With my blood pooling out into the waterlogged streets and my leg too ruined to stand on, Carrion began to pace around me, taunting.

“So good to meet you, my child.”

“Fuck you!” I shouted in between my screams.

"I have been wondering what your power is like," he said to me. "I bet it's fun."

"You want another t-taste of it?" I harnessed the pain my head was swimming in, forming it into a great blast of yellow light. Even though the monster stood confidently in place, he still skittered back and let out an inhuman hiss as it landed. He still felt the raw sensation of crackling bones that I deigned to share.

He remained unimpressed by it, all the same. I had an idea about why, but in the end it didn't matter. He could engineer himself to ignore my power, and that was all that mattered. And so, he went on talking. "It's unpleasant, yes. What I mean, though, is the lived sensation of the thing. The way it penetrates the unreachable subjectivity of experience. You and I are alike in that way, Headcase... I was fascinated by you when I first heard of your arrival. What great luck that you let me know you were here. Finding your scent was an easy matter, after that."

Oh, fantastic, I thought. He fancies himself a great thinker.

"What... What are you talking about?" I asked. My hope was that Stumblebum would show up any minute now, but something about being incased alive in dirt and rock was making his power much slower to bring him back than in times past.

Sixes was my second-best bet, but he was busy fighting a two versus one battle against Skiddles and Chrysalism. My focus was shattered to the point that I had no hope of calling him for help, even if he could manage to escape such a tangle.

Carrion took his time in replying then as I drug myself back along the road, trying to put distance between us. He merely stalked along like the predator he was, watching me and waiting to make his final blow. "Whenever I take a body," he said, "I gain all its memories. I tend to lose them later, of course, since my designs can be quite compacted; they cast off extraneous structures. But there is something so, so special about the perspective such a thing grants me. Have you seen it, Headcase, in your own power?"

Suddenly Stumblebum popped back into existence right between the monster and me. The only problem was that he was still entombed. His hands jutted out just as they had just before. It was as if his power couldn't figure out the glitch it had encountered. Like it was used to displacing air upon his teleportation, but now that it was displacing asphalt, it didn't see the difference.

Without his conscious control, Stumblebum’s power lacked any kind of intelligence.

Carrion let out a chittering laugh at that. "Oh, don't worry about him. I've seen in Passthrough's memories how this works out. He'll be stuck down there for hours before it tries dropping him from the sky."

My eyes went wide. If that was true, then I had no chance. Already I had known that we couldn't fight Carrion, but I held out hope that we could run from him. With my leg broken and the teleporter out of the fight, I realized he was telling the truth when he'd said it before…

You lose.

My mind kept on racing a million miles a minute as Carrion leisurely basked in this reality. "Tell me, Headcase, and tell me honestly. I can steal your knowledge soon, but first I want to hear the way you phrase your answer naturally. What is a man to you?”

"Why not... just puppet my mind? Or can you only puppet the body?" I dodged the question.

"My power is not as versatile as yours, despite what it may look like. I work with very basic morphological toolsets. See, just because I can have your memory doesn't mean I can have your soul. I can't puppet the mind and force it to act naturally. I just consume it, turning it into biomass that I control. Now, I've answered your question. Your turn to answer mine. What do you see when you see people for what they truly are?"

Was this some kind of riddle? Did he want me to pontificate?

He's killed enough people to be bored with the process, I thought. What little I could see of his aura told me that his mind was deeply dissociated from itself. What it saw was no longer conditioned by any kind of embodiment in social mores or human identity. It was utterly abstracted in its interests. Alienated.

Stumblebum teleported again beside me, springing up from the ground. He only had enough oxygen to survive consciously in that state for a little while. Then he'd reset again.

The rain was lighter now, but I was chilled to the bone. The bite on my leg was had gone terrifyingly numb. Black veins extended around it as the bubbling continued, and I feared that my body was slowly being taken over as cells were killed and converted, one by one.

Seeing my hesitation to meet his philosophical quandary, Carrion prompted me further. "You've peered inside the lives of countless people, Headcase! You see what makes them tick, just like I do, and judged their deepest interiority from a clear vantage. You've turned them inside out, just like I have! Although perhaps less literally." He paused to laugh, long and hard.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

I decided that I had to give him what he wanted if I wanted to keep him from tearing into me. The longer I waited, the closer he drew in impatience.

Though the question didn't make much sense to me personally, I saw what Carrion was driving at. I had an idea about how he wanted me to answer it. Following from that realization, and perhaps as one final fuck-you, I gave him the exact opposite answer. "People are... unique. That's what I've seen. Just because you know their history doesn't mean you can predict how they'll act. They have a kind of spontaneity. Call it free will if you want. I call it a soul."

My opinion didn't matter here, though I drew upon it. This conversation merely was a tool to buy time.

