"Man's enemies are not demons, but human beings like himself."

-Lao Tzu

********

"Wake her up," I told Panacea as I kept my eyes on our prisoner.

"Say please."

"Wake her up or I'm telling Vicky about some of your... experiments at Xavier's."

Despite the threat, I was smirking at the sass the biokinetic was giving me. To be honest, I liked Amelia. Not only because she was my primary source of Man Flesh ™, but she had just helped my wives deal with a threat to my home.

I side-eyed the door that led to Tsunade as she continued to run her tests on the unconscious Mystique.

I trusted her to know her limits and to take care of our unborn children, but a father couldn't help but worry.

Man, I was going to be a total pushover father.

Eh. Worth it.

"How do you even know about that?" Amelia asked with wide eyes and an ashen face, bringing me back to the present. She looked around the room like she feared her sister would burst into our improvised hospital/prison instead of helping the Amazons rebuild.

A problem I'd deal with later.

"I have my sources," I smirked. Sources like Emma Freed from limits when we were first scouting Amy.

Who knew giving a bunch of hormonal teenagers superpowers would lead to sexual experimentation that bordered on Cthulhuian rituals?

I did. As did anyone with a functioning brain.

Superpowered sex makes the brain go BRRRRR.

Still, Rogue was much freakier than I gave her credit for.

Good for her.

"Fine," Panacea grumbled as she poked Madelyne Pryor, waking her up. "I'm going to check on the kid again."

I waved her off, keeping my eyes on the redhead that slowly stirred to consciousness.

I saw the moment the drowsiness gave way to the memories before her capture.

"NATHAN!" Madelyne shouted as she sat bolt upright in her bed, eyes wide and frantic as she searched for her son with a desperation all too common to new mothers.

"He's safe," I said softly. A half-truth, but we'll get to that.

The clone's eyes snapped to me. I saw confusion. Fear. Anger. A pungent cocktail of negative emotions as the woman glared at me with all the hate in the world.

"YOU!" She snarled, trying to lunge from her bed at me. "What have you done to my son!?"

She didn't get very far. While she could sit up in the bed, her legs were strapped down, and her arms were tied in such a way as to allow her to extend them, but stopped her from reaching the end of the bed to free her legs. It wasn't chains that held her, but there was no way Madelyne was getting out of those enchanted straps without help.

I let the woman struggle fruitlessly, not saying a word as she showered me with insults, demanding her son, her freedom, my flayed corpse, and any number of other impossible things at the moment.

Was I the bad guy here?

...

Nah.

"Are you done?" I asked casually when she finally paused her struggle to heave deep breaths.

That set off another round of tirades.

Again, I let her. I honestly didn't care if people insulted me, and she did have a reason to. I had technically kidnapped her and her newborn baby and was running experiments on them.

Ugh, I was never going to live down the fact that I was equivalent to a comic book villain now. I should get the spandex out right now and practice my monologue.

... Then again, villainesses were seriously hot. And the puns. Villains got the best puns.

Maybe I can convince my wives to also become villains with me?

Robin could be something like 'Madam Lotus.' She could dress in evening gowns and go for the Femme Fatale look. Yoruichi could catfight with Selina Kyle over the 'Catwoman' name. Glynda could be the 'Disciplinarian' and rock the school teacher aesthetic.

We could be called the ' Evil Hoard,' and I already had an evil lair.

But what sort of crimes should we commit?

Jaywalking was a must, of course, but something more serious to seal my dastardly reputation.

Maybe I could hold a city hostage until the best artists in the world sculpted my wives in various poses?

Nah, Medea would want to do that herself.

So, what else did villains do?

We didn't need money, I had no heroic rivals, and there wasn't a security system in the world that could keep me out, so stealing would be boring.

... Man, this supervillain thing was more complicated than it looked.

Idea!

I'll cover a city in custard. All of it.

Maybe Brisbane?

Then I drop thousands of giant plastic replicas of whale dicks on the city, each carved with various pro-ocean conservation statements. I was already helping this world's seas, so why not go all the way and make it my 'thing?'

Observers will make the obvious connection between the custard and dildos but will not expect that it is only step one of my master plan.

Next, I'd let the Australian heat cook the custard. The smell will drive people crazy, and then-

"What do you want?"

Madelyne's question tore me from my twelve-step plan to conquer the universe.

"Oh, are you actually ready to talk?" I asked.

Sure, she was a victim, but there'd be countless other victims if I didn't figure out a solution. I hadn't even done anything to her, despite being falsely (at the time) accused of kidnapping her, so I was entirely within my right to be snarky.

"What. Do. You. Want." She bit out between clenched teeth.

"You're going to hurt yourself if you grit your teeth so much," I said, then sighed. "What do you actually remember? I freed you from Sinister's control, but I have no idea how that will work with false memories."

"What?" Madelyne asked, brow furrowed.

"Right," I sighed again.

Then I told her the whole story, as far as I knew it.

How she had been kidnapped, and I had been framed for it.

How she had telepathically interrupted the peace conference, leading to me fighting the X-men.

How, after all the heroes had been kidnapped, my Family and I rescued her and her child from her actual kidnapper.

I could see her struggling to process all this, and I am sure she didn't really believe me, so I settled on a simple solution now that she was awake.

"Do you want to be free of all false memories?" I asked casually.

"Of course I do! What kind of quest-"

I poked Madelyne as she was in the middle of talking, freeing her from false memories.

All of them.

They hit her all at once.

I saw horror dawn on her face, and it was the instinct honed from a million battles that had me jumping out of the way in time to avoid the projectile vomit that exited her mouth.

Gross.

Then again, if she just remembered Sinister's labs, I didn't blame her.

Thankfully, I had destroyed them all. Good riddance. There had been quite a few, but I was... motivated.

