Victor had done other things. Taking all talent from a black violinist and leaving her with nothing. She’d never got it back. Taking away all restraint and subtlety from a gay twenty-something, in an effort to humiliate them, or get them to do something criminal. The victim’s friends had managed to restrain him and alert authorities, but they’d only noticed because he’d already self-destructed whole parts of his life, outing himself and losing the funding from his parents that let him attend the university. I remembered the fundraiser from after. According to the gathered info that had been released about the Empire Eighty-Eight villains, he’d once tortured ABB gang members, taking away all pain tolerance and willpower, because those were skills we all learned over the course of our lives. He’d broken them, then taunted Lung with videos of him lording over the once-proud gang members that now acted like animals.

So much ugliness and degradation, and a chilling, quiet pride in how he’d done it.

And he’d gone hero… briefly, I supposed. He’d said the right words, did the right things, and we’d accepted it, because like Miss Militia had said, we gave heroes that benefit of a doubt if they were willing to take it.

It hadn’t stuck. I fully believed that what he was now was a consequence of his old monstrousness. Of doors he’d closed, weaknesses in his own character he’d ignored in the course of imagining and even forcing weakness onto perceived ‘others’.

Fuck him, and fuck, if the Nemean Titan had even a quarter of his old cruelty, it was going to be a malicious bastard of a thing.

The list kept on going. More Titans. One that looked like it was made with thick black cords all tangled together, with silver needles glinting throughout, like thorns on a rose stem. Its face was like a cluster of flowers that overlapped and intermingled, forming a shape that was vaguely face-like.

“The Ophion Titan. Formerly a villain who went by ‘Mr. Bough’, one half of the human trafficking partnership Orchard, which mutated people in body and mind to customize them for their clients. He was incarcerated in a prison world, and was closest to the breach that created an overlap between our world and the prison dimension. Several who attempted to escape past him and into our world were struck with his needles, and have mutated dramatically. He attacks quickly and with great reach and accuracy, and even brief contact with the needles seems to induce physical changes. With one of his creations arrested and one dead, we haven’t seen them revert yet. We’re holding out hope.”