> The tiger
>
> He destroyed his cage
>
> Yes
>
> YES
>
> The tiger is out
-Nael
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Consul was beyond pain. He'd had some rough moments in his life, baseball bat to the head not even the worst of them. There was the time he'd been thrown into an active volcano by one of the few metahumans 'villains' who could take him on in a fist-fight, which itself was soon overshadowed by being cooked with gamma ray lasers by the aliens. It never got better really, he just got used to horrible agony being an occasionally necessary evil when it came to using his powers.
Right now, he wasn't hurting too bad. After all, the bombardment he'd been undergoing had stripped the skin off his flesh, in some places down to the bone. That's where the nociceptors were densest, after all. A more detached, intellectual aspect of his consciousness that wasn't howling observed that most of his foes had been trying to flee rather than fight, for all the good that would do them.
So far, the majority of his opponents who had stood their ground had been nearly destroyed ships. He wondered if they simply lacked the ability to run, but it made no difference, he was killing for the sake of killing, his mind a haze of noise and fire, his vision, when it wasn't mere nothing after this eyes were occasionally boiled away, saw naught but red.
Still, something in his brain, exposed and steaming in places, had higher order thoughts. It remembered flying as hard as he could at a vessel nearly torn in half before he'd met it, hitting the hardened hull and punching through it like paper. His nearfield telekinesis relied on his perception of danger to come online, the more stress he was under, the faster. Not entirely, of course, or he'd have been merked in his sleep a decade back, but now it was permanently on, dealing with the overwhelming majority of the abuse he was dealt. It was a clear sign of how badly they wanted him dead that he was this hurt, a normal human, or even most metahumans with enhanced durability, would be little more than a rapidly expanding cloud of plasma.
He'd sheltered inside the corpse of that ship, after he'd gone to the trouble of making sure it was dead for good this time. Not much inside that could hurt him, even in his berserk state, he hadn't messed with what he knew were the antimatter bottles. Just a few zombies, of all things, the odd security robot.
He felt the thump of other weaponry on the hull, more dead ships trying to flush him out. To be honest, they weren't trying very hard to kill him, as far as he could tell, they considered him an incidental threat, they seemed more focused on chasing far more nimble craft that had fled to the other side of Mars.
He stood there, newly regenerated eyes blind, panting ice crystals, feeling the craft heat up from more lasers caressing its skin.
Something felt different. He'd initially felt the harsh restrictions of the Reality Anchor as he'd flown closer to Mars, and then the nearly overwhelming suffocation and weakness when it had recalibrated to target his particular abilities. After a period of near uselessness, where a stray laser burst had nearly cooked him, he'd suddenly felt a surge of newfound strength.
Previously, he'd been flying blind, unable to really track targets as he chased them, with his senses bedazzled. He'd given up and had begun targeting fixed structures, the many O'Neills that lay high above Mars, tearing them apart, rejoicing in the pulping of meat and burning ichor of cybernetics, or the snapping of brittle graphene and bones. But he started feeling a foreign sensation, one that downloaded knowledge and spatial awareness into his head. A large drone had been annoying him, making him blind even when his eyes had ceased to burn. To its surprise, he suddenly knew where it was even as it tried to outpace him while bombarding him with photons and hypervelocity shells. It wasn't as satisfying to destroy as the screaming civilians and soldiers on the O'Neill, but he'd enjoyed it all the same.
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Any station, any station, this is the ONS Third Moon, we request immediate evacuation for the thirty-two thousand souls on board. We've been hit by debris from the battle around Mars, and now there's a rogue Metahuman here, he's fighting the security turrets.
I say again, we need immediate-
The broadcast was cut off with a wet squelch. Consul held the woman's skull in his hand, feeling the rush of escaping air behind him. She'd been dead before he decapitated her, the shrapnel from his forced entry had seen to that. The screaming of the other people in the room faded out with the lost wind and the snicker of emergency visors sliding across their faces. No matter, when he had his hands in their guts, he could feel the vibrations through the bone, as he set about his reckoning.
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A cyborg built like a brick shithouse jumped him, smashing a fist of titanium into a nose of adamant. The arm broke, then did the man. Consul took his time killing the rest, letting them feel a moment's relief when their wimpy weaponry scratched him, his powers not deeming them a real threat. The panic interspersed by the sheer confusion when they momentarily recognized him. Another part of his broken mind felt shame, it hadn't intended for it to be this way. Yet another giggled in satisfaction, considering it just appropriate payback for all the indignities and abuse he'd suffered at the hands of the so-called powerless.
