Chapter 198: If You're Blacklight, You Take a Nuke
In the clouds.
The moment the command center issued the order, the pilot pressed the release.
The warhead detached from its mount.
A second later, the igniter fired.
A white line traced through the cloud layer and fell toward the ruins at the center of the engagement zone, fine as a needle, fast as anything.
SHIELD.
Fury swore under his breath when he heard the command center's response, then turned back to the main screen.
He watched the aircraft actually fire the warhead at the center of the engagement zone, and his hand clenched.
"Mother—"
"These people move fast."
"They didn't leave me a single second to send a message."
"Maybe that was exactly what they were waiting for." Agent Hill spoke up from beside him.
"Looking at the intelligence we gave them — Apocalypse has a spatial teleportation ability. Without someone to keep him pinned, even a nuclear strike might not be reliable."
"So they decided to spend the Avengers to buy the window for the strike."
Fury let out another profanity, louder this time.
"When this is over, I'm going to have some very pointed words with those people."
He turned to Hill. "Speaking of which — did you—"
"Already handled, Director. The moment they issued the nuclear strike authorization, I passed the notification to Umbrella's internal AI for relay."
"Whether it reached them in time, I can't say. But we did everything in our power."
Stark Industries.
Tony Stark was in his workshop, deep into a heavy metal playlist while working on upgrades to the armor, when the music cut out.
He stopped working the moment it did. He had a particular relationship with unexpected silence.
"Hey. JARVIS. What happened to the music?"
"Did I forget to pay for another month?" He set down the component in his hand, tone somewhere between joking and not.
JARVIS did not take the bait this time.
"...Sir. It appears your friend Matthew Lawrence has run into some difficulty."
"Difficulty?"
The smile on Tony's face went flat. Matthew was not the kind of person who ran into difficulty.
"What kind of difficulty?"
"A significant kind."
"News reports indicate that a powerful mutant known as Apocalypse appeared in Eastern Europe approximately ten minutes ago. The individual's abilities are considerable, and his stated intention is the subjugation of the human race. SHIELD engaged Matthew Lawrence to resolve the situation."
"At present, local government authorities — acting without notifying SHIELD — have authorized a nuclear strike on the area."
"Matthew Lawrence is inside the strike zone. He is currently in the center of it."
Tony stood there for a moment not fully processing what he'd just heard.
Then he swept a hand across the workbench and pulled up a projection. Satellite feed.
The feed confirmed it. Tony turned to the display with complete seriousness.
"JARVIS. If we hack into the fighter formation's internal channel right now and order them back — do we have time?"
"...Apologies, sir. I've attempted to breach the formation's internal channel. I was unsuccessful."
"From the satellite imagery, the nuclear strike has already been initiated."
"Damn it."
The white nanometal suit assembled over him in an instant. Tony punched straight through the ceiling and accelerated toward Eastern Europe.
"Sir—"
"Don't. JARVIS. Not now."
"And get the satellite feed up on the suit display."
Eastern Europe.
As the warhead tore through the cloud layer, trailing a blinding white line straight down, every set of eyes in the area locked onto it.
In the ruins, Hunk, Leon, and Nemesis all looked up at nearly the same moment.
When they saw what was coming through the clouds, all three moved.
Not away from it. Toward it.
There was only one thought between the three of them: put themselves between their commander and whatever was about to happen. Take as much of it as possible.
They had covered less than twenty meters when:
An invisible gravity field closed around all three simultaneously without warning, like an enormous hand locking shut.
The next instant, gravity reversed.
Before any of them could process it, they were launched outward — faster than they had been charging in — flung in three separate arcs across the ruined city.
Three trails across the sky. Three impacts at the city's edge, each one throwing up a column of smoke and debris. Dozens of kilometers out.
By the time that was done, the warhead had arrived.
First: light.
A light more violent than the sun, but nothing like sunlight. Not warm. More like someone had torn the world open down the middle and let everything bleed out, all color stripped away, leaving only the white that burns through everything.
Then, as the light settled, the sound reached them.
A nuclear detonation at its epicenter produces something that the word "explosion" cannot contain. The sound compressed the air itself into something solid and then shattered it, as though an invisible fist had swung through it.
The entire ground surface of the ruined city inverted simultaneously. The shockwave moved outward at supersonic speed, and everything in its path — the wreckage of high-rise buildings, bridge supports, tons of reinforced concrete, and the entire field of metal spike columns — was reduced to powder and pushed in every direction.
A mushroom-shaped pillar of fire and smoke rose from the ground.
The cloud rolled upward, carrying fire and black smoke, churning as it climbed thousands of meters into the cloud layer.
The shockwave punched a gap straight through the clouds.
Firelight spilled from the edges of that gap, staining every surface of the landscape below in red.
The sky for dozens of kilometers in every direction was lit by the column. It looked like an ending.
The entire space shook under humanity's most terrible creation. The air itself boiled.
The city was gone. Every remaining structure, flattened. Everything reduced to scorched earth.
Everything returned to nothing.
But:
In the deep pit at the center, the black cocoon was still there.
The light from the detonation had barely begun to fade when the shockwave arrived, carrying heat sufficient to melt steel, and hit the cocoon directly.
On contact, the outermost layer of the cocoon's flesh began vaporizing.
Not burning. Vaporizing.
The outer layer converted directly from solid to gas on contact with the heat, the liquid phase skipped entirely.
The flesh became white vapor that hadn't even had time to disperse before the next wave of higher-temperature flame consumed it.
One layer. Then another. Then a third.
