---

On May 20th, 1982, the world changed forever. This change was not wrought by human hands, not an invention imagined by human minds. It was something with no explanation, something that defied all logic as the world knew it.

On that day, a golden man descended from the sky, and history was thrown violently off course. As genuine superpowers began to spread across the population - rare at first, but quickly spreading to dozens, then hundreds - the world had to restructure itself. People with the strength to topple skyscrapers or fire beams of radiant light or make technological marvels had to find a place in this new, ever shifting world. The peons beneath them, those scorned by whatever phenomenon or god or alien being had granted humanity these powers, had to secure their position.

In continents like Africa, anarchy reigned. Countries like China were quickly taken over by super-powered despots grasping at every opportunity and advantage they could get to remain in their new positions of power. Years passed as people attempted to find stability in this new world. Heroes rose - those with great power who sought to fight back the growing tide of superpowered criminals. The first and greatest hero was, coincidentally, the very first parahuman. They called him Scion, and he was utterly unstoppable. Even today, no one has ever come even close to matching him. No government controls him, no person can sway him, and fighting him is as good as committing suicide. In America, four of the greatest heroes in the world resided. The general populace called them the Quadrumvirate, and they were second in strength only to Scion. But alongside great heroes must also rise great villains to oppose them. Those who used and abused their power to do evil in the world. Gangs, solo operators, simple serial killers and more began to pop up, outnumbering the heroes.

They did what they could, but with a lack of organization, what they could do was not enough. The Quadrumvirate began to campaign for a government-controlled organization of heroes, to better protect and serve the United States from this new form of threat, but the politicians were slow to accept change.

Most of the world called it Behemoth. Some called it "Hadhayosh" and "Prathama". It struck in Iran, cutting a bloody swathe across the country, utterly implacable in its march, striking down hundreds of super powered individuals and millions of regulars. It was a tragedy, not only because of the undeniable might of the beast, but because of the lack of organized response from those present. Despite the Quadrumvirate’s appearance at the battle, they were unable to stop it, with Legend wounded terribly in the battle. Scion, despite pleas from whoever could find him, did not even deign to appear, too busy destroying stores of nuclear weapons or getting kittens out of trees. Much of the world quickly realized that it was utterly helpless in the face of parahuman threats.

The Protectorate was founded shortly after that. Their numbers quickly swelled - from dozens to hundreds - heroes with newfound community and structure. Gangs were fought back across the United States.
The next year, Behemoth attacked again, this time closer to America, in Brazil. A defense was mounted, but this time was no different than the last. A handful of cities wiped off the map, nearly seventy percent of the defenders dead, and a wounded Protectorate limping back home.

The year after that, Behemoth attacked New York City. This time, the city was not destroyed. This time, Behemoth was fought back. This time, the whole world learned the true power...

Of Gold Skull!

Battle for New York. 1994

Gold Skull floated a little over a kilometer above New York City, just outside the range of his power. Occasionally, he could feel a parahuman get sent flying up into his aura. They were only sometimes flyers, and only sometimes were not followed by a blast of lightning or exotic energies that vaporized them. Thrice, he felt Alexandria herself get punted upwards before rocketing back down at her enemy. Always tenacious, that one.

There was a reason he floated leisurely high above the ongoing battle with Behemoth. He had nothing to fear from the beast. The lumbering thing could never reach him, and even if it did, he was sure that even its mighty power would crumble in the face of his aura. There was nothing it could do to him that Alexandria or Eidolon could not.

No, his reason for hiding was simple. He would aid the defense force, but waiting here served two purposes. For one, more and more of his competition died as the minutes passed. Though anyone who died here wasn’t really worth calling competition anyways. The second and far more important reason was presentation.

What good would it be to show up, digging in the trenches like the trash below him, struggling like the weaklings of the Quadrumvirate? No, he would strike Behemoth like a mighty hammer of god and slay the beast himself. It made him chuckle just to think about, the mixed admiration and horror from all those present, knowing that he not only had that much power, but that he had used it to save them.

Minutes passed as Behemoth grew closer and closer to the shoreline, glowing with an intensity that seemed to absorb all the light around him. He saw Eidolon cycle through dozens of projectiles in a minute, some taking chunks out of Behemoth before fire was returned and he was forced to retreat. Legend rained down hundreds of beams of light of varying color and intensity, all less effective than Eidolon’s, and he saw Alexandria shoot down towards an arm, grappling the monster even as tremendous bolts of lightning struck her dozens of times per second.

Gold Skull looked around for the final member of the Quadrumvirate. The one who called himself * Hero *. The name itself lit a fire in his heart, but he would not kill Hero today. No, first he had to make the man realize that he did what Hero could not. He had to cement inferiority into his mind.

