The Conquistador moved with deadly intent. The first slash of his sword was only for the testing of my reflexes. As soon as he stepped forward and swung, I stepped back, inching towards the chasm of the Kizmet's cage.

The ground had become unstable as it started to push its way up through the floor. If it was allowed to go on, I hoped, it would tear this entire damn Palace apart.

I could see in the Conquistador's eyes, he was aware of this too. The clock was ticking for him to put me down and put the lid back on his monster. Everything he had built was at stake.

Naturally, his next strike was not so hesitant. His feet swept in a beautiful change of pose as he lanced forward and drove his sword out. He may have opened himself up to an attack in the process, but he didn't care at all. His sword plunged straight through my supposedly invulnerable shell, and it tore the organs within to shreds. Meanwhile, my own clawed strike did little more than glance off of the King's face. It failed to do an ounce of damage.

"That's quite the shield," I said, speaking through the pain of the blade in my gut. He needed to see that I wasn't afraid. This was just another problem to solve for me on the path to my desires, albeit a potentially impossible one.

"Do not waste my time," he hissed, wrenching the hilt of his weapon. Then, with a single jerk of his arm, he slashed down and out of my torso, nearly cutting me in half as he did.

Though I could heal in almost the instant the damage had been done, he was determined not to give me that opportunity for free. Subsequently, two more strikes came even faster, this time going for the limbs. And like clockwork, two of my arms were sent falling freely to the ground.

I didn't bother trying to stall for time by talking. I gracefully jumped back instead, landing across the gap and the monster's claw on what remained of its cage's warped lid. My arms scurried away as Alejandro watched them. With a nod to one of his men giving the order, our exit was barred using a Power with control of the Earth. Large boulders moved to shape a stone blockade, sealing me and my arms inside with the King.

"You're not using your Power?" I asked, feeling my body restructure to sprout not just two, but four new spiked appendages. The muscles prioritized twitch-speed over strength. Without lowering his shield, I was getting nowhere. I had to tire this bastard out. Wear him down so I would have the opportunity I needed. Otherwise, this fight would drag on forever.

As soon as he jumped forward across the gap, I decided to put my designs to their limit with a rapid dodge. I fully somersaulted behind him at that moment, twisting in the air to land on the other side.

"You cannot run," he warned, annoyance flashing across his face. "Nor will stalling for time do anything but harm your chances. You will exhaust all your energy before you see a drop of sweat has fallen from my brow." He might not have had a taste for banter, but he was more than willing to drive home his expected victory.

I tried to check for any sloughed-off cells outside this chamber, weighing my options in case I needed to run. Only, I couldn't find any just beyond the crowd outside. Not a single cell had gotten farther... And that could mean just one thing, unfortunately.

"Fine," I admitted. "You've trapped me." He was employing some Power to keep my own realm of influence locked into a small area. Though I might have tried transferring my consciousness to one of the few clumps of cells in the hall, it would be a critical mistake. Since I couldn't run, I had to give this fight my all. I couldn't risk diminishing myself to a form that was easily destroyed or lacked the size to host my mind. If I lost my planning ability, it would be easy for them to find the right Powers to kill me, no matter how savvy my adaptations were. "We're pulling out all the stops, then."

This had to end right here and right now.

At my sides, two figures rose up onto their feet. The men that I killed had been mangled by the reanimating tendrils that my severed arms sprouted. Their nervous systems could be hijacked and restarted now, with my cells digging into them. Their flesh could be interwoven with my own right up until they became one living being. Though I still could not maintain my connection for more than an hour, this was all I needed.

The three of us spread our arms in perfect unison. My mind was inundated with multiple sets of eyes and ears. Though their own brains had to be taken offline, mine swelled to handle the cognitive load. Grey matter crept down my spinal column, growing like fungus through my organs.

Possible moves spread out in infinite sequences within my head. I'd never felt smarter.

This time, I was ready for his attack. As he jumped forward for another slice, I knew he would trade damage for damage, trusting in his shield to give him the better end of the deal.

Let's see if he feels this, I thought.

With a duck and dash, I got low beneath the point where I knew he would land. Then, I launched my knee upward with all the force my body was capable of.

The impact to his frame failed to break through his shield, but it showed me that he was not immovable. Instead, he was ejected with a thunderous crack, up to utterly blow through the stone of the ceiling. The palace shook with the impact, and down below the Kizmet groaned.

