This was it. This was what I'd been missing.

The years of confinement, of torture, of solitude and misery, only to break out and be unleashed upon the world, and for what? Following a cute keister around, attached to an insecure little man-child who constantly yanked my leash while going off of his.

Even that wasn't so bad. We'd had our share of misadventures. I'd even mind-fucked him on occasion, ridden to the rescue at least as many times as I needed rescuing myself. We had a nice rapport, give and take. By which I meant, the two of us gave ass-kickings and took names.

But something had always been missing for me. For a long time I thought it was the evil I wasn't really allowed to be. After being bottled up and set free, was I not entitled to a little rampage? A tiny bit of murdering? A teensy snippet of omnicide?

As Athan had slipped further and further into morally grey, I realized, that wasn't it. You could kill assholes all day long, and the asshole factories would just keep pumping out more. So then I wondered if it was the existential dread, the fear of being alone for a billion years after all the people had died and all the stars had gone out.

Which, yes, was still a valid concern. But meeting our god of Oasis and then Bob had mollified that somewhat. I'd learned there were other immortal entities out there, and if I lived long enough, I'd meet them all, and maybe when the universe came to a crushing black end, we'd have an eternal dance party or something. Maybe one of them would have the power to produce fine cheese, and after eating enough of it to get very, very, very sick of the stuff, we could play god and make our own cheese-universe, complete with sentient cheese-bitches to do our cheese-bidding.

I mean, that'd take a while, I didn't imagine the process of turning cheese into a star would be easy, but the fact remained that the end was not, in fact, the end. Potentially.

No it wasn't any of that which I'd been missing. I knew it now as I stood on my titan's shoulder, looking down at Justice as he sized up the enormity of the six-armed, three-eyed, musclebound, quad-wielding, golden-lighted threat I was bringing to town.

It was the laugh. The evil laugh. That was what I'd missed.

[MWA-HA-HA-HA-HA!]

I revelled in seeing the entire assembly wince in unison at my head-splitting cackle. Yes, let my belting mirth tickle your fragile brains until they weep. Hear me, I am Saga, tamer of titans, and mine is an evil laugh!

[MWA-HA-HA-HA-HAA!]

Somehow, Justice seemed unamused. He even tried to hurt my titan, graceful lines flashing against the invincible flesh, only to ring off of his flank without effect.

[MWAH! HA! HAAAH!]

"Holy shit, stop," Tower said from my titan's hand. "That is absolutely going to give me a headache."

[Oh, live a little. How often have you gotten to ride an impervious titan into battle?]

"Hmm. Well, I'm pretty big," he said, looking down at himself. "And when Moon's with me, she takes my shape...and she's unkillable…"

[You are such a freakin' buzzkill.]

"You love me. Missed you, girl, where'd you find this golden tank?"

I wished for Tower to be brought up onto the shoulder with me so we could talk properly. Or, more specifically, so he could talk properly to me, while I continued to have no interest in using my mortal mouth-flaps like a peasant whatsoever.

[Oh just something I dug up in San Francisco. You'd be amazed what people leave lying around out there.]

Justice was gauging our defenses now, slamming into Bob with a dozen different Exhuman powers without effect. I grinned and laughed again, just to demonstrate how feeble and inferior he was.

In retrospect, I kind of understood all the times Athan warned me about power going to my head now. Guy definitely had a point.

"You're serious?" Tower asked.

"Sure am," I said, using my pitiful mortal mouth, so the conversation wouldn't be broadcast to the whole fleet below our ankles. "He's an Exhuman, or used to be. Had the power to grant wishes, I got the whole story out of him once I figured him out."

"So I can just...wish for Justice to be dead?" Tower asked. His grin fell away after a moment of thought. "Wish for Jack to be okay?"

"Not really," I said, feeling myself frown as I swept the battlefield for Jack with my mind. I wasn't coming up with anything, and didn't like that implication. But someone who be nimble and be quick wouldn't wind up nailed like the rest of these suckers. I was probably just missing him somewhere in the din. "Uh, that ship kind of sailed, with what this guy did to himself."

"Did to himself?" Tower echoed, looking down across the expanse of glowing hunk. "You mean...this?"

"Sort of...hang on."

I closed my eyes and wished exactly what Tower asked for, that Justice would be dead. And no sooner did the thought actualize, a really, really determined wish, than Bob began to move again, instead of just standing there like an idiot.

