"...Also," Luz continued after letting her dramatic declaration of friendship and mutual support hang for a moment, "you sort of left this behind when you flew off."
She then held up what was unmistakably Anne's shoe.
Anne looked down to confirm and gave a long-suffering sigh. "Please tell me I don't have leaves in my hair," she said as she took her shoe back.
"Well you did fly through a tree on your way out," Luz noted, which made Marcy take a closer look at Anne and realize something.
"It's weird how the leaves and twigs are always in the same place," she observed. "You think it has something to do with the gem power?"
"...If we manage to get a working portal to Amphibia, I'm shaving my head and gluing my shoes on," Anne said in frustration as she tried to get her shoe back on in a hurry. "Or just going without, but that's probably a bad idea in a swamp."
"...You know," Sasha began, "I never did question why you were walking around with just the one shoe. That can't have been good for your hips."
"I'm fine," Anne replied. "The worst that happened in Amphibia was all the cavities I somehow got from a bug-based diet... Dang it, now I want pillbug pancakes."
"Are those good?" Luz asked.
"Seriously, you'd be surprised how good bug-based food can be once you get used to it," Anne replied.
"I don't think I would, like I said when I tried those cicada cookies I eat even worse," Luz continued. "Like, some of the food in the demon realm would give normal people nightmares and the only hard line I draw is eating fairies."
"As fascinating and disturbing as this discussion is, ladies," Mr. X interrupted, "we are in the middle of an alien invasion, and if you're able to help..." He looked at Luz. "What is it that you do again?"
"I'm a witch," Luz replied. "Pretty strong one. My 'specialty' is elemental magic with glyphs but I'm also pretty good at healing, construction, oracle, and beast keeper magic. I know some other stuff too but—"
"Pretty sure she's technically a god," Anne interrupted. "Like, she got gifted the power of the big-name god of an entire dimension a little bit ago."
"...Yeah," Luz said with an awkward laugh and a hand at the back of her head. "I um... Don't really like to think of myself that way, but yeah. My friends are all witches, too, and my girlfriend is also a Valkyrie."
"Okay, we can work with that."
The next extended bit of time was spent bringing Luz's friends into the bunker and going over what was happening.
The good news was that a number of superhero teams were coordinating with authorities to deal with the invasion, including but not limited to the Avengers, the X-Men, the Great Lakes Avengers(who were not actually affiliated with the Avengers, there was some interesting legal stuff there,) and the Guardians were in the galactic neighborhood and had swung by becuase one of the Novas called in a favor.
"We're also receiving international aid," Nick Fury added, "Excalibur is in the state working at the ground level. We received an offer from Japan as well but when we followed up on it... Apparently, no one has heard from Big Hero 6 since 2014."
The bad news was, now that the Core had confirmed where Marcy was the entirety of its highjacked Phalanx army was barreling down on this general area. Now, some people would call that a target-rich environment, but still.
Right now, things were being coordinated so that everyone's skills would be used optimally once they were out, who was paired up with who, and the like before the bulk of the forces got there, which didn't involve everyone directly so Luz too the time to fill everyone in on what she'd learned about the goings on of Amphibia while she was walking The Witches' Road. Marcy was saddened to hear about Andrias but... At least everyone else was doing okay.
And then... the anticipation got to her. She didn't understand why she was so scared. She hadn't been this scared fighting the Core the first time... But then again she might have still been running on adrenaline and excitement from having cool anime powers and fighting alongside Anne and Sasha.
"Does the core have a house you can seize ownership of?" Luz asked spontaniously.
"Not on Earth, no," Marcy said, confused about where this was going.
"Shame. Speaking from personal experience when the trauma gets to me real bad knowing that we've claimed the guy who hurt me's childhood home as a clubhouse kind of helps," Luz replied. "They say the best revenge is living well and if that's the case then it must be burning Belos pretty bad that a bunch of witches are having fun in what used to be his house and that's a thought that keeps me warm at night when I have trouble sleeping."
"Pretty sure that the meaning behind the phrase is that you're just living your life without thinking about them," Anne noted.
"Yeah but trauma doesn't really work that way," Sasha added. "Wounds heal and scars fade but you never really forget being hurt that badly and sometimes your abuser casts a long shadow. As long as you're not living your life to spite them I don't see how there's anything wrong with acknowledging that the things that are going good in your life would piss them off and take a bit of satisfaction in that."
Marcy laughed. Just a small chuckle, but "the minds that make up the Core... They were afraid of becoming irrelevant, of being outlived, of being obsolete. The fact that everything is better without it, that people are living their lives outside of their rigid control..." She trailed off. "And it's not working."
Anne patted Marcy on the back. "It's gonna be okay. We can get through this together."
"Yeah, I just," Marcy began, "I just need to hype myself up for the fight."
That seemed to inspire Anne, somehow. The Thai girl got up and approached Mr. X. "Hey, back at the battle of LA when I was starting to lose steam... You don't have something like that set up here, do you?"
