Chapter 194: Three Heroes vs. One Monster
On the street, Apocalypse watched the blade working steadily through the cracks in his barrier, and what had been indifference on his face became something closer to genuine attention.
His era had produced no shortage of beings with formidable raw power. But none of them had been capable of overpowering him through force alone.
This was the first time he had ever encountered a living being that could.
"Such ferocity, and it can't be made to serve me. What a waste."
He murmured it to himself, something almost like regret in his eyes.
Then his molecular restructuring engaged again.
This time, instead of reshaping the air around him into another layer of defense, he went directly for the blade.
He began dismantling it at the molecular level.
The moment his ability activated, the flesh blade where it had pushed through the barrier began dissolving at high speed. But the dissolution didn't start at the tip.
It spread simultaneously across every part of the blade that was in contact with the barrier's surface, the way a colony of insects appears all at once across something they're consuming.
The blade's substance — flesh, synthetic organic material, the symbiote structure — was being disassembled and reconstructed at the molecular level.
The symbiote, as it converted, produced a sharp, thin shriek. Even it, apparently, had instincts that recognized molecular deconstruction as something to react against.
The dissolution spread up the blade toward Nemesis's forearm at a striking pace. Everything it touched — flesh, bone, the symbiote plating — became loose grey-yellow sand, falling away in a light, dry scatter.
Nemesis registered the change through its tactical visor. It didn't feel pain. But it could see what was happening to its arm.
When the dissolution reached the elbow joint, Nemesis didn't hesitate.
Its left hand, still in the Vibranium gauntlet, closed around the arm above the conversion boundary. Five fingers drove into the flesh.
Then the grip tightened.
And it pulled.
Like trying to tear a tree out of the earth by the roots.
The sound was wet and dense and immediate — the specific sound of living tissue under tensile force beyond what tissue handles.
With everyone watching, Nemesis tore its own right forearm off at the elbow.
The break was not clean. It was what force produces — ragged, asymmetric, the bone end white and protruding, various structures hanging from the stump like cut cabling, moving in the open air.
Nemesis looked at what it had done with no expression that registered distress. It wasn't capable of distress.
It was a weapon. Pain was a luxury it had no use for.
At the same moment the arm came free, the stump began moving.
Muscle fiber rebuilt itself at speed visible to the eye. Vessels reattached and sealed. Bone extended from the break outward.
The new bone came in a clean porcelain-white before the muscle layered over it, then the skin, then the symbiote plating closing over everything.
In the time it took to register the change, a complete arm had grown back.
The regenerated fist clenched the instant the bone structure was solid. The knuckles cracked through the sequence in a single burst.
Nemesis looked down at the new arm and threw two test punches at the air.
Each one compressed the air visibly as it moved through it.
The severed arm, lying where it had been discarded, continued dissolving from the moment it separated from the host body. By the time it reached Apocalypse's feet, it was sand.
At the moment the sand reached Apocalypse's feet:
A barely-audible sound.
The sand where the arm had been vanished. A human outline appeared in its place.
Hunk.
He had registered the severed arm while it was still falling. The instant it hit the ground, he used his ability on it, swapping himself into its position.
From dozens of meters outside the barrier, where the shockwave had pushed him, he was now inside it.
He was at Apocalypse's side.
Close enough to feel the killing intent coming off him.
The Stanavistin engaged at maximum output the moment Hunk materialized.
Everything stretched.
The air slowed. Dust particles suspended mid-drift, each grain individually trackable. The ambient detonation sounds stretched into long, low frequencies.
Hunk looked at Apocalypse.
The expression on Apocalypse's face was a compressed combination of shock and sudden awareness. He had registered the danger. But the neural signal hadn't reached his limbs yet.
His mind had caught up. His body hadn't.
For Apocalypse, the gap was too small to use for a dodge or a block.
For Hunk, moving under Stanavistin at maximum output, it was sufficient.
The Extremis heat concentrated in his right arm in the same moment.
A temperature beyond ordinary combustion. Orange-red light bled through the skin as the vessels and structural tissue beneath it lit up like something about to rupture outward. The military-grade sleeve evaporated on contact — no burning, the fiber simply disintegrated into ash that drifted away.
What remained was an arm that no longer looked like a human arm.
The skin had taken on a texture somewhere between liquid and solid. What moved beneath the surface was not blood. It was something with the quality of poured metal still at heat.
Orange-red fracture lines covered the entire arm's surface, dense as a volcanic field before an eruption. The air around it was warping badly from the thermal output, and the heat was already producing ripple effects on the surface of Apocalypse's energy barrier.
Apocalypse's eyes finally moved.
The peripheral catch registered the figure at his side. His pupils, in the stretched-time perception, began contracting slowly.
His eyes started to go white.
He was attempting to engage his ability.
He was too slow.
In the instant before his ability engaged, Hunk's arm was already through the defense he hadn't had time to reinforce.
Under the influence of the Las Plagas parasite, the arm restructured itself. The outer tissue converted in the same motion, forming an arm blade radiating severe heat.
The blade added seventy centimeters of reach. The gap between them closed in the same movement.
Hunk's arm moved.
A clean stroke.
No technique. Pure speed and force.
