Dark Skies

"What the fuck just happened?" growled Angela. "We’re made?"

Of the nine of us in the room, five were computer techs. All stood rigid with shock. Our observation spread comprised a central fifteen-foot screen and six satellite monitors. Though excessive at first glance, each served a distinct purpose in informing us of mission progress. None boded well. The techs had organized their seats in a wide ring, with the rest of us standing immobile behind them.

There was no live feed, obviously, but we'd all heard the explosion from drones stationed right at the edge of the watchtowers' sightline.

My jaw was set hard enough to crack stone. "Lucas!"

He glanced up from his tablet. For once, Lucas’ nerdy, oblivious personality served us well. He looked to be the only calm one in the room, even among his slack-jawed peers.

"You're taking command! Power up the suit."

He shrugged and barked a few quick instructions to one of his subordinates. Natalia, I remembered. She sprinted out of the room. Eye-Lie and Church, in full combat attire, turned to look at me.

"What–" started Eye-Lie.

"Quiet!" I barked. "Prime, what do you hear?"

Nova’s singular comms blast all mission had been a positional check. It had been cool, unbothered, and focused. That was no longer the case.

He cleared his throat. "Hear? Bernard, I saw the explosion. From CP1. I can taste the fucking ash. That's not big enough to kill Blacklight, but it sure as hell wasn’t accidental." I heard wind rush as he shifted through the sky. "Orders?"

I raked jittering fingers through strands of now dishevelled hair while mentally tearing the rapidly worsening catastrophe apart.

The portal would burn five critical minutes powering up. Obviously, an explosion hadn’t been in the mission brief. Though most dials currently pointed to disaster, it could also have been some kind of impromptu diversion from Alpha Team. Perhaps to account for an unseen obstacle, as, of course, we were in uncharted territory.

Literally and figuratively, given our dangerous lack of mapping data.

"Give–"

Red's line sparked. Everyone's mouth snapped shut.

"CODE BLACK!" he screamed.

I gripped one of the techs’ consoles as Eye-Lie, Angela and Chu– no, Black Dwarf spun on their heels and took off.

"How many?"

"All of– Fuck! We're engaging! Successful wave break!"

"Red, focus! How many Quadruplets?"

"All save Evo, Skies! Blacklight confirms we're made! We're switching to Black Extraction!"

The line went dead. My fingers drilled furiously into my temples. How? How did they know? Did I miscalculate? How could we have been made? My plan was bulletproof, and I had leverage. There was no reason for–

"Bernard!" shouted Nova. "What are your orders?"

"Sunbreak Tacti, then leave Ergo and Magne to us."

Nova sighed tiredly. "Fuck. Copy."

I faced the techs. Lucas was the only composed one among them, and even he looked uncertain. He wouldn’t stop glancing at me from over his keyboard.

"Lucas, take the chair," I barked. "Close drone ranks for a visual, then call the field from high. Keep your heads ."

He nodded sternly. "Understood."

I sprinted from the room and took the stairs three at a time. It took me two minutes to get to the roof, where the team was already waiting.

"Tired already?" snorted Black Dwarf humourlessly.

I shook my head as I pulled Lucas' armour over my head. This one comprised only the barest of exoskeleton bones, with hardened cuffs and shins, along with a few weapon slots and a propulsion pack on the boots and shoulder blades.

"How long, Natalia?" I asked.

Her fingers danced between monitors before she grunted with frustration and pressed her hand against the machine. Glowing light rolled from her fingers and seeped through the metal, eliciting a grating groan before the entire thing shook the Sheath as a portal swirled into the ring.

"No time at all," she heaved, falling to her knees with exhaustion.

"Keep this thing alive, or we're all dead," I warned her. "And I mean all of us."

She swallowed and nodded vigorously. "Yes, sir."

I took a deep breath, priming the pulse canons on my wrist. They didn't look anywhere near as efficient as the ones Pink designed, but Lucas would've made them work. I'd live.

Hopefully.

"Move!" I told my team before diving through the gate.

Blacklight woke up in a ditch. He grimaced at the burning pain in his chest, trying to get his bearings. There was stone beneath him, tall grass around him and water in the distance. He glanced left. His crash traced a long, long furrow east. He'd been knocked to the west coast of the island, then.

Lovely, he grumbled, rolling to his side. Something in his chest was screaming. He chose not to think about it. Hopefully, he had a superpower somewhere for that.

"He lives," purred a deep, playful voice from above.

Blacklight threw himself left and just managed to avoid pulping via flying Tacti. He had to spectre in the same move to evade Ergo's light blast. He emerged from beneath his attacking assailant, only to be blindsided by a tree trunk.

Gravel shattered and dented around him. This time, his furrow ended at the base of a low hill.

"Agile, too," noticed Magne, raising a house-sized boulder from the sea. To say he looked strained would be, at best, a delusion.

