A cold sweat broke out across Mark’s body as he sat down on the couch, in front of the television. It was 8:55, and Isoko, Sally, and Eliot were already sitting in their own seats. Snacks abounded, from soda bottles in large ice buckets that were made of silver and probably meant more for wine, to sparkling crystal bowls that held chips instead of whatever fancy thing Blackthorn usually used them for. Sally had a gallon of berry ice cream in a big bowl in her hands, waiting to start on it, while Eliot grabbed another slice of pizza from the box.

  Mark ate a single chip, just to show that he was ‘enjoying himself’.

  Episode 2 was airing in… Oh god. 4 minutes? Fuck. Time was going fast, now.

  Isoko giggled from the side.

  Mark turned and saw Isoko looking at him.

  Isoko said, “I have never seen you this afraid. It’s practically comical.”

  Sally went, “Ohhhhh! Leave him alone.”

  “Okay okay!” Isoko said, grinning. “Sorry, Mark.”

  Mark shook his head. “I’m fine. It’s just… I’ve been on the news. I have seen myself on the news. But this… This is so much different—”

  “It’s starting!” Eliot exclaimed.

  And then everyone was focused.

  “Breaking news!” began the ‘reporter’, as they held up some papers and knocked them together into a more uniform stack, using their reporter table as a leveler. “Established heroes and villains are shook as a new possible supervillain emerges…”

  And then Blackvein was on the screen, walking down a dark alleyway, dressed impeccably alongside his team, as fireworks bloomed overhead. The villain looked up and the cameras caught reflections of the sky in his eyes, beyond the rooftops of the alleyway.

  The camera zoomed in, and the viewer saw the fireworks were actually explosions.

  And then the scene was high in the sky with Credenza fighting Frozenfire.

  Mark found himself enthralled by the fight, because he remembered how it looked from below but not how it looked from this close, from these angles of these cameras. Credenza was avoiding icicles by mere centimeters and then throwing back grenades that bounced off of ice sheets right as they were forming, to explode behind those sheets and send Frozenfire tumbling.

  Credenza cackled, pushing her hoverbelt hard, spinning and twisting in a way that was completely reckless, but she was doing fine.

  She won the fight in 20 short seconds, racing down an alleyway, into a trap that was held open by Frozenfire’s team, the Fire Brigade. They were dressed in red or blue and they waited by cables up in the air, in the alleyway. Credenza went through. The Fire Brigade tried to trigger the trap but a mechanism jammed on the trap and a grenade on a timer went off right behind Frozenfire, who had been chasing Credenza into the alleyway.

  The Lucky Villain went right through the trap.

  Frozenfire got snagged.

  And that’s how that trap worked out, huh? Frozenfire was supposed to win that one, just like he said later, to Mark. Mark kinda wondered how the night was supposed to play out from there, from that sort of starting point. Maybe the team was supposed to go out and rescue Credenza? Mark had no idea.

  Mark asked Eliot, because he probably knew, “What would have happened if Credenza would have lost?”

  Isoko answered, “It was a scramble to rewrite it all when Credenza won. We were supposed to go rescue her, but she wrote her own storyline— Here we are again!”

  And then the scene was on Blackthorn and them, looking away from the firework sky, toward the Black Pyramid.

  Mark was almost not embarrassed, but then Blackvein approached Grey Phantom and Mark didn’t want to hear himself speak. But he watched anyway. Mark watched himself try to offer Grey Phantom cooperation and influence, and it was what it was. And then the team took the Villain’s Oath at the gate of the Black Pyramid, which was just so strange to see—

  The scene shifted onto Tartu and his team.

  Episode 1 had had some of this stuff from Tartu’s perspective, but not much and Mark had been too embarrassed to really watch it the first time. But this time, Mark watched.

  It was earlier in the day in the scene with Tartu, in the afternoon, and the superhero Sentinel was there in all his golden armor, and he asked Tartu for a spar. Well. More like bullied him into a spar.

  Tartu was in an office room, holding a screen, watching himself get dominated to the floor by Mark’s black lightning. He was stewing in his own hatred.

  Sentinel showed up and picked the screen out of his hands, saying, “Enough pity. Get up. We’re sparring.”

  Tartu almost spat something at the golden superhero, but he pulled back and silently stood, saying, “I welcome the instruction.”

  Sentinel grinned. “We’ll see if that’s how you feel after said instruction.”

  Mark had no idea when the resulting ‘fight’ had taken place, but it had to have happened hours before the party, in the daytime. Or maybe they had just used stage lighting to illuminate the sky and this had happened a simple hour before the party. A lot of things were happening very fast these last few days.

  In the middle of a sandy field, Tartu and Sentinel were separated by 20 meters, and some guys in guard outfits stood to the side. More guards and even a few costumed heroes rapidly came out of the building to watch the fight.

  Sentinel said, “Any day now, kid.”

  Tartu frowned, and then a sphere of power enveloped Sentinel, and Sentinel was frozen.