He walked through the endless fields of amber grain, that filled the underpopulated structure, watching them run and hide. The latter worked far better than the former, he couldn't see through walls. Shame they were still no impediment.
When the grains ran red more than copper, he was bored, flying to the central axis around which the megastructure spun, casually ripping it apart. The strain felt good, his muscles hadn't had a proper workout in weeks. Too busy. Always too busy.
A child wriggled as the floor beneath it fell away, the centrifugal force throwing it into the vacuum. Good. Die young. Never become your heroes, they never are. He didn't notice the miniature figurine of him the boy clutched till it froze to his fingers.
Someone, maybe another O'Neill afraid of his arrival after he'd disposed of two already, hit him with a nuke and finished the rest of the job for him.
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His eyes had begun to return a vision of blurry darkness, barely illuminated by emergency lights as he stood by the ribs of a metal whale bleeding antifreeze. Even with his newly regrown eyelids firmly closed, he could detect a dozen objects outside, most of them the zombie ships hunting him. He could feel the precise trajectory needed to chase them, even as they tried to beat him at Newtonian police chases.
This was truly novel, something that same analytical region in his brain recognized as foreign. Someone or something was helping him, lending him their strength, speed, and knowledge, to augment what had been lost under the remorseless pressure of the Anchor, now exceeding it.
Consul.
That voice in his head. Louder now. Most of his mind snapped at it like a rabid dog, but a part of him listened.
We're here to help you.
He ripped hardened ultralloy like paper as he thrashed about inside the ship, but that part of him, while still suspicious and hateful, still listened.
We give you sight where you have none. We take your pain, and feel it ourselves so as to spare you.
All of him was dumbfounded when the pain just vanished, it had been coming back, becoming nigh overwhelming as his skin coalesced out of nothing. Whatever psychic insanity had taken him, it didn't budge, but he felt a sense of gratitude, or at least a desire to kill his benefactor last.
I understand. I cannot quell your rage, or tell you that you are wrong for hating me. But as long as you kill our mutual enemies first, I will keep helping you.
There is a ship you must destroy, a man you must kill. Do so, and your strength will be yours again, and more than you have known, even if you will lose our aid.
A target appeared in his mind's eye, a vessel entirely intact, unlike the ones he'd been chasing. It was bright blue, with the red accent of the Chinese flag waving in an electronic breeze on its hull. He felt that it was surrounded by many other ships, guarding it like faithful sheepdogs fending wolves away.
A man inside. No, not a man, there was too little left to call him that. But he felt innate hatred for him, almost as if he knew him from before, a vile torturer who, if not going scott-free for his sins, had hardly paid enough.
Killing him won't undo what they did to you, or your brother. But it's a start.
He didn't need more encouragement, a moment later, the UNSC Garibaldi was torn apart, one chunk with the reactor aboard detonating hard enough to blast away some of the little air Mars had left. The rest of the dead ships turned his way, pleased to have a target.
As the new volley of death approached him, he cracked his neck and prepared himself again, let's be quick and move on to the people that matter.
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The precogs were seizing again.
The medical autodoc grumbled internally as it pumped them full of magnesium sulphate. It resolved that, if by some miracle, the Lycosan ended up under its manipulators, it would give her an entirely suboptimal dose of medication as punishment, which was about all the violence that its Hippocratically mind-fucked consciousness could contemplate. The fact that it was, in the option of external observers, even more spider-like, was ignored by a mind not really designed for an appreciation for irony.
It wondered again about the incredibly weird RNA samples it was picking up, from a sampling of several different patients. Contemplating the matter, it found out the patients had something in common, they'd all been recently treated in the dorsal med bay, by the same Healer. There, chimeric DNA, cells that, while phenotypically within normal parameters, didn't share the same genes as the rest. Overwhelmingly distributed in neural tissue, but since they were replacing cells that had been damaged in the course of use or by battle, it wasn't immediately concerning.
In more normal circumstances, it would consider potential sample contamination, but for now, it chalked it down to a queer property of the powers of the Healer in question. Sadly, Medscape didn't come with very good guidelines for handling the myriad eccentricities of such forms of healthcare, and it grumbled some more, both at the thought of pesky humans taking its job, as well as how much of a headache it was to try and account for all of it.
No matter, it had reported the issue to the Boss upstairs, that awfully pompous Indian AI.
Maybe, if the Censors would allow it, it might pen a paper on the unexpected incidence of bis-amino acids in Metahuman physiology. A surprising fact, because while that was unheard of in normal human biology, it was nigh omnipresent in biological Centauri Warforms.