This time, when I wake up, I feel like a million bucks. I sit upright, expecting to groan or feel like I’ve just been shot open by a super rifle, but when I touch my chest, my t-shirt is damp with blood, but that’s about it. I can feel my chest fixing itself, hear when the bones snap back in place and the skin pulls together. I touch my forehead and my fingertips come away wet with blood, but my head is in one piece, and I’ve got enough strength to stand up—

  The next second, I’m hurtling through the warehouse roof. I yelp and cross my arms as I smash through the metal and the concrete and explode into the night air, higher and higher until I will myself to stop. Then I do. I hang in the air, panting, thousands of meters above the line of warehouses not too far away from the silent ocean. And there’s something weird going on. Very weird. My powers were developing slowly, because every day I would try to hear quieter and quieter sounds, or try to see if I can spot the distant remains of warships out on the horizon, count the seagulls on them and the jagged ends of a hole some Superhuman made through their hull. It’s the only way I can know I’m getting, well, better. Stronger. It’s slow, I’ll admit, and some days I can’t hear or see what I’d just done.

  Mom says it’s fine, that I’m still growing and it’s just part of the process. Dad just pats my back.

  “You’ll get there,” he likes saying. “We always do.”

  But now?! I can see the grains of dust sprinkled on top of the asphalt! I can count each and every one of them, smell the ants crawling along the wall separating the warehouses and the ocean, and hear the fish deep in the water. It’s a sensory overload that lasts too long and too little, like I’ve been walking around blind my entire life.

  Now I can see. I can smell. I can hear and I can taste.

  The wind is warm against my skin, making every single one of my cells vibrate with warmth as they’re smothered in this insatiable kind of heat that’s burning in the air, making it crackle and sizzle and smell so sweet and feel so alive against my body as I tilt my head back. I can’t help but smile and laugh a little, grinning because this is probably what it really, really feels like to be alive. When I’m on stage, there’s an electricity that you can feel pulsating throughout the crowd that burns through the air and dances up your feet and into your body. Being alive makes you sweaty and tingly, makes you breathe in and out and catch yourself wanting to just keep on going. Jade has never understood it when I explain it to her, because the first time I had flown by myself had been the exact same. Scary. Thrilling. Knowing that, as you skim the clouds, there’s very hard Earth underneath you right now.

  But you don’t fall. You just keep flying amongst the clouds and the rays of sunlight. You go faster.

  I spread my arms a little and do just that: breathe, hover. I inhale deeply, then exhale with a smile.

  Using my powers before this had felt like a chore in comparison.

  But I had a job to do, a promise to keep to that creature. Embody justice, it had said, and considering I had just died trying to do that a few minutes ago, I figured that hey, how about I give all of that another shot now, too?

  I run a hand through my hair, pushing it out of my face as I search the warehouses. Now, let’s get even.

  And there, below me, are the criminals who killed me, their convoy of heavy-duty armored trucks racing through an aisle of warehouses that doesn’t look like anywhere in San Angeles. I don’t even think about it. My body reacts for me, and suddenly, like a bullet through the wind, no, like lightning slashing through a storm, I’m in front of the trucks, slamming into the ground maybe a little too hard, because I’ve got to pick myself out of the very deep crater I’ve just dug myself in. I cough and shake my head, waving away the plume of dust and spit out the grains of concrete that erupted in my mouth as soon as I landed. I expect to feel bruises forming on my knees and hands, but…no. Nothing. I can stand up just fine, and float (very, very tentatively) out of the crater, facing down the sharp headlights and the idling trucks. I’ve cut off their escape route, but I can’t even stop myself from smiling now.

  Is this how dad feels? I think, curling and relaxing my fingers. No wonder he never looks afraid.

  The front truck door opens, and out comes the woman in the white compression shirt. She stares at the hole then at me, probably wondering how the hell some teenager just survived a bullet to the chest and head just now.

  I don’t really know how I did either, but I’ll ask those questions later, because baby, I’m on a fucking high!

  “Hey there,” I say, cracking my knuckles. “Turns out I’m kinda immune to dying.”

