Chapter 197: Absorbing Apocalypse — The Blacklight Evolves
New York Sanctum.
Matthew felt something sharpen inside him the moment the Nemesis unit's report came through.
The Ancient One, who appeared to have sensed something, looked over. "You're going yourself?"
"Yes." He nodded.
"Their capabilities have a ceiling. Against Apocalypse's regeneration, they can't finish it. If I want this resolved quickly, I need to go while he's still down."
He opened a portal as he spoke and stepped through.
The spike field.
The moment he arrived, he saw what was above him: a dense curtain of metal spikes still falling like rain.
He looked up at the columns descending toward him.
The next instant:
Every spike in the sky stopped.
No sound. No warning. The entire falling field — enough metal to plow through the ruins of a city a second time — simply froze in place, suspended in the air as though someone had pressed pause on the world.
Tens of thousands of spike columns hung at under a hundred meters, tips pointed down, catching the light with a cold metallic gleam. An inverted sea of steel, motionless above the rubble.
Once that was done, Matthew turned his attention to the ground.
His gaze crossed the scorched ruins and found the Nemesis units — three of them, more than half-converted to sand by now, but still holding Apocalypse in place.
Apocalypse beneath them had recovered to somewhere between fifty and sixty percent.
The brutal vertical wound the original Nemesis had opened was closing at a speed that was difficult to watch without some discomfort. Inside the cut, flesh was growing and fusing. New muscle fiber pushed out from both faces of the wound like countless thin threads and knitted together. Bone followed, moving like viscous grey-white adhesive, pulling the split halves back into contact, and then the internal organs rejoined the process.
The description made it sound complicated. In practice the whole sequence took a few seconds.
His face — burned past recognition by the plasma beam — was regenerating layer by layer. The dead charred skin was flaking away, revealing fresh tissue underneath.
When Apocalypse's eyes found Matthew's figure, something shifted on his otherwise expressionless face.
"You—"
He didn't finish the sentence.
A massive force came down without warning.
The gravity field hit like an invisible hammer. One moment he had just seen Matthew; the next, the force was already on him.
The detonation of impact was enormous.
The ground beneath Apocalypse dropped. A ten-meter radius around him compressed and shattered simultaneously — soil, rubble, structural debris, all of it flattened and driven downward in the same instant.
A pit dozens of meters deep appeared from nothing.
It looked like a sinkhole had opened.
At the center of the gravity field, Apocalypse took the full force of it.
Every bone in his body failed at once.
The force tore the newly regenerated skin and flesh from his body in the same moment of impact, stripping it away like removing a layer of clothing. The sound of it was small, but cut clearly through the roar of the gravity field.
The tissue didn't scatter. It was caught by the gravity the instant it separated and pressed flat against the pit floor, mixed with rubble and grit into a thin layer of red paste.
In moments there wasn't an intact piece of skin or flesh left anywhere on him.
The exposed muscle fiber convulsed under the pressure. Blood vessels ruptured directly under the sudden force.
Feeling the damage register across his body, Apocalypse ground his teeth.
He tried to push himself upright, to get to his feet.
Fresh muscle fiber was already forcing its way up through the stripped tissue, trying to reconstruct the ruined frame.
He had barely raised himself halfway when:
Another gravity field came down.
His legs, just beginning to form again, shattered under the impact.
The torso, already severely compressed, was driven down several more degrees.
He slammed back to the pit floor with the strike. The pit dropped another two meters.
A spray of blood expanded outward from beneath him and settled across the pit floor.
Before he could recover any breath:
Impact. Impact. Impact. Impact.
Gravity fields, one after another, each one heavier than the last, without pause.
By the end, Apocalypse's body no longer had a recognizable shape.
Flesh pressed to a layer less than a finger's width, plastered against the broken stone at the pit floor.
Bone ground to powder, mixed with blood and grit, indistinguishable from each other.
From a distance, it looked like something from a science fiction story — a three-dimensional object that had been reduced to a two-dimensional film by some theoretical flattening force.
At the bottom of the pit, the blood-paste still twitched slightly.
Even in this state, accelerated regeneration was still trying.
A blood vessel formed and was immediately crushed by residual gravity pressure.
A piece of muscle tissue formed and was immediately hammered back to pulp.
Relentless, unreasoning force, applied without pause, had given Apocalypse his first real experience of despair.
From the blood-paste, an eye assembled itself with great difficulty and stared upward.
At the edge of the pit, Matthew descended slowly. He didn't land in the blood-soaked floor. He chose to float at about half a meter above the pit bottom.
He looked down at the mass of tissue still writhing and struggling below him.
His expression was neutral.
No mockery. No pity. None of the contemptuous superiority of someone looking down from a great height.
Matthew extended his hand.
Five fingers spread.
The Evolution Field expanded in silence.
An invisible pulse covered the pit floor instantly.
The force worked like an unseen vortex, wrapping around Apocalypse and drawing inward.
The next instant:
Apocalypse felt something being forcibly extracted from him.
Thin threads of golden light were pulling from his body, moving toward the figure standing above him.
That was Apocalypse's life essence.
The source that had sustained his accelerated regeneration and carried him through thousands of years of rebirth cycles.
The light rose from the blood-paste, as though caught by invisible hands, and was drawn out thread by thread, peeled away in layers.
The threads gathered into fine golden filaments in the air, and followed the Evolution Field's direction toward Matthew's extended hand.
As that energy flowed in, the Blacklight Virus inside Matthew lurched.
