20th June, 2020
Earving, codename Black Noir, felt the cold breeze of the night air caress his suit as he quietly made his way through the forest. The moonlight from above guided his sharp blade as he cut down the thick shrubbery in his way.
A squad of 3 Sentinel operatives trailed behind him, equipped with their signature matte-black Voughtanium armour, automatic KR-30 anti-material rifles, and their brand new standard-issue night vision goggles. They trained their weapons on anything that moved, their years of experience prompting them to stay vigilant and alert. They needed to be; they were up against a supe, after all.
But while the Sentinels may fear, they would never, ever run. That went against their years of training.
Individually, they were unlikely to win a head on fight against any superhuman that knew how to use their powers. But that didn't matter, that was just how it went when you were going up against a walking demi-god.
So long as they drew breath, so long as their hearts thrummed with life, the Sentinels would do everything in their power to make America's enemies regret taking up arms against democracy.
Earving would never say it, his entire schtick was to be the silent type, after all. But he was proud to serve alongside these men. They made him feel safer than any non-Phantom supe ever did, despite their inherent powerlessness.
Snap!
The sound of a twig shattering in half caused Noir to signal his squad to stop in their tracks. He crouched down, prompting them to do the same. In a split second, Noir holstered his knife, unclasped the M249 light machine gun on his back and swung it around with contemptuous ease, aiming it at the direction the sound came from. His squadmates followed suit.
Silence.
Noir's enhanced senses strained to detect anything in the immediate vicinity. Nothing.
But he didn't signal for his squadmates to move, something felt off to him. You could never be too paranoid when dealing with a supe.
"Do you guys see anything up ahead?" He murmured.
"Negative." Jayden, one of his squadmates, called out.
"Maybe it's a deer?" Kaine, another member of his Sentinel squad, suggested.
Before Noir could respond, a moving, charging mass sprung from out of a bush 40 metres away, making a beeline towards him and his squad.
"Contact!" Noir shouted.
Noir didn't even need to tell his squad to shoot before the air was filled with a cacophony of gunfire. Their KR-30's lit up the forest with tracer rounds, Noir's M249 adding to the barrage.
The mass, the supe, zig-zagged around trees and shrubbery with speed and dexterity impossible for a normal human, the force deposited from the supe's movements so great that he was kicking up dirt. Noir grit his teeth, the briefing beforehand didn't tell them that this man had super speed. He kicked his senses into overdrive, using his slowed perception of time to land more accurate shots.
Bullets ripped through birch, trunk and stem alike as if none of it were even there, but only Noir's found their mark.
Despite that, Noir's shots seemed to have little to no actual effect on the superhuman rampaging towards him.
"They didn't tell us he had enhanced durability either… Assholes…" He thought to himself in aggravation.
He tossed his M249 aside and stood up, curling his fists and getting ready to take the enemy supe head on; superhuman strength was deadlier than any gun, more often than not. Noir's squadmates glanced nervously at him before they stopped shooting, taking the chance to back off and let Noir handle the supe alone.
The supe got closer, and closer, and closer, his heavy footsteps shaking the ground beneath him. He let out a roar, the sound of it reverberating across the forest.
"You won't take my daughter away from me!" He screamed in rage.
The supe lunged at Noir with a yell.
Noir leapt into the air and knee'd the supe in the face, stopping the man's momentum with a crunch and sending him reeling backwards. He crashed onto the ground, blood flooding from his nose and staining the white tank-top he was wearing.
Before he could recover, Noir's squadmates flanked the grounded supe and unloaded their automatic anti-material rifles into him, finally able to land shots on the speedster without him moving out of the way. The bullets pierced through his clothing with ease, but they only managed to bounce off his skin.
Nevertheless, the supe began to scream as he curled up into a ball, covering his head with his hands to protect it. It didn't matter if he was bulletproof, bullets still hurt. The Sentinels didn't let up, round after round impacting the supe relentlessly and making him scream louder.
Noir signalled for them to stop.
The supe didn't get up; instead groaning in pain as he looked over his tattered clothes and his broken body.
Noir stood over him ominously.
"Fuck… You…" The supe choked out.
Noir lifted up his boot and stomped on the supe's head. The supe's breath hitched, but he didn't have enough time to process what was happening before Noir began stomping on his head over and over again. The supe let out gurgled sounds at first, but got progressively quieter as Noir continued to rattle his brain, rendering the supe unable to speak as his flesh peeled away.
CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!
The Sentinels watched with indifference, they were used to the brutal measures which needed to be taken in order to kill supes properly. They would've preferred shoving an implosion disk inside the guy's mouth, but those were running low.
CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!
Noir didn't stop, his enemy's skull now completely shattered open.
CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!
Noir took a step back to catch his breath, staring with dazed eyes as his gaze lingered on the supe's exposed innards. He watched as the man's fingers twitched, and stomped on his head one last time.
CRACK!
