The Battlefield
"Dr. Ernst," Azazel hissed, grabbing Ernst's arm.
"We are leaving. That woman is the rumored goddess. You are not safe."
Azazel wasn't afraid for himself, he could teleport instantly, but he knew Ernst was the linchpin of their future.
If the Doctor died here, the dream of a mutant empire died with him.
Ernst shook off the hand.
He stood calm amidst the rain and gunfire, his eyes locked on Wonder Woman.
"Do not panic, Azazel," Ernst said coolly.
"Have you forgotten? I am not just a scientist anymore. My density is five times that of a human, and my absorption capacity is at peak efficiency. I want to see what a god can do."
"But, "
"Go," Ernst ordered.
"Help Kroenen. I will handle the Amazon."
Before Azazel could argue, a shout cut through the storm.
"There!"
Professor Trevor Bruttenholm. The occult advisor to the Allies.
He was pointing a shaking finger directly at Ernst.
"That is Dr. Ernst!" Bruttenholm yelled, his voice cracking with desperation.
He turned to Diana, waving his arms to get her attention.
"Forget the assassin! He is the architect! The weapons, the serum, the portal technology, it's all him! He is the head of the snake! Take him down!"
Wonder Woman's head snapped toward Ernst.
Across the battlefield, their eyes met.
Hers were ancient, burning with the fire of a warrior born of Zeus.
His were cold, blue, calculating, lit by the HUD of his nanite interface.
She scanned him. She saw Kroenen as a thug, a clockwork monster to be broken. But Ernst?
She sensed something different in him.
A darkness. A cold, void-like hunger.
She realized Bruttenholm was right. Ernst was the mind behind the monster.
She didn't hesitate.
Kroenen, the clockwork Nazi assassin, lunged at her with his blades, screaming in mechanical rage.
Diana didn't even look at him.
She spun, a pirouette of red and blue armor.
She kicked Kroenen hard in the chest.
CRACK.
The sound of shattering gears and collapsing clockwork echoed over the gunfire.
The assassin was launched backward as if hit by a freight train.
He flew thirty feet, crashing into a pile of brick rubble, his limbs twitching as his internal mechanisms failed.
Diana grabbed a twisted steel rebar protruding from a broken concrete pillar.
The metal was two inches thick.
With a grunt of effort, she ripped it from the concrete foundation. She hurled it like a javelin.
THWIP.
The rebar flew through the air, pinning Kroenen to the remaining wall by his shoulder.
He hung there, thrashing, effectively neutralized.
Then, she turned her full fury on Ernst.
She crouched, the mud exploding beneath her boots as she coiled her muscles.
"Move!" Azazel shouted, realizing the negotiation was over.
He pulled three high-explosive grenades from his pocket dimension.
With a flick of his wrist and a teleporting twist of his tail, he tossed them at her feet.
BOOM.
The explosion tore up the wet earth, sending a geyser of mud and fire into the air.
It would have shredded a squad of men.
Wonder Woman didn't even slow down.
She emerged from the fireball, her shield raised.
The shrapnel bounced off the divine metal with harmless pings.
She leaped through the smoke.
She covered ten meters in a single bound, her sword drawn.
The Blade of Athena glinted in the lightning, hungry for blood.
Ernst didn't flinch.
He didn't teleport.
He didn't activate a force field.
He just watched.
Target velocity: 45 meters per second.
Trajectory: Linear.
Threat level: Extreme.
Diana, realizing he wasn't running, changed tactics.
She needed to crush him before he could unleash whatever techno-sorcery he was hiding.
She skidded to a halt next to the wreckage of a half-destroyed German Sd.Kfz. 231 armored car.
The vehicle weighed nearly eight tons. It was a burning hulk of steel.
Diana grabbed the bumper.
The metal groaned, protesting the physics.
She lifted the massive vehicle over her head, her muscles corded like steel cables.
"Hera give me strength!" she screamed.
She hurled it.
The armored car tumbled through the air, a mass of steel, fire, and death.
It blocked out the sky as it flew toward Ernst.
Azazel vanished with a BAMF, reappearing on a rooftop fifty yards away, unable to watch.
"Catch," Ernst whispered to himself.
He planted his feet.
His boots, reinforced with magnetic clamps, locked onto the cobblestone street beneath the mud.
He extended his right hand, palm open.
It looked ridiculous.
A man trying to stop a landslide with a high-five.
THUD.
The sound was sickening.
It was the sound of a hammer hitting an anvil the size of a mountain.
The impact should have turned him into red paste.
It should have driven him ten feet into the ground.
