They Didn't Laugh At Me.

{ I'm The Ghoul, you fool. }, Peter said nonchalantly. { I'm already dead. }

"W-wha-Ugh!", Manuel's mental breakdown was cut short with a precise head kick to the temple.

BAM!

He exerted just enough strength to knock him out and not accidentally explode his head like a watermelon. The complete body control that he had owing to his Extremis continued to keep giving. The feeling it induced was exhilarating.

But just then, alarm bells rang in his head, warning him of an immensely dangerous attack barreling toward his head.

With a sidestep and a small roll, he dodged the projectile, which was a pitch-black magical disc that quickly disappeared into the trashed road. He looked up at the perpetrator, a young blonde girl who nervously raised her hands.

"I-I...sorry?", she stuttered, taking multiple steps back. "I surrender! Just don't hurt me. I like walking."

It seemed that his fearsome reputation preceded him.

{I don't negotiate with terrorists}, he shrugged before dashing toward the terrified Roulette and slamming the hilt of the Muramasa Blade into her jaw with enough force to exceed the blunt force threshold, effectively making her unconscious.

His hands reached out into his armour, pulling out a tiny mechanical syringe that he quickly injected into her wrist, taking a blood sample.

'Luck Manipulation', his eyes glinted with scientific curiosity. 'Wonder how that works.'

BOOM!

"Fuck!"

THWIP! THWIP!

BAM!

"Need some help over here!"

He looked over at Gwen's position to find her dodging and weaving the wild swings of a far larger, far muscular and far, far stronger Beef who made the earth quake with every step.

The mutant trampled on police cars and ran through buildings while SWAT teams unloaded their guns on him, but they merely bounced off.

She seemed to be dealing with the mindless assault well enough, by webbing up his limbs and eyes, but Beef seemed to only be getting stronger and larger as time passed, seemingly growing new sets of muscles that even he didn't recognise. The man's current strength had long exceeded Peter's upgraded Base Form.

{Hang on!}, he yelled over the sound of constant gunfire as he prepared to jump amid the fight, while already building a fairly detailed predictive model of Beef in his head. The mutant did appear to have had some form of hand-to-hand combat training, but he seemed to have abandoned all that, resorting to clumsy dog fighting.

But just as his powerful legs kicked off the ground, he was slammed back down by an invisible force.

BOOM!

"You....aren't...going anywhere", the Bishop spat, blood pouring down from his every orifice. He seemed to have stopped limiting himself, unleashing every bit of power within him, regardless of what it would do to his ruined body.

The very air seemed to be pulled to the ground as a titanic amount of pressure descended upon his shoulders, making him stumble and strain his muscles to their limits.

BOOM! BOOM!

The force was such that every single building in a fifty-metre radius, from the small, dingy shops to the concrete giants, collapsed into themselves, releasing gigantic shockwaves and waves of dust.

Helicopters were plucked out of the sky and smashed into the ground by an invisible flyswatter while half the police force was flattened along with their cars and belongings, turning into bloody pancakes of flesh and metal.

Yells of pain, surprise, anguish and despair along with the sounds of buildings and helicopters exploding attacked his enhanced ears, but a familiar wail of pain cut through the chaos.

His head snapped over to Gwen being smashed into the road, while Beef's hulking form slowly made his way to her, fighting against the colossal pressure...

...and he saw red.

Time seemed to slow down as red-hot anger coursed through him, filling every nook and cranny of his newly evolved body. It wasn't figurative - his body had begun to heat up to hundreds of degrees, melting what remained of the road and making the very air bend and warp.

***

Leland's bloodstained vision narrowed as he took note of The Ghoul showcasing an unregistered ability.

'Secondary mutation?', he thought slowly, his unhealthy body struggling to stand owing to him abusing his power. He was feeling more lightheaded by the second and he doubted whether he'd come back from this little stunt.

'If I'm going down, I'm taking New York's Golden Boy with me', he sneered, refocusing on The Ghoul but the infamous anti-hero was nowhere to be seen.

His bushy eyebrows narrowed in confusion.

And in confusion it remained as his head was cleanly removed from his pudgy body.

***

Beef was almost launched into the air as the titanic pressure that previously pressed down on his unnaturally wide shoulders abruptly disappeared before a gigantic cloud of dust rolled over him.

"Bishop?", he lightly coughed, his remark quickly drowned by panicked screams of surviving law enforcement and gunfire.

He looked around with a heightened sense of awareness, still keeping a part of his attention on the groaning body of Ghost-Spider. Her lack of strength had most certainly led to a few broken bones when the Bishop decided to all out.

Had Manuel defeated The Ghoul? If so, they had to destroy the Sanctum Sanctorum and escape. He had no intention of getting caught in his first-ever mission, not to mention getting imprisoned in the dreaded Raft.

'Hmm?', he tensed as he instinctively crossed his giant forearms over his torso just before a fist tore through the dust.

BOOM!

It snaked past his hastily put-together defence, shattering his hip with ease.

"Argh!", he spat out stumbling back and collapsing on the destroyed pavement, flabbergasted at the sheer strength behind the small fist.

"Who-"

Beef's sentence was brutally cut short with a brief flash of red light, his eyes catching a streak of his murderer just before he was decapitated.

Incandescent lines danced akin to fiery rivers on The Ghoul's skin, visible even through his dark armour. They snaked down his arms, down to the vibrating Murumusa blade and up his torso, outlining beautiful patterns before forming a fiery crown on his forehead, a stark contrast with his deathly pale skin.

He looked akin to an avatar of a God.

'No...', Beef's last thoughts rattled in his lonesome head as the image of those golden irises with reptilian pupils reared its head once more.

No man could have those eyes.

He was no avatar.

He was no mortal.

***

Francis. G .Castle stepped out of the helicopter in full SWAT gear as he took in the destruction before him.

It looked as though a giant had stepped on a bustling street before bending down and pummelling it more.

"How many?", he growled with clenched teeth and barely concealed anger as he spotted pancaked bodies and large amounts of blood staining the pavement. The number of these superhuman incidents had drastically spiked in the past few years and he didn't like it one bit. If he'd been half a decade younger, he'd given no thought to returning to his old pastime of personally hunting down such scum.

"Thirty-two dead and twenty-one officers injured", his colleague replied in a grim voice as city personnel were cleaning up the debris and helping the injured.

"FUCK!", he swore as he unconsciously gripped his gun, a flicker of demonic light flashing past his blue eyes. He quickly pulled his head from the deep dark abyss in his mind before he reaffirmed his will, muttering a familiar mantra underneath his breath.

"All the ones who thought they were above the law, or outside it, or beyond it. They knew all the law was good for was to keep good people in line. And they all laughed. They laughed at the law. But they didn't laugh at me."

***