I'm HALPING! Pt 25 (Patreon)

Part Twenty-Five: Do Not Go Gentle

[A/N 1: This chapter commissioned by @Fizzfaldt, and beta-read by Lady Columbine of Mystal.]

[A/N 2: Woo! Last chapter!]

The woman called 'Contessa' stared up at us, but mainly at Zach. "Who—how did you do that?"

"Let her go!" shouted Kurt Wynn. He aimed the pistol briefly at me, then it twitched sideways to line up on Zach. With my glasses active, I could literally see the waves of influence rolling off my Endbringer best friend, messing with the guy's head.

Zach smiled down at Contessa. "I am Zach. I am here to relieve you of your duties and your powers. You have been mishandling them for years, and I have a better use for them."

Wynn fired his pistol at Zach, who blinked and allowed the flattened pieces of lead to fall to the floor, sliced into three parts by his eyelashes. I rolled my own eyes in irritation.

I mean, really? What sort of moron is this guy?

When I tossed the Idiot Ball, he was already throwing himself out of the way before it caromed off the wall on its way to him. It swerved in mid-air, bounced off the ceiling, and accelerated toward him. He shot at it, and would have hit if it was anything but a physical representation of the power. Instead, it changed direction again and ricocheted off the floor, still heading for him.

Twice more he fired at it, all the while performing an acrobatic dodge that I would've personally sworn was physically impossible. Of course, because I wanted it to get to him, it dodged twice more, and homed in anyway. Changing tack, he fired twice at me, once at each eye. I watched as the pieces of lead fell off the lenses. Then the ball hit him, and bounced back to my hand.

"Shit!" he yelled. "Trump! Doorway to Alexandria!"

I tuned him out for the moment as I watched Contessa's face. She probably thought she had a poker face, but my glasses pulled every tic and tell off her and showed them to me in glorious Technicolor. This was the first time she'd been actually scared in years, and it showed. I watched as she tried over and over to figure out a way to deal with this situation, and nothing worked.

Welcome to the world I used to live in, lady.

Alexandria burst through the portal that opened in the air beside Wynn, then came to a halt so fast I half-expected to smell burned rubber, accompanied by a screeching sound. "Oh, for fuck's sake," she groaned. "Not you two again. Contessa, Kurt, I told you about these two!"

"Hello, Chief Director!" Zach greeted her chirpily. "It is good to see you again. This means I do not have to go looking for you."

Waaaait a minute …

The last time Zach had met Alexandria, she'd been in civilian guise, and he'd addressed her by her hero name. This time, she'd shown up in costume and he'd called her by her civilian title.

It was official. Zach was just as big a troll as his sister, only a little more subtle about it.

"These are the two you were talking about?" Kurt Wynn seemed to recall he was holding a pistol, and replaced it in his shoulder holster. His suit was extremely well tailored; I could hardly tell it was there at all. "But they're … he's … she's … that jacket …"

Alexandria facepalmed. "I also told you that the boy is both a Stranger and an Endbringer. You do remember me saying that, don't you?"

"Yes, but …" Wynn squinted at Zach and shook his head. "I can't see it. I shot him in the eye and it didn't do a damn thing, but I still can't see it."

"Hey, what about me?" I demanded. "You tried to shoot me in both eyes! You might've scratched my glasses!"

"You took my powers away!" he shouted.

"Not before you shot me!" I retorted.

"Rebecca … can you … make him … let me go … please?" asked Contessa. "I can't Path him at all, and this frightens me."

I snorted. "You need to be frightened. You need to be utterly terrified. You tried to hurt me, in Zach's presence. Zach has a habit of reacting really badly to that sort of thing."

"This is true, Taylor," he agreed brightly. "I do. My entire existence is based around ensuring your safety and happiness, so I will utterly destroy anyone who poses a credible threat to you."

"Don't hurt them right now, please," Alexandria said, in the most conciliatory tone I'd ever heard her employ. Then she switched to 'ominous'. She did that one really, really well. "They either understand where they went wrong, or they will once I explain it to them in words of one syllable or less."

"That will not be necessary," he informed her. "I will be taking all of your powers here. All of them. They are needed."

Again, she was taken aback. I'd seen her plenty of times in the news plus a few documentaries, fighting the Simurgh and her brothers, and she'd always been poised and confident. Zach just seemed to have a talent for putting her on the back foot. I would've thought it was funny, but I had a feeling we weren't here for a funny reason.

"That statement requires explanation." This sounded like her 'I'm putting my foot down' voice, and I figured it would work on … well, everyone who wasn't Zach or his siblings, or me. "Needed for what?"

He spread his hands. When he spoke, his tone was as serious as hers. "In all the world, in all the multiverse, who is the single greatest threat to the happiness and well-being of Taylor Hebert?"

She blinked. "I … you can't mean …"

"Really?" he asked. His tone, normally bright and cheerful, was as sharp and deadly as Armsmaster's halberd. "You are a member of Cauldron. Your cabal here has stumbled and blundered from one crime against humanity to the next for the past thirty years in the name of achieving one objective, which you are still no closer to reaching, and you doubt my meaning now?"

