Fighting, I had learned, was like a puzzle.

And if you didn’t solve it, you died.

I waited in the center of Memorial Square for my first customers. It was one of the only wide-open spaces in the Skip, a half-mile plaza once intended to accommodate all of the shopping and socialization needs of the borough, now a desolate colosseum for anyone looking to pick a fight. After the Skip had been selected as a dumping ground for refugees, they had chosen this square to erect a memorial to everyone they had lost, hence the name. I can’t describe it to you, because it was torn down shortly afterward by city authorities. Then, after the supervillain takeover, they rebuilt it again, only for SCAR to rip it down. Then again, and the Nihilists defaced it, before SCAR then blew it up. They hadn’t tried to rebuild it since I arrived in the Skip. Now it was just Memorial Square, sans memorial.

I floated a couple feet in the air, lotus-style, where it once stood. Ever so slightly, I relaxed my mental barriers. I didn’t open them—I had no desire to sample the emotional ambiance of the Skip—but I needed to be able to sense people as they arrived.

The first comer was a vampire, one of the garden variety castoff spawn types, more animal than human. He probably hadn’t even been at Club Hellfire—more likely he just saw a girl sitting alone in the dark and decided to have a snack. He crept up behind me, thinking darkness and silence would protect him.

I didn’t even bother turning around. I pointed an index finger back over my shoulder and released some of the energy I was holding.

Light flashed, force hit him like a wrecking ball, and I followed him with my mind as he arced through the air for about fifty feet before landing. He wasn’t injured, probably—vampires were like undead cockroaches—but he was startled as all hell, and he hit the ground running, fleeing the square only slightly faster than an Olympic sprinter. New vampires barely got any powers for all of their drawbacks.

I waited.

Next came a hail of gunfire. Most of it plinked off the ground around me, throwing up sparks and chunks of stone, but some of it would have hit me, if not for the psionic shield in its way. Light blossomed on my right, a dozen glowing rings spreading out in concentric circles from the points of impact, revealing the little dome I had erected.

Whoever it was, they were too far away for me to sense clearly with as little as I was letting in. Judging by the volume and rate of fire, there were at least three of them opening up on full auto. They had either hoped to take me out quickly or just didn’t have the trigger discipline to take measured shots, because they burnt through their ammo in a couple seconds. A combat-trained individual can reload a magazine in about three seconds. These goons were not combat trained, so I had a little more time to formulate a response.

I extended my mind a little bit in the direction the bullets had come from and felt there were actually five people. I also began to feel the gross, clinging miasma of misery and despair imprinted on every brick of the Skip. It was like the land itself was in pain. I wanted to retreat back into my mind and put my defenses on maximum, but I didn’t.

I gathered up all of the energy my shield had stolen from the bullets and, with a small contribution, hurled it back in their direction.

A car-sized wedge of light rushed out from the dome around me, crossing the square like a bulldozer on a rocket, and smashed into a dilapidated storefront, blowing out the glass and most of the facade. Even from so far away, I heard shouts and screams of surprise. I couldn’t tell if any of them were injured, but they all managed to retreat in good order, out the back of the building and out of range of my senses. Hurriedly, I threw my mental shields back to maximum, cutting out the encroaching emotional residue of the Skip, before remembering why I was there and softening them just enough to sense anyone approaching.

I didn’t sense anyone—I saw them first.

They came walking down the main road into the square, right down the center of the street. They were both wearing colors. The one on my left wore full-body dull green tactical armor with a probably-ultratech visor that had a long, slightly glowing red eye slit. The other also wore the same shade of green, but only on his strongman-style shorts over black tights. Otherwise he was shirtless, with a predictably buff bruiser physique. I respected his commitment to the classics.

I wished my costume was more classic.

Here’s a secret about super-people, villain or hero or otherwise—nobody ever wears matching costumes for just teams of two.

I dodged to the side just as a stream of metallic pinions started slamming into the ground where I had been, embedding themselves ten inches into the stone. That kind of force would have ripped right through my shield. And my self.

