"Would you fucking stop that!?" Larry snapped. "Holy shit you might actually kill me."

Milton seemed somehow triumphant.

"So, the angelic facade falls."

What? The fuck?

"I'm a talking head, if you were still seeing an angel here then you're even dumber than I thought." Milton kicked him again, this time hard enough that Larry didn't even come close to landing before he bounced off the far wall. In fact, he bounced hard enough to roll all the way back to Milton before he stopped.

"You're lucky I'm still a cosmic being or that might've killed me." He growled, actually feeling his head—or rather, his everything—ringing from it somewhat.

"Looks like today is my lucky day in general then." Milton grinned, bending down to pick him up. Larry got a look at the two women with him across the room as he was raised high, both looked…Wary. "I'll make this simple for you Larry. Whatever powers you gave that tiny bitch, I want them too. Not instead of my beast-taming, as well as."

Larry stared at him, feeling the horror beginning to dawn on him. He knew where this conversation was going to go already and it was…not good.

"I can't do that."

Milton started dribbling Larry like a basketball, compensating for the lack of bounciness that was innate to any skull-having creature by simply throwing him down extra hard into the stone floor.

"Ow! Fuck, stop!"

But he didn't, so Larry had no choice but to try and persuade the idiot.

"Stop it would you, I fucking can't give you her powers because I didn't give them to her either!"

Milton actually paused at that, bringing Larry back up to stare at him. His scepticism was about as well-hidden as Epstein's murder, but that didn't mean it wasn't an issue all the same.

"What do you mean?" He snapped.

"She just does that stuff." Larry told him, surprised by the novelty of actually telling the truth. "It's called being Untethered, she…Uh, I think the virgin comic-book term is "reality warps", or something? Basically that. It's innate to her mind and not something I can replicate in anyone, you either do it or you don't."

Milton was far from convinced, grip strengthening in accordance with his obvious displeasure.

"That seems a little bit too convenient, angel." He growled. Larry resisted the not-inconsiderable urge to roll his fucking eyes, it would probably provoke more bouncing.

"Convenient for her, maybe." Larry spat. "You know why we don't give you idiots your powers until you leave our cosmic space? Because if we do, you might go nuts within arm's reach of us and attack us. Granted most of you assholes couldn't kill a rat with a rat-trap even after being empowered—there's really only so much you can expect from a monkey regardless of what you give it—but that's just one more fucking feature of the Untethered. No, dipshit, I can't replicate her power, and I didn't give it to her in the first place. If I had, I'd have done it when I knew she wouldn't rip my head off."

Milton paused at that, and a miracle happened. He seemed to actually take what Larry said into consideration. Larry studied his face in pure fascination, wondering if it might fall off or explode with the sheer strain. Instead, it just…moved. Stiffened, then relaxed. A conclusion forming before his very eyes.

"So then…" Milton noted. "Essentially what you're saying, is I don't have any further use for you, and nothing to lose by just taking revenge for what you did right here and now."

Oh shit. Oh shit.

"Unless you want Emma to go in using her full power next time." Larry suggested, quickly. Milton paused at that, then got angry.

"Don't pretend she was holding back last time."

"Oh, maybe not holding back exactly." Larry pretended to concede. "But she had tricks up her sleeve she couldn't use because you had me on you. Remember those garulkan you sent after her into the corridor? How exactly do you think she killed the three of them without a scratch."

As a fact, Larry was almost completely certain she'd done some sort of typical rattish ambush on the creatures. Maybe dropped a boulder on them or, in true Emma fashion, just walled them off somewhere and forgotten about them. Milton didn't know Emma, though. From his perspective she just suddenly dispatched three creatures which could each have individually threatened her before.

Larry saw the doubt blossom on his enemy's face, and knew he had a chance after all. He didn't need to prove any of what he was saying, not really. He just needed to leave Milton doubtful enough he was lying that it would be a risk to unilaterally kill him here and now.

Stolen novel; please report.

"So you want me to keep you alive so I can use you as a human shield?" Milton frowned. Poor thing, thinking clearly wasn't something he was accustomed to. Less so, even, than most humans. If most of his species were monkeys, this one was probably more comparable to a dog. Larry thought he could hear steam hissing from his ears.

"I want to live longer, not shorter." Larry told him, overtly. For once there was no need for bullshit. Always a relaxing state of affairs. "If being a shield is how I do that, then sure. Hide behind me while you fight a little girl."

He saw Milton's eye twitch, thought for a second that giving into temptation and throwing the last barb had been a mistake, but the neckbeard bit back his temper and sighed, affixing Larry to one of the buckles on his coat.

"Don't think you're living through this, however long I take to kill your favourite." He spat. Larry just hung there, baffled at the man's stupidity. It was one thing to let visible anger show every time you were slighted, what sort of drooling idiot openly told someone their plans to kill them? He must've thought Larry powerless—

—Which, Larry reminded himself, was not far from the truth. Being a severed fucking head and all.

