— Broadcast —
Vegapunk had finally secured himself in Rome, home to twelve Admirals, was supposed to be the safest city in the world.
Nobody had adequately accounted for the Infinity Castle. Its particular character made the city fight itself: each pocket of space isolated from every other, reinforcements bottlenecked at every corridor, the chain of command snapping apart at every junction. Everyone inside was on their own.
Caesar Clown was still embedded in the wall.
His cheek was wet and the section of plaster around his silhouette had fractured in a rough starburst. He had been in this condition for long enough that the initial panic had receded into something more manageable — a cold, methodical assessment of his remaining options. Most of his bones were sending unhelpful information. One eye worked properly. The other, he didn't test.
What the functioning eye found was Garou with one hand around Vegapunk's throat, holding the old man off the floor with the incurious competence of someone conducting a routine inquiry. Vegapunk's legs were dangling.
The old man wasn't talking.
Caesar Clown could hear enough through the ringing in his damaged ear to understand the shape of the conversation, if not every word. Garou was asking questions. Vegapunk was declining to answer them. Garou was escalating his description of what would happen to Vegapunk's tongue.
Vegapunk's expression was the expression of a person who had decided to die with what he knew rather than give it away. Caesar Clown recognized it. He'd worn something similar himself, once or twice, when he'd been younger and still capable of conviction.
His hand found the control chip at the base of his skull. He'd installed it himself, years ago, for exactly this kind of situation. He turned it over in his mind for a moment.
Don't blame me for what happens next.
He gave the command. Somewhere in the wall behind him, a concealed door began to rise.
Garou's five senses caught it before the smell reached him.
Something else was in the room. Not Vegapunk. Not the half-conscious idiot in the wall. Something that hadn't been there ten seconds ago and was now moving along the surface near the floor — slowly, with the particular patience of something that wasn't in a hurry because it didn't need to be.
The mass of black liquid had no obvious origin point. Its surface moved with a quality that light didn't behave well around — not absorbing it exactly, but wrong in a way that the eye kept sliding past. It left a trail on the wall as it traveled. The trail was wet and stayed wet.
It reached Caesar Clown.
It attached.
Caesar Clown had approximately two seconds to understand what was happening to him. His arms went out to the sides involuntarily. His skin changed color from the point of contact outward, darkening through shades of grey into an ink-black that didn't look like skin anymore — looked instead like something stretched over a shape that used to be a person. The musculature underneath swelled. His eyes went red at the centers, then all the way red. Whatever expression his face had been making dissolved into something that didn't quite belong to him.
The last visible trace of Caesar Clown sank beneath the surface.
The thing inside his body took a moment to assess the situation. It turned its head, slowly, orienting on the room, cataloguing.
"Free." The voice that came out was layered wrong — two registers simultaneously, one of them clearly not Caesar Clown's. "Hungry."
It regarded both of the other figures in the room with the uncomplicated attention of something evaluating food. The smarter the brain, the more nutritious — that was the hierarchy it operated by. Both of these qualified. The one who had released it would receive its gratitude, eventually, in the form of being consumed last.
But the other one was interesting.
Garou had released Vegapunk. He was looking at the black-skinned thing wearing Caesar Clown's face with the expression of someone who had just been offered an unexpected opportunity.
"You look strong," he said. "I wonder how many of my punches you can take."
Venom moved like liquid given a spine.
Its body twisted at angles that didn't track with normal joint mechanics, and it covered the distance between them in a single motion that collapsed the space before Garou had finished processing it. The mass of it aimed for his head.
Garou's fists came up.
The impact was dull rather than sharp — the difference between hitting something solid and hitting something that redistributed force through its entire body instead of concentrating the damage at a point. Venom didn't stop. It pressed forward with both arms, claws finding the gaps in Garou's guard, leaving furrows across his forearms and one across his ribs that stung properly.
Garou gritted his teeth, absorbed the pain, and recalibrated.
He didn't retreat. He settled deeper into his stance.
Flowing Water Rock-Crushing Fist.
It wasn't a charge — it was closer to water finding a downhill path. His footwork eliminated the angles Venom wanted to use; his body was somewhere else when the claws arrived, already repositioned at a point Venom hadn't yet covered. Every punch landed with the accuracy of someone who had already mapped where all the weak points were before the exchange began, and the force behind each landed in a direction calculated to redirect the counter rather than absorb it.
Venom's black skin rippled on contact. It didn't break. The force traveled through the substance and dispersed somewhere inside the mass, absorbed and distributed — but it accumulated. Each strike produced a slightly larger ripple. Sections of the outer layer began to peel away, revealing the shape of Caesar Clown beneath, thin and wrong, nested inside something that kept insisting on eating the damage.
"Haven't played like this in a while." The layered voice sounded genuinely pleased. "You're the first in recent years."
Then it stopped.
Garou watched it watch him for two full seconds.
Then Venom moved.
Flowing Water Rock-Crushing Fist.
The footwork was his. The stance was his. The positioning — the way each step eliminated the angles, the way each arm movement set up the next — was his, reproduced in real time by something that had watched it performed approximately eight times and decided it was ready to use.
Garou stared.
The two sets of techniques met each other in the middle. For a sustained stretch of seconds the exchange was genuinely even — mirror images, both sides finding and losing the same angles, the same redirections, the same follow-through patterns working and being worked against simultaneously.
The laboratory around them took the overflow without comment. Benches collapsed. Shelving tipped. The overhead lighting swayed.
It learned that from watching me do it once. The thought landed somewhere between outrage and involuntary professional respect. That's just an insult.
Vegapunk, who had been edging toward the far wall one careful step at a time since the fight began, was now almost at the door.