Well, dang. I looked at him with new eyes. It seemed Zach could indeed get annoyed, and not just playfully so. Although Alexandria was almost the same height as him, he seemed to loom over her. There was no question as to who held the moral authority between them, and it wasn't her.

"You're going to kill Scion," she said quietly. "Do you think you can pull it off? Contessa can't even Path that happening."

"I do not believe I can do it, Chief Director Rebecca Costa-Brown," he said cheerfully, reverting to his previous attitude like an extremely dangerous chameleon. "I know I can do it. I know I will do it. I merely need all the powers. Of everyone, everywhere, in all the Earths."

"That's … a lot of powers," she replied; not denying his words, merely commenting on them. "I know you've been collecting them, but … we're talking tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands."

"Oh, do not worry." Zach's tone was light and carefree. "I will be leaving those powers I have bestowed in the form of objects, along with all the Tinker tech that has ever been created. Those will serve to remind future generations that powers used to exist, and to beware of them."

"And how many people have those sorts of powers?" asked Kurt Wynn.

Zach beamed at him. "Two."

Alexandria looked like she wanted to tear her own hair out by the roots. This was not the first time I'd seen that reaction to Zach's apparent obliviousness. "That still leaves nearly a million capes!"

"I am aware of that." Zach smiled. With his free hand, he somehow reached in a direction I couldn't understand. A moment later, two men stood before him. One had pale skin and eyesockets that looked like they'd been burned to ash. He looked maybe twenty (but I couldn't be sure) and swayed unsteadily on his feet. The second one was in his thirties, equally pale, and stared around with blank eyes.

Kurt Wynn stared as they appeared. "What the—how did you just do that?"

"Contessa used a Doorway near me," Zach explained, as if it were the simplest thing in the world. "I have a special relationship with powers. These two will be useful, so I brought them to me. Taylor, will you heal them for me afterward, please?"

"I can totally do that," I assured him. I wasn't going to be doing much here, but I was going to back up Zach's play, no matter what.

"Thank you," he said with a beaming smile my way. "It is good that I can always depend on you."

Humming a simple tune, he removed the powers from the two men, drawing the filaments into himself. Contessa's power was next; it became an elaborate compass, set into one of his wristbands. Finally, he took the Idiot Ball from me and extracted Kurt's power, which became a tiny gyroscope, set into the other wristband.

"He's stronger than any cape, you know," Alexandria warned him. "Stronger than even Eidolon, I think. No matter how many powers you surround yourself with, he'll outmatch you. He's something above Endbringers."

"I know." His tone was endlessly upbeat. "This is why I am going to become one of his kind. They are collections of sentient powers that gain sapience as an emergent function of being clustered together like human cells. I will be using my core self as the basis for my sapience. And I will win."

"But how do you know?" She seemed to be trying for a reasonable tone, to talk the jumper down from the ledge. "Even Contessa can't—"

"—use her power to Path him, yes." He beamed at her. "When I take on powers, I can modify them. I have done so. I can Path him, just as he can Path me. I will not be doing so until the fight begins, because doing so beforehand will alert him to what I plan, but I know that I can beat him. May I have your power, please?"

She gave him a long, hard stare, then turned to me. "Miss Hebert. Taylor. Can you explain to him how impossible it is to do what he's attempting?"

I looked up briefly from where I was working on the two blind guys. The older one had been easy; mainly his eyes, and a little mental scarring. Meanwhile, the younger one had been using his powers non-stop for more than a decade, and what he'd seen would've driven him insane if his intellect hadn't been stalled at 'childlike'. I was gradually coaxing his brain up to adult levels of development and ensuring his psyche didn't crash and burn while I was doing that, and I didn't need someone jogging my elbow while I was working.

"If he says he can do it, he can fucking well do it," I snapped. "You're supposed to be a hero. Do the heroic thing here." Then I ignored her again.

Slowly, she nodded. "Will I have cancer again?"

Zach shook his head vigorously. "No, and you won't be thirteen again, either! You will be a normal, healthy, intelligent lady of your age. You can even ask Taylor to fix your eye afterward, if you want."

"Yeah, well," I grumbled. "I seem to be doing a lot of those recently."

I wasn't looking when Zach took Alexandria's powers from her, but she let out a sound like somebody had gut-punched her. "Damn," she said out loud. "That's … I'm going to be awhile getting used to this."

"So is every other cape on Earth," Zach said happily. "There is a lady in blue, several Earths over, who is going to be particularly upset. She will get over it, eventually." He raised his hands and flicked his fingers outward as though drying them, and tiny silver balls flew in all directions. They struck the walls of the corridor where two dozen of them expanded into circular portals, up and down the corridor.

Dozens of versions of Zach, each slightly different, burst forth from him and blurred to the portals, vanishing in an instant. Those portals shrank, and more expanded in their place. More versions of Zach flickered outward in their turn.

"That's Spree's power," said Kurt Wynn. "I've seen it before. Doesn't it make the clones stupid if he splits away so many?"

