He knew everything Shawn did. The flames and the theatrics were cute, but they were for show. Simple pyrotechnics. He didn’t know how Shawn was doing it, but that had never mattered before. All that had ever mattered when fighting for all these years was the what. If he could find out what someone was doing, he would find his own answer to the problem. And it was about time Shawn got to feel what it felt like.

  As Cy formed a bubble of verdant light around him and Shawn, he knew he would get one clean hit in before Shawn realized what was going on. But that was the point. He dropped the act. Dropped the show and the hesitation. Throwing everything he had into the hit he growled, “YOU STUPID IDIOT!!!” He could feel the moment of impact harder than any other hit he had landed. He could feel the hardened responses from decades of experience responding just as they should on reflex as Shawn took the hit. What he didn’t expect was how empty it felt. How Shawn didn’t lash out in response, at least not at first. He simply accepted the hit. He flew through the air limp until he landed on the ground some distance away.

  “You know… I kind of expected you to hit harder… maybe put some elbow grease into the next one.”

  Shawn lingered on the ground for a moment before leaping to his feet with practiced ease and his hands in his pockets. As Cyrus looked at that armored smile, he watched those weathered eyes looking past him. He watched as Shawn looked without surprise at his trick. “A time marble… because if every when is now then I can’t do my little trick. Leave it to a replica of me to come up with-”

  “STOP ACTING LIKE I’M NOT HERE!!!”

  Cyrus felt Shawn’s eyes finally and truly see him, his haunted eyes weighed down by decades of regrets, some fresher than others. He said firmly, “I can’t believe you… All this work! All this theater! Just so you can throw it all away?”

  Shawn’s bravado fell away for a moment as his eyes grew cold. “It isn’t that simple.” It wasn’t the usual haunted expression. Not the same self-destruction. There was something else behind those eyes. Something cold as the deepest pit. And yet as quick as it settled, Cyrus saw the fire roar back to life. “But hey, if I have to go out I’m going to make damn well sure it matters. And you? You are gonna have to swing a lot harder than that to-”

  Cyrus shouted, “This isn’t a game! You broke a deal that wiped your history out completely!”

  Shawn nodded, “Of course I did! I would expect even a copy of me to-” Shawn blocked this punch, gripping the fist hard. Shawn’s eyes lit up with excitement as Cyrus’ knee collided with Shawn’s elbow before unleashing a spinning crescent kick with more speed than Cyrus had expected. Turning with the strike to respond with one of his own, he watched as Shawn effortlessly predicted and blocked it before driving a side kick into his gut.

  Shawn laughed playfully, the time for talk over and clearly excited for a genuine fight. “Now now… perfectly symmetrical violence never solved anything… Good thing I have a decade of experience over you. Kinda tips the scales in my favor.”

  As Cy got up, he felt his mind beginning to run to solutions. Solutions he knew Shawn was thinking too… but Cy wasn’t Shawn. Not anymore. And this was his time marble… no, more than that…

  Shawn readied himself to block Cy’s next strike but instead watched as the blow froze for a moment before Shawn felt himself hit with the full force. As Cy’s strike finished its motion, Shawn picked up on it quickly and laughed weakly, “Quantum Desync… now that’s interesting. Doesn’t matter if I know your move if you shift the timing around, does it.”

  Cyrus sighed, “If you want to pretend this is a game, I don’t mind forcing you to fight against lag.” He hated this. Hated playing Shawn’s game. But he had to. He had to break this man enough to get his answer. To find out the secret that Shawn was still burying behind that smile. Closing the distance he saw that all too familiar makeshift peek-a-boo boxing stance but it was obvious that this was about to devolve into Shawn’s true fighting style. A street brawler. A survivor. A man who learned how to fight not from countless martial artists but by scrapping time and time again out of his weight class and powering through. Cyrus hated to see it. Hated the primal fury that he knew Shawn was pulling from. Remembered with every fiber of his soul the poison pit of pain that drove him to survive. To claw scratch and bite until his final moment.

  He tried to block it out, to respond with focused and carefully chosen counter blows, but with each strike he could feel it. The damage didn’t matter. Even as he heard bone crack. Even as he watched the pain shoot across Shawn’s face, he saw it again and again. That fire that didn’t just survive the pain but fed on it. That turned every punch, every ounce of agony into a new injustice to repay tenfold. He demanded again, “Why! Why play the villain?! Why manipulate so many people?! Why lie about it!?”

  Shawn laughed but his voice was tainted by pain and cosmic outrage. “Why?! Why not!? Haven’t I earned it? You know what I can do! You have felt the power we have. How the heavens themselves tremble if we walk with just one foot too heavy! I can’t just ignore that! If I can help I have to! So when I punched my way out of that prison of infinity, what else was I supposed to do?” He practically began to monologue as his strikes became feral and pure instinct. “I have tangoed with everything the universe can throw at me and came out the top dog. So when given the chance to do it all again, to save everyone I couldn’t save before, why the hell wouldn’t I? The way I see it, this is basic math. I can do nothing and billions die who I could have saved. I do nothing and pretend I’m ignorant and I have to live with that! But if I’m here and I have the power, I can bring that down to millions! Prevent tragedy at a cosmic scale. Kill only the right people! Do it in a way were normal people can just live their stupid little lives without ever having to worry about little old me!”

