My host's home was a plain and drab building. Only distinguishable from the others because of the lighthouse attached to it. A lighthouse that seemed very out of place with how far away it was from the ocean of black water.

The top was covered in a glass dome that should have given off a blinding radiance. Yet the light coming off the lens, or the Intruder molded to take the shape of a lens, was dim and oddly grey.

As if it was a tinted nightlight instead of a device meant to steer ships to safety.

"Quite a place you've got here." I mused out loud.

"It is more than I deserve." He stated plainly. His earlier cheer now muted, just as the light above us.

"I should have far less. I deserve far less."

He shook his head.

"But no matter. You are here and you are real and I will be gone soon. Erased from this wicked place where future and past intermix so very unnaturally. I will be gone like a nightmare upon waking and hopefully, no one will ever have to remember that I even existed in the first place."

He cringed.

"That is one of the reasons why I am hesitant to let you carry off too much of myself out in the real world my better self. I am not someone to emulate. Even for a cause as noble as yours."

He cringed again. His hands coming up to his head as if he meant to hit himself again. Unlike before, they stopped and he was able to let them down without incident.

"My Enhancer abilities were not forged under the fire of combat. Not as you know the concept anyway. They are abilities that suit my… shall we say… unique style of fighting. I have one that would suit just about anyone, my [Potence] ability. And maybe my [Incorruptible Body] would suit you too. But other than that…"

He shook his head.

"No. I think it would be best if you went ahead and talked to some other of my possible selves. Or just go along and get out of this madhouse."

He stopped, as if to consider his words after he'd said them.

"The Dragon, Hazimon. I am familiar with him. He died screaming, much like the rest, but I seem to recall that his greatest advantage was his speed and the way he wielded it in accordance with every single minute movement."

He nodded to himself. Stopping just shy of opening the door to his own abode.

"Yes. The speed. I have my [Spectral Celerity X] of course, but even now, if he and my strongest version fought using Enhancer powers, I don't think I could match him."

"How so?" I asked him. Genuinely curious.

He shrugged.

"Some of my Enhancer abilities are synergistic, like I told you. They were molded by one Title of mine. A Telepath Title. And all the Titles the Enhancer, Shifter and Projector abilities gave me were molded after that first Title of mine. My curse."

He began gripping his right arm. Now drawing blood.

"Yes. That damnable curse of mine. It sings to me even now. In this place that was meant to be quiet. In this place that was meant to be isolated from the noise."

"Wait a second." I snapped him back to reality. "Your Title influenced what abilities you got in other Types? I thought that only happened with regular Masters. Not with Savants."

I shook my head again.

"Even then, those kinds of developments are supposed to be super rare. Like, I know from peeking through memories of Kenari bigshots that Singing Metals, the Divine, was like that. She became so strong in Telepath so quickly that Projector abilities dealing with magnetism and Shifter abilities that turned her body to metal triggered the effects of her own Tier 10 version of [Puppet Machine]."

I recalled the events. Swimming through the ocean of foreign memories I had.

"Not quite sure on the details, but I believe it was called [Symphony of the Machinist X]. She developed higher-Tier Projector, Shifter and Enhancer abilities later. So her Titles channeled that first power through other Types as well as Telepath."

I might have shuddered at the thought if I'd been fully human.

"From what I gathered, it meant she was able to activate parts of the power for no cost through the activation or usage of Projector and Shifter abilities. Like, she could activate it as if her targets were machines if she controlled the magnetism around them. Or in the case of Shifter, that she could control her own body as if it was a machine whenever she turned her cells to metal."

I looked at him quizzically.

"If that had happened to me. Or us. It would have meant that we could automatically activate [Dominate] or some other power on anyone that hit us, if applied to Enhancer or some Shifter power. Or we might be able to apply the effect automatically if someone got hit with a Projector attack of ours."

I thought of the implications.