On cue, the bone-spider hissed once more, expressing Carrion's displeasure. "They're biological machines, surely you know that! Collections of instincts barely held together by the stitching’s of social oppression. The only true freedom is to liberate ourselves from that common programming."

My head was getting light from pain and blood loss, making it impossible for me take this seriously. "That's such a boring thing to say. Look at you, you're a goddamn flesh horror and you're monologuing! You want to know you're not alone in seeing this profound truth? I could find the same opinions on fucking reddit, Carrion."

The spider leapt forward and onto my chest, its mouth hovering just above my face and profusely dripping with gore. "You want to die!?"

"No," I said. "But that's just my programming, right? Should I liberate myself from that, too?"

Horrible, horrible silence lingered after that. My life hung by a tiny thread in Carrion's hands, and I could feel him mulling over various ways to kill me.

I'd seen in his mind the intense interest in these abstractions, though. Even as I was pissing him off and flirting with a gruesome death, I bet it all on his need to prove his point being the only thing that would keep me alive. I was like a train laying out its own track ahead of itself. I knew I was going to run out of material sooner or later; I saw no way this ended but in fiery wreckage, yet I kept on going, nonetheless. Trying to survive.

"You pedantic little creep," Carrion accused me as he searched my eyes for the truth. "I know what you're doing. You're playing for time. But I've already told you, I have all the time in the world. You want me to take you back to my nest so we can continue this conversation indefinitely? I bet you'd like that. I can keep you alive there, fused to my flesh reserves."

New objective. Survival is secondary. Avoid the nest at all costs.

I stuttered over my next sentence, trying to salvage this and calm my nerves. "Y-you're right, I'm a manipulator. It's a bad habit. Let me answer you honestly!"

"I'm waiting."

"What you're saying m-makes sense. I can see peoples' thought processes, and yours is clear. You're making freedom out to be less about absolute, uh, freedom to do anything, and more about attaining your truest self; able to express its root nature without subversion. Like, there's no way not to be a machine, right? But we can be better machines. It’s very Nietzsche. I respect it."

"Now you’re being sycophantic. That's what I think, yes, but you're simply repeating it."

My mind drew a complete blank. Between the blood loss and my fear, I couldn't give him a genuine answer or a deep thought out of my own head. My response to philosophy in the past had always been dismissive. Who cares if we have free will? Who cares if we're machines? I knew in my gut what was right and wrong. Ugly and beautiful. True and false. Real and illusory, with so much tending towards the latter.

Philosophy, as most people used it, was nothing but another illusion of the personalities. An excuse to cling to certain ideas. Staying detached was much smarter, but it didn’t make for good conversation.

In the end, that was the only outlook I could give him. I spoke from the heart.

"Words are caustic, Carrion,” I said. “They reduce everything. Yeah, you're not totally wrong about things, but because you think you're totally right, that makes you an idiot anyway. Your perspective, any perspective, even a supposedly objective one, is an expression of personality more than truth. You're just like everyone else in that way. Even when you think you're being disillusioned, you never really get outside your own head. So, you wanna know what seeing the world through other peoples' eyes showed me? It showed me that no one ever really forces themselves to think differently. I mean truly, deeply differently. You ever enter the mind of a fucking pedophile? Try a Nazi and a Communist back-to-back? It's one thing to see their certainty as a memory like you do, but I feel it. I can't help but feel it and live it as if it were my own. And so, what do I believe? I believe in nothing. None of its reliable. I don't trust a single goddamn fucking combination of words that passes through my tiny brain, instead I watch them. I trace their origin. I see their implicit motivations. What I believe and trust in is just this doubt, that’s all. Ultimately, I trust my own feelings."

And right now, I felt like I didn't want to die.

That motivation was what conjured ideas up and out of nowhere. It can't be said that people have ideas, really. Nor dreams. Something inside of us offers them up as if they were magic, and we merely accept them as good or bad from there.

Right in that moment then, I was offered an idea, and I judged that it was a wonderful, beautiful, salvatory idea. I thanked God for this little idea.

It was not enough to win. But it could be just enough to survive.

When Stumblebum came back again, this time I reached over and took his hand. Carrion was so intent on thinking over what I said that he hadn't noticed. "Fascinating," he said. "I will have to see this for myself. I don't think I can bear to put you in the nest and wait. I'm already halfway done rotting your leg. We can speed it up now. I’ll make it painless, since you answered earnestly."

Through my direct contact with Stumblebum's hand, I reached into his mind. He wasn't panicking too much, even as he suffered through death by suffocation over and over again.

He had entered an almost Zen-like state, meaning he was prepared to hear me then as I spoke to him silently. "Get ready."

I didn't know if what I was about to do would work, or if his power would accept it, but with his full cooperation, I sent the sight from my own eyes into his. I showed him the street above in all its gloomy glory. I gave him the sight he needed for his ability to work.

And just like that... we were gone.