Like her earlier tirade, Madelyne's vomiting went on for a bit. I approached again when her stomach was empty and nothing was left to expel.

"Oh god," Madelyne whispered in horror. "I'm not real. I was never real. I am a fake. A clone. My parents aren't real. I never went to school. I never had friends or pets."

"I actually have some good news on that front," I said with a smile as I cast a spell to clean up all this mess. Man, magic was so convenient. "If it helps, unlike most clones, you have a fully unique soul courtesy of our friendly neighbourhood firebird." I paused before I clarified my words. "Unique as in unique to this world. Multiversally, there are countless versions of you and me, some of which will have identical souls."

"How is that supposed to make me feel better," Madelyne asked, glaring at me with wild eyes. "I am a clone of my husband's dead lover, created by a madman who practically forced us together! My entire life has been a lie! Whether I have a soul or not doesn't fucking matter!"

"If. I said, 'If it helps,'" I muttered petulantly. Then I sighed again. "Listen, I get it. More than anybody else, I really get it. The loss of identity. The fear. The panic. But I am telling you right now, as a complete expert on souls, you are real. Your child is real. Your love might have been built on a lie, but it was real. If you work at it, it will be real again."

I stared into the scared, tired eyes and willed her to understand how genuine I was being. "

Right now, my Family and every hero in this world is working on finding your husband. Once I bring you back home, you will have plenty of time to sort out your marriage, feelings, and place in the world."

"And you will? Bring me back? Just like that?" Madelyne asked doubtfully.

"We've come to the snag." I held up a hand as her eyes narrowed in suspicion. "Do you remember what Sinister was doing?"

"Something to do with genetics, blood, and... evolution?"

"Close enough," I shrugged. "The basics is this. He attempted, stupidly, to try and kick start human and mutant evolution by infecting the world with a blood-based plague. You and your son were infected." Again, I held a hand as she looked like she would panic. "While you remain here, you are not at risk of anything. We are working on a cure but cannot let you out until one is found. Am I correct in believing that you do not want any of the blood in you? You want to be cured of every drop of Old Blood?"

"Why the stupid question?" Madelyne asked. "Of course, I don't want a plague in me."

That was enough.

For the second time in a few minutes, the hospital room/prison was covered in bodily fluid. This time, it was all blood as Madelyne Pryor was 'Freed' from every drop of Old Blood in her body.

All one and a half gallons of it.

I kept my finger on the horrified woman to ensure she didn't die by having every drop of blood violently ejected from her body.

I needn't have worried. Like Rhino and his armour, the 'Freeing' had no adverse side effects for the person Freed. She still had one and a half gallons of blood in her body, just Freed from all factors that connected it to Bloodborne.

"What the fuck did you do?" Madelyne snarled, yanking her arm from me and scooting as far from me as her bonds would allow.

Hmmm? Did this count as creating matter since I had essentially doubled the amount of blood? Food for thought.

"I tried to cure you," I said simply, not letting her know I had succeeded.

Or that when I tried the same while she was unconscious, I had failed.

I stood with a sigh and, with a tap of my hand, 'Freed' her from her bonds.

The woman hurried to slide away from me, still glaring.

I rolled my eyes and waved my hand to clean the room and us again. I made sure not even a drop of blood survived.

"One of my wives will bring you to the suite we set aside for you and the kid. Unlimited food, books, and every entertainment system you can imagine and a few you can't. You are free to wander around or outside if you want. Anywhere you can't get to is off-limits, duh, but there are only a few of those."

Seriously, this mansion was stupidly large since it was essentially a hollowed-out mountain. It was easy to seal off the top half, make a passage from her room to the outside and set up a boundary field to keep anybody from getting too far if she decided to run.

"I imagine you want time to process everything and see your kid. We have everything you need to take care of him easily. With any luck, this will be a short vacation, time to get your head on straight after the recent... revelations."

The woman continued staring at me like a cornered animal as I left the room, leaving the door open whenever she gathered the courage to step out.

One of the perks of Robin's Element was that she was essentially a hive mind of herself. I could trust our prisoners to always be under watch if Pryor decided to do something... drastic.

I sighed, running a hand down my face, feeling very tired.

"She not fall for your charms?" Panacea snarked as she leaned against the wall, a biologically engineered cigarette in her hand. I stole it. "Hey!"

I didn't really smoke; it had never been my vice, but I felt it was appropriate.

"Did you know," I said conversationally as I took a long draft. Why do people like these things again? "That babies are stupid?"

"They're babies," Amy deadpanned as she lit up another. "They're not supposed to be smart."

"Yes, but they are so dumb that they don't even know how to be Free."

"What are you babbling about?"

"Humans are such stupid animals." I incinerated the cigarette with a spell. That's what I get for trying to be cool. I should stick to goofy. "Always chasing, always hunting for the next achievement. Always climbing to the next peak. Just to see if we can." I loved humanity. I loved that foolishness. But man, could they piss me off. "And babies are just humans at their most basic. No thoughts for the future. Just innocent animals. If something feels good, it is good."

'In Yharnam, they produced more blood than alcohol, as the former is the more intoxicating.'

Expecting an infant to want to be Free of something that feels good, that makes it 'better,' would be expecting too much.

"If you are going to keep ranting about nonsense, I will return to my patient," Amy said with narrowed eyes. "Unless you did something to her?"

"You do that. For all three of them. Keep Mystique knocked out for the moment. Maybe you and Shaper will be able to do what I couldn't. Whenever you want to go home, just call out. We are always watching."

I flicked my wrist in a wave goodbye as I ascended the stairs to the part of the mansion closed off to all these 'guests.'

"I have a long overdue conversation to get to."

********

"What is going on?"

"Hello to you too," I greeted Diana as she joined the rest of us in the sitting room.

I didn't stop petting Medea, of course. One, because it was soothing, but two, because I didn't want to fucking die.