Looking up, I saw a winged man swooping down over the square, also in green. He screamed in frustration, a startlingly bird-like screech, before turning into a wide bank for another pass. His wings shimmered with a million more of the pinions.

A cloud of sharp, fast-moving metal feathers detached themselves from the flying meta and streaked towards me like crossbow bolts.

The villain with the visor put a hand up to it, and the glow intensified into what I was sure was about to be some manner of beam, most likely of the “death” variety.

The strongman rushed forward, his unnaturally long and fast lope clearly enhanced by superstrength, his skin shifting into what looked like asphalt.

And, worst of all, I felt energy condense around me—psionically shifted energy. Whoever it was clearly had both training and focus, because there was barely a glimmer in the air of shed light as a ring of force wrapped around my torso and slammed me downwards out of my hover. I got my feet beneath and kept upright, but I couldn’t move at all.

Like I said, a puzzle.

Puzzles might look overwhelming at first. They might have a thousand pieces jumbled up in a box that’s telling you it’s supposed to look like a beautiful sunset and judging you for not having everything in order yet. That’s the first hurdle. You see the whole instead of the individual pieces and it’s all too big to comprehend. That’s why anybody who learns puzzles learns to start with the corners. This was a little more complicated than a jigsaw puzzle, but the principle was always the same. Corners, edges, build towards the middle, one step at a time.

Step one: I couldn’t move, and therefore couldn’t fight back. These problems were my corners.

Telekinesis versus telekinesis was tricky. On one hand, you could be powerful enough to shake a city to its foundations. You could shatter mountains, knock the moon out of orbit, or blow up the Sun, and if you encountered someone more focused and skilled than you, none of that mattered. Their will would cut through yours like a knife through butter, and it didn’t matter how much butter there was. The band of force around me was like iron, far more concentrated than my own power could be, and while I could eventually break it, I was pretty sure I’d be dead three times over ten minutes before that happened.

So if I couldn’t break the construct, I had to break the maker’s focus.

Another tricky thing about telekinesis is that it does, in some very confusing ways, deal with physics. Right now, the issue in play was leverage. The farther out you tried to operate a construct, the weaker hold you had on it, for the same reason that holding a textbook out at arm’s length would tire you out very quickly, while holding one against your body basically took no effort at all. That was part of the reason why I almost always flung force directly from my hands versus reaching out and manipulating it at distance like this psion was. Also, I wasn’t sure if I would even be able to do that if I tried—blasts and torrents were pretty much the extent of my arsenal.

My point is, whoever was doing this had to be close. I couldn’t sense anyone—there was a way to hide from psychic detection, I just didn’t know how to do it—but I didn’t need to.

In the quarter-second I had to consider the situation, I formulated a solution for step one.

As I’ve said, telekinesis usually generates light due to an inefficiency in energy conversion, which could be rectified by proper technique and focus. That meant, conversely, there was a way to be super inefficient about it, and that’s exactly what I did. I shut my eyes and unleashed my power in every direction as sloppily and stupidly as I could.

The square lit up with a searing white light, radiating out from me, along with a rush of force no more potent than a gentle breeze. In retrospect, it might have been smarter to only be half as sloppy and maybe deflect the pinions about to impale me, but I wanted to make extra sure that step one went off without a hitch.

It did. The construct around me turned soft, malleable, and I threw myself against it sideways. It shattered, and I rolled out of the way just as the ground where I had been became a miniature metal forest of spikes. As an added bonus, I felt whatever the psion had been doing to hide from me falter—they had snuck up behind me, within twenty feet of my back. Should have just blasted me.

Now for my edges.

Almost everybody who had been looking at me was currently in some measure of disarray, having not expecting a human-sized flashbang to go off in their faces. The psion was going to need a few seconds. The flying meta—Razorwing, I remembered suddenly, I had heard of these guys—broke off and twisted away frantically, and I intuited that eagle vision might have been a part of his powerset. Strongman—I thought his name was Roadrage, clever—had raised his arm in front of his eyes to block the light.

That left the visor guy. I didn’t know his name, but I assumed it started with an ‘R’.

