“Fucking Silk Pants...This wasn’t courting death, this was showing up on her lawn after she’s filed for a restraining order and playing your boombox till her sisters Fate and Sleep poke their heads out the window to shout at you and threaten to call the cops,” I growled.

Flesh hit flesh, repeatedly and rhythmically, but it wasn’t a fun noise. I was in a dark room beating the living shit out of a little old man. Don’t feel bad for him. He doesn’t deserve your pity. Nevermind that old man was actually quite tough, the old man had been up to some annoying hijinks and was refusing to be a good sport and spill the beans now that he’d been caught.

The old man, or rather the deity-class entity in the shape of an old man, had done a fair bit to draw my mire. Enough so, that it didn’t at all chafe my scruples when I tied him to the seat he was sitting in, with his own intestines and some materialized cosmic law.

Thankfully, I didn’t need him to talk. I just needed to be in the same room with him. So I could use the proximity to study the akashic-encryption that he and his co-conspirators had used to hide their crappy little plan from me.

Fun fact, the most annoying thing about everyone knowing that you were borderline-omniscient was having everyone do their best to come up with new and innovative ways to try and think their way around that power.

Thankfully, I was quite the out of the box thinker myself. For every new means of hiding facts from the world, or least making it look like one had hidden those facts, I made sure to learn at least thirty new ways to discover things that had been hidden.

The only problem was that sometimes those truth-discovering, data-sniffing, solutions didn’t come to me, until after some complete and utter idiot had gone and done something stupid.

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Maci ran up a ramp that led to the boarding section of one of the new spaceports that were slowly supplanting airports within Terminus-Earth. Someone lobbed a smoke grenade. An unnecessary mercy and a fatal mistake. A little telekinesis let her snatch the grenade out of the air. A little alchemy let her turn the smoke grenade into a bottle of hyper-kinetic chemicals on the verge of a very rapid nuclear decay.

She was there and gone in a flash but the grenade was left behind. Flashing brightly before exploding with enough force to vaporize the entire building. When the news covered the story, or rather when the news told its sanitized version of the story, they’d have to force a small aetheric-battery production firm to take some of the blame. There was no other way to explain away the mushroom cloud that could be seen from a whole other state.

The fae-woman kicked up onto a wall. Running horizontally for a good ten seconds before using one of the soldiers who’d been sent to steal her offspring as a landing pad. As the man’s spine broke and his chest caved inwards, Maci tore his gun from his hands and used it to fire on the other soldiers that were still in the midst of taking cover behind him.

She killed three, and got too impatient to bother shooting the rest. She let the gun go, and tore into the rest with her bare hands and some deft use of telekinetic arrows.

By the time the gun hit the ground, and the bullets hit her targets, the other men were all already dead. Their heads and limbs were torn from their bodies. The brutality of their deaths was only alleviated by the fact that they all died almost instantly and thus likely weren’t alive long enough to feel the damage that was done to their bodies. Fading from the world too quickly to know that they were gone. Likely popping into the hereafter with question marks above their head.

The last segment of her run was up the ramp that led to the shuttle. The shuttle was trying to take off. She wasn’t going to let it. She increased the gravity of the shuttle, and thinned the air around the shuttle, to make it impossible for the shuttle to gain lift. Finally, she used pyrokinesis to burn out the shuttle’s anti-gravity thrusters.

Then apparently having decided that she’d done quite enough running for today. She bent the space within the entire import. Purposely doing so clumsily, because as far as she was concerned everyone that was involved in this little scheme was complicit and therefore she had no need to be concerned about “innocents” being ground up and crushed by the morphing dimension.

The shuttle was the only thing that she spared from her wrath. How could she not? That shuttle was carrying precious cargo after all. As the shuttle skid backward before stopping right in front of her, she glared up at the cockpit. Using a minor expenditure of mental energy to kill the pilot with her thoughts.

She waved her hands and tore a hole in the shuttle’s side. The earth beneath her feet rose up forming a staircase that she could climb so she could enter the shuttle.

Then she walked up onto the shuttle to find that she probably needn’t have worried as much as she had. The sole living occupant of the shuttle was a little girl. Blood-red hair, blood-red eyes, skin the color of latte with a little extra milk added. Cute, long, delicate looking, little pointed ears that marked her as being half-fae.

Flannery Kaylan might have been only a little girl, but she was me and Maci’s little girl, which made her quite the fearsome creature even without the multiple lifetimes worth of combat and survival knowledge that the girl had been born with.

That being said, my little girl was still a little girl. So once she saw her mother she broke down into tears. Maci swept her up in her arms crying with her as they teleported away. A fiery crimson mass fell from the sky and swallowed up the entire spaceport reducing the area into a deep crater that was soon turned into a lovely lake followed by a weekend of torrential rain.

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Naturally, that means that the rest of the soldiers were dead. Very dead. Good riddance. They were men and women who’d cooperated in the plot to kidnap one of my children in an attempt to blackmail me while holding her hostage. A plot that also included possibly trying to use her as a research sample to try and figure out what made me tick, because no one ever said stupid people couldn’t be greedy too.

