Marvel: My Life Is A TV SHOW!-Chapter 123: The Crimson Reflection

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Chapter 123: The Crimson Reflection

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"You're... learning from me? Fight Me!!" Shishido snarled, his composure finally shattering into naked fury.

"Observing," Adam corrected, his eyes still closed, a serene smile on his lips. "Understanding. You're a fascinating specimen, Tomi, almost going gay for u. Such controlled violence. Such artistry. I want to remember this."

The Gorgon attacked with renewed savagery, his sword a storm of death. Adam met him blow for blow, his blood-katana matching every strike, every feint, every killing stroke.

The soldiers were all dead now, their bodies strewn across the laboratory in grotesque tableaus.

Only the two of them remained, dancing their lethal dance in a chamber of corpses.

But Shishido was wounded. A dozen small cuts marked his suit, his skin; none fatal, each one a testament to Adam's brutality.

He was being studied, and the knowledge burned worse than any blade.

[He's doing the thing again!]

[Damn, he's a master level ragebaiter.]

[This is such a grotesque show, wtf!]

[Damn, was so immersed I forgot my kids were by my side, give me a min...]

[...] [???]

[This show is ruining parenting.] [Don't excuse bad parenting, my man.]

Minutes passed. The poison mist continued to disperse, though neither combatant seemed affected; Shishido's assassination training rendered him immune to most poisons.

Adam's vampiric nature also renders him immune to most toxins. They fought through the laboratory, through adjacent rooms, through corridors.

It was genuinely frustrating to fight Adam, for the Gorgon felt like he could read his mind, and Adam could indeed read him like a book.

All the more frustrating was Adam's fighting style, which was slowly but surely perfectly mirroring his, as if he were fighting himself.

Such a form of battle was so exhausting that Shishido's form was crumbling, his attacks weaker by the second, so Adam leaped back so as to give Shishido time to breathe.

Adam stood amid the carnage, dripping with the blood of a hundred enemies; his enemies' blood, not his own.

His eyes were closed as he took a deep breath, musing on what his information vision allowed him to see, all Shishido's forms and styles, including them in his repertoire.

"Lovely," Adam whispered, licking his blood-stained lips, savouring the taste before spitting it out, "Yup, some dishes are definitely better than others. I miss my lovely girls already."

Shishido stood across from him, sword lowered, chest heaving. Wounds covered his body; not deep enough to kill, but enough to remind him that he had been toyed with.

His dark glasses had been shattered at some point, revealing eyes that burned with cold, crystalline fury.

He pointed his sword at Adam. "I will make it my mission," He swore, his voice a ragged whisper of pure hatred, "To end you. If not in this life, then in the next. This I swear by all I believe."

Adam's response was a wild, gleeful grin; the grin of a man who had just received the best possible news.

[I don't think he will have a next life!]

[Adam's reaction: BEST DAY EVER!]

[True true, I have a feeling Adam will visit death and mess around... Just a little.]

[Death into the harem, how much u bet?]

[That sounds great! That means the Yandere coalition grows! And death will end up killing them all and win the race!! Yahooo!]

[Fuck, the Yandere psycho's been summoned.]

[Dude, it won't be a Yandere mass murder! Stop Saying THAT!!]

From the audience's point of view, the camera lingered on Adam's face, that wolfish grin stretching wider as the Gorgon's vow of eternal vengeance hung in the air like incense.

Crimson eyes; one cybernetic, one natural but burning with the same hellish light; gleamed with amusement.

The camera swooped closer, its lens focusing, zooming in.

Closer. Closer still.

The right eye filled the frame, a landscape of red and black, and in its depths, something shifted.

A reflection that wasn't a reflection. A scene playing out on the curved surface of a retina that saw past, present, and future as one continuous now.

The reflection was strange.

The laboratory was a charnel house.

Bodies lay in pieces; decapitated, dismembered, sliced into grotesque approximations of anatomical study.

Limbs formed abstract patterns on the blood-slicked floor. Torsos stacked like cordwood.

Heads arranged in a rough semicircle, their glassy eyes staring at nothing.

In the center, a fountain of blood still flowed from, a painted picture of the previous massacre, everything in coats of fresh crimson.

Adam Cypher sat on the largest pile of corpses, legs crossed, looking for all the world like a meditating monk in a temple of viscera.

In his left hand, he held a head by its long, dark hair; the head of Tomi Shishido, the Gorgon.

The face was frozen in an expression of eternal shock, the eyes still open, still beautiful in a horrific way, the mouth slightly parted as if caught mid-curse.

