When the two men walked through the double-doors, Ed knew his time on Athena was coming to an end. He barely glanced in their direction, holding on to the glimmer of hope that their coming into his bar was just a coincidence, that they didn’t know he was here and wouldn’t recognize him. Ed realized that he had gone rigid, and consciously relaxed his stance, trying to look focused on the glass in his hand that he was absentmindedly wiping off. He tuned out the loud dance music and the jabbering drunk at the end of the bar, forced a deep breath, and looked out from the corner of his eye at the approaching duo. He imagined that he cold hear their footsteps as they marched towards him to tell him what he already knew- that he was going on the run again.

They stopped and held their place for a few moments, looking straight at Ed as he filled the clean glass with beer from the tap. The shorter of the two slowly started to park himself on one of the barstools. Without looking at him, Ed gave up and said, “Let me guess... Hawk sent you?”

With a bored and slightly annoyed voice, the man said, “Lose the damn beard, Ed. You look like a moron.”

Ed smiled. “Nothing gets past you, eh Max?” He now took a better look at Max Hammer, the thin, wiry man that wouldn’t stand out in a crowd if he were wearing a clown suit. The bar’s red lighting seemed to magnify Max’s annoyed expression, giving him a rather comical, impish look. Ed didn’t recognize Max’s much larger companion, who was standing in place with a dumb smile at no one in particular. The man was fiddling with something in his jacket pocket, which Ed made sure to keep an eye on.

Since there was no longer any point in the disguise, Ed signaled the nanomachines in his body, and they quickly got to work disintegrating his facial hair. Within seconds, his large beard was gone, and his shoulder-length curls began to retract to his normal short, straight head of hair.

Still acting mightily inconvenienced, Max said, “Not with a body trail like the one you leave, no. Still, you’re a hard man to find, I’ll admit.”

“But Hawk keeps sending you after me anyway.” Ed gestured with a towel at the larger man. “Who’s the ox?”

“Hawk figured I couldn’t just ask you to come back nicely, so he sent this idiot. Say hi, Idiot.”

With the fidgeting hand, Idiot pulled out a pistol, pointed it in the air and in a surprisingly nasal voice said, “Yo.”

In the blink of an eye, Ed grabbed a small knife from the counter behind him and swung it at Idiot’s wrist. The gun fell to the floor and discharged a shot, which the bar patrons heard loud and clear over both the music and the Idiot’s panicked cries. The whole crowd erupted in a frenzy and rushed for the doors, pushing over each other in a mad dash to escape.

“Goddamnit, Ed,” said Max, again sounding more inconvenienced than angry. He got up from the stool and quickly grabbed Idiot’s wrist, which was spilling an alarming amount of blood. The large man let out an even louder scream than before and fell crying to his knees, and when Max let go of him the wound was cauterized, the skin around it burned and smoking. The bar began to fill with the smell of cooked flesh.

“Hush,” said Max to his companion, shaking away the heat from his palm. Within a few moments, the bar was empty, albeit completely trashed from the panic. That didn’t bother Ed much, though. He wouldn’t be coming back to it again anyway.

Ed tossed away the bloodstained knife and whilst looking directly at Max said, “Damn. Hawk really needs to stop sending the dumb ones after me.”

“Ha, ha, ha. Are you going to make this difficult on yourself?”

Ed laughed, trying to hide the tension that he felt in every muscle in his body. “Not at all, Max, beating your head in is almost a reflex now. How many times have you completely, totally, utterly failed to bring me in, again?” He feigned a gasp and widened his eyes. “Oh! Wait, is that why Hawk decided to send some help with you this time?”

He caught the brief flash of rage that washed over Max’s face, the millisecond that his eyes screamed murder, his teeth bared, and his hands tightened as if to tear Ed from limb to limb. But it passed, and Max forced a laugh.

“Right, right, laugh it up, Ed. We can play this game forever.”

“With your track record, we probably will-“

Max whipped out his pistol and aimed it so fast that Ed barely had time to spring. He jumped up on the bar and bounded off just as the bullet smashed through a line of bottles, right behind where Ed’s chest had been a fraction of a second ago. The core of Edward Ramses – the cold, automatic, reptilian part of his brain - took control as he flew through the air and brought his right elbow crashing down on top of Max’s skull with a satisfying crack. A cough was all that escaped Max’s lips as he crumpled to his knees, blood trickling down his head and face. As soon as his feet were planted on the floor, Ed spun around and kicked Max in the back of the head, sending him flying face-forward into the bar.

