POV: Arthur Maddicks (Artie)
The beast is near.
Artie could not understand it, could not fit what was happening into anything his mind could hold without breaking apart. He was only thirteen, and for two years he had lived with the Morlocks ever since his mutation had manifested.
His voice had been stolen from him, leaving him trapped inside himself, and his body twisted into something grotesque the surface world would recoil from.
He could neither speak nor write, his thoughts locked inside him with no way out except the strange projections his power allowed, and even those felt useless now in the face of what hunted them.
The surface world is not for people like us. But here in the underground where none can see us, we are safe. We are cursed to be monsters and no one will care for us nor will they give us the benefit of the doubt. So we must band together and protect each other instead.
Those were the words Callisto had given him when he first stumbled into their hidden world, trembling and starving and too afraid to even look anyone in the eye, and they had taken him in without hesitation and given him something he had thought he would never have again - home.
They had given him a place, and more than that they had given him people who looked at him without disgust, people who saw him and did not turn away.
He had been happy with them, in the quiet, fragile way that only existed in stolen places beneath a world that hated them. He even made friends, real friends, and the Morlocks had become something like a family made from broken pieces that somehow still fit together.
They did not have much in the sewers and life there could never be called good when compared against the life he had once known with his mother and father, but there had been warmth and laughter and the certainty that someone would stand beside him no matter what.
Some of the Morlocks had once been musicians, performers who had lost their place above when their bodies changed, and they would still play down here in the dim tunnels, their songs echoing softly through the pipes and stone as if refusing to let the world take everything from them.
Others did what they could to make life bearable, to bring small moments of joy into a place that should have had none. For a time, Artie had believed that this was enough, that this hidden life could last.
Now even that had been ripped away.
His friends were dead, so many of them that his mind could not hold their names without choking on them, and the family that had taken him in was being slaughtered like vermin in the dark. They were being hunted through their own home, chased through tunnels they had once called safe.
The tunnels he called home are filled with the dead.
They lie twisted across the ground in positions that spoke of panic and pain, bodies torn open, blood pooling into the shallow streams that run through the sewers until the water itself carries the color of slaughter.
The air is thick with the metallic stench of it, with the low, broken sounds of those who are not yet gone but will be soon, and Artie feels something inside him fracture with every step he takes among them.
They are being hunted like animals.
Artie was terrified to his bones, something that made it hard to breathe and harder still to think. He could not understand what they had done to deserve this. The Morlocks had hidden themselves from the world, had asked for nothing except to be left alone, and still death had come for them.
"A-artie, l-leave… me… here and run," Leech said, his voice shaking as each breath came out wet and strained. "He.. will- kill- us- both- if you- have to carry me like this, and I will- only slow you down. Leave.. me here, you are… still uninjured and you can perhaps escape."
Leech was one of the first friends he had made in the sewers, a small green-skinned boy with an oblong head and large pale eyes that had once always been bright with excitement, and now those same eyes were dim with pain as blood soaked through the deep claw marks carved across his chest.
The sight of it made something twist violently inside Artie, a desperate refusal to accept what was happening, a silent scream that had nowhere to go.
Artie tightened his hold instead.
He wanted everything to go back, to return to the quiet nights filled with distant music and soft laughter, to a time before the gunshots and the screams and the smell of blood thick in the air, but that time was gone and it was not coming back.
All around them, their people were dying in the tunnels, hunted by men with guns and by something else that moved through the darkness with hunger, and the knowledge of it pressed down on him until it felt like the tunnels themselves were closing in.
He would not leave Leech behind.
He had already lost too much, had watched too many fall, and he could not bear the thought of abandoning the last person he cared about here. They would either make it out together or they would die together, and there was no world in which he would choose anything else.
Artie's mutant ability flickered at the edges of his mind, showing him fragments of what others saw, flashes of terror and pain from Morlocks scattered throughout the tunnels, glimpses of bodies collapsing under gunfire and of something far worse closing in on those who tried to flee.
If he focused, he could see it more clearly, could watch the slaughter unfold in its entirety, but he forced himself not to look too deeply because he knew that if he did, he would break. Even without that, he already understood the truth: there was no escape.
He could feel the beast drawing closer, and it made his skin crawl and his chest tighten as if the very air recoiled from it. It followed them with a playfulness of an apex predator, tracking the trail of blood they left behind, letting them run just long enough to believe they might survive before closing the distance again.
It was hunting them for its own satisfaction. Like a game with their lives on the line.
A sound reached him through the suffocating silence between distant gunshots, the unmistakable noise of someone vomiting, followed by ragged sobbing that echoed weakly against the walls.
Artie tightened his grip on Leech and moved toward it, each step careful as he navigated the bodies scattered across the ground, forcing himself not to look too closely at the faces he passed because he knew them - each one was someone he had laughed with, someone who had once stood beside him in the only home he had known.
If he allowed himself to truly see them, he would stop, and if he stopped, they would die. He could not afford to break now.
The stench of blood grew thicker as he approached, and when he finally reached the source of the sound, he froze for a moment at what he saw.
A stranger stood among the fallen, tall and dark-haired, his body shaking as he struggled to breathe between bouts of vomiting and quiet, broken sobs. He was dressed in blue sweatpants and a red leather jacket, clothes far too clean and intact for someone who belonged in this place, and surrounded by the grotesque forms of the Morlocks, he looked almost unreal, like an angel that had fallen from heaven into pits of deformities .