Earving glanced at the supe's corpse one last time as it went through instantaneous rigour mortis, the sound of his own breathing the only thing he could hear. He looked up, staring at the moon as it smiled down at him even through the great trees that stood in its way. The great celestial body watching from above as it lay far outside the reach of Humanity's hopes, dreams, despairs and nightmares.
Earving gazed upon the interstellar giant in all its shining glory, his eyes tracing the contours of its glowing form. Oh, how humanity blessed humanity was. To have the privilege to live in a world where they were able to thrive and breathe under such a marvellous… Thing. Earving would curse the creator that breathed life into him, for he would've been happy enough to be an insignificant pebble on the moon. Then, then he would be able to watch from his lunar throne as humanity toiled and died underneath him. He would exist above all of mankind's petty conflicts, above the superhuman child trafficking, above all the needless civil wars, above all the strife and grief caused by cruel men and the superhuman weapons that serve them. Forever and always.
A large, grey cloud crawled across the sky, its ever-reaching grasp darkening the forest around him and consuming the moon's light completely.
"We good now?" Kaine asked as he and the rest of the sentinels scoped the forest around them, getting ready to fire on any supes that wanted to make themselves known.
"Yeah," Earving mumbled, "we are."
The group began stalking through the forest once again, intent on tracking down the one thing they came here for.
"Why the hell did the Overlords not tell us about his super speed?" Calvin, one of Noir's more quieter squadmates, murmured irritably. "Supes with low enhanced durability aren't that hard to deal with, but surely those stuck-up assholes could have told us he was a speedster?"
"He was a low-profile supe before he went rogue," Jayden said helpfully. "He deliberately hid the fact that he had powers for a long time. Not many people knew he even had super strength in the first place, let alone… Any of what he just showed us."
"With powers like that? He could've been a solid hero," Earving said idly, "maybe even make it to the C-tiers."
"Assuming he didn't want to use those powers to work in… Construction, or something." Kaine said as he stepped over a big log.
Earving held a fist in the air, urging the squad to stop in their tracks.
"Fire," he whispered, "I smell fire."
"How far?" Calvin questioned, clearly on high alert.
"400 or so metres, that way." Earving pointed up ahead, where only he could make out a vague outline of a cabin far off into the distance. All 3 Sentinels raised their weapons, and the team silently followed Earving's lead as he guided them through the darkness.
As they got closer and closer, the Sentinels spotted plumes of smoke ascending from a small chimney on top of the cabin.
"Night vision off," Earving called out quietly, "there's fire inside."
The Sentinels did as he ordered, lifting their night vision goggles off of their eyes.
The team observed the cabin a bit before approaching. No windows to speak of and extremely small, the wooden house looked extremely unremarkable. Easy to miss in the endless void of darkness that characterised the forest at night. Inwardly, Earving figured that was intentional.
"On me," he whispered in the radio as he stood in front of the door, unclasping his M249 while he got ready to kick the door down. The Sentinels got into their positions, instincts honed over years of field work allowing them to stay calm.
Earving nodded at his team, his team nodded back.
Earving lifted his foot-
BOOM!
Earving flew backwards as the cabin exploded in a ball of fire and fury, the blaze consuming Kaine, Jayden and Calvin before they could react, annihilating them instantly.
Earving sat up, his beating heart and ringing ears the only thing he could hear. His vision was blurry and unfocused, but he could just barely make out the burning holes in his suit, mild burn marks emitting smoke in parts where his voughtanium padding used to be.
"Calvin…" Earving slurred out, "Kaine… Jayden? Are you there?"
Silence.
He realised he was hundreds of metres away from the burning cabin, and he silently marvelled at how powerful the explosion was as he watched the dozens of trees surrounding it on fire.
Earving wheezed as he stood up, observing the wreckage a second more before pressing a small button on the side of his helmet. The Overlords had been alerted.
The blaze grew bigger, reaching up into the sky like the hand of an angry god and illuminating Earving's surroundings in an orange hue.
A figure emerged from the middle of the fire. A small girl with long, red hair, blue flames covering her from head to toe.
She glared at Earving hatefully, her tears evaporating from the intense heat.
Earving reached for his gun, inwardly thanking the ADI's R&D division as he realised it was still in perfect condition.
The girl clapped her hands together, forcing the fires around her to obey, moving and flowing like liquid as they swam in-between her palms. The forest darkened around her as the only source of light left disappeared within her fingertips.
Noir held his M249 up, refusing to let her continue breathing as he held down the trigger and illuminated the forest once again with his muzzle flash.
The girl opened up her hands, revealing a hyper-dense orb of flame about the size of a tennis ball. The orb morphed, stretching into a titanic wall of blazing fury. The bullets melted on contact as they passed through the fire wall, shifting into small splotches of liquidated metal that harmlessly splashed against the girl's face and slid off her cheeks.
Noir growled in annoyance and tossed his gun away haphazardly, letting out an angry roar as he charged forwards.
