"Looks like break time is over," Henrik muttered, cracking his neck. He rolled his shoulders like he was heading into a morning jog, but his eyes had that familiar sharpness now—the kind that meant someone was about to get hurt.
"Good. I was getting bored." Alex's voice lost its softness, clipped back into something sharp and eager. But when she looked at Mateo, there was a flicker of something else still there—concern, maybe, or recognition of whatever had passed between them.
Mateo snatched up his helmet and snapped it on with a hiss. Whatever strange, almost intimate moment he and Alex had just shared was shoved down beneath the crashing tide of alertness. The old rhythm returned. His heart raced, but his thoughts were clear. Or at least, they better be.
They broke out of the gym fast, instincts snapping into place like a well-oiled machine. Mateo stuck close to Alex as they jogged past the mangled gate and into the dusty street, his eyes darting between alleyways and shattered windows. Every shadow could be an ambush. Every broken storefront could hide a threat.
Dong, still in raven form, descended from the sky in front of Akira like a black meteor. Almost in a flash it transformed from a sleek feathered bird to a magnificent brown Arabian riding horse as Akira climbed on with practiced ease.
Alex practically gawked at the majestic mare mid-run. "I thought she couldn't turn into animals that big?"
"Well, she can't do it for long!" Akira yelled, the tension rising in her voice as their transport was only temporary and whatever situation with the B-1 team could be getting worse by the second. "So hop on! We'll be faster this way."
Henrik and Alex nodded as they slung themselves onto Dong's broad back. When Akira called for Mateo, he shook his head and extended his arms forward. Riding on the horse would just lead to more strain and hit the limit faster. Besides, he didn't have to run on his legs like the others. He had a better way to get places—assuming he didn't screw it up.
The familiar slime tendrils shot out and latched to the buildings. By shortening them and moving backwards, the tension grew and shot him forward into the sky like a human slingshot.
The wind rushed against his eyes as he was momentarily weightless. Then the iron soles of his boots smashed against the concrete roofing of a building as he dashed forward, the rest of his team barely the size of pebbles from his height. The city spread out below him like a broken toy, all jagged edges and smoke.
He jumped forward again, latching tendrils to a billboard, repeating the same shooting forward process. But instead of pulling himself back, he let himself fall to the ground. Before he hit the pavement though, the tension outgrew his weight, and he flew into the sky, far higher than any building.
The air got thinner as Mateo felt on top of the world. But this feeling wouldn't last forever. He had to make the best use of it. He turned his head to the left to where the Conwood hotel, or what was left of it, remained. In the past it was a luxurious and lavish place, but as the war grew closer, it lost customers until the only people that frequented it were drug dealers, gangsters, or pimps. With the war at its borders now, the forced evacuation had left it completely empty.
In the distance, the hotel was becoming even more ruined. He could see levels of concrete collapsing to the floor like melting butter, and flashes of red light and heat illuminating the already scorching mid-day air.
Whatever challenge the B-1 team had gotten themselves into, it looked serious. Really serious.
Could they even handle it?
Could he?
They were dying out there, he realized with a cold stab of fear. Switch's quirk was genius, Maya's knives moved like thoughts—and even that wasn't enough. What the hell was he going to do with slime?
His tendrils flexed involuntarily. A tremble of hesitation seized his chest, ice-cold despite the heat radiating from below. Then he clenched his fists. I can't just stand here.
No time to think. He was descending, the earth pulling him back to its surface like a magnet. He stretched out his tendrils and slung himself forward with increasing speed, the decision made.
In a couple of minutes, he was at the scene of the fight, where hell was breaking loose in ways that defied imagination.
The first thing he noticed was the dust. Plumes of powdered concrete, dust and debris filled the air due to the collapsing buildings, creating a choking fog that was barely impeded by his respirator. Through the smog, he could barely see his other teammates, but he knew they were not handling the situation very well. That was putting it mildly.
