Superstrong hands roughly pulled him out of the harsh glare that scorched what remained of his clothing and much of his skin.

  Forcefields emerged between him and the seeking gold light as they carried him away like a desperate parent carried a child away from an onrushing flood.

  A glance to his chest revealed ugly blisters, but that was better than more gray, like the gash in his side.

  He couldn’t see anything within, but understood that the organs that had been in there as of his last checkup were gone.

  The beating in his chest gave him hope to cling to, as faint as it was.

  Perhaps his humanity wasn’t entirely gone.

  Except, he couldn’t beat the demigod as he was.

  He couldn’t go back for that was a weaker him.

  But, he didn’t want to move forward down that path the demigod had mentioned.

  Strength enough to strip his father and uncle of much of their powers once, meant strength enough to strip a demigod’s or even a so-called god’s.

  Let go of his promise to himself.

  To his family.

  To his friends.

  To everyone.

  To the victims of the past monster that had birthed him.

  It was the only way to seize the strength.

  The wheels turned.

  A plan took shape.

  Let go.

  Subsume the demigod.

  Take the memories.

  Take everything.

  Learn the location of the spire that led to the demigod’s father’s world.

  Travel there before he lost control.

  Before he lost himself.

  Alin would cease to be.

  Only the fog entity would remain.

  Doom life on an entire world to save his own.

  The choice balanced on edge of a cliff.

  He rejected it immediately.

  Run to the edge, but don’t jump off.

  The gold light winked out.

  The demigod clapped like thunder, scattering the gray.

  Only for it to rush back with the echoes riding ahead like surfers on a wave.

  The demigod staggered from superstrong blows.

  Weapons glowed brighter and more distinctly than ever before as some pierced the demigod’s protections to score wet gold lines against his obsidian-colored skin.

  Alin pulled from the demigod without the typical restraint, nor the disgust that always accompanied that aspect of his abilities.

  He funneled it right back into the gray, into the echoes, giving them more being, bringing them closer to their true selves. The ones the fog entity had subsumed long ago.

  Light flashed, blinding.

  The demigod stood like a beacon pushing away the thick fog encroaching from the dark ocean.

  “Still not enough… too much…”

  “Mean it when you take it.”

  The voice came from behind his shoulder.

  He saw a form take shape.

  Ethereal to corporeal.

  Gray mist to brown skin.

  Clothed in a simple t-shirt and sweatpants.

  An old man.

  He knew even if he hadn’t seen old pictures.

  “Tito Novy?”

  His grandmother’s brother.

  “Eyes forward, Boy.”

  Golden light flashed.

  A thin beam struck sudden teal panes.

  Another form took shape behind his other shoulder.

  “Tita Lu…”

  His grandmother’s cousin winked at him.

  “He’s right. You have to want to take it.”

  Her form wavered, heralding the breaking of her triple-stacked forcefield.

  The golden beam fizzled, uncovering a golden arrow hidden within.

  Crimson light flared.

  A large, glowing hand snatched it an arm’s length in front of his face.

  Tito Novy clenched his fist and broke the arrow with his extension.

  “But— I don’t—”

  “Bahala na si Boy!” Tita Lu smiled.

  “Huh?”

  “We trust you,” Tito Novy said even as he enlarged the crimson-hued projection from his hands to block a barrage of golden arrows.

  “Take from all of them.”

  A third figure coalesced in front of Alin.

  Short, wiry, bald.

  Wearing basketball shorts and a ratty, old Laker’s jersey.

  A really old man from what he could tell.

  Tito Carlos.

  His grandfather’s uncle.

  The physically strongest of the echoes.

  The old man pointed a gnarled finger to the cavernous ceiling.

  “A lot of tarantado up there. And no more whining. Just take from the ones that deserve it. Like that one.” He flipped the demigod off.

  “The strongest ones, Boy. Take from them. They have more to give, so you don’t have to worry about taking too much, too quickly,” Tita Lu said.

  The demigod leapt with a roar, blazing with golden energy from hands and eyes.

  The echoes rose up to meet him with strength and a riotous rainbow.

  Fists and weapons met.

  Gray burned to nothing, only to quickly re-form.

  Hands dragged the black tower down to the floor.

