Panic was a contagion, and it was spreading through the Pit with venomous speed. The Syndicate soldiers on the arena floor were trapped between two impossible choices. In front of them, Kael advanced, an avatar of calm, inevitable doom. Above and around them, the screams of their comrades echoed, signaling an unseen, slaughterous force. Their chain of command had been decapitated, their leader publicly humiliated, his secrets broadcast for all their enemies to see. Their discipline shattered.
One soldier, his nerve breaking completely, raised his rifle and squeezed the trigger, spraying a frantic stream of automatic fire at Kael.
The crowd of onlookers across the city, watching on their secure feeds, leaned in. The soldiers in the Pit flinched. Silas Kane's eyes widened with a sliver of desperate hope.
The bullets left their barrels. They crossed the ten feet of open air.
And they stopped.
They halted in mid-air, a foot from Kael's body, hanging suspended as if caught in thick, invisible amber. The kinetic energy vanished. The deadly projectiles simply hovered, their brass casings gleaming under the floodlights.
Kael didn't even seem to notice them. He continued his slow, deliberate walk forward, the cloud of frozen bullets moving with him like a deadly halo. The soldier who had fired the gun stared, his mouth agape, his rifle slipping from his nerveless fingers and clattering onto the sand. The sight was not just impossible; it was sacrilegious. It was a complete rejection of the laws of physics.
"My stage... my armor... my men..." Silas Kane snarled, his terror transmuting into the last bastion of the cornered beast: pure, unadulterated rage. He was the Butcher. He was a Section Chief of the Chimera Syndicate. He would not be rendered obsolete by this... thing.
"I'LL CARVE THE ORGANS FROM YOUR BODY!" he bellowed, his voice a guttural roar of fury. He charged, his heavy armor thundering on the sand, kicking up great plumes. He swung his massive cleaver in a vicious, horizontal arc aimed at Kael's neck. The blade, honed to a monomolecular edge, whistled through the air, powerful enough to sever a bull's head in one blow.
Kael didn't dodge. He didn't block.
He simply raised his left hand.
The cleaver, a masterpiece of sharpened steel, slammed into his open palm.
There was no clang of metal on bone, no spray of blood. There was only a dull, dead thud. The force of the blow, which should have sheared through Kael's arm and deep into his torso, simply ceased to exist. The blade stopped dead, its edge pressed harmlessly against his skin.
Silas stared, his eyes bulging from behind his helmet's visor. He put all his weight, all his strength into the blow, and it was like trying to split a mountain with a hatchet. It didn't budge. It didn't cut. It didn't even leave a mark.
"Pathetic," Kael whispered, his voice dangerously soft. His obsidian eyes met Silas's terrified gaze. "This is your power? This is the might that terrorized a city?"
His fingers closed around the blade of the cleaver.
With a sound like tearing granite, Kael tightened his grip. The hardened steel blade, Silas's signature weapon, began to groan, bend, and then crumble into a shower of metallic shards in his hand. He crushed it into useless scrap as if it were a piece of dried clay.
Silas stumbled back, unarmed, his mind reeling. The symbol of his power, destroyed with a casual squeeze.
Kael took a step forward. "My turn."
He moved. He wasn't a blur; he simply ceased to be where he was and reappeared directly in front of Silas, inside his guard. Kael's fist, moving at a relaxed, almost lazy speed, slammed into the center of Silas's breastplate.
The impact was silent for a fraction of a second, and then the sound hit: a deep, resonant BOOM like a church bell being struck by a meteor.
The custom-forged plate armor, designed to withstand high-caliber rifle rounds, didn't just dent. It exploded. A shockwave of force radiated outwards, shattering the breastplate into a thousand pieces of shrapnel that ripped through the air. The remaining soldiers on the floor were thrown back like dolls, their bodies peppered by the flying metal.
Silas himself was launched backwards, flying a full thirty feet through the air. He hit the concrete wall of the arena with a sickening, wet crunch of breaking bone and rupturing organs. He slid down the wall, leaving a thick, gory smear of blood, and collapsed onto the sand in a heap of twisted limbs and shattered armor.
The arena fell into a profound, ringing silence. The distant screams had stopped. The broadcast feeds now showed only static. The only ones left standing on the arena floor were Kael, and Jax, who was trembling in the VIP box, his face the color of chalk. The old woman, Mrs. Gable, had fainted, slumping against her chains.
Kael walked calmly over to the broken form of Silas Kane. The Butcher was still alive, somehow. His helmet had been torn away, revealing a face contorted in agony. His chest was a concave ruin, his breathing a shallow, gurgling rattle. Blood poured from his mouth.
"Please..." Silas wheezed, his voice a broken parody of his former arrogance. "Mercy..."
Kael crouched beside him. "The people you carved up," he asked, his voice genuinely curious. "Did you grant them mercy when they begged?"
Silas could only weep, his body convulsing in pain.
"I didn't think so," Kael said. He placed a hand on Silas's armored leg. "You are known as the Butcher. It seems only fitting that you experience your own art."
He began to pull. Slowly. Deliberately.
A sound ripped through the silent arena that would haunt the nightmares of everyone listening. It was not the clean snap of a bone. It was the wet, tearing, rending sound of muscle, tendon, and sinew being ripped from their anchor points. Silas shrieked, a sound of such pure, unholy agony that it barely sounded human.
Kael tore the man's leg from his body at the hip, armored boot and all. He tossed the severed limb aside with disinterest.
He then moved to the other leg.
And then the arms.
One by one, he systematically and brutally dismantled the Butcher, limb by limb, keeping him alive through the entire process. Silas's shrieks became hoarse, gurgling pleas, then devolved into mindless, animalistic screams of torment that echoed across the empty stage.
When he was done, Silas Kane was little more than a living, screaming torso, a monument of bloody, twitching meat lying in a pool of his own filth and blood. His eyes, still conscious, were wide with a madness born of unimaginable pain.
Kael stood, wiping his hands on his trousers, though they were perfectly clean. He looked up at the VIP box, his cold gaze locking onto Jax.
"The trash has been taken out," Kael said, his voice calm. He gestured to the screaming, dismembered torso of his former boss. "Send a message to the Hydra Council. Tell them I accept their declaration of war. Tell them the Butcher was just the appetizer. The feast has just begun."
He then turned and walked away, leaving the living torso of Silas Kane screaming under the harsh glare of the floodlights, a final, horrifying broadcast to the darkest corners of Aethelburg. The reign of the Butcher was over. The age of the FEARBREAKER had just been christened in blood and agony.