And strange signals not unlike those he had picked up from Chevalier, when Chevalier had waded into battle.

“They’re going after the pieces of the Simurgh! She gave them pieces of herself!”

Dragon changed tasks, shifting to a full-on offensive, unloading every weapon she had into the dust cloud.

This was the danger, the fact the Simurgh could use to manipulate them. That they were forced again and again to make sacrifices today, to save tomorrow.

He’d worked so hard, training, sacrificing opportunities to meet people, make friends, meet women he could date. He’d given his all to fight crime in Brockton Bay, sometimes for selfish or ambitious reasons, but he’d tried. He’d tried to train his team to brave what was inevitably a losing battle against greater numbers and enemies who didn’t play by the rules.

And in the end, tomorrow came and tomorrow stood on the brink of ruin, paying no mind to their efforts. He’d lost his team well before he’d received the paperwork telling him he was being moved to a new city. Then, as if to drive the point home, sheer chance and out of control situations had killed his Wards, taken Battery’s life, killed Velocity. He’d faced the last end of the world lonely and scared out of his mind because he’d finally found something to hold onto, after a lifetime of avoiding any such thing.

He wasn’t as scared now, and the changes he’d made to his body might have accounted for some of that. But he felt lonelier.

All of this, the decision he was being asked to face, if they could even manage the Simurgh, it felt like a referendum on himself as a person.

“I hate it,” he spoke aloud, repeating his earlier statement. “I know I’m supposed to be better, more open to others’ ideas. I’m supposed to trust, and this is an exercise in trust more than anything. But I don’t want to die. I don’t want you to die. That’s what it takes, isn’t it?”

“I think of the children who we got to know in Dracheheim. The boy brave enough to wave at you whenever he saw you. We do this for them.”

“I haven’t had enough time with you. I’m supposed to be a better man, but in this… I feel greed, hunger, a… need for more time.”

“I love you, Colin.”

She didn’t refute him, she didn’t argue or disagree.

“I love you too,” he said.

He took evasive action as more of the Machine Army’s lasers sought to cut him to pieces. Where he could, he flew back, kept his distance, even though it made his effective responses worse. When he fired his own energy weapons, the sheer distance between himself and the robots added a time lag. The lasers didn’t really face the same lag.