Hero

The flesh dimension, this was Scion, the real Scion not the golden boy lie he showed people. Behind me was a small legion of Thinkers, Tinkers and other capes. People who were officially dead. No there wasn't any acess to Earth Bet for obvious reasons. It was a hidden village, a place we had crafted to be out of his sight.

"Woody, can he sense the probes?"

A tree showed an image of our Endbringer.

"I spent most of my childhood trying to figure out ways to hide from my parents visions, from my siblings visions. It's as secure as I can make it, thank you for the samples it helps alot."

"Good but-"

"I've done what I could, I can't defeat father by myself and... if he forces me to choose between my children and himself then the future must defeat the past."

"He's your dad, can you-"

"I have my own family now, I know were I stand."

Our probes went into various preselected areas, we cringed this was risky, so incredibly risky if we were discovered we would be fucked.

"Do it."

We pressed the button and watched as the horror of the flesh dimension pulsed and shifted, the wait seemed to last forever.

"Probes successfully locked on."

The Masters went to work, aided by Tinkers, guided by Thinkers. We were in the mind of a god, and we carefully placed forth the illusion. This required trust, could we trust Woody to kill his own father? Could we trust an Endbringer?

In the end we had been presented with that choice a lot, at first we had a defector, do we try to kill it? Do we imprison it? We had unlimited responsibility and limited resources, so we didn't have a choice. That seemed to be a theme of the relationship, not having much choice because the alternative was worse, but I was alive because of him.

"Let's do it."

We were renegades and sometimes the most rebellious and renegade thing you could do was make peace. I watched as the walls of the flesh dimension shifted as it moved and then it stopped.

"Woody what do you sense?"

"He... has fallen for it, to secure the false image of a continuing cycle he has given up more of his shards, which have been scattered across different worlds, he is weaker now."

"How much?"

"1%."

I clenched my fist, years of work tons of perperation and all we were able to do was 1 fucking percent.

"Fuck."

"You do realize he has trillions of shards right? With a ton of redundancies, a power loss of 1% is a big deal."

"Yeah but he can still slaughter us all with the other 99%"

I took a seat.

"I'm doing another scan, hnnn 30% of the lost shards were Thinker based ones, the focused ones."

"Is that good?"

"It creates more blind spots, it will make this process easier."

"You think we can whittle him down?"

"Do you have more then a hundred years? You can't afford to act quickly and if he gets too weak too quickly he will notice the lack of power."

"How many times do you think we can get away with this realistically?"

"With my best capabilities? 4 more times, if we target the thinker shards which is difficult we can close off more worlds. Minimize the damage father can do."

I sighed.

"You heard the man, back to the drawing board."

I felt tired, frustrated and exhausted, but I also felt a sense of progress, we were not running around like chickens with our heads cut off any more. We were fighting back, and though it sounded arrogant, I felt like we could win.