As soon as Stumblebum's arm drew back with the knife, Passthrough took a deep breath and activated his power. Between him and the ground below was twelve feet of raised ceiling-height, and all the hesitation of a pathological phobia. Yet, faced with a plunging blade, these threats became very little in his mind, and he allowed himself to fall through floor, full of dread.

"Dammit!" I swore and ran for the stairs.

Stumblebum was closer to the door, and he took off running ahead of me, intent to finish off the villain first.

I could see their aura down below. The pain coursing through Passthrough's legs told me that he had likely injured them. He was conscious, but he wasn't moving, making him an easy target. Just a helpless victim.

Once more I called to the rogue, "Maybe wait!" I said. "We don't know if we're in Carrion's range!"

"We're fine!" I heard shouted back.

When I landed at the foot of the stairs and shot out into the restaurant below, I saw that the deed had already been done. Passthrough's steaming blood was spilling out onto the floor, and his nervous system was shutting down from massive trauma, jammed through the eye-socket. There might be residual activity for a long time inside his skull, but I knew death when I saw it.

My wish was granted. The bastard was gone.

"My conscience is clear," Stumblebum spat on him. "That's one less psychopath in the world."

I squatted down beside the corpse just as he was standing up. "Says the guy who just murdered someone in cold blood," I retorted. Though I didn't feel like getting into an argument over this, in truth I felt disturbingly little pity for the man. I did, however, continue to worry about the consequences of our actions. Carrion was known for being able to control dead bodies. What if he could sense the creation of a new one?

I made this happen, I thought.

I'd seen Stumblebum's actions coming on like clockwork. His agency was little more than an automata in this matter. While it might have been unethical to treat people in such a way, I may as well have killed Passthrough myself, because the choice was mine to let it happen.

Wherever control lies, there lies ownership.

And if Carrion came, I would own that.

Forget it. This is useless doubt, I told myself, over very little lost. What's done is done now. A coldblooded killer has left this world.

I sighed and looked around. My heartrate was elevated, and it was harder for me to focus suddenly than it had been at the start of all this. Though I could still see up to the Heroes' Operational Building and the cerebral forms around it, it was as if my sight was less keen. It was wavering from a mixture of exertion and distraction.

The figures ahead were blurred together. Telling them apart was nearly impossible, then. Even counting them was hard. One, two, three villains, all in their places, and with none having moved our way. That was all that I cared about, initially.

Since death was no imminent, I had to the find Sixes in the mix. If only I could see him amongst the surrounding areas’ many refugees. The homeless and displaced hid in the buildings all around us, scared of the commotion, but also too scared to flee. They were my primary confounding factor here.

Sixes’ silhouette was bound to be the closest one acting with superhuman focus. This knowledge was what allowed me to get a lock on him quickly enough. I needed to warn him that some of the villains were spreading out around the tower. They noticed that their reinforcements were missing, and they were lurking in search for them now.

If he wasn't careful, he would be walking blindly into their jaws.

Using a targeted projection, I extended my hand and tried to reach out for his mind. “Chris," I said. "Can you hear me?"

As was intuitive, he imagined his reply as if it would be heard aloud, and it came back to me dim, but audible. "I'm Sixes in the field, Headcase," he reminded me, intent to the rule even in his own mind. "Do you copy? Man… This is fucked up."

"I copy," I thought back to him. There was no point in responding to the last part of his message. It was likely that he had accidentally projected his private opinion, there.

He was right, though. It always felt perverse to be hearing the private thoughts of others. Especially those which were not meant to be heard.

I was just one step away from discovering someone’s darkest secret at any moment, and they knew it. Make no mistake, everyone had one, especially men like Sixes.

"Watch out, there's a villain up ahead. I think it may be Chrysalism," I warned him, still unsure.

The enemy came in three distinct sizes, I had seen. Carrion was sprawling, Skiddles was short, and Chrysalism was tiny. Yet right now they were merely splotches of colorful light. Like specks on the horizon. Impossible to tell apart.

"Dammit." I swore for the second time. Stumblebum was at my side, respectfully staying quiet as he watched me with my eyes closed, not interrupting.

Stolen novel; please report.

He knew I was doing my work, but hearing me now, his concern caused him to ask. "Is there some kind of a problem there, Headcase?"

I had under-estimated how much the negative energy I generated torturing Passthrough would interfere with my abilities. Between that and the general strain, I was back to the same shoddy performance I'd had during the fight with the rampager. My progress, it seemed, was taken for granted, but in fact it was tenuous.

Though my power had increased massively in its reach and complexity since I first started using it so aggressively, I lacked the fine control to switch gears quickly or rebound from exhaustion. It took time to recover from the usage of my abilities at their max, including just the extended range of my mental sight.

Putting some distance between myself and the dead body was my first step to getting this telepathy back in cooperation. I went out onto the street and into the rain where I could think clearly. The next step was to purge myself of whatever residual funk was clanking around in my system.

If only my powers worked on my own body, this would have been a lot easier. Though I could influence myself with blowback, that would only worsen the exhaustion side of my two-pronged problem. For now, I just wanted to conserve as much energy as possible. As it stood, I was left with the same tools as anybody else, then.

