I already felt more powerful than I ever had in my life—and that was before he hurled me like a fastball into a goddamn cliff face.

No, seriously. Dude was charging me with an actually criminal amount of kinetic energy. Like, “physics has left the chat” levels of bullshit.

But oh ho ho—he was gonna get it. I was laughing inside, right up until he closed the distance and caved my fucking skull in. Not literally, but my nose definitely snapped like a twig. Vision went white. Eyes watered.

Okay. I might be a little overpowered.

Punch.

Punch punch.

Punch punch punch.

It was like he was playing a drum solo on my guts. Each hit slammed through me like a wrecking ball. Breathless. Boneless.

Eventually, he stepped back, and I stayed behind—embedded in the rock like a cartoon. Ivy-shaped crater and all.

He tilted his head, voice calm, curious, like he was observing a lab rat that wouldn’t die. “Fascinating. Your healing factor truly is remarkable. But did you really think you could stand against me with just that?”

I burned just a sliver of stored momentum. Not much—just enough to force my battered body out of the wall and drop to the ground like a sack of bloody potatoes. Then I staggered upright, legs trembling, whole body swaying like I was drunk on my own pain.

“Pssh.” I wiped blood off my lip with the back of my hand, blinking hard. “Izzat… izzat all you got?”

Then promptly collapsed face-first into the dirt.

“Whoops.”

I pushed myself back up again, using way too much effort for how casual I was trying to sound. “I can take it. C’mon. Ain’t nobody ever knocked this bitch out.”

I swayed on my feet, pointed vaguely at him with one broken finger, and grinned a bloody grin.

“Fuckin’... yer weaker’n I thought, y’overcooked Sunday school fascist.”

“Crude as ever. I look forward to shutting you up permanently,” Apex said coldly—like he was just taking out the trash. Then came another punishing left hook.

My head snapped sideways with a crack, vision swimming. “I can... fuhhckin’... take this alll the days,” I slurred, flashing him a bloody grin. My legs wobbled but stayed locked, my pride too stupid to let me fall just yet. He didn’t like that.

Another hook. My jaw whipped the other direction. A third one snapped in, then a fourth—like a pendulum of pain just swinging my skull around.

He was testing me. Or taunting me. Or maybe both. I could practically feel his arrogance radiating off him—this unshakable belief that he was the pinnacle, that I was nothing but a cracked slab of meat daring to speak back.

Well... fine. Let’s see what all this "godlike" energy he's been beating into me can actually do.

I let my legs buckle a little, slumping forward with a soft grunt, letting him think I was finally breaking. His posture relaxed just a little—just enough.

My hand twitched.

Time to remind the bastard why my codename ain’t just for show.

My arm trembled as I raised it, fingers twitching like they were drunk. My whole body ached like it had been put through a blender, because, well—yeah. Pretty much had. But I still had one finger left to point, and I jabbed it into his chest.

“Hey... bitch boy,” I slurred, blinking through the blood crusting my lashes. “You got’s... sumthin’ on your shirt.”

He blinked. Honest to god, this seven-foot glowing tin god actually looked down. I don’t know what was funnier—that he fell for it, or that I could still find it funny with half my ribs in pieces.

I grinned wide, teeth red. Then I lifted my finger a bit higher and flicked his nose.

And in that instant, I let it all go.

All the pain, the impacts, the momentum of every punch he’d fed me—every crater-making blow, every bone-rattling smash, every tree I’d become intimate with. I’d stored all that kinetic energy like a battery, and now I was pulling the plug.

There was a crack, like thunder got sucker-punched.

And Apex. Fucking. Launched.

One second he was in front of me. The next, a streak of golden white light shot through the air like a comet on speed, obliterating a row of trees, tearing a trench through the dirt like a meteorite strike had kissed the Earth. The sonic boom hit a second later, knocking dust and leaves into a whirlwind around me.

I stood there, swaying slightly. “Gottem...” I whispered, before my knees gave out.

God, that felt good.

Then the dust cleared.

He wasn’t lying on the ground.

He wasn’t unconscious.

In fact, he was hovering in front of me. A little dishevlled, but none worse for wear. Then he grabbed me.

The wind screamed past us as he rocketed upward, dragging me by the throat. My feet kicked uselessly at the air, my arms clawed at his wrist, but it was like trying to bend a steel girder. I could feel my body straining just to hold together, muscles screaming, vision narrowing.

The clouds whipped by—then we broke through them entirely. Higher.

Higher.

The blue of the sky deepened to black. The curve of the Earth started to show below us.

I couldn’t breathe.

