With strain in her voice, she screamed into the sky, "CONFINEMENT!" A mixture of tears and blood fell down her eyes—a striking contrast between the pain she felt and the pain she was about to inflict on her enemies. She stared down the four students, veins bulging along her hands as she drew downward with all her strength.
To her absolute shock, nothing happened.
The four students remained totally fine, grinning back at her. These were no ordinary students.
They all smiled simultaneously. "Oh, little girl, fresh into the wastelands and look at you. Let me guess, Bola gave you a motivational speech telling you how you'll achieve great things? Well, so were we told. But look at us—eyes empty, trapped here with no choice but to become stronger to survive. We eat whatever we catch, we ravage whatever we see, because the wasteland is true FREEDOM."
The speaker stepped forward. "My name is Une, and my twins are called Deux, Trois, and Quatre. We are known as the Napoleon Deadlock, for together, no one can defeat us. Now, we have no grudges against you; we're just a bit horny, and we haven't gotten a fresh one like you in a long time. As for why you can't use your ability—well, my power was built by absorbing the pain of other ability users, allowing me to cancel abilities outright. Deux possesses intangibility, making his body completely see-through and able to phase through matter. As for Trois and Quatre, they are quite special—if you survive long enough, you'll find out."
Une smirked. "Now, I'll be taking the first round."
Elizabeth felt her hands tighten together. She tried to move them, but they seemed to move on their own. Then, a chilling voice whispered right against her ear: "Awnn, baby girl, don't struggle with what you can't see."
She kicked and thrashed, but her legs hit nothing. Her body was forced to the ground, and her clothes slowly began to tear apart as the four men stared at her with the raw, predatory lust of beasts. Hands strolled up her thighs. She shook and cried, desperately wishing Michael was there. But he wasn't. For the first time, she felt utterly powerless as the invisible Deux caressed her body, unzipping her collar and licking her neck. "No hard feelings, but you might as well try to enjoy this."
As the terror mounted, Elizabeth's mind drifted backward, searching for Michael. She had always tried to be his anchor, steering him away from the dark. But was there any good left in her? Her life had been a ruin since childhood. Her father had used her for horrific experiments, pushing her powers to absolute exhaustion before casting her aside. Then, his fellow lab colleagues used her as a plaything, violating her body over and over. When she was finally broken beyond repair, they threw her onto the streets and moved on.
After all those years of agonizing solitude, she had finally found Michael—only to be pushed away by his erratic fits. And the moment he was ripped from her side, she was about to be violated again.
I REFUSE.
A twisted, terrifying smile broke across her blood-stained face. "Please... be gentle."
She opened her legs wide. Astonished and completely blinded by sudden triumph and rampant lust, Une rushed forward, dropping his guard entirely. In that split second of overwhelming desire, Une released his cancel ability.
Elizabeth's hair violently whipped upward into the air.
"I DON'T CARE IF I DIE! WITH ALL THE SECRETS I HAVE... CONFINEMENT RELEASE!"
With unimaginably massive force, Une's body compressed instantly right in front of his twins' eyes, violently imploding into a sickening puddle of warm blood. Deux recoiled backward in sheer terror.
Elizabeth stood slowly on her feet amidst the torn remnants of her garments. Blood flowed freely from her ears, her eyes, and her nose, dripping down her chin.
"I look crazy, don't I? I look like a monster, don't I? Well, that's because I am. A beautiful girl... is this what your kind deserves to be erased for? Michael was right. Humanity is truly disgusting."
She stared down at the pooling blood of the dead twin. "Awnn, are you shocked your loving twin is gone? Watch this."
With a sickening pull, she yanked all the spilled blood off the ground, forcing the crimson liquid straight down her own throat. Her eyes turned completely bloodshot, glowing like a vampire's, her veins stretching tight and black against her pale skin. She looked less like a human and more like a risen corpse; the physical force she was exerting right now was comparable to twenty African elephants collapsing simultaneously from a height of ten thousand feet.
Deux didn't waste a single second. He shrieked, "Trois, Quatre! DO IT!"
Instantly, Trois and Quatre bolted forward. They were standing on a cliff edge five thousand meters in the sky, where the clouds were literally within arm's reach. The thunderous, violent waters of the wasteland river screamed in the abyss far below. Trois and Quatre lunged toward each other, slamming their bodies together as they cried out to the heavens: "NUCLEAR!"