You only stop petting your cat when it decides you are done, not when you do. Otherwise, it will give you the cold shoulder for at least an hour.

A fate worse than death.

That and my fat floof had been in a foul mood since she had flapped in. Must have eaten something uppity.

"Now that we are all here," Medea (Wife) said with a roll of her eyes at my sass. "We would really like to know what has you and Emma so on edge."

"I honestly don't know where to start," I sighed. "I'm sure you all picked up some details. You're not dumb, and I haven't made it a secret, even if I haven't really talked about it. Why don't you tell me what you know, and I will fill in the blanks."

"A pig got off the island, pig-boy cloned it and spread its blood, the equivalent of a super plague, around the world," Yoruichi drawled, leaning back in her armchair casually. "That about sums it up?"

"More or less," I snorted.

"The blood comes from thy last world," Ranni continued. "The one after the Lands Between. The boars are like all animals on this Island, recreations of creatures thou hast encountered in thy travels."

"Yep."

"You were in that world for a very short time, considering you stopped summoning us after a month on your end," Robin picked up, sipping her coffee as she cast her mind back. "You returned to summoning us once a week to get to Emma's turn, as she was needed to 'wake you up.' For us, only a day and a half passed; for you, it was... seven weeks?"

"Eh, something like that."

To be honest, I had only really been able to keep track of time by the feeling of immanent summonings. I knew now that it was 'Future Me' connecting to 'Past Me' through the Dream to send the girls back/sideways. It wasn't time travel, but more like a time projection on the past.

"From what I saw," Scathach tapped an idle finger on her lips as she smirked at me. "It was not a nice place."

I blinked at her.

Right, she had been the next one in the 'cycle,' the pattern of summons that allowed me to predict who would be summoned next. She had been the first one called in Bloodborne and the only one summoned in Yharnam proper. All the others had been summoned while I was in the Chalice Dungeons below the city or in the Hunter's Dream.

"The One Reborn," I groaned, rubbing my face tiredly at the memory. "Right. That... thing. Miyazaki always had a thing for monsters made out of bodies, but that was hands down the worst." Just the memory of the smell was enough to get me to gag.

Scathach laughed, even as the others looked at me with frowns.

For most of my time during my sentence, I had tried to ensure they only saw the 'better' parts of my prisons. Anor Londo looked a lot better than Blightown, after all.

By Bloodborne, a combination of my fear of what I would do, my weariness after I failed to escape, and the sheer horror of Yharnam meant that I had largely stopped giving a fuck about putting on a show.

As I sat atop the piles of corpses that were once the abomination from beyond time and space, I felt the call of the summoning. I had let it happen. I was exhausted, emotionally, more than physically. I was covered in blood and other, more vile fluids. I hadn't been clean in days. I had slaughtered my way through a city of monsters.

I honestly had no fucks left to give at that point.

"Well, you got the gist, at least," I said, shaking my head. "Now let me tell you why it is a problem."

"The blood plague turns people into mutated abominations?"

"Well, yes, but actually no," I answered Robin's deadpan with my own. "This is a comic world. Strange plagues, infections, and things that cause mutations are a dime a dozen here. Even if Tsunade here couldn't fix most of them, which she probably could, this world has no end to super geniuses and strange powers like Valeria and Amelia."

"But I couldn't fix it," Tsunade said with narrowed eyes. "You call it a plague. It spreads like one, but it isn't. It is not a disease or virus or anything like that. It is just blood."

"You are starting to see the problem," I said with a crooked smirk. It came out a lot more tired than I wanted. "Tell me what you all found."

"It's not magic," Medea said instantly. "There's power there. A spiritual and conceptual weight in that blood which would make it a very potent material for magecraft, but the blood itself isn't magical at all."

"It is completely biological in nature," Tsunade agreed. "And as I said, it isn't a plague. The Rot is a plague, a fungal infection, to be more specific. This is just blood. It is a universal donor that optimizes the bodies of the recipients. It heals them. Makes them stronger. It is like a lesser version of your own blood. When I ran scans on all our 'prisoners.'" It was still a bit weird that a baby was a prisoner, but I would appreciate the irony until I found a way to get it home safely. "None of them are in any way disadvantaged by it. The infant is so healthy that I would swear he was an Uzumaki if I didn't know any better. Nor is the mother any worse off after you removed it from her. I can't say one way or the other whether the shapeshifter, Mystique, has been improved as her biology is too different from what I know."

"It's blood," Scathach said simply with a shrug. "Powerful blood, but just blood."

"That is all it is. Blood," I sighed again. Man, I was doing that a lot lately. Maybe I should stop? From now on, every time I sighed, I'd give Medea a tummy rub instead. That would improve my mood. "You weren't wrong, Tsunade; it is like my blood. Dragon Blood, the perk of the Catalogue that allows me to empower others through the absorption of my fluids, is a more potent version of the Old Blood, working on a conceptual level rather than a biological one. That is where the problem is. The simplicity of it. It is just blood. The blood of an eldritch being, but just blood."

"That does not sound simple at all."

"Mikael," Artoria interposed simply, ignoring Yoruichi's snark and cutting to the heart of the matter. "You have been avoiding the issue."

"I have," I sigh- Tummy rub, tummy rub, tummy rub. "I'll just out and say it. The blood, as it is, is a categorically good thing that only benefits the 'infected.' There is no cure because there is no disease."

"Those clones did not benefit," Raven deadpanned.

"They did," I disagreed. "Make no mistake, they were abominations that needed to be put down. None of you should feel bad about killing them, but the blood made them 'better' in every way. Except for the one that mattered. Their humanity. Because that is the limiting factor."

