Jason Fuller & The Elementals: The Stones Of Olympus (Book 1)

by Andarion The Storyteller

This story is about the adventures of a young mutant named Jason Fuller and his friends as they embark on a journey to save the world from Doctor Doom and the Masters of Evil. Lives will be changed, destinies will be fought, ancient magic will resurface, and for Jason, a question that has plagued him since his parents death, about what it truly means to be a hero, will be answered.

11. Chapter 11: Day Of The Dead

Chapter 11:Day Of The Dead

When I could see again, Grant and I were in some kind of war room. It wasn't like the usual meeting room where Fury assigned us missions and stuff, this place was fully loaded. Seriously, there were weapons everywhere. From missiles, to plasma rifles, grenades, drones, knives, swords, whatever. All of this stuff would've impressed, and even scared me, considering the fact that Fury never would've brought us to this room unless we were about to do some type of Call of Duty $#!+; but there was another sight that caught my eye, and almost made me forget about the war room altogether. Apparently, Allyson had just gotten done showering, because she was dressed in a pink bathrobe, and her hair was still wet and stringy. Her face was nothing short of shocked and devastated; this was clearly the most embarrassing moment of her life. You gotta believe me when I say, it took every ounce of my concentration and willpower not to bust out laughing at her, and I could tell Grant was thinking the same thing. But considering where we were, and the people sitting at the opposite end of us, I decided to keep my composure; this was obviously a few steps up from our average mission briefing. I say this because, at the opposite end of the table, Fury, Kennedy, Maria Hill, Ms. Marvel (glad to see she was ok), Nightcrawler, Storm, Colossus, and Quicksilver (relieved to see him up and about), were assembled in a U shape, around the huge, fluorescent, and rectangular meeting table, that was like ten feet long and wide. All of their faces were grim and serious (even by S.H.I.E.L.D. standards); something big was going down, but before I had time to ask what it was, Fury answered the question.

"We have an urgent situation," he said.

"You found another stone?" I guessed.

"If only we 'found' it," he responded. "This time, it looks like the stone found us."

He took out his clicker (that thing must have been universal), pointed it toward the meeting table, and pressed a button. The table glowed bright blue and purple, and a huge holographic landscape, dotted with wheat fields, tractors, and barns, popped up like dominoes falling in reverse. After the wheat field was finished, it was covered in a huge purple layer. I could see thousands upon thousands of purple mini people marching across the wheat field like an army. As they marched, a huge purple aura, that stretched from the sky to the ground, followed them like a plague. And at the beginning of the army's base point, a huge purple sphere glowed like a burning lamp, spawning thousands of new mini people every 30 seconds. It didn't take a genius to figure out what this was about.

"A few moments ago," Fury continued. "Our EM sensor just picked up a huge, and I mean so huge that it overloaded the system and shut it down, power level burning in the urban area of Scott City, Kansas."

"We goin to Kansas?" Grant asked. "Laaame!"

I punched him in the arm and gestured to Fury to go on.

"We zoomed in on it's last known coordinates," he said. "And found the stone residing in Kansas' biggest wheat field; only now, it seems like wheat is the last thing that field is producing right now."

"What are those things?" I asked him.

"Not alive," he responded. "From what our satellites have picked up, these things are more or less zombies of sort, which means we're dealing with the stone of Hades. This undead army is creating some kind of aura that is killing anything that lives; take a look."

He pressed another button on his clicker, and a picture frame of a huge wheat field popped up above the hologram stuff. From what I could tell, this was some sort of satellite image that got zoomed in by 1,000 or so. It showed a huge golden field of wheat, but every second, a wave of black spread over the field. In other words, the stone reeked of death itself, and it was on a rampage in one of the biggest farming states. I guess I should care about that, but farming really was not my thing, if anything else I was more worried about the city than the wheat.

"Ok," said Allyson, who was clinging to her robe for dear life. "This is really menacing and serious and all, but can someone get me some clothes please?"

For the first time in probably her whole life, the whole of everyone in the room pretended not to hear her, and continued on with the task at hand.

"You have to get that stone," Fury said. "At their current position and speed, the zombies will flood into the nearest populated area within three hours. The devastation they could cause will be unfathomable, if it wasn't for the fact that they're headed for a relatively small town. But if Doom gets his hands on that stone, there's no telling what kind of monstrosity he could unleash."

"But how are we supposed to get near the stone?" I asked him. "That death aura will eat us alive."

"No it won't. Based off of what we've observed, the aura is entirely magical. We're not certain as to what effects it may have on your powers, but you should be able to get within range without worrying about withering up."

"Ummm," Grant jumped in. "You see, it's not that the confirmation doesn't relieve me, but I think you forgot to account for the fact that there are still thousands and thousands of zombies, that the three, again, THE THREE of us have to fight. Even with our powers we can't hold off an army that size on our own, what are we gonna do?"

"I'm surprised at you Grant," Fury chided him. "And here I thought you were my go to guy for inspiration."

"Just saying, in the Amazon, it was us against a few thousand. Now, it's way more than we can take alone."

"Duly noted. Which is why you won't be fighting this battle alone."

Grant, Allyson, and I shot him and each other inquisitive looks; then Mrs. Kennedy stepped in to shed some light on Fury's words. She pressed some buttons on her end of the table (because apparently, it was the world's biggest iPad), and the Walking Dead diagram shrunk, and hovered several feet above the surface of the table. Mrs. Kennedy pressed a few more buttons, and a new battlesuit diagram popped up. The suit was similar to the ones the team used, but these ones were a lot bulkier, had Halo style helmets, and were equipped with: Gatling guns on the wrists, assault rifles strapped to the backs, and was stocked with some kind of laser sword (no, not a lightsaber, it was actually shaped like a sword) and riot shield. The gear looked pretty bad ass, but it wasn't really my style.

"So you're gonna give us an upgrade?" Grant asked her. "Again, not trying to be ungrateful, but a new suit, no matter how fully loaded, except may be Iron Man's, is gonna turn the tide against this Zombocalypse."

"Well then," Mrs. Kennedy said. "What if I told you that these suits weren't for you, but for 1,000 of your personal soldiers."

"Come again?" I asked her, because 'personal army' sounded really good right about now.

"You heard me." Mrs. Kennedy continued. "After the Brotherhood's latest attack on Washington, these suits became standard issue for S.H.I.E.L.D.'s defensive inventory. They're made from the same material as your battle suits, but come with fully loaded, arc reactor powered energy weapons, that are self sustainable. The suits come with a small energy reserve, used to power body shields, that can withstand blows from tanks, missiles, and high caliber gunshots. I've re-routed the power usage, so that it acts like a buffer force against the death aura's corroding effects; the suits should be able to last two hours in the field before the shield runs out of juice, although the users will be more vulnerable to physical attacks. We have over 1,000 in storage, each encoded to respond to one S.H.I.E.L.D. agent; for threats like this, we've assembled every active operative we were able to get our hands on, including your trainers."

So long story short, S.H.I.E.L.D. was squaddin up for a turf war; this job was starting to get interesting.

"Ok," I said. "Better, but still, we're gonna need way more firepower than that."

"Then look around Jason," Fury said. "This is the defense weapons hangar for S.H.I.E.L.D. We have firepower galore."

He pressed another button on the clicker, and the table flashed holograms of a bunch of weapon diagrams. He left me and the team to study the weapon designs (which only took half a sec to read), and then we resumed our 'overcoming impossible odds' meeting. Long story short, most of the weaponry that was in the hangar, was drone based. There were flying drones, capable of shooting high pressure caliber energy bullets. Tank drones, capable of shooting energy bombshells, and cannon-like devices that shot pods into the air, and basically scatter shot bullets everywhere in enemy territory. With weapons like these, we stood a small chance; then again, everything good was small when we were involved.

"So, what's the plan Mr. Fuller?" Fury asked me.

"What do you mean?" I asked him back.

"You have full access and authority over the strike team that will combat this threat. We don't have a lot of time, I need to know how you plan to lead your soldiers in this battle."

My heart started pounding really hard. I silently knew it would come to this, but I was praying it wouldn't come to this. Leading Grant and Allyson on small knit team missions was one thing; leading a thousand people into a battle, and being responsible for all of their lives, that was a whole new ball game.

"Ok focus," I thought to myself. "You can do this, you HAVE to do this."

I took a deep breath, and told Grant and Allyson to speed up with me as we tried to figure out a plan.

"So what you got cookin up in there Jason?" Grant asked me. "What's the game plan?"

I was still deep in thought, thinking of every possible way my plans could fail, and blow up in my face, so Allyson rushed in to fill the awkward silence.

"The best thing for everyone is for me to create a sun in the middle of the army," she said. "I can take them down by the hundreds, and thin out their ranks."

"That can be Plan A," I said, finally getting my old creativity back. "But like Fury said, the aura might have some sort of effect on our powers; we need to plan for the worst, but hope for the best."

"So what do you think we should do?" Allyson asked me.

"We start out with range. Hopefully, the aura won't affect our powers. If that's the case, I summon heavy lightning, while you focus on incinerating as many of those undead freaks as you can. Assuming that doesn't hold them back for too long, we use the pod shooters, and scatter shoot the living mess out of em'. We keep doing that until we run out of ammo; between the ten shooters we have available, that'll take out at least a good 10,000 of the suckers."

"But they're zombies dude," Grant protested. "Unless those things can automatically head shot, bullets will only slow them down at best."

That may sound stupid to you, assuming that we had no confirmation that the creatures were zombies, but Grant raised a valid point; for the most part, we didn't know $#!+ about whether or not our weapons could harm them.

"We gotta hope that won't be the case," I told Grant. "Besides, if it comes to that, we'll have to do a lot of head trimming."

"Fair enough," he said. "But even then, that won't hold em' back for long. What do we do when they start getting closer."

"That's when we should bust out the tanks and Gatling guns," Allyson immediately responded (did she pull rank or something all of a sudden?). "Use then close range to take out more of the attackers, and create a temporary buffer shield while we get ready to counter charge them."

"That's good," Grant said. "But a counter charge? Seriously? Even if by some miracle, our plan works, we'd still be facing down at least 10,000 zombies at best; what then?"

"We charge them back," I said.

That earned me two very surprised and 'have you gone nuts?' looks from Allyson and Grant.

"Seriously," I continued. "Between the three of us, if we use our speed, we can thin out the ranks even further. We can cut a path through the head of the charging force, and get in deep within their ranks to cut them down from the inside. The other soldiers can handle the foremost enemies, they'll be softened up anyway."

"You really think the three of us can manage that?" Allyson asked me.

"Four of us," I responded. "I mean Quicksilver and the others are gonna help us, right?"

"Depends if they get a suit."

"Hold up," Grant said. "Let's just slow down and ask them."

We did, and Grant asked whether or not our trainers would be getting a suit.

"Of course," said Mrs. Kennedy. "We need all the help we can get, i'll be down in the field with you as well, plus we're recruiting as many heroes as we can get our hands on to help out."

"Ok, thanks," said Grant. "Just checking, the plans are going great by the way, we're really brainstorming here, see you in half a sec once were finished."

We sped up, and resumed our war meeting.

"Ok," I said. "Now that we got that out of the way...yeah, the four of us will rush the bulk of the army, thin it out, and collapse it's infrastructure. If all goes accordingly, we should be able to make their defense collapse from the inside out, and we'll have the stone in no time. You all cool with that plan?"

"Yeah," Grant said. "I'm on board."

"Same here," said Allyson. "You ok Jason? You don't look so good."

I realized I was letting my fear shine through. I couldn't afford to look weak in front of my team, charismatic or not, I was the face of the team, and I had to present it well.

"Yeah," I said, adjusting my face to make the lie more convincing. "Just a little nervous is all, no big deal."

I could tell that Grant and Allyson weren't completely convinced, but they didn't have a choice but to believe me. We slowed down, gathered our thoughts together, and with a little help from them, I explained the battle plan to Fury and the hero crew. They didn't look overly enthusiastic about my plan, but after a few minutes of debating and talking in circles, we pretty much agreed that most of this plan depended on the success of sheer dumb luck.

"And you're sure you're ready for this Mr. Fuller?" Fury asked me.

"As i'll ever be," I responded.

"Estimated casualties?"

"Maybe 200 or so, assuming my plan doesn't go accordingly; besides, it's not like we can retreat or anything."

"Are you prepared to deal with that?"

That was a double question. Not only was he asking me if I was ready to take responsibility for the deaths of those that would be involved in this fight; he was asking me if I was ready to stand and die if it came to that.

"I am," I said after a brief pause. "We all are."

I looked over at Grant, who looked as determined as ever to fight; there was no question of whether or not he was brave enough to die for thousands of people he didn't know. I looked over at Allyson too, who surprisingly enough looked just as determined as Grant. Seeing their faces filled me with renewed drive and focus; nobody would be dying today.

"Ok then," said Fury. "Call in the rest of the agents, and let's get this party-"

"HOLD, COLONEL FURY!" a voice straight up boomed through the entire hangar, probably taking half of my ear drums with it.

A second later, a huge flash of light burned in the air to the right of the table, and when the light died down, Dr. Strange was in the room. He was dressed in something blue, that looked like a mix between pajamas, and a robe for monks. He had a kind of cool red cape draped around his back, and some weird looking amulet around his neck. The guy definitely had a professor type look to him, what with his grey streaks in his hair and what not. Of course, he ruined all of that by just happening to be levitating 10 feet in the air, and having glowing white eyes like he was the Avatar (Last Airbender, not the blue people).

"Hold," he said again in a voice that didn't shatter my hearing. "Your plans, no matter how elaborate and tactical, will fall apart as soon as you deploy your forces."

"And why is that Stephen?" Fury asked him. "As far as I can tell, all we need to do is blow the damn things back to hell, get the stone and be done with it."

"It is not that simple Colonel. These creatures you see, are a portion of the unredeemed souls that have been rotting in the depths of Hades for the last five thousand years. Over time, these souls have fed off of the sins and malice that have dammed them to rot; their collective evil is strong enough to rot away any organic life form not properly defended, and even your greatest weapons will be overall ineffective against them."

"So that's it?!" I shouted. "We just give up and let those things destroy the city?!"

"Hold your tongue, Jason Thaddeus Fuller," he said. "There is still hope, but we must act swiftly."

I was still reeling from the fact that he knew my full name (not that big a deal but still, I didn't tell him), so he had my undivided attention. He waved his hand through the air behind him, and after a brief flash of yellow, he was surrounded by backup. There were five of them, each with a different look. One of them was a tall white guy with long brown hair, wearing animal fur, and carrying a staff made of tree bark, with an aura of small green animals, like a lion, rhino, and cheetah, scampering around it. Another was some bald Chinese guy, wearing a green and yellow shaolin robe. I would've laughed at him, but considering the fact that he was in league with Dr. Strange, plus the fact that he had two katanas strapped to his back, I decided to lay off of him. There were two women with the magic crew. Both of them were tall, black, and from what I could see, identical twins. They were both wearing red robes with hoods that covered their heads. Over the robes, they were wearing red breastplates, combat boots, and armor greaves. They didn't talk, move, or look interested in anything; so why did they scare me the most? Dr. Strange introduced them to us in order. The wild man was named Zachery, and he specialized in animal and nature magic. The bald Chinese guy was named Wong, and while he had no magic powers, he could still whip some ass with his swords, so he was still useful. Finally, the twins were named Azaria and Abimbola. They specialized in blood magic, using their blood as an energy source to create anything they could imagine, or use it like magma to melt through their opponents. They didn't talk, or look interested, because apparently, they were cursed by some demon, whose name I can't pronounce. As such, they've had to constantly remain emotionless and silent, because if they felt anger, their blood would start to boil, and they would have no choice but to spew it out. If they felt sadness, they could freeze the blood in the veins of anyone who surrounded them, and if they felt annoyance, there's no telling what could happen to you. Also, happiness was out of the question; the demon took away their ability to feel that. Anyway, after Dr. Strange had introduced us to his magic crew, he instructed Fury to do the same, and call in the available backup we had coming. Fury pulled out a walkie talkie looking thing, pressed a button, and spoke into it.

"This is an emergency call to all meta-humans available for combat" he said. "Respond to coordinates SNN-Alpha 6 on the double."

It took a few seconds, but after a while, a ripple of light flashed to the left of the table, and our backup crew arrived. As far as backup was concerned, we could've done worse. Most of the guys weren't heavy hitters, but as you can tell, we needed any and all help we could get our hands on; anyone who showed up was an automatic MVP. There were only ten heroes that responded; Wolverine, Daredevil, Rogue, Psylocke, Angel, Falcon, Spider-Man, Gambit, Black Panther, and War Machine. Still, they were as welcome as The Avengers would be. With everyone assembled and ready (Grant trying not to look like a fanboy, and Allyson trying to be invisible), Dr. Strange started the second half of his lecture.

"Friends and comrades," he started. "Your arrival is most fortuitous, for today, the world needs your protection like never before."

He thrusted his hand into the air, and a real time projection of the zombie army materialized. Up close, they were really hard to look at. Each of them were roughly around 6 feet tall, with grey pasty skin that looked like it was infused with gravel and dried magma. They were glowing with purple energy, actually frothing the stuff from their mouths, and they all had long purple talons, that looked sharp enough to carve a tank like a Christmas ham. To prove my point, one of the creatures, who stumbled upon a tractor, picked it up like it was a softball, and started shredding it to pieces before moving on with the pack. Apparently, the local police force was trying to make a stand. 100 meters south of the army, was a barricade of police cars and trucks. Dozens of officers opened fire on the army, but from what I could see, the bullets didn't even prick the zombies, but it sure as hell made them mad. The ones in the front started to charge; the scene was 1000X more scary than the zombies from I Am Legend. I started to turn my head away, I didn't wanna see what those things were gonna do to those poor stupidly brave officers. Fortunately, I didn't have to. The twins lifted their heads, revealing their glowing blood red eyes. They started waving their hands in sync, saying words that I couldn't begin to understand. A few seconds later, they thrusted their arms forward, and right before the zombies tore through the cops, a red wall, that looked like it was made of glowing red water, rushed in front of the cops. The sisters made a pushing movement, and the wall of glowing blood started to push the zombies back; the sight of it was both impressive and disgusting to watch at the same time (I could actually hear Allyson baby barf in her mouth). Dr. Strange had pretty much seen that we had gotten the picture, and moved on with his speech, but left the projection on display.

"What you have just witnessed," he continued. "Is a direct response from the awakening of the stone of Hades. A few days ago, Dr. Doom and his cohorts went on a brutal rampage, killing hundreds of innocents to obtain five of the seven Stones Of Olympus. Once, I was wise to his schemes, I released a chaos wave on the earth, with intentions to scatter the stones, and prevent Doom from obtaining their incredible and destructive power. As such, the three youngsters you see before you, have been working tirelessly to find and obtain the stones; they have already secured the stone of Ares. Now the stone of Hades has awoken, and it is only through our collective might that we might be able to stop it from spreading it's aura of death throughout the entire world. I have already placed a containing enchantment on the stone; making it's magic double back on itself, and slow down the uprising of more damned souls. However, the enchantment will weaken and break within a little over an hour at best; if that happens, millions of the dead will pour into the world like a flood. We must act swiftly."

He levitated into the air, got into a meditating stance, and started chanting. Weird looking symbols started to envelope him in a weird looking sphere, and after a few seconds, he shouted at the top of his lungs: BY THE HOLY WATERS OF EDEN! I felt a huge wave pass through me, and when I looked up, I saw remnants of a blue shock wave making it's way through the room, and though the wall; the shock wave probably spread throughout the entire Helicarrier. I looked at myself, trying to see if I looked any different, but I was just fine. I used my sensory abilities to scan my body, and found to my surprise, that I was covered in some kind of invisible aura. It was different from my magic shield aura, in fact, it kinda blended into it; like my aura knew this new sensation meant me no harm. I looked around at everyone else, and saw to my relief that everyone was ok; although by the looks they were giving Dr. Strange, he had some fast talking to do.

"Do not worry yourselves my friends," he calmingly said. "The spell I have just performed is a warding spell, turned offensive. You see, normal, and not even magical weapons will be enough to fell these unholy beasts; they are fueled by millennia of sin, hate, and suffering. The only thing that could possibly vanquish such evil, is weapons blessed by the Holy Waters of Eden,heavenly water that has been prayed over, and blessed by St. Michael, Archangel of God, himself. The water has been etched into the very fabric of your being, the ship's structure, as well as all of the weapons it is carrying; in other words, we now stand a chance against the stone of Hades; or at least the products of it's magic."

The rest of the heroes weren't exactly thrilled that they had been sprayed with heavenly zombie repellent, but they quickly got over it, considering the fact that we were outnumbered, and needed all the help we could get.

