271 Paleman Unleashed [Paleman/Candyqueen]
271 Paleman Unleashed [Paleman/Candyqueen]
[POV: Paleman]
The city had already fallen silent by the time I arrived.
Not the silence of peace, but the kind that followed screams. Buildings were reduced to jagged skeletons, streets split open, and the air thick with ash and heat. Gray matter shifted around me in slow, deliberate motion, rising and falling like a tide of living flesh.
They came anyway.
Heroes and villains alike.
Desperate, stubborn, predictable.
A man in battered armor rushed first, his kinetic aura flaring as he tried to close the distance.
“I held the line once,” he growled. “I can do it again—”
“Meaningless prattle,” I scoffed as a tendril pierced through his chest before he finished speaking. “You should focus on the enemy before you.”
Another cape followed immediately after, her body flickering with light as she attempted to blind me.
“This world won’t fall to monsters like you!”
The gray matter surged upward and swallowed her whole. Her scream cut short as she disappeared into the mass.
More voices overlapped as they charged together.
“Fall back! He’s not human!”
“Keep attacking! Don’t give him space!”
“For the Accord!”
They died all the same.
My body moved without resistance, tendrils lashing out in every direction. Limbs were severed, torsos crushed, minds erased in an instant. No amount of coordination or strategy altered the outcome.
They were simply too slow and too limited.
I had lived through thousands of iterations of conflict across countless worlds. Every movement they made had already been seen, refined, and surpassed. Their powers, while impressive within the scope of this world, lacked the depth needed to threaten me.
I had been many things.
A father comforting a child.
A mother mourning loss.
A son chasing approval.
A teacher shaping minds.
A neighbor sharing quiet moments.
A student learning the structure of reality itself.
Each life added to the whole and each memory layered into my being. Identity, in the end, became fluid. The battle before me was nothing new. Only the faces changed.
This world, however, was… interesting.
The SRC’s ability to stabilize timelines across parallel worlds had made existence repetitive for me. Patterns emerged, cycles repeated, outcomes converged. Yet this world, offset by a century in its development, offered a different flavor.
A different texture.
Playing the role of a member of the Ten had been particularly enjoyable.
Light had been… entertaining.
I allowed myself to act the fool around him, to play a role that fit his expectations. In time, something resembling genuine companionship formed. It was an odd sensation. After all, I was the last of my kind and the last of my friends.
In a sense, I had become my own friend.
A group of capes descended from above, interrupting the thought.
Veterans.
I recognized the way they moved. They were disciplined, measured, and experienced. Probably survivors of the previous Great War who had come out of seclusion for this one final conflict. They were not a stranger to me, since they were a subject of interest for the previous Light who had become obsessed raising his ratings.
A woman cloaked in compressed gravity fields struck first, attempting to pin me in place.
A man wielding twin blades coated in spatial distortion followed, slicing through the air with precision.
A third, an older man with layered shielding constructs, advanced carefully while issuing commands.
“Focus on containment,” he ordered. “Don’t engage directly!”
They worked well together, better than most.
However, it didn’t matter.
The gray matter surged outward in a wave.
The gravity user was crushed instantly as her own field collapsed inward under the pressure. The swordsman managed a single clean strike, carving a shallow line through my form before a tendril wrapped around his neck and tore him apart.
The leader raised multiple shields in rapid succession.
For a moment, he held.
Then the mass overwhelmed him.
Layer by layer, his defenses shattered until he was consumed completely.
The city was in utter ruins. The more deaths I caused, the more souls that would be devoured by my lord. I did not truly understand the concept of souls, as I could not perceive them in any meaningful way. My master had shaped me without one for the sake of the great work, and for the most part, it did not bother me.
Still, there were moments where I found myself wondering what it would feel like to possess something like that.
Perhaps, that absence was the reason I developed such sadistic tendencies. Pain, fear, and desperation? These were reactions I could observe even if I could not fully comprehend their origin. So I inflicted them freely, not out of necessity, but out of curiosity, chasing something I could never quite grasp.
“Monster! Look at me!”
