Frost wasted no time at all as he charged forward and picked up the Hound in a rugby tackle. He barged through a chair and smashed straight through the wall into the back garden, landing in the swimming pool with an almighty splash. Sokolova's plasma sword, still in the Hound's grasp, loosed a horrendous, shrill squeal as steam rose from the submerged blade as its wielder thrashed in the water against Frost. The two shed sparks as they threw deafening punches able to shatter concrete like glass at each other. Finally Ryan got a good grip of Frost and tossed him out of the pool, the captain smashing into the grass with a metallic thud as the Hound scrambled out. Freed from the water, the sword reignited with a blast of fire, plasma leaking from the weakened magnetic bottle setting the grass ablaze at the slightest touch.
Ryan made a beeline toward the horrified Jason, the boy having taken shelter behind Frost's favoured armchair. Then suddenly the ground vanished beneath the Hound's sabatons; Frost had grabbed the armoured giant by the legs. The last Jason saw of his brother's fanged helmet in this time was him crashing to the floor before Frost swung him around to throw him away. The Hound's armoured hulk smashed through another wall into the garage, showering all around and behind him with plaster and mooncrete. A crash of metal against metal and the subsequent squawk of an alarm denoted that he had struck and most likely destroyed the family car.
Almost as fast as lightning, Ryan recovered, leapt to his feet and smashed an exit hole through the wall through which he had entered. He found Frost standing in the hole through which he had initially exited the house, both blades at the ready. With a poisonous snarl he reached for the holster behind his cape, drew his plasma blaster into his right hand and turned it to face Frost, mashing the trigger to manifest a fiery barrage.
Frost ducked before the first bolt could impact against his armour and dashed into the house. Ryan's plasmatic assault did not relent, blasting bolts through the windows with the full intention of setting the domicile ablaze, driving his foe out into the open. At this last endeavour he succeeded, but not as he had hoped: a smoke-grey hulk burst through another wall in a spectacular combat roll, landing atop the corpse-strewn street into a crouch. He raised his particle rifle into firing position, the weapon thrumming with magenta energy as it charged up. All of that transpired in too short a time for Ryan to react.
Target locked.
The first purple blast struck the plasmacaster in Ryan's hand, the massive burst of energy causing the core to overload and blow up with an energetic fulmination in its wielder's face. Another blast scored a hit square on the Hound's breastplate and sent the armoured giant spinning back into the garage.
For the first time in this fight, fear swept into Ryan's mind. A single shot from that particle rifle had ablated away most of his chestplate in an instant, molten metal leaking from the incinerated armour. He propped himself up against the same dent he had left in the car upon his first entry and began to ponder. Would he die here and now, having failed in his mission and broken the promise he made to Sokolova?
No...
Frost began to close in on his mark, having left the Hound stunned and terrified, his beast of a weapon trained and ready to fire. He would not kill Ryan, because he knew deep down in his heart that the only way to atone for his horrific crime against his son was to liberate him from the claws of baleful evil that had seized him.
An eruption of plaster and concrete through the wall caught him by surprise. Then he was knocked down as if having been slapped with the hammer of Thor himself, his particle rifle clattering to the ground. Much to his shock he saw his own car hovering over his head, an enraged Hound clutching it from beneath as Atlas would the world. The front bumper once again crashed into Frost's helmet like a warhammer, causing the visor to crack and the heads-up display to flicker with each strike. And again, and again...
Warning! Total helmet integrity at 68%! Left visor integrity at 22%! Right visor integrity at 54%!
Frost wrenched up his hands and grabbed the bumper as it came down again to pound his face in for a fifth time. With a roar he shoved the weaponised motor vehicle forward, jumping to his feet almost like a cat; the move pushed Ryan off balance and caused the car to crash down on him. Before Frost could recover his rifle though, the Hound pressed his sabatons against the car's underside and kicked forward, the vehicle slamming into Frost and sending him crashing to the floor once more. This bought Ryan ample time to recover Sokolova's lost sword, a spiralling molten trail marking where the infernal weapon had skittered across the gravel. He was on the blade like a hawk, grabbing the handle and brandishing it against Frost once more.