"Well thanks for that Doc," said Fury. "We all appreciate the extra protection, but like you said, time is short. I'll call in the rest of my forces, and we'll finally get this party-"

"WAIT!" Allyson screamed, with a really panicked look on her face. "BEFORE WE FILL THIS PLACE UP WITH MORE PEOPLE, SOMEONE NEEDS TO GET ME SOME CLOTHES RIGHT NOW!"

It took the collective willpower of everyone in the room not to laugh at her, and even then, a few sniggers got loose. Anyway, Dr. Strange waved his hands, and Allyson was suddenly wearing some weird looking all white PJs, that were made from some type of weird cotton. Not much in fashion, but from the look of relief on Allyson's face, you'd think she had just gotten a free set of designer clothes. After we had managed to shut the drama queen up (never let her know I called her that), Fury called in the rest of the troops, over 1,000 agents, and we went to work.

Setup took about 30 minutes in total. The first 10 were spent on bringing the agents and heroes up to speed on my plan of attack. At first, they weren't really receptive of the idea of taking orders from the 11th graders, but after having S.E.R.A. show them some scenes from our simulation exercise (especially the part where I blasted a hole straight through the Empire State Building), they got the memo that underestimating us was not the best thing to do. After getting everyone up to speed, we all got dressed for war. Grant, Allyson, and I morphed (causing everyone within sight to laugh at us), and Mrs. Kennedy brought us up to speed on the new upgrades she put into our battle suits and weapons. Apparently, Allyson was a pro at using throwing knives (and she never thought at anytime this information might be useful for Grant and I to know), so Mrs. Kennedy stocked her suit with 20 of em; each able to be charged up and used like a grenade, and of course, automatically returnable. Grant wasn't lying when he said he was fully loaded with awesome, improved gear. He summoned his axe for me and showed me the new features. For starters, the thing weighed at least 500 pounds. Furthermore, Grant got the idea that combining a sword and axe into one weapon is cool, because when he willed it, his axe shot out a three foot blade, retracted the axe blades in just a bit, and became a really big sword. It would've looked awkward, considering the fact that the axe blades should've been too big for the blade to hit anything, but like I said, the blades retracted. What he had was a bigger than usual hilt guard, but not so big to where the actual blade was pointless. Of course, he could convert the sword axe into a spear as well, so yeah. And still, it got better…or worse, whichever you deem it. Grant retracted his sword, flung his axe out, and the head fell off of the handle, hanging by a chain that was somehow buried in it. Basically, Grant was carrying the world's most deadly flail ever. Finally, as if he actually needed more weapons, Mrs. Kennedy had a sword taken off of the training rack (the dull ones), and had it sharpened and calibrated for Grant's battle suit. It was wicked looking, like 'Conan The Barbarian' wicked looking; so apparently he was serious about the dual wielding thing…whatever, so long as it kept him alive. Finally, Mrs. Kennedy upgraded my Kevlar interior, to where it was now generating 2,000 volts of juice into my system. Just like Allyson, this was overkill, now that I could produce and store an unlimited amount of voltage in my body; but then again, I didn't have a year to build up my reserves, so this upgrade was much appreciated. Mrs. Kennedy also upgraded my shield (the one I haven't even used yet). Now, it was synced to my electric powers. It was able to hold, maintain, and amplify a charge, meaning if I wanted to, I could give my opponent a nice shock surprise when he (or she) hit it. Also, the outer rim of the shield was sharpened; as long as I kept the shield charged with voltage, the outer rim could slice through a full grown oak tree with no problem at all. Finally, because having a shield means Captain America has to be involved in some way, Mrs. Kennedy rigged my shield to be able to be thrown, controlled from a distance, and called back to my hand. Again, not to sound ungrateful…oh who am I kidding, this was sweet (Cap would be jealous)! I summoned my shield, to take a look at it and get accustomed to it's weight. Just like I thought, it weighed almost nothing; Vibranium and Adamantium are surprisingly light. More than that, the front had the S.H.I.E.L.D. emblem plastered on it, like Captain America sold out and became an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. I found it ironic that a shield would have the S.H.I.E.L.D. emblem on it, but then again, everything in this place, even my clothes couldn't escape it's brand. Lastly (and this really is the last part of the upgrades), Mrs. Kennedy gave us all a new fashion accessory. I didn't notice it at first, but when I turned to look at Grant, a domino mask, in a rough shape of a bat, was covering his eyes, and most of his cheekbones. I checked to see if Allyson had one, and sure enough, she did.

"Thanks for the new upgrades," I told Mrs. Kennedy though my communicator. "But what's with the masks? Are we really gonna need them? I thought we were more of a hit a run type of crew."

"First of all," she responded. "You're welcome; I also installed an emergency evacuation transport function to your communicators. Please try not to break my stuff. Second, yes, you do need them. You got lucky with Venom, and managed to bring him in for detainment. But what if any of your enemies see your faces? Believe me when I tell you that they can and will find out who you are, and use that against you. These masks do the obvious, and conceal your faces, but I installed a neat little trick in them for extra security. Each of them emit a small frequency that will make your faces blurred to anyone not wearing them. Right now they're off, but once outside the Helicarrier, the masks will automatically jump online. The sensation will fill a bit ticklish to your faces, but you'll get used to the feeling."

I wasn't to thrilled about the masks. I mean they did make us look cooler, and more legit and all, but I dunno. Heck, the only real reason I didn't complain, was because of the whole 'real identity thing'; i'd never forgive myself if something happened to my mom because of this whole hero thing. In the last 10 minutes that it took to get everybody suited up, and the weapons ready for battle, Grant did the thing I dreaded him doing, and went total fanboy.

"Uhh, Dr. Strange?" he asked him as he cautiously approached. "Not to bother you or anything, but-"

"You want my autograph," the doctor cut him off.

I thought he was gonna politely tell him to %^(# off, or blast him with magic, but surprisingly enough, he did the opposite. Dr. Strange reached into the air in front of him, and after his hand had pretty much disappeared into some type of small dimension, he pulled his hand back. In it, was this huge, dictionary type book, with elaborate designs, a golden spine that was bedazzled with gems that were probably real, and had the word 'Autographs' plastered on it's cover in big shiny letters. Dr. Strange opened the book, which had nothing but blank pages in them, and summoned a pen out of thin air. Before the pen even touched the book, the first page flashed, and instead of a blank page, it was now an extremely well drawn (or taken), and actually moving photograph (like Harry Potter pictures), of Dr. Strange doing some mystical stuff with his glowing white eyes. Dr. Strange signed the picture, the ink looking like liquid diamond, and gave the book and pen to Grant.

"The book will do the same for any and all autographs you wish to acquire," Dr. Strange said plainly. "And do not fear losing it or the pen, they are magic, and will return to your possession when you have need of them; take care Mr. Jackson."

Grant looked at the book like it was worth a million dollars. He looked up at me, and then looked around at the room full of heroes; the guy was a kid in a candy store.

"Go ahead," I thought to him. "Just try not make them hate you."

Grant dashed towards the nearest hero he could spot (Wolverine), and began his quest for ultimate fanboy ship. With Grant out on nerd patrol, I decided to do a bit of hero searching myself, before it was time for battle. I looked around the room, searching for Ms. Marvel and Quicksilver. It only took a minute to find Ms. Marvel, who was chilling beside Storm, and getting used to her battle suit.

"Hey Ms. Marvel?" I said. "Can I talk to you for a minute?"

"Sure Thunder Man," she shrugged (how'd she know my code name?)" "What's up?"

"It's about the other day in the training room. I'm sorry I blasted you so hard, I didn't mean it, it was more or less of a reflex. But I am really sorry I hurt you so bad."

I expected her to give me a curt and polite thanks, or at least go off on me for being so reckless. Instead, she simply smiled, and started laughing at me (which was way worse).

"What's so funny?" I asked her, trying not to sound confrontational.

"N-Nothing," she said, trying to get a hold of herself. "It's just, I was never in any danger to begin with. One of my powers is energy absorption, what you did the other day was overload my powers, and temporarily shut them down, but I was never in any serious trouble kid; however your apology, though unnecessary, is duly noted and appreciated."

To many questions arose from that response, like, if she was never in danger, why did she go all supernova and almost send me crashing through the walls? I decided it was better not to ask questions, and moved on to locating Quicksilver; besides, I could see Grant coming in from the left, and it wouldn't take a genius to figure out what he was coming here for. It only took a few seconds to find Quicksilver (the hair was a dead give away).

"Hey Quicksilver," I said as I approached him. "About the other day, I just wanted to-"

He held up a hand, sat up straight in his chair, and stared me down.

"Don't ever apologize for strength," he said bluntly. "It makes you unworthy of it. What happened in that fight was the result of basic evolution; the strongest will always prevail, so don't ever be ashamed of the power that courses through your very veins."

"Uhh, thanks," I said, not sure about whether or not I was off the hook. "Also, thanks for the energy bar, it really hit the spot."

"No problem, I got a million of em'. By the way, when i'm off duty, you can call me Pietro, you've earned the right. Hit me up whenever when you wanna train, you may have beaten me, but you still got a lot to learn about the true potential of being a speedster, your friends too. Now go get ready for the battle kid, may be when the circumstances are less dire, we can run a few laps around the world together; don't worry, it's easier than it sounds."

I decided it was better for my sanity to not wonder what that meant, and just shook his hand. Finally, with five minutes left before it was time for the show, I sent a shout out to my team.

"Yo, Grant, Allyson," I thought to them. "You guys ready?"

"You know it Thunder Man!" Grant shouted in my head. "Just give me a sec, i'm getting Daredevil's autograph."

"I'm warming up with a few practice dummies," Allyson responded. "I'll meet up with you guys at the loading bay."

I was going to take her word for it and let her be, but I found myself seeking her out. It didn't take anytime at all to find her, especially since I used my electric energy detector (i'll call it Thunder Sense), to single her out. She was in a small corner of the room, about ten meters away from some poorly constructed target dummies. She was practicing using her throwing knives, and I gotta tell you, she was killing it. Every throw either landed dead center in the chest, head, eyes, shoulder sockets, etc. Her face was so fierce and determined, that I knew all of those hits were entirely skill; no luck was involved whatsoever. I watched her for a minute before clapping my hands slow, like an evil genius, and making my presence mysteriously known.

"Thought I told you to leave me be," Allyson said, not at all surprised to see me.

"Thought you were raised in Alabama," I responded. "Not District 2."

"Funny, so what do you want?"

"Just waiting around. With Grant all out playing fanboy, you're the only other person I can talk to."

Her face flashed from annoyance, to light sympathy.

"You're nervous too, aren't you?" she asked me.

"Not so much about the battle," I responded. "But ever since I woke up this morning, I haven't been able to shake the feeling that something bad was gonna happen; this zombie stuff is only the tip of the iceberg, I just know it."

"Hey, don't get so clouded in the head Jason. Whatever it is, we've proven that we can overcome anything. Besides, as long you, Grant, and I are a team, what's the worst that could happen?"

That statement was so ludicrous, and so stupidly optimistic, I couldn't even begin to tell you what was wrong with it. Still, I thanked Allyson for the moral support, and she sat down next to me, to take a breather until the army was ready for deployment.

When that time came, it was not a peaceful, or for that matter, subtle. Fury's voice simply said: 'Strike Team, prepare for departure' over the intercom, and everyone who fit that description was whisked away in a flash of light before having the time to soak all of that in. When I could see straight again, I found myself side-by-side with Grant and Allyson, in some kind of empty airplane hangar-like room. Next to them, on either side, were the rest of the heroes that we had managed to scrounge up for this last minute operation. If you didn't know any better, you'd swear we were a seasoned team of veterans (technically, THEY were, but not the point). Still, that wasn't the best part. Using my Thunder Sense, I could feel every living agent armed in their battlesuit, as well as the massive tanks, and various other war machines ready for decimating. At our disposal, we had: 10 pod shooters, 20 tanks, 50 aerial drones, and 1,000 S.H.I.E.L.D. agents; not to mention the minor hero support we had going on. All in all, I liked our odds, even if they were slightly on the wrong end. Dr. Strange waved his hand outward, and a circular glyph that looked like a mystical fine china bowl, flashed outward, through the Helicarrier, and then came back like a boomerang a few seconds later. After my eyes readjusted from the flash, I quickly took in my bearings.

12:41 P.M. December 15, 2014, Vulgamore Family Farms, Scott City, Kansas

The entire strike team was in the middle, or should I say, near the edge of the huge wheat field that the zombie army (who were still trapped behind the blood fortress), was. Ok, three things right off the bat. First, this was the biggest wheat field I had ever seen. Sure, that doesn't mean much coming from a city kid, who's never seen a farm in his life, but still, this was definitely a main contender, I mean the place was just rolling hills upon hills of golden, soon to be dead wheat. Second, it was really freaking dark and sinister out here. The holograms didn't show it that well, but there were really thick storm clouds in the air, the sky looked like night when it was noon, not to mention the howling winds that made it difficult to hear anything without a communicator or a psychic link. Third, the strike team was not in the best condition for an attack; in fact, we were a lot worse off than we thought. Apparently, the spell that Dr. Strange had placed on the stone was starting to slowly unravel, and the stone was making up for lost time; basically hurling up more dead flunkies by the hundreds. Now, like I said, I can use 100% of my brain, so everything i'm about to tell you is about 97.3% accurate. This wheat field was a 30,000 acre square. Convert that to miles, and that's about 46.8 miles. So far, the zombie army was covering about 3/4ths of that distance. So when you do the math of how many people can fill a mile side by side, you get (let's see, carry the five...):about:177,408 undead psycho killers coming our way. Somehow, I get the feeling that this wouldn't feel half as bad if it weren't for the stage that was set for us. Seriously, there was the ominous weather, not to mention the fact that the death aura (which i'm uncertain about whether or not I could only see), was looming over the land like a huge cloud of depression, that was literally making the crops wither as it came our way. Add that with the sight of a barley intelligent, 7-foot tall undead army coming your way, and you get an indigestion surprise in your stomach. Still, I managed to bite down my fear and focus. Right now, Quicksilver and I were running back and forth, placing the pod shooters in line, about one and a half miles from each other (the cops were already retreating back into the city, with instructions to start an evacuation); we only had ten shots from each of them, we had to make them count, and stretch them out as far as we could. After we got done with that, we had to wait a minute for the pod shooters to charge up (I still don't get why they had to charge, or why we didn't just do that on the Helicarrier).

"Grant, Jason?" Allyson sheepishly thought to us. "Do you guys go to church?"

Okaaay; that was...unexpected. It wasn't random, or at least not as random as you might think. I mean think about it. Here we were, about to face down the 'Walking Dead' X1000. The thought of dying right now was not lost on any of us, so I can definitely see why Allyson sprung up this question; if God was listening (and yes I am Christian, I do believe in God and all that stuff), we sure as hell needed his help.

"Yeah," I hesitantly responded to her question. "I do."

"Same here," Grant thought. "Why, what's up?"

"Do you believe in God?" she continued. "Do you truly believe in Jesus, and what his death and resurrection means for those who follow him?"

"Yeah," Grant and I responded again, kinda getting what she was implying.

"Then pray with me. Please."

Grant and I looked at each other for half a sec, and nodded. Together, we all shifted into our respective speed modes, joined hands, and bowed our heads as Allyson did the honors.

"Heavenly Father," she started. "It's Allyson again, or Sunbird if you will. Father, thanks so much for bringing me and the guys through these last few days, you know they've been tough on all of us. Father, we're about to go up against some really tough odds right now, and we're all really scared. Please, give us the courage to stand against the enemy, and the strength to overcome them in the battle. Keep us all safe, that includes everyone fighting on our side, and watch over us. In Jesus' name...Amen."

"Amen," Grant and I followed.

What happened next was so strange, and so mind bendingly out of left field, that I knew it had to be God doing something. As soon as we all said 'Amen', our battlesuits surged with that same Holy Water energy that Dr. Strange had flashed on the weapons cache, and when the surge died down, I felt...better? stronger? faster? calmer? all of the above? It was like all of the fear and doubt had just left my body; like someone had stuck a fish hook in me, and just pulled it out. I looked around and Grant and Allyson, and it didn't even take telepathy to figure out that we were all on the same page; we were so (^ #!&% ready! We came down out of Speed Mode, just as the blood fortress dropped, and I heard the voice of Captain Sanders in my new earpiece.

"Thunder Man!" he shouted. "The shooters are primed and ready. Permission to fire?"

"Negative Captain!" I responded. "We commence with Plan A. Should that be unsuccessful, fire on my signal!"

"Understood sir! Shooters on standby!"

I looked over at Allyson, and gave her a quick nod. She nodded back, and went to work. She raised her hands outward, and closed her eyes in concentration. Immediately, I knew this was gonna fail, Allyson never had to concentrate this much to create a mini-sun; still she tried on. It took a total of ten seconds, but the air in front of us started to heat up, and a blazing mini-sun, struggled to surface in the center of the zombie army. The nearby ones combusted within the second, but others were not that unlucky. Looking at the mini-sun, I could see why. Allyson's mini-suns usually glowed with the golden light of..well, the sun. Plus, the heat radiating of of them were usually enough to slap your body full on into a near heat stroke. Now, her sun resembled a sunset kind of glow, and I could barely feel the heat, even from about a mile away. Allyson managed to keep up the effort for a good ten seconds, maybe taking out 1,000 or so zombies, but afterwards, she dropped her hands, and let the sun dissipate; she was clearly winded.

"What's up Sunbird?" Grant asked her. "Not enough juice in the tank?"

"As if," she responded. "It's this aura. The stone's fighting my powers, it was all I could do to get that sun up and running. I'm sorry guys, but I don't think i'll be of much use in this fight, not right now.."

That was truly a shame. I mean don't get me wrong, I give her points for effort, but if we had to bench Sunbird, this was gonna be a more difficult fight than I was aiming for.

"That's ok Sunbird," I said anyway. "We planned for this. Right now, you just hang back, see what you can do from a distance, and help out in any way you can; Super-G, Quicksilver, and I will be ok."

She didn't look too pleased about taking a back seat, but she quickly conceded to the fact that she was of more use from a distance. She nodded her head and resumed her position.

"Captain Sanders!" I said through my earpiece. "Plan A has failed, commence with Plan B on my signal!"

"Understood sir!" he responded. "Awaiting your orders!"

I summoned my sword to look more bad ass, and Grant followed suit with his axe.

"You know what you guys?" he thought to me and Allyson. "This is totally a classic movie moment!"

"What?!" Allyson and I thought back to him.

"Oh come on! Chronicles of Narnia? You can't tell me this isn't just like the movie!"

I honestly didn't have the brain cells to spare to deal with that comment, so I just made a mental note to hit him later, and moved on with the plan. As of now, the zombie army was about a mile and a half from us, we needed them to get within 800 more meters for them to be in range of our pod shooters and tanks. By the way, I think it is worth mentioning that we were about 3 miles away from the city entrance. My estimate was that there were at least a thousand people who were gonna be devoured if we did not hold the line right here; in other words, no pressure. Anyway, once the zombies were in range, I gave the signal to Captain Sanders, to launch all of the volleys in rapid fire. The ten shooters whirred to life, and started shooting huge black saucer-like objects high into the air. It took about three seconds in between shoots for the shooters to fire the next volley, and five seconds after being fired to actually do some damage, but once the carnage started, it started with a bang. Once high enough, the pods spun around in mid-air really fast, releasing hundreds of mystically charged bullets raining down on the zombie army. As soon as the bullets made contact, the zombies combusted into bright blue flames, and after wailing horribly, disintegrated faster than you could count to three. In the first volley, the bullet shower took out around 1,000 zombies or so; over the course of the next nine volleys, the bullet showers had killed over 9,000 (estimating here). After the ten consecutive volleys, the zombies did something completely unexpected; they stopped dead in their tracks (pun intended). It was brief, only for like five seconds or so, but the fear was definitely there. If they were capable of speech, they probably would've said 'Oh $#!+' in unison. As was such, they just stood and stared in our direction, as if frozen in fear. Then,in a this-is-the-scariest-$#!+-you-will-ever-see-in-your-life second, the zombie army all roared together, which sounded like a war horn magnified by ten, and started charging at our downright puny looking defense setup, at around 20 mph.

"TANKS, OPEN FIRE NOW!" I screamed into the com-links. "AIR SUPPORT, SCATTER THE DRONES, I WANT INBOUND BACKUP IN FIVE! STORM, LIGHTNING TIME, LET'S GO!

"I HEAR YOU THUNDER MAN!" she shouted back. "LET US CALL FORTH THE RAGE OF THE SKIES TOGETHER!"