  Tartu was surprised, but he recovered fast, saying, “Now that is how it’s supposed to work!”

  Someone called from the bleachers, “You didn’t trap him at all!”

  Sentinel laid a hand on Tartu’s shoulder. Tartu stiffened, as Sentinel called out, “Let him figure it out, Lucy!”

  Tartu looked at his trap. Sentinel was still there. But he was also holding onto Tartu’s shoulder.

  Sentinel let go and floated, flying back into position, next to his image that was still trapped in Tartu’s first sphere. He said, “Again.”

  Tartu tried another sphere. Sentinel slipped out of that one, too, but he was still inside the sphere. He still laid a hand on Tartu without Tartu realizing he was there before the touch. That repeated a few more times and Tartu was getting more and more angry each time.

  And then Tartu slammed out several spheres at once onto Sentinel, and the result was different.

  Sentinel moved like a man in slow motion, and Tartu watched as the guy stepped out of the sphere while leaving his image behind. But Tartu had slowed him down for a moment.

  Sentinel grinned, saying, “Good! But answer me this: Which member of Blackvein’s team is the most dangerous?”

  “Blackvein,” Tartu said, scowling. “But I can handle him if he’s alone.”

  “Correct. The second most dangerous?”

  Tartu said, “Platinum Princess, just because of the speed and her resistances. VeryHuman is a non-issue when he’s outside of his material. Miss Masher is similarly a non-issue, but for different reasons.”

  Every single person sitting around the screen, and Mark too, was offended.

  Eliot exclaimed, “I’m not a non-issue! I could have kicked all of their asses!”

  The show was still going.

  Sentinel said, “You have 4 against 4, and you can shut them down if you know what they can do. But, do you really have to shut them down at all? Battlefield control, seconds versus seconds, can be just as valuable as actual elimination of threats. Sometimes, to win, all you have to do is shut someone down long enough to get a good shot.”

  Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

  Tartu looked contemplative.

  Sentinel added, “And, of course—” He gestured to the images of himself, still trapped in their Domains. He flicked his hand, and the images disappeared. “There are more ways to control a fight than with direct confrontation.”

  Tartu looked surprised, then thoughtful, then he winced. “Ah.”

  Sentinel smiled, saying, “Ah!”

  The scene switched back to the party, to Blackthorn and the others, approaching the buffet and Titanfist, disguised as Punchman. Mark and them knew what happened next, and watching Sally fight Punchman was still interesting, but Sally wasn’t too interested in her own fight.

  Sally said, “So there’s no way that Tartu sparring with Sentinel worked out like that, right?”

  “I have never seen Tartu do illusions before last night,” Isoko said. “But that fucking… molasses Domain. That’s a new one, too. The bastard blindsided me!”

  Eliot said, “He does that.”

  Mark asked, “I agree with Sally: There is no way that the spar worked out like that. I bet Tartu shut him down hard and they had to recover something for the cameras. Tartu has had his Power for years by now.”

  Isoko said, “I’d feel better if he shut down Sentinel, but I doubt that.”

  Eliot said, “Sentinel is known to be immune to most forms of crowd control and Tartu would have known that, so he probably tried to do the slowing Domain, to gain those seconds instead of shut down. Tartu isn’t an idiot.”

  “Doubt that last part,” Isoko quipped.

  Eliot continued, “That fight was probably altered for the camera, but Tartu probably did get a real sparring session with Memphi’s top superhero.”

  “What does Sentinel do?” Sally asked. “Some sort of phasing thing, like Grey Phantom? —They’re not the same person, are they? With the illusions and the phasing?”

  Mark paused.

  Eliot paused.

  Isoko paused.

  Mark and Eliot looked to Isoko—

  “Okay, well…” Isoko began, “The Sentinel/Phantom situation aside, and with my own personal opinion being that they are not the same person because they have had public fights against each other…” Isoko continued, “Sentinel is suspected of a lot of different power sets but he is absolutely a Tinkerer, with a very strong Mind for tech and fighting. His Mind Talent might be something like Battlefield Tinkerer, but that’s classified, as far as I know. He’s a Bi-Talent of some sort.”

  The conversation sort of dropped there, and they all returned to watching Sally fight Punchman.

  Toward the end of it, Sally said, “He really was fun to fight. He was fucking huge out there today, too. Fucking… Titanfist! It was pretty cool…” Sally furrowed her brow.

  Mark felt something strange from Sally, and Isoko felt it too, for sure.

  Mark’s eyebrows went high as he exclaimed, “You liked him!”

  Sally instantly, vehemently denied it, saying, “No! No! You’re crazy. He was just fun to fight!”

  “It’s okay to have hero crushes, Sally,” Isoko said, “Mark has one on Aurora.”

  Mark pulled up a blanket and hid himself as the allegations came crashing in, with Eliot calling out how he knew it, and Sally laughing, and Isoko saying some other dumb shit, for sure. And then Mark threw down the blanket, saying, “Watch the damned show, please!”

  Laughter.