For one, Switch and Maya were getting obliterated. The only thing preventing them from getting killed or seriously injured was Switch's incredible well-timed application of his quirk, switching positions with his opponent every moment he was about to be thrown or squashed to death, so he would be the one inflicting damage while his opponent was the one taking it. Even then, he was barely lasting, bruises and blood laced all over his skin like war paint.
"Switch! Get behind the car!" Maya screamed, her telekinetic knives spinning in desperate arcs around a massive chunk of hotel wall. She was trying to create a barrier, but the debris kept crumbling under the pressure.
Maya was faring even worse. The only thing she could use to cushion her falls or block attacks with her telepathy were debris from the collapsing buildings, which damaged her as much as it protected her. Her crimson blades danced through the air with deadly precision, but they might as well have been toothpicks.
Inferno, on the other hand, was the only one preventing this from being a wholesale massacre. With one hand—the other, Mateo just realized, was still in a cast from their last duel—he generated massive fireballs that were volleyed at their opponents like artillery shells. He grunted through gritted teeth: "Keep them distracted!"
Marina was maintaining her distance, blowing herself from the fighting radius with gushes of water and shooting dangerous, compressed jets of water to attack. Smart. Stay mobile, stay alive.
All of these tactics were barely enough to inconvenience their attackers, which were completely strange and like nothing Mateo had ever encountered.
The two men looked incredibly muscular, with almost comically oversized proportions—huge chests and biceps, thick necks and legs the size of tree trunks. The oddest part was that they were wearing black and white checkered three-piece suits that threatened to rip apart due to the sheer size of their muscle mass, though they were already torn and burnt in parts from the attacks. They were dressed more like they were going to an expensive night party, not an infiltration.
And that wasn't even the weirdest part. On top of all of this, they were wearing masks. Not the hospital kind that only covered the mouths, or the ones worn at costume parties. They were the kind that robbers wore, which looked like white socks had been placed over their heads with holes cut only for the eyes. There was no space for the nose or mouth, almost as if they didn't need them.
They didn't move like people. That was what made Mateo's skin crawl. Their eyes didn't track like human eyes. They didn't blink. They didn't seem to breathe. When the nearest one briefly looked in his direction, Mateo didn't see hate or purpose. He saw the terrifying calm of a gun before it's fired. No soul. Just inevitability.
From what Mateo could see, the two men displayed a scary set of abilities. They were able to level buildings and throw debris the size of boats at the others like they were tossing pebbles. They also seemed incredibly fast, dodging the majority of Maya's knife attacks despite their bulky frames.
And since Mateo couldn't see any visible injuries even though they must have been hit by some of Inferno's flames, he could only assume they had some kind of invulnerability. He mentally ruled out the possibility of simple healing or regeneration. That would make this mess incredibly hard to solve.
With his momentum already carrying him toward the battlefield, there was no time to stop and plan. The others could die at any moment if he didn't act immediately.
Twisting his body to increase his angular momentum, he raised his leg back, priming himself for a powerful kick, feeling the heat around himself increase from Inferno's flames. His leg was aimed for the back of one of the men's heads, but before his boot could connect, the man had already sensed he was coming.
Simply by raising his arm up, he blocked the impressive kick without even flinching. At least against his fight with Brett, Mateo had seen some signs of struggle—neck muscles tensing, forehead sweating. This man wasn't even shifted a centimeter from his spot even though the kick had been accelerated and reinforced by his speed and iron soles.
Mateo and the man's eyes connected through the mask's crude holes. He expected to see anger, or pride like in Eschart, or calculation, like in the man in the white coat. But in those pale brown eyes, all Mateo could see was... emptiness. Like there wasn't even a soul in the body. Like staring into the eyes of a corpse that had forgotten to stop moving.
Even through the fight, Mateo had just noticed that they never uttered a word between themselves or to the heroes. It was becoming seriously creepy, like they were silent sentinels with no other objectives than to destroy.
But their silence was the least of Mateo's concerns right now. The man, having blocked Mateo's attack with ease, twisted his arm in an attempt to grasp his shin and break it in his grip, and most likely slam him against the ground, rendering him nothing more than an eviscerated flesh bag of broken bones and blood.
