Karu and I left the clinic to a scene of pure chaos. Sirens cacophonously echoed off of the mountains and buildings, making the air buzz with panic. People poured from every home and the dozens of brick two-story stores which seemed to make up the downtown area of this little suburb, flooding the streets in a panic to press towards the nearest shelter.

Without hesitation, Karu launched into the air and began shouting instructions to the crowd, directing people to leave their vehicles and possessions, move in an orderly way, keep moving, faster people in the middle of the road, keep in mind the infirm and children.

Even without her weapons and armor, aloft wings of blue plasma she was an angel, and her words were heard by the panicking masses like the voice of God. Once or twice, she had to swoop in and single out a troublesome individual, but through her efforts, this street at least moved quickly and efficiently forward.

Which left only…the rest of the whole town. In the distance, there was an explosion and one of the sirens wailed its last as it crumbled, sounding like a digital scream as it failed.

I swallowed hard and began to cut my way through the crowd, doing my best not to destroy the brief bubble of order that Karu had crafted as I headed across the flow of people and towards the explosion.

In an alley, I got a level up on a fire exit to stand out some and shouted to Karu. “I’ll meet you there!” She gave me an ‘ok’ gesture even as she kept herding her flock.

It would take me a lot longer to get there than her, and I honestly wasn’t sure why I was going. I couldn’t use my powers here without simply doubling the number of Exhumans these people had to worry about, but I couldn’t do nothing either. If Karu was going to fight, I had to be there to help.

It was slow, exhausting, dangerous going. None of the other roads I had to cross had crossing guards like Karu hovering over them, so instead it was anarchy as people shoved and ran as fast as they could toward the shelter, and someone like me going the other way was likely to get knocked down or trampled. I was extra wary of anyone barging into me, worried that any second my lightning shield would decide to go off and kill someone innocent and drive the whole city into an even greater panic, but somehow I made it through the worst of it and entered the part of the city where everyone had already fled.

Here was…somehow even worse. Signs of damage from the Exhuman were scattered here and there, dead bodies, a building on fire, cars driven into each other in a panic. Macabre as it was, I stopped to inspect some of the bodies on my way. Some had seemingly died incidentally, run over or caught in an explosion or rubble, but here and there I was able to pick out the strangest, most unexplainable deaths and from that figure out the Exhuman’s powers.

In the middle of the street, a man purple and blue from internal bleeding, surrounded by broken asphalt like a crater. He looked like he’d been stoned by an angry crowd. Another man was stuck half-inside a wall like he’d been catapulted into it. Most telling, a young girl, probably Lia’s age, bent in half and propped up by a rock spire jutting from the ground.

My blood boiled at the senseless death. A terrapath then, with control over rocks and earth. My power wouldn’t be too useful here, but I couldn’t stand here doing nothing. I heard the roar of an engine and turned as Karu landed behind me. She frowned as she scanned the scene from behind her visor.

“Terrapath,” I said. She nodded. “Why would anyone do this?”

“Your case is exceptional, as I hope I have made very clear to you. This is the fate of almost all Exhumans who do not surrender themselves. They see themselves as different and above humans, and when one being holds himself above all others, they lose all sense of empathy for their inferiors. We have seen it countless times in human history with tyrants and slaves both, and countless times more since Exhuman events began.”

She shook her head sadly, like she couldn’t believe it either. “Demons like these are my reason for being. I must engage, no matter the cost.”

“You’re not properly geared,” I pleaded. “You don’t have your weapons or armor, you left them when you carried me to the clinic.”

“Be that as it may, I must do everything in my power or I will never be able to face my creator with an honest heart. This is my choice and my calling. Should the worst occur…”

“It won’t.” She looked at me, and I could read her concern even under her visor. “I’ll be there. We’ll stop him together.”

“This is also your choice and I will not question it. But…you know the dangers as well as I do. There is more at stake than just your life here.”