Blacklight didn't even bother speaking. He sprang clear of the hundred-ton slab, threw a half dozen shadow daggers in Magne's direction and dove into the void.

"Aw," Tacti cooed, turning slowly. "There's no need to run, Blacklight. Or is it Micah? All these secret identities get confusing sometimes. Surely, we lowly 'Rogues' do not frighten you. You're a mighty Hero, no? Awe us with your mighty Hero strength."

Blacklight did no such thing. Fighting all three at once was a roundabout way of killing himself. At best, he could stall for a minute or three before getting overwhelmed. Blacklight needed a way to separate them, but he had no idea how. Especially considering their extensive power sets. Hell, he could barely differentiate them. Tacti looked comparatively larger than Ergo. Magne was... lither? He couldn't tell. The differences were stupidly minuscule.

Only after having moved far enough from the trio did he process Tacti's comment on his real name, but that was packaged away for later. He had neither the time nor the presence of mind to address it. Instead, he set his mind on circumventing this new, sizeable obstacle in their rescue mission.

He'd worked through a dozen half-baked response plans when his comms crackled to life.

"Bl..ight. Take.. over... eleva–"

The connection didn't work in the void. The only way to hear what Red needed was to return to the corporeal realm.

With a soundless, tired sigh, Blacklight raced back to Dreads and Hedge's initial blast zone and ducked behind a splintered trunk.

"Bad copy. Say again, Red?"

"Novax incoming for elevation. We'll use your location, but only out of spectre. Get Tacti isolated. Prime needs an alley-oop."

Blacklight groaned loud and long. "Fuuuuuuck . Standby."

He glanced around his cover to see the quadruplets spreading out. The three hundred-odd yards between them held more trees, some shrubbery and long, flat stretches of stone. The slight, undulating hills dipped as weedy grass stretched toward the coastline, giving Blacklight a bit of an advantage through elevated terrain.

Unfortunately, he had the strangest feeling it wouldn't be very meaningful.

"Keep it tight, Blacklight," he breathed, gripping the bark concealing him hard enough to splinter. "Night is your court. Your house. Play your game. That's all you need."

He spectred.

The mile between Blacklight and the trio disappeared as umbric power swelled in his incorporeal fists. With a wave, nine convincing Blacklight proxies leapt from the grass and charged the Rogues. The Quadruplets would dispatch them comfortably, though at the cost of distraction.

His window would be narrow.

Absurdly narrow.

Blacklight simultaneously solidified and drove a massive, thirty-foot tentacle into Tacti's side, blasting him off his feet. Blacklight almost cried at how quickly his brothers reacted. Magne's telekinesis pinned him like a magnet as Ergo lit up the night.

The Hero thought he'd felt strain when deflecting Crackle's electricity.

Oh, what he'd give for the soothing, refreshing sensation of Crackle's electricity.

Ergo literally sent him flying off the island, flaming with plasma. Blacklight's shield kept him able enough to spectre into the ocean and come flying right back.

In an uncharacteristic twist, fortune finally threw him a bone. He actually managed to catch them off guard, with Magne taking every inch of his supersonic boot to the groin.

Alright, he thought in unabashed relief, now we're getting somewhere!

Blacklight twisted, hooking tethers in Magne's shoulders to wrench up and into the path of Ergo's retaliatory blast. Magne, somehow, parried it and sent a devastating backhand whipping for Blacklight's temple.

SHIT!

With agility that surprised everyone present, Blacklight ducked. He peppered two jabs to the Rogue's torso before thrust-kicking him back at his brother. Ergo cleared his sibling like a hurdle and unleashed a storm of furious silver fire.

The energy dissolved Blacklight's hastily erected decoy and left Ergo open to a flanking tackle. Two hundred feet of uneven slope was thoroughly chewed through before Blacklight's instinct screamed and he twisted to hurl Ergo at a blurring projectile.

Tacti glow stepped past his brother with the grace and poise of a figure skater. He even used the manoeuvre to charge Blacklight as his atomic fist cocked into gear.

The Hero spectred in the nick of time, a quarter-second before Tacti's glow fist touched down and shook the Mexican island to its roots.

Three Blacklights jetted out behind Tacti, braced to attack. The Rogue ignored them and instead threw a sharp cross at the lone figure manifesting discreetly on his left. His fist passed harmlessly through the decoy as one of the bodies he'd ignored, this one flesh and bones, slammed its bladed hand into his shoulder.

"Very clever," commended Tacti, snagging Blacklight's foot and flinging him off.

Blacklight went sailing into the Breaker camp. His internal GPS knew it had to be at least six or seven miles away. None of this mattered to his adversary. Tacti's fingers leaving his ankle and the crunch of debris disintegrating around him seemed to happen at the same time.

