Deep below Bone Heaven, beneath even the oldest laboratories and secret places, there was a nest.

The Tyrant Lizard King had once been called the King of the Paleo-beasts. According to the Gene Tyrant that had recreated it, the beast had been a relentless and ferocious predator, capable of overcoming nearly any obstacle and devouring nearly any prey. Before it, nearly all other organisms were mere fodder.

The bones of countless Tyrant Lizard Kings lay discarded around the nest, each cleanly stripped of meat. The beast that resided in this quiet place had taken a liking to them. They offered the ideal nutrition and taste for its ancient palate.

Yes… the Tyrant Lizard King could overcome nearly any obstacle, devour nearly any prey…

The purpose of this nests occupant, the final creation of the Gene Tyrant Tyros, had been to eliminate that ‘nearly’. It was a species of one, able to endlessly evolve and adapt to conquer any foe. The paleo-beast perfected -- no, if you asked its creator, it was life perfected.

It was called the Kaiser.

The nest shifted, and the beast emerged. It moved on all fours, arms and legs muscular and long, but it could shift to a bipedal stance if it felt the need. Its head was covered in spines and scales, but no eyes -- there was no need for eyes. It had already developed far more efficient ways to perceive the world around it.

It parted its lips slightly, revealing rows upon rows of tightly packed, razor-sharp teeth. A barbed tongue tasted the air. Something had caught the interest of the Kaiser.

As it continued to move, the nest shifted, and the piles of bones slid down the edges of the hill. Not all of this matter belonged to the Kaiser's prey -- most of it actually belonged to the Kaiser itself. When it shifted form, taking on new traits to survive, it often shed skin, bones and muscles as required.

Once, this had been incredibly painful, but the Kaiser had long since adapted to the pain.

Emerging fully from the pile of the past, the Kaiser rose to two feet, snout pointed upwards towards the roof of the cavern. It did not sniff. It did not search. It had already spotted exactly what it was looking for.

The Kaiser had been given one directive, one purpose -- one biological imperative that its blood screamed out for.

Overcome obstacles.

The greatest of obstacles had already presented itself.

It would be a mistake to say that the Kaiser was happy. Its brain did not possess the capacity for such emotions -- and if it did, they would swiftly have been adapted away. But, all the same, the light shifted…

…and the Kaiser seemed to grin.

“Keep him under pressure!” the hunter roared, firing off another volley of arrows. “Don't let him get close!”

Dragan weaved through the projectiles, his legs vanishing into Aether and granting him flight. It wasn't just his legs -- many useless internal organs were recorded away for the time being, reducing his weight and granting him greater maneuverability. The amount of Dragan Hadrien that truly existed in this world changed from second to second.

The final arrow scraped past Dragan's face, leaving a thin cut. He clicked his tongue in displeasure, floating over the street -- even with Dragan's speed and flight, the hunter was quickly adapting.

His face was familiar. Dragan had gone over every one of the contestants in this Melee before arriving -- and that information was quickly pulled out of his Archive.

Hazmuth. No known surname. A famous big game hunter, specializing in deadly and unique beasts. Gene Tyrant leftovers and the like. Now he was aiming to become Supreme -- or, more likely, aiming to hunt down other Supreme hopefuls.

Dragan flipped in the air -- vanishing entirely into Gemini World for a moment as a hail of jigsaw pieces sliced through space. He reappeared down in the gutter, already firing a series of Gemini Shotguns upwards, annihilating quite a few of the pieces… but they were drops in the bucket.

The jigsaw woman was called Mackenzie Mahaire. Apparently, that unusual body of hers was the result of exposure to a dangerous Aether Armament in her youth. The pieces she disassembled into were sharp and strong enough to cut through steel -- Dragan didn't want to risk direct contact. Right now she'd disassembled her entire body, too, so there was no external user to take aim at.

“Oh spirits…” muttered a soft voice from the end of the street. “Accept my apology, accept my reverence, accept my offered vengeance… reach down into the ground and grasp the spine of holy retribution…”

Dragan narrowed his eyes.

Victor Nezhel -- another former member of the Final Church. A gravekeeper who'd suddenly abandoned his post and made his way to the Supremacy, entering the Dawn Contest in a frenzy. A midlife crisis, maybe, or something more?

Dragan supposed it didn't matter -- Victor was gravely mistaken if he thought he was in the middle of his life.

Right now, he had bigger concerns. The arrows Hazmuth was loosing and the jigsaws flying at him. Their assault was constant, keeping him on the defensive, preventing him from going after Victor -- and the ability he was obviously setting up.

