#werds

And Scion spoke, for the third time since he'd arrived all those years ago, to Taylor and the arrayed capes behind her.

"You cannot fight Me."

Taylor raised the ragged stump of her remaining arm toward a distant collapsed building, and the damaged walls shattered before the gesture was complete.

What pushed out into view was too huge and disturbingly strange, even at a distance. Capes that had stood against endbringers without faltering stared blankly.

The distant rubble swelled and birthed what looked almost like a crayon drawing of the sun, gleaming with spikes, as it pushed up from below. And then mandibles. And compound eyes. And legs.

The giant insect emerging had only the most superficial similarities with the remains of Atlas the teams had used to create it. It was too impossibly, physics-defyingly, sanity-shakingly big to feel like Atlas. It was Colossal in a sense that made the original Colossus a mere bookmark being held next to a skyscraper obelisk.

And it gleamed. The beetle shimmered as if it had been carved--no, as if it had been grown--from some immense fiery opal or glistering diamond.

Fully emerged, it loomed like a storm.

And it moved. Too swiftly, like a glowing marble speeding down a polished ramp. It skittered smoothly forward with uncanny grace on its six legs. As it approached, the back end of the gargantuan dung beetle lifted, pushed upwards by a ball of light that shone with painful, blinding intensity.

And Taylor answered.

"No, but Khepri can."

And Khepri spread her impossibly large wings, and she rose, wobbling with the weight of the magnesium star she carried. Billowing out behind her, clouds of various smaller dung beetles, each with their own projectiles forming beneath them, began the criss-crossing multidimensional precog-blinding aerial dance that so many thinkers, precogs, biotinkers, strangers, case 53s, and others had given up so much to make possible.

~ ~ ~

Taylor mused, as she half watched the bright swirling murmurations of her--no, of humanity's flock, for she'd had to sacrifice most of her own shard to the creation too--that maybe they should have made the offspring themed as locusts, what with all the voracious efficiency they devoured and destroyed everything that connected Scion to his true form. But no matter. It was soon over. They'd won. They'd all worked together, compromising and giving of and from themselves, their shards, and even their lives. And they'd won.

There was cheering. And then the humming of the insects, reminiscent of an orchestral work by Miyake Yu, eased Taylor into satisfied sleep.

As Taylor slept, the Earth's new gods split off in various directions. There were other threats. And those threats would be removed. Humanity would be cared for. Humanity would be treasured. Humanity would be useful.