"Okay...safeties are off," AEGIS announced, holding her head we all wobbled across Bob's shoulders. "I'm...I think that did it."

"Well that sounded easy, why didn't you do that before?" I asked.

"Because...all the safeties are off," she said, as though that were obvious. "I didn't have time to dig into which might be causing my...freakout. I just went in and...anything I didn't recognize, I commented out. Kind of reckless, kind of insane. I'm actually surprised I'm...still running, to be perfectly frank. And with those protocols written out, that's a lot of my crash prevention and recovery gone, so if I did go, I might never wake up. Heck, if something happens now and I crash, I'm probably gone."

Tower eyed her like he might accidentally break her. "Damn, girl."

"Well...yeah. Trust me, I'm uncomfortable with it myself. But...the way I see it...if something happens to any of you, you'll also go down and not get back up. I'm just on...even footing with the mortals now."

"Except you have a backup."

"Yeah...about that," she coughed. "Um. Almost all my backups were wiped out when we lost the Vegas place to the XPCA. The ones I have left...they're kinda...under the stewardship of TARGA."

"Lia says that's a terrible idea. With more emphatic yelling. She says there's no way we'd be able to get those from her."

"Erm, yeah. Well. I didn't think we'd wind up so...antagonistic. I felt like I was entrusting them to a sister. I know she'll keep them safe but…"

"Well I think the plan is, we don't need 'em," Tower said. "Let's just get through this without AEGIS or anyone else dying, alright?"

I frowned at him. "Well, not to side with our depressed huntress friend, but that's not really our choice to make, is it? If Justice decides he wants us dead, we're dead, and there's not much we can do about it."

"Speaking of--" I started, but my warning was painfully slow compared to its subject.

Bob reeled as Justice slammed into him with amplified telekinetic force, making him stagger, and Tower yelped as he suddenly had to divert power into keeping the big guy upright, which involved a lot of shouting and patting him on the back.

But Justice didn't linger. He shot under Bob's legs, just in time as a beam of plasma that could have passed as an arcing facsimile of Tem's blasted into Bob's chest. Most of the electricity ran down the golden legs and into the ground, which seethed with sparks and arcs…

But not all of it. I found myself shuddering, jaw clenched painfully, every muscle in my body spazzing and feeling like it was on fire. I heard the same involuntary shriek-moans escaping all the others. Thankfully, we were holding onto Bob's hair, and with all of my muscles locked rigid, I wasn't letting go and falling anytime soon, despite my thrashing.

Really, the most awful part of it was having my head scrambled so that I couldn't really see either Justice or Athan at this point. Every time anything happened from them, it felt like being blindsided, even if the blind spot was of my own creation.

The electrical surge relented, and we were all gasping and panting, scrabbling to find better footing on the shoulders.

"Look out!" AEGIS screamed.

I barely had time to turn my head before, for the second time, a wall of metal impacted me, red hot, slamming my body before the sonic boom did.

Apparently it killed me instantly, because the next thing I knew, I was coming back, disoriented, a few dozen feet from Bob; Justice's and Athan's powers rippling all around me. Flames fell from the sky, igniting trails of sparks, thousands of lightning swords were everywhere, diving like kamikaze fighters, crashing into interceptors of stone, of metal, of sound, and fire. I felt my pulse suddenly slow as an unearthly chill turned the air to frost.

And I just fucking ate all of it. Rocks punched through my body, perforating my useless organs. Metal barbs ripped out of walls, passing through me like I wasn't even there as they formed into magnetic railgun bolts. The lightning swords erupted like supernovae, burning so hot that parts of my body too close just evaporated, scorched, spherical bites taken from my flesh. The sound pummelled my head, the footing broke under my feet, my bones and body broke and knitted and broke again.

It was brutal. So many deaths, coming so fast through the compel, my mind felt like it was breaking just trying to keep up. I was a fighter on the ropes, with my arms just trying to hold me up while the two of them battered my head in, left, right, left, right, reality snapping in and out and no ref in sight to stop the brutality.

My compel was getting in the way a lot now. Even attacks I might have been able to dodge, I was just blind to them, and more than once I found myself stumbling right into them, like a toddering idiot. Hugely dangerous erupting lighting-flame sword? Yeah, I'll just stroll that way. Ground trembling with incoming stalagmites erupting at mach speed? Sure, I'll stay standing right there.

My brain seemed to be inventing its own pain, too. So much was going on, and I was so overwhelmed with sensation that it'd helpfully started linking them together even when my nervous system wasn't screaming at it. Sometimes I came to and found myself face-down just hurting, for seconds or even minutes at a time as my mind tried to comprehend everything it'd experienced, until new experiences piled into me.

