Bain's eyes snapped open, and he rolled out of his bed, disoriented and breathing hard.

Staring at the soft white carpet, he inhaled deeply, sucking air into his massive lungs and closing his eyes as he calmed himself. He could smell the faint scent of sheep on the wool, the dry powdery plaster floating down from the ceiling in minuscule increments catching in his mouth. His tongue wasn't dissimilar to a snake's in that regard.

Pushing himself to his feet, Bain realized he'd done so with all of his arms, and checked downwards in surprise. Despite the nearly absolute absence of light, he could make out a fully functional lower left arm. He smiled despite himself. In all honesty, he'd been less than sure he could regenerate that much damage, but his worries had clearly been unfounded. Nahma would have regrown the limb in under a minute, assuming anything could remove one of his legs to start with.

Something tugged at the edge of Bain's attention, pulling at his mind and itching in an uncomfortable manner. He frowned, wondering what it was before shrugging. He'd figure it out later.

He made himself a bowl of cereal, the resulting dust cloud flying into his mouth. His face wrinkled, and his eyes twitched as he tried to keep it down, but his head split open as a thunderous sneeze exploded from him, knocking the bowl over and scattering cereal across the floor. Sighing, he leaned down to pick it up and froze.

The floor was cracked.

His eyes following the gaps in the tiles all the way to the door to the hallway, Bain straightened, turning his body towards the exit.

His claws twitched reflexively, and he slowly worked his way over to the hallway before opening the door.

Bain began to tremble as the sight met him, and while it didn't show, his jaw began to tense, multiple layers of teeth grinding against each other.

The hallway was dripping in blood. A mess of red handprints and deep scars coated the walls, wet drag marks covering the ground. The lights above were almost all ripped out, and only a single lightbulb remained, flickering pitifully in front of Amber's room. The door had been kicked down.

Raising his claws, Bain slowly stepped over the trails of blood, trying not to disturb them, and entered Amber's room.

The decoration went utterly unnoticed the moment he saw the battered and shredded jersey-clad form in the corner. There was no illumination in here, scorch marks and ragged tears having mostly destroyed the room. Bain walked over to her limp body, staring in quiet disbelief. He crouched down and extended a claw, shaking as he poked Amber.

She didn't respond.

Bain tore out of the room, skidding on the soaked carpet and sprinting for the elevator. The doors were similarly torn to pieces, metal cables loosely dangling with nothing to hold up. It didn't matter to Bain. Leaping directly into the shaft, he sank his claws into the sides, hurling himself upwards while counting floors.

What happened? What had killed all of the heroes on his floor with such merciless abandon? What creature had that kind of power?

It wasn't just on his floor. Every single floor's elevator doors had been ripped from their sockets, and carnage was visible behind them. Thankfully, he didn't see any more corpses, but there was only one dead body he did want to see.

Clambering onto the forty-ninth floor, claws scrabbling as he tried to get a grip on the wet floor, he was met with the same sight he'd had on the other floors. Without a hint of hesitation, he ran for room 4912, pausing as he saw the gaping hole where the solid wooden door should have been.

Tentatively, he entered. Dim red light cast vague shadows on everything, illuminating the wrecked furniture and decimated king-size bed. Sunken deep into its covers and splattering over the edges was a mess of red.

Whatever it was that had attacked the Tower had literally torn Stitches to pieces. Barely anything was left of him to recognize, but Bain would never forget the half of Stitches' face that remained on the pillow, one eye staring at Bain in dead shock. There was no way he had died quickly, but the zombie had clearly met his last fight.

Bain collapsed on the floor, falling to his knees as he stared at the ground numbly.

His mentor was dead.

His best friend, however short he'd known her, was dead.

Based on what he'd seen, everyone in the Tower was probably dead.

A shrieking noise accompanied the sparks rising from Bain's claws as he clenched them into fists, his face morphing from absolute agony to incomprehensible fury.

They were going to pay for this.

Rising like a phoenix from the ashes, Bain turned around and left Stitches' room how he'd found it. Jumping into the elevator shaft, he ignored the feeling of freefall, waiting for the impact of the lobby forty-nine floors below. It came sooner than he expected, a spray of water splashing onto him. He blinked it away. So what if the Tower was flooded? No one was left to care about it.

Pacing through the empty lobby, Bain exited through the doors and realized what had been off earlier. What had been itching at his consciousness and building into a roar over the past ten minutes. What had been casting that odd red light into both Amber's and Stitches' rooms.

Centropolis was on fire.

Bain stepped out, slowly heading down the stairs. Somehow, the flooded water stayed at his knees the whole way down, and he waded through it. The shattered windows and holes carved through buildings spoke of a battle the likes of which no one had ever seen.

As he kept going, the wreckage increased. Apartment buildings had collapsed against each other, toppling like dominoes. The silence was unnerving, the only sound being the fires that were lit on what felt like every other surface, crackling quietly to inform all those nearby that something had happened.

Bain passed Firepower's mutilated corpse, flames flickering sporadically above his palms. Fancy DeMancy, his shredded blue suit barely identifiable among the bricks his body had been buried under. Even Hallow hadn't been spared if the headless trench-coat-clad body was anything to go by.

Bain paused, staring at a familiar tanktop and shorts-wearing human. He had short black hair, and his tinted, cracked goggles rested above a manic grin, slack in his death. Across the street from Mike's motionless form was a massive hole through a warehouse, the edges still simmering from the streamer's final blast.

