Chapter 195: Every Trick in the Book
Under the dense spike rain, all four Nemesis units looked up at the sky simultaneously.
The moment they did, a massive spike column came hammering down.
The kind of impact designed to pin them to the ground and grind them into nothing.
The lead Nemesis — the original — stepped forward first. Arms thicker than a normal person's thigh came up over its head.
The next instant:
A detonation.
The enormous inertial force drove Nemesis's legs into a bend and blew the road surface beneath its feet outward, pressing a shallow crater nearly two meters across into the concrete.
Even so, Nemesis didn't move. It stood exactly where it had been. An iron tower that hadn't shifted an inch.
It looked, in that moment, like a giant holding up the beam of a palace.
Nemesis looked at the spike column in its hands, and its fingers tightened.
With a grinding shriek of deforming metal, it pushed all five fingers into the surface of the spike column like pushing into clay. Then its arm drove forward.
The spike — solid, five or six meters long, a meter across — launched back the way it came, like a bowling ball thrown in reverse.
Faster than it had fallen.
The column tore through the air on its return path, a white shockwave skirt trailing from its tail end, moving at a speed that something this massive had no right to achieve, closing on Apocalypse's position from below.
At the exact moment the spike left Nemesis's hand, the three units standing behind it dropped into a crouch simultaneously.
Three launch sounds overlapped into one.
Three iron-grey shapes, like solid rounds fired from a railgun, shot upward in the wake of the rising spike column.
They hit its surface with a combined impact that rang across the whole block.
Even against the air resistance bearing down on them, they held. Planted against the column's surface, immovable as anchors.
The column's tail dipped briefly under the combined weight of the impact, then surged upward again under the force now driving it.
Three Nemesis units standing abreast on its surface.
The column, more than a meter across, had become an enormous inverted lance, carrying three war machines straight into the face of the falling spike field above.
Above them, the sky was gone. Nothing but spike forest, each column five or six meters long, tips catching the light with a cold metallic gleam. Tens of thousands of them, spatially accelerated, falling with the kinetic energy to punch through steel, covering every angle.
If these had been ordinary people looking up at that, the psychological weight alone might have broken them before the first impact landed.
Nemesis did not have fear.
All three looked up at the incoming field without a flicker of hesitation.
Their legs drove down in unison.
The spike column beneath them shuddered under the force, the surface fracturing outward in a web of cracks from the launch point.
Three shapes launched off it like meteors rising in reverse, driving directly into the curtain of falling metal spikes.
The lead Nemesis moved first.
Its flesh blade on the right arm dragged a dark red light-thread through the air friction at high speed, and the edge swept through the midpoint of an incoming spike column in a clean transverse cut, splitting it in two.
The sudden lateral force knocked the halved column off its trajectory.
In the same motion, Nemesis used the recoil from the cut to spin in midair, left foot planting hard on the cut face of the falling lower half, and drove off it.
Another launch.
The column dropped straight down under the impact; Nemesis climbed higher.
The other two moved the same way.
Their frames were enormous, but they found gaps, cut them wider where needed, and used every impact as a launch point, always moving forward, always ascending.
Within moments the three of them had carved a corridor through the suffocating rhythm of the spike field, pressing upward against the flow toward Apocalypse's position.
At that exact moment:
A barely audible displacement.
Hunk's face materialized out of nothing behind Apocalypse. Then his torso. Then his limbs.
The Extremis heat had burned his right arm to a near-molten orange-red state, light bleeding from every crack in the skin, dyeing the surrounding dust-clouds crimson.
The Las Plagas parasite restructured his forearm bones in the same instant.
A seventy-centimeter bone blade punched through the skin at the wrist, the surface running the incandescent white of metal held at extreme heat.
The air around the blade's edge was already warping, a tearing silk sound rising from the distortion.
Hunk moved without windup. Without any preparatory motion.
Pure speed and force.
The bone blade tore through the air, tip closing on the back of Apocalypse's neck.