On the one hand, [Dominate] was so naturally strong that it hardly needed the boost. If I wanted to end a fight quickly, I could more or less rely on it all the time. On the other hand, that only applied to targets I could sense with my Telepath senses. My mind-reading through [Omniscience]. Anyone with a good enough mind-blocking ability, like the Dragon, could just beat the ever-living shit out of me without worrying too much about it.

'But if I had the option to activate [Domination] without that restriction then… well. That matchup would suddenly become far less one-sided at the snap of a finger.'

Indeed, if that was the case, then I very much doubted Hazimon would have been in the mood to screw me over that time. Or any other time for that matter. Sure, he might have been able to resist the effect regardless, but any kind of breach into his mental defenses meant me having a fighting chance. Not just to defeat him, but to make him utterly mine.

Forever.

As far as deterrents went, that one was hard to beat.

I gazed over at my counterpart. More closely this time.

"I was under the impression that Savants could not be like that." I paused. "Though to be fair, Savants having access to other Types was unheard of before us. Still, I can't imagine that having a synergy like that between Types would be a bad thing. On the contrary, it sounds like a blessing. It means that all your powers complement each other more than the norm and your strengths are all the stronger for it."

I paused to think of downsides.

"It might mean your Enhancer Titles or those of Projector or Shifter are less effective as Titles of their own Type, but I can only imagine that the added flexibility more than makes up for the shortfall."

He nodded.

"You are correct. But I was very atypical from the get go." He reasoned. "That, and my build was not as balanced as yours is right now. Nor as balanced as it was when you were a child. Mine was always…"

He paused again.

"Skewed."

"How so?" I pressed.

"I only had four Tier X abilities. Compared to your many variants. And of those, [Domination] fell by the wayside almost immediately. As did my own unique Veil-twisting ability. Instead, I had something… more inclined to what I deserved. A shackle to punish me."

He shook. Something that should not have been possible for a Tier 10 Shifter.

"That ability was at level 70 when I entered the Tutorial. And it immediately went up to 82 two seconds after I arrived."

I blinked at him. Staring a hole into his back.

"That… high." I admitted. "Much higher than my highest leveled ability right now. Holy shit man. How did you manage that?"

"As I said." He repeated wearily. "It has always been my curse. The one truth I could never escape from."

He seemed smaller then. More bent over. Out of shame perhaps.

But he did not allow me to peer deeper into his demeanor. The moment was gone just as quickly as it had arrived and from there, he was opening the door to his abode.

What I found beyond the doorway could only be described as a disquieting though.

It was more like a very large nest of rats than a space a human being might willfully inhabit.

Random items like chairs and bean bags and silverware were strewn about the place with no thought or general purpose behind their placement. Around them were other objects, like empty cans of baked beans or pre-made soup. Left to rot next to a collection of loose dead batteries and several kinds of simple radios.

Every now and then, I spotted something that looked like a computer. Attached to several makeshift wires. Some clean looking and some that appeared as nothing more than copper wire tied together with string.

And then there were the books. All kinds of books from romance novels to adventure stories for teenagers to textbooks on the subjects of physics and biology and chemistry. To manuals informing the user as to how to go about operating simple devices one might order online.

But the most abundant towers of books were those labelled as cooking and survival manuals. There were a lot of those. More than any of the other kind put together.

Stolen novel; please report.

It made me wonder about the sort of life my counterpart had lived until now. The kinds of priorities he had.

"Bit of a survivalist are we?" I asked him plainly.

"Yes." He admitted with some shame. "A great deal of my life was spent on simple survival."

I frowned.

"I'm guessing something happened to mom and dad."

He did not speak for several seconds.

When at last he did, his voice was a hush. Barely a whisper, even to my greatly enhanced senses.

"Yes."

I nodded my head. Barely inclining it.

"I take it you couldn't find anyone to take care of you through the… usual ways?"

"No." He confirmed.

I sighed.

"Well that's a bummer. I'm sorry that happened to you."

