"Get ready," Johnny muttered, his hand pausing inches from the wood as he turned to glance at the agent beside him. "Are you certain he's inside?"
Barbara Morse didn't waste breath on an answer.
KNOCK. KNOCK. KNOCK.
Her knuckles struck the hollow metal of Apartment 3B in three sharp, disciplined beats. The muffled sound of heavy, dragging footsteps immediately echoed from the interior, shuffling toward the threshold.
The two exchanged a silent, grim glance.
"Are you operational during the day?" Barbara murmured, her eyes remaining locked on the peephole.
"What?" Johnny blinked, caught off guard by the abrupt question.
It took his mind a fraction of a second to parse her meaning. In the early days, before he had established any measure of control over the Spirit of Vengeance, the transformation had been an involuntary nocturnal curse—erupting at dusk and relinquishing him at dawn. That outdated physiological assessment had undoubtedly been filed in S.H.I.E.L.D.'s central archive by Natasha after the New York containment.
"I command the Rider day or night," Johnny replied, his jaw setting hard. "Worry about your own blind spots."
CLICK.
The heavy brass deadbolt retracted. The door swung inward, revealing a gaunt, hollow-cheeked man clad in a threadbare bathrobe. Deep, purple bruises of exhaustion ringed his bloodshot eyes, and his ashen skin hung loose across his cheekbones.
"Who are you?" the man rasped, squinting against the harsh corridor light. "What do you want?"
Johnny opened his mouth, but Barbara was already stepping forward.
"Federal Bureau of Investigation," Barbara announced smoothly, flashing a pristine gold badge from her palm while resting her right hand casually against the tactical holster concealed beneath her jacket. Her posture radiated the lethal certainty of an agent ready to draw blood. "We have reason to believe this unit is housing illegal contraband, Mr. Miller. Step aside. We are conducting an inspection."
Johnny stood frozen beside her, his eyebrows twitching in sheer disbelief.
'FBI?' Johnny thought, staring at the back of her blonde head. 'Aren't you top-clearance S.H.I.E.L.D.? Since when did we become G-men? Did I just get roped into an unsanctioned federal raid?'
Across the threshold, David Miller's confused expression violently curdled into manic, rabid hostility.
"Why...?" Miller hissed, his vocal cords tearing as an unnatural, mechanical rattle vibrated within his chest. "Why won't you parasites leave me in peace?!"
TEAR.
The man's flesh suddenly expanded like a rapidly inflating balloon. Seams split across his bathrobe as his epidermis stretched to a translucent, grotesque tautness.
BOOM!
With a sickening wet pop, his mortal skin ruptured into ribbons of gray mist.
Floating suspended in the center of the doorway was a floating, spherical monstrosity forged from dark, riveted iron and brass clockwork. Protruding from its rusted metal hull were multiple blunt gun barrels, while the front of the sphere bore the stretched, weeping ceramic visage of David Miller.
Barbara reacted on pure tactical reflex, grabbing Johnny's collar and hauling him backward as the shockwave of dust blasted across the landing.
"WHY WON'T YOU LET ME SLEEP?!"
The floating iron sphere shrieked with a voice of tearing metal, its thrusters firing as it rammed toward them like an artillery shell.
Johnny and Barbara rolled in opposite directions along the narrow corridor.
CRASH!
The mechanical monstrosity slammed into the opposite wall, pulverizing concrete and shearing structural studs into kindling.
Scrambling to his feet, Johnny stared at the floating abomination in utter bewilderment. "Is that a demon?! What kind of mutated species did your lab let loose?!"
"You're asking me?!" Barbara fired back, drawing twin collapsible stun batons that snapped open with an electric whine. "You hunt the damned for a living! What is that thing?!"
"I've gutted fiends from Hell to the Rio Grande, but I've never seen a demon forged out of clockwork and ballistics!"
The spherical machine pivoted mid-air, its gun-ports clicking as it realigned its trajectory, hurtling directly toward the corner where they stood hemmed in.
"Get behind me," Johnny growled. "I don't want to singe your eyebrows off."
FWOOOOOOSH!
Primitive, blinding hellfire erupted from Johnny's collar. The orange-and-yellow inferno consumed his flesh in an instantaneous roar, burning mortal skin, muscle, and hair down to a bleached, grinning human skull bathed in supernatural flames.
The Ghost Rider stepped into the light.
"Damn," Barbara muttered, shielding her eyes from the blistering heat radiating off his leather jacket. "That never gets less terrifying."
"Thanks for the review," the Rider's gravelly, dual-toned voice echoed down the hall.
The mechanical demon barrelled forward, aiming straight for the Rider's throat.
Without breaking his stance, the Ghost Rider raised a single, skeletal hand clad in scorched iron.
CLANG!
The impact sounded like a sledgehammer striking an anvil. The charging iron sphere stopped dead in its tracks, its immense kinetic momentum completely arrested by the Rider's unyielding, bony fingers.