"Self-modification," Medea joined in, eyes narrowed in realization. "That's what is doing. It heals and improves, but when the blood finds a weakness, it attempts to fix it. And humans are creatures of weakness. A form of 'Innocent Monster' perhaps? Or closer to 'Golden Rule (Body)?' A correction of human limitations."

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

"Ding ding ding. Give the witch a cookie," I nodded. "From an evolutionary standpoint, the only thing humans have going for us is high intelligence, the ability to use symbolic language and our opposable thumbs. Other animals are just as smart but can't communicate detailed information, inhibiting the transmission of information between generations. Some use tools and, given enough time, would probably evolve to replace us. The simple fact is humanity is not special in the least. It is a fluke that we evolved first. We are just one tiny race on a tiny rock flying around a tiny star in a tiny galaxy in an enormous universe. On every scale, planetary or galactically, humanity just sucks."

"You are being too harsh," Diana disagreed. "No matter your view, it is a fact that we all come from worlds where humanity is the dominant species."

"Not mine," Glynda raised her hand. "In mine, we were the prey. It is why our fighters were called hunters. They were the exception, not the rule."

"Nor mine," Robin agreed. "While humans were the most numerous, any number of others could have been the more dominant species if humanity hadn't been the one to colonize the world. In my world, humanity is the equivalent of the English language here. They just happened to spread far enough at the right time to become a staple. There was nothing inherently superior about them."

"He has a point," Tsunade also joined in. "Humanity is incredibly fragile. Our skin is thinner, and our organs are fragile. Exoskeletons are inherently superior tools to internal skeletal structures from a biological standpoint. And that is only defensively. Our senses are weaker than other animals. We lack fur to moderate our body temperature, though we make up for it with the ability to sweat. We also lack natural weapons, such as claws, fangs or tails, that we can use to defend ourselves. Entire clans in my world became famous for having one animal trait that gave them a massive advantage over other ninja."

"Spirituality," Yoruichi chimed in on Diana's side, surprisingly looking more severe than usual. "The afterlife, the human soul is unique in its ability to adapt and linger."

"Religion isn't unique to humans," I shook my head. "Elephants have been known to go on pilgrimages, to bury their dead, and other 'useless' tasks that hint at a sort of spiritual root. Again, we are getting a confirmation bypass. All the worlds you are from are connected to mine through media. That's where my prison is based on and where I filled out the Catalogue. Of course, they are human-centred. Humans like to tell stories with other humans. I could doodle a picture and, in the infinite variety of possibilities, there is a world out there that lines up with it. I didn't 'create' that world. It always existed. For every world where humans are the dominant species, there are just as many where they don't even exist. We are not special."

In my previous world, it was easy to forget that.

We had no proof of alien life, no superpowered beings, and the multiverse was a hypothesis that still didn't have enough evidence to be qualified as a scientific theory.

Still, it was true even there.

We, humanity, were less than ants when placed on the cosmic scale.

And humans couldn't deal with that.

"We got off topic," I said, shaking my head. "I didn't say all that to denigrate humans. I love humanity. It was to point out that humanity is not a 'desirable' trait to the beings whose blood the plague originated from. The Old Blood, the source of the plague Yharnam found, comes from Great Ones. Beings so far beyond human limits, ideas, and concepts that just being able to perceive them requires an enormous amount of Insight into the true nature of the world. If humans grow a sixth arm, tentacles, or claws, they do not see a problem. Great Ones are sympathetic to humans. They want to help, to improve humans, but their idea of help has led to entire civilizations being wiped from the map."

The entire story of Bloodborne could be reduced to the attempt of humans and Great Ones to communicate with each other. To meet and join.

The Great Ones did it out of sympathy and a desire to find a surrogate for their inability to have children. Humans did it out of a desire to transcend mortality, to cure their diseases and afflictions.

And both sides died in the attempt.

"While I appreciate the logic behind the issue," Tsunade interrupted my rambling. "What is preventing me, Medea, Scathach, and Panacea from creating something that will target the blood to purge it from the infected."

"Because that would destroy every drop of blood in their body." I didn't joke. I didn't smile. I met everyone's eyes in turn as I spoke clearly and succinctly. "So long as even one drop of blood enters you, you become a source. The Beast Plague starts from the Old Blood, but all infected will transmit it."

That was it.

The simple, terrible truth.

In Bloodborne, you could farm blood vials from almost every enemy, beast or kin, and all of them healed you. Just as enemies who killed you gained power from your own blood.

Anyone, everyone, was a source of the beast plague.

Even the player.

"Unless you are willing to kill every single person who ever touched that blood, there will never be an end to the beast plague. That is why what Sinister did was so terrible. He put it in the water. Millions of people are already infected. If I can Free them, I will. If I can't, if they choose the power of the blood, or if I cannot get to them in time before it is too late, then the events of Yharnam will repeat. And I do not want to become a beast again."

Faces set as realization dawned.

Still, some were confused, unable to put the pieces together because their image of me was wrong.

I couldn't have done what I was hinting at. Not me. Not the man they loved.

It was harder to see the monster in people you knew than in the stranger on the street.

"Sir Bard..." Priscilla, quiet until now, whispered lowly.

I needed to be clear.

They needed to hear this.

"Of the thousands of people who called Yharnam home," I continued, pretending I didn't hear the heartbreak in her words. "Less than a hundred had never imbibed blood. Man or woman, old or young. The blood was a cure-all, a panacea to fix every issue. It fueled the hunters, the scholars, and the everyday smuck. It was a religion, an institution. Those who didn't partake in communion were not just suspicious. They were evil. Heretics. There was no saving anyone who had even a drop."

"You-" Artoria cut herself off as she stared at me, eyes wide as she realized what I had done.

What I had had to do.

"I killed them all."

"Mikael."

I bulldozed over any attempt to interrupt me.