  Then her steely brown eyes narrow. “Warhammer,” she says, and a man in black inside the truck (something that I just noticed I can see inside, too! How freaking cool is that?!) drags a large black warhammer out of the rear seats and hands it to her. The truck rises that little bit more when it leaves, the suspension hissing without the extra weight. She rests the hammer on her shoulder, this giant pole fit with a block of red steel fitted to the other end of it.

  I don’t even bother with a quip, and instead go right for her, fists extended in front of me.

  And miss. Terribly. I slam into the truck just behind hers, caving in the front end and impaling it into the concrete. Now I’m groaning and shaking my head, having to pick myself up again. Okay, a little slower next time.

  Baldy the Speedster, though, wants to play cat and mouse now. He appears from the rear of the convoy, a blur of skin and a hail of feet slapping against the bare asphalt. As I shake my head and slowly stand up, he runs around me, a flash of pale skin under the moonlight and the headlights, laughing and insulting, then I catch his fist.

  He stops suddenly, staring at me, that smile on his too-smooth face fading away as the wind that had wrapped around his body shoves aside the debris and the dust and my hair, quickly flinging it all into my face.

  Baldy stares at me, his face growing pale, and I stare at him, wondering why he’s started shaking.

  Then he starts shrieking.

  I feel like it’s a little bit much for someone just catching your hand, then I smell blood. It hits me like a gust of wind from the ocean, mixing with the engine oil and broken tarmac and rotting fish. I look at his hand, at the blood that’s pooling at my feet, and the meaty red mess of fingers, sinew, veins and arteries I’m holding now.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  I gasp and let go, stumbling backward as he drops to his knees and screams so loud I flinch. “Oh shit,” I whisper, looking at the blood on my hands, on my shirt, then say, “Oh, fuck. Okay. Look, it’s not that bad. I—”

  A bellowing cry, and suddenly I’m flipping through the air, landing on my hands, somersaulting onto my feet, and watching as Warhammer Lady slams her weapon into the tarmac with so much force that my teeth rattle. I didn’t do that. I stare at my hands, at my body and how it stands up again. It feels like I’m in the passenger seat, or better yet, like everything around me is made out of plastic. I take one step forward as she drags her hammer out of the rubble, and the asphalt cracks underneath me. I’m not flying, don’t intend to do that, or else I would probably go straight through her, so why, why, why is every step I’m taking leaving behind deep prints in the concrete?

  I stop, for their sake, and raise my hands. “You should probably give up or I might kill you.”

  She might have taken that as a threat or a brag, and instead runs right toward me. I flip over her hammer and land behind her, ducking low to the ground when she swings backward, then follows up by grabbing my arm.

  Her fault, totally her fault—I didn’t mean to keep flipping over when I had dodged her swing, and that left her spinning through the air and suddenly flinging off of me when I stopped. I watch her fly through the sky, tumbling feet overhead, screaming as she does as her body plows through dozens and dozens of feet of clear air as her hammer slams right through a warehouse and brings down its front wall on impact. She’s gonna snap her neck. I dart forward, figure out where she’s about to land (I guess where that’s going to be, I’ll admit), and spread my arms, waiting for her to fall into them. I’m too scared to fly up there and catch her. Too afraid of turning her into meat.

  I don’t have to wonder for long what would have happened if I had tried that, because when she lands on my arms, her body is cleaved into three chunks and splatters onto the ground. I stand still. Perfectly. Fucking. Still.

  The silence is like a gunshot of its own. Loud, sudden, violent, ripping through the nighttime winds.

  I spit out a chunk of wet meat that flew into my mouth. I gasp and pant and try not to breathe her in, but she exploded when she landed on me and her torso had split open, her legs and chest coming apart as if my arms had been blades and her body had been nothing except fleshy, blood-filled putty to me and…oh God. Oh fuck. I stumble backward, dizzy, tripping on my own feet and falling. I shake my head and look at the dead-eyed stare of a skull that’s not attached to anything anymore. Covered in blood. Her intestines hang around my shoulders like a scarf of green and blue and gray, and then I vomit. Puke until I can’t and let her organs slough off my body when I tug and pull and wipe myself down. You just murdered someone. I stare at her in flashes, like this is a picture show and my brain can’t process anything more than that. You just killed someone, Kacy. I’m shaking, crawling back.

