(Ed note: Trigger warning: gore)
When the negotiator mentioned that his hostage was almost dead, Kim Ho Song's hands stopped burning. However, the girl already had scorched flesh on her neck and had fainted once again. This time, though, she was actually on the brink of death, her brain having nearly been cooked by the heated blood flowing to it through her carotid arteries. Her situation was critical.
"Listen here, you unblessed peasant filth, I'm superio-" he began, but before he finished his sentence, something passed through the wall, buzzing like a swarm of bees, and hit the left side of his waist. It passed through his entire body, shredding everything around his pelvis and leaving a cavitation wake so severe that even his skin and the organs in his abdomen practically exploded from the overpressure and following vacuum. Then, after it passed through his body, it continued, passing through the other side of the vault and finally digging itself ten meters deep in the ground in the alley to the side of the bank. Only after it came to rest was the report of a gunshot heard and Kim Ho Song's brain received the message from his nervous system.
He screeched in absolute agony as his mind was overwhelmed by the signals from his body. He reflexively released his grip on the poor bank teller as his lungs dropped to the ground following his inhuman screech, cushioning him when he fell atop them. The bank teller crumpled on top of his chest, her head coincidentally having its drop cushioned by the erstwhile superhuman supremacist's chest. She listened to the last beats of his heart-or would have, had she been conscious-and his legs, jostled by her fall, fell to the ground on either side of her.
A single bullet had turned one person into a gruesome pile of flesh and organs, surrounded by a spreading red mist.
Not even three seconds later, a SWAT team breached the vault along with a RES-QR bot, which immediately began tending to the teller and failed bank robber. The teller was carefully lifted onto a gravity stretcher for transport to the empty pod awaiting her aboard the First Response Vehicle, while Kim Ho Song was decapitated and his head unceremoniously stuffed in a nanobag to preserve him for later reconstruction in a medical pod at the penal cube at the North Pole.
The researchers at Lab City had completely outdone themselves with the Mk. XVIII Nanite-Equipped Tactical Stasis device. The NETS was a black bag designed to loosely fit over a human head that, upon activation, would tightly seal itself to the contours of a person's head. They were equipped with a colony of healer nanites that would maintain blood oxygenation and everything else required to keep a brain active and healthy, along with a connection to the simulation to keep the patient from going insane due to the severe trauma their bodies had suffered.
As a backup, and sometimes primary, measure, they had a stasis field generator in them that would keep the interior of the bag in complete stasis for as long as they had batteries to maintain the field. Each specialized battery could last up to an hour, and they could be hot-swapped without losing field effectiveness. NETS were designed for medically evacuating ARES troopers who had been catastrophically injured and would have otherwise been deemed unrecoverable and listed as killed in action, and testing them in the simulation had proven their worth. Even though the soldiers themselves despised being "headbagged", as they called it, they were still thankful that there was gear that would let them live to despise it.
Outside the bank.
Although the police had immediately cordoned off a 200-meter radius around the bank to prevent any harm, people were still tightly crowded around the cordon line and pressed against the windows of buildings with direct views of the bank itself. They had seen the massive police and emergency medical response, so somewhere deep inside, they knew there was danger to be had there, but they still wanted to see it for themselves. Among the looky-loos, most of them had pulled out their phones and were livestream the events, seeking their fifteen minutes of fame.
News channels had picked up the livestream feeds for rebroadcasting as well, pushing the bank robbery even deeper into the public consciousness with testimonials from people who were "on the scene", even though most of them couldn't even see anything from their vantage points. And even if they did have a view of the bank, it was still an exterior view and they had no idea of what was going on inside it.
The only thing they knew was that the police had been broadcasting a repeating message to stay indoors and behind the cordons for their safety, as the criminal they were apprehending was one of the blessed.
The media had learned their lesson after the second purge, for the most part, and were only rebroadcasting the livestreams without any added commentary or speculation, as any bias on their part at all would likely trigger a third purge among the media conglomerates. And they were running out of interns and fresh graduates from media majors in colleges around the world, so a third purge was something they absolutely had to avoid.
With the situation involving a superhuman, it spread even faster, with watchers from every corner of the world tuning in to see how the empire would deal with it.
Shortly after the world caught on to what was going on, they had their answer. A single gunshot boomed out from only god knows where, then the SWAT team barged into the bank alongside a scuttling RES-QR bot. Then there was only silence, followed by the SWAT team escorting a hovering stretcher and a portly man that had been painted red to the FRV outside the bank's front door for emergency treatment and evacuation to the cube on the outskirts of Pyongyang. Accompanying them was one police officer carrying an unidentified head-sized black object.
The police officers got back into their squad cars, the SWAT team got back in its truck, and the traffic officers took down the cordon from around the bank. The bank itself was still sealed with crime scene tape, but the entire crowd of police and emergency services workers simply just packed up and left with far less fanfare than they had arrived with.
Everyone watching was left confused as to exactly what had just happened inside the bank, but the empire remained mum on the subject.
