Parasite

**Parasite** is the thirty-ninth episode of Reflection.

*The finale approaches! The Beleth arc comes to an explosive head with an appearance by the 4th Tormented in the flesh! OPIA engages in a life or death battle against the man who rejects the flame!*

## Summary

In a strange extradimensional labyrinth, Ridill Arondite chases an alien creature through a series of spatially warped trapdoors. Meanwhile, within the warped corridor of space at the center of Beleth, Mic feels the presence of something threatening on the horizon before being attacked by a boar. Up in the Sylt Islands, Treble receives footage of Eternity's attack on Trailhead as she and her forces are shelled by Logic. Back in Beleth, Willow and Ace continue to engage Eternity. Ace teleports away to receive more Flame from Lyst in exchange for letting her tag along when he teleports back. Basil rushes deeper in to Trailhead to get to Stein before Eternity does. After helping some civilians and restoring his Flame, Ace attempts to leave without Lyst but she grabs on to him at the last second. Further north, Cal also assists civilians. Willow continues to fight Eternity one-on-one, interrogating him about his motivations. He reveals that he sees Flame as fundamentally parasitic, and the humans created by it to be cheap imitations of the "real" humanity. Willow attempts to debate him on these points, but is mostly unsuccessful. Ace and Lyst drop in and continue the fight. Over the course of the fight, Ace realizes that Eternity is literally incapable of seeing or hearing most Flame-based phenomena. Willow manages to hold on to Eternity with Grasp the Earth, the added weight digging into his flesh and revealing mechanical parts underneath. Willow comments that Eternity is even less "human" than she is, which causes him to freeze in anger, giving Lyst an opportunity to act on Ace's realization and stab him through the neck. This only serves to push Eternity to take the fight more seriously, encasing most of Trailhead in a barrier of his power that will immediately kill anyone it touches.

In the Godsblood laboratory beneath Beleth, Stephano and Septi inspect the tear in reality. Septi attempts to convince Stephano to follow him inside and see what's out there in the Astral Sea, but Stephano's duty prevails and he refuses to. Septi accepts this, thanks him for the company, and leaves. After some time, the Golden Knight makes it to the laboratory and comes up to sit next to Stephano, who lets him, but is somewhat cold towards him. Back in Trailhead, Basil makes it to Stein's location only to find most of the people inside dying from Eternity's power. She briefly hallucinates an exchange with Planned Obsolescence Unit 03 where he declares his new mission to drive her insane like he did to Upwind in the past. Basil returns to reality and forces herself to decouple her perception of time from its linear flow and imagine her past when she was in Cam's tower in Cialla. She grows to consume the entire hotel within her form and disappears through the Flame trail. However, due to Compulsion's hijacking of teleportation on the surface, she ends up back in the Derelict, where Nectar hurriedly passes her off to Helena before leaving with Laughter. Back in Beleth, Cal manages to get his group of civilians into boats and away from Eternity's barrier before it forms. Sei, who also made it out, notices a rocket hurtling towards Trailhead and decides to go after it. Inside the barrier, Willow, Ace, and Lyst continue to confront Eternity with backup firepower from Arg0s as well as Verona, who arrived earlier in the fight with Cast as well as Arg0s' other body. Unit 04 is also trapped inside the barrier with a member of the Wisp Family she was unable to rescue in time, and they decide to head towards the fight and away from the slowly constricting barrier. The battle grows more chaotic as Eternity summons titans of his power that fire massive disintegrating blasts. Ace runs dangerously low on Flame once again and before he reverts to his bloodlusted state, he commands his body using his remaining Flame to "kill Eternity". Willow pushes Eternity back and attempts to use her "Grasp the Future" ability, but even with the added power Eternity is able to redirect the blows, causing a shockwave that reduces most of Trailhead to rubble.

Elsewhere in Beleth, Sei rushes towards the incoming GEIST missile and attempts to use her Fangs to halt or redirect its approach. Up in Sylt, Treble watches these catastrophes unfold and begins to fashion a Flame signal to call some sort of fighting force to assist. She is interrupted by Tetra, who commands her to stop and not to waste Exulansis resources on a world that isn't going to last. Treble acquiesces as Logic's army fires a white flag of truce onto the beach, followed by a simulacrum of Logic himself who agrees to halt the fighting while Eternity is preoccupied. After he leaves, Treble takes Aura with her to subvert Logic while Melli heads out to execute her own plan to put a stop to the war in Sylt. Back in the ruins of Trailhead, Willow sees a vision through her ESP of an ancient world, where a younger Eternity was worshiped as a god and learned a unique fighting style from a clan of insectoid monks who wished to emulate the perfect stillness he embodied. In the present, he begins to express uncharacteristic glee at being able to actually use that style for the first time in eons. He traps Arg0s' original body in the same labyrinth as Ridill and begins the fight once again. Willow is joined by the now-feral Ace and Saru, who managed to free himself from Eternity's command to "sit and fish". Ace goes in for an attack and Seagazer steps in, briefly dragging Ace and Eternity into her viewing platform and harming Eternity with a deluge of Astral Sea, which also restores Ace to lucidity. The fight continues as Verona, Lyst, and Arg0s's remaining body fire from a distance. 04 and her newfound Wisp companion also aid in the fight. Within Eternity's prison realm, Arg0s undergoes a variety of menial chores until eventually being contacted by Fio, who manages to free him from the prison by dragging his Flame fully into his simulacrum body on the outside. In Sylt, Treble and Aura watch as Logic bombs the ocean floor, opening a massive hole right above Trailhead and flooding most of Beleth, although Treble's ESP stops the flooding from interfering with the battle below. The fight continues as a barely conscious Sei has a flashback to one of her composite memories, an eager researcher from an ancient world who went to the moon to research a growing Flame-based epidemic but died before she was able to effect any change. Mic arrives to heal her but is attacked by Willow's reanimated body.

Back in Trailhead, Ridill, who escaped the prison realm entirely on her own, manifests out of thin air and tells Willow she needs to help Mic and Sei, which she does. High above the rapidly flooding swamp, Treble redirects a warship that fell through Logic's sinkhole and aims it at Trailhead. Ridill then sends Ace high into the sky, where he uses Seagazer to "hack" into the warship's weapons systems and fire all of them directly at Eternity. Ridill helps everybody else escape as the warship comes crashing down on Eternity. Willow appears and fights her own corpse alongside Mic. She uses her ESP to summon Swampzilla and corner her opponent, debilitating her with ease as the crisis in Beleth comes to a close. Some time later, Ace asks around in the Wisp Family home where Lyst and Ridill are. He then gets a call from them that they went off to Gravnir to fulfill a request from Mic. Ace tells them to make sure that his severed Flame is "doing alright."

## Characters

### Player Characters

* Ace Galatine
* Basilisk Id
* Willow Wisp
* Arg0s
* Ridill Arondite

### FLOW

* Ascalon
* Twice
* Lyst Solais
* Aura Pridwyn
* Melli Luxity
* Ruth Galatine
* Charybdis
* Saru
* Helena
* Breach
* Justice

### OPIA

* Dr. Verona
* Mic
* Cast
* Cal
* Isabeau

### Demonic Courts

* Logic
* Pyromancer of Laughter
* Golden Knight
* Nectar
* Stephano
* Sei Miscellany

### Exulansis

* Treble
* Tetra
* Septi

### Other

* Eternity
* Seagazer
* Unit 04
* Grandpa Wisp
* Swampzilla
* Brad Wisp