The Five Evolution

『"The perfect disease requires the perfect victim."』

Corruption’s first breath poisoned the air itself.

The oxygen molecules broke down into toxic compounds designed to slowly destroy life at the cellular level.

Nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, all of it was manifested, killing them slowly. Essentially making this a fight with a timer.

Sophia’s telekinetic barrier also started to crack. She fell to her knees, clutching her head as the psychic feedback from its transformation lanced through her skull.

"Sophia? You good?" Amara gave her a quick side glance, still preoccupied with the abomination standing before them.

"Yeah," Sophia gasped. "The psychic pressure from that thing, it’s like trying to hold back an ocean with my hands. I can’t—"

Corruption took one step forward and Sophia’s telekinetic barriers shattered immediately. The invisible psychic framework she had carefully woven around them suddenly unraveled in its presence.

Around them, the fractured remnants of the barrier dissolved into glittering particles of psychic light before blackening and disintegrating entirely.

"What—?" Sophia gasped, staring at her hands in disbelief. "...You’ve got to be kidding me."

Corruption laughed, the sound no longer resembling anything remotely human. "You cannot shield against me, little Helmet. Your thoughts rot in my presence. Your mind. Your will. Your very consciousness. All of it decays when exposed to perfection."

The comms suddenly crackled in Amara’s ear as electronic devices around them began rebooting, freed from War’s electromagnetic interference.

She tested it quickly, reaching out to the boys in desperate hope. Please work. Please— "Ethan! Hiro! Raj! Do you copy?!"

After a heart-stopping moment, Ethan’s voice came through, strained. "We’re here. War retreated. We’re..."

Despite her current predicament, Amara couldn’t help the wave of relief that washed through her. The boys had survived.

"We’re good," Ethan’s voice finished. "What about Plague?"

Amara’s eyes swept across the chamber, taking in Sophia’s destroyed barriers, Maya barely keeping herself together, and the abomination before them that had transcended its original form.

"It’s... it’s changed, Ethan," she said, unable to keep the fear from her voice. "It’s turned into something worse—we need you—"

Static suddenly cut her off mid-sentence. She kept tapping on her comm desperately, but nothing worked. The connection was dead again. "Fishsticks..." she muttered.

All of a sudden, the pressure in the chamber intensified, pressing down on everything and making even breathing feel like labor.

Beside Sophia, Maya had grown more pale. It looked like her attempt to slow the necrosis seemed to accelerate it instead. The black veins around her arm were climbing faster now, past her elbow and approaching her shoulder.

Sophia tried to reform the barriers again, but the constructs collapsed immediately, her telekinesis unraveling the moment it took shape.

"Come on!" she snapped at herself through gritted teeth. "Come ON!" But nothing held.

Corruption smiled, tilting its head, then vanished in a blur of motion. Amara’s eyes tracked the movement, reacting instantly and mirroring it.

One moment she stood several feet from Sophia and Maya. The next, Angel’s Bane flashed through the air in a brilliant arc as she intercepted six poison-coated claws descending toward her teammates.

CLANG!

The impact blasted her backward across the chamber floor, her boots carving deep trenches through corrupted stone before she managed to stabilize herself, sliding to a halt twenty feet away.

The force behind that single exchange made her arms vibrate painfully, bones rattling in their sockets. Whatever Plague had become, it was stronger now. Significantly stronger.

She had expected Corruption to press the advantage, to capitalize on the opening while her arms still rang with pain. Instead, the Malice took a calculated leap backward and raised four of its six arms in a deliberate gesture.

"I am Anti-life," it declared with solemnity. "I am the Unmaking." It paused, all six eyes focusing on Amara before sliding past her to fix on Sophia and Maya behind her. The intent was clear and malicious.

"Rot."

The air between them began to fill with microscopic horrors, billions upon billions of them materializing from nothing, spawned by Corruption’s will alone.

Viruses that rewrote DNA on contact. Bacteria that dissolved organic matter at the molecular level. Prions that unfolded proteins into chaos.

And beneath it all, something worse: a plague that attacked the very concept of health itself, that targeted wellness as if it were a disease to be cured through suffering.

Her intent sight saw as it approached. An invisible tsunami of death moving toward her team at an alarming speed.

With Sophia’s shield, she no longer had herself to focus on. A hundred and ten percent of her focus had to be given to the next moments to come.

This was like the spore attack from earlier, except these moved exponentially faster, numbered in the billions rather than thousands, and she no longer had just herself to worry about. Sophia and Maya were directly behind her, vulnerable.

A technique like this was meant to be witnessed and admired for its deadly elegance. But Amara didn’t care about that. All that mattered was ensuring that not a single organism got past her guard.

She took a deep breath and activated every muscle in her body simultaneously.

She exhaled, and from there on, her movements became a complete blur.

The ground shattered beneath her feet as she launched forward, splitting into what looked like ten afterimages slicing through air at once.

One slash became ten became a hundred became a thousand became a million, ten million...

The microscopic organisms died before they could reach her team, eliminated in the space between moments.

Corruption’s multiple eyes widened with shock. "Impossible. You’re—you’re impossible!"

"I told you," Amara said, sweat dripping from her face, chest heaving and knees shaking. "I’m a quick study. So no point in pulling that same trick again. It won’t work."

There was no way in hell she could do that again. But she didn’t need to admit that. All she could do now was bluff and make her next move.

Still riding the adrenaline rush, masking exhaustion with a smile, she cut forward, appearing inside Corruption’s guard in a flicker of spatial severance.

In a blink, Angel’s Bane carved through Corruption’s torso before it could react.

The Malice stumbled backward as black ichor sprayed from the deep gash. But the wound closed up as quickly as it came.

"You can no longer hurt me," Corruption said, its posture straightening, more confident as it spread all six arms wide in a gesture of dominance. "I have transcended damage."

Amara quickly retreated several feet, blade held ready as her mind raced through rapidly diminishing options.

"Perhaps I had the right idea the first time," Corruption continued, lowering its arms into a fighting stance. "Forget long range."

Amara’s grip squeezed tighter on the hilt of her blade.

"It will be so much more satisfying to kill you with my bare hands." Corruption clenched twenty of its fingers into fists. "To feel your bones break. To watch your flesh rot beneath my touch."

It shot forward like a projectile from a rail gun as two of its arms reached toward Amara with terrible speed.