"You know, I really hate your type." Larry spat, thinking of past times. Better times. Times when powerless humans ran screaming and flailing from his otherworldly power, and he was never buried beneath underwear, and he could melt a person's tongue and lips for even thinking to call him an asshole.

Milton, of course, was not privy to any of this, and so responded with glibness. Another mark against him.

"What type?" He asked. "Men who know what they want, who've had enough of society's shit?"

"No." Larry replied. "Pathetic shut-in misanthropes. I mean, don't get me wrong, hating your species pretty much gives me life. That moment where you assholes see yourselves stranded? The look on your faces? Fucking classic. But shit, there's a reason I picked this job over just twisting Hitler's nuts off you know."

Milton wanted to ignore him, Larry could see. Thing with Milton's type was they could never let a slight go unanswered.

"I'm not pathetic, not a misanthrope." He growled. "You've got me wrong. It's not my fault people think I'm a bad person and judge me just for the hobbies I like."

Larry laughed at that. "Oh, christ, that shit right there? Hilarious. You believe it too, don't you? No dipshit, people don't hate you for your hobbies. They hate you because you do shit like enslaving women."

Milton's eyes flared up instantly.

"My Battle Bitches are not slaves!" He snarled. "They're compensated for their work."

"Right." Larry nodded. "Yeah, compensated just little enough to keep them around, while you humiliate and terrorise them constantly just to get your dick hard. Sure man, and it's just a coincidence that you started doing this shit in the world without labour unions or H.R departments right?"

Again, Milton's face contorted.

"You probably think you were some downtrodden underdog, who would've blown everyone away if you were just given a chance." Larry continued. "The truth is, you were being given chances. And you squandered them by being a fucking asshole. People didn't talk to you because you were unpleasant to talk to. That's why plenty of other people share your hobbies and have sex—but then those aren't "real gamers", are they? And because they aren't real, you don't need to question yourself because of what they prove is possible." Larry was enjoying himself now, enjoying the mounting rage on Milton's features.

Milton, as it happened, was not.

"Everyone treated me like shit." He hissed. Larry laughed.

"And you put up with these perceived slights because you didn't have power, now that you have power the first thing you do is terrorise a pair of women who'd never even heard of you before you got it. What a swell guy, if only those bitches back home had been scared enough to let you stuff them into stripper outfits and make them call you senpai, right asshole? You were never victimised, just weak. Now that you're strong you can do what you want, and what you want is to victimise other people. Go ahead, kill me and shoot yourself in the foot. Prove me right."

Milton did not, in the end, kill Larry. He wanted to, he so very clearly wanted to.

But Larry's judgement proved about right. He was scared of what Emma might have up her sleeve, and that fear stayed his hand. It had, after all, stayed it for an entire lifetime before he first met Larry. As it stayed all human hands.

They played at morals, at making decisions and standing on principles. Larry knew them better than that, though. When push came to shove a human would do what it wanted, when it wanted, how it wanted and to whom it wanted. Only fear and self-interest kept them in place. Their ethics were simply a list of behaviours they had at some point deemed practical for wider society, and thus beneficial to each individual who followed them.

And even those weren't properly stuck to, because nothing humans stood by was.

There was nothing unique about Milton. In fact, there was so little unique about him that Larry's entire strategy for winning the cosmic war had relied on finding an unending influx of Miltons. Mindlessly entitled enough to want power, pathetic enough to not mind leaving their own world, stupid enough to have essentially zero chance of actually turning around and getting revenge against him once they figured out they were stranded. The perfect little shock-troopers to destabilise the Enemy's worlds.

It had all been going perfectly until Emma. She, actually, was one of the worse ones, and it had been pure, awful luck that saw her developing Untethering of all things when she did. There was no accounting for bad luck.

Or, well, there was. But not with the Untethered. They tended to be "causally challenged" as one of Larry's peers had once said, and even the most precise prophetic visions failed to quite manage a grip on them. Reality just went a bit runny around the edges when one tried to enforce it on them. Almost like…

But no, Larry wasn't about to start comparing Emma to one of the denizens of the Depths. That was a very good way to build her up into something unstoppable in his own mind and leave himself snivelling with fear at the very thought of challenging her.

But Larry was getting ahead of himself. Ahead, eugh. He would kill the inventor of puns. But not before he killed a few other people. Not before he got back his body, his power, his freedom. Not before he'd set a great many other things right.

First, though, he'd need to get out of this shitty weasel's clutches.

"Where are we going?" He abruptly asked Milton, who only grinned.

"We scouted out the tower before, unlike you and your idiotic party. We think the treasure room is right up at the top. I'm going to clear it out, and then flee to use the riches for the beginning of my new empire."

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