It was clear my brain wasn't working right, and I suspected it was because I'd been cutting into pieces of it. Dangerous as it was, I needed to get back in there and peel back this band-aid a little, or I'd be useless and malfunctioning just as badly as AEGIS.

Next time I had a reprieve, I began to pick at the compel I'd put in me for Athan. He was where most of the collateral was coming from, and his mind wasn't quite as awful as Justice's. I just needed a little more visibility of him, that my brain could understand what was hitting it, that I could avoid just a few attacks, buy myself just a few seconds here and there to parse, process and patch up.

I blinked as something white drifted towards me. My brain, already dumb, already focused on my task only barely registered it, a nagging sensation more than a thought, a sort of I really should do something about this. I blinked at it several times, before realizing there were thousands of them, blanketing the ground, like a school of jellyfish.

I twisted something in my mind, like prying up a scab, and with that, my realization of what I was looking at popped into being. Ball lightning. Little drifting spheres of death. Oh yeah.

I barely had time for my epiphany, my hands still elbow-deep in the workings of my own head when the nearest one bumped into me. I felt it go off, setting off others. I felt lightning, now a painfully familiar sensation, running up and down my body, turning my muscles to rigid iron, but jelly at the same time. My brain scrambled and my eyes twitched.

And the scab I'd been working on was ripped clean off as my mind flailed and my concentration broke. I couldn't control myself as my mind fell into the new wound, as I found myself deeper and deeper in the rush of connection between Athan and myself, a familiar bond, now twisted, seething, pulsing with ominous darkness.

I landed, mentally there, in the dark, a familiar place now corrupted. The pitch black of his mental space was moving around me, undetectable as blackness in blackness could be, but somehow I knew it was.

I'd never before been in anyone else's representation of their locus. I'd dragged Athan into mine once, the pitch-black nothingness throne from which I sat within myself. And I had a creeping memory that couldn't be found of another time he'd been in there, something about Justice and the memories I'd walled off.

It must have been real bad. If this was anything to go by.

It felt like infection. The blackness around me was sick. It wasn't just empty, it was loaded, with nothing. Invisible, intangible, pulsating, swollen masses of...nothing. Some kind of lurking intelligence, something there and yet not there, only seen out of the corners of one's eyes, little wisps of blackness in the black.

It was unsettling as fuck is what it was, and went a long way to explaining what was going on in Athan's head. This was the control center, in a way, where Athan resided in his own mind as a sentience. A 'soul', some might call it. Whatever spark that transcended him above an autonomous mass of chemicals and electrical impulses into a self. Or a metaphor for it, anyway, a construction of his mind, of itself.

And, with some wandering, I found him there, still hanging onto his throne, but only just. He was leaning forward, eyes narrowed and bloodshot, hands gripping the darkness with trembling fingers, lips muttering alongside the whispers which seemed to fill this place.

I tried listening to the words, not from him, but from the seething blackness. I couldn't really make out what they were saying, but they were insistent, demanding, driving him to do more, more, more. But more what, I couldn't tell.

"'Sup?" I greeted him.

His head turned towards me slowly, with shuddering movement, like on a ratchet. I tried to give him a reassuring smile, and block out the whispers and black things moving in the corners of my vision.

"A...AEGIS?"

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

"So close," I grinned. "I'm Saga."

"Saga. I...I remember you. I'm so...what are you...I messed up. I need your help."

"Really looks that way. You're kinda in deep here, Athan. What are these things?"

"Me? I'm...m-muses. They are. AEGIS, help me, please. I can't hear over them. There's too many. I really fucked up."

I looked forward with him, and if I stood in just the right place, I could see the world through his eyes. I saw his entire focus on Justice, tracking the half-man, half-monster through the sky, attacking relentlessly, the both of them. In glimpses I saw the others, but he...didn't recognize them anymore. He wasn't seeing through eyes, but through the powers that had become central to his existence.

Tower was just a big mass of nervous impulses and Lia just a smaller one. Gangly and screwed-up as I was, he saw me just the same as the others, small and shining. At least, I thought it was me.

Because as it turned out, there were tons of people down there. Hiding in buildings, buried under rubble and screaming for help, given up on life and shambling until death saw fit to take them. All just little root-clusters of light, flaring up here and there as their nerves fired and moved their muscles. I could only tell which ones were the others because they were together, and on Bob's back, who was easy to pick out by his size.

