6: Chapter 6 The Fear of the Crossbones

Deep blue arcs of light wove together in the air, forming a web of death.

Brock Rumlow had pushed his speed to the absolute limit.

The exoskeleton armor on both sides of his thighs spewed out scorching White steam due to overload.

Like an experienced, starving wolf, he precisely avoided the range of Lynn's frontal attack, leaped high using the momentum of his sprint, and with high-frequency vibration daggers emitting a piercing hum, slashed fiercely toward Lynn's eyes and throat!

"Die, you big lug!"

"Clang—tsss, tsss, tsss!!!"

Sparks flew everywhere.

There was no spray of blood, only the teeth-gritting sound of metal being cut.

The grimace beneath Rumlow's mask froze instantly.

He felt a terrifying recoil force transmitted from the hilts of the daggers held in his hands, and the webs between his thumbs and fingers split instantly.

His high-frequency vibration blades, which were touted as being able to cut through main battle tank armor, stopped dead the instant they struck Lynn's throat and the area below his eyelids!

The deep blue high-frequency electric arcs jumped wildly, but upon cutting less than half an inch into that dark red skin, they let out an overwhelmed whine.

The blades were stuck fast in Lynn's muscle fibers, which were comparable to high-density alloy, unable to advance even a fraction of an inch further.

Lynn didn't even dodge.

He didn't even blink, simply allowing this lethal weapon to strike his vital points.

"Agility? Neural reaction speed?"

A low, cold laugh, like the sound of raw iron rubbing together, emanated from Lynn's throat.

He lowered his head, his four eyes burning with brutal red light, looking down condescendingly at Rumlow, who was suspended in mid-air.

That gaze was like looking at an ant trying to trip an elephant with a toothpick.

"You think I'm slow because I can't dodge?"

Lynn's massive head tilted slightly forward, pressing against the blades of the high-frequency daggers as he moved closer, "No, it's because your attacks aren't even worth me dodging."

"Damn it! Retreat!"

A piercing chill instantly shot up Rumlow's spine.

His years of life-and-death instincts were frantically screaming a death warning at him.

He decisively released the stuck daggers and activated the micro-thrusters on his back exoskeleton, wanting to fly backward to create distance.

But he made a fatal mistake.

In the face of absolute power and speed, any tactical retreat was a joke.

"Boom!"

A sonic boom erupted in the air.

The thickest arm on the upper right side of Lynn's body shot out with a terrifying speed that Rumlow couldn't even comprehend.

It didn't even leave an afterimage.

"Bang!"

A giant hand, the size of a manhole cover and covered in dark bone spurs, grabbed Rumlow by the neck, yanking him from mid-air as if he were a chick, and held him suspended.

"Ugh... let... let go..."

Rumlow grabbed Lynn's rock-hard fingers with both hands, struggling desperately to pry them open.

His pride-and-joy combat skills and his exoskeleton armor, which could unleash tons of explosive power with a single punch, were like children's toys in front of Lynn's giant hand.

"Crack, crack, crack..."

Lynn hadn't even used much force, yet the heavy tactical bulletproof armor around Rumlow's neck began to emit a teeth-gritting cracking sound.

The high-strength carbon fiber neck brace was cracked like a biscuit.

A strong sense of suffocation caused Rumlow's face to turn purple-red, and his legs kicked helplessly in the air.

He was Crossbones!

He was a top-tier assassin who struck fear into the hearts of mercenaries worldwide and was on S.H.I.E.L.D.'s blacklist!

But now, he was like a reptile held by its throat, his life and death completely controlled by the whim of this four-armed demon god.

"Your bones seem a bit harder than theirs."

Lynn's four blood-red eyes stared at Rumlow, his lips curling into a cruel arc.

Then, his five fingers slowly tightened inward.

This wasn't an instantaneous crush, but an extremely slow, inch-by-inch application of pressure.

