The broadcast had been running for exactly six minutes. Six minutes of rehearsed, sanitized propaganda, funneled through every screen from Sector One’s gleaming towers to the rust-stained tunnels beyond the perimeter.

The president of The Unified Sectors of Carvek was a man with thinning lips and splotchy pale skin, bloated by overindulgence and lack of oversight. His name was Derek Solen; though most called him Sir and pronounced proudly that he was ordained by God. Right now, he stood beneath the seal of the Unified Government, a red, white and blue ring of stars with a fearsome bear symbolizing power and inevitability. Around him, twenty-four soldiers at the ready, lined shoulder-to-shoulder with rifles held at ease, visors down, and boots gleaming. It was all a desperate and gaudy display that was meant to show strength. But it felt more like fear. A pathetic performance to those that knew better.

 “…and we will not be intimidated by rogue threats or whispered rebellions,” he declared, his voice sharpened by the feed, echoing through a thousand fractured cities. “The Republic holds steadfast, and the people stand with us. Stability will be restored.”

Sweat glistened at the man’s brow. This public broadcast was a rare display—it was too risky. Solen rarely ever left the safety of his fortified underground bunker. For every citizen who hailed him as anointed, there were just as many who would see him dead. And celebrate it. He was painfully aware of that fact. His eyes kept twitching, unable to hold still under the weight and pressure of the lights. Hyper aware of just how exposed he was on center stage. 

His eyes flicked toward the soldiers on his flank. Then to check exit and entry points. Flicking forward again to scan the crowd for any sign of resistance or outbreak. It wasn’t that he’d leave it to chance, however. The town square had been secured hours ago. Streets were cordoned off. And all civilians in attendance had been thoroughly checked and funneled through scanners, being stripped of anything sharp or potentially dangerous or inciting. 

Solen droned on, eyes fixed on the teleprompter that dangled from a government-issued drone.  He had just swelled to the peak of his speech when the lights faltered. The jumbo screens to his left and right buzzed with static. Something unnatural warped the air, cracking through the faint hum of the feed. The disruption warped the signal, producing enough static to make your hair stand on end. 

The crowd distantly murmured, confusion setting in. Then, a sharp whine of microphones cut through the air, just for a second and a sea of eyes jerked towards the sky, just as arcs of lightning cracked across the clouds in jagged veins, illuminating just before the atmosphere went black. A sudden gust tore through the plaza, wringing out a symphony of gasps. The wind howled as it swept over the crowd like a crashing wave.

There, far above the marble eaves of the Republic Hall, shifting through the overcast haze, was a man. He descended through the clouds like a slow wave of gravity, his cloak opening in the wind, as vast and soundless as the landing of a dove. The atmosphere around him rippled with a shimmer of charged ions.

Recognition broke through the president’s expression like a crack across glass. All the color drained to leave behind a grayish pallor. His heart broke into a staccato at the sight of his frozen, elegant face. The face Solen found himself staring into wasn’t the face of a man at all. It was the face of retribution.

“Vox,” he breathed, his voice a mangle of frayed vocal cords.

The man in white’s boots met marble with the finality of a cathedral bell collapsing, never slowing. It rang out as a bone-hollowing sound. Gasps of shock and awe tore through the crowd at the sight of him. 

The man himself was slight, the sort of frame that could vanish into a crowd, and his skin was pale, washed out beneath the glare. His golden hair was cut close so the planes of his face showed as sharp as bone. He carried no weapon with him. His fists weren’t even clenched. No—the reason for their panic was simple. The sheer terror that had etched itself into their leader’s face, unearthed a raw panic so visceral that people cowered empathetically.

Solen’s snipers wasted no time jerking to attention on surrounding rooftops. A line of shiny black rifles snapping upward in unison, their fingers hovering patiently, waiting only for their signal to unleash fire.

Vox’s eyes looked to the rooftop, a simple, nonthreathing observation. His pale eyes had to squint slightly at the silhouetted outlines of the tiny bodies ducked behind concrete that were carefully stationed around the plaza. 

What Vox saw, that the snipers didn’t see, were five silhouettes ghosting through the sun’s washed-out glare in tactical suits of white and chrome. 