  “You take too much, susuntok na ako sayo,” Tito Carlos said.

  “Promise?”

  The old echo glanced back and arched a brow.

  “Sira sa ulo, diba?”

  “I’m not crazy.”

  “Hindi,” Tita Lu laid a hand on his shoulder. It almost felt like real. Warmth and weight more than he had thought possible. “Boy just cares.”

  “We’re with you, Boy,” Tito Novy said. “Remember, we know what you do. We know your greatest fear. We won’t let it happen.”

  “Ano ka ba?” Tito Carlos snorted. “Nothing matters if the putang gets what he wants. So, let’s beat him up!”

  Alin quivered with indecision for a moment, but only just.

  “I trust you.”

  He had withdrawn from the gray he had blanketed the city above out of fear from accidentally hurting innocents and people he cared about in his earlier desperation.

  Now?

  He focused on the strongest presences.

  Blazing lights in his mind’s eye.

  Golden ones. Just like the demigod in front of him.

  And those that fought them.

  Take from the former and leave the latter.

  Take from the monsters and leave the Earthians.

  Simple in concept.

  Nearly impossible in practice.

  “We’ll keep him away, but don’t take too long.”

  The whisper in his ear came from faraway as he lost himself in the gray.

  Phosfuraie grunted.

  Annoyance, but one verging on genuine concern.

  For the first time since the battle with those brave, but ultimately weak rangers, he felt the control gloves begin to slip off his hands.

  The stolen copies the entity in the shell of a young human male had begun to take on more corporeal forms, which seemed to make them more powerful and harder to disperse back into the mists from whence they came.

  “Away, rabble!” He lashed out with golden light in an explosion from his bare torso, front and back.

  Most burned to nothingness.

  He gathered his legs, aiming to take one giant, bounding leap low to the floor to ram into the boy and put an end to it before the gloves slipped further.

  Strong arms suddenly wrapped around one tree trunk-sized thigh.

  A pink rope coiled around the other.

  And a woman with translucent white lining her arms and legs slashed their blade-like edges at his nethers.

  Fortunate that he wore protective under clothes.

  Regrowing what made him a man was most unpleasant.

  Once was one time too many.

  Hence, a most powerful enchantment.

  The narrow, flat panes reminded him of the glass broad swords wielded by the Keepers of Tomorrow's Dawn on Afelanor.

  He chopped down with a hand, shattering both blade-shield and bone.

  “Not as durable,” he mused.

  The woman snarled and leapt, leg scything for his neck.

  Gold light flared.

  The woman disappeared from his sight.

  He tugged gently on the sparkling pink rope.

  The young woman on the other end cursed, eyes widening.

  “Oh shi—”

  What undoubtedly eloquent thing she had been about to say would, regrettably, be lost to the mists of history.

  “As for you—”

  “Fuck your mother!” the young man around his thigh actually tried to bite down.

  Like trying to bite a tree, which, unless one was a giant paddle-tailed tree gnawer, left a belly full of nothing and a mouth full of splinters. As the saying went.

  The young man relinquished his hold and struck a might uppercut betwixt Phosfuraie’s nethers.

  The demigod grunted.

  “Not pleasant, but not… impactful.”

  He snatched the young man around the head with serpent-like quickness and brought him face to face, ignoring the kicks.

  “I’m curious. How much do you remember of your original version’s life?”

  “I remember I’m me. Name’s Vernardo and I punched a demigod in the dick!” He spat a glob in one golden eye and laughed.

  Phosfuraie closed his fist.

  The young man kicked and laughed till the end, vanishing into the thick mists.

  “Odd. I felt the slick heat of his blood, the grit of his pulverized skull, the soft squelch of his brain… yet…”

  His hand remained clean.

  Godly senses marked them in the surrounding mists.

  They would return.

  Regardless, he deemed there enough time to deal with the remaining three ghosts protecting the boy.

  “Fuck your mother!” the old, grizzled man spat.

  “My mother was a good mother. A brave and skilled warrior. She fought an army for me. I will have you take those words back, young man.”

  “Young? Who’re you calling young?” A laugh, bitter, mocking.

  “You may look like a dried out twist of old leather wrappings, but I measure my years in centuries.”

  “It’s not the number that matters. It’s how you feel inside.”

