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The door was all heavy steel and pneumatic seals, several inches thick and built for damn near anything you could throw at it.Unfortunately, Rex was more than most.

"Knock knock, assholes." Two weeks of sleeping his ass off in a hospital gown and this was the kind of shit the GDA had him doing first day on his feet. “The King’s got some new powers to play with.”“...Did you just call yourself ‘The King?’”Rex didn’t even bother looking back, too locked in to bother with distractions.Hands up and ready, he didn’t have to go for his utility belt, popping out one of the little metal washers and ball bearings he carried with him. There was no digging through his pockets for whatever paperclips or spare change he had on him like he was hoping he had enough for bus fare.Nah. Bare palms planted themselves flat against reinforced blast doors and Rex let all his brand-new hardware do the talking. With a body that could handle it, no point not to.The door didn’t open so much as it left, those strong seals saying bye-bye as it tumbled down the oversized hallway like tin foil in the wind. No time wasted, Rex went in after it, heading through the smoke first because being the guy who blew the way in gave you privilege like that. Gold on his palms trailed light as it faded down, another bit of brightness to add to the emergency red of the screaming klaxons bleeding the whole corridor.

Yeah, that’s gonna give me a migraine. It was even louder with the door gone, the noise that had already been annoying from the outside way worse the second they made it through another section of the base. This whole sublevel had been on lockdown before they even got here, the Lizard League having a good ten minutes to fight their way through.Dumbass plan, by the way. Rex couldn’t get what they thought they’d get by setting off nukes or holding the world hostage with them. Last I heard, roaches survive nukes. Not lizards.

Then again, school wasn’t exactly an option for him, so he could have heard wrong.

"Wow." Dupli-Kate poked her head in as she made her way right behind him, the girl ducking under a little bit of door that avoided being deleted. "Subtle as always, Elvis."

“I mean…” Rae came in last, or at least her voice did, that thick Queens accent projected from somewhere way below knee-height. "Saved us time, right?"

The sound of pounding caught Rex’s attention about a quarter-mile of gray concrete down the hallway, past another bulkhead frame and stack of crates shoved sideways; two big-ass baddies slamming meaty fists into a giant door and already halfway through it.Lizard League! 

Standing in the widest part of the hallway, right in front of what had to be the silo access, were the snake-suckers themselves.“There’s a lot more of them than usual, right?” Rae popped up to waist-height for a second, fists up as she looked like the world's most combat ready third-grader. “Like it’s not just me?”“Nah…” Rex shook his head, taking in the whole League. Because Rex knew the Lizard League even from back before his Teen Team days, when it was just him and Eve. The weirdos were a cult that… 

Honestly, they made no sense.Because usually cults were about something. Rex figured snake-themed terrorism was probably a type of goal, but it didn’t make sense that they had so many people who were down to do snake shit like that.Because the Lizard League had a lot of soldiers.

Like, a lot a lot.But they rarely had more than three powered members since Rex had known them, four if you counted King Lizard but — apart from the kinda-green skin — no one was really sure what that guy had going on.Somehow, those four seemed to have more than doubled when they weren’t looking. “Pretty sure it’s not just you.” Kate swallowed something that wasn’t food. “...definitely not.”“Fools!” King Lizard whipped around, the man standing about thirty feet off from everybody else as he waved a gun around which — was pretty on-brand for the guy, yeah. “You face the new and improved Lizard League!”

New? Sure.

Improved? Rex would have to test that out.Komodo Dragon he knew; the bastard was big as hell in an ugly mustard-orange outfit, with hands like fucking hams. Iguana was green and twitchy, her nails long and deadly but somehow doing nothing to her as she scratched her own arm. 

Salamander was… wet-looking.

The other six, though? Rex couldn’t tell jack from shit.

One of them stood even taller than Komodo and wider too, a pale white guy with a jaw like a barbell plate and gray-scaled plates coming off his shoulders. A woman stood beside him, a tail longer than she was poking right out of her ass, the thing taller than she was and spiked to all hell. Something lean and green stood way too still just in front of somebody small that his eyes kept sliding off even as the guy stood on the wall, just beside two more women; a thin one in an orange-black bodysuit and another that—Jesus!

Rex blinked at the last of the League with red-scales down her face, mouth hanging open for a second. That one’s got some heavies on her. 

Barely able to pull his eyes off the woman with a cup size real low in the alphabet, Rex raised his hands and cupped both around his mouth. “You realize when we kick your ass, it’s just gonna make you look worse, right?!”

"I dare you to try, hahahaha! I did some recruiting!" King Lizard tilted his head to the side, one gloved hand holding that regular 9mm up like a trophy as his other hand pointed at each of his new Lizard Leaguers. "Say hello and goodbye to Monitor, Mamba, Basilisk, Thornback, Gila and Draconica!"

"Yeah, well…” Rex cracked his knuckles loud, emitters almost warm under his skin. Eight fingers and both thumbs crackled gold above palms just as bright, each one of them ready and raring to go. "You're about to have some staffing issues!"

Dupli-Kate split before the last word even cleared his lips; one body into four, four into twelve and then twelve into too many for Rex to even try and track. The alarms in the corridor fought to be heard over the shouts of several dozen identical Asian girls flooding the space, the whole swarm of Kates turning what should have been a hallway fight into a numbers problem.

