Time seemed to slow. James’s eyes bulged. He looked slowly down, down towards his heart – where a sparking silver hand gleamed out from his chest, dripping in blood. James’s mouth opened, his eyes rolled back – and as if in slow motion, he fell, lifeless, to the ground, a gaping, sucking hole burnt clear through his chest.

Where he lay, unmoving, before the Black Death’s feet.

Somebody screamed. The Black Death’s smile widened.

And all hell broke loose.

Suddenly, spires of earth erupted from the ground around the Legion, launching up behind them, into the forcefielder, skewering the boy from Michigan through a hundred different places before anyone could move or blink. The ranks broke – the Legion swarmed, some forward, some back, some firing, chaos, but their enemy was everywhere, nowhere, supersonic, untouchable. Jane launched forward, bellowing a wordless roar, and suddenly alongside her raced Natalia Baroque, swearing, her fingers flying to her forehead, her eyes burning into the Black Death, power streaming from her mind – but an instant later her curses turned to shrieking and she fell, blood spurting from her eyes and nose, unconscious, shut down. Jane saw the Black Death’s fingers drop from his temple, the work of his antipathic abilities done, his eyes shifting to her as she flew, a bullet of fire and lightning, straight towards him, screaming, deadly. Faster than she could react he opened one palm towards her, one hand behind him and suddenly between them was a red, pulsing ellipsis, five feet tall and half that wide, inches from Jane’s face, and she was hurtling into it, through it-

And suddenly she was no longer in the battle, no longer in the street, no longer flying towards the Black Death but moving through open sky, tumbling headfirst out of another red portal. Jane dropped her powers, spun, flew to a halt, her head spinning around wildly, trying to get her bearings, and figure out where the hell she was. Far below her, somehow almost a mile away, she saw it, the crimson mass of the Legion and the lone figure of the Black Death moving through them. She clenched her teeth and swore, burning hard with everything she had, rocketing back towards them, despair bubbling in her chest, willing herself to get there, to re-join the fight-

But she was too far and he was too fast. Jane flew like she’d never flown before, but it was too late. All she could do was watch.

Faster than a bullet, the Black Death sped through the Legion’s ranks, ignoring everything they threw at him, focused solely on one target – the neutraliser Anubis, standing at the back, his eyes struggling to track the racing blur. There was no pause, no sound, no warning – the Black Death simply grabbed the Egyptian man on either side of his chest and suddenly he was in two pieces instead of one. A shadow loomed – the Black Death’s eyes flicked up, and he flew backwards as a car-sized fist slammed into the ground where he’d been only seconds ago. Nancy bellowed, thirty feet tall, but before she could even raise her fist the Black Death flung out his arm and a road sign tore free from the pavement, instantly reforming, melting into a three-foot metal spike, flying up and through the titan’s forehead. The girl fell, but the Black Death was already moving, ducking under a withering ball of fire, hands moving up, a gash opening in his palms, projecting a stream of hissing clear acid ten, twenty feet, cutting a swath through the Legion, melting skin and armour and everything it touched. But aimed squarely at one man, at the head of a group of Acolytes – the burning form of Charles Farrington. The clear stream hit the Ashes pyromorph squarely in his flaming chest, and for an instant Charles looked down in shock, the attack seemingly doing nothing, evaporating harmlessly against his impenetrable barrier of fire – only to begin screaming, a second later, as his lungs filled with acidic gas.

Half a mile away, Jane could only look on in horror as first her teacher, then everyone around him, fell to the ground, clawing at their throats. The Legion reeled. The Black Death moved.

And nothing they could do against him worked.

Chino, the floramancer, erupted vines around his feet, but the Black Death simply flew up, telekinetically pulling him into a blast from the Inuit Acolyte’s laser eyes. Celeste, morphed into a dragon the size of school-bus, launched at him with crushing jaws but he flew under her bite, grabbed a hand on either side of her scaly jaw and snapped her neck with superhuman strength. Still airborne, he rolled, a thick cable-like cord shooting from his wrist and wrapping around a terramancer’s waist, pulling him up and straight into the Black Death’s other arm, turned to a blade – the man struggling helplessly as Heydrich infused his body with sickening violet light and then threw him down into a clumped crowd. The man exploded – a blinding flash – and through the smoke and stifled cries Jane’s eyes found Mac, his grizzled fingers throwing bolt after bolt of lightning at the black, supersonic shape hurtling towards him, flying around his attacks. Suddenly the Black Death’s face was an inch from his, split into a manic, inhuman grin – Mac’s eyes widened, weathered lips twitching in some final word, as the Black Death touched two fingers underneath the old man’s chin and shot his own bolt of lightning directly up.

Then he was gone – vanished, as Odette Dodecan’s hyper-voice screamed through the air where he had been. No, not vanished – split into two identical copies, who in unison raised their hands and pulled the building behind Odette down on top of her. Then the copy flickered, and again there was only one. One man, slamming his fist down into the asphalt, splitting the earth, raising from the fissure a swarm of broken, jagged piping which flew out, indiscriminately sinking into the wounded, the fleeing, the fallen. Anybody, everybody. Anyone who was left.

It took Jane only seconds to get back.

But in the space of those few seconds, it was over.

The Legion had already lost.

Jane landed, her powers flickering as she skidded to the ground, falling to her knees – her body numb, her mind hollow. The street suddenly, horribly quiet. The air whirled, billowing brown and grey, streaked with curling trails of dust and smoke. Ground broken, walls blackened. All around her, destruction, death. Frozen faces, empty eyes. Lifeless piles of splattered crimson and broken gold. She tried to speak, to call out, to cry, but nothing came. Only choking, mangled sobs. There was nothing. No one. She was alone – alone amongst the dead.

And against it all, standing in the centre of the slaughter, the Black Death slowly turned to face her.

“Poole,” he ordered quietly, “Turn the camera off.”