The smoke cleared and they reached an expanse that looked like the street in front of the hotel and other residential buildings. Mateo's boots crunched on broken glass and concrete dust as they surveyed the damage. They saw the hole through the building where Man 1 had fallen through—a perfect silhouette punched through brick and steel like it was cardboard—and crashed on the ground. Obviously still unharmed.
Mateo was at least grateful no one was in these buildings they were tearing through like paper mache. If the heroes won this two-and-a-half-year battle, he wondered how they would deal with the collateral damage. How do you rebuild a city when every block looks like a war zone?
The man paused on the ground, standing perfectly still, as if waiting for them. Several parts of his suit and pants had been torn apart or burned, revealing unnatural bulges of pure muscle coiled underneath like steel cables. He was waiting. His cold eyes bearing down on them, devoid of emotion or recognition.
Who would make the first move? Mateo thought as they approached, but his question was answered before he could finish the thought.
Man 1 dashed forward like a launched missile, but Alex's reflexes were faster, as if she had been training her whole life for this exact moment. Her push factor activated, sending him flying backward like a piece of debris, but he recovered mid-air and charged forward as if inertia was just a suggestion, not a law of physics.
"That's not normal," Akira breathed, bringing out the electric net Reeves had given them. She threw it with everything she had at the man's head, but the nets were meant to immobilize, not kill. Even then, the man tore through it like it was nothing more than an annoying cobweb caught in his face.
They scattered out of his path like leaves in a hurricane. Henrik flanked to the man's left side, bringing up the taser tuned to lethal voltages and striking at the man's ribs. The electricity arced across his suit, but he barely reacted—raising his fist to crush Henrik into paste until Alex activated the pull part of her quirk, yanking the boy to safety.
Mateo stepped in from a distance, holding up the 5kg iron block at his hip and attaching it to a slime tendril, turning it into a makeshift flail. He heaved the block at the man's skull with enough force to crack concrete, and just like with his kick, the man caught it effortlessly and hurled it in the opposite direction with monstrous strength.
Mateo, still gripping the flail, was yanked along with its trajectory—but this was part of his plan, using even the kinetic energy meant to attack him. As he was thrown backward, he created more tendrils and attached them to the tops of the buildings he passed. The tendrils went taut as he slowed, like a rubber band stretched to its breaking point.
"We're killing this guy, right?"
Henrik's voice crackled through the radio comm between pants and grunts, his headpiece somehow still connected even through the chaos.
Reeves had told them not to kill anyone unless absolutely necessary. Below, his teammates were fighting for their lives, barely surviving. They couldn't even defeat him, let alone restrain him. Even if they somehow managed to immobilize him, his strength would tear through any bindings like wet tissue.
This is absolutely necessary, Mateo thought grimly. "Yeah," he said into the comm. "We take him down."
The admission felt like crossing a line he couldn't uncross.
Mateo forced the slimy fluid from his skin into the gauntlets, feeling the pressure build as he adjusted it to devastating force—enough to hopefully make a difference, but not enough to shatter his own bones when he used it.
He launched himself forward, the cylinders groaning and flashing with pneumatic hisses. The tension snapped and he shot like a cannonball, g-forces stronger than anything he'd faced before pressing against his chest until his vision started to tunnel. His heart hammered against his ribs so hard he thought it might burst.
But even as he rocketed toward Man 1, the masked figure turned and sent a casual backhand that practically neutralized his momentum and sent him crashing into the street. The impact drove the air from his lungs and left his ears ringing, but somehow nothing was broken.
How is that possible? The physics made no sense. That punch should have liquefied him.
As Mateo gasped for breath, Man 1 struck at Akira, who barely managed to block with her Japanese war fan. The metal bent under the impact. Dong stepped in, shifting from wolf form to an emerald snake in seconds, attempting to bite at the man's neck, but the fangs barely scratched the surface before he grabbed the serpent and hurled it like a stuffed animal.
For a terrifying moment, Mateo watched Dong hit the wall with a sickening crack and wondered if losing her companion would kill Akira too, or just leave her quirkless and broken.
Behind Man 1, Alex surged forward, landing a square hit on his muscular back with her brass knuckles. The impact should have shattered vertebrae, but it merely seemed to irritate him. He rotated his torso with inhuman flexibility and attempted to swipe at her when Henrik unleashed another devastating barrage at the man's center mass. The bullets pushed him back maybe an inch.
Mateo groaned in pain and frustration, tasting copper in his mouth. This was going nowhere. They were fighting randomly, desperately, hoping to accumulate enough damage to matter. But their opponent was simply too strong. Too fast. Too resilient. Too everything.
