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Something inside Byron cracked open as he watched Korbius’s body lose its structural integrity and sink out of sight near the horizon’s edge.

The Unmaker struggled to Its giant feet, pushing up off the ocean floor with Its unbroken arm and heaving Itself upwards. Another chaotic garble of otherworldly screams filled the air for miles as the Unmaker tried to put weight onto Its right leg, which buckled under the strain with a massive crunch where Korbius had snapped the appendage to the core.

Byron stared after Korbius until the last of his central mass sunk out of sight. No sooner had Korbius disappeared beneath the waves than a surge of power exploded from within Byron’s chest – as if a syringe full of adrenaline had been plunged between his ribs and into his heart. Where before the new muscles of power that the Cantos had enabled were small and hard to distinguish, now they bulged in Byron’s mind, hungry for use.

The Unmaker managed to remain standing, shifting Its weight onto Its good leg and scanning the sky for the speck that was Byron. It was times like these that the Unmaker pined for Its Brother’s ability to create and to heal – however distasteful the idea might be, The Unmaker found pain to be far worse – and It wished It had the capacity to mend Its pathetic physical vessel.

But no matter, It channeled the pain into the burning well of Its hatred for all things which exist.

BYRON!

For a hundred miles inland, every human being heard the Unmaker’s mental assault. Men and women woke shaking even from the deepest sleep, children burst into tears and hid beneath their bed covers, infants wailed in uncomprehending desperation. The dogs of South Carolina went mad in their kennels.

The Unmaker scanned the sky until It found It’s target. It opened It’s fiery mouth to unleash a beam of flame at the glowing white mote floating in mid air five hundred feet away. The laser-like beam shot out, a dozen meters wide, and sliced through the air. The beam would have been visible from space as it set off at an acute angle, sizzling through the Earth’s atmosphere and out into vacuum.

The Unmaker shut Its mouth and the beam disappeared, just as a sound like the collision of continents erupted behind him.

The Unmaker spun around just in time raise up the palm of his good hand in front of the path of a literal mountain, its granite peaks still capped in snow, goats and birds confusedly falling off its crags and pine trees, like small toys, taking to the air or plummeting into the ocean below. Its granite apex was aimed at the Unmaker’s chest like a colossal spear head thrown by a God. The whole, impossible thing glowed fiercely white and flew toward the Unmaker.

Byron floated in mid-air far behind and below the projectile mountain, having teleported by instinct out of the path of the Unmaker’s beam, his hands raised up over his head, skin and eyes more light than flesh.

The Unmaker stumbled backward, still submerged just below the knee in the deep Atlantic, the pain from Its broken leg arcing up through Its body. Its palm began to burn fiercely and as the mountain’s peak touched, a chain reaction coursed through the rock at near the speed of light, dispersing humongous geological formation into harmless vapor and leaving a mountain-sized artificial cloud obscuring the Unmaker’s view —

— through which cut a titanic bolt of lightning. The bolt struck the Unmaker in the shoulder and sent It reeling back, searing a smoking divot into its shadowy form.

Enraged, the Unmaker swiped at the obscuring cloud with his hand and from nowhere savage hurricane winds pummeled the air, dispersing the clouds and smacking into Byron just as he shot another bolt of lightning from his extended hands. The lightning missed by a large margin eastward and Byron was thrown across the sky, dragged bodily by two hundred miles per hours gales.

Hungry for blood, the Unmaker lifted Its body into the air, until It was hovering over the ocean, shrinking down to Its original size even as It did so. The entire transformation took less than a second and the Unmaker shot forward like a bullet, good arm outstretched in front of him, fingers transformed into a fiery blade. Like a black comet reentering Earth’s atmosphere, the Unmaker shot forward, aiming right at Byron’s heart.

Byron caught sight and instinct brought his hands up, even as he still tumbled through the air in a chaos of wind. A half mile of ocean water exploded into the sky, smashing into the Unmaker like a brick wall from below. The Unmaker was hurled skyward half a mile, carried by the force of the vertical tidal wave. With a frustrated yell, the Unmaker’s hand morphed back to human form and glowed with a dark light —

— and the entire body of rising salt water snapped into a cloud of black smoke and began drifting lazily in the otherwise clear night sky.

