Chapter 212: Wrath Of Hexi
The air in St. Jude’s Plaza did not just vibrate; it hummed with the terrifying resonance of unleashed gods.
Eric’s transformation was not an instantaneous pop of magic—it was a brutal, industrial expansion of flesh into living war-steel.
With every ragged inhale, the titan’s muscular frame tore violently past human proportions. Seven feet. Ten feet. Twelve feet. His muscle fibers grooved and hardened, shedding their biological skin to reveal an interlocking chassis of dark, brushed titanium and gunmetal steel. Thick, hydraulic-like sinews pulsed beneath the metallic plating, venting bursts of pressurized steam through vents along his forearms and spine. At twelve feet tall, his body reached its absolute physical threshold—an armored colossus forged purely for kinetic ruin, his glowing white eyes radiating a terrifying, vengeful brilliance.
Beside him, Nectron did not even touch the ground.
The gravity-manipulating titan drifted into the air, his silhouette wreathed in ribbons of deep-space violet. He raised both arms, fingers splayed, and twisted his wrists in opposite directions.
VUUUUUUM.
The laws of physics collapsed across the plaza.
A fifty-yard perimeter around the execution platform lost its gravitational anchor. Massive boulders of pulverized concrete, jagged steel rebar, and the burning chassis of municipal buses tore free from the asphalt, lifting silently into the sky. Thousands of loose stones, spent bullet casings, and structural girders began to spin in a massive, dizzying orbital ring around Nectron’s hovering form.
The humiliation, the helplessness, the hours spent kneeling like cattle under Malik’s mocking gaze—it all converted into pure, apocalyptic fury.
"You wanted an audience, you insects?!" Eric’s voice boomed, layered with deep, mechanical thunder that cracked the remaining glass in three surrounding city blocks.
From the shattered foot of the stage, Zayx stared upward.
A sane man would have fled into the sewers. A calculating killer would have dissolved into the dark with Shadow. But Zayx was neither sane nor calculating. With his master dead and his own mind shattered by a severe concussion, the monstrous brute let out a bloodcurdling, feral roar.
His impure ability—dormant during Joan’s suppression—exploded to life through his veins.
Zayx slammed both fists into the cracked earth.
From the drainage grates, subterranean cracks, and rubble piles, millions of flesh-eating, armored bio-insects surged to the surface in a chittering, black-and-crimson tidal wave. Massive chitinous beetles with razor mandibles and centipedes as thick as telephone poles erupted from the stone, swarming around Zayx’s bulk to form a swirling, crawling armor of living parasites over his broken limbs.
"I’LL TEAR YOUR STEEL OFF YOUR BONES!" Zayx howled, charging forward like a berserk juggernaut, his swarm of carnivorous insects churning the ground behind him into powder.
He leaped into the air, aiming to bring down his massive, insect-coated fists directly upon Eric’s skull.
Nectron didn’t even look at him. He simply snapped his left fingers.
"Down," Nectron commanded, cold and indifferent.
KABOOM.
A localized gravitational singularity—dense as the core of a dying star—materialized directly above Zayx’s spine.
The sudden increase of fifty times Earth’s gravity seized the leaping behemoth mid-air. Zayx’s forward momentum ceased in an instant. The crushing downward pressure dragged him out of the sky like an anvil dropped into an abyss, violently slamming him face-first into the concrete with enough kinetic violence to crater the earth three feet deep.
The swarming insects around his body were instantly pulverized into a spray of black fluid under their own multiplied mass.
Zayx groaned, vomiting blood, his spine bending backward as he clawed desperately at the crushing air.
Before he could push himself an inch off the floor, Eric stepped over the crater.
The twelve-foot steel colossus drew his right fist back, his kinetic chambers locking into place with a series of deafening mechanical clangs. The air around Eric’s arm shimmered, vacuum pressure pulling loose dust into the knuckles as he concentrated every ounce of stored impact energy into a single point.
"For the Association," Eric snarled.
The punch descended.
THOOOOOOOM!