He was beautiful, and his green eyes were red from crying as they lifted and met Artie's. There was shock there, and confusion, and something else that Artie could not immediately name.
"Are you one of the Morlocks?" the young man asked, and there was a fragile hope in his voice that did not belong in a place like this.
Artie tried to reach into his mind, tried to understand him the only way he could, but he could not. There was something there that stopped him, something closed and impenetrable, like a door that would not open no matter how hard he pushed.
Artie did not know who he was, and fear flickered through him at the realization that his power could not reach the man, but beneath that fear there was a quiet certainty that the stranger would not harm them, a feeling that stood in stark contrast to the terror that stalked the tunnels behind him.
…
POV: Adonai
He looked at the two boys, and the only word that came to mind was aliens.
The pink-skinned one was carrying the other with visible strain, his thin arms trembling under the weight of the green-skinned boy who looked badly injured, his body slack and stained with blood.
Neither of them had pupils, their eyes pale and empty in a way that made them seem even more unreal, and both of them were completely hairless.
Their clothes were ragged, soaked through with filth and water and blood, clinging to them like they had been dragged through hell just to make it this far.
Adonai did not hesitate. He moved the moment he saw the state they were in, stepping forward quickly and carefully taking the green skinned boy from the other's arms. He handled him with as much care as he could manage, mindful of the wounds, and carried him away from the pile of corpses before gently lowering him onto the ground where there was at least a little space to breathe.
He brought his hands up and formed a sign, fingers shifting into position as his shadow stretched along the wall behind him, shaping itself into the outline of a deer's head.
"Tranquil Deer," he said softly.
From the shadow behind him, the creature emerged.
The deer stepped forward with a presence that filled the narrow space, its body towering four or five feet taller than Adonai himself, its sheer size making it immediately clear that this was no ordinary animal.
Its antlers spread wide and branched outward in intricate patterns, resembling a crown of living wood, and there was something undeniably otherworldly about it, something that radiated calm and tranquility. The air around it seemed to settle, the tension easing just slightly in its presence, as if the world itself recognized it as something that brought relief.
Adonai noticed the pink-skinned boy staring at the creature, fear and wonder warring openly in his expression, and he offered a small, reassuring smile, though he doubted it would do much in the face of everything the boy had just endured.
The deer stepped forward and lowered its head, gently pressing its nose against the boy's chest in a soft, almost affectionate touch. A faint glow spread from the point of contact, a soft and steady light that only Adonai could truly perceive, and beneath it, the torn flesh began to mend.
The claw marks, deep and jagged and clearly inflicted by something savage, started to close, the bleeding slowing as the skin knit itself back together.
The green skinned boy stared at him, wide-eyed and stunned, like he could not quite believe what he was seeing or feeling.
"What's your name?" Adonai asked calmly, his gaze flicking over the pink skinned boy to check if he was injured as well.
The boy responded with a series of quick, urgent hand movements, his fingers moving in ways that were clearly meant to form words, but Adonai had no idea what any of it meant.
He watched for a second longer, trying to make sense of it, but it was completely lost on him. Still, the panic in the boy's expression and the sharp, frantic way he moved made the message clear enough. Whatever he was trying to say, it was urgent.
"Calm down there, buddy," Adonai said, reaching out and placing a steady hand on the boy's shoulder. "I have no idea what you just said to me. I don't speak sign language, but I can tell you're pretty distressed. Don't worry, you are safe now. No one will harm you here."
The boy shook his head immediately, the denial frantic and desperate, and his hands moved even faster, his gestures growing sharper as he tried again to communicate.
He pointed back the way he had come, his arm trembling as he jabbed his finger toward the darkness of the tunnels, then brought his hands up to his face, baring his teeth in an exaggerated snarl before curling his fingers into claws and slashing them through the air repeatedly.
He hunched forward, then jerked back as if something had lunged at him, repeating the motion again and again, trying to force the image into Adonai's understanding through sheer desperation.
"Hmm, I see," Adonai said, rubbing his chin like he was following along.
No, I don't, he thought dryly. It looks like he's trying to tell me that something is chasing them, some kind of beast or monster.
"I wonder where the others are," Adonai said out loud, glancing around the tunnels as if the answer might just present itself. "I probably should've created the divine dogs first instead of focusing entirely on Mahoraga and the deer. Tracking would've been a lot easier if I had them right now."
At the time, it had made sense. He needed Mahoraga to deal with Rogue's situation, and Tranquil Deer was always useful because healing was never a bad thing to have on hand.
Now, standing in a sewer filled with corpses and a mute kid trying to warn him about something, it felt like a pretty stupid call. Something that could track, something that could understand whatever the hell the pink kid was trying to say, would have been incredibly helpful right about now.
He glanced at the green skinned boy, who was still being healed, and wondered if he was mute too.
"Hey there, buddy," he said as the boy slowly opened his eyes. "Can you speak? Are you okay?"
The boy looked at him, startled, then glanced down at the massive deer pressing its nose gently against his abdomen, a flicker of fear crossing his face before he gave a small, uncertain nod.
"I-I can," he said slowly, his voice strained like every word cost him something.
"Brilliant!" Adonai said with a bright grin. "I'm Adonai, and don't worry, I'm here to help. Your pink friend here is trying to tell me something, but I can't understand him. Can you translate for me?"
The boy swallowed, his expression tightening as he forced the words out.
"The… beast… is… coming."
Adonai understood immediately.
