Chapter 150: Ultimate Nemesis vs. Nemesis.
The cars thrown back by the impact landed squarely on the charging T-103 Tyrants, stopping them cold mid-sprint.
The Tyrants tore the crumpled steel off themselves the way you peel foil from something it's wrapped around. They looked toward the source of the attack.
Their intelligence was limited, but they could distinguish an attack's origin point from their designated target. The interference had come from somewhere else.
While they were still searching, the ground announced the answer.
Boom.
Nemesis came down with one foot and scattered the dust. The flames that had been burning around Matthew went out under the impact.
It stood in front of Matthew, positioning itself between him and everything facing them. A guardian with the disposition of someone who intended to hold that position without much concern for what came at them.
Behind the symbiote living armor, Nemesis scanned the T-103 Tyrants standing off in the distance.
It said nothing. It raised one arm, which was approximately as thick around as an ordinary person's waist.
Then:
A metallic shriek tore through the air.
The forearm of the living armor split open. Black biomass surged out through the gap, then immediately solidified, hardened, and set.
When the resonance faded, a massive combat blade, roughly as tall as a standing person, had replaced Nemesis's hand.
This was one of the most practical abilities Riot's weaponized form offered: the symbiote could reshape itself into weapons on demand. In the first Venom film, Venom had described Riot as a living arsenal. This was what that looked like.
A casual sweep of the blade through a nearby streetlight.
Hot knife through soft material. The lamp post went in half. The severed electrical cables threw sparks in every direction.
Nemesis swept its gaze across the line of Tyrants at the far end of the street.
It didn't wait for them to come.
Once it had their positions locked, it launched.
Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom.
The footfalls hit like drum strikes. Each one drove a crater roughly two meters across into the road beneath it. The sound alone was enough to rupture eardrums at close range.
On the building nearby, Tony Stark watched the approach and felt something he recognized.
"Still the same presence it always had."
In the street below, Nemesis's sprint was completely aggressive. That enormous frame leaned forward at nearly forty-five degrees. Each stride covered dozens of meters. The legs worked like industrial piledrivers, alternating, hammering the ground. The whole mass of it came forward wrapped in displaced wind and scattering debris, a grey-iron wave driving toward the lead Tyrant.
The lead T-103 didn't have time to set itself.
Its eyes had barely registered the incoming shape before the blade was already above it.
It raised both arms on instinct, trying to absorb the strike.
The blade came down.
A flash of cold light.
Then the sound of bone and muscle failing in ways they weren't built to withstand.
Half a shoulder and the entire arm went sideways.
Grey bone exposed at the stump. The wound hadn't had time to bleed before Nemesis's left arm reshaped into a square hammer covered in bone spurs and drove it down onto what remained.
The impact was audible from a significant distance.
The T-103 Tyrant's lower half became a dispersal event. What was left of it stopped moving.
When the blood mist and dust cleared, Nemesis drew its left arm back.
The hammer dissolved and reformed into a hand.
It looked down at what was on the ground with eyes that contained no particular emotion. Then it said, very evenly: "Target one. Confirmed dead."
The description of the process took longer than the process. From the moment Nemesis had fixed on that Tyrant to the moment it was dead, less than a second had passed.
In that time, one of Umbrella's proudest B.O.W.s had been removed from the equation entirely.
Nemesis's pale eyes moved to what remained.
The surviving T-103s had enough optimized intelligence to assess the situation correctly and without discussion. Five of them split into two groups instantly.
Three moved forward simultaneously, using their combined mass to form a wall between Nemesis and the open street behind them.
The other two turned and went for Matthew at full speed.
The intent was clear: one group to pin Nemesis, one group to kill the target.
Nemesis looked past the three blocking Tyrants at the two moving toward Matthew.
It moved.
The blur of it went straight into one of the three blocking Tyrants head-on without any attempt to go around.
That Tyrant roared, tore its restraint coat off its body, and began changing.
Heat poured out of the musculature. The frame that had already been large expanded rapidly, reaching two point five meters. The right hand reshaped into a clawed structure layered with bone protrusions.
It swung at the incoming Nemesis with full commitment, aimed at the center of mass, trying to punch through.
Nemesis's living armor swelled in response.
It hit the Tyrant like a high-speed train taking a curve.
The Tyrant's arm was not the thing that went through anything.
Its limbs and internal matter were distributed across the immediate area.
On the building above, Peter Parker had been watching all of this through his lenses. What he'd just seen gave him a new framework for what "combat" meant.
He'd watched the Tyrant come apart in sequence. From his angle: the clawed arm went first, crumbling inward from the point of impact. Then the arm itself. Then the body. It had disassembled like someone had pried apart a construction toy. Forcefully, all at once.
His stomach made a decision he hadn't been consulted about.
"Mr. Stark. My stomach is not doing well."
"Don't talk to me. Neither is mine."
"I'm sorry, Mr. Stark, I can't help it-"
Peter Parker threw up.
Because he hadn't removed his mask, the results went directly back onto his face. Which made things considerably worse.
"Mr. Stark. I need to go wash my face."
Tony: "...At a time like this you can't just go ahead and do that?"
He watched Peter swing away through the cityscape with an expression that said: this kid would rather wear his own vomit than take the mask off in public.
Back in the street.
One Tyrant had been destroyed on contact. The other two from the blocking group hadn't stopped. They tore off their own restraints, doubled in size and distortion, and came at Nemesis from both sides at once.
Under normal circumstances, something might have hesitated at that approach.
Nemesis was not the prey in this engagement.
One of the two Tyrants didn't track the movement.
By the time it registered that anything had happened, Nemesis was directly in front of it.
