Success was, perhaps, a mistake.

We had been entrenched in the field for hours, unloading all we possessed into the iron hide of the floating man. Effortlessly, he had evaded or absorbed the blows, as though to show how untouchable he was, as though to demonstrate the futility of the tens of thousands arrayed against him.

One had now succeeded, and brought the charade crashing down. No longer was Justice untouchably aloof. No longer did he remain at the edge of his powers and tease us with death.

Now he was as close and as deadly as the blood-stains across his hands would indicate. He was shifting and appearing within the broken ranks, killing at random, whetting himself in an explosion of gore, before tearing away to appear elsewhere.

More than unhinged, he seemed uncaged, his powers seemed limitless. Where he went, eruptions of death bloomed in every form, every color. Tendrils which corroded flesh and metal flayed from his back, beams which did not burn so much as puncture, flashing like strobes at his fingertips, wreathed in fire which burned from too far away, and floating pellets of mossy rock which leapt for exposed eyes and throats to plunge through soft tissue.

All while releasing a constant, keening roar, another power I could not fathom, but which unsettled all the same. He no longer looked human, there were only glimpses of human parts in his form, he was being cut and shredded with such frequency that he was a mass of floating, geometric flesh, constantly assembling and reassembling, a possessed Rubik's cube of skin and muscle in zero-g.

Except for his core, the still-weeping slash across his chest where the shadow Exhuman's lance had bit him. The touch that had set him off. That piece of flesh remained stubbornly intact, hiding within him like a nucleus, glowing with a black radiance I didn't understand, as though by breaking, it had become his center.

I was doing my best to strike at that core, but Tem's powers were too sweeping and too slow. Precision fire was simple enough, the beams of white and violet death we produced were as large or small as mandated. However, the timing was impossible; it took entire seconds for the light to coalesce, and in seconds, Justice jumped three or even four times across the battlefield, mangling victims anew, like Jack, but possessed of more lethality than a mere knife.

The battle lines were no more. Justice was no longer stationary, it was no longer possible to form a concave ring around him. Instead, was chaos, as men scattered in every direction, the animate shadows also joined by sentient crushing stones and horrid drifting fields of gas that seemed to drive those within it insane enough to attack their compatriots.

In short, where Justice had been water content to erode us slowly, now he was pumping himself into our lines, and we were fracked.

Another wave of shadows erupted from our feet, signaled by a scream as a bladed hook caught the unprotected legs of an Exhuman. He blasted the thing without effect, his projectiles of dark energy sizzling on the asphalt.

I turned up the lights around us, as Tem was preoccupied with unloading a pillar of light into an animate shamble of stone that was creeping towards crushing a strike unit against a wall. With the unnatural, ubiquitous light at our feet, the shadows melted away. The slashed Exhuman remained seated, holding his torn legs and screaming for help as everyone around him ignored him, just another pained voice in the thousands.

Except, he was not fully ignored. He had drawn the worst kind of attention. His voice stilled as Justice suddenly appeared before him. Blackened blood-dripping hands itching and twitching, the arms suspending them a gyrating cubic mess of abstract, twisting form, and sliding even further into insanity progressing further up his body.

And the keening howl, made from no throat I could see. It set my shoulders tense, my spine seemed to curl and hunch despite myself, my hair all on-end from my neck to the tufty down on my arms. I swallowed a lump through a throat which seemed to close around it, and readied a beam to blast through him and into the sky.

But just as he'd come, he was gone. The mutilated man was now suspended by his guts, which hung in the air as though he'd been punched through by a cannon from behind, and a high-speed camera had frozen the moment forever in time. Thankfully, he was dead, but his pose and expression, the gore floating around him, the tense of his muscles and silent scream on his face, all made clear that his was not a painless death, no matter how quick.

As though involuntarily, all around shuffled away from the new landmark. They shuffled towards the edges, even as they fought, they were running.

We were all running. I had realized long ago that this fight was lost. Even if he was now close enough that he could be cut and bled, so long as he was on the offence, so long as he could dictate when there was a pause to put himself back together, our efforts were as meaningless as when he'd remained remote. Sure, we were hurting him now, but what worth was the hurt of a being so beyond being human?

My beam finally went off, scouring the sky with a streak of violet. Entire seconds had gone by, and he could be on the other end of the battlefield by now. Aside from banishing the endless shadows, I was useless here, and by extension, Tem.

"We need to go," I repeated. "We're achieving nothing."

"We are...fighting!" she panted.

"We're fighting shadows and rocks, and he won't run out. Many are fleeing, and we should join them. At the very least, put me back in my body so I can make my own decision."

"No," she said, staring at me with her icy-blue eyes. "No, we are fighting."

