The Boy Who Burned the World-04

As Maxmillian, he continued to present the public persona of a personable and fashionable young man- the roguish man who's just mysterious enough to capture the attention of the people around him and yet safe enough to be tolerable to the elders. As Lord Cygnus, he afflicted those that hadn't died in the assault on the society's campus center and finished them off in grotesque and horrific ways- often in public. The public attention that Lord Cygnus attracted was fierce, but since everyone liked Maximillian well enough he got plenty of warning--inadvertently, of course--when enemy action got too close and therefore shunted them away with a shift in tactics.

Of course the Federal Government got involved, despite there being no reason under their own rules for doing so, because he's slaughtered the next cohort of fresh recruits into the Establishment's machine. Using that catch-all con of "terrorism", they intervened and took over investigation of the events to date. Lord Cygnus decided to grace the agents with a visit, and by that he meant that he would call down a rain of fire upon their base of operations- a rain that concealed the summoning of a powerful demon warrior, one who smashed through the walls and then got up and began slaughtering all it encountered until the agents' managed to destroy it with an excess of conventional firepower.

The message he sent, using that attack as the means, was crystal clear to the Establishment: "I have real power, and I will burn you all with it."

The media reaction, as most of the witnesses caught it on their phones or tablets and then uploaded it to the Internet in various places, could not be more predictable: panic, panic, and more panic. Fear-mongering on a scope and scale only seen in comic book movies previously. Speculation of all sorts, in all corners, exploded and raged across all media all across the world. Here was a bonafide superhuman, and he was no Superman or Spider-Man. Meanwhile, as Maximillian he kept to the fashionably cheeky opinions but otherwise kept distant from the topic while out as this persona; as Lord Cygnus, he played to the hype and made some obvious public assaults to manipulate public perception- and to get his supervillain persona out there as a meme. Soon, "Lord Cygnus of the Abyss" became a thing.

As for the Establishment, they conferred and called upon their own inhuman patrons. Most got nothing useful back. A few learned that this enemy was himself a wielder of powers like their own. A handful learned that this was the promised cleaner, the one signifying that the final stage of their great plan had come at last, and it was these handful who--being agents of the same inhuman patron--began to work behind the scenes to keep others from taking him out.

Meanwhile, other factions in the Establishment--unaware of treason within their own ranks--moved to deploy secret technologies against this threat, and as such the word went out through the underground network to activate vast numbers of previously-prepared disposable assets: MK Ultra subjects, specifically the Delta-class killbot mind slaves. Within a week, Lord Cygnus' public appearances began to involve increasing numbers of seemingly ordinary people going berserk and attacking him; all of them died horribly, incinerated by his fires or butchered like cattle by his in human aids- and the media frenzy continued to accelerate until it was an all-consuming obsession. The former Chester Lame greatly enjoyed this development.