So, tell me why I shouldn't go after Nilbog?" I asked.

I was having dinner with Amy, having delivered her to the cannibal world to look over Blasto's work.

He'd created a fast-growing form of plankton that needed less sunlight to grow; as the levels of sunlight increased, the plankton would actually grow less quickly, down to the level of regular plankton at normal levels of sunlight.

She'd given her seal of approval after making a few tweaks, and we were going to incubate the plankton using the compost from the village below, and in a couple of weeks I was going to release it onto the shores of the Atlantic.

It'd take a while to spread, but once it did, I'd be able to start introducing some fish from Earth Bet. Our fish stocks were actually better than those in Earth Aleph because Leviathan had made many fishermen too anxious to continue their work.

I'd have to be careful in how I introduced the fish; introduce too many and they'd eat the plankton faster than it could reproduce. Get the food chain wrong, and the whole thing would collapse.

Amy stared at me.

"He has arranged to release plagues when he dies," she said. "And they probably won't be coming from his body, so you can't just pop in and send him to space or something."

I scowled.

"I want his power," I said. "It'd make terraforming Earth Het a lot easier. Right now, it'd take me a couple of hundred years to terraform Mars, but I'm betting that the more tinker skills I get the faster it will go."

"Why go to all the effort?" Panacea asked. "Wouldn't it just be easier to take them all to another world and resettle them there?"

"Where would I take them?" I asked. "Every world I have access to has serious problems. We've got Endbringers, Silent Hill has the Simurgh…and it's pretty much hell even without her. Earth Het is facing potential destruction in twenty years. The zombie world has a potential pandemic, and the Giant world has man eating giants."

"Even so," she said. "It'd be easier for you."

"Well," I said. "There's a few reasons. First, it's going to be a test bed for things I can use to help restore other places."

"What?"

"It seems like every place I go is a postapocalyptic wasteland. If I can save places as badly damaged as this, maybe I can save them all."

I ran across so many of those places that I was starting to wonder if any worlds existed that were actually in good shape.

"Plus, I'm not sure that I'm going to age," I said.

"I'm pretty sure you won't," Amy said. She stared down at her coffee. "I don't think you'll ever have kids either."

That stung a little, but it was possible I'd eventually get a power to change my own biology, or maybe I could create an artificial womb.

"That means I might be around for a long time," I said. "Things like climate change, or the cumulative effect of Endbringer attacks on the environment…it's academic for most people because they don't think they're going to have to live through it."

"Most people aren't sure they'll be here ten years from now," Amy said pensively. "We all thought Victoria was immortal, and she's dead now."

"Well, if I have to live here, I want to make it the best place to live that I can. I don't want to experiment anywhere there are billions of people, because what if I get it wrong? Their world is empty, and if it all goes to hell, I can just move them."

Another reason that I chose not to share with Amy was the idea that if I ended up having to fight Scion, it was possible the battle would destroy a lot of the world.

I might need a world for the people of Earth Bet to evacuate to, or I might want to restore Earth Bet. There was no scenario where having an extra, empty world was a bad thing.

"Well, attacking Nilbog is likely to make it all go to hell," Amy said. "He's probably got more than one plague waiting, and that's why nobody has tried to destroy him so far.

Maybe I could read his mind to find out where all his plagues were located. I'd have to get some kind of stranger power, though. My telepathy didn't have the range to let me be undetected, especially since he had thousands of creatures of unknown power.

I'd get to him later; it wasn't like he was going anywhere.

"I've got to get back to school," Amy said, looking at her watch. Her eyes widened as I inventoried ten thousand dollars into the inside pocket of her jacket.

"Ten grand," I said. "It's a first payment. I got it from salvaging the boatyard."

Also from upgrading the scrap man's machine so that it ran partially on solar energy, but I didn't mention that. He preferred that no one know that he was working with me, and so I now took payment in his house and made deliveries in the early morning.

"I can't take this," she said.

"Yes, you can," I said. "Even if you won't take money from healing, this isn't healing. You're providing specialized work that nobody else can do, and there's a premium for that."

"It's not right," she muttered.

"Your family is gone," I said. "And Carol didn't leave you any money. You're going to need money for college and money to live on after that. It'll take a million bucks after taxes to even have a modest lifestyle if you aren't getting paid for what you do."

It had hurt her, not being in the will. Carol Dallon had gone out of her way to exclude her. The Pelhams didn't feel the same way, but they weren't exactly rolling in cash even after the inheritance.

Nobody wanted to buy a house that had been the site of a Slaughterhouse attack for fear of hidden boobytraps left by Bonesaw.

"I go over everything that Blasto does, but he's still better at the biological stuff than I am. I need a third set of eyes to make sure that we're not creating a world ending biological plague or something."

She frowned.

"You're saving a world, and maybe a lot more than one," I said. "We're creating proven technology that can make things better. It'll never be released here, but there are other worlds that would love to have you. You'd be a Rockstar on Earth Het; you'd have women throwing panties at you."

She flushed red and ducked her head.

"I'll take the money," she said. "But…not the panties thing."

"I can hook you up with a lawyer who can help you with the taxes aspect."

Our world wasn't as difficult about buying large things with cash as some others, but there were still tax concerns.

I reached out my hand and inventoried her, and then I teleported away.

I left a hundred-dollar tip.

Angie the waitress had just discovered she was pregnant, even though she hadn't told anyone else yet. She was about to need some money, and from what I saw in her mind, her boyfriend was a deadbeat.

It wasn't like I had time to help everyone. I had to focus on the big picture.

I dropped Amy off in front of Arcadia. I didn't have time to troll the Wards today.

Instead, I was meeting with the new President of the Brockton Bay Restoration Project. I'd been calling it a charity, but I doubted that many people would be contributing to it.

I already had three patents under consideration by the patent office. I'd been warned that sometimes companies would steal patents and make money off of them because they thought the original patent holder didn't have the money to litigate.

Given that I wasn't above using telepathy for blackmail, and in the worst case, I could just steal their factory equipment over and over until they got the message, I wasn't too worried.

Scanning the area with both my telepathy and my eyes, I appeared inside the office of the man who'd replaced my father.

The Dockworkers had managed to keep the Empire from nominating their candidate, and this was the man who was holding it all together.

I would have thought it to be bittersweet because the Dockworkers had been Dad's life, especially after Mom's death. Meeting the man who'd replaced him should have made me angry, but I couldn't help but like him.

Keith Brown was a tall African American man who had been raised in Brockton Bay before he went into the military. The Marines weren't what they had once been; parahumans had overshadowed him, but he'd actually fought foreign parahumans in secret.

He'd seen men die, and he hadn't let it embitter him toward parahumans.

My father's job had involved negotiating contracts, using diplomacy to intercede between parties who were diametrically opposed to each other, and being comfortable with the rank and file.

"Taylor," he said. "Are the guys working out all right?"

"They're working out great," I said. "I heal them every time before I take them over, and the guys you picked do great work."

I paid them good money, and I'd thrown free healing for all of their family members in as a perk. The healing before they went to Earth Het was so they didn't transmit anything to the sick people there.

"So…why are you here?" he asked.

I'd felt a little guilty for not hiring the Dockworkers to disassemble the ships in the Ship graveyard. Unfortunately, it would have taken years for them to finish, and I wasn't sure my eighteen million would have been enough.

So, I hired as many of them as I could, and hopefully I'd be able to hire more through this. "I've got more work," I said.

He smiled, genuine pleased. Times had been hard enough for the Dockworkers over the past few years before the bombings and the zombie plague.

"What sort of work?"

"I'm creating a new organization," I said. "The Brockton Bay Restoration Project. It'll be a nonprofit dedicated to helping Brockton Bay back on its feet. Hopefully, the Dockworkers will be part of that."

"I'm sure we'd be happy to help you in any way we can," Keith said.

"The thing is, I need somebody to head up the project. Somebody good with people, somebody who won't back down when they get threatened. I need a hero."

He frowned.

"I'm not sure I know of anybody working here that fits that description; there are heroes here sure enough, but what you're talking about is somebody with experience on the contracts side of things. My assistant doesn't have enough experience to take on anything of that scale."

"There's one person here that fits," I said. "One person who has some experience as a paralegal before he got disgusted with the whole system."

"Me?" he said, surprised. "I'm no hero."

"There's a family in Guatemala who would argue with that," I said. "And an entire village in Honduras."

His hands tightened on the desk.

"Powers," I said. "This isn't a job I'd give to someone who wasn't a good man. But being a good man won't be enough. I need someone who is willing to make the hard choices while still remaining a good man."

"What kind of hard choices?" he asked.

"The kind that involve working with criminals," I said. "My next step is to talk to Accord. He loves to create plans to save the world. I'm going to get him to give me a plan to save Brockton Bay."

"He's crazy," Keith said, disturbed.

"He'll never know that you are involved. As far as he's concerned, I'll just be threatening people into doing what I want."

"Then why tell me?" he asked.

"Because you need to be able to trust me," I said. "And because you're able to handle it. I'm not asking you to commit a crime, but the powers that be seem to want to throw this city away. Have you seen FEMA trucks anywhere? Did they declare this a disaster area and send Federal aid? No."

He frowned, then nodded.

"I'd have to leave this position, and I've only been here a couple of months."

"You'll be working with the Dockworkers quite a bit, and it'll be a few months before the money starts rolling in and you're doing much of anything. But eventually, you'll be able to make a difference in the lives of everyone…not just the rich who are deserting the city in droves, but the common man.

"Just what sort of things are you wanting to do?"

I had him.

It only took thirty more minutes to get him to accept. We'd sign the papers tomorrow, and I'd have him looking for a small office shortly afterward.

Property prices in the Bay were in the toilet at the moment, even more than normal, and so told him that I wanted him to purchase a small, free standing structure. It wouldn't matter if it was an old church, or an old garage, as long as it was in the right kind of location.

Purchasing the place would mean that I could secretly add security measures. I had plans in my head for a bulletproof spray insulation for example. I could reinforce the building, and I would dig a basement if it didn't already have one.

Checking my watch, I switched to a new red suit, and I appeared at the front door of Accord's current base. I knocked politely at his door.

A beautiful blonde woman in an evening gown opened the door. She had a mask studded with gemstones. Everything was in yellow, including her lipstick.

I could have simply attacked Accord and his Ambassadors, and my speed was great enough that I could probably have killed them all before they could react.

However, there was a chance that whatever I got from Accord's powers wouldn't be what he had. Even if it was, it would be at level one, and maybe Accord had the equivalent of level one hundred with his power. I couldn't afford the time to level something like that up.

However, if he refused to help me, I was going to beat all of them, and kill them if they were horrible people.

"Miss Hebert," she said.

"Harvest," I said. "I'm wearing the suit."

"I thought your suit was a hoodie and sweatpants," her voice was a little arrogant, but she was afraid of me. She suspected there was a chance that I would murder them all if this meeting went poorly.

People just had all sorts of preconceptions about me.

"That was before I discovered Armani," I said. I looked at my watch. "I wouldn't want to be late for my appointment."

She nodded and led me through his place.

Everything here screamed money. The walls, the flooring, the paintings on the wall. Everything was perfect in proportion and placement.

I'd taken the opportunity of doing a flyby yesterday and scanning everyone to get an idea of what powers I might be facing, and of what sort of people I would be dealing with.

She led me to a large, heavy wooden door.

A discreet knock at the door, and a moment later she opened it.

He was shorter than I would have thought, barely over five feet. He was wearing a white, tailored suit that looked almost as good as mine. His only concession to being a cape was a mask.

"Accord," I said, stepping into the room. I kept my posture straight and my face professional.

"Harvest," he said. "I was surprised to have you call my secretary on the telephone. I would have expected you to just break in here and start killing everyone."

"I still could," I said. "You haven't done anything to anyone I care about, but you all have powers I'd very much like to have."

I was lying, of course.

Of them all, only Accord and Citrine had powers that I really wanted, although Lizardtail might give me the ability to give an area of effect to my healing power and Ligeia had an interesting water power.

All of the Ambassadors were in the room; apparently Accord didn't trust me.

"However, you have something that I want. May I take a seat?"

He nodded.

"What could I possibly have that you might want? You don't seem interested in taking over territory. You have money through the bounties on the Slaughterhouse 9. What could I have that you would want enough to forego our collective powers?"

"I want you to save my city," I said. "And later to save the world."

"What?" he asked.

"When I kill or beat someone, I get a weaker version of their powers that I can make stronger through practice, potentially beyond the strength of the original. However, that takes time."

"You want my plans?"

"All of them," I said. "World hunger, world peace, everything."

"And what would you offer me in return?" he asked, sitting back in his chair.

"Nothing," I said. "Other than the opportunity to finally see what you've been working towards all these years come to fruition."

"What can you accomplish?" Accord asked. "You have a kill order on your head, and nobody would legally work with you."

"I can build tinkertech that is reproducible by anyone," I said. "And I know how to make the tools to make the tools too. Australia wants to make me a citizen, and if I decide to make them the next great superpower, how to you think the other nations would react?"

Accord frowned, but his mind was already racing, making inferences with such lightning speed that even I was having trouble keeping up.

"They'd come after you," he said. "Especially the CUI."

"And what would happen then?"

"You'd get stronger exponentially," he said. "And you'd kill as many of the CUI parahumans as you could."

"What are the odds that I could take over a nation?" I asked. "If I just started killing people at the top and worked my way down until I found people who were willing to work with me?"

"They'd try to work around you," he said.

"I've got a lot of thinker powers," I said. "And before I try to take over China, I'll make sure to acquire as many as I can. I'm capable of dropping meteors on their cities if they don't agree."

He stared at me.

"I believe you."

"I have no plans to attack the CUI openly," I said. "But there are more subtle ways of exerting influence."

"Let's talk," he said.

"Of course," I said, "Everything is predicated on your plans being any good."

"What?" Acord asked.

He was angry at the insinuation that his plans were substandard, but I couldn't make a deal if he was just making pie in the sky claims.

"I need to take a look at your plans," I said. "Do you have a copy of your world hunger plan?"

"Citrine," he said.

He was staring at me as though he would like to kill me. I could tell that he really would.

The book Citrine returned with two minutes later was at least four inches thick. He'd had it bound in nice leather.

"Is this your only copy?" I asked.

She shook her head.

"I've got a power that lets me gain knowledge instantly, but it destroys the book I'm getting it from. Is that all right?"

Accord nodded shortly.

Placing my hand on the book, I assimilated it, leaving only dust on the table. I inventoried the dust before it could drive Accord into being even more angry.

Knowledge flooded my mind, even though I didn't get a named skill.

I frowned.

"I can see why they ignored you," I said.

"What?" Accord said. His face flushed.

"This is too complicated for a normal person to understand," I said. "It's brilliant, and it'd probably work, but it would require the politicians to make concessions that would be politically difficult."

He nodded grudgingly.

"You have to take human psychology into account," I said. "People are like horses; if you try to force their heads into the water, they'll fight you, even if they are desperately thirsty."

"You really understood my plan?" he asked.

"Well, I'm not really understanding why you chose to use Somali mercenaries to guard transports instead of government troops."

"Those mercenaries tend to become bandits when they're unemployed," he said. "Which means that by keeping them occupied I'm getting a service and keeping them from stealing food by keeping them content, or at least busy."

"The biggest problem with your plan was that you assumed that people really wanted to end world hunger," I said. "They say they do, and maybe they do in the abstract, but do they want it enough to actually sacrifice? Two hundred sixty billion dollars a year for fifteen years is a lot of money when it could go to some senator's pet project to buy votes."

He scowled.

"It's so clear! Why can't they see it?"

"If it doesn't personally benefit them, and especially if it benefits their enemies, they're going to hate it. A lot of people blame the poor for being poor, and they see them as freeloaders on the system."

I'd known poor people all my life; Dad and I had been working poor and so had everyone I knew.

"So, it can't be done?"

"You'd have to blackmail the people in power," I said. "Make it in their interest to do what you want. That would take a thinker of unparalleled power."

"A thinker who has a great number of other abilities to aid the process along."

I nodded.

"Unfortunately, I've got other priorities at the moment."

"Which are?"

"From a purely selfish perspective, I want my city to survive and thrive," I said. "It seems that the government is determined to discard it like a used facial tissue."

He looked intrigued.

"Brockton Bay would be a project that could be a proof of concept for my other projects," he said. "It might help gain attention and give me some measure of credibility."

"Plans are nothing without execution," I said. "People will always be doubtful until you have something to show them."

"I could have a plan for you within a couple of days," he said. "Assuming I knew what you have to bring to the table."

"I can create solar panels on an industrial scale, essentially for free," I said. "I've put a million dollars into a charity I control from the shadows designed to put plans into motion. You can probably figure out which charity it is, and who is working there, but you know what happens when people target people I care about."

You have no worries there," he said dismissively. "I understand that you have a propensity for violence, but that it is not without your own code."

"Ultimately no plan either of us makes will mean anything if the Endbringers are allowed to continue. They are systematically dismantling the world economy and killing people we'll need to make any positive change."

"The Endbringers are monsters who can't be defeated," Accord said. "Even if you managed to lead the Simurgh away."

"She followed me, for reasons of her own," I said. "And yet."

"Yet?"

"They can't be defeated…yet."

"There's no way to plan for that."

"Plan for afterwards," I said. "What will happen to society without the Endbringer Truces and with people finally starting to have hope? Will we start having more wars? I need to be able to take it all into account before I go blundering in."

He frowned, then nodded.

I could sense the incredulity of his ambassadors. I was claiming to eventually have the power to defeat the Endbringers when I wasn't even close to Alexandria's strength or durability.

If the Simurgh had wanted me to take her somewhere else, she wouldn't have wanted to actually kill me. That meant she'd probably tailored the damage to be enough to panic me, but not enough to actually take me out.

