The military had replicated the Therons' technology wholesale, and the end result was exactly what you'd expect: all spectacle, no substance.
A thunderous crash.
Everyone watched the Black man slam headfirst into the exterior wall of the Dior building. A human-shaped hole punched clean through the oversized Dior J'adore advertisement, and every Chanel designer and staffer within eyeshot broke into radiant grins.
Duke was more agile—his reflexes and physical conditioning strong enough that he managed to wrench himself into a turn at full sprint. He tore through a ground-floor door of the Dior building like a wild horse and disappeared inside.
"Those guys just crashed into Dior?"
"I can't stop laughing!"
"I need to get this on camera!"
Dior had been grinding Chanel's face into the dirt on a near-daily basis. Both were French luxury houses with office buildings practically next door to each other. The idea that there was no bad blood was a joke nobody believed.
A crowd of Chanel employees leaned over railings and pressed against windows to watch. Storm Shadow moved through the Dior building like an ape—agile, fluid, grenade launcher in hand—scaling from the ground floor upward. Duke and the Black man pursued relentlessly, and the two Accelerator Suit–clad maniacs kept smashing through wall after wall.
What had been a grand, luxurious building was quickly reduced to a sieve. It looked ready to be condemned.
Dior employees cowered in corners, trembling. Several models in skimpy outfits fled screaming from the designers' offices.
Chanel's staff was having the time of their lives.
Bella watched in quiet amusement and limited her intervention to a single phone call to the police. After that, she was done.
Where you sat determined what you thought. Before today, she'd had no particular grudge against Dior—she'd even used their products. Now? Mortal enemies. The kind where only one survived.
Over the past few days, Dior's marketing department had been taking turns mocking Chanel's new American owner. Calling Americans crass and uncouth—fine, that counted as polite criticism. Saying Chanel was obsolete and belonged in the garbage—harsh, but technically not wrong; she could take it constructively. But saying Bella was flat-chested, had no curves, was vulgar, uncultured, arm candy, a naïve child playing at business, a lightweight with no vision—every other word dripping with contempt? That made her blood boil.
She wasn't going to murder someone over a few insults. But help them? Not a chance.
If Natasha hadn't kept reminding her to mind their public image, she'd have been doubled over laughing already.
Storm Shadow was a good man!
"That first guy who ran past—that was Storm Shadow, right? You know him?" Natasha was starting to think Bella had more connections than an actual spy. What kind of cultured intellectual knew this many rough-and-tumble types? Everywhere she went, familiar faces.
Bella wasn't taking that accusation. "I saved his life once, but he repaid the favor by doing a job for me, so we're square. He actually tried to fight me just now—you saw that yourself, didn't you?"
The two of them stood at a comfortable distance, eating the metaphorical popcorn. Bella was relishing every second.
Natasha was equally clear about whose side she was on. Chanel was theirs now, so she certainly wasn't going to help Dior. She stood beside Bella, perfectly content to watch.
Storm Shadow vaulted and wove, blindingly fast—pushing the absolute limit of human capability.
Combined with exquisite evasive footwork, he bounded through the Dior building at full tilt.
The two men in Accelerator Suits chased behind him like stampeding mules.
Dior's security guards and a handful of male employees tried to intercept the three of them, but they might as well have thrown themselves in front of a freight train.
Storm Shadow reached the top floor, oriented himself, then kicked open an office door. Ignoring the Dior executives mid-meeting inside, he raised his grenade launcher and aimed through the window at the Eiffel Tower.
Click. He squeezed the trigger—nothing. He squeezed twice more in rapid succession before he noticed a small, button-like device adhered to the left side of the launcher. It glowed white, and with a faint pop, the firing mechanism shorted out entirely.
Far below, the two spectators were still chatting.
"Was that one of Ironhide's gadgets?"
"Please. That was my idea. Ironhide only contributed a bit of Cybertronian tech. And that warhead of his looked extremely dangerous."
Earlier, when Bella and Storm Shadow had grappled, Natasha had quietly slipped a ring-shaped adhesive patch onto his grenade launcher. Simple function: disable the firing mechanism.
It had worked perfectly.
Storm Shadow hesitated for a split second, turned to run—but the two Accelerator Suit brutes had already closed the distance.
Two moves. That was all it took to put him on the ground.
One against two, outmatched in speed and strength across the board. No amount of martial skill could close that gap.
Blood filled his mouth, but his hard-set face was pure mockery.
"Idiots. Look over there."
He pointed.
To the southwest of the Eiffel Tower, a second warhead—the same sickly green—streaked through the air. Both men had been focused entirely on Storm Shadow. Now there was nothing anyone could do.
Not them. Not even Bella, several kilometers away with her sightline half-obstructed.
The tiny warhead struck the 324-meter (1,063 ft) Eiffel Tower. An instant later, thick green fog erupted from the point of impact. The 9,000-ton iron structure buckled and warped outward from the blast center. In the blink of an eye, the corrosive fog had eaten a hole more than ten meters wide through the metal, and the dissolution was still accelerating.
Bella had never seen this weapon in person, but she knew M.A.R.S. Industries' work. "Nanomites?!"
The Nanomites fanned out from the tower in every direction.
The Eiffel Tower was Paris's most iconic landmark. Tourists from around the world packed the surrounding area, and now the Nanomites latched onto passing cars, pedestrians, and buildings beneath the tower.
Cars carrying trace amounts of Nanomites sped off in all directions, artificially accelerating the weapon's spread. Whether the particles stuck to something or merely brushed against it, the green fog radiated outward from the Eiffel Tower, spreading across Paris like a plague.
Whoever was behind this seemed unwilling to let Paris be completely destroyed. They watched coldly for nearly a minute, and only after the buildings surrounding the Eiffel Tower had been reduced to near-total ruin did they activate the Nanomites' self-destruct sequence.
The Eiffel Tower crashed to the ground. The entire Champ de Mars choked on an acrid, scorched-metal stench—residual gases left behind as the Nanomites consumed iron and then self-destructed. Many bystanders felt dizzy just from breathing it in. Far more had been injured in the preceding chaos. In an instant, a tourist paradise had become a living hell.