Everything was so much easier when one was allowed to do it wrong. I'd never known what a blessing it was to fail; I felt alive again, as the adage went, to err is to be human.

Just for the hell of it, I smashed my fist into the wall, the blinding pain nothing to me after so many, many, many thousands of lifetimes of agony. Pain wasn't something I felt so much as registered nowadays. One could only become shattered to their very molecules so many times before a cracked bone became utterly meaningless. And besides, the popping and cracking of my flesh as the injury mended in moments was always amusing.

Well.

Not the mending itself. But the horrified reaction of the person before me. It had always forced me to remain clinical in my work before, professional. Which I'd agreed with, in principle. But like so many other things It had robbed from me, I found myself craving anything forbidden, for no other reason. Now that It was dying, I was a different man. A boy, maybe -- like a child escaping its parents tyranny for the first time, I was lashing out, simply because I could.

I hadn't been sadistic before, but oh did it feel good now. I crushed the fragile hope of the cringing man as I advanced as slowly as I could, milking their terror, delighting with every spilt tear of fear and frustration.

He cried out as he reached into the frost-burned wound on his chest I'd provided him with. Then his hand snapped forward, flecks of blood flying at me. In the air, they became as bullets, a trail of red vapor as the teardrops formed piercing cones. I caught the ones headed for my face with tendrils of ice pulled from my breath. The rest I let hit me, leaving my regeneration to impress even more helplessness into my prey.

He just gaped, horrified, as I closed the distance, apparently oblivious to the holes he'd put in me.

His power wasn't even that useful. Blood manipulation, requiring physical contact. I couldn't imagine the circumstances which would give rise to such a useless power. But I was collecting any power I could, and his seemed enjoyable for the macabre amusement I might be able to indulge in when stalking prey in the future.

My face lit up when I considered the possibilities of the things I could do to that Athan boy with this. Force his blood out his eyeballs. Rupture him from the inside. Give him minor strokes, over and over, until piece-by-piece he went fully braindead.

None of it seemed sufficient for the pain It had inflicted on me over him, but it was a start. Perhaps with him, I could revive my professional demeanor, just for once, and have him put away indefinitely. I'd feel better once I crushed Its plans forever.

My prey stirred again once I was only feet away. He was cringing and holding his guts in, the screaming and wailing from earlier, reduced to this. It felt good to be better than others, even if they'd be dead in a moment.

But he surprised me by suddenly lashing out, his own blood on his fingers again, trailing through the air like a whip. Perhaps surprise wasn't the right term, more a force of habit to do nothing, instilled in me against my will by the endless years It had inflicted upon me. So long had I just taken whatever life had thrown at me with the expectation that, if I failed, I could -- and would -- do it all over again, in a way, I'd been trained to fail.

But It was not helping me anymore. Flat-footed as I was, I still managed to react enough, by taking half a step backwards.

As I moved, I left behind a trailing version of myself, like an echo. A neat trick I'd picked up from a nice woman I'd murdered. The duplicate would mimic my actions, even my power usage, though randomly disjointed in time, sometimes acting before I did, sometimes after, and at times my mirror. It was ill-suited for precision, but an excellent tool of defense and havoc.

I saw myself prepare to strike, an icy lance extending from my arm, goosebumps rising from my echoed flesh as the sweat on my body raced and pooled to my striking arm, leaving trails of frost across my body as they rushed and froze.

But my echo never acted. The whip landed and slashed him across the cheek. I didn't quite follow what happened, but at once, my echo exploded into a haze of gore. The illusory properties of the echo caused the entire mess to vanish before it could splatter either of us.

Unexpected. And perhaps the blood-control power had more to it than I initially thought.

"How did you manage that trick?" I asked. He cried, and held his injury, gasping in pain at the sudden lashing out he'd foolishly done. You would think he would be more willing to talk, considering it would buy him more precious seconds of life. But few people thought rationally about such things,at times like these.

I tapped my cheek where my echo had been struck and struck a pose to muse aloud. A thought hit me, and I ran it past him. "Is it...perhaps...that you can control any quantity of blood, so long as it is somehow connected to you? I suppose that would have to be the case if you could make a whip of it, or else the tip would just fly off. So then, what? You lashed at my echo and...oh I see." I grinned at him. "You made contact with his blood through the whip of your own. And in that moment--" I flashed my fingers at him. "Poof."

