I take a bite of my cake. It's delicious, but then, I already knew that it was delicious from the memories I stole. I take a sip of the latte and it is much less delicious, but full of caffeine, and thus probably even more important.

I'm alone again. Lisa did not take kindly to my friendly taunting it seems, and shortly after I made it known that I was aware of her masked counterpart, she had promptly booted Alec off of his seat, fled from the café and Brian and Alec had followed after.

Well, Brian followed. Alec had more sort of meandered off in the general direction of where she was probably going. I guess that counts as following for Alec. Also, none of them chose to loan me any money, so I was forced to fix my being broke using a power slot instead.

I sigh. It was a fun detour from getting stuff done, but now it's time to get back on track. I look down at my pitifully short list. Honestly, one of the largest issues I'm facing is choice paralysis. Across the spectrum of all the powers I have available to me, there's very little I can't go out and accomplish right now. That list currently consists only of dealing directly with Scion, and I'm not even sure about that. The broader issue is that I'm not sure which things I should resolve first. I tap my cheek with my golden pen. I reach down and circle 'Kill Slaughterhouse 9'.

That's my top priority, probably. That's something I could feasibly do right now to prevent enormous amounts of death and suffering. The only problem is the response. That will likely immediately put me on the map as an extremely powerful parahuman. Is that what I want? Or do I want to maintain some anonymity until I have more of my projects up and running? The image of legions of armored super soldiers answering to my every order flashes in my mind, and I have to admit that if I am intending on making the claim of being an Emperor to all of humanity, that would be a fairly decent way to sell it. Not to mention, the idea of siccing a squad super-Custodes on the Nine did have a certain appeal to it.

But what would Cauldron's response be? As far as I'm aware, Cauldron's policy with the Nine is hands-off due to them being potential assets if worst comes to worst and everyone is forced to fight Scion. Would they take exception to me wiping them out? Do I necessarily care? Probably not.

The Protectorate would hardly be able to be able to lambast me for taking care of a gang of super-powered serial-killers, nor would the PRT, but if it pisses off the two-thirds of the Triumvirate that aren't Legend, I may have issues if I want to bring them into my fold later, which could be a minor cause for concern. Recruiting the Triumvirate could be fun.

'They're members of a secret illuminati, not completely evil,'I remind myself, 'They're not completely irrational either. If I can easily kill the Nine, they should consider me a more valuable asset. If I can impress on them that I'm more useful to them than Eidolon was in his prime, I imagine they'll basically let me do whatever I want.'

Legend, I imagine would have no issue with me killing the Nine, Cauldron or no. He seemed like an upstanding sort of guy in the canon story, very much a Superman type character, wanting nothing more than to make the world a better place. He was the white sheep of Cauldron. If there's any member of the Protectorate that I'd probably want to join me the most, it's him.

'Although, if I could get Alexandria into a set of Sororitas armor…'I chuckle to myself at the thought.

"Any thoughts, predecessor?" I feel a power slot shift into a bubble of silence that surrounds me and my booth, smothering my voice from the patrons of the café. Huh. I didn't even consciously do that. I guess the autopilot on the power slots is pretty good after all.

Slaughterhouse Nine. Threat to humanity?

I nod, "Big time." I send him my memories of them from my previous life, emphasizing the atrocities and cruelties they commit. He surges with anger and indignation.

Purge them.

I nod again. That's that I suppose, no real room for debating. They need to die. I can kill them.

"Second highest priority is probably the Endbringers," I explain, tapping 'Kill Endbringers?' with my pen for emphasis, "Honestly, they'd be above the Nine if not for the fact that I know Leviathan is coming to me. That means that we know the next attack will be here where I can react fast enough to minimize the effects of it. The next attack is a known quantity."

Better the enemy you know.

"Exactly. That being said, I'd like to do some research on the Endbringers before then. Probably on the Simurgh, just because she'll be the easiest to find. I'd like to test whether or not I can influence their programming and maybe see if I can't just turn them over to our side." I explain.

Programming?

"Uh, yeah. The Endbringers are weird. They're more like crystalline robots than creatures. Programmed by giant alien space whales." I send memories containing my rather limited knowledge about them across our mental link. I feel my predecessor's thoughts shudder.

Abominable Intelligence. Xeno technology. Purge them.

I wince. Oh yeah, that's going to be a touchy subject.

"Look, I know you've had bad experiences with AI, but so long as certain precautions are put in place, they can probably be utilized safely. The Endbringers are already attacking humanity. The thing you're probably afraid of? It's already happening," I take the last bite of my cake and wash it down with the last few mouthfuls of my coffee, "My goal is two-pronged. We need to stop the Endbringers from attacking humanity. They kill millions, destroy infrastructure, and halt the progress of the species as a whole."

Agreement. Purge them.

