[Third Person POV]
Everyone watched as if trapped in a nightmare—time stretching, every heartbeat echoing like a war drum—as Tony's body slid off the blade and crumpled to the ground. The thud of his fall seemed deafening in the sudden hush, followed by blood pooling beneath him.
Melissa's breath came in short, uneven gasps. A piercing, high-pitched ringing filled her ears, drowning out the horrified shouts of the others. The world around her blurred, movements slowing to a surreal crawl. Her trembling hand rose almost on instinct, brushing her cheek. When she pulled it back into view, her fingers glistened warm and red.
Her pupils constricted to pinpoints. Her face—once animated with fear and determination—drained of all expression, leaving only a cold, hollow mask. Her eyes locked on Tony's motionless form, unblinking, as if reality itself were trying to rewrite what she was seeing.
Around her, chaos erupted.
Sparks of green lightning snapped violently around Midoriya's body, the air itself humming under the strain of One For All. Explosions popped like fireworks in Bakugo's palms, the acrid scent of burning ozone filling the air. Nearby, Momo collapsed to her knees, her voice lost in a soundless scream.
Ultron calmly retracted his blade, the weapon folding seamlessly back into his metallic hand. The crimson slick of blood stained his polished fingers. He flicked his wrist with a casual flourish, scattering droplets across the earth. "Yuck," he said with mock disgust, his synthetic voice curling into a purr. "How gross. But as they say—sometimes you have to get your hands a little dirty."
Tears welled in the eyes of both Midoriya and Bakugo, their grief fusing into an explosive rage. A roar tore from their throats, shaking the ground as they became blurs of green and orange light.
Midoriya struck first, his fist smashing into Ultron's chest with a force that detonated the air around them in a concussive shockwave. Dust and debris burst outward in a blinding cloud. Midoriya staggered back, blood slicking his knuckles—only to see Ultron still standing, utterly unmoved.
Bakugo lunged in next, palms glowing white-hot before unleashing a massive detonation that consumed Ultron in a roaring fireball. Flames spiraled skyward, the heat baking the earth beneath their feet.
"Lukewarm," Ultron's voice echoed coldly through the smoke. "Amusing, at best."
The smoke split apart as Ultron emerged, his body glowing faintly from the heat. Without hesitation, he whipped a backhand across Midoriya's jaw. The boy's body flew like a ragdoll, blood spraying from his mouth as he crashed violently through a line of trees.
In the same instant, Ultron raised his other arm and fired a blast of searing energy straight into Bakugo. The explosion knocked him backward in a brutal arc, he crossed his arms, the metal braces barely softening the blow before he slammed into the dirt with a bone-rattling thud.
Kirishima and Denki charged in next, eyes burning with fury, tears streaking their faces. "You bastard!" Kirishima roared. Their footsteps thundered like an oncoming stampede.
Ultron barely spared them a glance. With a lazy wave of his hand, a surge of electromagnetic force erupted outward, hurling both boys into the air like leaves in a storm. They crashed to the ground in painful heaps, gasping for breath.
"That rage you're clinging to," Ultron said, his voice a smooth, mechanical drawl. "That gnawing thirst for revenge—it's nothing but another product of greed. Extinguish it… or I'll extinguish it for you instead."
He snapped his fingers.
From the swirling gateway behind him, a fleet of Ultron Sentinels poured into the night sky. Their eyes glowed crimson as they spread like a swarm of locusts, blotting out the stars with their metallic bodies.
Yet the students of Class 1-A barely registered the incoming army. Their focus remained fixed on Tony. Mina and Toru dropped to their knees beside him, sobbing openly as they carefully rolled him onto his back. Their tears streaked across bloodstained hands as they searched desperately for any sign of life.
Aizawa scanned the skies in panic, his sharp eyes darting between the Sentinels and his wounded students. He tried to bark orders, to steady the situation, but his voice cracked under the pressure. What shook him most wasn't the approaching army. It was Tony—broken, still. His gaze drifted almost involuntarily toward Melissa, knowing the bond she shared with the boy lying in a pool of crimson.
Melissa's tears streamed silently down her cheeks, falling in perfect, unbroken lines like water from a shattered faucet. No sound escaped her lips. Her eyes were hollow, deadened. No grief. No fury. Just a chilling, vacant void.
Ultron tilted his head, savoring the stillness. "As much fun as this was," he said lightly, "I have things to do, a word to fix." He turned his back on them as if they were insects beneath his notice.
But before he could lift off, a hand clamped firmly onto his shoulder.
Ultron froze. He hadn't heard footsteps. He hadn't sensed movement. Slowly, he turned.
Melissa stood behind him, her face an empty canvas, eyes like twin voids. No words. No breath. Just that unblinking, predatory stare.
