"So, this is your ultimate weapon?" Immortal asked, cocking an eyebrow at the extremely ordinary-looking sword in front of him.

In his defense, I'd deliberately made the sword look as ordinary as it possibly could, to give it the element of surprise when we finally took the fight to Nolan.

Nolan was a complicated question, for me. He genuinely did love his family, and was doing the Viltrumite Imperialism shit mostly out of inertia; when confronted with the conflict between his family and Viltrumite Imperialism, he did, demonstrably, side in favor of his family.

It's just that he did this after shoving Mark face-first through a commuter train in an attempt to both 1) demonstrate the worthlessness of human life to Mark, and 2) reenact the lawnmower scene from that one Peter Jackson zombie movie.

So, y'know.

When I considered the question of whether or not Nolan could be redeemed, it very quickly became a question of whether or not he could be redeemed without consigning hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent civilians to death at his hands.

To kill a good man was a tragedy. But compared to the atrocity that he would willingly wreak upon the people of this world just to try (and fail) to win an argument with his son?

Well.

I've killed people for worse reasons.

And Nolan's made it clear that if I didn't take him seriously, if I didn't come at him like a genuine threat to my life, then he'd just kill me, as many times as it took for it to finally stick. There were times when people had to be treated gently, even if they were shitty, because using my power to crush them beneath my boot would've been an abuse of my power. But Nolan wasn't an inferior, someone who just straight up could not hurt me if he tried. Nolan was a peer, who very much could hurt me if he tried, and who has already done so. And, well.

The rules of engagement between peers were different, in my opinion.

"Viltrumites like Nolan are four-dimensional existences," I said. "As it turns out, every superpowered being is a four-dimensional existence, along the very same axis. This sword, here, is also a four-dimensional existence, and what it does is fuck up those fourth-dimensional powers. It'll carve through superpowered toughness just like regular flesh and bone, and, if wielded just right, it can even disable all of someone's superpowers at once, carving away the extradimensional limbs that let someone breathe fire or shoot lasers from their eyes."

"You would not believe how long it took her to get this working," Karasuba said. "Or how many clones of me we ended up going through in testing."

The infuriating thing about the puzzle piece that finally got this whole thing working was that it required magic to actually move anything along that fourth axis, and I had not gotten any better at magic in the century of practice I'd gotten with Clover. As such, while I could design four-dimensional weaponry, I had to simplify it to the point where someone who wasn't a comic book supergenius could build it, because I couldn't.

"Eugh," Immortal said, grimacing. Oh, right, the clone thing.

"This one's fresh," I promised. "Hasn't been used to cut down clones of my wife or anything like that."

"Mhm... So... is this it?" Immortal asked. "Do we just... arm up, go find Omni-Man, and stab him to death?"

"Well, no," I said. "We might have a weapon that can hurt him, now, but the fact of the matter remains that he very much has weapons that can hurt us, and also everyone in a three-mile radius. He might very well just punch our fucking swords in half, and then throw us through a skyscraper and kill everyone on that block."

"There is still a plan, though," Karasuba said. "We know where Nolan Grayson lives, and where he sleeps."

"This is sounding a lot like my plan, just at a different time of day," Immortal pointed out.

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"The plan is to psychologically destabilize him first," Karasuba said patiently. "Ophiuchus and I both have psychic powers, and can turn invisible. Sneaking into his house and giving him a panic attack is well within our abilities." The fact that I'd somehow managed to forget that I could just straight-up mind control people had been pretty embarrassing, but testing showed that, even if I had remembered, it wouldn't have been a silver bullet; Viltrumites had some innate psychic resistance, so enthralling Nolan completely just wasn't in the cards.

"From there," I continued, "we're going to implant an idea in his head: that he should run away from his family, get some fresh air in the middle of nowhere, where nobody will bother him. And then, once he's far away from anything breakable, then we stab him to death."

