I shouldn't be posting this but i dont want to leave u guys on a cliffhanger and i want u guys to read/ feel this peak fight!
Chapter 193: The Fight Begins
A single gunshot tore the quiet of the street apart without warning.
The people on the street didn't scream when they heard it. Their first instinct was to drop and find the nearest cover.
At the same time, the local government, having already received SHIELD's alert, moved immediately. They directed the city's television and communications networks to broadcast evacuation notices to the nearest underground shelters, and deployed police to redirect traffic away from the area before a gridlock made everything worse.
On the street, Apocalypse glanced at the man beside him, whose face had gone white with fear, and let his eyes go white.
He needed this man to see his power firsthand. Without that, any potential he had would stay buried under the habits of a lifetime spent among baseline humans. Ability alone wouldn't make a Horseman. Conviction required a foundation.
He activated his molecular restructuring ability.
The incoming round was still in flight when the effect took hold. The tip of the bullet began visibly dissolving from the front, converting to loose particles of sand and scattering into the air.
The round was moments from vanishing entirely when something else happened.
A soft sound — barely audible, almost nothing.
The dissolving bullet disappeared.
In its place, a figure in modern combat gear and a respirator mask materialized at the exact point where the bullet had been.
Apocalypse stared at the sudden appearance.
The figure raised its weapon again.
Two shots.
The abruptness of it left Apocalypse no time to react. Both rounds punched through the newly-recruited man's skull, throwing a spray of blood and bone.
Before the body finished falling, the figure vanished again.
It reappeared at the position the body was now occupying. The body appeared where the figure had just been.
Their positions had been exchanged.
Hunk, now directly beside Apocalypse, moved without pause. His hand drove toward Apocalypse's throat at a speed that exceeded the bullet he had just displaced.
If that strike had connected cleanly, Apocalypse's throat would have been destroyed outright. The head would have followed.
But Apocalypse had recovered.
He raised his palm.
An energy barrier snapped into existence.
The strike that had been aimed at the throat hit the barrier instead.
A detonation. Like artillery.
Every pane of glass in the shops lining the block shattered from the shockwave alone.
Hunk didn't follow through. He vanished again.
When he reappeared, he was back on the rooftop where he had started.
At the point where he had stood a moment before, the half-dissolved bullet casing hit the ground with a flat sound.
The entire sequence had taken under a second.
The clinical precision of the attempt earned Apocalypse's attention, if nothing else.
"Unfortunate," Hunk murmured from the rooftop.
Leon, standing beside him, responded without much heat. "It's fine."
"Besides — if someone like him could be put down in one move, the Boss wouldn't have needed to send us. Would he?"
As they spoke, a second portal opened next to them.
Before either of them had finished the thought, the ultimate Nemesis came through it in a single leap, landing against the wall of the building across the street with both hands spread wide, holding position.
On the street below, Apocalypse watched the portal open and close, and through the narrowing gap caught a glimpse of Matthew on the other side, talking with the Ancient One.
He didn't know who Matthew was. But the inference was immediate: that was the figure behind the group now standing in front of him.
What Apocalypse hadn't anticipated was that at the exact moment he looked at Matthew, Matthew looked back at him.
Without hesitation, Matthew fired a heat vision beam through the portal at Apocalypse.
It was stopped without difficulty.
Matthew didn't press the engagement. He hadn't been planning to come down and join the fight directly. He exchanged a brief look with Apocalypse through the closing portal, then let it shut. He needed to maintain his position as the portal anchor and keep Apocalypse's location continuously tracked — if Apocalypse teleported again, he had to be ready to follow the coordinates in real time.
On the street, Apocalypse looked at the three figures arrayed against him and didn't immediately move to flee or attack. Instead, something else occurred to him.
He could sense something unusual in their biology. A form of the X-gene, different from anything he had encountered before, but unmistakably present.
Anyone carrying the X-gene was someone he was willing to accommodate.
On the condition that they submitted.
He turned his gaze toward Hunk and Leon on the rooftop.
"I don't know what you've been told about me, or why you've come here as my enemies. But if you're willing to submit and become my Horsemen, I will forgive the offense of having been misled."
"Beyond that, I can unlock the potential within you. What you're currently capable of will seem like nothing compared to what you could become."
"And surely you don't want to remain in the service of these inferior baseline humans."
"Join me. Power, wealth, land — whatever you want will be yours." The quality that had worked on the man before crept back into his voice, the subtle pull directed at whatever a person wanted most.
"What do you say?" He looked up at the rooftop.
Hunk and Leon exchanged a glance. Something lit up in both their eyes at the same moment.
A beat of silence. Then Leon was the one who spoke first.
"You said you can unlock the potential within us. Push our current abilities to a fundamentally different level?"
Apocalypse's expression brightened. "That's correct. If you genuinely submit and become my Horsemen—"
"Interesting," Leon said, chin in hand, apparently thinking it over. Then: "In that case, I'll become your Horseman."
"Go ahead. Unlock my potential."
"I'm ready."
On the street, Apocalypse heard the agreement come that fast and immediately suspected it.
He considered for a moment. "I can unlock your potential. But in exchange, you first deal with your companion."
"...Me?" Hunk pointed at himself.
"What if I also want to join you? The terms you're offering are very attractive."
Silence.
"Then kill him to demonstrate your sincerity." Apocalypse redirected his gaze toward Nemesis on the wall.
"And what if I want to join you as well?"
Nemesis, who had been completely silent until now, spoke up.
Apocalypse went quiet, processing the sequence of responses.
...This was, admittedly, a problem.
He arrived at a solution quickly.
"Simple. All three of you just need to eliminate the one who sent you. Your previous master."
