Chapter 196: Apocalypse Is Harder to Kill Than Expected
As the compressed lightning came down, it seemed for a moment as though there was nothing left in the world but that light.
The sight was spectacular enough to make the pilots of the fighter jets that had just arrived catch their breath.
After a long pause, one of them managed to produce a sentence. "The forces of nature really are beyond anything human beings can stand against."
The others heard this and felt their expressions do something involuntary.
"Is there any chance what you're calling 'the forces of nature' was actually done by a person?"
"A person?" The pilot blinked.
"What else? Did you actually think something called 'the will of the earth' came down and personally struck him?"
The speaker looked toward Leon's figure, half-visible in the rolling thunderclouds.
"See that silhouette in the clouds?"
"If I had to guess, that attack came from him."
"We don't know if the one causing all the trouble down there survived something like that. But I think we need a closer look."
"If he didn't die, then the warhead we're carrying gets to do what it was actually made for."
There was a certain clinical detachment in the way he said it. The kind that came from treating the standing orders as the only objective that mattered.
Or possibly, there just wasn't anyone he knew personally in that city.
On the ground.
The clouds were still roaring.
The spike columns were still shaking.
Three Nemesis units stood in the lightning, steady as iron towers.
The thunderbolt split the air and came straight down onto Apocalypse, pinned to the column by three flesh blades.
The instant the current hit, his entire body went into violent convulsions.
Flesh carbonized under the heat in an instant. The surface of his skin fractured into a dense web of cracks, and beneath those cracks something glowed a deep red, like lava seen through cooling rock.
That was the current moving through him.
His bones cracked under the electrical pressure. Every muscle in his body seized and contracted without his control.
The skin exposed to the current was charred black. The flesh beneath it was burning.
The heat a lightning strike generates can melt steel. What was happening to Apocalypse's internal organs right now was not rapid. It was thorough.
Even his eyeballs burst under the pressure of the current. Two jets of fluid launched from his eye sockets and were vaporized by the electricity before they traveled more than a few centimeters.
The three Nemesis units were caught in it too.
This was an indiscriminate strike. The current flowing through Apocalypse conducted along the three flesh blades into all three of them simultaneously.
Electrical arcs exploded across their skin and muscle.
The arcs snapped and jumped from the blade contact points and chained up through their bodies, crackling across every centimeter of exposed flesh.
The symbiote plating on the surface of each unit was burned with silver-white lines, the way lightning leaves marks on tree bark.
None of them moved.
They didn't even look down at the arcs jumping across their own bodies.
Even as the strike caused them serious damage, they didn't flinch. No reaction. No expression.
The lead unit glanced down at its own carbonizing skin, seemingly unbothered, and pressed its blade in another increment.
The blade went deeper.
One of the other units was angling its head slightly to avoid sparks flying off Apocalypse's body.
The motion was about as urgent as someone tilting an umbrella to avoid splashing rainwater. Completely unhurried. The posture of something standing in a shower it found mildly inconvenient.
Apocalypse felt the current tearing through him, his teeth grinding.
His skin was fracturing and sloughing off under the energy load, exposing the muscle fiber beneath, burned black by the current.
The flesh on his cheeks cracked and fell away in pieces, like scorched plaster off a wall.
Once the flesh was gone, the jaw was exposed — gum tissue burned to the point of contraction, teeth embedded directly in bare alveolar bone.
In the lightning's light, the teeth had a strange porcelain-white quality.
His accelerated regeneration was trying constantly to repair the damage. New skin cells formed beneath the surface and immediately got there too late — the residual current burned them before they could cover the wound.
Repair and destruction running simultaneously. Destruction winning.
A healed eyeball reformed from the char of his eye socket, the lens barely managing to focus through the current's interference, finding the tall shapes standing in the lightning with him.
Three Nemesis units, in the middle of the thunderstrike, their bodies wrapped in electrical arcs.
They were in marginally better condition than he was. The current had burned deep red lava-like channels through their bodies, the flesh beneath constantly regenerating and constantly being burned again.
Even so, they were standing straight.
Blades still locked inside him. Not moving.
These things won't even step back. Are they not afraid of dying at all? The thought crossed Apocalypse's mind.
He didn't dwell on it. He was the one losing right now, and he needed a way out.
He looked down at the flesh blades inside him, now partially carbonized.
They were still in him, but their structural integrity was nothing like what it had been. A moderate external force should be enough to destroy them.
He started to raise his hand.
The next instant:
A displacement.
A figure appeared directly in front of him without any warning.
Hunk.
"Am I late?"
The man who had half his face blown off by the force wave had already put himself back together.
The jaw had regrown, the new skin a fresh pale pink against the old surface still covered in soot and dried blood.
The eye that had been shattered in the blast had reconstituted. The pupil contracted to a pinpoint in the lightning's light, locked on Apocalypse's barely-raised right arm.
Extremis heat concentrated in Hunk's right arm in the same moment.
An arm blade, horizontal sweep.
No unnecessary movement. The edge passed across Apocalypse's right arm at the elbow joint in a single motion.
A soft sound.
Like a heated blade through butter.
Apocalypse's right forearm separated cleanly at the elbow. The cut surface was smooth as a mirror.
The arm dropped.
What didn't happen was blood.
The enormous heat generated by the combined attack had already evaporated most of his body fluids. What remained in his vessels was no longer blood — it was a dark red viscous substance somewhere between liquid and vapor.
By any medical assessment, injuries of this scale should have been completely nonviable.
But Apocalypse had stopped being classifiable as human a very long time ago.
Sheer biological tenacity was keeping him functional.
The lead Nemesis unit seemed to register at this point that Apocalypse still hadn't lost the ability to resist.
