Chapter 144: Three Punches to Break a Blood God's Soul. I'm a Reasonable Man.
Golden rounds kept pouring into Deacon's mouth and exiting through the back of his skull with enough force to punch through a human body. The pain came in continuous waves, his body seizing with each one, but the Blood God's recovery kept him from any kind of relief. It simply reset him each time so the next wave could land clean.
He tried to struggle.
The force available to him was enough to tear through two centimeters of steel plate. In the Astartes' grip, it produced nothing. Those hands held him like a pair of small hydraulic presses, fixed in place, no movement possible.
Click.
The trigger pulled and the AK returned only the sound of an empty chamber.
Astartes Two looked at the spent weapon, tossed it aside without particular interest, and reached back for the chainsword.
He was preparing to resume when Matthew spoke from behind them.
"One, Two. You're not going to get anywhere hitting him like this."
He reached to his side, drew a syringe, stepped forward, and pressed the needle into the side of Deacon's neck.
The moment the compound entered him, Deacon's entire body lurched.
His perception of pain amplified in an instant by an order of magnitude he had no reference point for. Processes that had always been below the threshold of awareness: intestinal movement, joints articulating against each other, every minor mechanical function his body performed automatically, all of it converted simultaneously into unbearable agony. The sound that came out of him wasn't voluntary.
"AAAAAHHH!!!"
Natasha watched Deacon begin screaming at a completely different volume than before and looked at Matthew. "Mr. Lawrence. What did you just inject him with?"
"Nothing to worry about. A new compound." Matthew's tone was pleasant.
"A new compound." The crease in Natasha's brow didn't move.
Matthew nodded. "That's right. It was originally developed as an epilepsy treatment. Unfortunately the therapeutic effect was negligible and the side effect profile was significant."
"The primary side effect: temporary suppression of the endogenous pain inhibition system, producing acute pain hypersensitivity. It also disinhibits an area of the brain called the locus coeruleus, triggering abnormal electrical discharge and a sympathetic nervous system cascade. The physical presentation is full-body muscular convulsion and pain in the bones of the type normally associated with something actively consuming them from the inside."
"So it's a failed drug."
"You could put it that way." Matthew acknowledged this without any apparent discomfort, then shifted direction. "Though that depends how you define failure."
"On the specific metric of amplifying pain response, the efficacy is quite pronounced."
He bent down, picked up a handgun from the floor, and put a round into Deacon.
The crack of the shot.
"AAAAAHHH!!" Deacon's screaming went up another register.
Natasha was quiet.
Hawkeye, standing nearby, couldn't help raising the practical question. "The compound amplifies pain. I understand that. But how does that help us complete the mission?"
"It helps considerably." Matthew's pace didn't change. "Under this level of pain, even if the Astartes let go of him, he won't be launching any attacks. He's a tiger with his teeth pulled. Completely manageable."
"And we now have all the time we need to work out how to actually kill him."
He tilted his chin toward Astartes Two. "Continue."
Two received the instruction and resumed. The chainsword came up again, and the correction of the new Blood God proceeded.
With each cycle of destruction and reconstruction, the blood energy Deacon was drawing on to repair himself began running down. The most obvious sign was that the recovery was visibly slowing.
To avoid wearing out the chainsword, the Astartes switched to fists.
Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.
The rhythm was dense, each impact accompanied by the servo whine of the powered armor's joints cycling under load.
Deacon's head was held up by the hair, a fixed point in the air, not permitted to move. Each punch delivered its full energy directly. The sound of bone cracking and the wet sound of flesh reconstituting itself alternated in a continuous loop. His face was destroyed and rebuilt, destroyed and rebuilt.
At some point, Deacon stopped making noise.
Hawkeye sat on a nearby block of stone and watched Deacon absorb the iron fists in silence. Something surprised him.
He hadn't expected that kind of resolve. After all this time under the Astartes, not a word.
What Hawkeye didn't know was that Deacon's silence had nothing to do with resolve.
He had wanted to beg for mercy from the first punch. The second punch had destroyed his vocal cords, and he simply couldn't produce sound. The punches after that hadn't stopped long enough for anything to recover.
He'd been subjected to this without pause, one after another, like a heavy bag being worked by someone with no intention of stopping.
By now, Deacon deeply regretted everything.
Regretted initiating the ritual. Regretted becoming the Blood God.
An ordinary vampire subjected to this treatment would have suffered for a little while at most.
He had been beaten continuously for three hours.
Three hours. This was what torture actually was.
Stop. Stop hitting me. I give up. I don't want to be the Blood God. Please just let me go.
He couldn't speak. He screamed it internally, at full volume, where it went nowhere.
In that level of pain, death became the most expensive luxury imaginable.
Two more hours passed.
By the time the sky outside was beginning to lighten, the Astartes dropped Deacon's body on the ground the way you drop something that no longer needs to be carried carefully, and set it alight.
He was dead.
His blood energy was gone. He had died under the iron fists.
No heaven. No hell. No return to any higher power. A pure, simple death, of the kind that doesn't involve anything afterward.
He had died in considerable pain and was finished dying and would not be doing any more of it.
"Mission complete." Astartes One stood in front of Matthew, the powered armor now a uniform dark red from gray. The voice had no particular quality in it.
Matthew turned to Natasha. "Do you need to verify the result?"
Verify.
Natasha looked at the fire. Deacon was ash and fragments.
What exactly would a verification step add here?
"I don't think verification is necessary. I trust Mr. Lawrence's operational competence."
She paused. "And I trust the Astartes."
Her gaze moved slowly across the Temple of Eternal Night, which had at this point substantially achieved the status of rubble. Her assessment of the Astartes' combat capability had gone up again.
So had her assessment of what Umbrella Corporation represented as a potential threat. Something operating at this level, if it ever lost direction, would be extraordinarily difficult for anyone to contain.
She made a mental note to give Fury a full account once the mission was wrapped.
She was a professional. Nothing of this reached her expression. She walked out of the temple with the others as though the preceding several hours had been unremarkable.
Outside, Coulson had been waiting for some time.
When he saw everyone walk out intact, he exhaled with more feeling than he usually let himself show. They'd been in there long enough that if Hawkeye and Natasha hadn't sent him the occasional "mission in progress" message, he would have concluded something had gone wrong.
The hatch opened. Once everyone was aboard, Coulson looked at them properly.
Natasha. Hawkeye. Matthew. None of their clothes were even dirty.
The only things that had visibly changed were the two Astartes.
Their armor had gone from silver-grey to a uniform dark red. At close range, the effect was not pleasant to look at.
"You two," Coulson said, unable to stop himself. "Did you actually do anything in there?"
Natasha glanced at him and offered a small shrug. "Mr. Lawrence was right."
"The two of them were more than enough for this operation." A brief pause. "Honestly, the rest of us didn't need to be there at all."