"Nyahahaha," Rhea cackled as she watched the footage of Chad's escape, right up to the moment he lowered his bare ass onto his luxury toilet, the one she had rigged to detonate.
The explosion was localized and quite weak, even by Chad's Expert ranked strength standards, but it was more than enough to tear an Expert ranked human who barely trained at all to shreds. Porcelain and bone shattered together in a wet blast that painted the marble walls red. The lower half of Chad's body vanished in a spray of blood, shredded muscle, and splintered bones.
What remained of him toppled sideways, still conscious, nerves screaming as shock and adrenaline kept him awake. He stared down in disbelief at the ruin where his hips had been, at the ragged edge of torn flesh and jutting vertebrae. His abdomen had split open, and loops of intestine slithered out over the cracked tiles, steaming and slick, slipping through his trembling fingers as he tried uselessly to hold himself together.
"Aaaaah!" he screamed in abject horror after realizing this wasn't going to be a quick fix with a few potions.
He flipped over and clawed his way toward the door, too shell shocked to realize that help was already on its way, since the maids had heard the explosion.
Rhea, meanwhile, shook her head as she watched the monitors.
"The maids' response time is too fast," she said thoughtfully. "Maybe I should have knocked them out before escaping? No, that would have been too suspicious. Everything needed to be perfect before he was brought to that location."
Rhea had all the information she could ever need regarding each of the remaining founders' escape routes and hideouts. She had spent the past few hours visiting each location, infiltrating them, and setting up traps.
Some were too secure, while others had too many options, so she had to minimally compromise them. She would give the guards reasons to report foul play, such as clogged sewage, a few missing employees, or network issues, to limit their escape options to only a select few each.
This ensured they were all within the palm of her hand as soon as they decided to execute their extraction protocol.
Before any of the guards or maids could approach, she took one last long look at Chad struggling to reach the door handle before activating her failsafe and cutting off the feed. She had placed a much larger explosive inside the bathroom that was more than enough to seriously injure her, so the resulting explosion should be enough to kill Chad, leaving nothing more than fragments of him buried in the rubble.
She then turned her attention to the other founders who were still in transit and discovered that one of them had already made it to his highly secured villa in Undella City via the private jet that had landed on the rooftop. It was Gerald Falkner who, if the information retrieved by Malamar was correct, was working on rigging all the VR devices Argent Solutions had ever created with the ability to mind control their users.
"Which one was this again?" Rhea asked aloud, shifting from one hidden camera to the next. "Oh, right, the acid."
Gerald, upon arriving at his villa, quickly made his way to the bathroom. He hadn't soiled himself, but his shirt was drenched in sweat from the nerves of the entire ordeal. The mind reading had been particularly traumatizing; he had plenty of secrets he would rather not share with anyone, not even his fellow founders.
He stripped off his clothes and stepped into the shower, turning it on and letting the hot water run over his skin. He reached for his shampoo when his skin suddenly began to itch. Hastily, he grabbed some soap instead and lathered himself, but the itching only grew worse. He scrubbed and scrubbed, his eyes clenched shut as calm composure slowly gave way to rising panic.
He looked down at his body, opened his eyes, and saw his skin deep red, covered in raw, bleeding spots from his frantic scratching. He hadn't noticed a thing amid the adrenaline slowly fading, the sting of the hot water, and the dulled pain in his frayed nerves.
"Gyah! What… what is—?" he screamed, his voice breaking with panic, more from the horrific sight than the looming death.
The shower water hissed against his skin, the red turning to a bubbling black as the acid ate through skin and flesh. He stumbled back, clawing at his arms, but every movement only dragged more of his skin into the corrosive torrent.
Chunks of tissue sloughed off, the smell of burnt flesh sharp and acrid, and rivulets of blood mixed with the acid, steaming violently as they hit the hot tiles. He tried to wrench himself from the shower, but the tiles were slick with gore, his body covered with a combination of blood, skin, and chemical burns.
Every second stretched into an eternity. Fingers curled and melted inwards, hair blackened and clumped into molten strands. The pain, when it finally registered, shot like lightning through his nerves, and the sound of his own sizzling flesh became deafening. He screamed again, a ragged, choking wail that echoed off the bathroom walls as his body continued to dissolve under the relentless shower.
No help ever came. He died quietly, melting into the drain until only bones remained, which would take hours to dissolve completely.
"Ew… gross," Rhea said, grimacing.
