"Oh my God, what is wrong with those people? Did they turn into zombies? Tony, look, even the military and the Seven can barely hold them back."
About one kilometer away from the town, by the stream, the two young men in plaid shirts were still controlling the aerial drone and recording.
The young man called Tony snatched the controller and said, "Why are you filming that? What the audience wants to see is Homelander. Filming Homelander is what brings views!"
"Huh, where is Homelander? Where did he go?"
A faint whistling sound rang out in the sky.
Charlie raised his head and looked up high, and then a blue afterimage tore through the clouds and shot downward.
"He's in the sky!"
"Tony, Homelander is in the sky!"
The drone hurriedly adjusted its angle. On the screen, Homelander looked like a comet slicing through the atmosphere at extreme speed. Only a blurry afterimage could be seen, not his actual form.
That shadow streaked across the frame, plunged straight down, leaving a pale gray trail, and fell into the town.
BOOM!
A terrifying, thunderous explosion rang out from within the town.
It was like a meteor smashing into the town. The entire ground shook violently.
The next second, at Homelander's landing point, towering waves of rock erupted upward, then those rings of stone surged outward in a frenzy.
The earth quaked, rolling out wave after wave of stone. Wherever the stone waves passed, buildings were flung into the air and then exploded into powder.
In an instant, the stone waves swept across the town, hurling countless Night Servants into the air and burying them.
The military and the superhumans retreated at once. Engines roared as all kinds of vehicles sped away toward the highway outside the town.
When the shaking finally stopped, fragments of all sizes began raining down from the sky.
Element Woman's eyes turned pale yellow. The ground beneath her feet immediately rose, becoming a stone pillar that lifted her more than ten meters into the air.
Standing atop the pillar, she looked toward the town and could not help but suck in a sharp breath.
Sylvester Town was gone.
In its place was a massive meteor crater, dust and smoke billowing up from within it.
A moment later, a dark hand suddenly reached out from a pile of rubble, and then a Night Servant crawled out of the debris.
After that, more and more mutated residents climbed out. Like bamboo shoots after rain, they emerged from beneath ruins and broken stone all over the place.
Seeing this, Element Woman's expression changed, and she shouted downward, "They're not dead!"
"Those mutated residents are still alive!"
Colonel Yuri was dumping sand out of his hat. Hearing this, his face was filled with bitterness.
———
Inside the crater—
At the very center, Alex frowned slightly as he watched bubbles float up before his eyes.
These soap-bubble-like things appeared here, looking completely out of place.
What made Alex frown was not these bubbles themselves, but the fact that when he had just charged down from the sky and smashed into the town, he had been about to crush that fat man.
Yet at the moment of impact, Glutton had scattered into a pile of soap bubbles.
This clearly was not Glutton's ability.
Or rather.
'Is it because the level of "Insight" is too low, so I can not see all of that fat man's talents?'
Alex raised his head, his feet leaving the ground, and flew upward through the bubbles.
After emerging above the surface, he scanned his surroundings and quickly spotted two figures.
One was Glutton.
The other was a clown dressed extravagantly, his face painted with all kinds of colorful makeup.
"Midnight Clown".
Alex immediately threw an "Insight" at him.
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[Name: Brad Willy (Midnight Clown)]
[Life Level: Level 4 (Superhuman)]
[Status: Terror]
[Talent: Substitution Technique, Illusion Creation, Absolute Hit]
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Substitution technique, illusion creation, absolute hit. Three talents.
Compared to other superhumans, that was a luxurious setup.
No wonder he could serve as a councilor of the "Dark Night Council."
Alex glanced at Glutton beside the clown and thought that the fat man turning into soap bubbles earlier must have been the clown using substitution on him.
In other words, substitution could be used on people other than himself.
Alex scanned the surroundings again.
The animals from before, as well as that Replicator, were all dead.
In the massive impact just now, they had been close to the blast center and taken tremendous force.
This allowed Alex to confirm something else.
Substitution could not be used on everyone. At most, it could be used on himself and one other person.
Alex's guess was not entirely accurate, but it was already very close.
To be precise, the clown's substitution technique could be used on multiple people, but with one condition. He had to touch the other person in order to use substitution on anyone besides himself.
At the time, he had been inside the tent with Glutton and had also used his illusion ability to disguise himself.
That was why he had been able to save both himself and Glutton in time, without Alex noticing.
For now, his life was spared.
But the clown had still broken out in a cold sweat. He had originally thought that once Homelander's heat vision was sealed, this superhuman would be half crippled.
Instead, not only were his troupe members killed one after another, Homelander had turned into a living meteor and fallen from the sky, nearly scaring him into wetting himself.
"It looks like…"
"The circus only has you two left."
Alex smiled and instantly flashed forward, charging at Glutton.
The moment he moved, the Midnight Clown, who was grabbing Glutton, screamed. The figures of the two of them immediately lost all solidity.
When Alex crashed into the fat man, their bodies suddenly turned into a flock of white doves, flapping their wings.
"Oh! So that's how it is."
"You can do magic tricks."
"Although, to pull off this kind of trick, it seems you need physical contact?"
Alex turned around and looked at the clown and the fat man as their figures reappeared in the air.
Midnight Clown Brad suddenly pulled out a syringe and shouted, "Long live the Council!"
He was about to jab it into his own neck—
Alex kicked up a stone from the ground. The stone instantly exploded, shattering into hundreds of fragments that whistled through the air like machine-gun bullets, sweeping toward the clown and his syringe.
But the figures of the clown and the fat man suddenly shattered like a mirror. Their forms broke into specks of light and rapidly dissipated in the air.
Those two figures were illusions created by the clown.
The real clown appeared behind the ruins of a building. He also took out a syringe and stabbed it toward his own neck.
At that moment, a hand reached out from the rubble behind him, blocking the space between the clown's neck and the syringe.
The syringe jabbed into that hand, the needle instantly bending. Then the ruins behind the clown exploded.
Amid the flying debris, Alex stood behind Brad with a smile and clenched his fist.
The clown's syringe crumpled and shattered, and the blood-like liquid inside splashed all over the ground.
The clown and Glutton turned into countless playing cards, their figures disappearing within the cards.
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