GUYS... An early chapter today. WHY? You may ask... Well you see, I will be traveling.. as my semester has ended early.
AND GOOD NEWS!!! Daily chapters soon
😁😁
Anyway.. enjoy the chapter.
+++
Five minutes before the world saw the fire barrier on television, Muscular hit the jungle as Akira flung him.
He crashed through the canopy like a plane, snapping trees at their trunks, carving a trench through the scorched earth that stretched thirty metres before his body came to a stop. Dirt and debris rained around him. Smoke rose from the furrow his impact had carved.
He lay there for a second.
Then he laughed.
"HAHAHAHAHAHA!!"
He stood up, brushing dirt off his massive frame, his muscle fibre armour rippling as he rolled his shoulders. His human eye was bright with excitement. His Nomu eye was empty, tracking for movement.
Akira landed ten metres in front of him.
The phoenix form dispersed, as red flames scattered like embers, leaving him standing in the cleared patch of jungle.
He looked at Muscular and stopped.
Something was wrong.
The talons should have damaged him. Akira had felt his grip burning through layers of muscle fibre, the heat searing flesh, the flames eating into Muscular's body during the carry.
But the damage wasn't where it should have been.
Muscular's human side was burned badly. The talon marks had gone deep. Skin was gone in three places, the tissue beneath charred black, and in one spot near his ribs, Akira could see bone.
But it was healing at a rapid rate. The flesh around the burn marks was bubbling, new skin crawling across the wounds at a rate that was far beyond what Muscular's original quirk should have allowed. Within seconds, the bone was covered. Within ten seconds, the burns were pink scars. Within twenty, they were gone.
However, the other side?
The Nomu side?
Akira stared at it. The right half of Muscular's body was barely scratched. The same talons that had burned through human flesh to the bone had left nothing but faint marks on the Nomu tissue, marks that faded as he watched.
The black skin hadn't burned.
Muscular saw his expression and laughed again, louder this time.
"Your flame tricks won't do shit, kid!!" He flexed his right arm, the Nomu side swelling with muscle fibres that stacked on top of each other like geological strata. "This skin was built to take hits from that crazy quirk of yours! They made me better than I ever was!!"
He took a step forward. The ground cracked under his weight.
"HAHAHAHAHA!! You should've NOT brought me here!! Now it's just you and me!! No heroes, no cameras, no one to save you!!"
His grin stretched wider, splitting his face along the line where human met Nomu.
"You're gonna die here, kid!! Just like those two bastards on the mountain!!"
Akira's face went blank.
The words hit him in a place that flames couldn't reach. Not his body. Deeper. The place where he kept the things that still hurt, the things that time hadn't healed, the things that woke him up at three in the morning with his sheets soaked in sweat and a scream caught in his throat.
Those two bastards.
The memories rushed in like water through a broken dam. The mountainside. The fire. The blood. The two people who had died trying to protect him and the boy they left behind.
The weight settled on his chest. The kind of weight that made breathing feel like a choice rather than a reflex. It pulled him down, inward, toward the dark place where grief lived.
He could feel himself sinking.
But then, something pulled him.
His mother, standing in the kitchen, laughing at something he had said, her eyes bright, alive, the way they always were when he came home.
His grandmother, sitting in her office, scolding him for training too hard, then healing his bruises anyway because that was what she did. That was what she had always done.
Momo. Her face when she created the railgun. Her face when she aimed it at him. What she said, with that beautiful smile of her's.
Smile, handsome.
The way she held his bleeding hand, even when his skin was too hot to touch.
Nia. Tiny paws on the glass. Go Daddy!! The way she purred when he scratched behind her ears. The way she called Momo "Mommy" without anyone telling her to.
And Kota.
A small boy sitting on the beach, crying because the world had taken everything from him and he was too young to understand why. A boy whom Akira had found and held and promised that it would never happen again.
I promise you. No more.
The darkness receded. The weight didn't disappear — it never fully disappeared — but it shifted. It moved from his chest to his back, from a burden to a foundation, from something that crushed him to something he carried.
He opened his eyes.
BOOOOOM.
Red flames erupted from Akira's body and spiralled upward into a tornado of crimson fire, swirling around him and Muscular in a cyclone that stripped the remaining trees, incinerated the undergrowth, and scorched the earth in a perfect circle.
The tornado expanded, then solidified. The outer wall of flame compressed, hardened, and became a transparent barrier of superheated air and red fire that stretched twenty metres into the sky. Inside the barrier, the temperature was rising rapidly.
What was left was an arena. Built from fire. Sealed shut. No exit for either of them.
Akira stood in the centre. Two figures inside a ring of flame. One boy. One monster.
"After this day," Akira said, his voice low, his eyes locked on Muscular, "no kid will cry because of disgusting villains like you."
Muscular cracked his neck. His muscle fibres expanded across both sides of his body, the human half and the Nomu half swelling in unison until he was nearly three metres tall, a wall of dense tissue and dark membrane.
"Try me boy."