He tracked me as I moved like the light had no effect on him at all. Made sense—the light currently building up in his visor was brighter than the one I had generated. I had fewer options than you’d think. I could try to blast him first, but the problem with playing quickdraw was that I didn’t know what form his attack would take. Could have been force, could have been heat, could have been gamma rays—that was his name! Raygunner.

If it was the latter two, or basically anything else, there was a good chance that he would fry me where I stood. My ability to deflect forms of energy aside from force was limited as, again, I just didn’t know how to do it. It would go right through my own attack and do its damage, or outright kill me.

Dodging was also probably not on the menu. It was almost a guarantee that he’d be able to track me with his eyes faster than I could move, as eyes are notoriously good at looking at things. Even babies can do it, and babies are stupid.

Fortunately, they had made a tactical error.

The “everyone charge and overwhelm the target” thing wasn’t a bad idea most of the time, but there’s a reason they don’t hand out bayonets anymore in the army. Mixing melee and ranged was a recipe for friendly fire—or in this case, mobile cover.

As Roadrage charged in, I put him between myself and Raygunner, breaking the line of sight, and moved along with his blind charge, keeping it broken. The blast never came, but a curse of frustration did.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Furthermore, moving backwards provided me with an excellent opportunity.

Build towards the center.

I raised my palm in the direction of the psion, who was just starting to recover. She was pretty, I noticed, in the split-second I had. A redhead with a soft, mousy face. She wasn’t wearing green, and I didn’t know her name. I assumed she was work-for-hire.

She should have considered a different career.

I loosed my blast, and she raised her psychokinetic shield. It was just as excellent as her binding had been, strong and durable. She was better than me, had presumably been doing this longer than me—who hadn’t, honestly—but it was immediately clear that I was leagues more powerful than her. My force hit her shield and she stopped most of it, but this was where weird physics came into it again. The shield held up, but got pushed backwards. She, in turn, maintained the exact same amount of space between herself and the shield, as though she were holding it in front of herself on a rigid pole. Her feet scraped brick as she was driven backwards—

—straight into the blinded strongman’s path.

He hit her at about thirty miles per hour, a superpowered behemoth of black-top. He didn’t slow down a single step. The impact cracked, and her broken body ragdolled a short distance through the air and came to a skidding stop twenty feet away. She didn’t move. Her arm was bent backwards.

I would see that in my dreams later.

The strongman finally realized that his charge had failed and he dug in his feet, screeching to a halt. He shook his head, blinking, then turned and squinted at me. I don’t think he realized he had taken out his teammate. He probably hadn’t even felt the impact.

He shouted, “Tricky, aren’t you?” in a gravelly voice before he rushed me.

I kept him between me and Raygunner, and held my ground.

His fist came at my nose like heavy artillery.

I reached up with my hand and caught it.

Because, two years ago, I had inexplicably developed superstrength.

I said, “Nope. Just stubborn.”

He had just enough time to look surprised before my own punch took him straight in the diaphragm. He rocketed backwards, heels an inch off the ground for a dozen yards, before falling just enough to start tumbling tail over teakettle, plowing a furrow in the ground as he went.

Okay, so, it wasn’t quite inexplicable. Amongst the plethora of psionic skills—telepathy, psychometry, empathy, and more types of -kinesis than I could write down and keep this paragraph from taking the rest of the chapter—there was an obscure, rare ability called “intrakinesis.” It had to do with the ability to regulate the flow of energy through one’s own body. You could think of it like chi, if you’ve ever done any Eastern martial arts. Psions who mastered it could do a whole bunch of very useful things. Bind their cells together to make themselves more durable, redirect impacts to pass through less vital parts of their body, negate them entirely—or benchpress a spaceship.

And, it turned out, intrakinesis was not only in my arsenal—it was the thing that I was best at.

Sometimes dreams really do come true.

I shot forward, flying, fists in front of me, and right as Roadrage managed to get his feet beneath him again, I crashed into him with the exact same level of indifference that he had hit the other psion with.

He rocketed backwards again, letting out a breathless curse.

