Chapter 197 Away.

Chapter 197: 197 Away.

Ooooh, this was gonna be a big one.

Through the thick, distorted lens of Glacia’s glacial wall, I watched the heroes down below completely lose their minds and scatter.

Mister Invincible didn’t run. He flew directly up above the Metropolis Police Department, thrusting his golden arms out toward the heavens.

The air around him violently rippled and distorted as Micheal Carter used his invincible meat-puppet as a direct conduit, trying to project his telekinetic might upward to catch the falling meteor.

I didn’t even know he could do that.

But he couldn’t even slow the fireball down as it screamed toward him. Gravity was a harsh, unforgiving mistress, and she was about to spank him hard.

"You!" Rick snarled, his blank eyes suddenly flashing with Micheal’s genuine panic as he looked back down at me. "You son of a—"

The satellite slammed directly into him, swatting the indestructible hero out of the sky with an ear-splitting shriek of tearing metal and atmospheric heat.

It drove Mister Invincible straight down, smashing him right through the precinct’s lovely reinforced glass ceiling.

And then came the boom.

The entire upper portion of the MPD headquarters went down with a bang. Glass shards blasted outward on the wings of a rolling orange fireball.

The whole building opened up like a blossoming flower of destruction, heavy steel girders groaning and snapping like dry twigs as pulverized cement and stone flew everywhere.

It was the sound of absolute doom. Of a localized apocalypse. The kind of explosion that ended the prehistoric era.

I braced myself as the massive blastwave hit our defensive barrier. The glacial ice groaned, deep spiderweb cracks shooting through the fifty-foot wall.

Blinding white steam hissed and poured around us as the outer layers of the ice were instantly vaporized by the sheer heat of the explosion.

I held myself steady, digging my leather oxfords into the rooftop gravel, waiting for the shockwave to pass.

God, I loved this job.

The roaring explosion slowly faded into the rattling patter of falling debris. As the thick clouds of dust began to settle, I peered through the remaining steam.

The kinetic blast had functioned exactly as intended—it had completely cleared the board of the small fry.

Dozens of minor heroes were sprawled out across the ruined courtyard, unconscious from the shockwave or pinned beneath manageable chunks of drywall.

A couple of speedsters had even been blown entirely across the plaza, currently slumped against the far side of Glacia’s ice wall.

Among the unconscious was Divina, buried up to her waist in a pile of ceiling tiles. I let out a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding. I didn’t want to kill her, and keeping her out of this fight was a massive relief.

But the heavy hitters were a different story.

A concentrated beam of blinding white plasma suddenly hit the center of the ice wall, blasting a clean hole straight through the frozen barrier with a violent flash of boiling steam.

Cloudfire hovered up through the gap, the hero completely consumed by his own power. His eyes were solid, glowing white, and the air warped and shimmered around him as superheated plasma rolled off his shoulders.

To my left, I saw the Rubbernecker’s mustard-yellow body wriggle bizarrely out from under the wreckage of a crushed police cruiser, his elongated limbs snapping him back to his feet like a horrific, human-sized rubber band.

Then, near the ruined entrance, came the deep, guttural groan of shifting rubble.

The Brute heaved a massive, multi-ton chunk of the precinct’s load-bearing wall off his back. The eight-foot-tall beastman climbed out of the crater he’d been buried in, shaking his furry head to clear the dust from his eyes, totally unscathed.

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised that the core roster of the BSA had survived a direct orbital strike. They’d faced bigger, far more magical menaces than a weather satellite.

But it did complicate my schedule a fair bit.

"Alright," I sighed, adjusting the cuffs of my charcoal suit. "Guess we’re doing this the hard way."

The Rubbernecker’s neck stretched an impossible thirty feet into the air, his head whipping around to glare at me, his fists bulging into massive, taught mallets of flesh.

"You bastard!" he shouted, his voice echoing over the ruined plaza. "Do you have any idea what you’ve done?!"

"I remodeled the lobby," I called back. "So you’re not going to give up and take a nap like the others?"

"Of course not! Justice never sleeps!"

"Cool. Alright," I said.

I let my magnetic field radiate outward, pushing past the ice wall and bleeding into the ruined courtyard.

After the blast, I had absolutely no shortage of ammunition to work with.

Massive chunks of cement threaded with exposed rebar. Mangled police cruisers thrown about by the impact. Red-hot steel girders.

At my silent command, they all shuddered, groaning against gravity before violently rising into the air around me like a metallic asteroid belt.

From the streets behind us, lamp posts ripped themselves entirely out of the sidewalk, and even the city bus-stop benches floated up to join my arsenal.

"Glacia! Take them!" I barked.

"With pleasure, sir!" Glacia said. She raised her elegant arms, entirely unbothered by her crinkled tin-foil hat.

