It was often said that Swiss chocolate was the best for its milky smoothness, while Belgian chocolate was the best for its stuffings of cream, praline and caramel and more elaborate mixes. Maybe that was true fifty years before, but after eating my way through over a hundred of the highest rated shops I could say with confidence that modern travel guides either threw recommendations to the highest bidders or consumers nowadays had no idea what quality tasted like. Because it turned out that Norwegian salted chocolate was superior to all other options.

Tromsø, Norway, often referred to as the "Paris of the North", was a vibrant place that captivated with its fascinating mix of modern culture and breathtaking nature. Here you could immerse yourself in the rich cultural history, enjoy the vibrant city life and explore the untouched Arctic landscape at the same time - all while wolfing down a two-pound bar of the best chocolate I've ever had without superpowers being involved. That I was sitting on top of the bridge connecting the two halves of the city, looking up at a brilliant night sky where the green-blue band of the Aurora Borealis danced overhead only enhanced the experience.

A brief activation of my senses revealed the mechanism behind the dynamic patterns of brilliant lights that appeared as curtains, rays, spirals, or dynamic flickers covering the entire sky. I'd known it was due to an intrusion of the Solar Wind on the Earth's magnetosphere but the precise details gathered by my senses showed me the phenomenon under a new light. If I wanted to, I could probably make something even more impressive with enough effort - as in, months of forcefield creation - anywhere in the world. With far, far less effort, maybe a couple of hours, I could build a field that generated high-energy particles similar to those in the Solar Wind, projecting similar phenomena far beyond the field itself. It wouldn't have nearly the same interesting and complex patterns though. Maybe one day that idiots would not have the power to cause great harm I'd be able to go on a real vacation and do some inspirational power-assisted art. Florida could do with its own Aurora to go with all the monsters, right? Right.

I ate the last pieces of salted chocolate and stretched again. I'd been procrastinating for half a day now, but I felt pretty entitled to the break. It wasn't every day that someone realized they'd forgotten their official birthday for more than a week. On the other hand, the bad guys waited for no-one and if my powers list was right there was at least the potential for time-travel bullshit eventually. So with a sigh, I focused back to my pick of a new power. I'd run out of chocolate anyway.

Immediately, I discarded all the options that just gave me more of the same healing I already had. Doubling up on regeneration might look good on paper, but each active power used the same limited slots all the other powers also used up. Six abilities at once might seem like a lot, but when one had over three times as many options, it became a significant limitation. Thus Redundant Regeneration was out and with some hesitation so was Progressive Regeneration. Maybe when I had the points to upgrade my active powers capacity to the next level I'd consider it.

Adaptive Regeneration was nice, but ran counter to my existing Empowering Regeneration. Sure, with enough exposure I'd eventually become immune to standardized weapons and mass-produced monsters but with every power of every super being essentially unique, it was less effective against them unless we'd already fought once and I survived to adapt to them without them developing their powers in the meantime. If, on the other hand, the fight was dangerous enough that survival was questionable, I would want to grow stronger through Empowering Regeneration as quickly as possible.

Devoid Regeneration was cute. Its healing rate was nothing impressive or special, but by not counting as healing or even a power, it could not be countered by things that stopped them. It couldn't be enhanced either, but I didn't have any enhancers for Regeneration yet. Were it a standalone effect, a permanent one, I'd take it in a heartbeat. Having an ace in the hole precisely for those situations the enemy thought to bring a counter to your known abilities was always good to have and unlike trying to double up, this power would replace a better Regeneration skill at the times it failed to work. A strong contender.

Retroactive Regeneration was the odd one out. It was not a healing skill at all, it undid temporal bullshit and reality warping. I already had a general resistance to such shenanigans in Immutable Force though, and I kept it almost always on. While being able to reverse changes that had already overcome my resistance or happened during times my resistance skill wasn't active, requiring a second active power to do so was too much of an investment for a form of attacks that were exceedingly rare as far as I could tell.

