Chapter 226: —Check!
New York.
The moment Thaddeus Ross gave the order for a nuclear strike, several missiles began their slow climb into the sky.
At the same time, inside the New York city government, which Umbrella had already secretly brought under its control, word arrived that a nuclear strike was inbound.
Air raid sirens tore through the city instantly, and panic swept through the population in a heartbeat.
The moment the news broke, the people of New York, who now understood they'd been written off as expendable, turned immediately on Thaddeus Ross and the U.S. government with a wave of public condemnation.
After all, bombing your own citizens with a nuclear weapon is the kind of act that gets you nailed to the pillar of shame no matter where in the world you are.
Word of what had happened stunned every nation that hadn't declared war, and every nation that had already surrendered, just as badly.
As far as they were concerned, this war had never come anywhere close to justifying something like this.
Everyone knew perfectly well that the war had only started in the first place because of fear, fear of superheroes and Umbrella, fear that their governments would be overthrown, fear that superheroes and Umbrella Corporation might one day turn on humanity itself.
But superheroes and Umbrella hadn't turned on humanity yet, and here was Thaddeus Ross, dropping a nuclear weapon on a city of ten million of his own people.
That was taking things a little too far, to put it mildly.
And so, nations around the world began publicizing exactly what Thaddeus Ross had just done, loudly and without restraint.
The missiles hadn't even arrived yet, and Thaddeus Ross and the U.S. government had already become the target of condemnation from every corner of the globe.
Coverage poured in from every direction, an absolute flood of it, and it finally settled something for a public that had been wavering, unsure which side of this war actually stood for justice.
That Umbrella Corporation, the company the government's own media had spent so long painting as a monster, apparently wasn't nearly as terrifying as the U.S. government had always claimed.
Sure, Umbrella had dismantled the military forces of several nations in a single night, with terrifying speed, and folded their territory into its own hands. But set against what had just happened, Umbrella's conduct looked almost restrained by comparison.
Next to Thaddeus Ross's attempted massacre of an entire city, Umbrella came across as downright reasonable.
After taking control of the nations that had declared war on it, Umbrella hadn't instituted some brutal, bloody iron-fisted rule. It hadn't oppressed the populations under its control either.
If anything, people's lives had recovered at a remarkable pace after the fighting ended, and even public safety had improved dramatically under the Astartes' watch.
As the old saying goes: compare people to people, and somebody ends up wanting to die of shame. Compare goods to goods, and one of them ends up in the trash.
Set the two side by side, and it wasn't hard to see which one came out ahead.
One was a man willing to treat ten million lives as an afterthought. The other was Umbrella Corporation, marching under banners that read "restoring order" and "setting things right."
Anyone with eyes could see which one deserved the benefit of the doubt.
The air raid sirens kept wailing over New York.
The shrill alarm poured in from every direction, and the sense of impending disaster spread through the city right along with the sound, raising gooseflesh on everyone who heard it.
By now, the streets had already dissolved into chaos.
Car horns and screaming crowds tangled together into one continuous roar.
Streams of people poured out from every direction, merging into dark rivers of bodies rushing toward the nearest air-raid shelters and underground bunkers.
Here and there, towering Astartes, built like iron water towers, could be seen holding the streets in order, making sure the crush of bodies didn't turn into a stampede.
Umbrella Corporation's own broadcasts mixed in with the air raid sirens, working constantly to calm the frightened public.
Thanks to Umbrella's reassurances, the tense atmosphere never quite tipped over into full-blown panic and chaos.
No one actually knew where running would take them to real safety, but under Umbrella's protection, they held on to the belief that they'd come through this in one piece.
High above the clouds.
Matthew stood alone in the open sky.
Wind tore past him, whipping the hem of his coat into a violent flutter.
His gaze cut through the gaps in the cloud layer, out toward the far edge of the horizon.
Out there, several small black dots were closing in fast.
They streaked in above the clouds, long white contrails trailing behind them, moving with unusual speed.
His eyes swept over the dots, and Matthew spoke, slow and unhurried. "...Seven nuclear warheads."
"Sounds like he's genuinely committed to blowing up both New York and me at the same time."
Even as he said it, there wasn't a trace of concern on his face.
To him, one nuclear weapon and a hundred nuclear weapons made no real difference.
If anything, a nuclear blast, paired with Dynamic Adaptive Evolution, could double as a decent workout.
Still, to keep radiation from contaminating what would soon be his own territory, he had no intention of letting any of these warheads actually reach the ground.
