Project ROWDY 2-12
AUGUST 2023
The pressure of the earth itself compacted tight against his body as soil packed itself into his mouth, the taste of ash, vaporized copper and long-powdered bone stale on his tongue.
The being known as Yǒng Zhé did not breathe, China’s Eternal Breaker never needing something as simple as air. His needs were greater than the frailties of mortal men, and things like suffocation held no terror for a weapon forged to withstand the collapse of nations.
Eyelids forced themselves open against the suffocating grit as he met darkness of the most total kind, absolute and crushing, senses telling him he was miles beneath the ground.
But the darkness did not matter as his body sang with power.
Deeper than simple muscle and flesh, or even blood and bone.
No, the very atoms that made up his form hummed as each individual cell vibrated with the sort of power he had only known once before; a hysterical frequency born of the most powerful of earthly materials.
His lungs expanded, the air burning as he breathed in the heat of a fire that sought the heavens themselves; the divine flame of split atoms.
Radiation.
The gift of unbridled nuclear fission, raw and potent, flooded his cellular structure, a thermonuclear furnace raging in his heart with every beat. Rather than burn him or force his cells to face death, the energy fed him like the mother he once knew. He felt his muscles thicken far above their already blessed standard, swelling with the payload that had just gone off above his head.
Yǒng Zhé’, the Mandate of Heaven…The yield bled down through the bedrock as he pulled it in, soaking his long-dormant flesh. His cells drank the poison and his once-quiet heart beat yet again. Rendered in flesh.
Memory flared, sharp and humiliating, and cut through the atomic ecstasy.
Calloused fingers, thick as his own, gripping his temples, the smell of dust and old man’s sweat filling his nostrils as an indifferent white face simply twisted.
Yǒng Zhé’s jaw locked as he braced his form against the subterranean pressure, pulling his knees up into the crushing weight of the earth.
He drove a fist upward.
Bedrock shattered, a thousand tons of earth and rubble giving way as the hand of a god demanded it. He punched again, the absorbed yield turning his arm into a piston of absolute judgement and nearly liquefying the ground around him. Yǒng Zhé swam through the crust of the earth, a god emerging from his tomb as he breached the surface with a crater blown hundreds of meters wide.
Sunlight struck his bare chest, most of his uniform gone along with his blood-red cape. Only the thick weave of his trousers clung to his legs. He hovered in the air above the glassed crater of Myanmar’s capital, breathing in the wind thick with the sickly glow of a fresh atomic bloom.
His gaze dropped to his hands, both of them whole again and the bones intact. They both drifted to his neck, once-broken vertebrae firmly in place once more.
He knew nothing of the year.
It did not matter.
He knew nothing of the decade.
It did not matter, either.
Only the memory of the hands on his skull, the utter blasphemy of an American dog breaking his neck with a simple sharp twist.
Yǒng Zhé turned his body, vision locked on the horizon.
A scream left him, so loud it ruptured the air around him, as he launched himself East.
Toward the Pacific.
Toward America.
Toward the epicenter of global disease.
– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –
AUGUST 2013
The capital of Myanmar burned beneath the midday sun, the air thick with cordite and the burn of diesel. A sprawling monument to a vassal state that had forgotten its place in the hemisphere, as it looked toward the American dogs.
To invite Western imperialists into their borders and offer them foothold was the same creeping disease that had birthed the Century of Humiliation, a foreign predation of the same kind that had carved the Middle Kingdom while the emperors slept.
Beijing had slept.
Yet Project Tiānming had awoken.
Shaking off the bindings of lesser masters, those who had attempted to hold them back from their cause, the Seven Weapons of Heaven had acted as the state would not.
Seven assets.
Seven gods.
Seven living repudiations of the Century of Humiliation, born and bred and built to guarantee no foreign power would ever dictate terms to the Middle Kingdom again.
Dì Mǔ drove her hands into the wide avenues of the government district, the earth obeying her without hesitation as it groaned in submission. Massive canyons split open, racing down the avenue in jagged lines wide enough to swallow armored carriers and hundreds of fleeing civilians and infantrymen alike. Buildings sheared apart, tumbling into the abyss in a cascade of raining glass and crumbling masonry. By the time his honored bride rose to her feet, the mass grave beneath her stone-gray boots was silent.
Tiān Guāng rained correction as he hung even above Yǒng Zhé in the clouds, a halo of blinding sunlight surrounding the sleek black-and-white suited form of his lesser brother. Aimed fingers called down pillars of concentrated heat that vaporized missiles and seared the eyeballs of any mortal that dared look upon the sun.
“Brother!” Tiān Guāng’s voice reached his ears even at such a distance and over the screams of countless thousands. “May I destroy the bunkers?”