He found Sabretooth by smell before he found him by sight.
The corpse-choked tunnel opened into a broader chamber where the old government construction widened into something almost cathedral-like in scale, a vast circular junction ringed with maintenance walkways and rusting ladders, its ceiling lost in shadow above thick pipes that sweated moisture into the fetid air.
The instant the beast stepped into it his nose picked up the new scent threading through the blood and death.
It was animal and man fused together into something foully intimate, the hot musk of wet fur and fresh gore, a predator's scent sharpened by sweat and the copper tang of torn-open bodies.
He followed it calmly, stepping past floating corpses and dark stains dragged across concrete, and then he saw him standing on a raised maintenance platform ahead, one boot planted on the chest of a dead Morlock as though he had paused in the middle of his work merely to admire it.
Sabretooth was enormous, broad-shouldered and thick-limbed with a frame that looked built for rending and breaking, his heavy musculature bunching beneath torn fabric, his blond mane hanging damp around a face carved into a permanent sneer by cruelty and appetite.
Blood painted his claws and soaked his hands to the wrists, some of it still wet enough to drip from the hooked tips in slow pattering sounds that vanished into the sewage below.
There was a disgusting leisure to his posture, the satisfaction of a butcher who had done a long shift and found the work to his liking.
His pale eyes lifted as he looked at him and immediately brightened with a savage amusement that told Adonai everything he needed to know. There was no strain in the man, no urgency, no look of someone cornered after battle.
Sabretooth looked pleased. He looked entertained. He looked like a creature who had spent the past hour indulging every appetite he possessed and was considering whether dessert had just arrived.
For a single beat Adonai simply stared at him while the tunnel air scraped his lungs raw with the stink of corpse and his gaze moved from the blood on Sabretooth's claws to the bodies in the water and back again, and then something inside him settled into a stillness colder than rage and heavier than grief.
The tears that had come earlier had not fully dried, and his eyes still burned from them, though the trembling in him had gone and left behind a hard, lucid fury that felt almost crystalline in its clarity.
This thing had done this.
This thing had walked through the hidden homes of people already brutalized by the world above and had turned their refuge into a charnel house. This thing had laughed while doing it. This thing was still grinning.
"You did this?" Adonai said, and his own voice sounded strange to him, quiet and furious and stripped clean of everything playful.
Sabretooth's grin widened until his fangs showed. "I did a whole lot tonight, kid. You're gonna have to narrow it down. You talkin' about the screams, the begging, the blood in the water, or that look the little uglies get when they realize nobody's coming for them?"
Adonai began walking forward.
Without a hurry, he simply stepped off the narrow lip of concrete and into the wider chamber, his shoes scraping wet stone, his breathing even, his gaze fixed on Sabretooth with such intensity that the bigger man's amused expression sharpened slightly in response.
Adonai felt his aura stirring under his skin, Nen gathering with the natural ease of a heartbeat, not yet flaring outward in a visible storm, only filling him from within as Ten sealed his body and Ren thickened his presence until each muscle in him felt denser, more alive, more perfectly under his command.
The air itself seemed to tighten around him. He rolled one shoulder, then the other, and felt the familiar exhilaration of imminent violence begin to rise through his nervous system in glittering currents, that old intoxicating thrill that always came when danger showed its teeth.
He welcomed it. He let it sharpen him. Beneath it the cold fury remained like iron sunk into deep water.
Sabretooth hopped down from the platform with a heavy impact that sent a shudder through the metal and a spray of filthy droplets into the air.
"I know that look," he said, flexing one hand so the claws slid wetly through the air. "Seen it a hundred times. Someone finds the bodies, gets all righteous, thinks they're about to make the big bad wolf pay. Then I open 'em up and listen to all that hero stuff leak out with the blood."
Adonai stopped a few paces away. "Keep talking. I want the sound of your own voice to be the last thing you hear before you lose the privilege."
Sabretooth laughed, a harsh and delighted sound that bounced around the chamber and came back warped by echoes.
"There it is. That's better. You got some bite after all." He sniffed the air, nostrils widening. "Funny thing about you, though. You don't smell scared enough. New to this kind of slaughter, sure. I can smell the grief on you. I can smell the puke too. But underneath it you've got that sweet little spark. You like this. Somewhere in there, behind all that moralizing, you're enjoying the part where you finally get to cut loose."
Adonai smiled then, thin and humorless. "I enjoy a great many things. You're making a brave effort to become one of them."
Sabretooth blurred.
The leap came with almost no warning, a devastating assault pounce launched by a body that knew exactly how to convert monstrous strength and predatory instinct into one compact explosion of savagery, and Adonai only barely got his guard up in time.
Sabretooth hit him like a truck going full speed. Claws shrieked against Nen-hardened forearms, sparks and blood flying together as the impact drove Adonai backward across the slick concrete and slammed him into a pillar hard enough to crack it.
The second strike came before the first finished reverberating through his bones, a savage rake aimed low then high, feint into follow-up, one hand opening his guard while the other clawed for his throat.
Adonai twisted aside and took the slash across the shoulder rather than the neck, pain blooming hot and immediate as Sabretooth's claws bit through reinforced flesh farther than he would have liked.
He answered with a short elbow aimed into the ribs, pivoted into a palm heel for the jaw, and felt both strikes land cleanly.
Sabretooth laughed in his face and headbutted him.
Adonai's vision flashed white.
