Marcus floated in the silent void, a conductor watching his orchestra of chaos reach its crescendo. He cataloged the escalating power levels with clinical interest. The test subjects burned brightly and desperately, their strength fueled by their own dwindling life force. Homelander, supercharged by Vought's serum and the Void's corruption, was a raging, golden god of destruction.
But it was A-Train who was the most fascinating. He had not been merely enhanced by the Void; he had been fundamentally rewritten. When Vought's serum hit his system, it didn't just boost his speed; it catalyzed a complete metamorphosis.
Now, when he moved, there was no blur, no rush of wind. There was only a flicker of blue static, a brief distortion in space, and then the result. One of the test subjects, a hulking brute who could manipulate concrete, raised his hands to crush a bus. In the next instant, his head simply exploded in a shower of gore. A block away, A-Train came to a halt, the air around him crackling with ozone, not even breathing hard. He had become a living glitch in reality.
The chaos wasn't limited to the supes. From shattered office windows and rubble-strewn rooftops, a third faction had joined the fray. Ordinary men and women, their faces grim with hatred, armed with high-caliber anti-materiel rifles. They were opportunist, those that had experience what Billy Butcher had experience in the hand of supes, taking advantage to dispense their own brutal justice, their heavy rounds powerful enough to punch through the weaker, distracted supes.
Marcus saw it all, another welcome variable. It was time to take a more direct hand.
His Limbo form dissolved into a shimmer of energy, which then coalesced and solidified into the sleek, powerful armor of Mag. As he sat on an unseen throne high in the sky, he extended his power, a subtle magnetic pull that reached down into the carnage below.
At first, no one noticed. As the battle raged, tearing the city apart, something strange began to happen. A steel girder, ripped from a collapsing skyscraper, did not fall. It simply stopped in mid-air and began to drift upwards. It was joined by twisted rebar, sheets of aluminum siding, and fragments of shattered cars. A slow trickle became a stream, then a rushing river of scrap metal, flowing silently into the sky.
The air grew cold. The light began to fail.
A supe, panting for breath after dodging a blast of lightning from Stormfront, looked up, confused by the sudden twilight. His jaw went slack. The sky was gone. In its place was a churning, grinding maelstrom of metal, miles wide, blotting out the sun like a man-made apocalypse. A low, metallic groan, the sound of a city's skeleton being held in agonized suspension, filled the air.
From the center of this iron cloud, a figure descended, seated upon a throne forged from twisted subway cars and steel I-beams. It was Mag.
"Good," his amplified voice boomed across the battlefield, cutting through the sounds of combat. "It seems you've finally noticed me."
He raised a hand. The churning mass of metal above them stopped its slow rotation. Then, with a sound like a thousand anvils striking at once, the entire cloud compressed. Countless tons of scrap were crushed and reshaped by an unimaginable magnetic force, forming millions of razor-sharp, javelin-like projectiles, all aimed downward.
"You have all played so nicely in my sandbox," Marcus declared, a cruel amusement in his tone. "It is time for a new game."
With a flick of his wrist, he unleashed them. It was not a fall; it was a launch. Propelled by a wave of pure kinetic force, the spears screamed through the air, a hypersonic torrent of metal death that targeted everyone on the battlefield without distinction.
The war between the supes stopped instantly. Survival became the only imperative.
Two ruby-red beams shot from Homelander's eyes, frantically sweeping the sky, superheating and vaporizing dozens of spears, but a thousand more took their place. Stormfront threw her arms wide, conjuring a massive tornado of wind and lightning that deflected a section of the metal rain but struggled to hold against the sheer, overwhelming mass.
All across the battlefield, desperate pockets of defense erupted. One supe created a fragile, cracking dome of ice over his small group. Another, whose power was to charge inanimate objects with explosive energy, became a human anti-air gun, hurling chunks of concrete into the sky to detonate the spears above his head. A hulking man with skin like granite simply hunkered down, the metal projectiles pinging and thudding against his body, some embedding themselves inches deep into his flesh.
The rain of iron stopped as abruptly as it began. The silence that followed was deafening. The ground was a forest of embedded spears, and scattered among them were the bodies of the less fortunate, impaled so many times they looked like grotesque, bloody hedgehogs. The number of combatants had been cut in half.
Clap... Clap... Clap...
The slow, deliberate sound of applause echoed in the ruins. Marcus, stepping off his throne and onto a floating metal plate, descended to just above the rooftops.
"Your performance," he said, his voice dripping with condescending praise, "was even more exciting than I imagined."
Before the words had finished echoing, a coordinated blast of red and white energy shot towards him. Homelander's heat vision and Stormfront's lightning, a desperate, unified attack from the two most powerful supes left standing.
Marcus didn't even flinch. A shimmering, hexagonal energy field materialized before him, and the laser vision splashed against it harmlessly. At the same time, the metal spears still embedded in the ground around him acted as a massive lightning rod, drawing Stormfront's attack and grounding it with a deafening crackle. The metal fragments still swirling around him formed a protective cage, absorbing the stray arcs of electricity.
He looked down at the two panting, horrified leaders of the Seven.
"You've been given new life, new strength..." he said, his voice a low, dismissive murmur. "And yet, you are still just toys in a box. My box."
Marcus's dismissive tone, a verbal pat on the head to a group of gods and monsters, hung in the silent, debris-strewn air. It cut through the shock and terror of the survivors, striking the raw nerve of their pride. For the test subjects who had never seen this armor before, the equation was simple. This being had just slaughtered dozens of their own. He was the enemy.