In less than a second of this happening, the man's other arm swung and swatted away the razor-edge small knives Maya controlled in space, each with murderous intention, like they were nothing more than pesky flies.
The world seemed to slow as his arm twisted with supernatural speed. Mateo had gotten himself into this situation, too slow to move himself from the kicking position. He could feel the man's dense muscles twisting under his iron boots. He had to move quickly before—
A gunshot resounded through the battlefield and the man paused, giving Mateo just the fraction of a second needed to create a small slime barrier around his calf and twist himself out of the precarious situation.
Just a moment later, the man's hefty palm clasped nothing but slime and thin air, letting out a massive boom as his hand impacted on itself. The gunshot Mateo had heard had been aimed straight at the man's eyes. But instead of seeing the side of his head blown off with brain matter, skull fragments and blood, all he saw was nicked flesh next to the eye, and that part was already rapidly regenerating.
"Oh shit." Mateo muttered as another barrage of bullets was shot straight at the mountain of a man in the checkered suit. His iron boots landed on the soot-soaked ground as he turned to see the source of the gunshots.
Henrik was jumping off Dong—still in horse form—as several different guns and rifles emerged, still bonded with flesh and skin as the bullets were shot mercilessly at the man's center mass. Instead of being reduced to nothing but a flesh sack of holes, he took them without even a flinch, the only damage being inflicted was the holes in his checkered suit. Even worse, the little injuries they were able to inflict on the man's skin were rapidly healing.
"Fuck this!" Henrik hissed, not relenting as the flashes of death shot forward from the smoking barrels fused to his body. "This is just Ben again. But worse!"
Mateo remembered how Henrik and Ben had fought in the evaluation trial. Ben had taken zero damage in the fight. But this man seemed different. They could inflict damage, even if minuscule. The problem was, he could just heal it in seconds.
The man crouched, ready to launch at them with inhuman speed, before a plume of fire the size of a small car slammed into him from behind. He was shot out of place—not because the fireball had done any damage, in fact the man just dusted off his suit, the back burnt leaving a huge black hole, but still seemingly unaffected—but because it just had that much force behind it.
What else could be expected from the son of the top-third hero?
"Take him out of here!" Inferno grunted, still struggling to fight the second identical man with his own team. A section of the hotel's facade crashed down between them like a concrete curtain. "This site isn't big enough for all of us!"
"Already on it." Alex growled as she cracked her knuckles and slung herself off Dong in anticipation. There was steel in her voice now, but Mateo caught the slight tremor underneath. She wasn't going to be benched again. Not after last time.
As the first man regained his footing and shot toward them, Alex extended her hand and stretched her fingers. Immediately, the man was sent flying forward, straight into a building and out the other side in an explosion of brick and mortar, out of their view.
But Mateo knew that didn't mean the threat had been eliminated. Things like this didn't stay down.
"Let's finish off these bastards," Alex said, but her voice was tight. This was her chance to prove herself. Her incredibly dangerous chance.
Mateo nodded in understanding as they began running from the B-1 team toward where Man 1 had disappeared. Since Alex had arrived, she hadn't had a chance to prove herself. The first villains she fought against had immobilized her and she had to be saved by her teammates. This was her shot at redemption.
Mateo turned back to the B-1 team plus Marina. He was almost scared about whether they could handle even one of those monstrosities on their own. But Mateo remembered that they had taken on two of them before the B-2 team showed up, even if they were seriously struggling.
Inferno met his eyes over the distance, as if reading his thoughts. "We can handle this!" he yelled over the sound of crashing concrete. "We have our responsibilities. Let's trust each other to see it through."
Mateo nodded and focused on the task at hand. He had his own problems now. This would be the fight to prove himself. To determine if he was really fit to be a hero, or if he would just end up crumpled on the floor like his brother.
The weight of that realization settled on his shoulders as he and Alex rounded the corner, chasing down something that might not have a soul to kill.