Trailblazer END.2

The explosion came from nowhere, detonating to the left and right of my head. The first blasts were small, but the moment they impacted one another the blast rippled the air and literally tore a tiny hole through reality. The force threw anyone within a dozen feet into the air, and even rocked Eirene around me as I backflipped away.

Well that answers the first of four questions.

My feet hit the ground and I instantly skated over the ground and turned away from a second explosion.

Some kind of reality bubble bomb.

That was his first power.

Coming about in the spin I swung a sword up. A fist crashed into the flat of the blade and shook it. A flash of golden light spread from the impact, and David threw more of his weight behind the blow to no avail.

The second power was obviously flight, or it was tied to some other power. The super strength maybe but that wasn't a concern.

I gave ground, sliding back as David pushed me.

"You can't solve the world with pretty words," he accused.

You can hear what I hear. "Are you trying to convince me or yourself?"

My sword bits swung around on either side of the man and went overhead. From all three sides they fired, a crisscross of beams slicing the air as David vanished.

Three.

I quantized Eirene. Moving myself away from the next explosion as it ripped a chunk out of the ground. Appearing behind David, I spun backward and kicked him. A field appeared before him, blocking the blow at the last moment before the force went through and launched him through the air.

And four. Good.

Everyone else stood back and watched as David slammed into a building outside the fence and kept going. I teleported behind him again, swords ready as he swung a fist up. A field of force enclosed his arm and I pushed my head to the side as the shield projected forward from his hand over my shoulder. My sword came up from the ground, projecting a ribbon of particles from the tip. David teleported out of the way only to find another blade waiting as I followed him.

"I didn't create Blue Cosmos," he argued, hands in motion to attack and defend. "I didn't put hate in people's hearts. It was already there."

"And what a marvelous job you've done quenching it."

We flashed back and forth through the building. Walls blew out. Windows shattered. The roof began to cave.

David flew upward and outward. I slammed the flat of a blade into him from above. The barrier appeared again and took most of the blow, but the remaining force was still enough to send the man slamming back down into the debris. The ground exploded an instant before impact as he rocketed back toward me. A lance of energy shot upward and I drifted back to dodge it before teleporting to his side.

He teleported behind me. "Something has to change. People have to change!"

"We all have to change." I teleported above him.

We went back and forth twice more before he teleported to my side only to find I was already gone. He moved to get behind me, but guessed where I was incorrectly. Instead of teleporting to my back he teleported in front of me and I punched him in the throat.

He sputtered, recovering with shocking speed before I brought a sword down on his collar. Nothing broke, but he smashed into a wall and through the rest of the building behind it. He came out on the other side, putting himself back into my sight as I zipped past windows and over streetlights.

We have to be more, he thought, his mind recalling the powers Lalah Sune had displayed. Powers she possessed beyond powers as he understood them.

We, or you? I asked back.

David whirled about, forcefields forming between us as another double explosion ripped through the air. I teleported directly between him and the barriers, letting the blast roll off his own defense as I grabbed him by the arm and whipped him over. He shot a spear of solid light at my thigh, but I flared the GN Field at the moment of impact and evaporated the energy.

"How do you imagine this ends?" I asked aloud.

David righted himself just over the fence of the Titans base. He exhaled, seeming to have not lost a moment of breath. "I imagine one of us dies. Because you were right. Neither of us can overlook the other."

I haven't killed anyone since the Simurgh.

I swooped in, driving a sword toward his shoulder. David teleported, knocking my blade aside and aimed for my face.

Point of fact, in all the squabbling and posturing, has anyone in the Titans or Londo Bell died in the past nine months?

He paused, eyes widening as his fist hung out in the air.

Yeah, I told him. Think about that when this is over.

My knee struck him in the back, my teleport faster than he could even attempt to follow. As he shot forward I teleported again and caught his gut with the flat of two swords. The others zoomed around, firing in a barrage that came from every direction. David dodged some and blocked others with barriers. None of the beams hit him. I teleported under his feet, grabbed him by the ankle and threw him forward.

