SmackDown: MadMike's Revenge!

Redemption Duel 1: Genie - @bloodsword

Genie

by bloodsword

He used to think that the day when the world got flipped over and everything changed would be somehow biblical, announcing itself with thunder and storms, maybe even the finger of God Himself reaching down and touching the earth or something. But he was wrong, dead wrong. That day was a day like any other.

The day after, however, was something entirely different!

Djinn slowly rolled the fat coin between his fingers before lightly tossing it into the air. As he waited for it to drop back into his hand, he looked beyond the arcing piece of silver and over the the city that sprawled away from the foot of his perch. Rather, what was left of it.

This was the Q, the walled-off part of the York Supercluster where those exposed to the weaponized Medusa retrovirus were quarantined. It was a wasteland where food and water were scarce and enemies were anything but. Djinn's eyes narrowed thoughtfully as he smoothly snatched the coin out of midair.

Exposed; that was a funny way to put it. Like it was that sci-fi horror story about the zombie apocalypse started by an accidental release of a deadly mutagenic virus into the general population, turning everybody in a matter of days. Except this virus didn't turn people into zombies. It just killed them outright by unraveling them from the inside, frickin' Ebola on steroids.

Abruptly his fingers convulsively tightened around the coin as his extra sense told him that someone was approaching from behind.

"Djinn," a hard voice grated. Brow lifting, Djinn looked over his shoulder at the speaker.

Lean and dangerous-looking in a dark trench coat and torn jeans, the speaker smirked, a strange expression on a hatchet face that looked like it seldom cracked a smile.

"Procyon." Djinn turned back to his view of the city. "I've already kicked your ass three times this week. So kindly fuck off."

"I'll keep coming until I take what's yours," Procyon replied as shimmering blades of reddish energy appeared around his clenched fists. He whipped his energy blades through a complicated pattern before coiling into a ready position.

"It's okay if you don't feel like fighting today, buddy. Just hand me your shit and we'll call it a day."

Djinn barely fought off the urge to sigh. You can give a moron super-powers, but apparently you can't make them smarter. Yanking up the hood on his jacket, he made to swing off the edge of the roof he had made his perch and come to his feet. Only he disappeared instead.

The eggheads called it 'matter-to-energy-to-matter translocation', or M.E.M.T.. Djinn just called it 'going empty'. His ability to go empty was a side-effect of having every cell in his body bonded to high-powered nanites.

It's pretty natural to assume it was Medusa that changed the world, killing everybody exposed to it. But that wasn't it. It was the damn cure that changed the world. At least, the part of the York Supercluster that was in range of the 'accidental' release of Medusa and was turned into the Q.

As Medusa rolled silently through neighborhood after neighborhood in the early hours of the morning, Earth's emergency response system kicked into high gear and triggered a nanite cloud as a counter to the infectious, airborne agent that was killing its way through the streets. The nanites were supposed to halt the virus, neutering it while knitting the infected's DNA back together again.