An instinctive hunger.
The feeling of something that had never eaten its fill suddenly finding an entire banquet laid out in front of it, wanting to consume every last piece at once.
The Blacklight Virus churned inside him, greedy, swallowing every thread of incoming life essence without pause.
Matthew's veins pressed against the skin on his arms and hands, something moving rapidly through them. His muscles contracted and released involuntarily. His bones made faint cracking sounds — the virus was using the new intake to reshape and reinforce his body in real time.
As Apocalypse's life essence continued flowing in, Matthew's presence and power climbed steadily.
At the pit floor, Apocalypse was desiccating rapidly. The blood-paste that remained of him was shriveling, as though everything inside it was being drained away.
Feeling the last of his life essence being extracted piece by piece, the shapeless mass of tissue began thrashing uselessly.
Accelerated regeneration gave up on repairing the body. It redirected every remaining fragment of energy toward resisting the extraction force.
It didn't help.
The Evolution Field was a pump running at full output. Apocalypse's life essence was the water. Once a pump was running, water had no choice but to flow.
The remaining tissue visible at the pit floor was shriveling and blackening as it lost moisture.
The bone powder lost all vitality and converted visibly into a grey-white dust.
The eye that had just assembled itself from the blood-paste lost focus rapidly, the lens turning cloudy and yellow, then contracting to a hard black grain the size of a soybean.
Apocalypse tried desperately to activate his ability.
His eyes struggled to go white in their desiccated sockets.
A gravity field came down the moment the attempt began.
The focus shattered.
He tried to concentrate again. Tried again to activate.
Another gravity field.
Shattered again.
Several more attempts. Each one broken up with surgical precision at the moment the concentration was almost there.
By the end, Apocalypse could no longer maintain the concentration to begin.
What remained of his awareness reached upward toward the figure above him — the one saying nothing, simply continuing to consume him.
"Why..." The question formed somewhere inside what was left of him.
He understood the situation. There was no reversing this. Death was the outcome.
What he didn't understand was why. Why beings that were also mutants would move against him.
As Apocalypse waited quietly for the end, Matthew's voice reached him, pulling his fading awareness back.
"Why what?" Matthew said, tone even.
"Why are all of you stopping me? Wouldn't a world ruled by mutants be better?"
He was near the end, and there was no anger in it. Just the flat question.
Matthew considered it and smiled slightly. "Honestly, I have no real stake in whether mutants rule the world or humans do."
"Either outcome is the same to me."
Apocalypse found this more confusing, not less.
"Then why are you doing this?"
"Why..." Matthew thought for a moment, then answered plainly. "Simple enough. Compared to mutants ruling the world, I need your abilities and your genetics considerably more."
"Your genetic material is a necessary component for the Progenitor Plan."
Apocalypse was quiet for a long moment.
"So humans and mutants both mean nothing to you. What actually matters is me being useful to you. Is that right?"
Matthew nodded, without any attempt to soften it. "That's right. Though I want to reassure you—"
His tone shifted slightly.
"You won't truly die."
"Once this body is gone, you'll be reborn very soon. As a Progenitor."
"So please bear with it."
As the last of Apocalypse's life essence was drawn out, his remaining awareness began to dissolve.
Feeling the endless void closing around him, the darkness moving in, his consciousness fixed on the last thing Matthew had said.
Please bear with it...
At the pit floor, as the final thread of Apocalypse's life essence was consumed by the Blacklight Virus, something changed in Matthew.
Flesh roiled across the surface of his body.
The intake had come too quickly, too much at once. The Blacklight Virus was running past capacity, overloaded in the most productive way possible, and it had no choice but to absorb the excess and begin converting it into evolution.
The churning tissue wrapped around Matthew entirely, forming a large black cocoon.
Around the cocoon, enormous quantities of matter were reorganizing at high speed.
At the same time, because Apocalypse's own nature had included an amplification quality — the ability to enhance — the moment that force entered Matthew, every one of his capabilities and metrics began accelerating upward rapidly.
The gravity field went chaotic.
It spread across the entire city in an instant, and ninety percent of the area dropped into a state of near-zero gravity. Everything not anchored lifted.
In the clouds.
As the zero-gravity zone expanded, every instrument aboard the fighter jets began producing impossible readings, and the pilots lost their composure for a moment.
"Command, this is Falcon One."
"Radar is showing a high-energy event below us. It appears the target has become aware of our presence and is interfering with our navigation."
"Requesting authorization to engage."
The pilot was fighting the instruments and the controls at the same time.
The engagement he was describing was a tactical nuclear strike on the entire area.
Elsewhere.
In the operations command center, the people watching the satellite feed felt something pass through them briefly — some reluctance.
It didn't last.
The senior commander on duty was quiet for two seconds.
Then he gave the order. "Engage."
"Eliminate that mutant. Priority target."
"Falcon One copies."
The warhead loaded on Falcon One detached and began its descent toward the center of the engagement zone.
At the same moment:
The large display screen in the operations command center flickered.
Nick Fury's face appeared on it.
"Fisher. I have reliable information that you've dispatched an aircraft carrying a nuclear warhead to the engagement zone. Is that accurate?"
"...Yes. What of it?"
Fury's expression tightened at the confirmation. "You know perfectly well that our people are still in that zone. You think what you're doing is acceptable?"
"Fury. I don't have the luxury of weighing that right now."
"These are orders from above. I need to eliminate that threat."
"So." A pause. "I'm sorry."
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