Chapter 148: A One-Sided Demolition With No Suspense Whatsoever.
Smoke billowed up from the street. Screaming and car horns filled the air in every direction.
The sniper had been about to pack up and leave.
What happened next stopped him mid-motion.
Through the scope.
A figure walked out of the rolling smoke and fire with not a single item of clothing out of place. The flames parted under his feet. The smoke and shattered vehicle debris pushed away from him on both sides, like they had their own awareness of the man walking through them and wanted no part of it.
"That's a problem." The sniper's voice had lost its composure. "Looks like we're not wrapping up early."
The observer, still not understanding what was happening, raised his binoculars again and looked toward the center of the explosion.
When he saw Matthew walking out of the fire, his expression changed.
He wasn't alone. Spencer, watching through the live feed, went completely still.
"Impossible."
"That was five hundred kilograms of TNT. Enough to bring down a building. How is he walking?" Spencer's fists closed on the armrests of his wheelchair. The shock in his face ran deep, and underneath it, something more difficult to read.
Back on the street.
The sniper had Matthew in his scope and didn't hesitate. His finger closed on the trigger.
The shot.
A custom round tore through the air toward the back of Matthew's skull.
In the same instant the shot fired, Matthew turned his head.
Through the scope, their eyes met.
It wasn't a feeling. It wasn't an impression.
The bullet stopped one meter from Matthew's face.
Matthew glanced at it.
He flicked one finger.
The air bent around the sound of it.
The bullet reversed at a speed that exceeded what it had arrived at.
The observer was already shouting: "Move! He's found us!" The words weren't finished when the bullet reached the rooftop position and took the sniper's upper half with it.
Blood reached the observer before he could complete a thought. He stood there with it running down his face.
Then, quietly:
A headless body folded to its knees. The binoculars hit the floor.
"One, come in."
"Confirm status. Target has engaged your position. Are you alive?"
"One?"
"...Fuck."
The radio produced a single defeated expletive.
"One is down. Repeat, One is down."
"Target is a major threat. All units, free fire."
"Free fire!"
The remaining snipers at other positions stopped waiting and put their crosshairs on Matthew simultaneously.
Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.
Tungsten-core armor-piercing rounds, the kind designed to punch through composite tank plating, tore through the air from four directions at once, converging on the figure standing at the center of the fire.
Matthew stood in the middle of the burning wreckage and did not move. The fluctuating fire threw his silhouette against the smoke like a fixed point in a landscape that had lost all other stability.
He raised one hand and swept it to the side.
A dozen cars that were still burning compacted in an instant under a massive invisible force, folding down to flat metal squares roughly the size of a manhole cover.
Listening to the rounds incoming from every direction, Matthew moved his fingers.
The metal plate blurred past him at a speed the eye couldn't follow.
The sound of impacts rang out continuously.
When it resolved, every incoming round had been intercepted.
The snipers stared at what they were seeing and couldn't produce words for a moment.
"What the hell is that thing?"
"What the hell kind of monster is this?" One observer's throat moved as he finally got something out.
"Watch out! It's about to hit back!"
Before the next volley could begin, Matthew closed his fist.
The rounds embedded in the metal plate pulled free, hovering in the air above his open palm.
He opened his hand.
Every round reversed simultaneously, faster than they had arrived, and with better aim.
Almost simultaneously:
Concrete exploded across multiple positions. No screaming. No drawn-out sound. Just the sharp crack of impact and then silence, position by position.
When the sounds stopped, the threats at those positions had been removed. Clean and fast.
Spencer's body shook again where he sat watching.
The Ten Rings operatives present went quiet.
Spencer collected himself and gave the order. "Bring in the reserve units. Deploy the B.O.W.s."
"Whatever it takes. He does not leave this street alive."
One or the other. That was the premise of this operation from the beginning.
Matthew Lawrence, you are too dangerous.
While you live, I cannot rest.
At Spencer's command, footsteps detonated from every direction at once, heavy and massed.
From side streets, rooftops, windows facing the road: hundreds of figures emerged simultaneously. The mercenaries were armed and they materialized as though they had grown out of the walls themselves. The cold glint of M4 muzzles formed a continuous arc through the shadows.
Every barrel pointed at the same target: the man standing alone in the center of the road.
