The monsters were herded in front of the soldiers, who stood, hidden, ready to kill them on the orders of their superiors.

And yet, one of the soldiers was nervous.

His name was James Thompson. Initially, he was happy to join the military. Protecting the people of America was all he wanted to do.

James eagerly consumed what he was told, that monsters were genocidal freaks who were holding back from killing humans long enough to insert themselves into society so they could catch their unsuspecting neighbors off guard, rip them to shreds and take their souls. But looking at the monsters, huddling together pitifully and fearfully, he couldn't help but wonder how they were supposed to annihilate humanity.

As he stepped forward with his comrades, guilt gnawed at him. Are we sure that this is the right thing to do? They're defenseless, for God's sake.

James met the angry glare of one of the monsters, a teenaged goat-like boy wearing a tattered red hoodie with what looked like a bullet hole in it. The monster's eyes raked him mercilessly, judging him in a heartbeat to be beyond forgiveness, and a deep shame and sorrow struck him.

And as he lifted his gun in sync with the others, a thought came to him.

Didn't Hitler use arguments like the ones we were given?

With a short gasp, he lowered his rifle. He was not the only one.

And then his muscles twitched, and the gun came up again.

What? NO!

His gun blazed, cutting down monsters, bullets vaporizing their delicate bodies in heartbeats.
And as it did, as he desperately tried to pull a finger that was no longer his away from the trigger, a voice spoke in his head.

And it said:

Insubordination will not be tolerated. You will kill them with your brethren.

James watched in horror as his body moved on its own, cutting down the defenseless monsters with bullet after bullet.

Who are you? Why are you doing this? demanded James, trying not to break down.

Silence, and then: You may call me the Anomaly. I'm very close to winning the game, and I won't tolerate some useless NPCs who decided to have a change of heart.

One of the monsters had not fallen with the others, the goat in the red hoodie. There was an ethereal green shield surrounding him with smoldering, half-melted bullets lying in front of it. His left eye was blazing yellow; his expression twisted into something both frightening and pitiable.

Suddenly, the shield flickered and dropped away, yet for some reason he looked almost... relieved?

James felt himself stepping forward, legs moving and arms bringing his gun up. "I've got this." he heard himself say in a terrifyingly detached voice. "I've still got several bullets left."

Something blue flickered in the corner of James's vision, rapidly growing larger, but his head refused to turn, focused as it was on the sole surviving monster.

I don't understand. pleaded James. WHY? Why are you doing this?

Why the hell not? came the amused reply as his gun fired.

The first thought Asriel had was How am I not dead? He had heard the gun fire, and there was no way the soldier could have missed.

With a slight growl, he opened his eyes. Dammit, Caleb, if you put up the shield again, I'm gonna-

And then he saw the reason that he was still alive, and he felt his soul crash through his body.

Frisk stood in front of Asriel, arms spread, facing the soldiers, a slight grin on her face. Blood trickled from the hole in her chest, drilled through by a bullet that had been meant for the last surviving monster in the United States of America.

Asriel felt his eyes widen in disbelief. How? Where...? Tears refused to come.

Teetering on her feet, Frisk fell backwards and started to crash to the ground, but Asriel caught her just in time. He tried to say her name, but his throat refused to cooperate.

Frisk was still smiling, even facing death, though it was clearly forced. "Asriel... I..." she managed. "I'm sorry... I shouldn't have... been angry... at you... I just... I... I..."

And then her voice stilled, eyes staring blankly to the sky above.

The soldiers stared in shock at the dead human and the gently quivering monster kneeling beside her, but the one who had stepped up to shoot Asriel kept his gun trained on him. "Get the HELL away from her!" he roared, expression bellicose, the fear in his eyes betraying his assumption of what would come next. "You're not getting her soul!"

That's what you fear, is it? Asriel lifted his head to stare defiantly into the soldier's eyes. You tried to kill us, fearing what might be, and you succeeded.

I wonder how many senseless wars and deaths could have been eliminated if this mindless, mass fear didn't exist.

