The beast before him stood at a staggering height of two meters. It stared at him with hunger and malice and a hint of caution. Victor's gaze swept over the corpse-filled floor. Bodies lay twisted and broken, chests punctured, limbs torn free, blood smeared across the ground.
The aftermath felt less like reality and more like a horror film left on pause.
They were quite unfortunate. It had just been a few minutes, yet they had almost all been wiped out. Their high grade gear and weapons meant nothing against a meta of this caliber.
Its strength was quite formidable. The attack he had blocked carried more weight than he had originally thought.
"Let's see how strong you are," he thought with amusement and curiosity. The anger he expected never came. They were strangers after all. It flickered briefly, weak as a candle in a storm, then faded into indifference. What remained was a thin edge of amusement.
His attention returned to the meta, smiling as he turned to face it. Suddenly, a wave of frost shot from his palms, rolling outward in biting waves that quickly flooded its body.
The beast, still stunned by the stranger's sudden appearance, suddenly felt a chill race up its arm. The cold spread through its body, a wave of weakness flooding its limbs. It reacted sharply, instinct taking over. It leapt backward in retreat, creating distance.
"Smart move," Victor nodded, observing the creature.
The beast stared, fixated on its arms, frost clinging to its skin. It flexed its muscles, dispersing the lingering cold through sheer force. Slowly, its gaze lifted to Victor, filled with wariness and hesitation. This was the first time it had encountered prey capable of enduring its strikes.
"Oh, are you scared?" Victor said, amused. He had expected it to charge him by now. During their brief clash, he had already grasped the nature of the meta's biology. The situation awfully resembled Caitlin's condition. An alter ego with a completely different personality, except this meta's alter ego was a mindless beast driven only by bloodlust.
The beast seemed to understand and immediately charged, its hesitation vanishing, replaced by feral rage. Claws extended, it lunged at him with shocking speed. The sheer force of its takeoff shattered the concrete beneath it.
Victor reacted instantly. He sidestepped the attack with uncanny fluidity, then burst forward with a brutal counterattack, driving a cold infused punch into the beast's gut. The point of contact instantly bloomed with frost.
The beast staggered slightly. He made sure not to put too much strength into it. He did not want to end everything in one punch.
It grunted at the impact, pain flashing through its body. It froze for a split second, wondering how a human could have such strength.
"Come on, let's dance," Victor taunted, gauging just how much intelligence it retained. Its expression shifted once more, turning ferocious. It seemed it could understand him to some extent.
It lunged with renewed fury. At speeds surpassing human limits, they exchanged rapid blows and attacks. The sheer force behind their movements shattered the concrete beneath them.
The beast was giving its best, and on the other hand, Victor was simply using the battle to refine his own technique. He already possessed vast practical combat knowledge and some real experience. If he ever had to face someone stronger in the future, he wanted proper combat arts and styles ingrained into muscle memory.
Although he doubted this exchange would bring any improvement. He ducked under a wide swing and countered instantly with a brutal, vibrating kick to its chest. The blow sent the beast skidding back several meters, bleeding out the force with its sharp claws gripping the floor.
An almost human look of disbelief and shock crossed its face. It clutched its chest at the point of impact, feeling the damage. Its ribs had been fractured, and the cold in the attack slowed its regeneration.
Victor did not press the advantage, waiting for it to recover. "That's not all you can do, show me everything." Victor had already scanned its biology early, he knew it had a trump card in its arsenal.
Suddenly Wells' voice sounded over the comms, distracting him from his thoughts. "Victor! What's going on on your end?" he questioned, having just spoken to Barry.
"It's a hybrid of a bat and a man, just like we guessed," Victor replied, his gaze fixed on the recovering creature.
"Any casualties? Are they still alive?" Caitlin asked, already dreading the answer.
"Most didn't make it. I only managed to save one," Victor said, glancing back at the last retreating, injured man.
Caitlin fell silent for a moment, accepting reality. "Victor, be very careful. You just need to hold on until Barry deals with Danton."
"Don't worry, Caitlin," Victor said calmly. "I can handle it just fine."
All of a sudden, the beast lunged at him, trying to close the distance. When it got within range, it suddenly threw its head back and opened its jaws wide.
It unleashed a loud, destructive sound wave, but Victor did not move to dodge, after all he had already anticipated the attack. He took the full brunt of the assault head-on, without so much as a tremble. The comms were not so fortunate, frying instantly under the overload.
He ignored the fading, panicked voices and focused instead on the rapid changes suddenly surging through his body.
His skin rippled beneath the suit, vibrating under the force of the sonic assault. Arms crossed, he endured the onslaught. He ignored the ongoing attack, instead concentrating on the adaptation taking shape in his body.
The bio-gear, primed and alert, instantly began its work the moment it was exposed to the sound based attack. It began running simulations, finding solutions. Not that he actually needed it. He already had vibration resistance.
But that was what made the bio so much more terrifying. The first priority was to acquire resistance that would make an attack completely ineffective. After that, it would focus not just on simple resistance but on how to nullify or counter that specific attack.
The first results came after a few seconds. He always imagined an inaudible click when an adaptation began to settle.
