“Hello Dasuan. I have waited a long time to speak with you.”

“W-who are you…Where am I?”

“You are asleep, and I am your savior.”

“My what?”

“I was the one who relinquished part of my being to give you meaning.”

“Are you God?”

“For some I am, to others…I am the cleansing hand of causality that they fear. The humans know their time has come to an end; just as their ‘holy’ books of prophecy mutter into the void.”

“Why me?”

“Why not? Do you think so lowly of yourself, Titan? You have escaped all that life has binded you with. You have proven yourself worthy of power…It Is time to use it in order to bring about the new era of Terra; possibly beyond–”

“Beyond?”

“It will all be mine. No matter how many epochs I must wait seeding Lesser beings into tools in order to take back what has been stolen from me!”

The first thing Dashuan felt was cold. Not the gentle chill of an autumn morning, but the biting, desperate cold that made every breath feel like swallowing razor blades. His eyes opened to find a ceiling of rough-hewn ice, lit by the soft blue glow of emergency lighting strips that pulsed like artificial rivers through the frozen cavern’s roof.

"...can't keep justifying this!" Mina's voice echoed from somewhere nearby, tight with an anger he'd heard from her before. "How many more have to die before you—"

"As many as it takes, my dear sister." Ultress's reply was calm, clinical, a tone Dashuan recognized as Ultress. But there was something else there now – something hard and unyielding that made his skin crawl. "You've seen what they're doing to our people. The death camps. The experiments. The—"

"He's awake." Arc's voice cut through their argument like a thunderbolt. Before Dashuan could fully process what was happening, she was there, her eyes lighting up when meeting with his. "Dashuan... you're actually..." Electricity crackled across her skin in sporadic bursts, betraying the emotion her voice wouldn't.

Dashuan tried to sit up, but his body felt wrong – like wearing a suit three sizes too big filled to the rim with stones. "How..." His voice was rough from disuse. "How long?"

"Two years." Ultress appeared in the doorway, her mask absent, showing features that seemed to have aged a decade in what felt to Dashuan like moments. Behind her, Mina's face was streaked with tears, her portal energy crackling dangerously around her clenched fists. "You were unstable. The gravity powers were tearing you apart at a molecular level and would threaten the world if left unchecked. I had to keep you under until—"

"Two years?" The words hit him in the jaw and left it hanging. Memories flooded back–AirForce's sacrifice, the light that had consumed everything, the feeling of his own power eating him alive mixing with the strange encounter with ‘the Saviour.”. "What... what happened while I was...

"They tried to kill us all." Arc's hand found his, squeezing with desperate strength as she felt his pulse with 2 fingers. "After what happened with AirForce, when they saw what we could really do... The humans decided we were too dangerous to live. Starting with the Lessers – rounding them up, saying it was for 'registration' and 'safety.' Then the camps. The experiments. Trying to find ways to neutralize our powers, to—"

"So I killed them first." Ultress's voice was matter-of-fact, as if discussing weather patterns or traffic routes. "I released the perfected virus six months ago. Targeted genetic markers that only affect baseline humans. Quick, relatively painless, and—"

"You did what!?" Dashuan's voice cracked as he pushed himself upright, ignoring the protest of atrophied muscles. The air around him began to distort, gravity fluctuating with his rising horror. "How many?"

"15 percent of the human population so far." Ultress met his gaze without flinching. "It was the only way to ensure our survival without needing to worry. They were already working on their own bioweapons, targeting Aberrant genetics. I simply struck first."

"The only way?" Mina's voice shook. "You murdered millions innocent people! And you won't even release the cure you developed because you think they haven't 'learned their lesson yet while watching them blame us from this stupid mountain.

The ice walls groaned as Dashuan's power leaked out, his control still shaky after so long asleep. He could see others now -– Lesser Aberrants watching from adjoining caverns carved into the mountain, their faces showing a mix of fear, relief, and something that looked disturbingly like worship at his presence. "Where... where are we?"

"Mount Everest." Arc's voice was gentle, trying to calm him. "After the virus started spreading, we needed somewhere defensible. Somewhere they couldn't easily reach us while we regrouped."

"Stop." Dashuan's voice carried a weight he'd never managed before, and everyone in the cavern fell silent. He looked at each face in turn– Arc's desperate hope, Mina's tearful rage, Ultress's cold certainty, and the watching Lessers mixed emotions spiralling to fear. "You're telling me that while I was asleep, you decided the solution to human aggression was perfecting a solor genocide?"

