It wasn't too long after we got back to AEGIS and Lia's bloodstained hotel when I got a call from Cosette. Exasperated, she let me know that we had work to do, and with Tem out of the picture, I'd be picking up her share of the effort. Or else.

I knew I was on thin ice with her. I'd already blown whatever goodwill I'd accrued in arguing with her about not going out to Chicago, but then hospitalizing Tem on top of that meant she was completely done with me for the time being. I gave in quicker than I wanted to, hanging up with her and stepping back into the office to talk to my sister and friend.

I had still wanted to stay with Tem. Greedily, I wanted to be there for her, instead of for the people and country which needed me. I was going to argue. I was going to complain. I was going to wonder at just how damn unlikely it was that we'd seen two events in D.C. now in the short time I was here.

She had sent me an image of the Exhuman event in progress and I shut my mouth. Any reluctance I had was gone. It was time for the XPCA, for the P-Force to go out and save lives.

"Lia, AEGIS, I need to go," I said.

The two of them looked at me warily. Lia spoke first. "You look...bad, Athan. What's happened?"

"Exhuman event. I need to go." From their looks I hadn't told them anything they didn't already guess.

"You're not telling us everything," AEGIS said, her eyebrows threatening to angle downwards into her radiant eyes. I held up the image on my holo for them to see and both leaned in to take a look and then fell backwards. "That isn't possible."

"Not from what we know," Lia said. "But there is admittedly a lot we could not know."

"I'm pretty sure if he had any more tricks, he would have used them," AEGIS replied. Her hands seemed to move on their own, tenting and untenting and her fingertips rubbing against each other, before she broke down and grabbed one of her copper hanging twintails to stroke.

"Obviously he had at least one more. He's there, and Athan's going to go fight him," Lia said with a frown.

"Well, I'm coming with," AEGIS said.

"No, AEGIS," I replied. "It's too dangerous."

"Are you kidding me? I'm at least a thousand times more durable than you are."

Lia frowned even more. "No...he's right. I mean, he's wrong, but he's also right. You haven't sorted out your bugs yet, AEGIS. If you crash out in the field, not only will you be a sitting duck, but you might endanger everyone else as well."

"That's bullshit," AEGIS said, looking at the two of us disbelieving. "I've only crashed like, what, twice? What are the odds it'll happen again just then?"

"It doesn't matter the odds, things happen at the worst times, always," Lia said. "Always."

"That's a stupid argument," AEGIS replied.

"The fact is, you're not going," I cut in. "This Exhuman is a killer, and I don't want you getting hurt."

AEGIS made a noise like 'pfeh!' as she choked on some words, still blinking back disbelief. "This Exhuman is a killer and I don't want you getting hurt!" she echoed back. "And you!" she turned to Lia. "I can't believe you're arguing against me on this. After we just argued against your brother killing himself on a suicide mission--"

"This isn't a suicide mission," I interrupted. "The whole P-Force is going...the whole force minus Tem...we've retained the services of any local hunters, which means Karu and at least one other, and the XPCA strike forces are mobilizing."

"So let me come with you," AEGIS said. Her voice was confident, but her eyes were pleading. I shook my head.

"Your job is to find out what they're doing to you and fix it. That's it. If I can't help you with that, then you're the only one who can, and you need to. Let me do what I can do, and you do what only you can do, okay?"

She looked like she was going to continue arguing, but closed her mouth when Lia put a hand on her shoulder.

"If you die out there, I will kill you," she warned.

"Thanks. Both of you. Now I need to go."

Less than twenty minutes later, I was in the back of a van with the rest of the P-Force, Cosette barking last-minute addendums to the extremely brief briefing we'd been given into the comms in our ears.

No Captain Targa to be seen. I guess her last command hadn't impressed sufficiently.

I stared at the picture on my holo Cosette sent me earlier. I still couldn't believe it. Even just holding my holo, I felt my hands growing cold and realized I had to actively battle back the memories.

When I closed my eyes, he was there. Cocky grin. Business casual. Fingers of ice in my veins. Dipshit.