Yǒng Zhé hovered above the main thoroughfare, brown suit and red cape snapping in the thermals rising from the burning city. “Melt them to nothing. Leave no structure intact.” His voice carried easily, baritone powerful enough that his own brother’s senses caught it. “Leave no leadership to sign a surrender.”
“Yes, brother!” Solar fury lanced from the clouds, striking the reinforced concrete of the government complex, metal walls turning to slag in literal seconds.
Yǒng Zhé turned his gaze as a silver blur tore its way through the valley, any body in its path no sort of obstacle. The shooting star painted the evacuation routes red, Liú Xīng breaking the sound barrier on the streets below as a kinetic spear guided by blood. Trucks flipped into the air, tanks crumpling like discarded cans as their turrets spun off into the dense jungle. The displaced air itself was enough to rupture eardrums with his passing, fists moving at Mach 4 turning bodies into clouds of fine mist suspended in humid air.
Yet the shattering of the sound barrier was not the only inhuman sound that tore through the capital city, a shriek not meant for mortal ears high and loud. The gaunt Xiào Hún stood atop a building, jaw unhinged as a frequency left his lungs and met the bodies of those below. The hairless man’s scream vibrated directly into the internal organs of those unlike them, civilians dropping to their knees as they clutched bleeding eyes, ears and stomachs.
It was for nothing, though.
They knew little of burst capillaries and hemorrhaging lungs, sonic pressure tearing them apart from the inside out as mass panic became mass death.
Bīng Mǎ Yǒng marched through barricades, a giant beast of terracotta that bore artillery against his hide as if it was rain. Bullet after bullet sparked harmlessly into the air as the giant trodded forward, conscripts crushed beneath merciless boots. There was no need for speed, the hunched golem rarely moving with nothing more than purpose as he failed to form more than simple grunts. The trail of flattened flesh and twisted steel behind him spoke plenty.
Where Bīng Mǎ Yǒng took the streets, Wú Yǐng had not bothered with targets so obvious. The specter made her way through panic rooms and steel vaults as if the walls were water, hands solidifying for the split second she needed to grip the beating hearts of dissenting leadership and tear them from their chests.
And leading them all was him.
Yǒng Zhé.
The vanguard.
The Eternal Breaker.
The center of the plaza cracked as he dropped from the sky, his landing its own announcement as the ground rippled.
A battalion of remaining defenders turned their weapons on him as he walked forward into the teeth of the capital’s desperate defense. Assault rifles, heavy machine guns, RPGs, tank divisions and even the attack helicopters; they all empitied their ordinance against his chest in a blind panic.
Those that didn’t miss struck his chest, his face, his cape.
Yet he did not brace.
There was no need.
Every bullet that deformed against his skin fed his reserves. Every explosive shell that blossomed against his chest deepened his density. Each desperate act of resistance served only to make him stronger. Muscles hardened further as power pooled into his core, the genius of his creation acting as it should. The violence of mortals only made him heavier, stronger, and more absolute, feeding him in greater amounts than the star above could manage.
No, the light of the sun truly belonged to his lesser brother.
Yǒng Zhé just took the force of their weapons and threw them back with greater strength, main battle tanks punched with enough force to send them through the air like toys. Soon enough, he stepped over the bleeding corpses, boots leaving wet prints on the marble stairs of the parliament building.
The Seven Weapons stood there, six in front of their leader as the capital burned as a beautiful ruin; millions dead or dying in the rubble. The message to the West was carved into the earth itself, China’s borders more than simple lines on a map: This hemisphere belongs to the Dragon.
A smile had nearly found its way onto his face as he took it in.
Then he heard it.
Yǒng Zhé looked up, blinking.
High above the smoke canopy, a silver speck caught the sunlight as he took it in; too high-altitude for local radar and far too fast for regional defense. The arrogant impunity of American stealth. He narrowed his eyes. A coward’s machine.
Something detached from the bomb bay. A cylinder falling through the stratosphere.
Dark eyes widened even as Yǒng Zhé flew up to meet it, the air screaming immediately. The bomb detonated two miles above the city, directly in his face.
There was no sound.
Only a flash that erased the concept of shadow as the thermal bloom ignited over the ruins of Naypyidaw and Yǒng Zhé’s team failed the ultimate test of reality.
Tiān Guāng looked up as the heat wave hit him, silhouette burned permanently into the air as a floating shadow. Xiào Hún tried to scream, but the thermal radiation stripped flesh from bone as his skeleton turned to white-hot dust. Liú Xīng was already sprinting toward the horizon, moving at his maximum speed, but the expanding nuclear fireball caught him mid-stride as he simply dissolved into the shockwave. Dì Mǔ’s hands rose in front of her, a dense barrier of compacted earth and ore flying up to shield herself. It lasted bare seconds before the heat buried her in molten slag.
