“OPEN F-!”
The SWAT leader never finished that sentence. In an instant, the barest flick twitched through Fredericks’ hands and an unseen force shot out around him in a ripple, racing not just through the air but through reality itself. And to the horror of every onlooker, the ring of men around him simply evaporated. Turned to dust.
“Holy-!”
Wally barely knew what he was doing but suddenly, instinctively he was sprinting back with Natalia, his arms around the tiny British psychic, hauling her off her feet as she could do nothing but stand there, eyes wide, mouth gaping, as everywhere around them the siege turned to chaos. He dove behind a squad car, pulled them both into cover, as all around them descended death.
“FIRE!”
The Sheriff screamed, police officers fired, bullets flying from every direction. They could not miss, their aim was true, and Fredericks made no attempt to evade them. Yet nothing hit. Staring wild‑eyed over the back of the car, Wally could only look on in horror as a thousand bullets became nothingness mere feet from the Pastor. Disintegrated. Turned to dust.
“FIRE!”
Only now it seemed did the police remember they had superpowers. Torrents of fire and ice and lightning streamed towards Fredericks, but the priest’s crimson eyes merely twitched and the air around him was suddenly not air but crystal, great walls of impossible glass erupting into existence, absorbing the energy harmlessly, appearing from nowhere to-
And suddenly Fredericks was rising. The earth beneath him tremored and burst with diamonds the size of school buses, roiling sheets of marble and granite, waterfalls of liquid metal sweeping suspended through the air as he rose, gazing imperiously down, as whatever powers came near him disappeared, reformed.
“Back!” shouted Wally, Azleena, Farrington, someone, a terrified voice in every Acolyte’s head, “Back!” People were screaming, civilians, onlookers, media, Fredericks’ own followers, tumbling handcuffed and scrambling, screaming, out of the back of now unguarded police cars. The officers surged forward, yelling wordless panic, terror or pressure or training making them just keep shooting, keep advancing with their useless guns-
From his outcrop of shining stone Fredericks swept his gaze down over the mortals, over everyone, and he reached out his hands, his lips still moving, a conductor poised to command a symphony. Everywhere he turned disintegration followed, rolling in a wave without mercy, without distinction. The police, the media, the Baptists – their voices all suddenly gone, swallowed by silence, their bodies turned to ash.
“Run. Run!”
Spread far back from the homestead, some Acolytes were firing, attempting to bring their powers to bear. Wally saw Gabbi hurtling shards of shining steel with razor precision but the moment they got within three feet of Fredericks they were no longer steel but raindrops. A tornado hurtled down from an unnatural grey cloud but the wind did not so much as ripple the priest’s hair, instead drifting harmless to floating snowflakes. Farrington’s fire met inch‑thin barriers of obsidian, swirling into existence with almost indifference.
And suddenly Fredericks rose, his feet no longer touching the ground, his palms down and outstretched as he lifted through a hurricane of swirling black and white and silver, spiralling stone and sheets of diamond, the earth beneath him bristling, breaking and reforming into man‑sized crystals of a dozen different colours, cobalt and chrome and clear, rippling squares of interlacing fractals, the boiling landscape of an alien world. Suspended ten feet in the air, his maroon, listless eyes turned back to the stumbling crowd where they found Monique, the dreadlocked force‑fielder Acolyte, holding a champagne-coloured hexagon between Fredericks and a camera crew. The Pastor’s left hand flicked towards her, his finger making the barest twitch- but suddenly a black blur shot in front of the girl and Monique was gone, dustless. Wally felt Giselle’s mind reconnect to their psychic network, felt the speedster race, wordless, covered head‑to‑toe in black nanofiber, desperately grabbing members of the Legion, hurtling them clear. In his mind Wally heard her breath coming hard and fast, panting beneath the helmet and respirator as she desperately sped, racing in a blurring circle, hauling one after the other her Acolytes out of the way-
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Suddenly Giselle split, and faster than a bullet she was running, leaping step by step through the surreal hurricane surrounding Fredericks, feet pushing off disks of stone and shards of diamond, faster than the eye could follow, hands gripping titanium blades-
But Fredericks did not even glance at her. Giselle leapt, plunging the daggers towards his neck, only for the metal to turn to salt before they got anywhere close. Giselle did not wait, did not waver but instead sped off, running back to the Legion’s perimeter – but now Fredericks’ eyes followed. Wally watched in horror, in the space of a heartbeat, as his demon‑blood gaze traced the blur of Giselle’s speeding form, as his lips moved, as his right hand followed – as he pointed with his forefinger.