A painful tumble through tens of tents and towers disoriented Blacklight enough for Tacti to tackle. Guadalupe shook as Blacklight was dragged through miles of dirt. A thicker satellite dish knocked them apart, though it effectively dissolved in the process. Tacti didn't bother landing, content to trigger glow steps with the goal of driving an elbow into Blacklight's nose.

The Hero contorted his body past it while shaping a spiked, shadowy net. It dissolved the instant Tacti made contact and hardened into a thorny mass of constraining vines. They bound him in place for the single second Blacklight needed to kick Tacti into the side of the mountain.

Mountain. They were on the mountain.

With shaky, horrified shock, Blacklight realized the Rogue had taken him all the way across the island.

Tacti broke the bonds midflight and hit the ground feet first. He appraised Blacklight over an arched brow.

"You've gotten... slicker." The Rogue laughed heartily, like he'd just made a hilarious pun.

Blacklight shrugged, disguising a quick tap to the comm in his ear as a shoulder roll. "And you haven't gotten much smarter. Ever read Anthony Weldon?"

Tacti cocked his head curiously.

"Didn't think so." Blacklight pointed up. "Your fault."

Novax appeared in a blink and powered into Tacti like a ballistic missile. Even he, with all his battle prowess, couldn't do much when blindsided by a projectile moving fifty times the speed of sound. Blacklight, with memories of LA still far too fresh, wisely spectred first.

The shockwave rolled over the mountain. Cracks spread further across its slopes, hailing pebbles down on the destroyed camp while sweeping ripples through the surrounding ocean. Tacti, on the other hand, pinwheeled into the clouds as Novax crashed into the Pacific.

Of course, because he just couldn't let a good thing be, Tacti righted himself with a series of uncharacteristically janky glow steps to propel back to solid ground.

Blacklight stepped out of spectre and grinned.

"Enjoy your flight, asshole," he spat.

Prime Nova, like a dark spirit, appeared from nowhere. He used the clouds to his advantage, masking his approach in the night sky with their thick, pregnant cover. It worked like a charm, because Tacti was only just angling his final glow step when the Sunmaker intercepted him.

Moving fast enough to make Novax's previous charge look lethargic, Prime Nova traversed the fifty miles between himself and Tacti in a second. His body glowed with the strain of pushing muscles far beyond their natural threshold.

An artificial comet eclipsing the thin, crescent moon. All eyes went up, though Blacklight's sagely turned down.

Like every Hero present, he knew that wasn't the reason it was called a 'Sunmaker'.

Prime twisted all momentum into his fist, accelerating it hundreds of thousands of times faster than sound to crash into Tacti's hastily raised blocking arm at over half the speed of light. The pressure caused his friction-resistant suit and skin to tear. The clouds didn't just part, they dissolved for miles. The grounded combatants could hear the whistle from Prime's approach, no matter where they were.

This attack had only ever been used once before, and it'd almost killed him. Prime, though, was older now and, thanks to the nature of his abilities, stronger. Blacklight could almost imagine Tacti's eyes ballooning as the punch connected. He prayed the idiot missed his block, and Prime blew his head off.

The sky went white, and night became day. The moon disappeared while the ocean was bathed in blinding, searing light. Even with all his superhuman gifts and armour, Blacklight felt the heat from his spot atop the cracked mountain.

A new sun indeed.

KAAAABOOOOOM!

Though he knew it was coming, the shockwave nearly tossed Blacklight back into the Pacific. Then sound hit and sat him firmly on his ass. It was loud enough to taste . How the fuck the Pawns and Rooks composing the Breaker camp would survive escaped him.

Tacti rocketed into the horizon, vanishing instantly. The tip of the mountain behind Blacklight sheared off, with a sizeable chunk of it disintegrating to sand. Magne somehow threw up a massive shield that deflected the bulk of the collateral around the rest of the island, diverting it instead into the ocean.

Shockwaves hit the Pacific like a nuclear bomb. Sea levels dropped by a mile as colossal tidal waves were sent screaming into the distance. Even with Magne's protection, the crack from Tacti's earlier blow tripled in size and spread, stretching to cover most of the northern Guadalupan strip.

Blacklight reeled for balance as he fought to stay standing. The ringing was overpowering his thoughts.

He dropped into a crouch and took deep breaths, trying to work oxygen back into his brain to help quiet the shrieking in his ears. He was so focused, in fact, that he almost missed the flailing crash of something beside him.

"Fuck!" he barked, spinning drunkenly.

Prime Nova, collapsed to his knees, regarded Blacklight flatly. Blacklight, conversely, stared in horror. Nova's arm was completely black, even the parts where the bone protruded the skin. Blood dripped from every orifice, and his suit, though already a stealth variant, was six shades blacker.

"Chief, you're missing, like... all your fingers."

Prime grimaced as he fought to a knee. "They'll regrow. Tacti's done. I felt his arm, ribs and jaw go, then lost track of him a few hundred miles west. In the next few seconds, he'll wake up in either Japan, Korea or China. Or space. Hopefully space."