My lungs convulsed, mouth opening wide, but there was nothing. No air, no sound, just the horrible, suffocating silence of near space. My healing factor kicked in automatically, sealing burst vessels, repairing shredded lung tissue—but it didn’t matter. There was nothing to breathe.

And then the cold hit.

Oh fuck.

Not the kind of cold that stings your fingers or makes your skin tingle. This was absolute. The kind of cold that steals everything—heat, thought, will. My suit started to crackle with frost. My lips split. My tears froze on my cheeks.

I tried to move. To speak. To fight.

Nothing.

His face was inches from mine now. One of his eyes swollen shut, blood trickling from his nose, lips split from where I’d hurt him. And still, he smiled.

He was enjoying this.

“I’ve held back for too long,” he said, voice muffled through the growing buzz in my ears. “But now, I think I’ll see what happens when I break you, Miss Momentum. Let’s test your limits, shall we?”

He spun.

The stars wheeled around me.

And then he let go.

I dropped like a stone.

No—faster. Faster than falling.

He’d thrown me back to Earth.

A black blur in the void, plummeting. The upper atmosphere rushed up to meet me like a wall of fire. My body started to burn even as I froze.

And somewhere in that chaos—somewhere between pain and panic—I grinned.

He was about to give me a whole lot of kinetic energy.

But first?

Pain.

I don’t recommend reentry. Seriously. Zero stars.

The upper atmosphere tore at me like a wild animal, peeling heat shielding and sanity away in equal measure. My whole body lit up, every nerve ending screaming as plasma licked at my skin. My suit didn’t stand a chance—it blackened, bubbled, then started to slough off in ragged chunks. Bits of it whipped away, trailing sparks and burning fabric like a comet tail behind me.

A quick glance—because sure, what better time for a status check—and yeah. My suit was basically barbecue sauce now.

Except for the shoulder.

That stubbornly okay patch, still snug beneath the invisible, heatproof harness holding the camera. Somehow, it was surviving. Of course it was. Gotta get that Apex footage.

I hoped the camera got my middle finger before I hit.

The ground rushed up like it was personally offended by my existence. I didn’t fall so much as detonate. One second I was a flaming meteor, the next—

BOOM.

I hit.

A shockwave tore through the landscape. Trees flattened in a perfect ring around the crater. Dirt geysered skyward, a plume of dust punching into the air like I was a damn missile. A nearby ridge collapsed.

And in the center of the destruction, at the bottom of a fresh new geological feature, was me—cracked, burned, twitching… alive.

Barely.

I coughed, wheezed, then started laughing through the pain. Blood ran down my chin, and one eye wouldn’t open, but I was still here.

And ohhhhhh boy… was I charged.

All that energy, all that fury, every last ounce of Apex’s attempt to break me?

Stored.

Waiting.

Building.

Unfortunately, I think that snapped my neck.

I couldn’t feel my body.

Well, that was fine—sort of. At least I could only feel the dull, muffled pain in my charred face—

SWEET MERCIFUL FUCKBISCUITS, THE NERVES JUST RECONNECTED.

Every inch of my skin ignited in a white-hot scream. Pain exploded like a goddamn supernova inside me, like a million needles jabbing every nerve at once. It was the worst kind of torture—being alive in a body that hated you.

“FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKKK!” I howled, teeth gritting, eyes squeezed shut, feeling like I was being ripped apart from the inside out.

I barely had a second to register the agony before the sky streaked—a comet made of pure menace—plummeting straight at me.

Apex was back. Faster than before. His boots slammed into my battered body with the force of a meteor, carving out a second, even bigger crater around me. The earth shattered beneath his impact, launching shards of rock and dirt into the air.

I was driven deeper into the ground, crushed and broken beneath his weight.

And yet... still breathing. Somehow.

I was the ultimate punching bag. Seriously. If there was an award for "Most Smashed Face While Still Talking Shit," I’d have a whole trophy case by now.

Still. May as well put some of that gift he gave me to use.

I don’t normally do this. Too much damage, too many screaming bystanders, way too many lawsuits. But we were out in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. No buildings. No people. Just trees, rocks, and the guy who had just tried to turn me into kinetic paste.

So I let it out.

Just a little.

A tremor rolled through my core as I channeled some of the stored kinetic force into the ground—and released it in a pulse.

BOOM.

The explosion wasn’t fire or flame. It was pure, concussive force. A shockwave of dirt, air, and fury erupted around me. Earth ruptured like it had just lost a bet. Chunks the size of trucks went airborne. Apex himself was blasted backward, tossed into the sky like a ragdoll made of gold-plated rage.