  But…she also killed you too just now. Isn’t that, I don’t know, kinda fair?

  “That’s not what dad would say,” I whisper. Blood in my mouth. I spit, spit and spit until I can’t.

  That’s not what superheroes freaking do, Kacey!

  The Technomancer lands behind me. I can hear the hum of his thrusters and the impact of his boots hitting the concrete. I shut my eyes and ask the heavens why this has to keep going on as I pull myself together and stand up. Just give up. I slowly turn to face him, my face slack and eyes wide, stinging with the blood that’s trickling into them and down my forehead and seeping into my hair. I’m soaked in the stuff, shivering as the wind picks up. All he does is stare me down, his face plate hiding whatever’s behind it. I can see myself, my body, and the chunks of a human being at my feet. Her shattered bones and torn body, laying there like she’s roadkill I just bathed myself in.

  “Threat level: 200% and counting,” he says robotically, his voice modulated. His fist tightens. “How?”

  I turn to face him fully, shaking my head, raising my hands. “No, wait. Don’t move. Don’t get any closer, because I’ll hurt you, and that’s the last thing I want. So just tell your…your people to stop, alright? Just stop.”

  Please, God, just put down the weapons, get out of the armor, and stop.

  “You’re still playing the hero gimmick,” he says to me. I hear the gears in his armor whir, and the scuttle of the things, maybe nanobots that are scuttling around his body. “Not wanting to kill your murderers. Foolish, maybe noble to some, but I frankly find it amazing how you have the capacity to say that dripping in blood. Is this your true self, or is there more that you can do?” He tilts his head, and I can feel this…thing, this weird thing that’s just gone over my body. A scanner, something infrared. My skin tingles with the effect. “My God,” he whispers. Then he raises his knuckles toward me, and a compartment on his forearm opens up, firing a rocket at me that shoots through the air so quickly it sounds like a whistle. He fires one more, and then another, all three blasting right for my chest.

  I catch the first and use it to backhand the second, almost through reflex, letting them shoot off to the side and blow up half the entrance of a warehouse, vaporizing it to dust. I hold onto the last rocket, clutching onto it.

  The thing bucks in my fist, it’s tiny jets shooting out flames so bright and hot they’re melting the asphalt.

  I press my fingers into it, and then it explodes. I wave away the smoke it’s released, nothing like the others. For a second, the smoke it pours out stings as I inhale it. I cough once and then twice, then hack up a goblet of spit.

  My saliva burns into the concrete, probably along with whatever he tried poisoning me with.

  “Incredible!” he says. I glare at him as he steps forward. “Tell me, what’s your Category?”

  “Unranked,” I say, then, angrier, add: “Don’t you care about your friend here? She just died.”

  “And your theorized Hazard Grade…it’s the highest I’ve ever had the pleasure of scanning!”

  I walk toward him and only stop in front of his face plate. I don’t touch him, don’t dig my fingers into his chest piece, but stare at my own blood-covered reflection. “Your friend just died. Your other one is screaming. And all you care about is what I can do right now? What the hell is wrong with you! Call off your guys, then we can—”

  “Shock,” he says. “You don’t believe in what you’re saying. It’s shock. You’ve never taken a life before, and yet a part of you is petrified only because of the sight of it, but I doubt it’s your first time seeing death. You’re simply struggling to come to the realization of how easily you can kill someone, or better yet, how little you care.”

  “What?” I ask him shrilly. He winces, maybe because his sound dampeners just spiked inside that helmet of his, or whatever’s modulating noise in there. “What kind of person doesn’t care that they just killed someone?!”

  “The kind who is now above all of humanity throughout creation,” he says. “A god amongst men.”

  “I’m not a freaking god.”

  “You will be in due course,” he says. Then adds: “Eventually, at least. I’ll be sure to analyze your body and what I’ve learned today. How extraordinary! Tell me”—the flames in the warehouse beside us only grow brighter, casting us both in their flickering red shadows—“every subject needs a name, every hero a moniker. What’s yours?”

  “Her name is All-Star,” a voice says. A voice that echoes through the sky. Dad. “And she’s in big trouble.”