waiting for him.

One day, perhaps soon, his world will simply seize to exist.