Make sure to check my Patre.on out if you want to support me and want to read advanced chapters: Patre.on.com/VQuintessence[20 Chapters in Advance on Patre.on]
.................
Chapter 121: Cut Off One Head, Two More Shall Take Its Pce
.................
The wind caught his white hair, his blood-stained shirt. He looked down at the compound, at the hidden entrance to the underworld below.
"Alice," He said, his voice carrying across the silent night. "Initiate The Mephisto Scratcher."
[No man wtf? You want irl cosmetics? That shit is already a blight on gaming, tf?!]
[Well, I have news for you, irl cosmetics exist.]
[Ohh, yea, u right, I don't have an irl life so forgot.]
[Huh,] [...] [...] [I'm with ya man.]
[But what the fucki is The Mephisto Scratcher?!]
[Definitely an anti-Mephisto weapon.]
[But what weapon can he come up with that can possibly do anything against Mephisto?]
[I think none. There is a reason it's named scratcher.]
High above the French countryside, a mechanical entity stirred to life.
The Mephisto Scratcher descended through the clouds, its massive form blotting out the stars.
The weapon was Adam's masterpiece; a cannon the size of a delivery truck, its barrel lined with electromagnetic accelerators and psma containment fields.
Four articuted thruster pods, each rger than a man, kept it hovering with inhuman precision, their blue-white exhaust painting the night sky in shifting auroras.
The weapon's surface was a patchwork of matte bck armor and exposed, pulsing energy conduits, giving it the appearance of a mechanical heart torn from the chest of a god.
The thing took a fortune to make and a lot of assistance from Stark Industries, as Adam had to use some of their facilities to create the framework.
The Mephisto Scratcher's systems engaged with a rising hum that vibrated through the air itself.
Targeting sers nced downward, painting the earth far below. Containment fields stabilized. Energy capacitors shrieked as they reached critical mass.
The barrel began to glow; first orange, then white, then an incandescent blue that hurt to witness.
Then it fired.
The psma bst was a beam, a condensed star hurled from the heavens. It struck the earth with the force of divine wrath.
The detonation was silent for a single, eternal second; a sphere of expanding light that consumed everything in its radius.
Then the sound arrived, a thunder that rolled across the countryside for miles, shaking the nd.
When the light faded, a wastend remained. The military compound above was simply gone.
In its pce gaped a crater a hundred feet wide, its edges gzed to gss by impossible heat.
Lava pooled at the bottom, bubbling and hissing. Psma after-effects danced across the surface like captive lightning.
Adam observed from his ptform of blood, hovering a safe distance away, his white hair whipping in the shockwave's aftermath.
He frowned. The Back door's open, sure, but the destruction didn't feel enough.
It's his first time testing the weapon, but for the amount of work that went into that thing, it wasn't yet enough.
After all, not only did Adam create it for pure destruction, focusing on that above all, but he also enhanced it with his mechanical force, yet, "Would that even scratch Mephisto?" He had to wonder.
The blood ptform dissolved, reforming into those vast, terrible wings. He unched himself toward the crater like a missile, velocity building with every second.
At the st possible moment, he transformed; human form folding into bat form, the tiny creature slipping through the superheated air with impossible grace, diving into the glowing wound in the earth.
Deeper. Faster. The va-lit tunnels of the crater walls blurred past. Then, with a final burst of speed, he reversed the transformation mid-flight, his human form materializing an instant before impact.
A cocoon of blood erupted around him, cushioning, absorbing...
Boom!!
He burst through the far wall of a subterranean boratory in a shower of gore-red and shattered concrete.
The facility beyond was vast; a cathedral of mad science stretching into darkness.
Adam rose from his crater, blood-wings retracting, and took in his surroundings with the appreciation of a collector entering a long-coveted gallery.
"Alice," He murmured. "Begin harvest."
The drone swooped past him, its camera drinking in every detail.
From its undercarriage, a swarm of mechanical spiders detached; hundreds of tiny, multi-legged machines that skittered across floors, up walls, into terminals.
Each one was a data vampire, connecting to every electronic system, siphoning every file, every communication, every secret Hydra had buried here.
Adam began to walk.
The first guard rounded a corner, rifle raised. Adam's blood-arm extended, fingers elongating into five razor-sharp scythes.
He didn't break stride. The scythes passed through the man like smoke, and the guard colpsed in four distinct sections.
The second wave came faster. Adam met them with brute force; his vampiric body a battering ram that shattered bones on contact.
