Chapter 656: More Than the Simple Fear of Dying

Shortly after Erica had left to destroy the researchers and their facilities, Benjamin had already started battling with the Apex Girls in the open streets of Lot.

The sun had climbed to its peak and then begun its slow descent, and still the fighting had not stopped.

Dust hung in the air like a permanent fog. The cobblestones under their feet had cracked and shifted so many times that the street no longer looked like a street at all. It looked like the aftermath of an earthquake that had decided to take its time.

Much to the Apex Girls’ collective shock, the god-touched standing in front of them was nothing like the image they had carried in their minds, and this was someone whose appearance in the world had not even been that long ago.

They knew very well, of course. That god-touched folks were supposed to be powerful, yes, but power came in flavors they understood.

Power came with limits and patterns. You could study an opponent’s patterns and find the gaps between them. You could wear them down, or you could outlast them.

That was how the Apex Girls had survived for centuries. That was how they had become what they were. Apex hunters.

Benjamin did not simply match them blow for blow the way they had expected any strong opponent to do.

Instead he was actively crushing them with every exchange, forcing them backward and downward under a pressure none of them had prepared for.

He moved like a man who had already seen every technique they knew and had felt they were not worth the effort of avoiding.

When Hawthorne threw a punch, Benjamin was already behind him. When Zuri called down a pillar of flame, Benjamin was already walking through the smoke.

Hawthorne is an arch human who has trained rigorously and accumulated power across centuries of constant effort, and even among other arch humans he was considered abnormal for the sheer depth of what he had built.

His arms were thick with muscle that had been earned through decades of daily practice.

But since the fight began he had not managed to land a single sound blow of his own, while he himself had already taken several clean, heavy blows from Benjamin and was bleeding freely from both his mouth and his nose.

The blood ran down his beard and dripped onto his chest.

Zuri was as well an arch human and stood closer in age to Hawthorne.

While her raw physical strength could not be called unique among arch humans of her level, her elemental authority was immense and unusual in a way that had always set her apart.

Never in all her years of training and battle had she imagined she would one day meet a god-touched whose elemental power could actually rival the scale of her own.

She threw fire at him. He caught it in one hand and threw it back at her, and she had to dive behind a wall to avoid being burned by her own flames.

She sent a wave of ice that should have frozen the air itself. He walked through it and the ice melted before it touched his skin.

The same realization was settling over Sekhmet, Zanya, and Saharit at the same time.

Their shared idea of what a god-touched should be, even a strong one, had always been of an opponent they could at least wound and eventually destroy if they were given enough time and space to work.

With time, however, it was becoming painfully clear that Benjamin would simply wear them down, continue wounding them, and in the end destroy them completely if the fight was allowed to continue on its current path.

More than the simple fear of dying, the Apex Girls had always prided themselves on standing as true Apex predators above every other force they encountered, and a defeat of this nature would be beyond shameful for every one of them.

They had spent centuries building their reputations. They had spent centuries being the ones who walked away. The thought of being the ones who fell—the ones who were remembered as the enemies who had been crushed by a single god-touched in an open street—was worse than any wound they had taken.

Stubborn to the core, Hawthorne forced himself back into the fight once more, gritting his teeth against the pain and the growing weight of what was happening.

His ribs were broken in at least three places. His left shoulder had been dislocated twice and popped back into place. His vision had begun to blur at the edges. He did not care. He planted his feet and raised his fists.

Frigoris appeared beside him.

She was the fastest of them who had struck and retreated before he could strike back.

She had landed more hits on Benjamin than any of the others. None of them had done any lasting damage.

Her fist and Hawthorne’s fist began pounding forward together in a continuous, overlapping barrage of smashes, both of them throwing everything they had into the attempt to force Benjamin into a full defensive stance so they might finally regain some measure of control.

Benjamin only smiled at the tactic they were using. It was not a mocking smile.

In the next moment his aura changed so completely that it felt as if an entirely different person had taken possession of his body.

The air around him grew heavier. The dust on the ground began to drift upward instead of settling.

Even the signature of his soul shifted in a way that made the atmosphere around him grow heavier and more dangerous with every passing second.

Being extremely careful and more than a little fortunate in that single critical moment, Frigoris and Hawthorne immediately threw themselves out of the sphere of his reach before the full weight of the change could settle over them.

And they had both felt the same thing at the same time—the instinct that had kept them alive for centuries, the voice in the back of the skull that said move now or die.

So they had moved.

What resulted next was the complete collapse of every building that stood around the open space, the structures coming apart under the simple swing of Benjamin’s arms.