The blade crossed Apocalypse's throat. Skin and muscle ignited against the heat as the edge passed through, the spray of blood converting to mist in the extreme temperature before it could travel.
Apocalypse felt his head separate from his body. His eyes went wide.
In those white eyes, for the first time: genuine shock.
They had expected it to be over.
The headless body raised its arm.
A force wave detonated outward.
Hunk was thrown clear. The impact stripped the clothing from his body on that side, and the skin and flesh beneath it along with the clothing, leaving bone exposed.
If his regeneration hadn't been what it was, a single hit of that output might have ended the fight then and there.
After throwing them clear, Apocalypse raised a hand, caught his own airborne head, and pressed it back to the stump at his neck. His palm held the junction.
Beneath his hand, tissue began moving.
In moments, the decapitation had reversed itself.
He owed this to a choice made during his last rebirth: the body he had selected as his vessel had belonged to a mutant with accelerated regeneration. The original ability had been middling at best — adequate for broken limbs, nothing more. But the amplification his rebirth process applied had pushed it far beyond that baseline. As long as the head could be reattached while the body was still functional, complete recovery was now possible.
He looked at Hunk, who had been knocked back, and at Nemesis, who had caught Hunk with the flat efficiency of a fielder making a routine play.
Something cold moved through Apocalypse's expression.
"Enemies or not — well done."
He didn't withhold the acknowledgment.
"But believing you can actually stop me is naive—"
He didn't finish the sentence.
A bolt of lightning the width of a barrel came down and hit him directly, cutting off the rest of the word in his throat.
The strike made his body seize and shudder, and when he spoke again his voice had taken on an involuntary vibration.
He looked down at the blackened crust forming and flaking off his skin as it regenerated, and his expression got darker.
He had overestimated the moral restraint of the people he was dealing with.
"Spending time around these inferior baseline humans has clearly rubbed off on you. You've picked up their habit of hitting when someone's back is turned."
His eyes went white.
He lifted off the ground, rising into the air in defiance of gravity. His gaze moved across all of them.
His voice amplified. "Since you refuse to submit, then witness the power that belongs to a god."
He focused.
The city began to shake.
The molecular restructuring extended outward and encompassed everything. Buildings that had been standing solid moments before came apart like sand structures in a gust of wind.
The material mass of half the city was drawn upward, fragmenting and rising, gathering into the air above them. In moments, the structural matter of an entire city district had been disassembled.
Lightning crackled in the darkened sky above.
Apocalypse looked down at the three figures standing in the ruins beneath him, something dismissive crossing his face.
He would acknowledge they were formidable. Relative to him, they were still outmatched by a significant margin.
"You refused to submit. Then die here."
"Consider it a demonstration for anyone else who decides to resist me."
The enormous mass of molecularly restructured material that had been surging like a sea above the city condensed at his direction. It reshaped itself downward into a dense field of massive spikes and began accelerating toward the ground.
From below, Leon looked up and slowly raised an eyebrow.
It wasn't hundreds. It wasn't thousands.
The disassembled matter of an entire city district had been repurposed. The count was beyond any number worth naming.
On top of that, each spike was five or six meters long, the tip drawn to a point as fine as a spear, and Apocalypse had been accelerating them through spatial compression as they fell. The friction as they cut through the air produced a sound that conjured the image of hundreds of fighter jets making a low pass directly overhead.
Looking closer, the surface of the spikes carried a metallic sheen that the original building materials didn't have. Apocalypse had restructured their molecular composition during the reshaping, converting ordinary matter into a composite harder than steel by a considerable margin.
The sky was gone.
Not metaphorically. Looking up, Leon could no longer see the sky at all. The dense field of descending spikes had consumed every angle, and the sunlight had been cut into thin slivers that barely threaded through the gaps between them.
"Hm."
"That's a lot of sewing needles. Should last about a century, I'd estimate." Leon's mouth curved slightly. He gave a small shrug.
Then his body converted to a streak of electricity and shot sideways.
Hunk engaged his ability at the same moment.
He vanished from his position a fraction of a second before the spikes reached it and reappeared on the roof of a structure a hundred meters away that hadn't been fully disassembled yet.
The moment he landed, the floor beneath him began to vibrate heavily.
Before he could find his footing, the floor surface converted to flowing sand.
In the same instant, hundreds of spikes erupted from the ground around him, coming from every direction at every angle, enclosing the position completely.
Hunk registered the situation. He wasn't concerned.
The floor was already sand. The spikes had closed off every exit.
He didn't hesitate. His ability engaged.
The soft sound of displacement.
Hunk was gone from the position. In his place, one of the incoming spikes from above dropped into the enclosed space.
Because of its particular material composition, the spikes couldn't cut through each other, and the incoming spike remained intact as the others pinned it.
Hunk reappeared in the air at the point the spike had been falling from.
He looked up.
More spike rain above him. Denser.
His eyes narrowed slightly.
A rapid, low sequence of displacement sounds.
In moments, Hunk was back at Apocalypse's side.
On the other side of the field.
Nemesis did something unexpected when faced with the falling spikes.
It removed the Vibranium powered suit entirely.
Then its back began moving.
Three misshapen heads pushed out from its back, one after another. Then necks. Then arms.
Three identical ultimate Nemesis units extracted themselves from the original body, emerging fully formed.
Four stood where one had been.