“Everything for Earth!”

–Super Corps slogan

“Everything for Earth… everything.”

–Extract from Cold Comet’s diary read at Dark Fire’s trial.

There’s a titan on the Moon and it’s standing between us and final victory.

“I’ve got this!” I say over the squad radio

I gather all my power to me and form a ball of whirling dark energy: a black hole that quickly grows so large that it rips the ground around me to cause a rain of stone and metal that flows into the ball and feeds it. The rest of my team are fleeing from me, but I don’t care. I clap my hands and the sphere of power slips into a dozen smaller fragments that spin around me, swallowing triclops and cubetanks alike.

This is true power; no wonder Simon Smith never seemed worried on the battlefield.

I charge at the titan, dragging my arsenal of dark powers with me. The titan charges right back at me, and we clash like two warring gods. It grabs me and leaps into the sky, dragging me far from the arch. I fight back, and although there is no sound in space I feel the titan’s bones breaking at my touch. My spheres of spinning energy rip it apart even as it tries to consume me, and my shield forms layers of rainbow plates that keep me safe. No other superhero could wield such enormous power, and no other superhero could take such terrible punishment.

This moment is what I was born for.

I scream as the titan hits me with all the power of whatever hell it crawled from, and my world turns red and hot as fire consumes me. It’s all I can do to fight back, reflecting the titan’s own attacks against it and adding my own as the huge creature splits and dies.

It dies suddenly, falling slowly to the ground.

I float down beside it, landing on its head to make sure it is as dead as it seems.

“I just killed a titan,” I say, proud but exhausted.

“Wow! That was amazing,” says Little Voices, helping me up.

All my team has to do now is blast the arch apart, and we can all go home. As for me, I think I’ve done my part. My armor weighs down heavily on me, even in the low gravity, and all I want to do next is go home to the Cerberus and sleep for a month. Little Voices drags me back to the arch in time to see our team planting their bombs all across the enemy base.

“It’s over!” I say in relief.

Then the arch bursts into violet flames that melt our bombs and throw my team into the sky. A new titan appears: a fat sphere of a creature in a carapace of hardened shells. It lumbers slowly out of the gateway and squats in the open. Energy crackles over its skin, but it makes no move to attack us.

“I don’t even think it has any weapons,” Never Lies shouts to me as she flies towards it.

The titan opens its shells and a dome of energy springs out of its body, catching us in the air or on the ground and physically pushing us away from it. The dome might be made of energy but it feels as solid as stone. It grows until we can’t get anywhere near the titan or the gateway it is protecting. We do everything we can to try and break the shield, but it’s useless. I even hit the red button on my suit until I nearly pass out, but the titan is immune to even my powers.

“This thing is un–killable,” says Never Lies.

“Yeah, it’s got better shields than Danger Magnet,” Silver Shadows says sourly.

We can see more titans emerging through the gateway, and each one that emerges makes it less likely for us to succeed. Killing one took nearly everything I had, and I doubt I could do it again.

“Four titans,” says Never Lies, and she makes the words sound like a terrible curse.

Bad Day is trying to teleport through the shield, but he can’t. We start looking for weak spots in the shield, but we don’t find any. Meanwhile, the titans continue to marshal for their counter attack.

“Nine titans,” says Never Lies like she is announcing the end of the world, and perhaps she is.

Hundreds – thousands – of saucer creatures gather around the titans’ feet and shoulders, eager to be released on us. We pull back from the shield and consider our options. If we all charge at once, one of us might make it.

“No we won’t,” says Never Lies.

“So? Do you have a better idea?” asks Past Prime.

“No, I don’t, I just know that doing that won’t work!”

We are stressed and angry, so an argument breaks out between people with different ideas. Only Dark Fire and Small Talk don’t get involved, standing to one side and having an intense conversation of their own. Dark Fire seems angry, but Small Talk doesn’t care. Then Small Talk holds his hand up, and he is holding a second squid’s head. Even Dark Fire doesn’t know what to say.

“What the…”

“You told us you lost it,” I say to Dark Fire.

“He did. I found it,” Small Talk says as if we were talking about something as mundane as Dark Fire’s wallet or car keys.

“How? How the hell did you manage that?” Never Lies demands.

“Is it important?”

“Yes!”

Small Talk shrugs again.

“After we let Firestorm Commando fall into the ocean, I felt remorse. I went to find him.”

“To… help him?” I ask incredulously.

“To make sure he was dead. On the way back I found this floating in the water, so I collected it.”

“How did you–?” I ask.

“–shut up and get working,” he says, throwing the squid head to Dark Fire.