"Why, yes, Harbinger, it does," Zach agreed happily. "It is a good thing that I am an Endbringer, is it not?"

A third and fourth wave of Zachs poured outward into newly expanded portals while this discussion was going on. I finished with Clairvoyant's eyes, and patted him on the shoulder. He looked back at me and blinked a couple of times. "Uh, thanks?"

"You're welcome." I gave him a Zach-style beaming smile, then turned to Alexandria. "So, Zach said something about your eye."

She grimaced. "Yes. The Siberian took it, once upon a time. I may have danced a little jig in my office when I heard she was dead." Carefully, she removed her helmet.

"I suspect a lot of other people did, too." I put my hands on her head and felt her body's systems, mapping out the connection to the prosthetic eye. "This might sting a little."

"Said every doctor, nurse and medical practitioner, ever," she growled. "Just get on with it, please."

I did my best not to make it hurt, removing the artificial optic and growing the new one in its place. She winced a few times, but I knew there were no messages of pain reaching her nerves. Psychosomatic symptoms were a thing, I guess.

I was almost finished when Zach turned to me. "Taylor, it is time for you to go. All of you."

"What?" I stared at him. "No! I stay at your side! I'm here to back you up, all the way down the line!"

"No." He let me finish with Alexandria, then put his hands on my shoulders. "Taylor, my need to keep you safe will always override my need to keep you happy. Most of the time, I have been able to do both, but now I must forego your happiness for your safety. Being near me is going to become very unsafe, in the next five minutes."

Almost absent-mindedly, he created a bunch of new portals under the Cauldron people. The yelps as they vanished from sight would've been funny at any other time, but right now comedy wasn't high on my priority list.

"But I can help you!" I insisted. "I can fight, too!"

"Taylor, I have no doubt that you would willingly stand at my side to face an angry god," he said sincerely. "Of everyone I have met on Earth Bet, you are the strongest and bravest of them all. You have great potential and you will go far, even without me to help you along."

Tears were pouring down my face by the time he finished speaking; I knew without a doubt that this was his farewell to me. He'd been trying to hint to me all along that something like this would happen, but like an idiot, I'd ignored the signs.

"Zach …" I began again. "I wish …" My hands found his, and I laced our fingers together.

"I know," he said softly. "So do I. I came here to perform a task, and found myself learning more about humanity with every day. If it were at all possible, I would stay here with you, but it is not." He looked up. "Scion is beginning to notice the harvesting even now. Cauldron kept this base camouflaged with their more problematic experiments; my duplicates have almost cleared them out. He will find us sooner rather than later. And even with all the powers I gave you to keep you safe, he would obliterate you in a heartbeat."

My eyes opened wide. "My powers! You need to take them, too!"

He frowned slightly. "But I gave them to you. To keep you safe."

"And if he beats you down because you haven't got these ones, how safe will anyone be?" I argued. "I love all of it, and you're the best friend in all the world for giving them to me, but you need them more than I do."

Before he could keep arguing, and before I could talk myself out of it, I unzipped the jacket and handed it over to him. Reluctantly, he took it; I almost swore I could see a tear in the corner of his eye. The ping I felt as I relinquished ownership of it was almost palpable.

Holding the jacket, he gave it a light shake that transformed it into a classic James Dean black leather jacket. It had been stylish before; when he slid his arms into the sleeves, he was the epitome of the rebel-without-a-cause from all those old movies Dad liked. I could almost hear the teenage girls of the era swooning in the aisles.

Next, I handed over the glasses, which became reflective aviator shades; the gloves ended up as fingerless motorcycle gloves. In for a penny, in for a pound. One by one, I returned to him every last trinket he'd gifted to me, and he added them to his ensemble. Each one sounded its tiny ping deep inside, as I let him take them.

By the time we were finished, I felt as though my soul had been scraped dry. I was plain old Taylor Hebert again, no longer the classy-jacketed sidekick to the most ass-kicking teenage boy in the universe. Zach, on the other hand, radiated so much cool that Scion should by rights have been asking permission to exist in the same reality.

"Thank you, Taylor," he said quietly, holding my hands in his. "I will attempt to do you proud."

"You better, mister." I could hardly talk through the huge lump in my throat. "I expect my Endbringers to kick ass and take names, you hear me?"

He gathered me into his arms and held me close. "I will always be your Endbringer," he promised. "What I do today, I do for you and nobody else."

Pressing my face against his leather-jacketed chest, I tried to stop crying, but it was a lost cause. "Will I ever see you again?"

"I doubt it, Taylor." His tone was sombre. "I am very good with my powers, and I have many, but he has much more experience than I do, and he has powers that I lack. But there is one thing that I have that he does not."

"What's that?" I tried to figure out what he was referring to.

"Someone to fight for." He let me go then, and fished my old glasses from my pocket. When he breathed on the lenses, they fogged over, then cleared up again, cleaner than ever. Carefully, he fitted them onto my face. "I have imbued these with a tiny part of Clairvoyance's power, along with a large portion of my Stranger ability, so that Scion will not be able to track them down. This is to allow you to see how the fight progresses."