Was I anywhere close to being able to take out an Endbringer?

I didn't have any attacks that were even remotely strong enough. If I was able to inventory more weight, and then use my relative speed trick, it might be possible.

Even if I could inventory them, they could probably fight their way out like Echidna had. My best bet against Leviathan would be to simply carry him out of the atmosphere; I'd have to fly him out and he was strong enough to beat Alexandria.

I needed to increase my strength and durability to a point where I could not be hurt by an Endbringer. Even then, it might not be enough.

"I have some side projects," I said. "I want to terraform a world where all life has been destroyed by a massive asteroid, except for a few human survivors. Methods designed for that should scale to other worlds, including our own, without the risk of killing billions due to a mistake."

"So that's where Blasto disappeared to," Accord said. He steepled his fingers. "Restoring a complete ecosystem. An intriguing prospect."

"I recently saved another world from alien invaders," I said. "They'll receive reinforcements to wipe out humanity in twenty years."

I materialized a burner cell phone. I'd gone to great lengths to ensure that even though I had the pictures inside, it couldn't be tracked. I gestured toward Accord, and I quickly sent pictures to his telephone. He wouldn't have wanted to touch my telephone, even if I hadn't had a reputation as a disease carrier.

He was likely going to have his office sterilized after I left.

He stared at my alien invasion pictures.

"Is the size of these ships as large as they seem?"

"Larger," I said. "Their mothership was five thousand kilometers long. I barely managed to destroy it."

Accord showed the pictures to Citrine. The other Ambassadors were going to have to wait until after this meeting.

"I also may have to kill Scion if information I gained recently that he may be planning to destroy the world is correct," I said.

They were all suddenly silent.

"Don't worry," I said. "These are long term goals. It's not like I'm going to try to kill Scion tomorrow. I've got to beef up for a while."

"Perhaps you should wait until some of your other plans are complete."

Accord thought I was going to die against the Endbringers; against Scion I would certainly die. He planned to use me for as long as he could before either thing happened.

"Those are my main goals for the moment, other than killing Lung," I said. "You haven't heard anything about his location, have you?"

Nobody had.

"I think we can come to an agreement," Accord said.

He didn't offer to shake my hand, partially due to his own fastidiousness, and partially because of partially realized fears that I might have brought something back from one of the other worlds.

"I'll expect some preliminary plans the day after tomorrow. I'll text you the details of some of the patents I've got in the pipeline and the expected monetary return. I'd like to have at least some of the production facilities in the Bay."

"There's an issue with the stranded ships in the Bay."

"I'm disassembling them and using them for parts for other projects," I said.

He nodded.

"I keep this phone in stasis most of the time. You can have citrine email me the details."

"You have an email account?"

Killthemall , I said.

Everyone in the room stared at me, as though I'd grown a second head.

"You think I should have gone with KillOrder instead?"

Citrine shook her head.

"MissMurder?"

None of them seemed to like any of my ideas.

"Perhaps something innocuous?" Citrine said delicately.

"The more outrageous I act, the more off-guard people are when I act subtly," I said. "Because they won't expect subtlety from a mass murdering woman in a hoodie. You can actually send it to Restorethebay ."

I actually had the killthemall and Killorder e-mail accounts, but I was pretty sure they were being monitored by Dragon. I only used Nazi phones for those accounts, and I kept a burner phone for the other one. Hopefully, the PRT would think they had all my electronic communications, and I could mislead them with false messages.

The potential for leading them around was too good to be ignored.

"We have an agreement," Accord said.

I nodded to him.

"I've got other business," I said. "So, I will take my leave."

I teleported to the roof of the building and listened in to their discussion over the next ten minutes. Once I was sure they wouldn't betray me, I blinked away.

The problem was that I had too many things to do, and some of them, like saving the Bay were complicated things that would take months to accomplish, if they could even be done at all.

I wasn't a planning genius like Accord, and I didn't have experience in planning a military campaign like Earth Het was going to need.

All I could do was try to deal with one thing at a time and hope I wasn't forgetting anything.

Blinking over to Cannibal world, I was careful to appear in Blasto's courtyard. I'd embarrassed us both by blinking in unannounced once, and he'd demanded that we never talk about the incident again.

It had been an education I'd neither needed nor wanted, and I was careful to respect his privacy after that.

I knocked on the door, and I waited patiently. Since it was a door leading to a courtyard, I was the only one who could be knocking.

"Hey," he said, opening the door. The interior reeked of marijuana fumes. "What's up?"

"Have you gotten the anti-zombie vaccine yet?" I asked.

Blasto had further changed the vaccine to replicate in water and to grow exponentially. We'd left the genital itching; it would go away once the vaccine had produced full immunity, and it wouldn't reoccur no matter how much of the vaccine someone drank.

My plan was to drop batches of the vaccines in the reservoirs feeding city water supplies in zombie earth. It had been more than a month since I had been there, and hopefully the survivors were still alive.

"Yeah. There's no way you'll be able to inoculate an entire planet," he said. "We just don't have the time to make that much vaccine even with Tinkertech. I worked with Panacea to make it airborne once people are infected."

Panacea had given her approval; I could see it in his mind.

"How do we administer it?"

"Still in the reservoirs," Blasto said. "It'll be a couple of weeks before people are fully immunized, but they'll be infectious for a while."

I nodded.

Blasto had built bladder like sacs filled with the virus in a liquid suspension. The bladders would dissolve in water; the liquid on the inside had an enzyme to keep it from dissolving. However, once immersed in water, the whole thing would go, delivering its payload.

He'd only managed to create a dozen bladders the size of thirty-gallon buckets, but he assured me that each one would be enough to contaminate the reservoir of ordinary cities.

"As long as people keep flying and moving around, I'd expect the whole world to be infected in about four months," he said. "And places too remote too be infected probably don't have to worry about zombies either."

I inventoried the sacs, careful not to touch them too hard.

"All right," I said. "Is there anything you need?"

"A root cellar to keep beer in, and some stairs down to the town you've got downstairs. There's a chick downstairs that's really cool."

"I thought you were going out with Bad Apple?" I asked. "Or Poison Apple, or whatever you're calling her these days?"

"It's kind of an open relationship," he said. "And I think she'd like Lizzie. She's skinny, but she's cool."

"If I build stairs that means you might have kids crawling around up here," I said. "Getting into your stuff. Maybe an elevator?"

"You can't build a house, but you can build an elevator?"

"I can build a house," I said defensively. "Mostly. I probably couldn't do any of the tile work or the carpentry or anything like that without eating a lot of skill books, but I could."

"But an elevator?"

"It doesn't even have to be a box," I said. "It could just be a frame with counterweights."

"You're kind of cheap for a millionaire," he said.

"I grew up poor!" I said. "If I blew money on building fancy houses for everybody, I'd go broke and everybody would still be outside when winter came."

He grinned.

"It's not like I care, as long as I've got my herbs and some beer and maybe a little stuff on the computer."

I sighed and handed him a memory stick.

"Don't blame me if that thing has viruses," I said. "I programmed the bot to scan the web for the stuff that you like. I haven't seen it, and I don't want to see it…again."

"It never happened," he said looking straight ahead.

"Right," I said. "Well, I'm off."

I switched to new, disposable hoodie and sweatpants. I planned to disinfect myself by taking a bath in a volcano afterwards, and then inventorying whatever hardened lava appeared on my body afterwards.

Hopefully the refugees were still alive. I might never find them; it had been more than a month since I'd seen them last; maybe two.

I appeared in the air over Racoon City.

-1 HP.

+1% RADIATION DAMAGE.

The whole city was gone. Had they nuked it?

-1 HP.

+1% RADIATION DAMAGE.

I dropped lower to examine the damage. I wasn't worried about the radiation damage; at its current speed my regeneration could handle it, and since I was likely to eventually fight Behemoth it was actually helping me.

-1 HP.

+1% RADIATION DAMAGE.

They'd deployed six overlapping nuclear weapons in an overlapping pattern, destroying all the buildings in a ten-mile radius.

It was the best they could do at this tech level, anyway, and hopefully it would have removed the threat.

-1 HP.

+1% RADIATION DAMAGE.

RADIATION RESISTANCE IS NOW 12%.

It added to my physical resistance, anyway, which was why my trips to space hadn't been damaging to me. If I was taking this much damage, the area must still be hot.

I had a feeling that the refugees we'd helped hadn't survived. The city had been locked down as far as I could tell.

The buildings had been completely destroyed. I walked around on the surface, ignoring the rubble that crunched under my feet as I absorbed radiation.

I only gained another 7%, reaching 19% RADIATION RESISTANCE before I stopped taking damage.

Blinking to the location of the volcano on Harvester world, I plunged into it. Lava was heavy, and a normal person wouldn't have sunk inside; they'd have simply burned to death on the surface.

I plunged down inside the lava, and to me it felt like warm mud. I made sure to dunk my head and hair inside, although not for long; I couldn't see inside the lava.

When I felt I was decontaminated, I flew out, naked and then inventoried all the lava on my body.

It only occurred to me then that I could have simply inventoried all the radioactive dust on my body at once.

Blinking back to an area outside the city, I flew.

Hopefully they'd managed to burn out the infection. I flew down the highway toward the next large city; it only took me five minutes at a thousand miles an hour.

There were zombies all through the city.

I dropped the package in the reservoir anyway.

There were zombies in the next city, and the city after that. I spent the next five hours looking, and it appeared that there were zombies in every city, even when I flew up to the Bering strait and crossed over into Russia.

Had this already happened before we'd developed the vaccine, or had I had the opportunity to stop it and had simply forgotten about an entire world?

The five hours I spent after that, killing as many zombies as I could was ultimately futile. There was no way I'd be able to kill six billion zombies without killing the human survivors, if there were any.

As far as I could tell, the disease had spread even to the birds and the animals. I was attacked by a zombie cow in Minnesota, and I gained +3 STRENTH, bringing me to 37.

Other than that, the trip was a bust.

I couldn't afford to keep making mistakes like this. Even through whatever protection's Gamer's Mind provided, I felt guilty.

I was going to have to do better.

I'd considered simply collecting powers from the villains in my world; the problem was that most villains were in hiding. If I got close enough to them, I could identify them. If they had gangs, I could interrogate them.

However, most villains did not have bases whose locations were known by the PRT. Most villains weren't gang leaders either; more villains were like Uber and Leet. They tended to be individual contractors with a few henchmen rather than leaders of gangs.

There were only a few villains who had known locations, and most of them were too powerful to move, or there were other reasons they were left alone.

The Sleeper was the great unknown. He was so terrifying that no one even talked about what his powers might possibly be.

The Moord Nag had a known location; she summoned a monster that grew stronger the more it killed. It might synergize well with my tendencies to kill a lot of people and monsters.

Even if I never used the power, I could do a lot of good simply by destroying her. After all, she didn't have any deadmen's switches.

I'd have gone after Nilbog, but my experience with Bakuda and with Zombie earth had made me cautious. The last thing I needed was for Dad to wake up and find that I'd turned Brockton Bay and the rest of the world into another wasteland.

A quick google search gave me her general direction, and I was now in a bookstore picking up the books I'd ordered.

"Afrikaans for beginners?" I heard a voice from behind me, "The English to Afrikaans dictionary?"

Vista.

I'd known she was coming in of course, but I was hoping to avoid her. I had less reason to troll her than the others, and after my failure in the zombie world I really wasn't feeling up to the effort.

"Are you going on vacation?" she asked. "I haven't heard good things about Africa."

She'd been offended by the corruption in the PRT, but she'd chosen to stay. She was gathering evidence everywhere she could, but it was slow going.

Vista still believed that the PRT was a good organization overall, but she was afraid that a few bad apples were going to ruin the organization.

Clockblocker was helping her, but the Wards were generally kept away from most of the important decisions.

Being told about a homicidal cape apparently was not something they were kept from.

"Well, I'm going to make it better!" I said, forcing myself to smile.

"Who are you going to kill?" she asked. She looked down at the books in my hand.

They vanished into dust.

NEW LANGUAGE ACQUIRED: AFRIKAANS.

I shrugged.

"Does it matter?" I said. "I don't go after heroes, and Africa is not under the control of the Protectorate."

"It's the Moord Nag, right?" she said. "Her monster gets stronger the more that it kills."

"Maybe," I said. "It's not like I'm planning on killing anybody but Lung, and maybe villains who are real assholes. It'll probably never get to be bigger than a housecat, really."

"And what happens if you kill her?" she demanded. "You'll destabilize the entire region! Warlords will start fighting for power. Thousands of people will die!"

"If you're always worried about consequences, you'll never do anything," I said. "I'll buy this too."

The girl at the register was staring at us, her eyes as big as saucers. Vista was in full costume, and she'd finally placed me.

I'd healed her cousin, apparently, after Bakuda's bombing.

As she handed be the World Atlas, my hand brushed over hers. I pushed healing into her.

"What did you just do?' she asked, her eyes wide.

"You won't have that chronic pain anymore," I said. "There were some cysts in your ovaries that were about to burst. You should go to the doctor more often."

"I can't afford it," she said. Looking up, she said, "Thank you!"

I smiled and I assimilated the Atlas as quickly as I could before turning to leave the store.

Why hadn't I done that as soon as I'd gotten Schrodinger's power? Having mental road maps of most of the planet was a good thing.

It might even help in alternate Earths that were close enough to mine to have the same roads.

"You can't just go around healing people without asking permission!" Vista hissed.

"I don't ask permission when I kill them?" I said. "Why should I ask before doing something nice. Like if I put $50,000 in your bank account right now, would I ask permission?"

She paled.

"Don't do that," she said. "They'd start investigating me."

"Well, if you need help with your investigation, let me know," I said. "I can probably find a lot of dirt that would help."

She paled.

"How did you know?"

"Thinker," I reminded her. "I've got powers I haven't told anybody about, just in case, you know."

Other than telepathy, I didn't really have many abilities that they didn't know about. However, I felt it was good to keep them guessing.

As we stepped out of the bookstore, I asked, "The Protectorate isn't coming to kill me again, are they?"

A large group was approaching, all parahumans.

She didn't know anything about it, which didn't mean much. The Protectorate knew I was a thinker; they probably hadn't wanted her to warn me by inadvertently giving off body language cues.

I sent my eyes out in every direction, aiming high and looking down.

There were capes that I didn't recognize, along with some that I did. I wasn't within range of my telepathy, but Intuitive Empathy suggested that they didn't mean me any good.

"You should probably leave," I said. "I think someone is about to try to execute a kill order on me."

She frowned.

I could tell that she wanted to stay, but she didn't need to be around this. Vista hadn't really seen most of my murders, although she'd seen the aftermath.

"Call it in," I said. "See what they say."

Thirty seconds later she grimaced, and said, "I'm not to interfere."

"Of course you aren't," I said.

With capes of unknown power, I couldn't wait and let them attack me to increase my resistances.

I teleported to the rear of the group. They were attacking me from three different directions, and it would be best to pick off as many of them as I could, all at the same time.

The man I was targeting was dressed in a costume patterned after Behemoth. After I blinked in close enough, I realized that I was being attacked by the Fallen.

They'd taken exception to my seemingly banishing the Simurgh, and they anticipated getting my bounty from the PRT and rubbing their faces in it.

Eligos died without even knowing what hit him as I punched him in the back of the neck. I could now lift eight tons, and it was easy.

BLADESTORM IS LEVELED UP BY 3 LEVELS.

YOU NOW DO 800 HP OF DAMAGE.

LEVEL 16.

That was…fair.

Apparently Eligos had an ability like Stormtiger's, to slash out and do wind damage. I wouldn't complain about a little more damage, but it was a little underwhelming.

He was in the bed of a pickup truck with a man in a delicate looking mask with no eye holes; the mask represented a woman's face, with while and silver feathers on flowing white clothing.

He was wearing a corset!

He was lifting his mask.

"STOP," he said, and something gave his words more resonance than they normally would.

"No," I said, and I drove my thumbs into his eyes before crushing his skull.

"TELEPATHY IS INCREASED BY TWO LEVELS. YOU MAY NOW READ MINDS WITHIN A RANGE OF 640 FEET. YOU MAY CONTROL ONE MIND WITH A 70% CHANCE LESS ANY RESISTANCES. LEVEL 7."

The drivers were normals, but they were members of the fallen too.

They were speeding down the road at seventy miles an hour, and so I simply inventoried the car and let them continue skidding down the road.

One of them didn't make it, and the other was barely breathing.

I stepped on his neck and then I blinked to the next location.

Normally the three families of the Fallen worked independently, but sometimes they lent members to each other.

They were an Endbringer cult, but the different families had different beliefs. The Wichita branch were the most fervent; they mixed Christian beliefs with Endbringer worship.

They used crack and meth, mostly homegrown.

The next truck I attacked was coming from the north. It held members of this family. There was a bodybuilder with biblical verses tattooed on him. He had a monstrous fish on his back, with tentacles as a costume. His mask looked like a gutted fish.

He called himself Dagon.

I appeared beside him in the bed of the truck, and I lashed out, only for my fist to be caught in a tentacle made of water. It was stronger than I was.

I inventoried the water, but more reappeared almost as quickly as I inventoried it. He was a hydrokinetic, and I found that I suddenly wanted that power.

Leviathan was likely to ne the next Endbringer on the list, and it was unlikely that I could level up the power enough in the time we had left to be able to match him. However, it might help me to save lives by creating pockets of air in the middle of the typhoon.

-50 HP!

DEHYDRATION DAMAGE!

THIS DAMAGE BYPASSES PHYSICAL RESISTANCES! FORTUNATELY, YOU DO NOT HAVE BLOOD AND AREADY HAVE AN 80% RESISTANCE TO DEHYDRATION!