He watched them with a detached, clinical interest. In the heat of their red sun, their forms were nothing more than a solar distortion, but to him, they were instruments of war. Then, as a heavy cloud drifted over the sun casting a shroud of gray across the plaza, the sudden shift in illumination stripped away their camouflage, leaving their forms standing out starkly against the dull, milky sky. But by that moment, it was too late for anyone to react.

The first Unified sniper lost his windpipe with a quick slash before he’d even heard their hollow footsteps. The second man, who had been perched silently on another roof, had a blade pushed upward and through to the soft underside of his chin before he’d even seen the flash of a shadow. Every move was surgical and practiced. Their executions were not made into a spectacle. Each death was simply a strategic eradication. Then, with a blast of fractured static, communication devices fried out, and the environmental lights flicked as signal disruptors pulsed out through the square. In seconds, the tightly held perimeter collapsed into madness.

It was all quite a taxing and overwhelming distraction, but Vox’s men weren’t there to fight. Moreso, they were here to watch. Their glowing white forms rose in unison to stand tall on the rooftops above to hold their positions. Ready to witness a reckoning. 

Vox lifted his right hand.

Onstage, The president finally flinched out of his bewildered stupor and and ducked instinctively out of the way. His cowardice overtaking what remained of his dignity in a single instinctive lurch.

“You fools! Fire—!” his eyes were wide and glassy as he shrieked. “Open fire!” His voice skipped as if he was a boy again, echoing over the loud speakers.

Vox’s eyes became dull, falling half-lidded at the panicked outburst. His pale fingers twitched upwards in mid-air as though plucking threads from a tapestry only he could see. 

With a wave of shrieks, the front line of soldiers rose, one by one, their rifles sagging in their grips. A shriek of black boots scraping stone cracked over the loud speakers as something unseen hoisted them into the air. Vox’s pale gloved fingers twitched yet again, something like a slight adjustment. Like the taut line of a pulled thread, limbs pulled backward and shoulders dislocated with sickening wet snaps. 

The screams that erupted were loud and ugly. The soldiers’ joints locked up stubbornly for only a moment after they pulled, though the weight gravity helped, finally snapping the stubborn  ligaments like limp rubber bands. The soldiers’ armor groaned under the strain as their bones cracked and the pressure climbed and climbed and  increased tenfold to the point of sending even their spinal vertebrae in the wrong direction. After the most resistance, their crumpled bodies folded inward like heaps of crushed paper; their knees finally shattering with the force.

No one dared to move even one single muscle. A single guard managed out a broken wet wheeze of disbelief mere seconds before his before his jaw was yanked sideways and cracked open like a birdcage. Vox converted him into nothing more than another pile twitching viscera to cast among the heap of flesh turning the stage into a shrine of gore. 

At the sight, the square’s cacophony died a sudden death, instantaneously replaced by a silence so hollow it felt deafening. Every soul in the plaza turned to stone, suspended in a breathless vacuum where time itself seemed to still. Then, with the velvet hiss of a cape and the slow, predatory tilt of his head, Vox’s gaze swept across the crowd. The moment those eyes locked onto theirs, the dam of horror burst. Their terrified stillness shattered into a primal stampede, a tidal wave of bodies cascading over one another in an animal scramble to breach the barricades and flee the weight of a God’s gaze.

They fired in a panicked unison, a scattershot of desperation fueled by eyes that had gone blind with a horror so profound it made breathing a challenge. Their fingers spasmed against their triggers in a hopeless last stand. The roar of automatic gunfire tore through the square, and the crowd detonated into a fresh layer of chaos. Civility vanished in the blink of an eye. The government fed news reporters abandoned their rigs and bolted, while the air filled with the sounds of screaming. Around the square, bodies fell to the ground and  children were trampled beneath frantic feet. A fine mist of red droplets painted the barricades before the lead could settle. 

Vox remained ever stoic and unflinching. Perhaps even more indifferent amongst the mast hysteria than before. As if the screams where only a backdrop to his final morbid display.  He moved his palm outward, and his face remained an unreadable mask composed to the point of a vacuumous emptiness. It seemed as though the carnage before him failed to register at all. 