I didn't have to ask what he meant. If he won, it would be cause for celebration; but if Scion won, it would be up to us. Humanity. All the mundane and Tinker tech at our disposal might or might not make the difference, but with any luck, Zach would draw him down far enough to give us our chance.

I took his hands again. "Kick his gold-plated ass for me."

He leaned in and gently kissed me on the forehead. "I intend to, Taylor. For you."

I didn't even have time to blink as I found myself in the living room back on Earth Bet, my face still wet with tears.

Dad looked around from where he was watching TV. "Oh, hi, Taylor. You're home early. I expected you to be still upturning the natural order with—hey, what's wrong? Where's Zach?"

I collapsed on the sofa and shook my head, to indicate that everything about the whole world was wrong. "He's about to fight Scion, Dad."

We were among the few people on Earth who knew the truth about the golden 'hero', so he didn't protest that aspect. But his face drew into a sudden and deep unhappiness anyway. "Can he win?" he asked. "Can he actually beat Scion? Can he kill him?"

"I don't know." I shook my head helplessly. "He's more powerful than he's ever been before, but Scion's always been more powerful than everyone. Zach's grabbing all the powers away from everyone … but I honestly don't know if that'll be enough."

My glasses flickered, and I blinked as I saw an image before me, of a vast room. Within it was contained a sea of grayish flesh, sprouting various body parts of inconsistent size and arrangement, some of which were twitching and moving in ways that were both weird and creepy as fuck. Portals hovered to the left and right of his point of view, through which his Zach-clones flickered, both coming and going.

"So that explains what's going on, on the news," Dad said; I could hear him, but only see him if I concentrated past the image on the glasses. "Capes all over are suddenly losing their powers. Not just in the States, either. Mexico, the UK, Australia, the Middle East, India …"

I grimaced. "Yeah, he's worked out a power combination that lets him be a lot of places at once. But I still don't know if he can do it."

I watched Zach's feet descending a set of metal stairs toward the flesh garden, then he paused and his point of view swivelled toward the top of the steps. An older woman with dark skin stood there, holding a pistol. She said something, but the glasses didn't transmit sound, and I'd given Zach my earpiece (he'd turned it into a set of rockin' headphones, slung around his neck like a fashion accessory). My best guess, going by extremely basic lip-reading, was along the lines of, what are you doing there?

Mirroring the glasses I'd given Zach, my own eyewear popped up the following information:

NAME: DOCTOR MOTHER

Note: Is neither a doctor nor a mother

POSITION: HEAD OF CAULDRON

POWERS: NONE

QUALIFICATIONS: NONE

SIGNIFICANCE: NONE

I had no idea who this 'Doctor Mother' really was, though I didn't doubt that Zach knew her birthday, her star sign and her Internet password. He didn't seem to have the time to deal with her, from the way he waved his left hand and she vanished. Then his point of view turned around again, and he lifted into the air. Drifting outward, he turned slowly; I could see he was over the rough centre of the vast garden of mismatched body parts.

Strands of something began to drift upward toward him. He caught them, twisted them together, then began to turn in place. In the corner of his vision—and mine—a tiny golden man began to slowly blink on and off, on and off. Faster and faster.

I didn't need an explanation for that one. Scion was on the way, and he was coming in hot.

Zach accelerated his pace. His clones were still pouring in torrents through the portals that surrounded him, though they were moving so fast that I suspected some of those I saw coming were also going, and vice versa. He pirouetted like an airborne ballerina above the world's squickiest dance-floor, drawing the intangible strands upward to him, as though collecting them on a reel. Sections of the grotesquerie below him were flickering and vanishing, dissolving into the strands to be drawn into his collection.

The golden man was blinking very quickly now. More and more of the pink-gray flesh dissolved into nothingness as Zach absorbed the powers within. I found myself sitting forward on the sofa, staring at the unfolding drama, biting my lip with the tension. Come on, Zach. Come on.

Just as the last of the flesh thing vanished—it was a humanoid form in the shape of a woman, right in the middle of everything else—the roof of the vast room shattered inward, and Scion burst through. Every other time I'd seen him on the news, he'd seemed sad and introspective. Now, he was blazingly angry, glowing with the heat of his rage. I still wanted to be alongside Zach in his fight, but suddenly I was glad he'd sent me away.

In my own mind, I heard Zach saying in that same upbeat tone he used for everything, Hello, Scion! How are you today?

Whether he actually said it or not, Scion apparently wasn't in the mood for banter. He threw out his hand and a vast torrent of energy roared forth, all aimed at Zach. It would've been a devastating surprise attack … if Zach hadn't had an image of this very thing happening, half a second before it actually did.

I could see on the glasses a readout of the sheer power output of that first blast. From what I could see, it was hotter than the surface of the sun, and packed enough destructive energy to destroy the entire United Kingdom, or maybe the eastern seaboard of the United States. I expected Zach to teleport out of the way, or use a portal to funnel it somewhere else, but all he did was hold up his hand in a 'stop right there' gesture.