I knew. If I didn’t die here, which given how earth was likely to counter lightning would already be a stretch, if I was identified, all of our concerns back in the clinic would be realized. XPCA descending on the unsuspecting AEGIS and Lia, Karu stripped and shamed, executions all around for treason and complicity in Exhuman events.

“I know. But I can’t let these people suffer. I’ll try to stay hidden.”

“And I shall take to the skies. Would that I had a spare comms, we could keep in contact, but even with my full kit I do not take such provisions.”

“I’m sure we’ll be fine. If I need you urgently…I’ll call down a bolt of lightning from the sky or something.”

“I have no flares to signal…simply screaming at one another will have to suffice. Would that I had my equipment…or armor at least.” She frowned, looking down at her bare legs and feet. She snapped out of it abruptly, straightened up and fixed me in the eye, refusing to waste time brooding. “Best of luck.” She grabbed my arm and dragged me in for a brief soldier’s embrace before backing off and roaring into the air.

Almost immediately, black streaks tore through the air with an ominous whistling and pierced the sky where Karu flew. She entered her defensive stance, seeming to flicker from existence as more projectiles the size of my head rocketed through the air at her.

My feet slammed the cracked pavement as I sprinted towards the source of the volley. A T-intersection, mostly open, surrounded by destroyed buildings, the ground caked with rubble. In the center, standing right in the open, a woman in a white sweater marred with dirt and splotches of blood, a torn red skirt over black leggings. She screamed like an animal as she pumped her arms like punches, launching broken chunks of the shattered street at Karu like bullets.

Karu, meanwhile, was untouchable as ever. Impossible even for me to follow, she seemed to be everywhere at once, appearing only for moments while she reversed momentum before zipping off in a flash in a new, unexpected direction. She vanished behind buildings, reappearing back on the same side she entered, stayed high and spiraled, making the Exhuman look straight up and spin to keep her in sight, disorienting and dizzying her.

The next volley, the Exhuman thrust forward with both arms, firing a whole salvo of rock at once, saturating an entire section of the sky. As soon as it came at her, Karu streaked backwards in full reverse, losing distance slowly to the rocks. Just before they caught up with her, she went straight up, splitting her legs as she flew to just straddle one incoming rock.

“You crazy bitch!” screamed the Exhuman. “Just leave me alone! Give me back my family!”

“The unjust will perish!” Karu yelled in response, swooping back in again. “Seek mercy in God’s salvation, for I have none to give!”

“Fucking religious nutjob! Leave me the hell alone!”

I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to help Karu, attack the crazed woman, avenge the slaughtered innocents…but she was just an Exhuman like me, trying to get her family back or something. Maybe we could still resolve this without, well, more bloodshed.

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I took a couple more steps forward, walking out into the open. I felt her glance at me for only a moment before she resumed her attack on Karu. However, in that one moment, I felt the ground shifting under me, and not certain what was coming, dove forward and rolled out of the way.

It was a good choice. A moment later, a rocky spire burst out of the ground and impaled the space where I had been walking.

“Hey!” I shouted.

“Trying to sneak up on me? I’ll show you all!”

“I just want to talk to you!”

“While I’m fighting your friend in the skies? Somehow I don’t think so!” She lifted a stream of rocks and fired them machine-gun style at Karu’s streaking trail, slamming with earth-shaking force into the fronts of buildings.

“Karu, stop,” I shouted. “Let me talk to her.”

“There is no conversing with the corrupt!”

“Karu. Seriously. How did you and I even meet?”

“This is entirely different!”

“Karu, I’m walking up to her, stop. Lady, I’m coming over. I’m unarmed, okay?” I held out my hands as I stepped forward. Karu hesitated and then dipped below a building to disappear from sight.

“No! I won’t be fooled by you or by anyone! Just leave! If you really are willing to listen to me then listen when I tell you to go away!” She hurled a fine spray of gravel at me which vaporized as it hit my shield, peppering me with hot sand. Her eyes widened.

“I’m not leaving lady, XPCA are on their way, and they’ll kill you eventually if you keep up this rampage, even with your powers. Now tell me what’s wrong.”