There is no time for us to ask where he had been keeping the squid head or why it didn’t drive him crazy; there is no time for anything except the mission.

“It won’t help, though. The current squid head isn’t having any impact at all on the titan,” Silver Shadows warns.

Dark Fire seems to consider this dire news thoughtfully. He turns towards me and points at the squid head on my back.

“Well… a direct attack won’t work, that’s for sure, but there is something we can try… something your mother and I were talking about right before she died. It’s risky,” says Dark Fire.

“Risky compared to what?” I ask with a shrug.

“Fifteen! Fifteen titans! Whatever you are about to do, do it now!” orders Never Lies.

“Well… here we go,” says Dark Fire.

He reaches into a satchel at his side and pulls out a set of wires and complex tools. I remember what he said about building his own superhero suit, and I hope to all hell that he was telling the truth.

“Now get ready, because I’m about to plug this directly into your power plant.”

It only takes a second. My suit heats up and the lights in my helmet flare and burst as all my alarms run wild. I can feel the minds and powers of the superheroes besides me, their energy joining my energy, their power rolling into mine. My thoughts fly further, back to Earth, back to my family, my friends back on the Cerberus, especially Stacey.

I want to kill saucers and save the world, and I want to keep my friends safe. That is all that matters. I rise into the air and thin lines of light spread out from my fingertips and join me to the rest of the team.

“You need to gather everyone’s power,” Dark Fire yells at me.

He’s right. I know how I could break the energy dome and the gateway, but first I need a bigger body.

“Small Talk knows how,” Dark Fire whispers to me, and I nod in understanding.

I reach out to Small Talk and grab his arm, letting his power flow out of him and into me, applying his abilities in ways even he has never thought possible. The buildings around me shake and tear themselves into pieces that fly towards me and form a massive new body with me as its head and Small Talk in its heart. Dark Fire tells everyone to fly towards me, and they push themselves into my new body. Silver Shadows flies into the chest and is encased behind a turret, his powers building my own. Little Voices and Bad Day join him, and I feel their strength become my strength. The connection doesn’t stop there; I can feel my mind filling with the years of Past Prime’s experience, the spinning wheels of Never Lies’ analytical mind. I let my thoughts reach out to touch every superhero I have ever heard of, every superhero who has ever served. I know them all – I spent my youth learning everything about them, especially what their powers were – so it is easy for me to call their essences from Earth to join me.

The feeling is incredible; I think my brain is going to explode from the buzzing of my thoughts.

I can teleport through walls, fly faster than light, speed time up or slow it down, twist matter and breath plasma, change the universe in whatever way I want to. I feel the ground itself flinch at my touch and I see fear in the eyes of all fifteen titans I face. I am a hundred feet tall, unbreakable, unstoppable. I have become a god, and it feels good.

The only superhero who has not become part of me is Dark Fire. He hovers in front of my massive new form and I reach out to grab him.

“No!” he yells, and I can feel the power of his rage batter against me.

I shake my massive head and boom out a call of my own anger, demanding that Dark Fire joins me. Instead he flies up to my face and screams, “Think of your mother!”

Something snaps inside me, and I am myself again. Parts of my new metal body fall away as I lose control, but I am not alone. I don’t want to be like The General, I don’t want to become a monster, but I don’t know what to do.

“Focus!” yells Dark Fire over my radio.

“You can do this!” adds Little Voices.

I can hear a clamor of voices in my head as everyone on my team screams as me. It’s worse than that – it’s like everyone on Earth is screaming with me, their desperation a tsunami that threatens to wash me away. Dark Fire rescues me; he flies towards the titans guarding the metal gate, and I follow him. I hit the dome of energy so hard that it shatters and fades to nothing.

Now there are only fifteen titans between me and victory…

I focus my energy and a lance of light shoots from my chest and cuts one of the titans down. A second one leaps at me, but Little Voices is expecting it and we step aside easily, bringing up my elbow in a deadly blow that came right out of Past Prime’s arsenal of moves.

The titan goes down, and I yell with victory.

“We don’t have time for this!” Dark Fire says.

One of my arms becomes a sword capable of splitting planets and I let Little Voices and Past Prime guide my blows. Another two titans go down, and I am growing stronger with every second. The titans are coming at me in waves, but I do not waver. I am the combined power and fury of all of Earth’s superheroes, and I laugh as the titans fall around me. Fifteen titans cannot stop me!

“But twenty might,” says the voice of Never Lies at the back of my head, “so close that gate right now! Do it!”

