I Am Rage {Superhero, Action, Tragedy}

*bizvvvv* "Tower Actual, this Strike!! Red Line, Red Line, Red Line!! Repeat, we are over the red line and need immediate counter deploy!!"

"It's time then. You-"

"I'm ready uncle! I've always been ready!"

"I was going to say you go kick some ass."

"O-oh…"

"I already knew you were ready. All of us made sure of that. But are they? Just keep the armor on and keep your calm. This is what you've been waiting for, but doesn't mean let them get to you. You need to show them whose life they have been ruining. So you can live the rest of yours in peace."

"And if… If they really did it? If this is really him?"

"Then you show him who you are. And make him regret ever coming back. Keep yourself, prove you're stronger than anything he ever was, and we'll be there to catch you. Just please… don't destroy everything."

"Heh… No promises."

The once bustling, beaten drum of conflict. The metal stretched to fit and ring with revered strength. The sand meant to catch and hold the blood that marked its passage. The stands to see and witness ascension. All of this place had been driven to silence and simmer. To charred melt and broken façade. To falling debris and creaking tenor strain. To the driven away throngs kicked out to shame, to the outer world come to show them they were wrong. To the arrested designated too hostile to leave to chance, turning silence to din through layers desecrated. To the far closer groaning and broken held fast. To the staunch observant so very not long to last. And the only one left upon this field of glass. With grin and stature and form on blast.

Seth was just too proud to leave it all alone.

To not smile with teeth that once terrorized his nightmares. With visage and form that would have made him falter, just as those who ran and hesitated at the sight of him in full again. At his blitzing truth marring only two… maybe three. He hadn't really held back against his so assigned avatar. So maybe they were feeling the same stay-down that Tasha was. Which just made him smile wider.

That it took the same amount of power as unraveling a half bound psyche just to get her to stop. To see and accept that yes, he was alive and standing right here. It just made him all too proud of how far she'd come. The last time he'd seen her, she was scowling at him from beneath the crowds knowing so much less. Fearful and angry at him hiding away what he had been. What he'd done… The fact he had kinda done that again was starting to dawn on him. Forcing a defeating snicker out of his snout and a claw over his face. Before letting it shine up to that bare open sky. As he sighed away and let it all din the only way it could.

"…Fuck…"

The out loud utterance made the groaning strike a wince from Tasha's attempt to sit up. Those brown eyes caught in their pure remembrance, and yet had fought hard with the image looming before her. Had fought.

Now it was all falling apart, falling hard into strain against his radioactive existentialism. Against a death she knew and conflictingly mourned. And yet proof abounded, pressed down on her, sapped and yet remained warm unlike the cold of all else. Questions fluxed and flared and made mockery of all that she had. And so forced their way out rather unneeded. As they contorted her face enough as it was.

"H-how… Why…? How!?"

Though it was not so straight forward. The look on her face, the grit of her trying to manage a kneel as the weight of her own body pressed down, the slight singe of her hair as the last streams of heat faded. She demanded more than he could really give. But he had time to kill. The grunts of other's effort to cover up.

"Heh. I'd say long story, but it's probably shorter than what I missed. I did die after all. It's just… how things went."

His shrug nearly ignited the embers he'd had to douse, but stopped short as her children broke from the cover of that blackened hole burned through the wall behind. Helping their mother up and screening kinda pathetically.

"You…!"

"We've got you!"

"Don't move… W-we've got this."

"Tyra get her out of here!"

But retreat was not on the table. As hands held her up, her own fought for stability and her place on this field.

"You… can't be…!"

"...And why not?"

His voice, defiant of buzzing malice, mounted the height it could reach. And yet stayed a level more sustainable.

"Do I not cut the figure? Am I not just as you remember, if maybe a bit more out? Or has the gulf of time truly taken more than just my honor…?

"If I ever had any."

His smile faltered that image facetious, disregarding of more disturbed and more fearful stares. But hers seemed to just refuse all it bore. Falling back into what he'd hoped he'd hauled her up from. From whatever had happened in his interim. Though, her anger seemed to have a bit more gravity than he'd expected. Her grit seething intermittent as something drove her to reconcile. And fail.