He recovered on instinct, feet sliding for purchase through damp grime as he ducked under another claw and drove a knee up toward Sabretooth's liver, then snapped a compact straight punch into the bigger man's throat layered with Nen.
The hit was heavy enough to crush ordinary cartilage. Sabretooth absorbed it with a strangled grunt and tore a clawing backhand across Adonai's chest in return, forcing him to retreat three quick steps while blood warmed his shirt.
The beast-man pressed instantly, no wasted movement, a seamless flood of old killing experience deployed through an animalistic style that was far more intelligent than it first appeared.
The beast lunged at an angle, low and then suddenly high, using the slick wall to propel himself in a vicious diagonal leap that carried his full mass toward Adonai's upper body with sublime speed. His claws lunged for the face and throat and belly all at once, as if any piece of flesh removed from the body counted as success.
He attacked from ugly angles, crowding space, smashing grappling attempts into strikes, using the chamber itself as part of his assault by hammering Adonai toward slick footing and obstructing pillars where evasion became less clean and more dangerous.
Adonai knew that Sabertooth was skilled, he wouldn't defeat Logan each time they fought otherwise. Yet fighting him here now, he could only compare to fighting a wild animal with the intelligence of man.
He fought like something that had spent centuries learning how fear moved through a body, how pain changed posture, how a wounded man favored one side and then the other, how to create openings through taunts and force them wider through pressure.
He used his size mercilessly, crashing into clinches where his mass could maul and tear, then springing out again with disturbing quickness whenever Adonai tried to establish a cleaner rhythm.
His claws were worse up close than expected, each hand a storm of hooks, rips, hammering swats, and tearing half-grabs meant to break muscle, and more than once Adonai escaped by fractions so small that he only understood how close he had come to disembowelment when he felt air against the fresh tears in his clothing.
And because he was Adonai, because he had always been a creature of appetite and adaptation and delighted self assertion, something inside him answered with a grin.
Sabretooth talked through all of it, voice thick with enjoyment. "You're fast. You're trained too. Fancy little footwork. Nice spine on that punch."
He slipped a right cross, slammed a forearm into Adonai's temple, and followed with claws that carved a furrow along Adonai's flank. "Still too clean. You learned how to fight people who follow rules. I learned how to kill meat."
"Oh my god!" Adonai shouted, grinning madly. "Just shut up, man! No one wants to hear your corny ass lines."
Adonai retaliated with a low sweep into a rising hook that should have taken the bigger man off balance, but Sabretooth turned his hip just enough to spoil the sweep and caught the hook on his shoulder, then rammed a knee into Adonai's stomach with vicious grace.
Air burst from Adonai's lungs as Sabretooth seized the back of his neck and smashed his face toward the edge of the maintenance rail.
Adonai brought both palms up, caught the rail instead, kicked off the pillar behind him, and inverted the position into a twisting escape that carried him over Sabretooth's shoulder.
He landed in a crouch, immediately launched a thrust kick into the back of the knee, and then surged up with a two-knuckle strike for the kidney followed by a chopping blow aimed at the neck.
This time Sabretooth snarled in real pain.
Good.
Adonai pressed, the thrill returning in hot bright streams despite the blood running down his side and shoulder. He felt the thrill of battle and he rejoiced at its music.
He flowed through angles now, testing, measuring, letting the fear and revulsion burn off into focus. He remembered his training with Logan. He shifted into tighter combinations tailored against this furry, using short strikes from close range, elbows, knees, compact hooks, anything efficient enough to fit between Sabretooth's mauling arcs.
Nen reinforced all of it, thickening his limbs into weapons and his body into tempered wire.
Sabretooth adapted right back.
The son of a bitch was good, Adonai had to admit. Clever. Delighted by patterns.
Every exchange taught him something. Every block, every pivot, every preferred response was catalogued behind those pale predatory eyes and fed into the next ugly little trap.
He began baiting Adonai's counters, opening one side just enough to invite the kick and punishing the chamber of the hip, presenting his jaw to draw a straight shot and then dropping his chin while his claws came upward from below.
He talked less now and breathed more heavily, and in the rhythm of that breathing Adonai could hear the deep pleasure of a creature finally getting the resistance it craved.
"You care about 'em," Sabretooth said, circling through the half-light while blood crawled down the side of his neck where Adonai had split the skin. "That's your mistake, runt. Makes you honest. Honest fighters are easy to steer. They're my favorite toys to break."
"I care enough to finish this properly," Adonai said. "Your continued existence is a personal insult."
Sabretooth grinned. "You care enough to get angry."
He lunged again, this time with a jagged line of attack that began as a direct charge and broke twice mid-motion, once into a dipping shoulder fake, then again into a lateral burst fast enough to fool the eye, and Adonai was a breath too slow reading it.
Sabretooth crashed into him and drove him down into the grime, claws hammering for eyes, throat, belly in a blur of wet silver. Adonai trapped one wrist, deflected another, then felt the third tearing rake open his thigh because there were simply too many limbs and too much mass coming at him all at once.
The world compressed into impact. Sabretooth's face was inches from his, lips peeled back from his fangs, his breath hot with rot and gore.
"You know what they all do at the end?" Sabretooth murmured, forcing Adonai's pinned arm toward the concrete. "They start making deals. Begging. Promising. Everybody's got a sermon until the claws go in deep enough."
Adonai looked into his eyes and smiled with blood on his teeth. "Then you've had an impoverished sample size."
