I had four missiles, two bombs, two allied fighters, and more than a hundred thousand of the strongest remaining Martians. Around us, countless hordes were gathering. Millions of enemies outnumbered us, even greater now than when the fight had begun. With each loss on our side, the enemy gained, and our pit only deepened.

Against the Supers remaining, our firepower was paltry.

The Scarab took a killing blow only minutes into the fight, collapsing the building on which it was propped and cutting off our forces. Half had made it up to the gigantic glass platform where the Lich was fighting from, while half remained helplessly on the city-floor.

Looking down there, I saw nothing but a slaughter. Very soon, I realized, this fight would be over once and for all. Then, only the dead would fill the land, and Seraph would have no one to stand in the way of their perfectly loyal armies. They could take the North, and rule forever.

We’ve lost, I knew. It’s all but certain, now.

As I came up over the glass platform and started firing my rockets and bombs at the Super Thralls of the Lich, trying to get through to him, I saw how little effect they had. Dodging barely through attacks that would vaporize me, my enemy merely stood still, placidly letting the explosive force roll over them without a thought. The asymmetry of power was stark.

All of our fighters only managed to reduce the Lich’s thralls by half. Sol took the frontline, attempting to pierce straight through their ranks and kill the old Russian, but he was swiftly met by one of the great punches I had seen before. Launched on a gust of earth-shattering force, he was tossed limply into the wreckage of the city below.

So long, General, I thought.

The troops were leaderless, running thin, and faced with enemies so beyond them that there wasn’t even a hope of victory.

After I drew the Lich’s attention, I was forced to maneuver back under the platform’s edge. The other Martian jets were not as lucky. They were pulled from the sky on a whim by one of the Lich’s Thralls. A powerful psychic unlike any I’d ever seen. In his grasp, they were crushed to bits.

I watched from beneath the transparent platform, my head spinning, trying to figure out a way through. Yet, no plan presented itself.

In all the chaos I had lost track of Hickory and Daniel, but I caught sight of them when the green blasts started up. They were single-handedly holding the offensive together with their Powers. Foci and Paradise were nowhere to be seen. They’d died or fled. In either case, I would not be seeing them again.

“Don’t you get it now?” I heard the voice of Seraph in my mind. “You could never win.”

I cursed him. “Fuck you! You created the Lich for just this situation, didn’t you? You knew that eventually, the Logician would create a Power that might complete his work, and that you had to subvert his plan with your own.”

“I have been planning my victory for centuries, Walter. You should’ve just run when you had the chance.”

“But it won’t be enough, will it?” A terrible realization was coming over me. “When you kill the Logician, it might cancel out all the Powers he created… But will it cancel out yours? You said you were his equal.”

“That I am. And when he’s gone… I will remain. As will the Lich, who sustains the abilities of those in his grasp, granting them to me. My domain will grow to encompass this entire universe, indeed. And then I will do what the Old One lacked the will to. I will transcend suffering entirely.”

It was worse than I could have ever imagined. Seraph had only been trying to manipulate me when he said his goal was to affirm the direction of history before Powers and end them once and for all. No. It was his full intention to go on creating them for himself, and to assure that all the strength, both of technology and of Supers, was his.

Through my horror, I saw the implications. He knew that this was his only path because maybe, just maybe, technology wouldn’t lead to a singularity. It might have just intensified the blossoming of life out into the universe, and he couldn’t have that. He craved uniformity and finality.

“God, forgive me,” I thought. “I didn’t believe it was possible. I was too afraid.”

High above us in the dark night sky, there were flashes of blinding golden light. Something unexpected was happening, and it made me tune out the mockery in my ear. A great echo of bestial roaring came down, and fire filled the whole firmament. There was a thundercrack then, and silence followed.

I was doing what I could to save the forces on the ground, dropping my last bomb to kill a Hero, so I couldn’t split my focus for long. Despite the absolute dread I felt, I went on doing all that I could.

Suddenly, there was another fighter jet pulling up along my side. It was sleek and silver, not at all like Creep’s designs. After only a second I recognized its face, and I was about to get ready for a fight when it signaled.

Using lights haphazardly strapped to the bottom of his ship, Ironbolt had created a program to clunkily translate his speech into Martian, broadcasting it through the lights. He said only two things. “Have faith. And eject.”

A million things raced through my mind in that instance, but one fact pushed through to the surface. In our negotiations, he had been willing to offer me forgiveness. Even after everything I had done, Ironbolt refused to say that, given the chance, he would have killed me back in the beginning, at the lake. To him, an innocent man was innocent, and an evil man, never an ally.

He stuck by his principles to the end.

And so, without any further hesitation, I did what he said, because this was my last, last chance.

As soon as I activated the eject function, my ship exploded and threw me out. There was a weightless and breathless instance where the world was spinning too fast for me to make anything out, after which I felt a heavy impact. I’d been thrown into the dark.

But it wasn’t the dark of the night sky or a rubble grave. Instead, it was the interior of a poorly lit vehicle. Ironbolt’s ship. Somehow, he had caught me in midair.

“What is this?” I asked. “Why are you doing this?”