"Girl, we've got something like that set up everywhere," Mr. X replied. "And we pre-emptively secured the rights to, well, a lot of stuff just in case."
"How much taxpayer money did you spend on that?" Nick Fury asked.
"How much taxpayer money did youspend poaching that platypus?" Mr. X deadpanned back.
"Hey, I was skeptical at first too but he gets results, damn it!"
Marcy decided that maybe it would be better not to ask.
"Anyway, Anne, what do you need?" Mr. X continued.
"Marcy needs a little something to help with her nerves," Anne replied. "Something... Hmm, Mar-Mar, does something to remind you of the sorts of things we all learned living in Amphibia work?"
"I guess?" Marcy agreed. One of these days she needed to ask Anne how the Frogvasion went down from her perspective. Marcy missed it all, being trapped in her own mind at the time.
"...Something about how you all learned to live?" Mr. X asked. "Marcy, I understand you're something of a gamer... How do you feel about platformers?"
"Right next to JRPGs for my favorite genre, why?"
The agent smiled but didn't answer.
TLOA
Outside. Outside where everyone was on lockdown. Outside where a bunch of other heroes, including Luz and her friends, had already gone off to fight the armor of frogbots whose numbers blotted out the sun... Anne, Sasha, and Marcy were probably the most powerful people who'd assembled so far, and as they had experience with this foe in particular... It's a lot of pressure but... Marcy held her girlfriends' hands tight. They were together, they could get through this, and then they could... Well, as far as Marcy knew none of them had had their first proper on-the-mouth kisses with each other yet so if they could figure out how to do a three-way victory smooch, that might be nice.
Speaking of smooches, Marcy was shaken from her thoughts by receiving one on each cheek from each partner. "You ready to do this?" Anne asked.
"As ready as I'll ever be," Marcy answered.
No sooner had she said that than a whole bunch of speakers began to manifest out of various light poles and other municipal fixtures. Then the music started, most notably a rocking guitar riff that Marcy recognized almost immediately. It certainly did the job of getting her pumped up for the fight. She and her two partners drew on their powers and transformed before exploding upwards, soaring off into the sky as the lyrics began.
"Can you fe~el life, movin' through your mind...?"
The Core's forces didn't stand a chance. As the iconic music played, Marcy and her girls destroyed them. Dice, pompoms, cats, frogs, toads, newts, and energy constructs of every shape and size were used to clear out techno-organic frogbots and space bugs by the dozens—no, the hundreds. As Marcy realized that the coolest, most anime thing to ever happen to her could just be her life if that's what she wanted, without having to sacrifice living in reality... It felt good.
As she got into the mood, she even experimented with conjuring a couple of energy spears to skewer some enemies. It was... Appropriate, after all.
Of course, they weren't the only ones out fighting. Marcy noticed Luz in her God Form blasting a bunch of them apart with some kind of super scream, her fiancée in full golden armor and flying on lavender wings with her sweet guitar lying riffs that resulted in massive fireballs that toasted bots in big batches before they came together and spun around, drawing a massive pink-and-purple circle that created a large blast of technicolor flames that cleared the sky. Dozens of Luz's glowing glyphs then appeared and countless bolts of various elemental effects picked off all the stragglers in their area.
"So are you like, the Demon Realm's Sorcerer Supreme or something?" Marcy asked as she flew over briefly.
"Nope," Luz replied. "Trust me I'm not that good."
"She's the closest thing we've got," Amity insisted.
No time to follow that up though, so Marcy dashed off to help deal with more bots. As she did so she saw others fighting: Luz's other friends were using their magic to support an FBI cleaner crew and a guy in a blue and red costume took an energy blast for a SHIELD Agent, very clearly dying from a sudden case of hole-in-chest, then get back up like nothing happened.
"Not gonna lie, kind of jealous of that and I don't like it," Marcy mused to herself. Something to bring up in therapy.
As the song came to a climactic finish, Marcy reunited with her loves and one last tri-colored blast cleared up almost all of the remaining frogbots. What few still remained began to flee into the sky as everyone regrouped. Everyone Marcy had already seen today was there, as were Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch, a 2D knockoff of Mister Fantastic, a walking tree, and a couple of other people who didn't seem distinct enough to make special note of at the time.
Marcy was about to ask if they should go after them when she noticed red tron-lines going up one of Luz's arms, which had otherwise become a metallic black. She pointed, shouting "Luz is infected!" The techno-organic, or transmode, virus was insidious, infected both organic life and machinery alike and turning all into either more phalanx, prey for the technarx, or something else along those lines. Sure, it came with power, but it also came with horrible pain, bodily dysphoria, and eventual loss of identity in favor of cold machine logic driven to kill or infect things around them: There's a reason why the phalanx were colloquially called robo-zombies. Only absurdly powerful, god-tier healing factors or some ability that would let the victim absorb the virus outright could save one from that fate and...
...And Luz looked at her arm, annoyed, and said "Again?" and with a look of concentration the lines tracing up her arm retreated, her metal turning back into flesh, until all traces of the infection were gone. "That's the fifth time."
