"Though, not to you," Vox said. "You were never in the room. That is what I want the country to hear. You never once came down to see what you had ordered."

The second shoulder popped open with a wet burst, wrenched wide until the tendons snapped like fraying rope and the hollow socket emptied itself in a new shower of red. Vox then let the limbs drop from their suspended display with a wet thump. The impact caused a splash of red to flare across the podium.

"The Enhanced Containment Protocols," he recalled, his voice almost gentle. "Your signature is on every amendment. I have read all of them." He tilted his head. "Section four permits the indefinite retention of a minor for the purposes of study. The session broke for lunch afterward. It is in the record."

The president's screams ricocheted, booming through the livespeaker feed with the intensity of a banshee, but as loud and blood-curdling as they were, they were still somehow not louder than they were inside his own skull. His discarded arms were only lumps of mutilated flesh now. The two of them lay strewn at the foot of the dais like discarded limbs in a mannequin scrap heap, the blood still pooling thick across the marble as if they hadn't realized they weren't attached anymore. The man in Vox's grasp had fully lost control of his bladder now, the piss streaking dirty lines down his tailored suit in full view of the cameras. His screeches had fractured into something animal now, no longer human. His unbearable torment piped through public speakers in a live broadcast, small screens illuminating with his execution in every city square. Horrified onlookers found themselves locked in place by the savage brutality of it. The display was unbearable to watch, and yet impossible to look away from.

There was a reason Vox had drawn Solen out. And there was a reason for the carnage, even as merciless as it was. Vox wanted, no needed, them to see what real justice looked like. This was what a reckoning sounded like. Despite the years of tyranny and torment, Vox needed them to see how easily the old world order could be broken when it was finally held to account.

Then came the legs. One knee bent entirely backward before shattering cleanly through as the sinew tore like pulled taffy. Solen's tibia erupted through cloth with the pressure of it. Vox barely blinked.

"Do you know what I remember most?" His tone had shifted into something almost curious. "They opened my chest when I was nine years old and kept me awake for it. That isn’t the thing that still haunts me." 

The second leg broke away with a dreadful snap, flinging arcs of blood across the dais. A tiny fractured chunk of bone clattered off the edge of the podium like a tossed stone. Vox's hand unbent for a beat and the rest of the limb dropped, skidding wetly across the marble. The momentum of its fall dragging it through the gore already pooled there, leaving red smears in its wake. The horrific scene looked like the lair of a madman, as if someone had been painting with a body.

"They were polite. Every one of them." Vox's expression didn't twist into rage as he spoke, if anything, he sounded calmer and calmer with every word he uttered. "For eleven years, no one in that building ever raised their voice to me."

He let that stand in the open air, where nobody watching had any idea what to do with it.

"You will find that is the part I cannot put down."

Vox clenched his fist again and bones cracked. The sound that followed the sickly snap was nothing but a strangled, liquid rattle from somewhere deep in the man's throat. His body had already begun to understand it no longer belonged to him.

The final display of madness was the opening of the chest. With a small adjustment of his invisible keystrokes, the old man's ribcage opened outward in slow motion, his sternum cracking down the middle like splitting fruit. Organs spilled forth in an ugly procession. The intestines unspooled in slack, glossy ropes no longer held back by the muscle lining. The length of them fell, pink and steaming, wet with heat and horror. Each loop fell heavier than the last, dragged earthward by its own weight. The lungs fluttered their final few gasps, slowly deflating in rattling bursts. Another twitch of fingers and blood jetted from the spine as it fully unseated itself from the meat that held it.

He said nothing at all while he did it.

He tilted his head like a scholar, as he watched what was left of the president's body come apart in ribbons above the stage. He held the spine aloft for one lingering moment, the frayed nerves still twitching with leftover spasms. His prize. The final relic of his own unholy judgement.

When he was finished, he let the remains fall like a dead weight. The butchered remains collapsing into the awaiting sticky pool below, a symphony of flesh and fluid striking marble before smacking outward like broad crimson wings on the stage with a sickening, sodden thump. The splash even reached his boots. Red bled up the hem of his long cloak.

In the crowd, all sound had been smothered by a fear too dense to pierce. The broadcast drones hovered above the carnage, their lenses pulsing red, still streaming as thousands stood paralyzed in living rooms across the nation. Every pair of eyes too terrified to turn away.

Vox stepped through the remains without pausing. An image of divine fury. Holy white marred red. His cloak dragged behind him through the muscle and flesh without a single hesitation.

"Today," he said, pausing to stare directly into the eye of the nearest broadcast drone, "the old world has ended."

Blood painted everything. He was a king on a throne of bodies. Red speckled his regal jaw. His voice carried on like pages of scripture. He was inhuman with how little he seemed moved by what he had done.

"We remember what you did. The hands that held us down and forced us to forget our own names."

Groups of metahumans scattered across dozens of districts were all tuned in, their eyes wide and enraptured. The glow of the screens flickering across their vision like fireflies. Vox's words rang out like a hymn of liberation, settling deep into bone. For years they had been told to bury themselves, to silence their tongue and identity alike, but now, Vox had spoken their suffering aloud and turned it into a holy plague of retribution.

Where others may have felt horror, they felt vindication. Vox had reduced their former oppressor to nothing more than a smear on a stage. The same stage upon which Solen had built his lies and touted his hypocrisy. It wasn't just that Vox had spoken of salvation—he'd delivered it on a silver platter. His bloody retribution built of gore and flesh.

Vox's voice grew softer as he continued. It was suddenly as if he was only speaking to the meta children watching from their hiding places underground.

"We're not hiding anymore."

In his face there was no remorse, only clarity. Only victory.

"My name is Vox," he declared, his voice cutting through the stillness. "Your president is dead."

He allowed the silence to stretch, letting the weight of the announcement settle over the crowd like a prophecy. A sea of paralyzed faces tracked the movement of those eyes that didn't belong to a man, but to something far more alien. Below him, the survivors huddled behind toppled barricades and mounds of jagged debris, their bodies still trembling. Some faces were caked in drying blood; others were stained by the salt of silent tears. All of them were caught in the singular, terrifying gravity of his presence.

"The lie of democracy ends today. You've been ruled by cowards."

Vox's eyes swept over the crowd one last time, an apex predator; utterly unchallenged and inevitable. Above him, the planet's pale ring system had emerged as the sun shifted, casting a faint banded shadow across the marble at his feet. It was as if the sky itself had drawn a line beneath his judgment. He brought a pale hand to his chest, a gesture that should have been a peace offering, but coming from him, felt more like a titan's decree. He stood before them now not as a leader, but as a god. A merciless, ivory-clad deity who looked upon the horror of the battlefield calmly as per his own divine judgment.

"Now you’ll be ruled by me."