At most, he'd let one of them detonate up in the air, just to put on a bit of a show.
Matthew's eyes lifted, sweeping across the seven warheads closing in fast.
The next instant.
A gravity field swept across the sky in an instant.
The field that had once been limited to a hundred-meter radius now blanketed the sky for miles.
Apocalypse's own power-amplification trait, combined with Fusion Extraction, which converted unused abilities into raw material that fed back into himself, had let his gravity field, at full extension, cover a full tenth of the United States.
That force spread out silently, drawing the entire sky into his grip.
A single thought from Matthew.
The gravity field instantly reversed into a surging upward torrent!
It was a force invisible to the naked eye, but entirely real, as if the whole sky had been turned inside out.
The air let out a low, groaning roar under the violent pull of gravity, and the clouds were dragged instantly into a series of vertical white streaks, as if the entire atmosphere had been twisted into a single pipe leading straight up into space.
Six of the seven contrails changed direction at the exact same instant.
Only one continued its dive straight at Matthew.
The six warheads that had been wrenched off course trailed white flame behind them, looking for all the world like six fish hooked through the throat.
They were violently torn off their original trajectories and sent arcing, straight and hard, up toward the space above.
That took care of six of them.
At the same moment, the one warhead Matthew had deliberately left alone reached the airspace over New York.
The people below heard the shriek of something tearing through the clouds, and their eyes filled with pure terror.
"The nuke... is it actually coming?!" On the streets, crowds froze in place, heads tilted up.
By this point, they understood clearly enough that, at the speed the warhead was traveling, it no longer mattered whether you ran or not.
By the time you actually heard and saw it, it was already too late to find any real shelter from the blast.
Compared to any ugly, desperate struggle, simply standing still and waiting for it was already the most dignified option left.
Just as everyone stood there, heads craned upward, watching—
A figure among the clouds blurred into an afterimage and slammed straight into the falling warhead!
The next instant—
BOOM!!
Blinding light and searing heat flooded the entire sky.
A violent pressure wave rolled outward toward the ground below!
Just as the people of New York braced for that heat and pressure to sweep through the city like the end of the world—
A hundred-some meters above the city, a barrier woven together from a gravity field held firm against the heat and the pressure, bending the blinding light and the shockwave around it.
It looked exactly as if some invisible pane of glass had caught the whole thing dead in its tracks.
The sight left everyone watching completely stunned.
But the truly astonishing part was still to come.
Right in front of everyone's eyes, the fire, the smoke, and even the invisible radiation spreading out over the city were caught, in the space of a single instant, by the transparent gravity field, held perfectly still, and then, as if seized by an invisible hand, hurled straight out into space.
At the same moment, the remaining warheads were accelerated by the gravity field and driven out into space as well.
In the end, all of them detonated together in the pitch-black vacuum.
This time, there was no sound.
Only a few clusters of blinding white light bloomed silently against the void, as if someone had let off a handful of enormous fireworks made of pure fire, high above the dome of the Earth.
The light lasted a few seconds, then slowly faded.
Matthew stood in the empty patch of sky the explosion had cleared, not a single tear in his clothes.
He tilted his head back, watching the seven points of light gradually die out, a faint, disdainful curl touching the corner of his mouth.
"Not bad, as fireworks go."
"...But that's really all they amount to. Fireworks."
With that, a spark-trailing portal snapped open.
One step forward, and Matthew was gone.
The nuclear crisis had arrived fast, and it left just as fast.
Word that the danger had passed spread just as quickly as the fireworks that had announced it.
For the first time, the people of New York had genuinely experienced what it felt like to have a nuclear warhead detonate over their heads.
That feeling of death closing in, face to face, was something they'd never forget for the rest of their lives. Neither was the feeling of having been written off, expendable, by their own government.
If Matthew hadn't stepped in when he did, every last one of them would already be dead.
Which only made them hate Ross and the U.S. government even more.
Meanwhile, New York's major news outlets, having just narrowly escaped death themselves and watched the whole crisis resolve in real time, found themselves caught between relief and fury.
Relief, because they weren't going to die after all. Fury, because the U.S. government and Thaddeus Ross clearly hadn't thought of them as human beings worth saving in the first place.
And so, after a bit of embellishment, the media wasted no time recasting Matthew as the hero who'd "turned back the flood and kept the crumbling tower from falling."
Thaddeus Ross, meanwhile, got cast as the clown who'd tried to murder a hero and level an entire city in the process.