I grimace, "Thesecondprong, is that humanity then gains three very powerful superweapons. You've seen what they can do in those memories I showed you. They would be invaluable. They would also serve as a huge psychological tool here in this world. The entire world fears them. If we can bring them to heel, if they serveus, very few factions would be brazen enough to oppose us. We would place ourselves in a position where we can simply demand submission, and most will give it just to prevent conflict with us."

Unnecessary. Conquer without them. Purge them.

I breathe out through my nose heavily, steepling my fingers. I'm not getting through to him. I can feel my temper attempting to flare up, so I shift a power slot into a rather mundane ability that gives me extreme emotional self-control. While I'm at it, I slot in something akin to Uber's power, a power that grants competence to its user. In this case, I choose for it to bestow greater ability to communicate, persuade, and reason. I feel it wash over me, suddenly see a new avenue of attack, and begin once more.

"The Men of Iron. That's what has you so set on this isn't it?" I ask, referring to the ancient artificial intelligences that nearly wiped out humanity in the pre-history of Warhammer 40,000.

My predecessor's thoughts flash with a momentary flash of hatred, an emotion I've never seen from him.

They nearly extinguished humanity before I was ready to lead it. Infanticide.

My eyes widen in alarm. I already knew that, but the raw vitriol in that message makes my blood freeze. That was also the single most coherent thought I have ever received from my predecessor. Typically, he limits himself to raw thoughts: concepts, emotions, or a few scant words to convey a point. That was the psychic equivalent of a full sentence. He's serious.

This was looking more and more difficult. He has a bias thousands of years in the making. God forbid I fail to convince him before we meet Dragon. That is one purge that I amnotwilling to carry out.

"Predecessor," I say softly, "This isn't your universe. These are not the Men of Iron. We are so far removed from that right now that I literally don't even know how to quantify it. You said the Men of Iron tried to extinguish humanity before you were ready? We're readynow. If they can't be made to serve, make no mistake, we will fucking annihilate them, but if we are attempting to lift up humanity, we owe it to humanity to exhausteverysingle tool available to us."

I can feel him hesitate. Progress.

"This is a different universe. These are different artificial intelligences," I intentionally stress the word artificial, "and we stand ready to intervene if necessary. If they ever pose a threat to humanity, we will dismantle them just as we would any other malfunctioning machine. We have nothing to fear of them if we fail, and everything to gain from trying. I don't want to do it against your wishes, so please—please! Give me your blessing. Let's turn these machines into tools for our New Imperium." I finish, brushing against his mind with my own, indicating the expectation of an answer.

I wait for it for nearly twenty seconds, which feels like an eternity.

Tentative agreement. Absolute loyalty.

"Absolute," I agree, "Otherwise they get purged. I refuse to allow the possibility of them reverting to their original programming. We either ensure they serve, or ensure they die. No in between."

Agreement.

I let out a relieved sigh and smile as I lean back, releasing the powers from my power slots. This was an excellent demonstration of how effective they could be when applied effectively. Those social enhancement powers are potent. I'd need to put them to work more, later. Maybe even create some permanent versions with Power Manipulation. Some type of aura, even? Like Glory Girl's but attuned to convincing people to agree with me and follow my requests and orders. Certainly that would go a long way to making life easier.

"Thank you, partner. I really do appreciate it."

There isn't a response in words or even thoughts, but I receive the mental equivalent of a nudge from him as acknowledgement. I grin, as I try to move past the heavy topic.

"So, on a lighter note, there is one other thing that we need to do that I didn't put on the list." I begin conversationally.

Curiosity.

"We need to go beat up Lung at some point. It's basically a rite of passage in this world."

Confusion. Lung?

"He's an Asian guy that's also a supervillain. Half Japanese, half Chinese. I think he might be Yakuza? Also sometimes he's a dragon."

Confusion.

"It's just a touristy thing to do you know? Everyone does it. You come to Brockton Bay, you've gotta beat the shit out of Lung at least once. Sometimes twice if he escapes PRT custody, which he almost always does. It's just a thing."

Confusion. Resignation.

I laugh. Brushing off my front, I slide my pen into an interior jacket pocket, then fold up my to-do list and place it into my breast pocket. I drop my sound bubble power from its slot, and stand.

"Check please!" I look towards the waitress from earlier with an honest smile and hold up Lisa's wallet.

--

When I find the Nine, they're relaxing. It infuriates me because they're doing so in a house. That house is in a small town, and the Nine are the only people alive for miles. I don't need a thinker power to figure that one out. I've caught them post-slaughter. While I was sitting in a café fucking around, having a goof at a teenage girl's expense, they had been here, murdering every man, woman, and child they could get their hands on. My gauntleted hands clench into fists, having re-summoned my armor before arriving.