“What’s wrong? Look around you idiot. Everything’s wrong. One day I have these powers, and I decide I’m going to go take my kids back from my ex, and the next the whole city is in flames and I still don’t know where they are. Marlene! Daniel! Come out here now!”

“I’m sure they evacuated so you wouldn’t kill them,” I said, stopping ten feet from her. “You just decided that because you can, you can take your kids from your ex-husband?”

“I can do whatever I want, you idiot, don’t you realize that? I realized that one day, after keeping my powers hidden for weeks. Hours slaving away at crummy jobs, eating garbage food every day while fatass CEOs make millions doing nothing? If I had that kind of money they never would have taken my kids away. But now they can’t stop me, I can take and do whatever I want.”

“Look around you, this is what happens when you take what you want. How’s that treating you?”

Again she screamed and threw rocks at me, larger ones this time, but still my shield annihilated them before they could touch me. I kept my eyes closed and flinched at the avalanche of shards. The flying grit was extra painful against my newly-soft skin.

“Shut up! Everything went wrong because of them. People see me using my powers and panic and cry out, and then I have to stop them before they tell everyone. If they’d just shut up, they’d still be alive. Why can’t people just understand–“

“You killed those people. You know that, right?”

“Only because they made me!”

“They did nothing but fear you because you could kill them in a heartbeat. And were they wrong to do so? Didn’t you prove them all right by doing exactly that?”

“Shut up!” She picked up a huge chunk of street and floated it over her head. “Shut up, shut up, shut up!” She then heaved it at me. I took off running as soon as I saw how big it was–no way my shield could block that. I ran inside the front of a building, vaulting a broken window and the tiny meteor smashed into the storefront, eradicating the entire front of the building, knocking me down and covering me in dust and darkness.

“Athan!” I heard a scream, and then the sound of weapon fire from outside. The ground trembled as the earth answered in return, and then the two women were locked in their duel again.

I…don’t know what I was expecting. That I’d talk to her and everything would be okay? That suddenly, all her life problems would clear up just because she had someone who’d listen to her? I bet she had friends and family who would listen to her issues before she decided to resort to force, and obviously that hadn’t been enough for her.

I lit up a small blade of lightning in front of me to illuminate the ruins and swore. I felt like I missed a connection, like if I had just done things differently, she’d be redeemed, and…I don’t know, she could have a life like I have? Better than being gunned down by the XPCA on a street corner.

It was still hard to see even with the light, dust choked the air. I started breathing through the front of my shirt, unsure of how much that actually would do. There were rooms in the back, with any luck, one would lead to a back door or have a window I could get out of.

I remembered my first kills. Helpless, as XPCA soldiers threw themselves at me and died to my shield as I watched. It was so easy, ordinary humans were so very powerless compared to us, I could see how someone would decide themselves invincible and take and do whatever they wanted. But the numbers didn’t lie…well…they were provided by the XPCA so they could…but every Exhuman event I’d ever heard of ultimately ended in the Exhuman’s defeat or death. Just a matter of how many dozens or hundreds of lives later. Weak though humans may be, there were literal billions of them, and armed with technology, any single one could wipe out an Exhuman if given the shot.

I couldn’t fathom it. But I also was one who surrendered. Others didn’t think as I did, I had to remind myself. Maybe they thought they could hold out forever or kill millions without getting hit. Or maybe they just never thought at all. I couldn’t know.

And that was the frustrating part. This woman was more willing to kill me than talk to me. Maybe that’s what Karu meant when she went off screaming about the irredeemable or whatever.

I sighed and pushed open a door to find a ray of light coming through a half-window near the ceiling. Good enough. I cut the glass window down with a few swipes of my blades, pane and all, and climbed out from atop a desk, grey with dust.

I trotted back around the corner and found Karu in trouble. The Exhuman had figured out the essence of flak cannons by having her rocks explode in the air, and Karu had to use more cover and less evasion to avoid getting blasted out of the sky, since even a near miss would now be fatal.

