Project ROWDY 2-13

The atmosphere screamed as it parted, heat and friction shedding like scales against invincible flesh of the Mandate of Heaven. Pacific airspace blurred into a single streak of deep blue beneath him, the curvature of the earth itself bending to accommodate his path. His body sang, the voice of every one of his cells joining the chorus of radioactive grace. Veins long-starved and now flooded with more energy than he could manage pushed him faster and further.

It had rebuilt him, knit him whole again, until he was stronger than the pathetic capital he had flattened, stronger than the worthless handlers who had kept him on a leash, and a million times more powerful than the old white American whose hands haunted his neck.

The coastline of the imperialist West waited in front of him, on the horizon; Washington D.C. a mere thirty seconds away. 

The Western Millenia of Humiliation began today.

Then the sky tore open with thunder and light, three trails descending from the sky above bleeding ruby, sapphire and jade across his eyeline. All three dropped with velocity matching his, intercepting the path of his flight before he could demand they flee.

Black eyes narrowed against the wind. Children.

American pups, small bodies wrapped like confectionaries; bright and eye-catching to match the colors of their own over-large eyes. Young, unmarked faces that had no right to exist in the heavens he ruled, let alone keep to his pace. Children… The insult of it flared in his chest. 

Not even the Omni-Man or the Undying King of the West. 

They send me children.

The one in red simply floated dead in his path, long hair flowing in the wind and arms loose at his sides as he stood on empty air with the slouching stance of a vagrant. To his left, the blue one cartwheeled through a slipstream, grinning like a village idiot.

The green one did not simply float. 

Like him, he hummed with barely-restrained power, green eyes radiating a desire for violence Yǒng Zhé had only seen in the mad. “LET’S GUT ‘IM!”

Green shot straight forward, a crude missile of anger bleeding jade light.

The impact might as well have been a falling mountain as it struck Yǒng Zhé. Short arms locked around his bare chest, a crushing embrace that forced the breath from his lungs and compressed his ribs to the point of breaking.

Both boy and man crashed downward, plummeting in a tangle of limbs as the air compressed into a solid wall of shrieking sound. Eyes glowed green from a face mere inches from his, teeth bared as he laughed with a rasp that sounded like a feral dog fighting a chain.

Yǒng Zhé grit his teeth, the kinetic energy of the collision filling him with power even as it rocked him with a pain he hadn’t felt since his youth. His power was designed against the greatest strength of mortals; bullets, artillery shells and cruise missiles, their explosive yield absorbed  into physical supremacy. 

But this was no mere mortal blow or detonating bomb. 

The sheer force pushed past the limits of his absorption, translating into agony that actually strainedhis reinforced bones.

He roared, shoulders flexing outward as he tried to snap the child’s grip.

But the brute did not let go. Instead, the green child threw his head back and cackled wildly as he spun the both of them, dragging him down in a whirling freefall. Force built in a sickening rush before the child swung Yǒng Zhé around by the shoulders and hurled him down with the crude glee of a thug discarding a sack of wet concrete.

Yǒng Zhé tumbled and fought his own momentum even as the Pacific Ocean rushed up to claim him. Finally, the greatest of China’s Great Seven twisted his torso, body scraping against the air itself until he halted his descent a mere fifty feet above the churning whitecaps.

His head snapped up at the sound of laughter once more, nuclear fire in his chest pulsing hot with promised retribution.

The blue one was already there, coming in low just above the water's surface as his body spun in a chaotic motion that mocked the discipline of martial arts. A right heel whipped, catching Yǒng Zhé flush on the jaw with enough force to snap his head sideways.

Air cracked like cannonfire and, before he could even blink, the child twisted in mid-air and another leg whipped around in a mirror-strike that forced another crack from the air. 

Yǒng Zhé tasted copper, a bloody roar leaving him as he reached out with hands that could crush main battle tanks. Thick fingers closed on empty air, grasping nothing but blue sparks where solid flesh had hovered a heartbeat before.

"你太慢了！" (You're too slow!) A voice spoke behind his right shoulder; cheerful, bright, and in perfect, unaccented Mandarin.

The Breaker spun around at the sound of imperialist vermin wielding his mother tongue. His rage spiked, burning hotter than the fire in his veins. The boy hovered ten feet away from his grasp, open hands crackling with blue lightning and that same sunburst of a grin splitting his young face.

Before Yǒng Zhé could lunge again, a burst of red appeared directly in his vision without  warning, barely even a hint of displaced air.