In the instant before the blast hit, a golden shield flashed into existence, covering him from head to toe. The energy burst smashed into it, inexorable, unstoppable … and stopped. Or rather, splashed.

The blast ceased. Around Zach, the protective golden field shattered and fell away. Scion still hovered there, still angry, glaring at him. Zach himself seemed untouched. But all around, out to the horizon, a tremendous crater had been gouged into the surrounding bedrock. Of the base, there was not a single iota left. Miles below, magma welled upward into the open air, in a vast circular lake.

There was movement in the magma, a stirring, as if something large was coming to the surface. Zach apparently ignored it, and launched his own attack. On the glasses, I saw the words:

HOMING

STING

When Zach aimed what looked like a Saturday Night Special at Scion, the golden-skinned asshole wasn't fooled. The 'pistol' went off, and Scion blurred to the side. I could see, on the glasses, as the trajectory of the shot altered to remain on target.

Scion vanished.

Zach tapped his glasses and concentric circles appeared, in imitation of a radar screen. The landscape altered abruptly, as he also teleported. Now, he was hovering in low earth orbit, with Scion right in front of him. Energy was building around the erstwhile hero's hands, while he looked down at the eastern seaboard of America.

Wait. Shit. Is he aiming at me, or just people in general?

The question became moot as Zach fired another attack at him. This time, the glasses readout said:

GRAY BOY

HOMING

POWER DRAIN

He hefted a frisbee, gray in colour, with a blinking red light in the centre. Despite there being a near-total lack of air up this high, the flying toy banked and angled in toward Scion. While it was on the way, he threw another one that seemed to flicker in and out of reality.

STING

HOMING

DIMENSION JUMP

Scion was well aware of the danger because he vanished again, as did the second frisbee. Zach followed, his glasses tracking Scion across the multiple worlds as the golden fraud sought to evade the incoming attack. Finally, Scion fired a blast at the frisbee itself, freezing it and causing it to fade away.

The preliminaries over, the two combatants squared up to each other, back over the crater once more. Scion's mouth opened, and he spoke a single word. I couldn't make it out, but the glasses seemed to be able to translate it.

You are a usurper, an intruder. The power you hold does not belong to you, and I will regain it all before I destroy these worlds and everything that lives upon them.

Zach seemed to think about this for a moment, before he replied. I couldn't see his mouth from this angle, but he thoughtfully put his answer up as well.

You are the intruder. I am here to protect and to help. You are here to destroy. I will not let that happen.

Scion looked puzzled.

You are a Chaos Engine. You are here to harm, not help.

Zach's reply was simple.

Not this time.

Scion's eyes narrowed.

I have calculated all possible ways for this battle to be fought. You cannot win.

In response, Zach tilted his head slightly.

I never said anything about winning. I just do not intend to lose.

For a long, frozen moment, they hung there in mid-air over the welling magma, then Scion unleashed a devastating series of attacks. The first was stopped by the golden shield, but it fell away and a second blast hammered through. Zach deflected that with a Gray Boy frisbee, then fired several shots from his Saturday Night Special. Through some twisted-space bullshittery, Scion evaded them all, then fired a green beam that punched into Zach's chest and detonated.

In pieces, Zach flew in all directions … then each piece reformed into a full-sized clone of him, and they all circled around Scion, threatening him from every angle. Once again, they all launched Sting attacks—I didn't know what that was, but Zach apparently thought a lot of it because he was spamming it like crazy—which Scion only evaded by sweeping the area with his stop-everything attack. Then, just as he was prepping to retaliate, the magma below burst upward; surfing on the molten rock came Behemoth, claws spread wide and mouth open in a devastating roar.

Caught in the middle of the trap, Scion took the full brunt of Zach's oldest brother; both the energy attacks that led the way, then the lava-skinned Endbringer himself. Wreathed with lightning, glowing with radioactivity, hammered with an incessant sonic barrage, Scion struggled against Behemoth's onslaught. Energy attacks did little but fuel the monster, and Behemoth had clearly come here ready to rumble.

Watching this, I couldn't help but bounce up and down on the sofa. If someone had told me two months ago I would be watching Behemoth fight Scion and be on Behemoth's side, I would've called them crazy. And yet, here we were.

Scion lashed out with a blade made of some bizarre material that sliced Behemoth's arm clean off, but that did little to deter the creature. As the black bone in the silver flesh began to grow back, he stabbed Scion repeatedly with the sharp end. But time and again, whatever he did to Scion, it affected him not at all. Even his white bodysuit was doing its best to self-repair after each attack.

Apparently abandoning Sting for the moment, Zach continued to circle around the struggling pair, firing off blasts from all angles. They hit and did something; whether these were lasting injuries or merely cosmetic effects, I couldn't tell.

With a convulsive effort, Scion threw Behemoth from him, then launched some combination of the stilling beam and the cutting beam as he fell toward the magma. Bisected, then each part sliced in half again, the first Endbringer fell into the magma and vanished from sight. I didn't know if he was dead or just badly injured, but seeing him go down like that sent a pang of horror through my heart.

