While a part of Mod was with Clara, the rest of him was facing down Amarque and Helion over the Atlantic. Slowly, Mod recalled his presence back to the Atlantic and set his entire might to the task of taking down his opponents. 

The other capes and drones had evacuated some miles away, leaving the three Class 5 supers alone for several miles in either direction. That was good because no one else would’ve survived the maelstrom above the Atlantic. 

The first thing Amarque did was tear open reality. 

Gouges appeared in the sky, like Amarque had reached out across the world and raked titanic fingers across it. The gouges criss-crossed the sky, some over a mile long. The wounds spread open, and a kaleidoscope of colors bled through, painting the ocean in otherworldly greens, ultra-deep purples, and shimmering blue-blacks. 

Amarque was tapping the full might of his powers, indiscriminately calling on other realities. Space and time warped, and the laws of physics bent in a dozen different directions, throwing the ocean into turmoil. Waves churned, some exploding thousands of feet into the air. Waterspouts erupted as gravity was reversed. Other spouts coalesced into floating orbs the size of small islands. Some waves spontaneously turned to ice or steam. Others turned to different elements completely. 

It wasn’t elegant or creative, but for most other supers on the planet, the fight would’ve ended immediately. Amarque had turned the Atlantic Ocean into a stellar minefield, and anyone else would’ve been boiled alive, stretched into taffy, or met an otherwise gruesome end. 

But Mod was Class 5 now, and his body could withstand everything from the crushing pressure at the bottom of the ocean, to being submerged in a volcano, or being blasted into deep space. 

Amarque must’ve realized this because he and Helion hadn’t stopped their team-up attack. Enormous panes of glass littered the sky, and Helion’s lasers filled the spaces in between. Together, Amarque and Helion aimed a hundred lasers at Mod. They cut swathes through every reality, unaffected by the distortions, and where the lasers passed, the air boiled and the ocean exploded. 

Seen from nearby sensors or Daedalus’s spyplanes, Mod, Amarque, and Helion looked like ants in a hurricane. 

Mod opened up his thrusters and dove headfirst into oblivion. The sky disappeared. The world twisted around him. Gravity warped and bent before breaking completely. This was the most inhospitable place in the solar system, short of diving into the sun itself. 

Mod wanted to test his Prime body, and this was the last chance before the main event. 

Physics changed every hundred feet, and Mod parsed the differences in an instant. He slipped around lasers, rode gravity waves, and plunged through geysers. He ignored searing temperatures and frozen storms, and charted a course through the storm without missing a beat. 

Amarque was trying to overwhelm him, but it wouldn’t work. 

It took Mod back to one of his earliest memories as a super. He’d still been learning the limits of his new abilities, and had spent much of that time in the Gray Room. During those days, Emmett had spent much of that time playing the superhero version of tag, chasing and being chased by training robots. Dr. Venture and Clara had taken turns controlling the robot, and they’d definitely taken it easy on Emmett. But that didn’t change the fact that those were some of Emmett’s fondest memories. 

In those days, he was just running across the rooftops and jumping over alleyways. Back then he had to climb up the side of a building, and trying to get back down to the street was a dangerous ordeal. Flight was a distant dream. 

Only when Mod reached the heart of the maelstrom did he bother tapping his shard of mirror. 

Lasers split, blossoming until the world was overwhelmingly bright. Beams of destruction converged on Mod, and he summoned impenetrable armor. 

Athena’s barriers were simple, two-dimensional surfaces, like individual polygons in a video game. Each one was little more than a flat plane. The true power lay in combining them. Six polygons could make a cube. A few dozen could make complex shapes. With enough processing power, it was possible to take thousands of such surfaces and turn them into lifelike people or into realistic-looking water. 

Mod took millions and combined them into armor. Then he added billions more and layered them until that armor glistened like liquid diamond. 

He flew through the storm, utterly dwarfed by its immensity, and yet shining through it like a beacon. 

Lasers rained down on Mod, glancing off his armor like arrows off medieval steel. The beams deflected into the ocean, sending up explosions of saltwater. 

When those didn’t work, Amarque pulled a mountain from another reality and hurled it at Mod. It grew enormous in Mod’s vision, seeming to stretch to either horizon and blotting out what was left of the sun. Mod turned one arm into a laser cannon and funneled a portion of his power into it. Despite the strength of his Class 5 body, his arm trembled. 

Mod cleaved through the mountain, like he was wielding a sword made out of a dying star. 

Once—

Twice—

Three times. 