"There is an easy test to see who is infected. You cut yourself, you cut the person and drop some of their blood on you. If you heal, they are infected. If I healed, they died. Obviously, this is only viable if you are already infected, like I was, or are immune, like we are now. It will be even easier to do it now."

"Mikael."

I couldn't stop. Wouldn't stop.

For weeks, I had told them I wasn't a hero. Some still didn't really get it.

I had never been a larger-than-life character. I wasn't a character out of a story, a man from myth or fiction.

Maybe other Company Contractors, when they receive all the bonuses of the Catalogue and become infatuated with their own myth of uniqueness, could have risen above their baser nature.

Maybe someone else, not going through the crisis I had been in at the time, would have settled for just killing time until Emma was summoned.

It was just one world out of an infinite number of possibilities. They would do the bare minimum, beat the 'game,' and move on. To others, it might simply be a dream, a wish-fulfillment fantasy of power and sex.

They could ignore all the suffering and consequences of their actions or inaction.

Not me.

To me, it was always real. I had known I wasn't a protagonist ever since that small cell in the Undead Asylum. Things wouldn't just work out because of plot devices.

No Oscar would ever come to free me from my cell.

I had to do it myself.

I had to seize every happy ending with my own bloody claws.

I had done to Bloodborne what I did to all the worlds before.

I gave it the 'Happy Ending.'

Not for the people of Yharnam. They were too far gone. They had been the problem, the cancer I had needed to cut out.

But I had to hope the rest of the world would be better after leaving it.

I had to.

"Nobody ran. Even when word of me spread. If they tried, the beasts would get them. Or I would. I went through the city, house to house. I was so strong, so good at what I did, that not even the strongest beasts could stop me. Most who refused to take the blood had either already left Yharnam, been killed in the previous hunts, or lynched by the mobs that roamed the streets."

"Mikael!"

I was just a man.

In Bloodborne, I had no extraordinary abilities beyond my skill. No magic to heal me or rain cataclysmic destruction. The closest thing the world had to spells was borrowing abilities from Great Ones through special items, and they worked no better for me than anyone else.

"Not all were insane," I chuckled ruefully. "It was easy when they were. But some weren't. The blood enhances you, but only in ways that 'benefit' you. If you hunt, you become beast-like. If you study, you gain Insight easier. Blood doesn't create monsters. Humans do."

I remembered a kind, forsaken church dweller who offered sanctuary to the lost and scared.

He hadn't begged for his life. He just wanted the nightmare to end.

"If you simply live? If you are kind? If you don't kill or fight or try to ascend, you are just a healthier version of yourself. Those were few and far between, so choked was the city with blood and madness. But they existed. And they needed to die. Because even a drop was enough to destroy the entire Phtumeru race. I couldn't let that drop escape. So I killed them all. Beast. Kin. Man. I hunted them all. A hunter has to hunt. It's for your own good."

Like all Fromsoft games, there was no 'happy end' in Bloodborne. Miyazaki and his team were famous for leaving things open to interpretation, for there being no 'right' answer.

The 'good' ending was waking up from a nightmare, thinking everything had just been a bad dream.

But the blood plague still existed. The Great Ones were still there.

The 'true' ending was simply taking Gherman's place in the Hunter's Dream. Becoming another piece in the perpetual nightmare that goes on and on and on.

"And all that? All that pain and death and bloodshed? It was all just a breeding ritual. An attempt by the Great Ones to gain offspring. And it worked. I became a Great One. But even after I did and beat the game, the blood would remain. It always would. Unless I burned it from the Earth."

The 'secret' ending, the one I had chosen in my paranoia, was the 'best' ending.

It was supposed to signify that an infant Great One would lead humanity into a new age where they didn't need bodies that could be infected by the blood. Where they became beings of pure thought, unshackled by mortality.

I wouldn't, couldn't, do that. I couldn't be trapped there as the god the world would have needed to lead it into that future.

I needed to be Free.

I would have left the blood plague behind to purge humanity from that world, as it had done for all the races that came before and all that would come after, rather than staying trapped in my eternal prison.

But I also was not the type of man who could do nothing when I had a solution to a problem.

I had forced a 'Happy Ending' on that world.

One where humanity had a hope, slim as it was, to grow by themselves. To become something more than beast or kin.

All it took was becoming both myself.

To save that world, I had to be a monster.

That had been Djura's mistake. He had sought to keep the beasts, those who used to be people, alive out of guilt.

I had been beyond guilt.

Not better. Not worse.

Just a madman with a different solution. A man with an Out-of-context perspective and enough power to inflict my vision on that world.

"I burned Yharnam and all its inhabitants to the ground. I buried it in the rubble of the chalice dungeons, hoping nobody would ever discover it again. Because if they did, there would be no saving that world."

There was silence in the room.

In turn, I met everyone's eyes, making sure they understood what I was saying.

"I would do it again."

I saw fear, pain, understanding, and so many other emotions of every range and spectrum. Not even my most morally fluid wives, Medea and Scathach, could take what I said without feeling something.

Except for Emma. She had known. She had always known.

In the grand scheme of things, most of the people in this room had killed more people than had been in Yharnam. Directly or indirectly. Even to me, my total kills in Bloodborne made up a fraction of a fraction of the beings I had killed in my time.

It wasn't the number that was the problem.

It was the totality.

I had single-handedly committed genocide against an entire city. Many of whom were guilty of no crime. Simple people, farmers, shopkeepers or labourers who had fallen to paranoia and fear. Who partaken of the Old Blood, not out of ambition or evil but to survive.

Just as I had.

I had my reasons for the slaughter, reasons they no doubt saw the terrible logic of, but that didn't change what I had done.

My Family would have to acknowledge that. Acknowledge that I might not be the man they had built up in their mind.

I might have put my best foot forward with them, but I had never claimed to be a hero.

I was just me.

Some would have a harder time accepting that than others.

Diana stood.

