Nihel made no response.
“A lot,” Nuklear Man said in the hopes that his intimidation would be intimidating.
Nihel rubbed his temple and sighed. “Arel, Arel, Arel. How far you have fallen.” He shook his head. “Look at what these Earthim have done to you. I had hoped to reclaim our former glory. And though I have waited so very long, I can wait no longer. I will not wait for you to recover your identity as Arel, Harbinger of the Flame.”
“Why does that sound familiar?” the Hero muttered to himself.
“I don’t need you. I only need your powers.” Nihel closed his eyes. His cape ruffled slightly.
Norman crashed into the scene. His Magno Field collapsed upon itself. “Nuke! I’ve got your back!” he called while running up behind him.
“Thanks, Normie. But I think I can take care of this jerk—” A flash of light emanated all around Nuklear Man and he was completely encased in what appeared to be a glass cube.
“Nuke!” Norman yelled as he slid to a halt at the cube’s barrier.
It shrank and expanded simultaneously in all directions across several dimensions of space and time.
“What did you do to him!” Norman demanded. He blindly punched the cube’s shifting walls with his tungsteny fist, but to no effect.
“Nothing,” Nihel explained. “I simply rearranged the matter
around
him into a hypercube expanding into higher dimensions at a linear rate. It’s something of a prison you see. The only way to escape is if I dispel it, or if the prisoner were to exist in those higher dimensions. Arel does not. I shall transport him to the Galactic Hub and use him there to drain every last drop of energy from every star in the Milky Way, thereby destroying it just as he was born to do. With the galaxy obliterated, there will be no battlefield for Ragnarok, the destined war of good against evil. Fate will have been shattered. And I,
I
shall be free.”
“Over my dead body!” Norman growled.
“Well, yes, actually.”
Norman shook. His body quaked with anger. His friends were dead. He let out a cry of fury, deep, resounding, a warrior’s cry. He leapt at Nihel.
The monster dodged over to the catatonic Atomik Lad. “Now watch, boy. Look at what Fate demands of me.” He dashed back to Norman. Atomik Lad’s eyes followed, but his mind did not.
__________
Waffles. I swear they only exist as an excuse to eat syrup.
“Don’t forget your vitamins,” Dad says from behind his newspaper. Katkat—I told you Dad’s sense of humor is weird—is beside him, on the floor and licking the milk from a mostly empty cereal bowl.
“Yeah, yeah.” I take them with a shot of orange juice for each. Vitamin E, Multi-Vitamin, Calcium, and Ginseng. The orange juice is calcium fortified and has extra pulp in it. Dad likes vitamins.
“Mew!” Katkat says.
“Good boy,” Dad puts down his paper. I’m nineteen, but when I see him I feel ten years younger. He is a giant with the strength of a god and a laugh that could infect anyone with his friendship. To me he is the living embodiment of vigor, power, confidence. He doesn’t look a day over thirty, just like Solar Man. He could chop down mountains.
When I was a kid, I asked him how he was so much stronger than me. He said he had overpowers from his experiments at the Nuclear Physics Center. I think a part of me never stopped believing that.
He looks at his watch. “Hm, running a little late, are we?”
“I’m not really late until Rachel—”
“Hello!” front door slams shut.
“—gets here
.
“Rachel,” I hear Mom say cheerily from her bedroom. It’s near the front door.
“I’ll just take my usual seat, shall I?” Rachel says.
I can hear mom walking through the house to the kitchen, “Yes. Sorry, dear.”
“It’s okay, Mrs. Koen.” I can hear Rachel sitting on the leather couch in the living room. My mind is of course instantly ablaze with thoughts of her ass and leather. I’m young and healthy. I can’t help it.
Mom is in the kitchen now. She leans down to Dad. They kiss. It’s not that they’re ugly people, far from it. But they’re my parents, the ass and leather disappear. You understand.
“Looks like the boy is pathologically late. He can’t help it,” Dad says to her as I put my dishes in the Warning: Woman’s Work sink. I said he has a weird sense of humor.
“Gee, I wonder where he gets it?” she says.
Dad’s eyes scan over her for a second. She even has her lab coat and name tag on, Dr. Heather Koen, Überdyne Theoretical Physics Department. He looks at himself. Unshaven, old orange bathrobe, undershirt, and boxers. “Hm. Is it eight-thirty already?”
