I decided against pursuing the disintegrating Hero. He was not an easy problem to solve on his own. On top of that, it simply wasn't worth the time to try. All I required was that he be taken out of the way and this goal had been defacto achieved. He had run off!

Now, these sterile halls were my hunting grounds...

Though the countdown was going off in my ear, I was unperturbed. All this meant, in my mind, was that the unwitting scientists would gather in one place for my convenience. They would be filtering through the Rift Gate where they planned to escape before the base self-destructed.

The problem was, if I attacked too boldly and blazed through the survivors, Seraph would cut their losses and blow the facility, ruining all my gains. Burning up the biomatter. Instead, I would need to be more tactful, taking what mass that I could not only attain, but keep.

My microscopic scouts had already penetrated into the air system. Hepa filters were a joke, really, and now I knew how to break through encrypted locks. I had even improved upon Cyber's process. So I went on, mapping out the base and snagging people where my scouts found them. Truthfully, I felt lucky.

Unlike so many days in the past, unsure of myself and wandering through the dark, I felt positive. My direction, though subject to changes in particular detail, was solid in principle. For the first time in a long time, I felt again as I had all those months ago, swimming freely in the blue expanse.

After exploring the tunnels a while, my main body lept down into the hole that the Disentigrating Hero had created. I went in the opposite direction of his escape, searching here and there for more food while on my way to the core. All the while, I was racking up kills in the background. 

It was true that the more action I took with my separated constructs, the quicker they alienated themselves from me. Yet, there was a partial solution to this problem. Using complex engineering, I could make my feeding cycle autonomous to an extent. 

While there were numerous issues involved, I only had to create a genetic program that remembered my will. One that was designed to account for my loss of control. Then, regardless of my power fading over separated flesh, I could carry out my work. It would hijack and mutate anything it came in contact with, then causing the resultant entity to seek me out. A perfectly complete extension of myself, despite the limitations of my Power.

For now, I was using radio signals to attract them, but I would need to improve my method going forward. If I was to strike out from a position of strength, millions of miles from Earth, I would need robust minions capable of their own problem-solving. 

Even light would have too great of a delay for direct control. 

I would have to create a genuinely new and sentient life. Something almost akin to becoming a father, I thought, stirring all kinds of strange emotions. Such a simple matter of extending my will beyond its limits, but perhaps that was the root of all reproduction. Immortality...

I had to remind myself of the countdown, as I was becoming distracted by the future. Once back to the task at hand, I moved like a flood, washing through the moon base and consuming as I went. Where cells met fresh bodies, they went to work creating roving, sporulating masses, increasing the spread in turn.

Unfortunately, I decided that I would indeed have to forfeit those precious pounds of flesh congregating by the Rift Gate. I couldn't risk an immediate detonation. Yet, it was not too terrible of a loss.

I only needed the minimum fuel for my travel. Once my evolution took root in the environment of my new world, I would have everything I needed in the form of carbon and sunlight. There would be nothing to stop my fullest growth from occurring.

Still, there was something bothering me about this situation, despite my security. The Disintegration Hero, I saw, had not gone the way of the exit. Before I lost track of him, he had been heading deeper into the facility.

As I was loping through the eerie halls of the nuclear reactor wing, I stopped. Rationally speaking, there had to be some secondary escape route down there. Or perhaps a bunker capable of withstanding the meltdown?

"Maybe I should give them a visit?" I thought aloud.

"First we need to stop the meltdown," I heard Walter interject. As usual, he was always watching and judging; pushing me through his desires to act while I was merely problem-solving.

"Of course," I said. The issue was, these things were constructed in reverse; exactly opposite to the way they would have been on earth. Instead of having failsafes to remove and cool the fuel-rods if they overheated, their failsafes were to accelerate the explosion. It was rigged to blow.

"We need to get creative..." Hickory told me. "Consult the help."

Already my vision was getting blurry enough that I could see them standing near me as if they had entered the room. The same old hoodied young philosopher and his edgy looking southern friend approached. Then, turning further to my side, blurriness transitioned to complete darkness, and I gazed into my Power.

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Up above, designs were running like computer simulations in the air. Various ghostly visions of possible organic machinery flickered by, each being run through the same scenario and each failing to stop the meltdown. Such was the process of solving an equation.

I was heavily limited in what I could imagine here, though. Nuclear pressure was a foreign selector for my biology. And with scarce information about how failure might happen, all solutions remained vague.

Ultimately, I knew Hickory was right. So I summoned up the minions from their dreaming slumber. First Daniel, Cyber, Foci, and Paradise. But then, I started drawing out the newer members, angry as they were.

Cyber immediately took a glance up at the simulations I was running and shook her head. "You're massively under-estimating them. A reactor meltdown wouldn't be enough to terminate a facility like this. It's a glorified pressure cooker. No. There has got to be a proper nuclear bomb buried somewhere around here..."

With a thrust of my thumb back towards reality, I shunted her out of the darkness and into the physical world. As her body was forming, I told her. "See what you can do on the software side then. And find that bomb." Next, I turned to the crowd. "What can we do about deactivating the hardware?" I asked them.

