User blog:Seieireppa/God Eater:Universitas, chapter 24: The Horizon (Arc 1 Final Chapter)

“Now… where to begin?”

At present, all ten God Eaters who had been present for the battle against Feldman—Idenn, Ken, Baluar, Nia, Beoblade, Soma, Kota, Blake, Jack, and C—were currently gathered in front of the one called Sigma in the lounge of the Liverpool Branch. Here, Sigma had promised them, he would tell them the truth about all the events that had transpired thus far.

Here, everything would be made clear.

“Before we begin,” Sigma exclaimed, taking a seat opposite everyone else, “I need to tell you a bit about myself. I was born in California, in the year 2042. When I was eleven years old, the Aragami attacked my hometown and killed everyone there except for me. I survived… and shortly thereafter, in my desperation and hunger, I feasted on an Aragami, an Abaddon, and became half Aragami myself.

“After that, I was taken in by a group of human survivors… but they, too, were annihilated by the Aragami, save for our leader. I journeyed with her to Fenrir’s America Branch, and there I became a God Eater in spite of myself, to protect humanity against the Aragami threat. Later on down the line… I want to say it was thirteen or fourteen years later, I journeyed to the Russia Branch, hoping to do what I could to eradicate the Aragami across the planet.

“What happened next, well… Nanako, you know this part.”  Sigma looked over at Nanako, who nodded. “I caught wind from a superior officer of mine that the R&D department at the Glasgow Branch in Scotland were constructing a massive anti-Aragami cannon called the Gigantes… a weapon that would have required a human life to power it. While I would have stopped at nothing to destroy the Aragami… the sacrifice of a human life was too much. Left with no other option, I massacred my comrades and superior officers at the Russia Branch and departed on my own to the Glasgow Branch to stop the Gigantes’ deployment. Looking back on it now, I see how foolish I was… but the past is the past, and those actions are just as much a part of me as anything else.

“Anyway, I digress. I arrived at the Glasgow Branch and murdered the R&D head in my rage over what he had wrought. However, in doing so, I also met Nanako here, and when faced with the awakening of an Aragami of mountainous proportions known as the Gehenna, Nanako and I worked together to operate the Gigantes and destroy the Gehenna before it could obliterate the Glasgow Branch, and the rest of humanity thereafter.”

Everyone there looked enraptured by Sigma’s tale. Everyone except Ken.

“So,” Ken interjected, “what exactly happened next? Everyone lived happily ever after, or what?”

“Hardly,” Sigma returned. “Nanako, what happens next concerns you… as well as you, Thomas.”

“Just ‘Beoblade’ is fine, thanks,” came Beo’s curt reply. “But get on with it.”

“I shall,” responded Sigma. “You see, the Gehenna itself was no mere Aragami, but a sort of timespace nexus holding multiple timelines together. In destroying the Gehenna, we created a branching timeline where the Gehenna was not destroyed. In that timeline, the Earth was ravaged and its peoples annihilated, save for a small portion. Nanako took it upon herself in this timeline to rally a group of survivors and fight against a new variety of Aragami that sprang up in the Gehenna’s wake.

“Eventually, Nanako, with the help of myself and a number of allies, journeyed back in time to the moment of the Gehenna’s awakening. There, we invaded inside the Gehenna directly and destroyed its core, which was itself a nexus of countless timelines. In doing so, we erased our own timeline, but in the process we reset everything to how it should have been, essentially restoring time to its proper flow.

“After this, I went my own way, eventually encountering another person here… that person is you, Beoblade. Remember?”

“That’s right,” came Beo’s reply. “You journeyed through the Five Doors with the rest of us. Your power was a significant asset to all of us, but… what happened after that?”

“After that,” continued Sigma, “is where things truly get interesting. Have any of you ever wondered how Isaac Feldman obtained the means to create something as powerful as the Boundary Aragami?”

Nia scratched her head. “Come to think of it…”

“After my travels in the Five Doors with Beoblade, I was spat out in a dimension beyond the reaches of time itself. Here, I discovered the ultimate truth of the world—a truth called the Horizon.”

“The… Horizon?” exclaimed Ken. No one here had ever heard of such a term before, so…

“Precisely,” answered Sigma. “The Horizon. It is essentially an existence, a force, that stands outside time at the origin of all things, of all existence. At the same time, it is the ultimate destination, the endpoint of all existence. It is both a source of life and the end of all life. I arrived here purely by chance—it is impossible for any ordinary being to seek out the Horizon—and forged a contract with it in a search for power, power enough to undo what had been done and go back in time, back to before the Aragami arose, and eradicate the source of the Aragami before they could wreak their havoc upon the planet. I was granted immeasurable power by the Horizon there, but…”

Idenn gasped. “But so was Feldman!”

“That is indeed correct,” came Sigma’s reply. “Isaac Feldman found himself at the Horizon, again purely by chance, and demanded it grant him power for him to achieve his ambitions. Unfortunately for him, and fortunately for us, the Horizon judged him unworthy, and thus it only granted him a fraction of the power it granted me. However, even that level of power was enough. With it, he returned to the present—his present—and began to use his Horizon-granted power to manufacture the first of the Boundary Aragami.”

“Hold on,” interrupted Soma. “Something doesn’t add up. If he encountered this… Horizon before he started making the Boundary Aragami, then where did he go in 2076? What was it that caused him to just up and vanish like that?”

“It was me,” answered Sigma. “I judged him to be too great a threat to the continued integrity of this timeline—after all, even a very small amount of the Horizon’s power is enough to inflict untold devastation on the world—and removed him from the present with my own two hands. It was as simple as opening up a portal in spacetime, grabbing him, and pulling him back in with me, then dropping him off at some point in the future. However, I neglected to plan out precisely what year I dropped him in, but fortunately…”

“I was there,” continued Idenn. “And I’m sure you know what happened after that.”

“Indeed,” came Sigma’s reply. “My ultimate objective was to allow Feldman to build up his Horizon powers in the distant future, then return there myself and use the resulting confluence of Horizon energy to cause a reaction that would enable me to jump far enough back in time to a point before the Aragami were born, thus enabling me to eradicate them at the source. However, you got to him before I could, and you used that Lifespring of yours to bring him back to the present, five years later. After that, of course, all of you know the rest.”

Everyone there needed a moment to process all the information they had just taken in. Some extradimensional force that was the alpha and the omega of all existence? It was all a bit much.

“You said earlier that Feldman might come back, despite being unable to travel through time like you can,” spoke Baluar. “What did you mean by that? How could he accomplish this?”

“Remember when I said that it was impossible for ‘any ordinary being’ to find the Horizon?” Sigma answered. “That rule doesn’t apply to those who have already been touched by the Horizon. There’s a very real chance that Feldman could find his way back there, obtain even greater power, and return to face us again… so before that happens, I’ll need to train you. Every last one of you will need to reach as high a level of power as you can before the time of Feldman’s return. It won’t be easy; in fact, you just might die, but I WILL make you all stronger. If any among you don’t feel you’re up to the task, leave now, because the road ahead is long and hard.”

However, after hearing Sigma’s words… no one left. Everyone remained where they were, resolute in their determination to take Feldman down.

“In that case…” continued Sigma, “let us get started. It’ll be a long road… but we WILL come out of this alive. For the sake of killing that bastard Feldman before he can wreak havoc upon this world—”

“—I will take all of you to the Horizon.”

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