"I decided the solution was survival." Ultress's voice hardened. "You weren't there, Dashuan. You didn't see them burning our safe houses with children inside. You didn't see what they did to the ones they captured. You didn't—"

"And this makes us better?" Dashuan pushed himself to his feet, gravity rippling around him as he found his balance. "AirForce sacrificed himself to save everyone. Not just Aberrants. Not just the ones we decided deserved to live. And you... you took that sacrifice and turned it into an excuse for mass murder?"

"The humans gave us no choice," Ultress began, but Dashuan cut her off with a gesture that made the very air shudder. “AirForce did not do what he did for human survival…do not try to misplace bravery where it is not needed.”

"There's always a choice." He looked around at the assembled faces. "And right now, I'm making one. Release the cure, Ultress. All of it. Or I'll tear this mountain apart finding it."

"You can't possibly be stable enough to—" Ultress started, but the sudden lifting of every loose object in the cavern made her words trail off.

"Try me." Dashuan's voice was quiet, but it carried to every corner of their frozen refuge. "I've been asleep for two years while you turned us into the monsters they feared we were. I'm done sleeping."

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Arc stepped between them, electricity jumping between her fingers. "D, please. You don't understand how bad it got. We had to—"

"Had to what?" His eyes met hers, and she flinched at the pain she saw there. "Had to prove them right? Had to become the threat they said we were? Do whatever this lunatic says!?"

"None of them were innocent!" Ultress's composure finally cracked. "They would have killed us all! They—"

"Some of them would have." Dashuan's voice remained steady as he turned to address the watching Lessers. "Some of them want us dead. Some of them fear us. And some of them were just people, trying to live their lives, caught between forces they barely understood. Something we all understand…” He could see his words landing, see the doubt creeping into faces that had probably learned to trust Ultress's cold certainty without a second thought. "We're supposed to be better than this. We're supposed to prove that power doesn't have to corrupt. That being different doesn't mean being monsters."

"Pretty words," Ultress sneered, "but words won't keep our people safe."

"No." Dashuan's power gathered around him, lifting him slightly off the icy floor. "Actions will. Starting with saving the people you condemned to die. The cure, Ultress. Now."

The silence that followed was broken only by the howling wind outside their mountain sanctuary. Finally, Mina stepped forward, portal energy swirling around her hands. "I'm with him. This has to end…I'm tired, Amy."

One by one, other faces emerged from the shadows-– Lessers who had perhaps been waiting for someone to voice their own doubts. Arc looked between Dashuan and Ultress, before finally moving to stand beside him. "He's right," she whispered. "We lost our way a long time ago."

Ultress looked at the faces turned toward her, faces that had trusted her, followed her, believed in her vision of survival at any cost. For the first time, Dashuan saw uncertainty crack her stoic expression. "The cure," he repeated softly. "And then we start fixing what we broke. All of us. Together." Dashuan's words hung in the frozen air when Ultress's laugh shattered the tension— a sound devoid of warmth that echoed off the ice walls like breaking glass.

"You really haven't changed, have you?" Her hand moved to the device on her wrist, fingers dancing across its surface with practiced precision. "Still thinking in terms of heroes and villains. Still believing that if you just try hard enough, everything will work out." The temperature in the cavern plummeted as she spoke, her breath no longer visible in the frigid air.

Dashuan felt it first —a creeping numbness that had nothing to do with the cold, a hollowness where his full power should be. Around him, others began to notice too. Arc's electricity sputtered and died. Mina's attempt to open a portal fizzled into sparks of impotent energy. "You didn't think I spent two years just waiting, did you?" Ultress's voice carried a bitter edge as she stepped forward. "I heard it too, Dashuan...The Saviour." The device on her wrist pulsed with a flaring green light that spread through the ice surrounding them like thousands of small mirrors. "Did you really think I'd keep all of you here, right next to me, without a way to control the situation?"

Three Lessers moved immediately to her side – faces Dashuan roughly recognized from the early days of the sanctuary. Their expressions showed not fear, but fierce conviction. Behind him, he could hear the remaining Lessers shuffling, uncertain, as their powers flickered and failed to come to his racing mind.

"What did you do to us?" Arc's voice carried more confusion than fear as she stared at her powerless hands.

"Temporary power neutralization." Ultress's smile was sharp as broken ice. "A little gift from those human experiments you were so concerned about, Mina. I simply... improved upon their work...once again."

Dashuan tried to summon his gravity manipulation, feeling only the faintest whisper of response. "All this time... you were using their research to use agaisnt them? is that why you made Arc kill Cassandra!? To make fucking weopons?"