He sailed over the vehicle lot and forcefully shot back toward me once he regained control.

I didn't need nine months to beat you. I needed nine months to keep as many people alive as I could while I did it.

The explosion tore through the air.

I moved out of the way, letting the explosion push me aside only long enough for David to charge in to strike. Moments before he did I teleported, clearing the blast area and leaving a burst of golden light behind me. On the ground below—in a conspicuous truck I'd kept my eye on—a sensor detected the particle density and triggered.

David reared about to face me, floating directly over it as I dropped my guard and withdrew all my swords back into their binders.

And here we are, at the end of all that lies between us.

Eirene quantized once again and I reassembled us at the edge of the vehicle lot. David charged in, teleporting himself and swinging with a punch from one side and barriers of light from another. A pair of spears appeared behind me, one aimed for my brain and the other for my heart.

It's over.

Ironically, if he'd hung onto basically any thinker power, he'd probably have noticed I was maneuvering him somewhere the entire fight.

The truck exploded, lightning arching into the sky and missing my suit by mere inches as David screamed.

It was a terrible weapon Leet had created, even as a prototype that only worked in a small area.

I closed my eyes, reaching out to Priest and taking its 'hand' in mine as it finally died and left its suffering behind. Down below, David spasmed on the ground. My other hand reached for him, severing the connection in the instant before the blowback would have fried his brain.

Even you're still alive…

As the lightning faded, people began approaching. Some like Damocles and Vindicate were under Veda's guard, rounded up and closed off as the GN Drives wound down. Tierens and FLAGs were securing the grounds and Helpers were tending to the wounded. The reporter and her cameraman were trying to get closer but weren't fighting to get through the crowd. I stayed in the air, looking down at David as he started to come to and immediately noticed the absence of the wailing in his skull.

"Wha—" His pained expression turned toward me. "What did you do?"

"Me?" I asked. "Nothing." Come on now. "You trusted a man who blames you for his best friend being killed. As with a lot of things, David, you did this to yourself… But Priest was already dead. This way, you don't have to die with it."

He needed a really long time to catch up to that.

Really.

A really long time. He kept reaching for the 'well' of power he'd lived with for twenty-five years and couldn't find it. It was gone, and without it he wasn't sure what to do. He couldn't comprehend it.

"It's over, David." I glanced to the side, to a spot of conspicuously empty space. I stared at the spot for a few seconds… but it was time for me to start stepping away. "Have a good life. Whatever's left of it." I hope you can find the peace you need.

I drifted back and pulled up into the air. StarGazer and the Thrones lifted off to join me, and Administrator flew alongside. I turned north, leaving the situation to be resolved by those on the scene.

With a deep breath, I cast my eyes back toward StarGazer.

What do you say when there's nothing left to say?

I looked ahead, calling, "Doormaker. Claire. Please."

The portal opened and we flew through it. Veda could handle the situation back at the Titans base. The very idea that powers could be taken away would end the fighting. No one would immediately know it was Leet who'd done it. They would think it was me, but that would be enough.

The fighting was over.

Ironic, in a way. Even the capes who got their powers from a bottle had sad stories to tell. None of us got our powers because we were happy. Yet, our powers were part of us. Who we were. What we became. There were dark sides to that. No one wanted to give up power, but we didn't want to surrender our identity either. For a cape they went hand and hand.

We were our powers, and our powers were us.

The very idea that powers could be taken away? That would stifle things for months. Years even. It would be a long time before anyone dared to take the risk that they could lose theirs and that would give everyone the time they needed.

Leet might have intended that weapon to catch David and I at the same time but who says a positive can't come from a negative?

Coming through the portal on the other side, I looked down into the valley. So far from any major city, the stars were bright and the moon was out and full. The light was enough to illuminate the world below despite the long shadows. The Rockies rose up to the left and right, a gentle snow filtering through the air. The forests below were quiet and sparsely lit by a few lodges and streets. Mostly though, it was pristine woodland.

