chapter 7.4
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"Could you maybe not smoke when we're all about to die here?! Wasn't it you in that stupid commercial telling kids drugs aren't cool?" Butcher demanded, turning to face Soldier Boy. He had a hand grenade in his grip, which was prompting increasingly worried looks from Annie.
The old hero sat calmly on a stool, leafing through a Playboy from 1984 and smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. Annie was doing her best to stand as far as possible from one of her childhood idols, since whatever he was smoking seemed very much illegal in their state.
"Yeah, I was in it, and I was goddamn great. So go ahead and call me the uncoolest son of a bitch on earth," Soldier Boy answered without lifting his eyes from the magazine, taking a long, slow drag. Butcher stared at him with a frown but said nothing more.
Silence settled over the room for a while. Butcher worked through his arsenal and checked his traps. Soldier Boy kept smoking and browsing the vintage adult magazines, though his expression, Annie noted, suggested he wasn't particularly interested in them.
"Um, I know it's a little late, but maybe we should try to actually coordinate?" Annie said with an awkward smile, doing her best to lighten the mood. "Worst case, we're going to be fighting the greatest hero on earth, and it'd be better if we were ready…"
"First of all, he's at best the greatest dipshit on earth," Soldier Boy said, raising a finger. "Even out of shape and with whatever's in my blood right now, I can kick his ass. Second, sweetheart—I'd suggest you stand back and let the grown men handle things. A woman's place is in the kitchen and on pretty magazine covers, not brawling with real men. We have a plan, and we're sticking to it."
"What about Liberty and Crimson Countess? Was their place 'in the kitchen' too?" Annie asked with genuine curiosity, frowning, doing her best to ignore his other remarks about her.
"The second one actually understood her place pretty well, which is why she almost never got in the middle of men's business. Almost never…" Soldier Boy's frown deepened, and with his mood clearly soured, he set the magazine aside and burned through the rest of his cigarette in one drag. "Liberty was a different breed entirely. Women like her wrap men around their fingers and then tear off anything they consider unnecessary. God, she was incredible in bed though. I remember during the first Herogasm, she and I—"
"Oh, shut up already. Makes me sick just listening to you, I might actually throw up," Butcher said, grimacing, as he moved his weapons bag aside. "Can you two be quiet for five minutes?…"
He didn't finish. His eyes had landed on Starlight, who had gone rigid and was staring at the ceiling with wide eyes.
"…He's close," she said quietly, breaking into a run toward the generator. "I can feel some kind of vibration above us, like someone trying to drill through ten meters of rock and steel. Though I'm not sure even Patriot could actually do that…"
"Never underestimate how that half-wit manages to be stupid and strong at the same time." Butcher had already bolted to the monitors. "Either the idiot couldn't find the hidden entrance to the bunker, or he simply couldn't be bothered dealing with it and just decided to—"
A tremor rolled through the entire underground shelter, answering his question better than any words could. Within seconds the ceiling cracked apart—steel turned red-hot and split—and a man in a blue suit with an American flag on his cape dropped through the gap. The blond man was clearly in an elevated mood, his eyes blazing red as he scanned everyone in the room.
"Bit of a gloomy place you've got here," the greatest superhero on earth said with a gleaming smile. "Convenient, though—all my targets in one spot. No need to split up to either persuade you… or handle things a bit more forcefully. Though I notice I'm not seeing the one responsible for this whole gathering. Where's Mark? I don't feel like giving my speech twice, so just tell me where he is."
"Running a little late to tell you where to go, so I'm covering for him. You piece of garbage—nobody invited you here to throw a dinner party," Butcher practically shouted. "How's this for a welcome?"
Moving fast, he produced a device that Patriot had never seen before, something resembling a homemade water pistol, leveled it at the hero, and triggered it with a manic grin. Patriot, accustomed to scenes like this, didn't bother dodging. He simply stood and let the attack come, smile firmly in place.
His complacency cost him. Instead of bullets or a wave of fire, a green-yellow stream hit him directly, immediately eating through his costume on contact—and when the liquid caught him in the eyes under pressure, even he felt a small sting and burning itch.
But the psychological damage far outstripped any physical harm a normal human could inflict. The stunned Patriot froze in place, arms spread, still not quite believing what had just happened.
"What… what is this? Have you all lost your minds? Do you understand that I'm going to tear you all to pieces now?!" the hero stared at himself in genuine shock, then raised his furious gaze. Whatever impulse he'd had to make a speech evaporated entirely, replaced by the desire to start a massacre.
"Relax, moron—they wouldn't let me have any real fun, so I just filled it with sulfuric acid. Honestly didn't think it'd work. But at least it got your attention and bought us some time," Butcher answered with a wild grin, snapping his head to the side. Wisely, because an instant later the entire room went white with a blazing golden flash.
Patriot, still somewhat dazed, had barely been paying attention to the girl who'd grabbed hold of the wires. While they'd been talking, she'd been absorbing the energy of an entire generator—bought and fully charged specifically for her. All of it saved for a single attack.
When a pale luminous glow wrapped around her figure and her eyes blazed with molten gold, she rose several centimeters off the ground, raised both hands toward Patriot, and unleashed a pure torrent of light. For a superhuman who could see a needle from orbit, this was deeply unpleasant.
