[A/N]: The First GOAL of the week is to achieve 250 Power Stones and unlock TWO more bonus chapters. Comment, share, and you know the drill 😎✨
A suffocating aura descended over the museum parking lot. The air itself grew heavy, pressing down on everything like an invisible weight. Survivors stumbled, gasping, and some even dropped to their knees.
Jay's powers surfaced with intensity. Black tendrils of Darkforce coiled around his left arm while brilliant white Lightforce blazed from his right. The two energies crackled against each other, creating sparks that left afterimages in the air.
The demons howled. Their bodies were twisted amalgamations of flesh and shadow, all claws and teeth and burning red eyes. They charged as one, a wave of supernatural violence aimed at the remaining civilians.
Jay caught Domino's eye and nodded once.
She understood immediately.
Jay launched forward, and light daggers materialized in his hands. Pure white constructs hummed with purifying energy. The first demon lunged, jaws gaping wide. He drove the dagger straight through its skull. The creature's scream cut short as holy light exploded outward from the wound, incinerating it from the inside out.
The mask of humanity fell away, revealing the monster underneath. The thing that had been alive since before civilization. Since before humans learned to speak in anything more than grunts.
"What... did you just call me, boy?" Each word dripped venom. Dripped rage that had aged like wine in a barrel. Concentrated fury that could crack mountains.
Jay's white hair whipped in the supernatural wind gathering around Selene. His eyes blazed with every color of stolen power. Blue, white, green, red, purple. A cosmic kaleidoscope of theft made manifest.
"I called you a geriatric whore who's terrified of becoming irrelevant. Want me to repeat it slower? I know memory's the first thing to go when you hit your third millennium. Or was it the fourth? Hard to keep track when you're that fucking old and irrelevant."
Selene barked. The sound was half rage, half something else. Something that might have been delight. Sexual excitement at being challenged. At being treated like prey instead of predator for the first time in centuries.
"You think I don't know?" She stepped forward. Each footstep cracked the pavement. Power gathered around her like a visible aura. Psychic and magical both, creating a storm of energy that made the air scream. "You think I can't sense it? You don't possess those god-touched powers you wielded during the New York invasion! That magnificent display of denying death itself!"
The ground cracked beneath her feet in concentric circles. Windows shattered for three blocks. Car alarms wailed in chorus. The museum's walls developed hairline fractures that spread like spider webs.
"Rewriting death must have taken its toll, yes? Breaking fundamental laws of existence? You lost your chance at godhood, didn't you! Spent it all saving those pathetic mortals who will die anyway in a few decades! Wasted your ascension on temporary sentiment!"
She threw her head back and laughed. The sound echoed off buildings.
"You're weakened! Diminished! And you dare insult me? ME? I who have outlived empires! I who have drunk the blood of gods and titans and creatures whose names would drive you mad!"
The demons howled in response to their mistress's rage. More demons came and raised their voices in chorus. A hymn of violence and hunger and ancient, terrible need.
Power gathered around Selene like a visible storm. Psychic energy crackled purple and black. She raised both hands toward Jay. Fingers crooked like claws. Eyes burning with power that predated human civilization.
"Let me show you the difference between age and youth, boy. Between experience and enthusiasm. Between a god and a fucking child playing with powers he doesn't understand!"
The power released.
And the parking lot became ground zero for a battle between ancient evil and modern defiance.
Jay went into a full massacre, and after the demon's death, released a cloud of Darkforce energy. Jay's left hand shot out. The darkness flowed into him, pulled by instinct and hunger. It traveled through his body, and something inside him shifted. The Darkforce touched the Lightforce already burning in his core, and they collided. Merged. The darkness bleached white, converting automatically through his Polarity power.
He felt stronger and fuller. The white glow around him intensified.
Another demon came from his blind spot. Jay spun, light whip wrapping around its throat. He yanked. The head separated from the body mid-leap. More dark energy released. More absorption. More conversion.
The pattern clicked into place in his mind. A realization that made him smile despite the carnage around him.