+1% DEHYDRATION RESISTANCE.

"Clockblock," I said, and I reached out, not for him, but for the water between him and the cab of the truck.

A single cubic foot became time-locked, and the truck kept moving. It slammed into him at seventy miles an hour, and he went flying out of the truck.

I blinked after him, and before he could recover, even as he was spinning and skidding on the street, I clockblocked his head.

His body immediately went limp, and the water around him dropped to the ground.

With all signals from the brain stopped, his breathing and heartbeat immediately stopped. It would only last for two seconds, though, so I plunged my hand into his chest.

NEW POWER CREATED!

HYDROKINISIS!

YOU NOW CONTROL A 10 FOOT BY TEN FOOT BY TEN FOOT CUBE OF WATER! YOU MAY ALSO DO 10 POINTS OF DAMAGE PER LEVEL TO INDIVIDUALS WHO ARE NOT RESISTANT TO DEHYDRATION DAMAGE AS YOU WITHDRAW WATER FROM THEIR BODIES. SOME BEINGS AUTOMATICALLY HAVE 100% RESISTANCE, LIKE ROBOTS, TIMELOCKED BEINGS AND SOME FORMS OF UNDEAD. THE AREA YOU CONTROL DOUBLES IN ALL DIMINSIONS WITH EVERY LEVEL. DAMAGE INCREASES BY 10 POINTS PER LEVEL. THIS BYPASSES PHYSICAL RESISTANCE.

That was going to be very useful! If I was able to pull the water from Brackish pools, I could make salt, which might be useful on cannibal earth!

A boy was shooting sparks of fire. They hit me, piercing into me, but all I felt was a warm sensation inside. I saw a girl beside him; she was dancing, and she hit me with fire.

A third girl hit me with smoke.

The smoke didn't do any damage to me, but it burned off the material of my outfit.

My Armani!

I'd forgotten to change out of it, and they'd destroyed one of three suits!

They called themselves Phobos, Mania and Deness respectively.

I blinked into the back of the truck, behind both of them, and I smashed their heads together. I felt their heads crush under my hands.

FIRE CONTROL HAS INCREASED BY +2 LEVELS!

FIRE CONTROL HAS INCREASED BY +2 LEVELS!

FIRE CONTROL IS NOW LEVEL 12! YOU CAN CONTROL ALL FIRE WITHIN A FOUR MILE RADIUS!

YOU CAN CREATE FIRE DOING 600 HP OF DAMAGE!

Holy crap.

I could literally destroy entire cities with this. The damage wouldn't destroy buildings, not at first, but once they were on fire, they'd continue to be on fire.

What would I get from smoke girl?

My fist punched down, only to stop an inch from her nose.

She was my age, and she was incredibly shy. She wasn't completely innocent; no one could be being raised in the family she had been.

Her smoke power didn't discriminate; she'd had to build a costume out of her own hair which was skimpy because it destroyed her own costumes as well as that of others.

Her body was tattooed in an effort to make it look like she was wearing more clothes than she was.

She'd been forced to do this by her family, despite her reluctance, and ultimately she just wanted to get out and live a normal life.

I flicked her forehead, and as she fell unconscious, I touched the blood that was coming from her nose.

NEW POWER CREATED!

DISINTEGRATING SMOKE! THIS SMOKE COVERS A TEN FOOT RADIUS CLOUD AND IT DEALS 100 HP PER LEVEL. THE RADIUS OF THE SMOKE AND THE DAMAGE DEALT DOUBLE WITH EACH LEVEL. THIS ONLY AFFECTS NONLIVING MATERIALS, AND DOES NOT AFFECT PARTS OF YOU THAT ARE NON-LIVING, SUCH AS YOUR HAIR AND NAILS.

Level a power like that up enough, and I could literally disintegrate entire buildings. That had been what her family had wanted her to do, and it was the reason she'd been considering leaving.

That bit of humanity was also why I wasn't going to kill her. I wasn't going to heal her either, but she'd wake up with a headache and free from her family.

I'd have the PRT make a deal with her as long as she didn't destroy my suits again.

Ultimately, that was the fault of her family, and they were going to pay for this.

The truck had slid to a stop, and the norms inside were shooting at me. I ignored the bullets, and I inventoried the girl and then released her on top of a building nearby.

We'd skidded to a stop beside a three-story building, and it was easy enough.

I was still nude, and I considered for a moment before switching into a pink hello kitty hoodie. I hated this hoodie; it had been given to me by Emma before everything had gone to hell, and I'd hated it when she gave it to me.

Besides, maybe it would be more humiliating for them to be killed by someone in an outfit this ridiculous.

The men in the truck were still shooting at me. They'd already reloaded, and so I telepathically spoke to one of the men.

"Your cousin as been cheating on you with your girl. Nobody would know if you killed him now; you could always blame the crazy bitch."

He shot his cousin in the head. A look of horror appeared on his face.

"How could you kill your cousin! He wouldn't cheat on you! What kind of person kills kin? Maybe you should…"

He'd put a gun in his mouth before I could even finish my mental spiel.

Flame appeared all around me, destroying the hated Hello Kitty hoodie.

There was a cape on the building opposite me, and he was gesturing at me.

"Bladestorm," I said, and as he fell, I teleported to his side.

FIRE CONTROL HAS INCREASED BY 1 LEVEL!

YOU CAN NOW CONTROL ALL FIRE WITHIN AN EIGHT MILE RADIUS. LEVEL 13.

The damage I'd taken had already healed, and I turned as I felt a teleporter appearing within my range. She was a slender woman. She called herself Batitbat.

Intuitive Empathy screamed at me, and I barely managed to dodge in time.

His name was Chort, and he was as strong as Alexandria. He wore a wolf pelt with goat horns on it, and he'd been mastered by someone.

Armored skin covered me, and I lashed out, but he dodged me!

Someone else was lending him a danger sense. His eyes were glowing yellow.

I appeared behind me, but he hit me.

-200 HP!

+1% PHYSICAL RESISTANCE!

Fuck!

I found myself flying backwards through a building, the walls collapsing after me.

They were teleporting to meet me on the other side, and so I blinked into the air, seeing Chort going through the area I had been.

He was incredibly strong, and although he was nowhere as durable as Alexandria, he was just as strong. It was likely that he was more durable than I was.

It required 10,000 hit points to do a single point of damage to me in my normal skin. In my Armored Skin, that increased to 100,000,000 hit points to do a single point of damage.

His skin was tougher than mine, and I had no way to deal anything near that kind of damage. He was faster than he should have been, likely due to having that overwhelming level of strength.

He was also flying directly toward me, his body propelled by his massive strength, even as I felt Purity trying to blast me.

She wasn't doing it of her own will. She'd been mastered by someone too.

STATUS EFFECT!

FRAGILE!

-2 LEVELS OF ARMORED SKIN!

EFFECT WILL LAST FOR FIVE MINUTES!

Someone on the ground had hit me with a status effect; it meant that for the next five minutes, my damage resistance had been cut to one tenth normal.

If Chort hit me, I would take 2000 hit points. I didn't have anything near that.

I didn't have a choice.

"Planeshift," I said.

I felt a hand around my ankle as the world vanished around me.

Vista had been controlled by Mama Mathers; I knew that the moment she'd grabbed my leg. I plane shifted, but she warped space around me as I did.

Instead of arriving in Cannibal World as I'd intended, I found myself floating over a version of New York city.

I inventoried Vista absently, and I simply floated and stared.

Everything here was so bright and new. It lacked the scars from Behemoth's attack, and places were filled with buildings that were empty in my world.

Why was I here?

My experience suggested that if this world wasn't some weird hell where everyone was already crazy that things were about to go batshit.

Was my power drawn to conflict, or was I subconsciously controlling my power because I wanted to be stronger? Nobody got stronger in a world where everything was peaceful and the people were powerless.

I waited for the next three minutes until I had to release Vista. When I did, she stared at me and spit angrily.

"I'm not your enemy," I said telepathically. "Mama has no control over you here."

Strictly speaking it wasn't true. Mama Mather's power didn't seem to connect interdimensionally, but she was able to reinforce suggestions over time. The human mind hated cognitive dissonance, and sometimes thinking one way long enough was good enough to twist your thinking, even if you were free of the initial controlling influence.

Even with Intuitive Empathy and Telepathy, and even with Mama Mathers dead, it would likely take some time to deprogram Chort. He'd been with the family for a couple of years, and he'd been forced to perform atrocities.

She stared at me for a moment, then looked down. She shrieked and space warped around her so that she was suddenly on the ground.

People around us were staring; hadn't they ever seen parahumans before?

A quick check of their minds showed that they actually hadn't. There was apparently a tinker who had gone public a few years ago, and there were rumors of a green monster, but the public didn't know about parahumans.

Well, Earth Aleph had fewer capes than Earth Bet, and this place had fewer capes still. I didn't see any reason to stay here except to wait out the next two minutes so the fragile condition would be done with.

We needed to get out of sight; no point in upsetting the natives if we didn't have to.

I pulled Vista around a corner, and I touched her shoulder. Her costume disappeared, and in it's place was a cute pink outfit with Hello Kitty emblems on it, and a Hello Kitty backpack.

Even the alleys here were cleaner than back home. It wasn't perfect, but it looked like the street cleaners came through regularly.

"What's this?" she said, scowling.

"I figured you might hitch a ride sometime," I said, "And so I got you something in case we have to decontaminate you again."

Grabbing her hand, I healed her of the cold that she was developing.

"Hey!" she said, pulling her hand away.

"There's no telling if these people have any resistance to the variant of the cold virus you were incubating," I said. "It was for the sake of this world. I'll heal you again when we get back."

I was going to be extra careful about viruses from now on. While I couldn't inventory living things without them taking up a whole slot, viruses weren't alive and they could come along just fine.

"Katie," I heard her mutter.

A friend had come to school sick, more worried about getting an attendance award than about making her friends sick.

"Where are we?" she asked, looking around. "New York?"

"It's one of those low parahuman worlds," I said. "People aren't used to costumes."

She looked down at herself and grimaced.

"You couldn't get me anything…cooler?"

"Nope," I said. "You keep being an uninvited guest, I'm going to keep humiliating you. Besides, making you look more like a kid will make people underestimate you."

She worked incredibly hard to be taken seriously. She hated the thought of being seen as a child, despite actually being one.

"Think of it as going undercover," I said.

"I'm surprised you aren't going back already," she said.

"I've already got the location of their base," I said. At her look, I said, "Thinker, remember. They'll stick around for a couple of days because they'll want revenge on me for killing their members."

"The PRT was mobilizing," she said. "Because they didn't want them destroying half the Bay fighting you."

"They aren't here for them," I said. I frowned. "I'm going to have to leave you somewhere until Mama Mathers is dead."

Her face paled and she looked down.

She didn't speak German, so Paradise island was out. She knew more about me than I wanted Earth Het to know. They still thought I was a hero.

"I'm going to have to leave you on the world I left the Protectorate," I said.

"The one with the Cannibals and no food?" she asked.

"I've gathered some of the non-cannibals there," I said. "And I'm trying to restart civilization."

"What?" she asked.

I'd have known she was stunned even without telepathy.

"I'm not a monster!" I said. "People were starving to death!"

It didn't fit with her image of me as an unstable killer.

"How many people have I healed in the Bay?" I asked.

"Less than you've killed?"

"Twice as many! Maybe more! I'm cutting down on killing!"

"What, like a smoker? You were like a ten pack a day person before…you've cut back a pack or two?"

"I've cut back like eight packs! I'm a two pack a day person now!"

"You literally killed like five people less than five minutes ago."

I shrugged.

"Self-defense…. totally legal."

"And what you did before, with the gangs?"

"Aggressive self-defense," I said. "They'd have come for me eventually."

"That's not self-defense!" she said. "Not according to the law."

"Well, the law doesn't apply to me," I said. "I've got a Kill Order. I'm literally outside the law."

"Would you obey the law if the order was rescinded?"

"….Maybe? Once I've killed Lung anyway."

She scowled.

FRAGILE CONDITION IS ENDED.

I looked over her shoulder.

"Is that a portal appearing in the sky?"

"Yeah, right. I'm not falling for that one," she said.

"I'm not Clockblocker."

She looked behind her, and her eyes widened.

There were figures coming out of the portal. I blinked to just above the portal, and I used my telepathy.

I couldn't understand their language, but their intent was clear. The intended to invade, and they intended to kill.

Blinking back to Vista, I touched her shoulder again. Her costume was back in place.

"I need you to redirect the bodies to an open spot," I said. "Otherwise people are going to die."

She nodded. I inventoried her, and then flew above the spot where the aliens were coming through in their flying motorcycles.

I inventoried her in my arms, and I pointed to a location.

She nodded, and I re-inventoried her, and I blinked to the spot. She nodded grimly to me, and I blinked back above the portal. A couple of hundred of the invaders had already made their way through. I could sense a lot more on their way through the portal, and so I ignored the ones who were already shooting.

"Bone Garden, Bone Garden, Bone Garden, Bone Garden, Bone Garden."

As the creatures began coming through the portal, I killed them. As they fell, Vista redirected them to a spot in central park. Bodies began to pile up until I felt myself hit from behind.

-5 HP!

+1% LASER RESISTANCE!

-5 HP!

+1% LASER RESISTANCE!

-5 HP!

+1% LASER RESISTANCE!

They were part of a hive mind, and I was surrounded by them, and so the individuals were harder to track telepathically than ordinary individuals would have been.

"Bone Garden," I said, lifting the effect a little above the plane of the portal.

The ones that had attacked me were now falling, but a few more had escaped into the portal.

Something massive started coming through the portal.

"Bone Garden!" I said. "Blade Storm!"

It was some sort of space worm, which meant it didn't have any bones. It was covered in some kind of armor that kept my Bladestorm from having an effect.

It was monstrously huge.

Using my eyes to see inside, I blinked inside.

Apparently, the aliens had reengineered these worms to act as vessels. They were able to traverse space, but also had cybernetic parts that were beyond my skills as a tinker.

"Bladestorm!" I said. "Bladestorm!"

It took five more bladestorms to kill the thing. The thing had a lot of hit points, but it's resistance to damage was pathetic; that was why it had the armor.

I also killed the aliens inside the thing.

We suddenly began falling. I tried to inventory the thing, but I couldn't. I touched a wall, and I got a message.

STRENGTH HAS INCREASED BY 10!

YOU NOW HAVE A STRENGTH OF 47!

That meant I could now lift thirty-two tons. Becoming a wolf would increase that to one hundred twenty-eight tons. Growing a foot would increase it to five hundred sixteen tons.

I changed into the werewolf form, and I grew. I pushed my back against the top of the worm, and I felt myself passing through its flesh. The armor held, though.

Slowing the fall was all I could do; the thing was massive. The only reason I could affect it at all was because it was hollow. I might have managed to lift it if it wasn't for the weight of the armor.

There were hundreds of people underneath the thing, and Vista was defended herself from being attacked.

"Get out," I said. "Get out. Get out. Get out."

I could only affect one mind at a time, but I did what I could.

Using Clockblocker's power, I froze the piece of armor I was straining against. I stretched it out as much as I could, and the whole thing stopped.

It only lasted two seconds and then it started falling again.

"Get out! Get out! Get Out!"

Some people were frozen in panic; my telepathic command pushed them into motion.

One guy was arguing on the phone and he hadn't even noticed the fact that the sky had blackened above him.

The whole thing would fall for a second and then stop for two seconds. It would fall for a second and then fall for two.

I cursed at the people below me; while I was dealing with this, the army in the air was spreading out. Objectively the smarter thing to do would be to abandon the people below me to their fates and move on t help the most people.

The aliens on the motorcycles were killing people even as I sat inside this alien worm.

Worse, more of the worms were appearing in the skies.

By the time the people below me had gotten out of the way, including one guy who stumbled along because he needed a walker, there had to be at least three thousand enemy soldiers scattered around the city.

There were people around Vista now, people dressed in colorful costumes.

It looked like one guy was wearing an American Flag. There was a tinker in a suit of armor, a man with a bow, and a giant green Case 53. There was another guy with long hair wielding a hammer.

They were standing around Vista, who'd been injured protecting a group of schoolgirls.

Letting the space worm fall, I changed back to human form, and I blinked as I realized that my hoodie now had space guts dripping onto it.

I blinked beside Vista and healed her.

"She's with me!" Vista called out. "She's the one who made the pile over there."

It was an impressive pile, twenty feet high and fifty feet wide and covered in bodies.

"They're all part of a hive mind," I said.

They didn't seem to be paying attention to me, and so I scanned them.

I was stunned.

The tinker had no powers at all; he was simply a genius at a level that I'd never seen before. All of his technology was replicable, and some of it was beyond what I could manage.

The man in the flag suit had been in World War II. His mind had the same sort of purity I associated with the President Whitmore. He was the sort of person who would throw himself on a grenade to help others.

The man with the hammer was an alien, over a thousand years old. His people had been worshipped as gods by the people of this world.

Two of these people had no powers at all, and yet they were here, fighting.

The green guy….

"HULK SMASH!"

He punched one of the space worms, and I stared. What kind of strength would that take?

"What can you do?" the guy in the flag suit asked.

"I can kill," I said. "But usually with these hive minds, if you can kill the queen, the whole thing comes tumbling down. The portal goes out into space, and there's a ship out there somewhere with a lot of reinforcements for these guys."

"Go," he said.

"You'll be all right?" I asked Vista.

It wouldn't look good if I brought one of the Wards back dead.

"I'll be helping civilians evacuate," she said. "What were you saying about cutting back on killing?"

I shrugged.

"Well, you backslide sometimes."

I blinked until I reached the portal. I flew through after bone gardening the aliens that were still coming through.