And by move, I meant move. In addition to being completely impervious, he could do this ripple-thing, where space just kind of closed on his behalf, which was handy, because otherwise his movements were ungainly as fuck. But with this neat perk, even Justice found himself suddenly pressed, as instantly, a whole variety of giant-sized weaponry was reaching through folds in space to stab, skewer, slice, and shoot.

Even got him a few times, I noticed, although to be honest, I was just doing my best to pretend Justice wasn't even here, walling off my mind from even recognizing him, going so far as to mind-fuck myself just a little bit to keep those walls high. I didn't want a repeat of...whatever had happened last time. It made it difficult to keep track of what exactly was going on here, but as long as Bob knew what he was doing, I was okay with being in the dark.

"Um, yeah. So this guy, a long-ass time ago, he was an Exhuman kid, who granted wishes, right?" I continued. "Kept screwing around with his powers, called himself a Djinn or some shit, common Exhuman denial."

"Sure," Tower nodded. He'd had some of that. Pretty sure we all did, 'cept those of us who never had a chance.

"Well he goes on a date with this girl, really out of his league, basically tricked her into it, as I understand it. And he makes up this stupid, elaborate lie, that this little pagoda sitting in some park in Chinatown--"

"What town?"

"Chinatown, that's what they used to call the Chinese districts in cities."

He blinked at me. "Like Little Tokyo?"

"Don't make me kill you with a titan, Tower. Chinatown. I'm old, okay?" He nodded, but didn't quite seem to get it. Like I cared. "Anyway, this pagoda in Chinatown, which had no religious significance whatsoever...and if it did, it's certainly be fucking Buddhist or Taoist, but this kid was a moron...so he tells her it's a Hindu shrine and there's an ancient, invinicible, all-powerful, wish-granting Hindu deity who lives there, and she should make a wish. So his powers would go off, y'see? And presumably, he assumed she would not freak out at the sudden display of magic-and-or-Exhumanity, and would instead, presumably, spontaneously orgasm on the spot, or some shit."

"What did she wish?" Tower asked, his face all scrunched up with how much he was not following the story.

"She wished that there really was an ancient, invincible, all-powerful, wish-granting Hindu deity, who would protect people. She was a little cynical, see? Had some troubled home life? Maybe a little old and a little defeated to believe in blowing out candles and wishes coming true?"

"So...this is...the thing the wish created?" Tower asked, looking up and down the golden god again.

"Far as I can tell, the wish turned the stupid boy into this thing. So, yeah. Big ol' mentally-enslaved, hundreds-of-years-old, shaped-like-a-Hindu-deity-as-he-understood-it...thing. Just trapped underground this whole time, because that's where he told her the god lived, and nobody ever gave it a wish it could hear."

I grinned at him, my very best, most malevolent grin. "Until me."

[MWA HA HA HAH!]

"Yeah, I got it," he winced. "So can I make a wish now?"

[Nope, my first real wish after I got it going was that he'd ignore everyone else's wishes. He's my bitch and mine alone.]

Justice, who was dodging the same arrow over and over as it tore through holes in space and repeatedly came after him from new directions as it flew in the world's most convoluted straight line, must have heard that, because at my words, he looked up at me.

[Yeah, come and get me, meatsack,] I issued. [You'll find me no easier to kill than Bob.]

Tower, to his credit, fuckin' bolted, as he should. Because what came next was such a comprehensive compilation of deaths, I'd have scored a quintuple bingo if I still had my death journal on me to fill in.

I was blasted. Shredded. Mauled. Mutilated. Eviscerated. Decapitated. Fried. Burned. Roasted. Bisected. Trisected. Polysected. Fragmented. Flayed. Melted. Disincorporated. Sundered. Peeled. And shaken, but not stirred.

Kinda considered bottling all of that up and wondering if I shoved it into Karu's mind, if she'd just cream herself on the spot from all the different horrible sensations. But the whole time he was railing me, creatively finding new ways to detach parts of me from other parts of me, only to find me hale again, I was grinning like it was me who was the masochist.

I wasn't. It hurt a lot, and that actually kinda sucked. Understatement there, to be clear.

But the simple fact was, I was frustrating the shit out of him, utterly pissing him off, and that was worth any amount of death, no matter how agonizing. Pissing people off had to be my favorite thing in the entire goddamn universe, and this guy was arguably the most important douche in ours, making this the most monumental, most absolutely critical off-pissing that had ever occurred in the history of history, ever.

I'd take one laurel wreath and a fat check, please. Made out to cash.