Blacklight grimaced, holding his head as the whine slowly subsided. "Space is good. Space is great."

"You need to go help Novax," hissed Prime, spitting out a dislodged tooth. "Now. They'll be unsteady. If I know anything about Bernard, he's flying in with reinforcements as we speak."

"I'll keep our big boys busy," Blacklight promised with a cough. "Stay out of sight. You're easy meat like this."

Prime held up his working right hand and casually punched a small crater into the mountain.

"I stand corrected," muttered Blacklight. "Don't wait up, sweetheart."

He spectred and bulleted across the island. Doing so actually displayed the hilarious new state of the Breaker camp, consisting entirely of unconscious or dead Breakers.

It appeared the Sunmaker had done a lot more than just incapacitate Tacti.

The middle section of the island, though, was a battlefield. Novax flitted through the sky with Magne, trading telekinetic projectiles and impacts with physical blows and searing heat vision. The Chaos Committee had matched back up against Ergo, doing their standard dance. The remaining Heroes were locked in combat with contracted Rogues, all enhanced by Mother's Kiss.

Novax and the Committee looked to be in good enough condition. That left the main force, consisting of Mammoth, who'd grown to nearly thirty feet tall, Cryo, Fer, Valkyrie, and impressively, Silver Shade to hold up against the likes of Black Ram, Blowback, Migraine, Gel and Sonnet.

I guess I'll even the odds, Blacklight mused haughtily.

He rose from the void with an eruption of traffic light-sized spikes. The Rogues went flying, then really started regretting life choices when he summoned a tempest of whip-like shadows to drive through enemy ranks.

Sonnet's scream now packed double the punch, and she didn't seem to need air to refuel herself. That made no difference as Blacklight stomped a spike up through her thigh. She screamed another ear-piercer before Valkyrie swooped in and punched her into next month.

With the tides properly turned, he spectred over to Red, still locked in combat with Ergo.

"Where are they?" he demanded, crawling out of the ground.

Red shrugged. A deep, imperious part of Blacklight's soul felt miffed at the lack of reaction to his surprise appearance. The rest stamped it out and refocused on the task at hand.

"North is empty!" Red was saying. "They're somewhere on that mountain, or they're gone."

Blacklight narrowed his eyes. "No, I don't think so." He looked up, where Novax was doing a marvellous job keeping Magne off balance by refusing to allow space between them. "Their mover protected the whole island. He wouldn't do that for disposable Breakers. They're here."

Red nodded as he Pushed a shaggy lump of mossy grey stone Blue Pulled from the cracked ground. Ergo split it in half, exposing him to Yellow's Swell. He went spinning.

"Find them," ordered Red, punching a Push that tossed Ergo over the cliff's edge.

The Rogue reappeared a second later, with a boost from his blasts, and went right back on the offensive. "We'll be fine."

Blacklight threw himself back in spectre. He flitted up and down the mountain in minutes, finding nothing. Unless they'd holed all the kids up in the vaporized tip of the mountain, they'd never been there in the first place.

Wait, he realized. What if...

Blacklight raced over the island's southern edge. He swam past aggrieved waters, lashing against a slick, dank cliff face. Spiky, cone-shaped stalagmites smoothed over years of relentless erosion jutted up from the frothing sea.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, he ended up in a cave, untouched by the chaos upstairs. A translucent film of energy coated the walls and ceiling, no doubt insulating it from damage sustained by the island. Blacklight studied it momentarily and decided it didn't have long to live, as was clear by its flickering, unsteady pulses, and the glowing generator's pained whines.

He also spotted Vulcan's bored and imposing figure. He'd propped a small laptop on a table to watch a movie. The shipping containers behind him were hooked into a dozen little computers, all centred around a smooth metal platform.

Anita's description hit the nail on the head.

Bingo.

Blacklight crept closer, still in spectre, and ironically realized Vulcan was watching his newest film, Hardwood Love.

"If you really wanna see it, I can get you tickets," he informed the Rogue. "I know the actor."

Vulcun spun and took a backhand to the cheek, which sent him spinning out of the cave and a mile into the ocean. Blacklight watched him splash in the distance before tearing the containers open. All were occupied by sedated, filthy children. All in their school clothes, all smelling terrible. They hadn't bathed in days. In fact, Blacklight was fairly certain they hadn't been moved in days.

The wiring snaking through the container suggested otherwise, anyhow.

"Fucking animals," he hissed furiously. "Alright, guys. Time to go. I'll be right back."

Moments later, Blacklight was topside. Magne had taken his battle with Novax to ground in search of ammunition. He was also fighting side by side with his brother, complicating things for the Heroes. Novax threw the Committee's natural rhythm off, especially against opponents of that calibre.