There was a ship in the distance; it was only a hundred miles away, and while its size was nothing compared to a harvester mothership, it was large enough that I had no trouble seeing it.

Blink.

I was at the outside of the ship.

My eyes were sent out, scanning for the Chitauri queen, if there was one. It was possible that they were all clones controlled by a computer, or something similar.

Blinking through the ship, I started emitting disintegrating smoke everywhere I could. It wouldn't hurt the aliens, but it might disable vital systems, especially if I concentrated on certain subsystems.

I'd seen enough alien ships that I could make some guesses about where things were, at least with my interplanetary level of tinker skill.

Finding myself in the power chamber, I started spamming smoke. I dropped all my clothes first; I didn't have an unlimited number of hoodies after all.

Aliens came through an open chamber and attacked me.

Now that I was no longer fragile, their weapons had no effect on me.

I grabbed one and snapped his neck.

STRENGTH HAS INCREASED BY +1.

YOU NOW HAVE A STRENGTH OF +48!

Crap.

These guys were useless.

I plunged into the second alien's mind, connecting to the alien hive mind.

There wasn't a queen; instead they were controlled artificially, by a computer.

Well, in that case, I might as well get to it.

The smoke in here was burning right through the casing of the power plant.

DISINTEGRATING SMOKE HAS RISEN TO LEVEL TWO!

The damage suddenly doubled, and my estimate of how long it was going to take was suddenly drastically wrong.

The world exploded around me.

-250 HP!

+1% RADIATION RESISTANCE.

+1% PHYSICAL RESISTANCE!

+1% FIRE RESISTANCE!

+1% BLINDNESS RESISTANCE!

It took me a moment for my vision to clear up. When it did, I realized that the portal was closing.

I blinked back to the portal, and I was through just in time.

Flying sky cycles were falling from the sky everywhere, and the two surviving space worms were falling too.

Fuck.

Were there people underneath?

Yes.

I blinked on top of one of the space whales, and I clockblocked some of its armor from the top.

Blinking to the other, I cockblocked it.

Back and forth I blinked, while sending messages to the people below to get out of the way.

One after the other. Blink, clockblock, blink, clockblock, blink, clockblock.

CLOCKBLOCKER HAS RISEN TO LEVEL 2. YOU MAY NOW MANIPULATE 2 CUBIC FEET FOR 4 SECONDS!

This made it easier, but I still wondered if people in this world had any sense of self preservation at all. They grabbed for stuff in their cars, they tried to help other people, some of them stumbled and fell.

Suddenly space seemed to warp around the people underneath the first ship. Vista was shortening distances so that even the slowest of them was soon out of the way.

The man in the American Flag suit began shouting out orders, and people were soon organizing a rescue brigade to help the people under the second worm.

Blink, Clockblock, blink, clockblock.

The woman, the norm was pulling people out of cars and as some of them had crashed into each other, it wasn't always easy.

When the first worm was clear, I let it drop and focused on the second.

Vista was there too, and it wasn't long before I could detect no one living underneath the worm.

I let it drop, and I appeared before them.

"That was good work," Vista murmured.

"You too," I said.

Color came to her face, and she turned her head.

I felt a fist grab mine, and I almost pulled away, but he was shaking my hand.

"We still have to go after Loki," he said. "The one who started all of this."

"The god of mischief?" I asked. I grinned. "Count me in!"

If this was the Loki of mythology, he might have all sorts of interesting powers, from illusion, to shapechanging, to being able to become pregnant by a horse.

Somehow, I hoped the last one wasn't the power I ended up with. Some powers were just stupid.

"Shouldn't you girls be home playing with dolls instead of fighting with alien invaders?"

He was flying around us, the jets from his boots making enough noise to be an irritant to my enhanced hearing. I wondered if I could get resistance to deafness if I spent enough time around loud noises.

Maybe I should start going to rock concerts.

Vista bristled beneath me. I was holding her up with telekinesis as I flew and she was doing an impression of the Thinker statue. If I let her fall, she was fully capable of reducing the distance to the ground to nothing.

I'd inventoried Captain Rogers and the Russian Spy lady.

Thor had thrown his hammer and it was pulling him along, despite the fact that my tinker ability and my common sense both told me that was bullshit. Physics just didn't work like that.

"I've been doing this for two years," Vista said indignantly. "How long have you?"

"Four years," Tony Stark said. "I have to admit that I respect your costume more than hers. Is that trashcan chic?"

"She gets a lot of blood on her costumes," Vista said. "And she hasn't figured out how to make a costume where the blood will slide off, despite saying she's a tinker."

"It's not one of my specialties!" I protested.

I had designs for spacesuits and bomb squad outfits, but I couldn't do Armani. I'd never been able to sew, and while it would be inconsequential to learn, it would also be stupid to put that much work into something that was just going to get burned or exploded or disintegrated off me.

"Besides," I said. "I go through too many suits to wear my nice ones into battle."

"I wear my best suit into battle," Tony said.

"You can just wipe the blood off that, easy peasy," I said.

"You seem obsessed with blood. It's a little disturbing." He said, doing another loop around us. He was doing it because he knew that it annoyed me.

"You've got no idea," Vista said.

I was probably at least fast as he was, but I didn't want Vista to get whiplash, or to throw up because of too many G's of acceleration or whatever.

How did he manage to deal with acceleration and whiplash inside that suit of his?

"This isn't my first alien invasion. The first one I had to stop practically by myself. When we get done with this, how would you like a look at genuine alien technology?"

"It looks like we're going to have our hands full for a while," he said. He gestured down at the fallen giant space worms and the fallen space cycles.

"Different alien technology," I said. "We're from a different universe, and I recently saved a second universe from different aliens. The aliens are going to have reinforcements that are bigger and stronger in twenty years, and it'd be nice to have a second opinion."

"Different universe?" he asked. "Like a different timeline?"

He believed us. We were both too practiced at what we did to be completely new, and he kept an eye on his world's capes, if only so that he could modify his armor to take them into account. People like us would have made waves.

That was especially true because we were kids, and he didn't think kids had anything like the ability to defer gratification.

I could totally defer gratification! I was waiting to go after the Fallen so that I could collect on this Loki guy.

"I've been to some that looked like they were pretty similar to here, and some that were pretty different," I said.

We were approaching the tower much slower than we otherwise could; the green giant was following us pretty well by jumping from building to building, although the damage he was doing at the same time seemed like a liability issue to me.

It was probably pretty expensive to fix things in New York, at least if it was anything like home.

"I'd be interested in seeing some of those worlds," he said.

"I'll have to heal you before you go," I said. "I'm trying to prevent any more interdimensional disease transfer."

"Any more?" he asked.

"There were some incidents," I said defensively. "That totally weren't my fault."

"Zombies," Vista muttered. "It was bad."

"I told them to destroy the samples, but they didn't listen," I said sharply. "That was clearly not a virus they should have been messing with."

She nodded reluctantly.

"I've got some heart issues," he began.

"I can pull the arc reactor out of your chest, and I can heal you without having to put you under anesthesia," I said.

"How did you know…"

"Powers," I said. "I've got like a ton of them."

"Huh," he said. "I've got to build all mine."

"You've got the two best powers," I said. "Genius and money. With those, you can literally change the world."

We were rapidly approaching the tower.

"The guy with the arrows and the scientist are up top," I said. "Loki looks to have them down. Vista?"

She nodded, and a moment later she was at the top of the tower.

I blinked and I was beside her, and a moment later so was the Captain and the spy.

Thor and Iron Man were close behind.

"Brother!" Thor called out. "Stop this madness!"

"Why should I?" Loki asked. "These people are beneath us. Why shouldn't they be ruled by the gods?"

"Because some of us are stronger than you are?" I asked.

"Who is this?" he asked. "You've decided to start fighting me with children?"

Thor threw his hammer, but it passed through the illusion Loki had already set up. He had a staff with a stone in it, and he was hiding invisibly to the side.

I blinked beside him and I inventoried the staff. The stone did not come along with it, and it began falling through the air.

We both lunged for it, and our hands met over the stone. I realized suddenly that the stone in the scepter was attached to the glowing cube farther up the tower, and I tried to blink away with it as I felt Loki willing the stone to take us elsewhere.

The world twisted around us both, and we were both enveloped in darkness. It took my eyes a moment to adjust, and then I saw that we were in a very dark cave. There was ice everywhere.

-1 HP

+1% COLD RESISTANCE.

Grabbing the stone, I punched Loki in the face.

He grimaced.

"Take us back!" I said.

We were further out in space than I had ever been. Even at a million miles a jump, it would take me two months to get even a light year- and that was if I didn't sleep at all. It would take me a great deal longer otherwise.

All that assumed that I could even find my way back.

"I can't," he said.

He tried to grab for the stone again, using his illusions to make himself seem to be two feet to the left. I ignored him, and I punched him. He grabbed my hand, and we discovered that we were equally matched in terms of strength.

We struggled for a moment, then I blinked five feet away from him. Apparently, I could teleport the stone, I just couldn't inventory it.

"That stone was required to use the tesseract," he said. "The tesseract is back home. We clearly can't go back."

"We're in another galaxy?" I asked, flabbergasted from what I saw in his mind. Even with leveling up, there was no way I'd be able to teleport back again in time to save any of the Earths. The closest galaxy was 25,000 light years. The next one was 70,000 light years away. Without leveling up, the nearest galaxy would take me more than four thousand years of doing nothing but constant blinking.

"You must have a way back!" I said.

"You grabbed the stone!" he said. "I don't know where in the Nine Realms we ended up. It's dark in here."

-1HP!

+1% COLD RESISTANCE.

He didn't seem to notice the cold, and so I chose not to mention it either. It wasn't like I couldn't produce as much fire as I wanted, and gaining cold resistance wasn't a bad trade off for having to deal with his being a jerk.

I could read his mind, and I knew for a fact that he was a jerk.

"Well, it's probably not Midgard," I said. "And it's probably not Asgard, unless you have a crapton of totally dark caves."

He frowned, looking around.

"This cave is partially made of ice," he said. He frowned.

"Jotunheim?" I asked.

My mother had been an English professor, and I'd grown up learning about Beowulf, the Greek and Norse and Celtic Gods. I'd never thought it would be particularly useful, but it had given us time together, and I'd always appreciated that.

He looked at me, surprised.

"I thought humans had forgotten the old ways."

"My mother was a scholar," I said. "And she didn't want me to be ignorant."

He smirked.

He didn't have a very high opinion of mortals. Apparently, the Asgardians lived to be five thousand years old.

"You know, I could live twenty thousand years if nobody kills me," I said.

"And how old are you?"

"Fifteen."

"I doubt you'll make it another month," he said.

"I'm good enough to kill you," I said.

"And then who'll get you home?"

I grunted.

The cave we were in had the entrance covered in Ice.

"You want to get out of here?" I asked.

I gestured, and a jet of flame burst from my hand. It began to melt the ice.

Loki recoiled.

Wasn't he supposed to be half ice giant or something? I couldn't quite remember. My mythology knowledge was mostly from my childhood.

"You'll bring the cave down on us!" he said.

"Oh," I said. "You're kind of fragile, aren't you?"

I inventoried him before he could react, and using my eyes I blinked outside.

-1 HP

+1% COLD RESISTANCE.

Releasing him from my inventory, I stared at the endless plain around us. It looked like we were in the Arctic somewhere. There was ice and snow and the sky was dark.

Loki stared at me; apparently, he wasn't used to being teleported against his will.

Looking around, he sighed.

"It's going to be tough finding a way out of this place," he said.

"You could call out to Heimdall," I said.

I could see in his mind that this was an option that he didn't want to take. After all, he was a wanted criminal back home.

"Mortals are forbidden in Asgard," he said.

"I'm more immortal than you," I responded. "You'll be dead in a few thousand years and I'll still be here."

I didn't know that for sure. After all, what if my power was drawing from some non-replenishable source of energy?

I'd just have to make the best of it while I could.

His form shifted into that of a ten-foot-tall, blue skinned version of himself.

"I don't suppose you can disguise yourself," he said.

Using illusions, I shifted to the same form as him.

He stared at me in surprise, and I enjoyed his consternation.

"It only works on one person at a time," I said, switching back.

-1 HP

+1% COLD RESISTANCE.

I suddenly felt better.

Apparently even at 10% I was now able to resist this level of cold. Space hadn't bothered me this much; however, space tended to be a great insulator. Overheating was more of an issue, and my fire resistance was really high.

"Well," I said. "We won't get anywhere standing around here."

I grabbed his arm and I yanked upward. We were in the air and he gasped.

"You're an idiot like my brother," he said. He grimaced, as though I was pulling his arm out, but I wasn't fooled. Despite the fact that I was holding him by one arm, he wasn't really in pain.

"Which way?" I asked.

"How should I know?" he said. "There are no landmarks."

"Aren't you half-frost giant or something?" I asked.

"I am not!" he said. "Where did you hear something so ridiculous?"

"I just hear rumors," I said. "I also heard that your mother was a goat."

He yanked at my hand, scowling.

"Well, or maybe a donkey, since you're such an ass," I said.

"Take that back," he said, his voice gone cold.

Apparently, his mother was the one person in all Asgard that he really cared about.

"I'm sure your mother was a very nice person," I said. "Which is why it's such a surprise that you turned out so poorly."

"What about your mother?" he asked slyly. "Or your father?"

"Both dead," I said. "I've killed thousands to avenge my father, and I'm working on ways to resurrect him."

I drained some of the water from his body, and he looked startled.

"The last invaders who invaded one of my Earths died by the millions before I was finished with them."

I used illusion to send him images of the Harvesters and the information I'd gotten from their queen.

He looked intrigued.

"I should have used them instead of the Chitauri," he said.

"Yeah," I said. "That was stupid. What was your plan, kill seven billion humans one at a time?"

I caught a flash of a thought in his head.

"Who's Thanos?"

"You can read minds?" he asked, horrified.

"Don't spread it around," I said. "Or I will cut your brain out of your head, keep it in a jar, and try to put a computer in your brain to run your body."

"That's oddly specific," he said.

"Well, I can manage a brain transplant," I said. "But the computer thing will be the real challenge."

We were moving over the featureless plain at a thousand miles an hour.

"Keep an eye out," I said.

In this darkness, it was hard to make out anything, but I was listening to my telepathy, hoping to hear a blip as we passed someone.

Suddenly I was hearing a lot of blips.

There was a camp below us.

There weren't any fires, of course, and they didn't seem to bother with tents. They were content simply to lie wherever they found a piece of ground.

"Maybe they'll know how to get off this rock," I said.

"That's not a good idea," Loki said.

"It'll be fine," I said. "Hey, do you speak Jotun?"

He nodded reluctantly.

I could read his thoughts because he spoke allspeak, a language that self-translated into all other languages. To a Frenchman he sounded French, to an American, he sounded English.

So, I routed the thoughts I was hearing through Loki's mind, and then I listened as his mind translated those thoughts.

The leader's area was in the center of camp. He'd created a throne of ice, and he was receiving supplicants and judging disputes.

Normally they lived in longhouses made of ice, but they were gathering an army to attack Asgard.

They weren't thinking about how they planned to get there, but they were planning to go there soon.

Loki heard these thoughts, and he was already planning to figure out a way to use this to his advantage; maybe get a pardon in return for stopping an invasion.

I landed in front of the King, dropping Loki as I did.

"Hey!" I said.

The king also spoke Allspeak as did several of his elite guards.

I really hoped Asgard had skillbooks on Allspeak; even a child's primer would be incredibly useful.

The guards around him snapped to attention, and they stood to their full ten feet in height. It was tall, but it wasn't exactly as tall as I was expecting. Maybe they'd shrunk in the wash.

"I took a wrong turn at Albuquerque, and I'm hoping to get back to Midguard. Anybody know how to get out of here?"

The King knew.

As soon as I had the information I wanted, I said, "So you guys are going to attack Asgard. What are your plans for Midgard?"

As some of the elite translated, I heard a nasty laugh from the crowd. I could read images from them. It seemed that they thought that without the Asgardians to protect it, Midguard would be easy pickings.

"Right," I said. "Does anyone here not agree with attacking Midguard?"

I listened, but I couldn't hear a single dissenting thought in range. Presumably those who had objected had been killed or had remained at home.

Well, my conscience was clear.

Several of the Elite grabbed at me even as the King gestured to Loki.

"My son!" he called out. "Welcome home."

I blinked to Loki, grabbed him by the arm, and then I flew straight up in the air.

"What are you going to do?" he asked.

"Kill them all," I said, "And then I'm going to climb the world tree."

"There's got to be fifty thousand of them," he said.

His mind was still reeling that the King had called him son.

"Phantom Weapon, Fire control!" I called out.

Dropping Loki, I grabbed him telekinetically. He was heavier than he should have been, but I was still able to hold him.

In the air beside me, a bomb made out of golden glowing light formed.

I let it drop, and a moment later there was fire everywhere. I used my ability to control fire to keep the flames below us, with everything in an eight-mile radius on fire around us, reaching out to the horizon.

As I listened to the screams of the army below us, I purposefully made the flames form into a version of my face laughing up at us.

Loki was staring up at me silently, and I grinned at him.

"You think this will get Heimdall's attention?" I asked.

Hopefully I'd be able to acquire a few powers before I got yanked to Asgard.

"The Bifrost was destroyed," Loki shouted.

I was watching the flames below. The Jotuns were vulnerable to fire, but they had a lot of hit points, and it was taking the strongest of them longer to die than I would have liked.

Fortunately, they weren't all that fast, and their movement capabilities were limited.

"What?" I asked.

"Thor did it," he said defensively. "I was fighting him on the bridge, and he did like he always does and destroyed things. It's not surprising that he enjoys spending time with that green brute; they both like destroying things."

"How…?" I hadn't heard a hint of a thought from him about any of that.