  “An elder should behave with grace and wisdom.”

  “Don’t care. You need to drop. This isn’t your world. Time to put you down for the count, right?”

  Crimson light suddenly loomed above him.

  A giant hand slapped him into the floor as if he was some insignificant insect.

  “Hold him, Novy!”

  “What does it look like I’m doing, Carlos? Lu, get ready to put him in a box.”

  “Wait for me!”

  Phosfuraie pushed against the floor, deforming the metal.

  The grizzled old man stalked toward him as teal-colored panes appeared beyond the giant crimson hand, creating a rather beautiful violet where he gazed.

  He flared his divine energy.

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  Oh, how he loathed the way it suffused every part of his being.

  Oh, how he relied on it.

  That was the trap set by his father, of course.

  The secret only he had discovered, at least, as far as he knew.

  Demigods didn’t tend to live more than a few centuries.

  As designed by the Gods.

  Those cowardly, greedy—

  The translucent crimson hand vanished, cleansed by the divine.

  A tiny, gnarled fist slammed into his nose.

  The old man’s crooked grin peeked out from behind a pugilist’s practiced guard.

  Proper stance, bladed.

  Fists protecting face.

  Tucked elbows protecting ribs and the easily damaged organs within.

  Bare feet bounced lightly.

  “You move well for one that looks like you’ve been left out in the sun to desiccate.”

  “Second— make that third chance at life.”

  “How would you like to make that count? How would you like to be the downfall of a being that has caused untold amounts of pain and suffering over tens of thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands of years?”

  “I’d say yes… but not on your terms. He hurts trillions, you hurt thousands. It’s all the same to each individual person you pieces of shit hurt.”

  They traded punches, creating thunder that crashed against the walls of their translucent teal box for the brief seconds that it lasted.

  The demigod walked through the wispy remnant of the old man to break the wall with a gold-wreathed fist.

  Only to stride right into an uppercut rocking his head back.

  Furious fists beat a staccato against his stomach and ribs.

  Strong enough to break steel, strong enough to tickle him through his golden protection.

  “You’re forming them faster.”

  The boy was lost in the thick gray choking the cavernous chamber.

  It was worse than any smoke-shrouded siege he had ever been a part of in the past.

  Even his divine senses couldn’t pierce it.

  What he could feel was the drain.

  A grin split his lips just as a fist rocketed out of nowhere to wipe it off.

  It didn’t dampen his mood.

  There was pleasure to be had in the knowledge that his bastard cousins above ground were being impacted significantly worse than he was.

  The benefit to age and experience.

  The ghosts came back in force, assailing him from all directions and angles.

  What did it matter if he couldn’t sense the boy when he could just lash out indiscriminately?

  He flared golden divinity in every direction, burning the air clear to reveal the boy standing right in front of him.

  The gray swallowed him a split-second later, but it was too late.

  Gold flashed from the demigod’s eyes, clearing the space in front of him to reveal… nothing.

  Just scorched floor.

  Sudden strikes fell upon his chest like a storm of bolts.

  His second skin of translucent gold energy flashed repeatedly, weathering it all as it always had.

  Until, he felt it crack, then break.

  Pain.

  He wasn’t unused to it.

  What was unique was that he hadn’t expected it to be inflicted by the boy.

  Fingers dug into his wounds.

  Perhaps taunting the boy had been a mistake.

  “Ah, hubris,” he sighed.

  They helped him rip and pull.

  Tito Novy, Vernardo, Karlee with her over-sized, translucent tiger claws and others.

  The demigod was so large that Alin didn’t feel crowded amongst the dozens of hands digging into the broad, obsidian chest.

  Flesh and muscle as hard as titanium didn’t want to give, yet, slowly, inexorably they pried it open.

  Golden gore painted his fingers and flowed down his arms.

  Hot.

  Just on the edge of scalding.

  He needed more.

  The golden beacons on the streets above blinked in his mind’s eye.

  Angrily at first.

  Then frantically as they understood what he did to them and realized that they couldn’t stop him.

  Now?

  After minutes?

  They pulsed weakly, like those flashlights from his parents’ stories of the initial nights when the spires had first appeared.

  As for those that fought the demigods?

  He had tried, but couldn’t completely control the gray’s hunger.

