"What is your limit?" A cold voice emanated from a dark corner of the room. Masculine? Feminine? He couldn't tell. It was only cold and rough. But he, as he had decided himself a good judge of character, could sense undertones of frustration creeping through that voice. "I've sent slices at you. What is the maximum? Your power has to follow some law, some mechanism. There has to be a drawback. So what is it?"
The person broke, and while he expected thousands more blades being flung at him, none came.
The person drew closer, metallic steps sounding through the room as they stood over his healing body. He was grateful for the respite. He took a deep breath, but the air didn't have anywhere to go from his nostrils. His lungs weren't back. He hadn't realized how long he hadn't been breathing until now.
His muscles regrew, connecting back to the rest of his arms. His torso emerged, the rib cage forming like a prison against his heart and lungs. His organs re-emerged in only three seconds—pancreas, intestines, liver, kidneys, stomach. He could even feel the acid pouring into the vessel of his stomach from the walls. Heat radiated from his body in waves, steam rising from his skin as his metabolism burned through impossible amounts of energy to fuel the regeneration.
His pelvic bone, genitals and legs grew back in two more seconds, and finally, he took a breath. His lungs inflated, his chest expanded. I'm back, he thought.
He was naked. The cool morning wind brushed against his skin as goosebumps emerged in the dark room. The person standing above him was waiting, watching him grow back in great detail.
"Who sent you? King? Or are you just an aimless villain?" the person asked, calming down, formulating a plan to stop this immovable wall.
It was a question, but it didn't sound like one—more like a rhetorical thrown at this monster beyond comprehension.
"There's only one thing you need to know about me," he said, getting up and brushing the dust off him. He finally got a look at his attacker. They covered themselves in metal—iron armor, from bottom to top, dull iron breastplate and helmet gleaming in the light.
The Iron Knight—that was what he would call his attacker who had been pestering him for how long? Five minutes? Hours? He didn't care. The Iron Knight didn't move as he spoke.
"I will use this power that has been granted to me," he declared, "to save everybody I want to. To protect all those I desire. To stretch out my hand, reshape the destiny of the people I care about, sacrificing my most valuable possession. My life. That is the person I am."
That was his honest, unabashed, bold and self-serving declaration.
The Iron Knight didn't speak. Their expression was unreadable under the helmet. He was still yet to figure out how their power worked. Iron wires and blades were used to kill him, so maybe they could create iron and form them into weapons? That was his conclusion.
"Then you do not know how to use your life," the Iron Knight muttered.
"Oh, I'll show you how to use a life!" he said cockily, rearing back for a punch. He wasn't sure how he was going to beat this Iron Knight who had put him through hell, but he could always try, couldn't he?
He threw a punch, right in the center of the Iron Knight's chest, and as he expected, there was no effect. Only the dull thud of impact that rang through the mall.
He didn't notice it. Couldn't. But rivulets of blood, tiny, minuscule rivulets, each cut the size of a grain of sand emerged on his bare skin like pinpricks.
The rivulets continued, the cause invisible, numbering thousands, hundreds of thousands, tens of millions even. They tore through the flesh, the muscle, the tendons, the bones. Fine strands of iron, small enough to cleave through cells themselves, dismantled his arm.
Calling what was left 'minced meat' would be like calling an understatement an understatement. What was left could as well be called 'mist'. His full grown arm was turned to fine mist in just 0.36 seconds.
The cause? The Iron Knight. Wires and blades did not seem to do the job. Complete eradication at the cellular level—that should do the trick.
And so it was done. By meticulously and precisely chopping up the body incrementally, he was transformed from a fully-regenerated human to a mist of red in a single second.
He was gone. The regenerating freak had been eliminated. No body emerged. No twitch. No breath. He reduced the mass beyond coherence—below the centimeter, the millimeter. That had to be it.
The Iron Knight began to walk back towards his post, until he started coughing. He knocked his chest and thought it was dispelled, but the coughing became stronger, then violent.
He fell to his knees, wheezing, as he entered another coughing fit. This had never happened before. He never had any coughing issues. He was completely fine. No fever, no sickness. So what was happening?