Home boy wasn't doing too hot either, as he pounded me. From what I could tell...which wasn't much, honestly, as I couldn't read him by my own mind-fucking, and I couldn't see much, by how much time I was spending dead...but he was also getting a good butt-fucking by my enormous golden friend, whose dick was probably bigger than Justice's whole body.

I mean, not literally, although I guess I could have wished for that, if I'd had the time to consider. But more in the perpetually being mauled by weaponry sense.

Constantly, the blade, or the torso-sized arrowhead, or the tip of the fuck-off building-sized spear were coming down on him, severing him in half or worse, and he felt it, I knew that much by his reactions. But he seemed stupidly resilient, oblivious almost, to the damage being done to him as he focused on doing worse to me. Any chunk of him which was carved away just dissolved into floating meat-cubes, which would recreate themselves, and then reform into whatever had been cut off. It was obvious that simple bladed attacks weren't cutting it here, literally.

Next time I got a breather, by which I mean, lived long enough to draw a single breath, I wished for Bob to destroy him. Like, really, all-out.

Because I knew what that meant. I knew the kid's mind, and how he saw Hindu gods. I knew what was coming.

The closed third eye in Bob's forehead opened, and what was in there was…

Well, it was indescribable.

Whatever thoughts I had were utterly insufficient. It felt like anything I thought, any words I strung together to explain to myself what that phenomenon looked like, they would look up at the resplendence, would be awed and terrified as I was, as we all were. And then they would shut themselves up and give me a stern glare for even thinking of trying to use them to describe it.

It was like watching the birth of the cosmos. A swarm of meteorites, falling through a nebula, at once on fire from their descent and freezing from the frozen gasses they were crashing through, light of every imaginable color cracking off of the spinning, prismatic, cristalline husks, and the random rainbows of hues they cast stretched across all of space into eternity, until all of creation was filled with color and light and sound.

It was like watching clouds on a time-lapse video, as they boiled and churned, hours of watching them billow and swarm and pile atop one another, creating both darkness and light, but instead of filming for a day, watching for an eternity, and instead of clouds, they were nebulae, giving birth to stars. The lights within them, nascent solar systems, each one promising new life to new worlds, but each just a glittering diamond in the sky.

It was fire, arcing through the sky in perfect symmetric arches, the same curvature as a sunlit beach, or the iris of a fractal, beautiful eye. The fire seethed and burned, but also was completely still, an impossible duality of life and death, creation and destruction, hot and cold.

Even Justice, I think, was moved by seeing the eye open. Justice, whose eyes disconcerted me, which seemed to writhe within themselves, at the sight of something so purifying, his eyes went very still.

But his body did not. He dipped in the sky, before shooting upwards, the beam of fire, or creation, or cosmos, or whatever-the-fuck-have-you screaming after him, all white and black and red and blue at once, a beam of pure annihilation so vast that Tem would hold her powers cheap and her womanhood flaccid for the rest of her pitiful life.

Well. More flaccid. God knows Tem wasn't getting anywhere on the whole self-value thing.

Where Justice had been content to simply take the blows before, now he was running for his life. He was dipping behind buildings to pull instant one-eighties, rising and falling erratically, flashing here and there in the sky like Karu, all to evade Bob's gaze.

Which, y'know, just didn't work out very well. It was a gaze, it was fast as hell to twitch one's eye from point A to B, and apparently third eyes had no greater difficulty in doing so than my own.

Once or twice, I thought we had him. He was fucking fast, that was for sure, using more than just telekinesis to fling himself around now, he was actively throwing out spurts of fire like jet engines to rocket himself at speeds that should have torn him apart. But even when he was hit, it wasn't enough, some critical mass or functioning core of him yet remained, and his body re-coalesced, the annihilated parts of him reforming as dust, and then grit, and then clumps, and then chunks...probably his very atoms knitting themselves back together after passing through Bob's eye, the trail of meat flying behind him, struggling to catch up and reassemble itself on his body, like some bizzaro butcher conga line.

And I wondered, after a minute of this, of the skyline being reduced to nothingness, of how many new holes being blasted through the troposphere, and lines carved through the asteroid belt, I wondered if we'd just be here forever.

Maybe Justice couldn't die, maybe he was like me, an eternal entity, built to keep going past the end of everything, and just convinced that bringing that end would help him somehow. Just his bad luck that his adversaries, Bob and myself, were both capable of matching that eternity.

"Uh oh," I commented. "Bob, hey, watch it."