He smirked.

"The Norse didn't call me the God of trickery for nothing. The best way to sell a lie is to believe it yourself."

I hadn't bothered to do a deep scan of him, despite being in physical contact because I'd assumed surface thoughts would give me everything I needed to know.

Keeping the fires below me burning, I rectified that mistake now.

"You knew you were half-Jotun?" I asked incredulously.

"I led an army into Asgard myself," he said.

"You were genuinely nervous about seeing the Jotuns," I said.

"I betrayed them," he said calmly. "I thought they might be a little perturbed at me."

"And the one who said he was your father?"

"My uncle actually," he said. "The new Laufrey. He was reminding me of my betrayal."

"I didn't get a hint of that!"

"You filtered their thoughts through my mind," he said. "I was able to keep some things away from you."

"Were they really going to attack Midgard?" I asked, horrified.

"Oh, that's true," he said dismissively. "They really are genocidal maniacs."

He'd hoped I'd be stupid enough to attack the Jotuns. He'd thought he'd be able to steal the stone from me and escape in the conflict.

It was a little insulting that he now put me in the same category as the Jotuns, but I could feel his caution toward me.

"I hadn't expected you to be so…. effective," he said, looking down at the fire below.

Now it was my turn to smirk at him.

"Seriously," I said. "How are we going to get out of here? I assume you had a plan?"

"We'll have to find the world tree," he said.

"Is that really a thing?" I asked.

A glance in his mind showed that it was actually a nimbus connecting planets in nine separate galaxies. He didn't know exactly where it was, but he knew how to find it.

There was something else; a dark thread running through his mind. It took me a moment to identify it.

"You were mastered!" I said.

I let the fire below us start to die down; when I saw that some of them were still moving feebly, I stoked the fire again.

"What?"

"Mind controlled," I said. "Someone controlled your mind."

"That's impossible!" he said.

"It was probably Thanos," I said. "Is he very powerful?"

"Incredibly dangerous," Loki said. "But he doesn't have mind control powers."

"I haven't told anyone in my world that I have telepathy," I said. "Maybe he's the same."

"What would you pay to keep that secret?" he asked slyly.

"I wouldn't drop someone who'd keep it," I said mildly. "But…I might find my arm starting to get a little weak if I was trying to hold someone up who would betray me."

He planned to try to betray me; it wasn't anything personal; it was just part of his nature. He'd cheat in a card game without stakes, just for the pleasure of getting one over on someone.

He glanced down.

"I'd rather you didn't," he said.

Loki was cautious of me, at least. Even his brother wouldn't have slaughtered an entire Jotun army without giving them a chance to fight back.

"Do you judge me?" I asked.

"For that?" he asked, looking down. "I tried to do the same thing, and they were theoretically my people."

"They'd have been a danger to Earth," I said. "And I'm getting tired of invasions. It was just business."

I let the fire drop, and I saw that there was no more movement.

Once the flame was gone, I dropped Loki to the ground, and I approached the area where the throne had once been.

I was likely to get my best results from the elite soldiers, but I approached the body of one of the regular soldiers first, at least according to its location.

I shoved my fist into its chest.

A human would have smelled like burned pork. This thing had a heavy, coppery smell.

+10 TO STRENGTH!

YOUR STRENGTH IS NOW 58!

That was useful. My ability to carry things while planewalking was limited to my strength. I could now lift thirty-two tons even without growing or turning into a wolf. As a wolf, I could lift a hundred twenty eight tons, and as an enlarged wolf, I could lift a thousand tons, although without hands I was somewhat limited.

"What are you doing?" Loki asked. His voice was clinical, but I could sense that he was mildly appalled. He had a fleeting thought that I was going to eat the heart.

"Blood or flesh of defeated enemies gives me lesser versions of their powers that I can make stronger through use," I said.

The next body wasn't different enough to give me any more powers.

Approaching the area where the elites had been, I tried another body; I was fairly certain from its position that it had been one of the king's guards.

+20% COLD RESISTANCE!

A third body, and another message.

+10 CONSTTUTION!

YOUR CONSTITUTION IS NOW 44!

YOU HAVE GAINED 55 HP!

YOU NOW HAVE 297 HP!

Of all the powers I'd gained so far, I was the most thrilled about this. More hit points meant that I could fight longer; I would survive large attacks now that would have killed me before, or moderate esoteric attacks that bypassed all damage resistance.

I checked several other guards and received nothing, until I found the last guard.

NEW POWER CREATED!

ICE MASTERY!

YOU MAY CREATE A CUBE OF ICE 10 FEET ON EACH SIDE AND SHAPE IT AS YOU WILL. EACH SIDE OF THE CUBE DOUBLES IN SIZE WITH EACH LEVEL! THIS REQUIRES A SUFFICIENT QUANTITY OF WATER.

YOU MAY ALSO DO 100 POINTS OF COLD DAMAGE PER LEVEL BY TOUCH OR BY ICE BLAST!

LEVEL ONE.

That could potentially be useful if I leveled it up some.

Approaching the king's body, I leaned down, only to be startled as the king's hand grabbed my throat.

I switched to armored form, and I blinked out of his grasp.

"Bone Garden!" I said, excluding Loki.

Bone began to sprout from the king and from the bodies of those around me. Maybe I needed to look for some kind of bone control power; then I'd be able to make use of all the bones I normally created.

The king twitched, and he settled down.

His blood was blue, even though his flesh was almost entirely burned.

ICE MASTERY HAS INCREASED BY THREE LEVELS!

YOU MAY NOW CREATE A CUBE 80 FEET ON EACH SIDE!

LEVEL 4!

So instead of a thousand cubic feet, I could now make 512,000 cubic feet of ice. It might be useful to make sea walls against leviathan. Presumably the ice melted like normal ice.

"Are you done?" Loki demanded.

I inventoried the viscera on my hands, and then inventoried it off and onto the king's body.

"Jotun's don't carry weird viruses, do they?" I asked.

"Rethinking your life's decisions?" he asked with a smirk.

"I'm immune, but people have complained about me bringing weird viruses back home with me. I wonder if frost giants or Asgardians can catch zombie viruses."

"What?" he asked.

"Well, once I get a look at their biology, it'll be easy enough to tailor something up," I said. "Just in case."

"Just in case what?"

"Well, if they plan to attack Earth, I'll have to respond," I said.

"By giving them all a disease?" he asked.

"Highly contagious," I said. "Mutates them into monsters who attack and kill each other until there's nobody left. Easy peasy."

He looked revolted.

"I will defend humanity," I told him. "If you're ever going to become king of Asgard, I need you to believe that."

"You wouldn't try to stop me?"

"Depends on if you plan to attack Earth or me," I said. "Your brother seems nice enough, but he doesn't seem all that bright."

I could tell that pleased him. I hadn't actually gotten enough of an impression of Thor to actually know that, but reinforcing his own opinions was likely to give him a higher opinion of me.

Of course, I wasn't going to try to help him take over his own country; he'd just finished trying to attack Earth. However, he'd been manipulated into that, presumably by Thanos.

He feared Thanos, who appeared to have power outstripping that of ordinary Asgardians. From what I saw in Loki's mind, I'd need to level up some before I attacked him, but it looked like he'd be what I needed to outstrip Alexandria, and maybe start being strong enough to have a chance against the Endbringers.

"Do you at least have an educated guess about where the nexus might be?" I asked.

"I know exactly where it is," Loki said. "I just don't know where we are. This was a second army gathered to avenge the destruction of the first army, which means that they likely were pulled from clans further afield of the central city than the original army."

"How large is this planet?" I asked.

"Around the same size as Midguard," he said.

"Well, it looks like we have some flying to do," I said. "Keep your eyes peeled."

He grimaced, and so I used ice powers to create a small chair for him. I had to keep it under my weight limit; he weighed about six hundred pounds and so I had to make sure the chair weighed less than a hundred.

If it leveled up my telekinesis, it would be for the best.

He looked at me with a raised eyebrow.

"New power," I said. "Gotta use it or it won't get any stronger."

He sat down in it gingerly and it groaned under his weight.

I shrugged.

"I'm not up to building ice thrones yet."

Actually, I could. I just couldn't lift one telekinetically.

I lifted him, and a moment later we were in the sky.

I chose a direction and started flying. With height came greater vision; at the height we eventually reached, the horizon changed to a hundred feet.

If there were cities, presumably there was light.

I'd been flying for an hour, and I received two messages.

TELEKINISIS HAS RISEN TO LEVEL 8

800 POUNDS!

Great.

It wasn't a power that scaled very well; most of my attack powers didn't. The Frost giants had averaged 2000 hp each, and they'd had resistances. The Endbringers were going to be a lot worse.

I was flying 2000 miles per hour. Loki found this to be unpleasant; it was blowing his hair straight back, and ice particles kept hitting him in the face at a speed that made even his face sting.

It eventually occurred to me that there was a better way.

I blinked next to Loki and I inventoried him. I then teleported straight up, five hundred miles into space.

I could see the entire planet from here, and since the sun here was so dim, it was easy to see the places that had light.

There was a scattering of places, but most of them looked to be very small settlements widely separated. Presumably an arctic climate like this wasn't particularly fertile without a lot of sunlight.

It occurred to me suddenly; maybe I needed to question the Jotuns about what plants they used that didn't require a lot of sun. Presumably whatever foods they had were adapted to a cold climate, but Blasto could probably change that with a little work.

There was only one larger city on this side of the planet at least, and I appeared over it, and a moment later I blinked straight downward.

As much as I would have enjoyed simply flying downward at two thousand miles an hour, using the acceleration of gravity to achieve enough speed to become a falling meteor, I didn't have an unlimited clothing budget.

As soon as I was floating directly over the city, I brought Loki back.

"Hey," I said. "You can't fly, right?"

"No," he said sullenly.

"So, if I dropped you from a thousand miles up, you'd have a bad day?"

Given his resistances and the fact that terminal velocity was a thing, he'd probably get up afterwards, but it might cause him some pain.

"Go ahead," he said tiredly. "If it'll make you feel better."

"What'll make me feel better is to go home," I said. "Where's the nexus?"

He pointed toward the north side of the city, and I flew through the sky.

-20 HP!

+1% LASER RESISTANCE!

"Did I forget to tell you that they have city defenses?" Loki asked. He smirked, but I could feel his fear.

I inventoried him, and a moment later I was at the north end of the city.

"Would you stop doing that?" Loki asked irritably.

"I'd be happy to drop you off in the middle of a city whose people you betrayed," I said.

Loki's form shifted, and a moment later it seemed as though I was holding a full-sized frost giant.

"Go ahead," he said. "I'll be fine. How are you going to sneak around the city; you're a little short to be a frost giant."

"Do you have a really tall trench coat?" I asked.

He didn't get the reference. Apparently, he'd never watched cartoons.

"Do they keep slaves?" I asked.

He frowned, then nodded.

"So, I'll pretend to be a slave, you can drag me to whatever guards are at the world tree, and you can talk us through."

"Why should I help you?"

"My other option is to drop you off in the middle of the city, then light everything up."

"There are women and children here!" he said.

"There were women and children in Midguard too," I said. "No telling how many of those died because you decided you wanted to be king of the ants."

Loki frowned.

He'd been mind controlled into it, but he did have an underlying ambition that made him vulnerable to that kind of attack.

He hadn't thought of taking over humans as being beneath him, though.

Not that I was intending to firebomb the entire city. For one thing, I didn't want to destroy innocents, and for another, I needed to get the farming information from them.

"I need to make a stop first," I said.

"What, you've decided to go shopping?" he asked incredulously.

"Yes. I need some seeds from whatever plants they use to feed themselves here," I said. "And if they have any kinds of books on Allspeak or Jotun and on farming, I want them."

"They don't have bookstores," he said flatly. "Or seed stores or whatever you think they have. You might be able to steal some samples of Jotun wheat from a bread maker."

"Let's do it," I said.

Apparently, Jotun bread was cooked without fire, using ice magic in a way I didn't understand.

I left Loki on top of one of their longhouses while I blinked inside a bakery and stole some of their wheat, as well as some of their other ingredients.

I literally kept an eye on Loki, and when he tried to slip away, I blinked next to him.

"Well, it's time to go to the Nexus," I said.

Covering himself in illusion, Loki had me create ice manacles, and he had me dress myself in a dress made out of ice.

It was an interesting challenge, making a dress of ice that could still move. It looked great, glittering in what little light there was.

The Nexus was apparently located within a massive tree; apparently it was traditional to grow such trees wherever the Nexus was found.

"Who goes there?" the two guards at the gate demanded.

I inventoried them, and blinked up to space, dropping them into space to die gasping.

Blinking back, I saw Loki staring at me.

"What happened to the plan?" he asked.

I pointed.

There were humanoid bones next to their camp. Some of them looked like they'd been picked clean.

"Dwarves," Loki said, examining them closely.

"Oh. I thought they were kid's bones. Oops."

"What did you do to them?" he asked.

"Dropped them off in space. Ah well, I don't particularly like cannibals. For some reason I keep encountering them."

Loki stared at me, then shrugged.

"Let's go," he said.

"Why didn't they set the army up here?" I asked.

"You can't move armies through the Yggdrasil," he said. "It'd be detected by the keepers on the other side, and they'd shut off the connection on the other end."

"What happens then?"

"You end up somewhere else," he said.

"Well, take me to Midguard," I said. "Then you can run from your brother."

"I promised Thanos the stone," he said, glancing at my pocket.

"That's not happening," I said. "He sounds like the kind of person who shouldn't have the stone. Besides, I think I'm going to kill him later."

"What?" he asked flatly.

"Oh, not yet. When I get stronger."

"I thought you only cared about humans," he said.

"I'm not a racist…speciest," I protested. "But I've read your mind. He's killing half the people in all the worlds he can get to, and he knows about Earth. Sooner or later he'll be coming there."

"Ah," he said.

"Besides," I said. "I want to shove my hand into his chest and squeeze his beating heart. I'd love to have some of his power."

The look on his face was worth it.

"Well?" I said. "Let's go!"

Flames surrounded us, and Loki screamed.

I inventoried him, and I looked around curiously. My clothes had burned off, and the fires were severe enough that the ice clothes I attempted to make melted immediately.

I took no harm from the flames, though; my fire resistance added to my physical resistance was already high enough that even without Armored Skin I wasn't bothered at all.

There were lakes of fire everywhere, and I was glad I had some resistance to blindness.

There were two guards, fire giants, and they turned and swung at me.

"It was an accident, coming here, really," I said. "Really."

I didn't have Allspeak, and they didn't understand English, so I ducked as one swung at me.

Some images in their mind were clear enough; they assumed I was an Asgardian, and apparently, they hated the Asgardians.

I swung at one, and he stumbled back even as the other guard tried to hit me.

I ducked under that, and I said, "Bone Garden."

Apparently, they didn't have bones, because it didn't affect them at all.

"Phantom weapon-Bladestorm!"

That was more effective, somewhat. I spend the next two minutes ducking even as the blades cut away at them. They had a massive amount of hit points.

Eventually, I wore them down and they fell.

Hopefully I wasn't going to end up leaving all of the Nine Realms at war with Midgard.

+10% FIRE RESISTANCE.

FIRE RESISTANCE IS NOW 73%

I grimaced as I pulled my hand from the body of the first giant. I'd hoped for more strength or constitution. Given that fire resistance stacked with physical resistance, fire resistance was my most well-developed resistance, almost to the point of immunity.

Given that each ten percent increase in resistance represented me taking one tenth the damage, it meant I could survive 10,000,000 times as much fire damage as any other damage type.

I could dance on the surface of the sun and only the gravity would bother me. Given that the gravity there was about twenty-eight times that of Earth, even that wouldn't bother me that much.

Realistically, only the blindness would bother me, and that would go away eventually.

I tried the other body, but I didn't find anything.

There weren't any structures around, and I had less than thirty seconds to bring Loki back. Considering that he was half frost giant, that probably wouldn't go well for him.

I'd watched how he activated the Nexus, keeping a hand on his shoulder to see what he was doing. He'd tried to send us both to different places, but I'd kept hold of him in transport.

I didn't know which realm was Midgard. He hadn't actually tried to send us there, so I had to choose one at random.

During transport, I was able to switch into my last hoodie. I'd have to get some more; otherwise I'd be wearing ice clothes all the time.

I stumbled out of the tree, and I saw a swarm of at least a hundred men wearing ancient armor. They were all holding weapons pointed at me.

"Is this… Asgard?" I asked.

The people here looked like Thor, at least.

"It is indeed, friend Taylor!" I heard a familiar voice call out. Thor stepped out from behind the group. "Where might you be keeping my brother?"

I gestured, and Loki appeared beside me, badly burned.

I touched him, healing him as well as I could, although it wasn't a complete healing.

+1 LEVEL TO ILLUSION!

YOU CAN NOW AFFECT UP TO FOUR PEOPLE WITHIN A 40 FOOT RANGE!

LEVEL 3!

Men stepped forward and placed him in handcuffs.

"What's happening back home?" I asked Thor, as I felt cuffs being placed around my hands. I inventoried the cuffs away, while creating the illusion that they were still there to the men cuffing me.

I replaced the cuffs before anyone could notice.

Presumably they were designed for someone of my strength level; I might be able to use cuffs like that in the future. Thirty tons was probably normal for Asgardians, but it was relatively rare on Earth Bet.

"Why am I being arrested?" I asked.

"My father has questions," Thor said. "Which I'm sure will be quickly resolved!"

"It's not about the Jotuns, is it?" I asked. "Because that was just aggressive self-defense."

"Aggressive self-defense?"

"They were coming right at me!" I said. "Or at least they were about to. Besides, they were planning to invade Asgard. I was doing you a favor."

"My father is wise," Thor said.