Ryan sighted the other armoured giant grapple the car for himself, having grabbed the bonnet in both hands and swung it to his side like a mallet. Frost proceeded to bring the car around in a wide counter-clockwise arc, intent on knocking Ryan to the ground. The Hound proceeded to lower Sokolova's sword as he reared it backward; in a mighty upward swing, he sheared the car clean in half from left to right door. The synth-leather seats in the car burst into flames as the car itself split in twain, the severed partition crashing harmlessly off of the Hound's armour. He charged forward once again as he recovered from the swing, smashing square into Frost's armoured shape and knocking him off balance. The remaining half of the car was thrown aside like a ragdoll, landing in the pool and showering the area with water.
The heel of Frost's right boot impacted hard into Ryan's helmet, causing its fanged maw to crack once again as he crashed back to the gravel. Frost reached for his particle rifle as the Hound once again sprang to his feet, sword in hand; he raised the gun and fired just as Ryan swatted the barrel away from himself. The particle blast struck the quartz-glass ceiling protecting the entire district from the fury of outer space, leaving a vivid scorch mark. For a moment Frost was thankful that was all that the blast had left behind, or else everyone in this district and possibly even the entire city would be dead in a heartbeat.
The more immediate problem of the Hound raising Sokolova's sword to strike presented itself front and centre. To this Frost responded by raising the rifle in a desperate defence; the sword cleaved into the receiver and into the trigger system, but failed to split it in half. With immediate effect Ryan struggled to liberate his blade from the rifle's grasp, allowing Frost to return to his feet and attempt to wrench the sword away from the Hound's grip. The two locked blazing eyes, sanguine flame meeting with bitter ice as they fought.
Then the sword blade dug deeper into the rifle and struck the cord feeding power from the chevron-painted block at the gun's back to the firing system. The power block began to glow a fierce magenta, prompting a double-take from both Frost and Ryan. As a wet hiss pierced the air, the two shot wide-optic glances at each other, the exact same pair of words having materialised in their heads at that moment.
Oh, nuts.
~
Two half-tonne wrecking balls, one grey and one silver, shot forth from the epicentre of a tonitruous fulmination. A pillar of amethyst fire rose into the sky as the blast wave blossomed in a five metre radius; electrical whips lashed all around, transmuting water to steam, mooncrete to boiling lava and corpses to ash. A shimmering silver mushroom cloud towered from the blast site as ashes, steam and liquid hydrogen fuel from the wrecked car ignited and burst into the air, swallowing the oxygen in the immediate vicinity.
Frost smashed straight through the wall of his house and ploughed through several rooms until he blasted through the other side, his aerial exodus finally coming to a halt when his armoured bulk slammed into the wall of another house and crashed onto a foreign lawn. Ryan careened the other way across the body-strewn street, the corpses now ablaze courtesy of the plasma explosion. He demolished a bird bath in the next garden and destroyed an empty kennel, his flight concluding when he smashed his way through a glass window and landed on a double bed, the furniture snapping and crashing to the floor under his weight with immediate effect.
~
Ryan struggled out of the un
conscious realm with a groan. The first moment he knew that his helmet was missing was when he awoke to the plainness of the real world rather than a heads-up display. A sweeping pain covering his face and scalp prompted him to run his armoured gauntlet over his head, this being when he realised that his eyebrows and eyelashes were missing and his hair had singed to half its prior length. In his head he thanked the augmenticians that had designed his spider silk-reinforced synthskin; otherwise, his head would be little more than a boiled metal skull. Nevertheless, Sokolova would be most displeased at the revelation that she would have to make another toothed helmet for him.