Credit where it's due.
Nobody does embellishment quite like the American press.
By the time Thaddeus Ross saw how the media was describing him, half a day later, he flew into an absolute rage, cursing at the top of his lungs.
But before his temper had even started to cool, one of his subordinates arrived with another update from the front.
With the front-line forces having suffered catastrophic losses and no longer able to hold back the Astartes' advance, units were now either surrendering outright or falling back wherever they could.
And because the forces at the front had lost the will to keep fighting, several Astartes legions were now advancing rapidly on Washington, D.C.
That wasn't all.
Because Ross had dropped a nuclear weapon in his own backyard, the citizens of America's other cities had started publicly condemning him too, demanding he bring this pointless war to an end, terrified that they might end up abandoned the same way New York had been.
Listening to his subordinate's steady stream of battlefield reports, Thaddeus Ross's eyes went bloodshot, his chest heaving.
"End the war?" Ross muttered through clenched teeth, low and dangerous, before suddenly roaring the words out loud.
"Absolutely not! I've given up too much for this war already! We haven't even won yet, how could I possibly let it end now, just like that!"
Beside him, the subordinate who'd just delivered the report listened to Ross's near-hysterical outburst, drew a slow breath, and finally, bracing himself, spoke plainly. "Mr. Secretary... given the current state of things, our odds of winning this war are effectively zero."
"And we just received word, five minutes ago. Four hours before that, the Grey Knight legion, the one tasked specifically with hunting down American politicians, tracked down and eliminated another underground facility used to shelter senior government officials."
"At this point, aside from you and the people in this facility, there's no one left anywhere in American politics still arguing for continuing this war."
At that, the man paused briefly, his voice dropping lower. "And given how fast the Astartes are advancing at the front, it won't be long before they find this facility too."
"So—"
"There is no 'so'!" Ross swept a hand through the air, glaring furiously at the man.
"I don't care whether that pack of cowards supports me or not. I will not surrender, and I will not end this war!"
"If this war ever really does come to an end, it'll be the day I die!"
Ross said it with total conviction, his tone leaving no room for argument, and the subordinate standing nearby found himself with nothing left to say.
Just as the two of them fell into that silence, an uneasy commotion suddenly rose up in the corridor outside the office.
Ross's brow furrowed, and he rose and walked to the door, scanning the hallway.
The corridor outside was already in complete disarray.
Crowds of politicians in suits and officers who'd changed into civilian clothes were rushing around, bags in hand, hurriedly packing up whatever they could carry and running for the exit.
Their bags bulged, stuffed full of what were clearly valuables.
They were doing this because word had somehow reached them that the Astartes were about to hit this location.
To save their own lives, they didn't hesitate for a second, abandoning Ross and the soldiers still fighting at the front without a second thought, grabbing whatever they could and preparing to run.
Watching all this unfold, Ross froze for a moment.
His gaze swept back and forth across the chaos filling the hallway.
A few of the politicians and officers who spotted Ross slowed their steps for a moment, as if about to explain themselves, but their attention was immediately pulled back by the crowd of people fleeing past them.
Seeing that, they gave up on any explanation entirely, just tugged their hats down a little lower, and melted into the crowd.
Only five minutes passed.
The corridor that had been in complete chaos a moment ago now stood entirely empty.
He'd clearly been abandoned.
Ross stared at the wreckage littering the hallway, one hand gripping the doorframe, unable to stop it from shaking.
In the end, he snarled through gritted teeth, "Spineless cowards!"
The words had barely left his mouth when Ross turned to look at the subordinate who'd delivered the report a moment ago.
"They've all left. Why are you still—"
He never got to finish the word.
The cold, dark muzzle of a gun had already pressed itself against Ross's forehead first.
Feeling the cold press of the barrel against his skin, Ross's brow furrowed, and he let out a contemptuous laugh. "Heh... to think, after all this time following me, you'd end the game trying to trade my life for a better future for yourself."
"I really did misjudge you." Ross's eyes stayed locked, unblinking, on the figure in front of him.
In response to Ross's mockery, the figure murmured the words back under their breath, then shook their head.
Then, under Ross's confused stare, the figure slowly raised a hand, fingertips brushing along their own cheek, and peeled away a gossamer-thin electronic face mask.
Under the harsh white light, the mask came away in Ada's hand, and that unmistakable face came into view before Ross's eyes.
"Sorry, Mr. Secretary."
"The war's over."
"The game's come to this point. You've been put in check."
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