Finding them had been easy, far more so than I had really expected. My psychic senses weren't really feasible for doing so. In Brockton Bay, finding Taylor was fairly easy because of the much lower number of people present, as well as my knowledge about her as a person. Narrowing a search down from all people in a city, down to just the teenage girls with depression had turned an exhaustive search into a quick check between just a few thousand individuals.

Instead of attempting that across all of North America, I found myself pleasantly surprised with how effective Kaleidoscope was at finding people. It seemed to work largely off of intent. When I wanted to go to Brockton Bay, I could simply step through the fractured lens wanting to be there, and I'd be there. Likewise, when I had specified that I wanted to see the Slaughterhouse 9 of my current dimension, it had shown me their location with no further issue. When I stepped through it, I had found myself transported there, hanging in the sky above their temporary abode.

I reach out with my mind, probing for their thoughts. Jack is watching patiently as Bonesaw stitches two bodies together in a gruesome parody of surgical theater on the kitchen table. Hatchet-Face, Shatterbird, and Crawler all seem to be asleep, the first two making use of the house's empty bedrooms, their thoughts drifting aimlessly. Crawler is actually curled up outside the house in the backyard, rather than within it, and though his thoughts are still flickering with activity, they seem mostly subdued.

Mannequin is performing maintenance on his right arm in the attic of the house, his mind flickering with ideas to upgrade his arms, from sturdier joints that allow for greater physical feats to canisters to store biological agents donated by Bonesaw. Burnscar is awake, but distracted, laying on the couch in the largest room of the house, paging through a book that she isn't really enjoying.

I feel the Siberian with my Psychokinesis, rather than my psychic sense. She is not a creature, but rather a hole in my senses, within which there is no matter. All atmospheric space contains at least some matter, even if it's just air molecules and dust. Instead, the Siberian appears to Psychokinesis as a blank silhouette in the shape of a human woman. The projection is standing idly in the room with Bonesaw.

Her projector, on the other hand, occupies a different abandoned house, three houses down from the rest of the Nine. Manton. If I kill him, the Siberian pops like a bubble. The rest will be fairly easy to deal with, I imagine.

That leaves only eight, however. We are approximately one month before the beginning of what I know as Canon. At some point before then, the Nine had a vacancy that Cherish approached them to nominate herself for, killing Hatchet-Face in the process. I assume that this must be that interim period since Hatchet-Face is still alive and Cherish is nowhere to be seen.

'Power-slot, make with the Thinker power,'I mentally command.

I feel it settle, a power that specializes in constructing brutally efficient plans. I can see it in my mind's eye already. First Manton, remotely. Then teleport into the kitchen before Jack or Bonesaw even have time to be confused from the Siberian's sudden disappearance. A wide-scale area attack using Psychokinesis to take care of the members inside the house, then strike from the scattered debris and rend Crawler from existence.

It should take less than three seconds. I dial my perception to allow me the necessary speed of thought.

I reach out with Psychokinesis and compact the house Manton is squatting in into a point the size of a golf ball, and then erase it from existence. The Siberian's form doesn't have time to vanish before I'm standing in the Kitchen, transported in a flash of gold by the subconscious activation of a power slot.

'Turn it to dust.'I command psychokinesis. It lashes in a wave rushing outwards, ripping through all matter it encounters, breaking it down into its constituent atoms, and converting it into black carbon dust. No one in the house even has time to react before they're obliterated. The black dust still hangs heavily in the air as I turn my attention to Crawler. He hasn't even started reacting to the destruction of the house yet. I'm fairly certain I could easily cook something up to kill him using a power slot, but I kind of want to try this.

I summon all of my psychic might, more than double what the Emperor possessed in his prime, and form it into not a lance or a sword with which to destroy Crawler's mind, but more of a psychic nuke with which I intend to rip his soul asunder and cast him into oblivion. The weapon that killed the Warmaster.

'Die as Horus died.'

I feel it as it takes, my full power slamming into him with absolutely zero resistance, his psychic defenses being nonexistent. His mind evaporates instantly, and his body follows quickly after, not even attempting to regenerate, and not even leaving behind a corpse. He simply vanishes, removed from existence.

Like that, the Slaughterhouse Nine is no more. I consult Kaleidoscope to check my time.

3.23 seconds. A bit slow.

I blur upwards back into the sky, pausing as I reach my previous vantage. I look balefully down at the empty neighborhood. So much needless loss of life that I could have prevented. An entire community exterminated.

'Unacceptable,'Both I and my predecessor think in unison.

I reach out to Kaleidoscope and demand that it show me this town before it was ravaged by the Nine. Kaleidoscope provides it in my mind without delay, and Ipull,instead of passing through it as a door.I yank the image of it from the shattered lens and cast it over reality, overlapping it with the ghost-town below. It takes a scant second before the alteration takes hold, but as it does so, my psychic sense flares to life with the sudden appearance of thousands of minds.

