3.9
The supervillainess, as I had decided to call the lightning master, squeezed the blood dagger. It immediately started to crack and, despite my resistance, shattered into pieces a second later, which she then tossed aside.
Right after that, her other hand shot up, and a myriad of lightning bolts surged in my direction, filling almost the entire corridor. Butcher and Frenchie managed to dive into one of the opened rooms, while I ducked into another.
"Are you kidding me..."
I immediately had to dodge a flying fist that was clearly intent on punching through my skull. Standing before me was a bearded man over two meters tall, glaring at me with the hateful gaze of a true madman. Saliva drooled from his mouth as he gnashed his teeth, mumbling something incoherently. He clenched his hands into fists so tightly that they literally turned white.
I braced myself to dodge his strikes, but instead of simply charging at me with his fists, the giant did something unexpected. He began to greedily suck in air, causing the temperature in the room to plummet. I didn't care exactly how his power worked, but it was obvious it wouldn't bring me anything good. So, I took preemptive action.
Making a quick dash toward him, I delivered a lightning-fast strike right to his diaphragm. He exhaled with a hiss, after which a massive stream of fire erupted from his mouth, filling more than half the room. The avalanche of fire incinerated the wall, the door, and everything behind it.
I only saved myself by rolling behind the man's back. Almost all supes, besides strength and endurance, also possess enhanced coordination and agility, but few develop this aspect of their powers, relying instead on their superhuman durability. I, however, preferred dodging strikes to taking them head-on.
The guy let out a piercing scream the moment he realized I had survived, after which he started mindlessly trying to hit me with his fists. It was clear he was physically stronger than me, but he had absolutely no technique, which allowed me to easily deflect his blows to the side.
I only needed a few seconds to stop the blood flow to his brain and knock the giant out, but the problem was doing it without harming him. Except I didn't have even a single free moment to concentrate.
Theoretically, I could use my power at full capacity and inflict internal damage on him, turning the blood in his brain capillaries into sharp blades, for example. Except that meant certain death even for a powerful supe, and I wouldn't have been able to stomach doing that myself.
Doing that even to a supervillainess seemed like overkill, but to a patient who was essentially innocent? It was out of the question. Besides, I didn't know if he possessed regeneration. I could determine that through a blood analysis, but again, I needed time.
I tried to knock him out the simpler way, just by starting to deliver rapid strikes to his head. Years of boxing training hadn't been in vain. A right cross, a small hop to the side, shift my feet, twist my torso, a left strike, then wind up and another right...
By the tenth punch, he started to stagger, and his attempts to attack me slowed down significantly. Right, just a couple more hooks and he'll be completely...
"There you are! Just stand still!" the woman shouted in annoyance.
Only thanks to my blood vision was I able to dodge the arriving villainess's attack in time. Her right eye was still a bloody mess, but it didn't look like it was hindering the woman in any way. Her lightning seemed to only grow stronger from her anger.
I rolled to the side, causing the entire charge to hit the enraged man instead. Surprisingly, he just froze in place, twitching with spasms, but took the hit in stride.
After that, he charged forward with a deafening roar, quickly closing the distance to the woman in a dash. He had already wound up, preparing to attack her, but she was clearly opposed to the idea.
"Trash, what are you thinking?" The woman looked at him like he was a total idiot, raising a questioning eyebrow.
Before the man's fist could reach her face, she dodged with a sharp movement. I felt blood begin to spray across the walls of the room. The woman tossed the man's torn-off lower jaw aside, grimacing at the blood covering her suit, skin, and hands. She tried to shake it off with disgust, glaring at me angrily once again.
The man himself stood there for a while, as if not understanding what had happened. He stared in horror at the stream of blood pouring from his mouth, after which he simply collapsed onto his side. The villainess just stepped over him and slowly headed in my direction.
"You know, sometimes I even feel sorry for garbage like you..." she drawled lazily.
