The subterranean cavern beneath the Washington Monument was massive, sweltering, and glowing with the harsh orange light of open magma fissures.
Eve and I hovered silently near the rocky ceiling, perfectly concealed in the shadows. Down below, the situation was a logistical nightmare. Doc Seismic had completely fortified the cavern. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of giant subterranean creatures swarming the floor. Massive centipedes three times the size of city buses slithered through the dirt, while giant arachnids stood guard over the hostages.
And there were a lot of hostages.
Every major superhero team on the Eastern Seaboard had been neutralized and wrapped tight in thick, white subterranean webbing. I spotted Brit and his squad looking incredibly annoyed. The Capes Incorporated roster was strung up upside down. And in the center of it all were the new Guardians of the Globe.
Immortal and Dupli-Kate were struggling against their bindings. Monster Girl was trapped in her human form. Shrinking Rae, Shapesmith, and Bulletproof were completely immobilized. And then there was Rex Splode, who was furiously thrashing around while wearing absolutely nothing but a shower towel and a layer of suds.
I don't know whether to be disappointed by these so-called heroes or be impressed with Seismic's power, I thought, shaking my head while smirking.
In front of the captured heroes, Doc Seismic was pacing back and forth, rubbing his metallic, earthquake-generating gauntlets together as he delivered a grandiose monologue.
"I've got this," I whispered to Eve, tapping my earpiece to switch to a localized frequency. "While I pull the aggro and keep Seismic talking, you slip around the perimeter and quietly dissolve the webbing holding the heavy hitters. Start with The Immortal and Brit."
Eve looked down at the literal army of giant magma monsters and venomous insects. She bit her lip, looking at me with genuine reluctance. "Mark, there are a thousand of them. You can't take on an entire army by yourself just to buy me time."
"Eve, I got this," I said softly, giving her a confident, relaxed smile. "It's just pest control. Now go."
She hesitated for a microsecond before nodding. Her pink aura shifted, bending the light around her as she silently glided down toward the hostages.
I rolled my shoulders, then I dropped out of the sky like a meteor.
I landed directly between Doc Seismic and the captive heroes. The impact cracked the bedrock, sending a shockwave that knocked several giant spiders off their feet.
Doc Seismic stopped pacing. He glared at me, a manic grin spreading across his face.
"Invincible! You're late to the awakening! Look around you! The surface-dwellers have poisoned this planet with their imperialist greed for too long! But today, I stand as a tectonic god! I will cleanse the surface and return the world to the collective!"
"Really now?," I said flatly, crossing my arms. "And how, pray tell, will a hypocrite do that?"
Seismic blinked. "Excuse me? What do you mean by hypocrite?"
"Well you use collectivist, anti-imperialist rhetoric to justify your actions, but your ultimate goal is to establish yourself as an absolute dictator," I stated, my voice echoing clearly so every captured hero could hear it. "You claim to have empathy for the oppressed, but you regularly commit mass murder, terrorism, and mass kidnappings. You have absolutely zero empathy for human beings. You value rocks over people."
"You... you insolent child!" Seismic sputtered, his face turning red as his intellectual superiority was challenged. "You don't understand the grand design! The surface world is corrupt!"
"The only thing corrupt here is your prefrontal cortex," I shot back, taking a slow step forward. "Let's be real, Seismic. Your ideology is a joke. Your earthquake gauntlets don't have proper kinetic dampeners. Every time you fire them, the concussive kickback travels up your arms and rattles your skull. Your entire radical worldview isn't some brilliant political awakening. It's just untreated brain damage."
Behind Seismic, Rex let out a muffled, barking laugh through his webbing.
Seismic's eyes widened in absolute, unhinged fury. His ego had been completely shattered. "Kill him!" he screamed at his army, raising his gauntlets to trigger a massive earthquake. "Tear him to shreds!"
He didn't even get to power them up.
I moved in an instant.
I crossed the fifty feet between us in a fraction of a microsecond. The sonic boom of my movement violently knocked the front row of magma monsters backward. Before Seismic could even process that I was no longer standing where I used to be, I was directly in his face.
I grabbed both of his metallic gauntlets.
CRUNCH.
I squeezed my hands, applying the exact, surgical amount of pressure needed to instantly crush the highly advanced titanium gauntlets into useless, crumpled tin foil, completely stopping the mechanisms without breaking a single bone in Seismic's wrists.
Seismic looked down at his ruined weapons, completely paralyzed with shock. He looked up at me, his mouth opening and closing wordlessly.