Dust rained down. Wind howled. The crater widened into a gaping scar in the landscape.

I stumbled to my feet, swaying like a drunk, spitting blood, bones still rearranging themselves inside my torso.

“Huh,” I muttered, glancing around the devastation. “The landing crater’s, like... two hundred meters across. That’s probably gonna show up on some government satellite. Sucks to be the guy who has to explain that.”

I looked up, wiping blood from my mouth just in time to see Apex hovering above, his golden form backlit by the sun, cape whipping like a pissed-off flag. His eye was still swollen shut. Dirt caked his suit. He was glaring at me like I’d just insulted his dead grandma.

I grinned wide. Giggled, even—like a drunk who just found out it was open bar.

“Oops,” I slurred. “Guess you’re kinda weak, huh?”

Then I looked down. “Also, uh... pretty sure I’m naked now.” I raised my arms triumphantly, bloodied but unbowed. “FLY FREE, MY TITTIES!”

Apex didn’t flinch. But his voice had an edge now, cold and vibrating with contained fury.

“I’m getting annoyed.”

I snorted, still a little lightheaded from blood loss, concussion, orbital reentry, etcetera.

“Pal, you are a short-tempered little bitch,” I wheezed, grinning like I hadn’t just been suplexed by the wrath of god. “Also—you’re gonna have to hit harder if you wanna take me down. But that’s the problem, isn’t it? You can’t. You’ve done your worst, and I’m still standing, baaaay-beeeee!”

I struck a pose—wobbly, bleeding, covered in ash and dirt, and definitely topless, but by god, it was defiant.

Apex hovered in silence for a moment. Then his lips curled into something just shy of a smile. Not a smirk. Not amused.

Predatory.

“You’re right about one thing,” he said, voice low, deliberate, measured. “You are still standing.”

His eyes began to glow. The air around him shimmered, warping from the heat.

“But I haven’t done my worst.”

Something in his tone made my smile falter.

Then the temperature dropped.

I didn’t even see him move. One second he was in the sky, and the next—

CRACK.

He hit the ground in front of me hard enough to split the earth again, a shockwave blasting outward, toppling what few trees had survived the last explosion. He straightened slowly, white and gold suit gleaming like the sun itself had decided to get into the murder business.

My instincts screamed. My guts twisted. I took an involuntary step back.

He wasn’t bluffing.

He hadn’t been trying before.

I was airborne before I even realized I’d been hit.

One second I was standing there, the next I was a human cannonball screaming through the sky. Then—crack—another impact. He'd appeared behind me mid-flight and redirected me with a brutal punch to the ribs that sent me corkscrewing in the opposite direction.

My stomach barely had time to catch up before—

WHAM.

A third punch, this one from ahead of me. He was there again, just waiting with a coiled fist that slammed into my gut the moment I got close. I folded around it like wet paper and was launched again, wind knocked from my lungs so hard I couldn't even wheeze.

Then it happened again.

And again.

And again.

A golden blur in the sky, vanishing and reappearing like he was playing his own violent game of teleport-tag. Every strike came with the boom of displaced air and the crunch of fractured sound barriers. My body jerked and twisted through the air like a ragdoll trapped in a god-powered pinball machine, shockwaves rippling from every blow.

I lost count of the hits. There was no time to react—just impacts, light, sound, pain, momentum.

My vision blurred. My ears rang. I think I lost a tooth somewhere around punch twelve. Maybe a rib around fourteen.

We were still hundreds of meters above the earth, and I was barely conscious enough to register that gravity had lost all meaning.

I wasn’t falling.

I was being kept in the air by the sheer frequency of the hits.

I didn’t hit the ground.

Not yet.

Apex blurred again, vanishing from in front of me—and then I felt it.

A punch from above, straight down, driving me like a nail toward the earth.

Then he was beneath me, heel slamming up into my spine.

CRACK.

I think I shrieked. I know I couldn’t move my legs after that one. Not that he gave me time to process it.

He was to my left. Fist in my kidney.

To my right. Elbow to the temple.

Behind me. Palm strike to the base of my skull.

Above. Below. Every direction.

He moved faster than thought, faster than light, faster than anything I could track. I wasn’t falling anymore—I was suspended by the constant, endless barrage of pain, of force, of power.

My shoulder dislocated. My sternum caved. I felt a rib puncture a lung. Then another one. Then both.

Every impact turned bones to powder. Every second was a new injury, stacked on top of dozens that hadn’t even started healing yet. My healing factor struggled, spasmed, screamed—and still he kept going.