Even Justice looked just like the others, in a way. Sure, he was a little more torn up, and sometimes flashed with electricity which was his own powers, or Athan's, but there was still just a nervous system in a body inside him. Just...a little more disassembled.

AEGIS was the only one different. She wasn't a root system like the others, she was a full body, electricity running through her everything at some level; a current buzzing across her skin, powering the cameras of her eyes, coursing through the cables of her hair.

She looked almost normal, if glowing. I could see why, in his current agony, he might fixate on her. She was literally the only person on earth to him right now, which gave me an unexpected pang of jealousy, considering I was literally in his head right now.

"Athan, buddy, you've got to block out the voices, okay? They're making you crazy."

"Cra...zy? AEGIS?"

"She's here, buddy. But stay with me. These 'muses', they're whispering in your mind. I need you to dig up all the focus you've got, need you to wall them out, like you've done with me before. Create a fortress in your mind, can you do that?"

His hair bobbed as he shook his head. "I've...I tried...I can't..."

"Sure you can. I'll help, okay? Slowly now…"

"No," he whispered. "They're in the...in the fortress. They're in my mind. I can't...can't...I messed up so bad. I messed up, AEGIS. After...four...or five...I lost control...I messed up so bad..."

I rubbed his shoulders and he was cold, even to my touch.

I didn't know what to do for him. This wasn't like before, in the thing I couldn't remember. That had been us getting too close to Justice's mind, and the memories of it ripping us apart. But now he was Justice's mind in a way. There weren't any memories here I could just block off, he was living it, constantly.

It didn't feel like I could cut them out. He wasn't quite wrong, they weren't in his mind so much as...swimming through it. Even if I chopped out a section of his brain they were currently inhabiting, regardless of the damage that might do to Athan, there was nothing stopping them from just drifting somewhere else, continuing to whisper at him from there. I got the impression that even if I destroyed every piece of him, they'd still be floating in the void, untouchable.

If only they had minds I could touch, tell them to fuck off. But all that happened when I looked at them was they seemed to grow and multiply in my own psyche, and I realized that if I kept that up, I'd go crazy like he was, or like we had been. I needed to stay focused entirely on him, shut out the whispers and block out the seething black, as I wished he could do.

I watched him pummelling Justice with a thousand swords, ripping through the air like hornets, the other guy only able to just hold them back, to dodge at the last second before a supernova went off right next to him. And when he zipped off, I saw the rest of the swords give up the chase, seek out some of those glowing root-structures of neurons, and blow up on them instead.

I turned to Athan, feeling my brow working with my thoughts. "Why are you killing them?"

"...who?"

"Those bystanders, you just sent swords over and detonated right on them."

"The...the lights?"

"Sure, Athan. Why did you put those lights out?"

"I...I didn't, AEGIS. I left the lights on. It helps."

Sure enough, when I looked closer, I saw...he had. They weren't dead, just mutilated beyond belief. Burned-out half-humans with minutes to live at best, falling dust and rubble tumbling into the whole-body burns he'd left them with.

"What the fuck?" I found myself asking. "Why did you almost kill them? What kind of torture is this?"

"It helps," he muttered. "It helps."

"Helps what?"

"The voices. It helps with them. It makes them quiet."

"Torturing people helps with the whispers you're hearing?" I found myself shouting. "Athan, what in the absolute fuck?"

"They want...they want...to be heard. The muse song. I make...the lights hear them. I make the powers known. The more...that they're thought of...the muses are fed…"

"Holy shit, kid," I said, watching the carnage with fresh eyes. I realized that he wasn't just randomly unloading collateral damage into everything, he was deliberately targeting survivors. He was still pursuing Justice, but whenever he had the chance, whenever he was close or it was convenient, he was murdering people, or close to it.

"What the fuck are you even doing?" My voice was shriller than I wanted.

"F...fighting...Justice."

"But you're not!" I realized. "You're doing exactly what he is, you're not even trying to end the fight. Neither of you are going all-out...you don't want it to end!"

"I'm...AEGIS told me to...she...she said to fight him."

"She wants you to KILL HIM, Athan! She wants this fight ended!"

"I...does she? I don't remember. So many voices...it's hard...to remember...what she sounded like."

I put my hands on his temples and took a deep breath. As soon as I bridged that final distance between us, I felt the whispers, too, almost overwhelming in volume, despite being whispers. My vision seemed to pulsate with exhaustion, with creeping blackness, which I now recognized were billowing like fires.

I had to focus or I'd lose myself. The threat was right there, plain as the pain on Athan's face.