Shit , grumbled Blacklight, solidifying. At least they were managing, he supposed. Things could be going a lot worse.

And, almost by divine intervention, things did.

The Committee was peppering Ergo with a standard salvo; rocks, tree trunks, and direct force. Blue Pulled the Rogue off balance for Red to bowl over with a Push. Green iced their chaotic cake by pinning Ergo to the ground, then stalked forward while charging a second Crush in his free hand.

He got too close.

Blacklight noticed immediately. In fact, he'd used that very strategy himself. Ergo made no concerted effort to escape. Getting in range of a Crush of that potency, no matter who you were, was needlessly dangerous.

Red hesitated. It was momentary, but even he smelled subterfuge.

Their warning came too late.

Way too late.

Ergo stumbled Green with a flash of bright plasma while unclipping a baton from his belt. Blacklight thought it was just part of the outfit. With a twist, a five-foot energy sword shimmered to life.

Indescribably sharp, blood coloured and reeking of evil.

It bore the shape of an isosceles triangle. The black baton served as the base and handle. The congruent sides running up the blade sported a small, concave bend on their way to a smoking, pinpoint tip.

Blacklight could feel the power from a hundred feet away.

Green never saw it coming. None of them did.

The Hero never even got the chance to crack a final, shitty joke before Ergo's horizontal swipe split his body in half.

Ergo grinned, inspecting the weapon fondly while Green's bisected torso crumpled.

"My, my. Little Mr. Pink has outdone himself," he laughed.

And, as if that wasn't bad enough, the sky broke again to make way for purple lightning. It struck Guadalupe Island like a meteor, cratering stone and singeing grass to flaky, airborne ash.

Crackle dislodged herself from Evo while taking quick stock of her surroundings. She then grinned.

"What was it you told me? 'Stay back, woman. We'll handle it'." She scoffed derisively. "Men. Every one of you are morons."

"Where've you been?" barked Magne irritably.

Crackle shot him an irreverent shrug. "Traffic, I suppose. And your explicit instructions not to interfere." A hungry, electric sparkle danced in her eyes. "Where's Prime?"

Magne rolled his eyes. Her tardiness almost managed to surprise him.

Almost.

Granted, he had warned Crackle off what should've been an easy slaughter. Heroes, however, were exceptionally slimy. Fighting back with sufficient spunk to incapacitate Tacti was no small feat. Needing the Bloodreaper to flip the script was almost embarrassing. Which, of course, was when the fodder arrived.

Leeches only ever show up to eat, after all.

Crimson and I are going to have a very interesting conversation , Magne promised himself, mind drifting to his brother pinwheeling across the ocean. What the fuck was that?

"He's disabled for now," he told Crackle, casting wary glances at their shell-shocked enemies.

Prime seemed to have disappeared with Tacti. Not that Magne was surprised. The explosion in the sky nearly knocked him, while telekinetically braced, on his ass. With any luck, the idiot was dead, though that could endanger their standing with Elise Nova.

Elise Nova. He wrinkled his nose. What is Mother thinking?

"Evo, get to the Chamber. Crackle, defend him until you get the chance to engage one of their Kings."

She rolled her eyes. "One of? I can take..."

He shut her down with a glare. Evo and Crackle scampered off while Magne refocused on their enemies, deciding it was finally time to bring this debacle to a close. The insects should've been long-dead by now, especially the flighty Blacklight fucker. Catching him was like trying to stab a fly with a toothpick.

The Chaos Committee kept impressive shape as they reignited their onslaught on Ergo, but Magne could tell their confidence was fractured. The Bloodreaper forced them well outside Ergo's melee range, and Green's loss was clearly taking its toll.

Too bad he'd only had time for one, mused Magne. What new horrors will you have waiting for us at home, dear little Pink?

Novax interrupted his ponderings with heat vision. Not only did it punch , but the shrimp could play it like a master musician. He'd alternate force, target, and width. He'd put everything in one eye to unbalance Magne's shield. He'd dial down the power to spread surface area and obscure Magne's vision. Novax never seemed to run out of creative ways to keep the Rogue on his toes, drawing this skirmish out far longer than it had any right.

A true King-Class.

In passing, Magne might have enjoyed the exercise.

Unfortunately, Novax stood between his mission and success.

He tore out a chunk of the cliff to flatten Novax underfoot. The Hero simply blitzed him, knowing his defensive abilities decreased with divided focus. Magne went up and dodged by hairs, though the Hero somehow twisted and tagged him with more plasma.

Magne's shield met wide, weak energy. Novax wanted him blind. The Rogue darted backwards, anticipating a charge and instead caught a glancing volley of ice spikes to the shoulder.

Snarling, he pulled a satellite tower from its post and tried burying Cryo, twenty yards to his left, beneath it. Magne never got the chance, as Novax then moved to tackle him to his back.