  They too felt his touch, his pull, despite his best efforts to leave them.

  As for the rest?

  Well…

  He was a failure in many ways.

  He couldn’t avoid it.

  Every living thing touched by the gray was taken from.

  Indeed, the weakest among them couldn’t last much longer before they too joined the echoes of his relatives.

  He wanted to stop.

  He didn’t want to stop.

  So close to the end.

  Some would say that it was worth the lives.

  “Not you. Never you.”

  A voice in his ear.

  He wasn’t sure which one had spoken.

  “One last push. Then I’m punching you.”

  That voice he recognized.

  “I wish I had tried to know you all sooner.” He grit his teeth painfully as the cumulative life energies flowing into him set nerves, muscles and bones on fire. Even his missing leg and fingers generated fiery pain and they were made of the gray. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t ever get past my guilt.”

  “You should. You did take our souls!” Karlee winked at him. “But, I guess I’ll let it go since it wasn’t technically you! Plus, you’re letting us fight this awesome fight! Against a demigod of all things!”

  “I’m not doing that,” Vernardo spat. “You’re still shit. Stole my life. I should be fighting this putang with my own flesh and blood. Not as your ghost. So, fuck you. I’m going to hate you forever.”

  “Vern!”

  “What? If we were around, this piece of shit wouldn’t have been able to hurt Madalena.”

  “I disagree.” Phosfuraie grabbed Vern by the head and pulped him into mist. “You merely might have taken her place. Although, without the little boy’s existence I wouldn’t have found a reason to be on this world beyond a cursory tour, if that. So, you truly only have yourself to blame for all this suffering. Your friends, family, all of them.” He gave a golden grin. “Their pain came from you and only you.”

  Heat flared in Alin’s hands.

  Too quick to pull away despite reflexes boosted to heights beyond what he had thought possible.

  Fingers turned to ash in an instant as he cried out and leapt back.

  His relatives vanished along with the gray.

  “Like father like son!” The demigod clapped. “Although, you’ve come off a lot worse than him. I suppose that is to be expected since you aren’t truly of his blood. Let alone your mother’s. Was that truth difficult to accept? That your ties to them are based on a superficial copying of your father’s physical likeness? And perhaps his genes?”

  Alin stared at his hands.

  Rather the lack thereof.

  Everything almost up to his elbows were gone.

  Just blackened flesh and exposed bones.

  He refused to let panic grip his heart and mind.

  Gray swirled around him.

  “I won’t ever be unarmed.”

  He flexed his fingers, clenching them into fists.

  The gray swirled into wispy trails as he moved them.

  Give it your all!

  You can do it!

  We’re with you.

  “This would be so easy if I didn’t need you to have a minimum amount of coherent thought. I could just release my anger and— no. That isn’t my way.” The demigod smiled. “I wouldn’t think you were fortunate in that, however.”

  “We’ve got the same problem. But if I release my hold on myself… all our hopes and dreams die in this.” He gestured to encompass their surroundings.

  The echoes struck.

  They were of one mind after all.

  Gold blasts erupted from the demigod’s hand.

  Colored lights blocked and absorbed as Alin dashed forward.

  A teal wall ate a huge blast while a second wall angled like a ramp appeared at his feet.

  He ran faster than ancient motorcycle riding daredevils.

  Blasts tracked his leap as bodies and forcefields intercepted them.

  The demigod thrust his hands up into a long spear, only for a silvery staff to parry it aside.

  Alin thrust his hands down to the demigod.

  Gray fingers lengthened.

  Five thin spears plunged into ruined chest.

  Five thin tendrils flowed into nose, mouth and ears.

  The demigod swept massive arms through the thin gray, passing through as if they were mist, yet failing to dislodge them as they re-formed instantaneously.

  Alin sought the prize from without and within, tearing through even a demigod’s flesh, reaching for the ritual stone. All the while continuing to take Phosfuraie’s life energy.

  A desperate, sustained blast of divine energy punched through his defenders and the teal pane he stood on.

  He twisted, slipping his head to one side with reflexes he hadn’t had before.

  Still, the heat scorched the side of his face.

  Sudden darkness and silence hit him with realization worse than the searing pain had.

  Eye gone.

  Ear gone.