The Tyrant's instinct said attack. Its body immediately began to comply.
Then it discovered that its strength was leaving it very quickly. It couldn't raise its arm.
It looked down.
An iron-grey arm had gone into its chest cavity up to the shoulder.
Its secondary heart had been torn apart. Blood was running out in volume.
A wet, adhesive sound filled the immediate area as Nemesis withdrew.
Five fingers opened.
In the palm: a heart that was still beating. The primary heart. The one responsible for circulation.
Slight pressure from the fingers.
The sound that followed was brief.
Blood mist from between the fingers.
With the second blocking Tyrant dead, the third came in without any sign of self-preservation, swinging its claws directly at Nemesis's throat.
In the next moment, the target wasn't there.
The swing connected with nothing. The Tyrant stumbled forward two steps from the momentum of a strike that had found no resistance.
It turned its head, searching. Nothing.
Then a hand came from directly behind it.
Fingers spread open and closed around the entire face.
Nemesis had appeared behind it without the Tyrant understanding when.
The fully armored arm lifted. The Tyrant was raised entirely off the ground by its face, feet cycling uselessly in the air, claws stabbing at the head above it, remaining hand trying to pry the fingers off.
The Tyrant's strength was enough to bend rebar. It couldn't move a single finger.
Nemesis watched the thing struggling in its grip.
In full view of everyone watching, it reached across with its other hand and took hold of the Tyrant's ankles.
Both hands applied force simultaneously. One pulling the head up. One pulling the legs down.
The Tyrant's body began to stretch. Then to lengthen. Then to deform.
A series of sounds came from it that made nearby observers' teeth ache. Muscle fibers let go one by one. The skin made the sound of thick wet fabric being torn.
The Tyrant's scream didn't reach its throat before the body parted at the midsection.
Blood came down like a hard rain.
Everything that had been inside came with it, spread across the street.
Nemesis released both hands.
Dropped what it was holding near the curb with two heavy impacts, the way you discard something that no longer requires attention.
It raised its eyes toward the last two Tyrants still driving toward Matthew.
It had been about to move to intercept.
Then both Tyrants left the ground simultaneously.
An invisible force took hold of them.
Both were caught as though in two enormous invisible hands, and then, with the logic of someone wringing out a wet towel, the force applied rotation.
As the towel twisted into a spiral, what was inside came out.
A wet impact as the wrung results were set aside.
Matthew's gaze moved to the last shipping container at the far end of the street.
"So. We've had the T-103 Tyrants. What's in the last one?"
He appeared to have already worked out the answer. A slight smile.
The container responded as though it had heard him.
One moment still. The next, the roof panel flew off entirely.
The figure that came out moved nothing like the Tyrants had.
It didn't walk out. It jumped.
The heavy body launched from the container, rotated once in the air, and came down in a half-crouch that drove a crater more than three meters across into the rubble below.
It stood up slowly, revealing itself in full.
Same origin as the Tyrants, but the scale was different. Over two point seven meters. Wrapped in a black restraint coat with the texture of thick leather. Its face was covered in suture lines, the features more distorted than a Tyrant's, the lips removed entirely, leaving a row of uneven yellowed teeth and gums in constant motion. Most prominently: heavy metal chains wrapped around its body at various points, and on its shoulder, a mounted weapon.
A three-barrel Gatling cannon.
The scale was not standard. Each barrel was as thick as a human arm. This was less a mounted gun and more a small artillery piece in portable form. The belt feed ran from a massive ammunition container on its back, the brass links catching the firelight.
Nemesis. Also called the Pursuer in older terminology.
An old acquaintance of Matthew's.
This one, however, had not been through the multiple enhancement stages Matthew's Nemesis had undergone. This was the standard production version.
Even so, the standard version remained the single most successful B.O.W. Umbrella Corporation had ever produced. Nothing else came close.
The Nemesis in the rubble straightened.
That misshapen head turned slowly. Clouded eyes found Matthew at the center of the street.
It spoke. The voice was low and rough. "Target..."
It raised the Gatling cannon from its shoulder and aimed at Matthew.
A larger shape stepped directly into the line of fire before it could pull the trigger.
Then walked toward it. One step at a time.
The standard Nemesis didn't hesitate. It fired.
The cannon sound was physical in its volume, filling the street.
The expected result, the target being torn apart by the barrage, didn't happen.
The shape kept walking through the fire. Steady pace, unhurried. The rounds landing on it might as well have been pelting it with peanuts for all the effect they produced.
The standard Nemesis processed this with something approaching confusion.
The shape walked through the barrage, reached it, and closed a hand around the still-spinning barrels.
It bent them ninety degrees.
The snap of it was like breaking a dry twig.
With its weapon gone, the standard Nemesis discarded the chains and ammunition container, looked up at the shape in front of it, which stood nearly thirty centimeters taller, and threw a punch.
Then another. Then more.
Heavy fists, landing on the upgraded Nemesis's chin in sequence.
At first, the upgraded Nemesis's head moved slightly with each impact.
Then it stopped moving at all.
The blows continued. The upgraded Nemesis stood there and received them without any response whatsoever. The incoming force was approximately what you'd get from a soft and determined infant.
The upgraded Nemesis looked at the standard model still swinging away at it.
"So this is what I used to be."
Something in its voice that might have been disappointment, in whatever register the living armor translated emotion into.
It looked at the standard version still trying to land something meaningful, and extended no particular mercy.
Both arms reshaped into blades simultaneously. One stroke through the chest.
Then, with the unhurried precision of something doing a task it found very straightforward, it pinned the standard Nemesis to the ground and worked through the rest of it.
The standard model offered no resistance.
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