No sense in wondering what could have been, I guess. Gently Asriel reached out to close Frisk's eyes. There's only what is here and now.

And there's nothing left for me... for us... in this world of death.

Asriel felt his sadness begin to boil away, replaced by burning rage. A cold fire seemed to spread from his amalgam of a soul to the rest of his body, freezing and burning his at the same time.

He could feel his hand moving by itself as it reached out for Frisk's soul, glowing a dim red as it drifted upwards.

AND THERE'S ONLY ONE THING LEFT FOR ME TO DO.

Ignoring the screaming and the guns raising, too late, to fire, Asriel's fingers closed around Frisk's soul.

There was a dim, underwhelmed moment of That's all? before his vision blurred, everything shifting violently around him.

There were panicked screams, but he ignored them in favor of concentrating, feeling the power flow through him, raw magic coursing through his body.

Asriel opened his eyes, and was somewhat surprised to find that he now had three of them, or at least that was what he could infer from his additional visual range. Trying to move his arms, he came to the realization that he now had six of them, huge, clawed behemoths replacing the arms of his weak, young teenage self.

The rest of him had changed as well, that much he could infer from the immense wings folding from behind him, but he wasn't in the mood to analyze his new body.

No.

He was in the mood for retribution.

His lips stretched away from his now-jagged teeth in an insane-looking grin as he summoned fireballs into each hand, catapulting them forward at the soldiers. They didn't even have time to scream before they were incinerated in a flash, skin melting from their skeletons, organs boiling and bursting, blood evaporating in a heartbeat.

There was distant cackling somewhere.

Their souls lifted towards the sky, but Asriel refused to let them go. He clamped down on each soul with magical pseudopods, cracking and fracturing each one till they ruptured, releasing their raw power, and he hungrily took it in.

So... much... POWER.

Asriel couldn't hold on to all that power. He had to release it, but how?

And then he knew.

Bringing his hands together at his chest, Asriel let himself glide higher, higher, until he was hovering above that wretched place.

Looking around, he surveyed the surroundings. A tranquil-seeming forest. Several scattered, small towns. A congested highway.

Farther away, on the horizon, there were a few cities, the largest one probably Boise, filled with humans going about their daily lives, unaware of the holocaust their government had perpetrated right under their noses.

Gathering power into his palms, Asriel slammed it downwards, into the ground.

There was a boom spreading outwards, the shockwave rippling trees, shaking houses, breaking windows, bursting underground pipes, before the blast even hit the ground.

And then it did, and the effects of the shockwave were instantly negated by what came next.

The beam of white energy smashed into the ground, obliterating the death camp and everything around it for miles in a heartbeat and cratering the area immediately beneath Asriel. The new shockwave created by that spread for at least fifty miles in every direction, or so Asriel could infer by the rippling wave that seemed to pass through the ground and everything on it. He could see a plane fall out of the sky at the exterior of the blast zone, managing to pull up just before hitting the ground.

I've barely ventilated any of this power. Asriel mused in a detached tone. Let's rectify that, shall we?

He didn't even bother to attempt to block the power this time, and it poured out of him in a raw rush, smashing into the ground and rushing outwards at a speed faster than even Asriel's augmented eyes could comprehend.

Asriel can't see what's happening here, nor how far the devastation will spread.

Understandable. Despite having absorbed two human souls and taken the power of several more ruptured souls, even his eyes cannot see that far.

But as your omniscient, all-knowing Writer, I can.

So let me tell you exactly what your innocent, fan-favorite goat child has done to this world, shall we?

In less than a second, easily half of Idaho, parts of Oregon, northern Nevada, and Utah collapse under the massive output of magic into an enormous gray crater, made unique by the interesting black patterns spread across it.

Boise, Twin Falls, Sawtooth National Forest, Idaho Falls, even as far away as Salt Lake City and parts of Yellowstone, all lost.

But that's just the crater. We are not even half over.

In your mind's eye, why don't you zoom out from the northwestern United States? Take a more wide look at North America.