Deep breathing and calming affirmations. Fat lot of good that did.

"I'm okay," I told myself. "I'm... okay." But in the back of my mind, I saw blades coming towards me. Tearing into my flesh. Shaving meat from bone.

For Passthrough, I had drummed up his worst nightmare, and that was coming back to bite me now. It was the first time I generated such a direct communication between the mind of another, going so far as to take control of his volition itself. No amount of containment was perfect with my power, and in order to manipulate the energy I projected, I had to first color it with my own emotions. This amplified them in a feedback loop when mixed in the melting pot of his pain.

Now I knew, the blowback from that level of connection was intense.

Sixes had circled the parking lot which surrounded the heroes' building. He looked like he was trying to get into a shooting position now. Very soon he'd need my help, and he'd need it at my maximum.

Alright. It was time to try something clever to fix this.

Stumblebum was standing under the awning of the restaurant, waiting for his question still un-answered. Is there a problem?

Through not-very-calm breathes, I said. "Problem? The problem is... I have to either get closer to Sixes to be able to see, or I have to increase my powers' performance again. What I did with Passthrough, it was on a whole new level. I rewrote one of the most powerful connections in his brain. There are consequences for doing that."

"Closer is not a very good idea," he cautioned. "Skiddles probably has drones in the air. In fact, we should probably scoot from the street pretty rapidly if we want to be careful right now."

He pointed to the next shop over, and I followed him in after he put a brick through the door.

"I want to try something," I said, "but I'm going to need your help to do it."

Stumblebum just gave me a thumbs up. "Whatever you need, boss. Unless it's a kidney. All of my shit teleports back to me after a while, unfortunately. No breaking matter-conservation for me, even though half these other motherfuckers get to do it."

Without following his tangent, I went on. "I saw you get your head crushed by a living monster and when you came back, you were as calm as could be. Just now you killed a guy. Something I've done before. But I couldn't possibly imagine having the aura you do right now."

"You can see my aura?" He asked. "Like, my soul?"

"That's just what I call it, but it's really your entire nervous system. My point is, I want to borrow some."

"Some... what now?"

"I want to borrow some of your calm. I think that I could reverse the flow of my power. I could take some of your energy from you... and that would at least solve half of my problem by clearing out the shit that Passthrough gave me before he died."

"So, you want my energy? Like my vital energy?"

"...Yes. Kind of."

Stumblebum jumped up. "Say no more!" He started stripping off his jacket and was moving quickly for his belt next.

"I really need you take this seriously, alright?" I said, trying as hard as I could to keep a straight face as I did. This man was a bonified lunatic. The kind of person who would chug hot sauce if they even suspected you doubted their ability to.

"Fine." Luckily, I managed to get him to keep his pants on. "What do you need from me?"

"Just stand still and stop making this weird."

I reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. I could practically feel him waiting to shout, 'no homo', but he managed to shut up for just long enough that I could do my work.

Though I couldn't exactly steal Stumblebum's psychic energy, I could use it to launder my own. That was the brilliant part. Because, unlike for me, the amount of stress in my system would be insignificant to this deeply numbed immortal.

All I had to do was pass my energy through his brain and body. He would feel the emotions I felt and, as he did, he would transform them through his own perspective, processing them by experiencing them. Since, for him, the memory of being skinned with knives was not so impressive, it would then return back that way to me.

In his mind, it became nothing more than an idle curiosity.

Then, I simply took it back.

Shredded through Stumblebum's caustic perspective, the energy came back to me a nice neutral shade of blue. Precisely as planned, a wave of calm washed over me as I was granted a new vantage from which to view old trauma, finally allowing the cloud of negative energy to pass. Suddenly, for the first time, it was painless to think back to that day.

Calling it refreshing would have been an understatement.

I shook my head and returned to my seat at last, thanking Stumblebum for his help. "That flushed my system perfectly. Much appreciated."

"No problem," he said, a hint of concern in his voice.

We'd both seen into each others' minds just then. He had seen all the endless hours of sheer panic, no doubt, that I had lived with. Whole days where I would do nothing but pace up and down the street like I had forgotten who I was. Meanwhile, for him, all I'd felt was static.

His entire mind struggled against itself, trying not to be utterly indifferent to a world without stakes. It was a state that was hard for me to relate to, really. But the absence of positive emotion was not a simple emptiness. It was suffering. Boredom. Anhedonia. That much I could grasp.

Funnily enough, we had both had the same thought at once before breaking away.

I wouldn't want to be this guy. Somehow I found that funny.

With no time left to spare, though, I turned my attention back to Sixes. He was in position, ready to fire. What he didn't know, however, was what I could now see clearly with my restored sight.

It was a figure stalking above him in the parking garage where he had set up.

Carrion had shrunk himself down to just a bundle of disfigured limbs, pulling and crawling along the ceiling above him. This allowed the monster to sneak up on the unpowered hero, so small and so quiet; ready to end his life.

It was very close now. Almost within striking distance, leaving no time left to think. There was only one thing to do.