Brock watched through frozen eyes as the necromancer ambled over to inspect each of the squad members, fingers idly tapping his chin. “Fools,” he muttered. He poked at Cap’s stasis-locked staff, caught in mid whirl next to her face. “Those attacks didn’t work last time either.” He turned back to Brock.

“You see? This is why they can only be NPCs. Caught in the same loops, repeating the same patterns. People don’t act that way.”

He ran a finger down Fiona’s chin, then licked it suggestively.

“Though NPCs can be fun at times.”

Brock raged against his immobility, but as before, nothing happened. He was still stuck.

The necromancer stepped in front of him again.

“Can’t say that I see what the Conductor wants with you,” he said petulantly. “You showed some skills the other day, but now look at you.” He tapped Brock on the forehead. “You’re a nobody. Can’t even break out of a basic entropy loop, right?” He spun back towards the squad. “A job’s a job, though, and the Conductor’s rewarding me well for this one. All that’s left is to finish off these idiots and then deliver you, all wrapped up. Right.”

Four of the Death Blast black holes spun into existence around the necromancer’s hands, sucking in everything around them in hissing roars.

...save them.

Simultaneously, Bindy’s voice echoed from Brock’s pocket.

“Hi! Brock! It’s time to make a choice! Take him alive if you can! We need more info!”

The stasis bonds, which had seemed so impregnable a moment before, were now nothing more than cobwebs and sunbeams. Brock took a step forward.

“Hey.”

The necromancer looked over his shoulder, then flinched, one arm coming up to cover his eyes. “Impossible,” he whispered, so low that Brock was sure he wasn’t supposed to have heard. “How can there be two...” A second later, the necromancer had regained his composure, miniature black holes still orbiting his hands, but one of the layers of the rainbow shield had disappeared.

“You’re...” the necromancer squinted, then jumped back, putting some distance between them, “different. Now I see why the Conductor wants to study you.”

Brock clenched his fists.

He was incredibly pissed off.

It had been a long day.

“What the hell’s your problem, man?! You froze me and Aphrodite! You’re treating everyone like shit!”

The necromancer glanced around nervously.

“Look, I just-”

The black holes surrounding his fists streaked towards Brock, accompanied by a spray of hissing acid, a wave of unspeakable horrors manifesting eldritch appendages, and the entirety of Fiona’s previously vanished munitions.

A second later, a reassembled Brock took another step forward. Amazingly, his clothes were still intact.

The necromancer held his hands up.

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

“Okay, fine, I see where you’re coming from-”

Streaks of blasphemous destruction ripped out of sickly jade pentagrams. A thousand horrors burrowed into Brock’s skin, twisting it into malformed abstractions of grisly flesh, but were just as quickly banished to the catalogues of distant memory.

He took another step forward, leather coat flapping around his ankles. The necromancer gulped.

“Right, we can talk about this-”

Billowing waves of pure negation poured out of the necromancer’s palms; colors of madness encompassing the dimensions of hate. Veins corded on his neck as he thrust more and more of the inimical energies into Brock, consigning him into eternal perdition.

Brock took another step forward, face to face with the quivering man.

“Right, okay, right, look,” the necromancer screamed, spittle flying from his lips, spells vanishing, “the Conductor can alter your Limiter! Like mine! Don’t kill me!”

He dragged his fingers across his neck, and beneath the opulent headdress fastenings a familiar metal band appeared. Brock stared at it in disgust.

“You... you did all of this with a Limiter on?”

“That’s right,” the necromancer gabbled, “that’s right. The Conductor, he’s looking for something, and if you help him, he can unlock the world for you.” His rolling eyes zeroed in on Brock’s. “A world where you can achieve all of the dreams you’ve ever dreamed. What’s so wrong with that?”

Brock paused, momentarily entranced by the visions suddenly crossing his mind.

He could be the best at everything he wanted to be.

Phantom cheers echoed through his mind, the adulation of millions wishing they were him. Confetti raining down as he crossed countless finish lines, interview after interview with adoring fans. His name in every record book for every sport, an endless sea of success.

When he looked closer, though, the cheering faces were blank, featureless, nothing more than mindless puppets.

He stared down at his hands, so clearly not his own.

There was no way anyone in this world would cheer him. Not if his success came at their expense. Not if the cost was the lives of the only people who seemed to care the slightest about him, even if they did try to murder him occasionally.

He clenched his still unfamiliar knuckles into fists.

“...what’s he looking for? This Conductor?”

“I don’t know,” the necromancer said. “I don’t know. The Conductor told me to get you, that’s all he said.” He waved his hands in the air. “Look, how is this even a choice, right? You can join us and live in absolute freedom, or you can let them,” he gestured viciously towards the frozen figures of Cap, Fiona, Mikael, and Verdant’s doll, “control your life forever. Don’t you have any pride? They treat us like things, man! They’re not even people!”

Brock’s right fist moved almost without him thinking about it, a vicious uppercut.

The upper half of the necromancer’s body exploded in a vast fan of blood and entrails. The lower half stayed upright for a second, then toppled over backwards. One leg twitched feebly and was still.

Brock stared at his hand. It was perfectly clean. The force of the punch had been so violent that all of the necromancer bits were blasted away before even touching him.

Low laughter filled the chamber. Dirty green smoke whirled out of the necromancer’s waist and drifted up above the body, forming four glowing eyes, one pair set atop the other, the Limiter hovering above them all like a tarnished crown. They gazed at Brock with unbridled malevolence.

“So you choose war. I was prepared even for that, you fool. You think that pitiful body was my true form? I am perfectly ready, Brock!”

More ugly viridian light blazed across the gigantic chamber, and the piles of bones began shifting and rustling. A femur whipped past Brock’s face, then a rib, and then the air was full of spinning bits of ossified ivory, a hail of skeletal matter. He looked around in confusion. The bones streaming in were coagulating around the four eyes, which themselves were growing larger by the second. A hulking shape began rising into the air, countless ancient remains slamming towards it in wave after wave.

The cacophonous noise sounded like a dryer full of teeth.

An asymmetrical head formed, one side bulging with hundreds of tiny grasping hands, the other sleek and composed of an almost imperceptible mosaic of toes. Arms grew out of the massive trunk, two to the right, one to the left, and five legs sprouted beneath it, a flensed mockery of starfish limbs.

The four toxic eyes, now as big as horses, glared down at Brock from hundreds of feet in the air.

“I am the master of death!”

Another hail of bones whistled through the air and a scythe the size of a four story building appeared in the monstrosity’s two right hands, a scepter built entirely of skulls in its left. Necrotic energies danced around the scythe’s inner edge, and purplish light glowed along the entire length of the scepter, blazing out of each empty eye socket.

“You will bow before me!”

Brock cracked his knuckles, an unfamiliar surge of anger pounding through his veins.

“No,” he said quietly. “I don’t think I will.”