Chapter 191: What Do You Mean, Object Swap and Thunder-Fruit Powers?
The explosion outside had pushed the already-unstable ruin into a second collapse.
And that second collapse, by a twist of circumstances, had done what nothing else had managed to do: it supplied the final missing step in Apocalypse's rebirth ritual.
More precisely, it activated it.
A thousand years ago, the ritual had been forcibly interrupted midway, leaving the entire process perpetually incomplete. What it had been missing was the re-awakening of consciousness after the rebirth itself. The second collapse, in knocking away the pyramid capstone and exposing it to sunlight, had provided exactly that.
As the light traveled along the ancient carved lines and reached Apocalypse, his eyes, sealed shut an instant before, snapped open.
He lurched upright like a man wrenching himself out of a deep, terrible nightmare, pulling in a sharp breath, and sat up straight from the stone platform.
The whole thing had a quality that didn't quite belong in the world of the living.
Newly roused from a sleep of immeasurable length, Apocalypse swept his gaze across the chamber, alert and assessing.
Because of how the ritual worked, he retained no memory of how long he had been under, and no knowledge that the process had been disrupted. As far as his own experience was concerned, he had simply gone to sleep, and when he opened his eyes, the magnificent hall that had surrounded him was a ruin, and the age that had been his was long finished.
His gaze moved across the people in the chamber one by one, and came to rest on a crew member who was in the process of attempting to load him into a lead-lined container.
His brow tightened.
In Apocalypse's understanding of the world, he was the supreme leader of mutantkind, a being of absolute standing. The figure in front of him carried not a trace of the X-gene in his genetic structure. An ordinary baseline human. Reaching for him without permission.
This was an affront beyond tolerance.
"Lowly slave..."
Apocalypse raised his hand on instinct. The loose particles of sand and grit floating in the chamber air gathered without sound and swept silently toward the throats of the crew members.
At the moment he was about to connect, two large figures in heavy powered armor erupted from the shadows without warning and swung their chainsaw blades at his throat without preamble.
Sensing the threat closing in, Apocalypse threw up an energy barrier in the same instant.
A low, resonant hum.
The shrieking chainsaw blades were stopped dead at one meter from his body, held back by a pale violet energy field.
Unable to cut through, the two Astartes pivoted immediately, each seizing one of the crew members who had been frozen in place, and threw them bodily toward the corridor.
At the same moment, the four Astartes standing guard outside the inner chamber heard the commotion and came through the doorway at speed, instinctively leveling their bolt guns at Apocalypse.
"Target threat level: high."
"We hold him. Everyone else fall back." The voice that came from behind the faceplate was flat and emotionless.
Eleanor didn't hesitate. She ordered the team to begin withdrawal.
The earlier explosion had triggered the second collapse, and the exit passage they'd cleared on the way in had suffered new obstructions at several points.
The good news was that the Astartes who had pushed outward to assess the combat situation outside had already cleared those blockages on his way back.
It wasn't a clean job, but it was enough for the team to get through.
Inside the chamber, the bolt guns opened up.
Round after round hammered against Apocalypse's energy shield in a continuous stream, the muzzle fire and the bursts of detonation lighting up the otherwise pitch-black chamber, throwing the cold faceplates of the Astartes into sharp relief.
Each round carried enough force to destroy a tank. Against the shield's surface, they produced nothing but ripples.
The barrage was doing no real damage to Apocalypse, but the shockwaves from the sustained detonations were doing damage to the ruin itself, which was already well past its structural limits. Sections of the ceiling began giving way again.
Behind his shield, Apocalypse looked up at the pyramid above him, coming apart piece by piece, then brought his gaze back to the armored figures still attacking him with no sign of stopping.
He considered briefly, then decided not to engage further.
He had just awakened. Fighting these people was not the priority. What mattered now was getting clear and quickly understanding what had happened to the world during his sleep, and what it had become.
His eyes went white.
A particular energy pattern built outward from within the shield, cycling for a few seconds.
Then it collapsed inward in an instant, and Apocalypse was gone.