Bīng Mǎ Yǒng’s armor went cherry red, then white, as it cracked clean down the center. The golem melted into a puddle of boiling composite metal, not even a groan leaving him before he knew no more.
Wú Yǐng didn’t even have a chance to phase fully, caught between reality and the void as the blast burned her phase-shifted form into a permanent screaming shadow etched onto the concrete.
They were flawed. They were prototypes. Insufficient vessels meant to serve him.
But Yǒng Zhé was the Mandate.
The radiation hit him, and he did not burn.
Heat breached the outer layers of his skin, and it merely drank in the power, mouth open as he breathed in raw fire from a toxic feast. Cells devoured the ionizing radiation as the ceiling of his power cracked, splintered and disintegrated; more and more energy converted into power as he drank in the power of a split atom.
Then the physical displacement of the shockwave caught up to the thermal bloom and millions of tons of pressure hammered down on him like a fist to dwarf his own.
Yǒng Zhé was driven backward, slammed into the crust of the earth with enough force to liquefy the bedrock beneath him. Punching through the crust, the impact drove him down; hundreds of feet, thousands of feet. Deep into the mantle of the earth, he fell for what felt like miles, swallowed in the crushing dark; supercharged and suffocating.
Fire and fury was all he knew in the blackness.
He was Yǒng Zhé, the sword of the state.
He did not die in holes.
He planted himself against the subterranean stone and punched upward. Granite shattered and stone gave way.
He punched again, fists carrying the absorbed yield of the nuclear device and every blow causing a seismic event. Magma, bedrock, and topsoil were displaced as he dug through miles of crushed stone. Yǒng Zhé breached the surface in an explosion of dust and stone, landing heavily on a fused slab of what used to be the parliament building as he dragged himself up.
Ash fell like snow from a poisoned sky as he stood in the center of the devastation, chest heaving as he braved the aftermath of the American fire; their ultimate weapon of war failing against him.
Then he saw the man.
An old white man sat on a slab of shattered concrete in the center of the crater. Completely naked, thickly muscled and entirely entouched, the old American sat there unharmed as he stared at Yǒng Zhé, a simple frown on his face as if waiting for a delayed train.
Untouched by the fire that had erased six of China’s greatest weapons.
“I am the Eternal Breaker!” He crossed the distance in a fraction of a second, the ground shattering apart beneath his boots. His hand, thick with newly forged nuclear muscle, met the old man’s throat and Yǒng Zhé drove forward, the throw sending the naked American through three remaining structural pillars that had somehow survived the blast. “Greatest son of China!”
The concrete exploded into dust around them, pulverized to nothingness.
The old man hit the ground and stood up as if nothing had happened at all, dusting ash off his pale shoulder.
Another roar slipped free from Yǒng Zhé as he closed the distance, driving a supercharged blow enough to drive the old man into an already-crumbled building. The impact cracked the air in a thunderclap that cleared the ash from the air and rubble from the ground, pinning the American against the sloped wall of the crater.
Yǒng Zhé hit him again.
And again.
And again.
Each punch a tactical yield, every barrage an earthquake. Fists ignited the air into plasma as the earth beneath their feet turned to powder, fault lines cracking and groaning as the crater deepened. Every blow enough to level a skyscraper, he hit the old man dozens of times per second with all his strength.
He struck the American in the face, the chest, the jaw; all of it an unrelenting drumbeat as he maintained the assault, refusing to stop until the foreign flesh ruptured apart and turned to nothing.
But the old man did not bleed.
He did not brace. He did not dodge. He did not raise his arms to block. His head snapped back with the force of the blows, but the skin did not tear or bleed or even bruise.
Yǒng Zhé roared, breath ragged as his punches slowed and began to falter. Even still, he refused to stop. The Mandate demanded this creature break. The universe required it.
He swung again and again, the full force of his blows colliding in quick succession with the old American’s bare chest.
A sickening crunch, wet and loud, echoed in the silence of the nuclear grave.
Yǒng Zhé stumbled backward, breath catching in his throat as he realized his skin was wet and hot and he could no longer feel anything below his arms. He blinked down. What…
His hands were destroyed.
More than that, they were gone.
Skin split apart like overripe fruit, the muscle had been pulped against the immovable density that was the old American’s face. The metacarpals were pulverized into a shifting paste beneath his skin, white splinters of bone protruding through the ruined meat of his knuckles.
He stared at his ruined flesh, confusion flooding his mind as his body desperately tried and failed to heal with the nuclear high worn down to nothing. He huffed, breath failing him as blood ran down his broken limbs and face.
“So… you’re done then?” The old white man stood up, splattered with gore that was not at all his in the slightest. “Guess you’ve finally used up all your energy, huh?” He casually wiped a layer of concrete dust from his naked shoulders, blue eyes flat and unimpressed.