Finally, we came to what I thought was the best option of the lot; Holistic Regeneration. It gave recovery from everything negative, however slow. This didn't mean just damage or direct harm but the kind of indirect shenanigans magic like transformations or curses was known for. Sure, it was a lot weaker than the other skills in their specialty, but by being a very broadly-applicable option it made sense for someone with a limit on how many powers could be active at a time. It also meant that it would cover possibilities that the other skills would not touch at all. There were far too many ugly, twisted possibilities out there, not the least of which the corrupted empowerment the Red Dragon forced on other supers. In the end, between it and Devoid Regeneration I picked Holistic Regeneration.

Name: Maya Wennefer Bio: female human, 18y0m12d Known skills:

Points: 0/241

Action and Reaction, Chronal Leap, Empowering Regeneration, Eyebeams, Focused Invulnerability, Force Adjustment, Force Awareness, Forced Acceleration, Forced Intangibility, Forcefield Creation, Greater Proximakinesis, Holistic Regeneration, Immutable Force, Instant Action, Lasting Force, Retributive Defense, Super Suit, Spatial Distortion, Spatial Leap

Attributes: Might 58, Agility 30, Reason 6, Vigilance 28, Ego 30, Luck 7

Word of Force: Power IV, Control III, Versatility IV, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope III

Word of Self: Power IV, Control III, Versatility III, Number of Effects III, Range II, Scope II

xxxx

As I flew over the Everglades and the more alien terrain at what had once been my home town and the Invasion's intrusion point, I set my powers for general combat. Force Awareness, Force Adjustment, Greater Proximakinesis for mobility, scouting and defense/offense combo. Forced Acceleration because doing everything faster was always a good idea. Immutable Force, because when delving into monster central it was always good to have a general anti-bullshit protection. Last but not least, Eyebeams. Several types of monsters couldn't easily be affected with kinetic force so having a broader type of attack made sense. I could have slotted Action and Reaction instead to be able to affect the incorporeal and the intangible, but the added benefit of range often gave considerable tactical advantages.

Since this was not an outing where I'd want to pass as somebody else or a mission where I'd remain hidden to ambush enemies, I was back in my white, blue caped, blue-booted costume previously created with my Super-Suit power. The monsters would certainly not care and if someone saw, well, I was a superhero. Recent evidence to the contrary, I was supposed to be seen and recognized. My relationship with mass media wasn't the best, mostly because I absolutely refused to tolerate their canned, prefabricated bullshit, but being captured on cellphone cameras would not be the same. Not that it was likely to happen, given what the plan was.

They were called subjugation missions in various computer games before some idiots who shall remain nameless introduced the idea that superpowers should look and function like such games. In truth they were just killing monsters for hire, whitewashed into sounding cooler for the masses. That particular practice had been reality for millennia before games were a thing, of course.

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Now, due to the nature of how monsters spawned in the corrupted state, going in and killing monsters always made things worse. But General Rinaker had an idea that bypassed the problem. Me, I was just the best we had at applying said idea. If it worked we might be able to stabilize the situation or at least limit loss of life on a grand scale. If it didn't... it wasn't as if we weren't facing an unsolvable problem already. Even if it backfired though, foreign villains were already growing dangerous. We had to keep improving and General Rinaker had rightly scolded me for holding back on the monster fighting. It was time to stop procrastinating and fix this.

I picked up speed, going faster and faster as I moved North across the wastelands. Even with Force Adjustment reducing the side effects, the air first howled then ignited in a plasma sheath as my speed exceeded that of any man-made spaceship four times over. Even at speeds they could survive without burning away, said spaceships would be flying deaf and blind as their own plasma sheath would block both electronic signals and visual observation. Yet thanks to Force Awareness allowing me to perceive the world at the level of forces and their interactions, I was not blind. I could see monsters over two dozen miles away so even at my current velocity I had over a second to see their approach and react to it - and react to it I did.

