The air around Keith shuddered.
Even the bravest among the Superheroes instinctively stepped back.
A few tried one last plea.
"You don’t have to do this! You’re walking a dark path!"
But their voices were drowned by the energy rippling off his body like the core of a nuclear engine.
One of the commanders whispered to his team, "He’s at least Tier Five physical. We can’t delay anymore. Teams One through Nine, fire suppression barrage!"
Another shouted, "Stage Four elentalists, target limbs! Don’t try to kill him—just bring him down!"
And then—the sky erupted.
BOOM!
A geyser of fla shot from a red-clad woman’s palm, roaring toward Keith like a volcanic eruption.
SHHHHRAAA!
A silver-haired ta launched twin blades of ice the size of buses, slicing through the air.
From above, a cape-wearing teenager with star patterns on his gloves rained down dozens of gravity spheres, slamming into the ground like teorites.
"Binding net, now!"
Dozens of steel-threaded cables shot forward, wrapped in electrical pulses to electrocute and immobilize.
"Sound burst!"
A sonic blast cracked the air, shaking the broken windows of nearby factories, aiming to shatter Keith’s concentration.
"Plasma arrows, deploy!"
Three archers on elevated platforms unleashed charged arrows that sliced through the wind, crackling with quantum-enhanced energy.
A fog of gas-based suppression toxins filled the battlefield, courtesy of a group of support-class gas manipulators. The air turned violet. Toxic. Suffocating.
Yet it wasn’t over.
An earthquake-style stomp split the ground beneath Keith, aiming to swallow him whole.
Above, a cryomancer froze the ceiling of a collapsed building, then brought it down like a hailstorm of deadly shards.
An illusionist tried to rewrite his perception, covering the field in twisted visual traps and looping phantoms.
Whip! Crack! Boom!
A set of chain-based manipulators flung their energy-linked restraints like glowing lassos.
Dozens of individual attacks rained from every angle—so launched like rockets, others conjured through raw thought. An animal hybrid hurled himself at Keith’s legs. A magnetokinetic aid to strip the iron from the ground and blast it like bullets. A light manipulator turned the entire arena into a blinding strobe show of confusion.
"NOW! EVERYONE FIRE!!"
They scread it in unison, voices like thunder.
A final tide of chaos burst forward.
Keith disappeared beneath fire.
Ice.
Lightning.
Sound.
tal.
Stone.
A maelstrom of attacks, stacked upon each other, fusing and cracking and breaking into a tidal wave of destruction. Smoke filled the entire battlefield, so dense and furious it ford a mushroom cloud that rose into the air like a small explosion.
The ground shook.
The sky dimd.
Nothing moved.
Silence.
Silence that rang louder than any blast.
The heroes stood, panting, watching. So collapsed to one knee. Others gripped their sides. More than a few had overexerted themselves, pouring everything they had into the coordinated strike.
No one could have survived that.
No one.
Not even Tier Six tas.
Not even artificial constructs.
Not even trained machines.
And yet—
The smoke began to clear.
First a silhouette.
Broad shoulders.
Unmoving.
Unbent.
Then—detail.
Dark pants. Boots undamaged. Shirtless chest—no scorch marks. Not a single cut.
And then, Keith erged.
He was standing in the exact sa place, his arms crossed, expression completely unchanged. There wasn’t even dust on his torso.
His eyes narrowed, staring at the dozens of would-be heroes who just threw their entire arsenals at him.
And then...
He spoke.
His voice didn’t roar. It didn’t shout.
It was quiet.
Cruel.
"Is that all you all got?"
After first, they were paralyzed.
Until, they obeyed.
"ATTACK!"
The command ca from everywhere and nowhere, raw, desperate, full of fury and fear.
The sound of dozens of powers activating at once ruptured the air.
The earth quaked.
Light twisted.
Thunder rolled—not from the sky, but from the sheer collision of superhuman forces.
One by one, the Superheroes transford—every drop of energy, every last speck of stamina flung into one final stand.
A woman roared and her body turned into pure steel, plates layering over her skin until she stood like a walking tank with fists the size of anvils.
A man next to her glead golden, his very flesh alchemized into shimring gold, a radiant humanoid statue who moved like molten tal, flinging discs of compressed light that exploded like grenades.
A trio of humanoid monsters burst into motion—twisted hybrids with distorted limbs, scaled skin, and jagged jaws. They stomped forward, each footstep shaking the asphalt.
Two ogre-type tas, massive and covered in reinforced skin like gray boulders, bellowed and slamd down their giant clubs, which were really just traffic poles wrapped in industrial chains.
A pack of werewolves lunged from the rooftops, leaping with haunting howls, claws glowing faint red from their fire-imbued DNA, their fangs already wet with bloodlust.
