One Million Masks: REDUX | ✓

One Million Masks, 2026

|| One Million Masks, 2026 ||

I could've destroyed you the moment we met.

It would've been easy.

I made a sport out of slaughtering edgy, fresh-faced heroes like you.

The Blacksmith and his flaming iron tool belt.

Python and her infinite venom darts.

Roaring Condor and his stupid ass wing backpack bullshit - after all these years I still have no idea what the fuck he was supposed to be.

You could've been another name in a long list of saviors disemboweled. Trounced. Bested.

Now that I've burrowed under your skin, sucked a taste of you, I'm so relieved I didn't. An existence without you would cripple me. I have no idea how I survived this long without Makeshift to balance out the evil I leech out into the atmosphere. A you-less world would be irksome, a herculean endeavor with no purpose, no payoff.

Some heroes see me hovering in the air, dark energy crackling around my body, and know to turn right the fuck around to the sob story that birthed them.

More often than not they're foolish enough to engage and only realize how far out of their league they've swum when my arm punches clean through their chests. I've stolen many beating hearts this way, whisked them away like trophies. Eaten them.

But You.

Not you.

You took one look at me, brown eyes blazing, a veritable bonfire, and said:

"I'm gonna kick your ass."

And I think that's what saved your life that day.

I remember it so vividly.

There was nothing special about your powers, nothing to set you apart from the rest except how vicious you were.

Bold and absolutely brutal.

Finally a Super without the cheap gimmicks. A Super who knows how to get shit done.

Most heroes come to me to make sense out of my violence but you take my disarray in stride and roll with it.

Metallurgy and electricity are your calling cards. They'll take you far.

You magnetize iron ore from the world around you and bend it to your will. You mold it into armor, shields, swords, make it fly, make it shatter.

Remember the year I released every clinically insane baddie from Blackburn at once for fun and you contorted entire buildings into metal monsters to strike them down?

Remember that? I do.

You refined vigilante justice.

You are the tireless extra hand of The Law.

For the first time since I stepped on the Super scene, I wasn't utterly bored.

And fighting you I feel...ohhhhh.... alive.

Yes.

Yesyes.

Raw.

Present.

So, like a fisherman with a guppy too small to eat, I let you live hoping we'd meet again.

We did.

Your electrokinetic powers grew and so did you, the mythos, the legend.