Rae disappeared somewhere into all of that. Not exactly hard on its own, the girl made it even more impossible to get a bead on her as she shrunk smaller than his fingernail and jumped her way into the fight like a grasshopper on the juice. 

Fingernail… Unlike the usual for him, Rex paused for a second, half-forgotten words from a certain Deputy Director bouncing around in his skull — ‘Kinetic discharge, fingertips allow a… something something… should be able to…’ 

Able to what? 

Fuck it.Let’s find out! 

Both Rex’s hands went up and finger guns became finger guns as a bolt of yellow snapped right out of his fingertip. He barely even expected it, no charge-up or even a kickba— “Oh, shit!”Wood shattered to a hundred flying splinters, a crate cratered from a single bolt he didn’t get the chance to aim.“Son of a bitch!” His fingers twitched again and more gold flew free and into the fray. Iguana chose the wrong time to try to get the jump on him, the green scrapper’s eyes wide for all of a second as three of them caught her clean in the chest and folded her into a flying pile of laundry under a mess of Kate’s bodies.The rest went wild, wherever the hell they went not important.

It wasn’t even the point right now.

No coins, no washers, no nothing.Just point and shoot before force went flying. “Oh…” A grin pulled tight across Rex’s face. “I could kiss you, Cecil.”

Before he could open his mouth to laugh, the air went weird to his left; a shimmer in the air a foot off the red emergency strip against the far wall. Camo?He was already turning with the question, almost overshooting with the pivot as the air twisted again. A screech went off to his side, Rex screaming back as some wiry little guy jumped out of nowhere, kicking right off the wall and right into his face. He swung out without thinking, the explosions expert meaning to ward off the hit coming at him. 

Holy-! Instead, Rex got a grip on the guy.

By the face.

For half a second Rex just stared through his goggles, bare fingers sinking into scaly cheeks.

Then something drilled into his ribs. “Son of a-!”

Three more shots came in just as hard as the first, the little bastard’s hand going for his body like a jackhammer that hated him. “Ow! Okay, fuck you!”Out of patience, Rex slammed his hand straight down.The floor lost, plating giving up with a squeal under the Lizard Leaguer’s head.

"Yo, that's…" He flexed his hand as he jumped back up. "...nice."

The second Rex Splode found his feet, something flew straight his way again. His arm was already up, Rex’s eyes wide and mouth open — huh? An elbow came right for him and he gripped tight to that one too, hands moving quicker than he could track them almost. Rex barely had time to even take that in before something cracked hard across the side of his jaw.

A split second later, something else took the chance to double down from right under it.Rex stumbled back, hand on his face and jaw still ringing from that last uppercut. Who’s trying to get their ass kicked? It only took a half-second for his eyes to get themselves straight and he finally tracked the unlucky bastard in a snake-suit right across him, a slippery dickhead in all green moving his limbs like they were rubber. Definitely doesn’t hit like rubber, though.With a grunt, Rex flew out with a straight right and hit… nothing. “What?”

Left did too, Rex’s eyebrows going up. Okay?“Motherf-!” By the sixth, he was downright steaming as the snake-suit guy didn’t even bother to even weave normally, just leaning his whole spine out of the way like he was in the Matrix. “You think you’re fuckin’ funny?” From the dry laughs leaving the guy, he definitely did. The asshole might not have been Agent Smith but he definitely moved like it, each punch slipped fast enough to leave a blur trail behind.Fine.

Nobody ever expected Rex Splode to wrestle.It wasn’t a weird thing, given his whole thing was ‘sploding, but that was the thing you missed when you had no idea where he came from. They hadn’t taught his twelve-year old butt how to throw bombs. His once-dad had made sure he knew how to kill, hands and feet first.

The bombs got bolted on after.

And for five years after that, Rex had kept everybody at range because he’d gone from taking out normals to fighting people that flossed with barbed wire (literally, one time). 

He didn’t really need that distance anymore. “Let’s wrestle.”Rex charged forward, his own speed surprising him again as he ate up the ground in a blur almost as fast as the snake. “The f-!” That wasn’t the only surprise as the second his arms grabbed tight to the slippery ‘dude’ that was giving him so much trouble, he realized he’d been a bit too quick to judge. “You’re a girl?!”“Of course I’m a g-!” Her words went unheard and unfinished as Rex rolled with it — literally — still in motion, as a knee took all the air out of her lungs. A glancing hit to the cheek was swallowed as Rex clinched his hold around the snake-woman even tighter, right leg hooked as she gasped for breath. No more words to give, he swung her around with all the momentum he could give and launched the lizard into a concrete divider as hard as he could. 

It seemed pretty damn hard from the way the pillar gave in, dusting the corridor in a cloud of thick gray. Rex didn’t bother being nice, hand already out and up as Donald’s words sounded off again. 

Yellow sparks flared from his palm and, with a flare of the same light, a cone of force filled his vision; the blast from him hard enough to send the fast snake skidding down another couple dozen feet off once-waxed floors. Weave that, lady.

Rubber body or not, he was pretty sure she wouldn’t be back up any time soon.

"Die fast, assholes!" He knew his grin came with fresh blood, but he really didn’t mind that right now. "I got a Deluxe Supreme waiting on me!"