Stanley didn’t answer Garren’s question, but he could tell it wasn’t a question. He had made up his mind that he was a Nova. There was no doubt in his mind anymore.

Stanley didn’t know what to do next. He protected Fred from the half a dozen guns that were pointed toward them. He was the only one that had any chance of sustaining too much damage here.

"Nova!" Stanley called out to her. "You said you knew what to do next."

"Huh?" Nova got out of whatever stupor she was in and replied. "Yes." She had a plan. Her plan needed her brother to be in a Net and now he was. So she could now work on it.

She stepped forward, and not a single person’s gun turned toward her. They didn’t care that she was walking toward their young lord. In a way, they were ordered not to care.

For the moment, their eyes were focused on Stanley, the other Nova in this conflict. And they feared him. They didn’t see how the man even died. He was there at one moment and the next he had his brains blown out.

They also didn’t see how the second one died, but his death scared them. They were more than ready to run if that was the case. But, since their young lord was there, they couldn’t.

Nova looked at her brother, the plasma net trapping his body from all sides. She had thought she would feel smug at this point, beating her brother who always seemed so strong. And yet, she felt nothing.

Only pain.

Her heart was filled with the pain of their parent’s death, the pain that it was her brother who did it, and the pain that she now had to kill her own brother.

She had not expected to feel so much pain.

Tears flowed down her cheek as she brought up her hands toward her brother. The arms of the plasma net were all metal and she could control it to crush him on the inside. She could crush him like she would a grape between her fingers.

With her improved powers, this would be so easy.

"Why do you cry, little sister?" Garren spoke, seemingly unbothered by the net he was in. "I thought you wanted to kill me. Is that not why you went through all the trouble for the last 3 months?"

Nova’s breathing got heavy. "You killed father and mother," she said, bringing back the rage, and pushing away the pain. The metal wires in her arm moved out, wrapping around her brother from outside the net. Another force upon the net.

"I promised this to myself when I woke up that day after you killed them," she said and started crushing the net. "I will kill you."

The plasma crackled as the net pushed onto her brother. Garren’s face went from nonchalant to slight panic as he was pushed. Still, he didn’t let it appear in his voice.

"Whoa! You got really strong," he said. "See? I was right to help you, wasn’t I? You got so strong because of me."

Nova crushed him harder. "You think I wanted this?" she shouted at him. "You think I wanted my parents dead when my brother forcibly improved my power? You killed father and mother for this, you bastard."

"And it made you stronger," Garren said.

Nova’s power stopped pushing for a moment. She simply couldn’t believe how callous her brother was. To his father’s death. To his mother’s death. She understood words wouldn’t do anything anymore. Not to a monster like him.

"Fine," she said. "Die!"

Then she used all of her force to crush her brother’s inside the net. The net wrapped around Garren, tighter and tighter. He laughed a bit at the start, but his face started to change when he realized he really could die.

Trapped as he was, without a way to leave was dead.

He saw this, his men saw this, Nova saw this.

Stanley saw this.

Trapped without a way out. "You nearly did it, sister," Garren said, grunting inside the crushing net. "You nearly did it. Had you known all of my powers, you might have even done it."

Nova’s eyes narrowed in a frown.

"Fortunately, you don’t know much about me. You were always protected from the horrors of the cult, both by me and our parents. So you don’t know anything. Not what they did, not what I do. Not what I can do."

They heard a little electrical noise. "Another thing you don’t know about me is that..." he tapped on the cylindrical metal at the front of the net where it houses the net’s power source. "You can’t use metal against me."

Darren’s entire body flashed suddenly and at the next moment, he was out of the net, standing outside as if he had never crushed to begin with. "That’s more like it," he said.

Nova, Stanley, and Fred looked at Garren in horror. Even his subordinates were a little surprised. Not everyone knew what he could do.

"Aww, you wrinkled my clothes," Garren said. "I liked this shirt."

His eyes suddenly flashed a bright color and he looked up. Electrical signals sped up in his body, everything moving at a speed that would have never been humanly possible.

His breathing was hurried, his heart beat faster, his vision capturing every single instance he saw, his ears catching onto every beat of a moment, and his brain processing every single thing just that much faster and sending responses back to his body.

That was to say, he saw when Stanley slowed down time and moved to the Net gun again to shoot. Unlike last time, he was prepared for whatever Stanley was going to do.

His face crept to a smile as he looked at Stanley, who saw him looking back in shock. Then, he pointed toward Fred whom Stanley had ended up leaving alone to grab the gun.

At that moment, Stanley understood, he had made a terrible mistake.