Bob, of course, did not watch it. He was functionally deaf to anything but a wish.

And so a few thousand people were eradicated in an instant as Justice dipped low and the beam of utter obliteration swept across them. From what I could tell from the last gasps of their collective minds...they weren't killed or destroyed...just...unmade. Whatever that might mean.

Fuck. But fuck again, as Justice picked up on the trick and, apparently content to resume his work, even with Bob on his back, began criss-crossing the battlefield to kill thousands more with creation-fire.

Shit! Fuck! This wasn't supposed to happen. I felt everyone wincing at my thoughts as much as I was cringing at inadvertently murdering them all. I had to get Bob to stop before he finished the job even more efficiently than Justice had.

[Bob! Close your fucking eye!] I screamed at him. [I mean...I wish for you to close your fucking eye!]

The beam screamed across the ground, tearing a rift into the Earth what must have been miles deep, annihilating those in the way. The crowd, which had gone from confusion to reverence to awe...rightfully!...were now in abject terror, and their confused din of voices screaming at me were not helping the situation.

[Bob, fucking listen to me!] I shouted at him, edging across his shoulder to look up into his perfect golden face. Justice whipped past, barely visible, but I felt it in the wake of wind that slammed my body, the crack of the sonic boom. And as I clung to Bob's hair to keep on, as Bob whipped his head sideways to keep following, I saw the problem.

[Not that eye, you fucking idiot! The third eye! Close the third eye!]

But of course, that wasn't a wish, so nothing happened. It took me too long to figure out, the screaming in my head of the thousands on the ground, the buffeting against me of the wind, holding on for dear life as Bob whipped this way and that.

And then the unearthly, impossible noise, that resonated straight up my spine as soon as I heard it. It was a noise of pure, distilled pain, agony so perfect that it could shatter glass.

It was coming from Bob. He began to stumble, his hair swayed over empty space, over the miles-deep canyons that he had carved, swinging over the abyss and carrying me with it.

From there, I could see, could see what could cause my titan to make such a perfect noise of pain. His leg had been sheared clean off above the knee, a perfect line that revealed flesh and bone beneath the skin, just as golden, just as impenetrable, weeping inhumanly fat, viscous tears of pure-golden blood that steamed in the cool night air.

The flesh could not be torn, cut, or broken. But it could be unmade.

[Bob, you fucking idiot!] I screamed as I clung to a strand of his hair, trying not to look down into the chasm. [I wish for you not to shoot yourself with your own fucking third eye, you goddamn dumbass! I wish for you to close it!]

But the damage was done. Bob was staggering, tumbling, falling, legless and useless. His eye closed, but only after destroying what little ground was left under his foot, and his six arms were flailing, not for balance, but to fulfill my previous wish, to strike at Justice, even as we were falling.

[Bob! Catch yourself! Don't fall into the hole! I wish--]

But my mind came up short. My face twitched as I looked at the shards of metal protruding for my forehead. Vaguely, through the blood dripping into my eyes, I could see him there, floating, panting, putting himself back together, even as my hand lost its strength, as I began to fall into the dark, dark pit of the earth, as the last thing I saw above me was the luminous golden god falling after me, blocking out the stars of the sky, his glittering blood falling with us like fat raindrops.

There were many crashes as Bob and I fell. Mostly from him. I got the impression it was not a spacious plummet for one as big as he.

But I didn't fuckin' know. All I could see was the darkness and Bob, lit up like there was a magical spotlight that only hit him. Which, I guess, was better than just being trapped in the Earth in pitch darkness, but probably not by much.

We fell and fell and fell. And just when I felt like I was getting comfortable with that concept, feeling like maybe we'd come out in China somehow, and I could say hi to waipo and waigong. As though it weren't just glass down there.

And then, unsurprisingly, I died. Probably twice, once when I met the ground, and again when the big oaf landed on me.

I spent a long, long time lying in that hole, contemplating what a failure I was, and how it seemed like every time I thought I had something in the palm of my hand, I always managed to lose it. I was an incompetent idiot, I had to conclude, to lose a fight like that, with every possible advantage in the world on my side.

Sure, Justice was nasty, but I was sure he'd die if we got a clean hit, he wouldn't be dodging if he could just take the shot. And with an eternity ahead of us, we'd get the shot eventually. All I had to do was not fuck it up.

And here I was, miles deep in the earth. Everything was up from here, especially how much I'd fucked.

