Mod faced down Amarque and Helion above the Atlantic. The surrounding sky was calm, and one hundred feet below, the waves rolled lazily. It was a picturesque scene. 

But even separated as they were, Mod could see Amarque scowling and the fierce look of determination on Helion’s face. 

Then Amarque raised his hands, and the sea below them began to boil. Waves surged upward as another mountain of water stretched up into the sky. Except this time, it wasn’t a team of supers doing it—it was just one man. Amarque pulled the waves until physics broke—until the waves looked like rivers and streams of taffy or gel instead of saltwater. Amarque would take the raw material and bend it to his will. 

At the same time, Helion fired his eye beams. Neither cape was holding back now, but Helion’s display was more immediately impressive. The sky glowed, like Helion had carved a gash in it and red light was leaking out. The air around the beams super-heated and let out a sound that was half scream and half explosion. 

But Mod had been summoning his own mountain. Nanite swarms surged up from below him, rising like a twin mountain to Amarque’s. A geyser of nanites erupted from the top and joined with Mod. He extended a hand, and the swarm became an extension of his arm. 

Mod had once channeled a mountain’s worth of power—

Now he did it again. 

His swarm formed a complex network of channels and inverters, all made to swirl and flow so that no individual nanite was burned away. Mod’s outstretched arm became a swirling cyclone. Helion’s twin lasers struck the heart of the cyclone and were dispersed, funneled into millions of channels and funneled into Mod’s spare fusion cores. 

The magma chamber beneath the Vault had been tame in comparison, almost as if that vast mountain of power had been condensed and purified into a tiny star. 

And yet, it wasn’t overwhelming his systems. 

Energy poured through Mod’s swarm and into his cores, and Mod felt himself relax. He’d expected a scalding hot beverage, and instead found it refreshing. Mod drank deep, and his cores quickly topped off. He funneled the excess power down the swarm and into the Atlantic, using the ocean as a giant heat sink.  

Mod amplified his voice so that it boomed over the shuddering sky. “You’re still holding back!”

The lasers abruptly snapped off, revealing Helion’s sneering face. Helion didn’t have time to reply. 

The red glow that had filled the sky a moment ago was replaced with twisting masses of water, like Amarque had turned the world upside down and the ocean was falling into the sky. Some masses were as thick as skyscrapers, and Amarque and Helion were quickly dwarfed by the display. 

Amarque snapped his fingers, and the mountain of water began to change. It transmuted into a whirlwind of stone boulders and a hail of razor-sharp blades. With another wave of his hand, he hurled the barrage at Mod. The air screamed as the tornado of projectiles was unleashed. 

Mod rocketed forward into the heart of the maelstrom. He slipped around boulders the size of houses and batted aside car-sized ones like toys. His point-defense system shot down smaller boulders. The whirlwind of blades slashed at him but his outer layers reknit as quickly as they were damaged. 

Again, Mod felt that his opponent was holding back. The feeling assaulted him, more powerful than even the maelstrom above the Atlantic. 

“Try harder!” Mod shouted. “Try again!”

Mod couldn’t even see his opponents through the hail anymore, but Amarque answered his taunt. Amarque pulled on the air between them just like he’d pulled on the water. What had been a half-mile stretched until it faded into the horizon. The boulders and blades sped up until they moved with the speed of asteroids and comets. 

Mod smiled and opened his thrusters. He blasted forward, moving with reckless abandon. He plowed through smaller projectiles and contorted around others. When a series of asteroids came at him with barely feet between them, Mod planted his feet and leapt from one to the other as easily as leaping across the rooftops of Belport. 

A part of Mod wept—both for how easy it was and for the nostalgia it brought. But he wanted more. Mod needed to push himself, needed to know just how far he’d come. So, he resolved to use this fight as a test run. 

Somewhere on the distorted horizon, Amarque was screaming in rage.

For a moment, the storm of projectiles stopped, and Mod was flying through the open sky—

Then a wall of stone appeared. It stretched off into the distance, disappearing into the horizon to either side, and stretching deep into the ocean and into the sky. It blotted out the sun, and darkness fell across the Atlantic. 