The only reason they weren't all corpses was because there were four of them, each covering the others' backs.
"This is ridiculous!" Henrik spat, literally—blood spurting from his mouth as he spoke. He'd gone on overdrive with his merge quirk, and he looked almost out of ammunition. Alex and Akira were still hitting Man 1 hard, but Mateo could see them tiring out, their movements getting sloppy. "How can someone have more than one quirk? That's impossible!"
The question had been gnawing at Mateo since the fight began, but there'd been no time to think it through. These abnormal people had super strength, super speed, near invulnerability to physical damage, and rapid regeneration. They'd never even heard of someone with two quirks before, let alone four.
And the way they moved—not like humans with unique fighting styles and egos visible in their techniques, but more like machines whose sole purpose was to create death and destruction.
Mateo's mind flashed back to what the man in the white coat had said when he was paralyzed. They were taking specimens for quirk extraction, for someone named 'King'—or maybe King was just the leader of the whole villain organization.
Is this how they use the stolen quirks? The thought made his stomach lurch. By turning already superhuman soldiers into unstoppable killing machines? If so, it would explain how the heroes kept losing and the villains kept winning. Not only could the enemy spy on them, but they could steal their abilities and stack powers like building blocks.
They needed a change of strategy. Something desperate and insane.
"Guys," Mateo grunted through the comm, wiping blood from his nose. "Can you keep fighting for ten more seconds?"
"What do you have in mind?" Akira said as she barely dodged an incoming strike that would have taken her head off.
"Three things," Mateo replied, his plan crystallizing even as he spoke it. "First, we Overwhelm."
As the three of them desperately held their ground, Mateo attached a slime tendril to a nearby building. Taking a running leap, the tensile material went taut and flung him skyward like a human trebuchet.
One.
As his speed built, Mateo attached another tendril to the side of another building. His momentum carried him until it built tension in both lines, snapping him back like a catapult and doubling his velocity.
Two.
He repeated the process, shooting himself farther each time, gaining more speed, adding more tendrils to increase the total tension. Each swing happened in one-second intervals, his body subjected to forces that should have torn him apart.
Three. Four. Five.
His vision started to blur from the acceleration. His organs felt like they were being rearranged.
Six. Seven. Eight.
The g-forces were crushing. His suit was starting to smoke from air friction.
Nine. He barely managed the count internally, his ten seconds almost up. Then aloud, so the comm picked up his strained voice: "Alex!"
"Gotcha!" She gave a vicious smile, sunlight glinting off her teeth like a predator's. Mateo was already speeding in her direction at terminal velocity—all part of the plan.
Jumping back and positioning herself carefully, she closed her fist, and the pull factor of her quirk engaged. Mateo was already slowing down naturally when Alex yanked on him, dragging him further back and stretching the slime tendrils past their breaking point.
The deliberately thick slime cables screamed under the tension, their surface attachment points on the buildings crumbling under the stress. Mateo could feel them about to snap and prayed they'd hold for just one more second.
Man 1 noticed something was wrong—some kind of trap being set—and dashed away from Henrik and Akira toward the real threat. But Alex and Mateo were quicker.
"Don't get yourself killed, dummy," Alex yelled, almost affectionately, as she released her hold on him.
Instantaneously, Mateo shot forward like a ballistic missile, attaching the tenth and final slime tendril to another building. The wind roared against his mask so violently he thought his face might be torn off. The sudden acceleration was so extreme that blood rushed away from his brain and he blacked out for a terrifying moment, his body experiencing forces normally reserved for fighter jets.
When his vision cleared, he was almost at cloud level, the vertigo making his stomach flip as he gazed down at the cityscape. The buildings looked like toy blocks from here. The explosions and collapsing structures seemed almost peaceful in their silence.
For just a moment, suspended between earth and sky, he felt like he could escape it all.
Like I'd actually want to do that, Mateo thought as he reached the apex of his flight, knowing this was just the calm before the storm unleashed hell.
This was his three-part plan in action: Overwhelm.
He could feel the extreme tension in every fiber, every cable about to tear apart. The attachment points were failing. He wasn't even sure he'd survive the descent, let alone the impact.
The plan was simple: since regular attacks weren't working, they'd settle for one single, devastating strike to end this.
But none of them were optimistic. If Plan A didn't work, they would move to Plan B.
Mateo stopped completely at the peak of his arc, floating above the world like a falling star waiting to ignite, and then gravity claimed him.
He shot downward with the force of a meteor, and prayed this would be enough.