"I was doing what we as originals have been called to do–some of us hear that call like AirForce, myself, and now you Dashuan…I feel the Saviour's energy flowing withing you." Ultress's hand moved to a locket hanging beneath her collar–a simple silver thing that seemed out of place among her technical gear. "Just like our parents taught us, remember, sister? Father trained us for the revolution, the revolution our weak Mother could never stomach!"

Mina's sharp intake of breath echoed in the chamber. "Don't you dare talk about them. They would never—"

"They're dead–Dead humans who both waste the energies they utilized to breathe!" Ultress's composure cracked for just a moment, real pain bleeding through. "They thought if we just showed enough good faith, enough trust...The Saviour would let them live long enough for the eclipse" She pulled the locket free, holding it up. "Want to know where I keep the cure you're all so desperate for? Right here. In the last gift they gave us before their weak human bodies got them killed."

The device on her wrist blazed to life, a swirling portal began to form behind her–but this one was different from Mina's. Where Mina's portals shimmered like heat waves, this one zigzagged with artificial energy, its edges geometric and sharp in nature.

"You... copied my power?" Mina's voice shook with betrayal. "All those tests you ran, claiming you were trying to help me understand it better..."

"Oh no, Mina…I improved it." Ultress's face was lit by the portal's harsh light, shadows dancing across her features in spiralling colors. "Just like I improved everything else. While you were all clinging to your outdated morality, I was preparing for the war we all knew was coming. It seems you are not strong enough to gain our Lord’s favour–" More Lessers moved to her side; some eager, others hesitant but clearly having made their choice.

Dashuan could see the divide forming, physical and ideological, splitting their sanctuary in two. "It doesn't have to be this way." His voice was ca despite the power dampening field, drawing everyone's attention. "We can still—"

"Still what? YOU know nothing!" Ultress's laugh was bitter as she backed toward her portal. "Still play pretend? Still act like we're not what evolution made us to be?" Her mask had cracked during the confrontation in her shaking grip, glowing lines spreading across its metal surface. Through the breaks, her eye blazed with fury. "I gave you a chance to understand. I gave you all a chance to see the truth."

"The truth?" Mina stepped forward, standing shoulder to shoulder with Dashuan. "The truth is you're scared. Just like the humans you hate so much. So scared you'd rather burn the world than risk being hurt again."

"If that's what you choose to believe." She gestured, and her followers began stepping through the portal. "But remember this moment. Remember when you chose your pretty ideals over survival." Her eyes locked with Dashuan's. "Remember when you had a chance to stand with us, to truly protect our kind, and instead chose to play hero."

"We're not playing anything," Arc spoke up, moving to Dashuan's other side as their powers began to flicker back to life each moment. "We're choosing to be better than our fear."

Ultress reached up and removed her cracked mask entirely, letting it fall to the icy floor with a thud. "Then you've chosen to be extinct." Her voice carried absolute conviction. "When the humans turn on you again–when the Saviour chooses a new champion to grind your bones into particles; don't come crying to me...I will have no pity for weaker beings." She backed through her portal, but paused at the last moment. "The cure dies with me, brother Titan. Remember that when the bodies start piling up again. Remember who really made the choice to let them die."

The portal snapped shut with a crack like breaking bone, leaving silence in its wake. Around them, the ice walls still pulsed with dying traces of power-dampening energy. The remaining Lessers, barely a handful of their original number, gathered closer, looking to Dashuan with a mix of fear and hope.

"What now?" Mina whispered as she stared at the space where her sister had vanished.

Dashuan looked around at what remained of their group– Arc's determined face, Mina's cold look, the uncertain but loyal Lessers who had chosen to stay. Above them, through gaps in the ice cave's ceiling, tauroras painted the sky in remembrance of another choice, another sacrifice he knew Airforce made not in selfishness.

"Now?" His powers surged back to full strength, lifting him slightly off the ground. "Now we prove her wrong. We show the world there's another way." His eyes met each of theirs in turn. "We become the heroes AirForce believed we could be." Dashuan told a calculated lie that he watched settle over the group with no protest; only fervent looks of resolution. He kept the secret of the Saviour to his heart. The wind howled outside their mountain sanctuary, carrying the weight of choices made and battles to come. In the distance, storm clouds gathered, promising change, promising conflict, promising a war none of them had truly wanted but all of them would now have to fight until no one had to any longer.

The lines were drawn. The sides were chosen. And somewhere out there, behind her artificial portals and stolen powers, Ultress was preparing for a future brought about by this mysterious entity--The Saviour.

The real war was just beginning.