"Holy hell, that one-man combat output is insane. It's only been a minute since the gunfire started, and he's already smashed through Tarikha's outer line?"
"Look at that. One punch, and even that armored vehicle with extra shielding turned into scrap."
"That thing is ridiculous. It makes the movie heroes with all their special effects look ta."
"The enemy's just too weak. He's barely eting any real resistance. This is easier than war. He's just beating up children out there."
"Enough chatter. We're going live to the Pentagon in a mont. The generals want a full update on this conflict."
The lead observer coughed once and cut through the noise.
"Yes, sir."
The operators snapped upright at once, all of them suddenly looking as though they were deeply, professionally focused on their remote reconnaissance feeds.
By now, the Tarikha leader was getting more and more frantic.
The world's most advanced weapons, bought from Stark Industries, were doing nothing to that flaming skull. Nothing.
Even when he saw it shattered, torn apart, blasted into pieces, reduced to nothing, it would rise again a second later from the black fire.
The leader, who had been brimming with ambition only monts ago, was already starting to feel the urge to run.
He slipped away to a private room and began disguising himself in secret.
anwhile, inside Tarikha's command center, they had installed a decoy. A puppet wearing his face was sent out to shout that they would fight those demonic heretics to the death.
Barnes pushed into a military camp and imdiately ran into another wave of ard n.
He did not change expression.
He just killed his way forward.
"Fire!"
"Kill that monster!"
This ti, the n coming at him were Tarikha elites. Every single one of them had blood on their hands and madness in their eyes. Before deploynt, each had been injected with drugs at the leader's order, keeping them in a state of artificial frenzy.
But the sight of that humanoid nightmare tearing through their firepower turned that frenzy into panic.
One terrorist slamd the accelerator and sent a large truck barreling straight at Barnes.
Barnes did not stop.
The truck was the kind of heavy military-hauling vehicle that might have rolled out of a factory in the East.
He sprinted toward it, and just before impact, he angled his body, drove his right foot into the ground hard enough to crater it, and slamd a shoulder strike straight into the truck's front end.
In an instant, the truck's nose folded inward. The entire vehicle flipped, rolled onto its side with a thunderous crash, and slid more than thirty ters, crushing God only knew how many unlucky n under its wheels.
"Monster!"
"Strike team, engage imdiately!"
A front-line commander crouched behind sandbags and shrieked the order while stumbling backward. Around him, four huge n lifted rocket launchers and fired into the Ghost Rider's back.
Those warheads were Arican-made anti-armor rockets, the sort developed for Soviet main battle tanks.
They had excellent penetration, enough to punch through seven or eight hundred milliters of rolled homogeneous armor.
Barnes did not even turn around.
He simply stepped forward, moving several ters off his original position, and all four rockets sailed past him.
Boom! Boom!
The explosions lit the battlefield, surrounding the Ghost Rider in firelight.
Under that glow, Barnes slowly turned his head.
A heartbeat later, the four muscle-bound n had already been reached. Barnes smashed them backward, sending them flying into the air.
The commander was still waving one hand and firing his pistol when Barnes grabbed him by the throat.
The man was hurled more than a hundred ters away and slamd straight into an ammunition depot.
By the ti he hit the ground, his body was little more than ruined at.
Only his hat and the shredded remains of his clothes still suggested he had once been one of Tarikha's higher-ups.
A few soldiers still guarding the ammo depot rushed over.
They saw the commander's corpse, opened their mouths, and found themselves unable to say a single word.
Barnes was already charging in through the depot doors, engulfed in hellfire.
Boom!
Another Tarikha ammunition storehouse went up in the air.
A huge mushroom cloud surged upward, climbing high into the sky.
Flas spread outward and set more and more buildings ablaze.
For many of the terrorists nearby, Barnes did not even need to keep killing.
The shockwave alone dropped them to the ground. They clutched at their ears and scread in agony.
Barnes ignored the fire entirely and kept advancing, cutting a path of fla through the battlefield.
He stepped out of the increasingly violent inferno behind him.
The terrorists staring at that figure, standing with the firestorm at his back like so demon-god, went pale. Terror and drug-fueled frenzy mixed inside them until they looked ready to lose their minds.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
Their heavy and light machine guns opened up together, but in their panic they were firing wildly, with no real aim at all. Barnes did not even need to dodge.
He had already crossed over one of the anti-air gun emplacents.
The n inside were still firing wildly when Barnes reached them. In an instant, they all beca living torches, staggering for a few seconds before tumbling out of the gun nest.
Barnes then snatched up a rocket launcher and fired a rocket straight into a command tower.
On the tower, one officer who had not managed to escape in ti was engulfed in flas. He jumped from the more-than-ten-ter-high structure, hit the ground with a dull impact, and never moved again.
Not far away, two helicopters finally lifted off.
They were ard civilian aircraft, converted for combat and ant to deal with the Ghost Rider.
But the pilots had not been injected with drugs. Their minds were still clear. Once they saw the utterly one-sided massacre below, their faces changed, and they quickly gained altitude, clearly preparing to run.
They cleared the mountain ridge and began turning away.
Barnes's rocket launcher answered with two impossible, back-to-back shots.
The rockets scread through the sky like twin anti-air missiles and smashed into the helicopters.
Two fireballs blossod overhead, then began falling from the sky.
The intelligence observers from the major powers watched every detail, recording each movent and sending real-ti reports to their superiors.
S.H.I.E.L.D. had made no attempt to hide the Ghost Rider incident from the world, so everyone now knew where these beings ca from and what they ant.
The fall of gods. The descent of darkness. A transformation unlike anything humanity had seen in a thousand years.
Those words made the world's leaders uneasy.
And after watching Barnes in action, no one could deny the evidence in front of them. An undead body that could not be killed was about as clear a proof as anyone could ask for.
Gunfire echoed like thunder. Flas spread across the valley.
If the intelligence teams had not tracked the fight in real ti, they would never have believed that one man could produce this kind of battlefield devastation.
After all, Tony Stark had only just appeared. The heavier hitters had not even stepped into the spotlight yet.
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