In the same moment he vanished:
A deep, resonating boom.
The ruin's structure, long past its final limits, let out its last groan.
With a sound like a sustained thunderclap, the ancient structure came down completely.
Outside.
Eleanor had just cleared the end of the passage when the sound hit her from behind like a physical force.
She spun around.
The ruin was coming apart from the top down, crumbling and folding inward on itself, as though an invisible hand were crushing it from the inside out.
Massive stones wrapped in rolling grey-white dust came down in a torrent, throwing up a curtain that swallowed the sunlight entirely. Whatever was happening inside was completely invisible behind the wall of debris.
It was some time before everything went quiet again, leaving only the soft clatter of settling stone and the low sound of wind moving across the sand.
In the distance, the chicken-rice vendor and the cold drinks vendor, who had taken cover behind whatever they could find when the explosions started, carefully poked their heads out.
They stared at what remained of the pyramid for a long moment. Then the drinks vendor spoke.
"So... didn't you say they were here for historical preservation?"
The chicken-rice vendor: ...
"...Looking at it now, I'd say the restoration came out reasonably well."
"At least now they can rebuild completely from scratch."
Elsewhere.
Eleanor had retreated to the mobile operations vehicle. Through the window, she watched the shell-shocked crew members outside, then took a slow breath, pulled out her phone, and started dialing Matthew.
Before the call went through, a voice behind her made her put it down.
"Don't bother. I've already seen everything that happened on site."
"This wasn't your fault."
"From what came back through the Astartes' camera feeds, everything your team did was exactly what I asked for."
"The problem was a leak inside the company. Someone tipped off our enemies in advance."
Eleanor turned.
Matthew was sitting on the sofa in the vehicle, apparently having appeared there at some unspecified point. Beside him on the cushion was a black opaque plastic bag.
"That's the main reason this operation didn't go as planned."
He tossed the black bag onto the floor in front of Eleanor.
She picked it up and opened it.
Inside, carefully sealed in plastic wrap, was a severed head.
"Aldrich Killian?" she murmured, more to herself than anyone.
"That's right." Matthew's voice dropped a degree. "He's been holding a grudge about the company taking ownership of his research results ever since he joined us."
"A while back he started showing signs of wanting to lift company files. Thomas, the deputy director of the research division, caught it and brought it to me. I had his activities placed under strict monitoring after that."
"Unfortunately, it wasn't until today that he actually made his move."
"At six this morning, Killian attempted to walk out of the company building with research files. Hunk intercepted him at the door and dealt with him on the spot."
"After he was dead, Hunk found a second phone on him, one that had never been registered with the company and recovered the complete chat history between him and HYDRA."
As he spoke, Matthew reached into his pocket and set a modified phone on the table.
"That's the conversation record. The short version: they were treating each other as the enemy of a mutual enemy, working out how to bring Umbrella down."
"This operation was a direct strike against us. The Extremis used in the attack was Killian's contribution."
Eleanor's brow had drawn into a tight line. Matthew stepped forward and gave her head a light ruffle. "Relax. This isn't actually a setback."
"He moved fast, but we can still find him. It'll just take calling in a favor or two."
The favor he had in mind was the Ancient One. Either ask her to locate where Apocalypse had gone, or have her teach him a tracking spell on the spot.
The old woman's retirement was only a few years away. If not now, when?
With Eleanor's mood settled, Matthew stepped out of the vehicle.
A quick visual sweep was all it took, even through the dust and rubble, to locate the Astartes buried under the collapse. His X-ray vision found them without difficulty.
Whatever else could be said, the powered armor's defensive performance was hard to fault. The sub-Adamantium outer layer plated with Vibranium gave the suits a defensive ceiling well above what most threats could reach. Even buried under that scale of impact, the buried Astartes all had stable life signs. The worst injury among them was a fractured lumbar vertebra and a broken femur.
And even that, Matthew noted as his gaze landed on the affected unit, had already been resolved. The Astartes' accelerated self-repair had finished correcting the fractures while they were still under the rubble.
