According to my old history teacher, Kaiju were the first mutations humanity ever came across, but knowing humanity, being different meant being hated, hunted, segregated and shelved by a society that much preferred their mutations to look normal, more human. Being able to turn yourself into a piece of flaccid skin that could just about stretch into any shape and form imaginable was maybe weird, kinda amazing, and if you hit the right crowd, you could make yourself a millionaire in the Cape scene. Kaiju were a different story, and it all came down to one thing and one thing alone: they were an evolution. The next step, a branch in the tree, just like how the humans had various ancestors, like Neanderthals, except these ones survived, except these ones didn’t hunt the humans down the same way every other human species was. The short answer to why was pretty simple: they just didn’t want to.

  And when I asked my twelfth grade history teacher how that even made sense, because all I’d known up until then was how badly the Kaiju had been treated, he gave me a simple answer: They’re more human than us. A part of me had really wanted to believe that, but then Harper burst out with laughter, and so did the rest of the class. Kaiju being just as human? Even more human? Hilarious, teach. It was easy for them to say, because they hadn’t spent the previous night trying to figure out what to do with a ten year old girl who’d torn a chunk from her dad’s throat with her bare teeth because he’d done things no grown man should be doing to kids and their mothers. The cops wouldn’t go to their apartment complex—too many Kaiju, sorry, not in our wheelhouse, so here came the hero.

  Who had no clue how to handle the little girl with meat still between her teeth, a mouth full of canines and eyes like a leopard’s, ears that twitched and dark, spotted skin. If the news found out, Gods know what would happen next, so I did the next best reasonable thing, and I told the police that I killed the guy because he was a piece of shit that didn’t deserve to be around. They’d tried to throw the rule book at me, tried to get me arrested because it was apparently pretty bad for a superhero to go around murdering random people inside their homes for no known reason, but that’s all pretty pointless when I could literally fly out of their cop cars any second I wanted.

  I still don’t know where that little girl and mother went. They went running into the night and didn’t even turn around to look me in the eyes. Around a corner and down a street and, just like that, they were a story. A tale only three people would ever really know about. I’ve got a grudgingly annoying soft spot for them, because I’d like to think people at the bottom of the rung deserve to be protected, no matter what they are. I hadn’t been strong enough to protect myself when I was younger, but I’m sure as hell strong enough to make sure it doesn’t happen anymore. Believe it or not, but I had a code, a guideline—a line that I didn’t like getting crossed, but right now?

  It was hard to hold onto my morals when I had a ghoul of a Kaiju trying to rip me in half.

  And all because I couldn’t shake the eyes—eyes I kept seeing when he lunged at me, getting so close he could sink his claws into my costume and pin me against a wall; eyes that didn’t look like some dog out of hell.

  Eyes that were bloodshot and human, tiny compared to the rest of this hulking mass of flesh, bone and ferocious muscle. And for just a moment, as he sailed through the air, claws like daggers pointing at me and beams of light coming through the sewer grates he flew under, I could see his pupils, how frantic and terrified they were.

  And for just that moment, I shut this part of myself off—the part of myself I wanted to be nowadays.

  For just a moment, I was Olympia—nothing more, nothing less.

  This fight would begin and end in the dark, and not a soul would see it happen.

  Especially not when I grabbed his wide open jaw and ripped the bottom half clean off his head in a spray of hot blood and lashing saliva. His momentum slammed us both against the wall of the sewer so hard we toppled back into the river of sewage. I shot out of the water. He bellowed and lunged and grabbed hold of my ankle, then slammed me against the edge of the walkway. Something gave inside my chest. Ribs moved. I gasped for air. Pain lanced through my side. Broken ribs. He grabbed my torso and plunged me into the muck, water and waste getting into my mouth, my cuts and wounds as the sewer began heating and hissing around my body. I let out a roar as the golden arcs of lightning around my body erupted, turning the sewer into a super-heated tunnel that stank of ozone and burning waste. Foul-smelling steam hung in the air as I climbed out of the river, coughing and gagging and reeking like hell. I spat and vomited, retching so hard my sides decided to stab me with breath-snatching pain.