He believed that fervently, which didn't match the image I'd had of Odin from Loki. Maybe Loki was biased.

I used illusions to cover my arcane eyes as I sent them high into the air. I sent them out in all directions to see what I could. If I needed to teleport back to the Nexus, I'd have alternate points to jump to.

Apparently, Thor was much much stronger than I was, and Loki was only average among Asgardians- probably because he was only half-Asgardian.

Thor thought his father was even more powerful.

Considering that his father had defeated the Jotuns in combat in the past, and the Jotuns had thousands of hit points, I wouldn't put it past Odin to be the same.

I was much stronger defensively than offensively, a problem I was going to have to rectify if I was to ever defeat the Endbringers.

Asgard was beautiful.

A combination of ancient and modern, it had an aesthetic sensibility that I could appreciate. This seemed like a place where you could comfortably drink mead and get into bar fights while at the same time have more sophisticated entertainments elsewhere.

Were there Greek Gods in this world?

Olympus might be nice to visit.

I was dragged to the palace, and I let myself be pulled along. These people didn't know me, and they were just being professional.

I'd reserve judgement until I met their leader.

"Loki!" the old man on the throne said. "What do you have to say for yourself?"

"I was just trying to assert my right to be a king?" Loki said, with a wry smile.

"He was mind controlled," I said.

Loki gave me a sharp look.

"What?" Odin said.

"I can read minds, and he was mind controlled. He's an ass, but he wouldn't have done what he did without some nudging."

"How do you know this, child?"

"I can read minds," I admitted. "It's one of the things I can do."

Odin frowned.

"Is that true?" he asked Loki.

Loki shook his head. "No…that's impossible."

"I keep telling you it's not," I said. "But it's like you hardly even hear me. That's a sure sign of being mastered."

Loki shook his head, but he seemed confused.

"No one is my master," he said, but there was no strength to it.

"We will take him to the mind healers, and then we will decide to what extent he is guilty," Odin said after a moment.

Loki was dragged away.

"Now you, Miss Hebert," Odin began. "Mortals are forbidden from Asgard."

"I'm just passing through," I said. "Send me back to Midgard and I'll be out of your hair."

"I have some concerns about what you did to the Jotuns," Odin said.

"Are you planning to attack Earth?" I asked.

"No," he said, shaking his head. "However, if I'd said yes, what would you have done?"

"Killed the guilty and spared the innocent," I said.

"And how do you determine who is guilty and who is innocent?"

"They are condemned by their own thoughts," I said. "And if I can't read their minds, then they are condemned by their actions."

"I was once like you," Odin said. "Full of anger and rage, convinced that my way was the only right way."

"To defend your people from murder and conquest isn't just a matter of opinion; it's a necessity."

"The Jotuns were not planning to attack Earth," he said. "They were planning an attack on Asgard."

"They'd have come to Earth eventually," I said. "I could see it in their heads."

I didn't mention that those thoughts had been filtered through Loki, nor that he might have twisted some of them.

Looking into Odin's mind, hoping to find out where he was going with all of this, I was stunned.

He had a connection to a sort of force. It filled him and gave him power that magnified his own. He called it the Odinforce, and sometimes he had to sleep to renew it.

He could see the entire universe as he slept. The Odinforce was in everything, and it bound all of life together.

I could barely read his thoughts, so distracted was I by the magnificence of the Odinforce and everything it represented.

All power, all knowledge, wisdom beyond anything I had ever known. He was suffused with it, and yet he was barely able to access the smallest portion of it.

"Miss Hebert?" he asked.

I'd lost track of what he'd just been saying.

"So, what do you plan to do with me?" I asked. "I'm nearly out of clothes, so if you plan to fight me, I'll have to figure something out."

I wasn't going to waste my last Armani suits. Maybe thick armor, or maybe just avoiding getting hit.

"I am not going to fight you," Odin said. "Nor am I going to try to imprison you. Your young companion was more than happy enough to inform my son of the futility of that."

Looking at him, I waited for him to continue. If he was going to send me home, I wasn't sure why he was pussyfooting around.

"I'd ask you to stay for dinner," he said.

"I'm sort of responsible for Vista," I said uncomfortably.

If I wasn't going to get to fight these people, I wasn't sure what they had to offer me.

"I can make an exception to the rule," he said. "Just this once. I'd like to speak to you about not starting wars in the Nine Realms without at least talking to the people who would be affected after you leave."

That sounded really boring and annoying, like listening to a lecture from Piggot, at least the version of Piggot I saw in the Ward's minds.

"We would offer you a bath and a dress," Odin said. "As well as a feast."

I looked around at the dresses the women were wearing in the court, and despite myself, I was intrigued. Armani had felt surprisingly great; what would clothes by these people feel like?

As it turned out, they felt amazing.

Whatever technology they used to get my measurements, the dress they put me in fit like a glove. It was beautiful too.

Surprisingly, they had showers. The showers were made to look like a natural waterfall, but the waters were pleasantly hot. I could feel the heat if I wanted to, even though hotter water would not cause me any pain or damage.

It was incredibly relaxing.

By the time dinner was ready, I found myself in a good mood. It had only been a few hours since the Fallen had attacked me; there was still time to find them and finish them off.

I already had a plan in mind to deal with Chort; showers were surprisingly good for inspiring new ideas.

Although I didn't need to eat, the smell of the food made my mouth water.

Vista was dressed in a smaller version of my outfit. She felt deeply uncomfortable. She was still wearing her visor; presumably she as trying to record everything she saw for the PRT to analyze later.

To people who lived five thousand years I must seem like a toddler. She would seem like an infant.

There was a long table, and it was covered in food.

I was seated next to Odin and the Queen. This was usually Loki's place. Thor sat across from me, and Vista was seated farther down the table, but still in sight.

Everyone waited for Odin's signal, and when he nodded, everyone dug in.

The food was incredible.

The drink was apparently Mead; I was immune to poison, so I could never get drunk. It was a sweet drink, and I liked it.

I glanced down the table at Vista. Apparently, she'd never had alcohol before, and she was already making twisted areas in the middle of the table to the entertainment of the other around her.

"As it turns out, you were correct about my son being under the control of someone else," Odin said. "But it was not the control of a person. It was a thing that controlled him."

"This, you mean?" I asked.

Odin hissed.

"That is one of the Infinity stones," he said. "There are six of them; Mind, Space, Time, Soul, Power, and Reality."

"And this one is…mind?" I asked.

He nodded.

Odin gestured, and a servant poured us both some more mead.

"And what do these stones do?"

"They are a source of power," he said. "And give the wielder control over their area of influence."

"So you could time travel with the time stone" I asked, leaning forward.

"Yes," he said. He looked at me curiously. "Most beings cannot hold a stone for long before they are overwhelmed by its power."

"It hasn't been a problem for me," I said. "Do you know where the time stone might be?"

It would be easy to use the time stone to jump back and save my dad. I could replace him with a cloned corpse easily enough. My earlier self wouldn't have even seen me if I moved fast enough.

"I do not," he said. He leaned forward, "They are incredibly dangerous. It's impressive that you are able to hold one without some sort of container."

"Well, there's my pocket," I said.

It was incredible that this dress even had a pocket. Apparently, the Asgardians were a little more practical about women's clothing than Earth humans.

It was a sign that they were a more advanced race, I guess.

"My son was influenced," Odin continued. "But he is not entirely blameless. If I were to set him free, there would be hard feelings among the people."

"So, exile him for a while," I said. "It'd be good for him to get the stick out of his ass and realize what it means to live like a regular person."

Odin smiled.

"I'm glad that you agree," he said.

"Agree to what?" I asked suspiciously.

"My son is clever," Odin said. "He would eventually get out of any prison short of Asgard's own. Once he escaped, he would undoubtedly try to return, and he would cause mischief."

My mind raced.

"But trap him in another world, one where I'm the only one who has the key, and he'd be unable to escape."

"Yes," Odin said. "I taught my other son a lesson in humility once; perhaps it is time to teach Loki as well."

"You think I'm a maniac who kills indiscriminately," I said. "Why would you trust your son to me?"

"Because it would be good for him," Odin said. "And just perhaps it would be good for you to be responsible for him."

"I'm responsible for entire worlds!" I protested.

"Humans have trouble caring for others in the abstract," Odin said. "A failing unfortunately shared by the people of Asgard. Individuals they are able to care for, however."

"Loki is an ass," I said. "Why would I take him with me? I can escape and find my way back to Midgard on my own.

"He is clever, my son," Odin said. "And he has a millennium and a half of experience. He may be able to advise you in meeting your own goals."

"What if I say no?" I asked.

"Then I might be forced to blame Midgard for the destruction of the Jotun army and two Fire Giants," Odin said.

"They'd blame Earth!" I said.

"I'm willing to smooth things over diplomatically," Odin said. "The Jotuns already planned to attack Asgard; this might make them think twice. Or I can blame you."

The last thing I needed was for armies of giants to attack the Earth. I'd already been responsible for the destruction of the zombie world; the last thing I needed was to be the catalyst for yet another invasion.

"Find another way," I said to Odin, pushing my will onto his.

He didn't even seem to notice the mind control attempt. He must be highly resistant to mind control, or maybe the Odinforce was controlling him.

"I don't think I will," Odin said. He stared at me, and he said, "Will you accept this burden?"

"I don't even have a place to live!" I protested.

"We will give you his weight in gold for your trouble," Odin said dismissively.

Six hundred pounds of gold? Gold was a thousand dollars an ounce back home. Sixteen thousand a pound…that was 9.6 million dollars' worth of gold!

That would do a lot of good for the Bay.

"For how long?" I asked.

"Three months," he said. "Make him better, and he can return here as the prince he wishes to be."

"Well, it's possible we might make each other worse," I said. "All right."

The meal was over soon enough, and Loki was led to me in chains.

Vista was incredibly drunk.

"Didn't you guys water her mead?" I asked.

Her attendant said, "We did…twice over."

"Right," I said.

Should I heal her, or leave her as she was? It might be amusing to see a drunk Vista, or maybe the PRT's reaction to me having gotten Vista drunk while we went on adventures together, but it might be more problems than it was worth.

Finally, I touched her on the shoulder and she stood up, alert and looking a little guilty.

Loki was led to us, his hands manacled.

"Well, let's go," I said.

I inventoried him, and I entered the Nexus.

CONTINUED EXPOSURE TO YGGRISIL HAS IMPROVED BLINK!

+5 LEVELS!

YOU MAY NOW BLINK THIRTY-TWO MILLION MILES AT A TIME.

That meant I could reach Mars in anywhere from two to eight jumps.

Sweet.

"So, this is where the Yggdrasill connects to Earth," I said. Looking around, I said, "It makes sense, I guess."

"The Asgardians met the Norse for the first time near here," Loki said quietly.

The mind healers had managed to break through whatever block had been keeping him from realizing that he'd been controlled, and now he was wondering if any of his thoughts were his own.

"All nine realms are inextricably connected by the world tree," he said. "More now than usual."

"Why is that?" Vista asked brightly.

I probably should have left her with a headache; it wasn't a good idea to leave her with too rosy of a view of drinking. My Dad had done his share after Mom died, and while he'd never been violent, it had made him even more distant from me than he otherwise would have been.

"Every five thousand years there is a conjunction, when the Nexus draws all the worlds closer together that ever, to the point that you could almost step across from one to the next, despite all the physical distance between them. It's coming soon."

Well, from what I saw in his mind, it wasn't happening tomorrow, although the conjunction was gradual so the worlds had been getting closer all the time.

Maybe that was why Vista's powers had worked in space, or maybe it was because the nexus created an opening from one world to the next, connecting them.

"I don't think it'd be a good idea to meet with your old friends," I said. "I doubt the Captain or the guy in suit would consider you anything but a war criminal."

"Who hasn't tried to take over this world?" he asked lightly. "It happens all the time here…at least every twenty years, and more often recently."

"I have never tried to take over a world," I said.

"You're fifteen," he said. "Nobody's tried anything at fifteen."

"She's killed a lot of people," Vista said. She had a bag with her costume in it and she looked down at her dress sadly. "The PRT is going to confiscate this, aren't they?"

"After the last zombie plague?" I asked "You bet."

I would be happy to get my load of assorted Jotun seeds to Blasto; they were taking up a slot meant for a person.

"You were serious about that?" Loki asked.

"I've got video," Vista said. She still seemed a little giddy. Maybe it was because she was still excited about visiting the home of the Norse Gods.

"Yeah, yeah," I said. "I'm sure they'll be plenty of time to go over my greatest hits later. Let's go."

Grabbing one in each arm, I said, "Planeshift."

As the PRT headquarters formed around us, I heard Loki say, "I hope you don't have to call out your attacks like some kind of anime schoolgirl."

I turned and stared at him.

"I've been to Earth before," he said defensively. "It's important to learn about your subjects."

Apparently, his knowledge of anime was limited to Sailor Moon; he'd last been to Earth during the Nineties, before returning more recently.

PRT officers were pointing weapons at us.

"You need to get Vista into decontamination!" I said. "I don't think that she was infected, but you can't be too careful. Also M/S screening! She was affected by Mama Mathers."

"What about you?" one of the PRT officers demanded.

"I've set up a decontamination station on another earth," I said.

"You could have taken me there first," Vista said reproachfully.

"They wouldn't have believed you, and you'd have to do it twice," I said. "This way I get to drop you off safely, and the guy who keeps accusing me of van murder has to go into decontamination…again."

"I never accused you of van murder," the receptionist said tiredly.

"Oh yeah…it was random van murder. Well, enjoy your decontamination!" I said cheerfully.

Before anyone could say anything, I was gone.

I hadn't actually built my own decontamination station; I'd just stolen the van mounted one the PRT had left behind.

Appearing inside it, with Loki in tow, I touched his shoulder, and he was suddenly in a special garment designed to improve the decontamination; it had been made by Blasto.

I was in the same sort of outfit a moment later, and then I hit the button. Our clothing was next to us a moment after that, along with the one hoodie I had left.

"What is this?" he demanded.

"Ordinary humans are terribly susceptible to disease," I said. "Even though we're probably immune, it's possible that we could have some on our skin or clothes, and so it's important to keep ourselves clean."

"I keep myself clean."

"Sterile," I said.

"I'm not that either," he said, smirking.

"Well, there was that thing with the horse," I said.

"That was a very poor joke by the fattest Asgard I've ever known. Unfortunately, the mortals overheard it, and it entered the mythology," he said. He scowled.

He'd felt that the slander by Volstagg had been a deliberate attempt to ruin his reputation among the mortals. It had been just one of a number of insults he'd been given throughout his childhood and early adulthood.

"I tried to correct the record, but..."

"The more you protested, the more people thought it was true."

A look through his childhood revealed that there had been a good bit of bullying, even by his brother Thor, although with Thor it had always seemed more good natured than with the others.

He was weak for an Asgardian, and trying to compensate for that with cleverness and magic hadn't been appreciated by a warrior culture. They'd seen him as untrustworthy, and they hadn't liked him.

He was a profoundly lonely person who dealt with it by pretending he needed no one.

"Are you planning to teleport me against my will again?" he asked, glancing down at my hand on his.

"Just doing a trip down memory lane," I said.

He yanked his hand away from mine.

"I'd thank you to stay out of my head," he said.

"I need to know who I'm traveling with," I said. "Can I trust you, for example. Would you make a good ruler if I find a place that needs one?"

"A ruler of the ants?" he asked.

"Who knows?" I asked. "What else do you have to do. You might be able to do a little good in the world. It might even buy you some favor with Odin."

He scowled.

The lights flashed, and I touched out clothes. Touching him again, I switched his costume back on, and then mine.

"This is the least pleasing time I was ever undressed by anyone," he said. "Except for once with a troll wife."

"I'd rather not hear that one," I said. "I'm fifteen and I'm an American."

He glanced at me with an eyebrow raised.

"We're a lot more comfortable with our kids seeing people murdered than nude people, at least in the media."

"You consider yourself a kid?"

"Well, I kill a lot of people, but I'm not really ready to date yet," I said. "Let me just say that this is not a world you want to escape from me on."

"It's that dangerous?"

"It's that boring," I said. "It was hit by an asteroid ten years ago, and the environment was destroyed. All that's left is a few cannibals here and there, and a few people I've gathered together who aren't cannibals who I've decided are going to rebuild this world."

I inventoried him and then I inventoried us into the sky over my small compound.

He appeared beside me, held up with my telekinesis.

"How many people do you have to do this?"

"Maybe fifteen?" I said.

"You have high expectations."

He looked out at the wasteland that stretched out in all directions. "Is the whole world like this?"

"As far as I can tell."

He whistled.

"Let's meet the folks," I said.

I'd discovered that people liked it better when I flew in. It gave them a little time to come of their storage containers and get ready to greet me.

"Taylor!" I heard one of the kids shout as he ran up to me. "Who's your friend?"

"This is Loki," I said. "He's an alien."

"Like a little green man?" he asked, his eyes wide as saucers.

Loki shifted forms beside me, shrinking down to the size of the child.

"Take me to your leader," he said in a high-pitched voice.

The boy stumbled back, then he laughed as Loki switched back to his regular form.

"He's another one of those para-whatsis, right?"

"Parahumans?" I said. "Nope. He really is an alien."

"He looks human," the boy said critically.

"I look like whatever I like," Loki said. He switched forms rapidly, ending up as a goat.

"That's how rumors get started," I said, and I suppressed a laugh as he returned to his normal form hastily.

People surrounded me quickly, anxious to talk to me about the progress they had made. They'd elected the older William as their leader. He was thought to have a good head on his shoulders, even if he was a little more paranoid than everyone else.

"Blasto says that we might be ready to try plowing soon," he said. "I'm not sure we're healthy enough to do that yet, not without animals at least."

