A scientist tried to run. Red Three dropped a hand and touched the floor, a jagged trail of ice surged forward, instantly welding the man's legs to the concrete, which snapped off at the ankles as his momentum carried him forward.
Red Two teleported around the room, appearing behind fleeing staff. He grabbed them, teleported them ten feet into the air and dropped them. Or he teleported them halfway into a wall.
Red Four walked calmly through the chaos. A guard aimed a pistol at him. Red Four looked at him.
"End it," Red Four whispered.
The guard's hand shook. He slowly turned the gun, placed the barrel in his own mouth and pulled the trigger.
Within two minutes, the staff of Project Odessa were dead.
Red Four tapped the side of his helmet, his internal HUD cycling through various spectrums before locking onto high contrast thermal. "Thermal imaging is active. They are in the stasis wing. To the left."
They walked into the stasis wing. It was a long hall lined with glass pods and medical beds. Tubes and wires ran from the ceilings, feeding fluids into the wasted bodies of the subjects.
"Waste products of the Homelander project.," Red One noted, reading the charts at the foot of the beds.
Red Five shrank down to the size of a rat. He moved to the first bed. The subject was a man with gelatinous skin… a Tier 5 mutant whose bones had dissolved years ago. He was kept in a tank of nutrient gel.
He climbed the tank. He dove into the gel. He swam to the subject's face. He placed his tiny hands on the breathing tube inserted in the man's throat and squeezed. He crushed the man's trachea beneath it. Bubbles rose. The heart monitor was flatlined.
He moved to the next. A woman with feathers growing out of her eyes. He resized to one foot tall, standing on her chest. He drew his combat knife… and drove it into her heart.
Red Four moved down the line of Tier 5s. He placed his hand on the forehead of a comatose patient whose skin secreted acid.
"Shutdown," Red Four commanded.
He sent a psychic spike directly into the medulla oblongata, commanding the heart to stop beating. The monitor turned into a solid tone.
…
There were seven Tier 4. One was a man made of living stone, but he was cracked. Another was a woman whose body temperature was so high she had to be kept in a liquid nitrogen bath.
Red Three approached the stone man. He placed his hand on the stone chest. He lowered the temperature until the atomic bonds of the stone structure failed.
Thermal shock.
CRACK.
The stone man's chest shattered into dust.
He moved to the woman in the nitrogen bath. "You like the cold?" he asked. "Have more."
He drained the heat from the nitrogen itself, taking it down to absolute zero. The woman's blood crystallized instantly. Her heart shattered inside her chest.
He moved down the line. A boy with elastic skin that had stretched too far and never snapped back. He froze him solid, then tapped him with a finger. The boy shattered like glass.
…
There were three Tier 3.
The first was a massive figure, strapped down with metallic weave chains. His skin was gray, like old iron.
"Regeneration," Red One said. "Annoying."
He grabbed the subject's head. He squeezed. The sound of the skull collapsing was like a car crusher. The regeneration factor tried to knit the bone back together, but Red One kept squeezing until the brain was paste. He tore the head from the body and tossed it into the corner.
The second Tier-3 was telekinetic. She was lobotomized, but her power flared unconsciously, rattling the bed frame.
Red Two touched the woman's arm.
Pop.
They vanished.
Pop.
Red Two reappeared alone.
Red One looked at the concrete wall. A human hand was protruding from the stone, lifeless.
The final Tier 3 was a man whose body generated lethal radiation. He was kept in a lead lined box.
Red Three approached the lead glass. He placed his hands on the glass. The lead grew white with frost. The man inside, glowing with green energy, began to dim. The cold sapped the energy, slowing the atomic reaction. The man shivered, his glow fading to a dull pulse.
Then Red Three clenched his fist. He froze the fluid in the man's eyes, expanding it until it pierced the brain.
Red One and Red Two went to the equipment lockers. They began grabbing the multi million dollar sequencers, the centrifuges and the scanning arrays.
Red One touched a massive electron microscope. It vanished. He touched a rack of servers. Vanished.
Red Two teleported around the room, touching the heavy machinery mounted to the ceilings.
Touch. Vanish.
Touch. Vanish.
Within ten minutes, the facility was stripped bare.
Red Four was standing at the main terminal. He had plugged a data spike into the port. "Copying... Encryption bypassed. Downloading... Complete."
He typed a command. "Drives formatted. Overwriting with garbage data."
Red One reached into his inventory… accessing the shared storage of the host… and pulled out the incendiary canister.
He walked to the center of the empty lab. He placed the canister on the floor.
""Timer set. Sixty seconds," he said.
They formed the chain again. Red Two took point.
"Jump one."
Pop.
They were at the blast door.
"Jump two."
Pop.
They were at the courtyard gate.
"Jump three."
Pop.
They were in the woods, the facility lights fading behind them.
"Jump four."
Pop.
One kilometer out. They stopped.
Red One looked back. Through the trees, the ground rumbled. A muffled thump echoed from the earth. Then, the ventilation shafts protruding from the ground in the distance began to spew fire.
"Jump five."
Pop.
They materialized inside the moving vehicle.
The car accelerated, the autopilot disengaging as Red One took the wheel. They drove for thirty minutes, heading deeper into the state, towards a known black site operated by General Raddock…
They pulled the car off the road, hiding it in a dense copse of trees less than a mile from Raddock's base.
They stepped out of the car. They stood in the dark woods, the lights of Raddock's base visible through the leaves.
In unison, they relaxed their hold on the physical world. The armor, the bodies, the weapons… it all turned gray, then smoky.
Five figures dissolved into mist. The mist swirled for a moment in the night air, then shot upwards, streaking across the sky, returning to the source in New York City.
PS: There are 20+ Advance chapters available on the Patreon for those who want to read ahead. www.patreon. com/Drrajnovel