She shut up, dropping sharply to one knee and letting out an incredibly loud scream that practically made my ears ring. The villainess clutched her leg, which must have been a source of incredible pain right now. No kidding, if rupturing her veins from the inside hadn't stopped her, my only option would have been to run.
It took me seconds to carefully knock someone out, but to inflict irreparable damage on them? One thought, and the blood inside their veins turns into a set of needles. However, the result was much weaker than it should have been. I'd need to recalculate my ability to affect a more durable superhuman body...
Now was not the time for theoretical musings. I wasn't going to wait for the villainess to recover and retaliate, so I continued to attack her silently and cold-bloodedly. I had seen what she did to the man, and therefore I had no intention of holding back.
A dash, and I'm instantly beside her. She was still looking down in confusion, so she couldn't block my knee to her face. I immediately felt blood start flowing from her crunching nose.
It was a good hit, so the villainess instantly flew back several meters, hitting her back against the concrete wall. Cracks spiderwebbed across it, and dust began to billow outward.
Two steps—and I'm next to her again. Wind up, pull my leg back, and a quick right hook to the cheekbone so she wouldn't be able to recover for a while. A left strike to the chest to knock the wind out of her lungs.
A couple more punches to the jaw and head, after which I start hammering her into the stone like a mallet. A knee to the liver, an elbow to the temple, a left fist into her only intact eye, two more hooks to the head...
I didn't come here to show off and prove how cool and strong I am. I'm here to save people, find evidence of Vought's crimes, and test my skills in actual combat.
And even though I don't have a lot of experience, I know perfectly well that pausing for a chat in the middle of a fight, like the local heroes love to do, is a very bad idea. First, you have to deal with the enemy and make sure there are no more opponents left.
I was trying to knock her out, not kill her, which is why I was aiming for her head. Technically, I had the power to finish her off without even touching her, but I really didn't want to start my hero career with the deaths of innocents.
Moreover, an even more important reason was that this woman clearly knows a lot of Vought's dirty secrets and could be useful as a witness.
Except no matter how much I hit her, it didn't seem to be very effective. She was a much stronger supe physically than me, which made her durability and endurance simply fantastic.
However, in a real fight, strength alone is not enough, and sometimes the most skilled and calm person wins. I was sure the lady would have torn me to pieces by now if she wasn't such a huge fan of talking and showing off.
With every punch, the pain in my hands grew stronger, as it felt like I was trying to punch through a mountain. Even her flesh was tougher than many of the materials I had trained on. And that's not even mentioning her bones, which seemed to be made of steel...
Immersed in the beating, I didn't notice someone approaching me from the direction of the melted wall. And that was exactly why I failed to dodge the hand that grabbed my jacket and sent me flying.
I flew about five meters, eventually slamming into a wall. Was it my imagination, or did I hear my own bones crunch? A sharp pain in my ribs wasn't exactly thrilling either.
As I got up, I was instantly sent flying again, launched upward by the man's kick. I flew a few more meters, but this time I managed to dodge, rolling away from the foot that crushed the floor right where my head had been a second ago.
After that, I clenched my hand and repeated the trick with rupturing the veins inside the enemy's leg, thereby buying myself a moment to stand up and figure out who had even attacked me. I only needed a second of calm, except the result didn't deceive me at all.
"You've gotta be kidding me..."
It's true what they say, it's a small world. Getting up, I saw a bearded Latino in his thirties, who was staring at me with the manic eyes of a wild beast, just like a wolf looking at a sheep. Only his injured leg prevented him from lunging at me right now. Around his neck was some kind of black collar with a device attached to it that I didn't recognize.
Anger instantly flared up inside me. Blood never lies. It's capable of bearing only the truth, and nothing but the truth. And right now, I felt that Martinez had changed a lot over the past ten years. His blood was practically half-composed of various drugs and sedatives, but I could still recognize the old lunatic.
Like a true beast, he tried to lunge at me, as if forgetting about his injured leg. Except I was much faster than such a cripple, which allowed me to easily dodge his tackle. Seizing the opportunity, I twisted his arms and pinned him against the wall.
