[Red Unit Perspective]
The spatial coordinates are locked.
Pop.
Pop.
Pop.
Pop.
Pop.
The five members of the Red Unit materialized simultaneously in a pitch black utility corridor.
The matte black Mark IV tactical armor absorbed the faint ambient light. On their chest plates, the crimson word RED caught the reflection of a distant emergency exit sign.
They moved forward as a silent armored phalanx.
They reached the end of the corridor. A massive vault style steel door blocked their path. The biometric scanner glowed red.
Red Four projected his mind through the ten inches of solid steel, brushing against the consciousness of the two armed security guards stationed on the other side.
"Open the door," Red Four whispered, sending the psychic command directly into their motor cortexes.
On the other side of the steel, the sounds of movement echoed. A keypad beeped. A heavy locking mechanism thudded and the massive vault door hissed, sliding slowly on its hydraulic tracks.
The door opened to reveal a state of the art biological laboratory. Glass containment units, centrifuges and stainless steel workstations gleamed under the harsh white lights.
The two guards stood rigidly by the control panel, their eyes blank, their weapons holstered.
Red One walked past them, stepping into the lab. He didn't even look at them.
"Sleep," Red Four commanded as he passed. The two guards collapsed to the floor simultaneously, their brains instructed to shut down autonomic breathing functions. They asphyxiated silently in their sleep.
At the far end of the lab, behind a secondary wall of reinforced glass, stood Victoria Neuman and Dr. Sameer Shah. They were bent over a microscope, examining a glowing vial of reddish liquid.
At the sound of the heavy boots on the pristine floor, they looked up.
Sameer's eyes went wide with terror. He dropped a clipboard, the plastic shattering on the floor.
Victoria Neuman's reaction was entirely different. Her face hardened into a mask of lethal intent.
"Sameer, get down!" Victoria shouted.
She turned her gaze directly onto Red One, who was leading the formation. Her eyes clouded over, turning an opaque white.
Hemokinesis.
She locked onto the blood flowing through Red One's brain. She reached out with her telekinetic grip, intending to force the blood pressure to spike exponentially, to burst the skull from the inside out in a geyser of bone and gore.
Inside his helmet, Red One felt a dull pressure building behind his eyes. It felt like a mild sinus headache.
Victoria gritted her teeth, holding her hands up, trembling with the sheer effort of the exertion. Veins bulged on her forehead. A thin trickle of blood began to leak from her left nostril.
She was pushing her power to its absolute maximum limit.
But Red One's biology was fortified by Tier 1 Super Defence. His veins, his arteries, the capillaries in his brain… they were functionally indestructible.
Her telekinetic grip was trying to crush titanium pipes with a pair of plastic tweezers.
"Impossible," Victoria gasped, wiping the blood from her nose, her eyes wide with shock as the armored figure continued to walk calmly toward the glass wall.
Red Three raised his right hand, pointing it through the reinforced glass at the cowering Dr. Sameer Shah.
Cryokinesis (Tier 1).
The temperature inside the glass containment room dropped instantly. Sameer didn't have time to scream.
The absolute zero energy washed over him, flash freezing the water in his cells. He turned stark white, a statuesque sculpture of a terrified man.
Victoria screamed, breaking her futile hold on Red One's blood. She turned her clouded eyes on Red Three, desperate to pop his head before he could freeze her too.
Red Five vanished from the formation.
Size Alteration (Tier 3).
He shrank to a centimeter in height, his mass condensing. He sprinted across the floor, faster than the eye could track, diving through a microscopic gap in the rubber seal of the glass door.
Victoria was clutching her head, the feedback from trying to crush indestructible blood vessels causing her immense pain.
Red Five launched himself from the floor, soaring through the air like a bullet. He aimed for the back of Victoria's knee joint.
In mid air, a millimeter before impact, he released his power, growing back to his full six foot height, clad in six hundred pounds of Mark IV armor.
The sudden displacement of mass and the immense kinetic force of the materializing armor slammed directly into Victoria's leg.
CRACK.
Her knee shattered, bending completely backward with a sickening crunch.
Victoria shrieked in agony, collapsing to the floor, her Hemokinesis completely disrupted by the sudden physical trauma.
Red Five stood over her, his armored boot resting on her chest, pinning her to the ground.
Red One gripped the reinforced glass wall separating them. He dug his armored fingers into the glass, the Tier 1 Strength easily finding purchase and simply tore the wall down, tossing the shattered sheets of safety glass aside.
He walked over and stood beside Red Five, looking down at the blood manipulator.
"You... who are you?" Victoria gasped, coughing up blood, her eyes darting between the towering armored figures. "Edgar? Did Edgar send you?"
Red Two moved through the lab. He approached the cold storage units holding the experimental Supe virus. He placed his hand on the heavy steel refrigerators.
Pop.
The entire refrigerator vanished, transferred into the dimensional inventory space.
Pop. Pop. Pop.
Centrifuges, electron microscopes, filing cabinets filled with physical research notes. They all vanished in rapid succession.
Red Four stepped up to Sameer's main terminal. He pulled a compact data spike from his tactical belt and connected it directly to the hard drive's interface.
His fingers flew across the keyboard, his Hacking Mastery guiding him as he navigated through layers of heavy encryption.
He typed in a string of complex decryption keywords, bypassing the firewalls until the directory tree finally spilled open on the monitor.
With the connection secured, he initiated the transfer, watching the progress bar as every piece of research, every experimental log and every hidden file was copied onto his drive.
Red One looked back down at Victoria. She was clutching her ruined leg, her eyes filled with fear.
"Please," she whispered.
Red One lifted his armored boot and brought it down precisely on her skull.
The heavy ceramic plating, driven by Tier 1 Super Strength, crushed her head against the concrete floor like a ripe melon.
Red One retrieved a Spencer Industries thermite canister from the inventory space.
He activated the dial, setting the timer for exactly sixty seconds and dropped it into the center of the stripped lab.
"Link up," Red Two ordered.
The five armored clones joined hands.
Pop.
The lab was empty. Fifty seconds later, the thermite ignited, burning at four thousand degrees, melting the frozen remains of Sameer Shah, the crushed body of Victoria Neuman and every microscopic trace of DNA left behind.
PS: Here's the third bonus chapter for this week. We need 60 more Power Stones for the next one, so come on guys, let's push a little more. Haha
PS: The novel is already completed on Patreon. If you want to read the whole story at once, there are 30+ advance chapters available. www.patreon. com/Drrajnovel