So did visored Raygunner as he dove to the side, out of the way.

I stopped suddenly next to him, eighty to zero on a dime, letting the strongman tumble. Raygunner managed to keep himself somewhat oriented, never taking his eyes off me, and raised his hand to his visor even as he rolled.

I was quicker—quick as a thought, in fact. I blurred behind him, grabbed his chin to direct his head, and pointed it skyward.

He unleashed his blast right as Razorwing began to swoop back in for his next attack, letting loose an unbroken lance of red energy. Heat, I thought.

I had planned on this being the next piece of my puzzle, but my aim with someone else’s head was off. The shot went wide, slicing nothing but air. Maybe that was a good thing—I already had one potential fatality. I didn’t need to see someone cut in half tonight. No need to ruin my fun.

It did cause Razorwing to break off again, though, which was good enough for me. He wheeled away, and Raygunner twisted his hand to shut off his visor. I let him.

Then I casually chopped the back of his head and let his unconscious body drop.

I sensed Roadrage coming. Instead of turning around, I blasted my whole body backwards into him, catching him off guard and stopping him in his tracks. That impact was fairly jarring to me too—I hadn’t had much room to accelerate, and he was big and heavy. I blinked as I felt that weird, silvery shock sensation all throughout my body.

I didn’t have time to dwell on it. I spun around and threw looping punch into his ribcage. My knuckles didn’t like it, but the crunch of it was deeply satisfying.

He grunted and swiped at me with his own punch, but he was too slow. I flashed backwards, then forwards again with a shoulderblock that took him in the chest. He slid backwards again, but this time, kept his feet. He looked pissed—and scared.

I realized that my teeth were bared in a grin that felt unhinged. I didn’t want to interrogate the feeling behind it.

And I didn’t have time to. He leapt forward, presumably to smash me with a haymaker.

Here’s some free advice: if you ever find yourself in a fight, don’t jump. Ever. It doesn’t matter if you have killer karate skills, or superstrength—in fact, it’s actively detrimental to the latter. It doesn’t matter if you can stop a train on its tracks if you can’t brace yourself against the ground. Even if you can fly—fly, don’t jump.

I caught his haymaker, which had severely diminished power, and uppercutted him into the air.

He rocketed upwards, and I flew—flew, not leapt—after him. And then past him, about ten feet, before I put my hands together and drove them both down, axe-handle-style, into his head as he rose. His ascent stopped, violently, and he shot back downwards twice as fast.

Because I could generate leverage in the air, and he couldn’t.

Don’t ever jump.

He crashed hard enough to send up a decent little dust cloud up around him, and I admired my handiwork.

Also, never do that.

An iron pinion embedded itself into my arm as I stupidly hung in the open air patting myself on the back. I let out a reflexive shout and threw myself to the side, only for one to graze my ribcage—this time, he had anticipated my dodge. Probably because I did it in the same direction as last time. Stupid.

In sudden desperation, I turned and blasted force in what I thought was his direction—he was out beyond my senses. I got lucky—the cloud of lethal feathers hit my stream of energy and diverted, though one still passed close enough to my face that I felt the wind from it. They tumbled out of the air, and I searched the sky for Razorwing.

He was higher than I expected—it seemed he enjoyed having the high ground. I didn’t see any reason to let him keep that advantage, so I streaked towards him.

Shotgun bursts of feathers launched at me, but I dodged, spiraled, and blasted them aside. He did a good job at timing his shots and making the spread just wide enough to force me off course multiple times, managing to stay ahead of me for about ten seconds, but I was more agile than him in the air. I caught up to him.

He twisted, mid-air, and tried to slash one of his wings at me—it was still covered in thousands upon thousands of the little missiles, more than enough to rip me in half like a chainsaw—but I saw it coming, and managed to roll just over the top of the attack. My momentum carried me behind him, and he turned again, but this time I got to him before he could try again. I hit him, pushing him backwards through the air, and drew my fist back.

His eyes lit up in triumph. Since he wasn’t using them to fly anymore, he curled his wings forward around us, and suddenly I was sandwiched between two walls of bristling metal death, prime position for pin-cushioning.