“More like eight
forty-five,”
she says.
“Eep.”
I pass them, wink at Rachel in the living room, and dash into the bathroom to brush my teeth. I catch Dad in the corner of my eye as he dashes into his bathroom to do the same. His bathrobe is flapping behind him. Dad’s cape. I load my toothbrush.
I hear Mom sitting in the recliner next to Rachel.
“Men,” they say together.
I smile and I brush. I’m only fifteen minutes late.
__________
Nihel grabbed Norman by the arm and twisted it off effortlessly. His cape followed through in slow motion. Norman fell to the ground and clutched at the perfectly flat stub of his shoulder. His tungsten teeth clenched. He held back a scream.
Nihel examined the detached arm carefully, like a jeweler inspecting a gem for its value. “A fascinating biology,” he said. “His entire body turns to metal. And not even in parts, such as metal bones, muscles, and so on. But rather a completely solid block of living metal. Tungsten to be exact,” Nihel continued. “A versatile and interesting substance.”
Norman pushed himself beyond the pain. He concentrated his Magno Power, made it the crux of his existence. The pain dissolved away. He picked up a discarded van from the destroyed parking lot. He couldn’t see it, but he didn’t have to. The Earth’s magnetic field told him everything he needed to know. The van rose into air on wings of blue energy.
Norman held the van several hundred feet directly above Nihel. The thin blue threads of magnetism around the van expanded as the Tungsten Titan supercharged the van’s magnetic attraction to the Earth while simultaneously repulsing it to keep the vehicle suspended. The van rattled as its parts were violently stressed by the mounting magnetic forces opposing each other.
“A high melting point,” Nihel said, pleasantly unaware of what was building above him. “Excellent tensile strength, resistant to fatigue and oxidation.” Nihel gave the arm an appraising stare. “Not terribly magnetic though.”
Norman let his magnetic hold slip. The van almost instantly broke the sound barrier. It rocketed like a rail gun’s projectile and slammed down on Nihel. The hypersonic force crumpled it like a brittle piece of origami. Norman almost smiled through the excruciating pain of his dismemberment. The wrecked van looked like a piece of modern art, something the Mall might’ve purchased in an attempt to beautify its grounds.
Until it turned to water and washed away. Nihel stepped out of its crater and walked to Norman. “You pathetic wretch,” he growled. “Haven’t you been listening? I am performing my destiny. You can’t stop it.” He tossed the spare arm at him. Norman winced. “Are you watching, boy? Are you watching what Fate is doing to your friends?”
Norman suddenly felt like he was on fire.
“See what fate does? It deforms you. It is an inevitable process.”
Norman began melting. It was like his veins pumped lava. He wouldn’t scream. He wouldn’t give Nihel the satisfaction.
__________
We’re running through campus. I ask Rachel “Why? We’re already late.”
“Okay, do you want to be any
more
late to Dr. McDougal’s class than you have to?”
“Good point. Speed up, woman!”
We hurdle over a row of bushes, throw open the big double doors to Floyd Hall, run down the hallway and burst into Room 112. Loudly. Our classmates snicker.
She squeezes my hand (too tight, what? What’s wrong? Tell me, tell me!)
“Nice of ye to join us,” Dr. McDougal says. He’s sitting on his desk, his feet dangling above the floor, a book in his gnarled hands with his tiny thumb marking a page. He spoke with a slight Scottish accent and wore his beard as full as possible. He was fond of plaid shirts.
“Sorry.”
Rachel doesn’t say anything. We get to our seats as quickly and quietly as possible. We sit right in the middle two seats of the middle row. It makes me feel centered.
I haven’t been sitting for a full minute before a meaty finger pokes me in the back. I turn around even though I already know it’s Norman. The Intellijock. This guy is nearly seven feet tall, practically four hundred pounds of ebony muscle, he’s got a full ride football scholarship, and he’s got a 3.9 GPA. No tutors or anything. And the girls are all over this bastard. I’d hate him, but he’s just so damn likable (magnetic?).
“Kinda late, aren’t ya?” he smiles his big damn smile.
“Ehh, time is relative.”
“Punctuality, it would seem, is not,” he says.
I laugh and turn back around. Dr. McDougal is, of course, ranting. The man is certainly passionate about his philosophy.