She’s right – her thoughts are as clear to me as if they were my own, and I can see every weakness and plan the titans have laid out before me. I cut through them as if they were nothing but the weakest of scouts. I can hear my team cheering me on, but then one of the titans launches itself at my chest and knocks me over. It rips into me, scattering the armor and machinery that make up my new body. A second titan leaps onto my legs and the third piles on, the weight crushing me. Dark Fire flies above, but he can do nothing to help me.

I can hear my team’s worry. They are strong and stubborn, so we keep fighting. It isn’t enough; the titans are piling onto my new body, crushing us with their power and weight. My team falls quiet one–by–one as the titans damage my arms and legs. We are losing, and I should feel defeated.

But I don’t.

I have known failure before, and I haven’t let it beat me. I’m too stupid to be scared, too stubborn to give up. I demanded to be a superhero, even when I knew what that meant, and I am the only superhero to ring the bell in the Cerberus’s gym for a reason. The titans may be stripping my body and my team away, but the fire in my soul remains the same raging storm of stubborn anger that it has always been, and that fire is all I need.

I push myself upwards, rolling the titans off me and kicking them in a style that Past Prime would abhor but which works just fine for me. Parts of my metal body rip apart and I hear my team screaming, but ignore everything but my target. More titans charge me down. There is no more time for Never Lies’ tactics or Past Prime’s skills with a blade, so I channel Small Talk’s anger and add it to my own. All we need is to push onwards into the scrum, using every dirty trick I know to keep moving.

Never Lies is right; we need to end this.

I ignore the titans and stagger over to the gate. I hit the dome so hard that my arm shatters. I reform it into a hammer and bring it down again and again, putting everything I have into breaking the gate. At last it cracks as the titans tear at my metal form. I feel my powers fading, but I focus as best I can on ripping the gateway apart.

A tiny crack forms, and I drive my metal fingers into it and force it to become larger so that the gateway begins to bend. I feel a crack rather than hear it, and I smile as the gate below me shudders. I can feel a titan clawing my back, but I ignore it and focus on breaking the gate. I blast it with every last shred of power I have, both my own and that I have borrowed from others, and my vision starts to fade as the gate snaps.

And then the gateway explodes.

I wake up some time later, and my titanic metal body is broken and ruined. My team is lying around me in the wreckage, and not everyone is moving. I groan and roll to my feet to look at the gateway.

I can see the cracks we caused, but it wasn’t enough because parts of the gate still stand. They flicker with light and power, an uncertain access into our world that still needs to be closed.

“The gate is still working,” I say aloud.

“Don’t worry about it,” says Dark Fire

He’s floating near my head, making some adjustments to his suit. It looks damaged, and I can see air leaking from his helmet. He doesn’t seem worried by this.

“But the gate is still working,” I repeat desperately.

“Don’t worry about that. You did great, kid, now take everyone home. I’m going to go see my wife, but before I do I have a score to settle with the universe.”

He swoops down and grabs the second squid head from my suit and holds it in his hands. He begins to glow as flames shoot out of his body. He salutes me, and then he is gone, a dark missile aimed at the gates.

Seconds later there is an explosion so large that it cracks the moon and fills the sky with stone rain. The shaking wakes the others, and we stumble away from the wreckage. I’m too tired to care where we are walking to, so I simply follow Silver Shadows as he leads us away from the crumbling gateway, away from the bursting explosions that consume the enemy base.

Eventually, we reach a low hill, and I finally give up and look back.

The gateway is destroyed, and the base is dark and without life. There will be no more saucers coming to Earth. We turn towards the dying enemy gate and know that we have succeeded.

“That’s a nice view for our last day,” I say happily.

But I have underestimated my team.

“It would be… but I think I’d prefer an ocean view,” Silver Shadows says, pointing at a row of tiny rockets waiting below us.

Talented Brat and Second Best must have been working overtime because there are enough pods to get home if we leave most of our armor behind. I squash into a pod with Little Voices and Blizzard Master.

The ride back to Earth is uncomfortable, totally without glamour and intensely dangerous – and I don’t regret it for a second. We fall back to Earth together, slipping through cold space in silence. At some point a low oxygen alarm starts ringing, so Blizzard Master kicks it until it stops beeping. We may very well still die, but at least it will be a quiet death. Life as a superhero is hard, but I would never choose a different path. Nor is it over – there are still renegade superheroes down on Earth, and a civil war just waiting to break out. We won’t let that happen.

We are the ragged superheroes, the misfit saviors that stand between Earth and destruction. I have seen more and done amazing things, far greater than I would have ever believed possible.

I saved the world.

“Hey,” I say to Blizzard Master, “does this mean I’m a real superhero now?”