"And if he wakes up and starts fighting back... we want to lead him out into space, away from Earth entirely."

"Right," Immortal said, nodding. "I'm guessing you two have a way to breathe in space?"

"Neither of us strictly needs to breathe," I said. "But if you need a way to breathe in space-"

"I'm fine," he said. "I don't need to breathe either."

"Then... I think we're good to do this whenever we're ready," I said. "We'll try and time it for when his family are out of the house."

"What am I doing until then?" Immortal asked.

"Sitting in a bunker and watching TV until we give you the signal and open a portal for you," I said. "Y'know. Same as always."

And just like that, all his enthusiasm was gone.

----------------------------------------

"Alright, Mark's still at school, and Debbie just left to take pictures of a house," I said to Karasuba over our bond. "Nolan is working on his manuscript. The time is now, and I've got an idea."

"Let's hear it," Karasuba said.

"Let's make Nolan very distractable, and have him keep opening up his browser to check the news," I said. "After a bit of that, let him notice what he's doing, and then, give him the idea of flying out to the middle of nowhere so he can't get distracted by the internet."

Karasuba sent over the impression of nodding in agreement, and we united ourselves in the Force. She was I, as I was her, and we worked as one, pouring our godlike powers into making a middle-aged suburban dad start watching youtube videos of a guy building a brass table clock in his machine shop.

I had no idea that Nolan would do that, specifically, to be honest. I just told him he was bored, and that he should open up his browser and entertain himself. I was genuinely a little worried he'd open an incognito window instead.

"...The hell am I doing?" Nolan asked, as an Australian man with a soothing voice gently peened over the end of a tapered brass pin. "I've gotta focus... ugh. I can't focus. Damn internet... hrm. Nebraska isn't that far away... I bet I can find a nice, boring cornfield with no internet to work in."

"Bingo," I said.

"You really are an author, huh?"

"Excuse you, but I solved my focus issues by using controlled substances like amphetamines, not day-tripping to a cornfield."

Nolan closed his laptop, stood up, and stretched, before casting about for what he considered to be essential supplies for a day in the fields- a camping chair made of articulated metal poles, a small folding table, his laptop bag with a spare power bank, and a standing umbrella to keep the glare off his screen.

Once he was appropriately geared up, he stepped out into his back yard, and took off. Karasuba and I, who'd been sitting on his shed, followed after him.

"Immortal, Nolan's left his house," I said through the psychic transponder I'd given him. "Get ready, we're doing this soon."

"Roger that," he said, before accidentally sharing the sub-vocal fact that he would need to find his pants.

Charming.

Nolan flew west for a good few minutes, with Karasuba and I keeping pace easily; he wasn't going anywhere near all-out, as far as airspeed went; he'd gone faster than this before. But that was tiring for him, like sprinting. This? This constituted a casual walk, for him.

Finally, he found what he felt was an appropriately-desolate cornfield in the middle of nowhere, and came in for a landing. He unpacked his gear with no great hurry, and sighed happily as he sat down in a (cheap and somewhat uncomfortable) camping chair, before opening up his laptop and his manuscript.

A portal opened behind him, silently, allowing Immortal through, sword in hand.

I drew my own sword, and floated up behind Nolan. I pulled back, and in one clean stroke, decapitated him.

...

Well.

I tried to.

See, judging by the loud swearing coming from Nolan, and the angry red line of blood across the right side of his neck...

...I had ever so slightly misjudged how much tougher Nolan was than a Viltrumite clone fresh from the pod.

"Who's there!" Nolan barked, spinning around and clutching a hand over his neck. I'd hurt him, but... he wasn't dead. Not by a longshot.

"Hey, Nolan," I said, letting the invisibility drop. "Bet you weren't expecting me, huh?"

"You bitch," Nolan whispered.

"We're done playing games with you," I said. "Are you going to fuck off and find something better to do? Or are you going to die like a dog?"

"I'm going to kill you," Nolan promised.