I teleported home and held my wife and my trembling, tearful, child and we spent the rest of the month at home, helping my little girl work through the trauma of learning that the world wasn’t as friendly or as kind as we’d lead her to think.

Somewhere amidst that recuperative period, I spent some time on the phone with Felix Seth. I called Felix because I didn’t want to talk to Carter and have him futilely try to talk me out of drowning an entire nation in its own blood.

Carter was a total scout through and through and definitely, wouldn’t want me punishing an entire nation for their leaders’ shitheadery and chicanery. Funnily enough, Primrose who was also a scout, was a lot less sympathetic to the Silpants Republic’s plight. But then again my Prim was also a little darker in the demeanor and outlook. Despite both being some of the kindest people you’d ever meet, She and Felix seemed to understand that sometimes you couldn’t be nice, and that was probably how the Seth family got as big as it did.

Felix and I had a chat, and when we were done, he agreed to pass the news to Carter to have him deal with clean-up once I did what I had to. I suspect he wasn’t much pleased with the perpetrators either, the Seths were protective of their own, and beyond the fact that Primrose’ marriage to me, culturally made all the children I had, part of the Seth clan, it could have just as easily been little Tau that was taken.

The good news was that this wasn’t something the people on earth cooked up, though, there were a few, now very dead, earthlings involved. Some of the earth’s friends within the universe of Terminus-Earth, weren’t quite as impressed with either me or the Seth family. One of these stinkers was an interstellar empire known as the Silpants Republic. Imagine the arrogant young master trope, but instead just one asshole, it’s the entire planet. Or rather, multiple planets, in multiple solar systems, because young masters sure do have a way of getting things done before being turned into cannon-fodder for the protagonist.

I normally wouldn’t give a shit because I not-so-secretly wasn’t that fond of the Seths myself despite having married one, and reluctantly having another as one of my few male friends. Which is probably why I’m in this mess. I got lax.

I didn’t break my promise to be careful when it came to dealing with matters that involved my family’s safety and happiness, but I was a little more live and let live than my normally paranoid self would have allowed.

Six plus years of not having to be afraid, and not having anyone gunning for me, Six plus years of being happier than I’d ever been, lead to me giving me the insects that imagine themselves, my enemies, a little too much ground to crawl around.

This both was and wasn’t a bad thing, because I suspect that I probably wouldn’t have been able to build the life I’d built, if I went around killing everyone who looked at me funny.

These last six years have been the kindest and most merciful years I’ve had, and maybe that made me a little more chill than I should have been. So now I had to remind everyone of why they used to be so afraid of me. Now I had to go back to being a little more of a bloodthirsty asshole than I was used to being, and honestly, it was more than a little exhausting.

The main perpetrators of this whole stupid affair were captured, killed in as many terrible, gruesome ways as I could imagine, and then their souls were scattered. Then I turned my attention to those who quietly supported those perpetrators or were at least complicit in their crimes.

Then after I was done dealing with ‘those’ people, it was time to clear the field and wipe away the roots of those who’d call themselves my enemies.

A few hours after ending my phone call with Felix, somewhere out in a distant star, several inhabited planets just ceased to exist. For the sake of being able to look my children in the eye, I gave those who were technically innocent of any wrongdoing, a total of seventy-two hours to clear out of the planets and space stations that I intended to destroy.

They weren’t allowed to bring any wealth with them. They weren’t allowed to bring any cultural relics. They absolutely weren’t allowed to bring any weapons. All I allowed them was food, clothing, medicine, and the other necessities.

Of course, more than a few ignored these rules, and the penalty was death. They disintegrated the moment they approached their escape vessels with the contraband in tow. At which point, it was hopefully made clear that this wasn’t a negotiation, this was me telling them the only terms under which they’d escape from this terrible mistake of theirs, with their lives. As could be expected from an interstellar nation of nothing but Silk pants, it was mostly the very rich and influential who thought they could flout the rules.

I’d decided that the Silpants Republic would no longer be allowed to exist in any fashion, even if I was allowing some survivors to flee the soon to be atomized planets. Culture, traditions, history, all of it, was going to be erased. Once they were all space-borne, I even tore the memories of their pasts from their mind after destroying their homeworlds.

I erased every record of the Silpants Republic’s existence, both within their homeworld and abroad. If anything remained of their legacy it would be as a vague cautionary tale that would be told over and over again, through the countless worlds. A tale of a people who were erased after falling afoul of me and were now lost forever to the sands of time.

I reduced the surviving Silpantsians to amnesiac travelers sailing the void sea in search of a new home, and with no memory of their old home. The people would be allowed the bare bones of their personalities and common knowledge necessary for survival but that was it.

Knowing Carter, he’d likely already made arrangements to have some of the other local interstellar nations to take these people in as refugees, after Felix clued him in on what was happening. Or maybe he didn’t. I didn’t really care. I had a traumatized daughter to console, who’d just been forced to make her first kill decades, or even centuries before it should have been necessary.