Chapter 87: Chapter 87: Soldier Boy (4) (Bonus Chapter)
"You’re fast, kid," Soldier Boy called out, his voice calm, turning his body in a slow circle to track the sonic booms. "I’ll give you that. But you’re sloppy."
A-Train didn’t listen. The adrenaline was screaming in his ears. He banked hard off the side of a concrete building, launching himself directly at Soldier Boy’s face, intending to drive his fist straight through the old man’s skull.
A-Train closed the distance in a millisecond.
Soldier Boy raised his left arm, holding the heavy brass shield out at neck height, rigid as a steel girder, stepping perfectly into the path of the speeding hero.
A-Train, moving at over a thousand miles an hour, ran throat first directly into the unyielding edge of the solid brass shield.
The sound was a catastrophic CRACK that echoed louder than a gunshot.
A-Train’s forward momentum was arrested so violently that his body flipped completely backward in mid air. The vertebrae in his neck shattered instantly. His trachea was crushed flat.
He hit the ground in a tangle of broken limbs, sliding across the concrete, leaving a long smear of blood behind him. He rolled to a stop at the base of a burning jeep, his body twisted at horrific angles.
Soldier Boy walked over to the broken speedster at a leisurely pace.
A-Train was still alive, paralyzed from the neck down, his eyes wide and rolling in panic as he choked on his own blood, unable to draw a breath through his collapsed throat.
"The problem with running away from your problems," Soldier Boy said, standing over him, "is that eventually, you run right into a wall."
Soldier Boy raised the edge of his shield high into the air, the brass gleaming with the reflection of the flames and brought it down like a guillotine.
The edge severed A-Train’s neck completely. The fastest man alive lay perfectly still in the dirt.
"That’s two," Soldier Boy announced, turning his attention back to the center of the courtyard.
While The Seven engaged in their chaotic strikes, the five armored Red Unit had reorganized their formation.
Red Five, standing at the rear of the formation, vanished.
Size Alteration (Tier 3).
He shrank down to the size of a grain of rice. To him, the battlefield became an impossibly vast landscape of towering fires and mountainous debris.
He sprinted across the concrete, his tiny legs pumping at blurring speeds. His objective was simple: infiltrate Soldier Boy’s physical defenses.
If the skin couldn’t be broken from the outside, he would enter through an orifice, the ear canal or the nasal passage and expand his armored mass directly inside the brain cavity.
Red Five scaled the side of Soldier Boy’s combat boot, racing up the fabric of his tactical pants, navigating the heavy web gear, moving toward the exposed skin of the neck.
Soldier Boy paused. His Tier 1 Enhanced Senses picked up the microscopic vibration of tiny boots on his tactical vest. It felt like an aggressive armored flea.
He waited until he felt the tiny vibration reach the collar of his shirt, making a leap toward his ear.
With lightning fast reflexes, Soldier Boy brought his right hand up, slapping the side of his own head with a tremendous clap.
To Red Five, moving through the air, the massive hand descended like the hand of an angry god.
SQUELCH.
The six hundred pound Mark IV tactical armor, condensed into the size of a rice grain, was incredibly dense.
But caught between the immovable object of Soldier Boy’s skull and the unstoppable force of his Tier 1 palm, the armor crumpled.
Red Five was crushed instantly, his internal organs turned to a microscopic paste within the tiny metal shell.
Soldier Boy lowered his hand, wiping a tiny smudge of red and grey off his palm onto his pants.
"Fucking bugs," he muttered.
Red Four stepped out from the formation. He raised his armored hands, focusing the absolute totality of his Tier 3 Telepathy directly at Soldier Boy’s frontal lobe.
He used his power as a blunt instrument, a psychic battering ram designed to cause a massive neurological short circuit.
SLEEP! the command echoed in the psychic plane, a localized hurricane of mental pressure.
Soldier Boy gritted his teeth. A thick stream of blood instantly poured from his left nostril.
The pressure inside his skull was immense, a white hot migraine that threatened to shut down his motor functions. The world swam before his eyes, the edges of his vision going black.
He stumbled, dropping to one knee, planting the edge of his shield on the ground to keep from falling over completely.
Red Three stepped forward, aiming both gauntlets at the kneeling, mentally suppressed hero. He unleashed a concentrated beam of absolute zero energy.
The cryokinetic blast slammed into Soldier Boy, instantly coating him in a thick layer of opaque white ice.
The temperature around him dropped so rapidly that the very air shattered, snow falling instantly from the sky.
The ice forming a crystalline prison that locked Soldier Boy into his kneeling position, freezing his joints, encasing his shield and creeping up over his face.
"Do not let up!" Homelander screamed, diving out of the sky.
The remaining combatants realized this was their only window.
Homelander landed ten feet away, his eyes flaring with maximum intensity. He unleashed a continuous beam of heat vision directly at the block of ice encasing Soldier Boy.
"Hit him with everything!" Homelander roared.
Maeve scrambled out of the rubble, her face a mask of cynical desperation. She knew if he broke out, they were all dead.
She sprinted forward, leaping high into the air and brought her heavy silver sword down with all her remaining strength, aiming to cleave the ice and the man inside it... in two.
Starlight, having recovered her breath, raised her hands. She channeled all her power into a searing beam of concentrated photons, blasting the ice block from the opposite side.
Red One charged forward, rearing back a massive armored fist and delivered a devastating haymaker to the side of the ice, adding massive kinetic trauma to the elemental assault.
Red Two teleported directly above the fray, dropping heavy chunks of concrete debris down onto the target like localized artillery strikes.