Create light constructs. Purify demons with holy energy. Absorb their Darkforce essence. Convert darkness to light through Polarity. Repeat.
An infinite loop.
The demons had never seen anything like this. They were predators, hunters from dimensions where fear was food and violence was currency. But this human moved through them like death incarnate, turning their own energy against them with every kill.
Three demons tried to coordinate an attack. Jay created a sphere of light that expanded outward in a pulse. The holy energy caught all three, and their screams echoed as their flesh burned away. He absorbed the residual darkness before their corpses hit the ground.
His hair began to lighten. The dark strands bleached incrementally with each absorption, each conversion. The process was visible, white spreading from the roots like frost creeping across glass.
Meanwhile, Domino moved to intercept the demons targeting the frozen civilians. Probability manipulation kicked in automatically. A demon leaped toward a cluster of office workers. Domino fired without really aiming. The bullet ricocheted off a car's side mirror, caught the edge of a parking meter, bounced off a fire hydrant's cap, and buried itself in the demon's eye socket. The creature dropped.
"Next," she muttered, already tracking the next target.
Her guns came up, both loaded with ammunition she'd laced with tachyon particles. She'd learned from their time together. Regular bullets were for regular problems.
These weren't regular problems.
She fired. The first round caught a demon in the chest. The demon's body vibrated, before collapsing as its molecular structure destabilised.
"Betsy!" Domino's voice cut through the chaos. "Stop standin' there with your jaw on the ground and use those psychic powers to get these people the hell out!"
Betsy stood frozen. Watching Jay work was mesmerizing in the worst way. He moved with surgical precision, each kill efficient and brutal. The demons died screaming, and he just kept moving, kept absorbing, kept converting their essence into more power. There was something beautiful and terrible about it. Like watching a force of nature destroy everything in its path.
The shout snapped her back to reality.
The butterfly mark blazed across her face. Purple psychic energy crackled outward from her left eye, spreading across her features like living tattoos. Betsy reached out telepathically, touching dozens of minds at once. Not commanding. Just... suggesting.
'Leave. Walk away. Don't run. Don't create panic. One foot in front of the other. You saw nothing. You remember nothing. Just walk.'
The civilians began moving. Their eyes were glassy, pupils dilated, irises reflecting purple light. Their movements were mechanical and Jerky.
It was wrong. Violating their minds like this was wrong. But the alternative was watching them get torn apart by demons.
Betsy swallowed the guilt and pushed harder.
Domino covered their retreat. A demon lunged at a group of stumbling office workers. She didn't aim, didn't need to. Her power ensured the shot would land. The bullet left her gun, curved in mid-air through a path that violated three laws of physics, ricocheted off a streetlight, a broken window, and the metal framework of a collapsed awning before catching the creature between its eyes.
"Yeah, that's right. I'm the one you want." She ejected the magazine, slammed in a fresh one. "Come on, you ugly bastards. Let's dance."
The parking lot became a killing field. Blood and ichor painted the pavement in abstract patterns. Demon corpses littered the ground, already beginning to dissolve into sulfurous smoke that stank of rotten eggs and burnt meat. Car alarms wailed, broken glass crunched underfoot, and the museum's walls were scarred with claw marks and scorch patterns.
Ten minutes of coordinated chaos continued. Betsy guided civilians in their jerky, puppet-like exodus while Domino provided covering fire with impossible accuracy. And Jay carved through demons with methodical brutality, his hair growing whiter with each kill.
The parking lot emptied. The last civilian stumbled around the corner, out of sight. Betsy let her telepathic hold drop. Somewhere several blocks away, those people would blink, confused about how they'd gotten there. Better confused than dead.
After killing most of the demons in his way, Jay stopped moving.
His hair was completely white now.
He turned toward Selene.
The External watched him with undisguised hunger. Her tongue traced her lips, slow and deliberate. The gesture was obscene in its intimacy. Like she was already tasting him. Already imagining what it would feel like to consume him, body and soul.
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