A man came out of the dark twirling a knife in his hands. He wore a featureless mask over a scarred face, and he spoke in a British accent. He was not too pleased, and that was an understatement. “It’s the hardest decision either of us ever have made is what this is. You better appreciate that.”

“Walter!” I heard Ironbolt shout from the front.

I went to see him at the head of the ship, knowing he couldn’t leave the cockpit. There, he motioned for me to sit down in the copilot’s seat, and he immediately began to argue. “You have to see now that you have zero chance of victory. Therefore- ”

I stopped him by grabbing him around the shoulders and hugging him. I didn’t know what came over me, and neither did the Hero for that matter. It was incredibly awkward.

He was silent all of four seconds before finally asking. “What happened?”

“You never waver, Ironbolt.” I didn’t need him to tell me what decision he had made, as it was clear to me. There wasn’t much time, and he had to be caught up with the facts. “If Seraph kills the Logician in the North, all Power in the world will belong to him. He will enslave this world to a fate worse than any cyclical cataclysm I might have brought about. I’m sorry. That’s all I can say to you now. I’m sorry I turned away from your help so many times throughout this last year. You’ve always had faith that if people just believed in morality, the future could be salvaged, and I always lacked that faith.”

His grip tightened around the ship’s controls, and he nodded slowly through his anger and confusion. “You might just be lying to me now, but I can’t lose my principles. Not today of all days. Because today is the day I needed to abandon them the most, and I didn’t. The Lich is Evil, and I have to believe that you’re telling the truth when you say you see that too and that you’re sorry. Tell me you will do the right thing here, Walter Watson. Help me to believe one last time that the ends never justify the means, so that I’ll have the strength to finish this.”

I placed a hand on his shoulder, thinking carefully about my next words.

When the battle was finally lost, I saw that it had always been destined. Even if I had come to the Earth with my fullest Power, it wouldn’t have been enough against Seraph and the Lich. Not without the help of others.

No matter how much I wanted it, there was no way to undo or stop history. I’d talked so much about affirming nature, but in this respect Seraph had been right, and I had just been another ploy at totalizing control. I was no better than him if I did not allow the world to take its course. And so, I knew what I had to do.

I had to join Ironbolt in his fight against Power. As the fight against entropy, it was not a war to be won, but it was a fight that we could win today. And if I accepted this futility, I realized, I would beat the nihilism of my desire for an end; a closed-loop. I would really be a good man for the first time.

Nothing would ever be finished in life and finally, I understood… That indeterminacy wasn’t our enemy. It was our only salvation.

With a deep sign, I felt my dream of Godhood slip once and for all from my mind, and I knew what I had to say. “I’m happy to lose, now. Just as long as it’s to you. Because I know you don’t want to win.”

Those were the words he needed to hear.

Looking out the front window of the jet, Ironbolt took those words as his cue to rise above the glass platform’s edge. He let loose two rockets, but these were no ordinary weapons. These were our Trump card.

The field was littered today with Seraph’s most taboo inventions. In the hands of a Technicist as skilled as Ironbolt, they could be taken and repurposed.

And so, the rockets landed in an explosion of utter darkness. And just like that, two of the Lich’s most unkillable Thralls were swallowed into an abyss.

“Matter erasure,” Ironbolt said. “Leave it to you, Creep, to coax out Seraph’s strongest weapon. They hid it for years. But now I finally have it.”

There was just one problem. The Lich had moved with prescient awareness of the strike. He had been the main target, after all, yet he’d gotten so far away the moment the rockets launched. It was the first time I’d seen the old man move, and he was fast as fuck.

“You’re never going to hit him like this,” I told Ironbolt. “What else do you have?”

“I only have one more of those left, and nothing else will finish the job…” He looked back into the ship, then. “I’m sorry.”

Avenger appeared in the doorway to the cockpit. “Set her down,” he demanded. “The first strike missed, and we’ve made ourselves a target. We won’t last thirty more seconds in the air. Set her down!”

With a grim resolve, Ironbolt reluctantly landed the ship in the midst of the remaining Martian forces. “So, it’s plan B.”

He stood up from his seat and lingered in front of his friend. They didn’t speak, then. They just moved past each other; eyes cast down. Whatever was known between them, it was too heavy for words.

The back of the jet opened up, letting the three of us down. There, I quickly found Hickory and Daniel. Out on the glass platform, there was no cover and nowhere to run. There was only the open expanse of sky made walkable by the dizzying material on which we stood.

The fighting was in a brief respite after the matter-deletion attack, each side waiting for the others’ next move. For our part, we gathered the meager handful of humans and Martians that remained.

“Well I’ll be damned,” Hickory said, looking at the Heroes who had joined us.

Above me, it became clear what the golden light had been created by, as a titanic body came falling down. It was Smiler’s Golden Dragon, and he crashed into the glass platform with such an impact that I thought for a moment it might shatter. In the wake of this slain beast, King Solomon’s chariot went hurtling to the Earth and likewise crashed.

The King was dead, as was the Dragon slain, both by each other's hand.

The last battle cry went out, and all of us charged.