Chương 52: And

In spite of the men who can fly and the great beasts of the sea and my ability to tear through walls without effort, I always assumed evil in this world was a mundane force. That it was simply fellow man's urge to commit sin, poisoning us. That there was no potential for greater, or more vile, evil to exist outside of human creativity. In this room, I was proven wrong. Evil is a real, tangible thing. It makes places that even God would look away from out of disgust.

The sickly moaning, wailing, screaming of different voices were all too weak to penetrate the walls. They only made themselves known when I broke through. Their agonized sounds raised the hairs on my neck. Not out of any instinct to fight, but something deeper. The same sensation you see in a cat, when their hairs stand up to make themselves look bigger. Pure bodily instinct. I couldn't blink at what I saw. My eyes simply refused to close.

There was no way to know for certain, but it was likely something similar to how my body was tensing itself. There were five of them, in total. Some were curled up on the ground. Some were actually on the walls. One dangled from the ceiling. Every single one of them was covered in thick, dark wooden roots. Not just covered. Digging into their flesh. Some were entering through whatever holes they could find, ears and noses and mouths and anuses. Others were simply penetrating and breaking skin.

On their faces, the ones who could be seen, was an ichor mixed from dread and terror. What little of their chests and shoulders could be seen, were heaving and rocking as they fought a losing battle for air. Tears streamed down their faces, mixing with blood pouring from their torn-apart bodies. As they saw us, they all started screaming louder.

Language was failing them; they were stuck groaning and crying out loose syllables that on their own meant only one thing: "Help us, kill us, we're in terrible pain, please end our suffering." I could hear May's voice, not in speech, but in a moaning vomit before the sound of her footsteps led her away from the room, back outside. One of them finally started to choke out the words, garbled by the vine in his mouth.

"VEY DONK GNO WHAD FEY'RE DWING! GILL UZ! I WANNA GIE! I WANNA GIE!" He then repeated those three words over and over, his voice somehow never growing hoarse, until a vine thicker than my forearm grew across his mouth. From there, he just helplessly let out muffled shrieks. One of them, dangling from the ceiling, looked like his body was forcibly curled into the fetal position, only half of his face visible as bark and growth obscured most of it.

One vine had penetrated through the top of his head, blood pouring out. He couldn't speak at all. He didn't even try. There was nothing behind his eyes. They just watched in dread. He looked almost familiar. Wait, he was on the lineup- Behind me, I could hear 1's voice.

"Tancred. We've found the two ADU suspects we were here to acquire. They're unobtainable."

"You need to clarify." Tancred.

"They're... fused with Wyrdwood. Them and three other people. Too integrated for us to just pull them out. I can see penetration into their skulls. Likely reached the brain. But they're alive. Please advise." The silence that followed was a close sibling to the same silence that accompanies men to their executions. Where not a single word is said, and yet they whisper every awful truth in your ear. About the inevitable. About what must be done. Tancred's voice arrived to confirm that silence's cruel vision.

"Euthanize them. Is the entire structure compromised like this?"

"The addition is. We don't know about the basement."

"Burn the addition down. Any means. Put them out of their misery and make sure this thing can't put more people in this position. May God have mercy on their souls." My stomach sank. I felt a hand on my shoulder. Whipping around with the plan of introducing whoever touched me to the full mass of my shield, I saw it was 4 and stopped. He spoke, his voice a little hoarse.

"Go secure the bulkhead with Spectroma. We'll be a couple minutes." I took that offer like it came with a million dollars. There was no way for me to kill these guys. It would just keep hurting them until they were burnt down. That wasn't a power I offered. Spectroma could help, but she didn't need to see all of this. No one needed to. Exiting the addition, I looked in the direction I heard Spectroma's footsteps going off to. I could see her sitting in the dirt, curled up into a ball.

Slowly, I approached, and spoke up to avoid getting blasted.

"Spectrom-""Don't fucking call me that," she answered. Looking around, I didn't see any signs of people. Just that tree man's corpse about thirty feet away. I tossed my shield onto the ground next to her, letting it lie flat. With the bars on the back, it basically worked like a miniature bench. Convenient.

"Sit on the shield, at least. You don't want bugs on your clothes." She sat there for a few seconds, before finally climbing onto the shield, immediately curling back up. My approach sped up a little, before I finally reached her, squatting down in front of her.

"May."

"I didn't even know people could end up like that."

"Yeah. I didn't, either. Look, we-""I didn't sign up for this. I thought I was going to be beating up bank robbers or getting cats out of trees or reading books to little kids or something. I thought we were going to help people. I'm in a raid on a fucking terrorist base. I've seen like six people die in the past fifteen minutes. Leo," she looked up at me, her eyes becoming pinkish from the tears already forming.

"Leo, I can't do this. I just wanted to help people. This isn't what I signed on for. I just wanted to help people, and people are dying, and there's those fucking vine things that did that to those people, and I don't know if they deserve it or not, Leo-""May, listen-" The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

"I just wanted to do something good because I was failing in law school and my dad's got cancer and I didn't want him to die with his daughter disappointing him and his son walking out on him! I didn't want this!" That explained a lot. The keys to her instability. I was looking at a bomb here. Just like me. The New Sentinels might as well have been a missile battery. Reaching out, I held onto either side of her head so she could focus on me.

"May," I started.

"It's bad. This is the worst thing we've ever seen. But it might not be the worst we'll ever see, if we just do nothing." I remembered. I remembered why I was Hell incarnate for those drug dealers, for those scumbags. When I saw that boy's corpse on the street corner, overdosed on the poison they were putting out. The logic that got me here.

