Logan forcefully twisted his wrist, expanding his claws outward, completely pureeing the hybrid's heart from the inside out.
He expected the ten-foot titan to drop. He expected the light to fade from those horrific eyes. He expected the silence of victory.
But Weapon H didn't fall.
Instead, a sound began to build deep within the beast's shattered chest cavity—a high-pitched, vibrating whine that sounded like a jet engine spinning out of control. The crimson light in Weapon H's eyes didn't fade; it ignited into a blinding, catastrophic, incandescent white.
The heart hadn't just been pumping blood. It had been the biological regulator. It was the only thing keeping the infinite, raw gamma radiation from tearing the hybrid's unstable cellular matrix apart.
By destroying the regulator, Logan hadn't killed the beast. He had just pulled the pin on the most powerful nuclear warhead on the planet.
"KRRRRR-THOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!"
A concussive blast of pure, superheated emerald plasma violently erupted from Weapon H's chest. The sheer kinetic force of the explosion hit Logan at point-blank range.
Logan was launched backward as if fired from a railgun. He flew over a hundred feet through the air, skipping violently across the frozen Canadian earth. He smashed through a jagged outcropping of granite, his adamantium skeleton absorbing the world-breaking impact, before finally coming to a halt at the edge of the mountain cliff.
GASP!
Logan violently arched his back, spitting out a mouthful of boiling blood. His vision swam with black spots. The flesh on his right arm was entirely scorched away, leaving nothing but gleaming silver bone. His healing factor was screaming, desperately trying to push new muscle tissue over the metal, but the ambient heat in the air was instantly vaporizing the fresh cells.
In the center of the battlefield, Weapon H didn't fall.
The ten-foot titan stood frozen, his massive arms splayed outward. His ash-grey skin was cracking open, massive fissures of blinding, toxic green light splitting his body apart like a dying star. The jagged adamantium armor plating along his spine and shoulders began to physically warp, melting and dripping under the astronomical temperatures radiating from his core.
The snow for a half-mile radius was instantly flash-vaporized. The bedrock beneath his boots liquefied into a bubbling pool of orange slag.
Within the dark, chaotic void of Logan's mind, the System interface violently forcibly expanded into his vision. The sleek, dark UI was flashing with harsh, terrifying red warning borders.
[CRITICAL ALERT: EXTREME GAMMA DESTABILIZATION DETECTED]
[TARGET MATRIX FAILING. SUPERNOVA DETONATION IMMINENT.]
[ESTIMATED BLAST YIELD: 50 KILOTONS]
Liam's human consciousness violently seized control. His eyes widened in absolute horror. Fifty kilotons? That's... that's more than Nagasaki.
He scrambled to the edge of the cliff, his silver fingers digging deep into the stone. He looked down into the dark, sweeping valley below Alkali Lake.
A mile down the mountain, illuminated by the pale moonlight, stood the massive, towering concrete arch of the Alkali Lake Dam. Behind it sat billions of gallons of freezing, pressurized water. And further down the valley, nestled in the dark tree line, were the faint, glowing streetlights of the civilian townships.
If Weapon H detonated right here, the fifty-kiloton shockwave would completely obliterate the dam. Billions of gallons of water would instantly surge down the valley. Those towns... those people... they wouldn't even have time to wake up before they were erased from the face of the earth.
Liam stared down at his shaking, blood-soaked hands.
He was nineteen years old. A kid from Sydney. A writer who spent his nights dreaming up fanfiction, agonizing over character designs, and plotting out power-scaling on Webnovel. In his stories, killing was just a keystroke. It was a plot point. It was an epic moment designed to make his readers cheer.
But right here, kneeling in the boiling mud with his flesh literally melting off his bones, the reality of it hit him like a physical blow.
To save the valley, Liam would have to commit cold-blooded, deliberate murder. He couldn't just knock Weapon H out. He couldn't rely on the Berserk Rage to do it blindly. The Animal was quiet now. The adrenaline was gone. The system had handed the controller back to the teenager.