"You think you can just play with us and walk away?" a supe whose hands were wreathed in roaring blue flame snarled, stepping forward from the group of survivors. His ego, already inflated by his new power, couldn't tolerate being called a toy. "That was your last mistake, you freak!"
He thrust his hands forward, unleashing a massive wave of brilliant blue fire, a torrent of heat so intense it began to melt the metal spears still embedded in the ground around him.
Marcus watched the attack approach with an expression of profound boredom. To use the power he had granted to attack him was like a candle trying to burn the sun. It was not merely futile; it was absurd.
He raised a single, armored finger.
The blue flame wavered, then stopped dead in mid-air, held in place by an invisible force. The hot-tempered supe's eyes widened in confusion, and then his feet lifted from the ground. He was hoisted into the air, choking as an unseen pressure enveloped him.
Slowly, deliberately, Marcus curled his finger, clenching it into a fist.
The supe's body folded. There was a sickening cacophony of snapping bones and tearing flesh as he was compressed inward, his limbs and torso twisting together into an impossibly dense shape. When Marcus finished, all that remained was a perfect, crimson sphere of organic matter. It hung in the air for a moment before dropping to the ground with a wet, heavy thud, landing beside the feet of his horrified comrades.
"Hello, my toys," Marcus said, his voice laced with mocking cheer. He flicked his wrist, and another supe who had been trying to discreetly crawl away was yanked through the air to hover before him. "My, my, getting excited are we? Or were you hoping to defect from this little party?"
CRACK.
With a casual twist of his hand, Marcus snapped the man's neck, dropping the limp body to the ground. He then turned his gaze upon the remaining test subjects. "These two were disappointments. They lacked commitment."
This was different. This wasn't the indiscriminate slaughter of the iron rain. This was personal, contemptuous execution. The fragile dam of fear in the supes' minds broke, replaced by a wave of suicidal fury.
"KILL HER!"
"WE'LL RIP YOU APART, YOU BITCH!"
"FUCK YOU!"
They roared their defiance, oblivious to the fact that the sleek, feminine armor of Mag was just a suit. Marcus simply chuckled, a low, metallic sound that was more menacing than any threat.
"You seem to be having fun again," he said, spreading his hands wide. "Why don't you share that joy with me?"
A wave of pure, invisible magnetic energy washed over the battlefield. It was an invasive, irresistible force that saturated every cell of every living being in the vicinity. For a horrifying moment, every supe—test subject and Seven alike—felt a total disconnect between their mind and their body.
Marcus slowly raised his arms and then clenched his fists.
Instantly, every person on the battlefield was contorted into the same agonizing, impossible pose, their limbs twisted behind their backs and their spines bent at unnatural angles. Homelander, felt his supposedly unbreakable bones groan and creak, threatening to shatter under a force that bypassed durability and warped him from the inside out. A supe with a body like rubber was twisted into a human pretzel, more annoyed than harmed. But his neighbor, a man whose flesh was as hard as granite, screamed as his rock-like skin cracked and crumbled, chunks of his body breaking off and falling to the ground.
It was a chorus of inhuman pain as bodies were broken and reshaped by a power they couldn't even comprehend.
"Ha," Marcus sighed with theatrical disappointment. "Such a letdown."
He gave his hands a slight squeeze.
The magnetic field violently compressed, crushing organs and snapping what few bones remained intact. Then, it reversed, expanding with explosive force. Dozens of the weaker supes popped like blood-filled balloons, their bodies first shrinking inward and then bursting in a grotesque shower of gore.
But he held back. He had not used the full, terrifying power of the Crush. He still needed pawns for his game, just enough to keep Vought bleeding. The survivors, including every member of the Seven, collapsed to the ground, broken and critically injured. Homelander was the worst off, his body a mangled wreck, his invulnerability having meant nothing. It was a clear and deliberate message.
Stomp... stomp...
Marcus's armored feet echoed on the pavement as he began to walk away, turning his back on the field of carnage in an act of supreme dismissal. "All this power," he mocked over his shoulder. "And this is all you could do with it?"
CRACK!
The sharp report of a high-caliber sniper rifle cut through the groans of the wounded. The target was Homelander. Lying helpless in a crater, he had no way to defend himself. The .50 caliber armor-piercing round screamed through the air, aimed directly at his eye.
The bullet stopped.
It froze in the air, less than an inch from his cornea, and began to spin. In Marcus's outstretched palm, a tiny, shimmering sphere of condensed magnetic force had appeared. The bullet was caught in its orbit, a miniature moon circling a miniature star.
From a rooftop a half-mile away, the sniper stared through his scope in disbelief. He had seen the shot. It was perfect. But the target was fine. The bullet had simply… vanished.
Thinking it a fluke, he fired again. At the same time, other hidden shooters opened fire. A volley of bullets converged on the fallen supes, only to halt in mid-air and be drawn into the swirling vortex of projectiles now orbiting Marcus's hand.
"Have you had enough?" Marcus's voice, now cold as the void, spread through the ruins.
He closed his fist. The singularity in his palm collapsed, and the orbiting bullets were launched back out with the force of a railgun. They traced perfect, deadly arcs through the city, unerringly seeking the assassins who had fired them.
The first sniper only had time to see his own bullet coming back at him a hundred times faster before his world exploded. Across the ruins, one after another, the hidden killers were eliminated with their own ammunition.
Marcus lowered his hand and glanced back at the broken form of Homelander, then at the empty rooftops.
"My toys," he stated to the silent city, "are not for you to covet."
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