"Creak—"

The tactical armor shattered completely, and Lynn's rough fingers embedded directly into Rumlow's flesh, locking onto his shoulder blades.

"No... don't..."

Rumlow's eyeballs were nearly bulging out of their sockets, and a desperate whine was squeezed from his throat.

"Snap!!!"

A crisp, hair-raising sound of bones breaking exploded in the deathly silent elevator hall.

"Aaaaaah—!!!"

A shrill scream echoed through the corridor.

Rumlow's shoulder blades were crushed into powder by Lynn's single hand!

The shattered bone fragments pierced through his muscles and skin, and blood instantly stained his tactical suit red.

His arms, like two limp noodles without support, hung down softly, completely ruined.

The intense pain nearly made Rumlow faint, but under the pressure of Lynn's terrifying life force field, he couldn't even pass out, forced to endure this hellish torture while fully conscious.

"Bang!"

Lynn tossed the half-dead Rumlow against a metal wall a dozen meters away as if he were discarding a bag of trash.

Rumlow slid heavily to the ground, spitting out a large mouthful of blood.

He looked in terror at the massive figure standing in a pool of blood, with only one thought remaining in his mind: invincible.

"Go back and tell Nick Fury, or tell any of your HYDRA higher-ups."

Lynn did not pursue; his voice, low like rumbling thunder, echoed in the corridor.

This is just the beginning.

Leaving a survivor to spread fear is far more valuable than killing him.

Lynn turned around and, with heavy footsteps, walked toward the central explosion-proof elevator at the end of the hall that led to the surface.

However, the moment his fingers were about to touch the elevator control panel.

"Hum—!"

The entire second basement level, no, the entire Base a thousand meters underground, suddenly let out a violent tremor.

The originally glaring red alarm lights instantly extinguished, replaced by a heart-stopping, sickly green emergency light.

[Warning: Highest-level self-destruct protocol has been initiated.]

[Lower-level nuclear reactor has entered an overload state.]

[Countdown: 120 seconds.]

The cold, synthesized voice of the AI rang out in every broadcast in the Base without warning.

"Strucker... that old fox..."

Rumlow, slumped on the ground, heard this voice, his face turning ashen.

He knew he had been treated as an expendable pawn.

Baron Strucker never intended for him to buy time; he wanted to bury him along with this monster here.

"Rumble, rumble, rumble!!!"

As the countdown began, a deafening mechanical roar came from above.

Lynn looked up.

He saw that above the central passage leading to the surface, twelve titanium-alloy-doped explosion-proof floodgates, each an astonishing two meters thick and weighing over 100,000 tons in total, had lost all hydraulic support and were crashing down like falling meteorites under the force of gravity!

"Bang!!!"

The first floodgate slammed heavily onto the passage in front of Lynn, and the entire earth seemed to experience an magnitude-8 earthquake, with the stirred-up wind and dust rushing toward him.

Then came the second, the third...

All escape routes, all exits, were sealed shut in an instant.

This was a steel tomb built specifically to bury top-secret projects.

Even if a nuclear bomb with significant yield exploded inside, it wouldn't be able to shake these 100,000-ton floodgates in the slightest.

[Countdown: 90 seconds.]

The scorching heat of nuclear radiation had already begun to steam upward through the gaps in the floor.

Rumlow closed his eyes in despair.

It was over.

However, in this steel cage where even the air was about to boil.

Lynn showed no panic whatsoever.

He stood before that two-meter-thick, 100,000-ton-class floodgate, his four scarlet eyes staring fixedly at the cold metal before him.

The Bloodtrix emblem on his chest, with his increasingly heavy breathing, erupted with unprecedented, blinding light.

"You want to bury me alive?"

Lynn slowly raised his four terrifyingly thick arms, clenching his five fingers into fists.

His finger bones rubbed against each other, emitting a thunder-like explosion.

"Then let's see whether your floodgates are harder, or my fists are!"