Idiot.

There’s a hard truth about superpowers, and it’s that they aren’t fair. Hyperion, for example, far outstripped me, Ripper, and pretty much every other meta on the planet in terms of pure strength—everyone except the Guardsman, maybe a couple others. He could also generate fire hot enough and plentiful enough to turn most of the city into molten iron. There was no rhyme or reason that anyone knew for why he was so uniquely gifted—he just was.

But even outliers aside, there are some things about powers that seem cheap to people who think about such things, and one of them was that manual methods of flight—wings, rocket jets, et cetera—were almost always strictly worse than (as it was termed) automatic flight. That is, metas who could just…fly. If you’ve ever seen someone fly without an obvious source of how they were accomplishing it, that was automatic flight.

It came with several advantages, and one of them was that metas with automatic flight could decelerate far faster, or if they were somehow superhumanly durable, just stop.

I stopped.

He launched his volley of missiles and I was no longer there. He ripped his own wings to shreds in a nauseating cloud of blood and fleshy carnage.

He screamed as he spun through the air, uncontrolled, and crashed onto the roof of one of the buildings at the side of the plaza.

I zipped down next to him—going pointedly around the bloody mist he had left behind—and landed. He was in far too much pain to register my presence, letting out a stream of sobbed curses as he writhed on the ground.

Just to make sure, I walked over, took the stems of his wings in both of my hands, and squeezed. Bone cracked—they felt hollow. He screamed, suddenly in too much pain not to register my presence. He begged me to let him go, I think. He was barely intelligible, almost to the point of gibberish.

I heard a crash below and felt the building tremble.

I let him go.

Curiously, I walked to the roof’s edge, stepped onto it, and looked down.

Roadrage was embedded in the brickwork, having apparently leapt halfway up the side of the building. He stared up at me, teeth bared, and started clawing his way up, eschewing handholds in favor of just roughly gouging his fingers into brick and mortar.

He screamed, “Get back down here!” up at me.

I felt giddy, maniacal laughter bubbling up out of my throat.

If he insisted.

Finally, the center of the puzzle.

I leapt—do as I say, not as I do—up and, after hanging in the air for one wonderful, weightless moment, shot myself downwards on a wave of force.

Into a pro wrestling-style elbow drop.

Because how many times in your life do you really have the opportunity to pull that out in a serious fight?

He saw it coming. It didn’t matter.

I hit him like a comet falling to Earth, ripping him off the building. Maybe it was elbow first, maybe not. The collision dazed me probably almost as much as it did him.

But not nearly as much as the landing.

I wish I could tell you what it was like, but I don’t remember it. I woke up maybe five seconds afterwards in a crater, Roadrage unconscious beneath me, my entire body letting me know that I had made a serious and unforgivable mistake.

As flooded with adrenaline and dopamine as I was, I really didn’t give a damn.

I laid there panting, bleeding from several wounds, and listened to the stones from the crash landing still clattering to the ground for several meters around us. I shut my eyes, mania and giddiness coursing through my veins, my problems finally—briefly—forgotten.

“Impressive, Darkstar,” said a man’s voice from the edge of the crater. “Clumsy, but impressive.”

I looked up.

A man in blue spandex stood at the lip of the crater looking down at us.

There had been any number of legendary superheroes over the course of the last century. First among them, obviously, was the Guardsman, but he was so legendary that it almost didn’t count. That was like looking at the sizes of the Great Lakes and calling them tiny compared to the ocean. Sure, but why would you even bring it up? It’s almost off-topic.

So understand me when I say that the hero standing at the edge of the crater was almost as famous as the Guardsman. And, sticking with the metaphor, the difference between them wasn’t even on the level of the difference between, say, the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. Maybe the Atlantic and the Indian. Though the Guardsman pretty much had to be the Pacific, so maybe put the Atlantic Ocean with the Arctic. I’m getting way too deep into this metaphor and I apologize.

What I’m trying to say is, the hero standing above me was Paragon.

And I was fucked.