The pale man’s soft gesture caught the bullets in the air like an invisible, impregnable wall. Their shimmering casings halted midair all at once, spinning and humming like a cloud of copper teeth. With a sigh and a single twitch of his forefinger, nearly an afterthought, the bullets reversed course carving back through the air to punch through the same line of soldiers who’d fired them. The men fell like a staggering collapse of dominos, clattering into heaps of bone and steel. Their limp bodies slumped against the marble with the ragdoll finality of marionettes whose strings had been cut.

Blood slicked the base of the monument like a seal of wax.  It pooled as thick and viscous as jelly, sparkling under the dozens of hovering mechanical eyes.

The president turned his face back to Vox, and the expression that met those pale eyes was one of an animal. His eyes were bulging and his mouth hung slack like a loose hinge; the terror on his face was craved into every line, too sudden and all-encompassing to disguise. Every inch of him sagged with cowardice, every instinct carved into his swollen features betraying the instinct to flee.

He finally managed to break out of his frozen, horrible trance and spilled down the stage steps in a blind scramble for escape. His suit jacket flared behind him like gravity itself was trying to pull him back. His sagging, jaunty gait carried him down two steps, maybe three. But even that small mercy was only because Vox let him. Vox hovered now, mere inches above the stage, a  predatory tilt to his gaze. He looked as if he was a starving lion who’d finally caught a whiff of blood and was sizing up the weakened prey that was slowly bleeding out. 

Vox remained still at the eye of the spiral, tracking Solen with an eldritch glint in his eye. The chaos circled around him like a plague, but within the eye of the storm, he remained a statue of crystallized stoicism. The only human flicker beneath the mask was the visible jump of a muscle under his eye; one single twitch as he lifted his right palm a little higher. Flecks of blood marred the fabric, the viscera drying like freckles on the pale fingers.

Then, Vox’s fingers slowly spread, tendrils of pressurative power reaching out and snaking around Solen like a vice. The weighty, invisible force tugged at Solen’s form like a greedy paw, and the man let out a shriek as the pressure hoisted from the ground like meat on a hook. Or rather, a mouse caught in a trap.

The old man kicked and twisted mid-air, his voice cracking with a raw, unadulterated panic. The mic clipped to his lapel was still hot, and his hysterical words echoed through hundreds of districts nationwide. Panic rolled off of him like unrelenting waves. He was a shell of his former authority, now he was just a weak, frail body with no where to go.

“No—no—please!”

Vox’s eyes narrowed minutely at the desperate pleas. Behind his eyes, something raged on like a beast gnawing at steel bars. When Vox finally spoke, his voice was low and calm. A deep, resonant, velvety sound that sounded both ancient and young.  The echo of his words reverberated over the speakers to momentarily still the chaos surrounding them. He almost  sounded almost conversational.

“You know, I used to beg too.”

The president thrashed violently, his wrists jerking and ripped fruitlessly against the invisible restraint.  All authority fell away. In that moment, the older man ceased to look like a man at all. He looked more like a squealing pig than the leader that had commanded the eyes and ears of generations. His plump body squirmed around in Vox’s grasp, flushed pink and slick with sweat.

“In the labs, before they stopped speaking to us all together. I used to beg. That was before the needles went in every night and the restraints became a daily standard. That was before I ceased to be human at all.” Vox stepped forward slowly, turning his wrist to command the man’s body to rotate with him. “We weren’t human. We weren’t even subjects by that point. Just data to you. Once your scientists realized that some of us couldn’t die by normal means… they got creative.”

Vox’s finger gave a twitch and a sudden, sickening crack echoed across the plaza as trapped man’s  first shoulder dislocated and tore, the muscle separating from bone with a sound like canvas being shredded. The arteries burst in a gush of crimson and the blood began to flood, trailing down his sides and instantly turning crisp white shirt red. His suit unraveled, the frayed layers catching with the pull of flesh.

“You burned us. Cut us open to see what was inside.” Vox tilted his head. “Did you know metahumans still bleed? I have the scars to prove it.”