Alex Mercer found him first.
It happened in the ruins of Midtown, where skyscrapers lay gutted like cathedral corpses and the infection breathed openly.
Red biomass pulsed along walls, whispering in rhythmic frequencies only the infected could hear.
Mercer landed hard on a collapsed avenue, boots cracking asphalt leaving a deep port hole, blade already forming from his arm, he was stronger than canon at this point, give or take 1 to 2000tons .
He frowned at my presence
Something was wrong.
The virus around him recoiled at sensing a possible threat with the potential to consume it .
Tendrils slithered away from an unseen center, flattening as though pressed beneath a vast, invisible weight.
Then the man stepped out of the dust.
Human. Average height. Dark coat. Calm posture. No visible mutations.
Mercer's instincts screamed at him to attack immediately without holding back but he waited wanting to gather information first.
"You're not one of mine," Mercer said, voice edged with threat.
The man smiled faintly. "Neither are you."
They moved at the same time.
Mercer struck first, whipfist tearing the air apart, capable of bisecting tanks. It connected and stopped. The strike sank inches into the man's torso and froze, as if embedded in a black hole wearing skin.
The man looked down at the weapon piercing him.
"Too loud," he said softly.
The street imploded.
Not exploded but it collapsed. Asphalt folded inward, cars crushed into metal fossils as gravity localized around the man's feet as he stopped holding back some of his mass.
Mercer barely escaped, launching himself upward, claws digging into a building's side.
He attacked again. Blades. Hammerfists. Muscle mass pushed beyond known limits.
Nothing worked.
Every strike fed him.
The man's body rippled, not outward, but inward, absorbing force, biomass,and most importantly identity.
Mercer felt it then: something pulling at his code, unraveling the lie he called himself.
"You're not the virus," Mercer snarled. "You're just another puppet."
The man's eyes darkened.
"No stupid, you're the puppet and... ," he said. "I'm the end of your story ."
He moved faster than Mercer senses could perceive.
A hand closed around Mercer's face, fingers phasing through skull and memory alike. There was no scream at all, only a sudden, absolute silence as Alex Mercer was pulled inward, molecule by molecule, thought by thought.
Blacklight devoured Blacklight.
Mercer fought inside him, reshaping, rewriting, but the difference in scale was obscene.
Twenty thousand tons of perfected mass crushed Mercer's adaptive genius like paper between tectonic plates.
His memories shattered, Penn Station, the morgue, the lies, the rage, all of it was consumed, stripped, cataloged, and some useless were simply erased.
In seconds, Alex Mercer ceased to exist.
The man stood alone in a cratered street, steam rising from his biomass . His face remained human, unchanged. Inside him, something vast settled, recalibrated.
He exhaled.
"Disappointing," he murmured.
Miles away, deep beneath a Blackwatch command bunker, alarms wailed.
Technicians stared at screens showing satellite feeds of the battle feeds that glitched, warped, bent around the man's presence. Generals watched Mercer's signal flatline.
"That wasn't Mercer," one whispered.
A scientist swallowed hard. "Sir… mass readings suggest localized gravitational distortion. Whatever that thing is, it's folding matter."
Silence followed that statement .
Then a general spoke, voice cold. "Conventional weapons are obsolete. Viral containment is obsolete."
A schematic lit up the central display: a ring of impossible geometry, space folding in on itself.
"Project Wormhole ," the scientist said. "Experimental wormhole displacement. If we can't kill it… we remove it."
"And if it comes back?" someone asked.
The general stared at the screen where the man looked up directly at the satellite.
"Then we pray," he said, "that wherever we send it… is worse than here."
The Mc tilted his head, as if listening.
And smiled I should think of a name for myself.
End of the chapter