This is what it means to be a Hero:
You are loved and hated, cheered and feared; sometimes all at once; sometimes by the same people.
Your life is not your own; it belongs to those you protect.
You fight hideous monsters sometimes, but mostly just grosslings.
You know people who went into the fire and never returned.
At some point, no matter how strong or fast or invulnerable you are, you will walk into a battle you think you’re going to lose, because you’re the only one who can.
*
Sigrun Eide calmly assessed the ruin the grossling had made of her left arm as she faced down the Sjødraug that had followed it. The flesh was shredded and useless, but the bones were intact, and she had staunched the bleeding, so it wouldn’t be the death of her.
This kind of pain was a new experience for Sigrun, but she was still stronger than it; she had to be, for the others were all equally hurt, or worse. The Red Terror was the last Hero standing.
Well, Sigrun reflected grimly, now was the time to see whether she could beat a Sjødraug with one hand tied behind her back after all...
*
Emil was being smothered.
Somehow, Emil was generally still able to breathe when he was the Firework, even through the fiercest and hottest flames, though no one had been able to give a satisfactory explanation of how beyond, “He just can”. Now, however, his flames had died, and he was struggling for breath as a sea of halon foam enveloped him.
The others, bunched up in a group not far from him, were all freezing under the blast of the Cold Ray, but Emil knew that he could save them with his fire... if he could just get it to ignite.
He just needed to shield some part of himself from this foam smothering him in its bitter cold...
*
Mikkel was hip-deep in a field of corpses. The dead surrounded him, and he was the one who had killed them all. He knew every face that stared blindly back at him: there were colleagues, friends, family, and even a few enemies. All of them had had people who loved them and were loved by them; none had done such crimes as to be deserving of the death Mikkel had visited upon them.
The Grave Dane was a true enough epithet for him, for he’d sent all these corpses around him into their graves; it was unsurprising that now they had risen to drag him into his own grave.
Mikkel felt them clawing at him, trying to lift his bulk so that they could carry him over to the fresh maw in the earth that he could see close by...
*
Lalli was racing to deflect a hail of bullets spewing from an ancient mini-gun away from his friends, who were bound against a wall. There were so many coming so fast that if he made the least mistake, his friends would perish.
His body wasn’t solid enough to absorb all the fire by itself, or he would have thrown himself over the muzzle, but there were other ways to silence such a weapon.
Lalli would need to set the angles of the ricochet he was planning perfectly to send one of the gun’s own bullets back at its muzzle, but the need to deflect all the others kept distracting him...
*
Reynir was watching his friends and family die, and he had no power to stop it, for he was doing the killing himself.
The mastermind had brought Reynir under his control instead of making him play dead, while freezing the others in place. Emil had faced this same test and overcome it, but Reynir was not as strong as Emil.
Reynir’s primary power was helping rather than anything big or flashy, so the body of Reynir under the mastermind’s control simply taped each of his friends’ mouths and nostrils shut and helped them suffocate, while Reynir himself watched on helplessly from the prison of his mind.
Despair filled Reynir as the others fell over one by one...
*
Tuuri watched helplessly as the Giant she had been merged into ran rampant against a group of terrified humans. She tried to scream at them to flee, but her voice would not come. Instead, her arms and legs and other obscene appendages reached out to tear at their prey.
“jOin Us, tUuRi,” she heard the hideous whisper slither into her mind once more. “yOu CaNnOt ReSiSt Us FoREvEr.”
Closing her eyes, Tuuri set her will, no, her entire being in negation. “I am Tuuri Hotakainen!” she cried desperately. “I AM TUURI HOTAKAINEN! I AM TUURI HOTAKAINEN AND I... AM... HUMAN!”
Reality was no match for Tuuri’s will; as it had so often before, Reality gave way for her.
A great, unutterable rumbling filled the world. The Rash-filth sloughed off of her like mud under a high-pressure shower head, and “Reality Itself” cracked around her, the illusion it was proving itself to be shattering and falling away to reveal...