One young man in torn tactical gear scread and beca pure plasma, his body unraveling into a storm of hot energy, whirling across the battlefield like a living nova.
Sonic cannons fired. Laser webs launched from gauntlets.
A hero ford dragons out of glass shards, directing them like missiles.
Another unleashed a field of rot magic, turning the ground brown and brittle.
A girl snapped her fingers and her entire body lted into swirling ink, then reford behind Keith, jabbing a dagger laced with dinsional disruption tech toward his neck.
Others launched powers so wild and unpredictable that even their comrades had to retreat.
There was a man who threw black holes the size of pebbles, a hero whose screams conjured illusionary horrors, and another who twisted gravity with his thoughts, turning cars into projectiles.
All of it, all of them, converged on Keith.
BOOM!
BOOM!
BOOM!!
The city block disappeared in a hurricane of chaos. Buildings collapsed.
Fire danced over rooftops. Ice encased trees. Windows shattered for six blocks.
The streets were carved open like deep wounds in the Earth.
Power lines exploded in sparks. Traffic lights swung wildly, flickering dead. The sky was blocked out by a mushroom cloud of smoke and debris.
And then...
Silence.
Then, a subtle sound—a crack. A shift in the ground.
From the fractured asphalt behind Keith, a hand reached up.
Then a man pulled himself out—thin, sharp-eyed, dressed in underground stealth gear laced with disruption tech. He held two glowing cubes in each hand, pulsing with strange runes.
"I got them both," the man whispered, voice low, urgent. "Two complete Cube Relics. No fakes."
Keith didn’t smile.
He rely nodded once.
Then, without a word, he took two steps forward, clenched his massive fist, and punched the ground.
KR-KRAK-KKAAANG!
The ground shattered.
From the crater blood a yellow light, rising like a sunrise compressed into a single breath.
It warped into a floating, cloudlike mass—glowing, golden-yellow mist that writhed and twisted, alive with violent will.
And then—it burst.
WHOOSH!!
The glowing mist swept forward like a tidal wave, smashing into the clustered ranks of F-ranked Superheroes with the force of a detonation. It didn’t burn. It didn’t pierce.
It overwheld—flooding their lungs, freezing their nervous systems, short-circuiting their powers.
SPLAT!
A girl with diamond skin slamd into the side of a broken truck, embedding her like a starfish.
CRASH!
A werewolf hero bounced three tis across the street before getting lodged in a coffee shop window.
THUD!
A sonic user was flipped through the air and smacked against a statue base so hard his power amplifier exploded in static.
BANG!
An energy manipulator was flung high, crashed through a billboard, and slid down limply onto the pavent, moaning.
Everywhere—bodies.
Dozens, then hundreds, slamd against poles, rubble, and cars.
So dangled from crushed balconies. Others were twisted into craters.
Blood pooled from cracked mouths, limbs bent at unnatural angles. Groans rose here and there—weak, pained—but mostly, there was unconscious silence.
It was massacre.
Not of life, but of pride.
The proud defenders of the lower ranks of hero society—scattered like dolls.
Keith exhaled.
"One is enough," he muttered coldly.
Then, without a backward glance, he turned and walked down the broken street—his silhouette a lonely mountain beneath the rising sun.
...
Later.
The sky had turned a soft amber. Smoke still curled faintly in the air.
Elius arrived, his golden hair whipping in the wind, riding on one of his flying swords, descending slowly into the devastation.
His boots landed softly among shattered helts and crumbled pavent. He took one look around, saw the unconscious bodies, and felt his stomach tighten.
He moved fast.
"Lesser Restoration, Stage Three," he muttered.
His five swords circled around him, humming with power. Their blades emitted a soft erald light, and each one split into three, covering the entire street like healing satellites.
Waves of life energy radiated outward.
Cuts closed. Bones reset. Bruises vanished. Breathing returned.
One by one, the fallen heroes stirred, groaned, woke with dazed eyes. They blinked, confused, reaching out for answers.
"Where’s Keith?" Elius asked a gas-powered hero who had just regained consciousness, his chest still heaving.
The man looked around, still in shock. "Gone. He left... like a storm."
Another woman sat up, wincing. "He didn’t kill us... but he might as well have. I’ve never seen power like that. It wasn’t human."
"Did he say where he was going?" Elius pressed.
No one had an answer.
Dozens of questions. But no trail.
No clue.
Elius narrowed his eyes.
"Doesn’t matter, I have an idea where the rift could be," he whispered to himself.
He jumped atop his largest sword, now transford into a sleek hovercraft. With a sharp SWOOSH, it lifted him high into the air.
The direction Keith was heading.
The destination... of the other three figures who were helping him.
An unexplored Rift Zone.
Without hesitation, Elius flew toward it.
Faster. Faster.
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