Mod Superhero

Chapter 4.44 - Paragon 2 / Detonation

Paragon hadn't moved from his vigil at the bottom of the Atlantic ocean. He floated in the darkness, waiting for the inevitable.

Magnus Venture had reached out to him with a deep water drone. Paragon had no idea how the drone had found him or why he decided to hear Venture's plea. The Deep Ones were preparing to use psychic bombs against humanity...

Paragon listened. Then he told Venture that nothing had changed.

Paragon refused all psychic communications, but the Menagerie had eventually pushed through. The cacophony of voices said one word:

Soon.

An enclave was a few miles away in the inky black. Paragon could feel their latent psychic energy.

The Deep Ones knew that something was about to happen. They saw the forces amassing on the surface, but they couldn't comprehend what it meant. Couldn't comprehend the level of violence that the surface could unleash.

Paragon knew about their nuclear weapons, but he'd hoped the Deep Ones were too far down to strike. He'd hoped that he was humanity's only option... and that his refusal to act would mean something. Paragon had refused to believe otherwise—

A shockwave passed through the water.

Paragon shivered. Not from the pain, but from what it meant.

Somewhere in the distance, millions of lives had been snuffed out. Countless more aquatic creatures were killed from the overpressure.

Humanity often spoke of incalculable things... It was said there were eight billion people on Earth. Every day millions more were born, and millions died. Imagine the most populated city on the planet rising and falling each day. Yet if their lives and deaths were grains of sand, they would scarcely fill an urn.

To say nothing of the destruction they caused to their own planet—whole continents paved over and oceans polluted.

Humans, and even Paragon's own brethren, could only comprehend tragedies on a scale relative to their own. Too small or too distant, and no one cared. Paragon told himself that the opposite presented similar problems, except that humans simply lacked the ability to process such a loss. But in the pessimism of the moment, Paragon feared he gave them too much credit.

Too large a tragedy, and they didn't care either.

They had split the atom, moving particles so small they could scarcely be said to exist to unleash power that they could not comprehend. Death was writ large, scrawled across their history and their world in letters that blotted out every other accomplishment.

In the aftermath of the nuclear explosions, a terrible silence followed. It might've been moments, but to Paragon the weight of it was more crushing, more absolute, than miles of water pressing down on him.

Then came the screams. A wave of psychic energy poured over him. The screams of the Deep Ones rose in Paragon's mind, boiling until they reached a terrible crescendo.

They weren't screams of pain. They were screams of loss. Screams of terror. Like children ripped away from their parents. Agony and grief that trampled the barrier of language and understanding and left no doubt in Paragon's mind of what to do next.

Paragon had refused to be a weapon of genocide. But as he listened to the mournful wails of a dying race, he was moved.

He could be a tool of mercy.

He could do that much.

When Paragon flew, he had to be careful how high and how fast he flew. A sonic boom over a city would be disastrous. Down here, in the darkness, he didn't need to be as careful.

He rocketed toward the wreckage of the nearest enclave, tracing the source of the screams. He moved just as fast underwater as he did through the air—his innate power unhindered by either medium.

A pressure trail followed in his wake.

In the darkness, the wreckage of the enclave sputtered with light. What had once been a towering city was reduced to rubble. Hundreds of spires had shimmered with deep blues like the ice from ancient glaciers. Now, the city lay in rubble. The ancient spires had been pulverized and lay in a heap like the ashes left after a bonfire, the bodies of the Deep Ones now indiscernible from the silt.

Paragon looped around the wreckage in a blink—outpacing the shockwave trailing behind him. Just passing near the survivors would be enough; the shockwave would do the rest. He sought out the voices and silenced them. His tears mixed with salt water, vanishing the instant they were created.

When the once beautiful enclave was utterly silent, Paragon turned his attention to the voices in the distance. Then he raced to the next impact site to put a dying civilization out of its misery.

~ ~

At roughly noon, Eastern Standard Time, thirty specialized torpedos carrying multiple nuclear warheads were launched by the surface world's joint coalition.

It took roughly four hours for the torpedos to reach their targets on the ocean floor. Their speeds were synced so that the torpedoes would reach their targets simultaneously.

The coordinated nuclear strike occurred at precisely 4:32 PM Eastern Standard Time.

TINA was monitoring the events in real time through various military, government, and DSA communications, as well as satellite and sensor data provided by the Binary Brotherhood. The nuclear explosions were so far underwater that there was no visible indicator on the surface that they'd gone off.

Mod knew all this because TINA knew this.

She sent all the information to Emmett in text form. It only took a moment to get used to the readouts in the bottom of his vision.

He relayed the incoming detonation to Arsenal, Serenity, and the others so that they would be ready when the aftermath happened.

The only other indication that the nuclear strikes had happened was immediately after, when drones opened fire on their targets. Belport had been quiet aside from the idle sound of waves and occasional rumble of military hardware. Gunfire and explosions erupted across the city as drones laid waste to the enemy's crystalline structures.

Mod watched in wide-mouthed awe as the horizon was blotted out by explosions. It felt like watching the end of a monstrous symphony when all the instruments were crashing in unison.

Until that moment, he hadn't really believed that there was enough firepower in the city to pull off a strike like that. But as he scanned the sky, Mod realized that the drones were almost all familiar ones. There were a few military drones sprinkled in, but TINA and Dr. Venture were carrying Belport almost entirely by themselves.

The Deep Ones had tried so hard to hide what they were doing. Mod knew that the Deep Ones had been playing the long game. They'd thrown millions, or maybe even billions, of their own creatures at humanity's forces, all in the strategy of finding out their weaknesses.

Now, it looked like the Deep Ones never really had a chance.

TINA's voice cut through the maelstrom. "I'm detecting activity..."

Mod asked, "What are they doing?"

"The forces near the surface are coalescing. The enclaves are destroyed and their forces are cut off. The swarms near shore are already turning. They're coming for you."

~ ~ ~