"Prove you've genuinely submitted by removing him, and I'll honor every promise I've made."
On the rooftop, Hunk's expression went flat the moment he understood that Apocalypse was asking them to kill Matthew.
He was a soldier. Following orders was the foundation of what he was. His nature and his function both categorically refused to allow any entity to speak disrespectfully of his commanding officer.
Apocalypse felt the sudden weight of killing intent coming off Hunk and understood immediately that nothing Hunk had said before that point had been genuine.
He shifted his gaze back to Leon.
"It seems the other two 'Horsemen candidates' have disqualified themselves."
"Now—"
Leon cut him off before he could finish.
"There's nothing to negotiate anymore."
"If your terms had been something like asking me to go buy you a croissant from the bakery on the corner, I might have given it some thought."
"But now—" A brief pause. His tone dropped. "I'm sorry to say you don't even deserve a croissant."
The sentence finished.
Nemesis released the wall and dropped like a meteor toward Apocalypse.
In the same instant, Hunk and Leon vanished from the rooftop. The quiet street became a battlefield in the span of a single breath.
Faced with the sudden coordinated attack, Apocalypse's expression darkened.
He raised one hand. The concrete road surface beneath him liquefied into fast-moving sand in an instant. Under his control, the sand surged upward and condensed into a massive hammer aimed directly at the falling Nemesis, intent on knocking it out of the air before it connected.
Nemesis did not dodge the incoming sand hammer. It didn't raise a guard. It didn't adjust its angle.
It simply clenched its Vibranium-clad fist.
The joints under the alloy gauntlet cracked out a rapid series of heavy, compressed pops.
Then the entire right arm, coiled like something under extreme compression, hit the sand hammer head-on with the force of something that could overturn a freight train.
The detonation was enormous.
Not the dull thud of a fist hitting packed sand. This was an air explosion — the sound produced when Vibranium traveling at high speed meets densely compressed particles at close range.
The sand hammer couldn't hold its form for even a fraction of a second after contact. The entire mass detonated outward from the point of impact, scattering in every direction as a cloud of fragments and grit that swept across the entire width of the street.
The shockwave carried it in all directions.
Shop windows that had already been cracked from earlier shattered completely. Car alarms up and down the block began screaming simultaneously.
Not a single intact piece of the sand hammer remained. It was dispersed cloud, stinging and opaque, hanging in the air across the entire block.
Through that cloud, Nemesis continued downward.
Its three-meter frame moved through the debris like a falling body released from a catapult, the remaining grit and fragments trailing behind it, pure mass and momentum aimed directly at Apocalypse.
Apocalypse, who had been entirely unconcerned a moment ago, felt something change in his expression.
He was still composed. He was the oldest mutant. A small degree of composure was the baseline.
He threw a punch.
An invisible force wave erupted from his fist. The air seemed to be sucked out of the space around it, then slammed violently back outward.
A translucent wall of impact energy, centered on Apocalypse, expanded outward in every direction.
The windows that had survived everything before didn't survive this. The frames themselves were torn free and came away twisted, the aluminum warping with a sound like tearing metal.
Against the incoming wave, Nemesis's Vibranium armor panel on the right arm opened.
The plates peeled back like something alive, exposing the structure of flesh and bone beneath.
This was one of the benefits of Stark-engineered armor. Modular. Whatever function you needed, it was there.
By comparison, the original Astartes power armor, whatever its structural durability, had been designed without much thought for adaptability.
With the Vibranium plating peeled back, the fist that had been the size of a person's head underwent a sudden, violent transformation.
The symbiote pushed out from beneath the skin in the same instant. Bone and muscle tore apart and reformed simultaneously. Muscle fiber twisted and knotted outward like steel cable under extreme tension.
The sounds of the restructuring were swallowed by the roar of the force wave.
In under half a second, the entire forearm elongated, hardened, and locked into a blade of flesh one meter long.
The blade's surface held a color somewhere between steel and bone. Its edge was thin as an insect wing but harder than alloy. Along the spine, twisted lines of dark red pulsed slowly, as though the blade itself were alive and the liquid in those vessels still circulating.
And the air around it was already warping from the heat it was generating.
Nemesis drove the blade into the oncoming force wave without hesitation.
The sound it made was not metal on metal. It was the sound of something tearing — fabric ripped cleanly and fast.
The invisible wave split in two.
The divided energy cascaded outward on both sides of the cut, carving two channels into the road surface a half-meter deep, the asphalt melting and bubbling where the energy passed through it.
Through the gap between the two halves of the divided wave, Nemesis came through like a stone from a siege engine.
The blade drove toward Apocalypse's face.
The dark red tip expanded rapidly in Apocalypse's field of vision.
As the blade broke the sound barrier at its tip, a visible white ring of compressed air formed at its point.
The attack was fast enough that Apocalypse's right arm, rising to block, hadn't fully come up before the blade was already there.
Then:
A ringing impact.
Not the sound of a blade punching through flesh and bone.
The sound of metal hitting metal.
Nemesis looked at Apocalypse through its tactical visor.
The strike hadn't connected.
In the final fraction of a second before the blade reached him, Apocalypse had restructured the air molecules directly in front of him, compressing them to a density approaching diamond.
An invisible wall. The blade's tip struck it and held, the impact point radiating a visible shockwave ring outward that cleared the surrounding dust in an instant.
Apocalypse allowed himself a quiet internal breath of relief.
He hadn't fully let it out before he heard it.
A fine, sharp crack from somewhere within the barrier.
His expression changed.
Under the continuous pressure Nemesis was applying, the flesh blade was cutting. A web of fracture lines was spreading outward from the tip across the surface of the invisible wall.
It was about to go through.
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