Chapter 59: Chapter fifty-eight

Present day

 

Oblivion dashed in, moving faster than he had ever moved before. He was pushing his body to its absolute limits.

Smythe was still faster. He was little more than a blur and Oblivion could barely avoid the flurry of strikes that came from his prosthetic hands.

“Interesting,” Smythe commented, noticing the increased speed of Oblivion’s movements. “It won’t be enough.”

Oblivion turned aside a blow that could have snapped his neck and danced out of the way of a blindingly fast leg sweep.

“How long do you think you can keep this up?” Smythe asked, his voice completely calm as he continued his relentless assault. “A minute? Two? Sooner or later your body will give out.”

He was right of course. Oblivion’s body was giving him all it could, more than he could sustain, and it still wasn’t enough to outpace Smythe.

But then, he didn’t need to.

Smythe might be stronger, faster, and a whole hell of a lot tougher than Oblivion. But Oblivion was better.

He dodged one more series of blows then, having the full measure of Smythe’s limited fighting ability, he went on the attack.

Oblivion stepped inside Smythe’s next strike, slipped a leg behind the metal man and shoved against him with all his strength. Smythe didn’t go down, but he did stumble a little, and that was enough. Oblivion was on him, punching him in the chest where he figured the old man’s heart would be. He struck again and again, putting all the force he could into each blow and attacking with both the desperate fury of a man who knows he doesn’t have much time left and the calm precision of a man who fights like others breathe.

Smythe was driven back, cracks starting to appear in the metal plate of his body. But he wasn’t the only one, both Oblivion’s hands were spiderwebs of fractures and swollen tissue. Still, he kept pummelling that one spot on Smythe’s chest.

Oblivion stepped forward and struck with the full weight of his body. There was a sickening crack as the hand broke grotesquely, but the metal cracked further. He threw another blow with his remaining hand.

And Smythe caught it.

Smythe fixed Oblivion’s faceless mask with an unblinking, robotic stare and crushed his Oblivion’s hand in his own, pulverizing bone and flesh with ease.

Oblivion could ignore a lot of pain, but that got a scream, even from him.

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“That’s enough playing superhero,” he said, lifting Oblivion off the ground by his pulped hand. “It was fun while it lasted, but this isn’t some comic book. This is real life.”

Oblivion pawed at Smythe’s chest with his free, but broken, hand.

Smythe’s fist connected with Oblivion’s face, the force of the blow threatening to break his neck. His mask cracked and shards of it stabbed into his face.

Smythe hit him again and he felt his teeth break, splintering in his mouth as he gagged on his own blood.

Oblivion’s vision tunnelled, the force of the strikes overwhelming his body and consciousness threatening to fade.

Smythe raised his hand to strike him again.

And there, under a thunderstorm in the middle of nowhere, a superhero laughed in the face of a man made of metal.

Smythe hesitated, his paranoia setting off alarm bells in his metallic head.

“Don’t you know?” Oblivion said, smiling with broken teeth, “Superheroes aren’t about realism.”

He held up his free hand and there, between snapped fingers, was a piece of metal. Smythe looked down to see that Oblivion had, somehow, pried a piece of his outer armour free with a mangled hand and now was holding it up for all to see.

“I—”

Whatever Smythe was about to say, he didn’t get the chance. Blood splattered his metal exterior as a bullet, fired from more than two miles away, passed through Oblivion’s body and into the hole he had dug in Smythe’s armour.

Oblivion collapsed to the ground as Smythe’s grip loosened and the metal man toppled beside him.

And there, bloody and broken, Oblivion felt an emotion echo through his mind, still distant, but strong and bone-deep:

Triumph.

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