Usually, projectiles like this would be no problem. He'd just record them into Gemini Shotgun and fire them right back. Only… Gemini Shotgun wasn't working. These attacks were seemingly immune to it.

Dragan understood when it came to the jigsaws -- they were basically Mackenzie's body spread thin, and so he'd have to use Gemini Dominion if he wanted to capture them. Recording a few jigsaws would be a waste of time and energy, but he could do it if he wanted to.

The arrows, though? That made far less sense. They definitely weren't part of Hazmuth's body, and their paths were simple and easy to predict. There should have been no problem -- and yet Gemini Shotgun failed to record them.

Why? An ability?

Under these circumstances, Dragan had little chance of figuring out the particulars -- the important part was that he couldn't record them. He needed only move with that in mind.

What an unlucky man Hazmuth was. He'd pushed himself right to the top of Dragan Hadrien's list.

Hazmuth wouldn't be able to keep this up for long.

He'd figured it out, watching this Cogitant pursue the biker from a distance. The young man's abilities were all based on recording. He recorded his body to avoid attacks and move quickly through the battlefield. Watching that, Hazmuth had made a wager.

If he could record himself, then surely he could record other things, couldn't he? So normal projectiles would most likely be useless.

Only… in order to record something, you had to understand it. Its structure, its nature. That created an opening. Hazmuth could transfer the properties of his slain prey to his arrows, filling them with contradictory characteristics. An arrow with no legs that was simultaneously a corpse on four legs… essentially, an attack that could not be understood, could not be recorded.

When he'd fired that arrow through the Cogitant's palm, Hazmuth knew he'd found a weakness.

It seemed the enemy had realized that as well. Hazmuth sniffed -- and the electric tang of the Cogitant's Aether was suddenly coming from beneath him, beneath the ground. Immediately, he leapt up onto the nearest building, narrowly avoiding the geyser of blue light that obliterated the street below.

The enemy had two forms of ranged attack, from what Hazmuth had observed. Both involved returning objects he'd recorded at greater speeds. The first form, the one the Cogitant had used in his initial bombardment and that maneuver just now, was obscenely powerful -- but the firing sequence took a few seconds, allowing for escape. The second form, the one he was using the most, was weaker but fired instantly.

‘Weaker’, of course, was relative. If Hazmuth suffered a direct hit, it would still be enough to kill him.

The Cogitant appeared next to Hazmuth's new perch in a flash of blue Aether, immediately swinging his leg at the hunter’s chest. Hazmuth whipped out his machete from his side, deflecting the Aether-infused limb and raining down sparks. He didn't have time to celebrate -- right away, Hazmuth ducked down, avoiding a shot from the Cogitant's Aether that surely would have decapitated him.

Taking on the enemy in close range like this, Hazmuth could tell -- his strength was mostly in his long-range attack. While he had a level of competence in martial arts -- and his infusion boosted that further -- close combat was by no means his forte. Just now, it hadn't been too difficult to block that attack.

Hazmuth lunged in, swinging his machete at the Cogitant's throat, the smile of the hunt spreading across his lips.

It was short-lived.

Gemini Dominion.

There.

As expected, the world around Hazmuth suddenly changed -- the ruins of Bone Heaven replaced by the stark white of an unnatural plane. Surreal and absurd architecture stretched up into the sky above, while below yawned an empty void. This was not a place that could exist in the real world.

Hazmuth held his machete up, vigilant for the attack he knew would soon come.

That biker had surely been taken to this same place, and -- once here -- beaten until he was unable to withstand those last few headbutts. Hazmuth couldn't blame his brief and fallen comrade: an ability like this was difficult to deal with if you weren't expecting it. It was only because Hazmuth had been taken inside second that he had the opportunity to defend himself.

Powers such as this, that transported the target to another ‘world’, mostly worked in one of two ways. Either an Aether construct was erected around the target, entrapping them in a ‘bubble’ of sorts -- or the target was recorded into Aether themselves, and then placed inside a simulated reality. This seemed to be the second.

Hazmuth had once seen a man who could drag others into an otherworldly forest and drag that forest out into reality, but exceptions like that were thankfully rare.

The point was, this wasn't a real location. That didn't mean Hazmuth could take things easy, though. The biker had undoubtedly sustained injuries in this place -- so whatever damage his simulated self suffered would be transferred to his real body when the ability ended.

Hazmuth was sure that the same caveat didn't apply to the ability's user. If that was the case, he could do nothing more than defend himself and wait for the ability to end.

Only… he really should have been attacked by now. Hazmuth lowered his machete slightly and looked, listened, felt. There was no denying it.

He was alone.