Rolling off of the thoroughly ruined bed, glass crunched under Ryan's armoured boots as he surveyed the aftermath of the plasmatic eruption that had cast him here. His face wrinkled as an all too familiar stink penetrated his nostrils: the bovine smell of tissue, porcine of fat, acidic of hair, perfume of spinal fluid, and ferric of congealed blood. Precisely as he expected, a sea of fire met his eyes, responsible for the infernal miasma emanating from the corpses. The dead levied militiamen that had helped assault his family home and destroy the vat-birthed abominations holding Jason as their prisoner. Their sacrifice would be remembered.
A second, smaller fire had broken out close to where Ryan was standing, consuming the front lawn of this other house. A skull pommel affixed to a handle stuck out of the lawn, the plasma-coated blade beneath it buried into the dirt. Leaving the house for good, Ryan dragged the blade out of the ground and back into his right hand. His irate gaze turned back towards his old residence, now profoundly trashed as he searched for where Frost had gone. This madness had gone on for long enough, and the unaugmented Frost could not possibly have outlasted Ryan even without his armour. It was time for the Hound of Sokolova to claim his long-awaited prize.
The armoured giant emerged from the wall of flames, charred bones crunching under his sabatons as he stepped onto the pavement. There he heard the sounds of a struggle, the audible presence of another armoured figure prompting Ryan to wrench his eyes in fury. How his hated abandoner continued to survive even now baffled and horrified him. What sort of a monstrosity could possibly live through an assault of that magnitude?
The sight that Ryan found upon witnessing the wall that Frost had struck dissolved his anger like sulphuric acid. His eyebrows raised, his eyes grew wide and his jaw dropped like an osmium brick. Sokolova's sword slipped out of his grip and clattered against the mooncrete pavement.
~
Frost had to peel himself off of the wall he had smashed into, ripping away bits of plaster as he stood to his feet. The pain reverberating from where he thought his right eye was as well as the vanished heads-up display denoted that his helmet too was gone. A shard of visor glass had punched into his right cornea, rendering him blind in his gun optic. Nothing that Sparrow's geneticists could not fix, he presumed. More difficult to repair was his battered, burnt armour; the left pauldron was missing, as was a chunk of his breastplate and some of the pieces covering his arms had fallen away.
The greater concern stood before him, in the shape of the Hound with sword at the ready. Frost hauled himself to action as he prepared for the fight to resume; but his guard was let down as he saw the dumbstruck expression on Ryan's face. For a fleeting moment came the consideration that the sight of his injured father had brought back some sense of compassion to the armoured beast that took his eldest son's place against the infernal backdrop.
"Dad..." Ryan uttered.
At that moment Frost realised that Ryan was looking elsewhere, the focus of his eyes resting on somewhere behind him. He turned his head to see for himself what had caught Ryan's attention.
The bloodstain smeared into the crater Frost had left behind after his heavy impact was the first sight to meet his eyes. Within the rest of the mark bone, muscle, skin and clothing, all flattened, took shape. But it was the face that had caused something deep inside Frost's heart to snap like piano wire: the face of Jason Frost.
"What have you done?" Frost cried out as his expression was consumed by the most primal of rages, turning on Ryan with an erupting glare. "What have you done?!"
Ryan's eyes flared brighter than a thousand suns as his face contorted into a blood-drunk snarl. With a brilliant anger-charged roar he broke into a sprint and tackled his father.
Two armoured bulks, one silver and one smoke-grey, smashed through the house where the latter had crashed into. Long, lupine howls filled the stale air as Ed brought his hammer-like fists down onto Ryan's face, smashing twice into his nose. Ryan reciprocated by catching the incoming fist in his gauntlet. He tried to squeeze down to no avail, opting instead to crash his augmented head into the bridge of Ed's nose.
"You killed my brother!" Ryan bellowed through teary eyes as he raised his fist and threw it forward. The jaw-shattering punch was stopped only as Ed raised his right gauntlet blade and caught his hand, the impact cutting through the armour and into Ryan's hand. As he threw the Hound off of him, he stood up and flicked out the other blade, sincere murder in his eyes scorching everything that fell under his gaze like frostfire.