Their bodies fused, melting into a glowing humanoid silhouette made of pure, blinding red energy.
Standing before this god-like entity was a broken girl barely 5 feet 9 inches tall, blood dripping from every inch of her battered body. Her hand trembled with world-crushing gravity as she stared at the new entity.
"Together, Quatre and Trois wield the power of an exploding sun!"
Elizabeth's expression did not shift an inch at Deux's warning. She launched herself forward, smashing her left hand backward into open air to create a violent shockwave that propelled her body like a cannonball.
The energy silhouette fired a searing, concentrated beam of pure nuclear energy straight at her. Elizabeth screamed as gravity surged out of her mouth, warping and bending space directly in front of the incoming beam. No one could differentiate Elizabeth from a wild beast now. She smashed her left hand backward again, forcing herself to even higher speeds, her throat tearing raw as she shrieked: "YOU ALL DESERVE TO DIE! MY FATHER, THE LAB, AND ALL OF HUMANITY!"
Realizing they were facing a force of nature far beyond any normal human, Trois and Quatre shot straight up into the sky, smashing their hands together and pouring every ounce of their remaining energy into a singular, colossal beam.
Elizabeth was reminded of Vincent's core-draining art, and her hyper-intelligent tactical mind adapted instantly. Positioning both hands backward, she blasted a massive, dense cube of force while shifting her body weight to weigh a literal ton, launching herself at the flying silhouette like a missile. High in the freezing sky, she rotated her arms with propeller-like precision, twisting her body into a ferocious tornado to generate an artificial vortex. The vacuum sucked in boulders, debris, and air around her, while she rapidly deployed her legs and secondary spatial bursts to fire heavy blocks of compressed space—each weighing ten times the Eiffel Tower—straight upward.
The sheer kinetic force she generated caused the mountain cliff below them to crack and fracture into sliding avalanches. Deux was shredded into red mist as collateral damage, caught entirely within the localized gravity distortion.
Left alone, Trois and Quatre altered their tactics, unleashing their full, unadulterated beam. A blinding, searing white light illuminated the entire ground below like a total solar eclipse, burning everything within a ten-kilometer radius to charcoal as they screamed at the top of their lungs: "ABILITY: NUCLEAR EXPLOSION!"
But Elizabeth was fucking done.
Screaming up to the heavens, her right hand and left arm literally dripping off their bones, she roared: "AS FORCE GOES RIGHT AND FORCE GOES LEFT, IT LEADS TO A PHENOMENON KNOWN AS SPAGHETIFICATION!"
She channeled every remaining drop of energy feeding from her core, pushing chaotic, unstable levels of gravity outward. A phenomenon akin to a localized black hole erupted around her, bending the incoming nuclear energy in every possible direction—away from her body, absorbing it into the void.
She wasn't done yet. Her core was already turning a dull, lifeless grey, but she didn't care. She wanted every single one of them dead.
Facing her onslaught, the nuclear silhouette of the fused twins murmured, "As we have been neglected to shine among our siblings in the past, may we shine like that of the sun as we explode like the sun!"
The fused twins smashed their hands straight into their own chests. Without even a nanosecond to react, they triggered a cataclysmic detonation.
Yet, within that single, frozen nanosecond, time itself seemed to stutter. Elizabeth coughed up a massive mouthful of dark blood. "And with enough force... even time must stop. To END IT, I MUST NOW DISMANTLE!"
Bringing her bloodied hands together until her forearm muscles visibly ruptured and burst, she compressed an infinite amount of opposing gravitational forces into a tiny, hyper-dense cube. Staring directly into the nuclear blinding light of the twins, she smiled wide, her teeth stained crimson.
"BOOM."
She released the combined, catastrophic force of a roaring wormhole and the surface of a star all at the same time, thrusting herself backward with every remaining atom of power.
The resulting detonation instantly obliterated a forty-kilometer radius into absolute nothingness—a scorched, smoking wasteland where not a single beast, plant, or speck of life remained.
High above the crater of absolute annihilation, Elizabeth's broken, bleeding body drifted weightlessly in the sky. Completely unconscious, stripped of all defense, she began to plummet downward at a speed no human could survive, hurtling headfirst toward the earth below.
"ELIZABETH!"