He didn't feel anything anymore. He just moved on.

That numb feeling didn't last very long. Turning a street corner, he was met with the most destroyed area he'd seen yet. Everything had been flattened for thousands of feet, rubble strewn about the place as though it had been thoughtlessly cast aside by some massive hand. What fully occupied Bain's vision, however, was the devastatingly recognizable and incomparably long form of a massive centipede.

Bain approached it, a stream of acid dripping from his eyes as he placed a trembling claw against Nahma's tall side, before hugging it tightly. No motion emerged from the half-mile body, deep scars having been carved into it. There wasn't a single leg left on him, and the mountains of destroyed sheddings told him exactly what had happened. Apparently, even Nahma could be overwhelmed.

Dumbstruck, Bain followed the path of Nahma's body, trying to reach his head wherever it was. If any creature on the face of the earth could survive this much damage, it was Nahma. He had to have lived. There was no way he could have died. He had to have lived.

He hadn't.

Going around a tight loop of Nahma's corpse where the body had been twisted in on itself, Bain was met with the sight of Nahma's white skull, dozens of empty sockets staring into nothingness. It rested near a small hill of human bodies.

There was a black form crouched on top, facing away from Bain. Based on the horrific squelching noises emanating from it, it was clearly eating.

Bain flexed his claws, muscles bunching as his face split open.

"HOW COULD YOU?!" The scream erupted from the back of his throat, forcing his voice into deep hoarseness, the inside of his neck shredded from the effort.

The creature stood slowly, throwing away what was left of a human arm, and Bain's heart dropped. Of course, he recognized that figure. Four arms. A bulky figure. A black carapace, shining red and orange from the light of thousands of fires. As it turned to him, Bain's limbs went slack, and he stumbled backward, falling over in the sticky liquid.

It wasn't water he'd been wading in. It was blood. Uncountable amounts of blood, dull green and red mixing in random spirals as Bain stared in open-mouthed horror at the shape grinning at him.

Looking Bain in the eye, the other Bain spoke to him in an earth-shattering rumble.

"You're gonna be worse than I ever was."

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Bain sat up from his place on the floor with a heart-wrenching scream, one that failed to pierce the flawlessly soundproofed walls of the tower.

His bedroom was a mess. The bed had been all but obliterated, scars from his claws shredding the covers and mattress, piercing through to the frame underneath. Dim white light streamed in from the broken window, the sound of hundreds of cars buzzing dully against his ears. Feathers were still floating down from the ceiling, where he'd pitched his now-destroyed pillow.

Sprinting out of his room and throwing his door open, Bain looked to his left.

The tension flooded out of his shoulders, and he practically melted into a heap against the hallway's wall. Amber's door was closed, with not a scratch on it. He wasn't even disappointed to realize his arm was still gone.

His enormous heart still racing, Bain stood and headed for the elevators, ignoring the curious and slightly worried hero who passed him. He didn't even pay attention to the fact that the huge armor-clad man was the fourth-highest ranker in Centropolis.

Bain pushed the elevator button, waiting for the doors to slide open with a polite ding. Leaving the elevator and the incredibly nervous lightning-themed rookie inside, he walked towards the undamaged door marked 4912.

Raising a hand to knock, Bain paused. Stitches' desire to stay asleep when asleep had been effectively burned into Bain's mind, and it was still very much so early morning, nearer to midnight than dawn.

It was for that reason that Bain went back down the elevators, exiting through the undestroyed and not flooded lobby, not paying attention to the dozing secretary at her familiar desk. Jogging down the stairs, he breathed in the relatively clean air, lights from hundreds of lamps, billboards, and cars shining on his carapace and reflecting dully onto the ground.

It was a matter of minutes before Bain was back in the tunnels, having taken a significantly lesser-known and harder to notice entrance located in a nearby alley. Ambling through hair-thin webs, he tiredly made his way down a few layers.

A rumble worked its way over to him as he walked, and he turned around, a sleepy grin spreading widely across his face as Nahma skittered around a corner. The centipede's many eyes narrowed as he saw Bain's stump. "What happened?"

Bain didn't respond, instead slowly stumbling forward and hugging Nahma's face. His wide forehead creased in concern and confusion. While a little odd as far as Nahma was concerned, Bain wasn't ordinarily one to show physical affection. "Are you all right?"

Bain nodded, slowly turning and leaning against Nahma's side between the layers of legs. "I had a bad nightmare. First one in a while, I think. I'm fine now. Don't worry about... about my... arm. I'm... fine." He fell asleep quickly, his head dropping onto his chest as a low rumble emanated from him.

Carefully, Nahma eased his legs around him, leaning him into a more comfortable position and lying his head down on the softer part behind the immense claw on the end of his limb. He sent out a powerful mental signal to every shedding for ten miles, instructing them not to let anything past. The end of one of his antennae split, particles of dry carapace drifting away as he formed a fuzzy, soft tip on the end.

Gently, carefully, he stroked the top of Bain's head, and the monster wriggled slightly, settling into a deeper sleep with a faint smile. "Sleep here, Bain. Nothing will harm you while I am here."

Nahma settled down, his thousands of legs folding in as his body rested on the ground. While not one to do so ordinarily, he fell asleep, still quietly comforting his son.