togophonebook Chapter 85 Why Fight?
Chapter 85 Why Fight?
Chapter 85 Why Fight?
"They...were protected."
Captain Atom, whose expression had been tense the whole time, finally frowned. He knew this Kryptonian's gaze could see through every corner of the world, but he hadn't expected the other party to use that to start the conversation:
"They'll stay in the safe house until we defeat you. Don't try to use them to blackmail me!"
"Don't fool yourself, you know I'm not the one using them to blackmail you!"
When Joey saw the red solar radiation emitted by Captain Atom, he felt that he couldn't let this ordinary soldier just perish in internal strife.
"Look at your abilities. You're practically born to fight those Kryptonians. Why not die on the battlefield against them instead of dying here?"
"Stop wasting your time."
At this moment, Captain Atom's heart was filled with only two words: loyalty.
"I don't want you to understand—I don't need to be coerced to serve my country!"
Joey dodged the red beam shot towards him, then launched Captain Atom, who had no time to react, out of the atmosphere with a flying uppercut:
"That's fucking stupid!"
The ridiculous things that some anthropomorphic creatures in this world have done are beyond Joey's comprehension.
Captain Atom's actions, while outrageous enough, are understandable given his ego.
These soldiers, who don't know their own age, are from the last batch of respectable white men in North America forty or fifty years ago. Now that they have a weakness that is being exploited by others, it's not surprising that they would fight to the death after receiving orders.
Others act neither out of self-interest nor out of ideology, but as if they are simply going against themselves.
There's a strange mindset here: "I can't do anything good, but I also can't let you do anything good." This peculiar way of thinking leads to a life motto of harming others without benefiting oneself.
Even the AI in the strategy games I played before, which focused on tripping up the player, never acted this stupid.
Joey had been pondering this since Captain Atom came to his door, and he had used enough brainpower to find a series solution to the Three-Body Problem, but he still couldn't figure out why the group in the pentagonal building and the white house were so determined to make things difficult for him.
Never mind, it doesn't matter anymore.
Besides making a long list like that red Santa Claus, he even picked out the address of the Gulag Hotel.
They placed it outside Anchorage, Alaska, hoping that the meters-thick permafrost and the cold winds blowing from the Arctic Ocean would calm these idiots down a bit.
Captain Atom's head was throbbing in the distance. He remained in outer space for several dozen seconds, but still did not receive the pursuit from Superman.
He could only grit his teeth and watch as he flew back to Earth.
Captain Atom's speed within the atmosphere is much slower than that of the Kryptonians, which is one of the main reasons why the General Staff insisted on placing the battlefield in outer space, but clearly the enemy was not taking the bait.
It took so long just to fly back to Earth that by the time he arrived at the original location, he was no longer surrounded by more than just Superman.
Wonder Woman and the orange-skinned alien woman were surrounding Superman, their gazes filled with no kindness whatsoever.
Especially Wonder Woman, whose expression was grim; her gaze at this moment was as cold and stern as when she executed the opposition figures on the British Isles—the gaze one would give a dead man.
"Do you know how grave a sin it is to interrupt a sacred Amazonian funeral?"
Wonder Woman's Vulcan sword gleamed with a dangerous cold light, and her stern question was clearly not an attempt to find a reason to attack Captain Atom, but rather came entirely from the heart.
She had just prepared the coffin and placed the drachma, and was preparing to take the remains of her other self back to Paradise Island in the Arctic for a proper burial as an Amazon.
Not only "myself", but all the heroes who died below deserve such a dignified burial.
Some people are even unwilling to grant the deceased even such a moment of peace.
In Wonder Woman's eyes, this kind of trash was clearly already on the verge of death.
The scene was far from pleasant—Captain Atom radiated an electromagnetic wave for communication, preparing to notify the backup team that the operation was clearly being canceled.
The plan was foolish from the start. All the assumptions were based on the premise that the super weapon hidden in outer space could actually work, while the other side never planned to fight them in the first place.
Killing Cyborg didn't even anger Superman, let alone Cyborg himself.
Just as Captain Atom was feeling a pang of guilt because of Cyborg, a dark cloud in the distance obscured the entire sky above where the four of them were.
No, those aren't dark clouds, those are Steel Bones, or rather, the Steel Bones.
Captain Atom had never imagined that Cyborg would be hiding so many unmanned robots. After he destroyed hundreds of Cyborg's machines with EMP, he pulled out the one above.
"Don't even try using EMP, it's a complete waste of time. Have you ever seen a combined electromagnetic shielding layer thousands of meters thick?!"
