Savin looked coldly at the man curled up at his feet, as though he were nothing more than a worm whose spine had been crushed beneath a boot.
Stark’s head of security?
So that’s all he amounted to.
He straightened the collar of his suit, which Happy had wrinkled during their fight, preparing to retrieve the briefcase before dealing with this meddlesome nuisance.
The screams and chaos around him were nothing more than irrelevant background noise.
However, at the edge of the chaos, a figure everyone had overlooked was doing something utterly insane.
Jack Taggart lay sprawled on the ground, staring at the overturned silver briefcase and the glowing syringes scattered across the pavement like drops of life-saving nectar.
Desperate greed burned in his eyes.
Savin and Happy’s fight didn’t matter to him.
He cared even less about whether that so-called head of security lived or died.
All he knew was that the “flaw” inside his body was devouring him.
The cold and weakness seeping from his very marrow had made him wish for death.
And the antidote was right in front of him.
He crawled and rolled toward it, seized one of the syringes, and, without even looking, viciously plunged it into his thigh.
A warm current surged through his body.
The sudden relief made him let out a satisfied groan.
But it wasn’t enough.
Not nearly enough.
Like a rabid dog that had been starving for centuries, he grabbed a second syringe, then a third…
He didn’t even care where he injected them—his arm, neck, lower abdomen.
He simply frantically forced the glowing liquid into his body.
Savin noticed something was wrong.
He turned his head just in time to see Taggart plunge the final syringe into his chest.
For the first time, Savin’s perpetually expressionless face showed genuine shock.
“Idiot!”
Savin cursed.
He decisively abandoned the briefcase and turned to run without hesitation.
This wasn’t a human anymore.
It was a bomb.
He took one step.
Just one.
Smack!
His body slammed face-first into the concrete as though he had been hit by a truck.
This wasn’t a trip or a fall.
It felt as if the gravity of the entire Earth had suddenly increased tenfold, then focused entirely on him.
Dust exploded around his face.
He tried to push himself up.
His powerful muscles tightened, veins bulging across his neck and forehead.
It was useless.
All four limbs were pinned firmly to the ground, and his bones groaned beneath the unbearable pressure.
Fear began spreading throughout his body.
He was trapped.
He couldn’t move.
Taggart’s body began emitting an unnatural red glow.
The veins beneath his skin stood out like red-hot iron rods.
Scalding steam erupted from his pores, distorting the air around him.
The concrete beneath his feet began to melt and crack, accompanied by a sizzling sound.
“Ahhh—it’s so hot! It’s burning!”
Taggart screamed, the sound barely human.
The Extremis virus inside his body had gone completely out of control due to the massive overdose, transforming him into an extremely unstable biological nuclear bomb.
Only then did the tourists around him finally realize that the glowing man wasn’t some kind of street performer.
He was a powder keg on the verge of exploding.
Panic escalated into desperate flight.
People shoved one another, trampled over each other, and fled in terror as screams echoed through the night.
On the steps of the theater, Happy coughed up a mouthful of blood, his vision beginning to blur.
He saw Taggart, transformed into a human torch, and felt the scorching wave of heat rolling off him.
He saw the concrete beneath Taggart’s feet cracking and melting.
He also saw Savin, flattened against the ground and struggling helplessly like a beetle pinned beneath a boot.
The apocalypse was unfolding right here.
Right outside the Chinese Theatre.
Just as Taggart’s body reached its critical point, with a blazing core on the verge of detonating, he suddenly stopped glowing.
No.
Not exactly.
The light was still there.
But his body was leaving the ground.
At first, he rose slowly.
Then faster.
And faster.
Like a reluctant rocket being launched into the night sky.
The terrified screams of the crowd caught in their throats, turning into a collective gasp of disbelief.
They raised their heads and stared at the human firework.
A trail of orange light tore across the dark canvas of the sky, climbing higher and higher.
Two hundred meters.
A silent, dazzling flash illuminated Hollywood, momentarily brighter than any searchlight.
Several seconds later, the sound arrived.
BOOM!
A deafening explosion shook the air, making people’s teeth ache and buildings tremble.
The shockwave expanded outward in a perfect circle.
The enormous glass facades of nearby buildings, along with the windshields of every vehicle in the vicinity, shattered inward or outward in an instant, becoming a glittering yet deadly rain of glass.
Yet the anticipated massacre never came.
The glass did not rain down upon the crowd, slicing them to pieces.
It was as though time itself had been frozen at that very moment.
Every fragment of shattered glass, large or small, stopped in midair.
They hung suspended beneath the city lights, refracting bizarre colors and creating a scene that was both magnificent and horrifying.
The civilians around the theater were still consumed by terror.
They had scattered in all directions, yet the surreal sight before them brought them to a halt.
No one knew what had happened.
They could only stare blankly at the motionless “glass stars” hanging above them.
Then a completely different sound cut through the commotion.
Tap.
A clear, rhythmic knock suddenly rang out.
Tap.
Another followed.
The sound wasn’t loud.
Yet it struck every person’s heart like a hammer.
The chaotic screams and frantic footsteps miraculously subsided. This story is hosted at novelping.com.
It was the sound of wood tapping against concrete.
Steady.
Rhythmic.
So utterly out of place amid the chaos, and so unnervingly calm, that it became impossible to ignore.
It was as though an invisible spell had frozen the crowd in place.
People involuntarily stopped and looked toward the source of the sound.
Amid the panicked masses, a passage seemed to open as though cleared by an invisible hand.
A man was walking toward the center of the storm.
He was exceptionally tall, standing at least two heads above those around him.
His physique was imposing, like a stone monument.
He wore a simple purple kimono and wooden sandals, while a white Marine coat rested across his shoulders.
Bold black characters reading JUSTICE were emblazoned across its back.
His face was stern and sculpted, framed by short hair and a neatly trimmed beard.
But the most striking feature was his eyes.
Or rather…
The eyes he no longer had.
They were tightly closed, while a massive cross-shaped scar stretched across his entire face, cutting through both of them.
He was blind.
One hand rested on a simple wooden cane sword.
With every step, its tip lightly tapped the ground, guiding him through the wreckage scattered across the street.
Incredibly, the sound of the cane’s tip seemed to grow louder with every step.
It wasn’t echoing beside their ears.
It was resonating inside the chests of everyone present.
The remaining panic gradually vanished, replaced by a heavy, suffocating sense of awe.
The air itself seemed to grow viscous, filled with an unmistakable sense of authority.
The blind man walked past the stunned tourists without the slightest change in expression.
He passed Happy, who was leaning against the steps and struggling to sit upright.
The man didn’t even lift an eyelid.
Eventually, he stopped.
His towering figure completely eclipsed Eric Savin.
Savin remained pinned to the ground beneath that crushing gravity.
With great difficulty, he twisted his head around.
A new and far deeper terror filled his eyes.
What stood before him was something even more incomprehensible than a human being capable of exploding.
The blind man stood silently for a moment, as though listening to the world itself.
He heard the distant sirens.
The sobs of civilians.
And the frantic pounding of Savin’s heart against the ground.
“Oh my, oh my… This really is…”
His deep, tranquil voice carried something closer to weariness than surprise.
“Treating human lives like chips on a gambling table, only to lose the wager.”
“What a terrible gambler.”
He paused briefly.
“I cannot allow the lives of civilians to be toyed with like this~”
He tilted his head slightly, as though listening to a sound only he could hear.
The tip of his cane sword rested quietly against the ground.
In this world that had just been torn apart, it was the one and only point of stillness.