He released the trapped wrist deliberately and took the slash across his bicep so he could free his hips, concentrated Nen into his core and legs, and exploded upward in a brutal bridge that launched Sabretooth high enough for Adonai to slip out and roll through the gap.
By the time Sabretooth landed, Adonai was already moving. He inhaled once, slow and full despite the pain, felt Ren surge harder through him, and for the first time let a meaningful fraction of his power breathe into the chamber.
The flow of battle changed.
Even Sabretooth noticed.
Ah, yes. There it is, he thought with a sharp laugh rising out of him. Nen was a power tied deeply to the emotional state of the one who wielded it, a force that answered to the fever pitch of the soul.
When the user rose, the power rose with them. When the blood ran hot and the mind slipped into that perfect edge between instinct and certainty, Nen did as well.
And Adonai was there now. He had hit that dangerous, exhilarating height where everything felt effortless and razor clear at once, the same wild rush a runner found when the body stopped feeling pain and became motion itself, the same fevered certainty a gambler felt when every risk suddenly seemed blessed by fate.
His pulse thundered, his grin widened, and the world around him sharpened into something bright and thrilling. He was in the roll now, and his power knew it.
In other words, Adonai Ezra was locked the fuck in.
Adonai's aura thickened with hungry brilliance around his body, invisible to ordinary sight yet tangible enough that the tunnel itself seemed to draw taut around him. His wounds still bled. His muscles still ached.
Sabretooth still outweighed him and still possessed a healing factor chewing through damage in real time. None of that changed. What changed was that Adonai stopped trying to survive Sabretooth's pace and began imposing one of his own.
Sabretooth charged and Adonai met him halfway.
Their collision sent a shock through the floor. This time Adonai did not give ground. He caught Sabretooth's incoming forearm with a reinforced frame, redirected it past his head by a razor's breadth, and drove a Nen-backed straight punch into the sternum with a sound like a sledgehammer hitting wet timber.
Sabretooth staggered. Adonai pivoted with him, elbowing the jaw, chopping the collarbone, sweeping the ankle, then kicking into the same knee he had attacked before. Sabretooth recovered with ugly resilience and ripped a claw across Adonai's forearm, but Adonai had already read the shoulder twitch that preceded it and rolled the damage, letting the strike graze instead of bite.
He answered with a heel palm under the nose that snapped Sabretooth's head backward, followed by a knee into the ribs and a short hook into the floating liver.
Sabretooth roared and the sound carried fury now.
"Better," Adonai said, stepping inside the next slash and driving a headbutt into the bridge of Sabretooth's nose. "You were beginning to bore me."
They became a whirl of violence in the chamber, feet splashing through filthy runoff, bodies slamming against pillars and rails, claws carving furrows in concrete when Adonai slipped by too quickly for flesh.
Adonai felt himself adapting in real time, his body absorbing the rhythm of Sabretooth's assaults until what had seemed wild became legible.
This was who he was in the core of his being, a man who felt intensely alive when death prowled close, a hedonist whose nervous system drank from peril like fine wine, and yet that exhilaration did not dilute his anger.
It sharpened it. Every beat of his heart said alive alive alive while the bodies in the water kept repeating too late too late too late.
Sabretooth sensed the shift and tried a different weapon.
He started talking again.
"You know they scream the same way no matter what they look like," he said between impacts, taking a kick to the hip and slashing at Adonai's eyes in the same breath. "Funny, isn't it? You'd think a sewer tribe would have some exotic noise in 'em. Turns out fear evens everybody out."
Adonai's expression changed very little, which was exactly why Sabretooth kept pushing, because the older killer smelled the restrained emotion and wanted it loose and stupid.
"There was one little thing down here with scales on half her face. Held onto her brother while I gutted him. Couldn't stop looking. Couldn't stop listening either."
Adonai hit him hard enough to crack a tooth.
Sabretooth spat blood and smiled wider. "There it is. Knew you had more in you."
The next exchange was vicious and ugly and brief. Sabretooth feigned high, ripped low, then converted the low line into a grappling entry that used Adonai's own forward pressure against him. In a different room it might have become a throw.
Here it became a maiming attempt. Sabretooth slammed Adonai into a support beam and drove claws deep into the concrete on either side of his head, trapping him for a fragment of a second while his knee smashed up toward the groin.
Adonai twisted just enough to save himself from the worst of it, but pain still detonated through his hips and lower abdomen. Sabretooth seized the opening, bit into Adonai's shoulder through torn fabric and skin with bestial savagery, then tore away laughing.
The pain was incandescent.
Adonai's control flashed white-hot.
For a dangerous instant he understood exactly what Sabretooth wanted. He wanted to anger him because rage promised relief, promised the childish ecstasy of surrendering to revenge without the burden of thought. And it made him simple.
He could feel how easy it would be to become all acceleration and no shape, all pain and answer, all appetite and impact. Perhaps that was what separated him from this thing in front of him.
Adonai loved pleasure and thrill and the electric wonder of dangerous living. Sabretooth loved degradation. Adonai chased intensity because it made existence bloom brighter in his veins. Sabretooth inflicted misery because misery was the only language in which he could hear himself clearly.
Adonai exhaled.
"With this treasure, I summon…"
The air grew impossibly heavy for an instant, pressure crashing down through the tunnel like the arrival of a storm compressed into one point. Shadows writhed along the concrete. Filthy water shuddered.