He saw Hero, drones flying around him materializing some sort of massive weapon’s platform out of hard-light or some nonsense. As he was doing so, Eidolon and Legend seemed to be aiding Alexandria in keeping the monster still. Hm. This would not do.

It was time.

Gold Skull began to float downwards towards the battle. As he lowered himself, he activated every last inch of space within his aura that was not shared by a living being, bathing the battlefield slowly in a golden glow that grew in intensity as it neared him. Those who had faced him before came to recognize that low, grinding static noise that indicated they were within his range. Instantly, the Quadrumvirate were on guard, the intensity of their attacks halting. He paused for a second, deciding he would have to thank them for holding his foe in place. Then, propelled by his power, he rocketed downward from the sky in a blur, sonic booms breaking the silence that had washed over the battlefield. As he came down, he could feel the people in his aura looking up, feel their mouths agape in awe. Those unfamiliar with him likely believed that Scion, the big golden idiot, had come to save them.

They were sorely mistaken.

Gold Skull struck Behemoth and sheared through his monstrous mass, vertically bisecting him, before flaring his aura all around him in a massive pillar.

Suddenly, the attacks from the parahumans attending the battle stopped, all at once. For the first time in hours, New York City fell quiet. Slowly, agonizingly slowly, he floated up from two halves of Behemoth’s skeleton he had left untouched, intending to take them as a trophy. To hang the so-called Herokiller on his mantle.

A parahuman in the crowd of defenders cheered. Alexandria dropped the half of Behemoth she was still holding, and she and the other three members of her little troupe looked at each other in apprehension, deciding whether or not they should approach. As they did, Gold Skull floated Behemoth’s corpse behind himself, splaying his skeleton out in a display of power.

Hero was the one to approach. Of course he was. The boy-scout was one of the few heroes that could somehow avoid instant disintegration at Gold Skull’s hands, as a result of some esoteric technology he employed.

“Gold Skull,” he said, voice firm, not afraid of at all, “I’m going to need you to relinquish Behemoth’s corpse.”

Gold Skull chuckled, his aura’s background static noise intensifying as he did, sending a wave of alarm through the surrounding parahumans. “I don’t think I will, Hero. After all, it’s my kill. You should have stopped it sooner if you wanted it. Besides, it’s not dead. The beast has been attempting to regenerate this whole time.” He released his hold on Behemoth as he said that, and immediately a thick, tar-like ichor began to spill out from its bones, being produced from seemingly nowhere. He quickly reasserted his hold after.

“Then you should let us finish it off, if you can’t. You’ve done a great thing here today, saved god knows how many lives. Please don’t antagonize us now.”

“Can’t? Can’t? I can assure you that if I wanted to, I would disintegrate this thing in a second. But I’d rather like to keep it, I think. It’ll make a good conversation starter. If you really want to push the issue...”

It was then that he noticed Behemoth had been, through some esoteric process, creating and storing a massive amount of energy not visible to the naked eye somewhere near the back of its shoulder. Curious. The beast was still conscious even in this state.

He tuned back in to realize Hero had been speaking and was waiting for a response. Gold Skull threw up his hands in surrender. “Fine, you can have the body. On one condition.”

Hero tensed as he waited to hear what the condition was. He knew Gold Skull, knew the lengths the man would go to be evil just for the sake of it. He had killed heroes and villains alike, and he was quickly rising to be the most notorious villain of them all. What could he want? What would he gain?

“Shake my hand.”

That froze Hero more than anything else. He couldn’t wrap his head around the demand, except to imagine some sort of trap. He held up a hand to the ear of his helmet for a minute before steeling himself.

Hero shook Gold Skull's hand.

That was how Gold Skull discovered that even while touching him, he couldn’t eat through whatever forcefield Hero had. But judging by the way Hero tried to pull his hand back, as though he had touched a hot stove, he could harm it. Gold Skull looked into the man’s eyes as he focused his power entirely on keeping his grip on Hero, pushing him closer inch by inch, and noticed a glint of something tantalizing through the visor of his helmet.

Fear.

Gold Skull laughed, throwing his head in the air before proclaiming, “You have all borne witness to my power! Know me and tremble! Know me and know that there is no safety for you, no respite or rest for those who oppose me! Live in fear, wretched weaklings! In fear of Gold Skull!”

It was then that Behemoth’s corpse suddenly exploded, framing the pair in a corona of blinding light and reshaping New York City’s coast, bringing the fight’s casualties into the six-digits.

