The street was quiet now, save for the soft hiss of scorched asphalt cooling beneath the night air. The air smelled of burning concrete and charred metal, thick enough to sting the lungs. Smoke drifted lazily in the orange glow of what remained of the streetlights. Every other shape—every person who had been foolish or unlucky enough to stand in his way—was gone. Reduced to ash.

Except for them.

Joseph Martin—Atomic Skull—stood several yards away, the faint crackle of nuclear fire rippling in the sockets of his exposed, incandescent skull. His gaze fixed on them with an intensity that made the air itself feel heavier. Radiation bled into the space between them, prickling at their skin like a warning. They should have collapsed. They should have been nothing but another scorched outline on the ruined pavement.

But they weren’t.

He tilted his head, vertebrae in his neck clicking faintly as his eye sockets narrowed. The green-gold fire flared hotter, almost as if he were testing some invisible threshold. He didn’t speak. Not yet. Just watched them—watched the way their chest rose and fell, the hesitation in their step, the way fear etched itself into every line of their body.

One long, deliberate second passed. Then another.

Without a word, he moved on. The heavy thud of his boots against fractured ground echoed in the stillness. The burning in the air began to fade as he put distance between them. His stride was slow at first, then purposeful, as if dismissing them entirely from his attention.

It was only when they finally turned, when the instinct to flee overpowered the paralysis in their limbs, that his voice came.

Low. Distorted. A growl forged in the core of a reactor.

“Don’t go anywhere.”

The words carried like a shockwave, vibrating in the bones, impossible to mishear. Somewhere ahead, the sound of crumbling masonry followed as he continued forward, dealing with whatever business had drawn him here in the first place. The warning hung behind like radiation in the air—impossible to scrub away, impossible to ignore.

They stood in the street, heart pounding in their ears, caught between terror and the strange, inexplicable fact that they were still breathing. Every instinct screamed to run, to vanish into the shadows before he came back. But there was something in that voice—an ownership, cold and certain—that froze them more effectively than any blast could have.

Somewhere in the smoke, the green fire still burned. And whether they liked it or not, Atomic Skull had made his choice.