The vast, terrible form of the Divine General manifested beside Adonai in a presence so immense and alien that even Sabretooth's predatory confidence faltered. Towering, armored in its own impossible might, wheel poised above it with solemn menace, Mahoraga entered the slaughterhouse like judgment given shape.
The Sword of Extermination gleamed from its forearm fiercely.
Sabretooth's eyes widened.
"What the hell are y-" he began.
Mahoraga moved.
There was no flourish, no warning worthy of the name, only speed so overwhelming that Sabretooth's reflexes, which had moments earlier seemed monstrous by any sane standard, might as well have belonged to a sleeping drunk. The blade flashed once.
Sabretooth's left arm came off at the shoulder.
For one astonished moment the severed limb remained suspended in the air, claws still curled, blood spraying in a bright arterial arc across the concrete wall. The arm struck the ground with a wet impact while Sabretooth staggered backward roaring, the sound more shocked than pained at first, his body trying and failing to understand how he had been dismembered so completely and so quickly.
Adonai stared at him with cold satisfaction. "You should look at your face now. For someone who prides himself on being the apex-predator, you crawl like bitch. Want me to throw you a bone, dog?"
Sabretooth's lips peeled back, a reflexive snarl that exposed bloodstained teeth. "Careful," he rasped, voice low and rough. "Dogs bite."
Adonai tilted his head slightly, considering him with a faint smile that did not reach his eyes. "Yes, they do," he agreed, almost pleasantly. "And then they get put down when they become too rabid to keep around."
Sabretooth recovered faster than most minds could even process the injury. His healing factor surged. Muscles convulsed around the stump. He launched himself sideways instead of backward, eyes flicking between Adonai and Mahoraga with instantaneous tactical reevaluation.
Clever bastard.
The fear was real, but so was the intellect behind it. He understood at once that the new arrival was the greater threat and he also understood that standing still was death.
He snatched a broken length of rebar from the ground with his remaining hand and flung it toward Adonai's face as a distraction while simultaneously diving for the maintenance ladder and the shadowed vertical space beyond it, trying to break line, reposition, think.
Mahoraga was already there.
Its blade drove down, splitting the ladder and the concrete wall behind it in one sublime line of destruction. Sabretooth twisted away by instinct and only saved his torso by sacrificing flesh, the tip shearing a long red gulf across his back that opened him nearly to the spine.
He landed badly, rolled through sewage and blood, and sprang up snarling, one-armed and furious and suddenly very, very mortal.
Adonai advanced with a smile that had finally acquired a little pleasure in it. "Run harder," he cried. "Cherish the breath in your lungs, It'll be your last. I want ENTERTAINMENT!."
Sabretooth bared his fangs. "That thing yours?"
"It dislikes you already," Adonai said. "Which is remarkable, because I didn't know it possessed taste."
They attacked together.
When the beast is cornered, it abandons everything for the slimmest hope of survival.
Sabertooth abandoned pride, abandoned straight exchanges, abandoning any lingering hope of dominance. Survival became the whole of him.
He used the corpses as cover, hurling one into Mahoraga's line while he slid beneath a broken rail toward Adonai's flank. He smeared blood and sewage across the floor to ruin footing. He baited Mahoraga's blade into pillars to create collapsing debris.
He even clawed through an electrical conduit and sent live sparking wires lashing into the wet runoff in an attempt to disrupt both enemies at once.
The wheel above Mahoraga turned.
The first burst of current danced across its body and meant nothing. The second was already obsolete. Mahoraga stepped through the crackling water while the electricity that would have killed ordinary fighters simply ceased to matter.
Sabretooth saw it, understood enough to be horrified, and then Adonai hit him in the mouth.
Adonai had no intention of letting Mahoraga do all the work. He wanted Sabretooth beaten, cornered, stripped of that hideous grin, and there was a savage pleasure in moving alongside the Nen-beast like a duelist paired with living calamity.
Seeing Adonai as the weak link, Sabretooth was on him instantly, remaining hand clawing for the face while his jaws snapped for the throat. The assault was so sudden and so animalistically timed that for half a breath Adonai' eyes widened.
Mahoraga's wheel turned again.
The Nen-beast intercepted Sabretooth's angle before the second sequence could complete, having finished analyzing the beast's pattern. The Sword of Extermination swept low.
Sabretooth lost his right leg at the thigh.
The roar that tore from him then shook rust from overhead pipes. He crashed to the ground in a hurricane of blood and sewage, clawing forward with one hand, stump pumping red, body already desperately trying to regenerate tissue that had no time to form before the next assault arrived.
Adonai kicked him across the jaw with enough force to spin him onto his back.
"That was for the child with the open eyes," Adonai said, voice steady and terrible.
Sabretooth spat blood and laughed anyway, because madness and refusal were woven into his bones.
"You think this changes what I am?" he snarled. "You think chopping pieces off means a damn thing? I've been carved up by better men than you and left their bones in ditches."
"Don't care," Adonai said as he stepped around the claw that almost took his ankle. "Let's see if you become quieter after I rip out your limbs."
Sabretooth's hand shot out with blinding speed and caught Adonai's trouser leg, claws punching through fabric into flesh. He yanked hard, using sheer feral malice to drag Adonai off balance while simultaneously rolling under Mahoraga's descending cut.
Clever again. Always clever.
Even limblessness came slowly to something like this because the mind inside it never stopped hunting edges. Adonai hit the ground, felt claws tearing toward his calf, and stamped down with Nen-enhanced force on Sabretooth's wrist. Bone cracked.