He hit me so hard my jaw disintegrated and reformed mid-punch, only to be obliterated again.

There was no more witty banter. No room for breath. No air in my lungs. Just choking and gurgling and a mouthful of blood that never stopped.

And then—he grabbed my face.

Not my neck. Not my body.

Just my face.

Fingers digging into my cheeks, thumb against my jaw, palm crushing down.

And he dragged me.

Straight down.

Not thrown. Not launched.

Dragged.

Through the air like I was nothing but a rag doll caught in a hurricane. The world turned to streaks of blue and green and blur and then—

BOOOOOOM.

We hit the ground hard enough to rupture the earth itself. I think a mountain died. Trees were gone. The entire forest vaporized. I felt it all.

The crater didn’t just expand—it deepened, swallowing layers of bedrock as I was driven down, down, down, through soil and stone and molten heat.

The pressure. The pain. The force.

He wasn't just trying to hurt me anymore.

He was trying to erase me.

It was quiet.

For just a moment.

Dust hung in the air like the aftermath of a nuke. My body—what was left of it—was barely twitching, twitching wrong. Limbs bent the wrong way. Eyes too swollen to open. Skin scorched and sloughing off in places. Blood leaking from every orifice.

I wasn’t healing. Not yet. My body was trying to figure out if I was even alive.

Above me, I heard it.

The soft whoosh of air as Apex descended, golden light burning around him like a sun wrapped in skin. He landed a few feet away, boots cracking the scorched, glassed-over surface of the crater.

He looked down at me. One eye still swollen shut. Face bruised and bloodied. Breathing heavy. But still smiling.

That fucking smile.

“You're tough,” he said, voice low, almost admiring. “But this ends now.”

He raised both arms slowly, theatrically, like a conductor before the final movement of a symphony.

The light around him shifted.

From gold to white. A piercing, searing white-gold glow that crackled with raw force.

“I’ve only used this once before,” he murmured. “Last time, there was a ten-kilometer crater and no survivors.”

His muscles tensed.

The sky warped above him.

Clouds spun into a vortex. Lightning arced from the heavens, slamming into his hands. The ground sank beneath our feet as gravity itself bent toward him.

He was becoming the eye of a fucking natural disaster.

“This,” he whispered, “is the Endpoint Cascade.”

The glow condensed around his hands—then around his forearm—then his entire body lit up like a star going nova. The ground exploded upward from the pressure. My ears bled. My skin blistered just from being near it.

And then he slammed both fists down.

Not on me.

Into the planet.

The world screamed. The shockwave was instantaneous—force so pure it couldn’t even be called “kinetic” anymore. The energy traveled through the bedrock, a seismic scream that cracked tectonic plates. The crater inverted, then collapsed again, burying me in molten earth, pulverized stone, and the sheer weight of his goddamn ego.

Everything went white.

Not black.

White.

Blinding, all-consuming, cleansing.

And then—

Silence.

Ash drifted through the air like snow.

And somewhere, buried beneath miles of rock and fire and hate, I started to cough.

Because I wasn’t dead.

Not yet.

Silence.

Real silence this time.

The kind that pressed in from all directions. No birds. No wind. Just the hiss of settling heat and the slow crumble of stone above me.

I was buried. Miles deep, maybe. Beneath a crater that probably showed up on satellite imaging already. My body wasn’t even screaming anymore—it had given up on that. My lungs barely worked. One arm was jelly. My legs weren’t connected to anything I could feel. Most of my skin had fused with molten rock.

And still—I grinned.

A dry, cracked grin. Blood seeping between my teeth.

He tried to finish me.

He really tried.

I flexed my fingers. Heard bones crunching, reforming. Tendons reknitting. My body was dragging itself back from the edge like a junkie begging for another hit. And all I could think about was how fucking smug he looked before he dropped the hammer.

“You’re not done with me,” I rasped.

It came out more like a wet wheeze than words, but I meant every damn syllable.

I dug my fingers into the rock above me. Nails cracked. Muscle tore. Didn’t matter. I pulled anyway. Dirt and ash filled my mouth. The heat should’ve killed me—had killed me, technically—but I was clawing upward all the same.

Hand over hand. Inch by inch. Pushing through layers of broken earth and melted stone.

I could feel the sunlight above me. Just barely. A faint warmth. A distant pressure.

I punched upward.

Used some kinetic energy to thrust myself upwards.

Rock split.

Again.

And again.

And then—crack.

My hand broke through into air, steam hissing around me as I dragged my body into the open, one blood-slick arm at a time.