You could hear a pin drop. "I am Groot?" the tree man asked.
"No clue," Luz replied. "The first time I panicked and started writing my last will and testament in my head before some part of me got angry that something was in my body without permission again and I sort of forced it back out. Each time I got infected it got easier, too... Weird that I'm the only one who seems to be getting infected... I don't know if it's a symbiote thing or a Titan thing or both but it's pretty convenient..."
"I am Groot?" the tree man followed up.
"...I think being a Titan gives me the All-Speak?" Luz answered again unsurely. "Not 100% sure on that though. Anyway, while we're here... Is Rocket an actual raccoon or is he an alien that looks like a raccoon?"
"Guys," Anne interrupted, "not to be a buzzkill but I don't think we're done here."
She was pointing up into the sky where something glowing and red was forming in the far distance.
"...Anne," Marcy said, "promise me that this won't end like last time."
"It literally can't, Doctor Strange said the powers are stuck with us this time," Anne replied. "But I get what you mean. Still, we should probably get up there."
With just a moment to breathe, the three girls shot off into orbit just in time to see the last techno-organic ship deform and merge into a facsimile of Amphibia's artificial moon, no traces of anything Phalanx-related anywhere else.
"Classic blunder," Marcy noted. "Pulling all resources from the hivemind into a single body, supposedly more powerful but in practice it's just a bigger target. For an amalgamation of the greatest minds in Amphibia, the core can be pretty dumb."
"What do you expect? This thing is like, the Ultimate Boomer," Sasha deadpanned. "Despite being literally thousands of years too old for that. It's like, the literal embodiment of entitled old people making their issues everyone else's problem, and that whole 'greatest minds' thing is probably something it made up itself to soothe its ego after losing a game of bog jump or something."
"So I take it that you're the experts on this thing?" came a woman's voice as the trio was approached by one of the heroes who had been in space fighting the orbiting Phalanx forces. Captain Marvel. Also approaching, Marcy noted, were Thor, the Vision, Iron Man in one of his more heavy-duty suits—that was a lotof guns on his shoulders, a man in a space suit holding a sci-fi pistol, a raccoon-like thing in a similar space-suit holding a much larger pistol... Like, larger than the guy holding it, Phoenix, and the entire Nova Corps.
...That last bit would have been more impressive if the Nova Corps wasn't just two dudes, one of whom wasn't much older than Marcy. They apparently had a very bad problem with turnover.
"Yeah, that's us... Now if this is anything like last time, it dies if you blast it hard enough so—"
"Fools!" The Core shouted. "This form may be smaller than our original Moon-Self, but it is far, far more powerful than we ever were before. It took the full might of the Calamity Gems to even temporarily vanquish us. Nothing can stop us now!"
"One thousand," Iron Man declared.
A golden bubble covered in glyphs shot up from the Earth and burst to reveal Luz and Amity. "Are we late?"
"No," the armored hero replied. "You're just in time to help show this hunk of junk what they've won."
Marcy took the initiative: "Light 'em up!"
Assorted blasts of every shape and size, from cosmic power to solar light to fire and lightning to plasma and other things besides, fully engulfed the mechanical mini-moon. A full thirty seconds passed before the light show cleared, revealing the total destruction of the construct... But it wasn't done yet, as inside a tiny forcefield was Darcy's helmet, seemingly untouched by the techno-organic infection.
With impossible speed, it shot back down to the planet below, and Marcy in instinct chased it down.
It landed in front of her family's new house, of all places, but it landed hard, the force field breaking as it did so and it stumbled on spindly legs as she landed before it and glared at it with all the killing intent she could muster.
"So, Marcy, we think we got off on the wrong foot today," it said in the most nonchalant tone it could manage, which wasn't a lot. "But think of what we could accomplish together. The power, the wealth, countless galaxies in the palms of our hands."
"You hurt me," Marcy said. "You hurt me, you hurt Andrias, you made Arias hurt me, you hurt all of Amphibia, and worst of all," Marcy said as she stepped on the helmet that was all that was left of the core. "You almost took Anne away from me."
"No, Marcy, think about what you're doing! If you destroy us that countless millennia of Amphibia's knowledge will be lost."
"In a messed up way, you even hurt yourself," Marcy continued as she channeled power into her armored foot. "A long line of monarchs, all groomed to have their minds uploaded and added to you... I can't imagine that most of them were exactly good people if Aldrich was anything to go by, but I have to imagine that a lot of them were like Andrias, too... Maybe even Aldrich was his father's Andrias? But they didn't have anyone to help them stand up to you. That's all you really are. Just... You're like if someone put a face on the cycle of abuse, aren't you? So it'd be best for everyone..."
"No, no, no... No! Marcy don't!"
Marcy pressed down as hard as she could, releasing her power as she did so. The helmet shattered and the shockwaves obliterated the shards. Not even dust was left. "If you stay dead this time."
Anne and Sasha landed behind her. "Marcy?" Sasha asked. "You okay?"
"Yeah. I'm gonna be just fine."