Quoted By:
<span class="mu-r">“My beef isn’t with you, Doom. I just want to make sure that Arcade gets what’s coming to him. He’s not going to have a bargaining chip for much longer, so you won’t have a reason to stay here.”</span>
You declared.
<span class="mu-b">“Trust us. He’s not worth all this trouble.”</span>
Abe agreed.
Doom narrowed his eyes slightly as he looked between you, Abe and Arcade.
<span class="mu-g">“I’m well aware. However, I cannot allow a man who is capable of creating armies out of thin air to reside here, where his talents can be used against me. So, he is either leaving with me, or he isn’t leaving at all.”</span>
Arcade’s eyes went wide, and all the color drained from his face in an instant. It was obvious that he hadn’t been let in on that little secret.
<span class="mu-r">“W-wait! You promised me citizenship in Latveria if I could deliver the prototype to you!”</span>
Doom waved a hand, and a second later, Arcade was floating helplessly in the air.
<span class="mu-g">“And you have yet to fulfill your end of the bargain. If you cannot provide me with the machine, then I will have you build it from scratch at a location of my choosing.”</span>
Arcade looked like he wanted to protest, but whatever he was about to say was interrupted by the arrival of the Punisher recruits that you tangled with earlier.
The star-spangled bird-man crashed through a window on your left and flew straight towards Arcade, while the psychic came up behind you, holding a mass of crushed Doombots in their invisible grip.
You and Abe stepped aside, allowing the psychic to lob the dense ball of metal at Doom. In response, the ruler of Latveria held up a hand, and in an instant, all the momentum had been ripped from the projectile, bringing it to a sudden halt directly in front of him.
He then raised another hand in the direction of the bird-man, and without looking he clenched his gauntleted fist, and the winged vigilante’s charge was halted in mid-air. Doom’s gaze was cold and dismissive when he turned to regard the Punisher wannabe. The psychic was visibly straining to regain control of the metal ball, but Doom was passively overpowering them, seemingly without paying much attention to them at all.
The bird-man struggled uselessly in Doom’s grasp, straining his finger in hopes that it would move the single inch required to pull back the trigger on his custom submachine gun to unload his entire clip into Arcade’s chest. It never happened, though.
<span class="mu-g">“Pathetic.”</span>
Doom uttered. And with a flick of his wrist, the Punisher recruit’s body flew up and smashed into the ceiling. A shower of debris rained down on him as his body slammed into the floor with a meaty <span class="mu-i">thud</span>, creating a crater in the ground that greatly resembled his shape. Up and down, up and down.
(Cont.)