I hauled myself to the edge of the crater, coughing up soot and bile, every breath a miracle of pure fucking spite. My body was glowing faintly now—cellular regeneration firing on all cylinders, skin reweaving over charred muscle like clingwrap.

I flopped onto my back, looking up at the sky. Still wide open. Blue. Beautiful.

The sky above was still tainted with the golden silhouette of Apex hovering like a damn deity over a broken battlefield. His form shimmered in the light, radiant and pristine, while I was a walking mass grave of nerve endings and second-degree fuckery.

“How?” His voice cracked with something dangerously close to frustration. “Why? Why won’t you die?!”

I tried to answer, I really did. But my lungs were clogged with wet, choking sludge—ash, blood, pulverized dirt. I collapsed forward onto my hands and knees, hacking and retching until the mess exploded from my mouth and splattered across the broken earth.

I should’ve been dead. Hell, I felt dead. Numb in the limbs, blind in one eye, ribs like cracked porcelain—but I wasn’t gone.

My vision swam. Apex descended like a god coming down from Olympus, feet hovering inches above the ground, his eyes cold. Calculating. Cauterized fury behind a calm mask.

I tried to stand. Got halfway up before my legs betrayed me and dumped me sideways in the dirt again.

I laughed, or maybe sobbed. Maybe both.

Then I pushed myself up again, joints screaming. Spitting blood. Legs trembling like paper.

“You… don’t unnerstand,” I slurred, voice thick with agony and defiance. “I always… always get back up. ‘N you’re never—never—gonna get in the way of true… justisss.”

I staggered forward, each step a drunk wobble toward doom.

He tilted his head, sneering. “You will never stop me. You may be difficult to kill—but nothing is impossible to end.”

“Probs,” I muttered. “But your reign ends here.”

I tapped my shoulder—the one blessedly not burned down to bone. The one where the invisible camera shimmered faintly in the sun, nestled in a suspiciously intact patch of my shredded suit.

“Wanna know why this bit survived?”

He glanced at it. Frowned. There it was. That flicker of unease.

“Orichalcum-reinforced camera,” I croaked. “Been livestreamin’ this whole ass-whoopin’. Half the damn world’s been watchin’ you beat the shit outta me, big guy. All your pretty words. All that fascist bullshit. All of it. Recorded. Broadcast. Eternal.”

His expression twisted. Confusion. Horror. Realization.

The look on his face… oh my god it was delicious. Like watching a king realize the crowd wasn’t cheering—they were filming his fall.

“You…” His voice darkened. “Then I’ll simply take over Earth by force. I’ll crush every nation, silence every voice, wipe the slate clean—”

“Tha’s real cool an’ all, buddy,” I said, now standing directly in front of him, swaying, eyes barely open. “But y’know what?”

“What?” he growled.

I grinned.

“I’m gonna shit your pants.”

I then slapped him.

Not a punch. Not a beam. Not a glorious haymaker bathed in celestial light.

Just a slap. Open palm. Raw. Disrespect incarnate.

Contact.

The sound wasn’t a crack or a smack. It was a detonation. Like God clapping once, directly into the mic.

A moment of absolute silence followed—total, pregnant stillness—as the universe processed what just happened.

Then everything went to hell.

The sky didn't just darken. It peeled open—as if reality itself tried to recoil from the force of that slap. Clouds vaporized in a ring expanding at Mach speeds. Satellites blinked offline. A shockwave roared across the stratosphere, shredding every sound barrier known to science and inventing a few new ones just to break those, too.

Apex was gone. Not “flying away” gone. Not “blasted back” gone.

Gone like a nuclear test dummy standing on ground zero.

He disappeared, only to reappear a split second later miles away as a golden blur—slamming through seven mountains in succession. Not over. Not around. Through. Carving glowing scars through bedrock and lighting the peaks on fire with the residual kinetic heat. He finally stopped by embedding himself in the side of a mountain that promptly collapsed from the impact.

The world tilted.

A new crater—no, caldera—opened around me from the sheer backlash. Forests flattened. Rivers boiled. Seismographs across the planet screamed. Somewhere, a weatherman shit himself live on air.

I stood in the eye of the storm, bare-ass naked, hair blowing upward in the gale-force updraft, body trembling with residual kinetic backlash, my broken hand sizzling with superheated blood.

And I was laughing. Low. Ragged. Triumphant.

Cameras were still rolling. Millions were watching. Somewhere in a living room, a little girl in a cape screamed, "HELL YEAH, MOMENTUM!"

I raised my hand—splintered, mangled, barely attached—and whispered:

“Try conquering that, bitch.”