“You’ve won - it’s over. You stopped the invasion and closed the portal. But it’s come at a price - Argent, VEGA. This entire operation. You see, I’ve watched you work; come to understand your motivation. You think the only way is to kill them all - leave nothing behind - and you may be right; but we can’t just shut it all down. Without Argent Energy it will be worse. I don’t expect you to agree.”
Hayden held out his hand, as though gesturing to the room itself, and the Crucible in the Slayer’s hand trembled. Trembled, but stayed put. An annoyed grunt emitted from Hayden’s vocoder, as he brought his hand closer, keeping it open. The Slayer tightened his grip on the artifact, at the same time already working out how to break free from his suspension in energy.
“The Crucible. Give it to me. Now.” Hayden’s tone was final, clear that bad things would happen if he didn’t get his way, but the Slayer was having none of it. It seemed that Hayden had not taken the time to listen to the Slayer’s Testaments, and therefore did not know of a key statement in Testament 4.
For he alone could draw strength from his fallen foes, and ever his power grew, swift and unrelenting.
With an explosion of energy, the Slayer broke free of his stasis-like prison and beat the three-fingered hand away with a mighty backhand. Hayden staggered back in horror, for the first time in nearly a century, genuinely afraid, especially as he saw his fingers had been slightly bent, and were no longer responding to his thoughts as well.
A meter-long blade of crimson Argent emerged from the Crucible, and Hayden barely had time to glance back at the Slayer as he plunged it into the cyborg’s chest, rupturing the Argent Accumulator in his chest. As this, too, was absorbed by the Crucible, and by extension, the Slayer, Hayden looked up in horror at the opaque mask glaring down at him.
Already almost every system in his body was failing, and even the backup mini-accumulators were struggling to keep the most basic of functions operational. Those too went offline as the Slayer twisted the blade in his chest, carving a neat, molten hole in the former man. Slowly, he leaned forward, and even as his optic unit was failing, now it was impossible to not notice the Slayer’s eyes, bright blue, wide open, but blazing with rage.
“͓̓ͣͫ͐̌͢N͚̰̭̤̠̭͋ͨͩ̏͝o̲͌̀͒̂̒͌̈́.͒͐̑͏͓̦͔͖ͅ ̪͚̪̱̖̘͗͑́̎͞Į͚̞̺̺̃ ̶͈̿ͤ̉ͮ̋ͭḍ̙̠̊̏̈́ͮ̀ő̄ ͈̦̱̼̳̿̽͌̈́̏nͥͩͭ̒̆̆ͫo͙͉̟̟͓̲̹ṱ̣͈̆́̇ͬ͝ ̤̪̬̞̩ͤͪa̩͕͛͘g̬͓̭̍̑ṛ̻̮͉͙̣̂͐͐͛ͯ̌e̡̤̦͙͇̩̱̭̍ͪ͑́ͣͧ̍e̩.̉̑̍ͧ҉̝̺͇͍͔̳”͓̼̦̲̫̥͝
With these words, the Slayer yanked the sword out of Hayden’s chest, which would probably have done more damage were he a man and able to bleed out, but now there was very little left of the cyborg’s torso. Hayden barely had time to come up with a last thought that wasn’t a battle in his mind between eldritch-like rage at betrayal, and skin-whitening fear of the dragon whose tail he had stomped on.
The sword stabbed down into Hayden’s head, skewering and broiling the little brain matter it contained, all that was, is, and would be Samuel Hayden from the day he laid down on the operating table. Now this too was gone, and what was left of the optic faded to dark, a rather anticlimactic death compared to the dimension-ripping explosion that was VEGA’s first body.
Taking a few minutes to just breathe, and stare down at the wrecked form of the templar-like CEO before him, the Slayer finally removed the blade from Hayden’s head, deactivating it with a flick of his wrist. In his other hand, he brought out the emergency backup chip of VEGA, and started thinking of a way to solve his newest problem: finding a body that would support the colossal AI.
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