Chapter 261 Luck.

Chapter 261: 261 Luck.

"Round two," the demon hissed, his voice echoing from tongues of pure flame.

Fucking perfect. The bastard must have hijacked an absorbing super with a severe identity crisis. Normally, this wasn’t an issue.

An opponent turning their skin into solid iron usually just handed me the remote control to their central nervous system.

But as I stretched out my power, the intense heat wrapping his body completely warped the magnetic fields. The thermal output pushed the metal way past its Curie point. He was entirely non-magnetic.

Guess we had to do this the old-fashioned way.

I fed a boost into my boots, rising higher into the air to hover just out of his reach.

The fact that he was made of boiling liquid metal meant I couldn’t puppeteer his limbs, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t physically hurt him.

I drew my hand back, gathering raw magnetic force into a dense, humming sphere around my gauntlet, and threw a heavy kinetic punch straight at his chest.

The invisible blast slammed into Legion’s oozing torso. The kinetic impact blew a clean, foot-wide hole right through his center of mass.

Nice. Solid opening move.

He reformed the missing mass almost instantly, the molten slag flowing back together to close the gap, but the strike definitely got his attention. Which was exactly what I needed to draw him away from the skylight.

It also drew his absolute, unhinged fury, which was even better.

"Mortal fool! Do you honestly think that will stop me?" Legion roared. He oozed across the roof after me, leaving a glowing, bubbling snail-trail of melted asphalt in his wake. "I am your end! Your doom!"

"You have to actually catch me first," I called down, sending another concussive magnetic punch that splattered his left shoulder across the gravel.

"I will!" Legion howled, surging forward. "I will melt your bones! I will consume your soul! Your existence will be endless torment! Your eternity shall be absolute anguish!"

"I bet," I said, casually swatting apart a molten arm that stretched toward my boots like golden taffy. "How is that strategy working out for you so far, by the way?"

"Shut up!" Legion snarled. He drew back a massive, goopy arm and threw a wild, elongated haymaker.

I zipped straight up. The limb of boiling metal swung wide, missing my boots by inches.

The intense wave of heat radiating off the strike made me sweat heavily inside my climate-controlled armor. I definitely could not let that sludge touch my suit.

"Oh! Almost had me that time. You’re getting much warmer."

"I will show you the true meaning of pain!"

"Yeah, I have trouble coming up with the right words sometimes too. If you want, I can pull up a dictionary on my phone."

"Raaaaaa!"

I almost felt bad for the poor bastard trapped in that meat-suit. But not really, because Legion was a massive liability. Thankfully, while I was keeping him busy, I had found exactly what I was scanning for.

A massive, industrial steel cylinder sat on a reinforced platform near the edge of the roof. I stretched my right hand toward it.

Given the facility’s heavy chemical research, a massive water storage tank on the roof could only mean one highly specific thing.

My power locked onto the heavy iron framing. The thick steel struts groaned in protest as I violently wrenched the entire structure off its concrete mounts.

I was definitely going to pay a heavy premium on the repair invoice after this, but property damage was just a standard expense.

Besides, it was a minor hit compared to the intense satisfaction of what was about to happen next.

I swung my arm in a wide, vicious arc. The massive cylinder whipped through the air, tearing free of its plumbing, and came to a dead stop directly above Legion’s head.

The molten demon looked up at the looming shadow in surprise. Then, he burst out laughing.

"Fine!" he roared, throwing his burning arms wide open. "Bring me more metal to consume!"

"Yeah, about that," I said.

I ripped both hands apart.

With an agonizing shriek of tearing steel, the massive tank split straight down the middle, cracking open like a hollow egg. Hundreds of gallons of pressurized, icy water dropped from the reservoir in a single, crushing tidal wave.

Legion’s grinning iron face fell in absolute shock a split second before he was entirely swallowed by the cascade.

A blinding, violent explosion of white steam blasted outward. I threw myself backward through the air before the superheated vapor could cook me inside my own helmet.

Holy hell, that was hot. Even as I retreated, I pushed my senses downward through the whiteout, scanning the roof to see if the bastard survived.

Oof.

I felt the sudden, rigid density of cooled iron. As the thick clouds of steam finally began to dissipate into the night air, the remains of the demon were revealed.

And it was a substantial amount of metal. But he wasn’t moving anymore.

The sudden, catastrophic drop in temperature had flash-frozen the molten slag instantly. Legion was reduced to a solid, jagged statue, frozen in place with his thick arms raised in a futile attempt to shield his face.

The skull visage was now little more than a hollow, heavily corroded mass of rusted iron. I swept my senses deep inside the shell, checking for a heartbeat, but there was nothing left.

If there was still a human host buried inside that mess, I had cooked the poor guy thoroughly.

Yeesh. Well, that was the job.

I left the rusting statue steaming in the cold air and jetted back toward the shattered skylight.

I touched down lightly near the edge of the jagged opening, arriving just in time to hear Glacia’s final scripted line echoing from the laboratory floor below.

"You may win this battle, Hex, but you have not seen the last of the Winter Queen!"

A massive, concussive blast of freezing air exploded upward through the skylight.

Excellent. She was really perfecting her theatrical escape whiteouts. I stepped back as she suddenly burst up through the blinding cloud like a swan cutting through a heavy winter fog.

She landed smoothly on the gravel beside me. Freezing power still whirled aggressively around her palms. Her ice-blue eyes scanned the dark roof rapidly, her snowy hair floating around her head like a pale halo.

"Where is he, sir?" she demanded fiercely. "Where is the fool who dared interrupt our production? I will show him a new ice age!"

"Back there," I said, jerking a metal thumb over my shoulder toward the steaming iron statue on the far end of the roof. "Pest control is handled."

Glacia squinted through the dark, her enhanced eyes picking out the twisted remains of the possessed host.

She relaxed her posture slightly, letting the aggressive flurry of snow gathering around her gauntlets fade away into the night air.

"Excellent, sir," she said smoothly, brushing a shard of glass off her white coat. "I am highly pleased to see it."

"I’m not," I muttered, staring at the corpse.

"Sir?"

I blew out a heavy, frustrated breath, reaching up to rub the back of my neck against the cold seal of my helmet. "This isn’t going to stop, Glacia. This bastard is just going to keep coming after us. Over and over again.

"He is the absolute worst kind of antagonist. He completely ignores the unwritten rules, he crashes professional sets, and he almost derailed a fifty-million-dollar contract. You did a fantastic job salvaging the script down there, by the way."

"Thank you, sir," Glacia said, preening just a fraction at the praise. "But it is of no consequence. No matter how often he tries to interfere, we shall simply crush him again and again."

"That is exactly the problem," I said grimly. "He doesn’t have to win every single time. He only has to get lucky once. Which means we have to find a permanent solution before he gets another chance at bat. This parasite can literally hijack anyone on the street."

"We will destroy him, sir," Glacia stated with absolute, unwavering certainty. "I know we will."

I looked back at the metallic, frozen statue of Legion’s latest puppet. A heavy, sinking feeling settled deep in my chest.

I only hoped we could figure out how to kill a demon before my luck finally ran out.