With an arrogant swagger, Ed walked slowly towards Max, who was slowly trying to prop himself up. Ed grabbed the weak man’s collar and pulled him up, staring at the blood-covered face with no small amount of satisfaction.

“See? Not hard at all.”

Max, who could barely open his eyes, bared his teeth in a weak smile and said, “Nah, this is real easy for you, isn’t it Ed? The killing and the beating-“

Ed shook him and roared into his face, “WHO THE HELL ARE YOU TO TALK?”

Now Max started laughing. “Ed, when I give you yours, I will cut you into itty bitty little pieces, and I will enjoy every second of it.” He laughed some more and said, “But see, I’m fine with that.”

Before Max could say more, Ed started to punch him repeatedly, breaking his nose and probably several other things in his face, leaving it an unrecognizable mess. He let go of his collar and let him fall to the floor, then walked over to the pistol that Idiot had dropped, pointed it at Max’s forehead, and fired into it until the clip was empty, grinning from ear to ear the entire time.

It seemed like minutes passed while he looked at the bloody mess. He looked at what remained of Max’s head as if it were a wondrous piece of art, savoring the scene and feeling like he was reunited with an old friend that had been gone for too long. And then, suddenly, the reptile brain relinquished control, and the smile faded from Ed’s face. He lowered the gun and stood for a moment, waiting for the buzz to fade from his head.

“Shit.” He looked to the side at Idiot, who seemed to have shrunk into the shadows in terror. How long had the fight lasted? Ed had no conception of how much time had passed, although experience taught him that it had probably been even less than a minute. He briskly walked behind the bar, pulled out his own pistol from under the counter, and shot Idiot in the head before the large man could utter a sound. This time he didn’t enjoy it.

Ed walked across the wrecked bar, all the way to the storage room in the back, and pulled out a large canister of the most effective cleaning fluid he knew of. The large club quickly filled with the putrid stench of the fuel as he poured it over everything on his way back to bar. He took one more look Max Hammer, checking to see if he so much as twitched, despite his destroyed head. Finally, he doused the body in fuel, emptying the canister.

He thought back to the mad joy he’d felt just minutes before as brutally killed Max for the hundred-thousandth time. The joy he’d always felt when he had his hands around someone’s throat, or was beating them within an inch of their life. Particularly when he was taking that life completely. It was a joy that he had now spent years trying to suppress. This time, on the planet Athena, he had gone at least four months without experiencing that joy. Oh, sure, he had killed men when it became necessary, but he treated it as a purely utilitarian act, forcing himself to push back his base self, the reptilian brain that made him the same kind of person that Max Hammer was.

But Max was right- the difference between them was that while Max embraced who he was, every time that Ed did the same, he was losing. And no matter how many times Ed killed the man, he somehow showed up again at his doorstep months later, undoing all of Ed’s hard work and sending him running to the next planet.

He left the building through the back door, lit a cigarette, and threw it back inside. The fuel immediately took, and Ed’s bar went ablaze. With little regret, he started walking away into the cold streets of Athena city, planning his next move.

Max would be back. Ed had no doubt of that, despite that fact that he had just left the man decapitated and left the body to burn. What really bothered him was that Hawk, his former employer, was sending help with him now. He was obviously determined to bring Ed back, even after years of failing at it- years of causing untold destruction and death, all of it merely collateral damage in the pursuit of one man. It seemed that no matter where Ed hid, Hawk could track him down. He couldn’t count on fighting him off forever. Taunting Max, making it seem easy, worked to make him clumsy, but the truth was that Ed was exhausted. One day he would be caught off guard, and that was what Hawk was counting on. He had all the time and resources in the world.

The police would show up at the bar soon enough, and chances were that they would figure out it was connected to Ed again and bring all the old familiar faces after him as well. No matter which way he looked at it, he had to get off world. To which planet, he didn’t know, but he’d figure it out. The universe was vast.