And a single car driving down a lonely road.

My brow rose and I flew down into the vehicle's path.

The brakes hit hard as I landed ahead of it, Administrator and Veda stopping nearby. The muscle car ground to a halt, the engine revving as my expression hardened.

"Don't go yet," I implored.

The head behind the windshield cocked and the door flung open.

"You can just go ahead and blow me bimbitch!" Squealer pulled herself up, her face red and her eyes more than a little puffy. "I don't take orders from you!"

"You don't," I agreed. I lifted off and floated over her slowly. "But he'll need you when it's done. Just be patient a few more minutes. It's coming."

Squealer looked ahead as Veda set Stargazer down. Her avatar came through another portal, watching me with a forced expression of calm. Administrator floated lower, toes just over the ground as I went on ahead.

Get ready, I told her. It's time.

Agreement…

I flew ahead at a casual pace, approaching a lonely self-storage facility that was barely lit and set far back from the road behind a heavily forested hill. A mountain flanked it to one side, providing good cover from anyone who might drive by or fly overhead. Easy to make sure no one noticed the large tarp covering the massive tinker-tech dish at the center of the structures. Cords and cables snaked over the ground like a rainforest.

It was actually really impressive.

I needed a year to build infrastructure half as well put together as all of that.

Landing in a vacant area, I set Eirene to kneel and pulled myself out of the suit.

I didn't have to look far to find him.

He was hunched over a collection of contraptions set at the base of the dish, arms buried inside and working at something.

I approached him slowly, glancing about the various reactors, generators, and converters all built into various storage sheds and garages. There was tech that definitely wasn't his present. Some I was sure he'd bought from somewhere or another. Others I imagine he 'appropriated' like the components he got from a tinker in South America.

"Figured you'd slip away," he mumbled as I drew close.

"You tried anyway," I noted.

He pulled one arm from the box and grabbed a long glass cylinder with a coil set inside. The component went inside and with an audible click the box ignited and lit up. It flashed red and green, and a slow hum began to rumble from all around.

Leet drew back, rising to his feet as he turned to face me. "It was worth a shot."

"You got David with it," I informed him. "He's powerless now. Priest is dead."

Leet didn't seem surprised. "And David?"

"Alive."

His expression, and his feelings, were a mix of disappointment, anger, relief, and contentment. "Shame. If anyone deserved to die—"

"No one deserves to die."

Leet scoffed. "Tell that to the dead."

"I have."

"Fat lot of good it does them," he dismissed, despite his internal relief.

"Ever consider you might be wrong?" I asked.

His expression hardened. "Yeah. Let's debate it again. Surely you'll convince me this time to change my ways."

"Not about that. You're not entirely wrong there." I glanced up at the massive dish that towered over us. His power was still active, contemplating the final steps he needed to complete before activating the weapon. "Powers have thrown the world into chaos… But is it worth killing millions just to be rid of them?"

Leet dismissed my concern. "David's alive."

"You're really willing to take that gamble?" I narrowed my shimmering eyes. "He's alive because I was there. I severed the connection between him and his Shard. I can't be everywhere all at once."

"Then you wasted effort." Leet turned away and walked over to a panel.

I had to give it to him. He hid his nervousness and his confusion very well.

"You're that confident?" I asked.

He didn't answer.

I smiled sympathetically and further asked, "You're so confident that Zero is right, but did Zero tell you I'd be standing here talking to you rather than trying to destroy your machine?"

"You can try. See how far it gets you."

"Because Zero said I would try," I agreed. "But I'm not, am I? I'm standing here and asking you to stop."

"You really like hearing yourself talk, I know."

"I really want to keep the promise I made to Uber."

Leet froze, staring ahead without looking at me.

"Why did you put on your mask, Jerry?" I looked at his back. "Did you do it to change the world, or did you do it because everything had gotten so dark and serious, and you wanted to make people enjoy living again."

