Chapter 12: Unleashed

## Gallery

*"Is this what you've been waiting for?"*
―Alien X**[src]**
**Chapter 12: Unleashed** is the twelfth chapter of 5 Years Later.

## Plot Summary

Danny, now unraveling, continues to fight Vlad through The Temporal Zone. His power and skills rapidly amplify, including his ability to clone himself, which impresses but irritates Vlad.

Meanwhile, Ben as Full Stop restrains Technus to give The Orion Squad an opening to use the Salazar Silencer. A portal opens, and GIR flies through, projecting a magic hologram of Gwendolyn and everyone else currently banished to The Ghost Zone. They inform Ben that he needs to escape with Danny, but Ben refuses, saying he already agreed to stay and finish the battle.

During this conversation, Ben’s hold on Technus begins to slip, so Lula leads the squad down to Technus, but are easily countered by Technus’ mechanical tendrils, which start to dismantle their Orion Knight armor. Crawnch takes the Salazar Silencer and requests GoTro to eject him directly at Technus to manually use the cure. Lula disagrees, saying that being that close to the Dark Matter that is still creeping over Technus’ body could kill Crawnch. Against his internal wishes, GoTro agrees to Crawnch’s command. Crawnch accepts his fate and is ejected onto Technus’ faceplate, where the Nanites enter his system and reverts his Big Ben transformation, freeing the Alternative Ben Tennysons inside the fusion in the process.

Lula informs Ben of Crawnch’s sacrifice. Ben comforts Lula, but is quickly interrupted by GoTro acknowledging Technus and the Alternative Ben Tennyson’s strange glitching. The Bens dematerialize and swirl into Technus, who is also dematerializing into a color-changing sphere of swirling, grainy energy.

Professor Paradox and Clockwork deduce that Technus’ defeat actually created a time rupture. The events that lead up to Future Fenton’s timeline have changed, but Divinity’s influence is preventing the future from changing, creating a paradox. Ben transforms into his Chronosapien transformation – also called Clockwork – to try to diffuse the rupture before it destroys the Temporal Zone.

Lula, still upset about Crawnch’s demise, leaves with GoTro to catch up with Future Fenton in hopes of finding Danny and reverting to his new form. Future Fenton starts to be affected by the rupture, too.

Danny and Vlad continue to battle. Danny fights more aggressively than before to mock Vlad’s ambition for Danny to grow more powerful, but finds he is still playing into Vlad’s hand. Vlad heals himself, and then, after briefly injuring him, heals Danny. This discussion leads to Danny questioning his choices to side with the Heroes, along with being negatively influenced by the dark matter he absorbed in the previous Chapter, which unlocked his current fury awakening. Danny struggles to think straight, but absorbs some of Vlad’s energy, slightly evolving himself further, just as Lula, GoTro, and Future Fenton arrive to restrain Danny.

Ben is about to finish reversing the rupture, but Divinity reappears and rips off Ben’s arm, causing the rupture to grow in size again. Ben uses Atomix to temporarily seal the rupture within a barrier of temporal minerals, but this solution only lasts a moment. Using a variety of transformations, Ben is still unable to defeat Divinity and seal the rupture at the same time, pushing him to his limits.

Vlad and Future Fenton make efforts to sway Danny to their sides, but this only causes Danny’s anxieties to spike further, which cracks the Temporal Zone around them. Danny attacks Vlad, Future Fenton, Lula, and GoTro, commanding them to stop fighting, or he will force them to.

To save the Temporal Zone, Ben succumbs to Divinity’s wishes and transforms into Alien X.

## Details

### Major Events

* Using Danny’s Infi-Map, Gwendolyn sends GIR back to the Temporal Zone to maintain a line of communication with Ben and the others, and hopefully bring them to Clockwork's Tower.
* Battle in the Temporal Zone
	+ Crawnch sacrifices himself to manually use The Salazar Silencer to defeat Technus’ Omni-Chimera form.
	+ Technus’ defeat, combined with Divinity’s Time Lock, creates a time rupture that begins to swallow the Temporal Zone, but is eventually resolved by Alien X.
	+ Danny’s negative influence from his Awakening Form and The Void’s Dark Matter causes him to have less mental control over himself, and erupts waves of Ecto-Energy powerful enough to rip open multiple cracks in the Temporal Zone, revealing many other alternative universes.

