Chapter 183: Heroes Nightmare
The heroes hit the burning district like a storm breaking.
They dropped out of the torn spatial folds directly into a city already coming apart at the seams. There was no time for a briefing, no tactical plan, and no time to formulate either. There was only the absolute chaos in front of them, and the oldest instinct any of them possessed.
They moved.
Nectron landed heavily in the direct center of a collapsing intersection. He threw both hands skyward, and the crushing weight of his gravity slammed a rampaging impure flat into the asphalt before the monster could reach a crowd of civilians fleeing past it. A slick, many-limbed beast the size of a city bus had a terrified family cornered against a shattered shopfront. Then, in an instant, it didn’t—because Furry hit the creature from the side with four hundred pounds of transformed, muscle-bound power, driving it straight through a brick wall.
Danqing’s giant brush swept across the air, and a thick wall of hardened ink rose instantly to shield a group of fleeing school children from a burning spray of acid. Raoi split his body into seven separate clones, creating a moving human barricade across an entire avenue while each copy dragged injured civilians behind the defensive line. Walküre’s burning wings carried her high over the rooftops, her glowing spear falling like divine judgment onto a winged impure that had snatched a man off the street. She caught the falling man before he hit the hard ground.
It was the nightmare of Denvi Town all over again, but scattered across a hundred streets at once.
There was no single dragon to fight this time. There was no one central monster to focus all their power on. Instead, the catastrophe had been divided into a hundred smaller pieces and set loose in every direction. The heroes were forced to split up, scatter, and chase down disasters block by block while the city screamed around them.
Mercury, heavily bandaged and grim, punched a charging beast so hard it simply stopped being a recognizable shape. She was already leaping toward the next threat before the pieces of the first even landed. Hunter, his broken hands taped tightly, waded directly into a knot of near-human impures, taking them down one after another with the flawless efficiency of a man who did not need his fists to look pretty. Vixen folded a collapsing highway overpass completely out of existence a heartbeat before it crushed the cars trapped beneath it, then folded the cars themselves to safe ground.
And through all of the madness, over and over again, they faced the exact same brutal choice: fight the monster, or save the people. Every single hero on those streets chose the people. They caught falling debris. They shielded the cornered. They pulled the wounded out of crushed buildings and pushed the survivors toward the evacuation lines forming at the district’s outer edge. They willingly took the hits themselves so the civilians would not have to.
Into the middle of that storm dropped one more spatial fold, and out of it stepped Eric.
The old manager landed heavily in the absolute worst of the fight. His hulking frame swelled as his internal ability surged through his veins. For a brief second, he simply stared at the surrounding ruin with an expression of pure fury—an expression nobody had ever seen on his usually laughing face. Then he moved. Where Eric moved, impures stopped moving. He ripped a rampaging beast off a downed police officer with one hand and slammed it violently into the earth with the other.
"DANA!" he bellowed over the deafening noise. "TALK TO ME!"
"The perimeter is collapsing on the east side!" Dana shouted back. She was already on the scene, her clipboard long gone, her voice cracked into pure command as she directed the flow of combat. "We can’t kill our way out of this—there are too many of them! We hold the lines, we get the people out, and we contain them! Vixen, Nectron, seal off the north avenue! Everyone else, push the civilians toward the river!"
The heroes fell into line without a single argument. The world’s greatest rivals moved as one single, synchronized machine, herding the living away from the dying, buying every single second they could with their own bodies.
They were so incredibly busy saving the city that not one of them thought to look up.
Far above them all, on the high rooftop of the prison, the Master watched the entire scene unfold with quiet, absolute satisfaction.
In his arms, Joan had finally surfaced.
Her eyes were wide open now—dark, clear, and thoroughly confused as she blinked up at the burning night sky. Her mind had climbed all the way back up from whatever deep suppression the machine had held it in. She was awake—truly awake—for the first time in two long months. The very first thing she did was ask again, her voice small, dry, and raspy.
"...A book. Please. I just want a book."
"Of course you do, child," the Master said gently, his voice soothing. "Of course you do."
He reached deep into his coat and pulled out a slim, bound manuscript. Its pages were handwritten, its cover completely blank. He had personally written every single word of it over long, patient months, and he pressed it into her small, waiting hands with the careful reverence of a man handing a loaded weapon to a child who had no idea what it was.
"Here," he murmured softy. "I made this one specifically for you. Go on. Read it."
Joan’s thin fingers closed tightly around the manuscript. Something in her hollow face visibly relaxed—the desperate hunger of a starved mind finally given something to hold onto. She opened the cover. Her eyes, at last, found words.
The Master straightened his back, turned, and walked directly to the front edge of the roof. He lifted his voice, projecting it so that it carried straight down over the burning district, over the loud fighting, and over the screaming, cutting through the entire war zone with unnerving clarity.
"HEROES."
Something deep within that single word made every single person on the battlefield stop dead in their tracks.
One by one, the heroes turned. Nectron, Vixen, Dana, Eric, Mercury—every single one of them snapped their heads upward toward the top of the prison structure. They looked at the figure standing at the edge with his hands folded neatly, and at the small girl seated right behind him with an open manuscript resting in her lap.
"You’re just in time," the Master called down to the army below, a wide smile spreading across his face. "You’re just in time for the story."
Down below him, small, quiet, and completely unnoticed until that exact second, Joan sat with the open book and began to read.
Her physical voice did not carry down the building. Her pale lips barely moved. But her thoughts—the exact words she was reading from the page—echoed out across the entire city all at once. The narrative filled every single mind in the district, sounding like a narrator speaking directly inside their own skulls.
[After many long years, the plague that had threatened humanity finally disappeared. And every impure lost their ability.]
A cold, suffocating dread instantly gripped the heroes on the streets below.
[With the sole exception of a small group of saviours. The ones who had brought salvation to this new world.]
And then, it happened.
Above the entire state, the night sky itself fundamentally changed. A massive, translucent dome shimmered into existence, shifting with strange colors as it rose from horizon to horizon, curving high overhead to seal the entire district beneath it like an insect trapped under glass. It appeared in a split second—silent, absolute, and total.
The moment the barrier closed over them, every hero in the city felt the catastrophic shift.
Their powers simply faded away into nothing.
Nectron reached deep for his gravity manipulation and found a total void. Vixen tried to grasp space to fold it, but her hand merely closed on empty air. Mercury took a running leap meant to launch her skyward, but her feet landed heavily back on the cracked street. Walküre’s burning wings sputtered out and died, dropping her awkwardly onto a flat rooftop. Furry’s massive, beastly transformation drained out of her body, leaving a small, ordinary girl standing terrified amidst the rubble.
One after another, all across the ruined district, the strongest people on Earth felt their power drain right out of them like water rushing through a broken dam.
The story had explicitly stated that the impures lost their abilities.
And because she read it, so they did.
The heroes stared up at the shimmering dome in dawning terror, stripped down to ordinary, powerless humans beneath its shell, as the Master’s soft, chilling laughter drifted gently down from the roof above.
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[A/N: Hey everyone! We’ve officially come to an end of the second volume of the book! With over 230k+ words written and I want to thank you all for making it possible! As the story carries on, I humbly ask for your continuous support for the books growth! (Ya know, someone said moments like these deserves gifts, so maybe you can do throw some for this author) All in all, thanks so much! Would never have made it without y’all! Let’s see what the next arc/volume will have for us]