As Storm and I were getting ready to summon the mother of all lightning strikes, the tanks opened fire. To say that they sounded like an army of football fans, was an understatement. It was more like the collective screams of a million football games were packaged into each shot, and fired rapidly. For a normal person, the sound would be extremely deafening; for me, it was a thousand times worse. The only good news was that the cannon fire was doing it's job. We set the tanks up to where two were side by side, and all twenty were spread over the perimeter. With each shot, the impact took out nearly 50 zombies, and that was only the average of one group. Over the total of the tanks we had at our disposal, we were taking about 500 zombies down every five seconds. If they were faster, we probably wouldn't have needed to get close, but the zombies were still running relentlessly, if not stupidly to their destruction; we had maybe three minutes before their army clashed with our, again, downright puny defense line. Anyway, back to the lightning. So like I said, the place was shrouded under a huge thundercloud. At first, I thought it might be from the stone, maybe some sort of side weather manipulation thing. But as it turned out, we were just in the right place at the right time to be in the middle of a brewing my own, I probably could've got things up and running after a few minutes, but since this was my first time actually creating a massive scale thunderstorm, as opposed to a regular lightning strike, I was glad Storm was helping me on this one. Together as one, we focused on the potent, but deeply buried energy built up in the thunder cloud. Storm was probably used to this feeling, but let me tell you that it was nothing like I had ever felt before. I could feel all of the electrons in the air as if they were the blood in my veins, I could feel the energy of the storm to be, as if I was waking up a sleeping bear. My heart started racing (and that's saying something for a guy whose heart beats 100 times per minute), I felt the energy build up inside and over me at the same time. Finally, after ten seconds of buildup, multiple streaks of lightning raced across the sky in distances that covered way more than just a two mile radius. Thunder boomed louder than the tanks, and after the warning call, Storm and I unleashed the fury of the skies!

The payout was nothing short of phenomenal; at least fifty bolts of red hot lightning struck at the zombie army from multiple directions. I was aiming for the bulk of the army in the way back, but making thunderstorms, and controlling them were two way different things. Together, Storm and I kept up the thunderstorm for about 30 seconds, taking out a good 3,000; that was when I started to get cocky. I had already gotten used to the rush of power that came with summoning a full scale thunderstorm, and now I was gonna push that boundary. Now that the sky was alive with residual lightning, I didn't have to rely so much on my own energy reserves; still what I was about to do was irresponsible, reckless, and outright stupidly risky on all accounts. I willed all of the electricity in the air to collect and condense in three separate points of focus, adding a good chunk of my power in for good measure. For those of you that can't control the weather (bless your hearts), this was in all aspects, trying to control the very skies itself. Or for you non power types out there, trying to walk thirty defiant German Shepherds. Still, I managed to pull it off. With all of these three points of unbelievable power, I focused on making them manifest themselves in the form of three HUGE bolts of lightning, big enough to punch a huge hole through the Helicarrier. The task was extremely brutal, but I managed to control the bolts of lightning and move them back and forth between the oncoming army, taking out at least 1,000 zombies every few seconds. This effort was only further improved by Allyson's help. Apparently, she had took to the skies, and was hurling mini-suns deep into the heart of the zombie army. At first, these blasts were probably strong enough to destroy most of the zombies, but after they flew past the death aura, they dimmed in both power and light. Still, the explosions were doing more or less what the tanks were, so points for trying.

So let's do a quick tally. Averaging all of the kills we got from the pod shooters, tanks, lightning strikes, death beams, plus the aerial drones that were just arriving on the scene, the strike team had taken out around 20,000 zombies (give or take). We were still, about 150,000 short, and our breathing room was running dry. The zombies were less than 800 meters from our position, in fact, it was time for the speedsters to get their hands dirty. I gave the signal for the troops to whip out their guns and fire at will, help keep the pressure back. Meanwhile, I got ready to do something reckless again. You see, Grant, Quicksilver, and I had to get into the thick of the zombie army if we wanted to soften them up from the inside out. However, from what I could see, the bulk of that army was really thick, leaving no room for running or maneuvering; I had to change that.

"SUPER-G, QUICKSILVER!" I shouted to them in my com. "WE GOTTA GET IN THE INSIDE, TAKE EM' DOWN FROM THE INSIDE OUT, I'M GONNA TRY SOMETHING! BE READY TO MOVE ON MY SIGNAL!"

"UNDERSTOOD BROTHER!" Quicksilver responded. "READY TO RUN WHENEVER I HEAR THE CALL!"

"SAME HERE THUNDER MAN!" Grant said right beside me (I may have forgotten his existence for a moment). "AND CAN YOU NOT SCREAM IN MY EAR LIKE THAT?!"

I quickly apologized, and then dashed to the left, until I was clear of the tanks. Once in the clear, I did my thing. I focused on harnessing all of the electricity in the sky, which was well over 300 million volts, and once it was in one place, I willed it to crash into me in a huge, way bigger than life blast of lightning. The power was way too much to describe. All I can tell you is that the adrenaline was enough to make meth and cocaine seem like pixy stix powder in comparison. More than that, it was like lightning had literally become the blood in my veins, I could feel it pulsating through every inch of my being, charging me up, and breaking any and all barriers that I thought I had. Finally, when all of the energy was in my body, and I felt like little more than a human bomb, I focused on the zombie army, and let all of the energy go with a massive war cry. This time, instead of just random bursts of lightning. I went back to my target practice from last night, and focused on redirecting my huge and overpowered bolts of lightning where it would hurt the zombie army the most. When the lightning bolts did make impact, the results were nothing short of legendary. The bolts of lightning were directed be in such a way that they blasted a rough W into the heart of the zombie onslaught. The kill score had to be at least over 3,000, but more importantly, it left huge gaps for me, Grant, and Quicksilver to maneuver through.

"Now guys!" I shouted to them. "Let's go!"

Together, we speed into the zombie army, and started to work.

So, what's it like to run headfirst into a zombie apocalypse? In short, not so bad. Quicksilver, Grant, Allyson, and I had a plan figured out about how to deal with this, and even through Allyson was currently benched, the three of us were sufficient enough. Quicksilver and I were on cleanup duty. Basically, we were running left and right on the inside, slashing away at anything that wasn't humanish, and keeping the bulk of the army at bay. Grant was kinda doing the same thing, but with a more barbarian-like approach. He put his axe flail mode to use, and went flying around in every direction, swinging the thing with no real aim or precision whatsoever. It would be annoying and irritating if it wasn't for the fact that every time that flail went around, 20 zombies got wasted. Speaking of which, slashing the zombies down wasn't as easy for me as you might think. Sure with the Adamantium/Vibranium blade, cutting through them wasn't an issue, but their gravel-like skin still put up a bit of a fight. Ultimately, it was the holy water that did the trick. As soon as the blade touched them, the zombie's cells started to break apart faster than wet paper; once I slashed them all the way though, there was barely anything left of them to burn in the blue fire. Anyway, the three of us stayed on cleanup duty for around five or ten seconds. Quicksilver and I went left and right through the perimeter, relentlessly slashing down zombie after zombie after zombie, until after it seemed like an hour, we had slashed down every stray zombie, and had left a half a mile gap between the bulk of the army, and the remaining ones that were still being taken care of by the long range crew. Quicksilver and I took a nanosecond break and watched Grant, who was now sporting his spear mode, in mid battle roar, taking down a good handful of the zombies (he was moving soooo slow).

"Quite the warrior, isn't he?" Quicksilver jested.

"Yeah," I responded. "He does ok, but we should probably help him out anyway; last time he tried to off it alone...well, it didn't go too well.

"Any ideas, not much room for anymore running."

He had a point. In the time it took for us to take out the stray zombies, the remaining ones were filling the empty spaces. Even now, we barely had any room to run anywhere but back, and we still needed to stall for a bit more time. Then I suddenly remembered my shield. If it worked the way Mrs. Kennedy said it did, and was blessed with the water stuff, then maybe I could work with it. I summoned it, motioned for Quicksilver to wait a half sec, and did my thing. Right now, I wasn't in SMS, but I was really close. I tapped into it, and started to power up. My body surged with electricity, and I willed all of it to transfer into the shield, which then became a circle of lightning death. Then, I got a running start, came back around, and threw my shield Captain America style. The shield sliced through 20 zombies faster than you could blink, and didn't stop until it had sliced a line diagonally through the upper left flank of the army. It was going really really fast, so before it spiraled out of range, I held my hand out, and willed it to make a hard right back into the fray. The shield obeyed my command with unbelievable speed, Mrs. Kennedy must've set it to be able to cope with speedster thinking. Anyway, I kept controlling the shield, making it dash back, forth, side to side, until in no time at all (literally), 1,000 more zombies were wasted, and Quicksilver and I had some more room to work with. As an insult to injury, I willed the shield to fly further into the center of the bulk of the army, and willed all of the built up energy to detonate in a massive electric wave. The impact took out around 2,000 zombies, and left a huge hole in the zombie's offensive force. I summoned the shield back to my wrist, and willed to, go wherever it goes when i'm not using it.

"Well that was dramatic," said Quicksilver

"What can I say?" I responded. "I'm a one man show. Now come on, we got work to do."

Quicksilver and I went back to work, this time, actually running in and out of the zombie army, slashing them down, and thinning out their charging strength. Unfortunately, this was the last wave we could afford to repel. You see, our job was to divide the zombie army in half. We were currently reducing the threat of the main bulk, while the rest of our guys were taking out the remaining 10,000 that we had cut off from their backup. Even now, with the occasional glimpses I was able to get, I could see that the cut off zombies were dropping like flies. Storm kept zapping them with lightning from above, the tanks and gunfire were also doing their thing, even Dr, Strange and his crew were doing good. That nature guy was actually summoning fists of tree bark to smash the zombies into paste, and the blood sisters were somehow using blood to melt the zombies down into a reddish grey soup; disgusting. Anyway, what was 10,000 was swiftly becoming less than 3,000; Grant, Quicksilver and I had to make this last Hail Mary effort count. Besides, if nothing else, we had to get Quicksilver out of this death aura, it was probably wreaking havoc on his battlesuit's defenses.

"Super-G!" I thought to him, as I summoned my spear, and started whacking away. "We gotta make this one count! Take out as many as you can, go big! After this, we gotta fall back and rally the troops!"

"What about the air strike?" Super-G asked me.

"We gotta stall a few more minutes for that, Fury just deployed the jets."

"Gotcha! Alright then, let's do it!"

Together, Quicksilver, Grant and I went ham on the zombies. I ran in SMS, Grant went into Blitz Extreme, and Quicksilver tried to keep up. We stayed in the thick of things for around 30 seconds real time. Grant and I ran in every direction possible, slashing down as many zombies as we could with our spears. I occasionally blasted a line through the army, and created a barrier to hide behind until I built my speed up again, but for the most part, Grant, Quicksilver, and I were chipping the undead down the old fashioned/magically enhanced way. Finally, when I looked back, and could actually see that our people had pretty much eradicated their portion of the zombie army, I signaled Grant and Quicksilver to fall back and regroup at the base.

"Fury!" I said through my com. "The airstrike, how long?"

"T minus five minutes Thunder Man," he said. "Hold them off just a little while longer."

Super. Just super.

"Ok you guys!" I said in a mass message over my com. "We gotta hold em' off until the cavalry gets here, so here's what were gonna do. Storm, Dr. Strange, I need you in the air. Use lightning, fire, brimstone, whatever, just focus your attacks on the bulk of the remaining forces, thin them out for us. Azaria and Abimbola, use your blood magic to bottleneck the far right and left sides of the charge. Do whatever it takes, just try and keep them at a manageable perimeter, we may not be outgunned, but numbers and space are factors. Whoever controls the tanks drones, keep them shooting, but target the further zombies, the rest of us can't fight while worrying about stray shells blowing us to oblivion; the same goes for the guys who control the aerial drones. Finally, everyone else, just fight. Agents, use whatever you got in those suits to kill as many of these SOB's as you can. Heroes, do whatever it is you can, but don't go all cowboy gung ho,i'm lookin' at you Super-G, try to stay within range of somebody, help em' out if they need it."

Again, you'd be surprised how willingly an army of highly trained operatives, and well experienced heroes took orders from a guy who was still learning the ropes.

"Way to rally the troops, Sergeant Thunder-Man," Sunbird thought to me. "You thinkin' about join the military any time soon?"

"Nah," I thought back to her. "I'd probably get booted out for zapping my commanding officer anyway; you sure you wanna be down here? You can stay in the sky with Storm and Dr. Strange if you want."

"I'll assume that was chivalry speaking instead of pigheadedness. And for the record, the stone's influence is starting to fade. I won't be able to summon a solar bomb or anything like that, but I can still move and whip my blades fast enough to not die."

She summoned her swords for emphasis, and started daggers at the zombie army, as if mentally scolding them for making me overprotective of her. Speaking of which, they were approaching fast. Currently, the zombie army was packing at a little over 143,000 strong, but still dwindling as the tanks, and aerial drones kept up the good work. Storm and Dr. Strange were already in the air, taking zombies down by the dozens with an odd mixture of lightning, truck-sized hail, and what must have been holy water blasts. Whatever it was, it was doing the trick, and my ears were filled with the sweet music of zombie death wails (yeah, i'm a bit disturbed). As the zombie army got within 400 meters of the army, I summoned my shield, and loosened myself up. The blood twins started to do their thing as well. On either side of the zombie army, walls of red hot blood materialized, and started burning right through their farther flanks. The initial impact took out around 7,000 zombies, but apparently, the bigger the blood, the more effort it took to maintain it. The twins switched from flooding tactics, to construct tactics. From giant swords, to huge demon claws, it wasn't pretty, but it was getting the job done; more importantly, the zombie army was less spread out, giving us the same edge the Spartans had in 300 (and yes, of course in the actual historical battle, i'm not a moron). Once, the zombie army got within 200 meters, I made my counter move.

"ALRIGHT EVERYONE!" I shouted through the coms. "WE GOT THIS! CHARGE!"

1,000+ brave agents and heroes counter charged an army that was still about 140X their size. Unfortunately for them, the zombies didn't have the resolve that we did; one way or another, we were gonna hold them off until the airstrike delivered. Heck, if the air strike didn't hurry, there might not be anything left for it to destroy.

"We got this?" Grant laughed at me, as he flew with the charge. "That's the best battle cry you could come up with?"

"It wasn't that bad!" I snapped back at him.

"Oh yes it was!" Allyson thought to me (I still can't get used to her running as fast as me). "Fighting may be your thing, but you really need to work on your presentation."

"Whatever," I thought to them both. "Let's just rekill some undead losers."

"See?" thought Grant. "That was better, say stuff like that!"

I ignored them and focused on the charge. Our squad was about 100 meters away from the oncoming undead force, so I decided to try and even up the odds a little more for our guys. While running (which was only at like 20 mph, I was barely using any Speed Momentum), I charged my shield up with as much voltage as I could, tapped into SMS, making everyone look frozen, and then threw my shield out towards the zombies. I moved my hand back and forth rapidly, taking out entire handfuls of zombies with every wave of my arm. Finally, to top it all off, I did that thing again, where I willed all of the voltage in my shield to explode in a massive destructive wave; the total kill was around 1,000. Not big enough to make a real difference, but hey, 1,000 less zombies to worry about. Anyway, I called my shield back to my hand, came down from SMS, and faced the charge with the rest of my team. In less than five seconds, after a tense all-or-nothing charge, we finally clashed.

The fight was…well there's no other way to put it; AWESOME! I honestly didn't know why though. Here I was, fighting the stone of death itself, to protect thousands of people, and my own existence. I should've been terrified, frozen in fear, $#!+ing my pants; but I was honestly having a ball. There was something about this, the fighting, the adrenaline, that gave me a release from a pressure that I didn't even know was over me. I could honestly say, that after God knows how many years, I felt like myself again, and I couldn't even remember what that feels like in the first place. So yeah, the battle was kinda epic. As soon as we got in range, I slashed my sword right through a zombie, and didn't stop there. Now, I wasn't able to run or anything like that, so I had to use my speed in another way. Instead of focusing my speed on a linear point (A-B), I focused on making my reflexes, and attack speed faster, while still maintaining a 10mph linear speed. Time was both slow and fast for me. I was quick enough to slash down 20 zombies that were in my direct line of sight, however, my speed sense did more than occasionally go off, meaning that a good handful of zombies were still getting at my blind spots. Still, as quick, tenacious, and as skilled as I was, I really wasn't the driving force for our side. For one, Wolverine and Black Panther were absolute monsters in battle. Wolverine was hacking down zombies left and right in every way possible. It was rare that a zombie got a hold of him, but if one did, they would find themselves missing a hand, or arm, or head. Black Panther was no less impressive. He was using his claws, doing some type of African Kung-Fu stuff, and was basically putting in some mad work. He wasn't exactly fighting forwards, so much as letting the fight come to him; simple and effective, my kind of fighter. Added on to their savagery, Nightcrawler was popping up in random spots, thrashing a handful of zombies and then vanishing somewhere else (he popped up next to me a couple of times), and the other ground fighters were holding their own (I assume). Besides, the skill and finesse that Wolverine, Black Panther, and I brought to the table, sheer power was also a key factor in what made our assault such a success. In the distance, about 50 meters to my right, I saw 50 zombies get busted all at once. When the dust cleared, I saw Grant, Ms. Marvel, and Rogue, all together as a unit, basically being human monster trucks. Grant was swinging his axe and sword back and forth with a well balanced mixture of skill and power. Every time those things went swinging, at least ten zombies met their doom. However, it was really Ms. Marvel and Rogue who were stealing the show. Ms. Marvel was in her zone, either punching down zombies with her fists, or blasting them to hell with her photon blasts. Her face was so calm, focused, and collected, that I had no doubt that she could've done this all day. Rogue, who wasn't as bad ass as Ms. Marvel, made up for it with her suit; which I have got to talk about! I had no doubt that these were just cheap knockoffs of the real thing, but if they were, they were as close to Iron Man as we suits had energy repulsors, and energy weapons that Rogue, Spider-Man, and every other non-major powered hero was using to their full advantage. In every direction possible, you could see some random guy (or girl) blasting energy from their palms, and hear the horrified death shrieks of the targeted zombies. If not that, then they were either using the machine gun function, or the energy saber function to get the job done. With how well the heroes and agents were doing with their suits (which was really freaking good), it raised the question of why didn't Fury just employ his own personal army for this Stones Of Olympus thing, but then again, only a fool doesn't heed the advice of supernatural fortune tellers.

In addition to the amazing ground force team we had, our aerial division was just as impressive. War Machine, Falcon, and Angel had taken to the air (not too high), and were basically dive bombing the further zombies that the ground forces weren't getting to, and the drones weren't hitting. Angel and Falcon were shedding their feathers, which were made of some type of metal, and pelting any zombies within reach. Angel occasionally landed for a few seconds, slashed his wings around, taking about twenty of the undead with him, and took to the skies again. War Machine was just using his trademark mini-gun, and repulsors to do an even more efficient, but kinda boring to look at, job. In less than three minutes, we had taken out at least 50,000 zombies or so. Hell, give us another twenty minutes, and we probably could've swept them all under the rug. Still, our defense was holding, and we had a little under two minutes until air support got here. As I was slicing a zombie in two with my sword, thinking that this couldn't get any better, a burst of golden flame flashed in front of me, taking out the five zombies that I had my eyes on; yeah things got slightly better.

Ten meters from where I was standing, Allyson was cooling down from that solar wave she had just unleashed. I couldn't tell how many zombies she had just decimated, but I could see that she was still surrounded pretty bad. I rushed in to help her, stabbing an oncoming zombie in the gut, blocking another one's attack with my shield, and then decapitating it. Finally, to even out the odds, I unleashed my own destructive wave, taking out 30 surrounding zombies, and giving Allyson and I enough room to work with.

"I had it under control," she quickly responded. "But thanks anyway."

"No problem," I responded, "Wanna team up real quick; all the other cool kids are."

"Just try and keep up dude."

Together, we killed the last minute and a half with some good old fashioned zombie destruction. I thought that I would have had to do most of the work, what with Allyson's power being all nerfed and such; boy was I wrong. She may not have been able to use the majority of her powers but her speed and skill with her swords were more than enough. She quickly stabbed or slashed down any zombie within her reach, ducking their swings, and getting inside their guard to give them the finishing blow. At one point, she summoned her spear, threw it through the chests of like 5 zombies, and started using her throwing knives. Again, every throw hit it's mark. The head, chest, neck, whatever, when Allyson threw a knife, a zombie died a horrible death. She did that for a good few seconds, summoned her spear back to her hand, and started slashing and stabbing away, actually finding the spare power to ignite it in golden flame. I wasn't doing so bad myself in the fighting department, but Allyson was the star of this show. Her face was lit up with such passion and determination, the kind that truly defines my definition of beauty, that I was finally able to admit to myself something I was trying to deny from day one; I had the hots for this chick. That made the fact that she pretty much hated me all the more painful. Anyway, with Allyson being a warrior supreme, and the clock ticking down to less than ten seconds, I decided to make my own mark on the battle. I slashed a zombie down, summoned my spear, and tapped into a good chunk of my electric reserves. Once my body was lost in the voltage, I slammed the but of my spear on the ground, and the lightning was channeled through it, and into the battle field. Basically, I was doing a really ramped up version of my heat seeking lightning. With this much voltage to work with, it was definitely dangerous to try, but nothing that would hurt me or anyone else. Every bolt of lightning hit a zombie and moved on to another one, avoiding any and all allies (I actually focused on the bit from The Son of Neptune, where Percy used the Legion eagle, to help me focus). The lightning traveled in every direction possible, not just forward, so it was a really good thing that I had a much larger usage of my brain capacity, otherwise I would've never been able to focus on every single bolt of lightning that I had unleashed. Five seconds (twenty from my perspective) and over ten million volts later, 30,000 zombies were decimated, and my troops were in a rough but spaced out group. You may ask why I didn't do this before hand, but i'll turn the question right back and ask why doesn't Thor just summon an F5 tornado when he fights with the Avengers. It's all about presentation (plus preparation), never use your trump card for your first move; besides, with the air support coming in, all of that was unnecessary, it was basically to show off.