That storm of emotions was back, though the anger was very loud this time.

"You kept trying," I recalled. "Even after everything went wrong. After you realized that some of the things you found funny, only you found funny. That people didn't see things the way you did. That you didn't even know entirely what you really thought or felt. You kept trying, because there were people who got you and that was good enough. You could make some people happy again."

His hand came down, bashing the console in front of him as he spun around and glared.

"Reading minds still?"

"You and I both know it doesn't work that way. Only way I could pick up on deeper than surface emotions and reactions is to be told."

"That's no—"

"Mitchell is dead," I assured him. "That doesn't mean he's gone." I pointed at his head. "You really think they can exist in our minds, watching the world through our eyes, even filtered as it is, and not be affected?"

Even Scion was defeated because he began to emulate us. Human emotions crippled him. Human emotions were weaponized to make him vulnerable. It was dirty, but that was war. It had to be done. That didn't mean we couldn't learn from it. Take the lessons that needed to be taken.

"A piece of him endures," I told Jerry, "because his Shard remembers him. Do you really want to kill that remaining shard of who he was?"

In the distance, Administrator watched nervously through my eyes. She knew this was pointless and I knew it too in a way, but it was a necessary step. Prototype itself was ignoring me and her. It had closed itself off to everything, too committed to achieving 'the end' to care what anyone had to say or think. An attitude that bled through into its host.

"They remember all of us," I encouraged. "My mother was a parahuman for all of a few seconds, and a piece of her lives on in Administrator. And me. We both remember her, in our own ways. In a way everything for us began when she died. It's when Administrator found the strength to keep going when all hope seemed lost. It's when my life seemed to start falling apart."

That was just perception though.

"They can understand us," I insisted. "And if they can understand then they can live with us, just as we can live with them."

I looked Leet in the eye.

"There is no going back, Jerry. What's done is done. We can't change the past, and some things stay broken no matter how desperately we wish they could be fixed. That's life."

My hand raised, held out to him.

"It's time to let go and keep going."

He looked at my hand dismissively and of course, he grunted.

"You really thought that would work?" he asked.

"I thought it important to try." I dropped my hand and shrugged. "I've been working pretty hard to bring all of this to a close without anyone dying."

"And lying will get you there?"

"You know I'm not."

"I don't believe you," he lied.

"Because you know I'm lying, or because Zero is telling you right now that I must be lying?"
It was somewhere nearby, absorbing and processing. Feeding data directly to Leet's mask where he could see the predictions and projections. He'd become so dependent on them that he disregarded everything. Even the woman who maybe sort of loved him. That whole thing was a bit complicated and not really any of my business.

It was a sad commentary, though.

Leet was the opposite of David.

David couldn't let his past go.

Leet so desperately wanted to push past it.

And he was held back by the very thing he'd created to push forward.

"So tell me," I whispered. "How many times has Zero been wrong in the past five minutes? Ten? Hour? Day?" I smiled. "Have I confounded it enough times to convince you that it doesn't know everything? Maybe you shouldn't blindly trust the very product of your own suicidal power. Do you think it could care less how many people die so long as its suffering ends?"

"There you go again," he snarled. Anything to cling to what he needed to be true. "Who made you the judge for the entire world?"

"We're all the judge of the world," I replied. "The world is ours, and we are the world."

I smiled warmly, thinking back over everything that had happened in my life. With time. Perspective. There was good, and there was bad. Very bad, but also very good. Things I regretted. Things I endured. Things I adored. Noelle's death. Constant self-doubt. Veda. My father. Lafter and Dinah. Orga.

As terrible as the lows were, there were things that made it more than worthwhile.

Things worth living for in and of themselves, that were good enough simply for what they were. Those small and fragile things.

"Why do you even care?" Leet growled. "Outside of your little circle of friends, when has the world ever not shat on you? Half of it thinks you're a tyrant. The other just blindly follows because they're desperate and have nothing. You're not dumb enough not to see that."