Soran, his name was. He'd been eradicated, we all thought. The combined forces of Tower's and Steffie's Exhuman powers...both of them multiplied forces on them in different ways, and their powers together had magnified to, as Cosette had described it 'a completely unjustifiable, uncalled-for, absurd and embarrassing excess of powers use, not in any way condoned by the XPCA'.

Basically, they'd obliterated an entire city block, and Dipshit...Soran, that is, had been right in the epicenter. Cosette was wrong about excessive force, because now he was somehow back.

The picture showed him exactly as I remembered, grinning, like he knew the traffic camera was there and was trying to smile for it. No event as of yet, but given his M.O. of hunting other Exhumans to steal their powers, he wasn't one who could be left alone. At best, he grew ever stronger...at worst, we were looking at a double event if his target and he had it out.

The van rolled to a halt and the doors opened to a narrow street, the rays of evening sun strangled by the valley of tall, deserted buildings. As usual, recon team had beat us here and had evacuated the area with their typical expertise.

Walking down the empty street as more vans pulled in and more XPCA filed out felt like we were setting up to stroll down main street in the old west. A shootout between old rivals. He wanted to pay us back for his last defeat. I wanted to avenge Mage.

So I was impatient as the last few assembled and we moved forward, but remembering AEGIS' and Lia's concern, I was taking no risks here. As much as my blood boiled, as much as I wanted to see this guy go down, a thousand times more, I didn't want to get someone else killed.

We knew from experience that he was cunning enough to lay a trap, and if Mage hadn't been there with her ridiculous powers, we would have all died. There was no room for that kind of error this time.

I heard a distant roar which cut out early and realized Karu was on the roofs above us, flying as little as possible to maintain a semblance of stealth. Out of one of the other vans was a large black man with dreads tied up which brushed the inside of the clear dome helmet of his exosuit. Another hunter. Almost three dozen XPCA, all in exosuits, a handful of whom were shieldbearers, holding the shimmering orange barriers in their hands to protect themselves and the rest of us. Jack, Tower, and Moon had shared the van with me.

No Tem. No Mage. Both because of me.

We were ready and split up and moved forward. The rest of the XPCA and hunters were there for support. Their job was to contain and corral, keep him from escaping or escalating the situation. The P-Force would be doing the heavy lifting.

Recon units had eyes on him, and we were following to catch up to them. We were on their comms, for the time being, and listening to their chatter made me realize just how little I understood of the XPCA recon branch, even though we'd worked with them before.

I remembered the pair of trackers we'd met up with last time we went after Soran, with their heads covered in sensors of all kinds, walking on stilts like animals. I knew the ones keeping an eye on him this time wouldn't be so obvious, but that was the image which was in my mind. Move and catch up to the herd of oddly-gaited quadruped spider-people.

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And then catch up with him.

Though we were all on-edge and kept on our toes as we advanced, the time seemed to pass in a blur. I felt simultaneously too hot and too cold, despite the unusual warmth of the day making it actually nice outside. When I thought of him my blood boiled, but when I remembered his face, when my mind wandered just past the moment, I felt frozen inside.

Memories flashed by in front of my eyes like they were right there, something I'd only ever experienced before when Saga was putting new memories in my head, or the time she was sleeping and I relived her and others' memories. But these memories were mine, and the fact they came on so unbidden and so strong, it made me anxious.

It'd go away when we beat him, I told myself. I was just nervous about stepping up to Mage's killer. Just a weird bit of brain chemistry.

I also tried to ignore the fact that last time I saw visions like this, I accidently vivisected Tem.

So yeah. My brain wasn't doing so great. Watching Karu's jetpack flare as she jumped between buildings above us, I had a brief flash of insight of a lesson she'd beaten into me. 'I'm fine, just--' means 'I am not fine', and should not be deploying. I wondered her opinion on what it meant if I knew I wasn't okay?

Didn't really matter, though. I'd pushed Cosette too far already and wouldn't be able to worm out of this even if I wanted to. Which I didn't. My head was just spinning a bit too much right now. I'd be fine when I got there. I'd have to be. Nobody else was going to die.