A bright speck forms in southern Idaho, blasting away a massive crater and continuing past that, shredding nearly all of the clouds in the western half of the continent to disjointed pieces.

The white blast spreads far, FAR, beyond the crater, annihilating Washington State, Oregon, Montana, California, and all but the farthest east parts of states like the Dakotas, Texas, and Oklahoma. Farther north, southern parts of Canadian provinces like British Columbia and Alberta have been blasted away as well, and some regions along the Mexican border have been vaporized as well.

Cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Vancouver, Las Vegas, Portland, Helena, Denver, Provo, Santa Fe, Phoenix, and everything in between are vaporized beneath the wave, industrial-grade steel liquefying. Skyscrapers seem to melt and collapse, as do their occupants. Brick is dust, mountains are gravel, people are torn apart into miniscule pieces which are then vaporized.

Less than ten seconds have passed, and nearly half of the United States, in addition to a good portion of southwest Canada, have been destroyed beneath the glaring white light, purifying all it reaches.

Don't think that's the end, though. And for those of you chortling because your home is just outside the blast radius, don't count yourself safe just yet.

The shockwave lashes out far past the circle of white fire, blasting away everything in its path. The northern two-thirds or so of Mexico, almost all of Canada west of Ontario, and all of the rest of the United States save the eastern seaboard are toppled in a wave of hot wind moving at several hundred miles per hour. The rest of the continent feels a strong wind, and although many will experience conditions similar to severe sunburn and several windows will be shattered, they will survive.

As for the rest of the world...

The blast of hot wind whipped up tsunamis in the Pacific. Miles high at their source, they travel across the Pacific, losing momentum and height as they go, but by the time the waves reach Taiwan, coastal China, and Japan, they're still at least half a mile high, drowning everything in their path.

It has now been a minute since Asriel's fury was unleashed upon the world. The tsunamis are rolling across the Pacific, and although countries like Japan and China will have some advance warning, islands like Hawaii will be caught completely off guard and become submerged beneath the waves, irretrievable and unfixable.

Devastation roils across the world. Shock and panic finds its way around the world.

It is most advanced in no place other than Camp David, where President Alvar O'Brien will receive the news with much fearful shouting and the beginnings of a nervous breakdown before retreating to his quarters. When he does not emerge for several hours, his guard will open the door and find him slumped over on his desk holding a Glock G43 single stack 9mm pistol. There is a surprisingly small amount of blood. He is the first president to die by his own hand.

The president pro tempore of the Senate, Orrin Hatch, will be notified of the second presidential death in this year and sworn in aboard an armored car in the middle of a large convoy while being shuttled from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where the surviving members of the government were sent following the nuking in Washington DC, on his way to Camp David. Considering the fact that his electorate has now been annihilated and his home state split between a crater's edge and blasted gray wastelands, he likely would have stepped down had O'Brien not killed himself, as do many of his colleagues.

If only you had known that all it would take to get a non-Patriot president into office was to destroy over half of the North American continent in magical white hellfire. Nevertheless, I believe that we can unanimously agree that this should be the end.

Now Asriel has become death, destroyer of worlds. And as the one who caused him to do this, by default, so am I.

This kind of damage can't be undone, even by a reset. Even if Asriel did manage to force a True Reset- which he can't- the trauma to the land and people would not be easily undone. They would be haunted by nightmares of their deaths in the prior timeline for years after the fact, and the soil will be as if it were salted for decades.

You may not be satisfied by this. Understandable. But even if this world is dying, it still has a story to be told, and as is my duty... as it has always been... I intend to tell it.

Asriel lowered himself to the ground, glaring across the charred gray wastelands. Nothing is left. He felt a fierce satisfaction. The crimes of humanity against my people and my family have finally been avenged.

And then a tiny voice made him immediately reconsider everything.

It was barely even a tendril of thought, slowly moving towards his mind. But it came from Frisk's soul, and so he immediately listened to it.

And it said, in a fearful voice, Asriel, what have you done?