She took pleasure in her victim's suffering, but even she couldn't bring herself to laugh at the sight, it was simply too disgusting to look at.
"I guess I'm more of an explosion kind of girl," she concluded, turning her attention to the remaining two victims.
Of the two, one was heading to a secret mansion deep in the wilderness, while the other was bound for a hidden underground bunker. The mansion posed no problem, as Rhea had already infiltrated it, but the bunker was far too secure. She lacked a Ground type Pokémon that could have helped her approach and enter unnoticed, so she tried to compromise the security remotely. It seemed it wasn't enough, though, as Itamar Lestrane was still making his way toward it.
"Good thing I added a backup trap," Rhea said as she activated it with a press of a button.
Itamar sat comfortably in the rear passenger seat as the car crossed the Marvelous Bridge when, suddenly, the rear compartment collapsed, shredding him to pieces while keeping him trapped in twisted metal.
The camera feed was immediately obscured by rubble, but the audio still came through.
"Aaaaargh!!!" he screamed, the sound broken by pained groans and desperate moans as the wreckage crushed him.
"Hahaha," Rhea laughed, delighted by her newest invention.
She called it The Crusher. It was a bomb that released an Elite ranked Gravity attuned to pull everything toward a central point rather than toward the ground, enhanced with a powerful magnet to specifically draw in metal. It was roughly the size of a car seat, and, as luck would have it, her target was sitting directly on top of it.
Under normal circumstances, it wouldn't have been this fatal. Itamar was an Expert rank and could have easily withstood the attack. The same couldn't be said for the car he was inside of, which was heavily fortified with Elite rated metal. The bomb shredded the vehicle apart while simultaneously crushing him inside the crumpled rear compartment.
Still, he managed to survive the ordeal thanks to his extraordinary lifeforce. The people outside, mostly trainers, tried to approach and help any survivors, but they couldn't get close without being affected by the pull themselves. That changed when some exceptionally powerful Fighting types stepped in, attempting to wrest the metal away from the victim trapped inside.
Fortunately for Rhea, fate wasn't done with her victim yet. The car's battery, heavily compromised, caught fire, heating the metal and roasting him inside. The last thing Rhea heard from her live feed was the sizzling of blood and flesh before the signal went completely dead.
"I guess implosions work for me too," Rhea said with a chuckle. "Now, on to our final target."
The feed on the monitor focused on another car that had just parked beside a mansion deep in the forest. Yasmina Olvesson, the last remaining founder, strode into her private room and took a shower. Like the others, she had feared for her life, but she had plenty of time during the ride to calm herself and draft a plan for human-enhancing exosuits.
She finished the plan in under an hour and went to sleep, resting before contacting her lawyers in the afternoon to secure the necessary patents. She would have loved to continue working, but the sudden crash after the adrenaline wore off left her completely exhausted.
She removed her clothes and slid into bed naked, taking comfort under the blankets while blacking out her room from the early morning sun. Just as she was beginning to nod off, she heard the familiar mechanical clinking of the tentacles that had bound her only an hour ago.
"Kyaaa!" Yasmina screamed in fright as the same tentacles wrapped around her legs and arms, and a fifth one emerged from beneath the bed, this one holding a rotating saw blade with obvious applications.
"No, no, please! I'll give you anything you want!" she screamed.
The saw blade began to dissect her, targeting the socket joints and removing all her limbs amid her screams of pain and anguish. With no limbs left to help her move, she squirmed and shouted for help, but it was pointless, as her sleeping quarters had been sealed for the sake of privacy. She needed to reach the button beside her bed, but with no arms or legs, she could only writhe and jostle herself, trying to reach it with her head.
The tentacles then forced her head, chest, and lower body onto the bed, holding her down and completely restricting her movements. She could do nothing but lay there helplessly and wait for the inevitable.
"Please… please…" she begged, but received no response other than the quiet and darkness of her tightly secured room.
"Ugh, now this is just getting boring," Rhea said as she watched Yasmina struggle through the night vision cameras in the room. "Nothing beats a good explosion or implosion. Sure, the suffering is quick and might even end without any, but prolonged torture just doesn't hit the same way. I guess I just don't have much of a torture fetish."
In the end, Rhea finished off her revenge by pressing a special button she had prepared. It detonated all the traps she had laid out throughout the night across Unova, targeting every hideout and retreat the founders had. This included Yasmina's room, quickly ending her suffering.
"All that's left is to shut down Argent Solutions permanently, and then my revenge will be complete."
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