Mod didn’t stop—didn’t even slow. 

He reconfigured his arms and tapped his antimatter reactor. Twin beams lanced out, boiling the air like a star had been brought to Earth. Mod carved a hole through the heart of the stone—

And blasted out the other side. 

The world beyond bore little resemblance to what it had once been. Massive waterfalls rose out of the Atlantic and miles into the sky. Streams broke away from the falls and morphed into sheets of glass hundreds of feet across. Amarque had turned the Atlantic into a floating hall of mirrors big enough for giants to stride through. 

Mod’s opponents clearly hadn’t expected him to punch through. They were floating in the middle of the scene. Helion’s eyes went wide with surprise, and Amarque had gone silent, out of concentration or desperation. 

Helion’s eyes glowed red, and Amarque made a sweeping gesture with his hands. Then all around the panes of glass began to glow too, like the sun was setting in the distance. 

When Helion fired, two lasers erupted from his eyes—

And a hundred more lasers erupted from panes of glass. 

It was time to tap the shard of mirror embedded in his chest. Time to put it through its final test. If it could stand up to Amarque and Helion, then it would stand up to Paragon. 

For the second time that battle, Mod engaged his antimatter reactor, and the shard of mirror in his chest flared to life. 

Mod could’ve harnessed any of the spells in the Mirror of Borrowed Fates… He could’ve made millions of copies of himself and become a one-man army, wielded lightning so powerful it shamed the clouds, or fire so hot it made fusion look like a candle. Maybe he could’ve wielded death itself. There were countless spells buried in that mirror—who knew what he could’ve pulled out of its depths. Maybe if Mod had all the time in the world, he would’ve chosen three or four powers instead of just one.

But Mod didn’t want any of those spells. He didn’t want to be a god or a living weapon. Any power that he gained was a means to an end. 

Mod wanted to protect humanity. He wanted to be a shield. 

That was what superheroes were supposed to be. 

And that was why he chose Athena’s power. For all the destructive and murderous potential it possessed, her power was far more valuable as a shield. 

He’d studied her powers, and knew the limitations and the untapped potential. He’d watched Athena use her power to layer her barriers. When one barrier wasn’t enough, she’d made wedges and slopes to redirect blasts.  Athena was an ancient super who had millennia to master her powers, but she was still just a super. Her reaction time was limited, and her own inner well of power handicapped her. Using her powers caused stress and even headaches. 

Mod had none of those limitations. 

Helion’s lasers tore through the sky, directly toward Mod, and Mod didn’t move. 

He focused power through the shard of mirror, forming barrier after barrier, and layering them with the speed of a supercomputer and surrounding him in a protective cocoon. 

Helion’s lasers struck Mod’s shield. The deadly glow magnified, casting the entire horizon in deep red. The magical barriers quivered and melted, others blinked out completely, but Mod made more and more at the speed of thought, replacing them as fast as they were destroyed. And layer by layer, the beams were turned away. 

Amarque and Helion didn’t see any of that though—all of it happened in microseconds. All they saw was a shimmer as a hundred Class 5 lasers bent away from Mod. The lasers angled down into the ocean, resulting in a cacophony of explosions. Waves churned and sloshed, stretching up into the air even higher than the supers floated. Saltwater rained down on them and left a haze in the air. 

While the ocean churned, Mod checked his systems. 

ANTIMATTER REACTOR STABLE

LATTICE SHIELD STABLE

ALL SYSTEMS STABLE

Amarque and Helion floated in stunned silence. They were still taking in how casually Mod had deflected certain death. Mod waited patiently for them to catch up. 

For a moment, it almost looked like they would stand down. Then the pair of supers began talking to each other. Clearly, they thought Mod couldn’t hear them over the noise or at that distance. 

Helion said, “There’s no way he can do that again. We have to attack now, while he’s recovering!”

Amarque nodded. “Together then. With everything we’ve got. This ends today.”

Mod didn’t betray what he’d heard. His generators hummed, and power flooded his body as he prepared for the coming storm. 

~ ~ ~