The specialized matter surrounding Apocalypse's body didn't have time to react before the heat vaporized it.
But this time — having learned from the last — Apocalypse had been ready for exactly this.
Something cold crossed his face. A thin curve at the edge of his mouth.
"The same move a second time?"
He had been waiting for this.
In the instant before the blade reached his neck, Apocalypse's eyes went white.
His right hand swung toward Hunk without warning.
A visible transparent shockwave erupted outward.
A ring of compressed air, centered on his palm, detonated forward.
The air in that instant was compressed to near-solid density, then burst outward under something far more violent.
The shockwave hit Hunk in the face at full force.
The mask was stripped and shattered instantly, exposing the face beneath.
It didn't stop there.
The force that had already destroyed the mask kept moving, hitting Hunk's unprotected face like a swung hammer.
A sharp crack of bone.
The lower jaw was half-gone. Half his face caught the full force.
The impact sent him flying backward, fast enough that a thin mist of blood hung in the air along the line of his exit trajectory.
Hunk's body demolished several spike columns on its way through.
Debris and blood-mist mixed together in a straight red line drawn across the air.
His consciousness went briefly blank under the force that could have overturned a tank. The only thing reaching him was the sound of blood hammering through his vessels and the crack of his own bones.
But before he lost control of his body entirely:
The one eye that still had a clear view found Apocalypse's figure above, contempt still written plainly on his face.
A soft sound.
Transposition.
The ability triggered on pure instinct the moment consciousness came back online.
Hunk's trajectory vanished.
What he swapped with this time was not an object.
It was Apocalypse himself.
He had locked the target before the impact even reached him, the instant he was sent flying. The anchor had been set. He had been waiting for this moment.
Two positions exchanged.
Apocalypse felt the world lurch.
The Hunk he had sent flying was gone. And Apocalypse himself was now in the middle of Hunk's backward trajectory.
The fragments of the spike columns Hunk's body had just been breaking through were now flying directly toward Apocalypse's face.
His pupils contracted in sudden alarm.
It had caught him off guard. Genuinely.
But what came next was even more unexpected.
In the same instant his body appeared on the trajectory, three iron-grey shapes materialized around him simultaneously — from his left, his right, and his back.
Three Nemesis units.
A perfect triangle.
No warning. No approach. As though they had been waiting in position all along, just for Apocalypse to be transposed here.
From three directions, all three Nemesis units raised their flesh blades.
The blade surfaces burned at a color somewhere between deep red and incandescent white, the air around each edge warping violently, trailing three arcs of heat.
No hesitation. No delay.
Three blades fell at the same moment.
The sounds of three tips entering flesh overlapped into one.
Apocalypse's instinct to activate his ability fired as the danger registered — but his eyes had barely begun to go white when three burning blade edges drove through his body from three directions simultaneously.
Left shoulder. Right ribs. Lower back.
Each strike placed with precision.
The left shoulder blade angled downward from above the collarbone, punching through the shoulder blade, the tip emerging behind the armpit.
The right rib strike came in horizontally, shearing through two ribs on entry, punching through the liver, tip exiting through the front of the abdomen.
The lower back strike was the most brutal: blade entering beside the lumbar vertebra, driving through the abdominal cavity, tip piercing outward above the navel.
Three strikes. Six wounds.
Apocalypse's body was transfixed in an instant by three crossed blades, pinned like a specimen on a display board.
But the Nemesis units weren't finished.
All three wrists turned simultaneously.
The blades rotated ninety degrees inside the wounds. The flesh on the blade surfaces exploded into dense reverse barbs in the same instant of rotation, each one spreading open from within, hooking into blood vessels, organs, and the gaps between bones, locking Apocalypse inside a triangular cage of three interlocked blades with no way to pull free.
Then all three drove forward together.
Apocalypse was carried on three blades, bodily, straight into the surface of the spike column still hurtling downward at high speed.