“Wh-!” The weapon could barely draw breath for a full word before a single elbow drove into the center of his chest. All the world-shaking momentum of the green one, with a precision that felt like a knife, the blow forced him back even as a trickle of the force added to his power. Yǒng Zhé swung out with a haymaker powerful enough to turn the air to plasma, a blow aimed at the red child’s head, one that could turn the skull to red mist and powdered bone.

The boy shifted his stance a fraction, not even bothering to block as he let the apocalyptic fist pass over his shoulder with an unbothered stare worn plainly. Instead, the boy’s palm lashed out to slap the side of Yǒng Zhé’s elbow, that single move enough to sever his balance.

Yǒng Zhé stumbled forward as he flew, his own force dragging him off-center.

He didn’t even get a chance to swing again.

“BANZAIIIIIIIIIII!”

The Eternal Breaker’s eyes turned skyward, a green meteor dropping from the clouds right above him, both small fists locked together overhead. His own hands went up as the impact cracked the air and the weapon of China took all of it directly to his own body, plummeting another hundred feet, then a hundred more.

By the time his eyes opened again, his body was already skipping across the surface of the ocean before he could drag himself back into the air.

Madness! It was.

These were not warriors.

They were children in every way but the power they brought to bear and that power… It was a mockery to everything he stood for. Yǒng Zhé shook his head, any other thoughts but battle pushed aside.

Without another word, he flexed an invisible muscle and shot straight up.

The red one materialized directly in his path again, a red trail behind him as the boy’s eyes flared a matching crimson lance directly into Yǒng Zhé’s face.

Yǒng Zhé grinned, exposing his teeth to the heat as he opened his arms, drinking the thermal energy as it fed the battery in his chest with raw strength. 

Then the lightning struck him from all sides.

The blue one danced around him in a blur he could barely track, jagged arcs of electricity that tore through the air and slammed into Yǒng Zhé’s torso. Voltage flooded his system as muscles spasmed involuntarily and attacked his nerves directly. Even still, he absorbed the energy all the same, drinking the lightning just as he drank the heat, pulling it all into his core.

But his body was forced to spend it almost as quickly just to repair the micro-tears in his muscle fibers, to force his locked joints to move against the paralyzing voltage, healing the superficial burns before they could reach his eyes. Gaining power, yes, but spending it faster just to survive the overlapping constant assault.

One of them tackled him from his blind side, familiar stubby arms wrapping around his waist for a second time. The green child roared — pure joy not strained effort — and spun them both into a violent downward spiral that forced a roar of his own from Yǒng Zhé’s lips.

Screaming together, both of them slammed into the surface of the Pacific.

The impact forced a temporary void in the ocean, a massive crater of displaced water plunging hundreds of feet deep, a wall of white spray erupting half a mile high all around before the ocean collapsed inward to fill it again.

Yǒng Zhé burst back out of the churning water, seawater dripping from his black hair and steaming against his swollen muscles. 

"你的队友就这样死了吗？" (Is this how your team died?) The blue one’s voice cut through the thunder of the crashing waves, carrying a curiosity that made Yǒng Zhé’s blood boil.

The words struck deeper than any blow so far as images of the capital flooded his mind. Dì Mǔ screaming as her earthen barrier formed an oven of slag, Tiān Guāng’s divine light overwhelmed by the atomic flash, and  Liú Xīng caught mid-sprint and turned to ash on the wind.

Yǒng Zhé roared like a demon, the calculated strikes born from training lost as he charged at the blue one as a javelin of force, pulling back a fist that could level cities.

The blue one vanished into lightning as the red one blurred in to replace him. The red boy drove in; a brutal blow perfectly into Yǒng Zhé’s liver. Before it could send him flying, a second, blow rocked his kidney with crippling pain, Yǒng Zhé’s internal battery burning energy just to keep his organs from rupturing. 

The blue one did not stop moving, spiraling around in constant motion. A flying handstand transitioned with a giggle into an aerial cartwheel, the heel of a blue-soled boot rattling Yǒng Zhé’s skull with a spinning back-kick. The boy was no stable target, laughing like mad as he bounced off empty air, barraging Yǒng Zhé with blow after erratic blow.

"对不起，我们要做的事。" (Sorry for what we're about to do.) A lightning-fast kick snapped into Yǒng Zhé’s ribs, the bone groaning under the pressure.

Between the high-velocity strikes, the boy kept talking, the Mandarin bright and sickeningly sweet.

"我保证会很快。" (I promise it'll be quick.)