With purposeful steps, she marched over to me. The entire room watched her with batted breath. The tension rose as she stood less than a foot from my seat.

Diana slapped me.

Faster than I could react and hard across the cheeks, my head twisting with the force of the blow. She hadn't held back. That slap would have killed an ordinary man.

There were gasps around the room, and I had to hold Medea down as she started hissing at the Amazon.

I had expected something like that.

The slap was not because of hatred or anger or anything like that.

It was because her image of me, already worn and torn, had irrevocably changed.

People lash out in their grief.

Face already healing, I looked into the eyes of the heroine.

For a long second, we stared at each other. The room watched us, holding their breath.

What did she see?

All I saw was the woman I loved. And she was in pain. Something she loved had died.

When Diana looked at me, did she see a beast? A monster who had killed millions in a selfish desire for freedom?

Most hadn't been innocent victims, but there had definitely been countless bystanders, guiltless of any crime, crushed under my feet as I endlessly walked forward.

Or did she simply see me?

A simple man, given power and thrust into situations where there was no right answer.

I am not sure I wanted to know.

Then Diana kissed me. Softly. It was heartrendingly gentle.

I pretended not to feel the tears that flowed from her eyes.

Then, the moment passed, and we separated.

Diana turned and left the room, not looking back.

Emma was about to say something, but I spoke first.

"Let her go," I said. I pretended my voice didn't crack. I was good at self-delusion. "I will never force any of you to stay."

Ours was a Mad Love.

Mine was born of their aid at my lowest points, of knowing them for a year of their lives, of my own twisted mentality.

Their love for me was fostered unnaturally fast by Dragon Aura and the various benefits of the Catalogue. A tool created for interdimensional sex slavery. Just because I refused to 'seal the deal' with permanent mind control didn't mean I ever forgot what our relationship had been built on.

An illusion. A Dream.

And we must all wake up someday.

When you throw in the fact that they had a highly sanitized image of me, problems were bound to creep up. Expectations met reality, and they did not line up perfectly.

I called them 'wives,' and they called me 'husband,' but our full relationship was only months old.

It was still fragile. It had barely been tested. With so many people and so many personalities, rifts were bound to form.

You can love someone and not be with them. Just as you could fight with someone and still love them.

A good relationship is not one that has never been challenged but one that weathers all challenges.

I had to believe that our own brand of Mad Love would survive this.

Taking a deep breath and giving Medea a tummy rub, I looked to the other 'heroes' in my Family.

Raven's face was completely blank, her eyes closed as she meditated on my words. With her absorption of Trigon, I knew her outward loss of control was a thing of the past, so I couldn't get a feel for her thoughts. She could be completely unaffected or amid an existential crisis right now.

I would have to leave her to it.

Artoria stared at me intensely, her eyes not wavering for an instant. More than any of the others, she understood the burden of the hard choice. Of making unpalatable decisions for reasons that seemed monstrous or unfeeling.

'The King does not understand human feelings.'

The dedication to an ideal over humanity. A Ruler was an impartial decision-maker. Feelings did not enter into it.

I don't think what I had done was 'Justice,' but it also wasn't wholly divorced from doing the most good for the largest amount of people.

It was insanity, but it was a logical insanity.

Maybe she understood that.

Artoria gave me the nod, the barest of acknowledgements that she understood my monstrosity.

Then she stood and left too.

I looked around the room, wondering if anybody else would leave.

Nobody stood.

Priscilla looked between me and the door my wives had just left with a distressed look.

"They're not gone forever," I gently told my Floofy Dragon as Medea rubbed against me, purring softly. "Sometimes you need space to think."

Sometimes, the people we love change. Sometimes, they were never who we thought they were in the first place.

When that happened, you always had a choice to make.

I just had to trust them to come back.

I had seen Diana fingering her bracers after she left. She hadn't discarded our little symbol of affection outright, so I was honestly hopeful. And I would fight for her.

But right now, she needed space and time to think. That was why Artoria had left, so her friend wouldn't be alone.

"I honestly thought I would get more than one slap," I joked, looking around the room. "I figured there'd be a lineup. I did keep this from you all for a few months."

"I once had a mission," Glynda said, rubbing her eyes tiredly. "Salem unleashed dozens of mutant Chill at once. They possessed people, human and faunus alike. So long as a possible host was nearby, they wouldn't die. By the end, no civilians survived. Information was never released to the public for fear of panic. I never talked about it, even to those who were there with me. I understand why you wouldn't want to speak about... this."

"Do not take this the wrong way," Robin said, her mouth half upturned in that smirk I so loved to let me know she, too, was joking. "But stories like that are a dime a dozen in my world. Entire islands have been wiped from the map for much lesser reasons."

"Eh," Yoruichi jumped on the effort to lower the tension in the room by reclining in her chair and kicking up her feet. "I was the main assassin for Soul Society for over a century. Get on my level."

"I also have done plenty I am not proud of for much worse reasons," Tsunade said, drumming her fingers on the arm of her chair. "But throwing blame around or losing ourselves in a pity party will not help our situation."

"I agree," I nodded easily. I hadn't said all of that to receive pity or to create drama. They needed to understand not just who I was but what we were dealing with. "And don't get me wrong, I hope I don't have to go on another hunt. We have so many more options now that I didn't have Yharnam. I can Free people from the Old Blood without killing them as I did with Pryor. I will, to anybody who needs it. But I can only do that to one or two people at a time because I have to be touching them."

That was one of the two major limiting factors I was facing.

My expression of Freedom and Life was so deeply tied to my sense of identity that I couldn't escape that limit. If I used my full Avatar, with its hundreds of tentacles and such, I could move much faster through the population at the cost of their brains dribbling out their ears.

But that wouldn't fix the second and most significant issue I faced.