  A heartbeat of silence. A pause in the chaos as water seeped back into the river behind me.

  I shot to the right, skidding on my shoulder and flipping onto my feet, watching as shards of bone whistled through the air and punctured the concrete walls. Panic shot through me. Cadaver? I spun around just in time to watch dozens of more shoot from the Kaiju’s claws, detaching like shrapnel from his fingers. I ducked and weaved, then swore when a single shard, about as long as a bullet, bit into my shoulder. I stumbled, clutching the bleeding flesh. Another got me in the thigh, the torso—one skimmed my neck, my side, my calf and my chest as I dodged. I threw myself to the ground and tore them out as fast as I could, pain washing through me, then getting instantly numbed as the torn suit kept feeding into my skin. I stood shakily, trying to catch my breath and wheezing hard.

  “Fuck,” I hissed, grtting my teeth and turning to face him. “Who the hell made you into this thing?”

  He responded by getting onto all-fours and roaring so loud that the tunnel shook and the mist in the air dissipated around him. One hand on my ribs, the other balled into a fist, I stared at him, watching as his claws sank into the foundation like it was made out of grey flesh. Just don’t know when to quit, do you, Ry? I rolled my shoulders and took a deep breath, letting the burning pain coming from every banging heartbeat against my ribs bleed its way out of my system. Electricity crackled around my hands, brightening the sewers and worsening the stench seeping into my pores. I didn’t want to keep going. I knew I should stop getting distracted and leave.

  But if some other superhero came across this thing, then it would be game over in a heartbeat. And the last thing I need is more shit on my consciousness right now. So I dropped the hand resting on my ribs, and crouched.

  Then, a sound—a sound so high-pitched, so shrill, that we both winced. Growing up, I could always hear dog whistles going off in the parks, but they sounded like blaring, shrieking alarms to me every single time, and inside the tunnel, it was like someone had just set off an explosion between my ears. It stopped as quickly as it came, leaving Mr. Campbell shaking his head, body swaying and limbs heavy and the putrid flesh clinging to all that muscle now loose and flappy. He was smaller, albeit by just a fraction. I would have taken my chance if it wasn’t for the fact I had to puke and my balance was thrown completely off kilter, so bad I stumbled over my own feet and landed on the platform, shaking my head and massaging my aching temples. I spat on the ground and dragged my forearm across my mouth, because I could hear it now, the slow, dragging sound of feet in the dark.

  “You’ve found my boy,” a grating voice said, echoing through the ringing in my head. Mr Campbell reacted, but he was sloppy and odd, moving like he was stop-motion. One large arm fell into the river, then he picked himself out of it and lazily swung his razors through the air. The man, though, stood there, hunched and vile, his eyes wild and skin pale but covered in patches of wild brown hair. What the fuck am I even looking at? I stayed on one elbow, looking the guy up and down, watching him stroke Mr Campbell’s muzzle and snout. He looked strange. Out of place. I was used to my supervillains being more well-put together. This guy looked like he’d just torn his way out of some Kaiju’s womb, still covered in all its remains. His fingernails were long and yellow, his teeth the same color and his eyes just as luminous. They turned on me, accompanied by a sharp smile. “Thank you. Oh, dear heavens, Olympia, thank you.” He kept stroking Mr Campbell, holding him in place with his thumb pressing hard against his eye socket, fingernail burrowing underneath the tiny eyeball. “You truly are a superhero.”

  I got up and spat again, because…it was him, the stink in the sewers, it was all him. So bad it made my eyes water and my overly sensitive nose shrivel. “Who are you?” I asked. “And what the hell did you do to the Kaiju?”