"You can't be… You're just another one of his discarded projects. Or worse, a ghost given a body that thought that accursed armor was anything but poison! Just another broken mind lost to…"

Her eyes belied none of the venom. But Seth had tasted worse.

"To what? Averous? Whatever the hell that was? That doctor? Whoever the fuck he is?!

"...I really missed a lot... Didn't I?

"Seen more memorials than I wished to. Seen quite the degradation of my name. Of what I did."

Slit yet mundane eyes smirked at the barren colosseum that echoed with the winds of impending mass incarceration. And who knows how many social programs it'll take to undo the damage already done. But also reverberating with the strain of all still present. Both in his shadow with fear and fury. And blocked from sight with something more substantial.

"There was more to him than just a fucking name! More than just a monster you think you can just become!"

"Am I not proving that right now? Did I not so many times before? I mean… would the me in your thoughts have accepted all this? ...Or... Well, okay yeah, I probably would have gone in guns blazing like… hughh… Yeah this was kinda out of character. But again, it's… it's just how things went. Who was I to spoil all the fun."

His acquiescence to fate nearly drove her footing back to her. Her progeny barely protesting as they too refused to accept what was plainly before their eyes. As all ground down that image in simmering ignition.

"Just shut up!! I won't allow you to claim him!! He- he died a better death than…! W-why the hell are you even here!? Just to destroy our only chance to stop this curse from spreading?! Because your fucking creator left you to rot in his skin!?!"

His smirk really did falter as, again, this unknown doctor seeming to be a more tangible reasoning than he'd actually come back to life. But his hope for an answer was closing. A buzz seeming to falter in its own defiance and an aggravation filling in the air. All signaled his ruse had paid off.

"Nah… I came for the same reason you guys did! Because what better way to get all the parts in one place than to let this guy have his moment to shine eternal!"

'And see just what all that greed will cost him.'

At that. At the falling of the veil of taunting existence. At the turning to face the next challenger of his divinity. All the fury in those stares sank. To fear swallowing them whole.

As the zealot of his church, the witness to his ascension, the high priest to dignify his existence for all to know and quake under, rose from the stands of shattered wood and broken open faith. With gleaming armor draping over. And malice so wrought it caved in the very air they breathed.

As what befell his champion took its hold on him. But with only the barest sliver of that poisonous malformation left. Willing itself to taint the purity of Seth's rage beaten into it. Because he needed a whole to unravel this monstrosity.

All at once, that weight upon reality given as mass, turned to suck! To greedy hold on all matter daring to still retain its binding particles! As the free flow of power, electricity that lit and snaked and surged through this place became his very will!

Wood snapped and as weight nearly doubled in an instant. Density overruling what laws thought they could bind him. But relent that density still did to its extraneous existence, though not to placate but to seize! To take! To reclaim all that was taken! As to none but Seth, the world striped apart into daggering tendrils of questing seek. And reeling want for his pieces-of-eight!

From between sheets and debris. From over and through the very walls that rattled around them. From beneath the sand and barreling passed all. They came at speed! At vicious reminiscence to his defiance of the Elite. Slicing and caving all in their paths. Riling that din beyond the wall to yells and demands. Curtailing the air into sharp jagged death. More than too many stained as they slammed passed, slammed into places upon a form barely fit to hold. Let alone bear its weight. Returning the armor in more of its full splendor, with all that Seth had missed by virtue of wanting to see just this.

The dashing of covetous holders, of failed sequesterers, of all those who wanted what had been left to take the place as his grave. Every piece of his now twice tainted armor returned together in one single form. Sparking and sharding and wringing tight. So that the true extent to its new malice drive could be taken in whole as it wound its tangled key.

In writhing agony!

At the undertaking this fool had just taken on. At the fibrous existence snaking into his very soul! Twisting, stealing, reverberating with all that it took and all it made a new. Making music of memory and consciousness alike. A true discordant tone too dialed up to be understood as more than just noise. As more than sheer electricity in the air! But it was there on full blast in Seth's ear. Reverberating upon his crackling corpus cordage, as contemporary finding his complete. As this, his high priest, became what he always wished for.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

As plates fused, so did taxonomy. Claws ripping free as bones cracked long. Flesh ripping and hardening in kind. Scales of pure mineral metastases spreading with the change. Snapping with discharge arc from nerves overloading. With the cacophony of life intermixing with life. With form mixing with malcontented form.