Ryan never even reached for his sword with which to butcher his father. Instead, as Ed roared and lunged forward with his right blade, the Hound grabbed a loose armour plate on his chest. Planting his boot on Ed's stomach and pushing him away, he tore the plate off and swung it backward. The armour piece smashed into Ed's skull like a mazzatello, sending teeth flying out and leaving a hideous bloody gash across his cheek and forehead.
Ed struck the lawn with a thunderous crash backside first, dazed and confused. The terrifying beast of war that had knocked him down stood proud, eyes blazing like twin pyrescent supernovae; at this stage Ed's battle instinct kicked into action. Ryan brought the armour piece that had sent his father to the ground over his head and readied to smash down again – Ed responded by shoving his fist upward with a roar, aiming for the gap in Ryan's chestplate.
The vibro-blade punching through the synthskin and metal endoskeleton like a pike forced Ryan to pause. His face stretched as each ultrasonic vibration sent shockwaves of agony ripping through his spine, leaving his lung punctured. If Ed pulled out now, he would die in unacceptable haste. Ryan reached for the first part to cross his mind – one of the missing plates on the arm holding Ed's blade. His augmented fist crashed into the limb like a hammer, shattering the bone and prompting a brilliant leonine roar. Cybernetic servos and myofibre muscles bayed like a pack of wolves and ground together as Ryan mustered every cubic metre of his metahuman power to haul Ed to his feet, the vibro-blade still buried in his torso. He caught Ed's other blade before he could shove it into his throat, and raised his foot to press against Ed's own breastplate.
A mere three seconds later, enough force wrenched Ed's power arm right out of its socket to humiliate an industrial hydraulic press in a contest of strength. With a tonitruous crunch the appendage buckled and broke free, a shower of metal, wires, carbon fibres, blood and sinew peppering the ground beneath. The mere shock of having his arm ripped out forced Ed to stumble backward, berserk eyes wide and bloodshot almost akin to a zombie. The move send Ryan staggering as well, all of his strength sapping away simply to exact this one small token of vengeance against his father. The blade still jammed into Ryan's chest was wrenched forth with a hideous suckle and the arm tossed to the floor. That spectral grating returned to Ryan's breath, yet no helmet crowned his head as he struck the wall of his home behind him, slipping to the floor.
Life flickered before Ryan's fading eyes as he fought his way back to his feet, stumbling forward and almost tripping over himself. His gaze directed him upwards to where Ed had fallen, only to see him risen once again, still battle ready as a blur in Ryan's faltering sight.
"That's not possible..." was all he could gasp before he was set upon by his furious father. "This cannot be hap-"
The crash of a gauntlet against his face cut him off. All that Ryan knew now was that Ed had picked up his own arm with the other app
endage by the pauldron and was now swinging the limb about like a flail.
"You! Murdered! My! SOOOOOONNS!!!" Ed's thunderous, grief-infused, bellowing roar echoed through the battle-stricken street, his infernal voice rising even over each deafening crash of the arm plates against Ryan's head and armour.
The final blow was marked as the vibro-blade struck edge first across the side of Ryan's face. Synthetic blood shot forth from the wound as if a bottle of red wine had been shattered underfoot. At last, the Hound of Sokolova staggered backward and toppled onto the lawn. At last, Ed's horrible rampage came to a close; Captain Frost staggered backward and toppled onto the lawn.
~
The battle was over.
Both men were left bloody and ruined. Ed was missing an arm, he could see from just one eye, and he had lost a phenomenal amount of blood. Staying awake was a struggle like none before. Yet Ed felt compelled to spare his dying son one final look.
What Ed saw when Ryan turned to face him was merely half of his real face, the face he had been raised with, what Ed knew. The other half: a twisted, daemonic monstrosity, an embodiment of human nightmares shaped from steel and circuitry into physical manifest. Damaged wires on his cheek sparked and flashed, causing a diagonally-positioned slit for a blazing vermilion right eye to flicker. The viperine optic sensor curved downward with his left eyebrow in an expression of malevolence; his interlocking, selachian teeth gnashed together, and what was left of his face twisted into a scimitar-like snarl.
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