"Do not feel sorry for me." He clarified. His voice iron.

"I do not deserve your sympathy."

Then he raised the volume of his voice. His tone sounding more resolute.

"I do not deserve anyone's sympathy. Everything that has happened to me was my fault. Mine and no one else's. It would be a disservice for me to claim victimhood all of the sudden. I could not bear it."

He inhaled a quick series of sharp breaths. Very unlike the slow, methodical breaths I and my dad and my grandad often took to calm ourselves.

"I am the architect of all my woes. Of all my suffering. I will not be pitied. For I deserve no pity or forgiveness. I will ask for none."

I thought of my own exploits.

Of my own journey through life.

Of the events of that fateful year when I was only six.

Of the voices, the pleading, the noise.

Of Australia.

"Yeah. I get how you feel."

"No." He snapped. A little too forcefully.

Then he stared me down. His eyes becoming daggers in the night sky behind him.

"You do not understand how I feel. Sully. You cannot possibly understand the kind of monster I am. The kind of evil I became and the horror and devastation that I left in my wake. However bad you think Hazimon is. However sinful you imagine the Seeking Drake to be. Their blackest sins are but mere stains on their legacy. Mere spots of grey, compared to the crimes attached to my name."

He inched closer.

"That is why I do not want you to take any more of myself out there than you have to. I should not be forgiven. Nor remembered. I should vanish into the darkness like the monster I am. And the multiverse should count itself lucky that I was no more than a figment of reality's own twisted imagination. That I never truly existed in the first place. Believe you me when I say that it is the best outcome that I or anyone else could have possibly hoped for."

I stared back at him. Then backed up.

"You sound, very sure of that." I pointed out. "But you never really told me what it is that you did. And I for one recall doing pretty heinous things back in my day. All without meaning to of course, but it doesn't make things all that much better. I don't think the things you've done, whatever they are, could be so bad as that. Not compared to the kinds of twisted and despicable things both of us saw out of humanity on a daily basis back when we first awakened."

I looked him up and down.

"I can't help but feel you're being a little bit overdramatic with the whole tortured soul bit. I mean yeah, I would never dream of calling myself a good person on any day of the week. Not with all the things I now know about myself. But I've done my fair share of good to make up for the bad. Maybe not enough to counteract all of the bad, but still man. I've saved worlds from disease and invasions from aliens and monsters. I've helped bring civilizations back from the brink of extinction. I've seen to it that children in all kinds of hell holes are not exploited. I've seen to it that they can all grow in peace without the threat of being sold off to warlords or mining operations or worse. I've stopped world wars and toppled more than one despot high on their own farts. I've given quintillions of humans across countless Earths a chance at a peaceful, dignified life. A chance at the pursuit of happiness instead of mere survival. I've freed slaves and toppled slavers. I've exposed shadow governments and fraudulent politicians. More often than not, my presence means an end to crime entirely. An end to most kinds of man-made suffering. I know what I bring forth isn't a real utopia, what with all the mental manipulation and conditioning, but it is hard to deny that the people I leave behind are better off than they were before I arrived."

I squared my hips and stared right back at him.

"Yeah man. The more I think on the impact I have had, I can't but think it's generally a good deal for the people I'm helping. At least, no one near me has offered up any better alternatives yet. And it isn't as if I'm taking away anyone's free will. Sure, I'm skewing their perceptions a bit. That's inevitable with the power difference. But at the end of the day, it is still their choice whether they want to change for the better or keep going about as they had before. I still think the good outweighs the negative and I would even go so far as to say that I've been pretty responsible considering all the bullshit I've had to go through."

I waved at him.

"All the bullshit we've both had to go through. I'm sure I wasn't the only one to have to face Hazimon when he noticed us. How did you deal with him?"

"I killed him."

…

….

…..

The moment of silence stretched on for an uncomfortably long time.

"Oh." I said.

He said nothing in turn.

"How did you do it?"