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  “I fixed him,” he said, voice quaking and mouth wet with white saliva that dripped from his lips. His heartbeat was fast and there was a bulge between his groin the more he stroked Mr Campbell’s shaved skull. Gross, what the fuck is this guy, anyway? “He was so…so flawed, so broken, so alone when I found him. Powerless. Weak. Unwilling.” He shook his head slowly. “But that’s no longer! Now he stands proud! A Kaiju, a true Kaiju of old!”

  I stepped forward, because I just decided that maybe flying straight through both of them would be a two birds one stone kind of situation—then, from the sewer water, rose a creature, another Kaiju, with thick green skin, scales and barbs so large they looked like armor plating, crawled onto the platform. Its head was long, an alligator attached to the body of a muscular man with scars running down his spine, matching the scales along his arms. He looked at me, daring me, just the same size as Mr Campbell, laying there on his fat belly and block-like biceps.

  Mr Campbell shuddered and tried to step back, snapping his head around to get the man’s grip off his face, but, almost like a switch had been flipped, he froze, relaxed, then got into a low crouch, facing me with death in his tiny eyes. The man turned around and wiped the saliva off his crooked chin, grinning wildly with his yellow teeth.

  Great, a nutjob, I thought, looking at the alligator-man, then at Mr Campbell. Some kind of telepath, too.

  Whatever. Powers or not, a human doesn’t work too well without their heart.

  Because I was wasting time down here fighting things that—

  It clicked.

  I stepped back, looked up, and strained to listen to the world above me. Silence. A deep, jarring silence. I shot through a manhole cover and into Lower Olympus. The streets were filled with smoke, the heavy kind that darkened the sky and choked the color out of everything. Fuck. Fuck! I slammed my palms together, banishing the shadows closest to me. Bodies lay on the pavement, breathing, but motionless, some twitching, others writhing, most of them like corpses. Dead flies caught in glue, except each one I checked had one single thing in common.

  No heartbeats, but plenty of life still in their bodies—just enough to cough up a foul black liquid.

  Tar. Sticky on my fingers. Scaldingly hot.

  I stood up and looked around, and found the two Kaiju on the street, shrouded in darkness and smoke, and on the back of the alligator-man, was the guy who’d gotten Mr Campbell to settle into a complicit trance. I quietly swore, because I should’ve known better. It was a diversion. A diversion to get me away from the main problem, the main fighting, the main pieces of action. It doesn’t matter if Adam’s with mom—if they want me away, that means they know they can probably handle him on their own. Lucian, it had to be him. Or someone else? All these freaks worked for him? Too many questions, too few answers. The pavement cracked under my boots the second the guy on the Kaiju opened his mouth to speak. The asphalt splintered, then I was on them. Mr Campbell lunged. I ducked, rolled onto my shoulder, my back, stopped behind them all, and sank my fingers into the meat of their spines.

  Have you ever heard the sound of a body being burned alive by electricity so terribly hot it melted the pavement I was standing on? No? Me neither, and it was tragically horrible, the stench so suffocating I could barely keep myself standing so close to the bodies when I ripped my hands out of their corpses and stumbled backward. Lightheaded. Heartbeat through the roof. The charred corpses smoked. The meat on their bodies swelled, bubbled, and spat bright yellow puss and boiling blood down their bodies and onto the ground. The man who’d been controlling both of them looked like he’d been smacked dead with a bolt of lightning from dad himself, fusing his flesh with the alligator-man to a point where I couldn’t even tell where one body ended and the other body began.

  I turned around, heading toward where I had last left mom, when I stopped and stared at a man in front of me. One of the bodies, now risen, their eyes a swirling black, their mouth filled with the tar-like liquid that steamed and gushed hot air between his bared teeth. I took a step back, raised my fist, and got my forearm grabbed by another body. All it took was one hand on my wrist to stop me. The other was a fist, one that swung at me hard enough to crack my head around and split my lip. They didn’t let go, but all that meant for me was to jerk my arm toward me, pin their body to mine, and slam their skull into the ground. The pavement cracked. Their skull didn’t explode. I bit down on my teeth and picked their head up again, then smashed it into the pavement even harder. Nothing. What the fuck? The man in front of me slammed his foot into my face, flooding my throat with blood. I reeled back, jumping far enough to open my mouth and let the blood spill onto the broken asphalt below me.

