Marvel: Raising — Chapter 147 - Recruiting the Ghost Rider
"You have sinned!"
"Guilty!"
The Ghost Rider refused to back down. He steeled himself, well, no, not his scalp. He didn't have one of those.
He steeled his bones and kept staring.
During this time, the Penance Stare kept rewinding through the past, playing back Pops' guidance, those joyful scenes of fighting side by side with the old man.
Azu got to enjoy every second of it. The man was grinning so wide he looked half-melted.
"..."
The Ghost Rider felt utterly stifled. His aura, his intimidation factor, both had cratered. But there was nothing he could do about it.
When it came down to it, the Penance Stare was just a subroutine God had installed.
Being able to recognize Azu at all was already this mechanism's hard limit.
What more did you want?
But the face God didn't care about, the Ghost Rider sure did.
This white-boned spirit was famously hot-tempered, and right now he'd lost control on top of that. If the Penance Stare was useless, then he'd fall back on the old method.
Can't win the argument? Fine. He'd make a physical one.
In a fury, the Ghost Rider cocked his fist and swung.
He roared. His feet scorched black tracks across the ground as the Spirit of Vengeance, hellfire, and the elemental power of the demon Zatanos seethed and churned beneath him.
Sure, this good ol' US of A white-boned spirit's raw physical strength was only in the ten-to-twenty-ton range.
But the guy had stacked a lot of buffs.
The source-level of those powers wasn't low, either. The result was that even his basic attacks carried a whole mess of chaotic magical effects.
He threw the punch. Like a rider kicking his engine to life, his whole body damn near combusted, flames and magic churning into one mass, surging with ferocity.
BOOM!
The punch landed on Azu. Force rippled, energy reverberated, every manner of special effect detonated at once. The shockwave spread outward like a hot iron, flattening the already-wrecked ground perfectly smooth. Along the leveled edges, hellfire kept licking upward.
The pose was very cool. The spectacle was enormous.
The effect was a whole other story.
Azu stood exactly where he'd been, steady as a rock, quietly watching the Ghost Rider's performance. Then he reached up and scratched the spot where he'd been hit.
"A little itchy."
At the same time, his super vision kicked in. Combined with the realm and authority of a Skyfather, Azu "saw" into the Ghost Rider's internal state.
The Spirit of Vengeance. Mephisto. Zatanos.
Three Skyfather-level powers wrapped around Johnny Blaze like countless cocoons, like an oversized truck trying to haul a tiny horse. The man was nearly being driven out of his mind.
"Hey, buddy."
"If you still want to ride motorcycles and do stunts, the company can give you a job. A real position."
Azu called out: "After all, in the Marvel Circus, you're someone Pops is genuinely fond of."
The Ghost Rider, seeing that one punch had done nothing, immediately dropped into a crouch to build power. Ready to deliver something fiercer. Something stronger.
Then Azu kicked him.
BOOM!
Stark Industries Tower was pierced from bottom to top in a clean diagonal line. Hellfire exploded outward like fireworks.
In the blaze of light, the Ghost Rider's skull cracked, flaking off like brittle bone and old paint, then quickly knit itself back together. Wreathed in flames and magic, fresh white bone pushed through. The fissures sealed. The ghost-light in his eye sockets burned deeper than before.
And his aura climbed.
Flames and the interwoven power of three Skyfathers formed a massive force field, the pressure enormous. In this moment, all of it converged on Azu.
"..."
He felt so relaxed. So bored.
"Damn it, I've been had!"
"Who recorded me crying my eyes out and uploaded it to the fan group chat?!"
"It was Deadpool!"
"Then he's actually dead!"
"Hulk, smash! Deadpool, gone!"
"Everyone, everyone — today is my daughter's hundred-day celebration. Do Tony a favor here... let me kill Deadpool first!"
The superheroes dissolved into total chaos.
Failure? Fine. Before the company, before Chief Zu, before Mr. Guan, every single one of them had been failing. That was just life.
The problem was that this time, they hadn't just failed. They'd lost face in front of their fans.
How was that not a complete public collapse?
Swallowing it down only made it worse the longer they sat with it.
The crowd went after Deadpool with everything they had. One hero finished, the next stepped in. They'd formed an actual queue.
Thor, somewhere in the middle of the line, clutched Deadpool — who had long since been beaten beyond any recognizable human shape — and wept with pure emotion: "Where's your regeneration? Hurry up and kick in! Your time slot is almost here! You son of a bitch, at least give me some decent feedback when I hit you..."
The only person present who didn't beat Deadpool was Peter Parker.
Because even after everyone had been judged by the Ghost Rider, even with mentalities collapsing and ugly sides on full display, Deadpool still hadn't taken a single embarrassing photo of Spider-Man.
...
The Ghost Rider launched his signature move from the sky, a motorcycle strike descending from above.
Full rider-bike fusion: skull, ghost flames, motorcycle, all one. Wild. Stylish. Explosively cool.
"Oh, that's pretty handsome."
Azu yanked the mini Godzilla off his shoulder and tossed it out.
"ROAR!"
Like a monster plush toy flipped to full size, Godzilla enlarged in midair, caught the Ghost Rider in one bite the way a husky chomps down on a bone, then shook and swallowed.
The Phoenix Force erupted.
More searing than hellfire. More absolute.
In an instant it burned through the impurities of all three Skyfathers, crunched the skull and motorcycle apart, and spat out one Johnny Blaze with a wet "p-tooey."
"You..."
The weathered, story-carved face of a middle-aged man. Knocked back to his original form.
In his moment of downfall, the voices came.
The Spirit of Vengeance, Mephisto, the elemental demon, chaotic voices layering over each other, each one narrating its own power, making its pitch. In their telling, the Ghost Rider was a walking god. Omnipotent. Undefeatable.
But now, looking at Azu standing high above the assembled superheroes, and the sky-blotting beast beside him, and the great figure standing quietly behind The Homie,
Johnny understood.
This was what a true god of this world looked like.
"Boss! Chief Zu!"
"I want to join the company. I want to drive. Drive fast."
Johnny said it before he'd even finished the thought.
"Mm."
Trouble handled. Azu nodded and flew off. Even the superheroes had no interest in posing over the wreckage, he certainly wasn't going to.
Shortly after, Ashley rushed over, contract already in hand, with Doom in tow.
A motorcycle-riding, magic-wielding white-boned spirit, that kind of thing barely registered in today's good ol' US of A.
It might trend on a few minor programs. But for the company, it wasn't explosive enough to bother with.
For disaster-weary New Yorkers, this was just another story about a mutant getting powers and going off the rails.
Everyone was tired of those stories.
But within this one, the superheroes who'd made fools of themselves, the shameless Deadpool who'd somehow turned it all into massive hype, The Homie arriving at the very end,
and behind him, Mr. Guan,
had drawn the attention of the entire world.
Because his moods determined the fate of every living thing on this planet.
On this planet, the most terrifying thing was The Homie. Even more terrifying was The Homie without Mr. Guan.
...
Had to revise a lot of the earlier chapters. Some are down to about a thousand words now, nothing to be done about that.
There's also a dialogue between Azu and Wanda, "you're eight years old" got changed to "you're eighty million years old." Just, uh, treat it as a running gag.
Couldn't write things too brutal. Trimmed a lot from the outline too. But compared to being locked up until death, at least it gets a decent ending.
Let's go, let's go!
➤ Next: Mephisto — The Conversation