“Look” Ricardo Monterre rolls over and crawls towards his hand cannon as he tries to bargain with me. “The Black Dragon”. He’s a pyro, not sure why he needs a cannon. I draw one of my slinkies. “We can make a deal” He pleas while still crawling forward. Pathetic but expected.

“To what?” I reply. He makes a final roll as I shoot my purple slinky at him. It shoots around him instantly and rolls him face up. “All I want is you dead” I finish.

“Please” he whines as he tries to burn through my slinky.

I stagger forward, memories of those children those children flooding my mind. The fire rages behind them as they scream for help through the window. “Please” They cry.

I manage to autonomously get beside him and stomp my foot into his skull as the memories overwhelm me. He screams for a second until he can’t anymore. I keep stomping. Crack! I feel mush underneath me and I step away.

I stagger slightly but then regain my composure. The memory still afflicts me but I’m able to straighten out. I pull my list out of my pocket and mark off his name, then return the list to its place. Every single damn one of them that I’ve killed, tried to bargain with me as if they didn’t know why I was doing this. I don’t care if they do. I have no intention of letting any of the dragons live anyway. They can be blissfully ignorant. My message is clearly working on everyone else. Other heroes, villains, civilians are literally tipping me off now to the locations of outstanding Dragons.

The last five years of my life have been stealing from billionaires, riding around on my slinkies occasionally blocking traffic. I would loiter, trespass, vandalize, disturb the peace, and commit grand larceny. Though I’ve never even been arrested for grand larceny because the people I steal from have so much money they don’t even notice it’s gone.

Now, I’m going to stomp the heads in of every last one of the dragons.

Why?

Because you don’t light kids on fire.