---

---

Gold Skull had been a supervillain for fifteen years. Fifteen years of taking whatever he wanted from whoever he wanted. Fifteen years of slaying worthy and unworthy foes. Fifteen years of building up a network of individuals loyal or indebted to him, fifteen years of setting the foundations for a proper criminal underground among the less moral parahumans. Fifteen years.

He sighed contentedly as he disintegrated a building-sized stone golem with a thought, watching the mad tinker riding it fall four stories onto the ground. It could so easily become so tiresome, this parahuman game they all played. That’s why, when he came to Boston, and witnessed the boiling pot of crabs that constituted its villainous underground, he decided to stir it. Heroes and villains living in this constant tug-of-war bullshit was, frankly, boring. And beyond that, it meant that everyone stagnated. Why, the tinker with the broken legs screaming in agony on the floor had never constructed a golem that large before. Just two days ago, a changer turned into a rhinoceros while inside another man. Before that, he had only ever turned into deer, for heaven’s sake. Now, with him around, people were properly trying in a way that really brought him joy.

Gold Skull flew upwards, allowing himself to get a good look at the city. Fires raged nearly everywhere. In the middle distance, he could see Legend and Eidolon of the Protectorate, dealing with some expanding plague that had been released by a now long-dead biotinker. Multiple skyscrapers had been inverted by a particularly irksome shaker who had nearly uncovered the bombs his minions had spent the past week planting. It was chaos. It was beautiful.

This next bit would be the piece de resistance, the coup de gras, the final master stroke that would mark him as the winner of this little game. PRT headquarters, the Protectorate base, city hall, major parts of territory held by the Brood, the Garden, and Entreaty would be devastated by an unsuspected bombing. How could they suspect it, when all they knew of him was his undeniable strength? No one in Boston knew him for his mind, despite the fact that he had played them all into this exact situation. All he had to do now was wait.

Time passed. He waited. The tinker on the ground dragged himself away, leaving a bloody trail.

A minute had passed, and Eidolon and Legend seemed to have the biotinker situation under control. He’d have to see if he could get one of those cooked up for him from the Garden sometime after all this.

On instinct, he almost checked his watch. Did something go wrong? But how could all of his bombs be -

Suddenly, a beam of golden light twice again as wide as his torso struck him at this flank. And, unlike a large majority of attacks, actually hurt. It had seemingly gone through the field of his power, totally undetected by him, and left a gash in his side.

There was only one man who could subvert him like this. It all made sense now, why only three of the Protectorate’s greatest heroes had been seen trying to stop the mayhem, why all his bombs had failed to activate at the moment of the crescendo, why he had been attacked unaware and actually hurt for the first time in a decade. There was only one answer, and finding it made him feel rage like he never had before. He shouted, and as he did, his aura activated at full power, burning a crater a half-kilometer deep below him, as he rocketed towards the culprit at speeds he had scarcely ever moved. His shout would reach his target seconds after he did.

“HEEERRROOOO!!!”

---

Gold Skull struck Hero with enough speed that they were both sent through multiple buildings before he could react with a wave of force that had Gold Skull tumbling away mid-air.

“Would you believe it if I said I was aiming for your head?” Hero said, determination in his voice. His prosthetic left arm was indistinguishable from the rest of his armor as he slowly flexed it, but Gold Skull could tell it was there. It was him that took it, after all. “That particle wave-field you’ve got around you is a hell of a thing, though. Even with my specialty built to fight it, you’ve never stopped being a problem for me.”

“You have ruined everything, Hero. It was going to be beautiful. How long have you been here? How did you know?!”

“The second you were spotted in the city I mobilized. And I mean, bombs? Seriously? I disabled them in a minute.”

Gold Skull lunged, reaching Hero’s position in less time than it would take to blink, but Hero disappeared in a cloud of golden particles just a moment before he was grabbed.

“Whew,” Hero breathed out, now a dozen meters behind him, “I’ll admit that that put my balls in my throat. No quips this time, Skull? Just going for the kill? Fine. Guess I’ll respond in kind.”

Gold Skull only barely dodged out of the net of energy that seemed to materialize around him, telekinetically launching a massive boulder at Hero’s back, watching as he teleported away once again just before it hit.
“You can’t keep this up, Hero. The longer you stay here, the longer I eat away at your shield. We’ve done this a dozen times now. Only this time, I won’t be letting you get away.”

“Letting me get away? That’s funny. Usually you’re the one running.” Hero slapped his gauntlets together and they fused, forming into a long-barreled cannon. Gold Skull began to evade, launching concrete spears sharpened to nanoangstrom edges from a dozen directions, and while the extended barrel was speared, it still fired out a thin beam of energy that seemed to track him across the landscape, eating through any obstacles thrown in its way. After some seconds of dodging, it became clear that whatever let it track him was degenerating as it spent time in his field, and eventually it veered off into the distance.