For those fractions of a second, the light blotted out everything, and Mod saw the world in a wash of sensor data. Then it was over. 

Mod hovered in place, and the titanic beam of plasma disappeared. Molten rock splashed off him, and chunks of mountain flew past. Each piece was many times larger than a skyscraper. It would’ve been easier to bore straight through, but leaving the mountain intact would’ve caused a tidal wave. This way, the impact was dispersed, and the resulting wave would be far less destructive. 

TINA was already sending out warnings to nearby coastlines. 

Mod stared out across the maelstrom. It was only tenths of a second, but it felt like much longer to him. He’d chosen this empty stretch of ocean in order to keep people safe. But even out here in the middle of the Atlantic, Class 5 battles had the potential to be deadly. 

The air screamed as another barrage of lasers came. The beams converged on Mod, striking his liquid-like armor. Beams glanced away, but this time Mod didn’t stop. He altered his armor, bending the angles back toward their creators. The beams converged toward Amarque and Helion, like a fiery bear trap closing shut. 

Amarque conjured more mirrors, trying to catch the incoming lasers. These bent away at increasingly desperate angles. But Amarque couldn’t catch all of them. 

The lasers were nearly upon Amarque and Helion, when Helion stopped. The lasers winked out. Amarque’s mirrors vanished. 

Amarque and Helion shouted at each other now, but their words were lost in the roaring wind. 

Mod sensed one final attack coming. 

The Atlantic shifted. Ocean Guardian had rejoined the battle, and now he and Amarque combined their power. A mountain of water surged upward, hundreds of feet in the air. The mass of water stretched and lengthened until it was an enormous tube of saltwater. Finally, it twisted and looped around in a wide arc. The front of it split into the maw of a titanic sea serpent. Watery teeth emerged, each the size of a skyscraper. 

The entire thing was churning whitewater, but it was already beginning to change. Fins appeared along its flanks, each a mile wide. Green scales the size of buildings appeared along its surface. 

The monstrous serpent creature surged toward Mod like a cataclysmic tidal wave, the sheer movement causing a deafening roar of water. 

Mod stared it down. 

There had been moments where Mod had faltered, moments when his conviction wavered. When he wondered if taking people’s powers was the right thing to do. His memory was perfect now, and he remembered each of those instances with complete clarity. All those reasons for his hesitation felt utterly small and inconsequential now in the face of this power. 

The power that Amarque, Helion, Paragon, and the others wielded wasn’t meant for this world. That kind of power had no place here.

Mod readied himself. It was time to end this. 

REACTOR BLEED ENGAGED

Mod flexed the shielding around the antimatter reactor in his core. As he did, darkness spread across the ocean. Rather than a single bleed, he controlled the effect so that four waves of darkness rolled across the battlefield. 

Darkness washed over the sea serpent. Its surface rippled, and its scales turned back into water. The other three waves of darkness hit it in quick succession, each chipping away at the powers that held it together. Its body drooped, then finally collapsed. He took care to make it a controlled demolition. 

Amarque’s other constructs fell similarly. Mirrors disintegrated. Holes in reality were sealed, and gravity reverted to normal. Water spouts fell and ice blooms crumbled. 

As the maelstrom fell and the bright sky came back, Amarque and Helion also came back into view. They’d been at the edge of the darkness and were losing control of their powers. Helion’s eyes blinked from red to white as his power faded, and Amarque struggled to keep them floating in the air. 

Mod called on the nanite swarm beneath the ocean. It rose, pulling a confused and coughing Ocean Guardian with it. Nanites continued to rise out of the ocean, forming a small island. Ocean Guardian stood, dazed, while Amarque and Helion looked down with shocked expressions.

Mod floated closer to them. He reformed the laser into a normal arm and minimized his flight channels, smoothing out his appearance. He hoped it would make him look less threatening. 

All three enemy capes regarded him warily, but they didn’t attack. 

Mod called out to them. “You need to stand down.”

“Never!” Ocean Guardian shouted back. Amarque and Helion stayed quiet. They were clearly on edge and unsettled by Mod’s new power. 

Mod ignored the three of them and looked out across the ocean. 

A super was approaching at Mach 10 and picking up speed—so fast that the air friction caused a fireball around them. Mod studied them through every ounce of sensor data available. Theirs was another power not meant for this world. 

In a few seconds, that fireball would come over the horizon. And five seconds after that, the incoming super would be on top of them. 

Mod announced to the other others. “Paragon is here.”

~ ~ ~