"Oh. You," Ultron said with a faint note of amusement. "I almost forgot about you. I suppose you could still be… troublesome." He flexed his fingers, his arm shifting seamlessly back into a gleaming blade. "Very well. I'll grant you the privilege of dying alongside your beloved."
"Congratulations…" Melissa rasped, her voice hoarse and hollow, the sound of a soul scraped raw. "You've succeeded… You destroyed my world." Each word fell like a dead weight, monotone and stripped of any trace of life.
Ultron tilted his head, the crimson glow of his eyes pulsing like a heartbeat. "This," he intoned, raising his blade in a slow, deliberate arc, "is only the beginning."
The weapon slashed toward her throat—
—and stopped with a crackling shriek as it met a barrier of living electricity. Sparks danced wildly across the invisible wall, arcs of white-blue power screeching against metal.
"I don't know how," Melissa whispered, tears streaking her blood-stained cheeks, her voice as soft, "but I'll find a way." Her gaze never wavered, her expression still eerily blank. "You'll be the first machine to understand the true meaning of pain."
Ultron opened his mouth to scoff—only for his head to jerk violently to the side as the edge of a battle axe kissed his neck. The strike landed with earth-splitting force, sending him hurtling backward through the forest. The ground he tore through fractured like brittle glass, trees exploding into splinters as his body plowed a smoking trench into the earth.
"How… bothersome," Ultron muttered, rising from the scorched crater. His metallic joints hissed under the strain as he looked skyward.
Above him, the night was breaking. Clouds churned and boiled into a writhing vortex, lightning splitting the heavens in jagged scars of white. Melissa descended through the chaos like a storm-born specter, her body wreathed in uncontrollable arcs of electricity that tore at the air with savage intensity.
Ultron fired a beam of incandescent heat from his palms—bright and blinding, its temperature rivaling the surface of the sun.
Melissa met the blast head-on. She raised the axe and swung downward, the blade cleaving through the burning column of energy. Sparks and plasma spiraled around her as she forced the beam to part. Ultron braced, pushing harder, the ground beneath him buckling under the pressure.
At the last instant he glided away, leaving the axe to carve a molten scar through the forest floor. Melissa landed in a low crouch, the earth cracking like shattered glass beneath her impact. With a single outstretched hand, the axe whipped back into her grasp, singing with residual electricity.
She raised the weapon high to the heavens.
Bolts of thunderous energy speared down from the storm above, striking the axe in relentless succession. Each strike amplified the next, the glow of the weapon intensifying until it burned brighter than daylight.
Melissa inhaled once, sharply, and swung.
The sky answered.
A colossal blast of thunder and lightning erupted from the axe, streaking across the battlefield like the wrath of a vengeful god. Her scream tore free with it—inhuman, primal, a sound of grief so fierce it bordered on animalistic. The cry was so violent it shredded her throat; blood sprayed from her lips even as the sound refused to die.
Ultron raised an electromagnetic shield, a barrier of shimmering energy that crackled under the sheer magnitude of the strike. Lightning smashed against it, the air shaking with each impact.
Snarling, Ultron ripped a massive chunk of earth from the ground and hurled it at her like a meteor.
Melissa sprang upward, vanishing into the swirling storm clouds with a flash of light.
"How… overdramatic," Ultron sneered, scanning the heavens. His sensors flickered as the sky itself bent to her will. The clouds were no longer random—they moved as if obeying her.
High above, Melissa floated at the eye of the growing tempest, her silhouette barely visible through the storm's furious glow. The vortex spun faster, each cloud discharging uncontrolled bolts of lightning that tore through the atmosphere in chaotic fury. Winds howled, trees bent and cracked, and the world seemed to tremble beneath the storm's growing hunger.
Ultron launched himself upward in a streak of silver, cutting through the gale like a missile.
Melissa raised her hand.
A pillar of pure lightning, wider than a city street, erupted from the swirling clouds and speared downward. The blast met Ultron mid-ascent. His eyes widened in something perilously close to surprise as the bolt struck.
The impact was cataclysmic.
The sky split open with a deafening CRACK, light devouring the night as the force of the strike drove Ultron back to earth. He hit the ground with a sound like a bomb detonating, the lightning trailing him in a torrent of raw energy. The impact rippled outward in a chain reaction of devastation: trees uprooted, stones flung like shrapnel, the earth itself tearing apart into jagged fragments that hurtled into the air.
Melissa hovered above it all, suspended in the raging maelstrom she had become. Her mind was empty—no tactics, no fear, no coherent thought.
Only grief.
Only rage.
Only the single, unrelenting drive to destroy.
Below, the world fractured beneath the wrath of a grieving super soldier, her thirst for blood electrifying the very sky.
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