Could it be... Did that bastard infect him with something? Did he mistakenly inhale the bloody mist and contract some fatal disease? That would be a terrible misstep. But no disease could compromise an immune system like that in less than a minute. Only something like a venom could. But the bastard didn't have any of that on his person. And no poison could penetrate his armor. So whatever this was, it had to be airborne. Did that guy have some kind of secondary power on top of his regeneration that allowed him to pass diseases on his true death? He hadn't used it before, so it had to be a last-ditch effort triggered by death.
"Maybe I'm just cold!" he thought. He threw off the metal armor on his body with his metal-manipulation powers, exposing his brown cotton shirt and shorts beneath.
His thoughts became warped in panic. His throat clogged up. It felt like something was lodged in his esophagus. He grabbed his throat painfully, pain blotting his mind. Then the blood. As he coughed, blood leaked from the side of his lips, then poured out generously with each cough.
"I'm going to die here." He knew. He didn't feel he would die. He was certain he would not make it out of this scenario alive. It didn't just feel like something was stuck in his throat—it felt like something was tearing him from the inside out.
The Iron Knight felt his world tilting. This wasn't supposed to happen. He was the one who eliminated threats. He was the one who walked away.
Pressure built dangerously in his chest. His brain felt like exploding and his eyeballs felt like they would pop. The 'thing' inside him—it was no disease, he concluded—began moving down. Through his throat, into the space in his ribs.
Bulges appeared on the sides of his stomach. He retched even more blood at the sight of this and was sure his eyeballs were bleeding from the pressure.
He felt his heart being crushed, his lungs being crudely torn to pieces.
"WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING!" was all his mind could conjure up as he was slowly being driven to madness. He clawed at his chest, until he felt something else.
Something was pushing out from inside. Not pain, but pressure. Like a heartbeat from hell. Then his sternum cracked, then broke, and the center of his chest—the place where that unkillable bastard earlier had tried to punch him—was forcefully torn open.
Through the bloom of blood and bone, something reached.
A fist.
His heart blossomed like a flower under the rising morning sun, only instead of showcasing its petals, it burst through his chambers and valves and ventricles.
His mind calmed maliciously as the source of his pain became evident. A voice of simple determination rang out, even though it was hard to hear because his vital organs were blocking their speech.
"I have a list of people I want to save from death. You are not on that list."
With that, holes through his solar plexus and parts of his lower body burst open, as limbs came through. The crazy bastard had regenerated inside him.
"I must have inhaled a particle of his shredded body, then," he thought, just a tiny bit happy that his hypothesis was not that far off the mark. He stretched his feeble consciousness to his metal armor, reforming its slivers into sharp, thin knives shaped as crescent moons, attempting to rip apart the bastard as well as his own body.
As soon as he felt the blades sever him into several pieces, he realized it was hopeless. The bastard would just regenerate, and he did not have that ability.
His organs fell out, and a pool of blood—so much blood—bathed the dirty floor. He couldn't even feel it anymore. He was cold. So cold, as his consciousness faded away.
He realized then that he could have let the bastard crawl out of his body, then sewn himself back together haphazardly and carried himself to the nearest hero with a healing ability. It would be raw and hellish, and there was no guarantee he would survive, but it would be better than dying. Now, he had no more strength to use his power.
He was dying. He was very close to death. He had so much left to do. So many more people to save, so many more things to prove.
The bastard was cut up like him, but he started regrowing each body part again quickly as before. Steam rose from his regenerating flesh, the air shimmering with heat as his impossible metabolism burned through energy. He would accomplish all he had to do. He would save all the people he wanted, he would prove so much.
And yet, he didn't envy the bastard. He remembered how he had mercilessly dismembered and gutted and murdered him over and over again for hours on end because he deemed him a threat. If he had ignored him, he would not have been in this situation, but it wasn't his personality to think of what-ifs.
All he thought was that he never wanted to be brought back to life again like the bastard. If there was even the slightest possibility of him experiencing the hellish pain again, he would take his death, and now he was through with it all.
As the bastard stood up, brushing off the blood and viscera with casual indifference, and then walked away to whatever he planned to do in the mall, the Iron Knight closed his eyes, bled out, and accepted the finality of his death.