Loki was looking around the compound.

He thought this place was a dump, and compared to even Brockton Bay, it was.

He hadn't seen what it was like before, and the changes that people had made.

They'd put personal touches into their homes, going as far as to going outside to chop down some of the stick thin remnants of trees to make a variety of things.

The problem was that they still hadn't restored their fat stores, and they were all weak and lacked energy.

It wasn't like they were in the wilderness, where they could hunt animals and turn their skins into blankets and clothes, their skulls and bones into tools and their guts into waterskins.

All they had were a few tools left over by the workmen and the burned remnants of the forest outside.

They'd somehow managed to turn what little remained of the bark on the trees into rope and primitive sorts of clothing.

They'd made a fire pit near the center of town, far enough from the hydroponics tower not to bother the plants. They'd used local stones and the wood from outside as a place to sit around the fire telling stories and singing.

It helped them feel like people again and not just survivors. They'd managed to build attractive benches and a primitive looking swing for the kids, although there were only two swings made from bark rope.

I could probably deliver better just by looting an old park somewhere that was going to be demolished. I wouldn't, though, because it was obvious that they were proud of what they had accomplished.

"I'm glad you guys have gotten so much done. Anything you need?"

"More refrigeration," William said. "You've brought us a lot of canned foods and dry foods, but frozen will be nice."

"I'll build a root cellar," I said. "I've got a weight limit on how much I can carry at once, but we'll figure something out. I need to go see Blasto. How's he getting along with everybody."

"We had to tell him to stop smoking weed around the kids, but otherwise he seems all right," William said. "He's got a thing going with Vanessa. There's a lot of gossip about it."

Apparently, there was a lot of gossip about everyone. After a decade of isolation, everyone was intrigued by each other. Hopefully it wouldn't get old and lead to bloodshed.

The kids were grabbing Loki by the hand, and he looked disconcerted.

He was wondering why we were in a place this poor, and why I even bothered with these people.

Apparently, he didn't like children much; for some reason they weren't enough of a challenge to manipulate.

"Come along," I called out to him.

He pulled himself away from the children, who were just happy to see a new face, and we quickly made out way to the elevator.

It was made out of old wooden pallets, and we were being pulled up by a rope attached to a counterweight made up of a boulder.

As we were moving slowly up the side of the cliff, Loki asked the question.

"Why?" he asked. "They're so…dirty."

"A few weeks ago, all of them were on the run from cannibals," I said. "They had nothing that they couldn't carry on their backs. They'd spent ten years surviving, and while none of them were cannibals, all of them have had to kill people."

He stared at me.

"Look at them now," I said. "They still barely have anything, but they're genuinely happy. They appreciate every little thing they have, and they're making a community that works. You won't understand until you get to my homeworld how precious that is."

He didn't speak, but the doubt on his face was obvious.

"The people on my world are defeated. They've given up. They pretend to live their lives, but ultimately its hollow. They know that the end of the world is likely within their lifetimes, and that no matter what they do, none of it will matter in the long run."

Looking out over the horizon, I saw dust approaching.

"Hey," I said. "Do you want to kill some cannibals?"

"What?"

"My people don't have cars," I said. I nodded toward the dust in the distance. "Cannibals do."

"All right?"

"Well, you can just watch," I said.

I grabbed him, and a moment later we were up and over the pallet railing. I flew toward the car, and I scanned the people within with my mind.

Cannibals, definitely.

I dropped Loki off, and then I stood directly in front of the car.

They drove straight toward me, whooping and hollering.

A moment before they would have hit me, I blinked into the car next to one, and I shoved my fist through his head. I drove the car with one hand, using Squealer's driving skill even as the others unloaded their bullets into my skull.

Good; no damage to my hoodie.

I grabbed the next one, ripping his arm off even as I turned and hit the third with it in the face.

The man kept screaming, even as blood erupted from his severed arm. He probably shouldn't have been wearing a seat belt.

The others were dead.

"Who else knows about this place?" I asked.

He was going into shock, and so I healed him. His arm grew back.

"Who else knows about this place?" I asked.

He stared up at me, but didn't answer. He didn't have to.

There was a camp of fifteen cannibals ten miles to the west. Apparently, my solar cells on the mountain had been noticed, and they'd sent scouts.

They were particularly successful at finding victims, which is why they were able to field so many. They were actually three cannibal groups that had joined forces, eating their own weakest members whenever they couldn't find enough prey.

I shoved my hand through his head.

Inventorying the bodies, I stopped the car and turned it off.

I grimaced.

I'd gotten blood all over the upholstery. I couldn't clean it by inventorying either.

Well, I'd pull the seats out and give it to the community.

"Road trip!" I said brightly to Loki.

I inventoried him, and released him shortly before entering the cannibal camp.

By the time we returned, he was a little pale.

"Was all of that necessary?" he asked. "Couldn't you have just killed them?"

"More cannibals will come," I said. "I had to leave a message."

"But did you really have to…"

"They were judged," I said severely. "By their own thoughts and memories."

"Even my brother wouldn't have…"

"I'm not your brother," I said. "And these people didn't just survive by eating their own; they enjoyed it."

"You seemed to be enjoying yourself too."

"If they'd been forced into cannibalism, I'd have just transported them to the other side of the country and stolen their car. But they weren't, and I didn't. I don't really like cannibals."

He nodded after a moment.

"Well, let's take the quick route back to Blasto's lab."

Loki had a resigned look as I grabbed him again.

Blasto, as it turned out was thrilled with the Jotun seeds. I'd actually been able to steal more than just a few species, and he looked as though he was about to have a stroke as he looked them over.

"This makes so much sense!" he said. "Photosynthesis is overrated! All you have to do is…"

"I'll let you deal with it," I said. "I'll be back to look over what you come up with. I'll bring Amy."

He didn't look as though he'd even heard me, so absorbed was he in what he was doing.

"We're about to go to my Earth," I said. "It's a lot like Midgard, but more run down. We've got giant monsters that like to wreck cities and kill everybody."

"That's you, right?" he asked.

"No, that's not me," I said irritably. "I don't wreck my own cities. Only an idiot would do that! I've never even wrecked a….well, not intentionally anyway."

"And what will be doing when we get there?"

"What I do every day, Pinkie, try to kill everybody who recently tried to kill me."

"That's a lot of people, isn't it?"

"Surprisingly, more than you would expect."

The world shifted around us, to be replaced by Brockton Bay.

It looked like a war zone; fortunately, it always looked that way. However, it did look like the PRT had at least given the Fallen a bit of a fight.

"It's time to track down some zealots," I said to Loki.

The Fallen had decided to hole up in the remains of a warehouse store. Half of it had been destroyed by one of Bakuda's bombs, creating an effect that was expanding at a rate of an inch a day.

It was a wild, whirling mix of crystalline structures that moved at a fast speed. There was seemingly no source to power its motions, and PRT testing had showed that anything put into that space was torn apart.

The store had been abandoned as a result. The effect would continue to expand at a rate of thirty feet in each direction a year. I didn't understand it, but I knew that the effect would eventually peter out.

"What happened to this city?" Loki asked. "Was there an invasion?"

I'd taken him on a flyover to get him used to the lay of the land. He'd managed to cover us both in an illusion of the sky, making us effectively invisible to everyone.

The place had seen better days.

"No," I said. "I had a dispute with a couple of the gangs in town."

"You did all this?" he asked.

He was floating beside me; night had fallen and I was holding him up with telekinesis. He was getting more comfortable with that, it seemed.

"This is my city! Why would I destroy my own city? It takes forever to get reinvestment when people destroy their own city; investors are always afraid its going to happen again!"

Natural disasters were different.

Nobody blamed people for natural disasters, with the exception of Simurgh victims.

He stared at me with one eye raised.

"The glass and the burned city blocks are due to a group of serial killers who attacked the Bay hoping I'd join them. The weird effects are due to a bomb tinker who took offense to me killing a few hundred of her people and threatening to kill her boss."

"So, this is all because of you?"

"No!" I said. "Well, maybe I should have worked a little harder to keep them from experimenting with the zombie plague I brought back."

"That was really a thing? I thought you and the girl were joking."

"There weren't more than five or six thousand people turned into zombies; I killed most of them."

We were approaching the store.

"Now, I'm about to have to murder some people," I said. "It might get a little dangerous."

"I am a prince of Asgard!" he said stiffly. "I have explored all Nine Realms, and I have led armies."

"You led an army for like thirty minutes, max," I said skeptically. "And they weren't very effective."

"They would have been!" He seemed offended. "If we'd managed to establish a beachhead, I could have negotiated from a position of power! I had all the time in the world and human lives are short."

"We've got someone who did that," I admitted. "His entire kingdom is a town of less than twenty thousand people, and he's essentially been imprisoned there for years."

Before he could respond, I said, "This is it."

It was a one-story building with a flat roof. A quarter of the building was just gone, as though it was a cookie with a bite taken out of it.

"It reminds me of something I've seen before," Loki said. His voice was odd.

A glance at his mind showed his frustration. Something as distinctive as Bakuda's bomb should have been obvious, memorable even, but his recent encounter with Thanos had left him uncertain of his own mind.

Even as I spoke to him, I sent eyes toward the ceiling of the building. Loki watched them intently, but he didn't ask a question.

I didn't bother to explain either.

My eyes were visible, but there were ways to deal with that. Most people didn't look up anyway, and by only putting the front of the eyeball through the wall, I could reduce the visual footprint.

There.

They were gathered together. Several had been injured; it looked like Armsmaster and Miss Militia had been busy.

Chort was the most dangerous to me at the moment, and so I had to take him out first. He was a victim of Mama Mathers, but he'd been manipulated by her for years.

She wasn't here, but from what I understood through the others, she could manipulate people who sensed her, seeing through their eyes, hearing through their ears, and creating illusions through the senses she'd been detected through.

Torture applied long enough could change people's thought processes, and she used that to her advantage. She had control over Vista's senses, and the PRT would know that and keep her from anything sensitive for a while.

She hadn't had time to mind control her; the attack on me had been using illusions, which meant that she'd been seen and heard by Vista at the very least, and maybe touched by her.

I wasn't able to contain Chort; it was possible that I could take him to another world, but that would just displace the problem. Even putting him on an island in the cannibal world wouldn't mean he couldn't escape. It would likely be the best option, but I couldn't help but have a nagging feeling that he would somehow get free and murder all the people in the community I'd created there.

Well, here went nothing.

I blinked into the gathering, and reached for Chort.

-200 HP!

+1% PHYSICAL RESISTANCE!

I found myself flying toward the bomb effect by Bakuda. I blinked outside and left my eyes inside.

"Problems?" Loki asked.

"Not really," I said.

The walls of the building below us exploded into flame as I filled the area with fire.

There was screaming below us, and the roof exploded.

Chort's eyes had been glowing; that glow faded as the thinker who had been giving him a combat sense died.

"It doesn't look like he's very happy," Loki said conversationally.

"Yeah, funny how that works," I said.

I inventoried Loki, and then I appeared in the ruins of the structure below us. The fire had vanished as soon as I had willed it, and there were now bodies everywhere.

Unfortunately, there was no way to tell the powered members from the unpowered, and so I had to try them all.

The first body I touched was a hit.

+2 TO GROWTH!

YOU NOW GAIN 3 FEET IN HEIGHT AND ADD +60% TO STRENGTH AND CONSTITUTION. DEXTERITY AND REACTION SPEED IS DECREASED BY 5% PER LEVEL-CURRENTLY -15%. LEVEL 3.

I still had the clothes problem, although I could use ice powers as a temporary solution. It would be a tremendous power up, though.

My strength would go from 58 to 92, even without my wolf transformation. With it, it would rise from 68 to 108.

I'd be able to lift 4112 tons normally while enlarged, or 32896 tons as a wolf. My dexterity would drop to 36 from 42. My constitution would go from 44 to 70, and I'd gain 143 hit points while enlarged.

Did that mean that if I took enough damage and then shrank before I healed, I could die? It was probably better not to test that.

Chort exploded through the roof closer to where I had been, dropping down inside the store.

Appearing beside him, I inventoried him. I teleported straight up, appearing on the moon, and then I released him.

He stopped immediately, and I could see the look on his face as he tried to hold his breath. The alveoli in his lungs would be starting to explode about now.

He lost consciousness, and he fell silently to the sandy soil of the moon.

I looked around for a moment, and I wondered whether I should let Chort live.

Killing him would save me a lot of problems and I would not have to watch my back. On the other hand, the number of people who could test my defenses was limited, and I might find it harder and harder to level up my physical resistances in the future.

I might need him.

He didn't have any movement abilities that I could tell.

Reaching down, I inventoried him, and a moment later we were in the cannibal world.

Releasing Loki, I blinked a half mile away. I wasn't sure how much fight Chort would have left in him.

I healed him, just a little, leaving much of the damage to his lungs. Without the ability to take a breath, his combat abilities would be limited, even if he was still strong enough to kill everyone on the planet.

We were in what had been Hawaii.

There was no food here, and all the vegetation had been burned away. A quick check showed that there were no boats left anywhere around.

He coughed, and blood came up.

I wiped his mouth, and he grabbed at me helplessly. Without the combat sense, he wasn't quick enough.

+10 STRENGTH!

My base strength was now 68. With a strength of 30 letting me lift a ton, and every five points doubling that, I could now lift 128 tons in my base form.

I threw him a pizza as I danced back from him.

He tried to push himself forward, but he couldn't.

"Where is Mama?" he croaked.

"There is no Mama here," I said. I leaned forward, and I grinned. "There is no god here other than me."

"I beg to differ," Loki said mildly. He'd been walking toward us the whole time, although he'd been careful to craft an illusion ten feet away from his normal self.

I'd managed to completely heal the damage he'd done to me, but I was surprised when he managed to hit me again.

200 HP!

+1 DAMAGE RESISTANCE!

"This entire world is dead," I said. "There is no one else here, and there is no food. You will depend on me for everything, food, water and all of your needs. I am your master now, and you will obey me."

I used my illusion power to make my voice ring out, and to make the shadows behind me seem to loom over him.

He couldn't get up, and I doubted that he'd have a good time what with struggling to breathe. At least he was still alive, and I might experiment with deprogramming him once Mama Mathers was dead.

It might give me experience enough to work on Simurgh victims. A telepath should have an easier time than everyone else, right?

I telekinetically dug out a trench, and pulling water from the air, I filled the trench with fresh water.

"You probably shouldn't pee in that," I said. "But that's your choice. I've heard that you fallen make the Merchants look classy."

"Merchants?" Loki asked.

"Oh, I killed them when they turned into zombies," I said. I kept a close eye on Chort, and when I saw that he wasn't going to attack, I grabbed Loki and I planeshifted back.

I wouldn't have done that with an ordinary person, but I assumed he could survive whatever hostile environmental conditions we had from a jump gone wrong.

Fortunately, I was able to bring us back to the abandoned supermarket.

I began digging through the bodies, and Loki grimaced.

"More power," I said. "It makes it easier for me to kill people, which then gives me more power."

"And when will you stop?"

"When will you?" I asked. "How much power is enough? Is there any amount that will ever be enough to satisfy you?"

"Did my father ask you to ask me that?" he asked sullenly.

"Nope," I said. "I hoped you had an answer. I'd like to say that I'll be able to stop when I'm able to stop the Endbringers, or maybe Scion."

"Endbringers?" he asked.

I used illusions to send him images I had of them, doing my best to send the terror and horror they were creating in people, and a measure of their sheer power.

I must have done something wrong, because he looked intrigued rather than horrified.

"If they could only be harnessed," he said, almost reverently.

"I think they already are," I said.

I explained what I'd learned from the Harvester, and about my suspicion that Scion and his hidden mate would attack multiple universes.

"Why should I care about humanity?" he asked. "They refused my rule."

"They've been attacking star systems; I doubt the Harvester was their first, and I doubt humanity is meant to be their last. What if Asgard is next, and you have no kingdom to rule."

"Asgard is not full of weaklings like Midgard," he said stiffly.

"Well, it's full of idiots," I said, "And Odin isn't getting any younger. You people are like mayflies; five thousand years and you're gone."

"You're fifteen," he said flatly.

"And I'm going to live to be twenty thousand, maybe a hundred thousand. I don't age, and every day I'm getting harder to kill."

NEW POWER CREATED!

GRANT DANGER SENSE!

YOU MAY GRANT A DANGER SENSE TO ANYONE YOU CAN SENSE. THIS GIVES THEM AN EFFECTIVE +20 TO DEXTERITY FOR REACTION SPEED AND AVOIDING ATTACKS AND THEIR OPPONENTS AN EFFECTIVE -20 TO DEXTERITY TO AVOID THEIR ATTACKS. YOU MAY AFFECT ONE PERSON PER LEVEL, DOUBLING WITH EACH LEVEL! LEVEL ONE.

That was underwhelming.

I couldn't use it on myself at all, and if I was using it on people I was trying to save, I could only use it on one person at a time. Now if I could affect entire crowds, that would be different. It'd take quite a bit of leveling for this to be really good.

I could hear the sounds of people approaching, but I ignored it in favor of continuing to search the bodies. Most of these people were unpowered, including some of the people who had been in costumes.

Had they dressed ordinary people in their members costumes? That would suggest that they knew I'd be coming for them, and that they'd hoped to have Chort kill me, but weren't willing to risk anybody other than the person amping him up.

How had they known?

Had Mama Mathers already been looking through the eyes of PRT members, gathering information about me? It's what I would have done with her powers.

r

I'd only let the Protectorate know that I had thinker powers; they must have assumed that their base was compromised. Mama Mathers would have been looking through the eyes of the victims as I killed them, and Chot, at least as far as her power would reach.

Sending eyes outside, I saw that there were crowds of people heading in my direction.