Hero wasn’t idle in the time Gold Skull had spent dodging. After materializing some sort of massive pylon, gravity seemed to increase almost a thousandfold, pancaking the surrounding area and pulling Gold Skull down towards the ground. Hero’s thrusters increased in force, resembling the turbines of a space rocket now as they melted the concrete beneath him, and he remained in place as he began to materialize another machine.

Gold Skull found he couldn’t affect the pylon directly, so he began to carve the ground underneath it and tossed it as a projectile at Hero, stopping his current piece of hardware from coming into existence. It dematerialized before it could hit him, but it masked the dozens of projectiles now coming straight for him as well as Gold Skull himself launching bodily at his position.

He disappeared and reappeared in a safe position. Gold Skull was starting to understand that teleportation now. He lifted a dozen, then a hundred, then a thousand individual pieces of stone off of the ground, launching them at Hero all at once, inundating his surroundings with projectiles. Instead of teleporting, he simply blasted them away casually.

This would be a war of attrition, he realized. It would all depend on if Gold Skull could keep up with Hero’s tricks for long enough to completely deplete his energy reserves. He knew from experience that if Hero sustained enough damage, his shields would go down. It was only a matter of time.

---

Twenty three hours later, both men were on their last breaths. Hero was desperately pulling out inventions whose functions even he didn’t fully understand, as Gold Skull glanced wildly in all directions, paranoid of another ambush. The last one had been Eidolon, and though he had popped the trump’s head like a grape, it cost him his sense of sight for nearly an hour, and Eidolon’s body had floated through a door-shaped portal shortly after it had fallen on the ground. If it wasn’t for the distraction of being newly-blind, he would have done something to the woman on the other side of that door.

Before that, it had been some robot men made by the Boston Protectorate’s tinker, the Hoper. They had been nothing but distractions, but, thinking that they were Hero’s robots, he had given them more attention than they had merited and taken some sort of sound-based attack that broke his arm.

But no more distractions came. He had expected Alexandria, who was keeping a constant and exact kilometer away from him at all times, to have come in, but he supposed she knew better after she had lost an eye to him a year or so ago. Oh, the joys of showing an “invulnerable” cape that they were still very vulnerable to him.

Legend was busy dealing with some newcomers to the city, and he thought he felt the air displacement from Alexandria flying off to do the same. A shame. He wanted her to see him do what was about to be done.

Hero ran desperately away from him. His shield was visible now, a pale gold sheen glowing right over his skin, but it flickered sporadically.

Gold Skull backhanded an incoming missile, telekinetically pushing it towards a civilian-filled building in case its payload was dangerous to him. Judging by the fact that they had time to scream after the explosion, it probably wasn’t especially exotic.

Boston was practically in ruins around them. It made him happy to know that the Endbringers wouldn’t be the only ones known for their mass destruction. He raised a wall of concrete in front of Hero, but the man burned through it with a laser without missing a step. Unfortunately for him, a dozen more were already raised in front of him.

Gold Skull launched forward, catching him by the throat and applying telekinetic force to his limbs just as Hero turned to face him. “I’m going to enjoy this, Hero.”

He threw Hero in the air, keeping both their momentum with his telekinesis, and struck a hammer blow to the man’s chest that caved his armor in and had him skipping along the ground like a stone, before kicking him forward. Gold Skull sped up and grabbed the back of his skull, pressing him into the ground as they both increased in speed, leaving a trench down the length of an avenue.

They came to a stop. He was breathing heavily and Hero was hardly moving at all, fingers twitching slightly. Gold Skull flipped him over, and the front portion of his helmet stayed on the ground, revealing his face.

He would have been handsome, if it wasn’t for the fractures and peeled skin. Square jaw, high cheekbones, startlingly blue eyes and blonde hair. He stomped on his face once, and Hero’s force-field finally gave in, shattering into golden particles and ceasing to flicker as his head bounced against the concrete.

“I always told you I would be the end of you, didn’t I? You always knew I was right, and here we are now. You just couldn’t let your brain win over that stupid, good heart of yours, eh? All the other heroes, they wouldn’t come near me, but even when your technology was failing you and you could do nothing else to harm me, even when your reinforcements stopped arriving, you kept fighting. Why? What was the point of throwing your life away?”

He coughed up a globule of blood. “Because if I didn’t, innocent people would lose,” he struggled, “because if I let you win then every man woman and child out there would lose hope. Because it was the right thing to do. Even now, I can’t lose hope.”