Moving on. After summoning the Fulminata Blast (and yes that's my official name for it), I heard the screeching roar of incoming fighter jets (a little more than I wanted to). Less than three seconds later, the pilots dropped them over the battlefield, and I watched as the field was slowly (in my perspective) engulfed in holy blue flames. If you're wondering why I wasn't freaking out and trying desperately to get everyone off of the field (which I could have), it was because we weren't in any danger. According to the witch doctor, the flames could only harm people who weren't pure of heart (like undead sinners). Everyone else would only feel the sensation of taking a hot shower. I turned off my speed perception, and let myself experience the event in real time. As the flames engulfed me, I closed my eyes (and instinctively raised my arms over my face), but I honestly couldn't feel anything higher that 70 degrees. The flames lasted for about five seconds, and then gradually started to extinguish. When I could see ahead, most of the zombies were done. The only ones left were a last pitiful defense that the stone just managed to puke up, but the zombie toll was only 3,000; I could do this by myself!

"EVERYONE FORWARD!" I shouted into the coms. "HIT EM' FAST AND HARD, LET'S FINISH THIS!"

Everyone charged forward at full speed, which averaged at about 60mph (for the battlesuit users; the speedsters, flyers, and all the rest were way ahead of the pack). All of the heroes that could keep up with me (and my other teammates), actually got to have a last bit of fun. By the way, I think it is worth mentioning that with so many zombies destroyed, the stone's influence was about the same as the success of the president's second term; meaning Allyson was back to her sun goddess form, flying head on , like a missile ready to kill some fools. Before we made contact with the remaining zombies, I did something kinda cool. I focused on creating a mini storm cloud over their heads, and willed the mini storm to have twice as much voltage in it's lightning strikes than it usually would. It took a little more concentration than normal (which I can't even begin to describe; what does a little more concentration mean when you can use 100% of your brain capacity?), but when the finish product was released, a grey blanket swirled over the zombie mass, and in a quick flash, 1,000 of them were suddenly missing their heads. Allyson was blasting golden fireballs into the remaining undead, plus Grant had already threw his axe, and was controlling it from a distance, add that with the fact that the blood twins were using a wave of blood that they were surfing on (almost making me puke), to create raining spear constructs, and you get about 500 zombies total by the time we ACTUALLY got close enough to use melee. The rest of the battle was so easy, child's play doesn't even begin to describe it. With my speed, Grant's strength, Allyson's power, and all of the other heroes and agents who were fast enough to get to the fight before it was over, we decimated the zombies, and made a beeline to the stone. I raced ahead of the others. There was nobody to stop me. No zombies, no barriers, just me, and a floating purple rock shaped like a skull.

It was only one-tenth of a second, my hand was literally an inch away from the stone; that's where it all went wrong.

Reality distorted, and everything went black. I felt the air change, as if it had suddenly gotten heavier, then my vision came back. It didn't take any time at all to make sense of my surroundings, because this time, I was sure my brain was not lying to me. Right in front of me, literally an inch away, the Green Goblin was clenching his hand around the stone of Hades. My mind immediately started reeling. THIS DOES NOT JUST HAPPEN! My Speed Sense didn't pick anything up, he wasn't using his glider (I would've sensed the electricity); heck, his face looked like he was in mid sentence talking to someone else. No, reality simply broke, and the Goblin was now here, when he was probably God knows how many miles away. If you're asking why I wasn't kicking his ass, or slicing his hand off, it was because I couldn't. everything happened too fast, even for me. I didn't even have time to run, or defend myself, as Green Goblin roared like an army of lions, and released a deadly explosive wave of death energy, taking me down with it.

I remembered hearing screaming, really loud booms, and lots of roaring. I felt the area around me going to hell, I could feel the death aura somehow retracting in on itself, into a massive singularity; that didn't make me feel any better. However, I couldn't get up. For those of you that are unaware of what this feels like, let me give you a gist. Imagine you just had a good night's sleep. It's Saturday morning, you have nothing important to do, and you're looking forward to having fun, doing whatever it is that you do. The only problem is:your body is completely screwed up. You're mentally conscious and aware of the fact that you are awake, and that you should be getting up, but for whatever reason, your body is not responding, you're a prisoner inside of yourself. Well that's only half of what it felt like for me. I was awake inside myself, I could kinda feel my way around the area with my Thunder Sense, and I could just tell my friends, and teammates were getting the $#!+ beat out of them by whatever it is that Goblin was doing. I wanted, no I NEEDED to get up and help them out, but my body was conked out by the concussive wave; I wasn't going anywhere. I let myself be tortured by the sounds of the carnage, until I actually remembered i'm basically a walking conductor who can heal himself with voltage. Right now my body was absorbing the 2,000 volts constantly flowing through my suit, but that really was not enough to get me back on my feet. I focused as hard as I could on making my body surge with as much voltage as my unconscious body could muster. It took about 10 seconds, but after that, my body started to surge with over 100,000 volts; it was only a matter of time before I sat up straight like The Undertaker, gasping loudly.

The sight was actually worse than what I thought. Goblin was in a ball of purple energy, floating 100 feet in the air. All around him, purple lightning was shooting out in violent, unpredictable blasts (it's a wonder I wasn't struck). All around, giant zombies (15 feet tall) were ravaging what was left of our strike team. I say that because the only people who were left fighting on our side were: Dr. Strange, Allyson, Grant, and the blood twins. They were all holding their own, and this wouldn't have been that much of a problem, but everyone else was gone. Every agent, hero, and other magician was simply gone without a trace, leaving the rest of us to clean up the mess (that was technically my fault). I didn't understand what was going on, and I really didn't care, I just summoned my blade, and went to work. I went into SMS, and ran up the length of a zombie (which felt like a fleshy gravel road going up), plunged my sword into it's neck, and ran around in a circle; I reached the ground before it's head did. Afterwards, I did some other spectacular kills. I ran up a zombie, summoned a mega lightning strike, and completely obliterated it. I created giant arrow constructs, and put them through the heads of three of the undead bastards, and then I repeatedly ran up, and kept decapitating zombies.

"You trying to save some for the rest us Thunder Man?" Grant thought to me.

"Sorry bro," I thought back to him. "Gotta get while the gettin's good."

"Speaking of which," Allyson thought to me, in a voice that clearly said she blamed me for this. "What the actual hell happened? How did you fail at picking up a rock?"

"First of all," I thought to her. "I freaking had it like inches away from my hand! Once I got close, everything went dark, and when the lights came on again, Goblin had his hand on the stone; i'm surprised the blast wave didn't kill me!

"Ok, ok, whatever! But seeing as this mess is kinda your fault, what brilliant plan do you have to get us out of this?"

It's not that I didn't have a plan, it's just that the plan hadn't come to me yet. Heck, my initial thoughts were to focus on the zombie giants, and then send Grant up in the air to take a little off the top of Goblin's neck; looking back on it, that was actually a pretty good plan considering how everything else turned out. Goblin, who was still in the middle of a giant electro sphere, roared extremely loud one last time, and the energy that was bouncing off of him, immediately retracted into his body as he plummeted to the ground in a massive ball of purple energy. The force of the fall caused a minor earthquake, but even stranger, was the fact that the giant zombies suddenly went into a kind of trance state, almost like they were being given specific orders not to consume our flesh. Everything went quiet for a few tense seconds as the dust slowly started to clear. Suddenly, my Speed Sense kicked in like a tank. Through the thick layer of dust, five different skull constructs flew out in various directions. These skulls were about the size of a big screen TV, and while I may have been immune to magic, I was clearly not immune to concussive force; in other words, I created a giant shield construct, and held that mother up for dear life. Allyson did the same for herself, and Grant simply took to the air, and got the heck out of the way; the others (Dr. Strange and the blood twins), were not so lucky. Now to be fair, there was probably only 200 meters in between them and the blasts, plus the things were going at nearly 300mph; completely undodgeable without superhuman speed. As such, I was actually surprised to see the magicians actually conjure up a shield to defend themselves (and no I couldn't save them, I wasn't paying attention). Against anything else, their shields probably would've held up, but Goblin's blasts acted different. When they made contact with the shields, the skulls didn't just explode, they expanded into energy tendrils (like Venom's, but purple), and basically overpowered their entire bodies. The process maybe took about 1 second max, and boy was the result not pretty. The energy basically melted into their bodies, and caused them to collapse on the ground. When the team and I caught up to them, we discovered how bad of shape they were in. They had purple energy lightly spewing from their eyes and mouth, their heart beats were so feint, it was almost non-existent; even Allyson's healing songs couldn't wake them up. I was starting to freak out. My second mission as leader, and I was about to get Grant and Allyson killed, on top of probably being responsible for the death of 1,000 S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, plus a handful of the world's greatest heroes. Believe it or not, things actually got worse from there.

The dust from Goblin's impact suddenly vanished in a light wind that echoed from the center, and in the meteor crater, was…..technically Goblin. He was bigger. Much bigger (like 8ft tall). His arms looked strong enough to snap a telephone pole in half, and he had biceps bigger than basketballs. His face was nothing short of purely fu(k!%$ terrifying, with purple flames for eyes, giant Minotaur-like horns jutting from either side of his head, and fangs sharp enough to chew through steel. Of course he had power thighs that could withstand the weight of a trash compactor, and to top it all off, his armor was legit. It was made of some type of black metal that looked like a mix between obsidian, and titanium with a new paint job. The stuff completely covered his massive chest and pecs, and was also used to make his arm shields; also on a side note, he had finger long black talons (thought you ought to know that). Goblin started to glow with death energy, and started levitating. He was honestly the most frightening thing I have ever seen in my life; the zombie army couldn't hold a candle to the flame of his badassness. As he slowly started to hover towards us (we were kinda frozen in terror), a black medieval sword (like the one the Dark Knight uses in Infinity Blade), materialized in his hands like building blocks assembling themselves. He floated a few feet further to us (and yes, we still were scared stiff), and then suddenly stopped. He just stared into the distance for a few seconds, and then suddenly looked at me. Let me tell you something, his glare wasn't exactly as mind crashing as the Norn-Fates, but it was pretty damn close. His glare wasn't exactly as all knowing as theirs, but I got the feeling that he was looking down my entire life line, and that he knew without a doubt: when I would die, how I would die, and the funeral home that would lay me into the ground. He vaguely smirked at me, like my existence amused him in some way, but then quickly turned his gaze over to Grant. Now I can understand body language pretty well, and while Goblin wasn't showing much of anything other than the fact that he wanted to bust some heads, his face was basically saying:'You got a little something to you, but you're not worth my time." He stared at Grant for a little longer than he did at me, but the result was still the same; it was like Grant was closer to his mark, but still not high enough. Finally, he looked straight at Allyson, and he broke into a really toothy grin. He started walking towards us, swinging his sword casually, letting us savor our despair. He opened his mouth to say something, and I immediately knew something was off. For one, Goblin (like Norman Osborn), was not there anymore. I wasn't too keen on the idea of killing this guy, but I could already see that he was too far gone, the stone had burned so much of him away that there was nothing left to save. Besides that, I could see in his eyes that he was just a puppet listing to the commands of somebody else; I know this because even with purple fire eyes, he still had a really glazed look in his eyes, the kind that said he wasn't exactly 100% in control of his actions.

"Allyson Tabitha Grace," he said in a voice that sounded like a million ghouls speaking in unison. "The ones on high have deemed you too dangerous to live, prepare for your death."

He glowed with his purple Super Saiyan aura, and dashed at Allyson with bullet-like speed; that shook me out of my freeze. Call me corny, whipped, whatever (if you wanna get tazed by my finger), but nobody was gonna hurt Allyson, not while I was able to do something about it. I was about to counter charge Goblin, which would've ended in disaster, but before I could, Grant came in from the air with enough speed to put a Lamborghini at top speed to shame, and trucked into Goblin. The two fought in mid-air for a few seconds, Goblin swung his sword at Grant, but Grant quickly summoned his axe, blocked the strike, roundhouse kicked Goblin in the head, and hit him in the chest with his axe with more strength than I knew he had. Goblin should've died on the spot, even if the axe didn't cut through him, the impact should've shattered his bones, and left him a broken husk. Instead, Goblin just flew backwards, on a collision route to the city, and Grant took off after him. I imagine Grant expected us to follow his lead, and we actually were going to, but in the distance, Goblin shot a huge energy beam towards us that hit the ground, intensifying the gravity to where even I couldn't move, and closing me and Allyson in some kind of death barrier that was as large as a football stadium. At first, I thought he was just aiming to trap us inside the barrier while he had Grant all to himself; that was not the case. Zombie giants started springing up five at a time, like undead flowers. There were way too many of them to just cut down with my speed, besides, that would take way too much effort. Instead, I created a huge Spartan combat avatar, and started killing undead fools with my huge spear and shield.

"Ok," I thought to Allyson. "Just so we're clear, this is SO NOT MY FAULT!"

"I CAN SEE THAT!" she rammed into my head. "Just keep them off of me. This aura is strong, but it's power is limited, give me like ten minutes, and I can scrape up enough power to blow this stand!"

"Cool," I responded. "Let's go with that, and not to rush you, but we gotta help Super-G. He's strong, but Goblin looks like he's on a different level. If we don't-"

"I know," she quickly responded. "Believe me, I know."

We didn't say anything else to each other, everything else was pretty self explanatory. I focused on stabbing giant zombies in the everywhere; hacking them down, and keeping them the hell away from Allyson. I could feel her static field heating up, which meant she was also doing her thing. Ten minutes, that's how long she said it would take to get free; I hoped Grant would be able to hold his own until then.

(Grant's Perspective)

Ok people, let's get a playback going here. First, Delta Force and friends show up on the scene, whip some zombie ass, get within an inch of grabbing the skull candy, and then get thrusted into post-zombie hell, with a little OP Green Goblin for good measure. Don't worry folks, Super-G is on the case. So skipping ahead, Goblin's all super strong, he talks some mad $#!+ to Sunbird, tries to come at her, and I denied him access, and sent him shooting off into the distance after a minor tussle; things got really intense after that.

I soared after Goblin, swinging my axe at his face and chest, hoping to end this faster than the Venom fight. My swings probably would've been strong enough to take the fight out of him, but I underestimated his recovery time. On my first swing, a purple barrier popped up, and the force of the failed attack was enough to bounce me back a good few feet. Goblin took that single second to recover, summon his sword, and counter charge me. I immediately said a silent thanks to Sunbird for teaching me how to fight, and yes to be frank, this guy couldn't handle a blade for $#!+. I ducked his swing, which was not hard to do considering how fast I was, summoned my sword quickly, came up with a slash, completely severing Goblin's right arm, and with the leftover momentum, I spun into a reverse kick, and sent the creep careening further into the distance. I summoned my axe in my left hand, and soared after him. Goblin tried to put up a fight with his other hand, blasting me with a ray of death energy, death ray basically, but missed; I made him pay for that. I slashed at his neck with my sword, but he somehow managed to put a body shield over himself. Again, I refused to let this be a Venom rerun, so I decided to cut loose on him, and actually show how much force a swing has when the swinger can bench press 100,000 tons. I slashed and hacked at his body shield for a total of four earth shaking, glass shattering blows before his body shield completely failed, and he went rocketing into...oh crap! The city! I cussed myself out so much. I was so focused on pounding Goblin into oblivion, that I forgot that the objective was to keep zombie threats AWAY from the city. I went into Blitz Extreme, and soared after him, determined to clean my mess up. I got under him and tried for another killing blow. This time, I almost severed his head, but he managed to quickly create another sword in his spare hand, and parry my strike. That opened my eyes a little bit. You see, I was in Blitz Extreme, which meant I was moving way faster than he should've been able to react. If what he did just now was an indication of things to come, then I was in for one hell of a fight.

The good news was, the impact of my strike was enough to alter his momentum, and send him slightly flying into the air; slight, but enough. I kept the pressure on him, using my sword and axe to pound away at him furiously. With two weapons, you'd think that the fight would be so unfair, one-sided would be an understatement, but that wasn't the case. Maybe he underestimated me, and came to the realization that he'd have to step his game up, but as of now, even with one arm, Goblin was just as good with a blade as Jason or Nightcrawler. Don't get me wrong, I managed to get some good shots in to the torso area, and with a few mid-air backflip kicks, spin attacks, and some well timed slashes to the exposed part of his legs, severing them completely. I managed to give Goblin a good run for his money; even with him blasting purple fire, and shooting purple lightning from his eyes. With only one limb left, I decided to use my smarts, and actually use my speed to outstrip him, and get some good shots in from the back. For a while it seemed like that was working. Goblin strengthened his body shields quite a bit, but with me constantly moving round and round, he wasn't able to put that sword of his to good use. I kept the beat down going for about 10 seconds straight before something odd happened. All off a sudden, three purple tube like things flying towards Goblin and I, caught my attention. I didn't know what they were, but they were coming in hot. The distraction was for a second or two, but it was enough for Goblin to get a good swing at my head, which missed, and blast me away with a death ray, Again, whether it was from magical immunity, or physical toughness, the blast didn't hurt, the force of it was just enough to get me off of Goblin, and give him some breathing room; that was my biggest mistakes. The UFO's weren't just random tubes of energy, they were his severed appendages, the ones I had worked so hard to slice off of his body. The severed limbs flew back to Goblin, and after a quick second, in a really sickening reattachment, Goblin was whole again, cracking his knuckles, and actually doing mid-air squats.

"So," he taunted me. "Care to try that again?"

He didn't give me an option, as he summoned two swords, and came charging at me with the speed of a missile. I quickly summoned my axe and my sword, and $#!+ went down. For five minutes, Goblin and I battled in the air relentlessly. I'll give it to the guy, he was strong, fast, powerful, and looked bad ass, if it wasn't for the fact that I was dead set on splitting his head open, i'd say i've found my arch nemesis. Anyway, Goblin was definitely no pushover, but thanks to my recently developed skill with weapons, I was able to dodge, block, parry, and even get in between his strikes to get in some good slashes at his chest. Goblin didn't slow down for even a second, it was like my best strikes had little to no effect on him at all. Sure he was wearing armor that seemed kinda indestructible, not to mention the fact that he was coursing with the energy of the god of the Underworld, but still, everyone had to have limits right? Besides, Goblin was really fast, like Thunder Man fast. Once or twice he almost impaled me with those swords of his, and because they unpleasantly reminded me of my time with Dragon Empress, I decided it was in my best interest to not let those things touch me. So after five minutes of intense death battle, things started to…unravel. First, I managed to dodge on of Goblin's stabs, and slice his arm off with my sword, but before I could capitalize on that, he took off backwards, making me waste time chasing him. By the time I actually caught him, his arm had already reattached itself, and the sword fight continued. This time, after maneuvering his strikes a little more, Goblin basically had both my arms pinned with his sword hands. I saw his eyes start to glow with purple voltage, so before I found out what thunder of the Underworld tasted like, I tapped into Blitz Extreme, and headbutted him as hard as I could. Goblin immediately recoiled, uttering curses at me, and I wasn't that much better off. First off, that $#!+ actually hurt; my head was still throbbing, it wasn't supposed to throb anymore. Second, that impact should've left Goblin a state of unconsciousness, his skull should've been fractured. Whatever that stone had him on, I was now starting to worry, because even Venom wasn't as strong as this guy. So, after a quick second to heal up, Goblin charged me again. Instead of matching his moves, I tapped into Blitz Extreme again, floated over his swings, and then severed his wrists, followed by a slash across his throat, severing it completely. Goblin's face was a look of eerie calm rage, as his lifeless body started plummeting to the earth. I allowed myself to believe that it was over, I mean I severed the guy's head, he had to be dead right? Well as Goblin's body and severed limbs still fell to the ground, they started to glow with that same stupid purple energy that was a sign that this fight was clearly not over. Quicker than before, he reattached himself, and with a really loud roar, he came shooting at me like a ballistic missile. This time, he didn't summon any type of weapon, although his fists were blazing with the white hot intensity of probably like 1,000 souls; in other words, he was pissed off, and wanted to make this fight as up close and personal as possible.