I wasn't quite sure when she grew a backbone, but now was not the time for it. If we lived today, there was a chance for tomorrow, but that 'if' had less to do with our actions and everything to do with if Justice deemed us worthy of random mutilation.

"Listen Tem, we're useless out here. Athan wouldn't want us to die like this, if that's what you're thinking. I know you want to help and hold the line so he can do whatever--"

"No!"

"No?" I blinked at her, and then we both rolled sideways as another rock-thing came roaring past us, flattening an Exosuit that had been by our side. "No what?"

"No. We are fighting."

I sighed, and continued. "Dying to impress Athan won't impress him at all, you nimrod. He'll just fly off the handle that you got hurt and do something stupid. Do you want to be responsible for his death, because that's all you'll achieve if you keep this up."

The little idiot was running towards Justice, not away. If she died here, I'd be fine, getting sent back to my body the hard way...but it also felt as though if that happened, it would be because I failed to convince her, or to protect her.

Even though I well knew that wasn't the case. If Justice marked us for death, there was nothing I could do to stop it. I saw him flash past us again, scouring a line of three men with fire like a VTOL dropping napalm.

"Tem, this is insanity, please," I told her. "Athan wouldn't want this."

"I don't...I don't care!" she bleated, pushing her way past an Exosuit twice her size. "I don't care if Athan thinks I s-s-should be here or not. Please, Moon, look around."

I knew what I'd see but I looked around anyway. Her insistence, through our shared mind, forcing me to take in the battlefield in more detail than I'd like. More than just where the threats were, the hazards, our refuges of allies, and the enemy.

We weren't too far from the guy who was hanging like a Christmas tree made of guts, but he was far from the only grizzly landmark. Tem's frantic feet stepped over and through a puddle of another unfortunate bastard, who seemed as though his joints had liquefied and bled through his skin. Another was perfectly sliced in half, entirely up the middle, and then fallen over bloodlessly into two startled-looking heaps.

I had to wonder why. Justice had limitless powers, to be sure, but some of them were invariably more efficient to use than others. If he could streak past and blanket the entire battlefield in fire, why would he be wasting his time punching through an individual man, or slashing them, or shattering their joints?

I looked around anew and realized, nearly every corpse here had been hand-crafted with precision and care. Justice hadn't been quite unchained as I'd thought before, he was still playing with us, picking off individuals or small groups, when I was certain he could snuff out hundreds at once, as he had done the moment the shadow exhuman had slashed him.

But why? What compelled him to rotate through his powers? Why did he leave these ghastly pieces of art behind? They were spaced out so evenly, I noticed, as though he wanted everyone here to be within proximity of one. It was almost like a museum, the exhibits spread out so that the crowd could mingle and titter as they flowed between displays.

And those running away, I realized, were the foremost target. They were on the periphery, they were the ones growing the size of this macabre exhibition, paving new ground and providing new corpses for the museum to grow.

He wanted us to see these deaths, for some reason. He wanted us to be awed and captivated. But again, why? What alien motivation could this mass of writhing flesh have? Did he just want us to suffer? Did he want us to be able to see our future and know despair? Or was he just a thorough sadist?

I couldn't begin to imagine. But the moment of reflection paid off regardless.

"Did you want me to look because you'd noticed he's picking off the runners?" I asked, vaguely impressed. "You wanted us to stay, because right under these bodies is actually the safest place to be right now?"

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"Um…" she looked around, as though only taking in the hanging bodies now. "Um, no…"

I sighed, and with that breath went any esteem Tem had accidentally built.

"Then why did you tell me to stop and look? Force me to stop and look, really, the way your mind was screaming. Which I do not appreciate."

"They are dead, Moon."

"Yes, they are super-duper dead. Dead like nobody's ever been, in all manner of incredibly novel ways."

She shook her head, her silver hair-bobbins twisting as they bumped across her slender shoulders. "No! They are DEAD, Moon!"

"I...know?"

"They are dead. They have died." She bit her lip as though she was trying to find some other way to repeat this at me, to clarify her little idiot thoughts. "This has nothing to do with Athan."

I found myself rolling my eyes and peeking into her mind a little, just to understand what the hell she meant. And found most of it embroiled with the very same thoughts: they are dead. There are so many dead. They died all around us.

But the context of thought carried more than its mere words. Each thought was wrapped up in memories and emotion, and I understood her.

"They died here," I said, realizing my words were just another repetition of hers.

"Yes," she said.

"It's not that you want to die here, or impress Athan…" I looked at the bodies again, at how horribly they'd died. But every one of them had their boots on, they were armed, they were facing the hazard. "You want their deaths to mean something."

"I want...them not to mean...nothing."