Yǒng Zhé lunged again, attempting with strength he didn’t have.
“Oh, give it up.” The American spoke again, meaningless barbaric syllables that grated a dismissal against Yǒng Zhé’s ears.
Thick hands, heavy with callouses, reached out and the American’s hands clamped onto either side of Yǒng Zhé’s skull, locking his head firmly in place. “That’s better. This’ll just take a second.” Yǒng Zhé groaned as he tried to rip himself free from the hold, but he had all the strength of a child, blood pouring free from his ruined arms.
The old man gave a sharp, effortless twist.
– o – o – o – o – o – o – o –
“August Twenty-Thirteen…” Cecil’s voice came out clipped and deliberate, the director’s drawl coming out at speeds that meant something was already going down. The command center already smelled like the recycled stress of hundreds of bodies which meant that every analyst around was sweating up a storm over a possibly apocalyptic situation.
Brick did his best to bite back a sigh at the impending situation, wishing Cecil would just get to the point already. As much as he hated to sound like Butch, he had to admit his green little brother had a point sometimes. After all, it had been a whole month since a major threat and he was already fiending for something to sink his fists into. Superman… He really didn’t get how the big guy dealt with this sort of bullshit without just lasering every threat right through the eyeballs. Well, there was that one time with the Authority…
But even then, Big Blue was only bluffing.
A good bluff but still a bluff.
Red eyes rolled as cold air pushed down from the ceiling vents, the main tactical display stretched across the far wall, light throwing blue shadows against their uniforms.
“A Chinese government superhuman team known as the Seven Weapons of Heaven broke free from their black-site and chose to attack the capital city of Myanmar. In under six hours, the total casualty count was two-point-three million dead.” Cecil shook his head as the number hung there. “Agent Penrose eliminated the threat before things could get worse.”
“Eliminated, huh?” Butch leaned forward with a toothy grin splitting his face, combat boots scraping the pristine floor. “How’d he do it?”
Brick’s jaw clicked as he rolled his eyes again. Considering it’s Brit, probably a suicide bomb move. Rather than say it out loud, he ust pressed his tongue against the roof of his mouth and waited for the director to shoot down his brother’s stupid question.
Cecil didn’t blink. “…Not important.”
The massive display behind the old man shifted, showing seven faces and, with them, seven different flavors of government-funded mass murder. “The leader’s body was completely unrecoverable.” The old man didn’t waste a beat. “One of his teammates, a geokinetic, opened a fissure before she herself succumbed to her wombs, pulling him miles underground before GDA could do any retrieval work. We assumed he was dead.”
Brick’s eyes narrowed, tracking the scrolling data on the screen. “Assumed.”
“Four hours ago, a terrorist cell detonated a nuclear device in rebuilt Naypyidaw,” Cecil went on, hands behind his back. “And approximately four minutes ago, something emerged from underground.”
The screen cut to satellite footage of a streak of heat and kinetic charge burst out of a smoking crater.
“Whoa!” Boomer slapped his cheeks with both palms. “…what is it?”
“Yǒng Zhé.” The director dropped the name. “The leader of the Seven Weapons who took his team and went rogue after he realized his government would never allow him the war against the West he always wanted. The psychopath’s got energy absorption converted into flight, super-strength, super-speed, invulnerability. As far as we can tell, the detonation healed him and supercharged his system to something exceeding anything Mark can output and his current trajectory is a direct path to Washington D.C. at Mach sixty and rapidly accelerating. ETA: two minutes.”
Butch cracked his knuckles, the sound a gunshot in the sterile room. “Where’s Vince, by the way? He gonna tag in?”
Cecil bit back a sigh. “Mark’s off-planet for some ungodly reason. Once again, you’re primary response.”
Right. Sure. Brick adjusted the cuffs of his uniform. Need to stretch my legs anyway. “We’re used to it.”
Cecil nodded. “This joker’s power has a fifteen-minute peak and continues to lessen from that point. The absorbed energy will degrade, but while he’s at full strength, he’s near Viltrumite-level. You just need to make him burn through his energy reserves faster.”
Butch’s teeth ground together. “So, just make him work for it.”
Brick nodded. “Stall him and then break him.”
“Exactly.” The old man’s eyes locked onto Brick’s. “Make every second cost him maximum output and when his power fades, you end it.”
Brick looked at Butch, his brother vibrating with a toxic green heat signature waiting for an excuse to explode. He glanced to his left at Boomer, his blue brother bouncing on his heels.
“He killed two point three million people ten years ago.” The GDA director gave each of them a firm look. “Don’t give him a chance to finish what he started on American shores.”
Brick turned back to the screen, watching the red line burn a path across the globe. “We won’t.”