(3rd Person POV)
The Anus Gate stood open, and the chaos they'd counted on never came.
General Philip Grain watched the far side of the gate through a row of crystal balls, the crease in his brow deepening by the second. "What's going on? Where are the beasts?"
"Something's happening inside the Nether Realm," Mikael said. "It has to be."
"Impossible." Grain didn't look up from the crystals. "However strong Arthur is, the Nether crawls with more beasts than any one god could herd. A few should have slipped past him and come through by now. Unless—" His jaw worked. "Unless someone in there can command them. But that's not possible. Aides has been gone for centuries, and that mad bitch Mephista's been under «Eternal Sleep» this whole time. No one wakes her but Aides himself."
The hall fell silent, every eye on the crystals, the same unspoken dread curdling in the air.
One of the angels finally said it aloud. "...Could Arthur have actually woken her? Could Mephista be the one holding the beasts back?"
"He isn't that strong," another muttered. "...Right?" The doubt in his own eyes gave him away.
"He crossed worlds on his own. He drew Solarus down on this one." A third angel's wings drew in tight against his back. "At what point did we start deciding what that man can't do?"
"Enough," Grain snapped, though he didn't take his eyes off the crystals. He and Mikael had both gone pale, because the odds of exactly that were climbing by the moment.
Then the dread put on flesh.
The gate stayed open — but no beast came through it. What stepped out instead was a dragon. Vermillion. Vast enough to darken the whole threshold, his scales the deep red of banked coals, each one throwing back the pale light of the ice below. Where his breath rolled across the Glacia Expanse, that endless waste of snow and blizzard-cold began, impossibly, to steam, the frost hissing back into water and rising off the ground in ghosts.
"ROAR!"
The sound tore loose and shook the Expanse to its roots. Somewhere far off, a shelf of ancient ice cracked and slid.
"No—" Grain's voice cracked with it. "That's Vermillion. Mephista's own servant. Her Primal Dragon."
"What do we do?" Even through the fear, a thin thread of relief ran under Mikael's words; whatever else had gone wrong, at least the Nether's monsters had never been loosed on the world.
"Do? We start thinking about how to run—" Grain never finished. On the crystal's link, the dragon's head had turned, and it was looking straight at him.
Vermillion had felt the spying crystal.
"Fuck—" Grain slashed a hand through the connection and cut it dead.
Too late. Across the station's readouts, the dragon was already moving, and moving fast — impossibly fast — straight toward them. Altair Station's own wards flared with his approach.
"Damn it, he's coming here!"
The dragon flew, but not the way anything ought to. With the Space Element folded around him he seemed to leap from one point of the sky to the next, devouring the distance in stuttering jumps, until his spread wings blotted the sun out over Altair Station itself.
"Servants of Solarus! Cowards! Come out and face me!" Vermillion's roar carried straight through the station's barrier as if it weren't there.
The angels stared out at him, terror bare on every face. He stood above them — every one of them — and they knew it. And the deities who might have stood beside the Three Known Gods were all spent or dead by now, the Shadow Elf among them. There was no one left to shield the station.
"Vermin. Filthy lizard." Grain shot up to meet him, all twelve of his wings snapping wide, pure blinding white. "You dare barge in here?"
"Hmph." Vermillion bared his teeth, each one longer than the angel was tall. "Long time, little fly. Still crawling for the same master, I see. Except he isn't your master anymore, is he? You're a servant Solarus already threw away — and here you are, puffing yourself up in front of me."
The barb landed clean; Grain's chest went tight around it, the old shame flaring where he'd buried it. "Then let's finish this." He wheeled on his officer. "Mikael — get the angels into formation. Today we dine on Primal Dragon. Ready yourselves!"
"Yes, sir!" Mikael and the angels moved.
Vermillion's lip curled at the sheer gall of it — that this cast-off flock imagined they could carve him up.
But before a single blow fell, the air beside the dragon rippled and Arthur was simply there. At the sight of him, even Grain froze midair.
"...Damn." Sweat sprang along Grain's brow. Vermillion alone was already more than he could handle — and now Arthur stood beside him.
"Vermillion. I've got people inside this station," Arthur said. "You won't be fighting alone."
Vermillion slid him a look. "You're not stepping in yourself?"
"No need. This is well within you." Arthur raised a hand, and a flight of angels led by Scarlet rose out of the station to join them. "Mine. You can trust them."
"...Hoh." Vermillion looked them over, grudgingly impressed. A descendant of Mephista, with angels answering to his call.
"Scarlet!" Grain's face twisted. "You traitor!"
"Traitor?" Her smile didn't waver. "No. I just have no interest in ending up as discarded garbage like you."
Grain had nothing to say to that.
And while he was still groping for it, Mikael — his own trusted second — struck. A blade hissed toward Grain's heart; he twisted clear on instinct, but the edge still drew a hot line along his ribs, white feathers scattering loose into the air between them.
"Mikael—" Grain stared at the blood on his own side, then at the angel who'd drawn it. "You—"
"Forgive me, General." Mikael bowed his head, but the sword didn't lower.
"Why!?"
"The moment you were willing to spend the lives of Solarus's own faithful just to stop Arthur, I understood." Mikael's voice stayed low, almost gentle. "All that talk of pure faith, of devotion — it's worth nothing. Not to you. You'd throw your own followers into the fire without blinking, and call it duty. That was when I knew Scarlet had the right of it."
Grain's teeth ground together. "So you're a traitor too. Same as her."
"Yes." Scarlet's smile widened. "And I've been working on him this whole time, General."
Watching the thing come apart from the inside, even Vermillion was caught off guard. That Arthur had reached this deep — turned the Solarus faction's own core against itself, here in the heart of their strength.
"Well then. The rest is yours, everyone." Arthur's smile went cold, and between one breath and the next he was gone, teleported out.
What followed couldn't rightly be called a battle.
It was a rout. Grain's side folded almost the instant it began, swept apart so cleanly that for a moment the sky above the station lit up like fireworks.
And with that, Altair Station passed into Arthur's hands.
Which meant he could finally move as he pleased — including pulling out the cast he'd been waiting on for so long, for the film that had sat just out of reach. Avatar.