His telekinesis was strong, but even he couldn't wrestle Kings. Magne fought a losing grapple before realizing the hands clamped around his head were intended to screen, not throttle.

Blind, again. It didn't much matter, though, as Magne could both hear and feel thermal power surging above him.

Somehow, he wriggled his hands free. The beam stomped Magne back and bowled his shield inward, discharging boiling flecks of radioactive embers. The THOOM of solid ground being pounded into an Olympic pool-sized crater rolled across Guadalupe Island.

Grass burned. Stone melted. The very air in Magne's lungs seemed to ignite. His back sank through hard stone like wet clay. His arms shook with the strain of repelling dual rods of supercharged fire cylindrically compressed in five-thousand-ton magnetic drills.

He roared in frustration and unleashed a blunt, omnidirectional blast to knock Novax away.

"It's over," he warned, ignoring the spiking pain stabbing through his shoulder blades. "Evo will reach the Chamber, and you..."

He trailed off as the ground beneath them rumbled. Magne spun in confusion, trying to source it. Curiously, Novax did not. In fact, he just tilted his head as something chirped in his ear.

Magne faced him. "You think tricks can–"

"Wanna know something crazy about this island?" Novax interrupted, grinning.

Magne didn't reply, electing instead to halo himself with loose debris.

Novax snickered. "God, what dumbass decided to make a base on a volcano ?"

Magne snorted. "That's your play? Desperation is one thing, Nova, but delusion is a sad way—"

Another rumble rudely interrupted the Rogue's retort. Cracks violently fissured mazes through stone and dirt. The grass shredded with an earthy, stretched rip.

Then, a sea-churning groan shook the mountain.

Magne stared. "That's not... VULCAN!"

"Not me, boss!" wheezed the Rogue, staggering over to the group. He was soaking wet. Magne's midsection pitted with dread. He was supposed to be guarding the Chamber.

"Ergo, they've made the Chamber!" he bellowed, dropping his payload on Novax's head. The Hero somehow dodged clear.

Ergo's eyes widened. His attempted leap was cut short by an invisible force batting him into the side of a hill. The Bloodreaper spun from his grip and clattered to a patch of crumbling stone, dozens of feet away.

"Now," someone growled from behind them, "which one of you ingrates killed my boy?"

Magne overcame his astonishment to face the Black Dwarf. He'd crouched low to beam gravitational commands deep into the earth. Every pulse drew a new roar from the mount—no.

Not the mountain.

The volcano.

Magne wavered. The Chamber was located directly beneath it, which, though it endangered the children, would prevent him and his brothers from getting in range.

This wasn't chance. This was a perfect, plotted play.

And who better to call the game than their slimy insect leader?

"Skies ," he spat as the mountain's sheared top detonated.

The heat wave washed over the group and drove both Magne and Ergo to ground. Cracks beneath them surfaced broiling, molten rock. The temperature spiked by several dozen degrees in seconds.

Magne's vision swam. This was all going wrong. None of them should've still been alive.

He telekinetically slung a molten boulder at Black Dwarf. Magne needed to staunch the eruption, fast. Black Dwarf's profile would make him the biggest obstacle to that.

With a simple, noncommittal gesture, Dwarf turned the sedan-sized slab to a golf ball and let it rocket past his tilted head. The Rogue's stupefied reaction then bought Dwarf the second he needed to blindside Magne with a geyser of bubbling magma.

The Rogue's scream sent ripples through the Pacific. The accompanying telekinetic shockwave blew everyone back. Even Ergo went spinning. The stone beneath them cracked further as the island itself began to split. It wasn't built for this level of chaos.

Skies had doomed the island the instant he'd ordered Dwarf to hit the tectonic plates.

Fine , snarled Magne, delirious in the heat, let's play this game.

He pulled gallons of magma from the splitting earth and doused Novax in a shower of molten heat. The Hero simply flew through it and kicked him out of the air.

Relief washed over him like a cool breeze when his back hit solid ground instead of lava. The downside, however, lay in the half-mile now between himself and everyone else.

Novax hit like a tank with jet engines.

The parts of his body lucky enough not to be screaming with pain were smarting uncomfortably. The disorientation even stretched to his power, which he struggled to metaphysically seize. Sound was miles away, though he managed to make out someone shouting something about evacuation.

He turned to see Ergo battling away with the Chaos Committee, while the rest of the nonflying Heroes sprinted... toward the erupting volcano?

What the fuck?

With a flick, he collapsed the ground at the Committee's feet into a subterranean pustule of magma. Black Dwarf, the prickly shit he was, raised his hand and froze them mid-fall. Valkyrie swooped in to help him cart everyone off to dry land.

"They're moving toward the mountain," Magne coughed as he came up on Ergo, hovering himself and his brother to float past rivers of fire.