He was insanely strong. He was physically several times stronger than me, despite his body's severe exhaustion and a bunch of sedatives in his blood. His palm clamped down on my arm, and a second later, I felt my bones creak under his pressure. I gritted my teeth, but that didn't stop me from using my ability.
His body was already severely weakened anyway, so he passed out without any problems as soon as blood stopped flowing to his brain. True, my arm was still aching mercilessly. But our battle was far from over.
Another dodge allowed me to evade an incredibly fast fist that punched clean through the concrete wall. The villainess quickly pulled her arm out and turned to face me, allowing me to assess how badly she was injured.
Even despite all her superiority, I had messed her up pretty good: a missing eye, a broken nose, her whole face covered in bruises and blood, missing a couple of front teeth in her mouth. Her suit itself was completely covered in the scarlet liquid and concrete dust, but apparently, she didn't care about that anymore. Right now, she was completely focused on one goal—my agonizing death.
I guess she had already realized that I could quickly dodge her lightning attacks, so she decided to finish me off the simple way—by turning me into mincemeat with her bare hands. And her chances of succeeding were pretty good...
Spitting out blood, she silently lunged in my direction. The villainess moved several times faster than me, and the impact would correspondingly be stronger than anything I could possibly survive. Thoughts raced through my mind to just instantly kill her by blowing up her brain, but I wouldn't even have time to do that.
I saw every drop in her body moving under the force of her rapidly beating heart. I was perfectly aware that right now she was absolutely serious and intended to kill me. And that was when my reflexes kicked in.
"What the hell is this?" the woman said in surprise.
Her fist met not my body, but a dark red disk hovering a couple of dozen centimeters away from me. Never before had I created blood constructs with such speed.
The scarlet shield took the hit and, most surprisingly, even held up! I had no idea how; I'd have to figure that out later, but right now, it was more than I could have asked for.
The woman tried to pull her hand away from the shield and actually land a hit on me, but it wasn't that simple. The blood was completely under my control and moved to my will. And I commanded it to neutralize the villainess.
One impulse—and she falls to the floor, as an injury appeared in her other leg. The next thought—and her remaining eye bursts. Because of all this, the woman was unprepared for the shield to turn into liquid in an instant and pounce on her.
The scarlet liquid covered her body, pouring into her throat, nostrils, and ears. The villainess immediately panicked and started trying to tear it off, but doing that with living liquid isn't so easy.
She possessed monstrous regeneration, which was why the injuries I had inflicted earlier were already beginning to heal, but there was another way to neutralize her besides simply causing harm.
Blood began to fill her lungs and bronchi, preventing her from accessing oxygen. After such a "wonderful" sensation, she started trying to move more actively and even tried to use her lightning, but now it was useless.
I quickly ducked behind a wall, hiding in a scorched room where the electrical discharges couldn't reach. I felt the villainess beginning to thrash about more and more desperately as my power deprived her of her last scraps of life.
I kept breaking her, taking away her ability to even move her arms. And after I once again shut off the blood flow to her brain, she finally passed out. Finally...
A command, and every last drop of blood leaves her lungs, forming a simple puddle beneath her. I myself stepped out into the corridor to survey the scene, breathing heavily.
The entire fight hadn't even taken a minute, but the whole corridor was already unrecognizable. The dozen soldiers I had knocked out had turned into charred husks, having been caught in the uncontrollable effects of the madwoman's power. The walls were also scorched, making the entire place look as if it had been through a horrific fire. My old Latino acquaintance was the only survivor of the thunderstorm caused by the villainess, but even he was badly scorched and charred.
It was a shame to reveal my trump card in the very first fight, but who knew it would turn out to be so dangerous? I certainly hadn't expected to encounter a Seven-level supe right away. But preserving my own life was a price I was willing to pay.
It took me a few minutes to catch my breath and pull myself together. Looking around one last time, I began to think about the final question that interested me very much...
"Where did Butcher go?"
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