If Liam walked away, thousands would die. But to stop it, he had to take a life with his own two hands. He had to feel the flesh part. He had to watch the life leave the monster's eyes. Once he crossed that line, there was no going back to the kid he used to be. He would truly become the weapon.
[WARNING: CORE DETONATION IN 30 SECONDS]
[ADVICE: SEVER THE BRAIN STEM. DISCONNECT THE NERVOUS SYSTEM TO HALT THE BIOLOGICAL CASCADE.]
Decapitation, Liam realized, a cold, terrifying dread settling in his stomach. I have to take his head clean off.
"GRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!"
Weapon H let out a distorted, synthesized shriek of pure, mechanical agony. A beam of concentrated gamma radiation accidentally discharged from his mouth as his jaw locked open. The beam shot completely wild, slicing across the horizon and cleanly vaporizing the top half of a nearby mountain peak.
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!
The sky lit up with apocalyptic fire. The shockwave knocked Logan backward.
Twenty seconds.
Liam gritted his teeth. The hesitation vanished, replaced by a cold, unyielding necessity. He didn't want to be a killer. But he refused to be the coward who let thousands drown because he was too scared to get his hands dirty.
"Fine," Liam whispered, his voice steadying. "No more running."
He pushed himself up from the cliff edge. His left arm was still heavily damaged, the tendons exposed and bleeding, but it could move. His right arm was functional.
SNIKT!
The six silver blades popped from his knuckles. They gleamed perfectly in the blinding, toxic light of the dying titan.
Logan broke into a sprint.
He moved with complete, lethal precision. No rage. No feral bounding. Just the hyper-calculated, hyper-efficient stride of a man walking into the apocalypse.
"RRRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!" Weapon H shrieked again.
The hybrid couldn't see. He was entirely blind, drowning in his own volatile energy. But his enhanced hearing tracked Logan's heavy, adamantium-laced footsteps. Weapon H swung his massive right arm in a wide, desperate arc.
A massive wave of solid, kinetic plasma erupted from his broadsword claws, tearing a hundred-foot-long trench through the bedrock, aimed directly at Logan.
Logan didn't dive away. He didn't lose his momentum.
He dropped completely flat to the ground, sliding across the boiling mud on his chest as the plasma wave sheared the air mere inches above his back. The heat instantly singed the hair off his head, but his healing factor was already repairing the burns.
Logan popped back up to his feet without losing a single beat. He was thirty feet away.
Weapon H's chest began to pulse. The final stage of the meltdown. The green light turned pure white. The air pressure in the valley completely dropped, sucked into the vacuum of the impending detonation.
Ten seconds.
Logan needed height. He needed to be completely airborne to generate the sheer, momentum required to slice through a ten-foot-thick neck laced with adamantium bone.
To Logan's left, the Hulk lay slumped against a shattered boulder. The Green Goliath was out of the fight, his body smoking, his healing factor completely exhausted. But as Logan sprinted past, the Hulk slowly, agonizingly opened one glowing green eye.
He just looked at Logan, understood the assignment, and forced his massive, unbroken right arm under the edge of the boulder.
With a deafening groan, the Hulk shoved the slab of rock upward, tilting it at a perfect angle directly toward Weapon H.
Logan didn't hesitate. He hit the boulder at full velocity.
BOOM!
His heavy boots shattered the surface of the rock as he launched himself into the air.
Logan went entirely airborne, soaring thirty feet above the bubbling, liquefied crater. Time slowed to an absolute crawl. The roaring of the gamma fire faded into complete silence.
Below him, Weapon H tilted his massive, melting skull upward. The crimson light in his eyes flared one final time, locking onto the silver blur descending from the sky.
Forgive me, Liam thought. But you leave me no choice.
Logan didn't just fall. He weaponized his own mass. He pulled his knees tight to his chest and threw his arms outward, turning his entire body into a violently spinning, horizontal saw blade.
He descended like a silver hurricane. The Origins strike.
As he closed the final ten feet, Logan fully extended both of his arms. He crossed his wrists in a tight X in front of his face, the six adamantium blades perfectly aligned.