"W-w-why?" he groaned, his knee shuddering under his body, as though he didn't even have the strength to kneel.

"Because you have something I lack. And that is inexcusable." I closed the rest of the distance on him and performed the lancing act that my echo had earlier imitated, the second hole in his chest pushing him over into unconsciousness, and sending him tumbling forward, his intestines spilling out as his hands fell away, the blood he'd been holding back suddenly greasing the floor.

Bad as he looked, I had plenty of time to take his power, and the surprise of its added utility was making it into something I was very much looking forward to. It would serve me better than him anyway, with my regenerative abilities, blood was a tool, not a resource.

I had a dozen or more of them now, churning inside me like writhing maggots sometimes, but every one I took make It weaker, and thus made me stronger.

I reached out towards his head, one of the few parts not caked with his blood, and then stopped, momentarily confused as the haze lifted.

The damnable thing had sent me back. I hadn't noticed the fog, it had gotten much sneakier about trapping me in its false realities. But how far back?

The answer came when the whip of blood scraped my cheek and suddenly, I faced the familiar sensation of my own body ripping itself apart.

It might have been very bad, if it wasn't something I was accustomed to. Dying like this, exploding violently, was possibly the one thing I had done most in my entire tortured existence. And I'd long ago figured out the trick to not.

Even as he commanded my blood to boil, I iced myself, freezing my own blood in my veins. My cheek stretched and bruised as the blood within it swelled into crystals which bloomed red through my skin. When he tried to detonate me, his powers could only reach the tip of my cheek, unable to affect or pass through the dam of frozen flesh I'd built in the side of my face.

I'd done something similar across my entire body to survive the molecular-shredding impact of being pounded by the P-Force in the past. For so long, I'd been so close to surviving the blow. Surviving as in, enough of my body left over in a shredded heap to regenerate. And the extra durability from him pounding a body made of ice instead of flesh was all I'd needed to cross the threshold.

I smiled beside myself at the thought. 'All I'd needed.' As though it were so simple.

I was still fighting an old hemoist, wasn't I? It was so easy to get lost in my thoughts. Another bad habit picked up by the life It had forced on me. The present never seemed very significant when there was so much of it. But I had to remind myself that wasn't my life anymore. I only had one chance at things from here on. Sometimes, even fewer, because as It just demonstrated, even frail as it was, It was not yet fully helpless.

This time I didn't ask questions or play around. I strode through his surprise at my own face-icing, kicked him in his bleeding guts to drive him to unconsciousness, and grabbed his scalp, feeling the tingle as his powers became my own.

With my other hand, while I waited, I availed myself of the new ability by commanding the smears of blood to leave my clothes, leaving my dress shirt and slacks pristine. Even if my sadism had overcome my professionalism in some regards, the latter was still in there somewhere. No kill should end with the predator looking a bloody mess.

But that was the work of a moment. And with several minutes left, I found myself drifting again in my mind. I snapped myself out of it just long enough to be sure there was no lingering fog around, no pale shimmers in the corner of my vision, nothing to indicate that It would interfere again. And once I'd confirmed, I let my mind loose to drift over whatever thoughts it pleased.

First was Athan again. He was always first in my mind, but only because he was so significant to It for whatever reason. Though my personal experience with the boy was anything but exceptional -- the only exceptional part about that encounter being my ill-fated union with It -- the fact that It had been consistently pressing him into my life made me hate him beyond any reason. I'd resolved that once I was powerful enough, once I'd taken everything I could, I'd kill him. Brutally, if possible. And with that, drive It and him from my mind forever.

I pushed them aside and thought about the blood power I was absorbing. In many ways, it was like my ice, and perhaps it was short-sighted of me to think it merely a gimmick. I had to have physical contact to spread ice as well, which was easy enough to get around by laying down streams of water or the like. Though a trap room filled with blood instead of water would be obvious.

Still. I was a murderer. If anyone ever came looking...say that Athan kid...a room full of blood might be exactly what he'd expect. He knew of my ice powers, and any flooded room would be treated as a hazard. A room of blood? There was a possibility there.

The blood also seemed more flexible than ice. I could do little with ice, honestly, except create it and melt it with a thought. Having it lash out or act in any animated manner was an ordeal, a matter of growing and shrinking it constantly in the directions I wanted motion, rather than actual movement. In this, the blood could be helpful.