Eyebeams lanced out of the plasma sheath, blasting targets as quickly as my senses could locate them, firing out as quickly as I could aim with the benefit of superhuman agility and Forced Acceleration effectively multiplying the flow of time for me. A tenth of a second was the Guinness world record for firing from the hip; my rate of fire was an order of magnitude higher, and it was so slow only because I had to pick my targets with care based on several criteria.

A large group of shadows died as I made a fly-by attack from six miles up. Shadows were among the most dangerous mid-tier undead due to their incorporeality. For soldiers that relied on firearms, even enhanced ones, or supers with a crippling over-reliance on physical attacks they were basically an unkillable nightmare. Before the advent of powers a single shadow could have killed the entire US army if it caught them. Things were less lopsided now but not far enough; even individual shadows still were terrifying for the rank and file and an unacceptable threat. They had to go, so I did the spiritual equivalent of clean-up.

Instead of rapid fire, a continuous blast swept through a small murder of Stymphalian Chickens, then another and another. Unlike several depictions of that particular labor of Heracles, the overgrown magical avians were the size of a medium tank, made of solid steel that could shrug .50 caliber machine gun shots like rain, could throw sword-sized razor wings that exploded like grenades and breathed fire. Even all that put together wouldn't have made them truly dangerous to a modern army, except for two things; they could fly as fast as a military-grade helicopter and would explode like a heavy artillery shell once sufficiently injured. They could still be stopped but in the open they could set dozens of fires before antitank missiles did them in. Fortunately, their numbers rarely exceeded twenty thousand across the entire state. My sweeping beams culled every murder I could find, massively thinning their numbers in only a few minutes. If the General's suggestion didn't work though, they would all be back quickly and in greater numbers than before.

The third target group were casters. Many people who had unlocked their powers in the invasion still died. Outside our own group of survivors who got our powers early and were given help by a non-human ally to boot, the majority died in fact. Most of those that did came back as one type of undead or another. Thousands of returned horrors with the mind of a human, the twisted instincts of a monster - undead were cannibalistic - and the ability to understand that killing others made them stronger. Then they were those that hadn't been killed and brought back but willingly chose to embrace undeath by collaborating with the Invaders. Those had been initially few, but developing abilities to convert more to their service was not hard, it even came build-in with some undead monster types.

Both types of intelligent monsters I killed wherever I could find above anything else, often blasting entire areas when they were hiding inside ruins or underwater. Unfortunately, the solution would be even less permanent to them than it would be for other monsters because every one of them still left was capable of reformations. Specters just came back. Ghouls who'd fed on enough lives just spent some of their stored life-force to rise from the site of their death anew. And liches, skeletal undead capable of inventing their own spells, could anchor themselves to places or objects and regenerate given time.

There were ongoing debates on the internet on whether the monsters had been influenced by the ideas and myths of Earth, or been invented by the Mavethans whole cloth. There were ongoing debates between survivors on whether the flame wars caused by said debates were contributing to the problem through the mechanism of generating magic through violence that all Mavethan sorcery was ultimately based on. Not being personally interested in either discussion but having been repeatedly annoyed by proponents of all debated ideas over the past month, I would be very happy if General Rinaker's plan worked and all such arguments were suddenly made irrelevant.

I made one pass North, a second on the return trip, then repeated the whole thing twice more, blasting all the while. A small percentage of the monsters' power was transferred to me but the overall magic generated was more than the difference, I could see it from how the surrounding monsters were responding as the magic levels started to rise. That was the usual response of the cursed lands to any attempted purge of the monster infestation. It was not some giant spell the Mavethans had cast, some ritual that could be conventionally interrupted, it was entirely the cause of how they had shaped the nature of their sorcery. It was meant to corrupt, it was meant to create random monstrosities out of the tainted earth... so it did. But there was one way to ensure the magic would not taint the land.