Sabretooth only grinned through the pain and sank his fangs into Adonai's boot as though he might tear through leather, sole, and flesh by determination alone.
Mahoraga's blade fell.
Sabretooth's remaining arm came away at the shoulder.
For the first time silence followed the scream, perhaps because even Sabretooth needed a fraction of a second to experience what had become of him.
He writhed on the concrete, massive torso twisting, both legs now absent save one severed stump and one gone entirely, both arms removed, blood painting the tunnel floor around him in a widening slick while his healing factor struggled in frantic futility against wounds too catastrophic and too frequently renewed to recover from properly.
He was reduced and still not harmless, his jaws snapping at the air, torso coiling in predatory reflexes, eyes blazing with an undiminished hatred that somehow made the scene fouler rather than pitiable.
Adonai stood over him breathing hard, chest rising and falling, blood from his own wounds running into his clothes, exhilaration still singing through his body with bright and ugly vitality.
Sabretooth dragged himself an inch using only the torque of his spine and shoulder muscles, lip curled in a blood-slick grin. "Go on," he rasped. "Finish it. Or are you one of those pretty souls who needs a speech first?"
Adonai crouched.
"You keep trying to fit people into the only vocabulary you understand," he said. "Begging. Sermons. heroics. Monstrosity. It must simplify the world for you. Make everything easier to digest. I imagine that is useful when one has spent a lifetime chewing on one's own decay."
Sabretooth's eyes narrowed. "You don't know a damn thing about me."
"I know enough," Adonai said. "And frankly, I'm disappointed. When I first saw you, I was terrified. I felt like some random kid who had been thrown straight into an endgame boss fight with no tutorial. I had this whole image in my head of a flawless predator, some unstoppable killer who lived up to every story people whispered about him. I expected something serious."
He looked Sabertooth over with open disdain and clicked his tongue.
"But this is it? This is what had me stressed? You're a fraud. A full-time fraud. You can tear through the defenseless, chase children through tunnels, and butcher people who cannot fight back, but the second you run into someone who can actually hit back, you fold into this pathetic mess. All aura, no substance."
He gave a short laugh and shook his head.
"Now I'm wondering if I have been overestimating comic book strength this whole time, or if you are just exceptionally mediocre. I can't tell if the hype was fake or if you personally are just a generational bum."
Sabretooth pupils shrank in rage.
Even now he had one more trick, some desperate launch using the monstrous strength of his torso and jaws, some final attempt to close the gap and tear out a throat with his teeth.
Adonai saw the gathering of effort in the tightening abdomen, the subtle contraction along the chest and spine, the prehistoric resolve of an apex predator that would keep biting after dismemberment if rage alone could make it possible.
Mahoraga saw it too.
When Sabretooth lunged, Mahoraga countered before the motion had fully entered the world. The Sword of Extermination came down in a final merciless arc and removed the last leg at the hip, leaving Sabretooth as a bleeding trunk of a man writhing on the floor, every avenue of assault finally denied him.
He slammed against the concrete and lay there panting, eyes huge with pain and hate, his healing factor still fighting, still refusing to surrender even though every relevant battle had already been lost.
The chamber fell quiet except for dripping water, distant sewage flow, and Sabretooth's ragged breathing.
Adonai felt agitated just looking at the pathetic shape of the child killer writhing on the ground, and what unsettled him most was that he could not fully explain why the anger was hitting him this hard.
Why did it get under his skin so deeply that a group of people who had nothing to do with him had been butchered in the dark? Why did the sight of their bodies make something in his chest feel heavy and rotten? And why, underneath all the anger, did he feel like such a failure?
Maybe because some part of him knew this did not have to happen. Maybe if he had not been so busy chasing the next thrill, the next rush, the next distraction, maybe if he had used all that meta knowledge of the setting for something other than picking up girls and gaming the world for his own amusement, then some of this could have been stopped. Maybe not all of it, maybe not even most of it, but something.
But he had not done any of that.
Why?
Was it because he still could not believe any of this was real? Had some stubborn part of him convinced itself that tragedies like this only happened because comic books needed drama, because writers needed stakes, because stories demanded blood and suffering to keep readers interested?
Had he assumed that once the world became real, it would somehow become saner? Kinder? Less absurd?
The truth was uglier than that.
Adonai still had not fully accepted that the Marvel world he had been reborn into was real. He lived in it, breathed in it, bled in it, but part of his mind still treated it like a game map loaded around him, a setting full of quests and factions and famous characters whose lives existed for spectacle.
He knew intellectually that people here suffered, loved, feared, and died, yet emotionally he kept holding everything at arm's length, as if the whole universe was still fiction wearing a convincing mask.
People here felt half like NPCs until moments like this forced them into focus. Events felt like plotlines until he smelled blood and saw bodies stacked in heaps. Danger felt exciting when it happened to him, because he was the main character of his own head, but suffering happening to others had remained abstract, distant, part of the scenery. He hated realizing that about himself.
The corpses seemed to stare at him accusingly. Why were they looking at him like that?
It was not like he had known this would happen so early in the timeline. It wasn't like anyone sane would immediately accept all the insane things this world treated as normal.
Mutants secretly living in vast tunnels beneath a major city, building an entire hidden community underground while the surface went on unaware, sounded like conspiracy theory nonsense. The kind of thing internet weirdos ranted about in badly edited videos.
