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 Unifed 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 that held an immovable stance 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 that made your hair stand on end. 

The crowd murmured, confused. A sharp whine of microphones cut through the air, just for a second.

A sea of eyes jerked towards the sky, just as arcs of lighting 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.

It wasn’t a weather anomaly. There, far above the marble eaves of the Republic Hall, shifting through the overcast haze, was a man. 

He descended through gravity, slowly, his cloak opening in the wind, vast and soundless, the atmosphere rippling around him with a shimmer of charged ions.

Recognition broke through the president’s expression like a crack across glass. All color drained, leaving behind a gray pallor. His heart broke into a staccato. The face he stared into wasn’t the face of a man. It was the face of retribution.

“Vox,” he breathed.

The man in white struck the dais without slowing. His boots met marble with the finality of a cathedral bell collapsing, a bone-hollowing sound. 

Gasps tore through the crowd as he came into view. 

It wasn’t the man himself. He was slight, with the sort of frame that could vanish into a crowd, his skin washed out beneath the glare, hair cut close so the planes of his face showed plain as bone. He carried no weapon. His fists weren’t clenched. No—the reason for their panic was simple—the sheer terror that had etched itself into their leader’s face, raw and unhidden.

Soldiers jerked to attention on rooftops, trained for sniper cover, rifles snapping upward in unison, fingers hovering, waiting for their signal.

Vox’s eyes looked to the rooftop, squinting slightly at the black outline of the tiny bodies ducked behind concrete.

Vox hadn’t come alone.

Five bodies—dressed in white and gray tactical suits that stood out starkly against the dull sky, moved from the shadows, bodies glinting like blades.

The first sniper lost his windpipe with a quick slash before he’d even heard their footsteps. The second had a blade pushed through the soft underside of his chin, angled diagonally and surgically—plunging straight into his neural stem. There was no spectacle was the executions. It was just swift, strategic eradication. The communication devices died next, lights dimming as signal disruptors pulsed out through the square. The tightly held perimeter collapsed into madness in seconds.

Vox’s men weren’t there to fight. They rose, and stood tall on the rooftops above, holding positions, here to witness a reckoning. 

Then, with grace and calculated poise, Vox lifted a hand.

The president flinched and ducked, finally stuck into action from his frozen stupor. Even as he spoke, his cowardice overtook any remaining dignity in a single instinctive lurch.

“Fire—!” he shrieked, eyes wide, voice cracking. “Open fire!”

Unfazed, Vox’s fingers twitched mid-air—as though plucking threads from a tapestry only he could see. 

And then, with a wave of shrieks, the front line of soldiers rose, one by one, rifles still in their grips, their black boots scraping stone as something unseen hoisted them into the air.

It happened suddenly. Limbs pulled backward, and shoulders dislocated with sickening wet snaps. The soldiers’ joints locked up and were then pulled by gravity, snapping like taut rubber bands in reverse. Their armor groaned under the strain as spinal vertebrae bent the wrong direction, their knees shattering inward with it.

One managed a sound. It came out as a wet wheeze of disbelief before his jaw was yanked sideways and cracked open like a birdcage.

And then finally, in the mass of bodies that had been staring upward in frozen horror—chaos erupted.

The second line of soldiers didn’t wait for confirmation. They fired—scattershot and desperate, with eyes unfocused and fingers spasming on their triggers. The sound of automatic gunfire ripped through the square, and the crowd detonated into motion.

Vox remained stoic. His face unreadable, and composed to the point of emptiness. The carnage before him failed to register at all. 

The bullets halted midair and hummed. Shivering like insects caught in sap. They hovered there, a cloud of copper teeth, trembling against the wind.

Then, with a small twitch of his fingers—almost an afterthought—they turned.

Every round reversed course in a split-second bloom of kinetic violence, carving back through the air, punching through the soldiers who’d fired them. The men fell—clattering into heaps of bone and steel, slumping against the marble with the ragdoll finality of marionettes whose strings had been cut mid-pose.

Blood slicked the base of the monument. The wall behind them looked like it had been freshly painted. It clung thick and viscous, sparkling under the dozens of hovering mechanical eyes.

The president turned, his expression collapsing into something base and primal—eyes wide, mouth slack, his face contorted by a terror too sudden and all-encompassing to disguise. Every inch of him sagged with cowardice, his swollen features betraying the instinct to flee.

He spilled down the steps in a blind scramble for escape. His coat flared behind him like gravity was trying to drag him back.

He made it down two steps. Maybe three. But only because Vox let him. The man tilted his head, predatorily, like a lion sizing up prey that was slowly bleeding out. 

The stampede in the square had already begun. Crowds pouring into each other, limbs tangling, screams layering into a white noise of bewilderment. Barricades buckled. Cameras lay shattered on the asphalt. The broadcast drones shuddered and spun above, struggling to keep focus as their feeds filled with bodies scrambling for escape.

Vox remained still at the eye of the spiral, unflinching. The chaos circled him like a plague. A muscle under his eye twitched as he lifted one gloved hand.

An invisible force tugged at the man’s form, and he let out a shriek as he rose from the ground like meat on a hook. Or a mouse caught in a trap.

Solen kicked and twisted mid-air, the mic still hot as his words echoed through a thousand districts.

“No—no—please!”

Vox’s voice cut through. Low and almost conversational.

“You know, I used to beg too.”