The heat ate steadily into the cocoon.
Each layer that vaporized exposed the one beneath it, which immediately began resisting the next wave.
As the process continued, the cocoon visibly shrank, its black outer shell peeling back layer by layer like an onion.
But at the same time the flesh vaporized:
Evolution was happening.
What replaced the vaporized layers was not absence. Denser black material pushed outward to fill the gap — more concentrated than what had been there before, with a bone-quality crystalline structure in the surface that hadn't existed previously.
The carbonized residue left behind by each vaporized layer was absorbed by the new growth and reprocessed into something more structurally sound.
The heat was attempting to destroy it. The Blacklight Virus appeared to be learning faster than the heat could work.
It was dying in the flame, and being reborn, and evolving, in continuous sequence.
Every cell that survived the process was changed at a fundamental level.
The cocoon was reforming itself in the fire.
Before that first wave of heat had faded, radiation arrived.
Lethal radiation, moving through fire and shockwave as though neither existed, driving directly into every cell of the cocoon.
For ordinary human tissue and DNA, radiation at this level would have been catastrophic — genetic material shredded, structural integrity lost, nothing coherent remaining.
For the Blacklight Virus:
This was a feast.
Setting aside the specific anti-radiation conditioning Matthew had undergone, the current iteration of the Blacklight Virus was already beyond the threshold where radiation at this dosage could comprehensively kill it.
The virus consumed the energy in the radiation greedily.
It took the genetic fragments that the radiation had shredded and reassembled them, reconstructing them into something more complete than the original.
As the Blacklight Virus continued its evolution, every cell began to emit a faint golden light.
The light moved like countless fine golden arcs of electricity, driven by the virus through the structure of the body, locating weaknesses, repairing them, reinforcing, reinforcing again.
The heat was still there. The flame was still there. The radiation was still there. The tail end of the shockwave was still pressing on everything in that space with every remaining ounce of its force.
But the cocoon:
It was no longer something that could be destroyed.
It was consuming all of this.
Everything that had been applied to it was being fully digested and converted into fuel for its own continued ascent.
Inside the flame, the cocoon began to expand.
Like a massive heart finding its rhythm.
A deep, resonant pulse.
The black crystalline shell on the surface expanded outward a full ring with that pulse.
Then a hand reached through the top of the cocoon and pushed outward, slowly extending.
The hand had long fingers. The skin was pale. At the fingertips, a faint golden light.
The hand gripped the cocoon from the inside and tore.
A sharp tearing sound.
The cocoon split open.
A figure stepped out through the tear.
Matthew, emerging from the cocoon, felt the thermal waves still rolling across him and found a small, genuine smile on his face.
"Well."
"I've made it this far after all." He stood in conditions that would have killed an ordinary person a thousand times over, and his expression held something close to satisfaction.
"Surviving a nuclear strike in open air."
He murmured it to himself. "Feels better than expected."
"Roughly like sitting on a beach in good sun."
He turned his attention to the floating debris around him. Dust and fine particles gathered into his palm, and he shaped them.
A metal helmet formed in his hand — the kind designed specifically to block psychic intrusion.
Same model as a certain someone he knew.
Matthew looked at it quietly, thinking about whether this should become part of his standard equipment going forward.
"Molecular restructuring really is convenient," he said to himself.
"At minimum, the company's cash flow problem is solved." He opened his palm again.
Dust gathered. The particles shifted form as they accumulated.
A gold bar settled into his hand.
Elsewhere.
Fury, watching the nuclear warhead detonate successfully, looked worse than he had all day.
The profanity running through his head was not repeatable.
He understood very clearly what Matthew Lawrence's death would mean. Everything at Umbrella ran through Matthew. Every decision was his. With Matthew gone, the company would fragment. The Astartes Legion would scatter without centralized command. The security teams would go their own ways. And that was only the first layer of consequences.
They couldn't treat Matthew Lawrence's death as an ordinary death.
There were people in the Avengers who had genuine relationships with Matthew. Tony Stark. Peter Parker. Pietro and Wanda had just joined and they were Umbrella people. If they found out that SHIELD had failed to stop the government from using a nuclear strike that had directly killed Matthew, the trust they had in SHIELD was finished.
The Avengers, which had taken considerable effort to assemble, would disintegrate.
So:
A cascade of profanity, sustained.
With every additional layer of consequence he mapped out, Fury felt the urge to say more words of the kind that don't get transcribed.
And then Matthew's voice came through the channel.
"Sorry, I missed the notification earlier."
"But thank you for the heads-up."
Fury went still.
He stood there for a full half-minute without responding, all the noise in his head going suddenly quiet.
Then, carefully: "You... got out of the blast radius?"
"No."
"...Outside the perimeter?"
"Also no."
"So you're telling me you were at the center of a nuclear strike, took a direct hit, and you're talking to me right now like nothing happened?" Fury kept his voice even through considerable effort.
"That's about the size of it. Any objections?"
"One more thing, Fury."
"Ask them for me — what was the yield on that warhead? It felt a little on the small side. Barely registered."
Fury: ...
When the silence stretched long enough that Matthew apparently took it as a natural pause point, he added a laugh. "Alright, I'm not serious about that one."
"To summarize: I'm fine. Apocalypse is handled."
"Oh, and tell Fisher's people — they owe me an in-person apology. If I don't get one, I might find time to set off a very large firecracker outside someone's house."
The line clicked off.
Fury sat down slowly in the nearest chair.
After a long moment, he said very quietly to no one in particular: "...Was the yield actually too small?"
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