I realized we were alone now. The XPCA and hunters had split off, and it was just the P-Force running down the street. The warm winter air flowed through my lungs as my breathing remained even and slow. We were close.

Two ordinary-looking men and a woman emerged from the shadows under some pillars beside a large building and the one in front greeted us with a raised hand. We stopped our advance to see what they wanted.

"He knows he's being followed," the recon team told us, starting in the middle of a conversation we'd already half-had over comms. "We couldn't pursue any further without stealth tech."

"Where is he?" I asked, surprised to hear my voice come out as a growl.

"In there," the recon gestured towards a building under construction half a block away. "He hasn't left yet, not by any conventional means anyway. Intel says the Exhuman's a mutie?"

"Mutie?" I asked stupidly.

"His Prather classification...mutable?" I shook my head and the recon glanced back at his peers, as though asking if he was stupid or if I was.

"Sorry, I'm more in the business of fighting them than classifying them," I apologized.

"Yeah, lots of the strike teams are. That's why they have a higher mortality rate than recon," he replied flatly. "Each Exhuman is given a classification to generalize where their powers fall, usually discerned through the blood and sweat of the recon teams, by the way."

I sighed, but he continued. Proud of his job I guess.

He pointed at me. "Electropath. Now if you had a physical component to using your powers instead of just mental, you'd be electrokinetic. If you created self-acting entities, electrogenesist. If your powers defied convention but were still electric, you might be an electrist or a special electropath. And so on."

"And he's mutable, because his powers change. Got it."

"Special mutable. He earns that special title because his powers come from others."

"Great talk," I said, as I broke off to head towards the construction, leaving the recon to just shake his head.

"Sorry, we have some history with this Exhuman," Jack explained as an apology while we peeled away.

More like this Exhuman was about to become history. This time we wouldn't even leave dust.

This building was a lot less finished than the last one we'd fought in. Barely some walls, and scaffolding in place for pouring concrete on the higher floors. As we walked in, I saw a line of XPCA shieldbearers blocking the road ahead, blocking that exit. I briefly wondered if he liked construction sites, or if two of them in a row was just a coincidence. Not that it really mattered, there wouldn't be a third time.

He wasn't hard to find. He was sitting out in the open in the very middle of the building's shell, surrounded by a patch of snow presumably of his own making, judging by the lack of footprints. When he saw us, he waved and smiled, and my hands felt cold.

"Hello, P-Force," he sighed like he was already tired of us. I didn't wait for more. I filled both hands with lightning and hurled them at him.

But just as I stepped in to fire them off, my foot slipped on a patch of ice I hadn't seen, and the two bulbs fired off askew, both crashing and sparking and arcing on the wall just behind him. Jack was there, knife poised to strike when the bulbs exploded and electrocuted him instead of Dipshit.

"Jack!" I shouted. "Fuck!"

"Oh, he's fine," Soran said, finally rising and stepping away from where Jack was twitching and smoking on the ground.

With a roar, Tower shot straight at him, flying like a missile, the purple spectre of Moon's effigy standing on his back like she was surfing on him. Soran yawned and casually laid down as though to make a snow angel, and Tower sailed over him. As Tower hit the wall and rebounded back in and down, Soran was already rolling to the side, snow crunching under him, and just as Tower ricocheted back into reach, Soran disappeared under the surface of the snow, Moon's grasping hands finding nothing as Tower careened off the ground into the sky.

"Wrong way!" Moon shouted at him in his voice.

"I know that! We hit the ground too fast, give me a minute!"

They almost crashed into Karu as she engaged, her streaking blue plasma trail showing a sudden right-turn in her path where she avoided crashing into them.

"You die, godless scum!" she shrieked, and came to a halt in the air, her pack holding her steady against the backblast of dozens of micro-missiles emerging from every part of her body, small panels opening on her hips, shoulders, legs, and arms, and thousands of smoke trails twisting through the air as they converged down on him.

