Alexander stood motionless while the undulating tendrils of Anathema slowly collected around his body before slowly soaking into the flesh of his body, leaving only Alexander standing wearing a loose black long sleeve button up shirt and a simple pair of black pants and shoes. His body was comparatively small to Leonardo’s engorged form; Alexander stood at a meek five foot eleven and weighed in at a paltry one hundred and sixty pounds. He was thin and his muscles lean, but Alexander did not derive his power from the physical strength of his body but rather the power of his mind and his ability to channel energy from the tempest of the Chaotic Nether and manifest that energy with intent upon the planes of Gaia. It seemed Leonardo planned to up the stakes and Alexander would oblige his long time friend with a little game of show and tell.
The black eyes of Alexander looked to the heavens above; he tilted his head back to glimpse into the cloudy skies. The air around Alexander stirred, rotating around him slowly at first but quickly it picked up speed. As the currents of air quickened rocks and pieces of twisted metal within a twenty-foot radius of Alexander lifted into the air only to be swept up into the torrents of air and speed around him caught within the field of his control. Soon even the ground around Alexander shifted, rumbling at first before cracking and splitting apart into huge chunks of earth. A twenty-foot wide sphere of dirt and rock encircled Alexander, the massive rocks breaking apart into a maelstrom of smaller debris, that debris would continue to deteriorate until nothing but a cloud of dust remained, even that too would trickle away into oblivion. Alexander now levitated within that sphere, standing within the center as though propped up by some invisible platform. The outer layer of the sphere now defined by the crystal clear space between Alexander and the world existing beyond the temporal sphere. Outside of the sphere clouds of dust lingered and would drift into the sphere, which defined the outer edge of it, instantly larger rocks or other debris would crumble away into infinitely small particulate matter.
Alexander’s expression was quite calm; he slowly tilted his head down to meet Leonardo with an indifferent expression, the black eyes watched curiously, as his opponent readied himself as well. Alexander looked down to his right hand, turning the palm to face himself as he opened and closed the hand into a fist. He smiled a little, a trifling of a smirk denting his stoic and apathetic demeanor. He held the hand palm up, keeping the arm forward and bent at the elbow to form a perfect angle between his upper arm and forearm. His eyes slowly drifted back up to the skies.
Suddenly the clouds would tumble and swirl within the sky like smoke swirling around the wake of a hand dispersing the nimbus of clouds. Lightning rumbled across the massive billowing plumes illuminating them in a wash of white and silver flashes. Silhouetted with each flash were strange figures, impossible figures to exist in the skies above, massive rectangular looking fingers reaching down from the sky but not quite penetrating the clouds, some were further along than others. A darkness swept across the ruinous cityscape, with each great flash of lightning the world seemed to grow darker in the aftermath, never quite regaining the luminosity it once retained. This would progress until the world for miles and miles was black as a moonless night. Claps of lightning would provide snap shots of the world above them, a mirrored image of the city they stood in, building untouched by the chaos and calamity that the free for all had caused. There above, a few miles away stood the untouched intersections and immaculate buildings looking down upon Leonardo and Alexander, the upside down portrait of the city consumed the skies from horizon to horizon. Massive fingers of lightning crossed from the inverted city above down to the calamitous battleground below sending massive gouts of super heated rock and earth streaming into the air from the ferocity of the strikes.
One such massive coil of lightning streamed through the air turning and zigzagging through the air until it struck one of the huge armored guardians of Leonardo, in a tremendous boom the massive warrior was cleaved apart from the upper right shoulder down to the lower left hip sending the upper and lower portions tumbling to the ground. Thin streams of latent energy arced and jumped from the colossus to the ground and to what taller standing objects remained. The world between the two present temporal branches met with a cataclysmic and unfathomable release of energy. The wave in which crested with white and golden light surged down towards the ground as the inverted city above split apart. The scene above was that of a world torn asunder, shattering from the collision as the event horizons bounced off one another. In a sudden moment, nothing would be left aside for Alexander within his sphere and Leonardo surrounded by the black world in which he created. The armored guardians shattered into dust as did the rest of the city around them and for countless untold miles in every other direction. By now nothing remained to observe the fight between Leonardo and Alexander, they were free to continue in whatever form they saw fit.
The mirrored world above remained, splitting away massive chunks and segments of earth in place of huge streams of red lava and plumes of black smoke. It resonated a haunting fiery glow to the desolate world below where Alexander and leo stood, basking them in a golden and red light. Occasionally a massive bolt of lightning would arc from the event horizon of the world above to that of the present in which Leo and Alexander occupied. It would go to foreshadow the distance between the next collision between branches of space and time as Alexander would unfold the veil between to two.
“Without a doubt, but then again I’m not known for my Kung-fu, am I? Lets settle this as gentlemen.”
His voice boomed from beneath the sphere in which rotated around him, his eyes lingered on Leonardo as an arc of lightning drove into the side of the sphere only to be consumed by the rotation of the outer rim. Light engulfed the sphere in radiance for only a moment before tens of thousands of tiny flecks of light were tossed into the dim world that surrounded them, like thousands of shooting stars they zoomed across the skies until the photons of light returned to their natural state of temporal regularity and zoomed away. Within the world they stood temporal singularities would sprout up across the landscape, warming and bending time and space as the presence of the singularity above threatened the integrity of the one below.
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