The winds pummeling Byron finally died down, and he was able to right himself in mid-air, controlling gravity as intuitively as his other abilities. Looking up at the smoky plume that had just been an impossible upward wave of water, Byron imagined one hundred thousand razor-sharp sapphires and, with the blink of an eye, they appeared all around him and shot off at the speed of sound into the smoky haze. Just before the shotgun blast of gemstones pierced the smoke, dispersing it in airy, swirling twirls and gyres, Byron watched a shadowy streak divebomb straight out of the sky and into the churning ocean below, kicking up a plume of water hundreds of feet into the air.

Byron looked down and scanned the frothing waters, looking for some sign of the Unmaker. He saw nothing and had the wherewithal to create a gravitic shield below him only a moment before the Unmaker’s lithe form exploded like a bullet from the water’s surface. Its hand was a titanium sledge hammer and it struck Byron hard in the chin.

The Unmaker’s blow would have crushed Byron to pulp if the bulk of the energy had not been diverted toward the localized gravity well. Even that impact would have been more than enough to kill a normal human being but suffused with the Almighty’s energy, Byron only tasted the iron tang of blood and felt shattered teeth in his mouth as his head rang like a bell and he flew in a haze, up and across the sky.

Byron impacted in the soft, wet sand of what remained of Ocracoke island, cutting a crater into the soggy ground. As he came to a rest, whatever part of him was channeling the Almighty’s raw force gave out, and with it went both the extra-human protections, as well as the deadening of pain. Laying there in the gully his body had cut into the ground, Byron’s head ached as if there’d been an explosion inside his skull, and it was all he could do to let several teeth and a wash of blood dribble out from between his battered lips.

The Unmaker slowly approached and again it seemed to Byron he could somehow see the self-satisfied smile on Its featureless face. Byron tried to raise his hand up and use of those new muscles again, but his hand barely moved before falling back down and implanting in the cold mud.

When the Unmaker was only a few meters away, when Byron felt he could all but reach out and touch It’s dark form, Its voice came into Byron’s mind once again. It was weaker this time, more harried, rough around the edges – but still ripe with malevolence.

Oh, Byron. Byron! You’ve outdone yourself! This is – more than I could have asked for. So much more.

Byron tried to speak, but his jaw was as broken as his teeth. The Unmaker saw him struggling to form words with the shattered remains of his mouth and raised a finger of its good hand into the air gently up to Its lipless face.

No need to speak, Byron. We understand each other, perfectly.

The Unmaker slowly, steadily, began approaching, inching closer through the air. A white flash briefly lit the sky in the near distance as the Unmaker came to stand over Byron’s broken form. The line of fire appeared on Its dark face and ever so slowly began to widen into a circle. When the Unmaker spoke, his voice was filled to overflowing with earnest relief.

After all this time, at long last, it’s finally over. Thank you, Byron, for a fitting end. Goodbye, now.

With one unswollen eye, Byron looked up at the circle of flames as it braced to release its fiery breath. He could feel the heat of the Unmaker’s hate reflecting off the bruised and battered skin of his face – could smell the pungent scent of sulphur and ash.

Yet, Byron felt no panic, which surprised him. He only shut his eyes and thought of his Nan.

Byron’s belly fell out from under him as he shot upwards into the sky, glowing bright white. The spot where he had been only milliseconds before was consumed by the Unmaker’s fiery beam. The beam coursed deep into the Earth and then went dead as the Unmaker arced his shadowy head back and realized Byron was no longer below him, but above, floating a quarter mile in the sky.

The Unmaker slowly drew Its gaze down and looked around, bemused, the line of fire still drawn across its face, hungry to consume who or whatever had interceded.

Gleaming whiter than a cold sun, short hair floating in glowing strands above her head, her thin, almond shaped eyes filled with a pure white light, Tilda floated, small and imperious, over the mud and the muck. She lowered her raised hand calmly to her side and readied herself.

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THE DEMON’S CANTOS	INCIDENTAL SUPERHERO
BENEATH	THE HUMANITY SAGA
THE TRAVELER	I, LYCANTHROPE

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