### Characters

##### Heroes

* Danny Fenton
* Ben Tennyson
* Future Fenton
* Lula
* GoTro
* Crawnch (death)
* Gwendolyn Tennyson
* Professor Paradox
* Clockwork (Ghost)

#### Villains

* Vlad Masters
* Divinity
* Technus (death)

##### Minor

* Kevin Levin
* Rook Blonko
* Zim
* GIR
* Jungle Ben (death)
* Ninja Ben (death)
* Super Ben (death)
* Experiment 10 (death)

### Transformations

#### By Ben

* Full Stop (x2)
* Clockwork *(5 Years Later Debut)*
* Atomix
* MonKi
	+ Super MonKi
* Buck Wild
* Walkatrout *(5 Years Later Debut)*
* Soarnitho
* Portaler
* Alien X *(5 Years Later Debut)*

## Mythology

* By the end of this chapter, Ben has used every transformation in his Powerhouse Playlist at least once. This also means that every single on-screen transformation from the original *Ben 10 Franchise* now has an official *5 Years Later* design.
* Every Powerhouse Playlist alien was used in this chapter aside from Way Big and The Void. They were not used so that Ben could keep Divinity within his immediate line of sight.
* The rapidly-changing sequence was inspired by *Ben 10 Classic’s* Season 2 Finale *Back with a Vengeance*.
* Full Stop says “Time, huh? Thanks for the tip!” in reference to Hal Jordan’s line against Ben in their Death Battle episode.
* One of Soarnitho’s spells begins with the phrase “Call of Caladrin”. Caladrin was Soarnitho’s DNA source, which was first hinted at in the *And Beyond* episode of Legerdomain.
* When Divinity speaks to Paradox about Danny and Ben, a collection of planets from *And Beyond* are shown behind Alien X. Bellicus and Serena, the other beings inside of Alien X’s head, also make cameos during Divinity’s “vision”.
* *Phantom Hollow*, a project Kuro worked on as a character designer in 2019, appears as one of the many alternative universes that cameo in this chapter.
* Divinity calls Ben “The Oncoming Storm”, the same title Servantis gave him in *Ben 10: Omniverse*.

## Trivia

* Similar to Chapter 4, the fourth wall is broken with a character directly interacting with the comic’s borders. This time, when Portaler and Divinity’s powers intertwine, the force starts to break into the panel’s black bars around them.
* The fourth wall is also broken when Divinity splits Soarnitho’s “drawing layers” from each other, which even exposes Photoshop’s transparency grid.
* Danny’s Belt transforms with him once again, this time into a weapon dubbed the “Hell Hook.”
* Like every Chapter featuring the Temporal Zone, many Easter Eggs can be found floating around the area, including a Twonkie from The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, and Nimbisle, a custom Pokémon by O.R.Ash.
* Walkatrout is the first Non-Powerhouse Playlist transformation used since Atomix in Chapter 8. This also confirms that Ben can still use his entire arsenal, and is not exclusively locked into his Powerhouse Playlist.
* A short promo for this chapter was released, which features the first time Danny is voiced by Scott Frerichs, rather than Nicholas Andrew Louie. Scott will continue to voice Danny in the Motion Comic Adaptation.
* This is the second chapter so far to have a Non-Ink Tank artist contribute to the series, with Action Jack providing additional backgrounds for the Time Cracks, and a handful of Temporal Zone assets.
* On page 50, there are three universes shown, each filled with references.
	+ The first panel shows “The Tanklands” – a special server only accessible by Patrons, but has been showcased publicly a handful of times. Special events take place within that server, along with a history of cosmic lore by Crystalmoon101. Crystal also helped with some VFX and voicework on And Beyond. **You can join The Tanklands here!**
	+ The second panel is a collection of live-action media. This includes: Billy and Elena from *Billy on the Street*, George and Elaine from *Seinfeld*, The 99th Precinct from *Brooklyn 99*, *Key & Peele*, Rebetzel’s Pretzels from *Crazy Ex-Girlfriend*, Alton Brown and Gordon Ramsay, Michael and Janet from *The Good Place*, Ron Swanson from *Parks & Recreation*, and an advertisement featuring Dewey Finn from *School of Rock*. All of these references were from shows or movies Kuro has watched with Eve.
	+ The third panel features Siavash from *Ben 10: Siavash’s Secret* along with Ben and Siti from *Ben 7*, referencing Kuro’s then-recent collaboration with Diamondbolt. The panel also has Pre-Production Ben, Raj from My Name is Raj, and an unidentified fusion of *5 Years Later* aliens.

## References

The *5 Years Later* wiki has a collection of images and media related to ***Chapter 12: Unleashed***.