He focused.
The gravity field expanded out and covered the debris field in an instant.
With a small curl of his fingers, the buried Astartes were pulled free of the wreckage cleanly, one after another.
The moment they were clear, the assembled Astartes moved to offer apologies, but Matthew raised a hand before any of them got the words out.
"Skip it. None of that."
"Your immediate task is to return to Osborn Industrial, get the armor repaired, and rejoin your unit."
"There are more assignments waiting for you."
He flicked a hand. A sparking portal opened beside the group.
The Astartes, kneeling on one knee, rose as one without further words and walked into the portal in formation.
On the other side, the engineering team was already waiting. The moment the first Astartes stepped through into the facility, the repair work started.
Once the last of them had gone through, Matthew said a brief goodbye to Eleanor and stepped back into Umbrella's laboratory level on his own.
The loss of Killian had left no visible gap in operations. Everything was running as normal.
On the examination tables at the center of the lab, Hunk and Leon were lying side by side, quietly receiving injections of the improved Compound V.
A short distance away, the ultimate Nemesis stood in silence, having already completed his own Compound V injection ahead of the others.
Under Matthew's direction, Nemesis had been fused with the System reward: a Blackwatch Super Soldier. The result was a Nemesis who had climbed another tier in both raw strength and physical resilience, and who had also gained a new and blunt capability.
Fission.
He could now split into multiple independent instances while each retained the original's full combat output.
Maximum three-way split. Beyond that, combat effectiveness began to degrade.
Time passed.
At length, the System's flat notification tone sounded in the lab.
"Injection complete."
Leon sat up first.
He pulled the IV line from his chest without ceremony and looked across at Matthew, who was watching him with open curiosity.
"...Boss. I understand you want to know what ability I've developed, but I feel I should point out that, as one man to another, staring at another man while he's not wearing clothes is generally considered impolite."
"...Fair enough." Matthew clicked his tongue and spread his hands.
Once Matthew had turned away, Leon dressed quickly, pulled on his combat gear, and stepped out of the central lab.
"So. Ready to tell me what you got?" Matthew glanced over with genuine interest as Leon came up beside him.
Leon didn't try to be coy about it.
He extended a finger.
His finger changed.
The solid physical form dissolved into flickering blue current, crackling softly, the electric discharge producing a sharp, stuttering sound.
"Elemental transformation?" Matthew said, eyes lighting up.
"That's the one." Leon's mouth curved. "Going forward, if the company forgets to pay the electric bill and the lights go out, I can serve as a temporary generator."
Matthew's expression twitched at the deadpan delivery. "Leon. Has anyone ever told you your jokes are funny?"
Leon's eyes lit up at the question, as though he'd just met the first person in his life who understood what he was doing.
"...Actually, Boss, now that you mention it, nobody has ever told me my jokes are funny," Leon said, with complete seriousness.
"So..."
"Since nobody has ever told you your jokes are funny, why exactly do you keep making them?"
Leon: ...
Excuse me, that's a bit harsh.
My particular brand of humor happens to be very funny, actually.
Meanwhile.
While the two of them were debating the merits of Leon's comedic sensibility, Hunk quietly sat up on his examination table.
Through the glass, he looked across at Leon, who was still in the middle of defending himself.
Then:
A faint, almost imperceptible shift in the air.
In the next instant, with Matthew watching, the completely undressed Hunk and Leon swapped positions.
Matthew's eyebrow went up. Something clicked in his mind immediately.
Object swap.
"Mission accomplished, sir." Hunk stood in front of Matthew with his usual expression of absolute composure.
Matthew looked at the unsmiling Hunk. "What's your ability?"
"Object transposition," Hunk said evenly.
"Any solid object within my line of sight that is capable of movement. I can swap any two of them."
Matthew gave a quiet internal nod.
Right. Object swap, exactly as he'd thought.
If you're enjoying the story, toss a Power Stone or drop a review — it helps more than you'd think.
Advance chapters → patreon.com/Eatinpieces