The spine forming new vertebra and trailing out behind. Ankles flexing up in new higher gaits. Hands gripped in steel and with molten metal running through them, threatened to rend asunder the staff they held for support in this most holy of trials. Till his head, weighed down in visage he was unworthy of, bent up in a pain so loud it could not but scream in silence. As teeth and bone and very persona were rippled and rent into the contours of that maw.

Only to have it fall back down in wracking hurt, as his body was made to fit what was not meant for him. As new muscle and bone and organ accompaniment made way. Bulked what was once frail. Gave stature to hunching age. Breathed agonizing life into one so very over ripened. Till it all was touched. Till it all burned too hot to not feel even from afar. Till it all… left him.

So he could take his first breaths as the thing he'd worshiped.

So what he had become could take in the world it reviled.

As those burned through holes of alloyed metal shined no light. As every muscle and threaded electron flexed to judge and know the extent of this new existence. Come to terms. Come to the light. Come all you are, as what you have become.

"Fear ye all, for death comes again! Born anew from curse and matter all!"

Seth could not hold back the gesticulation, could not keep from smiling at this newest addition to so very limited a club. Giving him the entrance he so much wanted, with all the venom he deserved for partaking. That part of Para he had uptaken just reveling in the stage light.

"Risen from ash! From graves so numerous! From burnished hell and greatest triumph not all could bear to witness!"

The words riled, rattled that armor in seethe between teeth sharp and fighting for a breath.

"But lo! Here it has come! The newest claimant to this highest of order! To lay low all that survived that torrent!"

The grit was starting to creak that armored maw. Muscle flaring below and over plated carapace. Marring the image this bastard wanted clear.

"So what shall they call it!? What name doth it bear!? As all have had, to show their contempt for this world and this world for thee!"

The prodding, the goading, all just the push were Para chose to shove. To see just what…

"What shall this laceroid be? Pride? Or Greed?"

"I!!! Am more than such monstrosities!!!"

His voice held the buzz, but also the grind. The hiss and clang and hidden away malice of one so very off the deep end. And yet still able to float.

"I!! Am that which burned away that stain!!"

And yet rising up from behind that staff, shining that green of that avaricious thing still behind those slit eyes.

"I!! I am what quaked the earth and sky to heel!! What made all before him know and fear and fall to his feet!!!"

Up and up his angle relieved. The weight being borne, and that which churned to rise to its top.

"I am that which brought this world to its knees!! That which suffered and trialed so that all would know the path to true power!!"

His chest puffed yet strained in the grit of unprepared fool. In sinking defiance of what was too much to bear.

"I… am Saint Saladar Smythe!!

"I am more... than empty wrath's call!!!"

And yet up came words that only so few would know. Through... no... From that strain to reign. To find the power of this existence beyond the material.

"I am beyond... that broken night's fall!!!"

To feel it course, ebb and surge. Know its breadth and feel more than what you had taken.

"I!!!"

Till the whole world became-

"Am!!!"

Just fuel for the slaughter!

"The second coming of RAGE!!!!"

The wood, the metal, the stone, the air, the all of everything nailed down by the this world materia! Matter and energy in its ever ebbing dance made cliché damsel before the dragon of greed! That staff of pale metal and broken horn turned conduit! Ionized and magnetized and overload of all that bound! As this self-made antichrist found no need for gravity and law, as his power coursed and flowed and siphoned and fell into the pit nothingness he wanted to become!

A ring, a halo, an event horizon of pure taking hate! Pulling at the sand and metal and world around it! Scorching wood to nothing but nothing! Rippling the rest in concentric repeat of history! But that maw was already open and bearing its teeth with its hunger plain and roaring!

Yanking at everyone, armored or not. Riptide of grit pulling progeny off their feet. Colored flames fighting in streaking trails of jet fire caught as they were. Tasha and Tyra slipping barely a degree before armored boots stamped into the floor and held for dear life. As the hurricane of a new black hole rushed by only one unaffected.

