Sepsis 6.5
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On the surface, Soldier Boy was several times stronger than me. I still had images burned into my mind from live footage shot fifty years ago—the man picking up an entire train and throwing it into the air. When it came to raw strength and physical endurance, probably only Patriot could compete with him.
But the greatest weakness of the world's first superhero was that beyond plain superhuman muscle, he had nothing else. He couldn't fly. He couldn't shoot lasers from his eyes. He didn't even have super-speed. And in a fight against me, that simply wasn't enough.
He pulled back wide and swung, trying to shatter my jaw and send me airborne. But before the punch landed, his fist met a liquid shield of black and red that buckled under the impact without tearing or cracking.
It's hard to break something that has no fixed shape and can endlessly rebuild its own structure.
The old hero stared at the substance with obvious confusion. I only shrugged. Then dozens of liters of black fluid launched outward from every direction, beginning to encircle him.
The first mass transformed mid-air—reshaping into something like an enormous bloody spear—and drove straight into the hero's chest. Soldier Boy was thrown several meters backward, but he didn't appear to have so much as a scratch on him.
"The hell is this?!" he shouted, looking around in shock.
"The reason you don't want to fight me after giving me time to prepare," I answered with a light smile, "and why I paid ten thousand dollars to a local meat processing plant to make sure I always have reserves on hand."
Twenty barrels of the red liquid, rushed to the park in short order, had made me dramatically more powerful and dangerous. Powerful enough that what had once been the strongest hero in the world posed no more threat to me than an ordinary person stripped of their abilities.
Obeying my will, the fluid split instantly into dozens of streams that coiled around him like ropes, binding his arms and legs. Some of them sealed his mouth while the rest began flowing into his ears and nostrils. The hero went into full panic.
Soldier Boy grabbed at them and tried to tear free, but his hands passed straight through the red liquid as though through water. A few seconds later, when the blood reached his brain and lungs, he dropped to the ground and began convulsing.
The old hero glared up at me with pure hatred and tried to crawl toward me anyway. A single wave of my hand was enough to make him arch with pain, halting him completely.
"I told you to surrender peacefully," I said, continuing to talk while gradually tightening my hold over his body. "None of this would have happened. We'd have simply sat down and talked through what was going on. But instead…"
The hero's powerful body, saturated with pure Compound V, was extraordinarily difficult to control. But the blood I had pushed inside him—that was entirely mine to command.
A few seconds later, though, I was forced to stop. I felt something new. A strange radiation that his body had been emitting steadily suddenly surged, and kept climbing. Soldier Boy was turning into a living nuclear reactor slowly coming online.
I swept my arm, and every drop of red fluid in the vicinity redirected itself toward him at once, wrapping around him in a dense, nearly impenetrable cocoon. That turned out to be the right call, because the man was beginning to glow like a light bulb.
Not willing to gamble with that, I broke into a run and put as much distance as I could between myself and the strange hero. I wasn't a speedster, but a trained body could still push past the limits of ordinary human speed.
A prolonged howl tore through the air. A flash blazed across the entire area.
The blood cocoon I had compressed to its absolute limit evaporated in an instant. It had absorbed the majority of the explosion—I was barely grazed. But the gate had become a molten puddle of liquid metal, and the ground itself had been turned to glass.
Soldier Boy stood three hundred meters away, breathing hard, glaring at me with undisguised hatred. All that excess blood had vanished from his system somehow in an instant, and yet his clothing was completely undamaged. A hidden ability like that was a very unpleasant surprise.
*What experiments did they actually run on him? If he can keep releasing that energy indefinitely, I'm finished.*
But the odds of that were probably low. I could sense the cells in his blood—the radiation they were emitting was far weaker now and dropping by the second. It seemed he had spent everything at once, and needed time to recharge before he could set off another miniature nuclear blast.
That improved my chances. Not by much, but it did.
"How about we settle this the easy way? It's never too late, you know!" I called out, bracing for the next round. Soldier Boy said nothing. He simply charged straight at me with the clear intention of tearing my head off.
He'd covered fifty meters when he cried out and dropped to one knee. The flash of pain didn't stop him—strange as that was—and within a second he was charging again with even more fury. Tiny needles and blades kept appearing inside his veins with every passing moment, but all it seemed to do was make him angrier.
Controlling Soldier Boy's blood was dramatically harder than with any ordinary super. He felt like an immovable mountain that couldn't care less about my attempts to hurt him or bring him to heel. I had to adjust my approach and think of something different.
It took him five seconds to close the gap. He tried again to punch through my chest and rip out whatever was inside, but his fist met a blood shield—noticeably smaller than the last one. The reserves in my flask were fairly limited, after all.
The old hero quickly figured out how to crack my defense, and tried to land a hook with his other hand straight into my jaw. I pushed my brain to its limit and managed to dodge it, but a fraction of a second later his kick caught me square in the chest.
At the last instant I managed to pull my body sideways, and the blow passed within a couple of centimeters of my ribs. I rolled onto my hands, sprang several meters back from Soldier Boy, and raised my left arm toward him. I didn't like using my power this way, but I had no choice.
A red mass of blood erupted from my hand, crossed the distance between us in an instant, and hardened mid-flight into a crystal shape that punched through the hero's right eye.
Soldier Boy didn't even flinch. He simply reached up, grabbed the red crystal, and pulled it out without a sound. A dark crimson hollow remained where his eye had been, blood running freely from it, but he clearly didn't give a damn. He shook his head once and lunged at me again.