In an instant, there was a towering wall of flame between the two of them, and the missiles, unable to see past it drifted, suddenly unsure of where their target had gone. Flying in straight lines until they could re-acquire, a pair crashed into each other and detonated, creating a large explosion and shockwave which sent the others careening at random, exploding onto other walls or detonating on the ground. Karu herself was rocked by the blast and flew erratically to avoid getting caught in her own explosions in her face.

Her missile loadout was sourced from the XPCA, and it showed. Where the blasts occurred, it wasn't all fire and explosions. Some erupted into a sphere of gas, others into a gel which coated everything in its influence. I saw one erupt into a burst of electricity, which was new to me, I suppose nobody wanted to try shocking me. Similarly, none of hers froze the air into a starburst of ice, even though I had seen grenades of that sort back in our fight against the XPCA. Since Soran had ice powers, that also made sense.

Soran climbed out of the little pit in the ground he'd rolled into to avoid Tower and brushed snow off his button-down shirt. I was also up, and ran at him, but it felt like under the snow, wherever I put my feet, there was a small patch of ice just waiting for me. I slid and slipped until finally I landed on my tailbone with a painful crack.

"Really," he sighed, fiddling with something he was putting in his ears. "You never listen."

"Shut up!" I shouted back at him, feeling my face burning from losing to a damn patch of ice of all things.

The other hunter with the dreads appeared from the direction of the other XPCA and let loose with a focused blast of some kind of invisible energy that made my teeth rattle.

"Your calibration is off," Soran said to the hunter with a playful tap on his ear. "Don't you know that snow dampens sound?" he gestured at the circle of fresh powder all around him, much of which was now drifting through the air from the blasts of the fight. "But you can't turn it up more, can you? Not without liquefying your friends."

On top of the hunter's noises, the air sounded like it tore open, and Karu was there again, flying straight through the illusionary wall of fire. "Your tricks will not save you, serpent!" she shouted.

"I've heard that one before."

"Silence, devil! I stand with God!" Her arms snapped forward and two blasts of scattering light erupted from the guns strapped to her. Soran leaned slightly one way and the random scattering of the beams passed right around him, sizzling and refracting off the snow at his feet into harmless light. She fired again and again, but he just moved subtly each time with an intense air of boredom, and none of the scattergun shots ever touched him.

"Enough of this!" She shouted, and switched from her scatterguns to the machine guns on her wrists.

"Don't think you want to do that," he said, shaking a finger at her. "Water cooled, aren't they?"

She looked at him in surprise, and then with a practiced motion, ripped both of the machine guns off their hardpoints and threw them to the ground. As though waiting for that cue, each of the guns exploded from the inside with shards of ice.

Just like Mage had.

"What do you want?" she shouted.

"What does it matter?" I asked. "He's here to die, to us."

"He is toying with me," Karu sneered. "He could have used that ice to kill me at any time."

"It's true," he said. "I'm actually here to talk."

We all hesitated for a moment, interrupted only by Tower crashing back down into the ground with a grunt. "What'd I miss?" he asked.

"The Exhuman wants to talk," the black hunter said.

"Well fuck him," Tower replied, and shot towards Soran again.

"Tower, stop," said the hunter. "We're not that XPCA anymore."

To my surprise, Tower did stop. I was happy to see that from his back, Moon still tried to claw at the Dipshit, but she couldn't reach.

"Why?" she shouted at him.

"Well, uh, it's true, isn't it?" Tower replied.

"What's true is that he's a damn murderer!" I shouted. I tried to get up again but my hand slipped on a piece of ice, and I cracked my elbow against the concrete painfully. I held it as I rolled and swore in the snow.

"If I wanted to just kill people and take their powers, you're sitting in a puddle, Chariot," Soran said. "It would be pretty easy to kill you."

"So again, what do you want?" Karu asked, still hovering high beyond his reach.

"It's pretty obvious, isn't it?" he asked, looking around at all of us surrounding him. He turned and locked eyes with me and smiled. "I want to surrender."