Normally, i'd brace for impact, and figure out a plan later, but things were weird now; you don't just let a super villain suped up on undead steroids take the upper hand in a fight. So instead of taking the hit like a punching bag, I flew backwards, avoiding his charge altogether, and then, while in Blitz Extreme, I circled around him, got a good 200 meter head start, and came back around with a Super-G sized punch to his lower spine. Normally, i'd imagine this type of punch would at least make guys like Goblin flinch, and I could definitely tell that he felt a little of the effects, but that armor, whatever it was made of, took like 85% of the blow; that wasn't the worse part. After hitting him, and realizing that I did zilch in damage, I kept up the punches and kicks, while orbiting around him, and hitting him in random places. I hit him like 100 times in the chest and lower body, the same on the upper and lower back, not to mention the fact that I sliced his head off again for good measure, and then kept at the punching. I kept up at this for like 30 seconds real time, until Goblin managed to stop one of my cross punches, and punt kick me 100 feet further into the air. Ironically enough, the worst part about that wasn't the decapitated corpse defending itself. Again, I was in Blitz Extreme, which averages from around 10-20,000 mph in combat speed. That meant that Goblin was now more or less fast enough to keep up with me, on top of being stronger, tougher, and more bad ass; I was totally screwed.

Before I even had a chance at recovering and setting up a defense, I felt a huge fiery fist pelt me in the chest, which felt like a wrecking ball hitting me at 100mph, and I went soaring backwards. half a sec later, I felt another fist uppercut me higher into the air, which at this point, was probably somewhere in the stratosphere. This cycle continued for about five more hits, until Goblin made the mistake of trying to barbecue me. I started to feel this type of lukewarm heat above my head, and when I looked up, I was already being doused with Underworld fire. Now, before you write off the undead fire, keep in mind, I was already charbroiled in like 3,000 degree heat; lukewarm to me is probably 500 degrees. Besides, this was magical fire, the type of stuff my body was made specifically to defend against. If it wasn't for my super awesome magic shield, who knows what this fire would be doing to me. Anyway, in the wake of Goblin's failed attempt to barbecue me, I was able to get a split second to recover, and as you know by now, when it comes to speedsters, a split second is all we need. I shot up like a bullet, easily swooping through the fire, and delivering a massive uppercut to Goblin's disgusting face. The hit was strong enough to level a small tower, 60% of my overall strength, and the impact was just enough to make Goblin's face move back a little. That was scary. Before Goblin even had a chance to respond to that love tap I gave him, I reeled my fist back, and hit him in the chest with everything I had. The force of the blow was enough to send Goblin soaring backwards about 50 meters, but I knew he barely felt the punch. I soared after him, hitting him as hard as I could repeatedly, basically playing a game of mid-air soccer with my fists. But after five consecutive hits, that probably would've been enough to trash a few skyscrapers, Goblin dodged my sixth strike, and swung at me with a blazing hammer punch. He hit me dead center in my back, and sent me plummeting towards the ground, but this time I refused to be a human tennis ball. I tapped into Blitz Extreme, stopped myself in mid-air, and looked up just in time to see, dodge, and counter a soaring downwards punch from the big green undead machine. I reverse kicked him in the head, sending him flying backwards, and pursued. Unfortunately, by the time I caught up, Goblin was already recovered and ready to go. Still, I kept up my momentum, faking like I was going for a face shot, and then surprising the hell out of him when I juked him, and gave him a rib shattering punch to the abs. Goblin and I went at it like this for a while; a big mid-air battle of Titans, worthy enough of a DBZ moment. For the record, I was clearly the superior warrior when it came to skill; thanks Sunbird! When it came to speed, we were pretty much on par with each other, but I took the cake on that by a hair, considering that I actually could incorporate some aerial maneuvers. But Goblin, and I hate to say it through my gritted teeth, was clearly stronger. For every five of my best hits to his face or chest, all it took was a wild backhand, and yes he did backhand me away a few times, to even up the score. Hell, if I could be beaten to death, this guy was the one who could do it. Like I said, my speed, skill and reflexes were all that kept this fight kind of even, if not the only reason I was still alive. We went at it like this for like five minutes, give or take; after that came the transitional, not turning point of the fight.

I was coming at Goblin with my fiercest punch and kick combo, making sure to mix up my strikes, and keep a sharp eye out for any surprise desperate moves. Goblin and I kept at it relentlessly, playing a kind of cat and mouse game with each other, and I made the mistake of thinking that Goblin wasn't capable of using things like tactics, strategy, or traps. Yeah...let's just say I paid for that a little more than I would've liked. Basically, after 30 seconds of constant pounding, which totaled up to at least 5,000 punches and kicks, Goblin managed to block one of my strikes, try for a counter, and when I dodged, he shot me with a blast of lightning from his eyes. I went soaring backwards, although the pain wasn't as bad as I thought it would be; but that wasn't the worst part. When I recovered, and tried to charge Goblin again, I felt constructs, like handcuffs on my arms and legs, yank me backwards ever so slightly. The constructs weren't heavy, I could've easily broken through them, but they were unexpected, I was put off-balance for a split second, but that was more than enough time for Goblin to f^(# me up. He was already on a collision course with me, and by the time I knew what was happening, I felt his fist sinking into my chest. The impact was nothing short of excruciating. I actually coughed up some blood, my ribs felt like they were on fire, for the first time since being a mutant, I actually remembered what it was like to be in mind numbing pain. Goblin didn't stop there. He uppercutted me high into the air, and you better believe he didn't give me time to recover. Before I knew what was what anymore, I heard the sound of thunder, and my nerves were overloaded with the force of a lightning strike so powerful, even Thor would've been jealous.

This time I actually did plummet to the ground; just at like 224,000 mph, that's how fast a bolt of lightning is. I don't remember much about the explosions, all I knew was that I was in the air one moment, and seven feet under asphalt the next. My body was in so much pain, I could barely breathe, much less move, and I could hear the sound of rubble crumbing above me; the city that I had tried so hard to keep out of danger, had just been bombarded by me. I don't really know how long I was under, a few seconds, a minute maybe, but I did know one thing; I wasn't dead, and it wouldn't be long until Goblin figured that out. I used every ounce of my strength and will, and commanded my body to move. Forget the fact that I felt like I was just used as the filling for a million truck sandwich, forget the fact that I was in more danger than I had ever been in my life, forget the fact that my team was MIA, and I was alone. I was Super-G dammit! And if I had to see it through with my last breath, I was gonna stop Goblin, no matter what.

I exploded out of the ground, and my body immediately called for a Timeout. Like I said, Goblin was definitely not gonna fall for the whole possum death thing, and he clearly was still out to punish me a little more before he went for the kill. I quickly summoned my axe, thrusted it at his face, and commanded it to extend into it's flail form, as well as jut out a blade from it's head. By the way, my axe is now synced to my brainwaves, using electrodes that course through my suit as a network to my brain and axe. Not to be over dramatic, but in a way, I guess you could say my brain was hardwired to my axe as long as I was wearing the suit; or at least that's how Mrs. Kennedy explained it. Anyway, the blade went right through Goblin's eye, not to mention the fact that my axe was lodged deep into his head. I quickly flew upwards, grabbed my handle with two hands, and swung Goblin round and round until the momentum removed him from my axe, and sent him hurtling through a few one story buildings. Oh, quick fun fact, Scott City is not very big, don't expect any skyscrapers to be destroyed or anything. So, I soared after Goblin, who ironically enough was in the middle of what was left of the local bank. However, and this should go without saying, but the place was filled with screaming civilians. Forget beating him to a pulp, right now, the only thing that really mattered was getting this fight away from these people. I grabbed Goblin by his arm, and flew him out of the bank. My intentions were to fly him out of the city, back to Thunder Man and Sunbird, and figure out a way to put him out of action, but he had other intentions. Quicker than I could've anticipated it, I felt Goblin punt kick me so hard, I probably would've sailed from an end zone, all the way to the opposite field goal post. I managed to gain my balance, and land on my feet before hitting the ground, but Goblin was already on the verge of tackling me. I quickly ducked, cupped my fists together, and hit him with a hammer uppercut. I followed that up with a powerful punch to the chest, sending him careening into an auto parts store. Again, I raced after Goblin, determined to take this fight out of this taco stand of a town, but this time he was more than happy to greet me head on.

He rushed out of the wreckage of the auto parts store, this time with his sword of death at the ready, and charged me with the fury of a legion of undead souls; yes, I meant that as a pun. I summoned my axe again, thrusted it at Goblin, and activated it's chain mace protocol; but this time I made it do something weird. As you know, my axe responded to both my hand movements, as well as my thoughts. This means, that even in chain mace form, I had complete control of my axe's movements, essentially making it Adamantium/Vibranium anaconda. So with my new snake axe, might keep that name, I commanded my chain to wrap around Goblin's sword hand, and before he could even think of escape, I yanked him towards me, with enough strength to dislocate a T-Rex's kneecaps. Goblin came flailing towards me, his arm actually on the brink of being ripped out of it's socket, and as soon as he got close enough, I backflip kicked him under his chin, and spun into a reverse kick that hit him square in the chest. Now take this in mind, I was going at my full strength, I couldn't afford to hold back even a little bit. That kick I had just delivered was so strong, all windows in a 400 meter perimeter were shattered; even the cars were getting tossed around. Even with that much force, that black armor held firm. Whatever it was, it wasn't obsidian, definitely not obsidian. Goblin kinda laughed at me for my poorly thought out plan, and proceeded to nearly cut me in half with his next swing. I barely managed to duck it, but was swiftly greeted with Goblin's knee, sending me soaring into the air. I quickly recovered, summoned my axe and sword, and stood my ground, letting Goblin come to me. The good news was that I had successfully managed to get him out of the city. The bad news? I still didn't have a clue how to stop this guy.

For three more minutes, Goblin and I went at it like gods; fighting at such speed and ferocity we could've cut through entire armies on our own. Our battle was nothing short of intense, frequently switching from armed, to unarmed combat, and back again. I was doing a lot better this time, using my strategy of slicing off limbs, and trying to search for anything that could give me the edge over this guy; however, I definitely was not without fault. A few seconds after minute three, while I was still in the middle of one of my soon to be trademark punch and kick DBZ combo, Goblin, suddenly glowed really bright with that horrible purple light, and released an extremely powerful explosive wave; if we were still on the ground, it probably would've vaporized most of the city. The blast definitely took a bit of wind out of my sails, but nothing really threatening. Goblin soared after me, trying to finish me with a stab, but I managed to get out the way, only to behold the site of his eyes glowing with that purple lightning that I hate so much. I had no intentions to feel the sting of his thunder again, so I quickly summoned my axe, and batted his head to the side with the flat sides. Goblin was definitely pissed about getting pimp slapped, but before he could do anything about it, I slashed at his face. This time, he blocked my blade, and kicked at me with his oversized horse legs, forcing me to fall back a little. Just like I anticipated, he came howling after me like a total cheese head. It was so easy to counter him, I was pretty sure a child could do it. I leaned back a little, as if preparing to retreat again, and when Goblin poured on the speed, I quickly rushed into a backflip kick, nearly taking off his head with the force of that blow alone. I followed up by hitting him with a hammer punch uppercut, using the leftover momentum from my backflip. That sent him careening upwards with some considerable speed, but that wasn't enough for me; I needed to do some actual damage to this guy. I soared after him, using all of my speed to make sure I wasn't rudely interrupted while trying to waste this fool, and summoned my axe-spear. I got a bit of a flying start, and when I came back, I spun into a Jackie Robinson type baseball swing that pelted Goblin dead in the chest. That sent him soaring forwards, or at least from your perspective he was; he was still moving though jello at my perception. Instead of waiting for the momentum to pick up a million years later, I took the initiative to make my own. Flashbacking a bit, I soared off into the distance about a good mile or so, and after a literal second, I came back around with the speed of a comet. This time I used my axe in it's base form. The spear was good at close range, but at this speed, i'd lose a lot of power on the swing. Anyway, I came in hot, reeled my axe back, and struck Goblin dead center of his back; the blow was so powerful, you could hear the boom from miles away. My speed was starting to decline after that hail mary shot, so I decided to get another flying start upwards, and come back down with a flipping power slice, using my spear; I swear a midst the sonic boom that echoed through the air, I could hear Goblin's armor crack. As he went plummeting down towards the edge of the city, I soared after him, trying to derail him from his crash course, but Goblin wasn't as out of commission as I thought he was. He twisted around, and almost hit me with a death ray from his left hand. I dodged it, and kept up the assault, actually dodging a hand construct that tried to swat me out of the sky. Just as I reached Goblin however, I felt my body being constricted, and had my suspicions confirmed, when I looked around, and saw myself in some type of energy prison. Moving in it was really hard, I could barely get my arms to move even a little bit. Meanwhile, Goblin landed perfectly on the ground, and flew straight at me, this time with an actual good chance of cleaving me in two. Still, i'm as strong as I need to be, so you'd better believe I summoned my axe, raised it over my chest like a crucifix, and blocked Goblin's strike for all I was worth. I didn't go completely unpunished though, and by that I mean I was thrown through at least five buildings, and ended up smashing through something metal, filled with a really disgusting liquid. After a second, I realized that I was in a fuel truck, and to my horror, had probably swallowed a few gulps of gasoline. Don't worry about that, gas couldn't kill me. Why? Because if an entire bottle of antifreeze mixed with bug repellent and an overdose of sleeping pills couldn't do the job, this sure as hell couldn't.

Ok, ok, let me explain. Football was my life. Ever since I was eight, football was the only thing in this world that gave me the feeling like I could fly. I devoted my life to the sport, constantly training, getting better, basically eating, breathing, and sleeping the stuff. I was the first freshman from my high school to ever make quarterback and defensive Junior year, I had already won three state championships, I was already being looked at by scouts to be a quarterback or a defensive lineman for some of the best colleges in the mid-western area. Just when it seemed like my life couldn't get any better, I trucked the opposing team's quarterback in a practice scrimmage, and flew him to the other end of the field. My life was ruined. My chances at being a superstar, destroyed. My reputation, status, booty calls, all down the drain; there was simply nothing left to live for. So yeah, I made myself a liquid poison cocktail, and chugged it for all I was worth. Be in mind, even if the poison didn't kill me right away, the sleeping pills should've put me out of commission in like an hour or less. But after two hours of sitting at my counter, waiting to die, I didn't feel a thing, not even the urge to puke. I tried other ways too. Slitting my wrists, stabbing myself in the chest, even tossing a cinder block on my head. All that accomplished were three disfigured knives, and concrete pebbles getting strewn across the backyard. After that, I kinda calmed down, thought about things rationally, and decided that having these powers weren't exactly the worst thing that could happen to me. All that back sob story was just to explain that I was in no danger of death by ingestion of diesel. Still, I really wished i'd have gotten out of that tanker sooner, cause the next thing I knew, Goblin lobbed a ball of fire at it, and I got caught in a massive explosion, that sent me rocketing into the air, like a bullet out of a gun.

The explosion didn't really hurt, it basically felt like getting slingshotted out of a really hot circus cannon, plus, as you know, anything under 2,000 degrees doesn't even register on my level. At most, the only thing that really worried me was all the smoke blocking my vision. I quickly flew out of the mini mushroom cloud, scanning the air for Goblin; in a way, I sorta did find him. Basically, I heard thunder boom, so I knew what was coming next, and tapped into Blitz Extreme. I scanned the air and the ground for Goblin, and found him hovering slightly where he started the set for a Michael Bay film; then again, this whole fight is like a Michael Bay film. Moving on, I looked up at the bolt of lightning, which resembled a huge ass Kamehameha raining from the sky, summoned my axe, and with all my strength, hit it at it's base. Basically, it was the same thing when I bounced Venom's bolt of lightning back at him, but bigger and heavier, like hitting the world's biggest shot put with an indestructible baseball bat. I managed to derail the blast off it's course, aka me, and send it soaring towards Goblin. I was worried that the blast would do more collateral to the city, but it basically planted itself deep into the ground, taking Goblin with it. Normally, i'd call it a day, say i'd won, and hit the showers, but come on, we all know what was what at this point. I flew after Goblin, soaring down the hole, which cut deep into the sewage system; nasty. I found him after a few seconds of searching. He was kinda in a state of groggy consciousness, which meant that if I kept the pressure on him, maybe I could knock him out. I flew in hot, socked him dead in his face, and hit him with the hardest uppercut i'd ever dealt in my life, sending him up through god knows how many feet of metal, dirt, and concrete. I flew directly up after him, not even giving him half a second to think. I pounded him relentlessly. With every punch, windows shattered, the earth shook, and sonic booms echoed through the atmosphere. I didn't know why, but I felt myself getting angry, for like no reason; still it fueled my punches, and Goblin suffered more for it. After ten seconds of relentless pounding, I decided to pay Goblin back for that little explosion bull$#!+ he dealt me. I tackled him, and rocketed him straight into the air, after quickly scanning the ground for another fuel truck, I found one parked next to a post office; don't know why it was there off all places, but i'll take what I can get. I slammed into Goblin with a 50% cross punch, too hard and i'd send him into the ground again, and sent him crashing into the tanker truck. I followed that up by grabbing the front of the truck, and launching it into the air as if it weighed less than an apple. Once it was safely out of range of the city, I grabbed the nearest car, sure hoped the guy had insurance, and lobbed it in a collision course with the fuel truck; the fireworks were kind of pretty to look at. Again, I didn't trust fate to take care of Goblin, so I soared up after him. Even in the midst of that last explosion, I could see his purple aura glowing in the sky. He was definitely out of his daze, believe me, getting caught in an explosion is a faster wake up than your average can of Monster, but he was still unaware of my location; I decided to make my presence known in the form of a Mach 4 punch to the face, followed by a decapitating sword slice, and throwing his head head as far back as I could. Now was the time. Goblin would be way too far gone to even think about dodging my attacks. I took off directly backwards, and focused on going as fast as I possibly could, by the way, this is not as easy as it sounds, just because it's not running doesn't mean it's not as strenuous as hell. Anyway, the plan was to fly about 3 miles out at top speed, come back around, and hit Goblin with the hardest Meteor Punch, official name, ever. Basically, the plan for taking out Venom, but hopefully without Dragon Empresses trying to destroy the world. It only took about three seconds total, to hit my three mile mark, in fact I went over my mark my a mile and a half. I turned around as fast as I could, turning up the jets to maximum, breaking the sound barrier five times over. In a little more than two seconds, I saw Goblin's still floating body, summoned my axe -spear, and hit him dead in the chest with the force of several bombs. This time I wasn't imagining it, several pieces of his armor started cracking and chipping away; that was a good sign, but I wasn't done yet. I took off directly upwards, and then forwards, reaching the same speed again, and then coming back around for another Meteor Punch, or slash if you will, at the dead center of his back. Again, the sonic boom was deafening, and chunks of Goblin's armor started peeling off like dried skin. And to top that all off, I turned my axe-spear sideways, used it to scoop Goblin sideways, and then, with everything I had left, because I was actually firing on all cylinders, I shifted my weapon back to it's original axe form, and brought it down on Goblin's chest. He plummeted to the ground, somewhere in the middle of the city. I flew down after him, and to my horror, I found his head was reunited with the rest of him; however, he was still out of it, giving me the perfect opportunity to hit him with the perfect flying punch to his chest where the heart was, assuming he still had a heart. The punch didn't shatter armor, but it sure as hell had to hurt, and that was on top of the fact that for ten seconds, at maximum punching speed, I pretty much wailed on Goblin in every way possible, probably brutalizing the poor bastard with about 50,000 or so punches. Hell, the only reason I stopped was because, in a move that reeked of desperation, he knocked me backwards slightly with a small explosive wave, and then managed to hit me with a considerably powerful death blast from his mouth; gotta wonder if he actually had corpse breath due to that. I managed to get up, although i'd be lying if I said I got up like it was nothing. However, the state Goblin was in, made it all totally worth it. As he struggled to get up, the guy was clutching his chest, like he was having a heart attack; but that wasn't the best part. No, the best part was clearly seeing the streams of energy flowing through Goblin, like an X-Ray showing how much his body was trying to keep itself in one piece. All of that energy, all of that undead, underworld energy, was originating from his chest, where the stone probably was. I started kicking myself, and silently whooping at the same time. No wonder his torso was so heavily guarded, it was just like back at the Amazon, all I had to do was do some more mining, get my axe into the soft fleshy parts, and then take the stone away from this punk. I was getting ready to go all out, I was stinging a bit, but if I gave it another 110%, I knew I could pull through; that's when the deal got sweeter.

