“Fire!” John shouted as the oversized spiders rushed from every direction.
He and Kisch immediately opened up, gunfire hammering through the room as rounds tore into the creatures’ black bodies.
Their exoskeletons were not particularly tough, but that hardly made them harmless, because even spiders riddled with bullets continued crawling forward until their bodies were almost completely destroyed.
The worst part was how mobile they were.
The creatures climbed walls and ceiling supports with terrifying ease, allowing them to attack from above while John and Kisch were focused on the floor.
Kisch’s M249 finally proved its worth, however, because the heavier rounds carried enough force to tear the spiders apart with only a few solid hits.
“Click.” A hidden mechanism suddenly sounded at the far end of the chamber.
Orion looked up and saw the Collector standing there with the unconscious Elena in his arms, using her body as a shield while only one cold blue-lit eye remained visible behind his mask.
He stared directly at Orion for several seconds, almost as though memorizing his face, then pressed a concealed button on the wall.
A hidden door slid open behind him.
The Collector disappeared through it with Elena.
“Damn it!” John immediately understood what he was doing.
“He’s running.
Orion, go after him.
Bull and I will clear you a path.” Without hesitation, John and Kisch shifted their fire away from the spiders nearest them and concentrated on the creatures blocking Orion’s route.
Bursts of gunfire ripped through the black swarm, opening a narrow corridor toward the hidden doorway.
Orion gave them one warning before moving.
“Watch yourselves.” Then he lunged forward.
His Level 2 body exploded into motion so quickly that neither John nor Kisch could properly track him.
To them, Orion became little more than a dark blur crossing the room, clearing more than thirty feet in seconds before reaching the hidden entrance.
Kisch stared after him despite the spiders still crawling around them.
“Jesus.
So that’s why they called him Crusher.” Behind the concealed door was a narrow stairwell washed in dim red emergency light.
Orion paused briefly and listened, but the enclosed passage gave him no useful heartbeat or breathing sounds.
Rather than taking the stairs normally, he used the walls and railings to descend at high speed, reaching the bottom within seconds.
The stairwell opened into a sealed room measuring well over a thousand square feet but with a ceiling low enough to make Orion’s nearly six-foot-six frame seem even larger.
Silver steel panels covered the walls, and a massive generator thundered in one corner, connected to a large gasoline tank and several thick power cables.
Orion immediately realized this was likely the hotel’s primary power room.
At the center sat Elena.
She was unconscious in a chair, her head hanging forward, while the Collector was nowhere in sight.
Between the generator’s roar and the thick smell of gasoline filling the room, even Orion’s enhanced hearing and sense of smell could not easily determine where the killer was hiding.
He remained cautious, but there was only one obvious move left.
“Elena.” Orion approached slowly and checked her condition.
Her breathing and heartbeat were steady, and he saw no explosives attached to her body or hidden beneath the chair.
Satisfied that she was still alive, he lifted her into his arms.
“Hiss!” The instant her weight left the chair, a pressure mechanism activated.
Nearly a hundred steel bars shot upward from the floor and locked into the ceiling, forming a dense cage around Orion and Elena.
At the same time, the stairwell entrance slammed shut behind them under a heavy steel panel.
Then another section of wall opened.
The Collector stepped out from a concealed compartment beside the generator.
“Buzz.” He pressed a switch, and gasoline began leaking through channels in the floor around Orion’s cage.
The pungent smell became overwhelming almost immediately, making firearms useless unless Orion wanted to ignite the entire room with Elena still in his arms.
The Collector slowly approached, his heavy footsteps echoing through the steel chamber.
Separated by the bars, the two men stared at each other.
The Collector tilted his head while examining Orion from top to bottom, almost like an artist regretting that he would have to destroy an unusually valuable specimen.
Yet the longer he looked, the more something seemed to bother him, because Orion’s face showed absolutely no fear.
There was no panic, no desperation, and no sign that Orion believed he was the one trapped.
If anything, the roles felt reversed.
That calmness visibly angered the Collector.
Orion and the Bison team had already forced him to abandon large parts of Hotel Argento, destroyed several of his traps, and pushed him deeper into his own lair, yet Orion still looked at him like prey instead of an executioner.
The Collector slowly reached into his pocket and produced a lighter.
“Hiss.” He flicked it.
A small flame appeared.
“Whoosh!” Orion suddenly exhaled.
The burst of air from his enhanced lungs struck like a gust and instantly extinguished the flame despite the lighter’s wind-resistant design.
The Collector froze for a fraction of a second, clearly caught off guard by something so absurdly simple.
That fraction was enough.
“You’re too close.” Orion’s left hand shot between the steel bars.
His height and long reach easily covered the distance, allowing him to seize the Collector’s right wrist before the masked killer could pull away.
Orion tightened his grip and yanked with full force.
“Clang!” The Collector’s body slammed against the cage hard enough to bend several steel bars inward.
At the same moment, Orion’s enormous strength ripped the man’s right arm completely free from the shoulder, tearing away part of the surrounding chest muscle with it.
Blood sprayed across the steel.
Orion looked down at the severed arm in his hand and frowned.
“Hm?” He had attacked under the assumption that the Collector was another Level 2 life form, so Orion hadn’t restrained himself at all.
Yet the body he had just grabbed possessed nothing close to Level 2 physical strength.
The wrist had collapsed in his hand like soft clay, bone and flesh crushing almost instantly beneath his grip.
The Collector hit the floor and immediately scrambled backward using his remaining arm and legs.
He kept himself more than six feet away from the cage while glancing down at the catastrophic injury.
His entire right arm and part of his chest were gone, blood pouring freely from the wound, while the impact against the bars had visibly caved in part of his ribcage.
Yet he made no sound.
No scream.
No groan.
The Collector simply forced himself upright.
Even with a crushed chest and a missing arm, he appeared almost completely unaffected by pain.
His movements were unsteady, but his first instinct was still to escape rather than collapse.
Orion watched him retreat and finally understood that whatever made the Collector abnormal was not raw physical strength.
“Crack… crack…” Orion shifted Elena securely against one side of his body and gripped two steel bars with both hands.
His muscles tightened, and the reinforced metal bent outward under brute force until a gap large enough for him to pass through appeared.
He stepped from the cage with Elena still in his arms and looked toward the fleeing Collector.
A faint smile appeared on Orion’s face.
“Little late to run now.” (End of Chapter) Enjoyed the chapter?
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