"They have to want to be Free. You cannot force Freedom on people. That is just tyranny by another name. And some people will want to retain the power the Old Blood brings. Or they cannot consciously choose, like baby-Cable. As I said, the Blood is a categorically good thing for everything but humanity. Those who hunt, who use their bodies to engage in bloodshed, turn into beasts because beasts are better hunters. Those who use their minds to search for truth, for understanding of the world, will gain Insight."

"Is Insight not a desirable trait?" Ranni asked.

"Eh~" I waived my hand in a so-so gesture while the other scratched Medea at the base of her tail. "Insight is nothing more or less than the ability to see and understand the world's true nature. Which, by itself, isn't really bad, but it opens people up to the wider world. Eventually, unless they have cheats like a Great One supporting them or Defences, anyone who gains enough Insight will eventually be confronted by something they can't handle. It will stop being 'Insight' and become 'Frenzy.' They will become kin, closer in nature to Great Ones, but still mutated abominations. Neither that nor beasthood is good for 'humanity.' So long as even one person has the Old Blood, there is always a risk of another outbreak."

I wouldn't get into the likes of bloodlines like Vilebloods, Ashen Blood, or other 'genealogical' mutations that largely kept human forms but became as twisted on the inside as others were on the outside. Ideally, this entire issue would be handled long before that became a problem.

One way or the other.

"We first need to find a way to identify anyone infected that doesn't involve cutting them open," Robin listed off on her fingers. "Then we need to find a way of extracting the Old Blood without killing them. And we have to do this in the millions, possibly billions."

"And do not forget this might be a plan by our enemy to distract us once more," Melina reminded me. "We still need to discover what happened to the disappeared heroes."

"Yep," I said, popping the 'P' for emphasis. "That about sums it up. As of right now, my best plan is to go on international television and the internet and tell people that a plague was released, but they can get a cure by touching my true body. That will let me Free millions of people at once. But it won't be thorough. Some people won't be able to make it to me, so I will have to go around the world personally to free them. I will do that anyway to clear the bodies of water from infection, but it will take too long, and I won't get everyone. Just one person could go back to places I have already visited and reinfect everyone. I bet there are hundreds of big and small villains who would do just that."

"How much time do we have?" Scathach asked. "With enough time, I might be able to work with my Element enough to distinguish Old Blood from regular."

"I honestly do not know," I admitted. "Yharnam trundled on for decades. There were various outbreaks of the beast plague, some so bad that entire city sections were closed off, but the city continued. Every time a beast plague erupted, they'd call a hunt. Which led to bloodshed, which led to more beasts, and the cycle continued in a downward spiral. By the time I arrived, it was already a city of the dead and dying."

"We are dealing with way more people," Robin said with narrowed eyes. "We will have much less time before a collapse because the number of beasts will be much higher, even if the ratio to infected is much lower. The larger number of beasts will lead to more people fighting them, dying or turning into beasts themselves. We will not have decades. We might not even have years."

"It isn't all bad," I couldn't help but point out. While I wanted them to understand the seriousness of the situation, I did not want them to fall into fatalism. "The people of Yharnam were stuck fighting the beast at close range, leading to the Blood spreading with each kill. Here, even if one bullet won't kill a beast, automated weaponry or military machinery will. Not even counting on Supers, we have ways of killing from a distance that greatly lowers the threat."

"But cities, where the highest concentration of people and beasts, will not be able to use the most effective of those tools without civilian casualties," Yoruichi shook her head.

Despite the seriousness of the situation, I smiled despite Diana and Artoria not being there.

Yes, I might not have a solution myself, but none of my Family were anything less than women of action. Now that they knew the problem, we could work together to fix it. There was hope.

Case in point, I saw Priscilla raise her hand shyly, and I looked at her in question.

"Sir Bard," my Floof Dragon said slowly as if hesitating to even voice her thoughts. "Is it not so that the worlds thee visited, such as mine own and the source of this scourge, are video games? And in the manor?"

"All except Elden Ring," I nodded at Ranni and Melina. "It hadn't been released in my world before I appeared in the cell. Playing Bloodborne would be a good idea if you want to grasp Yharnam and what we're dealing with. Just remember it is not a one-to-one comparison. That is a game with limits on what you can do as a player and what is shown. And much of the story and lore comes through details never spelled out clearly. A huge chunk of what I know is pieced together from the community and never explicitly stated."

I had no problem if any of my wives wanted to play the games that I so loved. I was honestly surprised they had yet to.

Then again, Priscilla was the only one who enjoyed games, and even then, she preferred fighting and multiplayer games.

Dark Souls and Bloodborne were also not the type of game I would start a newb on.

"But..." Again, Priscilla hesitated, looking at me with almost pitying eyes. "Is it not an example we can use to illustrate the threat the Old Blood poses? So more visit thy true body?"

"You... want to stream Bloodborne?" I asked, blinking in surprise at the idea.

I don't know why I was surprised. More than anyone here, I had seen plenty of videos on Fromsoft's games. It was practically part of the games themselves, the sense of community that comes from videos or forum posts.

"If thy words of warning fall upon deaf ears," Priscilla nodded, more decisively this time. "Perhaps a visual would aid thy message. Mine only fear is that..."

"That I wouldn't want people to see what I went through," I nodded, understanding where her hesitation was coming from now.

"I do not wish to remind thee of past trauma," Priscilla said gently. "But I do wish to be of aid in some small manner."

"It's a good idea," I reassured her. "And I am not ashamed of what happened. Nor was my time in Bloodborne wholly traumatic. It was a tough time for me, yes, and I did things I am not happy about, but it wasn't all bad."

While I hadn't enjoyed needing to purge Yharnam, to destroy it down to a man to try and wipe the Old Blood from the face of the Earth, that had not been what the vast majority of my time in that world consisted of.

With gleeful abandon, I had slain my way through the Victorian alleys of Bloodborne.