"Super-G!" Thunder Man's voice shouted into my head. "Where are you!? Are you ok!?, Where's Goblin!?"

I almost shouted. Wherever the hell Thunder Man and Sunbird were, whatever they were doing, they were done; the cavalry was on it's way!

"Ok," I thought back to Thunder Man. "In that exact order, i'm somewhere in the middle of the city, yes i'm fine, and Goblin's with me, now hurry up and get down here, I could use some backup."

"On the way dude! Sorry about the hold up, Sunbird and I were-"

"Forget it bro. Tell me the details when my life isn't on the line, just get here ASAP, let's finish this!"

I kept my gaze on Goblin, who was just starting to look suitable to stand up and fight. As of now, he probably thought he was still set for a one-on-one fight, so I summoned my axe, took up a really cocky hero pose, and smiled at him.

"What are you smiling about child?" he asked me while slowly hovering closer to me. "Do you think me undone, do you think so weak as to that a child can defeat me on his own? I will crush you boy! I will fulfill my duty to my masters! No weapon, no amount of strength, no amount of power can stop me! So tell me, why do you smile as if the day is won, what makes you so certain of your victory!?

Is it me, or did this guy just not really live up to his full potential. Sure he was menacing enough, plus that whole multi-voice thing was kinda chilling, but he couldn't talk a big game; that's what really sells for a good villain.

"Because," I started. "First off, you're bluffing. Second. I'm not alone anymore!"

Before he could figure out what that meant, I heard Jason's voice telling me to get out of the way. I didn't know what that meant, but I quickly did a flying backflip, and the rest fell into place. Thunder Man and Sunbird were already en route by the time I had finished the conversation with them, confirming the fact that I was alive. By the time I had recovered from my backflip, Thunder Man and Sunbird, were already in the action of double punching Goblin in the stomach. On paper, this would be a seriously stupid idea unless Allyson was Super Sunbird, however, I forgot to mention the fact that my teammates were using their shields, the power enhancing ones, to blast Goblin away with the fury of a Thunder/Sun god/goddess; and yes that was necessary unless you want me to get railed for sexism.

"Thanks for the save guys," I quickly said to them, cause let's face it, even while talking at super speed, Goblin would be up and at em' in just a few, I needed to get these guys up to speed ASA-NOW!

"No problem Super-G," Sunbird said. "Sure you don't mind us cutti-"

"No I don't mind!," I quickly and rather rudely interrupted her. "But long story short, the stone is in his chest, his armor is freaking hard to break, let's get to planning."

They looked at me strange for a sec, but then kinda mentally shrugged it off.

"Ok," Thunder Man said. "You've got the most experience, any ideas from the expert?"

"So far," I started. "The only real option we have is hammering away at his chest, and prying it away from his cold undead corpse. He can use energy blasts and such, lightning strikes, and basically is a walking tank. Sunbird and I can use our strength, no offense bro, and chip away at his armor. At the same time, you two can use constructs and stuff to make the process smoother, we'll definitely consult the Delta Playbook more than a few times for this. Also, slicing off limbs will slow him down a little bit, but don't get surprised if they come back and reattach themselves, they kinda do that. Also, this goes without saying, but i've endangered these people way too much, let's get this fight out of the city before we do anything else."

I must've looked pretty downtrodden, because Thunder Man and Sunbird's faces morphed into the one where they looked like they wanted to give me a hug.

"Guys!" I said, putting on my brave face. "It's ok, seriously, let's just get this over with already!"

Apparently, Goblin was thinking the same thing, because as soon as I finished my poorly strung morale boost, he came charging at the three of us, with a very inhuman flight speed.

"Guys!" Jason quickly thought to us, reasserting his place as leader. "Scatter on my mark. Sunbird, giant hand construct, throw him out of the city. Grant, keep him from regaining his balance, and on my mark, get away from him, let lightning and gravity finish the rest of the puzzle; everybody ready?!"

"READY!" Allyson and I mentally chanted back to him.

We waited for… half a sec, maybe a full one, but when Thunder Man gave the word to scatter, I dashed into the air, Sunbird flew off to the side of Goblin's charge, and Thunder Man started running out of the city. Immediately, Goblin was caught in a giant golden hand, and flung into the air, out of the city; I started helping him along his way. First, I hit him with a few back to back flying punches, although they were kinda sluggish due to my tiredness. Goblin tried fighting back a few times via fire blasts, and wild swings, but even in my state I was having none of it. I simply outstripped his blasts, and kept up the punching barrage until Thunder Man told me otherwise. Ironically enough, when he shouted into my mind "Super-G, get clear!" Goblin actually helped me along the way, as he surprisingly managed to hit me with a powerful right cross, followed by a hard backhand that sent me flying backwards; too bad for him, Thunder Man paid him back in the form of a God knows how many volts, thunder strike. Seriously, the bolt looked big enough to tear straight through a baseball stadium, if we were anywhere near the city, it would've been vaporized. Speaking of which, I had just noticed we were in the same big dead wheat field we were when this whole palooza started; in other words, it was all gonna end where it began. If I liked poetry, i'd appreciate the poetic moment in front of me. Anyway, I soared down after Goblin, determined to finish him off with my team.

"Hey Sunbird?" I thought to her.

"Yeah Super-G?"

"If it won't be too much of a bother, can you give me a dose of that sun magic, going three rounds wit-"

Before I could even finish my request, I felt myself heat up a little, and in a quick second, I once again had the power to take on armies, hell, I could take on two with that energy boost. With my power at full strength, I rocketed at Goblin, and started wailing on him, determined to pay him back X10 for that cross shot. I pounded on him for 5 seconds at full speed, avoiding his wild counters, and making his face and body pay for hurting mine. I was about to summon my axe and do a bit of gardening, but then Thunder Man's voice sounded off in my head.

"Super-G!" he mentally shouted. "Launch him back in the sky, we need to wear him down some more, we'll start with hammer time, keep up the hits until or if he ever regains a foothold on the fight!"

Everything in me wanted to disobey him, and keep the punches going, but he was team captain, and besides, I was getting way too worked up, I needed to take a step back before I lost my head.

"Gotcha bro!" I thought back to him. "Sunbird. You pick up on that?"

"Loud and clear, let's pound this creep into the floor!

Gotta love team enthusiasm! So yeah, I gave Goblin one last cross punch for good measure, dodged a fire blast, and gave him an uppercut so strong, I actually created a crater where I was standing. Again, Sunbird must have given me a special sun dose, because, when Goblin went up, I could clearly see that he wasn't coming back down anytime soon if gravity was deciding this. I quickly flew in pursuit in Blitz Extreme, which was shockingly easy now, and gave him a hammer punch to his back sending him plummeting back down at a fast, but not too fast speed.

"He's ready guys!" I thought to my teammates. "Let him have it!"

They didn't need to be told twice. Within a second, two huge sledgehammer constructs, the size of flag goal posts, materialized in the air, and started whacking Goblin around like a hockey puck. At first, I didn't really know what my position was supposed to be on this play, but then, a golden fiery construct materialized right in front of me.

"What you waiting for?" Sunbird asked me. "An invitation?"

I rolled my eyes and chuckled aloud. I grabbed the hammer, which my hands were just barely able to grip, and joined in the fun. Even without super speed, we kept Goblin immobilized for a good 30 seconds. My job was mainly to fly around and keep him in range of the other hammer swings, just in case Thunder Man or Sunbird knocked him out of bounds. We were giving the guy such a hard time, I almost felt bad for him; then I lost my sympathy after he managed to recover. Basically, when Jason knocked him near out of bounds, I flew after him. I was gonna knock him back into play, but at the last second, his body started to surge. I didn't like that, I didn't like what that meant for my future, so I swung at him. The force of my blow was enough to knock him back several yards, but it was brunted by the emergency shield Goblin managed to create before the hammer fell. I knew right then that the fight was gonna get a lot harder. We had used Goblin as a tennis ball, now he was free, and clearly pissed off. The sky sounded off with the sound of thunder, and the sky lit up like the fourth of July. Lightning came down in every direction possible, and for those of you that don't know, being able to fly sucks when you're closer to the target.

"GUYS!" Thunder Man screamed into my head. "DODGE EM', GET OUT OF THE WAY!"

"NO DUH CAPTAIN OBVIOUS!" Allyson mentally screamed back at him. "SHOULD WE TRY DUCKING AND COVERING WHILE WE'RE AT IT!?"

"KNOCK IT OFF SUNBIRD!" I boomed. "WE GOT ENOUGH ON OUR PLATE AS IT IS WITHOUT RAILING EACH OTHER!"

That calmed things down, figuratively speaking.

"Look!" I continued. "We gotta take him out of the sky, make him fight on land, where he can't maneuver that well! Thunder Man, Sunbird, I'm gonna knock one of his bolts back at him, that should be enough to break the shields. Don't' wait for the flare to die out, as soon as you see his shield go boom, follow it up with dual thunder strikes, well..thunder strike and bolt of light falling fro-"

"Just call it a Sun Bolt!" she interrupted me. "It's cool, short and sweet. Now let's hurry up and thrash this guy already. It's been a long day, I smell like dead people, and I really wanna take another shower, and eat my bodyweight in BBQ ribs!"

I couldn't even with that comment, so I shrugged it off, and summoned my axe. I waited for the right bolt of lighting to come along, which oddly enough took a few secs, and when it presented itself, I took a batting stance, hit it with the flat of my axe, and knocked it straight back to Goblin. The impact must've done way more than just break the shield, because other than the blue and yellow bolts that smashed into Goblin after the explosion, all of the purple lightning just stopped flashing in a sudden halt. Goblin hurtled to the ground, creating a massive crater, and you better believe the team and I jumped on him faster than a cat on yarn. As soon as he was able to even resemble a rough standing position, he was blasted with a huge wave of solar energy, sending him flying back. I quickly, rushed behind him, and gave him another axe swing to the back, sending him towards the wolves. Sunbird, smacked him down to the ground with a fist construct, and as Thunder Man came running in, a small lightning geyser erupted under him, sending him spurring a good few feet in the air. I could tell at this rate, the team's attack pattern was severely lacking in organization, so I took the initiative, grabbed Goblin by his feet, and after a brief spin, hurled him into a small hill of dead wheat.

"Guys!" I mentally shouted to Thunder Man and Sunbird. "Team meeting now!"

Time froze around us as the team and I took a quick nanosec to refine our game plan.

"What's with the hold up Super-G!" said a clearly miffed Sunbird. "Since when can you call for a team meeting? Isn't that supposed to be his job?"

"A good leader knows when to listen to suggestions." said Thunder Man. "Besides we were kinda scattering out there, we need to get in sync with our attack formation."

"Exactly!" I almost shouted, pointing an 'I told you so' finger at Sunbird. "And speaking of which, a good old fashioned Delta Thrasher should do the trick. After he's down, let's keep up the beatings. Thunder Man, buy us as much time as you can, mainly by chopping off anything that looks important. Sunbird, i'm gonna need that Super Sunbird to come out, let's really take the hurt to Goblin, like you said, i'd very much like to eat my weight in artery clogging food sometime soon."

"Amen to that." she responded. "By the way, you two should cover your ears."

Thunder Man and I knew what was sure to follow, so we quickly plugged our ears as best as we could, and even then we still weren't that much better off from the sound of a million Justin Bieber fangirls being projected out of Sunbird's mouth. After the screams had died down, and Thunder Man and I recovered from being ear pounded, Thunder Man summoned his sword, and together, the three of us charged at Goblin, finally united in the struggle.

To be honest, for the first few minutes, things were going swimmingly. I charged straight at Goblin, and started pounding away at him relentlessly. After hitting him with a furious beat down, I fell back, as Thunder Man hit Goblin with a running drop kick, of course, making sure to add his signature lightning bolt shoot out of his feet. Sunbird, at the same, delivered an amazing flying kick to Goblin's head, and even managed to kick it clean off. This meant that Goblin's decapitated body was now flying head on towards me; I simply summoned my axe, and hit him out of the park like Derek Jeter. The team didn't even miss a beat, and we all raced after Goblin's body, determined to damage him even more. Again, it seemed like his body had developed the ability to fight without a head present, but that was barely a factor. I put my axe away, and with Sunbird's assistance, I started wailing on Goblin's chest with enough force to put down a dragon; and believe me, I know first hand what that takes. As Sunbird and I were busy with the front, Thunder Man was busy running around, using his sword to slash and stab at Goblin's legs, arms, and exposed points in his armor. For the most part, this constant attack strategy kept Goblin off-balance. Sure, sometimes he managed to get a wild swing or kick off, maybe an explosive wave if he was lucky, forcing us to scatter and regroup our attacks, but whenever that didn't happen, Sunbird and I were furiously beating him down, while Thunder Man kept his legs, arms, and head, from doing anything stupid, like fighting back. This strategy worked for a good while, but then Goblin managed to bat me away with a stray backhand, and nearly slice Sunbird in half with his sword; which begs the question of was she actually tangible in Super Sunbird form. Regardless, she wasn't ready to take the chance, and created a shield construct to block his strike. Meanwhile, Thunder Man kinda got the hint that the status quo was broken, and quickly sliced off Goblin's arms, and blasted him backwards with his 'Final Flash' move.

"Guys!" he mentally shouted to us. "Demolition Derby, let's go!"

Sunbird and I quickly got into formation. We charged at Goblin, having to bob and weave through lightning bolts and fireballs, and after a quick punch and kick combo from yours truly, I backflip kicked Goblin under the chin, and Sunbird blasted Goblin high into the air with a blazing geyser of golden flame. We didn't give Goblin a second to recover, and quickly resumed our punch and kick barrage, only now, about 1,000 feet in the air. After a quick beat down, I hammer punched Goblin back to the ground with so much force, Sunbird and Thunder Man actually had to call a team meeting, so that they could actually time the train construct collision; otherwise, Goblin would've created a massive crater, and probably would've caused a small earthquake. As was such, Goblin got caught between two extremely overpowered locomotive constructs, and was temporarily lost in a starburst of sun and lightning. Neither of us actually believed Goblin was down for the count, so Thunder Man ordered the team to regroup for the 'Aerodynamics' play. That was a good move. Not only would it keep Goblin off-balance for a little while longer, but Sunbird and I were already in place for the play, all Thunder Man had to do was tee Goblin up. Half a second later, a huge bolt of lightning erupted out of the ground, delivering Goblin to Sunbird and I. We quickly gave Goblin another quick beat down, in which I focused more on breaking off more and more of his chest armor, and moved out of the way as Thunder Man brought Goblin to the ground with a lightning strike. This time, Sunbird and I raced to the ground, and Thunder Man ordered the team to go back to the Delta Speed Thrasher play. This time though, it didn't seem like Goblin was having any more of it. Sure, Sunbird and I were able to get in a lot of good hits, plus Thunder Man was still doing his thing with the sword, but it seemed like Goblin had gotten a lot faster; maybe all that voltage overcharged him or something. But yeah, all of a sudden, Goblin's wild swings were becoming more and more effective as he started getting some good shots off on me and Sunbird; hell, even Thunder Man was getting less effective in his part, due to Goblin getting more and more opportunities to create more explosive waves.

After trying to keep Goblin more or less subdued for a good three minutes, Goblin pulled and ace out of his sleeve. He managed to hold me and Sunbird back for just a bit, with some skeletal hand constructs. In the half second that followed, Goblin roared like a warlord and the team and I were caught in a massive explosive wave that felt like a high powered tank shooting at rapid fire on every part of my body. The explosion was enough to send me sprawling a good 100 meters or so, and luckily, Sunbird wasn't that far away from my position.

"Yo Sunbird!" I thought to her. "You okay?"

"Yeah," she thought at me, a tinge of grogginess lingering in the air. "That wasn't so, NOOO!"

Sunbird dashed off into the distance so fast, it was like she teleported, I wouldn't be able to spot her if she wasn't a living emergency flare. When I did spot her, my heart kinda stopped in both worry and relief. Apparently, Goblin had zeroed in on a dazed Thunder Man, with a huge energy cannon; if Sunbird hadn't caught up to Thunder Man, and raised a barrier around the two, the guy was probably gonna be fried crispy. In other words, thank God for Sunbird's quick reflexes.

"SUNBIRD, IS THUNDER MAN OK?!" I boomed in her head.

"HE'S FINE!" she responded "HE JUST NEEDS A FEW-"

"No!" Thunder Man thought to both of us. "A few is for slow people, all I need is one, half of one. But yeah, I'm ok. Sunbird, repel Goblin's blast back with an explosive wave, we'll follow it up with Delta Cannon. Super-G, if you can run some interference on Goblin's end, that'd be really fantastic bro."

"Don't worry about it man!" I responded. "I got you covered, just get him set up!"

Sunbird released her own explosive wave, which was like so much bigger and more powerful than Goblin's, and in the aftermath, a huge Kamehameha-like blast, made of lightning and sun energy rushed at him. At the rate it was going, I half thought that the blast was gonna connect before he even had a chance to recover, but like I said, Goblin was a lot faster now. He quickly got in defensive stance, and released his own counter blast at my teammates. For the record, I gave him as much chance of succeeding in this power struggle as a baby against a Rottweiler. Then again, with the power of the stone…. Eh, whateves, all you need to know is I summoned my axe, hurled it at the mother f*(#&, and after it smashed into his chest with the force of a cannon, the guy was overtaken in the Delta Cannon, which made a really big and satisfying boom. This time, I actually let my mind hold a little hope that the fight was over, I mean damn, that was a pretty solid hit. Surely Goblin was dead right? Right?! WRONG! Goblin floated out of the crater he was buried in. His armor was a lot more damaged than before, in fact, I could practically see some of the glowing purple bulb that was the stone, glowing through his shattered armor, but he was still very much alive, conscious, and probably infinitely pissed off at the thought of getting owned by some random teenagers.

"ENOUGH!" he bellowed. "THE SHINING ONE MUST DIE! FACE ME IN HADES!"

I really had no desire to go there, my preference was somewhere up north if you catch my drift. Anyway, before I could do anything about it, Goblin slammed his fists into the ground, triggering another explosive wave, except this one was weird now. This wave didn't go up and out, rather than under and out, in fact it was more of a small tremor rather than a wave of undead power, seemingly harmless. I wanted to believe that Goblin was just blowing smoke, and that that shock wave was about as deadly as a sleeping kitten, but then the ground erupted, and my worst fears were confirmed. Hundreds of the dead started to rise from the ground in droves. They were all the same size and hideousness of their predecessors, the only difference was, now we were so far outnumbered, it wasn't even funny.

"NOW YOU SEE THE TRUE POWER OF THE SHADOW HERALD!" Goblin kept spouting. "DESTROY THEM MY CHILDREN, BUT SAVE THE GIRL FOR YOUR MASTER!"

"GUYS!" I mentally shouted to Thunder Man and Sunbird. "THIS IS SO NOT GOOD!"

In response, a huge cannon of lightning shot down from the sky, and hit somewhere roughly around where Thunder Man was, and dissipated just as soon as it flashed; if I didn't know any better, i'd say it was a f*(% you from the big guy himself. But lo and behold, I heard Thunder Man's trademark battle roar, and saw a huge flash of lightning burst in the sea of the dead. What happened next was so fast, I barely had time to catch it. Hundreds of the dead, were being systematically vaporized by huge tendrils of lightning. One second, I was up to my chin in zombie claws, and the next, I was in a circle of char, with the sight of a bunch of lightning bolts branching off of each other like some weird energy tree. At the center of all the ruckus was Thunder Man, the butt of his spear buried in the ground, the point shooting out millions of volts into the oncoming, and at this rate, never ending zombie hoard.

"YOU THINK!" he mentally shouted back at me. "SUPER-G, YOU AND SUNBIRD GO AFTER GOBLIN, I CAN TAKE CARE OFF THE ZOMBIES, IT'S JUST LIKE BACK AT THE AMAZON, I'LL TAKE THE SHRIMP ARMY, YOU TWO REEL IN THE BIG FISH!"

"If I recall correctly, we almost died back at the Amazon, you really wanna reminisce about it!? Besides, with all the dead running amok, how's Sunbird supposed to keep at it!?"

"It's ok Super-G!" she said. "The aura isn't strong enough to knock me out of Super Sunbird, although I wouldn't wager it'll last too long, we need to really take the hurt to Goblin; got a plan?

"Keep punchin the $#!+ out of him?"

"Good enough, let's go!"

"Hold up!" Thunder Man thought to both of us. "Let me give you a bit of a head start!