He grabbed a soldier by the face and ran, driving him through a reinforced door, through the room beyond, through the next wall, leaving a tunnel of wreckage and red mist.
A security checkpoint. Six men, heavy weapons. Adam's blood erupted from all around him in a radial storm; each droplet a bullet, each bullet finding its mark. They dropped without firing a shot.
He was reliving twelve years of torment in reverse. Every scream, every plea, every wet gasp of dying breath was repayment for the boy who had screamed in a Hydra cell with no one to hear.
He harvested them like crops, and his smile only bloomed. Sure, he always knew he was spiteful and vengeful, but he never truly felt just how much hatred is within him til now.
He thought he got over it, moved on. He did not, and he liked it for it felt exquisite, so exquisite was the feeling of releasing all his hatred and frustrations.
And he felt like it allowed some bottled up happiness and satisfaction to arise, as if he was freeing himself from a prison he didn't know he was in, so he ughed and enjoyed the process... He felt evil.
[Yeah, the scratcher ain't scratching Mephisto.]
[But hey, it's a start.]
[The mechanical spiders are harvesting everything! Pying looter simutor in here.]
["Every scream was repayment." CHILLS.]
[Bro, how did he ever doubt his spite? He more spiteful than my st girlfriend, and she tried to slice my cock.]
[WTF?] [?????] [Fake story.] [...] [...] [Trust, worst shit happened.]
He reached a massive set of bst doors. Beyond them, he could sense them; dozens of heartbeats, steady and trained. Waiting.
The doors slid open.
The boratory beyond was an armory's worth of open space.
Ranks of Hydra soldiers stood in formation, their weapons raised; not conventional firearms, but sleek, humming psma rifles.
Hydra's true arsenal, hidden from the world above, reserved for their most sensitive instaltions.
And before them, standing alone in the center of the killing floor, was a figure that made Adam stop.
He was Japanese, impeccably dressed in a dark suit that seemed more suited for a boardroom than a battlefield.
His bck hair was swept back from a high forehead. Dark gsses obscured his eyes, giving his face an impassive, almost robotic quality.
He stood with the absolute stillness of a predator, hands csped behind his back, sword sheathed at his waist, radiating an aura of lethal patience.
Tomi Shishido. The Gorgon.
Adam closed his eyes.
The gesture was not fear; it was recognition. The audience had fed him much, and among their whispers were the names of Hydra's most dangerous assets.
The Gorgon was a mutant of terrifying power; any living being who met his gaze turned instantly to stone. No resistance. No save. Just cold, eternal marble.
Adam thought he would be recruited into Hydra much ter in the future, believing that he was still aligned with the Hand at this time point.
The confusion was irrelevant. This World is too chaotic for him to fully understand. What mattered was that he was here, protecting whatever y beyond this room.
Jackpot, Adam thought. What the hell is in this base worth the Gorgon's personal attention?
The Hydra soldiers, trained to near-automaton levels of discipline, felt their composure crack.
The Gorgon's power was their ultimate trump card; a weapon that should have ended this fight before it began.
Yet this white-haired demon had closed his eyes. He knew. The rumors were true.
There were informants in their midst. Someone had talked. Someone had even betrayed the Gorgon's greatest secret.
[That's Aura!]
[Adam closed his eyes! That's us! The research association! He listened to us!]
[No it's not! It's us, the Comic Union, we fed him that shit! U guys spit so much unnecessary bullshit that it all gets lost in transtion! Fuck off.]
[You research weeb shit, we research everything, even a nuclear power source. We aren't the same!]
[...]
[I don't know about the nerds arguing above, but I know Adam's bullshit's working, on Hydra and Irl too.]
[Hydra will be so paranoid after this and will do a full sweep of their ranks, imagine them executing their people, not knowing he actually has no informant, HAHAHAHA.]
[Lmao.] [Lol, and u just know Adam will never let them live it down.]
The silence stretched, taut as a garrote.
Then Shishido spoke. His voice was cultured, calm, almost philosophical; the tone of a man who had transcended ordinary concerns.
"Why go so far for something as meaningless as life and suffering?" He asked.
"You limit yourself to mortal perspectives, Adam Cypher. Think bigger. See farther. Join us."
His head tilted slightly behind the dark gsses. "What is the point of existence, if not to reach for the sky? Do not disappoint us."
"The path you walk; hunting Hydra; it is hopeless. Hydra is immortal. Cut off one head, two more shall take its pce."
Adam was silent for a long moment. Then, slowly, an eerie smile spread across his face; the smile of someone remembering a very private, very funny joke.
