His mind felt like it was blowing apart.
Literally, because he could feel the bullet piercing the bone of his forehead, tearing through his skull, ripping his brain into shreds until he couldn't think anymore.
That was not something he considered a problem. The problem was that he felt his mind was blowing apart, figuratively.
Velez had addressed him as The Immortal. As if he was some incredibly dangerous villain who had allegedly killed a third of his men. That wasn't him. Even with his quirk, he wasn't technically dangerous, just survivable, impossible to kill.
The discrepancy, the absolute certainty with which Velez spoke those words. He had definitely seen Rhett, carved him into his memory like a scar.
But Rhett didn't remember any of that. When he probed his memory for any such recollections, he came up blank, and his head throbbed furiously. He couldn't wrap his mind around it. How could Velez see something that he couldn't remember?
Was it that his regeneration was ripping memories from him? Like some sort of trauma response? But he always clearly, and viscerally remembered his other deaths. He always came back whole.
Could it be that some other villain, a sort of clone or imposter of him was doing all this? Then someone with a regeneration-by-death quirk was loose in the city?
That somehow scared Rhett more than his own situation.
Still, that didn't mean his circumstances were helpless. He had a plan, inspired by what Velez had said.
"Immortal. The Unkillable. The one who would stop at nothing to save and protect the people he loves."
He had no recollection of Immortal, but that last sentence did describe him entirely. He would stop at nothing to save the people he cared about.
One drop on him is all I need—
That time, it had been accident. This time, he'd make it deliberate.
Lucille, and everyone else. Just you wait. I'm coming to save you!
Those were the words he spoke as the bullet emerged from the back of his head, deflected at an odd angle away from Henrik's path, killing Rhett instantly.
He died.
Blood spurted from his cracked skull, shooting into the air onto Henrik's tattered cloak, and on the fatigues of the approaching Velez.
Velez swerved, avoiding the worst of the blood spray and whipped something from his hip. Magnetic handcuffs, meant to bind Rhett's hands so he couldn't escape, even if he regenerated.
As he got closer, Velez realized something was horribly wrong.
The Immortal wasn't regenerating.
The wound in his head refused to heal, blood still leaking as his lifeless eyes stared into nothingness.
"He can die now? For good?" Velez muttered, slowing his military-grade bike in astonishment, momentarily letting Henrik escape. "No. That bastard might be stupid, but not that stupid. He wouldn't raid our shit if he knew he could die permanently."
The sergeant's jaw tightened as memories surfaced. You slaughtered my men at the docks—grinning like it was a game. Tore through them like they were paper.
As he muttered those words, he realized there was a weight on his shoulder, not from his equipment, but from something alive.
Something human.
Before he could react, an arm was wrapping itself around his thick neck, as if trying to strangle him. Velez grabbed the limb with his thick hand, easily pulling it away, but not before he felt teeth bite at his ear.
He bit back a curse from the pain, not wanting to give his attacker any satisfaction. There was only one person as relentless as this.
"Thought you could get rid of me that easily?" Rhett forced a maniacal laugh as he bit harder, trying to get as much leverage as possible on this mountain of a man.
Velez flashed an equally terrifying smile, exposing his wolf-like teeth, his green eyes glowing like furious emeralds. "Not for a fucking second."
Rhett would do anything to achieve what he wanted. But what he thought was his greatest sacrifice, his life, was not as useful as he thought. He couldn't just die and hope to solve his problems through brute force. He needed to be smart, tactical. He had to exploit every resource, every rule he knew.
Which is how his separate regeneration idea had come about.
When he fought against the Iron Knight, he had discovered he could change where his consciousness transferred when his body was dismembered. If his arm was cut off, he would die and either regenerate a new arm with his current body, or transfer his consciousness to his arm and regenerate his entire body from that point.
Even when the Iron Knight tore him to shreds with his fiber-thin wires, he was still able to regenerate inside the metal bastard when he inhaled the blood particles by accident.
That time, it had merely happened by accident. When the blood particle got into the Iron Knight, he regenerated inside him as he always did.
But against Velez, he made a conscious effort. When his head had been shot, droplets of blood had sprayed on Velez, something the sergeant hadn't taken note of.
From one single drop of blood, he could regenerate, abandoning his old body, tricking Velez into paying attention to the wrong place, changing the flow of the battle, even for a moment.
He might have been just a normal guy with no extraordinary power except resurrection when he died, but that didn't mean he had to stay useless.
He would exploit everything everyone thought about death, and use those misconceptions to his advantage.
But his first step was going to be slowing Velez down. Even with his quirk, he simply couldn't beat him in a fair fight. Slowing him down and escaping was the only option for now.
Fortunately, he had a plan for that too.
"Ah, this is going to hurt." Rhett groaned as Velez turned sharply in an attempt to throw the brat off him. His body was still regenerating—an arm to try and strangle Velez with, a head to think properly, eyes to see and a mouth to piss off Velez by biting him.
He directed his quirk to prioritize where it would regenerate to make his mission as efficient as possible. His torso reformed first, his spinal cord extending, muscles wrapping around his ribcage, along with his flesh and guts. When that was barely completed, he shifted his attention to his legs. Well, leg. He only needed one.
The motorcycle roared beneath them as Velez accelerated, trying to shake him off. Rhett calculated the angle, the timing. The spokes were spinning fast enough to—
His leg fell deliberately into the back wheel of the bike, jamming between the spokes with the precision of desperation. The limb got sucked into the wheel mechanism, and the mind-numbing pain of impact came seconds later.
Muscles and tendons shredded, arteries severed, causing a spray of blood to shoot out of the mangled limb as white-hot pain engulfed his entire being.
Even after all the deaths he'd endured, even after building tolerance to the quick snap of bullets and blades, this was different. This was partial regeneration—flesh knitting together while simultaneously being torn apart, nerves firing in confused agony as his quirk tried to repair what was actively being destroyed.
He let out a scream that was part pain, part rage, part desperate calculation as his shin became nothing but a pulp of flesh and bone, parts of his skin getting flayed by the spinning metal.
The only way he could put himself through this torture was because of the absolute certainty that it would be fixed by his next death.
"FUCK!" Velez barked, almost flying off his bike as Rhett's maneuver acted like a forced stop brake, his inertia pushing him forward. The wheels locked up, bone and cartilage clogging their movement, as the motorcycle skidded to a violent halt.
On instinct, to deal with the immediate threat, Velez whipped something from his hip. What Rhett had thought was just a normal gun flipped in Velez's thick hands. The black and orange metal compartments shifted, rotated and extended mechanically, changing shape until it became something that resembled a hybrid weapon from a nightmare.
The metal pieces connected to Velez's hand at the wrist. As he gripped an internal handle, Rhett could hear the shifting of gears as a black barrel emerged, pointed right at his head as he hung loosely from the bike, his stunt leaving him physically debilitated but tactically victorious.
"You always were too clever for your own good," Velez snarled, his voice thick with old hatred. "Say goodbye, bastard."
Velez pulled the trigger through the internal mechanism, and the moment the bullet left the gun, he knew he'd made a huge mistake.
Rhett was smiling through the pain, blood streaming down his face, because the man had acted without thinking, giving him exactly what he wanted.
Death.
The bullet went clean through his skull, severing his consciousness as bone, skin and flesh exploded outward, and another splash of blood erupted from the almost-completely formed body.
And this time, the body refused to regenerate.