This time it was different.

There were more snake-boys. There were different kinds of snake-creatures this time, too, not just the standard issue snake-boy: orange ones with more muscular arms, longer legs, purple trousers; pink ones with wings and whip-like tongues; blue ones that slithered on the ground and caught the ankles of the heroes, pulling them down, biting them in the face and neck until they were dead. Yellow ones that spat poison. Fat ones that did nothing but stand around and laugh.

And they were all singing. “He is the SerpenTerrorist,” they sang. “He is the rightful ruler of the Solar System. He is the rightful mayor of Bledsoe City. He is handsomer than God.”

The Three Towers, center of all crimebusting activity on the planet Earth, sputtered hard black smoke into the early evening sky. There were spaceships in that sky, twenty, thirty, forty of them, each of them wearing the eyes and the smile of the SerpenTerrorist him/her/itself, writ large, on its prow.

Aeroboy died, choking on poison a spitter had gobbed right down into his throat. Fast Action Freddie died, decapitated by a razor-sharp five-foot-long snake-tongue. Greensleeves died. The Dead Man Walking died, as did his sister, the Lady in Red. The Scientific Five. El Michigan. Prismatica. Nobody who had tried to fight them so far had survived. Nothing like this had ever happened.

The instant Sky Prince had flown onto the scene, bearing Snake-Boy on his shoulders, all evil eyes — the eyes of every snake-boy (standard issue, orange long-legs, pink tongue-whippers, blue slitherers, yellow spitters and, worst of all, the delighted eyes of the fat laughers) as well as the vast mechanical eyes of the spaceships themselves — locked onto Snake-Boy.

“Ah,” said the spaceships, in amplified unison over the sudden silence. “There you are, my son.”