So I didn't hesitate, as much agony as it might cause him, I went all-in, as deep and as hard as I could go, ramming every coherent thought I could into his incoherent mind, forcing the round hole to accept a square peg.

He screamed and his body stopped and hung in the air, Justice not hesitating to turn and unload a barrage of retaliatory strikes. Heavy, jagged shards of ice, as long as cars.

I filled Athan with all of AEGIS that I could. How much pain she was in right now, how she was struggling with herself, how she wanted nothing more than to go away, sit down, sort out her own crap...but she didn't. She was here, screwing with her own head and code, violating her own principles, running into full danger with half a plan, all because she thought she was needed, because she didn't trust herself to be herself right now.

She was at enormous risk of death. With all the lightning flying around and her failsafes disabled, any stray hit could knock her down, kill her, effectively, without a backup to go to. She was doing it because she had to, but also out of love. Love for Athan who once had been, who would have wanted these people to live, who wanted Justice to stop, who wanted more than anything to be helpful and normal and kind, and to somehow be together with her, like things were before.

That dream was gone. He was gone. But she was still here, fighting for the memory of it, and he was shitting all over that memory, and all over her efforts.

The shards of ice screamed towards him, and behind them, another hundred attacks, another thousand. Justice hammered the gulf between them with every power he had, as his form coalesced into human shape. The gashes in his body flared with black fire that I recognized now, his powers so concentrated and so overwhelming that they shone physically through him.

I pulled my hands off and gulped down lungfuls of air. Athan blinked at finding himself again, at the torrent of attacks coming towards him.

He yelled, as did his locus, not in anger, not in fear, but a primal scream. Athan's body dropped to the ground as he abandoned the magnetism holding him aloft, and the attacks trailed downwards, homing in on him, feet away...inches away…

Electricity surged out into the air...no...the air itself became electricity.

His entire vision went white, and what anyone else saw, I didn't know. But it seemed like every single fucking atom in the air around him ripped itself in half, positive and negative forces that shouldn't be separated, shredded and recombined, until the air bled energy, apocalyptic vibrations shattering the ground, the sky, the attacks coming at him.

Everything in the world had electric potential, from the air, to Justice's barrage of fire and earth and metal and death, and all of it could be stopped, riven, made not to be, as Athan's dozens or hundreds of muses went silent for a moment with all of their attention focused on the enormity of his attack.

It was strangely silent, for an explosion. There was no air to carry the blast, no propagation, no mushroom cloud despite the thermonuclear nature. Just...a sphere of total annihilation, between Athan and Justice, which turned everything inside of it into energy, into light, into nothingness.

And then, silence, stillness.

The two of them, opposite one another, Justice hovering and Athan standing on the shattered ground. Both broken, both ravaged by these muses inside them.

But Athan was no longer playing the voices' game. He'd remembered AEGIS. He remembered why he was fighting, that there was more than just the insistence of his madness. Even if it killed him, he would kill.

He took a step closer to Justice, ready to do it again, to rip every atom of his enemy in half, to shred Justice down to such insignificant pieces of matter that there was no coming back, that there was no more Justice in those scraps than in any breath of air, in any flash of light.

Athan breathed deeply and evenly, and I could see in the impulses coursing through Justice that he was terrified. He had unloaded his powers and they had come to nothing. I was certain his muses were screaming at him, that he had to do it again, that he had to show his powers to the world, had to be superior, demanded worship and thought to still the whispers.

But he knew he was outmatched. Nothing he had could stand up to that kind of scale, that kind of complete erasure. Athan strode forward for the kill.

And then stopped. I saw the locus of Athan twitch in his throne, shudder, willing his body to continue. His breath had stilled, his pace had faltered. No matter how Athan tried to move or twist, his body couldn't, his own nervous system gone, blacked out, not an impulse firing, not a muscle capable of movement.

He was stuck in something beyond this world. Even his heart ceased to beat, the only thing stirring in him was thought, and the locus of that thought screamed at the sudden restraint.

I found myself back in myself, my head spinning, strange little motes of black fire and urgent whispers playing at the corners of my mind, but I ignored them as I had when I was swimming in them. I staggered to my feet somehow and sprinted towards where I'd seen them last, throwing myself around a ruined building to find them there.

Athan, frozen in time, his eyes narrowed in hate, one foot just off the ground with the step he was taking towards Justice.

And Justice, floating there, triumphant and whole, seething tendrils and black flame, still hovering outside the range of that annihilation attack, drinking in his victory, feeling every eye in the world on him, every mind, bent towards feeding his muses.

He reached forward, theatrically almost, and a single silver cord descended from the sky and began to wrap itself around Athan's neck.