Another spinning strike clipped his shoulder, this one trailing a massive discharge of blue electricity that forced a twitch and a scream from him.

The nuclear charge that had felt infinite the moment he burst free from the womb of the earth bled out of his cells. Every expenditure of strength, every healed bruise, every blow taken from these relentless children stole another moment of power as he found himself at the center in a meat-grinder of overlapping aggression.

Yǒng Zhé threw himself forward with another roar and a burst of speed, flaring with power as he burned even more to catch up to the red one. Large hands enclosed around the boy’s neck, fingers that could crush steel a thousand times over locking into place. The tactician first…

A blow struck him hard from the left, knuckles wrapped in blinding blue lightning jamming into his ribs. Muscles misfiring, hand spasming and grip failing before he could exert pressure.

The red one’s eyes flared bright crimson at point-blank and, for the second time, heat burned right into Yǒng Zhé’s face. He absorbed the trickle of thermal energy, but the blinding light forced him to flinch backward, vision layered with an afterimage of red.

Another crashed into him from the right, a brutal knee driving directly into his exposed side as that thuggish voice cackled. 

His grip released completely and the red one slipped away with a sigh. 

"我们知道你的力量有时间限制。" (We know your power has a time limit.)

The blue one’s voice cut through the chaos again, cheerful words carrying the weight of a death sentence.

Yǒng Zhé’s blood went cold, frozen like he was at the realization.

"你还剩多少分钟？" (How many minutes do you have left?)

Before he could think of the truth of those words, the one all in red blurred past again. Three strikes peppered his chest, bruises blooming instantly across Yǒng Zhé’s bared torso, dark and ugly. 

"Now." The red one spoke, a single word he understood this time.

The green one responded with a bark, toothy grin wide and eager. "FINALLY!"

The blue one paused his erratic spinning, floating still for a single heartbeat as he faced China’s Greatest with a look close to regret. "再见。" (Goodbye.)

A blur of red drove a knee upward into the exact center of his chest, bone shattering and ribs going along with it as unneeded air exploded from his lungs in a wet cough. An elbow followed instantly to the side of his head, Yǒng Zhé’s vision whiting out entirely as the horizon spun in a sickening tilt.

The blue one was lightning made flesh, tearing through the air like a loosed bolt. His body spun through acrobatic sequences so fast they burned afterimages of electricity into the air, each face wearing that same ghostly smile. A flying kick wreathed in crackling blue lightning rocked Yǒng Zhé’s jaw, bone shattering as pain tore through his skull. Teeth broke free from the gums, white enamel spinning through the air alongside thick droplets of blood.

The blue child twisted back again, all the momentum of the first strike into a looping assault that fed back into the human dervish as he struck in so many different impossible angles. Heel, shin, instep; all of them into Yǒng Zhé’s face in the span of half a second. Each impact drove the fragments of his own broken teeth deeper into his pulped gums and tongue.

In another lightning-backed blur, the boy grabbed him. Small fingers clamped directly into the gaping space where several of his front teeth once sat, sinking deep into flesh and exposed jawbone. With another giggle, lightning flowed straight into his face, the smell of cooking meat filling his nostrils as thick gray smoke poured from his mouth.

The green one rushed in as the blue one darted away, a forearm wrapped in a construct of glowing jade catching Yǒng Zhé across the throat with a blow that nearly separated his head from his shoulders. As his neck whipped back, the same child grabbed Yǒng Zhé’s right arm and pulled at it with all his strength, still cackling wildly.

The shoulder hung loose almost immediately, a thick wet popping sound the only announcement of the damage other than the scream that left his lips. The green boy hoisted China’s Greatest overhead, the man held high like a simple trophy. 

They fell together yet again. 

The green child rode the descent, whooping like a madman as the wind tore past them.

For the second time, Yǒng Zhé impacted the Pacific like a meteor, the impact like hitting solid steel as another mushroom of displaced water erupted into the sky, disrupting the tides for miles.

Yǒng Zhé floated in the boiling foam, trying to rise.

He searched the deepest corners of his core for the nuclear fire to feed his cells, praying for the radiation to spark, to heal the shattered jaw, the ruined shoulder, the crushed chest.

Nothing answered his call.

The man lay there broken. 

Bleeding. 

Drowning in the salt water that flooded his throat and burned his exposed internal wounds with agonizing fire.

He looked up through eyes completely filled with his own blood, three silhouettes backlit against the blinding sun hovering directly over him.

They descended in a tri-color blur, his limbs suddenly held in their small arms. 