Just me, my weapons, and the Hunt.

It had been an escape from the rage and fear of my past and future.

I had found joy in that terrible place. The beauty of the dance, the whirlwind of death and blood.

In many ways, I had become just as blood-drunk as every hunter before me. I had found an ecstasy in the carnage, in the bloodshed.

I had 'cleaned' Yharnam after I had finished off Mergo and the Hunter's Nightmare, but before descending to the chalice dungeons. By that point, I was fast, strong, deadly, and tireless. I had absorbed so many echoes of blood that I was able to hunt the city clean in a matter of days.

Those few who had not already been claimed by the beasts or the nightmares fell to me over a little more than a week of effort.

It was still in hundreds, possibly thousands, of people who would have survived without my presence. I hadn't exaggerated what I had to do to ensure the Old Blood did not continue to spread.

But even if the memory of those days of killing innocent people weighed on me, it was only a fraction of the seven weeks I spent in that blood-soaked world.

Before, as I cleared Yharnam of beast and kin, and after, as I plumed the depth of the dungeons, were times of deadly, bloody, terrifying joy.

The fear of death, the excitement of combat, the wonders and horror of all I saw and did...

I might have been afraid, so terribly afraid, of what would become of me after I summoned Emma, but that fear had pushed me like nothing ever before.

Damn me, but I had loved Bloodborne.

I was no one special. I had gorged on blood just as everyone else did.

The only difference between me and every other hunter was that I knew what I was doing, and I would not stay around to inflict my beasthood upon the rest of the world.

There was a reason I had killed the Moon Presence, not with one of my innumerable weapons but with my own Beast Claws.

That was one of the reasons Miyazaki's worlds always connected with me.

Only in the darkest depths can you see the light at its clearest.

Even amid despair, fear, pain, disgust and trauma, you can always find a sense of beauty if you look.

Even if all that is beautiful is the bloody dance of violence.

Damn me, but despite all I had to do and face, I had loved Bloodborne.

"If we do decide to go with the 'warning everyone' plan, go right ahead and stream it," I nodded, smiling gently at the fidgeting crossbreed. "We might even be able to raise awareness with the upcoming concert. 'Experience a part of the Elden Lord's journey! See the terrible results if the Blood Plague is allowed to spread!' For now, let's table that plan with my own. As I said, I don't know if other plans will work better. So far, we've had an advantage over the beings of this world because we are Out-of-context people. We operate on different rules. This is also an out-of-context problem. We aren't in Bloodborne. We aren't completely bound to its rules."

"Let's take this one step at a time," Tsunade nodded at Scathach and Medea, the latter of which had been lost in thought for a while now. "For now, we'll work with Amelia on identifying the infected that does not involve bleeding them. Even if we can't cure them ourselves, knowing who needs to be cured will be a massive leg up."

"A good first step," I nodded. "I have to talk to Batman. I promised to give him information. Maybe he'll have a solution. Before that, I need to make a quick stop. Emma, you're with me."

My 'secretary,' utterly silent until now, nodded and rose to join me.

"Ranni, Yoruichi and I will search for clues for the missing heroes," Robin also stood. "There may be a clue in the Sanctum Sanctorum, so we'll stop there first."

"Let Medea know if you run into magic, you think you can't handle." Ranni nodded at my advice.

I wasn't worried about their ability to overcome wards or the like, but we wouldn't gain much information from a smouldering wreck if they were forced to go all out to defend themselves.

"I do not believe I will be much help with either endeavour," Glynda said. "I will aid the Amazons with rebuilding. If they do not wish my help, I will continue my reconstruction efforts from Heartbreak."

Melina looked between the other parties in the Family and me. I didn't need to know her for decades to understand that she was unsure how to help.

Until she gained more control over the Phoenix Force, or we needed something set on fire, she was more a liability than a help in delicate matters.

There was still something she could do, however.

"I am going to need you to act as a go-between for Valeria and us," I told her. "Brief her on what I've told you, our situation, and that it might be a plot by her enemy. Tell her our first priority is finding a way to cure people that doesn't involve slaughtering them, and our second is to track every single shipment of 'Sanguine' that ever existed. Those centers of distribution will also be the centers of an outbreak. Ideally, the smartest girl in the world will Deus Ex a vaccine for Old Blood, but I will settle for getting everything we can out of Sinister's records. Just let me know if she has questions you can't answer."

"Very well," my maiden nodded.

"And I?" Priscilla asked, eager to help.

"I needed you to keep an ear to the digital ground," I told her. "Forums, social media, news outlets, check all of it for mentions of Sanguine, odd beasts, brutal killings, or a sudden onslaught of blood-based Supers. Again, those will be early signs of an outbreak of the Beast Plague."

Priscilla nodded seriously, clenching her fists in determination.

I turned from the cute display, worried I would gain Dragon Diabetes, and faced the room as a whole.

"While we are working, we need to be brainstorming ideas. The Hunt is my last option, but it is one I will take. So please do not force me to take it."

"What of..." Emma trailed off, not finishing the question.

She didn't need to.

"They'll be back," I said, looking at the still-meditating Raven. "And they will do more good out there, being heroes, than with us now. Let's give them some time. They'll be back."

They had to come back.

How would we survive eternity together if our Family could not survive this?

I shook off the thought and the melancholy and got my head back in the game.

Right now, I have an unannounced appointment with our dear head of the PRT.

********

In the darkness of space, well beyond the bounds of Earth's solar system, a portal opened with a cracking 'BOOM' that was lost to the silence of the void.

The passage was utterly invisible in the dark void, existing for only a second.

Just as unnoticed, if still visible, was the humanoid that flew through it in the few moments it was opened.

Guardian did not turn to look at Earth or even so much as blink as he jettisoned into the depths of space toward the Shi'ar homeworld.