Most would not acknowledge me or started angrily carrying-on, cursing and yelling. All of those annoying individuals were quickly put away. Their complaints could be addressed later. Right now, I needed a can-do attitude and ample employee spirit.

Only a handful remained who were willing to help. Rapidly, I had them tell me their Powers so I could see what I was working with.

"Mind control."

"Shapeshifting."

"Weather control."

On and on it went, but nothing that could help me. If only I had managed to nab that Disintegrating Hero...

"Shit," I said. Even with the time-slowing effect of the metaphysical plane, we had only minutes left.

"Indeed," Walter sighed, knowing my decision before I even voiced it. "We need to cut our losses." Always so cautious.

"We'll never get through the Rift Gate," I spoke. "They'll shut it down from the other side. I may have cells in orbit, but there's no knowing if I can get far enough away to clear the blast radius. All of this could be a wash."

Even as I realized this, an idea had come to me. Wherever the Hero had gone, that was where we could be certain we would be safe. So, if we couldn't escape, that was where we would head. Into Seraph's own safe room.

I just had one order of business first.

"I'm not making any progress with the firewall," Cyber complained. "I can do an airlock, but I need executive control just to access this system."

"No worries," I said. "You did your best. We have to wrap up. There's just one last thing here..."

As I approached the reactor, I did my best to brace up for what was about to happen. Once upon a time, I had heard that deep within the vault of Chernobyl, there had been found a type of black mold leeching energy from the radioactive Elephant's Foot. This was a Power that I wanted for myself. I simply had to reach out and take it.

And so, I punched directly into the reactor's coolant tank. Not into the core, as I didn't want to get caught in the meltdown. Nonetheless, radiation bombarded my flesh. Once containment was breached, I could feel it shred through every ounce of my body, tearing cellular machinery with tiny atomic hellfire.

It was a lot worse than I had expected. Almost enough to liquify me. But very soon, I started to see changes occur that could repair and mitigate the damage. Even at its climax, my healing factor could keep pace. What I was after was the knowledge its wrath brought. The new designs.

It took less than forty seconds in the end for me to realize what I needed. The method to harness radioactive energy.

"Hell yeah," Hickory approved, his voice an echo from the increasingly distant void. "That's the kind of thinking I like to see. You've got to stop and smell the roses, boy."

He was right. The sensation of adaptation was pleasurable in my bones, like a wonderful ache being stretched or an itch being scratched. Like aromatic flowers in a cool summer breeze.

Just as my satisfaction was beginning to dull with the novelty, Walter had to remind me. "Three minutes left. We need to get a move on."

Without a moment to waste, I concluded my work and reabsorbed Cyber's avatar. She was getting used to the process now I noticed. There was not quite so much fear. And that was without a single drop of neurochemical manipulation. The girl was merely toughening up.

With little time left to spare, I sprinted off. It was easily a mile to my destination, but anything was possible with the right form. So on I went, faster than a speeding bullet.

The cells had finished their scouting, so I had a clear map in my head of the fastest route. A path to the very last place in which I knew the Heroes had to be hiding. The last room itself.

This map took me deeper and deeper into the bedrock of the moon. Down into the lunar belly until finally, there was nothing but naked, hewn rock and red emergency lights. 

Once the nice and clean facility had run out above, it had transitioned to vast tunnels of stone. What would have been an impassable labyrinth for anyone else was no more than a direct spiral for me. All of it culminating in a long and empty hall. 

Amongst the blinking gloom and black rock, it felt like being at the bottom of the universe. A world beneath everything else, where only solitude existed. So very far from who I once was.

At the end of this singular hall and at the very bottom of the facility lied a vault door. Residual heat confirmed that this was where the Heroes had gone to hide.

I was prepared for a fight as I approached. There was no keypad or anything high tech by the vault door, I saw. Immediately I worried. If this was an impenetrable chamber that could survive a nuclear blast, then I was screwed if they'd already locked it.

My heart sank as I realized how pointless this had been. Having sent a tonne or so of flesh to try and escape along the surface, at least some might survive.

The last seconds were slipping away.

Suddenly, grinding metal began to screech. The door was opening on its own, scraping up dust and stone along the roughly cut floor. The reactor was giving its death groans in the distance, and every red light flickered out at once.

Silence reigned as the door swung fully and in the pitch black, I stared into the room beyond.

Surrounded by dozens of corpses, a man sat waiting for me. His only words rung cheerily out of the steel box, "come inside and close the door behind you. We need to talk."

The dead heroes were strewn around him, bloodied and ruined. Yet his moth-eaten sweater was clean, and his fleshless, bleached head an unblemished white. It was a skull picked to the bone, with all except the bloodshot eyes long gone. He was looking at me with them, trained and unblinking, sitting lidless in boney sockets. He motioned for me to hurry, as he knew the fires were coming.

As the door slammed shut behind me, I felt a tinge of excitement... and visceral unease. This was what Seraph kept locked up in the belly of the icy void, far from Earth, I realized. This was a threat that they could do nothing but contain. Something beyond their Power to destroy.