“Pathetic. This has meant nothing. My terror will go on and your hope will die here, with you. But I suppose I should congratulate you. No one has ever lasted this long against me.”

“This won’t make you feel good, Gold Skull. We both know that. This whole thing in Boston... you were just bored, weren’t you?”

“You’re smarter than you look, Hero. It’s too bad -”

“Wait. Before you kill me. You’re strong,” Hero said, eyes set with none of the haze of near-death, “I shouldn’t be telling you this. But when the time comes, when the Enemy shows itself... please cooperate. For humanity’s sake.”

Gold Skull could only attempt to process that information at that moment. He stared down at Hero, and a tiny, traitorous part of him was almost convinced that he was making a mistake.

Hero disintegrated in his armor as Gold Skull silenced that part of himself.

He wondered what kind of trophy he could take from this...

---

Jon Ible rushed out of his apartment, invisible and inaudible, as he pulled his homemade bedsheet-costume out of his pocket dimension and over his head. He wasn’t Jon Ible, now. Now, he was Ghostboy 2. There was a scoop to be had out there, sleep be damned. This kind of thing wouldn’t even be on the news for minutes, but lucky for him he had obtained a police radio a few weeks ago from a corrupt cop who wouldn’t be needing it anymore. He used the call-outs on the radio to track down the action.

It took him only a couple minutes, what with being able to cut through buildings and all, and he was able to find some phony “heroes” clearly pretending to detain some of the lizards. Though they might take the form of children, he knew that those “Wards” were really sleeper agents. After all, who better to disguise yourself as than a child? Most people were far too bound by government enforced police morality to hurt something that looked like a child. Not him, though. He knew better.

Ghostboy 2 started to creep up behind the one in a wizard outfit, clearly some deep-state true ruler dog whistle, winding up his bat, before an explosion rang out a street away, shaking his footing and causing him to miss. Damn. They knew that kind of action was too juicy for him to avoid. He gave the kid a whack with his bat anyways before he ran off to see what the explosion was.

When he got there, he saw a four-way fight going on. However many ways it was, it wasn’t all that interesting. A man in a red mask was fighting three of the lizards on his own, slipping through their attacks like flowing water, hitting them a dozen times a second and leaving gouges in their flesh, and a group of armed and armored men were attempting to contain a fourth as that damn ubermensch robot, the Hope-bot or whatever they called it, wrestled a fifth in up in the sky.

He was about to slip in and taze the red-masked guy when he turned and looked right at him. Oh, no. No, no, no, no. Ghostboy 2 promptly turned and ran in a random direction. He’d seen that guy in the paper, he was bad news. Though he had no idea how he had seen him, that wasn’t supposed to happen. Maybe some government control devices were messing with his powers?

The thought had him hesitating to ghost through more buildings, in case they tried to get him while he was halfway in a wall. It wasn’t the direction he wanted to walk; after all, it was nearly completely silent this way. Nearly being the operative word. Normally he wouldn’t have really focused on it but... that static in the background. He thought it was due to the microwave beams that the gangstalking PRT tended to send at him, but it almost sounded like music, and it was getting louder as he walked. Not only that, he could tell with his sound power that something was struggling to breathe over here, and there was the slightest sound of... fizzling?

He sped up, masking the sound of his movement, and came across something he never thought he’d get to report on.

Standing in the middle of the street were two figures. One was a roided-up version of the lizards from before, only this one was suspended in midair, limbs splayed and disintegrating before quickly re-growing and re-disintegrating. And standing in front of the monster was a completely golden man with a skeleton’s face, black cape billowing in non-existant wind.

Ghostboy 2 pulled a camera out of his pocket space, holding it up to snap a good picture. If he brought this to his boss, he’d get a promotion for sure. Besides, if Gold Skull was in Brockton Bay, people needed to know. Of course, the government probably brought him here to begin with, but the good people of the bay deserved the truth.

He pressed his finger down and... it went through empty air. His power malfunctioning-? No, the camera was gone. And for the second time today, someone was staring directly at him. Gold Skull was staring directly at him. And chuckling, low enough that anyone else would have missed it. Did he know about his sound power, too?

The next thing Ghostboy 2 knew, Gold Skull had flown off into the distance, taking the lizard with him. And he hadn’t even gotten a single picture. He kicked the wall of a building next to him.

“Damn tinker triangulation devices! If it wasn’t for them, he would have never seen me!”

---

He tried to write a story about Gold Mask being in town, but without definitive proof, his boss wouldn’t put it to print.

Imagine his horror when the next day, the PRT were at his front door.