After my tenth pass, my tactics shifted. Instead of engaging with my eyebeams at range, I flew lower. Not on the area I'd scoured of the enemies we wanted, but on the areas directly struck by Mot's rampage. Places where fields of gigantic iron spikes had replaced towns and ravaged cities, where abundant twisted growth created impassable fields of plants that weeped poison and bore fruit that could walk and wail and whale on anyone that got too close. Areas where lakes had been turned to boiling tar, or the land itself was partially animated and given a hatred for all that walked on two feet. Through all those places I set my course, dropped the Eyebeams skill in favor of Focused Invulnerability and an immunity to high-speed collisions, then I flew faster.

I became a burning streak, a human missile that crashed through everything in her path without slowing down. At twenty miles a second everything I slammed into exploded as if hit by a meteor, molten fragments flying for over a hundred feet. Overgrowth detonated with the force of cruise missiles. Steel spikes liquefied in a two-yard-radius then blasted in showers of glowing, searing ejecta, the air itself was blasted off my path as a plasma sheath. Most monsters were simply obliterated. Each crossing of the state took a dozen seconds; in an hour I'd blasted my way through a strip two miles wide. Then I did it again and again and again and again.

By the time the Sun was low on the horizon, a dozen burning strips had been blasted through many of the most corrupted, most heavily infested areas. Individually the monsters slain by this were mere cannon fodder. Collectively, their millions of deaths had a profound impact on the magic levels in the area. It wasn't about clearing the area, though the destruction of permanent obstacles might help in future reclamations. What it was about was killing the larger populations of monsters faster than they could regenerate. It was drudge-work, utterly exhausting, and I'd need a week to do it to the entire state. But for the time being it had left temporarily high magic levels with temporarily very few monsters in those places. The results were about what General Rinaker had predicted.

The monsters that hadn't been killed, only a few thousands instead of millions, drank in the released power like a bottomless pit does water. They immediately started mutating at rates never seen before, not even during Mot's rampage that killed hundreds of thousands of people. Each of them took in the power of hundreds, even thousands of fellow monsters, growing in power individually until they matched the smaller kaiju that had been artificially created in Canada, or the stronger middle-weight supers. Each was as powerful as a battleship now and from how they bloated in size and ugliness like mutant balloons, some might approach the size of one.

But they were only equivalent to battleships. Not long-range missile batteries. Not nukes. Not towering monstrosities that could lay waste to cities. They were also dumb, because the plan had deliberately targeted the smartest, more unusual and dangerous, more experienced monsters first. They might have been given massive amounts of power, but something that started as a simple undead brute would only develop relatively simple and straightforward abilities. The most amount of power concentrated to its least effective forms. And this was what the entire outcome hinged on.

I flew towards the closest mutating freak, a skinless, two-headed monstrosity with arms the size of locomotives, legs even thicker and larger, and hundreds of gaping sores all over its body oozing corrosive sludge. It massed less than a thousand tons though, so it was no more difficult to pick up with Greater Proximakinesis than a particular unruly puppy. Then we flew straight up at close to a hundred gravities. In ten seconds we were out of the thicker lower atmosphere and its high air resistance so we sped up faster. In forty-five seconds we were a thousand miles away from the Earth with five and a half times escape velocity.

I reached for a patch of toxic sludge. It did not feel alive to my powers. If it had, I'd brought along a few pounds of mud as a spare. Then I shifted my invulnerability to what I was about to produce and reduced the nuclear binding force in the material by a factor of twenty. A pound of slime became a ten-megaton pseudonuclear blast that completely annihilated the monster. Some of the unleashed power was absorbed by me but the rest had nowhere to go. There were no monsters here for it to feed. No material objects to anchor it. No active rituals to claim it. And the Earth was moving away at a good few kilometers per second. Like the destruction of the Red Dragon's shade, the energy dissipated into space. By the time a fraction of it reached Earth it would be so dispersed it wouldn't be able to form monsters at all.

I was back on the ground in ten seconds flat to pick up the next monster.