Seth could feel every probe, every fiber touched, every whipping want of all that he was. And denied it all in talon stake and better control than this heathen. As the electricity of this cloister, this taken over sector, this ramshackle convent of blood and blasphemy, was all made singularity upon this being.

Upon his staff of foci necessity, as he parted with pure siphon for the need of control so barely had. Stabbing that horn into the sky to skewer his take, make physical the metaphysical and overbright the plasma of avarice. A ball of jagged edges, of burning plasma being formed and pressed and overpressured down again. Till its contours escaped his will in only tearing blister. Till its form only just slipped what little this bastard called his power. Till it was enough to bring to heel and reel down, to level its retinal third degree upon its target. Twisting with corona familiar, if sharp and arcing. But wholly in the wrong where Phazer was long right to scour him whole. But this constant repeat fell only on Seth. Sin of the past come to make him repent. Failing like all the rest, as he saw it as nothing but-

"This is the light!! This is his rage!!! This is what this world deserves for all it has taken from him!!! So that all can be made anew as he had done!!! So that all will feel his resentment and rue the day it sacrificed him!!!!"

'hughh… So it's a little bit in there too.'

Light and wind scorched over his scales, tried to pry them open and burn him alive preemptive. But it was all just bluster, bright and blaring. Wanting desperate to be heard in concert with the past. To avenge the already avenged. To mare what was already scarred and healed. To show that there was power beyond authority that needed to be seen and accepted and feared true! But all of it moot, dry and fallow. Seeded with salt from an ocean evaporated. So miniscule, so worthless, not his power to expand and demand at his will. Not even his own will in full, just some dried up memories of Resent guiding his hand. Guiding the fragmented fractions of Averous blended into this fool like a giving ancestor. All because he'd seen him die and wanted more.

"You so badly wanted to see that light again… That you failed to remember what it felt like."

Seth accepted the burn, accepted the surge, accepted the pull and convective conviction driving this loaded star. So that it could all feel the truth these gathered thought deniable. In risen hand and risen glare. In haloed eyes azure. Barely seen but made to be. Connected and tethered with but the will to open up to it all. Open to the storm thought overwhelming. The power insurmountable.

So that-

So he-

So all could see-

"So here. Let me show it to you again."

That storm, that surge, this unrefined catastrophe! All slipped reigns and flipped polarities and seen of its true master for all it covets! That blister, those cavitating failures, this wanton destruction stopped of all its portents. Brought to heel, made to still, as the world caught in overdrive was allowed to see! And feel! And know his truth! As that ball of plasma, over eager electron compression, was grabbed whole, made naught, and shot to the sky! Wrested with but a flick and flash of true authority!

Because his light was no small dying star!

The threads, the will manifest, the extension of control that burned with his being! Made mockery of this thought extent! Made core its compression and stellar attempt with the whole damn abyss that lurked beneath! Sand, metal, blood, and break! All were fodder to feed the birth of a more true nova! Whamming the air to Krakatoa! Bloating that star to supermassive in an instant show of almighty!

A white blinding orb of pure plasma hell, air caught in the crossfire and ionized with all that he was! All that he had been! Had seen! Raking the land for more to feed it, sucking dry the lot of this corrupted industry and cancerous history!

Kowtowing all to the ground or the stupor. Making all small those who thought themselves stood over. But not burning, not reducing that land to scorched hell on Earth. Because this energy, this thing, was but the froth of depths unimaginable to this blasphemer! And allowed no out but what he had say!

And he wanted naught but to see it taken away!

Crushed in claw and taken back to where it belonged! With the only one who knew the truth of its birth! The hell of its death! And the only one who gave a damn about using it to actually fucking help people!

So as instantaneous as its nova, so to was its collapse! This cosmic behemoth at three billionths scale, brought down to size after size. Imploding smaller and smaller, taking more of the world electric with it in every stammering crush! Till it was nothing but a point, a light, a small insignificant mote that dazzle shone with his light. With the white of all that he was together and undeniable. All of his rage, all of his resentment, all of the pride and greed and overwrought and weakness. Everything that had clung to his soul and suffered for it. That had lit up in that dark, been swallowed and melded together, been taken in as more of who he always was. All of it falling into his hand. So it could all be snuffed out.