  He stuck his tongue reflexively past teeth and found open air instead of the inside of his cheek.

  The demigod writhed and bucked like an angry bull trying to dislodge a rider, thrashing him through the air like a kite in a storm.

  His relatives piled on the massive statue of obsidian.

  A glowing pink rope flew out of the gray and wrapped around his waist, pulling him to the floor.

  “This is your chance!” Tito Carlos held the demigod in a choke hold.

  They looked like ants trying to swarm a scorpion.

  The demigod glared at him with wide eyes.

  Gold and burning.

  Beams blasted from both.

  Teal panes sprang up between them, but shattered quickly.

  His relatives used their bodies next.

  Until the last appeared with an ivory colored round shield.

  “Move it!” he said before the beam pierced the shield and his head.

  Alin ducked.

  He only needed a bit of time. For his gray fingers had reached the prize.

  Magic protected the stone hidden within the demigod’s chest.

  Magic he could take to empower himself.

  The stronger he got, the faster he could take.

  It cracked not a second later.

  Gray fingers pierced it, then shattered it.

  And, yet, the demigod just smiled.

  A feral smile.

  Alin withdrew his gray fingers from inside the demigod.

  “It’s over.”

  “Relying on your father to save you?”

  “No more stone. No more ritual.” It felt weird talking with a huge hole in his cheek. At least the pain wasn’t worse. It felt like a distant thing. As if he had been numbed by the world’s strongest anesthetic.

  “True,” the demigod snorted, “however,” he clapped thunder, scattering the echoes and the gray in a wide circle and forcing Alin to brace lest he be swept away, “it is not an instant thing.”

  Alin’s one-eyed vision went dark.

  He woke to the demigod standing a great distance away in the center of the cavernous chamber.

  The pain remained distant.

  Enough for him to understand that many of his bones had been broken.

  He pulled himself out of the deep crater in the strange, metallic wall.

  So what if bones were broken?

  He didn’t need them, like he hadn’t needed hands and a leg.

  The gray replaced what was needed.

  Gray roiled like a thick, dark smoke cloud from a raging inferno swirling within a kilometers-wide tornado.

  One battled many.

  Ancient against child.

  Golden flashes revealed a grisly tableau.

  Obsidian slick with shining wetness.

  Brown awash with gray.

  Their blows boomed like thunder.

  Their shouts echoed.

  One in exultation.

  One in desperation.

  The ancient allowed himself to let slip the adamantine shackles within his thoughts restrained the sudden rage of his hated birthright. A constant companion simmering ever beneath the surface waiting to overflow the pot.

  He whispered a silent prayer, not to any god, especially his father, but to his one singular belief.

  For his mother, he would maintain control and remain on the narrow path that led to his father and one, final justice.

  The child cried out silently, screaming for his own father.

  A plaintive howl that surprised himself.

  For he had thought himself a grown man no longer running to his parents to keep him safe from the monsters, real and imagined.

  The echoes within, the past made manifest, added their voices.

  Equal parts berating and soothing, but above all encouraging.

  That victory was possible.

  That victory didn’t necessarily mean life.

  At least for him and for them.

  The choking gray swirled, burning away in golden rage made manifest.

  They struggled along with their masters.

  Ebbing and flowing back and forth like the tides.

  Neither gained lasting advantage.

  Golden flashes revealed a child gazing up at a giant.

  Thunder cracked.

  Gold flowed.

  Gray swirled.

  A child cried.

  A demigod laughed.

  Golden flashes revealed a giant surging out from under a small army.

  They revealed a child impaled through the stomach, held aloft on a shining golden trident like a fish.

  They revealed a giant restrained by dozens of hands and a rainbow of bright lights.

  They revealed a child thrusting ten finger-thin spears of gray through dark flesh. Wet gold flowed from one to the other. Hungry roots sucking life-giving water.

  Golden flashes revealed a raging giant and a child of swirling gray. The latter protected by the desperate army.

  They sold their lives cheaply because they were the sort of the dead that didn’t stay dead for long.

  The final golden flash revealed an end.

  Earth flowed out of his way like water.

  He floated downward until a strange blend of dark metal and stone barred his way.

  It, too, parted for him.

  The ceiling of the large cavern clad in that magical material had been cracked by a titanic battle.

