You can't win them all. Sometimes you just have to run.

After Stumblebum had teleported the two of us as far as possible from Carrion, I found myself quickly passing out. He had dragged me, bleeding, into an alleyway. There we hid ourselves and prayed that the monster wouldn't find us.

Though we didn't know if we'd be safe, Stumblebum could take us no further, even if he wanted to. "My power is spent," he said. "I don’t got a single more jump."

I shook his arm a little, eyes going dark. "It's... alright."

Both of us were done now, and I accepted that. As much as we wanted to be heroes, there was nothing more we could do to protect the city of New Marion, or its people. All that remained was our lives, or what little I had left of mine.

The simple truth was that my body could only be pushed to its limit once in so short a time span. This had all begun less than a week ago with the rampager, when I had run myself into the ground trying to put a stop to the carnage. Without enough time to recover since then, I was crashing hard with little hope of a bounce back from my injuries. I had been successful back then, sure, and that pride would be with me for the rest of my short life. Yet, no one gets to save the city twice. Thinking otherwise was hubris on my part.

Still, I had done my best, and that was good enough.

The last thing I saw before slipping out of consciousness was my leg. It had stopped bubbling, thank God. Carrion must have had a range-limit to his power after all, meaning he was no longer actively cannibalizing my flesh. However, the damage he had done was severe, and the bleeding had yet to stop. It was the black skin that crept up to the base of my thigh; that coldness which settled in was the scariest thing of all.

Even sleep couldn't steal my fears away.

As my eyes closed, I slipped into feverish dreams. I saw visions of insects crawling in my skin, causing me scratch and peel at it. I dreamt that my teeth crumbled to meal in my mouth, spit with blood into the sink, only for me to gaze long into my own hollow eyes on the mirror above. These nightmares were like flashing vignettes. They were shallow beneath the surface, so it didn't take much to rouse me from them, but they had me tightly in their grip all the same.

Stumblebum shook me hard. It was just enough to quell them. "No time for sleeping, Adrian my boy! You've lost way too much blood for that. Just keep it wakeful for now."

I tried to focus on his voice. I was still lucid enough to know that I was slipping down a tunnel I might not come back from.

"What?" I asked, lost in my own head as I took in the dissonance of my view. Our surroundings had changed, and I had not noticed.

Stumblebum busted out the window of a truck, reaching through and unlatching the passenger door. Then, he carefully took me and propped me up inside it with a strong heft. He was searching everywhere for a pair of keys once he made his way around to the driver’s seat. "We gotta get you somewhere. I put a tourniquet on you, but that shit isn't going to cut it. You need a doctor. Preferably Wonder Boy."

"He's... in the building," I said, referring to the heroes' headquarters. Between us and that building was Carrion, Skiddles, and Chrysalism. Not to mention their impenetrable barrier, which they weren't about to let down for my sake. They had civilians to think about whose safety came before one little super in way over his head.

Stumblebum bashed his hands against the steering wheel, cursing loudly. "OKAY. What’s next, then? Yeah. Okay. Okay. I know a guy, Kuebiko, who could heal you. He owes me one!"

"No phones," I reminded him. “How will we… find him?”

"Goddammit! Options. Options."

"The hospital isn't far from here," I said. “At least… I think?”

“Yes! No, it’s not far at all, and that’s better than nothing. Just gotta get this damn thing going.”

Suddenly, I found myself reaching across to the driver's side and pulling at the compartment beneath the wheel. “I could… use a little help.”

“What are you doing?”

"I don't really know," I told him, but my hands surely did.

I wrenched the compartment free and found exactly the wires that I needed. Using the knife I had stolen earlier, I started trying to strip and splice them, but my hands were far too shaky.

Stumblebum saw what I was doing and finished the job for me. To his absolute amazement, the truck roared to life.

"Have you always known how to do that?"

“No.” As a matter of fact, I had never known how to do that. Somehow, the knowledge had just come to me. Then I remembered, Sixes had hotwired a truck exactly like this one earlier in the day. Though I hadn't been paying any attention at the time, somehow, I had picked up the skill automatically. Like it was just second-nature to me.

One last trick up my sleeve, I thought, from the power that I thought was a curse. Almost as if to spite me.

Stumblebum wasted no time trying to puzzle through this mystery with me. He merely shifted us into drive and peeled out.

“Good,” I said, sinking low into my seat. “Good…”

Once again, I drifted between waking and sleeping. I flirted closer with life and death.

Distantly, I was aware that Stumblebum kept on talking to me through the entire drive. He was trying to prompt responses from me, which I was good at giving only automatically. This only made it harder for me to keep the wheels of my mind turning, then. I needed genuine focus.