Its burned eyes rotated in their sockets, finding Apocalypse's ruined face.
Then it opened its mouth.
Far past what a human jaw could manage. The kind of expansion that belonged in a horror film, the oral cavity stretching grotesquely wide.
Inside, the flesh was burning an almost translucent orange-red under the thermal energy, and it was possible to see that energy gathering, compressing, and building pressure in its throat.
The Extremis heat was spiking rapidly.
The skin of its cheeks was developing a glowing-metal fracture pattern from the inside out, the light bleeding from the cracks making the whole face look like a volcano with a thin surface over an eruption.
Then that energy released.
A roaring torrent of orange-red plasma erupted from its mouth.
It wasn't fire at this point. It was more like plasma compressed to an extreme pressure. At the core of the beam was a concentrated point of white. Around that, a churning orange-red halo. Around that, the air itself warping and distorting from the heat at the edges.
It looked like a small-scale atomic breath.
Not quite as impressive as the genuine article, but moving in that direction.
The air around the beam ionized immediately, producing a high-pitched resonant shriek.
Apocalypse's newly healed eye found the incoming energy and his chest tightened.
His pupil contracted to a point.
The heat hadn't reached him yet, but he could already feel it.
As the beam made contact with his body, the already-charred scalp began fracturing further.
These absolute— His internal monologue was more profanity than words.
The stump of the severed right arm reignited at the cut surface under the thermal radiation. Sparks flew from the carbonized flesh, like someone blowing on a nearly-dead coal.
He wanted to move.
The three blades were still inside him, locking him to the spike column. Left shoulder piercing the shoulder blade. Right ribs piercing the liver. Lower back driving through the abdominal cavity. The reverse barbs on all three were buried in the gaps between his bones, every attempt to move just driving them deeper.
He was completely fixed.
He couldn't even raise an arm to block.
Apocalypse watched the thermal beam coming directly at his face with nowhere to go.
His mouth opened. He seemed to start to say something.
The beam hit him in the face.
The force of it drove his skull back into the spike column behind him. The back of his head and the metal surface made a single heavy sound on contact. The column shuddered, cracks webbing out from the impact point.
Then the heat.
Steel-melting heat.
Apocalypse's face began liquefying from the moment the beam made contact.
The charred skin went first. Then the subcutaneous muscle. Then the fascia, vessels, and nerves. The tissue was stripped layer by layer, as though scraped off the bone by an invisible blade.
Flesh melting.
Bone burning.
His facial structure was collapsing inward at visible speed.
The beam kept going.
It started at his face and worked inward, burning through his skull one layer at a time.
Feeling the energy consuming him, Apocalypse tried to activate his metallic transformation to resist.
Even metal couldn't hold up for two seconds under this heat.
The metallic skin began to melt almost immediately. The transformation raised his hardness and his ignition point, but without regeneration to support it, the melt rate was actually faster than his baseline tissue.
He canceled it.
Under the continued burning, Apocalypse's body was convulsing.
Not from pain. His pain receptors had burned out well before this point.
The convulsions were his body fighting instinctively to survive.
The lead Nemesis unit kept the beam going.
While it fired, it slowly lowered its head, tracking the beam down Apocalypse's body.
The beam moved with it, sweeping from the face downward, crossing the throat, moving across the chest cavity.
Everything it touched: flesh to char, bone to liquid.
Apocalypse's face was completely gone at this point.
What remained was a blackened, still-smoking skull.
Even so, he wasn't dead.
A new eye regenerated inside the socket.
It formed from deep within the char and looked out at the Nemesis unit still pouring the beam into him, the pupil slowly contracting.
No fear in that gaze. No pain.
Just rage, compressed past the point of expression.
Molecular restructuring engaged again.
This time he was going to reduce every one of them to sand.
His eyes started to go white.
Another Nemesis unit saw the attempt and immediately drove its fist into Apocalypse's skull.
Activating the ability required sustained mental concentration. A heavy blow to the head was one of the most reliable ways to shatter that concentration.
Impact after impact.
This time, Apocalypse kept going through the hits. The first few broke his focus, but he rebuilt it, and rebuilt it again. Each time the concentration reformed, the molecular restructuring built with it.
The ability engaged.
One of the Nemesis units in front of him began converting to sand across a large area of its body. Hunk, who had just arrived, got caught in the edge of it — if he hadn't cut himself clear in time, half his body would have gone with it.
The flesh blades inside Apocalypse dissolved into sand and scattered on the wind.
The affected Nemesis unit looked down at the leg that had just converted below the knee, felt its balance go, and felt its attack rhythm break.
It reached to grab Apocalypse before the situation deteriorated further. Its hand had already started to go.
On the other side, Apocalypse felt the restraints give way.
No hesitation. He released the force wave he had been holding.
Everything he had built up discharged simultaneously.
He activated his teleportation at the same moment.
He was moments away from getting clear.
The original Nemesis — the unit that had been maintaining its optical stealth throughout — materialized without warning.
Its Vibranium powered suit was converting to sand at a slower rate than the others, the material's properties giving it more time.
One axe-stroke split the incoming force wave.
The propulsion system in its feet fired.
A single sound. Then the enormous figure was inside Apocalypse's teleportation radius before he had any opportunity to respond.
Without giving him the chance to do anything at all, it bisected the teleporting Apocalypse vertically with one clean strike.
The unit was not operating under any illusions about whether that would be enough.
An injury like this on Apocalypse was a delay, not an ending. The only question was how long.
So the moment the strike landed, without pausing, it opened a channel to Matthew directly.
"Reporting to command. Field assessment confirms we cannot permanently eliminate the target."
"Target is currently incapacitated. Requesting support."
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