An elderly woman stood at the center of the ruined street, flames dancing around her frail form. I almost overlooked her, because I thought she had been dead moments ago. However, it seemed she just had a secondary pull and gained a healing factor. Her eyes burned with a fierce intensity that refused to fade despite the devastation around her.
Her fire was strong.
It was stronger than most I had seen in this world. She raised her hand and unleashed a torrent of flames that engulfed my entire body. The heat intensified rapidly, climbing to levels that would have reduced most matter to ash.
I stepped forward through it.
The flames parted around me as the gray matter absorbed and dispersed the energy.
“Foolish woman, you should’ve resorted to ambush or escape.”
I extended a tendril and wrapped it around her arm, lifting her slightly off the ground. She struggled, fire erupting wildly in every direction as she tried to burn through the restraint. I tightened my grip.
Her flames flared brighter in response.
I watched her closely, measured the output and analyzed the structure.
“It’s too lukewarm,” I said calmly.
I had endured far worse.
A Rated-25 pyrokinetic once burned with the intensity of a small sun. Compared to that, this was… lacking. I adjusted the pressure slightly, not enough to kill her immediately. She screamed as the tendrils constricted, her flames flickering erratically.
Pain produced reactions.
Reactions were… interesting.
A humanoid drone approached from behind, its movements precise and efficient. One of Master Sequence’s constructs.
It stopped a short distance away.
“Report,” I said without turning.
The drone’s voice carried Master Sequence’s tone.
“Conquest has been contained,” it reported. “War is currently encountering resistance.”
I paused briefly.
That was very disappointing.
…
..
.
[POV: Candyqueen Whimsy]
I always found it amusing how people insisted on reducing me to something simple.
Candyqueen Whimsy.
A childish name for something they once called a monster.
Before all of that, I had been something else entirely. A biokinetic who pushed her power to its limit and beyond, reaching what few ever achieved: evolution. Unlike the unstable chaos of a Power Mutate or the forced fusion of hybrid classes, evolution was something cleaner, something inevitable. A transformation of the self, where the power shed its old skin and became something new.
My biokinesis became amaikinesis.
By the time the SRC locked me away in Lockworld, I had already reached Amaikinesis-17. In other words, candy or sugar manipulation. After everything I endured there, after the endless cycle of fights and survival, I came out stronger.
Amaikinesis-20.
The battlefield before me was proof enough.
Every member of Team Delta had already perished. Their bodies were scattered across the ruined landscape, broken and still, leaving only me standing against War.
He knelt before me, barely holding his shape together.
Sugar pulsed through his system, something I had carefully injected into him earlier. It spread like a disease, devouring him from the inside with a grotesque mimicry of diabetes. Thick, sticky gum bound his limbs, anchoring him in place as he struggled to regenerate properly.
I laughed, even as my body protested.
Clumps of my cotton candy hair had burned away, leaving uneven strands drifting around my face. My skin was marked with deep lacerations, and I could taste iron as I coughed up blood.
“Is that all you can do?” I mocked, tilting my head slightly. “For someone called War, you’re incredibly underwhelming.”
I had fought Power Mutates before.
Not many, but enough.
Both in Lockworld and beyond, I had encountered those broken beings who defied reason with their strength. They were overwhelming, unpredictable, and often unstoppable in direct confrontation.
But they all shared the same flaw.
Instability.
War, a regenerator, was the perfect opponent for me.
“You bitch!” he snarled, forcing his body back into a more stable form. “I will kill you!”
He swung his arm violently.
Blood erupted from his limb, superheated and pressurized into a stream of deadly projectiles. The droplets stretched into thin, razor-sharp strings, capable of slicing through most defenses with ease.
It would have been impressive, if it worked.
The moment the blood left his body, it changed.
Sugar crystallized within it.
I seized control instantly.
The projectiles froze mid-flight before reversing direction and launching back toward him with even greater force.
“Ha ha ha ha ha~! What a loser!” I laughed, clapping my hands together in delight.
The attack tore into him, shredding his already unstable form.
I was only here because of a debt I owed Eclipse.
That was the only reason I agreed to join this operation. I refused to drag my people into something this dangerous when I already knew how it would end for most of us.