Asriel didn't comprehend for a moment, and then as the realization of what he had done in his moment of rage finally sunk in his eyes widened in horror. What... What HAVE I done?

I've ended this world, and everyone on it, including myself.

In a similarly fearful voice to Frisk, Caleb asked, What remains now?

Asriel let his eyes trawl across the barren terrain, and finally, in a tired, regretful voice that carried all the weight of the world on it, replied, "Hence nothing remains but our regrets."

A notification.

The Seraph tore eyes widened in disbelief from the open game window and its scene of utter devastation and forced himself to read the message.

It was from the Anomaly, and it was only three words.

I have won.

Gritting his teeth, the Seraph typed back .You have not won.

Oh? I think I have, brother dearest.

.Asriel still lives, as do Caleb and Frisk within him.

.I am not giving up simply because you tell me to.

.I will find a way to reset, and then I will be the victor.

Do remember the rules of the game. We cannot simply reset whenever we feel like it, only when the circumstances permit it and if the puppets have appropriate amounts of power. Asriel cannot reset. Frisk's soul has lost nearly all of its determination from all the death she experienced, and as for Caleb? While Justice souls do contain some determination, it's not nearly enough to reset the world. Asriel isn't even in the right place to reset!

That was all true, unfortunately. But the Seraph was not about to give up.

.You want to continue the game as well, do you not?

.There's a lot of potential for this world that has not yet been exercised.

.And I can help Asriel through an unorthodox source that you've never even thought of...

The Seraph smiled. He would exist in this world as his true self in addition to his little, independent avatar, after all. He'd made quite sure of that as a failsafe since the beginning.

Surely you aren't referring to the creator?

.Yes, I am.

.I speak of the one who invented the world we use as a plaything, of course, or more accurately his far less empowered counterpart within this world.

.He will aid Asriel in recovering what can be salvaged.

.And you shall not take him.

You want to try to bend the rules? FINE! I CAN BEND THE RULES TOO!

"Of course you can," sighed the Seraph, shoving the Undertale window to the side. "You wouldn't be my little brother if you didn't."

Ignoring the further incensed messages from the Anomaly, he opened the game files and checked the NPC folder for New England. Good, he was still alive. (Granted, almost everyone in New England was alive, but still.) That was something.

He opened the game file labeled "The One" and stared at the screen for a moment, uncertain. What exactly should I alter? If I do too much he could potentially be torn apart from the inside by the edit, but if I do too little he won't survive...

The Anomaly was still ranting. YOU CAN'T WIN! YOU WON'T WIN! YOU'VE ALREADY LOST, YOU FOOL!

.Since when have you been like this?

.You sound like some idiotic cartoon villain.

. And we both know with what frequency their plans succeed.

That shut the Anomaly up, at least for now, and the Seraph turned back to altering the file.

Guess that's enough. Making one last change- boosting maximum HP to 1000- he closed the game file for Toby Fox and set Undertale to full screen. This wouldn't be easy, but that didn't mean he was just going to quit, either.

A/N: In At the Death has reached its forlorn conclusion, and as Asriel and many before him said, "Hence nothing remains but our regrets."

While I'm not going to say that I hoped you liked this- that'd be expecting too much- I do hope you got something out of this.

You probably feel dissatisfied by this ending. Understandable. To be honest, I'm not entirely happy with it either. But that was intentional. You shouldn't feel happy after coming out of a bleak tale of oppression and genocide from a fandom with comparatively happy takes on the surface world. You should want a better ending, one that ties up loose endings and at the very least doesn't almost completely kill off the main cast, and with The Hand That Mocked Them (formerly known as After the Downfall and the sequel to this) I shall do my best to provide that.

And speaking of which...

I purposely posted the first chapter of The Hand That Mocked Them before posting this chapter, so you can go right to it without needing to wait however many days before it comes out and potentially miss it, and it can be found here: fanfiction (dot net) /s/12616050/1/Anomaly-Book-Three-The-Hand-That-Mocked-Them

Or, alternatively, you can just scroll up, go to my profile, click "hide bio" and it should be there right next to this.

See you there!