I remembered watching Scion battle Behemoth on the news more than once. Then, it had almost seemed like a struggle. One that the golden hero inevitably won, but everyone watching would be on the edge of their seats. Now, he was just pulling out moves that nobody had seen before. I began to understand where Zach had been coming from when he spoke about how powerful Scion was.

All this time, he's been sandbagging. Playing with us.

When Scion turned to face Zach again, something had changed. He still seemed perfect, immutable, unmarred. But his movements weren't as smooth as before. His finishing move on Behemoth had taken something out of him.

Zach didn't give him time to recover, boring in for the attack, he threw powers from all angles. Some seemed to shred away bits of Scion's body, but he replenished himself before any of the multiple Zachs could capitalise on the opening. Scion replied in kind; Zach evaded some attacks and tanked others, but I could tell they were taking their toll.

Between one instant and the next, Zach called up a power marked FATHOM, and the hellish crater-scape was replaced by the cool green of under the ocean, with sunlight filtering down from above. Scion streaked for the surface, leaving not so much a trail of bubbles as a column of obliterated water. Zach hit him with a Gray Boy attack, which slowed him briefly … long enough for Leviathan to hammer into him from the side.

Though Zach (and thus my viewpoint) was a long way underwater, the fight between Leviathan and Scion raised a huge froth of bubbles. Flame turned large volumes of it to steam, and shockwaves radiated outward, actually visible to the eye. Zach tuned his glasses to pick out Scion, and fired a projectile that apparently incorporated a homing black hole. At the last instant, Scion attempted to pull Leviathan into its path, but the missile (or maybe it was a torpedo, because it was underwater?) nimbly dodged aside and rammed into Scion's ribcage.

While Zach's brother tore into Scion and lashed at him with both his tail and his water echo (I wasn't sure how he was doing that last bit, but I wasn't complaining), the micro black hole kept on drawing water into that space. Leviathan, of course, was unimpeded by it, but the readout on Zach's glasses (and thus transmitted to mine) indicated that Scion was currently under the effect of several million tons of pressure, per square inch.

And yet, he fought on.

Worse, he wasn't weakening. The multitude of Zachs were bombarding him from all the angles that weren't covered by Leviathan, but he was tanking the attacks to focus on the second Endbringer. When he produced that cutting blade again, and sliced off Leviathan's tail, I felt the pain of loss almost as acutely as Zach must have when his brother abruptly went limp and began to sink into the depths.

"No," I whispered, my hand over my mouth. "No …"

Ejecting the black-hole torpedo from his body, Scion rocketed upward with the many Zachs in hot pursuit. He burst from the water, then half a second my point of view breached the surface as well. Just as the Simurgh teleported into position directly above Scion, pointing a gun at him.

Well, not so much a 'gun' as something I would've normally imagined to be decorating one of those mile-long spaceships from Star Wars. It had a barrel and (presumably) a trigger, so technically it was a gun, but that would be like calling Jack Slash a wanted felon. It misses several volumes of nuance along the way.

Approximately eight feet across at the muzzle end and forty feet long, it had a glow that I felt I was entirely justified in thinking of as 'ominous' emanating from the business end. At fifteen feet tall, Zach's sister wasn't dwarfed by much. She was entirely eclipsed by this thing.

Along the side was painted the legend, "H DRIVER". I had no idea what that meant.

Scion went to dodge. Three of Zach's clones grabbed him at once, holding him in place.

She fired the gun. Several things happened very quickly thereafter.

The first thing that happened was that a beam of energy erupted from the barrel of the gun, utterly vaporised Zach's sacrificial clones, and punched Scion through the core of the planet. As I was soon to discover, this meant that the entire planet (I could only hope that it hadn't been home to any kind of life) was shattered into several large chunks and quite a few smaller ones; the part of it that hadn't been converted directly to plasma and vapour, of course. This was merely underlined by the fact that as the second effect, the backblast set the atmosphere on fire.

Zach was relatively unharmed, though the lateral concussion blew him about a thousand miles to the side; drawing on a couple of his borrowed powers, he rode out the blast without a problem. Regaining his bearings, he located where Scion was, and teleported to that location.

As it happened, this also was where the Simurgh was. She was fleeing through the tumbling rocks and mountains that had once been a peaceful ocean planet, using them as cover every time he tried to tag her with his beams. As we got close, I could tell that her precog was the only thing keeping her alive. Chunks of rock that would've made reasonable sized islands were shattered every time he missed her.

Zach gestured, and a swarm of his clones lanced forward to take the pressure off his sister. They were growing now, becoming wreathed in flames. I recognised Lung's power in action and watched the clones arrow straight in to close combat. They came in at him from every angle, hammering at him and bathing him with blue-white flame. He fought back, obliterating them at every turn, but Zach churned out more to replenish the lost ones.

And then, Zach raised his hands and gestured to the left and right. I wasn't sure what he was planning on, even as the eight portals opened on either side of him. These were black with red edges, different to the silver-edged ones he'd used to send his clones all over the world. Also, they were huge, larger even than Leviathan.

And that was my clue.

"Oh, shit," I whispered. "He's calling the rest of the Endbringers."

