"Now behold! Behold as I unmask your...beloved...hero...?" The villain's voice trailed off as he tore open said hero's crippled mech suit on live TV, only to reveal something quite...unexpected.
The order of things was a little difficult to parse, both in the moment and afterwards.
The effect was the same, two different reasons for the same outcome. But it was all but impossible to sort out which came first, failing to understand what you were seeing because it was legitimately unexpected and hard to parse, and failing to understand what you were seeing because you already had a faint idea, and that was already too much.
The inside of the suit was black, and so was the hero. Not 'African American' black, 'I certify that I am not looking at the inside of this suit on behalf of Anish Kapoor' black. All that could be seen at first was a vague sense of movement.
The villain was just starting to go through the five stages of seeing something more horrifying than you believed could exist when the movement got...faster.
No one seemed to remember the next few moments especially well. It was captured on video, but somehow no one ever found it in them to watch.
All that could really be said with any certainty was that the villain had not expected, when he opened the heroes mech, to be assaulted by thousands of chittering insects. Defending yourself is a lot harder when you're trying desperately to decide which eyeball to prioritize saving. Defending yourself against a mech is very different from defending yourself against an intelligent swarm.
No one really seemed to remember what came next at all. As far as every retelling was concerned, the villain just...ended up dead on the floor. Might even have been natural causes, who knows? Even the cameras managed to 'lose' all the footage of this part.
Natural causes, of course, don't turn living creatures into skeletons as dry as the desert over the course of a few seconds. Nor did anyone seem to want to listen particularly closely to the audio, as the cameras came back on.
The villains scream was still reverberating, just a little.
The hero got back in his mech, and that, everyone decided, was that. Yay, hero! The celebration was a little...muted...but they certain didn't want to express any displeasure with their savior, no sir!
The whole incident really cut down on the number of new supervillains, for some reason.