The fifteen seconds he'd needed to recover from Novax's kick had been sufficient for most of the Heroes to scamper south. The few that remained were the ones not in immediate danger from the fire, and even those were in slow retreat.

Magne turned to watch the fringes of their island crumble like sand. Frothy waves thrashed against the fragmenting coasts, eagerly devouring the chunks knocked free. Magne was almost in too much pain to process anger.

How did this happen?

Ergo blinked, trying to concentrate. "The Chamber."

Magne studied his sibling. "Can you fight?"

"We don't have time for stupid questions," Ergo replied with a scowl.

They took off.

By now, Magne assumed all his Breakers were dead. Prime's attack had completely thrown them for a loop. Somehow, even after a mid-profile kill, they'd lost the Bloodreaper to the imploding island.

The brothers made it a hundred feet before gravity tripled and wrenched them into lava. Walls of pressure even fell from above. Despite all his power, Magne couldn't fight off a surprise ambush from Dwarf and the Committee all at once.

It was like being skinned with a machete coated in sulfuric acid. Their screams elicited a new volley of quakes that sent cracked cliffs sloughing into the ocean.

"NOW!" shouted a familiar voice.

Freezing cold drew a line of agonizing pain across Magne's back. Ergo caught the real brunt of the assault, though, and went spinning as Cryo pinned him to a block of blackened stone. Magne managed to roll to his side, nearly convulsing. This wasn't a fluke.

Skies knew. Somehow, Skies knew.

"Good!" shouted the idiot, turning the brothers' attention northward. "Hold him, Cryo!"

Standing fifty feet away, hovering through some crude jetpack, was the chief blank himself. The weak, slippery little fuck that'd cause his family so much trouble.

The slippery fuck who knew .

Crackle flailed to a grinding stop somewhere on Magne's left, pursued by a hunting Novax. She wasn't winning. She just couldn't keep up. Not to mention how craftily he could alternate between ranged and melee attacks.

She teleported behind him, only to be anticipated as his hand closed over her ankle. He twisted and drove her through a slab of magma with a wicked overhead throw. Her scream would've given Sonnet a run for her money.

The distraction gave Dwarf another opportunity to submerge Magne. It literally peeled the muscle off his bones. He thrashed wildly as his brother fought through Cryo's weakening blizzard. The Hero held, though not enough to prevent Ergo from loosing a single beam of silver energy.

None of the morons saw it coming. The idiots were too fucking arrogant to predict a swing for their collective head and singular weakness.

And if the Chaos Committee struggled to counter Ergo's blast, Bernard Skies was dead.

The chief moron's idiotic eyes weren't even fast enough to track the ray as it vaporized his skinny little legs. His blank, warbling mouth flapped uselessly as his disconnected torso and sundered power suit dropped out of the sky.

Except... it wasn't right. Heat cauterized, but there should've still been blood. Bernard simply flopped grotesquely to the grass as his body dissolved.

Like mist. Not from heat.

Both Guadalupe Island and a sizeable chunk of his body had melted to putty, but somehow, Magne's spine went ice cold as a single, damning word rang like a church bell through his dehydrated head.

DECOY.

He turned too slow. He heard the Bloodreaper ignite and reacted too slow. He knew it was too slow even as he condensed filthy, ash-ridden air into a fine, javelin-sized needle of infinitesimal sharpness.

Ergo's cocky grin vanished as red energy punched through his collarbone, then rose to split his head in half.

Magne screamed bloody murder as Bernard Skies, nonplussed, watched his brother's corpse tumble off the side of their stone patch and into a stream of lava.

His needle fizzed through nothing as Skies dropped, disabled the Bloodreaper and disappeared.

"It's the illusionist!" Crackle shrieked, having finally wrestled some space off Novax. "He's concealing him!"

Magne pulled Ergo's body from the lava before it dissolved, then blanketed the island in telekinesis. He found Skies and the illusionist, both cloaked, a hundred yards away.

His telekinetic surge carved a square mile out of Guadalupe and knocked the illusionist off his feet. Skies wobbled in the sky, then recovered and primed his jet pack to climb higher. Hilariously, at fifty feet or so, it spluttered and died, then he plummeted.

Magne roared with laughter and stomped a geyser of lava out to swallow him. Skies managed to reboot his systems and veered into a dissolving island of grass instants before he was toasted. Ignoring the debilitating pain of Cryo's frost pouring into his back, Magne twisted and extended his arm to crush the blank.

He met resistance from Dwarf, who battled him back with a dome of inverted gravity. Magne pressed through it, only to have the remainder of the Chaos Committee weigh in and fight him off.

Crackle was screaming something. He could not possibly have cared less as he shot forward to close Skies down. The ant was blank. He'd only need one hand. No, a single finger.

He got so tantalizingly close before something crashed into his side and sent them raking across the side of the volcano.