Akira raised both hands as red flames condensed in his palms, solidifying into two blades.
Phoenix Drive: Overdrive
Blue flames layered beneath the red, coating his body, enhancing his speed, his reflexes, his strength. Dual-layer flame output.
He gripped the blades and rushed.
The distance between them vanished in a heartbeat. Akira came in fast, both blades swinging in a cross pattern aimed at Muscular's midsection, the same opening strike Mei had drilled into him a hundred times during their training.
Muscular didn't dodge.
He caught both blades on his forearms.
The red fire bit into his human side — cutting through the first layer of muscle fibre, burning, searing. But on the Nomu side, the blade skidded across the black membrane like a knife across stone, leaving nothing but a faint scorch mark.
Muscular laughed. "THAT'S THE BEST YOU CAN DO?!"
He swung his right fist in a horizontal arc aimed at the boy's skull.
Akira ducked. The fist passed overhead, the wind from it tearing at his hair. He slashed upward with his left blade, carving a line from Muscular's hip to his chest on the human side.
It healed before Akira could follow up. The flesh knitted shut, the muscle fibres restacked, and Muscular was whole again in three seconds.
He countered with a downward hammer fist. Akira rolled sideways, the impact cratering the scorched ground where he had been standing. The shockwave knocked him off balance. Muscular followed with a lunging grab, both hands reaching for Akira's body with fingers thick enough to crush steel.
Akira fired a concentrated blast of red flame from both palms, hitting Muscular square in the chest. The fire engulfed his torso, burning through the human side, blackening flesh. Muscular staggered backward, momentarily blinded by the heat.
Akira used the distance. He circled right, targeting the human half. Two slashes, one across the ribs, one across the thigh. Both hit. Both cut deep. Both started healing the moment the blade left the skin.
Tch!
He needed something bigger. Something that could overwhelm the regeneration on the human side and penetrate the Nomu membrane on the other.
As Muscular recovered again, he charged, arms wide, muscle fibres expanding mid-rush until his upper body was a wall of layered tissue. He was fast for his size — faster than he had been the last time they met. The Nomu modifications hadn't just given him durability. They had enhanced everything.
Akira met the charge. He planted his feet, raised both blades, and caught Muscular's rush on the crossguard. The impact drove him backward. Muscular's raw strength was way too overwhelming. Even with Overdrive boosting his physical stats, the difference in muscle mass was catastrophic.
He backed off. Blasted sideways with a burst of flame, creating distance again. He launched a volley of red flame projectiles. They hit Muscular across his entire body.
And again, the human side burned, but the Nomu side absorbed it.
The human side healed. Again. Five seconds, and he was as good as new.
Muscular shook off the residual flames like a dog shaking off dust.
"You keep burning the same side, kid!! IT WON'T WORK!!" He flexed his human arm, the fresh skin smooth and unmarked. "I'll just keep healing!! And you'll keep burning!! And eventually, you'll run out of fire before I run out of body!!"
He was right. And they both knew it.
Akira could damage the human half. He could burn it, cut it, sear it down to the bone. But the regeneration was too fast. Every wound closed within seconds. And the Nomu half — the half that mattered, the half that gave Muscular his enhanced durability — was barely taking damage at all. His red flames couldn't penetrate that membrane deeply enough to matter.
He was fighting a war of attrition that he couldn't win.
Muscular grinned. He could see the calculation happening behind Akira's eyes.
"Time for round two, kid."
Something shifted in Muscular's body. The black tissue on his right side began to move. It crawled across his chest, his stomach, his left arm. The Nomu membrane expanded like a living thing, consuming the human skin beneath it, converting flesh to that dark, resistant material one centimetre at a time.
His face was last. The human half was swallowed by the black membrane. It stretched across his features, covering everything, until nothing human remained on the surface.
What stood in the fire arena was no longer a man.
It was a monster.
Three metres tall. Entirely covered in the black Nomu membrane. Its eyes were white, and empty, set into a skull that had elongated and widened to accommodate a jaw full of grotesque, interlocking teeth. Its mouth was a nightmare — rows of sharp, jagged fangs that jutted at wrong angles, built not for eating but for tearing. Its body was denser, thicker, the muscle fibres beneath the membrane stacking so deep that it looked like something carved from volcanic rock.
"ROAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAR!!!!!!!!!!!"
The sound was deafening. A frequency that vibrated in Akira's chest cavity, that made his vision blur for half a second, that carried across the fire barrier and into the jungle beyond
And Akira looked back.
His expression was grim. The blades in his hands burned brighter, the red flames intensifying, but his jaw was tight. He could feel the shift in power. The membrane that he couldn't damage now covered every inch of Muscular's body. There was no more human side to target.
No weak point.
No opening.
Just a monster and a boy inside a ring of fire.
<<>>
The new form is like a more scary version of Venom.
Plus if you want to support me, you can join my P@teron and read up to +15 advanced chapters and support me you can alway join my P@treaon. (Just search up Joe_Mama p@treon on google.)