The warzone hadn't gotten any quieter in the time it took him to eat.
Lucius saw it before he reached it — fire climbing three buildings at once, NCC vehicles trying to find a perimeter that didn't exist anymore, heroes he half-recognized trading blows with things that shouldn't still be standing upright. A traffic signal swung from a single wire overhead, still cycling red to green to red for an intersection that no longer had traffic in any meaningful sense. Somewhere in the smoke a car alarm was going off with no sound behind it, headlights strobing uselessly against a wall that was already coming apart.
He crossed the last open stretch at a dead sprint, and the silence found him again exactly where he expected it to — the moment he crossed back into it, like walking through a curtain that ate every sound on the other side.
Fine. He'd done this once already tonight.
He shut the expectation of sound off the way he'd trained himself to shut off pain, and let the water carry what his ears couldn't. Humidity thick in the air. Blood moving at speed through bodies he couldn't see yet. Sweat, fear, the particular chemical taste a body gave off right before it did something violent. And under all of it, the heavy, wrong-shaped displacement of something enormous cutting sideways through his blind spot from the left.
He didn't turn to look. He didn't need to.
He pivoted low, letting the massive, sweeping tail pass through the space he'd just vacated. Instead of retreating, Lucius closed the distance and grabbed hold. His hands fisted into scales slick with something that wasn't quite blood, his boots finding purchase along a hind leg thick as a support column. Drakon thrashed, trying to shake him loose, but Lucius rode the momentum of the beast's turn, swinging his body upward to get exactly where he needed to be.
He let go at the apex of the swing, suspended for a fraction of a second above the creature's back. Lucius drew the Lord from beneath his jacket, pressed the muzzle point-blank into the base of Drakon's wing, and fired.
The recoil nearly threw him. The wing was entirely obliterated.
Drakon's flight path immediately collapsed into an ugly, uncontrolled spiral toward the street below. Lucius didn't wait to watch him crash. Dropping clear at the top of the arc, he hit a neighboring rooftop in a bone-jarring roll, immediately popping back to his feet in a dead sprint.
He bounded across the rooftops, leaping the gaps between buildings until the tall, gutted structure of a hotel loomed ahead. Not slowing down, Lucius raised his gun and shattered the thick glass of a fourth-floor window from afar. He executed a maximum leap, sailing through the falling shards and landing smoothly on the carpeted interior.
Finding the central stairwell, he didn't bother with the steps. He vaulted over the railing, dropping multiple floors at a time, grabbing the banisters like a monkey to arrest his momentum before dropping again. When he hit the target floor, he moved down the hallway with absolute, predatory silence.
At the end of the hall, standing by a shattered window, was his target. The puppet master was a skeletal, twitchy man gnawing frantically on his own fingernails.
Lucius moved in to knock him out, but a sudden, blinding heat flared from the adjacent room. A blast of molten thermite melted straight through the drywall, turning the plaster into glowing slag. Lucius threw himself backward just as the superheated beam swept through the space he had occupied.
The intense heat snapped the nail-biter's attention away from the window. Stepping through the molten, dripping ruins of the wall was a man whose hands glowed with the blinding, volatile light of liquid magma.
Lucius didn't stick around to trade blasts. He bolted back to the stairwell, vaulted the railing, and dropped down to the floor below. The thermite user followed, heavy footsteps vibrating through the floorboards, firing searing blasts that hissed through the air.
---
Four blocks away, Miguel came back swinging.
Kit's shot had gone into his neck without ceremony, and whatever lived in that syringe of adrenaline put Miguel back on his feet with violent vigor. His vision swam once, cleared, and the first thing in it was the absolute chaos of the street.
The silence zone was still in full effect. Miguel watched a civilian scramble backward from collapsing rubble. Her mouth was stretched wide in a frantic scream, the cords in her neck straining, but not a single decibel reached his ears.
A dozen identical men in matching tactical gear—Legion's reckless clones—were throwing themselves at anything that moved. One clone sprinted blindly toward the fray, directly into the path of the downed civilian. Miguel didn't hesitate. He launched himself forward, tackling the woman out of the clone's path just as a chunk of masonry struck where she had been lying.
He set her down thirty feet clear, pointed aggressively down an alleyway, and turned back to the fight.
