On the far side of the courtyard, The Deep was trying to keep up.
There was no water here and no marine life to command. He was out of his elent and he knew Holander was watching.
A squad of soldiers took cover behind a concrete barricade, laying down suppressing fire.
"Take that, you army jerks!" The Deep yelled, his voice cracking slightly.
He ran forward, his superhuman strength his only asset. He grabbed a heavy steel door that had been blown off a nearby bunker.
Using it as a makeshift shield, he charged the barricade. The bullets pinged off the tal.
He reached the barricade and swung the steel door like a massive baseball bat. The impact caught three soldiers simultaneously.
The sheer blunt force trauma crushed their bodies against the concrete, pulverizing their internal organs. The Deep let out an adrenaline fueled laugh, looking around wildly to see if Holander had noticed his kill.
Above it all, hovering reluctantly in the air, was Starlight.
Her face was pale, her eyes wide with pure horror. She was wearing the revealing swimsuit costu, floating above a literal slaughterhouse.
"No," she whispered, watching A Train turn a man into a red stain. "Oh my god. No..."
A spotlight from a surviving guard tower swept over her.
"Supe in the air! Fire!" a sergeant scread from below.
A dozen rifles turned their muzzles upward. Tracers lit up the night sky, zipping toward her.
Starlight gasped, raising her arms to shield her face. The bullets struck her.
They didn’t penetrate her durable skin, but the kinetic impacts hurt, stinging like a swarm of angry wasps, leaving dark bruises blooming across her exposed arms and thighs.
She panicked. Survival instinct overrode her moral revulsion. She looked at the massive high voltage floodlights illuminating the courtyard. Her eyes began to glow with a golden light.
She siphoned the electricity from the entire grid. The lights across the base flickered, dimd and died, plunging the slaughter into darkness, illuminated only by the burning vehicles.
All that electrical energy concentrated in her hands.
"I’m sorry!" she scread down into the darkness. "I’m so sorry!"
She thrust her hands downward.
Twin beams of concussive photon energy erupted from her palms. She hadn’t ant to kill them. She just wanted to knock them away, to make them stop shooting.
But she absorbed too much power and she had no control over the chaotic environnt.
Her blasts hit the squad of soldiers firing at her. The concussive force was like a bomb going off.
The blast wave shattered their ribs, ruptured their eardrums and lifted them off their feet, throwing them backward into the brick wall of the armory with bone crushing velocity.
They hit the wall and crumpled to the ground, a tangled mass of broken limbs. They didn’t get back up.
Starlight covered her mouth with her glowing hands, a sob tearing from her throat. She had just killed them. She was a murderer. She was one of them now.
Holander floated through the center of the carnage, completely untouched by the violence swirling around him.
He walked on air, a few feet above the bloody concrete, looking down at the dying n with absolute contempt.
"Mud crawlers," Holander sneered, kicking a severed arm out of his path. "You really thought you could build a better ? Out of this?"
He arrived at the entrance to the command bunker. The heavy blast doors were sealed shut.
Holander landed on the concrete, grabbed the seam of the massive steel doors with his bare hands and peeled them open like a tin can.
He stepped into the bunker.
The remaining command staff froze, staring at the god of death who had just breached their impenetrable fortress.
General Raddock stood at the head of the holotable. His pistol was drawn, aiming directly at Holander’s chest. His hand was shaking violently.
"You," Raddock breathed, his face drained of all color. "What have you done? You’ve attacked the United States Military! This is treason!"
Holander smiled. It was a gentle expression. He walked slowly toward the General, ignoring the terrified staff cowering against the walls.
"Treason?" Holander asked, his voice echoing in the concrete bunker. "General Raddock. I’m an Arican hero. I wear the flag."
He stopped just inches from the barrel of Raddock’s pistol.
"You, on the other hand," Holander continued, his voice dropping to a dangerous purr, "are a traitor. You stole from Vought. You thought you could take so grunts, pump them full of our juice and replace ."
Raddock’s eyes darted left and right in confusion. "Replace you? What the hell are you talking about? I don’t have any Supes! I lobby against you freaks!"
Holander’s smile vanished. He tilted his head. "Liar."
"I swear to God!" Raddock yelled, his finger tightening on the trigger.
"It doesn’t matter," Holander whispered. "You thought it. You wanted to. And that’s enough."
Raddock fired.
The bullet struck Holander squarely in the chest. The slug flattened and dropped to the floor.
Holander reached out and grabbed the barrel of the pistol. With a casual twist of his wrist, he lted the steel into a useless lump of slag, crushing Raddock’s fingers in the process.
Raddock scread, dropping to his knees, clutching his mangled hand.
Holander looked down at the General. The ultimate military authority, reduced to a pathetic ss at his boots. It was intoxicating. It was exactly what the letter had told him he deserved.
"You wanted to build a god," Holander said, his eyes beginning to glow with a searing heat. "Let show you what a real god looks like."
Holander focused his heat vision, narrowing the beams until they were agonizingly hot lasers. He aid at Raddock’s knees.
The lasers sliced through the bone and cartilage. Raddock’s shrieks echoed off the bunker walls, a sound of unimaginable agony as his legs were severed at the joints. He collapsed forward, thrashing in a pool of his own boiling blood.
The command staff scread, covering their eyes, begging for rcy.
Holander ignored them. He kept his glowing eyes fixed on the General.
He slowly moved the beams up Raddock’s torso, cauterizing the wounds as he went, prolonging the death, ensuring the man felt every excruciating second of his punishnt.
"You are nothing," Holander whispered over the screams. "You are all just mud."
The red beams finally reached Raddock’s head. With a sudden surge of intensity, Holander flared his vision to maximum output.
The General’s skull glowed white hot from the inside out before popping like an overripe lon, showering the holotable in ash and charred bone.
Holander stood over the smoking remains, his chest heaving, his eyes fading back to a serene blue. He looked at the remaining officers cowering in the room.
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