Freezing air erupted around her in a deafening roar. The blistering, sub-zero cold whipped past me, freezing the moisture in the air into jagged dust as she pulled her powers to their absolute peak.

Cloudfire roared, surging forward on a blinding column of white-hot plasma, his hands raised to incinerate us.

I didn’t let him get the angle. I flicked my wrist, sending three crushed police cruisers flying directly at him.

He incinerated the first one, dodged the second, but the third—a heavy, armored SWAT van—caught him squarely in the chest.

The massive chunk of metal sent the elemental flying backward across the parking lot, crashing violently into one of the few surviving brick walls of the precinct.

"Cloudfire!" the Rubbernecker shouted, his owl-like head twisting around to watch his teammate fall, before snapping back toward me. "You son of a bitch!"

"Glacia? If you would," I murmured.

Rubbernecker stretched his massive, coiled legs, launching himself directly at our rooftop. His right hand grew to the size of a minivan, his elastic fingers spreading wide to try and swat me out of the sky. But he was so hyper-focused on me that he completely failed to notice the ice manipulator stepping up to the ledge.

Glacia thrust her palms forward, unleashing a concentrated, blinding beam of absolute zero directly into his chest.

The freezing ray hit the stretching hero mid-air. His elastic flesh instantly frosted over.

Rubbernecker yelped in shock as the sudden, freeze completely ruined his elasticity.

The sheer weight of the ice overbalanced him, turning his stretchy limbs brittle and sending him crashing down into the rubble below in a tangled, frozen knot.

"Keep the temperature on him," I told Glacia. "Don’t let him thaw."

"Consider him deeply chilled, sir," she replied smoothly, keeping a continuous stream of frost raining down on the rubbery hero.

"Rooooooor!"

I turned quickly just as the Brute bounded entirely out of the wreckage, clearing the fifty-foot gap in a single, terrifying leap, and hurled himself bodily at me.

I tried to pull myself out of the way on a magnetic current, but I wasn’t fast enough. His massive, furry mitt clamped down like a vice directly onto my ankle.

"Aha!" the beastman roared, dangling in the air beneath me. "Now I have you, villain!"

"Sure ya do," I deadpanned.

I mentally yanked one of the levitating lamp posts downward like a baseball bat.

It slammed into the Brute’s ribs with a sickening CRACK, hitting him so hard the force tore his grip right off my leg, sending him dropping back down into the wreckage below.

As he crashed into the rubble, I quickly reached into my jacket pocket and grabbed a small, metallic sphere—one of the specialized pods I’d specifically asked Rhea to build for me before heading out.

As the Brute furiously tore his way out of the debris, roaring with anger, I flicked the ball directly at him.

The beastman saw the projectile coming and quickly crossed his massive, muscular arms over his face to block it.

The ball struck his forearms and instantly detonated. It exploded with dozens of high-tension, magnetized iron cables that violently whipped around his torso, instantly pinning his arms tightly to his chest.

The beastman grunted, staggering upright and looking down at his bound chest in confusion.

"What is this trickery?" he demanded.

"Hyper-dense iron mesh cables," I explained politely.

He laughed, his chest expanding as he flexed his enchanted muscles. "I shall snap these frail wires in mere moments!"

"True," I agreed, raising my hand and locking onto the iron cables wrapping him.

The Brute yelped in surprise as his boots suddenly left the pavement.

My magnetic powers seized the cables, effortlessly lifting the eight-foot, thousand-pound behemoth twenty feet into the air.

I floated him right in front of me, his furry face twisting into a furious glare as he struggled uselessly against the bindings.

"You’re very durable, I’ll give you that," I said conversationally, inspecting the ruined hem of my trousers. "Now, if you’d be so kind... go away."

He locked eyes with me, opening his jaws to bellow a heroic threat.

I didn’t let him finish. I made a sharp, backhanded flicking motion with my wrist.

The hero howled as he was violently launched through the air like a screaming, furry cannonball. The magnetic repulsion shot him miles into the dark city skyline, entirely removing him from the combat zone.

There we go. That would take care of the muscle for a good, long while.

A sudden, blinding glow caught the corner of my eye.

I jerked my head back just as a condensed sphere of superheated plasma roared past my face, missing my nose by an inch.

The heat of the projectile was so intense I could actually smell the wool of my suit singeing, my silver tie curling slightly at the edges.

Cloudfire was back on his feet. The asphalt around his boots was literally turning into glowing orange slag as he focused his powers.

He hovered upward, the air warping around him, his face dark with a terrifying, mindless wrath.

It was a genuinely terrifying sight. And I would have been sweating bullets right now—if I hadn’t specifically come prepared for him.