After confirming Riptide's state, Erik moved on, stepping over the warped iron and deeper into the darkest, farthest part of the submarine.
His eyes held a cold, determined glint. He planned to act alone.
If Shaw was truly turning himself into a nuclear bomb, Erik was prepared to do whatever was necessary to stop him, even if it meant severing the temporary, fragile ties he had formed with the telepath and the others outside.
He marched toward the reactor room, the metal corridors groaning around him.
Above him, the fierce battles between Azazel, Beast, Havok, and the others raged on the sand.
Yet, despite their destructive mutant abilities, their skirmishes looked like children playing in a sandbox compared to the sheer, earth-shattering intensity of the duel unfolding down the shoreline between Ernst and Wonder Woman.
— —
The clash between Ernst and the Amazon Princess had escalated to an entirely different level of violence.
Each punch they threw shattered the air and cratered the ground, creating terrifying, concussive waves of destruction that blew the sand away down to the bedrock.
In a deliberate effort to gauge his current baseline strength, Ernst intentionally refrained from using his energy absorption ability.
He wanted to assess the raw, biological progress of his body.
The test results satisfied him. Though he was still slightly inferior to Diana in raw, divine muscle mass, Ernst exuded absolute confidence.
He knew he was on a trajectory to quickly surpass her. Not only had his physical density improved, but his combat processing speed had reached new heights.
Having assessed his physical condition, Ernst shifted his strategy.
He transitioned from trading direct, brute-force blows with the demigod to employing the intricate techniques he had mastered over the last decade.
He applied the fundamental mechanics of human kinetics, optimizing his push, pull, and leg drive to redirect her immense power.
When Wonder Woman launched a devastating high kick, Ernst didn't block it rigidly.
He adeptly caught it with both hands, leveraging her own upward momentum to pull himself gracefully into the air.
As he flipped over her head and descended, he drove all the kinetic force down through his right leg, stomping forcefully upon Wonder Woman's raised guard.
The impact was immense. Despite crossing her indestructible bracers to block, the sheer downward force drove Wonder Woman's legs knee-deep into the soft beach sand, temporarily immobilizing her base.
While she managed to lock Ernst's right foot between her arms, she left herself vulnerable. Ernst's nanite suit instantly responded to his thoughts.
His free left foot transformed, the fabric and boot morphing into a sharp, metallic sword-blade, driving straight toward her chest.
Wonder Woman, immobilized with her legs trapped in the sand, frantically twisted her torso to evade the lethal strike.
Ernst immediately followed up, raining down a relentless barrage of horizontal hooks, straight punches, and side kicks.
Wonder Woman found herself overwhelmed by the bizarre, flowing rhythm of his attacks, desperately trying to fend off the onslaught.
Even in such a critical, humiliating predicament, Wonder Woman still refused to draw the sword and shield strapped to her back.
She was a proud Amazon. Although she had suffered a loss at Ernst's hands in Europe decades ago, she attributed it not to her lack of skill but to his unnatural energy-absorbing ability.
She had spent years analyzing that defeat, concluding that Ernst required physical contact to drain a target.
She had specifically tailored her current empty-handed fighting style to minimize direct, prolonged contact.
She had been full of confidence seeing Ernst fight bare-handed. She preferred to beat him on equal terms to avoid any unfair advantage.
However, the more she fought, the more infuriated Diana became.
Despite being objectively stronger, faster, and more magical than Ernst, she was falling behind in actual combat.
The disadvantage lay in Ernst's strange, flowing deflections.
Every time she struck with the force to shatter a tank, he "borrowed" her strength, leading her strikes away or causing her to overextend upon contact.
Ernst pressed the advantage, beating Wonder Woman back for more than ten minutes. He specifically targeted the most painful nerve clusters and joints.
Even her divine body couldn't ignore the physiological responses; she was left sore, numb, and extremely uncomfortable.
Finally, the Amazon's legendary temper reached its absolute limit.
When Ernst threw another heavy, twisting punch aimed at her ribs, Wonder Woman didn't evade.
She braced her core and used her body to absorb the brutal impact.
Enduring the sharp pain, she lashed out and clamped her hands around Ernst's wrists like titanium vices.
With a roar of exertion, she forcefully separated his arms, pulled his upper body violently toward her, and delivered a devastating, skull-cracking headbutt directly to his face.
CRACK.
Ernst had realized his mistake the moment his hands were restrained, but it was too late.
He saw the grim, feral smile on her face right before her forehead smashed into his nose.
Ernst cried out. A sensory explosion detonated inside his skull. Sensations of sour, spicy, numb, and salty erupted simultaneously across his palate as blood flooded his sinuses.
The severe, blinding pain temporarily short-circuited his nervous system, making his knees buckle.
Instinctively, he leaned back to avoid a second strike, pulling and swinging his arms vigorously to break her grip.
But Diana held on relentlessly.
As the first wave of blinding pain began to subside, Wonder Woman yanked him forward and delivered a second, even more ruthless headbutt.
Ernst gasped in agony, genuine tears of pain blurring his vision.
Observing his staggering, desolate state, Wonder Woman felt a primal surge of pleasure.