At the same moment, helicopters appeared over the Manhattan skyline. They didn't attack Matthew directly. Instead, they dropped red shipping containers from hovering positions several hundred meters away.
Matthew glanced at the containers in the distance and let a small smile form.
"Normally, outside of the telekinesis that SHIELD has on file, I'd rather not show anything else." He looked at the assembled mercenaries in front of him. "Though I think what I've already got should be more than enough for this."
"Let's see exactly how high the ceiling is on whatever B.O.W.s you've brought."
"Open fire!"
"Fire!!"
The order came, and the rounds came with it. A metal flood from every direction at once, filling the air with the sound of hundreds of weapons firing in coordinated volleys. Mercenaries worked from cover in alternating waves. Spent casings hit the road in a continuous rattle. Muzzle flash strobed through the smoke like predators' eyes in the dark.
Matthew stood in the center of it and showed no particular interest. He didn't move. He didn't raise his arms. He didn't even blink.
He raised his right index finger and pressed it gently downward.
Time appeared to snap.
The incoming rounds, the metal tide capable of reducing any carbon-based organism on Earth to fragments, dropped straight to the ground five meters out from where he stood. Not deflected. Not stopped. They hit as though each one had been given a thousand times its own weight, driving themselves into the road surface with violent force.
The sound of tens of thousands of rounds hitting the asphalt in the same instant was louder than the volley that had fired them.
The road surface tore open under the impact. Debris and deformed rounds scattered outward in all directions, carving a visible depression in the asphalt. Everything within a five-meter radius of where Matthew stood had been driven down by a measurable amount.
Spent brass and flattened rounds sat in the scorched craters, still smoking.
The gunfire stopped.
Through the dispersing smoke, Matthew looked at the mercenaries scrambling to reload. Nothing moved in his expression.
"Covering fire! Where the hell is my covering fire!"
"RPG!!" The shout came from a rooftop on the left side of the street.
Three rocket trails ignited from separate positions simultaneously.
Three rockets, in a converging formation, screamed toward Matthew trailing white smoke.
He didn't turn around.
He reached one hand back. Five fingers spread open.
The three rockets stopped simultaneously, less than two meters behind him.
The airframes vibrated. The propulsion flames continued to burn uselessly at the rear, producing force that went nowhere.
Matthew gave his fingers a light, redirecting motion.
The three rockets flipped and went back the way they had come, moving several times faster than they had arrived.
The expletives from the rooftop positions were short.
Then the explosions weren't.
Concrete and other things rained down from the rooftop, hitting the road below in heavy impacts. The fire points on that side went dark. Only the sound of settling debris remained.
Left side alley.
Using the moment while Matthew had been dealing with the rooftop position, a group of about a dozen mercenaries tried to push through from the flank.
They had barely exposed themselves when Matthew turned his head.
The eyes that found them were completely calm in the firelight. Still, the way deep water is still. The squad leader, the moment those eyes landed on him, felt something move up through his body from the soles of his feet to the top of his skull. Years of operational instinct told him to step back.
He was already too late.
Matthew reached out and grabbed at the air.
The metal plate that had intercepted the sniper rounds earlier launched itself from the ground, spinning as it went, moving through the air with the sound of a hard edge at speed.
It entered the alley at an angle.
For a moment, everything was very quiet.
The dozen mercenaries were still in their firing stances, weapons raised, expressions frozen somewhere between fear and aggression.
Then, with what felt like a half-second delay, every upper body from chest to waist slid away from what was below it.
Blood mist spread outward and painted both walls of the alley dark red.
The lower halves remained standing for two full seconds before they fell.
"Pull back! Pull back!!"
The survivors screamed it.
Pull back to where, exactly.
They had come this far. Getting out wasn't going to be simple.
Matthew turned to look at the mercenaries retreating into the alley and brought his hands together once, the way you clap.
The brick walls on both sides of the alley moved like a hydraulic press engaging.
No warning. They simply closed.
The mercenaries inside were absorbed into the walls in an instant.
The ones outside didn't make it either. The rounds lying scattered on the ground rose against gravity, reoriented, and fired.
The sound of impact was continuous.
Then the sound of mass weight hitting the road.
The phrase "rivers of blood" found its literal form.