Still, I couldn’t deny it.
This was fun.
There was a certain thrill in crushing the weak, but that was fleeting. The real joy came from stripping the strong of their advantages and watching them crumble.
That was where the true entertainment lay.
I raised my hand and dragged my nail across my wrist.
The cut opened cleanly.
Instead of normal blood, a thick red jam flowed out, glossy and vibrant as it dripped from my arm. The liquid twisted and reshaped itself midair, forming small, colorful figures of about two feet in height.
Gummy bears.
“Eat him,” I ordered sweetly.
“You insane bitch!” War shouted as he forced his body to move, abandoning stability in favor of raw speed.
He ran, destroying the gum binding him.
It only lasted for a moment as his legs abruptly turned blue. The sugar inside him crystallized further, locking his regeneration in place. His limbs twisted unnaturally before tearing off completely, leaving him to collapse forward in a broken heap.
“You were powerless the moment I got my blood into your system,” I said with a grin.
More gummy bears formed from the flowing jam, dozens of them dropping to the ground before sprinting toward him with eager energy.
They climbed over his body.
Then they began to eat.
War screamed as pieces of him were torn away faster than he could regenerate, his unstable biology failing to keep up with the internal sabotage.
I laughed.
And laughed.
“I win!” I declared brightly, watching the last of him disappear beneath a writhing mass of candy creatures. “This is what you get for fighting me! Ha ha ha ha ha~!”
War’s voice broke apart into something pitiful behind me.
“You—fuck—please—stop—!” he cried, his voice cracking as wet, pathetic sounds followed, his body failing him piece by piece.
I didn’t even look back.
My instincts suddenly screamed, my sugar-fed brain warning me of an impending danger to my life. I leaped to the side just as a massive gray tendril smashed into the ground where I had been standing. The impact shattered debris and sent a shockwave through the ruined street.
Steam burst from my skin as I pushed my power harder, burning through sugar reserves to temporarily boost my output. The high hit immediately, my thoughts speeding up, and my senses sharpening to an almost uncomfortable degree.
Then I saw him.
Paleman.
He stood amidst the destruction, his gray matter writhing around him as my gummy bears were crushed and dissolved without resistance. The little things didn’t even slow him down.
I clicked my tongue.
My earpiece was long broken from my team’s earlier confrontation of War.
It was just me, right now.
“How are you even here?” I muttered under my breath. “Weren’t you supposed to be somewhere else?”
Paleman tilted his head slightly, his grotesque smile stretching just a little wider.
“You are quite fascinating,” he said calmly. “But unfortunately, you will have to die now.”
I didn’t wait.
I moved.
Debris became my cover as I darted between shattered structures and collapsed walls. His tendrils followed instantly, lashing out with terrifying speed and precision. They weren’t just fast. They were controlled, refined, almost elegant in their brutality.
Speedster-level, easily.
So much for an easy cleanup. A shadow flickered beside me. Paleman phased through the wall at my flank, his form emerging seamlessly as his tendrils struck toward me.
I reacted instantly.
The jam-like blood still dripping from my wrist splattered across his body. At my command, it heated rapidly, caramelizing in an instant and hardening into a sticky, binding mass that attempted to trap him in place.
It worked for a moment and that was enough.
I wasn’t stupid enough to think I could win a two-on-one fight, especially not against something like him. War was already done. Even if he somehow survived, the damage I’d inflicted would keep him out of the fight.
Super-powered diabetes.
I almost laughed at the thought.
Given his regenerative ability, it was probably twice as painful for him. Every attempt to heal only made the condition worse. I launched myself upward, expending more sugar as my body surged with enhanced strength. My amaikinesis fueled every movement, pushing my physical limits far beyond normal.
It wouldn’t last long.
I had to make it count.
For a brief moment, I thought I had created distance.
Then he was there.
Paleman appeared directly in front of me midair.
Gray wings unfurled behind him, pale and unnatural, fluttering gently despite the chaos around us. His smile twisted into something far more grotesque as his eyes locked onto mine.
“DoN’T bE imPatient!” he said, his voice shifting unnaturally as if layered over itself. “Let’s pLAy MoRe.”