My crew.
My every-fucking-thing.
If they were in positions to advise me, my friends would tell me to do it. To risk them and myself to rid our world of someone as terrible ashim. To spare countless people—with and without supernatural abilities—from his greed.
In a rush, he said, “You need me. You can’t kill me. You’ll die. They’ll die. Most of them are dead already. You can’t bring them … back without me.”
Hold my beer, motherfucker, and watch me.
At the very least I was going to go out giving it absolutely everything I had.
Magnum Chase had to die. It was as simple as that.
He kept talking, but I was no longer listening. He tried to shove more images at me. I deflected them.
I strengthened my bond with thelushina. Within their light bodies, they crystallized into forms resembling humans at the center of their brightly shining auras.
they sang. Their imperative filled every part of my being, driving me with purpose.
Magnum was wriggling and screaming, struggling to free himself. But I wasn’t crushing his skull against mine, as he’d done. I wasn’t grabbing him at all. My hold on his mind allowed me to dominate his body. After all, what is the body but a vessel that carries out the commands of the mind?
He fought me. He even attempted to slip free of his Magnum skin suit, which he hadn’t done since he killed and stole the body of a man in Ridgemore without family or friends to declare him missing.
My grip was a vise he wouldn’t escape.
Magnum didn’t like being adrash. He wanted to be alushina—but alushina plus. He wanted the advantages of his kind, those of mine, and any he could steal from other supes.
The man wanted it all and didn’t care whom he hurt to get his way.
He was a true archvillain, Hollywood 101 style.
He screamed, his protest hazy as it reached me. As if it were second nature now, my instincts guided me. I molded his mindspace into believing it wanted to recall his duplicates.
Magnum stopped resisting. This was his idea—so he thought.
One hundred and forty-two copies of him—only those still alive—returned to the one vessel, which absorbed them. Skullcrusher Magnum was the original.
With my mindspace merged with his, my command overriding his own, I held him steady. With my physical arm, I braced his body around the back and hooked his sweater around his shoulders, baring his torso. With a magnitude of force far beyond what I knew before, I curled my hand into a fist and drove it against his breastbone. The skin split down the center as if hit with a mallet. His breastbone cracked in a long, jagged line, smaller fissures racing toward its edges.
My physical eyes remained closed. Later, I would think it was a little like Neo inTheMatrix, when he fought the Smiths and saw the matrix itself.
A little like Neo, but far bloodier—Neo meets John Wick.
My fist was slick with Magnum’s blood. With thedrashnestled deep within his Magnum suit, his blood was human scarlet. He didn’t even gasp his surprise. I released my supporting arm, allowing him to fall back with a heavy smack of his head. Instantly, I was perched over him, my fist hammering against that breastbone again, shattering it. I reached around its pieces, behind his ribs, to grip his heart.
It felt human but it wasn’t. It was big enough to require two hands.
I slid my second hand alongside the first, cradling the pulsing, thrumming heart of my enemy in my palms.
I felt it beating.
Beating.
Beating.
I sucked the final threads of his energy into my own mindspace, where thelushinadirected the entirety of his essence elsewhere, so that no part of him would taint me.
His mindspace went completely blank.