Something wet was pooling around me, and my body began to react with panic as the golden liquid threatened to cover my nose and mouth. Boy that seemed like a fun way to spend a few years, drowning to death in luminescent blood, deep underground. A real winner.

But not worse than I deserved. I lowered my head and took a deep breath, letting the cloying liquid choke me out.

So I spent the next...unknown amount of time. Literally drowning in my misery. Revelling in those moments of panic and death, because hey, at least during that, I wasn't fucking up, or remembering doing so. Death could be my reprieve from failure. And maybe after a few years, when Bob ran out of blood--

Something brushed my hand. Then, with a grip firm as iron, pulled me, coughing and sputtering to the surface, my body pulled clear of Bob's through some hastily-dug channel of golden blood.

It took me a minute to realize who was holding my hand and looking at me with equal parts disinterest, concern, and annoyance. My mind couldn't find purchase on his, but that was even more telling. Once I figured out the who, I recoiled at his touch.

"Good, you're alive," Dragon frowned at me, his face lit up by the flashlight clipped to his chest.

"Oh like you'd care," I snapped. "What the hell are you doing down here?"

"I do not care," he confirmed. "About you. Your beast, on the other hand, is useful, and I need…" he stopped, and carefully cleared his throat before continuing, as though the next words physically hurt him to say. "I need...your help...to treat him."

"Treat?" I echoed stupidly. "Bob?"

"He is bleeding. I brought...ample fabric to make a bandage, and tourniquet, but I do not have the reach...alone...to apply it. Your assistance is required only because of physical limitations, and not of any failure of mine."

He almost seemed to be pouting. I was so confused what the fuck he was doing here or trying to help Bob in the first place, and still, the pouting was the most confusing thing.

But when I sat up, coughed up some more glowing blood...which was really vile, by the way, I could only imagine how that stuff might look staining my teeth...I saw he was telling the truth. He had what looked like a whole parachute, heavy cloth, strong cables, laid out and lined up by the titan's severed stump.

Bob was wheezing, pathetically, still making tiny utterances of pain, but still faintly grasping towards the surface, as though he could catch Justice from here. It was gross, but more gross that he was in this state because of me.

[Bob, I wish you'd stop trying to kill Justice for now. And I wish that you took this and bandaged up your leg as best you could.]

He did as I asked, and the two Sinos in the room stood awkwardly out of the way as he pulled the fabric snung and wound the cables around and around, pulling it tighter and tighter until he tied it off with a knot.

"What the hell are you even doing down here?" I asked.

"I came to assist how I could. Yet once I saw Justice in action, I knew to face him directly would be futile. This is something I can do."

"And what, we're just going to climb out now?"

He shrugged. "If I have to. It is not that far."

"It's miles, dude. And you've got one fuckin' arm."

"I made it down. I can make it up."

I shook my head at him. No wonder he was always such a pain in the prick. Impossible just wasn't in this guy's dictionary. I kinda wished I could peek into his head to see just what the hell else he was scheming, but given the situation, I didn't have anything else to go on but his word. And given that he wasn't gonna hurt me, even if he tried, I kinda didn't have reason to doubt it just yet.

So. I guess. I'd keep him around.

"Alright then. Bob, I wish for you to climb up and get all three of us out of here."

Bob scooped me up and put me back on his shoulders, and by the time I got there, Dragon was already waiting, kneeling and holding onto the hair for balance. I gave him one last disbelieving glance before the world seemed to shift under me as Bob rose to his foot, and began to grope along the walls for a way up.

I had an idea, and gave Bob permission to use his third eye to carve us a passage up, hoping I didn't hit anything too important as a new chamber was blown out of the side of the Earth. It'd be longer, but at least Bob would make it.

And then I'd get another shot at this. Might be hours from now, maybe even days. But I had the time, and so did Bob, and so did Justice. I'd fuck him up properly this time, no more screw-ups for me. Not this time.

Not this time, I told myself. No more laughter, no more stories, no more Ms. Nice Saga. Just murder, simple and clean, and I could save the laughter for the afterparty.

My thoughts continued to focus and I dwelled on my vengeance and mistakes until I was properly consumed by them, until I was as dark inside as the passage we were ascending.

He'd pay. I'd show him how dangerous I could be when I was really trying. He'd see what a real Exhuman at work could do. I'd show him.

Slowly we climbed, but also quickly, ponderous movements joined with reality-warping ripples. Creeping steadily, until at last the darkness before us was studded with stars.

"Alright, Bob. I wish you to take us back to Justice, so we can end this, once and for all."