Kira stood at the edge of the wreckage doing the bare minimum to defend the team, his eyes darting around, running through every version of where Hannah could be and liking none of them. The last confirmed sighting had her falling into a collapsing garage with a man half the security detail still didn't have real paperwork on. He didn't like the shape of that thought. Miguel ignored him, locking his glowing fists onto his real target: Kane.
Kane was severely damaged from his fight with King. He was limping on one remaining spider-leg apparatus, favoring a heavily damaged leg that was healing far too slowly. But cornered animals were the most dangerous, and as Miguel charged, Kane bared his teeth and prepared to meet him.
---
Above the fray, Sol was already moving.
He grabbed the Warden by the collar, dragging the man high into the smoke-choked sky before pivoting and piledriving him straight into the fractured asphalt.
Looking up, Sol saw Aegis, the hero with the broadcast drones, hovering precariously near a rooftop. Airlock appeared from the smoke and fired a compressed burst directly into Aegis's chest. The hero crumpled, plummeting out of the sky.
Sol launched himself off the cratered street, catching the unconscious hero mid-air and depositing him safely on a nearby rooftop. Without missing a beat, Sol pivoted and shot back into the sky, locking his sights on Airlock.
Airlock was scrambling along the edge of the roof. Drakon, missing a wing and bleeding profusely, had managed to scale the side of the building, desperate to help his partner escape.
Sol hit the rooftop like a meteor. His tackle caught Airlock in the chest, the kinetic impact throwing both of them violently off the edge of the building. Drakon lunged to catch his falling partner, but missed.
As they plummeted toward the street, Sol recalibrated. He reached out, managing to grab Drakon by the scales to arrest his fall, intending to subdue them both cleanly.
But Feedback got there first.
Intercepting them in mid-air, Feedback unleashed a lethal arc of current directly into Airlock's chest. The man convulsed once and went entirely limp, dead before they even hit the ground.
Drakon felt it. Whatever human consciousness was left buried beneath the scales felt the tether to his partner snap. The reaction wasn't grief. It was apocalyptic rage.
He began to transform, dislodging himself from sols grip as he plummeted.
The transformation didn't happen instantly. The air around Drakon superheated, radiating excessive waves of thermal energy. Steam hissed violently from his expanding skin. Beneath his hide, thick bones snapped and reshaped with sickening, visible protrusions. His muscles tore and bulged, expanding his mass until he was the size of a school bus. A massive, sac-like appendage swelled at his throat, while his face stretched into the terrifying visage of a serrated-toothed monitor lizard with a flickering, snake-like tongue.
The massive wyvern-beast crashed heavily into the street below, cratering the asphalt. Before the dust could even settle, Drakon lunged forward and crushed Feedback into the pavement.
---
Back in the hotel, the chase had ended in the industrial kitchen.
Lucius slipped inside, swiftly cranking open the valves on the heavy industrial propane tanks and resting them on the tiled floor. He left the heavy metal door wide open and waited in the dead silence.
Heavy footsteps vibrated through the floorboards. Pyre stepped through the open doorway, his hands glowing white-hot, ready to unleash a payload that would vaporize the room.
Lucius emerged from the shadows and shut the heavy door shut behind him.
Before Pyre could react, Lucius hurled a raw, frozen chicken straight at the head chest. The bizarre projectile hit with a heavy, muted thud, staggering Pyre just long enough for his brain to process the absurdity of it. Before he could raise his glowing hands again, he saw Lucius standing completely still, holding up a dry-erase board and a marker.
Lucius tapped the board with a finger, shaking his head in a slow no, no, no motion. The hastily scrawled black marker read:
> I've filled the room with propane. If you use your payload, we both go boom. You can either turn yourself in or attack me. As you can see, we are in a kitchen. Which is the worst place to fight. For you that is.
Pyre's eyes narrowed. He looked at the board, looked at Lucius, and scowled. The glow in his hands faded into a dull, smoldering orange as he shifted into a street-fighting stance.
Lucius tossed the whiteboard aside.
Pyre threw the first punch. Lucius redirected the strike with a fluid sweep of his forearm, stepping inside the man's guard to deliver two brutal, piston-like fists to Pyre's face, followed by a heavy kick to the chest. Pyre flew backward, slamming hard against a stainless-steel counter.
