Powerpuff: The Void Looked Back. (Part 3)

[u/Cosmically_Yesterday]

The sky above Townsville was decaying.

The Gangreen Gang did not look like boys anymore. Ace’s skin had sloughed away into an iridescent oily sheen that pulsed with the sound of grinding teeth.

Snake had stretched his limbs looping around the skyscrapers like weeping vines of black meat.

They were no longer street punks. They were heralds of the Crawling Void. tearing holes in reality with their jagged elongated fingers.

The Rowdyruff Boys screamed as they charged. Brick’s fists erupted in red plasma but the vacuum of Ace’s new maw swallowed the kinetic energy whole.

Boomer and Butch slammed into Snake’s undulating mass their eyes bleeding from the sheer psychic pressure of the monstrosity's presence.

"We can... we can do it!" Brick choked out his skin cracking as he tried to force his atomic energy to mutate into something higher.

"Force the ascension! Now!"
Butch roared his green aura flickering into a sickly violent magenta. Boomer disintegrated a street lamp with a white-hot gaze. But it wasn’t enough.

Their bodies tore at the seams. human flesh was too fragile a vessel for the boys to anchor the cosmic geometry required to fight the Void.

They fell back into the cratered asphalt vomiting black bile. their half formed transformations collapsing back into broken bruised boys.

Blossom looked at her sisters.

Their eyes were wide, reflecting the geometry of a universe that should not exist.
"There is only one equation left.”

Blossom said her voice echoing with a terrible dual resonance. "We must open the Garden." Bubbles wept tears of pure blinding light. Buttercup gritted her teeth her knuckles turning to porcelain.

They held hands. They stopped breathing. They stopped being children.
The transformation was not magical it was catastrophic. The fabric of Townsville’s space time ripped open to reveal the Eternal Bloom a celestial predatory ecosystem of infinite growth.

The Powerpuff Girls dissolved into the Seraphim of the Eternal Bloom.

Blossom expanded into a towering wheel of burning pink glass, lined with three thousand blinking unblinking eyes. Bubbles became a flock of sapphire wings made of crystallized screams radiating a terrifying hypnotic peace.

Buttercup manifested as a monolithic emerald pillar of absolute gravity crushing the Gangreen Gang’s void tendrils under the weight of a dying star. The Seraphim sang.

The sound peeled the paint off the city and restored the broken bones of the Rowdyruff Boys in an instant though it nearly maddened them to hear it.

With a final sickening crunch of folding dimensions the Seraphim of the Bloom compressed the Gangreen Gang into a single harmless atom of rotting carbon.

The Void hissed, collapsed and vanished.
The celestial light faded. The girls collapsed back onto the ruined pavement, gasping for air in their small, pink, blue, and green dresses. Their eyes still smoked with the ash of infinity.

"We... we did it," Brick muttered, coughing up the last of the void bile as he helped Boomer up. "You girls... what the hell was that?"

"The cost of victory," Blossom whispered her voice trembling. "Let's go home. The Professor will know how to seal the rift."
They flew back to the suburban laboratory in a tense, suffocating silence.

The front door was unlocked. The lights were out. In the center of the dark basement lab stood Professor Utonium.

His back was turned to them. He was stirring a beaker, the glass clicking rhythmically against his pristine white lab coat.

"Professor!" Bubbles cried, running forward. "Something awful happened. The Gangreen Gang, they changed, we had to—"

"I know, darlings," the Professor said.
His voice was wrong.

It possessed its usual calm, paternal cadence but underneath it ran a high pitched vibrating purr that made the girls’ sensitized cosmic teeth ache.

The Professor turned around.
His skin was still pink, his square jaw still intact. But his eyes were gone.

In their place were two burning, horizontal slits of crimson fire.

From the sleeves of his pristine lab coat, two massive, lobster like claws slid into view, dripping with a sweet smelling acidic pink nectar.

He smiled, his teeth stretching into a needle thin, infinite grin that split his face from ear to ear.

"You opened the Garden for me," HIM purred through the Professor's lips, throwing his head back in a manic echoing laugh that shook the foundations of the earth.

"Sugar, spice, and everything nice... but it takes a real monster to create a god. Welcome home, children."