Before I could even begin to understand what that was supposed to mean, all of the lightning bolts, which were currently still deep frying zombies, changed direction, and alll started to hone in on Goblin. Even if he did have time to raise a shield, I truly doubt it would've been enough to keep out the millions upon millions of volts. As was such, he got the full dose, and was engulfed in a huge explosion of thunder. As if that wasn't enough, Thunder Man still had something left for Goblin. Suddenly, Goblin was caught in a huge tesla sphere, getting constantly blasted from all ends, while simultaneously being lifted into the air. Once Goblin was about 200 feet in the air, give or take, Thunder Man clenched his fists, and hit the kill switch. Again, Goblin was caught in the middle of a huge lightning explosion that was actually kinda hard to look at; and as if he hadn't done enough, Thunder Man reignited the electricity in the air around Goblin, and sent him back to earth in the form of a midair lightning cannon.

"All done!" he said after he was finished with his electrocution. "He's all yours, give him hell guys!"

And with that, he took off in a really huge bolt of lightning, meaning he was hightailing it, running at near if not his max, to make sure the zombies didn't bother Sunbird and me from honing in on Goblin.

"Ready Sunbird?" I thought to her.

"Duh!" she thought back to me. "Let's go!"

Together, we charged Goblin for what I would be the final time. Goblin locked onto us before we reached him, and threw lightning at us, like I knew he would. Sunbird and I dodged the sparks like slow motion beach balls, but the one thing we didn't account for was getting backhanded away with another skeletal hand construct. This time, Goblin tried taking the hurt to us. Giant purple missile constructs materialized in the air, and it was only thanks to Sunbird's shield constructs that I wasn't blown away.

"Damn it!" I yelled at her. "Now he starts using constructs!"

"It's ok!" she yelled back. "I can run interference, keep them off of you and maybe get in some shots of my own, you just keep hammering him with your fists, it'll be hard to create anything when you're face is getting pounded in!"

"Gotcha!"

I zoomed at Goblin again, summoning my axe for good measure. This time, when a barrage of skull constructs tried to block my path, a giant wave of golden light obliterated them, and left Goblin completely exposed. I hit him in the chest hard with my axe, sending him flying backwards, I quickly zoomed behind him, swung hard at his back, and this time, a geyser of flame erupted under him while he was flying, sending him shooting into the sky. Sunbird and I regrouped for another combined assault, this time with slightly better results. We mixed up our attacks, me attacking relentlessly at Goblin's armor, while Sunbird tagged in occasionally, but was mostly using concentrated bolts of light to keep Goblin off balance. This strategy was kind of working, but like I said, Goblin was steadily improving with this fight. Now, it wasn't really uncommon for him to get in a few good shots on me, plus with the whole construct fighting thing, I was forced to either fall back and restart my attack, or break through the constructs, the latter of which almost got me a date with the wrong end of one of Goblin's swords. From my perspective, it felt like this cycle was going on for a good few minutes, but I could tell in real time, it was probably barely over 60 seconds. I was just about to re strategize with Sunbird about a new gimmick, but Goblin had other ideas. You see, Goblin and I were still locked in an awesome battle, that was 10X more DBZ worthy than the actual show itself. I got some really good punches and kicks on Goblin, not to mention the good axe swings I managed to break in, but when he came at me with a backhand, I made the mistake of blocking. As it turned out, this big boy knew the art of feinting attacks. As soon as my arms were covering my upper body and face, he quickly grabbed me with his free hand, which just happened to be surging with purple lightning, with a little bit of undead fire for good measure. The pain was uncomfortable at most, like a really bad itch all over your body, then again, this blaze/surge would be enough to fry right through your non super bodies, so I couldn't really complain. No, the worst thing was that due to the position I was in, I couldn't move, defend myself, or do anything but wait for Goblin to do whatever. He reeled his other hand back for what was probably gonna be one hell of a punch, but in a quick golden flash, his arm was severed; another half sec, Sunbird's right fist was lodged in his gut, which was followed up with an extremely hot wave of fire, sending Goblin sprawling backwards; in other words, Sunbird may have saved my ass.

"You ok Super-G?" she asked me, and whoa, weird voice.

"Yeah," I responded. "By the way when did your voice get all sexy and stuff."

"Comes with the transformation," she said chuckling slightly. "Ready for another go?"

"I wish, but it doesn't look like we're making any progress, unless…"

The sky erupted in thunder, as Goblin came back on the scene. A huge bolt of lightning cracked the sky, and flew straight for us. Sunbird was starting to freak out, but I calmed her down, summoned my axe, and batted the lightning at Goblin; at least that part of the fight was a constant. Then, as I watched Goblin momentarily fall, I got an idea.

"Sunbird!" I thought to her as I flew after Goblin. "Mini-sun around me and Goblin now!"

"Ok." she calmly thought back to me.

"Wait, just like that? You have no qualms about wrapping a million degree ball of fire around your new friend and teammate, seriously?"

"From what you've been saying, you kinda have a whole 'what doesn't kill you makes you stronger' type of vibe. Besides dude, my powers won't burn you unless I want them to, it'll probably feel like a summer afternoon in there for you."

"Oh yeah, right. I always forget that bit. Anyways, do it, and on my command blow the whole thing up."

That actually worried her.

"Are you sure about that?" she asked me. "I can protect you as far as being in the mini-sun, but the explosion might be a different thing altogether; You sure you wanna be in it when I make it go boom?"

"No choice Sunbird, gotta make sure this creep gets what's coming to him, besides, i'm all invulnerable and stuff, i'll be fine."

I could tell that she still wasn't exactly 100% on board with the idea of blowing me to Kingdom Come, but she grudgingly agreed, and as soon as I caught up to Goblin, the two of us were engulfed in a miniature golden sun. First of all, it really begged the question of how fast the team was capable of communicating with each other. I mean, time wasn't really slowing down, we were just moving so fast, it seemed like it, so yeah, Sunbird and I had an entire minutes worth of talking in just under .3 seconds. Second, being in the center of a sun was kinda cool. It was somehow both a mix of fire,and some type of magma substance, it was like swimming in a nuclear hot tub. Then again, I was protected from most of the heat; Goblin probably could tell you better than I how hot this puppy actually was. The guy was thrashing around and roaring in pain, I could tell he was trying to get out, but the gravity from this sun was intense, even I kinda felt it. Goblin wouldn't be going anywhere for quite some time, so I was gonna make it my personal mission to make his stay as inhospitable as possible. I summoned my axe and sword, and went to work. Firstly, I slashed off all of his limbs for good measure, and then focused on hitting that chest as hard as possible. The force of my blows were enough to make the mini-sun tremble a little, in fact, I could imagine Sunbird struggling to keep the thing together. But for what it was worth, I was making progress. His armor was starting to chip away little by little, and if the heat attributed to that in any way, then i'll give credit where it was due, but for now, I was going to town. How long was I in that sun? In truth, I couldn't tell you; five minutes? five seconds? It could've been either of which, all I knew was when Goblin actually managed to reassemble himself, and was actually fighting back, rather than thrashing around in pain, that was the moment to pull the plug. See, I kinda picked up on the fact that Goblin was an adapter, like me. The trick was to keep him off balance, and exposed to different environments, so that he didn't have much time to gain any real traction, and as of now, it was time for a field change.

"SUNBIRD!" I mentally shouted to her. "DO THE BOOM THING, DO THE BOOM THING NOW!"

Suddenly, the mini sun got really, really, really, really, hot! The heat was definitely above 5,000 degrees, and i'm pretty sure that's like core level hot. Plus, the actual explosion wasn't exactly a love tap. Maybe it was the Super Sunbird form that was responsible for the extra juice, or maybe it was the adrenaline, but the point is, I shot into the air so fast, I might as well have been shot out of a tank. Even through the haze of the pain I was in, I somehow managed to stop my momentum, which was at least Mach 2, and get a quick scan of the area. I managed to spot Goblin, soaring up under me at about a good 50 meters away. You know damn well what comes next. I summoned my axe, raised that mother high and mighty, and brought it down just as Goblin got within range. I hit the guy so hard, I actually had a piece of his armor to hold on to. It was only about a handful, but it was good enough for a souvenir. I raced after Goblin, letting gravity decide this outcome, and made another battle plan with Sunbird.

"You okay Super-G?!" she asked me, kinda wanting confirmation that I was alive. "Did that hurt?!"

I wanted to mentally scream at her f*(% yeah it hurt, but that would be rude.

"Nothin I can't shake off," I casually responded. "Come on, we got Goblin on the ropes, let's finish it!"

"And what exactly do we do now?"

"Just pound him into the dirt! I'll stay in close, you keep the constructs off my back, jump in when you feel comfortable. All in all, we gotta finish this now while he's out of it!"

"Gotcha Super-G, i'm right behind you!"

"Oh, and while we're on the subject, I have this new move I wanna try out!"

"Go on…"

I explained quickly to her what Delta Missile was. Long story short, either Sunbird or Thunder Man charges me up with a lot of energy, and I crash into the SOB who has my attention; in other words, i'm a human missile. Again, Sunbird didn't object too much to the thought of me turning my body into a weapon, probably because she already let me be the filling for a bomb sandwich. Before I knew it, golden fire was blazing around my body, and I was a freaking meteor! Goblin, who was still in the middle of a giant crater, went ten more feet under as I crashed into him, releasing an explosion that was probably visible from an airplane. As soon as the explosion subsided, I went back to thrashing Goblin with everything I had. The guy took half a nuke to the face, he was definitely not in enough shape to fight back, so it was just a straight up slug fest. I immediately went into Blitz Extreme, and started wailing on Goblin with as much power as I could muster between my two fists. Maybe it was because of the huge adrenaline rush in my system, or Sunbird's power still in effect, but my punches were suddenly a lot stronger, and not just stronger, stronger, I mean REALLY FREAKING STRONGER! Every blow had enough force to make the ground shake, and the air explode with sonic booms; hell, if I had kept up the punches for any longer than a few seconds, I would've busted my teammates eardrums, and created the biggest crater to ever be seen in Kansas. Be that as it may, after getting around 1,000 or so good punches on Goblin, I quickly reeled back, and hit him with a powerful reverse kick, sending him shooting through layers upon layers of dirt and soil, creating one hell of a crater once I was done. Sunbird joined me a half a sec later, and we really took it to Goblin. He was definitely recovered now, and as such, put up a bit of an impressive fight, but with Sunbird taking care of the constructs, keeping the energy blasts at bay, and occasionally jumping in to help me x2,000 combo this b!+(#, it was only a matter of time before we had chipped almost every last piece of stone off of Goblins chest; all that was left was a big patch, about the size of my head, covering Goblin's upper left chest; naturally, things started to go south. His body started to surge lightly, like a tesla coil getting warmed up, and little by little, small pieces of his armor were starting to grow back, like skin regeneration but rockier. I tried to rectify this problem by summoning my sword and axe, and going hedge trimming, while Sunbird continued to help me out with her blazing constructs, super duper enhanced fighting strength, and what not. However, even between the two of us, oh i'm sorry 'three'; Thunder Man was still in the distance slashing down zombies, Goblin's armor was regenerating, regardless of how much I hit it, or Sunbird blasted it, hell, even Thunder Man, who I requested a lightning strike from, couldn't even faze Goblin that much anymore. Which brings me to my next point. GOBLIN IS A MOTHER F*(%!N# SUPER SAIYAN! No, hear me out. For those of you that are knowledgeable about the DBZ universe, you know that Saiyans come back twice as strong, after surviving a straight up ass whopping. Goblin was more or less like that. Keep in mind, we've been fighting this guy for at least half an hour, and in that time, he's progressed from crappy brawler, to kind of strategic, much faster, more energy using fighter. Seriously, in the last five minutes of our fight, my combo went from averaging at least 700 hits, to a measly 200. On top of that, his swordplay, whenever he chose to bring out those oversized cleavers, was improving by the second. If it wasn't for Nightcrawler's teaching, which I barely was able to keep up with, the fights with him would be more or less a repeat of what happened with Dragon Empress. Roll this all up in one, lay it out flat, and you end up with at least an extra hour to our fight time, if not an outright retreat in the making; I was having none of it!

SUNBIRD, THUNDER MAN!" I mentally shouted to my teammates. "THIS ISN'T WORKING, WE NEED A NEW PLAN!"

"YOU THINK!?" Sunbird shouted back at me. "SERIOUSLY SUPER-G, YOU ALMOST HAD THIS GUY ON THE ROPES BY YOURSELF, WHAT EXACTLY DID YOU DO?!"

"Remember the whole one-shot from far away thing we used on Venom? Imagine that, just shorter and more frequently!"

"Wait a minute!" Thunder Man jumped into the conversation. "That's it! That's what we need, another precise, heavy hitting shot, one that'll knock Goblin completely out of the park! Super-G, you did it once with Venom, you think you can do it again with Goblin, just bigger and better?"

"Dude of course I could!" I responded to him as I desperately blocked one of Goblin's downward slashes. "But i'd need someone to keep Goblin busy for a good second or two!"

Now believe me when I tell you, this is not the same thing you think it is. Ok, I want you to do something. Count to five with me, ready? 1...2...3...4...5. Now, what I want you to understand, is that in the time it took you two get to that number, I could've flew to Seattle, taken a selfie on the Space Needle, and flew back here without overstepping a millisecond. That's pretty fast, but also slow compared to my terms. Those seconds can drag like entire minutes sometimes, meaning that i'd have to leave Sunbird and Thunder Man on their own with Goblin, and believe me, with the way his speed has picked up, that was not a good idea at all.

"That's not a good idea you two!" Sunbird said, backing my thoughts up. "My Super Sunbird power is ticking down, i'm gonna need to put a lid on it real soon, plus I think it's safe to say that neither of us can really take Goblin effectively, not like the way Super-G can."

True. Blunt and kinda hurtful, but true.

"Well what about nuking?" I asked her. "You think if I shot this punk halfway to orbit, you could give him a atomic bomb to the face?"

"Absolutely not!" she immediately lashed at me. "Not only would that be way too much power than I have to dish out right now, but the explosion would carry over way more than what would be considered safe, even for us, what if planes or copters are in the area? I can't risk someone getting hurt."

"Ok, ok, I get it, just trying to brainstorm here. Like you said, it's not like I can just take a timeout anytime soon, and this guy's not going anywhere anytime soon unless we put him down, so what do we-"

An idea hit me so suddenly, Goblin may have well smacked it into my brain.

"Hold up!" I suddenly thought to Sunbird. "You can fly at the speed of light while you're all OP and stuff, right?"

"Yeah." she thought back to me. "What's that got to do with anything?"

"A punch delivered at like 300 million miles per second from around the world has gotta hurt, right?"

"Light isn't that fast!" Thunder-Man interrupted me. "It's only 299,792,458 miles per second!"

"It's called rounding, you nerd!" I lashed back at him. "Besides, how exactly do you know the exact speed of light?!"

"Ever since I got 100% of my brain unlocked, i've been slowly remembering everything i've ever seen, heard, or learned about, and I use to watch a lot of PBS with my mom when I was 10."

"Who the hell watches-"

"BOTH OF YOU SHUT UP AND GET BACK ON TOPIC!" Sunbird screamed into our heads, nearly causing me to jump into one of Goblin's fists. "SUPER-G, TO ANSWER YOUR QUESTION, YES. IF I HIT GOBLIN WITH THAT MUCH FORCE, MAYBE IT'D BE ENOUGH TO TAKE HIM DOWN, BUT I'M WAY TOO DRAINED! DON'T GET ME WRONG, I CAN MAKE THE TRIP, BUT IT'LL TAKE EVERYTHING LEFT IN MY SUPER SUNBIRD FORM, I WON'T HAVE ENOUGH ENERGY TO PUT AS MUCH BITE INTO THE ATTACK AS I NEED TO!"

"What if I help you?" Thunder-Man asked her. "I've got energy to burn, what if I help you out?"

"I doubt you can run at lightspeed Thunder Man, even in your fastest sprint, you can't keep up with that."

"Maybe not on my own, but with a boost from you, I can hack it at least once."

"Huh!?" Sunbird and I thought to him, because he was making no sense at all, maybe all that running he was doing was affecting his brain.

"Ha!" he smugly thought back to us. "The guy who watched PBS isn't looking so stupid now is he? Well my students, in a nutshell, heat causes molecules to move faster, if Sunbird can give me a jump start on a molecular level, similar to what I did to Super-G the other day, the boost should allow me to reach lightspeed not by increasing my speed, which it will, but by temporarily allowing me to piggyback off of Sunbird's vapor trail."

"That's cray Thunder Man!" Sunbird responded. "Even if I could do that, the risk would be way too high! What if I cook you from the inside out? Not to mention the fact that Super-G would have to fight Goblin alone for at least a minute before I literally get you up to speed!"

"I'll take that chance!" I snapped at Sunbird. "Right now we don't have a lot of options, Goblin is making a hell of a recovery, plus at the rate he's improving, he's gonna knock us all on our asses if we don't knuckle down and put him away! Sunbird, i'll be okay, Thunder Man will be okay, but you gotta believe in yourself! We need you Sunbird, we literally can't do this without you; please take the shot!"

Sunbird thought on it for a good half a sec, but after probably surveying her options hundreds of times over, she eventually came down to the realization that this was our best bet. By the way, in case you didn't notice, we had that whole team pow wow in under a minute, while fighting the forces of death; if anything, that was a testament to our ability to multitask.

"Ok," Sunbird agreed. "I'll do it, but i'll be damned if I leave you alone against an army of the undead, Super-G."

She clenched her fist, and a mini-sun materialized in the middle of the wheat field. Of course when I say mini, I mean the size of that Epcot golf ball. All of the zombie fodder that Thunder Man was hacking down, immediately got drawn into the flaming death ball, even Goblin was faltering a bit; which made it easier to whack him in the head with my axe.

"We'll be back!" Sunbird thought to me. "Keep this thing busy for me! Oh, and remember to keep him near the ground, some of us can't fly!"

"I heard that!" Thunder Man retorted.

"Good!" Sunbird responded.

With that, they took off into the distance, giving Goblin and I some quality time.

Lucky for me, Sunbird was keeping the mini-sun up and running, keeping the zombies off of me, and leaving me with plenty of room to focus on Goblin. Speaking of which, the fight wasn't exactly what I call a success. Without Sunbird keeping the constructs off of me, Goblin nearly pounded me with a barrage of purple constructs. I dodged most of them, and batted away most of the others, but i'm not saying I didn't get a missile or skull blast to the face or the back. I managed to push through that faze, but I knew without Sunbird, this fight would progress from annoying, to deadly; in other words, I needed to change the circumstances.

"What's the matter Goblin?!" I taunted him. "Too scared to fight me without your light show?! I thought you were better than that!"

I knew this would put the seed of doubt in Goblin's head. See, him and I had a little bit of a competitive streak going on here. I was the strongest of my group, he was the strongest in the area, and us strong people have pride, pride that makes us make stupid decisions, and accept stupid challenges; Goblin was no exception, well, at least not now. He snarled at me, lit his fists on fire, and charged me straight on; I charged him with just as much metaphorical fire and ferocity. The two of us clashed, and briefly exchanged punches before I managed to dodge one of his kicks, grab him by the arm, and fling him to the ground; now all I had to do was keep him there. I soared after him, and kept up the fighting, using everything in my arsenal of skills and weapons to keep Goblin at bay. Again, 'at bay' was about the best I could hope for. Goblin was striking back at me with just as much speed, and at least twice as much strength, I was only able to hold him off for about 30 seconds or so, which may have well been like half an hour, before I severely f*(# $ up. I hit Goblin with a furious punch and kick combo, not so much worried about causing damage to his armor, rather than keeping him grounded. This was working pretty good, but then I made the mistake of summoning my axe, and trying to decapitate him with a flail swing; Goblin simply caught it by the chain, and before I could even think about letting go of my end, yanked the chain towards himself hard, taking me along for the ride too. Immediately, I got a mountain breaking shot to the chest, sending me soaring backwards. I rammed straight into another fist that sent me up into the air, and soon after, felt the fury of Goblin's fists and feet in a really extensive barrage.

"WHAT'S THE MATTER BOY?!" Goblin taunted me as he was beating my ass. "YOU CAN TAKE IT CAN'T YOU, YOU CAN FIGHT BACK CAN'T YOU, YOU WON'T DIE BEFORE I HAVE MY FUN WILL YOU?!"

He planted a blazing fist deep into my face, sending me soaring forwards. I tried to move, I tried to defend, but I was way too numb to do anything, even if my body called for a Timeout, I doubt I would've been able to respond.

"THIS IS WHAT TRUE POWER IS, CHILD!" Goblin bellowed at me, as he delivered a powerful kick to my chest.

"THIS IS WRATH INCARNATE!" a punch lodged into my chest, actually cracking my armor.

"AND THIS IS THE FACE OF YOUR END!" a powerful hammer punch, sending me hurtling into Sunbird's mini-sun.