  The rest of the show proceeded about how Mark expected it to, with all of the meetings between Mark and mages asking him to take the Oath, happening like a train of cameos that he did not know at the time. That had happened after the fight with Tartu, but in the show, it came before. And then Credenza showed up and Blackvein was sitting down with her to talk. Credenza brought up valid points about how scary Blackvein was, and Blackvein straight up told people,

  “Then go ahead and be troubled, because I’m gonna do what I need to do, and I’m not letting anyone stop me. Changing the world is never comfortable, or easy.”

  Mark cringed.

  Isoko said, “Damn fucking right!”

  Sally called out, “You tell ‘em, Blackvein!”

  “We’re tyrants over here!” Eliot joined in.

  Mark chuckled a little, feeling better.

  And then Mark saw Blackvein quote Glorious Man, and the firelight sparkle in his eyes, and then Blackvein adding in his own words about the need for power. No one called Mark out for that bit of embarrassment at all.

  Mark kinda just sat there on the couch, staring, feeling strangely connected to something much, much larger than himself. Those words resonated so much more upon hearing himself say them, once again.

  Mark had said Glorious Man’s words to his mom and dad before he accepted the responsibility of taking the Tutorial for Addashield, and Dad had repeated those words to Mark in his and Mom’s farewell video. They were powerful words.

  A sigh, a sorrow.

  Mark watched in silence.

  And then there was a scene where Tartu was told that Mark was spotted at a party, and Tartu spoke of how he needed to haul him in, for his own honor, for Mark was of the settlement, and it was wrong for them to let a villain loose upon the world. It was utter HVP tripe, of course.

  But the scene in the hovervan, flying to the party, was not tripe.

  Tartu told his team how they were going to handle it, and maybe, if they presented themselves honorably, if they allowed for the absolving of crimes for everyone not-Mark, then Mark would come quietly. This was, of course, followed by Kardi waiting till Tartu was busy with flight plans, to stand in the open window of the hovervan, and to aim and take shots, while muttering her reasons for attacking unprovoked.

  “He’ll reveal his demons, Spherix, but not unless you push him.”

  Mark said, “I’m glad I took her hands.”

  Sally was scandalized, saying, “Holy shit that’s just bad all around, Mark.”

  Isoko said, “She started it.”

  Eliot said, “It got really fucking gruesome out there.”

  Mark sighed. “Yeah… Yeah, it did.”

  The initial confrontation went pretty much exactly as Mark remembered, with the accusation of trading in dragon goods and the ‘display of guilt’, with the recordings of Mark loading stuff into vehicles.

  And then came the fight, exactly as it had been, but from tens of angles and stretched out over a full 6 minutes. It seemed more intense than Mark remembered, but Mark was kinda flowing that whole time, and here were 10 more points-of-view to view.

  In viewing it like this, Isoko going down in that slow-down-and-hiding-Domain was telegraphed by Tartu’s interaction with Sentinel earlier in the episode. According to Episode 2, Mark sort of went ballistic when he lost a team member. Taking bullets to the eyes and face didn’t bother him as much as when Isoko vanished. The show didn’t censor any of that blood at all, and Mark wondered why they were showing so much blood.

  Would people think that blood was fake—

  Mark had an out of body experience watching Blackvein blender legs and then Kardi’s hands while he told Kardi that he didn’t appreciate her unwarranted almost-killing attacks, then he confronted Tartu and Tartu revealed that Isoko was fine the whole time.

  The confrontation looked like it was going to end there, and everyone was going to separate, but then Tartu said that Mark had never suffered any lasting injuries.

  Mark watched himself cut Tartu off at the knee, but he wanted to do it all over again.

  Blackvein told Tartu to fuck off in an exhausted sort of way, saying that he was injured, too, and that Tartu wasn’t helping at all. Tartu took his limbs and escaped. All of them escaped. And then Tartu was firmly talking at Kardi about breaking protocol and Kardi couldn’t stop looking away from her stumps.

  And then it was an hour later and Shawn was in a vat of healing gel, with little machines regrowing the flesh of his legs one bit at a time. Kardi was staring at her stumps as the doctors descended to put her under. Lenny was looking pale in a gel tank of his own. And Tartu was using two crutches to stand outside of the healing center with Lenny, to watch as his friend was healed.

  Tartu looked scared as he muttered, “It shouldn’t have gone like that.”

  The scene changed and Sentinel was there with Kraigen Steele, the leader of the Hero’s Association of Memphi.

  Sentinel said, “Blackvein is more dangerous than we expected.”

  Kraigen merely hmm’d.

  The episode ended there.

  Mark, Isoko, Sally, and Eliot all sat there for a moment—

  Blackthorn stepped out from the back of the house, calling out, “Great episode! I’m surprised they kept the real blood and meat, but they do that sometimes. So you kids ready to get your suits back on and head out to the Hero’s Association for tonight's assault and infiltration?”

  Mark steeled himself. He stood, and spoke for the group. “Yes.”