"He's what?" Dad had been sitting by quietly, listening to my fragmentary description of the battle, but this startled even him. "How many more?"

"Sixteen," I said. Then I fell quiet, as I watched the creatures emerge.

There was a weird guy with a ball where his torso should be, a tentacular Cthulhoid horror, something that appeared to be a stack of cubes all sliding and moving around each other, a twenty-foot-tall woman made entirely of blades, and more besides. I didn't even try to figure out what they should be able to do; after all, Zach gave no clue at all. They were reinforcements, and that was all I cared about.

Scion must have had some kind of danger sense that told him something was coming, for he released yet another extravagant display of power that blew a few clones to shreds and sent the rest tumbling through the graveyard of the planet. Evidently deciding that it wasn't in his best interests to engage in combat where his opponents could unleash their powers indiscriminately, he dimension-jumped away.

Zach, of course, created portals for the others and teleported after Scion. Predictably enough, they caught up with him over the British Isles, once again prepping an extinction-event level of power. Before Zach could reach him, Scion unleashed the blast downward. But Zach had another trick up his sleeve; throwing out a portal, he redirected the blast straight back up at Scion.

That staggered the golden god just long enough that by the time he tumbled to a halt, he was halfway to lunar orbit. And then the other Endbringers caught up with him.

Zach paused with his head down, his hands on his knees, as Scion was mobbed by his brothers and sisters. I was shocked; the jacket was torn here and there, his jeans were out at the knee, and when I squinted, I could see the glasses were cracked across one lens. If they were in such bad shape, he had to be hurt himself.

The Simurgh, nearby, also looked somewhat the worse for wear, but she had the light of battle in her eyes. I could kind of understand it. For years, they'd been forced to attack cities and allow Scion to beat them up and drive them away. Now, at last, she was getting to exact some vengeance; not just for herself, but for Behemoth and Leviathan.

If they were charged up, then Scion was utterly pissed. It was clear he'd never had to fight so long and hard before in his existence, and he was taking it personally. As the various Endbringers attacked him with antimatter whips, nega-particle beams and neutronium darts (that was what Zach's glasses identified them as, anyway), he raged against them.

I hadn't even gotten to know their names, and now I never would. I watched as the glittering crystal cubes focusing laser-light from their corners were shattered before his fists, the nightmare tentacle creature torn asunder with a single continent-killer beam. They scored on him, their attacks did damage, but it seemed he could take all they could inflict and just keep coming back for more.

The Simurgh moved in, having assembled another one of her monster guns. Between the Endbringers jostling to dogpile Scion, Zach's Lung-enlarged clones snarled and bit and raked at him. She positioned the weapon carefully, bringing it into line. The muzzle began to charge once more.

With a burst of energy that flung his tormentors far and wide, Scion freed himself. His white suit was down to a few tatters, and he wasn't just angry. He was now in a bestial rage. Spinning around as a part of the blast, he triggered a single tight beam that blew apart one of the Simurgh's major wings. She slumped, the light dying from her eyes as she released the gun and drifted away from it.

Zach moved. One instant, he was hundreds of yards distant. In the next, the sight was snuggled up to his eye. He fired the weapon.

There was no convenient planet for a backstop this time—the only one nearby was the one I was currently residing on, so no thank you very much—so Scion went a lot farther this time. Zach pursued, along with the surviving Endbringers and his army of clones. He was wearing them down, just as they were wearing him down, and I knew the only hope we all had was for him to drop first. The gun, they left behind. Only the Simurgh could have recharged it, and she was gone.

And then … something unprecedented happened. Scion vanished, but he didn't just teleport or flee into another dimension. He was … nowhere to be found, in all of the levels of existence Zach could scan. They coasted to a halt, using their various methods of detection in every direction.

I shook my head. "No, he can't have bailed. Could he?" While he hadn't been beating them handily, he'd been taking his toll on them.

When the cracks appeared in the fabric of space-time, it took a moment or two for me to even see them. Zach stared, but his glasses couldn't come up with an analysis. Numbers scrolled up, and graphs flickered across, all resulting in 'huh?'.

Then the cracks widened, and split open, and a great blunt snout poked out. A crystalline outcrop swung around, and unleashed a beam that obliterated two of the Endbringers on the spot. That decided the rest; they swarmed at it, but that was entirely the wrong move. It had serious experience in combat, as it proved in the next few seconds, as it picked off the onrushing attackers before they could do more than lightly scar its ponderous hide.

Zach didn't rush forward at it. In fact, he recalled all his clones.

Across the cracked lenses of his glasses scrolled one last message.

This is it, Taylor.

I know what I have to do.

You once asked me if I loved you, and I told you that I did not, for love was illogical.

I have since discovered that love can be logical as well as unconditional.

Be well. Be happy.

Live long. Kick ass.

Give your Dad my very best.

With all my love,

Zachary

He took them off and let them float there, then moved around to where I could see his face.

His features were scratched and scarred, and he had a black eye and a bloody lip, but he was smiling as though he'd just thought of a joke to top the one about the fireman with the green suspenders.