The red one took his right, hands locking around the forearm with a grip that drew blood. The blue one took his left, fingers digging deep into torn muscle and finding bone. The green one grabbed both of his legs, a raspy, sandpaper laugh leaving him as he braced his boots against Yǒng Zhé’s ruined torso.

The leader of the Seven could only scream, animal terror leaving him in a sound that transcended language, culture, and three decades of training. The sound tore from his throat with enough force to shred his remaining vocal cords, bubbling up through the salt water and blood, but he could not stop.

“"那个...”  (Um…) The Mandarin was soft now as it left the blue one’s lips stripped of cheer and almost kind in its gentleness. Somehow, the pity made the words infinitely worse. “我好像骗你了。" I think I kinda lied to you)

They rose into the air and pulled.

Pain beyond any he had ever known flooded every remaining nerve in his body. Ligaments snapped as each joint parted with sickening resistance. Bones cracked and splintered, sharp ends cutting through his own muscle from the inside as the ocean beneath him turned a thick crimson.

With a final bellow, Yǒng Zhé, the Eternal Breaker, the Mandate of Heaven, knew no more.

– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –

Big red chunks of state-sponsored muscle hit the choppy Pacific water and sunk fast, the ocean swallowing up what was left of the guy and leaving nothing behind but frothy pink foam.

Brick Mojo stared down at his own hands. Blood coated his gloves, almost invisible agains the red fabric Cecil had personally chosen to hide it.

I’m not even the messy one.

A wet slap of meat on meat pulled his eyes up. Speaking of messy…

Butch hovered a few feet away, his greenest brother waving a severed leg by the ankle like a giant club. Green energy still sizzled around his knuckles, Butch’s ‘ki’ cooking the skin where he gripped it.

"Can I keep this?" He shook the limb with a grin, blood spattering the empty air as Brick blinked back at him.

Brick’s jaw clicked, the leader of Trinity closing his eyes for a half-second. "No."

"Why not?!" Butch pulled the leg closer to his chest, like it was a stuffed toy or something. "You didn’t let me rip off that Finkleburger kid’s head either!”

“It’s not that I didn’t let you.” Red eyes narrowed. “You literally weren’t strong enough to do it.”

“Don’t remind me.” He pouted — actually pouted — and held the leg tighter, not even caring about the blood getting in his hair. “But I wanna mount it! Like a… like a deer head or somethin'."

"Cecil won’t let you." That was probably a lie. Cecil would honestly take the leg for testing first for whatever super-experiments the GDA had and then let Butch keep it.

“I was gonna sneak it in anyway!”

“...” Brick stared, actually pondering the logistics of how Butch expected to sneak a thick bleeding leg almost his full height into the Pentagon of all place. “...no.”

More than that, Brick didn’t want to encourage any more psychopathy than was absolutely necessary.

“Awwwww.”

Butch was already riding the edge on a good day.

"Duuuuuuuude, the China-guy got blood everywhere." Boomer zipped in from the left, not even paying attention to the leg argument as his hands scrubbed at the ‘II’ that sat on his chest, the black-and-blue Roman numerals splattered in blood. "This is gonna stain. Mrs. Armstrong said blood stains are super hard to get out if you don't use cold water right away."

“...why do you call her that?” Butch frowned over at him.

“Call her what?” Boomer frowned back, still patting his uniform.

“Mrs. Armstrong?”

Boomer blinked his big blue eyes. “‘Cause that’s her name?”

Butch frowned like that was news to her. “I just call her Mrs. Super-Patriot.”

The comm link in Brick's ear crackled, a sharp burst of static cutting through another stupid conversation.

"Confirmed elimination." Cecil’s drawl rolled into his ear. "Good work, boys. Return to base. And tell Butch he can have the leg if he wants it.”

Brick rolled his eyes and tapped his earpiece. “Copy.”

“Well, now I don’t want it anymore.” Butch let out a loud huff, finally dropping the leg. It sunk into the dark blue with a heavy splash as Butch crossed his arms, toxic green eyes tracking the ripples. "Boooo."

Brick looked out at the horizon, the empty sky stretching all the way back to the American mainland. “Don’t worry, you’ll get another fight soon enough. Mark’s still in space. We’re primary response now."

Boomer stopped scrubbing his shirt, blue eyes going wide and bright.

Butch’s did the same. "Wait, wait, wait! That mean more killing?"

Brick didn't even bother looking at him. "Probably."

Boomer and Butch glanced at each other and threw both hands up in the air, a massive grin splitting both their faces. "COOL!"