"HANDS OFF, BALDY!" thundered Novax, pummeling the Rogue with devastating blows. Three punches took Magne through the mountain's outer shell. He'd barely regained his bearings when Novax gripped his throat and wedged him in a lava waterfall.

Magne, completely beyond registering pain, threw his hand out for ammunition. When he found it, he almost smiled.

Maybe some good would be gained from this debacle.

The Bloodreaper flitted up from the patch where Skies fell, ignited in midair and buried itself in Novax's spine.

Novax looked confused when his fingers slackened and a line of blood dripped past his lips. He hiccupped a cloud of blood, then lost control of his flight and slumped backwards.

"MATTHIUS!" screamed Skies, his eyes inflating with horror.

Yes, wheezed Magne, using what little power he had left to drag himself out of the stream. That's it. Look at what you did.

"MAGNE!" Crackle screamed, appearing beside him. "Evo's down! They're taking the kids!"

That cooled some of Magne's feverish rage. Movement below drew his attention to Black Dwarf levitating the Chaos Committee around the mountain, aiming for the southern tip. The rest of the Heroes were gone.

Where, though?

It couldn't be the Chamber. That was long gone. Perhaps an escape vessel? But what could possibly transport them quicker than their fliers?

Nothing made sense.

"We have–" rambled Crackle before thrusting out her right hand.

Electricity jumped out and granulated a flying satellite dish. It went off like a flashbang, batting them out of the air and reeling against the sloped walls of the mountain.

I need to kill that illusionist, snarled Magne, using a telekinetic dome to part magma.

The source of the dish, Prime Nova, was floating unsteadily below them. Magne stared in disbelief, only able to take comfort in the extreme extent of the Hero's injuries. In fact, he was so distracted that he didn't catch Novax's unconscious body roll off a ledge and plop into Skies' waiting arms. The jetpack's propulsion systems kicked into high gear, snapping Magne from his reverie as the two rocketed around the mountain.

Magne saw red and summoned a storm of power. Black Dwarf, even from almost a mile away, managed to scald Magne's body with another geyser, throwing off his aim and dragging him out of the sky. The Committee was nowhere to be seen.

Magne hit the ground right as Valkyrie rammed Crackle and sent her careening into the ocean.

"SKIES!" he roared, perforating the side of the volcano with a telekinetic ram. Doing so revealed the dissolving southern incline. Stone platforms slowly disintegrating into the sea of red met him with groans and splitting cracks as he glided through his opening and into the mountain's hollow centre.

And to Magne's utter delight, two hundred yards below, on one of the stabler stone flats, sat the ant and his dying brother, desperately trying to reboot his fizzling exoskeleton.

There you are.

With a deranged, maniacal scream, Magne uprooted the entire mountain. Every platform, every chunk of broken stone, every patch of seared grass. It rose in an undulating wave, mashing together in a colossal, eclipsing mound of weight.

Hundreds of thousands of tons of stone crushed the Novas in a heap. It was like a second eruption. Lava exploded into the sky, climbing high enough to completely cool before landing in the churning, angry ocean.

Said ocean then proceeded to roll in and swallow the newly vacated real estate. Magma hissed violently through a losing battle with the Pacific, slowly but surely being smothered to inert stone. Soon, the island would be nothing more than an aquatic junkyard of floating rock, blood, and metal.

Magne reached out for the corpse. With Novax's durability, it should still have been in relatively good condition. Skies, on the other hand, no longer existed. An attack of that potency would've obliterated anything below Queen.

Magne found nothing, causing him to frown. Was he missing...

No.

Shimmering light near Guadalupe's southern coast, where all the SWORD troops had fled toward, caught his eye. He floated closer and found the source, a flickering ring of gold and white energy.

A portal, only a few dozen yards from the Chamber.

Under it, caught in the indifferent, foaming embraces of the Pacific Ocean was Evo. Bloodied, bruised and completely unmoving. He lay sprawled over jagged stones. Magne couldn't tell if he was still breathing.

Inside the portal stood Skies, Black Dwarf, the illusionist, Cryo, Cher Fer and Prime Nova. At their backs, the remainder of SWORD's legion, scattered haphazardly around the three shipping containers, cut from their wiring and still full of children. He could even see a few of his captured forces. Second Skin, still in his X disguise, was sprawled beside a chained and wounded Black Ram.

They'd even recovered Green's corpse.

Skies, presumably the real one this time, exchanged words with a smaller blonde woman, who turned and ran off. He adjusted Novax's body, folded over his shoulder and met Magne's seething, mad eyes.

Then, through cold, unfeeling eyes, Skies raised a pistol as Magne drove a wall of pure force at the portal.

Too late. Again too late.

The gun went off. It wasn't quiet or loud, but Magne would remember the sound until the day he died. It wasn't even aimed at him, but something right under the swirling hoop of light.

Then the portal, complete with all three containers, several of his men and every living Hero, vanished.