The reflection was no reflection, but Adam's vision of the future, what he believed would happen.

He wasn't wrong. The vision, it all came to be.

Before Adam, suspended by chains of solidified blood, two things hung.

The first was a sword; an ancient blade of folded steel, its edge still sharp despite the decades, its hilt wrapped in aged ray skin.

The Godkiller. A grandiose name for a perfectly ordinary weapon, masterfully crafted but possessing no supernatural power.

It was a killer's tool, nothing more, nothing less. Shishido had wielded it for decades, and now it hung like a trophy, waiting for a new hand.

The second was a man.

He was middle-aged, with wild gray hair and eyes that burned with the unmistakable light of fanaticism.

His face was a roadmap of scars; some old, some fresh; and his body was a patchwork of crude cybernetic experiments that had clearly failed to achieve their intended purpose.

Twisted metal limbs hung at odd angles. Wires protruded from his neck. One eye was organic, the other a malfunctioning camera lens that flickered erratically.

Harlan Ryker. Cyberneticist. Mad scientist. True believer.

And he was laughing.

"You don't understand!" He cackled, his voice a wet rasp through damaged vocal cords.

"You can't understand! Hydra is eternal! Hydra is the future! Cut off one head, two more shall take its place!"

"You think this... this butchery... matters? You're a temporary inconvenience! A fleck of blood on the windshield of progress!"

He swung gently in his blood-chains, his mad eyes fixed on Adam with something like adoration.

"Join us! You're perfect for us! This..." He gestured with a twitching, malfunctioning arm at the carnage around them.

"...This is art. This is vision. You could lead armies. You could reshape the world in Hydra's image! Don't you see? There's no escaping us."

"We're in the walls. We're in the governments. We're in the dreams of men. You kill a thousand of us, and ten thousand more rise from the graves you dig!"

[Adam sitting on a throne of corpses like it's FURNITURE.]

[Damn, Harlan Ryker who? Never heard of him but god is he TERRIFYING. That laugh. Those eyes. Goddamn fanatic.]

[Cinema!! The cinematography there was immaculate.]

[Tf!? That was beautiful, one of the best shots I've ever seen!]

[The switch was perfect, we have a second Christopher Nolan in here!!]

[True true! The show director is literally cinema! Mind showing yourself so we can ride you?]

[Oh, yeah yeah! The show director is the second coming of Jesus Christ, now only if we knew who he is so we can worship him!]

[All hail the show director!] [+1] [+1] [+1] [+1]

[Tf is this level of glaze!? Wasnm't even impressive ngl.]

[Yikes, there is always gotta be that autistic retarded kid on the internet who can not fucking read the room.]

[Aghh, some people just cannot smell the vision, single brain cell mothafuckas.]

[Idiota! Have u not seen that we were baiting for a response!?]

[U know he's a basement dweller too cause he unironically wrote the word glaze.]

[Guys, sorry, that's my fault, I glaze his mom so much while he watches that I think I infected him, my apologies.]

[It's alright, man, continue doing God's work.] [+1] [+1] [+1]

[...] [...] [...] [...] [Chill out, guys, he's already dead.]

Adam wasn't listening to Harlan.

He was elsewhere; his body present, his mind swimming through oceans of data.

His technopathy was a flood, a tsunami of information pouring through the connection established by his mechanical spiders.

They had infiltrated every system in this facility, bypassed every firewall, and injected Adam's scripts and viruses to grant him access.

But Hydra, paranoid to the core, had countermeasures.

Deep in the facility's core servers, a digital ghost had stirred the moment Adam breached the outer defenses.

Arnim Zola. The man who had transcended flesh. A Nazi scientist who had served the Red Skull himself, Zola had perfected the art of consciousness transfer decades ago.

When his original body failed, he had uploaded his mind into a mainframe; then into a robotic body, a walking tank of tape drives and monitors displaying his leering face.

He was everywhere and nowhere, a digital cockroach infesting Hydra's global network.

And he had tried to delete everything.

Automated purge protocols activated the moment Adam's intrusion was detected.

Files vanished in cascading waves. Databases wiped themselves clean. Encryption keys self-destructed.

By the time Adam's technopathy fought through, a decent percentage of the facility's data was already gone; burned to digital ash by Zola's failsafes.

But Adam was faster.

His technopathy is the natural nemesis of such failsafes, a predator that chased the fleeing data through the network, catching it before it could escape into oblivion.

He preserved perhaps seventy percent of what had been here; and what remained was a jackpot.