Raising one hand in a combination of salute and wave, he vanished.

I re-read the message from him, and sniffled. That was so Zachary.

The glasses continued to show the scene, how the monstrous creature continued to wedge its way out of some dark dimension into Earth Bet's local space-time … wait.

Oh, shit.

Is that fucking Scion?

Was the golden man just a puppet?

No wonder he took all those hits and kept on going. He was being fed energy from behind the scenes.

After what seemed hours, but was probably only minutes, it dragged the last of its grotesque, lumpen body out of the dimensional hole and allowed the cracks to seal behind it. It turned, rotating its entire body, until what I'd vaguely labelled as the 'front' was facing where I suspected Earth was. I couldn't tell for certain, as the planet was out of the line of sight of the glasses, but it was a pretty solid guess.

Then the various crystalline outcrops began to power up.

Oh, shit. At this point in time, I started getting a really, really bad feeling. If a single shot from one of those things could casually obliterate an Endbringer, what would several really solidly charged-up ones do?

I didn't want to find out, but I suspected I wasn't getting a choice in the matter.

The outcrops became brighter and brighter, until they were almost outshining the sun, which was just visible in the corner of my vision. I didn't tell Dad, but my hand crept out to grasp his. If this hit us, we were all going to be dead before we knew it.

Zach, where are you?

From out of my line of sight, another great creature slammed into the first one, smashing it sideways and throwing its aim completely off-line. One outcrop went off, carving a molten line across the moon that was visible from where the glasses were (from Earth too, I later discovered). The Zach-creature had its own weapons, that it fired point-blank into the body of the Scion-creature.

Get away from me, you abomination!

I was pretty sure that was Scion. The pretentious tone was all his.

I believe Taylor would say, 'watch that not happen, sunshine'.

I found a pained smile stretching my lips. Yeah, that was Zach.

Energy flared from the rear of the Zach-creature as they tumbled over and over. Blasts were exchanged back and forth, wounding both but neither one was disabled.

Has nobody taught you to navigate? Watch where you are going!

I frowned. That sounded like Scion, but I wasn't sure what he was talking about.

Oh, I do not need to navigate. I know exactly where we are going.

Did that sound ominous? I thought that sounded ominous.

By now, they were far out of sight. Zach's space-drive, however he was accelerating himself, was going at full blast.

We are coming dangerously close to the primary star of this system!

Even the text looked panicked.

Yes.

And that said it all.

You cannot be serious!

I could've told Scion different on that one. Zach was always serious. Even when he wasn't.

Zach's last message said it all.

As I told you. My sole aim was not to lose.

I sat, watching, tears gathering unheeded in the corners of my eyes and rolling down my face, for another hour. And then, abruptly, the signal cut out. My glasses were merely glasses once more.

When I looked up and around, letting out a breath that was part exclamation, I was startled to see that the late-afternoon sun was slanting through the curtains.

Dad leaned in through the door to the kitchen. "Did something happen?"

Slowly, I stood up, feeling the aches and cramps from having not moved for so long. "Yeah, I think so. Zach's gone, and so's Scion."

"Gone, as in …?" Holding a tea-towel, he moved into the living room. "Will Scion be back?"

I shook my head sombrely. "No. I'm pretty sure Zach dragged him into the sun."

He blinked behind his glasses. "Oh. I'm sorry."

Going over to where he was, I hugged him tightly. "Me, too. He saved me, and in doing that, he saved everyone."

"He liked my lasagne." It was an odd thing to say at a time like this, but I knew what he meant.

"Yeah, he did. Before he went, he said to give you his best." I looked up at him. "He knew what he was doing, all the way. Because of him, the Endbringers all gave their lives to save … well, us."

Dad forced a smile and tousled my hair. "My daughter, the Endbringer whisperer."

I ducked out from under his hand. "Oh, ha, ha."

"So, what are you going to do now?" he asked, his tone more serious. "With him gone, I mean."

"Well, the world just changed," I said. "The powers are gone. Superheroes are going to have to go back to being normal folk. The PRT doesn't know it yet, but they aren't a thing, anymore. Me, I guess I'm just going to have to live my best life. It's what Zach wanted for me."

"Which is going to be pretty good, given that the check cleared for the Slaughterhouse Nine," Dad noted. "Lord's Port is open for business, and the Dockworkers are flush with cash. No criminal capes means no cape gangs to mess things up for us."

"There's always normal crooks," I reminded him, just to be contrary.

"And for those, we have tyre irons and baseball bats." He spoke with a certain amount of assurance. "Dinner will be ready in about half an hour."

"Thanks." I considered going upstairs to wash up, but decided instead to go and sit on the back steps for a while.

Out there, with the door closed behind me, the sound of the TV was muted enough that I could ignore it. I leaned back against the solid wood, looking up at the evening sky as the stars slowly pinpricked themselves out of the velvet backdrop.

I still wasn't over losing Zach. It would be a long time, if ever, before I was.

But thanks to him, I now had the time to do it in.

The End of I'm HALPING! 

(almost!)

Aftermath