With each punch, Dragan smashed a jigsaw piece into a splatter of gore. With each kick, he shattered whatever bones remained within them. With each bite, he tore their skin to shreds.

And still it wasn't enough.

When he captured a target within Gemini Dominion, he didn't necessarily have to go in there with them. He'd captured Hazmuth and taken him out of play for a while -- giving him time to focus on the jigsaw woman. Depending on the potency of his Aether and how much he actively resisted, Hazmuth could be gone from anywhere from thirty seconds to thirty minutes. It would likely be on the shorter end of that scale, so Dragan couldn't waste time.

He leapt through the air, twisting his body to avoid the flurry of flying jigsaws, wincing as their edges sliced at his skin.

An ability like Gemini Dominion -- recording an unwilling target like that -- wasn't easy to pull off. Needless to say, there were conditions. In order to capture someone in Dominion, they needed to move either directly towards or away from him in a straight line for a distance of two meters. That was the basic activation requirement.

After activating Gemini Dominion, Dragan had to immediately decide whether he went in there with the target or remained outside -- he couldn't switch halfway through. Usually, he would enter Dominion along with them to take out groups one-by-one, but in this case he didn't want to give them time to set up a trap in the real world.

That was why he was here, weaving through jigsaws, risking death. So long as Gemini Dominion was active, Dragan couldn't use any other abilities in the outside world. No World, no Shotgun, no Railgun. All he had access to was basic Aether usage.

He'd make it work.

Skidding on his heel, Dragan turned towards the building next to him -- some sort of transport hub, once connected to a monorail that no longer existed. The jigsaws whizzed by, dangerously close, one getting lucky and slicing off Dragan's right ear. It dropped to the ground in a splat of blood, but Dragan paid it no mind.

After Dragan had finished off David Divine, Mackenzie had fully disassembled herself, clearly worried he'd go after her next. It was a good move. Going after just a few of these jigsaw pieces would be useless…

…but Dragan knew that was what she wanted him to think.

With an ability like this, splitting herself into countless pieces, there had to be a drawback. For one, he assumed the individual pieces couldn't move too far away from each other -- that's why they remained in a general ‘cloud’ shape. Otherwise, she'd have sent some away from the fight just in case.

Secondly… Mackenzie Mahaire was by no means an Aether master. She'd used this unusual ability of hers to get far, but she herself was just about average. Her ability had to have a drawback -- a core, maybe? One of the pieces contained her consciousness, and destroying it would kill her? It seemed likely.

All he needed to do, then, was identify that piece.

Pinpoint Aether, electric blue, flooded into Dragan's fist as he slammed it into the wall before him. The building exploded in a hail of rubble and dust -- and at the very same instant, Dragan let out an Aether ping. He contained it to the immediate area, so he could defend himself quickly afterwards, but it was still more than enough to scan the cloud of jigsaw pieces.

There.

A single piece that, rather than lunge in for the attack, hesitated a moment -- faltered a moment -- stopped a moment. Faced with that sudden display of strength, it hung back. It hung back because it knew that, if it was destroyed, it was all over.

Mackenzie Mahaire was a coward, after all.

To the untrained eye, Dragan's movement would have been nothing but a flash of blue. To the trained eye, it was much more absurd.

In the moment before the rubble he'd sent flying hit the ground, Dragan kicked off. He leapt from chunk to falling chunk, each jump shattering the stone beneath him. He used a staircase that existed just for an instant…

…and before that instant was over, he was holding that fatal jigsaw piece between his hands.

A panicked green eye stared at him from the surface of the jigsaw, pupil flicking this way and that in search of nonexistent escape. The other jigsaws, commanded as one, surged towards Dragan desperately. They span through the air towards his back, ready to slice at flesh and bone the second they made contact.

But it was too late.

“Two,” said Dragan -- and he tore the thing in half.

Right after that, four things happened in very rapid succession.

Victor Nezhel twisted the shovel he'd planted into the ground, green smoke-like Aether pouring forth from the hole. He opened his eyes, and they were two empty black pits. He smiled, and his teeth were dark as tar.

Gravestones began to appear, protruding from walls, floors and ceilings en-masse, like a sudden and morbid forest. A chill went down Dragan's spine as the green smoke began to revolve around them. Whatever Victor had been cooking, it was ready.

Blue Aether flashed as Hazmuth reappeared, falling through the air. He aimed his bow right at Dragan even as he fell. A hunter couldn't resist such prey.

And, finally, countless green and decrepit hands burst out of the ground around Dragan, grasping him tight…

…and pulling him down.

Scratch that -- five things happened.

“Shit,” said Dragan Hadrien.