"That's more like it," our three voices spoke.

New light poured in from the hole cut out above. I could hear screams there, too. Helping my minions by throwing them up through the hole, I followed-suit with a six-limbed skitter up the stone.

All of us came up into a red draped room of the castle. Our presence sent the undressed inhabitants running in fear, and I searched for my target amongst them. These women and boys were not Powered, I realized, watching in the time it took for me to find him. King was pulling himself from rubble at the end of the room. These were his pleasure chambers, I guessed. Kept right above the entrapped Kizmet. Maybe they found having that much sheer Power beneath them exhilarating, I wondered.

I certainly did.

Suddenly, a boulder went airborne, hurtling towards my body from the end of the room. I barely had the time to dodge it, but my eyes caught something else. As it came closer, it obscured a portion of the room. Moving faster than lightning, the King had stayed in that blind spot. He had disappeared from where he should have been. All of this so that he could appear as if from thin air from behind me.

My head swiveled in a one-eighty motion, but there was no time to stop him left. His sword ripped through the air, slashing me three times before the boulder had landed behind him. The move was virtually instant.

I was severed at the waist, head, and chest by his attack. Blood exploded over the space, dousing the red curtains and beds, and my pieces flew away with the tearing force.

My head had remained intact, I felt. My brain kept its continuity. This meant I could still make my counter-attack.

One of my zombies jumped at him head-on, while the other ran up behind the Conquistador. Attention honed on decimating the target in front of him, he failed to stop the chokehold from falling in around his neck from the back. This was all the chance I needed.

Obviously, the King was unconcerned by the vice of a normal human's choke. He reached to rip the locking arm off with one clean pull but found that he couldn't. There was just one problem with his plan.

The limb's flesh slipped between his grasping fingers like sand. It began to spread out over his bare skin from there as if it were a cloud of dense insects. There was no solid point to grasp.

Meanwhile, the rest of the body laying against his back jettisoned out a flurry of hooked limbs from its torso, trying to wrap around and get a better hold. He was at once covered in the horror of my animate gore as I strained to push the mutations to their limit. Each of the zombie's ribs splayed open like a blood eagle and contracted to try stabbing into the Conquistador's own. Teeth formed across the corpse's legs and they curled upward at an impossible angle to gnaw at his skin. The last of his clothing was shredded. Yet, nothing truly worked.

It bought me enough time to reconstruct myself on the floor, but inevitably, my trap didn't hold him. Each swipe of the King's hands crushed and rent, throwing off my organic machines. I couldn't keep up the assault fast enough to stop him.

It turned out, the more my separated constructs healed themselves, the faster my control over them diminished. Soon, the spiked snakes I had biting at his eyes would no longer respond to my call. They either slithered away in terror, becoming independent lifeforms, or they died with the stress; no longer capable of accessing my Power.

My second fighter had healed up and he was standing in wait by my side, but the first was ruined beyond use. Now that I had seen the limitation of their toughness, I made a decision.

My parasites had been given enough time to work through the corpse's biology and change its DNA. With this fight, I had gained a glimpse into my Power's inner workings. I could only control cells that shared a very specific code, I learned. This was why, as my constructs healed and as time passed, I lost control of them. Replication failures accumulated throughout the cells with each change or repair. It was not as if I could simply set them to run, either. Their DNA was fundamentally unstable.

For some reason, my Power would only allow the direct repair of DNA in my central mass. This, I understood, was a hard limit, and it deeply informed my next strategy.

As the Conquistador faced me, I ordered my construct to converge with me. Both of our skins melted as they made contact, and the subsumption began...

For the first time, I saw genuine fear flash across my enemy's face. As the two bodies became one, I lurched forward, bones and organs rebuilding into something new. All that was left of my ruined fighter also joined us. Together, we were a giant.

The King's sword now could not possibly bisect me. I was simply too wide across to take with one strike. My strength was buffeted now as well. Each of my punches would hold the force of the same strike which had sent him flying through solid stone before.

"You can't lower your shield," I taunted. "Even a single cell might be enough to kill you. You know your healing is useless if I get my hands on you now. You should have just let me go, Alejandro!" It felt good to be the one making the threats for once. So many people had walked all over me. Heroes and villains treated me like I was disposable, so sure that they could end me with a thought. Now, it was my turn. "Yet, without your Power, you can't hope to beat me. You know that, don't you?"

