249 Guilt
249 Guilt
Back when I brokered Huston’s exile from Lockworld, I had been almost gleeful about sending him into NSD territory. At the time, destabilizing the NSD had felt efficient, even elegant. I had not anticipated that the Divine Forest King would flourish like this.
He was colossal now.
Roots thicker than highways coiled around his legs. Entire districts had fused into his body like trophies. The air around him pulsed with bioelectric resonance, as if the planet itself had been rewired to answer his will.
“Mr. Huston,” I said, hovering at eye level with the upper ridges of his bark-lined face, “I’ve come to ask you a favor.”
It was not my preferred approach.
If circumstances were different, I would have tested the upper limits of my gravity arsenal against his regenerative ceiling. However, biokinetics at his level were nightmares to eliminate. He could reroute function, replicate organs, and restructure vulnerabilities. In Lockworld, that capacity had made him effectively unkillable without unacceptable collateral and time investment.
Time was something I did not possess in abundance.
He snarled, and the sound rippled through the forest-city like a shockwave.
“Is that the tone of someone asking for a favor,” he rumbled, “after thrashing my territory and my beautiful greenery? Perhaps the meaning of favor has been lost to time. I am, as you can see, rather behind the times given my age. Adjust your tone, boy.”
I inclined my head slightly.
“You’re right,” I said. “I should fix my tone.”
I folded subtle psychic pressure into my next words, empathy woven with suggestion.
“How about you do me a favor,” I said evenly, “and refrain from shitting the place where you’re eating? It’s disgusting…”
His eyes flared brighter.
“What are you talking about?” he demanded. “Our agreement was simple. We do not interfere with one another. I have not returned to Lockworld. I am cultivating my paradise. You come here, detonate my lands, and demand concessions?”
Massive branches shifted around him, and I felt the psychic static of multiple presences closing in. Tree-formed capes. Hybrid entities. Each radiated hostility sharp enough to taste.
Huston’s voice deepened. “Tell me, Eclipse. Why are you truly here? You do not ask for favors. You take what you want, and kill what you don’t need. The damage you have inflicted obliges me to respond. Do you think this is Lockworld, where politics and stalemates protected you?”
“I’m giving you dialogue,” I replied calmly. “That is already generosity.”
The air around me shimmered faintly as I adjusted intangibility thresholds.
“Do you really want this to escalate?” I asked. “Do you believe you can kill me? I would wager heavily that my odds of eliminating you are higher than yours of eliminating me.”
The surrounding tree-capes tightened formation. Their emotional signatures were clear through empathy: anger, territorial instinct, and reverence toward Huston.
He let out a low, rumbling laugh.
“I have heard of your recent work,” he said. “A madman in porcelain and tailored suits, hunting highly rated capes across realities. A dog of the SRC. If the SRC wishes to negotiate, they should send someone of actual authority. One of their upper seats. Not a self-styled executioner playing at sovereignty.”
I had always relied on violence when negotiations stalled. It was crude, but it clarified positions quickly.
“The SRC’s dog?” I said, my patience wearing thin. “You really think I am that kind of person? A dog grovels to its master. I am far from that. I am the one who feeds the dog and then kills the owner.”
Violence was my most convenient language.
From my pocket dimension, gravity bombs slipped free in a stream of white orbs below me.
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” Huston thundered, enormous wooden palms rising instinctively to catch them.
“Throwing a tantrum,” I replied. “See? I can be unreasonable, too. Imagine. Eclipse, raiding your planets, unloading enough nukes to cause a nuclear winter. Or maybe technogy of this scale? Say, Huston… How long do you think you’d last if I decided I want to kill you?”
The bombs detonated mid-catch.
Black spheres blossomed like hungry stars, devouring bark, roots, and biomass indiscriminately. His arms vanished first, shredded and swallowed. The singularities chewed into his torso, carving vast cavities through living wood and pulsing green cores. The shockwaves that followed flattened entire swathes of forest-city, pressure bursting outward in a ring that split the earth for kilometers.
I sealed my pocket dimension shut.
“That,” I said evenly as debris rained upward into collapsing gravity wells, “is a taste of the forces you are playing with. The SRC. The NSD. Lockworld. And me. Continue your unruly expansion, and you risk facing all four.”
His voice emerged from the ruin, amused despite the damage.
“I thought you disliked the NSD,” he rumbled. “Are you that desperate? Afraid of the Entity, aren’t you?”
I frowned behind the porcelain mask I borrowed from the SRC’s costume department.
“What is your relationship with the Entity?” I asked.
“My mortal enemy.”
That almost made us allies.
“Explain,” I said.
I was emboldened by the simple truth that he could not kill me. Unfortunately, the reverse was equally true. Against Huston, I was more disadvantaged than I had been against the Führer. Regeneration, biomass manipulation, adaptive physiology… he was an ecosystem pretending to be a person.
