Caterpillar

Rejection

The word immense did not do it justice. As he looked at the endless expanse of darkness ahead of him, he could not find a word in his vocabulary to describe its size. In truth, it was way, way larger than dozens of planetary systems put together, a darkness blacker than the darkest black. His eyes would have not been able to perceive its existence in the first place if it had not been for the accretion disks glowing at its edge.

"W-What is this?"

His voice was shaking. A brave and courageous man, someone who never backed down, someone who had dared to even fight against a god: that man, at that moment, was frozen. A primal fear beyond his reasoning gripped at his heart. He could not breathe. In terror, he could not even look away.

A thought came to his mind:

'This is the end.'

Alarms rang and many warnings appeared on the screen of his computer. The ship began to shake terribly because of the force pulling at it, dragging it away from its trajectory.

Snapping out of his trance-like state, he grabbed the controls of the ship in panic and pulled on them, trying to steer the ship away manually. He pressed on several buttons and all the engines of the ship blasted at full power. But for all his efforts, the only result was that the ship started shaking even harder and then, with a loud bang, one of the engines superheated and exploded.

"Kurama!"

At his call, a yellow and red light came out of his body. He stood up from the pilot's seat and then squatted against the floor of the ship. The yellow and red chakra increased in density around him to such a degree that his silhouette became blurry, almost indistinguishable. His legs pushed against the floor with all the power he was capable of and he launched himself up like an unstoppable rocket. He broke through the reinforced special alloy that the outer walls of his spaceship were made of, straight into the Outerspace.

"Now! Blast it!"

Crimson red chakra burst from the soles of his feet, enveloping the several hundred feet long spaceship below. An enormous explosion boomed when the ship's main ion reactor blew up. That explosion did what the spaceships' engines could not achieve: it propelled him away violently, lessening the pulling force that had taken hold of his being.

There was no sign of relief on his face. A tailed beast bomb started to take form in the palm of his hands and it grew in size until it was as large as a football. But he did not throw it - where could he have thrown it to? For millions of miles, there was nothing around him. Pressing with his palms against it, the tailed beast bomb's spherical form was compressed to that of a plum. Then, it blew up and another violent explosion blasted him away. It was almost as powerful as a small nuclear bomb.

In the vacuum of space, those two explosions hurled him to more than a million miles away from his initial location.

'Not enough! It's not enough!'

Desperation threatened to overwhelm him. He felt like no matter how far he flew, he would not be able to escape. He could not escape from the intangible claws of the devouring demon that had grabbed a hold of him.

A shadow clone appeared behind him. But the clone did not have the momentum that the two huge explosions had granted to the original body. In a blink of an eye, the original body had disappeared from the clone's sight. Despite the original body's crazy speed and momentum, it had still not been fast enough to escape the radius of the explosion that followed. The shadow clone killed itself by creating and detonating another tailed beast bomb in his hands, just so the shockwave of the explosion could bast away the original body even further.

Terrible explosions with powers no less than that of nuclear bombs appeared like tiny suns as they lighted up, for a brief moment, the ever-present darkness of the space. The repeated shockwaves coming from them were enough to even pulverize some of his internal organs and make him cough up large amounts of blood. But after the explosion of nearly 10 tailed beast bombs, consuming much of his chakra pool, his body gained such an astonishing momentum in the vacuum of space that he had almost reached the speed of light. It was a speed that no-one could reach without the aid of a supernatural force protecting their being.