Another click later, and his body began to vibrate on its own, a low hum perfectly matching the frequency and intensity of the attack.
"Cool," he mused. "Matching sound waves that cancel each other out."
He began walking against the sound wave, the suit he wore vibrating under the intensity. As he walked closer, the beast's eyes widened in disbelief and horror. It opened its mouth even wider, unleashing an even more destructive sonic wave. Victor's steps did not falter. If anything, his movement grew freer.
The bio-gear was passing the test with flying colors, running multiple forms of adaptations and resistances at once.
As he advanced, he felt the bio-gear shift, coating his body in a thin, flesh-like layer.
He chuckled at himself. All these adaptations were not even needed. He already had the perfect counter. Either way, more adaptations were welcome. He willed chilling cold forth. The air grew misty, and the surrounding temperature instantly dropped by several degrees.
The sound wave's intensity dropped instantly. Air molecules slowed down, vibrational transfer weakened. The sound wave lost energy fast. What remained was a feeble screech.
"This is getting boring," Victor thought, his interest waning. All of a sudden, his speed spiked. One moment he was meters away, the next second he was already standing before the meta.
Its eyes widened in disbelief, and before it could react, Victor was already on it.
Bang.
A brutal punch slammed into its jaw. A wave of cold, infinitesimally close to absolute, flooded the point of impact. Half of its face froze solid in an instant.
The jaw would not be healing anytime soon. The cold made sure of that, and for the first time in its short life, the creature trembled. It felt true fear.
"I'm prey? No," the beast pondered, staring at the human before it. Fury instantly replaced fear, and it hurriedly lashed out at Victor with renewed ferocity in hopes of changing the situation, any trace of caution gone.
It could not be prey. It was the predator, the apex predator. It would not lose to a mere human. It poured everything it had into the strike and swung its right arm with reckless force.
A cold light of amusement flashed in Victor's eyes. The beast was growing desperate. In its short life, it had likely never encountered something capable of retaliation.
A blade of ice instantly formed in his palm. He ducked under the attack with barely any effort before driving the blade straight into its forearm. A screech of pain tore from the beast.
He pressed the attack, and several dodges and counterattacks later, the beast was severely injured. It had been turned into a target dummy, icy daggers embedded all over its body.
It staggered back, cold seeping into its body, making muscles weak and blood unwilling to flow. Its regeneration could not keep up anymore. It fell to its knees, breathing heavily. The fire in its eyes had dimmed. The instinct to fight had been doused by the chilling cold seeping into its body. It clearly was not planning to continue.
Victor stared with amusement. He had never taken the creature seriously. It was just a tool to satisfy his craving for combat. "You put up a good fight, but if that's all, this is where our little dance ends." He raised his palms toward the beast, about to unleash a finishing blow.
He paused midway and sighed in exasperation. Killing was against the team's morals. When Barry arrived on the scene to see a frozen meta, he would likely take it the wrong way, creating friction between them.
Barry was a good guy to the core and he rarely crossed certain lines. The years he had spent trying to corrupt him were proof enough. If it had been anyone else, he would not have cared. But Barry was a close friend he had genuinely come to admire. He had to show a level of restraint for him.
Plus, it could critically affect how Thawne viewed him. Right now, he probably saw him as a manipulatable pawn on a chessboard. Killing this meta right here and now would only make the speedster more cautious.
He turned to the trembling abomination. Its gaze toward Victor had changed drastically. If before it had stared at him like a much fatter, more resilient prey, now it looked at him with visible fear, horror, and the realization that it had been the prey all along.
The human had walked through its strongest attacks and trump card like they were nothing, dodging and evading every strike effortlessly before counterattacking in ways that made its regeneration seem lackluster and useless. Only one primal, instinctive thought crossed its mind at that moment. Escape. It needed to escape.
Using the last of its energy, it got up and ran. The monster behind it could not be human. It knew what humans were capable of. They could not shrug off its attacks effortlessly. They were prey, defenseless. Whatever was behind it was a predator in human skin. It could not be human.
"Oh, trying to escape?" Victor said with growing amusement. Clearly, the creature was capable of rational thought, at least to a certain degree.
He stretched his palm toward the escapee, unleashing a fraction of his cryokinetic might. The floor beneath was instantly coated in a layer of frost. The move was not some flashy blast or elaborate construct of ice.
It was a mix of contact based kinetic nullification and cryokinesis. The effect was immediate and lowkey. The escaping meta simply froze mid-step before collapsing onto the ground with a dull thud, a layer of ice encasing it from head to toe. It would not be recovering from the attack anytime soon.
"What should I do next?" he pondered, glancing around at the bloody, wrecked scene. Then he turned back to the defeated meta. If one did not look closely, they would think it was dead. But Victor had been meticulous and precise. His attack had just been enough to almost nullify its regeneration. It would live.
"I have to wait for Barry," he sighed, he'd thought Barry would have dealt with Danton at this point.
With no other choice he walked toward the exit, planning to wait outside, when suddenly a raspy voice drew his attention. He turned around, surprised.
"You can still speak?" he pondered, walking back over. He stared down at the meta lying before him. Its tired eyes turned to him, weak and exhausted.
"Kill… me… please."