Even as we spoke, roots rewove. Trunks spiraled into new limbs. His arms reformed with unsettling speed, bark knitting, sap hardening into armor. He stood whole again within moments, calm and composed. My observation told me enough of how troublesome he would be as an enemy.
“It is simple,” he said. “He devoured my world. I was thriving on my old stomping grounds when people began to change. Subtle at first. Then systematic. The Entity feeds in three stages: infiltration, invasion, and consumption.”
Images flickered through his surface thoughts of forests graying, oceans thickening, and skies dimming under alien logic.
“I learned,” he continued, “and I adopted the same stratagem. My power set allows it. Spore infiltration. Controlled adaptation. Gradual dominance.”
“So you are doing this deliberately,” I said, anger rising despite my Enhancer and Empathy ratings stabilizing my emotional spikes. “How long?”
“You misunderstand,” he replied. “I do not know where your world is. If one of my feelers entered it, that is coincidence. I disperse experimental spores widely. Some are scouts. Some are seeds. Some are… prototypes.”
His tone turned almost playful.
“You should be more honest with me, Eclipse. You do not know which world I might designate for a phase two scenario. Or which might serve as a testing ground for creative bio-architecture.”
Through empathy, I tasted it clearly.
Sadism.
It was neither like the wild madness of my old self nor the cold calculation like the Führer.
This was cultivated cruelty, the pleasure of redesigning ecosystems because one could.
It made killing him feel righteous. It also made restraint strategically necessary. If I escalated without structure, I risked turning him fully hostile. A multiverse-class biokinetic with nothing to lose was a catastrophe engine.
I had tolerated the NSD’s presence on my moon. Playing diplomacy with a sentient tree should not have been harder than that.
“The real negotiations will be handled by Guesswork,” I said at last. “He will designate protected worlds. You will not touch them.”
Huston’s newly formed eyes narrowed.
“And if I refuse?”
“Then I stop throwing tantrums,” I said calmly. “And start waging war properly. Fail to comply and I will bring the combined weight of every faction you dismiss so lightly down on you. You will not enjoy that outcome.”
He studied me for several long seconds. Around us, his forest stilled, awaiting instruction.
Finally, he inclined his massive head.
“Yes,” he said. “That much, I can agree to.”
I returned to the SRC facility shortly after.
The decontamination sequence took longer than usual. Layers of sterilization fields washed over me, scanning for spores, anomalous biomass, and foreign radiation signatures. When the chamber finally opened, the researcher-class capes—the lab coats—were already clearing the hallway.
They avoided me like I carried a plague.
I supposed, in a sense, I did.
I stepped into the corridor, porcelain mask tucked away, suit immaculate despite the destruction I had left behind. The air felt too clean compared to the forest I had just bombed into craters.
Guesswork found me before I reached my quarters.
“Good work—” he began, then stopped mid-sentence. His expression shifted behind his newly acquired eyes.
“What’s the problem?” I asked.
He tilted his head slightly. “You do know you’re exuding something extremely dangerous right now?”
I raised an eyebrow.
“It’s psychic in nature,” he continued. “Intimidation layered over anger, translated unconsciously through your empathy field. It’s tangible. If I can feel it this clearly, the lab coats definitely can. I was about to head out to set up negotiations with Huston, but you look like a mess. What’s wrong, Nick?”
I exhaled slowly.
The question formed before I could stop it.
“Can I be a good guy, Guesswork?”
He blinked. “That’s out of the blue.”
“I just brokered arrangements with two multiverse-class civilizations I consider morally bankrupt,” I said. “It’s one step short of an alliance. The NSD is consolidating power under a supremacist banner, and instead of dismantling them, I negotiated rent. Huston openly admitted to invasive world-seeding, and I negotiated boundaries. I am stabilizing monsters instead of destroying them.”
Guesswork sighed.
“Honestly,” he said, “that’s a stupid question coming from you.”
I frowned slightly.
“You already know the answer. Of course you’re a bad person. You started your career stealing from a classmate’s house. You escalated to killing his father.”
“It was an accident—”
“Tell that to Chad,” he replied calmly. “Not many people know the full story, but I’m well-informed like that.”
That silenced me.
He studied me more carefully.
“This isn’t about labels,” he continued. “You made peace with being a villain a long time ago. You function comfortably in moral gray. You kill when necessary. You manipulate. You exploit. That’s how you built the Company. That’s how you outmaneuvered the SRC in your own world. So this little existential spiral? It’s not about good or bad.”
He paused.
“It’s guilt.”
That word hit harder than any gravity bomb.
He was right.
I had long ago accepted that I lacked conventional morality. I had no problem weaponizing fear or eliminating obstacles. The Company existed precisely because I was willing to operate where others hesitated. In many ways, I had stolen the SRC’s shadow role and localized it.