Weapon H opened his mouth to release the final, explosive shockwave.
Logan hit the target.
As he passed perfectly parallel to Weapon H's massive, bulging neck, Logan violently uncrossed his arms, ripping his claws outward in a brutal, hyper-accelerated scissor motion.
SHLIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIING!!!
The sound was absolute perfection. It was the flawless, high-frequency ring of unbreakable metal cleanly slicing through dense bone, muscle, and cartilage. The sheer, unstoppable kinetic force of Logan's spin, combined with the microscopic edge of the adamantium, offered zero resistance.
Logan didn't even feel the impact. He just sliced completely through the air.
He landed thirty feet behind Weapon H, his heavy boots slamming into the bedrock, cracking the stone beneath his weight. He slid to a halt, dropping onto one knee, his claws fully extended, his back turned to the monster.
For a single, terrifying second, nothing happened.
Weapon H remained standing, his massive arms raised, the blinding white light still glowing furiously in his chest.
Then, a perfectly straight, microscopic line of bright, toxic green light appeared across the exact circumference of Weapon H's throat.
SSSHHHHHHHHHHK.
The massive, block-shaped head slowly slid sideways off the neck.
As the head completely detached from the shoulders, the nervous system was instantly severed. The biological cascade that was triggering the nuclear meltdown lost its containment.
But without the brain to direct the explosive force outward, the energy took the path of least resistance.
VWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!
The decapitated stump of Weapon H's neck acted like a massive, organic exhaust pipe. A colossal, blinding column of pure, concentrated emerald energy erupted straight out of the severed neck, shooting hundreds of thousands of feet directly up into the sky.
The energy beam pierced the cloud cover, blowing a massive, circular hole in the Canadian blizzard, painting the entire night sky in a brilliant, auroral display of radioactive green light. The concussive force of the venting energy sent a localized shockwave through the valley, rattling the concrete of the Alkali Lake Dam, but entirely sparing it from destruction.
The massive head of Weapon H hit the liquefied bedrock with a heavy, wet thud.
A second later, the colossal, headless body of the ten-foot titan swayed perfectly still. The glowing veins across its chest slowly flickered, dimmed, and died out entirely.
CRASH.
The gargantuan corpse collapsed backward, hitting the ground with a final, earth-shaking impact that sent a cloud of ash and steam billowing into the freezing air.
It was over.
Logan stayed kneeling in the dirt. He didn't retract his claws. His chest heaved, his breath pluming in ragged, exhausted clouds of steam. His silver ribs slowly disappeared beneath rapidly regenerating muscle tissue as his healing factor finally caught up with the damage.
He slowly stood up and turned around.
The battlefield was a ruined, smoking wasteland. The Hulk was unconscious, his massive chest rising and falling in a deep, healing sleep.
Logan walked slowly toward the severed head of Weapon H.
The monster's eyes were dark. The horrific, broken jaw was slack. There was no life left in the titan. It was just a hollow shell of meat and metal.
Liam stared down at the face of the man he had just killed. His hands were coated in the thick, toxic green blood. The metallic scent of it burned his nostrils. His stomach turned violently, a cold wave of nausea washing over him.
He had done it. He had saved the valley. He had saved the dam.
But the weight of the act settled onto his shoulders like a physical burden. He could feel the exact sensation of the blades slicing through the bone playing on a continuous, agonizing loop in his mind. He couldn't un-feel it. He couldn't un-see it.
The nineteen-year-old writer was dead. He had died the moment those claws uncrossed.
In the corner of his vision, the System interface flickered one final time. It wasn't aggressive. It wasn't flashing red. It was a soft, pale blue, carrying the cold, undeniable truth of his new reality.
[HIDDEN QUEST COMPLETED: APEX PREDATOR ALPHA]
[THREAT NEUTRALIZED. MASS EXTINCTION EVENT AVERTED.]
[REWARD: ITEM BOX, +4 STAT POINTS]
Logan stared at the glowing blue text for a long, heavy moment. He didn't feel victorious. He didn't feel like a hero leveling up in a game. He just felt cold.