It was not a punch; it was a localized meteor strike.
Eric’s kinetic hammer fist struck Zayx dead in the center of his chest. The sheer concussive shockwave blew the surrounding rubble fifty yards in every direction, obliterating the concrete beneath them and carving a fifteen-foot-wide crater into the bedrock of the city.
The localized singularity vanished just as the fist connected.
Zayx’s armored ribcage, dense bones, and flesh were pulverized in a fraction of a second. The shockwave ripped through his internal organs, destroying his biological core instantly. The behemoth went completely silent, his crushed form embedded deep within the shattered crater, lifeless and broken beneath the smoke.
One strike. Absolute annihilation.
Around the perimeter, the rest of the heroes unleashed an unrelenting tempest of vengeance.
Walküre’s plasma wings blazed with the intensity of a miniature sun. She swept through the sky like an archangel of death, hurling three ionic spears that detonated across the western barricades in cascading pillars of golden fire, incinerating the remaining Overseer beasts that attempted to crawl over the walls.
Mercury surged forward as a living, liquid wave of hyper-dense quicksilver, his metallic tendrils wrapping around the remaining sniper nests on the library terrace, severing iron beams and crushing brick columns like dry kindling.
The plaza had turned into a slaughterhouse, and the villains were the harvest.
Through the swirling fire, dust, and ozone, Hexi watched Zayx’s death.
He didn’t scream this time. He didn’t cry.
Something fundamental inside Hexi’s psyche—the last thread connecting him to reality—snapped into absolute, catastrophic void.
His eyes were completely bloodshot, staring at the shattered stage where Malik’s corpse lay beneath the falling ash. The heroes were back. They were gods again. They were glowing, invincible, and arrogant, stepping on his comrades as if they were nothing more than dirt.
And right in the center of it all, leaning against the broken podium with a chipped blade in his hand, stood Nicholas.
The mercenary. The butcher who had ended Malik’s life.
"You think you won..." Hexi whispered, his voice trembling before rising into a ragged, maniacal screech. "You think you get to walk away and spend your blood money?!"
Hexi’s impure ability—Hypnotic / Mind-Control Miasma—erupted from his pores at maximum, unrestricted threshold.
A thick, roiling ocean of deep violet and toxic crimson fog exploded from his body, expanding thirty yards in every direction within seconds. But Hexi didn’t weave the mist into puppets. He didn’t try to subtly infect the air for mind-control.
He reached into his chest harness, pulling out a cylindrical obsidian canister labeled with biological hazard warnings—the Apex Vector Catalyst.
Without a moment of hesitation, Hexi drove the jagged nozzle of the catalyst directly into his own sternum, injecting the unstable reagent straight into his heart.
SHNNNK.
Hexi arched his back, coughing a fountain of black-purple blood as the catalyst mixed with his biological miasma core. His veins turned jet black, bulging across his face, neck, and arms like writhing worms. His eyes clouded over into solid, hypnotic purple pools.
The miasma around him began to condense, pulling inward toward his chest like a localized chemical bomb preparing for critical mass.
"If the Master doesn’t get to have this world, NOBODY DOES!" Hexi shrieked, his voice distorted into an overlapping chorus of demonic echoes.
The biological suicide detonation would not just kill him—it would vaporize his flesh and release a concentrated neuro-toxin wave capable of liquefying the brains and hijacking the nervous systems of every living organism across the entire four-block radius, heroes and civilians alike.
"NICHOLAS!" Hexi screamed, tears of black bile streaming down his cheeks as the core in his chest flared with blinding, unstable violet light. "COME TO HELL WITH US!"
Ten yards away, Nicholas’s one visible eye narrowed, his broken ribs screaming in agony as he recognized the suicide sequence.
Eric turned his massive steel frame, but even at his top speed, he was too far to reach Hexi before the chemical core achieved detonation. Nectron raised his hands to crush the space, but the unstable vector was already collapsing into critical mass.
The entire plaza was less than two seconds away from an extinction-level chemical blast.