  Thick, dark gray filled the entire space.

  He couldn’t see past his hand.

  Could only see a short distance with his other senses.

  Without the cracks he wouldn’t have been able to find his son as quickly as he had.

  Even then… too late.

  A fist rocketed out of the gray.

  He caught it with a thought.

  “Tito Carlos…”

  “Calmin?”

  Fists and bright weapons of light struck from every direction.

  He caught them all with a thought.

  The echoes flowed around him.

  Angry.

  Wary.

  Hungry.

  “Will you help me save my son?”

  He read the answer in their thoughts before they could voice.

  “Too late.”

  He nodded. Then sped up his thoughts.

  Centuries passed before an eye could blink.

  He simulated hundreds of thousands of possibilities within a multitude of mindscapes.

  With all the knowledge about his son’s unique nature gleaned over two decades of study by the finest minds and the highest levels. Magic, science and a mix of both.

  All the paths and possibilities stored in his mind invariably led to one.

  Subjective lifetimes passed in less than an objective second.

  He blinked.

  “I’m sorry, Calmin,” Tita Lu said.

  Alone out of the echoes, she refrained from turning her teal forcefields against him.

  “We did our best.”

  “A thousand year old demigod is… unfair.”

  The gray parted, as if responding to his thoughts.

  It cleared a path to reveal the black-skinned giant laying in a crater.

  Suiteonemiades was more gold than black, reminding him of kintsugi.

  He suppressed the instinct to break the demigod further.

  “Your boy got him in the end,” Tito Carlos said. “Had to drain too much. Went too far.”

  The demigod stirred.

  Limbs, the ones not missing, shivered, unable to do more owing to their twisted and mangled state.

  He sealed the demigod’s mouth with a thought.

  There would be time for last words later.

  “Where is my son? Why can’t I see him?”

  The words came out hoarsely.

  Eyes saw through a curtain of liquid.

  The echoes strained in his invisible grip even as they spoke.

  “He’s— he’s all around you.”

  Tita Lu didn’t lie.

  He read her thoughts.

  He read all of their thoughts.

  They were more like the people they had been than ever before.

  Tito Novy appeared behind him, but didn’t attack.

  “You don’t have a lot of time left, Calmin. Boy’s trying, but it’s like trying to hold back an ocean. I’m going to attack you now.”

  Truth.

  Tito Novy’s fist lashed out, extending a larger copy in translucent red.

  A thought dissipated it in an instant.

  “Can’t you feel him?” Tito Carlos said.

  “Yes,” he choked the word out.

  The gray’s infinite tendrils poked and prodded, seeking a way past his defenses.

  To say it was weaker than what he had experienced in Manila would be a mistake.

  Rather, it was restrained.

  By his son.

  “Alin? My Boy?”

  Tell me how we can fix this? Please?

  Silence.

  “It’s too late,” Tito Carlos said.

  “No!” he snapped. “I can touch and move the building blocks of life! Stop say— please stop saying that. It’s not helpful. We need to work together.”

  “Calmin.” Tita Lu’s eyes held his. The true kindness he saw stung more than the anger and hunger he saw in the others. “Listen to your son. That’s all I ask you to do. He sacri—”

  “Stop talking like there’s nothing we can do.” He grounded out the words even as he heard the lie he told himself.

  “You promised us freedom,” Vern said through clenched teeth, straining against invisible hands. “We matter too! And we shouldn’t have to exist like this!”

  He flinched.

  The truth often struck like needles.

  “He’s not going to live forever. You’ll have your freedom then.”

  “Calmin.”

  He couldn’t meet Tita Lu’s eyes.

  “That was when he was still hu— when he wasn’t this.”

  “Boy’s holding himself inside this room, but you use those fancy powers of yours and check. If you tell me it isn’t spreading out then we’ll try,” Tito Novy said.

  The gray was indeed inching its way down the tunnels into the rest of the bunker complex.

  “He pulled it all down in here mostly to keep the rest of you out there safe when he had to cut loose,” Tito Carlos said. “He’s holding it together because he knew you’re the only one that can—”

  “Stop talking. I need to speak to my son. Only him.”

  Boy, please talk to me. I— whatever you want, whatever you need. I’ll do anything. Just talk to me… please…