Cyborg was right. These tens of thousands of machines were now gathered together, and the weak interconnections between the various reactors formed an electromagnetic barrier. Captain Atom knew that he probably couldn't use the same trick to make Cyborg leave the field again.
Ever since Cyborg deciphered the news of the Kryptonian invasion, he has been secretly assembling drones in batches, spending the Federal Reserve's money to expand his mechanical army.
The group of stock market gurus in Congress are busy speculating in stocks and printing money at the same time. They can't even count how much money they've printed over the years. Nobody cares about Cyborg's little tricks.
At this moment, he is using the loudspeakers of these tens of thousands of robots to launch a noise offensive against Captain Atom:
"Nathanil Adam, you bastard, beast, animal, scum, surrender now, or I'll beat you so badly your own mother won't recognize you!"
Cyborg remains as gentle as ever, still trying to persuade Captain Atom to change his mind, but the others present may not be so lenient.
Before Captain Atom could speak, Wonder Woman swung her Lasso of Truth with her left hand and secured him, then followed up with a straight thrust with her sword-wielding right hand:
"Trash like you has no value in repenting!"
Metaphor~
Joey dodged and reached out to grasp the blade of Wonder Woman's thrusting sword.
The Vulcan's Sword, which used to be able to pierce Joey straight through, now seemed to have lost its sharpness, leaving only two barely bleeding wounds on Joey's fingers and palm.
Wonder Woman quickly withdrew her strength upon seeing this, but before she could apologize, Joey interrupted her:
"Diana, don't do that. I gave you a chance back then, you should give him a chance too."
Joey knew that the Wonder Woman of this world was not one to be soft-hearted, but he did not expect her to be so decisive, killing him with zero frames.
Although Captain Atom, that bastard, was a perfect testing ground for Wonder Woman, there was a compelling reason for her to kill him.
But Joey couldn't just let Diana continue down this crazy path, or sooner or later a big problem would arise.
In a timeline where she didn't exist, Wonder Woman fought her way from Paradise Island to Britain.
Later, in order to completely eliminate Shazam, she became so bloodthirsty that she was even able to personally wield her sword and kill a child who was only thirteen or fourteen years old after Shazam deactivated his transformation, without any psychological pressure.
Every time you kill, you should make yourself and the world a better place, not turn yourself into a butcher like Wonder Woman did in the end.
Diana, whose attack had been intercepted, was initially at a loss, but after hearing Joey's words, she suddenly felt relieved and remembered what Aquaman had said to her before. Now she understood what Aquaman meant back then.
"I was wrong."
In this matter, as the one who was forgiven, Wonder Woman herself has no right to make the decision directly for Joey.
Aquaman was well aware of this, which is why he only focused on making jokes and wavering between two sides during the previous debate about whether to kill "Superman".
Joey couldn't hear Wonder Woman's inner monologue at that moment, and he didn't even expect Diana to admit her mistake so readily. His words just now didn't even contain any accusation against Diana.
He's even starting to get used to the quirks and eccentricities of his companions.
In a sense, we should thank the top-tier individuals at Vought International for their desensitization training; flawed, genuine heroes are indeed much easier to deal with than artificially packaged, fake heroes.
The demonic aspect of Captain Atom is that he still hasn't figured out what he's fighting for.
If he insists on claiming that he is fighting for his country, then Joey will have to help him define what his "country" truly is.
Joey has always been a good person, but sometimes he has to temporarily act like a villain in order to do good deeds.
He turned to face Captain Atom and held up two fingers:
"Two choices."
"Option one: you surrender and wait here. In two hours, everything will be back to normal, and you and your wife and daughters will go home. No one will die, except that some of the bugs living in the White House, the Pentagon, and the Capitol will suddenly go on vacation to Alaska in the north."
"Option Two".
Joey used his superhuman vision to scan Captain Atom's entire body, marking which areas would be struck to more quickly derail him and turn him into the most powerful nuclear bomb in human history:
"You'll fight us to the death right here. We'll kill you in three seconds, then use your body to detonate a massive nuclear bomb, sinking the entire North American continent to the bottom of the sea. Everyone will die."
"Look, you just said that no one is coercing you, that you are only fighting for your own country. So now, it is up to you to choose who can represent your country."
While talking to Captain Atom, to make his words more convincing, Joey also took the opportunity to help the North American Federal Statistics Bureau complete this year's statistical work:
"Your country now has 335678912 North American citizens, 18% of whom are children under the age of 14. Is that enough to represent your country?"
Oh~ Now there are 335678910 people. Three people died from shootings, and a new life has just been born!
Or is it that the "motherland" in your eyes is nothing more than those 3268 unforgivable parasites hiding in lead-filled underground bunkers right now?