But this was different.
By allowing the NSD to entrench themselves on my moon, I was complicit in whatever ideology they spread next. Their supremacy doctrine was not subtle. The marginalized groups forming under their pressure were, in part, reactions to power vacuums I had helped create. I had destabilized their leadership, triggered internal revolts, and fractured their command structure. It was the height of irony.
Then there was Huston.
I had broken him out of Lockworld. I had helped him reclaim his soul. I had indirectly enabled his ascent into a multiverse-class threat. Now he was seeding worlds with experimental spores, and instead of ending him, I drew lines on a cosmic map and called it containment.
The irony was suffocating.
“I’m really good at creating my own problems,” I said quietly.
Guesswork did not laugh.
“You’re good at accelerating unstable systems,” he corrected. “Sometimes that prevents worse outcomes. Sometimes it manufactures new ones. The difference isn’t morality. It’s foresight.”
He stepped closer.
“You can’t save every world. You can’t eliminate every tyrant. What you can do is shape the board so the worst-case scenario doesn’t occur. That’s what you’ve been doing, whether you like it or not.”
“And if my shaping creates long-term monsters?” I asked.
He shrugged slightly. “Then future you deals with it. Preferably stronger. Preferably smarter.”
“Yeah, it isn’t that easy…”
“Just don’t think too much about it,” Guesswork said. “Focus on the silver lining.”
I almost laughed at that.
The silver lining, apparently, was that I was capable of guilt. It was unsettling how sharp the feeling had been. I remembered fragments of something similar years ago, back when everything first spiraled out of control, but it had never been this pronounced, this… heavy.
Guesswork continued, folding his arms.
“Look. The NSD would be thriving right now if you hadn’t pulled half the stunts you did. You assassinated a disturbing number of their high-rated capes. You stole sensitive data. You destabilized their internal structure.”
The way he framed it made it sound almost noble.
As if my revenge against their version of the Witch and my petty desire to flip the Entity the middle finger had been some grand heroic arc.
He went on. “If that damned tree had remained in Lockworld, he would’ve continued experimenting on the inhabitants under the radar. You’ve seen what he does. Imagine that escalating in a closed system. Eventually the other factions would’ve gone to war. That place was a powder keg.”
He wasn’t wrong.
I had entered Lockworld intending to recruit assets. If I had not intervened, Gameboy likely would have succeeded in subjugating Candyland’s capes and reprogramming them. Cordellia would probably be dead. Huston might have consolidated the prison-world into a singular bio-empire before anyone realized what was happening.
The ripple effects were difficult to quantify.
Guesswork sighed.
“How about some simple advice?” he said. “Something you’ve been doing for years now. Ever since you came out of the closet and decided to actually use your powers.”
I frowned at the phrasing. “You make it sound weird.”
“That’s because it is weird,” he replied casually.
“What’s the advice?” I asked.
He grinned.
“Just do whatever the fuck you want. You’re good at that part. Minus the emo edgelord aesthetic.”
“Not funny.”
“I’m serious,” he said, tone leveling out. “Every major shift you caused happened because you stopped asking for permission. You don’t function well when you try to fit into someone else’s moral framework. Not the SRC’s. Not the GDF’s. Not some abstract ‘hero’ ideal.”
I leaned back against the wall, folding my arms.
“Doing whatever I want is how we ended up here,” I said.
“And yet we’re still here,” he countered. “The world isn’t consumed. The NSD isn’t dominant. Huston is contained for now. The Entity hasn’t completed a cycle. You’re stronger than you were yesterday.”
That last part lingered.
Strength had always been my metric. Power ratings. Applications. Thresholds. Apotheosis. I understood growth in numbers and capabilities far more clearly than I understood morality.
“You think I should just keep escalating?” I asked.
“I think you should stop pretending you’re trying to be something you’re not,” he said. “You’re not a saint. You’re not a conventional hero. But you’re not mindlessly destructive either. You choose targets. You draw lines. That’s already more restraint than half the multiverse.”
I stared at the sterile ceiling lights.
Guilt still sat there, dull and persistent, but it no longer felt paralyzing. More like a bruise than an open wound.
“Doing whatever I want,” I muttered.
“Yes,” Guesswork replied. “Preferably with slightly better long-term planning and fewer theatrical monologues.”
I huffed a quiet breath.
“Fine,” I said. “Then here’s what I want.”
He tilted his head.
“I want the Entity dead,” I said. “I want Huston contained. I want the NSD boxed into a corner where they either reform or collapse. And I want my world intact at the end of it.”
Guesswork smiled faintly.
“There we go,” he said. “That’s the Nick I know. Morally compromised, strategically ambitious, and dangerously motivated.”
The guilt didn’t disappear.
But it stopped dictating the conversation.