  Then, one by one, the bodies on the pavement slowly picked themselves up and stared at me.

  “We wish not to fight,” they said in unison, a monotonous drone, a chant, that echoed.

  “Should’ve opened with that,” I said, rolling my shoulder.

  “We simply wish to converse.”

  “I don’t negotiate with supervillains.”

  Silence, and then: “Heed our demand.”

  “Yeah?” I asked. More on the rooftops, even more in the windows. Blight, it had to be. I swallowed, feeling like the avenue was pressing in on me, the buildings tall, the smoky sky low and dark and heavy. “What demands?”

  “Your surrender,” they chanted. The Kaiju corpses jerked. Once. Suddenly. Then the burnt flesh began sloughing off their corpses, birthing a glistening coat of muscle and skin that clung to the ash hanging in the air.

  “Not happening,” I said. “So are you gonna try to kill me or what?”

  Heartbeat fast, throat dry, ears ringing and pain in my bone marrow. Tired and hungry, blood in my mouth. I swallowed my spit and licked my lips, wondering when the sun would finally come up, wondering when all this—

  A single voice spoke through the silence: “Yield, Daughter of Zeus. Lest you perish on his memorial.”

  Like all the others, this man had the same dark eyes, pale face, and lips lined with tar. Except he was tall, too tall, thin and lingering and jerking in the way he walked. His face was smooth, his fingers long. He crept from the alleyway, bent because of his height, reaching the streetlights at half their height. When he passed them, they stopped flickering, they stopped burning with yellow light. They turned off, their metal rotting and rusting and decaying, as if a disease was spreading from the pavement and up toward the bulbs that all suddenly shattered.

  He stopped in front of me, looking down what would have been a nose if he had one.

  “Blight?” I asked quietly. My skin prickled. It hurt being so close, like I was in front of an achingly hot fire that was leaping toward me, trying and failing and snapping away at my skin like tiny lashing whips of rot.

  “The honor,” he rasps, “is yours. Kneel, child, just as your father once did, and now you must in his stead.”

  “Here’s a thought,” I said, glancing over my shoulder—more people, almost a swelling crowd, all silent, or staring, all dead and pale, standing right alongside the Kaijus and their master. “How about you fuck off and die?” He opened his mouth to speak, but I cut him off, electricity pulsing from my hands. “I’ve got a city to save and the devil to murder before the night ends, so how about you all save yourself the hassle of dying, and all just vanish?”

  “It is His decree,” Blight said slowly. “And what He has insisted, is what shall come to pass.”

  “Lucian?” I said quietly. “What’s he said about any of this?”

  “That soon, The Golden Age will return, but for that, a life must be taken.”

  I stared at him, then bit the edge of my tongue and filed all those feelings, those emotions, that heat that I knew would lash out right now, deep into my body. I sighed through my nose, tensed my jaw, and looked around.

  I looked at the ground, at the lightning bolt on my chest, and then took off my costume, leaving me in nothing except my sweaty, filthy, torn white t-shirt, a pair of shorts, and sneakers. I folded it and left it on the street.

  Because I didn’t want the world thinking my symbol had to always be smeared in blood to shine brightest. They would watch, and they would question, but at the end of the day, it’s what my entire life has always been about. The fighting. The costumes. The symbols and the legacies. Fuck all that. They all wanted my dad back so much that, hey, fuck it, why not just give them what they want? The superhero costume was coming off because I wasn’t going to put the name to shame. What I was doing was dealing with a private problem. A personal settlement with the people, the crowd, the world, that kept wanting the Golden Age to look exactly like it did a decade ago.

  Newsflash for anyone that hasn’t been paying attention: it’s gonna look different this time.

  Because unlike them, I didn't shake hands with supervillains.

  I put my fist through them.

  I tied my hair back, looked up at Blight, then lunged for his throat.