He shrugged.

"The same way as all the rest."

…

"Would you care to elaborate?"

He paused once more.

"He teleported next to me. And then he was dead."

…

"I see." I continued. "But, how did you get around his mental block?"

He shrugged.

"That's part of the synergies I was telling you about. Only the base ability requires a mental link. But it was so strong, such a big part of me, that most of my other abilities in my other Types triggered the effect as well."

His eyes looked sad then. Pained as if he'd been stabbed.

"I actually acquired Projector pretty quickly after coming to the Elite Difficulty Tutorial. Randall just up and died on me and I took his power for my own before I knew what was going on. From there, I always kept a field of force around myself and that alone could trigger my curse."

The sourness on his face intensified.

"I can only imagine that the Dragon imagined himself safe when he teleported in."

I whistled.

"Yeah. Hazimon does have a bad habit of imagining things are going to go his way without preparing for the alternatives. Still, you make it sound as if you killed him by accident."

"I did kill him by accident."

…

I did not say anything to that.

…

He too said nothing further for a few seconds.

"He was a good person." He finally went on. "I knew what I did was wrong. I knew I had to be stopped. I knew that he was coming and I was hoping, praying, that he'd be able to stop me."

The bags under his eyes seemed to grow deeper. Darker.

"But he wasn't prepared." He continued. "I don't think anyone in the greater Labyrinth could have been prepared at that point. Nobody knew. Nobody could have known, save the Divines. And they are bound by strict codes of conduct. None of them were able to act until I was out of the Tutorial. And by then, it was far too late. Another High-Enforcer, a Shifter Savant, had been sent in. The Moving Mountain herself."

He looked pained as he recalled the memory.

"She lasted no longer than Hazimon did. And after her, nobody else came to stop me."

I sucked in another breath.

Looking back at the mess that was the inside of his home. At all the piled-up garbage that took up every inch of the floor and the way it was stacked up to my chest in some corners.

'Okay. So he's a bit of a mess. That's fine, I suppose. Not like I can't understand how being overwhelmed can lead to bad decisions.'

I myself had dug my head in the sand and ignored everything else going on around me for far too long, leading to many hundreds of deaths back in that Instance.

In hindsight, those deaths were all on me. Steve's death was on me. He'd tried to engage with me telepathically and ended up getting his brains splattered all over the cavern wall in that first watering hole.

'Though perhaps he got off easy, compared to what ended up happening to Anezka and pre-mindwipe Randall.'

"That's all right. I guess. I mean, listen man. Those two were assholes anyway." I said. "I mean, do you have any idea how many people the Moving Mountain killed with her whole open concept zoos? I'm not just talking human beings either. That airhead let her pets come and go to any dimension they damn-well pleased and the System did nothing to stop them. You have any idea how many pre-industrial societies filled with how many sentient species were just plain annihilated by her spawn?"

I huffed.

"I know we might not be saints or anything, but don't sit here and pretend us and her are on the same level. As far as I care, what you did was a public service. The System should have given you a medal."

He did not seem to share my condemnation.

Yet he didn't push the matter further.

"I guess you have a point." He spoke begrudgingly. "In any case, come. Let's go inside and sit together. So we may speak of what is to come."

I glanced back at the veritable ocean of garbage and stood aside to wave him in.

"After you."

He didn't seem to take offense at the gesture.

Instead, he went in as if the floor wasn't filthy and merely nudged aside any items that were in his way using his toes. His eyes never even bothering to look down.

I followed his lead in silence and we eventually arrived at a pile of refuse that I believed went all the way to the floor.

Instead, he placed an arm in one corner of an otherwise hidden table. Then he moved the arm across that table and knocked away all the stuff that had been covering it moments prior. The items clattered noisily to the floor, but my host didn't seem to care.

I stared at the mess. At the way it melded with the rest of the mess inside this filthy place.

And I wisely chose to keep my trap shut.

