Chapter 149: Nemesis: Lay Not a Hand on My Master.
Blood dripped from wounds on the ground, collecting in a winding stream along the cracks in the asphalt.
The noise from the street had been loud enough to draw a crowd of combat journalists who had arrived quickly and were now pointing cameras at Matthew from every workable angle, running a live broadcast from the center of the action.
Peter Parker, who had been at work when the explosions and gunfire reached him, found a vague excuse, changed into his suit, and got to the scene fast.
He was currently clinging to the glass exterior of a building in a way that violated several physical principles, and had recognized the figure at the center of the street almost immediately.
Matthew.
His chest tightened. He was about to move when a figure in powered armor crossed the sky and came to a stop beside him.
"Mr. Stark?" Peter said, surprised.
"Do we know each other?" Tony Stark, in the Mark VII, turned his head to look at the teenager in the skintight suit beside him.
Peter blinked. "No. But Iron Man's reputation carries pretty well globally."
"So. Do you want an autograph?"
"I mean, yes, but this probably isn't the moment." Peter's eyes had gone back to Matthew.
He'd heard that Tony Stark and Matthew were close. So why was Stark watching Matthew get attacked and looking completely undisturbed?
Tony seemed to read the question without it being asked. He turned his gaze back to the street below. "Honestly, I don't think he needs our help right now."
"Take a good look at the people who came here to kill him."
"Not one of them has touched a hair on his head. They're all in hell."
"For our own safety, I'd suggest we stay exactly here and watch. We can step in when he actually needs it."
He looked sideways at Peter. "What do you think, neighbor? Spider-Man?"
Peter considered this for two seconds, then nodded.
He was genuinely worried about Matthew. But the state of the street below made it very difficult to argue with Tony's read. They could observe for now. If Matthew was in real trouble, there would still be time.
At the far end of the street, one of the red shipping containers that had been dropped earlier was shaking violently. Something inside was throwing itself against the walls. The impacts were heavy, landing one after another, and the steel panels were visibly deforming outward with each one.
The journalists immediately redirected their cameras.
Before they captured anything, the Iron Man suit already had the answer.
"JARVIS."
"Sir."
"Fire an EMP missile."
"Of course, sir."
A micro EMP missile launched and detonated.
The electromagnetic pulse swept the entire area without distinction. Every piece of electronic equipment on the scene died simultaneously. The journalists found their cameras smoking before they'd understood what had happened.
At the far end of the street, the container that had been shaking finally blew apart.
A crimson shape erupted from the flying steel fragments and hit the road hard.
It landed on all fours. Five thick, metallic-edged claws on each hand. No skin anywhere on its body; red muscle fiber exposed directly to the air, the striations twisted and contorted into visible cords. No eyes on the skull, only a massive jaw that dominated most of the head, and brain tissue that had grown outward so extensively it had buried what eyes there might have been. From inside the tooth-lined mouth, a long, thin tongue emerged, built for puncturing.
A Licker.
One of the most well-known B.O.W.s in the Resident Evil franchise and among the most feared. Hearing acuity sharp enough to track the smallest sounds. Running speed sufficient to match a moving vehicle. Capable of moving at full speed along ceilings and walls. The claws strong enough to tear through steel plate.
Trained special forces units paid heavily for encounters with a single one.
Twelve of them were on the street now.
They hit the ground and launched immediately, four limbs driving them forward like they'd been fired, claws carving grooves in the concrete, leaving only crimson blurs as they came.
Matthew watched the twelve blurs closing on him and shook his head with a mild, disappointed air.
He'd been expecting something. It turned out to be Lickers.
"Spencer. You've gotten old."
"The world has so much to offer and you're still working from the same playbook."
"No wonder Umbrella keeps declining." He said it evenly, then looked up at the Lickers that had reached him.
The claws capable of tearing steel stopped ten centimeters from his body.
No matter how hard they pushed, how violently they threw themselves forward, they couldn't close the remaining distance. It was as though the space in front of Matthew had been stretched infinitely, making actual contact with him structurally impossible.