“What ye have to understand is this. The mind is not special. It’s easy to think it is. Natural humanocentrism practically
makes
us believe that our minds are special or somehow separate from the material world. There is no rational or empirical reason to believe this. Our minds are simply the result of evolution. It was advantageous for our species to have individual members communicate to one another for the sake of survival and propagation. The fact that these minds turned out to be so
good
at collecting, trading, and storing information that as time went by the minds, less concerned with the basic needs of survival , could then reflect upon their own existence, well, it’s an interesting advantage, certainly more diverse than claws, but that does not put us ‘above’ any other creature!
“Our minds are as natural a part of the universe as anything else. They are simply the product of the cosmos. This does not subtract from our dignity. Far from it. This
is
our dignity. Our beauty. And this is why murder is wrong. It destroys a part of the universe. It is a disruption of symmetry. It’s a waste. A bloody (bloodybloodybloodybloody hands of fire, soul, hate destroy—go from here!) waste.”
__________
Norman looked like a wax statue of himself that had been left in the sun too long. He lay on his back, most of it in a half-congealed puddle while the rest of him slowly lost its shape. He wanted to scream, but whatever mechanisms that would have allowed him to do so had already melted away. It didn’t matter though. In his mind, he was screaming. Sickly blue threads of energy limply extended from his malformed body. It was the only way to scream.
“Don’t you creatures know when you’ve lost!” Nihel yelled at the melting Tungsten Titan. “Look at you! You’re not alive. You’re not dead. Heh. You don’t even possess a specific material shape anymore.” He leaned in close to Norman’s mangled face. “I’d change you back to your biological form if doing so wouldn’t end your torment,” he whispered tauntingly.
Not that it mattered. Norman couldn’t understand a word Nihel was saying. Just as he had lost his capacity for speech, so too had he lost his ability to hear. Or see. All he knew was pain. All he wanted was to scream and bleed and die. He could feel himself falling apart. There was nothing else.
__________
Shiro’s ship raced through the clouds. He opened up all sensors and focused them on the Mall. Atomik Lad, Mighty Metallic Magno Man, and six standard humans were accounted for in the vicinity of the alien stranger. Shiro was puzzled by Nuklear Man’s apparent absence until the sensors finally made sense of an extra-dimensional anomaly in the same area. “Ahh,” he said. “Enemy of intelligence is like spirit. Smart time. Encapsulated the capturing with supaa space dragons of universalities multiplied.” The Mall rushed below him. Shiro looped back and his target floated above him. A pair of crosshairs were superimposed on his view by the Heads-Up Display. They were aimed at the hypergeometric cube. He was weightless for an instant where time stood still. “Nothing that to be was made can’t not then the solvent by exploding action!” He pushed the ship’s Whisakey-Fusion Drive to Critical. His craft was seconds from becoming the reaction mass of a fusion bomb.
Shiro was heavy with power.
__________
Middle row, the seat to the right of the center. Rachel beat me to it just to annoy me. She’s like that. I love her for it. Second class of the day. I’m taking notes now, but not too many. Rachel takes notes like her life depends on it. I don’t know why. She never looks over them for tests or anything.
Dr. Menasavich. Short jet black hair and pale skin. I usually dig olive skin tones, I mean look at Rachel. But on Menasavich, yowza. Everyone knows at least half of the people who sign up for this class, guys and girls, only do so to have an excuse to look at her for an hour every other day. Hopefully they’ll get something more out of it though. It’s really interesting stuff. Political Science. Specifically, the Philosophy of Revolution. I could listen to her all day. The accent isn’t hurting.
“What you have to underztand is thiz. Oppression iz a natural part of any zociety, inzofar az anything about a zociety can be zaid to be ‘natural.’ There iz nothing wrong with oppression az long az thoze who are oppressed are aware of it. Consciousnezz of oppression leadz to anger, outrage, and finally action—of varying legality. Only through knowledge of oppression can there be any change. Anger iz the only motivation. Happinezz iz ztagnation. Anger promotez change. Change iz life. Happinezz iz zuffocation. Happinezz iz silence, iz death. Anger iz the fuel of revolution. Revolution iz change, iz life. But here iz the catch. Revolution dizposes of the old order and replacez it with the new. Thiz new order will zeek to ztabilize itz
own
power. Thiz power muzt come at the expense of otherz. Thuz, revolutionariez inevitably commit the zame crimez az their oppressorz.”