I reached out and flicked him in the forehead. The micro-fraction of kinetic energy was enough to instantly knock him unconscious. He crumpled to the floor like a sack of potatoes.
The cavern went silent.
Behind me, the webbing suddenly dissolved into pink mist as Eve finished her work. The heroes dropped to the floor, coughing and rubbing their limbs. But none of them were looking at Eve. They were all staring at me.
Robot, hovering a few feet away in his mechanical suit, reached up with trembling hands. The mechanical eyes of his drone were whirring wildly, unable to process the speed and precision it had just witnessed. With a hiss of pressurized air, Robot detached his helmet, revealing his cloned, human face.
He stared at the crushed, surgically ruined gauntlets, and then at me, his human eyes wide with utter, profound confusion.
I ignored the stunned heroes and turned to face the roaring army of a thousand magma monsters and giant insects that were suddenly missing their leader.
"Alright," I sighed, cracking my knuckles as the first wave of magma creatures lunged forward, breathing a massive pillar of subterranean fire directly at me. "Let's get this over with. I've got dinner plans on Friday."
The pillar of fire swallowed me whole.
Behind me, I heard several of the newly freed heroes shout in panic. Dupli-Kate screamed my name, and I heard the heavy thud of Immortal preparing to launch himself into the inferno to pull me out.
"Stand down!" Eve's voice ordered sharply, her pink shields flaring to life to protect the others from the ambient heat. "Just watch!"
The flames roared around me, reaching temperatures that would have melted standard steel in seconds. But I didn't even flinch. I just closed my eyes and let the inferno wash over me.
My Bio-Reactive Containment Suit hummed to life. The specialized kinetic regulators and thermal conductors actively drank in the heat, channeling it directly into my smart atoms. I felt my internal reserves swelling, my muscles relaxing as the magma-fire basically acted like a deep-tissue massage.
When the fire finally ceased, the monsters let out guttural roars of triumph, expecting to see a pile of ash.
Instead, I stood there, completely unharmed. The glowing, thermal veins in my neck and arms were pulsing with absorbed energy. I rolled my neck, letting out a satisfied sigh.
"Oh, man," I groaned happily, stretching my arms. "That felt amazing. My traps were killing me. But I guess it's my turn now."
I didn't give them a chance to process what was happening.
I kicked off the bedrock, moving so fast I broke the sound barrier inside the cavern.
I flew directly through the chest of a magma monster, shattering its molten core and turning it into a spray of cooling rocks. I banked hard to the left, clotheslining a colossal centipede with my forearm.
The impact severed the creature in half with a sickening CRACK.
The army swarmed, trying to overwhelm me with numbers. Hundreds of giant arachnids and magma-beasts piled on top of me, burying me under a mountain of fangs, claws, and molten rock.
The heroes watched in stunned silence as the massive pile of monsters writhed and hissed.
"Kid!" Brit yelled, stepping forward.
Deep inside the pile, I unleashed the pent-up thermal and kinetic energy the monsters had just generously donated to me.
BOOM.
A localized, highly concentrated shockwave of pure thermal-kinetic force erupted from my body. The blast radius was perfectly contained to a fifty-yard sphere.
Every single monster caught in the blast wave was instantly vaporized. The magma creatures didn't even have time to scream before the sheer kinetic force flash-cooled them into solid obsidian statues, which then immediately shattered into millions of pieces of harmless, pebble-sized gravel.
The shockwave cleared the cavern floor. The remaining monsters at the far edges of the cave took one look at the rain of pulverized rock falling from the ceiling, turned around, and frantically began burrowing back into the earth to escape.
I floated down, landing softly on the freshly cleared bedrock. I dusted a piece of gravel off my shoulder.
I checked my internal clock. Thirty-two seconds.
It wasn't my best time, but I didn't wanted to accidentally collapse the Washington Monument on top of us.
I turned around to face the assembled heroes of Earth.
Nobody moved or spoke.
Rex Splode was standing motionless, one hand clutching his shower towel, his jaw literally hanging open. The Immortal was staring at me with a look of profound, deeply unsettled recognition, remembering how I handled his future self. Brit was just scratching the back of his head, looking back and forth between the thousands of shattered rocks and my perfectly clean suit.
"Well," Brit muttered, breaking the silence. "I guess I'm out of a job."
Eve floated down next to me, her pink aura fading. She looked at the devastation, then looked up at me with a smirk. "Show-off."
"Hey, I told you," I grinned. "They were nothing but pests."