I dial my perception back down and am greeted with the sound of a suburban neighborhood. Children laughing as they play, the sound of engines as cars pass up and down the uncongested streets. I smile.

I form a very carefully controlled psychic manipulation and release it over the community in a pulse. A very subtle manipulation that will prevent them from noticing the loss of time they've experienced from being shunted forward in time.

Pride. Well done.

I nod once, not trusting my voice at the moment. This is a mere scrap of my potential. A fraction of what I can accomplish. The people I can save. The problems I can fix. Get ready Earth. Your savior has arrived.

'One more thing to do.'

I vanish.

--

I appear in the office of Rebecca Costa-Brown, within which I know she'll be before I arrive. She's working on paperwork at an inhuman pace, but as I appear in a flash of gold, her posture goes rigid and she erupts upward in a defensive posture. I summon all of the charisma I can, both from within, and from my power slots. Six different powers appear, all helping to amplify my presence.

"The Slaughterhouse Nine is dead. Erased from this world."My voice booms, and I know she hears it both with her ears and her mind. Her eyes widen fractionally, but she controls her expression well.

"Who are—" As I interrupt her mid-sentence, she cuts herself off immediately, as if unable to continue while I'm speaking. My psychic senses inform me that the awe she feels is not entirely natural, but that is permanently affecting her. Convenient.

"Consult Clairvoyant if you doubt me. He is blind to me, but not, I imagine, to the effects I have on this world. The Nine were a blight, and a threat to humanity."

This time her expression does change. Her eyes widen further, and her mouth opens slightly, "How do you kn—"

"I am not finished. I intend to save this world from all that would do it harm. I have begun this with the extermination of the Nine. Soon the Endbringers will follow. Then Scion. Cauldron will fall in line with me, or they too shall be considered threats to humanity. This is a formal declaration to you, Alexandria,"I declare, causing golden light to surround me and erupt from my eyes. Her mind is awash with fear, awe, and the inexplicable desire to appease me. I continue, uninterrupted.

"I am the Emperor of Mankind. I will guide humanity into the future, and all those who oppose humanity will be culled. Your work is finished. I have already decided to save humanity. If you wish to continue working towards those ends, you will join me, or you will be purged."

Rebecca is floundering, her mouth working up and down, her enhanced brain seemingly stalled by my empowered presence. She finally manages to speak, and I nudge her mind towards what I want her to ask.

"Y-you, who are y-you?" She gasps out. I'm glad I already have a name prepared, as blatantly stolen as it is.

"For now, you may call me Revelation. In time, you and all others will come to call me Emperor. It is already decided that I should lead humanity. Rejoice Alexandria. I have come."Rebecca continues to gasp and try and speak. I have no interest in continuing the conversation however, so I shift a power slot, and vanish once more in flash of golden light, flooding her mind with a lingering burst of hope as I leave. Hopefully that would work to set her on the path of voluntarily joining me.

--

"That went well."

Agreement. Dramatic.

I laugh, "Yeah, I kind of wanted to make a big impression. She needs to mentally place me as a larger-than-life individual if I want to start cultivating the kind of reputation you had." I explain my thoughts as I walk, once more in my comfortable clothes. I am once more back in Brockton Bay, which will make a nice base of operations for my continued master plan.

Specifically, I'm near the docks, moving firmly through ABB territory, heading to where I know Lung will be located.

Destination?

'Agreement'I send back with a grin.

As I come upon a large building which I already know to be an ABB warehouse, I can sense Lung within, relaxing upon a very comfortable reclining chair. A scan of his mind tells me he's watching television in a back-room that doubles as his personal quarters, and I almost feel bad for what I'm about to do. I teleport in, bathing the room with golden light.

Inside the rather spartan room, I appear between Lung and his television. He startles, jumping and attempting to stand quickly from his reclined position. He fails, forcing him to reach down to force down the fold-out footrest down, cursing in fragmented Japanese interspersed with a few 'fucks' thrown in for flavor. He's currently maskless, and lookspissed. He glares at me murderously as I resummon my golden light aura.

He flinches back at it, cursing again, and while he's blinded, I telekinetically toss him through a wall into the larger section of the warehouse. As I stride through the Lung shaped hole, creating a larger, Emperor shaped hole as I do so, I can see that as he gets to his feet, he has already started growing, nearly matching my height already.

"I'm gonna fucking KILL YOU," He roars at me, fire erupting around him.

"Lung."The single word, delivered with a cumulative PRT rating of nearly 70 behind it, seems to make Lung completely freeze for a moment. After that moment passes, he suddenly surges in size, passing the fifteen-foot threshold almost instantly, his power apparently reacting defensively to what it perceives as a very large threat. I grin savagely.

"I have come to kick your ass."