None of them spoke, but as they entered the range of my telepathy, I could feel the horror in their thoughts. Mama was speaking to all of them, and pushing them forward, to attack and kill me.

There were people like them all over the city.

Mama had been busy since I was gone, or maybe this had always been the plan and she'd been doing this for weeks.

The people in the crowd who knew me thought they were marching to their doom. Mama had already told them that they would have to kill themselves if I ran, and that they were to let me know that would happen.

Did she know that I knew they were here? How strong did she think my thinker powers were?

All my powers were optimized for killing. Did I have any non-lethal options?

Well, there was one thing I could do. The problem was that my range with it wasn't very good. Twenty-foot radius sounded good, but when there was a thousand people coming for you, it wouldn't cover nearly enough people, not unless I was very quick.

Loki was looking outside.

"There's a mob outside," he said. "Friends of yours?"

"Mind controlled innocents," I said. "They're ordered to kill themselves if I resist."

"What will you do?"

"Stay out of the smoke if you value your modesty," I said. "Say, could you pretend to be me for a bit?"

He looked alarmed. "The crowd doesn't seem very happy with you."

"You're a god," I said. "And they're ants."

He nodded uncertainly.

"Besides," I said. "I'll be giving you a boost."

His eyes glowed yellow, and he stiffened, then he started to smile.

"I can work with this," he said. "This feels…amazing. If I'd had this when fighting my brother…"

"You'd probably be good on your own," I said. "But they'll never lay a hand on you. Keep their attention."

He nodded, and a moment later he was standing outside in front of the crowd in my form.

For some reason, he had me wearing my hoodie, and he had it covered in blood.

"Minions!" he shouted. "As much as I would love to murder you all, none of you have any powers that are worth bothering with. Leave and I won't murder your families!"

Great.

Blinking behind the crowd, which was surging forward to attack Mama Mathers, I wondered what her end game was. Was it to force me to kill people or see them kill themselves?

Did she really think that I was going to give myself up?

The street here was only forty feet wide, so centering the smoke in the middle of the street, I caught the back forty feet of people in the effect.

Within a second, they were all nude, and the weapons they were carrying were rusting into dust.

I blinked forward and the next forty feet of people were being affected, even as the ones in the back were noticing me.

They tried to lash out at themselves, but their knives and pipes were so corroded that they turned to dust, harming no one other than rust in their eyes.

They stopped in consternation.

By that time I had already moved on to the next section, sending smoke out to the next group.

None of them had clothing any more, with the exception of Loki, who had carefully kept out of the smoke even as people lunged out of the smoke at him with knives that melted to ash in their hands.

He smirked, put one hand on his hip while still looking like me, and he made a motion with his hand.

Really?

The "come at me bro" motion?

Instead of attacking him further, the entire crowd turned and headed for the walls of the buildings bracketing the street. They stumbled over the irregular ruts in the pavement generated by the smoke.

I'd mostly left the brick walls alone, and I froze as I saw the entire begin to smash their heads into the walls, almost in unison.

Some of them were crying, and all of them were terrified and in pain, but the visions they were being given hurt more than the pain of hitting themselves over and over again.

Crap.

"Is this normal in your world?" Loki asked, returning to his regular form. "It really doesn't seem healthy."

Blinking away, I appeared in the Protectorate.

"Where are the Containment Foam canisters?" I asked, leaning close to him. I pretended to listen, even as I put a hand on his to do a deep dive into his mind.

"Thanks for the information," I said.

"I didn't say anything!" he protested.

He wasn't the guy who'd accused me of Van murder, so I said "Thinker powers…your eye twitched."

I blinked to the armory, and it was empty.

There weren't any PRT Vans in the parking area; I'd hoped to get one with a confoam sprayer.

"What the hell?" I asked, returning.

The receptionist was pale.

"There are attacks all over the city by mobs. They're looting and attacking people everywhere."

They were probably bringing more victims to Mama Mathers, where ever she was.

"Hey!" I shouted up at the cameras. "Can you guys confoam me? I need to deal with some looters without killing them."

They were obliging, and I immediately inventoried another room's worth of containment foam. I already had some, but it wouldn't be enough.

"Hey, there's about five hundred people who are being forced to commit suicide by Mama Mathers. They're next to the Target on 42nd …the one Bakuda hit. Be ready to contain them when you get a chance. I think everyone who is attacking has been mastered."

There were probably a few people who were not, but were just taking advantage of the chaos to get what they could. However, the mobs were likely to attack them as easily as the PRT or the cops.

I blinked back, and I used my power to drop confoam on everyone. I had to be conservative with it; there was a limited amount. As I reached the end of the line, I had to inventory people and then release them from inventory in unused spots of the confoam.

Once everyone was foamed, I checked to see if anyone had brain damage. I healed everyone of their wounds.

Loki looked mildly impressed.

"One of your powers?" he asked. "I wouldn't think you'd bother with a power to make people naked; you seem a little young for that."

"Imagine what would happen if I used it on the bases of the buildings in Asgard," I said, smirking.

He thought about it for a moment, and winced.

"It's going to get stronger the more that I use it, and eventually I'll be able to reduce entire cities to ash, while leaving the inhabitants mostly ok."

"Mostly?"

"Well, people in high places will be dead," I said. "And so will people who have buildings fall on them before they disintegrate."

"So nobody will be ok?"

I thought about it.

"Yeah, probably not."

"For a moment I thought you actually had a fun side," he said.

"I do have a fun side!" I said. "Once, when I killed a whole bunch of Asian gang members, I turned them into a waterfall of corpses!"

"Right," he said. "What are we going to do now?"

"We're going to steal confoam from the PRT in Boston and get it here, where it's needed."

"The PRT?"

"The authorities," I said. "Or at least the branch that deals with parahumans."

"And you aren't worried about the authorities?"

"They've already got a kill order against me," I said. "That means that it's not a crime to kill me. It's the highest penalty the law can administer."

"Why?"

"Well, the Asian waterfall probably didn't help. They were unreasonably afraid that I might cause a zombie apocalypse."

"Didn't you say you caused a zombie apocalypse?"

"That wasn't my fault! Their containment procedures were flawed."

"Right. And since they've already given you their ultimate punishment, there's nothing else they can do."

"It's liberating, really. If I can kill everybody I want to, then maybe I can get a pardon for everything."

"So might as well make it worthwhile," Loki said. A slight smile appeared on his face.

I grabbed him and inventoried him, and a moment later we were inside the Boston PRT.

When I dropped Loki off beside me, I was surprised to see that he'd taken my form. He must have been in the process of changing when I was inventorying him.

"Where is your containment foam?" I asked the receptionist there.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

I had it already, and so I re-inventoried Loki, and then I began inventorying containment foam trucks from the parking lots.

"How do I use these?" I asked a PRT agent who was pointing a gun at me.

I appeared beside him, pulling his hand down even as I inventoried his uniform.

I read his mind, and then I restored his uniform next to him.

A moment later, I was in the Dockworker's union. People were gathered together here with their families.

"You all know who I am," I said. Loki appeared beside me, back in his own form. "This is Loki. He's a new hero."

Loki glanced at me sharply.

"I need heroes," I said. "No parahumans, but real heroes."

"We need to protect our families," one of the dockworkers said.

"It won't be a problem," I said. "What is a problem is all of the people out there who are being mind controlled into hurting themselves or other people. The PRT is outnumbered and undergunned."

"We aren't cops," Arnold Jacobson said quietly.

"Who does this city belong to?" I asked. "The government? The PRT? They abandoned us a long time ago. The gangs are gone."

I wasn't winning them over.

Loki stepped forward.

"None of you know me," he began. "But I've been traveling with Miss Hebert for a while. She is a person of honor. If she says this city needs people to stand up in order for it to be saved, I believe her."

He was lying through his teeth.

Everyone was silent.

"You all knew her father," he said. "What kind of man was he?"

How had he picked up on that?

A quick glance in his mind showed that he'd pieced it together from clues and suppositions.

"He was the hardest working, most honest person I know," another man said, stepping forward. "If it wasn't for him, I wouldn't have a job."

I heard other people agreeing with him.

"And everything that has happened to this city…the bombings, the zombies, years of being under the rule of ruthless gangs…does this even feel like your city anymore?" Loki asked. There was something about his voice; it wasn't a power. It was just charisma.

"No!" I heard voices calling out from the crowd.

"They consider you all to be ants," Loki said. "Insects to be crushed beneath their feet…not just the villains, but the heroes too. The government has abandoned this place as not worth their time."

He was pulling all of this from bits and pieces of what I had told him, and from the little he'd heard me say to others. Some of it was just uncannily accurate guesswork, based on his knowledge of humanoid nature.

Despite myself, I was a little bit impressed.

"The question is…are they right? Are you going to hide in your holes and wait while your city burns? Or are you going to prove to them that this is your city, a city of people and not worthless insects?"

He didn't believe any of it, but he knew I wanted it, and he thought it was wise to ingratiate himself with me.

"I'll do it," a large black man said.

"Me too," another said.

One after another stepped forward, until I had thirty volunteers.

"That's enough," I said. "I'm going to need teams of two; one driver and one person to run a containment foam sprayer. I'm going to give you powers."

Interest perked up at that.

"When we leave, I'm going to cover this entire building in a thick layer of ice," I said. "It'll be thick enough to stop bullets, and it'll keep everyone safe. The walls here are thick and well insulate, but I'd ask the women and children to stay in the center of the room because it might start getting chilly."

"What if you don't come back?" a little girl asked.

"The PRT will be here to release you," I said. "Or if the worst happens, and you don't get noticed, the forecast is for it to be unusually hot over the next few days. Your moms and dads have cell phones and there are landlines here."

If I'd had more time, I'd have taken them to Harvester Earth.

Instead, I was going to have to use this stopgap.

Taking the heroes out of the Dockworkers building, I made fifteen vans appear in the parking lot; all had keys in them. That part of the PRT parking garage was locked, and the thought was to have the vans ready to deploy at a moment's notice.

As I opened the door of the first van, I proceeded to demonstrate the use of the containment foam sprayer.

While I was doing that, I was using my water control power to pull water from the bay; I was then using my cold control power to create ice around all the entrances and windows.

The men noticed what I was doing, but they focused when I told them how important this was.

All of them were outwardly impassive but I could feel their fear. I was asking them to go out and face mobs of people who were little better than the zombies that had attacked the city only weeks before.

"There will be people attacking you," I said. "But I will be with you. I can grant you the ability a combat sense; it only works on one person at a time, but I can switch back and forth quickly."

"Imagine finally understanding everything," Loki said. His voice was deadly serious. How the entire world fits together, understanding exactly what will happen and how to make it happen. It must be what it is like to be Odin."

Loki was superhumanly fast; almost as fast as I was. His skin was bulletproof. He hadn't really needed any enhancement from me, but I'd given it to him, and he'd liked it.

Welcome to my world.

Power was intoxicating; being able to do new things was fun. Being able to actually do some good in the world was actually growing on me.

I blinked away, and a moment later I was back. I threw ski masks and gloves at each of the men.

"It's better if no one knows you were involved with me at all; for some reason villains keep thinking it's a good idea to attack people I care about."

There was a dark chuckle around the group. Kurt and Lacy's murder was still a sore spot with all of them.

"Choose your own teams," I said. "The better drivers should drive, and the people who are better shots should man the containment foam."

The black man handed me a walkie talkie. He must have been one of the newer recruits if I didn't recognize him.

Ah.

His name was Dennis Johnson, a former marine.

He'd known my dad, and he'd respected him. He was also brave, but had felt that marines were sidelined in a world of capes.

"I need you all to stay within range of this walkie talkie," I said. "I'll direct you through it. I'll use drivers' first initial when I'm calling you. So that would be B, C, D, E, H, I,L,M, O, P, Q, R, S, T and W."

Fortunately, there weren't any repeats, like there usually was.

"What I want us to do is to move forward in formation, hitting people with containment foam in multiple blocks at the same time. Mama Mathers can see through their eyes and hear through their ears. As soon as she sees what we're doing, she's going to escalate by having them attack us en masse. If that won't work, she'll start having people kill themselves."

They stared at me.

"I'm a thinker, among other things. I'm going to try to find out where Mama Mathers is, and if I can find her, I can kill her."

"And then it will be over?" Q asked. He sounded a little more anxious than the others. Quentin had surprised the others when he'd volunteered, but he had a sick mother in the city and he wanted to keep her safe.

I'd make a little visit to his mother when all of this was over.

After describing my plan to them, with a few astute additions by Loki and by Dennis, we started moving.

My telepathy didn't have the range to keep up with them; I could barely cover a city block with that. I had to use my arcane eyes, and I had to use them from a distance because I only had eight of them to fifteen of the PRT vans.

They could spread out four thousand feet, though, which gave me plenty of room as I was in the middle of a line of them.

I stayed a little ahead of them, keeping my eyes floating just high enough that they could see the driver's faces. It was hard to distinguish one face from another after a hundred and fifty feet. I had to keep the eyes low enough that I could see all of them, and yet high enough to see two city blocks.

I must have expressed my frustration, because Loki had a response.

"You should get some sort of superhuman vision," Loki said from where he was floating beside me. "I've heard that Heimdall has excellent vision, and he's someone who definitely needs a good beating."

"I'm sure," I said dryly. "I'm not sure that would endear me to your father."

"You worry entirely too much about the opinions of others," he said. "While not worrying at all about the law."

"I want to do what's right," I said.

"Like making a waterfall of Asians," he asked. "Are you racist? Aren't you supposed to murder a rainbow of humanity and make a waterfall out of that?"

"They'd killed two of my Dad's friends."

"All of them?"

I shrugged.

"If they'd quit the gang, they'd still be alive."

Before he could respond, I leaned forward.

We were about to encounter our first groups.

"D, P, M," I said. "We've got bogies straight ahead. Get ready."

Dennis was at a sprayer; most Brockton Bay PRT agents depended on hand sprayers, but these had domes on top where the men could water hose like sprayers. These vans were mostly filled with containment foam cannisters, and there was only room for three men.

There were people fighting in the streets; BBPD, citizens forced to defend themselves, and of course, the people Mama Mathers had controlled.

"Go," I said. "C, R, P, I need each of you to turn right at the next turnoff, and then attack the rioters from behind. We need to close them in."

They shouted agreement, and I could feel the excitement and fear in the men closest to me. I ignored it, concentrating on the people who were about to need my help.

Loki mimed eating popcorn, and I glared at him. He grinned at me.

The rioters were already disengaging from civilians and rushing toward the PRT vans on either side.

The spray began and it wasn't long before the containment foam formed a wall on each side, leaving the people inside trapped, but still able to hurt themselves.

"I'm starting with D," I said. "Belt yourself in."

As I dropped down, I kept an eye on the other vans who had stopped and were idling. There was no need in them getting ahead of the rest of us and getting in trouble.

I dropped beside Dennis's van and reaching down, I easily lifted it. I probably should have crunched it as the entire weight of the van was placed on the small area of my hands but the vans were reinforced, and powers were bullshit anyway.

I lifted the van, and held it at an angle.

Then as I moved slowly over the block, Dennis kept up the spraying.

We had to take the innocent with the guilty, but I figured most of them would rather be confined for a time than be stabbed or shot.

The men and women in the next block were already trying to kill themselves. I winced as I felt people began to die.

Several people shouted in unison, "If you do this, we will cause all the people in the city to kill themselves at once."

"Do that, and I won't just kill you," I said. "I will make what you show these people look like amateur hour."

"Turn yourself in. Join the family," another woman shouted just before the foam covered her.

I was scanning all of them, and most of them didn't even remember where they'd seen Mama Mathers. A few of them did, however, and the more of them I read, the more I could fill in a mental map of the part of the city where she'd been most active.

There.

One of them had been homeless, and he'd seen Mama Mathers going in and out of an apartment complex; she'd barely seemed to notice him until she'd sent out the general call.

Dropping the van gently outside the block, I said, "Good work boys."

I was close enough to feel a thrill of alarm as three of the vans closest to us had their windows broken.

I granted combat sense to the first driver, and he was able to put his foot on the gas and drive through the growing crowd in his street without hitting a single person.

I dropped Loki on a roof and I appeared next to the second van, and I inventoried it, even as I granted the combat sense to the man in the third van.

He suddenly began shooting containment foam in short spurts that managed to freeze people in place without using much foam; this left his driver able to move forward cautiously until he was able to get out of the block.

Dropping the van off back at the Dockworkers association, I scowled.

Returning, I spoke into the walkie talkie.

"Return to base," I said.

I picked up Loki and I made sure they returned to the Dockworkers building.

"Protect your families," I said. "If the containment foam runs out, there's weapons inside all the vans. If that doesn't work, call me."

I gave them one of my burner numbers, and then I threw the burner at Loki.

"You know how to work one of these, right?"

"I'm from a technologically advanced civilization!" he said. He stared down at the phone. "Now, how do you turn it on?"

He was over a thousand years old, and my grandpa knew more about phones.

He probably watched westerns, or maybe even silent films.

"Just hold it, and give it to me if it rings," I said.

Using my water and ice powers, I created a thick wall, four feet thick around the parking lot. It wasn't all that tall, just seven feet, but it had a step that the men could use to get into firing positions.

ICE MASTERY HAS RISEN TO LEVEL 5!

YOU CAN NOW CREATE 32 CUBIC METERS OF ICE AT A TIME!

WATER MASTERY HAS RISEN TO LEVEL 3!

YOU HAVE GAINED 2 LEVELS!

YOU CAN NOW CONTROL 4 CUBIC METERS OF WATER AT A TIME!

Well, my water mastery had been my biggest limit on all of this.

"Let's go," I said to Loki. "It's time to kill someone's Mama."

"Sounds like fun," Loki said.