"Flimsy scrap metal," the Rider mocked.
Hellfire surged down his arm, wrapping the sphere in an inescapable cocoon of judgment.
SKRRRRREEEEEECH—!
The weeping human face on the sphere distorted, screaming in absolute, soul-tearing torment as the mystical flames boiled its internal gears and melted its dark core. With a muffled pop of detonating ammunition, the charred, hollow shell collapsed onto the ruined carpet, smoking into ash.
"Is that the best the pit has to offer?" the Rider scoffed, kicking the slag aside. "Pathetic."
"Johnny..." Barbara's voice sounded tight, devoid of any relief. She was staring straight down the length of the apartment corridor. "I don't think that was an isolated scout."
The Rider tilted his flaming skull upward.
CREAK—CRACK.
Along the walls of the third floor, doors began rattling on their hinges. Plaster buckled and ceiling tiles tore loose as dozens of identical, spherical iron heads—each bearing the weeping, terrified faces of deceased Los Angeles citizens—punched through the drywall, their rusted barrels rotating toward the intruders.
"We aren't surrounded, Agent," the Rider chuckled, a wild, manic edge burning in his hollow eye sockets. "They just gave us a target-rich environment."
Placing two skeletal fingers against his grinning teeth, the Rider let loose a piercing, hellish whistle that cracked the corridor windows.
Down on the sunlit street below, the custom chopper roared to life without a key in the ignition.
VROOOOOM!
The tires spun violently against the asphalt, throwing plumes of black rubber smoke before igniting into ribbons of pure hellfire. Spikes of serrated bone erupted along the fuel tank and handlebars as the vehicle fully embraced its infernal awakening.
With zero operator at the controls, the Hell Cycle surged forward, launching itself off the curb and slamming directly into the vertical brick facade of the apartment complex.
Defying the laws of physics, the motorcycle tore upward along the ninety-degree wall like a predator scaling a tree, leaving two tracks of scorching black soot behind it.
CRASH!
The bike breached the third-floor hallway window in an explosion of glass, executing a blinding, ninety-degree drift across the carpet before coming to an immaculate halt directly beneath Johnny's leather-clad legs.
"Good boy," the Rider rasped, dropping his weight into the saddle.
Reaching down to the side frame, his clawed fingers unhooked a heavy, coiled iron chain. A flick of his wrist infused the metal with searing hellfire, transforming the links into a whipping, crackling serpent of judgment.
The Hell Cycle throttled forward on its own, its fiery treads gripping the floorboards as it surged into the swarm.
CLANG! CRACK! BOOM!
The Rider swung the chain in wide, sweeping horizontal figure-eights. Every mechanical sphere that crossed the blazing arc was violently cleaved in two, detonating into geysers of sulfurous flame and twisted shrapnel.
The Hell Cycle carved a path of total ruin through the complex, drifting into living rooms, tearing through interior partition walls, and incinerating every machine-demon nesting in the building.
Within three minutes, the gunfire and mechanical clicking ceased entirely.
The Hell Cycle rolled back toward the stairwell, idling with a low, rumbling purr beside Barbara.
The hellfire clinging to the bike and rider flickered, dying down to thin wisps of smoke as the burning skull melted back into the weary, human visage of Johnny Blaze.
Johnny wiped a smear of black soot from his forehead, breathing heavily as he leaned over the handlebars.
"These things are fragile," Johnny said, his brow furrowed in genuine unease. "A standard twelve-gauge shotgun or an armor-piercing round would punch clean through their hulls. An armed SWAT team could clear a room of them."
He looked down at the dozen smoldering craters littering the hallway floor.
"The problem is how they multiply. It's like finding a roach behind the refrigerator—by the time you see one scuttling across the tile, the walls are already teeming with thousands of them."
"Damn it all to hell!"
Barbara suddenly snapped, her face turning chalk-white as she tapped furiously at the encrypted S.H.I.E.L.D. datapad strapped to her forearm.
Johnny glanced over, his eyes narrowing. "What is it?"
"Do you have any idea how many confirmed resurrections our regional algorithm has flagged across Los Angeles County alone?" Barbara asked, her voice trembling with suppressed dread.
She spun the holographic screen toward him.
"Three thousand, six hundred, and seventy-six."
Barbara swallowed hard, looking into Johnny's stunned eyes. "And they aren't consolidated in one sector. They're dispersed across hospitals, nursing homes, school districts, and high-density residential zones across the entire metropolitan basin."
Johnny's breath hitched in his throat, his blood running cold.
If every single resurrected corpse across the city was a dormant, gestating womb for these mechanical horrors... then Los Angeles wasn't merely facing an infiltration.
The entire city was a living, breathing bomb—and the fuse had already burned down to the powder.
.....
.....
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Give me powerstones.
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