I gave her as much a mental hug as I was willing to offer, and she hesitated in confusion at the lateral brushing of minds. "You're still an idiot," I told her.

"These s-s...people, were s-stronger and brighter and braver, and better than I am. I do not think it is fair that they died here, and I s-s-should run away and keep living. I...I do not think it makes s-sense, but...I want...to honor them, who came here s-so bravely and fought s-s-s-o s-s-selflessly."

"And died so cruelly?"

She nodded.

I understood, despite my disagreement. Dying here would achieve nothing but adding to the pile of victims, there was no honor in that. Even if these bold idiots had come from all over to throw their pitiful lives at a force they stood no chance to defeat, heroic as that was, it did not change the pointlessness of it. It just meant that others got to live a few seconds longer, and with a little more reverence in their hearts before they became ripped out of their chests.

Besides, Tem was in the minority here anyway. Almost all of the soldiers were breaking, some overtly, some in fighting retreat. The playground of death in the middle was emptying out, affording us a better view of the corpse-sculptures and trampled bodies...and of the periphery, where Justice was still swooping down, obliterating a few, and finding another.

There was panic there, too. There had always been panic, but now that the lines were broken, the panic could concentrate on the perimeter, those most undisciplined running with abandon, fleeing to save themselves without a thought for those they left behind, except to get as far from them as possible. Most of that sort, I noticed, were the New Edeners, though there were a few XPCA, and not a single toad of course.

But their panic only multiplied as they were picked off, or saw others doing exactly what they were doing being so. It was infectious, the ripples of their flight and fright reaching inwards, toward those that remained. The path of the soldiers' disciplined escape grew longer and longer, and pocked with ghastly effigies of the deaths of those who had gone before.

It felt like the prevailing mood had swung several times over the course of this standoff. At first, there had been optimism, which Justice had ground down into frustration. And then a spark of hope with a shadowed blade, which kindled into the fires of fear and panic raging across the fields.

As though reacting to the forces breaking, Justice seemed to go faster. Even as the battlefield grew in scale and disarray, he was always there at the expanding perimeter, putting up new gory exhibitions for those fleeing to witness.

He acted with such frustrating intention. I'd thought he was completely random, completely insane, but he seemed anything but, just working towards an aim I couldn't fathom. I wondered, if I became his passenger, peeked into his mind, if I'd understand what it all was for?

But I doubted it. All I could manage was to sit here and watch as our ranks broke entirely, as the keening and gore got to us, the unnerving, gratuitous deaths blossoming, and disorder growing.

It was almost dismissively that Justice killed the toads, I realized. He squished them like ants and left their bodies to rot in the dust. Another sort-of-rule to his madness, another hint that got me no closer to understanding.

A chunk of rock shot into the air, the size of a house. Some Exhuman's power, but not Justice's, and not directed towards him, either. A pack of Exhumans were atop it, trying to ride the earth-discus to freedom.

Like a skeet-shoot, Justice was there, blowing up their transport from under them, sending their bodies to rain down amidst the others. I heard screaming, more than ever, as the dozen bodies became lethal projectiles, crashing head-first into exosuits and victims alike, the cracking of bone and flesh turning my stomach.

I still wanted to run. Surely some were escaping, he couldn't possibly stop all of us, not picking us off one at a time as he was. And if others distracted him with flashy escape attempts, maybe there was a chance. I could use Tem's power and we'd turn invisible and…

Another group launched themselves, possibly inspired by the first. Several powers acting in concert, the half-dozen forms smokey and illusory behind some mind-bending illusion, but drifting against gravity.

And then they stopped, caught on something invisible in the air, left to hang and scream as though crucified. One in the center, apparently the one producing the illusion, was ruptured, exploded with such force so as to shower all the rest in his entrails, creating surreal horror as the last vestiges of his failing powers magnified the cloud of his own guts.

This wasn't working. We were all going to die at this rate. That handful of Exhumans had been shot into the air like bullets and he'd snatched them effortlessly. What hope did I possibly have, putting on some invisibility and trying to walk out of here? Tem was as good as dead, we all were.

I thought, until I saw someone disassembling the human mobile. Jack was up there, and Tower, floating in the air, touching those who were strung up and disappearing, reappearing at the next victim. They got two out this way, and then vanished, as Justice came in after them, livid at his art being taken down.

My heart didn't know what to do. At once, I'd been so excited to see them still here, still alive...still doing something, unlike how useless I was. I thought, perhaps, I could join as Jack's passenger, double his mobility if possible. It was nothing I'd wanted to do before, but now was an exception in every possible way.

But at the same time, seeing them here, seeing Justice go after them, it made my throat clench and my stomach churn. They were quick, but they couldn't evade him forever. If Justice was provoked, he could open up again, go back to killing hundreds in a heartbeat, and with that kind of indiscriminate slaughter, even Jack wouldn't be able to dodge it.