The sun managed to catch me in it's liquid fire, luckily, Sunbird had it set to it's only kill enemies mode. Through the roar of the golden blaze, I heard the sound of Goblin's thunder, and I knew what was sure to follow. Normally, i'd respond by flying out of the mini-sun knocking Goblin's bolt back at him, and continuing the fight, but I decided to be a bit more strategic than that. I knew that bolt would make this golden globe explode something big, that would give me the perfect cover to make a proper comeback. I waited until the bolt was about a few inches from the mini-sun, yeah, I was waiting for lightning to get into position. Once I was certain the explosion was well timed enough to give me a good amount of cover, I tapped into Blitz Extreme, rocketed forwards, and once the fireworks had gone off, rocketed back to Goblin, giving him a Super-G sized slash to the chest with my trusty axe. From then on, I just went off on Goblin,

hacking and punching away at him with that same mysterious surge of strength I had found a while back. It was definitely the idea of being someone's personal punching bag that got me all riled up, and you better believe I made Goblin pay something serious for that. Sure he tried to come back, occasionally blocking one of my strikes, or dousing me in a wreath of purple flames, but I either dodged his attack, and sliced off his arm, or summoned my sword and stuck it in his throat. Then, I simply went on with my brawl frenzy like nobody's business. I probably could've went on like this all day, maybe even turn the tide on the battle again, but in the distance, something caught my eye. A small bust of yellow and blue. I immediately, hammer punched Goblin to the ground, tapping into as much speed as I could to make sure I didn't mess up the plan. As soon as the guy hit the ground, things went blurry. A huge wave of lightning and sun energy exploded like a bomb, I didn't even have time to register what was happening, but I did know thing; Thunder Man and Sunbird did it, they just did an all around the world punch. I quickly floated down, looking frantically for them. I found Thunder Man, on all fours, wheezing and coughing. Sunbird was a little to his right, lying on her sides, singing something softly, trying to come down from Super Sunbird without going into cardiac arrest. So far, it looked like we were in the clear. That blastwave did way more than shatter Goblin's armor, it obliterated him completely, I couldn't see a single trace of him anywhere, but then again, neither could I see the ominous purple glow of the stone. I was just about to go on a flyby to look for it, but then life decided to bend me over and f*(# my $$!

A little ways ahead of me, maybe half a mile or so, a huge swirling vortex, big enough to completely swallow a city, made of purple energy, spurred out of the ground. At first I thought it was the roar of the winds that was making the deafening sound, but I soon realized, it wasn't the wind that was roaring. The vortex spun wildly for a good 10 seconds, and then gradually receded back into the ground. I desperately wanted to believe that was the end of it, that it was just a last minute dying flare from the stone; it wasn't. A huge dark purple flame shot into the sky, in the shape of a Goblin, as in the Goblin we just worked so hard to put away. He didn't say anything, he didn't roar, screech, or anything, he simply raised his hand, and shot out a dark ball of fire, about the size of the Epcot golf ball. I knew I couldn't knock that back, not even on my best day, which this clearly was not. No, I grabbed Sunbird and Thunder Man, and flew for my life. I darted to the left, making the mistake of thinking the blast was meant for impact only, so I nearly leapt out of my armor when it made a 90 degree turn and went straight for us. I tried to get some momentum going, and managed to dodge the blast for a good few seconds, but I was way out of it, and the thing was way too fast for me to get a good start. Just when I thought I was finished, the death ball exploded prematurely, and engulfed me and the team in one hell of an explosion. Normally, this would be the part where we all died, well, more like Thunder Man and Sunbird, but i'd probably follow them shortly afterwards. Anyway, the three of us crash landed into the ground; I used my body to take most of the impact. I immediately stood up and checked on my teammates. They were out cold. Thunder Man had some nasty scrapes on his face, but they were already starting to heal up; the same could be said for Sunbird, but it was pretty evident that the two were not gonna be going anywhere for quite some time. Well, in times of peril, count your blessings, and the truth of the matter is, with the amount of power surging through that ball, they should've been dead. But that ball exploded because it hit something, some kind of force field. Now that I mention it, I did remember seeing electricity flicker through the air, although I must've hit my head pretty hard, because I could've sworn it was green. I didn't have time to worry about that tidbit of trivia though, I had bigger problems ominously descending from the sky.

How do I put this delicately? Goblin looked like a savage! His armor had been completely repaired, and was surging with purple energy, like some sort of undead Tron warrior. His eyes were burning with purple fire, his talons sharper than ever, and his horns were now ram shaped, which oddly enough made him look twice as threatening. He summoned his new weapon, a gleaming black axe with purple highlighted edges. Whether it was for pissing me off, or just for the sheer irony of it, Goblin decided to use my own signature weapon against me; the thought of it was enough to give me another wind. I stood my ground and summoned my axe, ready to defend my teammates with everything I had.

"I finally see it now," Goblin said in a soft voice that sounded like an avalanche. "The inevitability of it, the way the world was meant to be. This sham, this mockery known as life, must be eradicated. The millions of dead that fuel me, are calling out to you, to everyone who draws breath on this wretched planet. JOIN THEM IN OBLIVION!"

Goblin charged at me, and my body went into Timeout. I immediately started kicking myself, Dr. Strange said that the stone would pour out millions of dead, once it hit critical mass. The stone must have injected all that energy into Goblin, fueling him with the strength of millions; I was toast. Still, I had to at least try to fight back, at the very least I had to protect my teammates. I ducked Goblin's strike, and crashed into him with my best flying tackle. I took him straight up into the air, which probably wasn't the best idea, and let him go with a hard right hook to the chest. I may have hit him with a pillow for all the good it was doing, because he didn't even flinch before coming back for more. Again, I ducked his wide swing, and summoned my sword to chop off the arm, but I was immediately blasted back with a ball of fire before I could capitalize on that move. Goblin didn't stop for a second, and i'd be dead if I were any slower. He summoned a black sword to go along with his axe, and we both went at it. The good news was that I was just able to keep up with Goblin's fighting, the bad news was, that was all I could do. Sure, I got some good rib shattering axe strikes to the chest, even a few stabs to the face, but at the end of the day, even 1000 of my best strikes weren't gonna do squat against this joker; all it would take was one of his, and i'd be toast. After fighting for a few minutes in mid-air, Goblin got tired to constantly missing, and getting constant love taps from my axe. The sky immediately crackled with purple lightning, and an entire battalion of lightning bolts started to surround me like some sort of electric web. I was having none of it, and immediately dived downwards. I was a lot faster than the bolts that were trying to fry me, but instead of getting comfortable with my lead, I decided to learn from my history, and take the safe road. When I made a sharp right turn, I kept my speed up and cautiously took a backwards glance. Just like I thought, the bolts were following me like flying snakes. Even worse, they were starting to fan out and cut off my flying room, meaning I had to up the zoom zoom by a lot. For a good minute or so, I bobbed and weaved between the various lightning bolts, it got really bad when I found myself having to limbo under the ones that kept doubling back. Finally, after getting pissed at being toyed with, I got an idea of how to break the cycle. Through all of the lightning bolts, I found a small opening that I could fly through, and soared straight at Goblin. I summoned my axe and hurled it at him as hard as I could. He moved his head and dodged like I hoped he would, and then I poured on the speed, reeling my right fist back for a hard flying punch. I knew Goblin knew nothing about my remote control axe, and wouldn't think to catch it, or bat it off course, so you better believe his face was priceless when my axe found it's way to his lower back at about 100mph. I kept Goblin off his game for as long as I could. I brought a hard right to his face, which should've sent him flying, but instead, just made his face vibrate. I didn't focus on that, I kicked him with a powerful reverse kick, which did send him flying backwards at an acceptable speed, and started my combo chain. I tapped into Blitz Extreme and went back and forth whacking Goblin as hard as I could with my axe, making sure to chop off the limbs to buy me some extra time. This bought me about a minute before Goblin stopped me dead in my tracks with a giant shield construct, and then sent me rocketing backwards with a powerful blast.

The fight was many things. Epic, Explosive, Destructive, Epic…but the one word that I feel accurately described it, was long and hard; yes I know that's two words. As soon as Goblin got his balance back, I wasn't able to get him off it again. We clashed in every way possible, routinely switching from weapons to brawling to me flying around trying not to get my ass fried with lightning, while at the same time, trying to find a weak spot to exploit. But for all my speed, strength, and skill, I was only good enough to not get killed. Seriously, for every ten hits I got on Goblin, he did twice the damage with two punches that probably weren't even at full strength. Goblin and I went at it for…well I don't even know how long. Whether it was in real time or Blitz, the fight dragged on forever. Every punch I threw felt like moving my arms though lead, every punch I received felt like a city being dropped on my body; and don't get me started about the lightning and constructs, just don't. I tried my hardest to cut him down to size, and believe me, I fought with everything I had and then some, but it just wasn't happening, especially since I couldn't find that surge of strength that I had awhile back. Still, I pressed on, actually getting a fabulous kick and punch combo off, with a little axe and sword strikes for good measure. It wasn't perfect, but it was doing something. Besides, i had basically deduced that if I was faster than Goblin, I could damage him frequently, without risking getting more damage done to myself; that plan was better on paper. Goblin was only able to absorb so much attacks before he got pissed off, and boy was he ever. On my tenth and final go around, Goblin blocked my punch and kick combo blow for blow, and before I knew what was happening, my vision went dark and purple. All of a sudden, sharp pain shot into every nerve in my body. It was like being cooked alive with fire that happened to be electrical as well, it was agony. I didn't know where I was, but based on the way I couldn't see a thing outside of my dark surroundings, I made a gamble, and deduced that Goblin was taking a page out of Sunbird's book, and had me trapped in some sort of torture sphere. I tried to move, I tried to get out, to be anywhere but here, but it was like reality kept shifting on me, I could barely tell which way was which, much less focus though the pain to free myself. Lucky for me, Goblin did it for me. I couldn't see it, I didn't know it was coming, but after about ten seconds in his torture sphere, I felt the familiar tinge of a high concentrated bolt of lightning strike me from the side. I shot out of the thing like a bullet out of a gun, confused and dazed something serious. I flew for about three seconds before I landed headfirst into familiar asphalt. Damn it, not the city again! I forced myself to get up, I had to move this fight somewhere else, I had already done enough damage, I had to protect the people from this. Goblin came after me with a roar, and I took off after him on foot. This seemed to confuse the big guy, which was all the better for me. As we got closer to clashing, I summoned my axe, and reeled it back, as if going for a throw, this earned a weak, but significant response from Goblin. When I made the throwing movement, Goblin dipped out of the way, and that was a major f*(# up. I willed my axe to extend into chain mode, and it shot out so fast, Goblin didn't even have a chance to move as the axe buried itself in his head. I took to the sky as fast as I could, and threw Goblin up higher; that was when I poured on the hurt. I tapped into Blitz Extreme, but this time, as fast as I could go. I started wailing on Goblin with all of my might, focusing on nothing but beating the guy senseless as I pushed him further and further into the sky. There were times when he blocked one of my strikes and tried for a counter, but I would either get in close and attack his mid section, or summon one of my weapons to make his limb count less. I took this gig up as far as I could, going so high that the sky was starting to look black in the distance. Then, I summoned my axe, decapitated Goblin's head and limbs, and pounded his torso with the strongest hammer punch I had ever dealt. This would put Goblin at about 3,000 mph as his body hurtled to the earth, but that wasn't enough for me. I flew after him, and started beating his chest down with my axe, desperately trying to crack that armor, and get that stone out of him. Apparently, desperation is a great motivator, because with every strike, more and more pieces of his armor were starting to crack and crumble off. I probably could've torn the whole thing apart, but Goblin's limbs decided to reattach to his body, and ruin the fun. And yes, Goblin did not take too kindly to me, violating him like I just did. Still hurtling at 3,000 mph, the two of us duked it out one last time. I got some pretty good shots on him considering the circumstances, but i'd be lying if I said he didn't get a few good jaw busters on me. Soon, I started to see the rough outline of the city again,; not a good sign, Goblin and I were basically a meteor that would've crushed the populace if we made impact. Instead of taking that lying down, I got in close with Goblin again, wrapped my arms around as much of him as I could fit, and moved him at a higher angle, ignoring the punches to the back. Finally, when I was sure that we were no longer a danger to the city, I fell back a bit, went back to combating Goblin, and once we were just a few hundred feet from the ground, I got in close again, hit him across the face with a seismic right cross, and a brutal hammer punch to the chest. This was the part where Goblin was supposed to fall into the grass, but he had other plans. No matter what you say about Goblin, he sure knew how to pull an ace out of his sleeve.

All of a sudden, I felt something large, heavy, and roughly the shape of a hand, slap me hard in the back, sending me careening into the dirt. This time, it was Goblin's turn to go ham on my body. He smashed right on top of me, turned me around, and started beating the hell out of me, and yes, every single punch hurt. I tried desperately to move, to defend, to even cry out in pain, but I was completely immobilized. My muscles were aching, I was out of breath, and it looked like the rest of my team were still out cold. Goblin was screaming something to me as he savagely beat me to a pulp, but I was way too out of it to discern any type of language. Finally, just when I thought he was gonna beat me to death, he picked me up, and backhanded me as hard as he could, sending me crashing into the city; this time, there was nothing I could do to prevent the damage from coming, I heard the thunder, and braced for the huge lightning bolt that that pelted me into the ground. I thought that would be the end of it, that I was dead and gone, but then I felt cuffs wrap around my arms and lift me out of the ground. Goblin was on the surface, waiting patiently for me, his sword drawn in hand. His smile was one of sick triumph as he wrapped his hand around me.

"A worthy opponent," he said to me solemnly. "But not worthy enough. No matter how hard you struggle, no matter how much you fight, death comes for all, and it will always win."

He reeled his sword back and thrusted it clean through me.

Several things went through my mind as the blade went through me. First, was how familiar the blade felt, as if I had been stabbed by it before. Then it hit me, Dragon Empress, her metal was sharp enough to cut through me; did her and Goblin trade regularly or something? The second thing I thought about was the prophecy of the Norn-Fates. They showed me I would die of a battle with Magneto, so why was this happening now? Was I so bad at being a person, that fate decided to kill me off early? Finally, as Goblin dropped me to the ground to bleed out slow, cold, and painful, I wondered why was I not dead already. Seriously, the blade he stuck me with was big enough to create a downwards line from my chest down to my navel, everything in that area should've been cut clean through, my heart for example. The point i'm trying to make is that I should've died within the moment that blade cut through me; after two seconds of coughing blood and moaning in pain, Goblin also decided that I was cheating at this point. He placed a foot on my legs, and raised his sword for the killing stab.

"Impressive," he said, deciding to taunt me further. "Even in death you struggle mightily. Take comfort in the fact that you died at the hands of the herald of death himself, and if nothing else, the afterlife should reward you greatly for such a mighty battle."

He brought the blade down, and everything went white.

(Jason's Perspective)

The last thing I remember before getting my lights knocked out, was running around the world with Allyson; that was such a good time, even if it was to take out a death crazed green giant. I didn't realize how long I should've clung on to that memory, because it was the last one I was gonna have for a while.

When I woke up, I was dazed and confused. My brain was hurting, my suit was peppered with holes, and Allyson was lying next to me completely unconscious. The scary part? Grant and Goblin were nowhere to be seen, or at least they weren't until they fell from the sky like fallen angels. I saw Grant get seriously blindsided with Goblin's hand construct, and then everything went blurry in a huge cloud of dust.

"Sunbird wake up!" I constantly yelled at her as I tried to shake her awake.

"Come on!" I continued, my heart racing as I heard an unnatural thunder erupt in the sky.

It was no good, Sunbird was out cold, and the sun was still covered by the storm clouds, she wouldn't be getting any solar first aid for a while. Still, I couldn't let that stop me. Grant needed BOTH of our help, and he was gonna get it. I snapped my fingers, lit a small sparkle of electricity on my finger,and carefully tapped Allyson's chest with it. The voltage pulsed through her body in a flash, and she woke up sputtering and screaming like a horror movie chick. It probably would've taken her a while to gather her thoughts together before we could successfully assemble ourselves, so I decided to speed up the process. I quickly grabbed her face in my hands, and made her stare at me.

"Super-G. In trouble. Fighting Goblin. Let's go!" I said in quick spurts.

That immediately got her out of her spasm, and she focused herself quickly, activated her Sun Form, and we raced to Grant's aid as fast as we could in our weakened states. I could see the electron trial that the huge lightning bolt had shot down from, and saw to my surprise and fear, that Goblin had moved the fight to the middle of the city. Even worse, Goblin was winning. It only took Allyson and I a good half second to reach the edge of the city, and we were just in time to see Grant, lying with a bloody line going down his suit, and Goblin raising a dark, blood stained sword, ready for the kill. I didn't say anything, I didn't even scream, I just felt the huge surge of power erupt in my chest, and let myself give way to instinct. I stopped dead in my tracks, as a huge wave of lightning erupted from my eyes and slammed into Goblin with the force of a train. This wasn't just two streaks of lightning shooting from my eyes mind you, it was like a Kamehameha being ejected from my eyes, big enough to destroy a high school. Goblin rocketed off into the distance, giving Allyson and I enough time to check on Grant. His chest was dripping with blood, the guy was coughing and wailing in pain, the sight of it was enough to make me wanna drop to my knees, and at the same time, gave me enough rage to sustain my will to fight.

Goblin was gonna pay for this.

"OH JESUS!" Allyson screamed. "GRANT! OH MY GOD, OH-"

Allyson started to sing, trying frantically to heal Grant up, but I could see Goblin start to rise up in the distance. She wouldn't have time for it. Not while she was here.

"Sunbird," I interrupted her, making sure to talk in Speed Mode for Grant's sake. "Back to the ship, now! Heal Grant, and watch him . I'll take care of Goblin from here. Go now!

"But-" she started to protest.

"NO BUTS! GRANT IS DYING, GOBLIN IS IN A FRENZY, YOU NEED TO GET HIM AND YOURSELF OUT OF HERE! DON'T ASK ME TO COME WITH YOU, WE CAN'T LET HIM HAVE THE STONE; I WON'T LET HIM HAVE IT, NOW GO!

"JASON PLEA-"

"GOOOOO! NOW! SAVE GRANT, GET TO SAFETY, ALLYSON PLEASE!"

I was honestly scared; this was more emotion than i've ever portrayed in my life, and I couldn't even tell what I was feeling, although I knew anger and fear were in there somewhere. The look on my face must've really portrayed that, because I saw the fight in Allyson just die on the spot. She bowed her head, and started to cry a little. I tried not to feel bad about that, but this was the second time i've made her cry in under a week; maybe I was the monster she thought I was.

"Beat him Jason!" she said through her tears. "But you better not die, you hear me?!"

She pressed the blue button on her watch, and did the same for Grant's. In a flash of blue, the two were gone without a trace, leaving me and Goblin to parley. I could see him flying at me as fast as he could, probably licking his chops at the thought of this easy meal, I mean who was I to Grant right? I created a huge shield construct in front of him, it cracked under the pressure of his charge, but it was enough to derail him a bit. I followed that up with a lightning geyser, sending him shooting upwards, and then bringing him back down with a lightning strike from above (in addition to a massive war scream). Keep this in mind, the last time I tried to take Goblin down with a lightning strike, he shrugged it off like a blanket. Now, my lightning strike had tripled in both size and power, if it were any bigger I would've destroyed more than I bargained for. My brain was telling me to dial it back, to cut down on the power and take it slow. I told my brain to shut the hell up and let me be. My body was surging with power and adrenaline, I could literally feel my molecules vibrating faster, doing weird things in my body. Now was not the time for dialing back, now was the time to go all out, and go for the kill. I ran towards Goblin, and hit him with a massive flying kick, shooting a lightning bolt out of my foot, and on the recovery, created a huge sledgehammer and nearly knocked him out of the city. I made sure to finish the job by giving Goblin a first class seat on the lightning train out of the town until we were once again halfway from the city; now I could really go all out without worrying about civilians. Goblin got up, dusted himself off, and flashed me with a really surprised look, like he was surprised that even lasted this long; I was infuriated, stray bolts of lightning just bouncing off of me absently.

"Humph," he said. "Crush one gnat, another one takes it's place."

He was gonna pay for that one.

"I will tell you like I told your friend," he continued. "Death comes for all, and death always wins, surrender now, and let me give you the sweet gift of oblivion."

"Death ain't $#!+" I responded.

Goblin roared and summoned his axe.

"You insignificant, impudent, speck of dust and grime, I will see that you suffer for all time! Your death will be but a footnote in my campaign for universal carnage. I will destroy you, then the Shining One, then everything that draws breath on this mockery of a planet. DEATH REIGNS SUPREME OVER ALL, PREPARE TO EMBRACE IT!"

Goblin raised his axe and flew at me like a missile. This guy beat my best friend savagely, and nearly killed him. He kept making threats against Allyson. He was threatening to kill everything on the plant. Worst of all, he pissed me off. I summoned my sword and counter charged with my own roar. No matter what it took, no matter how long it took, I was going to kill him!