And suddenly Giselle was screaming. Pain, incomprehensible pain exploded in Wally’s head, and suddenly in the far parking lot Giselle was tumbling, dropping out of super speed, skidding like a stone and Wally was racing, loosing wordless cries, springing over the curb as Natalia sprinted beside him, to find-
Giselle’s body slid to a stop, her chest spasming, her hands desperately tearing at her helmet, ripping it free, her hair and cheeks caked with sweat and she was wailing, sobbing in the morning air, screaming as Wally slid beside her, eyes wide with horror because-
Her legs were gone. Not burned, not broken, not severed, simply gone beneath mid‑thigh, sheared in perfect lines to tremoring stumps, and they didn’t bleed, there was no bone or blood or muscle, just this creaseless black line like the wound had been burned flat and perfect-
“Giselle,” he whispered, “Oh no, hang on, we’ve got to- MEDIC, MEDIC-”
And just like that it was pandemonium. Panic surged through the Legion’s psychic connection and suddenly everyone was running, everyone was screaming-
Suspended in the centre of the field, Fredericks’ gaze no longer moved in a sweeping arc but person to person, flicking, a boy who had poured gasoline into an ants nest squashing one by one those with the temerity to survive. Wally felt Adam’s mind scream and go dark, Monique, Cameron, not just vanishing now but dying, dying horrible violent deaths. A sudden gasp as a chest was pierced from six directions by fist‑sized diamonds. A sudden heat, an inhuman shriek as blood turned to boiling sulphur. A group wailing as their bodies dissolved into the ground in fusing, hardening puddles, pain switching to choking gasps as the air around them became chlorine gas.
This was not fighting. This was not self‑defence. Wally saw it in the flash of Fredericks’ crimson eyes, the small smile playing on his lips. This was vindictive. This was pleasure. This was cruelty.
The Pastor’s eyes turned to Sheriff Brady and his senior staff, who were stuck standing stock still beside a police truck, eyes wide and hands shaking, seemingly unable to move. The police chief’s mouth moved wordlessly beneath his moustache, whispering some inaudible plea, and around him a few of his sergeants reached for shaking guns. Fredericks waved them away with a lazy flick of two fingers, and suddenly the men were coughing, gurgling, collapsing, clawing at their faces – their eyes, their ears, their mouths overflowing with liquid mercury.
“God,” Wally whispered. The word trickled from his lips in soft, desperate terror. “God.”
Fredericks hung suspended in the twisting, shimmering air, his hands outstretched, surveying the destruction before him. Nothing lived within a hundred feet. A radius of surreal devastation, of puddles of salt and twisting metal talons, floating diamond and velvet silver, spread out around him, an alien hell brought forth. His eyes left those beneath him, and once more Fredericks’ gaze turned up towards the heavens. The ground rumbled, and suddenly the Earth beneath him shifted as though giving birth to a great awakening monster. Ten feet below Fredericks’ legs there erupted trunks of glistening diamond, crystals bigger than a house, shifting and rising underneath him and interlocking with a shaking, resounding crunch. Fredericks rose, borne upwards by this impossible mountain, a castle of frozen rock and liquid diamond, and as he stood it melded itself around him, cradling him, his back and arms and feet. With a lazy turn he flicked one hand, and the homestead below disintegrated into splinters, and within an enveloping spiral of silver Matt Callaghan rose, wide‑eyed, bloodied yet alive, carried upwards atop the mountain on lifeless eddies of chrome.
And barely a minute since Philip Fredericks stepped from its door, the Eastborough Baptist Church was annihilated. In its place, brought forth from beneath the churned ground in the heart of docile suburbia stood a crystal citadel, a seamless diamond ziggurat with neither edges nor ends, shining curves untouched by tools of man. It gleamed in the morning sun, an impossible pyramid some six stories high – and there, at its summit sat a man, a towering man with scarlet, empty eyes, his body splayed atop a crystal throne, king of all he surveyed. And beside him, a prisoner. Matt Callaghan, who could do naught but watch on helplessly, bound by diamond chains.
The crimson faded from Fredericks’ eyes. The priest sat silent, smiling at the world beneath him, and waited without a word.
He didn’t have to wait long.
For at that moment, a figured dropped from the sky in a hail of blazing gold, slamming into the Earth, cracking the ground around her. Her eyes, clear grey‑blue, burned with unspeakable fury. From the base of his kingdom, she stared up at Fredericks without a word.
Jane.