The president thrashed, his wrists jerking against the restraint, looking more like a squealing pig than a man or a leader—plump, flushed pink and slick with sweat.

“In the labs, before they stopped speaking to us all together. Before the needles went in every night and the restraints became a daily standard.” Vox stepped forward slowly, wrist following the turn of the man’s body. His form floating like a marionette missing strings. “We weren’t even subjects. Just data to you. Once your scientists realized that some of us couldn’t die by normal means… they got creative.”

Vox’s finger twitched.

A sickening crack echoed across the plaza as the first shoulder gave out. The joint didn’t just dislocate, it tore, muscle separating from bone with a sound like canvas being shredded. Blood began to drip, trailing down his sides. His suit ripped into layers with the pull of flesh.

“They burned us. Cut us open. They wanted to measure our resistance to pain—our capacity to heal.” Vox tilted his head. “Did you know metahumans still bleed? I have the scars to prove it.”

The second shoulder popped with a wet burst, and the arms were wrenched wide—outstretched and trembling—until tendons snapped like fraying rope and the sockets emptied themselves in a shower of red. The limps dropped from his body with a wet thump. Splashing red across the podium.

“You passed the bill,” Vox said, almost gently. “The Enhanced Containment Protocols. You signed your name next to every amendment. That’s when you started caging us."

His screams ricocheted, booming through the livespeaker feed, but still somehow not louder than they were inside his own skull. His arms lay strewn at the foot of the dais like discarded limbs in a mannequin scrap heap, blood pooling thick across the marble. The man had lost control of his bladder now—piss streaking his tailored suit in full view of the cameras. His screams had fractured into something animal now, raw and stuttering, piped through public speakers in every city square. The people below had stilled now. Locked in place by the horror of it. Unable to watch—unable to look away.

There was a reason Vox had drawn Solen out. There was a reason for the carnage. Vox wanted them to see what real justice looked like. What reckoning sounded like. How easily the old world broke when it was finally held to account.

The legs twisted next—one knee bent entirely backward, then shattered clean through as it was pulled wide, the sinew tearing like pulled taffy. Solen’s tibia erupted through cloth with the pressure of it.

“And when you failed to control us… when you found out we didn’t want to be soldiers or science projects—what did your Republic do?”

The second leg came free with a dreadful snap, flinging arcs of blood like a broken fountain. A chunk of bone clattered off the edge of the podium. Momentum dragging it through the gore already pooled there, leaving red smears in its wake like someone had been painting with a body.

“They built prisons. Ten by ten concrete boxes with rotating staff so we didn’t learn their names. No clocks. No sunlight. Just isolation.”

Vox’s expression didn’t twist into rage. He sounded calmer with every word.

“I sat in that box for six years.” His voice cracked—but only barely. Emotion had become foreign to him. “Not because I was dangerous. Because someday I could be. Because you feared me.”

Vox clenched his fist and bones cracked. The sound that followed was not a scream, but a strangled, liquid rattle from somewhere deep in the man’s throat, as though his body had already begun to understand it no longer belonged to him.

The ribcage opened outward in slow motion, sternum cracking down the middle like splitting fruit. Organs spilled forth in an undignified procession. The intestines unspooled in slack, glossy ropes—pink and steaming, wet with heat and horror. Each loop fell heavier than the last, dragged earthward by its own weight. The lungs deflating in soft, rattling bursts, blood jetting from the spine as it unseated itself from the meat that held it.

“And now look. Look what I’ve become."

He turned, hand still raised, as what was left of the president’s body came apart in ribbons above the stage. The spine—still twitching—held suspended like an ornament, a relic of unholy judgement.

When he was finished, he let the remains fall. A dead weight collapsing into the sticky pool below, a symphony of flesh and fluid striking marble, smacking outward like broad crimson wings on the stage—a sickening, sodden thump. The splash reached his boots, staining the hem of his cloak. But he did not flinch.

The screaming had gone quiet. Smothered by a fear too dense to pierce. Broadcast drones hovered above the carnage, their lenses pulsing red, still streaming as thousands stood paralyzed in living rooms. In tunnels. Bars. Bunkers. Too terrified to turn away.

Vox stepped through the remains without pause. His boots were splashed in blood, marring the holy white. His cloak dragged behind him through the muscle and flesh.

“They wanted us contained,” he said, pausing before the nearest broadcast drone. “Never again.”

Blood speckled his jaw. His voice carried like scripture. Inhuman in how little he seemed moved by what he had done.

“We remember what you did. The needles. The dogs. The hands that held us down.”

Instead of horror, they felt vindication. Vox had reduced their former oppressor to nothing more than a smear on a stage built upon lies and hypocrisy.

To them, he was no longer a man. He was a God. 

Vox’s voice came softer then, as if speaking only to the drone, or to the children watching from their hiding places underground.

“We’re not hiding anymore.”

There was no remorse in his face. Just clarity.

“My name is Vox,” he said. 

“Your president is dead.”

He paused, and the words settled like a prophecy come to fruition. His gaze swept over the sea of frozen faces.

Terrified bodies huddled behind toppled barricades. Families pressed together under the scaffolding of the western promenade, faces half-shadowed, eyes wide and unblinking. Blood was already drying on some of their cheeks. On others, tears.

“The lie of democracy ends tonight. You’ve been ruled by a tyrant.”

His eyes swept the crowd, unblinking. Resolute. 

“Now you’ll be ruled by me.”