It had limitations. One of which had saved me just now. As I'd suspected, as I'd learned from interacting with dozens of Exhumans and their powers now, all powers had limits which, if carefully considered, it seemed could or should maybe work, but in practice would not.

Why couldn't his powers pass through frozen blood? Why could I freeze some liquids and not others? Why could I create illusions of fire but of nothing else? It was a mystery of the powers. But a mystery to which I held some hints.

It was, I had concluded, a matter of belief. Faith, in a very literal manner. Perhaps even cognition. Powers, as a whole, behaved in the ways we expected them to, which was a conclusion I had not expected to reach.

I could not freeze oil, for example, because I had never considered frozen oil as 'ice'. Or even thought of frozen oil in my life, before attempting it with my powers. Similarly, the man's association with blood as a flowing red liquid had been his downfall. If his mind were more open, if his experience with blood were broader, he might have beaten me today in his desperate attack.

But it wasn't. Nobody's ever was. I was only this maddeningly introspective because I'd been forced to it after thousands of years with nothing but my own mind to amuse me. I had realized a while back I was technically insane, which surprised me very little. To see myself from without, ambling, constantly lost in thought, talking to myself about It, all the earmarks of psychosis were there.

Not like that mattered. Insanity was just a label. To say I saw the world differently from most was to state the obvious. Most were not Exhuman. Most were not killers. Most could not absorb the powers from their victims. Most had not lived ten thousand years, within a year.

The body in my hands slumped with finality as I dropped him. The transfer was complete, and his vitality was mine. Just to test things out, I detonated his body, rupturing every square inch of him from within, and then had the emerging blood sink into the porous concrete until no trace remained.

The police would be so very confused when they found his dessicated skin and bones in his basement without a drop of blood. My sadistic side cherished the thought.

But my professional side informed us being finished here. The musty tomb of a basement held no further allure once its owner had been victimized. I turned on my heel and headed back upstairs and out into the heat and humidity of the day.

It was fairly dazzling out, and almost at once, I regretted not finalizing my plans in the relative cool of indoors. Not that it mattered, with cryosis, I could make my own cool wherever I went if I needed.

I wouldn't though. I was supposed to be keeping a low profile, at least for now. There was another Exhuman nearby, and the whole purpose of this trip was to catch both at once. Blowing my cover now for a reason so stupid as cooling myself would be a tremendous waste.

Though, standing on the sidewalk, and noting how absolutely silent it was, I realized that was not my current issue. It was as though everyone on the block had been taken by the rapture. I wasn't green enough to ponder what that meant.

Walls of fire sprang up all around me with a thought, obscuring me from view, the heat of them almost unbearable even if I knew they were fake. Next I created several echoes, one at a time, hoping that one of them would walk through the flames for me. It took a few tries, but at last, one of them did, perhaps imitating the future when I stepped from this spot myself, or the past, when I walked to it. Hard to tell.

But the effect was instantaneous. A colorful projectile, streaking purple...or maybe orange?...flew from somewhere to my left and blew a comically-sized hole in my decoy.

I just watched with amusement as at that point, one of my other echoes picked that exact moment to also walk out. I imagined the sniper's confusion as the first echo vanished and the second emerged.

Enjoyable as it might be to see how long they would fall for this, I didn't intend to discover if the damage that weapon did surpassed my regeneration tolerance. More walls of fire sprang into being, everywhere, criss-crossing and cutting off all sightlines across the neighborhood. Involuntary shouts informed me that others remained in hiding, some even standing right at my flanks, waiting under optical camo to close the distance for when I was distracted.

They hadn't even had their comms broadcasting. Unlucky for them that I'd picked up some powers that had enhanced my hearing along the way. A startled noise muffled by his mask would be his doom.

I stooped and picked up a handful of grass, throwing it in the direction of the nearest invisible agent. Rather than drifting in the heavy, humid air, the grass streaked into nonexistence, though I stopped it with a thought in less than an instant, the individual leaves stuck and protruding from inside the thug's body. His scream I would have been able to hear even without my powers, as the grass blades lived up to their name and punctured him like buckshot. He fell at once, but not before I'd found a handful of sand to do the same trick at longer range to the one who'd shot my echo.