After more than ten years of suppressed frustration over her past defeat, she wanted him to bleed.
"It's not over yet," she declared, her eyes blazing.
"I'll break you."
She pulled him in for a third strike.
But Ernst, driven by sheer survival instinct and blinding pain, abandoned all martial arts elegance.
As her face closed in, he suddenly opened his mouth and bit down viciously on her nose.
"GAAH!"
Wonder Woman screamed in shock. She violently shoved him away to break free.
Although her divine durability meant the injury wasn't serious, the sharp pain, mixed with the sheer, unchivalrous embarrassment of the attack, left her completely stunned.
Undeterred, Ernst seized the momentary lapse in her grip.
He ripped his wrists free and scrambled backward, wiping blood from his shattered nose.
"I'm going to kill you!" Wonder Woman roared.
Fueled by a mixture of old grudges and fresh humiliation, she finally reached over her shoulder.
The metallic shing of her drawing her legendary sword and shield echoed over the roar of the ocean.
She was ready to deliver a fatal blow.
Ernst's own eyes narrowed into a glare of pure, unadulterated hatred. He was done playing games.
Seeing her armed, Ernst abandoned his empty-handed testing.
With a flick of his wrists, the nanites in his sleeves rippled and expelled two long, gleaming tactical knives into his palms.
He didn't hold back anymore. The time for testing was over; it was time for fire and blood.
Ernst activated his mutant ability.
As Wonder Woman charged and swung her sword in a lethal, horizontal arc, Ernst met it with his right-hand knife.
CLANG!
The two exerted maximum force simultaneously, each attempting to overpower the other.
Initially, Ernst's boots slid backward in the sand; he was slightly inferior in raw, physical torque. But his energy-absorbing ability engaged perfectly.
He absorbed the massive kinetic energy of her sword strike, merged it with the cosmic energy already stored in his cells, and unleashed a devastating shockwave through his blades.
The kinetic burst was catastrophic. It blew Wonder Woman completely off her feet, sending her tumbling through the air.
Realizing her absolute disadvantage in a direct test of strength against an energy-absorber, Diana wisely chose a new tactic.
She landed gracefully, stepped back to regroup, and then leaped high into the air.
She focused every ounce of her divine strength into a single, targeted sword thrust aimed directly at his center of mass.
She theorized that Ernst's energy absorption must have a limit and a processing lag.
She aimed to concentrate all her power into a single microscopic point to overload his capacity and pierce him before he could absorb it.
However, she drastically underestimated him.
While energy absorption did have limits, Ernst's threshold was astronomically higher than his father's.
Years of continuous self-strengthening with the Tesseract's energy had elevated him to a nearly unbreakable state.
Wonder Woman's attempt to breach his limits was a feat far beyond her current reach.
Ernst stood his ground. He effortlessly parried her descending sword with his left knife, deflecting the lethal point into the sand.
With his right hand free, he immediately thrust his second knife toward her exposed chest.
Unable to raise her shield in time due to her downward momentum, Wonder Woman was forced to twist her body violently mid-air to avoid the lethal strike.
Ernst seized the brief lapse in her guard.
He seamlessly redirected the momentum of his right knife, hooking the edge of her shield and violently dislodging it from her grip.
The heavy shield spun away, burying itself in the sand.
Despite losing her primary defense, Wonder Woman maintained her fierce composure.
She retreated rapidly, expertly maneuvering her body out of his striking range. With a fluid motion, she unhooked the glowing Golden Lasso of Truth from her hip and lashed it toward Ernst like a whip.
Ernst crossed his two knives in an X-block, attempting to deflect the magical rope.
But the Lasso was flexible and alive; it skillfully looped around the intersection of his blades, binding them tightly together.
With a powerful, two-handed pull, Wonder Woman yanked the rope, aiming to rip the weapons from his hands or drag him off balance.
Reacting swiftly, Ernst locked his grip on the hilts, digging his heels deep into the sand to resist being dragged.
He immediately attempted to use the razor-sharp edge of his golden knife to slice through the constraint, but the divine material of the Lasso proved entirely impervious to physical cutting.
Sensing the stalemate, Wonder Woman changed tactics.
She wrapped the slack of the rope tightly around her forearm, using it as a pulley to rapidly haul herself toward him.
Closing the distance in a fraction of a second, she lunged.
When she was only a few feet away, she thrust her sword with pinpoint accuracy directly toward Ernst's vulnerable eyes.
Faced with a lethal threat that his body couldn't simply absorb, his eyes were still soft tissue, and Ernst felt a genuine spike of adrenaline.
Despite the risk, he refused to release his trapped weapons.
Instead, he twisted his wrists with brutal force, manipulating the bound knives like a giant pair of scissors.
CLACK.
He caught her descending sword blade perfectly between his crossed knives, clamping down on the steel mere inches from his face.
The stalemate resumed. They stood frozen on the beach, blades locked, neither willing to yield a single inch
-------------
Author's Note:
Do you want to read 25+ Chapters ahead right now?
Stop waiting. Come over to the dark side. We have cookies, advanced chapters, and very, very detailed 'plot.'
patreon.com/
Dark_sym