And even more absurd than that was the reality before him now. A massacre had happened beneath one of the greatest cities in the world, an entire people slaughtered in the dark while everyone above kept living their ordinary day without the slightest clue.
On a comic page, that was easy enough to accept. Stories needed conflict. Stories needed cruelty so heroes could rise against it.
Reality was not supposed to work like that.
Except it clearly did.
But even if he had taken it seriously sooner, what exactly could he have done?
He was just a boy with no political influence, no army, no institution behind him. It grated on his nerves that even with foreknowledge he might still have been powerless to stop any of it. The possibility that he could have tried and failed somehow bothered him less than the truth that he had never really tried at all.
Fuck. He felt like shit.
He had only wanted to enjoy life. Chase pleasure. Sleep with beautiful women, drink, party, laugh too loud, burn bright, and die before twenty-seven like some self-made legend of wasted potential.
He knew it was selfish, and until now he had not cared. It was his life, and he would live it on his terms.
But was it really that simple?
Was it fair to indulge himself while others were butchered like animals for things they could not control, especially when he had power and knowledge that might help? Even a little?
For the first time in years, he remembered his mother lying in that hospital bed. Her hair had been shaved away by treatment. Her cheeks had hollowed. By the end she had looked almost transparent, like life had already begun leaving before her body got the memo.
What would she think of him now?
That her son cared more about chasing thrills than doing anything meaningful with the strange second chance he had been given? What would she think of him laughing through life while pretending not to notice the pain around him?
At what point did pursuing pleasure turn into indifference toward suffering? Were those things truly the same, or had he just used pleasure as an excuse to avoid responsibility? Could he not seek pleasure for himself and still help people where he could? Could he not do both?
The plight of mutants was only beginning. He knew enough of the future to understand that suffering, fear, and prejudice were woven through what awaited them. He knew names, events, disasters, turning points. If he possessed that knowledge, did he not have some obligation to use it to shape a better outcome?
And was there not pleasure in helping as well? A different kind, maybe, but pleasure all the same.
He remembered Scott's words, that Adonai Ezra could become the hope of mutantkind. At the time it had sounded dramatic, almost cringe. Now, standing among the dead, it sounded like a challenge. There was beauty in that possibility too.
Still, he would not dance to anyone else's tune.
If he chose to act, it would not be by following Xavier's path or Magneto's path. He would not become another man's disciple, another ideology wearing a different face. He would do it his own way, on his own terms, with his own methods.
Yes. That was it.
He did not need to save the world today. He only needed to prevent the next tragedy. Then the next one after that.
He felt his Nen respond instantly to that conviction. It rose through him like a tide, sharper than before, steadier than before, the wild energy of it condensing into something refined and directed. Purposeful.
He looked down at the beast writhing in pain and decided its final fate.
In comic books, monsters like Sabertooth always came back. Death was a revolving door for creatures like him. They escaped prisons, crawled out of graves, and returned bloodier than before.
Adonai had no interest in playing along with that nonsense. He was not some saint wasting years trying to rehabilitate killers or show them the light. If he faced a problem, he preferred permanent solutions.
People like Sabertooth were beyond hope anyway.
He released small sparks of aura that drifted down and clung to the fallen brute's torn body like glowing embers seeking dry wood. Sabertooth noticed too late, snarling as panic finally entered his eyes.
Adonai reached into his pocket, took out a lighter, flicked it once, and tossed it onto him.
The fire caught at once.
Fire surged across Sabertooth's body in hungry sheets, racing along every line where Nen had settled. Fur blackened and curled. Skin blistered, split, and shrank back from the heat. Fat hissed. Muscles tightened so violently that his limbs jerked against the ground in broken spasms. The smell was nasty, thick enough to taste.
Then came the screaming. There was none of the earlier bravado to be seen on Sabertooth's face now that what he did to others was being done unto him.
Pure agony tore out of him in long, ragged shrieks that echoed through the tunnels and bounced off the walls like something damned. He clawed at himself, at the stone, at nothing, trying to escape a fire that moved faster than thought and bit deeper than ordinary flame. Every breath dragged more heat into him, turning each scream rawer than the last.
Adonai watched without blinking.
He watched the beast thrash weaker and weaker as flesh charred away, as the massive frame collapsed inward, as movement became twitching and twitching became stillness. He watched until there was nothing left worth calling a body, only burning ruin and settling ash.
He would like to see Sabertooth regenerate from that.
A sharp pleasure moved through him at the sight, dark and euphoric. It started as a chuckle in his throat, then rose into laughter.
He laughed too long. Too hard.
It rang through the tunnels bright and wrong, almost joyful in a place filled with death, the laughter of someone who had crossed a line and found the view on the other side exhilarating. It echoed among the corpses until it sounded like more than one person laughing, until even the shadows seemed amused.
AN: We are so back! The chapter was mostly about the actualization of Adonai's motivations, along with some much-needed development. The challenge was handling that development without contradicting the established personality of Adonai. It had to make sense, and I'm mostly happy with how it turned out.
Next chapter, the Mutant Massacre arc will be concluded, and with it, the introductory arc as a whole. It was a rather grim and depressing opening arc, but the fic will be much more lighthearted going forward.
And of course, the pacing will be faster in future arcs now that the characters have been established.
Is using Mahoraga in your first fight a fraud move?
Advanced chapters are available on my Patreon, so if you want to read ahead or support me so I can focus more on writing, check out my Patreon: https://patreon.com/abeltargaryen?