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  Cyrus could feel it. Hear it in his voice. He knew Shawn wasn’t exactly wrong. Even just by guiding Leithan’s life into one that was more productive there were countless worlds likely saved… but Cyrus couldn’t accept that, “And what about the countless heroes you killed before they could grow? How many villains do you think you made because they never knew loss and tragedy. You saved Despoda! No one can know how many of those are going to go on to hurt others! You brought the Falos to your home planet! Moved the invasion forward by a whole decade! How many died in that process because of your DIRECT INVOLVEMENT!!!” Cyrus had the same flash of memory he knew haunted Shawn every day and asked, “And if that’s true… why didn’t you save her…”

  Cyrus saw the lapse in concentration, striking Shawn hard in the gut before uppercutting him hard enough to take the head off a less durable fighter. As Shawn fell back and away, Cyrus could feel the air in the arena change some. But it didn’t stop him. He followed up his words with another. “With all we know and as strong as you talk, you could have saved your mother. But you knew better… you knew how much she was hurting. How hard things were for her… You know that you could save her but that doing so would be worse than letting history play out…”

  Shawn sighed and spoke from the ground, “And it makes her wrong, doesn’t it? It is, in a way, my fault. I can’t change it. Dear lord to I wish I could only move time enough for the cops to get there before I did. But what happens then? How much did seeing that… being haunted by that… make me less like him? By watching the failures of that asshole… did it make me want to be a better man? Or was being her son already the answer to that?”

  Shawn stared up at the marble, his despair radiating off of him for a time, darkening the light of the arena. “There isn’t a way to know. We can only decide that for ourselves. Just like I am deciding here and now. I won’t let you do this. I won’t let you throw away the life all of us are fighting to give you just because you are too buried in your own ego to accept that you aren’t responsible for all the evils of the world. You aren’t a monster.”

  The darkness faded and Cyrus began to gain hope until he felt his light around the arena bend some, it’s tone slowly shifting. Shawn spoke with a distance that he had never heard from himself before. Not cold but as if he was somehow a million years in the future. “You know, its funny. When I woke up in this body… I finally understood him. Leithan’s entire home. His family. His planet. Gone in only a few days. Hours buried under rubble while his mother held him. He had told me… but to watch the Falos glass a planet from its surface when you are just a child. It really does change a person. Surviving when no one else did from a power so much larger than your own… And I made a promise to him too. That if I got out before him, I would make things right between us…” As the green shifted to a golden hue, Cyrus saw chains begin to form within the dome he had created, the power shifting entirely away from him. Cyrus readied himself and began diving between the chains.

  “Anisa isn’t just alive, but she is going to show everyone just how good a person she is. Doug and Dean? They are good kids and can more than fill my shoes a million times over. Gena will move on. She’s done it before and I can’t wait for her kids to grow up while still having a mom.”

  Cyrus felt his left arm become encased and rolled out of the way of another set grabbing his legs only to have his right arm held too. He watched as Shawn stood up, a scarlet flame in his eye as his body shone with golden light.

  “It isn’t sacrifice anymore. Not for me. These chains that bind us across space and time… they are ones of love. Binding us to the gravity of our fates and inexorably to one another. I became the Cosmic Phoenix because Anisa had her life stolen. I ended Emperor Gram because no one else could. I saved Douglas because I knew his pain. I took in Dean because he was the sort of son I never got to have.”

  Shawn’s hair grew, as if time itself was catching up to him, his eyes burning with that entrancing fire. He approached slowly. Not like an executioner or the phantom of death but as if it was a casual stroll of a man who had ascended above even the gods.

  “I fought battles I hated and ended the lives I wish I didn’t have to. I did it so no one else had to carry that weight. That fucking rock groomed me and told me to do it, but I CHOSE this life. I gave up EVERYTHING normal. Turned my back on what I was. I did it because I give too much of a damn to pretend these people’s lives aren’t worth something. And if every life means something than billions of lives were worth working up the courage to die for!”

  He stood in front of Cyrus, his eyes blazing as he loomed over him.

  “And if even one of their lives is worth dying for than mine was a treasure I wasn’t going to throw away either. But that candle is burning really low right now… Nothing can last forever, even in this frozen time. So tell me, boy. What’s your name.”

  “Cyrus…”

  “Don’t worry, Cyrus. I’ll make this quick.”

  He raised his hand with a scarlet flame… and the golden light vanished. Shawn stood over the emerald form of the shattered machine, the one he had begun to feel a familial bond with… he heard Douglas speak… and the show had to go on. Weary as he was. Spent as he was… especially emotionally. He knew he didn’t have much time left. That Cyrus had run that clock down even faster. But he had a promise to keep and he had never broken a promise in his entire life.

  The lack of a crystal hadn’t even come to Shawn’s mind. He knew his blow wasn’t to the crystal containing the man’s mind. He knew in his heart the two would meet again… And as his mind drifted towards his old student, the purple warrior who had come to keep her promise from so long ago, slipped quietly away from the action without so much as a whisper along her way.