"And yet they're all doing the one thing you can't seem to get your hands on," I commented.

"And what's that?"

"They're trying to live."

I looked past the dish toward the stars above. That great and endless sea of possibility, just waiting for someone to reach out and touch it.

"It's all a mess," I agreed. "We have so little control but so desperately wish for just enough. Just enough to find our own peace. So much seems to conspire against us. Circumstance. Money. Power. Other people. Some of us get off better than others. Some of us a lot better off."

My hands rose to my hips and I closed my eyes.

"And the weird thing is that real people in the real world don't give up that easily. They keep going, searching. So many problems arise not because evil exists but because we know happiness does and we all want a piece for ourselves. We're all capable of contenting ourselves with something so simple, yet we feud like our own feelings are a scarce resource that can be seized or taken away. We withhold and we take, spreading the exact opposite of what we want in our pursuit of what we do."

"You think you can boil it all down to just that?" Leet asked, reaching back for the console behind him.

"They're just words," I murmured. "A way to convey meaning in the absence of true understanding. Even then, I'm not sure how far it can take us if we're unwilling to listen… Listening takes time, and work."

I took a deep breath and shrugged.

"But that's just me. My answer to the 'question of evil.'" I turned, looking him in the eye once again. "There's no such thing as evil. Not really. There's just us. Just people. People, and our dreams and our nightmares."

"Didn't you just pick a fight over who got to arrest Heartbreaker?"

"Some of us give in," I answered. "We fail. We break. Sometimes bad. For all the monstrous things we might do, we're still human and we're all chasing the same things. Lose sight of that and we break ourselves. We give up on the one thing we should never give up on, no matter how much it hurts."

"Each other?"

"See?" I pointed. "Unlike David, you actually can listen."

He thought I was naïve. I suppose I might be. Maybe I was just overly sentimental. Maybe not.

In all my time, I'd met maybe one man who truly wanted nothing but suffering and saw that as a goal unto itself.

The world was filled with all types and most weren't really evil. They were misguided. Foolish. Blind. We were desperate and afraid, and all the things that fed. Anger. Hate. Pride. We inflicted harm because we failed to appreciate or understand, or could only get by because we disregarded the consequences of our actions. Sometimes we realized the truth and just broke. Others, we buried it and told ourselves whatever lie we needed to keep going. For good or ill.

Suppose people might consider that to be evil but… I just wasn't there anymore.

Everyone had loved ones. Everyone had dreams. We all pursued happiness. We just couldn't reconcile all of it together. We were left scrambling, squabbling because we were afraid we'd fail to get what we wanted. Sometimes we wanted too much but sometimes we were happy with whatever little we got.

It made such a big mess, and still we endured. We took the fire and the fury and pain and we kept going. Tried to keep going. From the lowest to the highest, failure and success, we were trying.

We could endure and we could keep trying.

Until we found the answers to the questions we'd yet to even know to ask.

And that was enough for me, in the end.

I was satisfied because I'd been wrong when I began. It's not that the world didn't care. It just…hadn't figured out how to care right. But we were trying, all of us. And we'd figure it out someday.

It was frustrating. Infuriating even. We just needed time. The world was a big and monstrous thing. You couldn't solve its problems quickly.

"A hero who doesn't believe in evil?" Leet chuckled derisively. "Really."

"Really," I assured him.

I smiled, looking away from the stars, because I'd have to keep trying myself for a while longer.

"All that out there and you don't believe in evil?"

"I believe in people." I grinned, reaching for my hip. "I love the world—"

I swung my saber out, the beam igniting and illuminating both our faces as I aimed the tip for his throat.

A red arm lashed out, catching the blade and diverting it away. A single red eye set its sight on me while a yellow light flashed out from the shield on the other arm. Three swords shot forward, crossing in front of me and blocking the attack before it could reach my heart. Eirene shined, eyes burning gold as it rose up behind me.

Leet met my gaze, and I met his as the wind from our suits' movements swirled around us.

"—and I dream of Eden."