This time instead of trying to hit me, he tried to grab me and drag me to the ground. I managed to reshape another blood mass into something that snatched his leg, wrenched it sideways, and dropped him to one knee.
Soldier Boy reflexively tried to raise a shield—and realized too late that he didn't have one. It felt almost cruel, hitting an old man, a veteran who had survived years of torture. That's what I was thinking as I kept hitting him.
With him on one knee, I leaped and drove my elbow into his temple. A hit like that could rattle even a tough super and leave them briefly disoriented. I took full advantage of the moment and started working him over.
Soldier Boy was significantly more durable than me. I suspected none of my strikes were actually doing any real damage. But no matter how much Compound V was in his blood, he was still a human being with roughly human biology. Which meant his vulnerabilities were the same as any human's.
So I directed every strike at his head, trying to produce as much concussive force as possible. Simply put, I hit him so that his brain kept slamming against the inside of his skull. That way he couldn't recover enough to respond to my attacks.
I was confident his regeneration would keep him alive, but I used my power to monitor his condition just in case. And to keep him from tearing my arm off with his wild swings, I tried to use a blood blade to strike one precise point on his spine with surgical accuracy. That particular spot had been enough to paralyze Thunderstrike, and then—
Instead of stopping, Soldier Boy kept fighting. He practically roared with fury and landed a wild punch straight into my liver. I felt my ribs crack instantly, his fist driving into my flesh. I was still alive, but the sensation was deeply unpleasant.
Not willing to hold back any further, I simply closed my fist. A dark mass hovering nearby changed course and reached the hero's head in a thin stream. One more second and he was seizing, unable to move so much as a finger.
I couldn't say exactly how long I beat that great hero's skull. I just kept throwing punch after punch, putting everything I had into each one. There was no rage, no fury, no emotion at all—just cold certainty that I had to finish the job and neutralize the threat.
My fist met his skull again. And again. And again. After another dozen strikes I finally stopped, breathing hard, and looked down at the hero. At the bloody ruin his face had become, to be more accurate. Partially paralyzed, missing one eye, skin torn, covered in hematomas. But despite all of that, Soldier Boy was still conscious.
I looked down at my hands and realized that Soldier Boy's skull had been tougher than I'd given it credit for. My fists and fingers had become a sorry-looking mass of flesh and bone where it was impossible to tell one from the other. Alright, it wasn't quite that bad—but for the next week I was going to be walking around in bandages with no use of my hands.
Which left me momentarily unsure of what to do next. The problem was that I'd arranged in advance with Grace to have her people evacuate all civilians and keep them off the field. I'd also told her agents to come in only once I sent confirmation of success.
Doing that in my current condition was going to be something of a challenge. I looked around, found nothing but puddles of blood, and exhaled slowly. Then I closed my eyes. I'd never used my power quite this way before, but in theory there was nothing complicated about it. I'd just need some practice.
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***
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"No, Mom, I'm fine… Yes, yes, I just stayed in my room on Halloween and studied for a test… Yeah, I love you too."
Annie hung up and looked with visible concern at my hands and side, now wrapped completely in bandages. I could feel my regeneration already running, and it was only a matter of time before I was back to normal—but the way I looked right now left something to be desired.
Still hurt like hell though, obviously.
"Don't worry. Give me ten days and there won't even be scars. The specialists here are genuinely good," I told her.
"Just an ordinary laundromat, right?" she asked me with dry skepticism. Annie was far from naive, and she had clearly started to understand that the situation was considerably more serious than it had first appeared.
"The full story would take too long. For now all I can say is that Soldier Boy is going to receive the best possible care as well, which will probably include some attention to his psychological state. Once everything gets sorted out, maybe we can talk, but right now there are more pressing matters." I shrugged. "Our runaway woke up, didn't he? It would be worth having a conversation with him."
"I already did, while you were busy," the girl nodded. "He's still shaking and flinching at every shadow, but he's in much better shape than before. He said he was a Godolkin student who was captured over ten years ago and imprisoned while they ran horrific experiments on him. Despite all those years in captivity, he doesn't know everything. He kept coming back to some forest and the cruel scientists who tortured him."
"Can he at least point to where he escaped from? That would make things a lot easier for us…" I started to say, then stopped when I caught the expression on Annie's face. Full of sadness and something close to regret.
"He said he ran out of a secret facility beneath Godolkin?"
The voice that appeared caught me off guard for a moment, but I quickly understood where it had come from. Annie looked far more surprised when a woman I knew very well walked over to join us. Indira was approaching with a smile, glancing back and forth between me and the girl.
*That I don't like.*
"Pleased to meet you. I'm Indira Shetty—yes, that one," she said with a smile, to which I only rolled my eyes. "But I won't embarrass you. I'll just tell you what I know. The secrets only opened up to me very recently, after a significant shift in personnel at Vought. The moment I found out what was actually happening behind Godolkin's closed doors, I couldn't hold onto the company anymore. Not after everything they had done."
Annie and I exchanged a glance, then looked back at the woman, who was clearly carrying real distress for others. Her moral compass was, to put it gently, unusual, and I hadn't forgotten that she had tried to have my head messed with—but right now there was a larger and far more dangerous enemy in front of us.
And I could clearly use allies. The only problem was that figuring out who actually qualified as one was going to be harder than ever.
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