Twelve Lickers, suspended in the air one after another, pinned in place like insects set in amber.
Before anyone present had processed what was happening, several masses of blood mist detonated simultaneously in midair.
In the space of a blink.
The Lickers were gone. Every one of them.
Tony and Peter went quiet at exactly the same moment.
They now understood how the mercenaries had died.
"Telekinesis really is something." Tony's voice carried the private quality of someone thinking out loud inside their armor. "Can't see it. Can't touch it. And the output is completely unreasonable. It's basically an invisible, infinitely shapeable weapon that does whatever you want."
On the street below, the blood mist had not yet fully dispersed. Fragments and bone chips from twelve Lickers were scattered across the asphalt, as though something enormous and invisible had simply pressed down on all of them at once. Not a single intact body remained. Blood ran through the cracks in the road, dark red in the firelight.
Peter Parker, crouched against the building wall, was staring through his lenses with his eyes as wide as they would go. He opened his mouth, tried to find a sentence, and found that his vocabulary had temporarily abandoned him.
What had just happened?
He'd seen the Lickers launch. And then they were gone.
Just. Gone.
"See." Tony's voice from beside him carried the specific quality of someone who had already told you so. "I said he didn't need help."
Peter nodded, and quietly retired any thought of going down there.
Then, just as everyone present had concluded that the engagement was over:
Boom.
A single heavy impact from the far end of the street. Not loud, but with the quality of a sound that hit somewhere behind the ribs.
Boom.
A second.
Then a third. A fourth.
The rhythm accelerated. The force in each impact climbed.
The remaining red shipping containers began shaking. The steel panels pushed outward like the containers were made of paper, the metal groaning under the pressure.
The door of the first container was punched off from the inside. The heavy steel panel spun through the air, clearing fifteen meters before embedding itself in the facade of a shop.
Peter hadn't fully understood what he was seeing. Tony, however, had arrived at a conclusion.
"So this is an internal power struggle at Umbrella's upper levels."
He thought of Obadiah Stane and what Stane had done to him. He hadn't expected to watch his closest friend face the same thing today.
A foot in a heavy military boot stepped out of the container and came down on the asphalt.
The figure that followed it was over two point two meters tall.
It wore a black military coat. A wide-brimmed hat. A face the color and texture of a corpse. The coat covered the body entirely, but it couldn't conceal the size of what was inside it. The muscle mass beneath the fabric was visibly enormous.
A T-103 Tyrant.
One of Umbrella Corporation's finest pieces of B.O.W. engineering.
It wasn't alone. The remaining five T-103s followed out of their containers one after another.
The moment they saw Matthew, they stopped moving at a deliberate pace.
In full view of everyone watching, they began to sprint.
The road was blocked with abandoned vehicles from the traffic jam. The T-103s ran as though the vehicles weren't there.
When a Tyrant's shin connected with a car hood, the two-tonne vehicle launched off the road like a toy, rotating twice in the air, trailing broken glass and leaking fuel, and came down aimed at Matthew's position.
The other Tyrants did the same thing simultaneously. As they ran, they grabbed whatever they could reach: cars, streetlight poles, broken chunks of blasted concrete, and hurled everything toward the figure at the center of the road.
Multiple vehicles and a field's worth of debris came in from different angles at the same time, closing off every possible direction Matthew could move.
Matthew looked at the incoming vehicles and debris, raised his wrist, and glanced at his watch.
Seven minutes since the whole thing started.
"I've spent about as much time on this as I'm going to."
"Come out."
The words landed, and the crowd heard a series of heavy impacts erupt around Matthew.
Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom.
The sound of something striking the incoming vehicles like a fist hitting a heavy bag. Hard, clean, and with full commitment.
The vehicles went back the way they had come.
When the debris cleared, a figure stood in the settling dust.
Two point eight meters. Living armor covering every surface, symbiote plating shifting and alive across the frame.
The Nemesis. Multi-stage enhanced and carrying every upgrade that had been put into him.
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