To give myself more of a challenge, I tried to take control of the conversation, yet I wasn't sure what words were coming out of my mouth. I tried to babble my way through a favorite story of mine; one about a loud argument I had watched two-hobos have beneath a bridge near Main. Their fight had ended in a game of rock-paper-scissors, for reasons I couldn’t now recall.

I found myself getting lost in the flow, and time blurred by.

The next time I was lucid, Stumblebum was dragging me out of the car and putting me in a wheelchair.

We had arrived at the hospital parking lot, just outside where a battle had taken place.

The building had been completely overrun, and I saw the signs which told the story. The Unmakers had already hit this location, and they had hit it fast and hard. The heroes, so distracted with trying to take down their base, had apparently left the protection of the injured to mere police. Judging by the scorch-marks all around and the tossed and battered cars, they had been outgunned and outnumbered from the start. Mere humans against an army headed by supers.

They never stood a chance.

As I was rolled over the asphalt, my head lulled from side to side. My eyes turned themselves to the grey sky then, and I felt the rain on my face. Though it had let up some, just enough for the dark clouds to turn a lighter shade, my gaze still could not penetrate to see the blue beyond. What my eyes lacked, however, my power made up for, and I witnessed what was hiding up there.

Never before had I seen an aura like that.

It was utterly pitch black. Where usually there would be a dominant emotion overlying a rainbow of complex lights, here there was just a singular mood. This flying super was moving fast - so fast that he passed from my range in just a few short seconds. It was only enough time for me to wonder if I was hallucinating or not.

A man with a void for his soul.

It shouldn't have been possible.

Stumblebum shook me once again, this time to give me a warning. "There's a semi-truck parked over there," he pointed. "Probably still gang members inside taking hostages, too. Look alive."

"Can you handle them?" I asked.

"I can try," was all he said, though his voice was lacking confidence.

I didn't know what would happen if Stumblebum died after his teleportation had been exhausted. If he stayed dead until the next day, well, then I would be on my own, and that would be unworkable.

We entered through the emergency wing, striding into the black interior of the waiting room. There could only be one reason why the hospital was lacking power from its generator, and that was that the villains had cut it off. They must have considered this simply one more piece of infrastructure to destroy.

Anyone on life support would be long dead by now, I knew. The villains gave them no pity and abandoned them to their fate.

They don't make good hostages, I thought, so the bastards went and killed them.

The fury that realization brought me granted the small boost I needed to keep myself awake. As we entered deeper inside, Stumblebum tried to guide our way to where he thought there'd be blood, but with neither of us having a flashlight or phone, it was nearly impossible to navigate.

My power was on the fritz, but I could use it to see the shadows of human figures in all this darkness. Plenty of people had managed to hide in closets or in their rooms. The gang members were trying to hit a quota, and so they hadn't been too thorough it seemed in looking for stragglers.

My hand slowly raised, pointing our way down the hall. "Up ahead. Someone's in the janitor's c-closet... on the left."

"A nurse?" Stumblebum asked.

There was no way to know. I could tell it was a woman, so maybe the odds were on our side. "Here's... hoping," was all I said, nearly losing my thought halfway through.

Stumblebum picked up our pace even further, spurred on by the hope I offered. The faster we went, the less we saw in the black, and it was inevitable as a massive clang exploded through the hallway. We had barreled full-steam into an oxygen cannister, sending it sputtering over the tile by our impact.

What was worse, I had struck it with my bad leg, yet I felt absolutely nothing. I only heard the soft dripping of my blood on the tile as things settled. It sounded like entropy.

A red aura lit up further ahead, and shouting reached us from that source. It was a man, saying, "I know you're there! Don't move!"

And so we moved as fast as we could.

Immediately, I was pushed aside into an x-ray room by the rogue. Stumblebum gave me a pat on the shoulder then. "Don't go running anywhere, alright? I'll give em a little knifin'." And with that, he turned away to sneak back into the hall.

What he didn't know, and what I had lacked the strength to tell him over such a quick exchange, was that two more red auras had lit up on this floor. And they were both converging on our location...

I have to kill them, I decided.

There was no other choice. I had to muster what strength I had left and give my wheels a push. That much I could still do.

Slowly, painfully, I moved myself back to the door and opened it. I rolled myself into the hallway, just in time to hear gunshots echoing from down the way. Stumblebum had made contact, and he had managed to get into close-quarters-combat with the mook. The two were beating the shit out of each other now, trading blows back and forth. Stumblebum’s knife had been lost in the shuffle.

With his hands so tied up though, sending him a message would have been useless. This was all up to me. I had to shore up our rear.

My focus turned to the two men coming towards us that way. One from down the stairwell, the other from out of the cafeteria, I surmised.

They were well-coordinated as they rapidly converged on each other before making their way ahead. I had enough energy in me to blast maybe one of them hard enough for a knock-out, but that was it.

My thoughts were running away on me, but I was certain. My only card left was a bluff.