The beam itself only pushed him back a couple of centimeters and scorched his already-battered costume, leaving it riddled with holes—but the real damage landed in his eyes. Blinded, hands pressed to his face, he couldn't dodge Soldier Boy coming at him at full speed. The old hero drove a hit straight into his liver, then grabbed the blond and drove him into the concrete wall.
The wall cracked on impact. The cracks multiplied when Soldier Boy put a wide, full-force punch directly into Patriot's face and drove him deeper into it. Taking full advantage of the moment, the old hero launched into a sustained combination—targeting the head, liver, throat, and face in sequence. Every new stone-shattering hook left only minor bruising on Patriot's body, but the sustained hammering to the skull was the point—it kept him from recovering long enough to fight back.
Then Patriot absorbed another uppercut, clenched his jaw in fury, and snarled. His eyes blazed red in an instant. Two crimson beams hit Soldier Boy's body and flung him to the opposite end of the room.
"Told them I needed a shield…" the old hero groaned, trying to get up—only for Patriot's fist to crash into him at superhuman speed, immediately shattering several bones and sending him airborne again.
The impact was powerful enough that the old hero's body punched clean through the concrete wall and blew into the next room. Soldier Boy hit the floor, covered in dust and blood, and spent several seconds fighting his way back to consciousness—long enough to make out the silhouette looming over him.
"Pathetic, decrepit old man!… You seriously thought you could stand against me? I am a god! I am a true hero! I am the most powerful being on this entire earth!" Patriot leaned over him, screaming with fury.
"You're the strongest? Have you seen your little cape lately? You're nothing but a sad imitation of me," Soldier Boy said with a smile—then in one smooth motion brought his hands together in front of Patriot's head and drove a specially prepared titanium spike directly into his ear.
Patriot screamed in pain but managed one last strike. Tearing the spike from his bloody ear, his eyes fired again—a beam far more powerful than the last. The crimson torrent of energy caught Soldier Boy instantly. Even with superhuman endurance, his body began to blister with burns, visibly smoldering where the beam made contact.
But before Patriot could finish it, a rocket hit him from behind. It didn't wound him, but it made him turn—and there was the man who had managed to humiliate him. Butcher was already grinning, dropping the rocket launcher from his shoulder and throwing himself sideways at full speed, barely clearing the crimson beam that sliced through stone and steel without resistance.
The hero, capable of crossing a continent in a matter of hours, shot out of the room at superhuman speed, and in a single lightning motion seized Butcher by the throat and lifted him off the ground. Cutting off his air, Patriot watched his prey with a bloodthirsty smile, savoring every second.
"Some little insect thought it could wrestle a mountain? Compared to me you're nothing. Every single one of you…"
Once again the hero couldn't finish his speech—cut off by a sound loud enough to be deafening even through the loss of one ear. In the split second that Patriot lost his bearings, Butcher acted. He pulled a syringe from inside his coat and in one motion drove the needle directly into the hero's eye.
It didn't puncture, and resisted badly—but a professional soldier had enough force to open a small wound. Which was all that was needed to deliver the compound that Frenchie had developed.
Every superhuman was orders of magnitude tougher than a normal person, but even Patriot had weak points. Vought and the government had studied them for decades, and there were ways to get through even the most durable heroes. Butcher had memorized all of them during the years he'd spent preparing for exactly this fight.
Patriot screamed again and hurled Butcher aside—sending him crashing into a steel table, his body partly caving it in. Bones cracked. Butcher lost consciousness instantly from the pain and the head trauma.
Patriot had already forgotten about him. His attention moved to the last opponent still standing. Starlight hovered above the ground, blazing like a star after absorbing an enormous amount of energy, her whole figure pouring out light. What stood out most in the image she cut were the thick headphones she'd put on, shielding her from the speakers roaring behind her.
"Sorry, but I'm done being in a good mood."
When both of Patriot's eyes filled with red light again, Annie answered immediately, releasing her own wave of pure light. The two streams of energy collided, and for a stretch the field was held at a stalemate. Wounded, Patriot couldn't push to his full output—and the very fact that he wasn't simply overwhelming her was driving him into a rage.
Abruptly he cut off his beam—and her torrent of light slammed into his chest and threw him back several meters, leaving a serious burn across his torso. The beam kept burning for a few seconds longer, but then it began dropping off sharply, shrinking until it died completely and the burning stopped entirely.
Patriot was done talking. He crossed the distance to the girl at devastating speed and put her down in under a second, throwing her back against her own generator. His intention had been to take her head off—but she turned out to be considerably tougher than he'd expected.
He didn't have time to finish any of them off. First he needed to deal with the main threat that Sage had warned him about. Until very recently, he had been absolutely certain that no one could pose a genuine danger to him—but his opinion had shifted after the first real fight of his life. For the first time, someone had actually hurt him, and damaged something he valued far more than his body.
He didn't like that. Not even slightly.
He swept the area with his X-ray vision, then drove a single punch through the meter-thick steel door blocking the passage to the laboratory. It came down in pieces. A moment later those blazing red eyes fixed on the figure lying on the table inside—the one who was his actual target.
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