So that all that collective power could return to whence it came! Dashed aside, dashed to arcs back to ground and back to life! Back to matter and back to substance before all was broken and stained! A wave of sand surging under foot with no blood to defile it. Metal screeching back together and welding shut its cacophony. Wounds and maims and paths cut unmade. As he melded this ramshackle mess of a church into something more fitting his make.

Flash frying, melting and reforming. Making way for true power to have its say. Making rust and stressed and scorched mockery into an arena proper. From shattered stands to broken open portcullis, to the hole in its flesh all the way out again. Splashing it all to chrome, hardening it to steel, flexing it to the concrete, and buffing it to matte. Like armor against the worst this world would throw to it. As it was meant to before freeing that which held up inside.

Like that which stood dumb and agape. Knowing the rue of his hubris for himself.

Knowing that pull as it yanked at what had fused to his very being. Burned-in technique unraveling a soul from its amalgamate tangle. Though far shallower than all that preceded, it still took plenty along with it. Slamming this real pretender to the char of his stage, pink and sizzling and knowing despair. Regeneration and recombobulation allowing no escape. From the judgment clanking back together his symbol of godhood.

But not so as before, long past the simple slamming of matter, now all that it was became all that was his. A powder, a cloud, micro particles dashed apart and aligned back where they belong. Along their threaded extension, their own strings plucked at callously for scrapes of what he was. No more, no shot, this was all his forever more!

Crawling up arm and leg and torso. Rebuilding from nearly molecular regression. Yet flowing back to solid, wrapping over him, closing off the world that reviled it till it all reflected back. Till it dared, shiny and chrome, to be back to what it was. Till it flexed, hard and matte, to be more than show. Till it was and always would be. Till its extent became but a glance of a thought and a hum of its... incomplete tune.

"Uggaaahh!! Of course there's still pieces missing!"

The helmet gave way, visage dissolving around that which it could no longer hide. Becoming weight on his neck and metal under his skin. A part of him, moved just as easy as he breathed. All this power making its own mockery of his humble entrance on to this stage. Overdriving even in the slog of the mundane. And highlighting the world of its lower depths so he could have what was his.

Swiping the staff of bone white metal from that breaking zealot. And feeling real bone for the trouble. Feeling worrying extent of that armored keratin diode at its tip. The one that hide away a real horn of his beneath it. Still humming, still his and his alone. But... more. Grown down, formed out. Marrow core made staff grotesque. Raising questions that... had an answer he didn't want to really admit.

That castigation at the foot of Buster's memorial. When he'd ripped off a horn before he even really knew it was more than just metal. Stealing his grave was one thing, but now he had to worry about reliquaries? But that seemed moot. He didn't go around leaving parts of himself behind. This was probably the extent. But it still worried him, so it was dissolved and returned whence it all would never leave again. Bone and armor and keratin whipping out and shattering to sparks. Suffusing into his new whole as if hoping it forgave him for leaving it to be abused. But oh, no such forgiveness translated, no such mercy was allowed for the now hobbled and revitalized still upon the stage he had scorched.

Wood had unsplintered, just as years had been undone. No discrimination for telomeres and liver spots, but age still wrinkled his soul. And the weight of your god, irrefutable and glaring, drove no discrete direction but down to his knees. As step by earthquake by apocalypse he approached. Loomed even above the elevation he clung to. Slammed his head to in desperate supplication. Only to be yanked himself for daring to beg. Tossed to the sand by sheer might of will metaphysical, not rent asunder by incongruous force. Not by hunger or malice or greedy claimant. But by that which he knew nothing truly of.

Because he was not worthy of it.

The only thing he deserved. The only thing he would receive from that which he dared sainthood from. From that which he spoke for. From that which he stole!

Was that burning glare bending down into his face. So he could see into the eyes…

Of the man he claimed as his god.

All so that man could raise a claw to that repentant expression.

And flick the stupid right out of his dumb head. For all the crap he left Seth to deal with. And all that he at least had found for him. Mercy undeserved…

'But that's just not who I am.'