From the blood seeping through her clothes, I don’t think this was a lesson Karu learned cheaply. Even from here, I could tell she was moving slower.

“Exhuman, final warning,” I said, drawing my swords from the air and advancing on her. “Surrender peacefully, leave, or Karu, I, and the XPCA will eventually stop you.”

“You’d fight one of your own?”

“You killed people. You’re a murderer.”

“So? They were trying to stop me. Nobody can stop me, they needed to learn.”

“They are dead and learned nothing. Look!” I pointed at the bodies down the street. “Do they look like they’ve learned from this experience?”

“They look,” she said, heaving another dozen chunks of rock into the air, “like they will never try to stop me again.”

“You’re talking like all humans are the same. Like you can teach humanity a lesson by killing a few of them. You were human your whole life, tell me, is that how it works?”

“Yes!” she screamed and hurled the rocks at me. I sliced the largest into pieces with my blades and let my shield handle the rest. “People will see me on the holo and know how dangerous I can be. How I am to be feared! When I come, people had better flee!”

“Let’s say your plan works. Now every time you enter a city it’s just empty. You win?”

“I’ll have everything I ever wanted.”

“Yeah. All that money and nothing to buy.”

“I’ll have anything they left behind, I don’t need to buy anything.”

“So if all you want is to be alone with everything you need, why not just leave now? Why make the humans flee? Just skip the being a horrible murderous monster step and run!”

“I–nobody lives like that! What are you, stupid!?”

“I live like that.”

She hesitated.

“No. You’re an idiot, and I can take whatever I want. I am through listening to you.” She slammed the ground and I felt the earth quaking under my feet again and dove sideways. Again, rock needles punctured the ground with explosive force.

“Listen to me–“

“I am done listening! Leave me or die!”

“You don’t have to do this!”

“I WANT TO DO THIS!” A huge rock shattered into chunks on my shield and one shard the size of a golf ball caught me in the gut. I was fine, but it took the wind out of me and knocked me down. I felt the ground moving under me again and tried to get to my feet to jump again.

And found myself flying. I was confused until I saw the trail of blue plasma under me where Karu had snapped me up from the jagged stalagmites.

“Karu, let’s leave,” I said to her as she dropped me behind a building from the Exhuman. “Let’s just leave her to the XPCA, there’s nothing we can do here.”

“I cannot, Athan. I told you, fighting evil like this is my calling. If she kills a dozen XPCA, is that any different than her killing a dozen helpless civilians? If I could stop her now and prevent her from doing either?”

“I…I guess not.” It was hard for me to think of an incoming XPCA kill squad as people who needed protecting, but those were exactly the people I’d killed when I’d been arrested, and every death of theirs had still hung on me. “XPCA is going to kill her when they get here, right?”

“Yes, with certainty. She is not powerful enough to resist them for long, and has demonstrated enough destructive intent to warrant immediate execution.”

“Then…if we do it…”

“I will make you do nothing, but I am going.”

“I…I’m going too.”

“I…” Karu hesitated. “Ashton, this is more than is fair for me to ask, but bereft of my equipment, there is little I can do against this Exhuman save act as a distraction. I am afraid you will need to do much of the heavy lifting, as it were.”

“I understand. Do your best.”

She gave me another single nod and we walked back to the edge of the building together. Still out of sight, I felt the ground tremble familiarly beneath me and broke into a sprint towards the intersection while Karu took to the air.

As I ran forward, spires of rock bursting from the ground in my wake, I focused my gaze on the raving Exhuman trying to kill me, and my thoughts went back to the body of the girl she’d impaled and killed. I couldn’t not think of the girl as Lia.

This Exhuman was dangerous, she wasn’t sorry, she wasn’t repentant, she wasn’t willing to listen or change. And as much as I just wanted Exhumans and humans to get along and be able to live in peace, it was people like this who made my dreams an impossibility.

For once, I found I agreed with Karu’s solution. This monster needed to die.