[A/N]: Alright you wonderful gremlins, we just hit 200 chapters!! Thank you so much and enjoy this bonus chapter š
Jay's smile widened with predatory anticipation.
The smile of someone who had stopped pretending to be human and chose violence over morality and found it liberating.
He reached into his jacket, fingers finding a small dark blue crystal he'd been carrying since his visit to the afterlife months ago. A piece from the Inhuman's collection, given as a trade for services rendered. Something he'd kept as insurance. As a weapon of last resort.
It was a Terrigen crystal.
Carl Creel's power shifted. The Murasama properties faded as new ones took their place. Jay's body began to change, black and red giving way to crystalline blue. His skin became living Terrigen, compressed mutagenic potential made manifest. Every cell a source of transformation, and every molecule a weapon designed to trigger Inhuman genes or kill those without them.
"You and what army?" Jay asked. His voice was casual, like discussing the weather.
His hand, now crystalline and massive to the size of a small car, extended toward the assembled sorcerers. Diamond-like spikes erupted from his palm, each one a compressed lance of Terrigen crystal.
The spikes embedded themselves throughout the plane. In pavement, the walls, even the screaming columns, as hundreds of crystalline growths, each one pulsing with contained potential.
The black sorcerers stared at the crystals with confusion. Some pointed at them, some even tried to destroy them with magic, spells bouncing off harmlessly. Others attempted to teleport away, dimensional portals forming and failing as Jay's null field disrupted them.
But it was too late. Had been too late the moment the crystals embedded themselves.
Jay smiled and detonated them remotely.
The explosion wasn't fire or force. It was transformation.
Terrigen mist erupted outward in a wave that covered the area. The bluish fog was beautiful in a terrible way. Almost ethereal. Like clouds at sunrise. Like something divine made manifest.
It touched the first sorcerer.
His scream cut short as crystallization spread across his body. Stone-like Terrigen encased him from feet to head in seconds, blue crystal consuming flesh and bone and soul. The cocoon that should have contained transformation, that should have triggered latent Inhuman genes and elevated them to something more, instead became a tomb.
Because these weren't Inhumans with dormant genes waiting to activate.
These were humans. Plain old Homo sapiens with normal human genetics. Their DNA couldn't handle the forced mutation. The Terrigen didn't trigger evolution. It triggered cellular collapse. Genetic code unable to adapt, unable to transform, simply breaking down at the fundamental level.
The cocoon crumbled. The sorcerer's body went with it, reduced to dust that scattered in the wind. Ash then nothing as a person was unmade.
Across the plane, the same fate befell every black sorcerer the mist touched.
Hundreds of fanatics, each one a trained mystical master, each one individually dangerous, turned to stone and then to ash in the span of seconds. Their screams created a chorus as if a hymn of death. A symphony of endings.
Some tried to shield themselves with magic. Jay's lingering null field disrupted their defenses, leaving them vulnerable. The mist found them, consumed them and unmade them.
Others attempted to flee, but the mist spread too quickly, carried on the winds.
The mass slaughter took less than a minute.
Hundreds of people. Hundreds of human beings with names and histories and choices. All dying. All screaming and turning to dust that would blow away and be forgotten.
And Jay watched. Didn't flinch nor let himself feel anything except cold satisfaction.
This was necessary. This was what it took to stop someone like Selene.
When the mist finally cleared, only one figure remained standing among the settling dust.
Selene.
But the cost of survival was visible.
Her left arm was gone. Terminated cleanly at the shoulder, cauterized by her own magic. Her right leg ended at the knee, the limb missing entirely. She'd been forced to amputate. To cut away parts of her own body that had been exposed to the mist. Choosing mutilation over death.
Black blood poured from the stumps.
Her perfect skin turned ashen grey. The glamour that made her beautiful had vanished completely, unable to maintain itself through the trauma. Revealing the ancient horror underneath. Translucent flesh stretched over bone that was too white, too perfect and too inhuman. Eyes that were pools of absolute black and teeth that were just slightly too sharp.
This was Selene. Not the beautiful seductress or the confident External. Just the thing that had survived since civilization.
And standing before her, approaching with measured steps, was Jay.
His crystalline form had grown during the detonation. Now he stood eight feet tall, his body a mass of sharp angles. Blue crystal armor covered every inch, each piece sharp enough to cut diamond.
He looked like a demon made manifest. An evil incarnation pulled from nightmares and given physical form. Something that had stopped pretending to be good.
Selene tried to retreat. Her remaining leg buckled as exhaustion, blood loss and horror of what she'd just witnessed. All of it was too much and she fell, catching herself with her remaining hand.
"You..." Her voice was broken. All the ancient power drained away, leaving just a terrified creature facing death. "How... how can you wield such... such incompatible powers..." She coughed, blood flecking her lips. "... they shouldn't... it's not possible..."
Jay stood over her. Eight feet of crystalline death with power radiating.
"Nothing's impossible," he said quietly. "You just have to be willing to pay the price."
He looked down at her. At this thing that had violated the Braddock brothers. That had nearly killed Domino. That had built an army of fanatics and sent them to die. That had lived for thousands of years by stealing, consuming, violating everything she touched.
And he felt nothing.
Just cold certainty that this needed to end.
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