Crushing All Resistance, Raising the World to the Heavens

A ring-shaped shockwave spread from beneath its feet with the mushroom cloud. Wherever it passed, it ripped up the asphalt like a tablecloth yanked off a table.

Streetlamps tore free of the ground, tumbling and twisting through the air before crashing down. Parked cars flew up like toys.

Magneto and Li Xiangyang had to give everything they had to shield the hotel from a shockwave comparable to a small nuclear explosion.

Hound Two descended next, landing less than twenty meters behind and to the right of Hound One.

His body gave off no light, radiation, or trace of escaping energy. Standing there in a gray coat, he looked like an ordinary person.

His face was expressionless, his pupils a normal color. Even his breathing matched a normal person's.

But anyone who could observe the ground beneath his feet with atomic precision would have seen the asphalt changing.

He was turning its hydrocarbon molecules into a glass structure. Beneath the glass lay soil, which he was also rewriting, transforming its mixture of silicate minerals into quartz sand of 99.99 percent purity.

Hound Three stood at the rear, his body wrapped in a shield of gravitons invisible to the naked eye.

The shield was thinner than the diameter of an atom, yet dense enough to bend light slightly as it passed through.

He looked like someone standing behind a convex mirror. His proportions were subtly distorted, his shoulders appearing twice as wide and his body even more muscular.

Li Xiangyang retreated to the steps outside the Four Seasons Hotel. His dark-gray suit had been torn in several places during the fight, and a large patch over his left shoulder was charred, exposing burned skin beneath.

His black-framed glasses still perched on his nose, though one lens had a fine crack. He pushed