The sky began to flicker, and the clouds slowly vanished... Something shaped like a small meteorite slammed into the center of the destroyed country.
A great blaze spread rapidly, a cloud of smoke concealing a silhouette that slowly emerged... The smoke cleared, revealing a man with weapons on both arms, his gaze piercing. Only one order echoed in his head: "ELIMINATE THE HEROES."
He simply began to walk, unhurried. He would catch them off guard for maximum effect.
"Project underway. Code 01 active," a robotic voice announced from the weapon on his arm.
He nodded and quickly recharged his energy, then left massive destruction in his wake, his body crashing through everything in his path.
Cries of panic rose from the people, their voices nothing more than fleeting noise to the Boss, who didn't care whether he killed anyone along the way. The rush of air around him swept up animals and citizens alike without a second thought, leaving some gravely injured. The flowers met the same fate, ripped from their roots and flung into the air, their petals falling behind the Boss like a blizzard, though blood coated them. He held his speed until he stopped dead a few meters from the heroes' mansion.
He aimed the cannon's muzzle at the house. An energy tube on the weapon began to fill with sky-blue light, glowing so brightly that it lit up his face.
"Charge complete. Code 02 activated," the system said.
Without a second thought, he fired.
The projectile created a huge wave of air and dust. Slowly it settled. The mansion was now nothing but ashes, but when he looked closer, he realized there was only a scrap of cloth on the ground.
"Target detected. Automatically firing explosive charge," the system announced.
A grenade with glowing red markings shot out of the weapon and into the sky. Boss 23 threw up an energy field, and at that instant the grenade exploded. Everything around him was vaporized. He dismissed the shield with a wave of his hand and slipped on a pair of glasses. He looked around and sensed heat coming from his left. He turned his head slowly. There stood Kiro, eyes wide open, arms covered in scratches.
"How did you spot our ambush?" Kiro asked. He had known a Boss was coming, but not like this.
He shut his eyes tight and opened them again, his expression instantly serious. Behind him, Eduin stepped out with both swords in hand, followed by Worh and Sone. The hybrid watched from a hiding spot.
Kiro launched himself at a dizzying speed and threw a punch at the Boss, but his fist struck a thin layer of energy, and he was blasted backward in an explosion. His feet carved small cracks into the ground as he tried to brake.
Eduin didn't just stand there. He lunged at once, but the Boss caught him by the wrist and fired straight at his face.
A metallic clang rang in the protagonists' ears as Eduin slammed violently into the ground, his forehead bleeding, a tooth spat out. The bitter taste filled his mouth.
*Damn it, I felt death pass right before my eyes,* he thought.
Worh recovered quickly and drove a punch into the Boss's abdomen, but the Boss had seen it coming, and the weapon on his arm fired at the protagonist's leg.
"AAAAH!" Worh screamed, jerking away, his foot burning, his breathing ragged.
"Code 03 activated," the system said.
The man's two weapons began to glow. Without hesitation, he fired the projectiles at Worh, leaving him no time to react. Worh froze, watching everything in slow motion, the landscape around him blurring. He couldn't move. The shot was too fast.
A massive earthquake shook more than twenty neighboring countries. Waves swept across the horizon, seismic alarms went off instantly, and buildings trembled from far away. On the ground, only a bleeding figure could be seen, Worh barely moving his fingers. His brain was on maximum alert, his eyes empty and gray, as if he had seen his own death and now stood at the edge of it. Sone had gotten clear in time. He looked at his dying friend, and this time Worh wasn't just unconscious. This time it was worse. Death had come close...
"Worh?" Sone asked, his voice barely a whisper.
The color drained from his face. He rushed over and touched Worh's cheek, taking in the vacant expression and the slow pulse, barely alive.
Boss 23 gave him no respite. He swiftly aimed his weapon at Sone, but a punch from Kiro interrupted him, and the Boss staggered back a few centimeters.
"Bastard," Kiro roared in fury.
His speed climbed even higher. He landed a punch on the Boss's jaw at once, hurling him much farther away. His eyes blazed with blind fury, his limbs tensing as if overloaded.
The Boss didn't waste a moment and fired, but the shot had barely left the weapon before Kiro met it with a heavy blow. Everything fell into a deathly silence, and the seas grew more violent. Kiro remained standing, steam rising from his body.
Boss 23 emerged slowly from the smoke, a reddish mark on his neck, his lower lip bloody, his shoulders lightly burned. His weapons were pristine, as if all that clashing energy had never touched them.
"Code 03 complete."
The weapons quickly filled with sky-blue energy, their glow more intense than before.
Boss 23 aimed the cannon at Kiro's torso. The protagonist tried to move, but technological chains brimming with purple energy bound him in place. Kiro threw all his strength against them, barely cracking the links.
"Kill hero," the system declared.
The projectile was fired with such force that Boss 23 himself was thrown violently backward.
Kiro saw his life flash before his eyes, every memory...
"Kirito, Kirito, look what I found!" said a childish voice belonging to Sukori, who held up a grasshopper for Kiro to see.
"That's so cool! I heard they can jump all the way to space! Siuu!" Kiro answered, his voice full of excitement.
The memory shifted to their school, where they were walking along calmly.
"Hey, Kiro, what are you doing for your vacation?" Sukori asked, tilting her head toward him.
"It's a calm day. I'll figure out whether I'm going on vacation or staying home," Kiro replied, looking at her with a small smile...
Then it cut to a flashback: himself lying on the ground, bleeding and unconscious, Sukori's desperate voice calling out to him.
It was the memory of the day he saved her from the truck... And then he was back in reality.
"Sukori-chan," Kiro breathed one last time, just before the blast hit him head-on.
A great roar rolled across the continent, fading little by little. The place where Kiro had stood was empty, nothing but a huge crater. A thin wisp of steam rose from the hole before dying out, and a few cold drops of blood clung to the rocks inside.
Sone had carried Worh away earlier, but now he stopped dead, set him down as far from the fight as he could, and turned around to find that Kiro was gone...
His heart stopped on the spot, his mind swallowed by absolute chaos. He tried to find an explanation, but there was none. His brain overloaded with anguish, his breathing grew more and more erratic, and he felt his vision closing in. His hands shook uncontrollably, and then his body erupted in a massive surge of energy, yellowish and golden at once.
The sky lit up with a splendor that rivaled the sun's. Inside the energy, his body was utterly silent, but it slowly began to transform. Boss 23 quickly fired at him, but the shots disintegrated the moment they touched the energy. He didn't let up. He knew he had to do everything possible to stop whatever was inside, even if none of it worked.
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!" An animal cry, almost inhuman, tore from Sone's mouth. The yellowish energy covered even his organs, protecting them in a yellow aura...
The ground began to turn gold across a 25-by-25-meter area. Sone's head rose and fell again and again... His body was transforming into a super form.