"If we do everything we can to stop them, we'll never see anything worse than this. We can stop others from seeing this. We can make sure that the rest of the world doesn't even have to know this is possible, May. We're capable of putting these bastards down for good. You have a chance to save everyone. Please take it."

"I can't, Leo. I'm not meant to be a superhero."

"No one is meant to be a hero. No hero worth a shit wants to be one. That's why we ended up here. It's the hand we're dealt, and we need to play it through. We'll get through this, okay? We're almost right there. We're almost done. Breathe in." A shaky, long inhale came from her. I counted to three in my head.

"Breathe out." She followed up with a low, shiveri- FWOOOOM Our gazes both snapped to the addition. It was up in flames. The four agents were stepping out, no worse for wear. Not even a drop of blood on them. Their approach to us was casual and calm, like they were walking out of a store. 1 called out to us.

"Bulkhead secured?"

"Yeah," I lied.

"Good work," he lied in return. Bringing May to her feet, I helped her wipe the dust off of her clothes as though that was our highest priority. Anything to not think about what was burning in that addition. May reached down to pick up my shield to hand it back, but yelped as it fell from her hands.

"How are you just carrying that around?" she asked. Lifting it up without any concern, I slipped my arm back into the arm-hole for it while I spoke.

"By remembering that I'm carrying it so others don't." Sounded better in my head. We began moving for the bulkhead. It had a rusted tin shed surrounding and looming over the crimson metal doors.

"Spectroma, thermals for basement." She was quick to respond.

"Can't. It's steel. Infrared doesn't work. And I was already trying electromagnetic frequencies while we walked there. I just see more of those signatures. They're tangled together, like a snake coiling, so I can't make out any individual bodies."

"What about right through the door?"

"I'd need to do X-Rays. I've never gone that far and I don't want to get you all killed."

"Right. We'll play it by ear. Hercules, you're on breach." I nodded as we piled up by the bulkhead, me at the front like the tip of a spear. As that spearhead, I lunged forward and slammed my body through the bulkhead, bending it in such a way that it actually screeched. Either I hit so hard I could make steel hurt, or friction was capable of making that God-awful sound.

The licking and popping of flames muffled after the screeching of the bulkhead shouted them into silence, which the world disguised as them simply being muffled by us descending into the basement. This was a place that, in its life, used to smell like concrete dust and mildew. Now, it smelled like a lumber mill. Accompanying that scent of exposed wood was the sauna the basement had become. This wasn't from external force. Basements are isolated. No, this was the kind of humidity that came from collective body heat.

The thick roots and vines along the walls featured the agonized faces of men, women, and children. All petrified as bark into the form of despair and pain, their empty sockets gazing at me with the expectation and pleading to avenge what's been done to them. In my head, I assured them their deaths would not be without consequence. The basement had been heavily remodeled, with the various walls that likely separated multiple rooms torn apart, turning it into one greater "hallway" of sorts.

With my shield up, I led us down into that hall, where at the end we could see multiple figures. More of those human-sized tree men, four in total, whose very existence felt offensive. Standing in the middle was what I thought to be a fifth, but I had noticed a long mane of hair going down its back. A single vine had dug into the side of its head. It spoke, with a man's voice.

"They've arrived, Master Sequoia. I shall resume this conversation later." The vine disconnected from his head, leaving a solitary branch sticking out as he turned around. His face was human. Mostly. The left side was converted to bark, with a branch just jutting out of the side of his head. The spread of conversion seemed to have reached his eye, given it had a sickly green look to it. His body, meanwhile, was covered in thick bark and Wyrdwood.

It almost looked like a knight's armor, if it was made entirely from wood. Along his back was a thick cape of leaves and vines.

"You've been busy," the man stated, walking towards us as though there weren't four men with guns trained on him right behind me. 1 spoke first.

"On your knees, now!"

"No, no, I don't think I'll be doing that," the wooden man spoke, stopping his approach about ten feet away from us. The tree men followed him, flanking him on either side.

"If anything, I think you should all kneel before me, before I kill you all. But that would be... unexciting. Certainly, if it was just you monkeys with your guns, then I would have no issue. But I see who you have in the middle." He raised a hand, pointing towards me.

"In your silly little fruit-like colors, with your shield and your mask. You're a superhero. You're a champion of man, of a sorts." He then used the same hand to gesture towards himself.

"I, personally, am a champion of the trees. That would make me their 'superhero,' I suppose. But in this contrast, you'd call me a supervillain, right?" My gaze focused on his movements. Controlled. Natural. He was used to his body. This wasn't a tree pretending to be a person. This was a human being who's turned into this. He kept talking.

"I'll take the silent, stoic act as a yes. Could you perhaps name yourself? What superhero doesn't have a name, after all?" I answered, with a voice deep from my chest." Hercules," was what I bellowed.

"Fascinating. You may refer to me as Brother Gleditsia. As champion of the Arboreal Senate, designated by Master Sequoia, I offer you a challenge to a duel in return for me not simply brutally eviscerating all of your companions here. It would be wise to simply agree." Bull-fucking-shit it would be.

"No," I refused.

"You're under arrest." Managed to keep my chest voice there.

"Poor form!" Gleditsia called out as he simply clapped his hands. SHNK SHV SHWNG SHK Groans. Moans and wails. Cries of pain. Looking behind me, I saw the consequences of my actions. The agents, all impaled or torn apart by vines. Blood was everywhere, much of it splattered onto the horrified face of Spectroma. Turning back towards Gleditsia, I had run out of words. All I had was actions. I pounced.