Wind roared past his ears.
He tried to fight free. The barbs buried in his joints and bones held him in place.
The impact when he hit the column's surface was enormous. His back slammed into the solid meter-wide column, the collision forcing every cubic centimeter of air out of his lungs at once.
Blood and foam sprayed from his mouth and nose.
The three blades kept pressing in the same moment of impact, tips driving through Apocalypse's body and directly into the column beneath him.
Three sharp cracks of metal being pierced.
The blades pinned Apocalypse to the surface of the falling column like a cut of meat nailed to a board. The column was still falling at high speed.
And at that moment:
The color of the cloud layer above changed.
Not darker. Brighter.
A strange light, somewhere between blue-white and deep azure, bled through from deep within the clouds, as though something was building to a critical point above the overcast.
As the seconds passed, the light grew. Brighter. More blinding. Until it felt as though the entire sky had been switched on.
The clouds churned in the wind, beginning to rotate around the point directly above Apocalypse, moving faster and faster, tightening.
In the gaps between the cloud masses, countless fine arcs of electricity snaked like silver threads, crackling in a continuous overlapping percussion.
The smell of ozone thickened in the air. Strong enough to be nauseating. As though the entire sky had been scorched through by electrical current.
Air pressure dropped.
Debris and grit on the ground began jumping restlessly, the way they do before something catastrophic arrives.
The blue-white mass of light deep in the clouds had expanded beyond what the eye could comfortably track. It no longer looked like light. It looked like liquid lightning, boiling and churning inside the cloud layer, emitting a low continuous roar that didn't sound like thunder at all.
It sounded like air itself beginning to come apart at the seams, screaming under an electrical density past the threshold it could contain.
Then:
A figure dropped out of the cloud layer.
Leon, in his fully converted electrical form, hung in the air below the clouds. Every centimeter of skin was discharging arcs outward in all directions. His eyes had lost all color — they were two points of blazing white, and the current spilling from his eye sockets ran down his face and gathered at his jaw in two continuously pulsing streams of plasma.
His arms were spread, fingers slightly curved, each fingertip firing its own arc into the air around him.
Pinned to the spike column, Apocalypse saw all of this.
His pupils contracted hard.
This was the second time in this fight that he had registered genuine danger.
Feeling the electrical charge above continuing to build without any sign of slowing, Apocalypse moved to activate his teleportation. He couldn't afford to wait.
The Nemesis units disagreed.
The lead one closed an enormous hand around Apocalypse's skull and began slamming it into the surface of the spike column behind him. Once. Again. Each impact with the full weight and force of what it was.
The goal was simple: break his concentration.
Teleportation required sustained mental focus. These repeated, crushing impacts to the head shattered that focus every time it began to form.
"Damn you!"
Apocalypse's teeth ground audibly as he stared at the Nemesis units above him.
Two options remained.
The first was to destroy the three units holding him. The second was to use his abilities to blast them clear and then teleport.
The first was clearly unavailable right now.
Which left the second.
Fighting through the pain of three blades in his body, Apocalypse's eyes went white.
An expanding repulsion field erupted outward from him in all directions.
The same move as before — trying to knock everyone clear at once.
This time, none of the three Nemesis units moved.
The force stripped at them. Wounds opened across their bodies in large patches. Their regeneration was fast, but not fast enough to keep pace with what was being done to them.
And still they didn't let go.
They kept pressing him into the column, holding position even as their bodies deteriorated around them, executing their function through whatever state their bodies were in.
Above them, Leon lowered his head.
Those white-burning eyes locked through several hundred meters of open air onto Apocalypse, pinned to the surface of the falling column.
The next instant:
The entire storm network behind him collapsed inward.
Hundreds of millions of electrical arcs contracted simultaneously, as though caught in an invisible fist.
The charge condensed into itself in the sky, the blue-white brilliance intensifying beyond any fixed color—
And then:
Between the Sky and earth, a column of white light came straight down.
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