"Okay. So, what did you want to talk about exactly?"

He raised a hand to stop me.

"Before that, let's eat."

I raised a single eyebrow at him.

"It's been a long time since I ate with anyone." He explained. "I miss it. And I am about to disappear. I was…"

He swallowed his words and carefully chose the next ones.

"I know I don't deserve anything good, but I was hoping you'd at least stay for dinner before taking some of my abilities. Keep me company you know?"

He gave me an odd sort of smile.

"It's always been hard for me to find anyone to keep me company. A guy gets lonely you know?"

I looked around again. Then at the table, where two open cans of Bullwrangler's Baked Beans were now sitting.

"You… you realize those are Intruders, right?"

"Yeah. Of course I do."

"So, why don't you just have them accompany you?"

He rolled his eyes.

"What, like sock puppets? That's not real companionship."

"No. It kind of is." I countered. "They have their own personalities and their own memories. And some of them actually came from the minds of once-living beings. People. I know Mittens isn't the best company at times but if you're this lonely…"

"Mittens?" He asked.

I stopped dead in my tracks. My body tensing all of its muscles at the same time.

"Yes." I said after what felt like an eternity. "Mittens. You know, our kitten."

"The one the monsters killed?"

"Yes." I said again. "That's the one."

"Why would I be able to have him accompany me?" He asked. "I can't bring the dead back to life you know. If I could, then I wouldn't have lived such a miserable life."

"Well no, but he's not really alive right now. He's just an Intruder now. You know, since six-year-old me turned his mind into one. You know, how we can have people retain their memories and personalities after they die by letting them become Intruders?"

He blinked at me stupidly.

"No?"

Then it was my turn to look at him stupidly.

"Oh. I guess, that's one of the differences in our Titles."

"Yes." He agreed with an expression that could have curdled milk. "I guess it is."

He looked down at his meal.

"Damn it. Doing that would have solved so many of my problems." He grumbled. "At the very least, things wouldn't have been as lonely."

He glanced downwards at his baked beans.

"Damn. Even a feast like this one would have tasted better with more people around."

"Dude stop." I had to interrupt him. "We're all kinds of messed up, but you're making me depressed in spite of that. Just how bad was your life anyway? You must have gone into the system, orphanage wise I mean, but that still shouldn't have been too bad. Canada's system was at least better than the ones stateside. What the fuck happened?"

He shrugged again.

"It's just like I told you. There was nothing for me to do. Nowhere for me to go. Not after what happened."

"But someone must have been there." I pressed. "A social worker or, heck, a teacher or something. Even Charlie had his nuns teaching him."

"Yeah. I guess. But what was I supposed to do? Everyone was gone."

I stopped.

Dead in my tracks. The statement making me go over all the exchanges we'd been through so far.

I looked up from the beans on the table and stared at this man, who may as well have been a mirror's image.

"What?"

"What?" He echoed.

"What do you mean everyone was gone?"

"Exactly what I said. They were all gone."

"But, why were they all gone?"

He looked at me. Just as I was looking at him.

"Come on man. You're not stupid. You must have figured it out by now." He spoke softly. Almost grudgingly.

"They're all gone because I killed them."

He took a bunch of beans out of the can with his fingers. Licking them clean with swift motions.

"I heard the noises. Same as you. I heard all those billions upon billions of voices. The never-ending pleading and wailing and hurting from all across the universe. Like you, I lived every second of it. Like you, all I wanted was to make it stop."

He grabbed another handful of beans and slurped them down.

"Unlike you, I commanded them to stop. All of them. All at once. With every ounce of power I had under my mind."

He licked his hand clean a second time.

And each movement of his sounded like an earthquake in this still, silent world we were in. Nothing else made so much as a rustle.

"That's what my unique ability is." He went on. "My curse. What I wished for in that moment of endless pain as we awakened."

He swallowed once more before speaking.

"[Solomon's Eternal Silence X]."

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