Continencies flickered over his eyes. Down below, it felt like an earthquake was starting to take hold. His men were trying their best to put the genie back in the bottle... But without his draining ability, it would take his entire army to stop such a creature.

Only so many of his men could live in the Palace, though. The rest of his reserves would take hours to arrive from the surrounding countryside. By then, it would be too late.

The King threw aside his sword, knowing it was useless now, and struck violently into my body with his bare hands. He meant to tear me limb from limb until my healing was finally exhausted.

Even still, it was like he was punching into slime. He tore into me, but he could not send me flying back anymore. I had designed it that way, leaving my belly soft and impact absorbing. Blood merely exploded back into my chest cavity.

My own punch to his side hit with considerable force but elicited no grunt of pain. I might have been able to knock him through the air, I thought, but he was completely immune to the damage of the impact itself.

In my mind's eye, I saw the last two men I had killed. Their lifeless faces stared up at me. Deep down somewhere, Walter was in agony over all of this. Hickory was cheering at the fall of the weak. But I felt nothing but excitement for what was to come. There was no ideology at all in my actions. I was simply hungry.

Anger welled up in the King, bellowing defiance at the impotency of his attacks.

He attempted to step back out of the mound of pulp that he had been beating my form into. But he quickly saw that I moved forward to follow him. His arms twisted and he stepped back to try and cast off the blood growing up them, but I did not relent.

A shadow fell over his face as he understood what was about to happen next.

There was only one way for me to win here. We both had figured out what that was.

My flesh rushed to completely cover his body. Where the last zombie had failed, I had the necessary mass to make each swing of his arm or kick of his leg fail to find purchase. Enveloped in the soft prison, I kept him suspended off the ground, and he could not find the leverage to get free.

His chest spasmed as it tried for air, but his forcefield would not allow anything through. His strikes would eject my mass with their shockwave, but I had mass yet to spare. Each punch suddenly became weaker, and I knew that he was running out of stamina. His healing could not account for the complete lack of air.

Meanwhile, dozens of Supers came sprinting into the room the moment the fight had turned in my favor. They launched massive strikes of every kind at me as they moved into sight. I braced for the impact.

Lightning and acid scorched the sensory organs off of my surface and I was forced to do everything I could harden against the myriad attacks. Everything from shockwaves that would crack a building to projectiles that would shatter diamond.

Chunks were blown out of me, and air almost made it inside. One good hit might dislodge my meal from its casing. Thinking fast, I sunk down into the hole in the floor. Frantic yelling echoed after me.

This would come down to a matter of seconds.

The Conquistador's heart had been pounding when he went in. His oxygen burned fast.

The first overzealous Super reached me with enhanced speed and attempted to tear into my mass and drag out his Lord. He didn't get halfway there, however. Not without a tendril shooting out to cover his face and fill his lungs. His skin might have been invincible, but I learned his organs were not.

My work was almost done.

When the rest of the crowd at last arrived, someone else with a forcefield like the Conquistador's was able to reach in and pull him out before I could stop them.

"Step back!" one of the men yelled next.

He had spread out his hands and created a spherical field around me. It was like a haze in the air, spreading out over my body. I merely watched in amusement as temperatures inside spiked to the heat of the sun's surface. It was a smart move on their part, seeing that I had left behind my previously fire-proof form.

They all watched as my body was melted to a nice black stain on the ground, confident I was dead. Everyone fell into silence as the Conquistador sputtered and coughed where he had fallen down on one of the beds to catch his breath. He shook for a brief second as a minor seizure worked its way through his system. There came a collective sigh of relief as he stood up.

It wasn't to last, however. At once, the ground below us started to crackle. The Godlike Kizmet was nearing its full strength and we were but an insect on its back. The lid was about to pop beneath us.

The men looked to Alejandro where he swayed in place, shaking lightly. "Lord!" one of them yelled. "You have to drain the Kizmet, Lord!"

The Conquistador simply smiled at them and I felt all the satisfaction in the world.

The entire building seemed to turn on its head then as the foundations rose. Its weight released up from the earth like a leaf lifted by the wind. Everything began to crumble, and panic exploded through every man and woman. This was far and away the best day of my life.

Finally, the Kizmet was rising.