Within the walls of fire, there were seven or eight of me now, all moving through each other and myself, imitating my actions of the present and future and past, throwing blades of grass at random, spreading ice, doubling up or tripling the walls of fire across the neighborhood. One, I saw, even bulged with needles of blood shooting from his back, and I wondered when that happened.

I was answered almost instantly, as another solder emerged from nothingness and grappled me from behind, sticking a knife through my neck as he pinned me. Like my echo, I summoned my own blood to punch through my back and through the man, and both of us fell down gasping. Though I would be up again in a moment, he would stay down forever.

The fires, though fake, were as real-looking as any blaze, and their shifting palette wreaked havoc on the optical camo of the men standing nearby. Try as it might, the camo could not keep up with the random flickering, and certainly couldn't produce the same levels of eye-searing light. They stood out like glitchy smudges wherever they hid.

And I, and my echoes went forth and put them out. Many, I recognized as recon ops units, brought in to peer through the fires. Ironic, that the power they were here to counter would be what defeated them.

It was, ultimately, a short and brutal affair. A few dozen men sent to kill me, slaughtered for their folly. And all in less than ten minutes, without clamor. Brief and localized enough that I hoped it would not scare off my other prey. But who knows? It may turn out that I'd have to come back later. Not a huge loss either way.

But I also decided that with the delay and incident, speed was now more important than subtlety. Though, not to such a degree that I would throw myself using that girl's power, I'd done that once before and the result had been...disastrous. Ice would do.

And so I set out towards the city, my mind drifting again as I closed on my quarry, blades of ice on my feet skating across a sheet of it, forming from the humidity in front of me. It was slow going at first, but once I had an icy carpet trailing behind me, the whole thing pulling moisture from the air and chilling the world around me, it was not dissimilar from a pleasantly air-conditioned car.

Still. Whether my prey knew I was coming or not, the XPCA had tracked me here, they knew my movements. That introduced a level of danger, made me think of that letter It had forced me to write to him. The thought of that indignity still made me burn inside, even with the air around me close to frozen.

I didn't know when he would get it. Or even if he would get it. The contents of the letter itself, that It had forced me to reset again and again to get right made that clear enough. I cringed at remembering the lifetimes I spent, writing and rewriting the thing I hated to the person I hated at the hands of the thing I hated.

It was an apology. From It to Athan. Expressing to him in words what I had already felt. That It had lost its control over me, that It was no longer able to see and to plan, that I'd grown too strong for Its control. How It hoped that he would survive the fight that was coming, between him and me.

Half of the note made me ecstatic, and I wrote it with glee. The parts about It failing. The cryptic bits? Not so much. And none of it I enjoyed, mostly because of the nature of my enslavement. But also, the principle, of telling such things to him.

The end of it, I truly did not understand though. And I suspected Athan wouldn't either. The kind of mystical prophetic bullcrap that It liked to spew. Riddles that made no sense until they were already solved, placed in a person's mind to nudge them at the right moment towards the right end.

And the fact that, even in its dying throes, it would have me write such a letter, to explain itself and myself, and to try to push Athan towards something, when not sure itself that he would even win? It galled me up and down, all over again. It was the galvanization I needed to pick up every power in the entire world, and crush Athan with them. Just to make sure that stupid prophecy, every stupid prophecy that It portended would fail.

Hold concepts, listen to song, and not to die.

Stupid, pointless nonsense. Worse than most of the other stuff It had forced me to say, even. Though perhaps I was biased, hating this one especially for the number of weeks it had taken before I'd gotten its wording exactly right.

I'd arrived before I knew it. The courthouse for an insignificant down named Haydn. The city itself was barely a bump on the road, but there was a man here being tried for manslaughter, and it hadn't taken much more than a glance at his case to realize he was an Exhuman of some kind. For me, anyway. But that was what I did, read legal files and chase down prey. His powers seemed promising, something which could kill almost undetectably, and why he was here in court instead of being lined up in front of the XPCA firing squads.

I hopped off my ice trail, leaving my skates behind and adjusting my shirt as I walked up the deserted front steps. In the heat, nobody would be here unless they had to be, and my trail would melt away within minutes.

All that mattered then was looking presentable and finding my man within. I adjusted my collar, pulled open the enormous wooden door, and introduced myself to the clerk waiting at the desk.