Lucius didn't give him a second to breathe. He ran Pyre down, throwing a relentless volley of fists. Pyre tried to block, but Lucius was a machine, denying him a single opening. Lucius grabbed Pyre by the collar and slammed him violently into a heavy drawer.
The impact caused the overhead cupboard to collapse. A shower of kitchen utensils—rolling pins, frying pans, and heavy chef's knives—rained down around them in total silence.
Lucius's hands moved like lightning. He snatched a falling wooden rolling pin out of mid-air and cracked it across Pyre's jaw, then caught a cast-iron pan and slammed it into his ribs. Pyre desperately rolled away, grabbing a fractured half of a rolling pin off the floor. He swung it at Lucius's head. Lucius raised his forearm, blocking the strike so hard the wood shattered into splinters.
A brutal hook sent Pyre crashing into another cabinet. Dazed, Pyre tried to slide away, dragging himself with his palms flat against the steel counter.
Lucius caught a heavy butcher's knife just before it hit the floor, flipped his grip, and drove it straight down through the back of Pyre's hand, pinning him to the steel counter. Pyre's mouth opened in a silent, agonizing scream. Lucius followed up immediately with a devastating roundhouse kick. The sheer force of the blow shattered the blade of the knife, tearing Pyre's hand free and launching his body across the room.
Pyre hit the massive, heavy metal door of the walk-in freezer back-first. The thick steel dented inward upon impact, absorbing the blow without a single sound.
Desperate, Pyre began blindly grabbing things from the counter and hurling them. Lucius deflected a blender, dodged a cutting board, and then saw a massive plastic gallon of cooking oil flying toward him.
Lucius caught the jug out of the air, spun, and hurled it back with tremendous velocity. It struck Pyre square in the chest and burst, coating the man and the tiled floor in a slick layer of yellow grease.
Pyre tried to scramble to his feet, but his boots found no traction. He slipped, falling hard onto his face, and resorted to crawling frantically away on his elbows.
Lucius didn't run. He walked slowly across the greased floor, catching up to the scrambling man with terrifying ease. He reached down, grabbed Pyre by the belt and collar, and lifted him fully off the ground. With a massive heave, Lucius slammed him down onto the central island, picked up a dented frying pan, and beat the ever-loving shit out of him until Pyre finally stopped moving.
---
Leaving the unconscious man in the grease, Lucius walked out of the kitchen. He found a different stairwell and climbed back up to the fourth floor.
He stepped into the hallway. Stitch, the twitchy puppet master, was still standing by the melted hole in the wall, staring nervously in the direction Lucius and Pyre had originally run. Because of the absolute silence, he had no idea Lucius was right behind him.
Lucius didn't break stride. As he walked past, he casually delivered a brutal backhand to the side of Stitch's head. The man folded instantly, unconscious before he hit the carpet.
All across the city, the puppets dropped like ragdolls. Down on the street, Miguel briefly glanced over as the puppet he was fighting collapsed. That split-second distraction was all Kane needed, catching Miguel off guard with a vicious strike from his mechanical leg.
Up in the hotel, Lucius paused. The puppets had fallen, but the eerie, suffocating silence remained. He could still only feel the thud of his own heartbeat. Stitch wasn't the source of the silence zone.
He looked out the shattered window and saw Drakon. The massive, bus-sized wyvern was in the air, relentlessly chasing Sol through the smoke.
Lucius vaulted onto the windowsill and leaped into the open air, timing his fall perfectly. He landed hard on the beast's scaly back. Fighting the intense heat radiating from the monster, Lucius crawled his way up, pulled out the Lord, and pressed it directly against the back of Drakon's skull.
He pulled the trigger.
The gun bucked, but the bullet didn't punch through. It lodged deep into the impossibly thick bone plating of the beast's skull. Lucius cursed silently. That was shot three. He needed to reload.
Drakon, furious at the impact, began to thrash violently in the air. The beast rolled and twisted, intentionally scraping its massive bulk against the sides of skyscrapers in a desperate bid to scrape Lucius off.
Below them, Sol saw the struggle. He hooked a hard right, dragging the aerial chase away from the dense buildings and out toward the open water near the massive, looming silhouette of the Ferris wheel.
Determined to dislodge his rider, Drakon initiated a terrifying, high-speed mid-air tumble, sending the world spinning wildly out of control.
---
To Be Continued