It should have shattered every bone in his body and scattered his atoms across France.
Instead, the car stopped dead.
Ernst's hand didn't buckle.
His elbow didn't bend.
The tank hung in the air, its momentum arrested instantly.
Ernst's skin shimmered.
From the point of impact on his palm, a wave of violet light washed over his body.
It was the kinetic discharge.
The energy of the impact flowed into him.
The mass, the velocity, the sheer crushing weight of the vehicle was absorbed by his cells.
His eyes flared with intense purple light.
The veins in his neck glowed.
Wonder Woman skidded to a halt, her boots carving deep furrows in the mud.
Her eyes went wide.
She had fought Ares. She had thrown tanks at demons.
She had never, in her thousands of years of life, seen a human catch a tank one-handed.
"Impossible," she breathed, her grip tightening on her sword.
"Physics," Ernst corrected.
His voice was strained, gravelly, vibrating with the contained power.
His muscles bulged slightly beneath the trench coat as he metabolized the kinetic charge.
He felt drunk on it. It was better than the brandy. It was pure power.
"Newton's Third Law," Ernst growled.
"For every action..."
He pushed.
He didn't just throw it; he released the stored energy in a focused burst.
"...there is an equal and opposite reaction. Return to sender."
Using the stored energy, plus his own enhanced strength, he launched the armored car back at her.
It flew faster than it had arrived.
Diana barely had time to react.
She crossed her bracelets of submission.
CLANG.
The car smashed into her.
The impact shattered the vehicle into pieces. Shrapnel flew everywhere.
The force drove the Amazon warrior back.
She didn't fall, but she slid. Five meters.
Ten meters. Twenty meters.
She plowed a trench through the mud, finally stopping with a groan as her back hit the remnants of a stone wall.
Dust and smoke swirled around her.
She stood up, shaking off a piece of the fender that had draped over her shoulder.
She wasn't bleeding, but she was winded.
Her hair was wild, her tiara crooked.
Her expression shifted.
The shock was gone. Replaced by something scarier.
A warrior's focus. The thrill of the challenge.
"You are no mortal," Diana said, her voice carrying over the battlefield.
She raised her sword, the metal gleaming.
"No human science can do that."
"I am the next step," Ernst replied.
He adjusted his stance. He shifted his weight, raising his hands in a combat posture he had learned from a downloaded simulation of Lady Shiva.
"I am the intersection where science meets divinity."
Diana roared.
It was a battle cry that had echoed on the plains of Troy.
She leaped into the air.
She descended like a thunderbolt, her sword swinging down in a two-handed overhead strike.
It was a blow meant to cleave a tank in two. It was a blow meant to kill a god.
Ernst watched the blade.
Time seemed to slow down.
Angle of incidence: 85 degrees. Velocity: Mach 1. Force: Calculation error - too high.
Time to test the limits.
He didn't dodge.
He didn't use his energy cannon.
He waited until the blade was inches from his skull.
He clapped his hands together.
CLANG.
The sound was louder than the artillery.
A shockwave of compressed air exploded outward, flattening the rain for ten feet in every direction.
He caught the blade.
His palms pressed flat against the flat of the sword, trapping the divine metal between his hands like a prayer.
The edge stopped millimeters from his forehead.
A single drop of rain fell from the tip of the blade and sizzled on Ernst's nose.
The ground beneath Ernst cracked.
CRACK-BOOM.
A spiderweb of fractures shot out for ten feet, the earth groaning under the transferred pressure.
His boots sank six inches into the stone.
But Ernst didn't move.
Diana hung in the air for a split second before landing, pushing down with all her might.
She strained.
Her biceps flexed, the veins standing out against her golden skin.
Her teeth were grit in a rictus of effort.
She was strong enough to wrestle Superman.
She was strong enough to pull islands.
But the sword wouldn't budge.
"How?" she grunted, pushing harder, her eyes flashing with frustration.
"Absorption," Ernst smiled.
It was a bloodless, terrifying smile.
His eyes were glowing so bright they illuminated Diana's face with a ghostly violet light.
"The harder you push, the stronger I get. You are feeding me, Diana."
He was acting as a perfect conduit.
Her strength flowed into the blade, into his hands, and was instantly converted into binding energy that held the sword in place.
It was a perfect loop.
"You aren't fighting me, Diana," Ernst whispered, leaning in closer to the glowing blade.
"You're fighting yourself."
-------------
Authors Note:
Do you want to read 25+ Chapters ahead right now?
Stop waiting. Come over to the dark side. We have cookies, advanced chapters, and very, very detailed 'plot.'
patreon.com/
Dark_sym