The girl dispersed her fire wall as she spread her arms out, splitting it into smaller and smaller pieces until she was surrounded by dozens of floating, blazing cubes. She pointed her hands at Noir, causing the air to scream as the cubes flew towards him faster than a bullet train
Noir watched the cubes soar through the air, melting through wood and twig instantly as if they hadn't even been there, only darting towards him. He felt his skin tingle and goosebumps rise as the heated blocks of fire glided passed him. His mind moved at a thousand miles a minute, years of training and combat experience kicking his body into overdrive, the familiar feeling of danger sharpening his senses and allowing him to react to his oncoming doom.
Adrenaline pumped through his veins, forcing his heart to beat faster, his body to move quicker. Leg and arm worked in flawless tandem as he ducked and weaved past the flaming projectiles, small but loud explosions rocking the Earth as they missed him and veered off into an unfortunate tree or bush, generating more fires across the forest as dry wood was set alight.
The ground beneath Noir's feet shook violently as he ran across it, not being able to take the pressure of a human rapidly dispersing the force of a fully grown elephant onto it.
Noir crept closer by the second, the only sound he could hear over the explosions being his timed breathing and his rapid footsteps. The girl scowled as she gathered every fire cube she had left and reformed it into a smaller, more condensed ball of flame than the last one she'd made.
She looked up and stared Noir down.
Earving saw the rage, sorrow, and hate in her eyes.
She let out a piercing screech as the ball unleashed a beam of pure, concentrated plasma from its centre. The coin-sized stream of blue light melted everything nearby as it shot forwards, superheating the air and reducing its surroundings to molten slag despite how small it was.
Earving barely had time to blink as the beam pierced his left eye and travelled through his skull.
His legs stopped working instantly, causing him to stop running and haphazardly fall over, uncontrollably rolling across the ground for a painful few seconds until his body finally ran out of momentum.
He could feel a searing pain thundering in his head. It hurt, but at the same time he felt like there was an entire chunk of his face that he couldn't feel, it was weird. Earving didn't want to go through this sensation ever again, fortunately (or unfortunately) for him, he didn't think she was going to allow him to go through anything again.
The girl appeared in front of him, staring in silence at the gaping hole in Earving's head. It was almost comical in a way. 20 years of working in the field, and now he's here, failing to beat a 5 year old after losing his entire squad.
She watched him squirm, like a predator watching its prey bleed out.
"...You killed dad to get to me, didn't you?" She spoke in a hushed whisper.
Earving didn't respond. His singular eye met her piercing gaze unflinchingly.
"Who are you people?"
Earving remained quiet. He didn't even think he was capable of speaking, and he wasn't even sure how he was still conscious. Maybe it was his body's limited regenerative abilities doing their magic?
Whatever it was, he much preferred just dying.
The girl waited for an answer, until finally letting out an exhausted sigh and pointing a finger down at him. Earving could feel the still-hot burn wound she carved into his head begin to stir, and his stomach dropped as he came to a daunting revelation.
She didn't control fire, she controlled heat, she controlled temperature.
Earving could feel the already-burnt flesh in his skull beginning to get hotter, as if someone had shoved a piping hot bar of steel through his left eye and left it there as it seared his insides.
Earving didn't even bother screaming, he barely had enough energy to keep his eye open, let alone shout.
"Answer the question and I'll stop."
Earving stared up at her defiantly, less because he was brave, more because that was the only thing he could do.
The girl grit her teeth in anger, rotating her hand as if she were twisting something. Earving winced as he felt the pain grow stronger.
He remained silent.
She kept at it, but after a minute of ever-growing, constant and agonising pain, she relented, finally realising that torturing a now-mute was a pointless endeavour.
She let out a tired sigh as she dropped her hand to her side. Earving felt a world of relief as the head-splitting pain disappeared… Mostly… It still hurt like hell.
She kneeled down, her gaze seeming to pierce into the very essence of Earving's soul.
"Why?" She asked with a half-whisper, "why'd you come to hurt us?"
Even if Earving retained the ability to speak, he wasn't sure if he would've been able to give her the answer she wanted.
The girl stood back up, if her pained stare meant anything, he had to guess that she was currently agonising over whether or not to kill him.
A part of him didn't mind if she did.
The silence of the forest was interrupted by the increasingly loud thundering of a helicopter's rotor blades. She turned her head towards the direction it was coming from, before giving him one last glance and disappearing into a contour of fire and flame.
Earving laid there for a bit, silently contemplating everything that had happened thus far as the helicopter floated above. Its searchlight pierced through the treeline and bathed him in white. Earving scowled, only closing his singular eye in order to prevent himself from being blinded. The constant rotation of the helicopters blades sent leaf and twig from the trees flying every which way, kicking up dust as it descended further and long lines of polyester ropes dropped out of its side doors.
The ropes hit the ground with a thud, the only thing he could see being the outlines of three men rappelling down, and one supe - a woman - descending towards him.
He closed his eye, and slept.