Suddenly, knowing that it was more that just these brave idiots with Tem here, that there was Tower's life on the line as well...I suddenly felt more defeated than before. I wasn't exactly happy about Tem's prospect of death, but...Tower couldn't die here. He was too good a man to become one of these heaps of corpse. I liked him too much, as though that had any weight in the world, to anyone but me.

It felt unfair in a way I didn't expect, and that surprise had kicked the legs out from under my heart.

Those two idiots reappeared as soon as Justice's back was turned, taking the others from out of the sky. But this time, they didn't get away when he reappeared, flashing into their presence with a white light like a solar flare and separating the two with a shattering bolt of rock that sent Jack plummeting.

He disappeared just before he reached the ground, but Tower was still there, drifting listless in the air, flailing his arms like he could swim for safety before Justice descended on him.

I found myself screaming, an irresponsibly-large laser brewing before my eyes, a dozen of them, aimed all around Justice, praying that I could punch him out of the sky before he did the same to Tower. Trying desperately to save my best friend, pleading to God to do something.

Jack reappeared on Justice's back, knife plunging in blindly to the twisting flesh. There was a crack like a whip, and he fell backwards, his spine twisted at an inhuman angle, his limbs trailing awkwardly. The knife glinted in the air as he fell, casting sparks of moonlight at me.

"No!" I screamed.

He didn't teleport again before reaching the ground, and I lost sight of him under the crowd. I felt tears in my eyes even as I scanned the dark sky for Tower again, finding him in an instant, lit by the dark fire burning inside Justice's flesh.

My lasers went off, as did Tem's, brewing beside mine that I hadn't noticed. The whole sky turned to daylight as the combined force of all of our power tore the dusk a new dawn.

We caught him even, but only just. Only enough to force him to move, to force his flesh to churn further, to draw a solitary glance from a vindictive eye as he closed on Tower's helpless form.

I couldn't see too well, as tears threatened to spill, but I did see Tower punch Justice where his face should have been. The blow didn't seem to phase him at all, but rather, sent Tower rocketing backwards at insane speed a dark missile across the sky. I held my breath and prayed, hoped, that somehow it would be enough to get him clear.

But it wasn't, and I knew that. I saw chained blades made of blood and metal shoot after him, closing the distance at unbelievable speed. Tower dipped in the air, letting gravity take him, but the blades pursued right behind, seeming to accelerate, the metal glinting in the dark, hungry to strike and impale.

A huge golden hand seemed to ripple from the darkness and caught Tower in its palm, closing around him as the blades struck. They bounced off the glowing flesh, blunted and cracking against something even harder than metal, and I wondered just what the hell kind of Exhuman power this was. I'd never seen the likes of it before, and my mind demanded -- perhaps unfairly -- to know where these inviolable hands had been as all the others had died.

But that was just a burst of outrage, of adrenaline. The shock of Tower living wearing off. My heart soared for a moment as the hand opened and I saw him there, scratching his head in confusion at the effluent skin holding him aloft, a hundred feet in the air.

And then, rippling from the darkness, seeming to breach time and space as it manifest, appearing closer to Justice, an arm joined the hand, and then another, and another still.

Six arms, all golden and glowing, four of which were brandishing weapons of different kinds, each palm as immense as a car, each weapon the size of a building. A spear, a dagger, a sword, and a bow, each as radiant as the hand holding them.

And then the rest of him emerged. A hundred feet tall, perfection of human form, with swelling muscles and a sculpted six-pack literally large enough for me to fall into and use as a bed.

Which was a strange thought for me to have, but I'd gone and had it.

He had long flowing hair of the same gilt, and a skirt-like ornate piece of clothing wrapped around his waist, trailing down to his wide-set bare feet. His face was so symmetric and angular as to be almost painful in its perfection, and vertically, set into his forehead was a third eye, shut tight against the world.

I almost missed it, just a dark spot on his shoulder, holding onto the strands of flowing, golden hair, but there was a person up there with Tower, grinning and bouncing along with the ride, laughing almost as she looked down on Justice from atop her golden throne.

It was hard to make out, but her form was unmistakable. Saga, giddy and lanky, sat on the shoulders of giants, and laughed.

The entire battlefield paused at this sudden...impossible addition. It was hard not to, a hundred feet of rippling muscle, shining like the sun. Even Justice seemed stunned, or at least, calculating.

The effect was broken when I heard Saga speak in my mind, a surge of emotion which fought back the keening that had so long set me on edge, a pure rush of exultation and confidence.

[Cavalry's here. Let's fuck him up, boys!] she grinned.