The Torch Office…
Thursday Evening
The girl stubbornly worked late.
Walt had absolutely known she would.
He had stood silently in the dark, empty hallway at exactly six PM and closely watched the bright light shining under the wooden Torch office door…
that tiny sliver of yellow warmth quietly leaking right into the dark corridor…
and completely confirmed exactly what his inside source had nervously told him.
Sullivan was stubbornly staying extremely late to finalize the dangerous draft.
She actively wanted to run it directly in tomorrow’s morning edition.
He absolutely could not allow that.
Walt honestly had not deliberately set out to hurt anyone tonight.
He definitely had not confidently come to Smallville High on a quiet Thursday evening actively intending to successfully commit violent arson.
He had simply come…
he desperately told himself…
to just talk to the girl.
To reasonably reason with her.
To politely explain, calmly and professionally, exactly why this sensational story was absolutely not in the beloved school’s best interest, and exactly why a good, smart journalist might strongly reconsider publishing it.
But the massive heat in his heavy palms had been aggressively building all day.
It unfortunately happened right when he was deeply anxious.
Right when the mounting pressure heavily got to him.
The raw fire desperately wanted out.
It violently pressed against his tight skin exactly like a rising tide brutally pushing at a cracking dam, and simply keeping it contained heavily required a mental focus that was increasingly, terribly difficult to somehow maintain during a high-stress Thursday evening in which absolutely everything he had carefully built over thirty full years was suddenly about to be casually printed in a highly destructive high school newspaper with a massive circulation of approximately two hundred kids.
Walt violently pushed open the heavy wooden door.
Chloe Sullivan looked up sharply from her glowing computer.
She absolutely did not look slightly frightened…
she just looked deeply annoyed, which was somehow significantly more unsettling.
“Coach Arnold. The Torch is officially closed.”
“I deeply need to politely speak with you.”
“I am currently on a strict deadline. Make an appointment.”
Walt stepped heavily inside.
He quietly shut the wooden door right behind him.
Chloe’s sharp eyes darted quickly to the closed door and then rapidly back to him.
Her annoyed expression subtly shifted…
the fierce annoyance slowly thinning right into something much more cautious.
“Coach…”
“You completely need to silently pull that article,” Walt said firmly.
His deep voice was remarkably calm.
He was incredibly good at calm.
Thirty brutal years of intense sideline pressure had made him very, very good at calm.
“It will totally damage the football program. It will brutally damage the good players. It will forever damage people who have worked very, very hard for exactly something they truly deserve.”
“If the football program somehow earned those results honestly, the article will completely reflect that.”
“The article is entirely based on highly incomplete information.”
“Then simply give me the complete information.”
Walt’s large hands were incredibly, painfully warm.
“Miss Sullivan.” He took a heavy step toward her wooden desk.
“I am calmly asking you, purely as an adult and as someone who deeply has a great deal of respect for exactly what the athletic program actually means to this entire school community…” Find the original chapter at novelping . com.
“And I am telling you, directly as a journalist, that I absolutely publish based entirely on hard evidence and editorial judgment, totally not on exactly what coaches demand I do.”
Chloe’s chin came defiantly up.
She possessed, What Walt thought highly distantly, a very admirable, massive amount of steel spine for a young girl her age.
“If you ever want to formally respond to the story, you can easily give me a direct quote. I’ll happily run it right alongside.”
The brutal heat violently surged.
Walt absolutely did not consciously decide to actually do it.
It was completely not a decision.
It was the entire dam instantly breaking…
months of heavily suppressed pressure and six full days of raw fire violently building directly behind his tired eyes and three short minutes of this defiant girl looking exactly at him exactly like he was simply a trivial problem to be managed rather than a highly dangerous person to be feared.
He violently raised his glowing hand, and the tall metal filing cabinet right against the left wall instantly, explosively caught bright, roaring fire.
Chloe was miraculously on her feet in a total instant.
Her desk chair clattered loudly to the floor.
Her heart hammered a frantic, terrified, massive rhythm directly against her small ribs, but she bravely didn’t scream.
She wildly grabbed the heavy metal tape dispenser straight from her desk…
it definitely wasn’t much, but it was absolutely a weapon.
She bravely took two quick, frantic steps directly toward the door and instantly stopped.
Walt was now standing directly between her and the closed door.
“I am truly sorry,” Walt said softly, and he deeply meant it.
He genuinely, deeply meant it.
“I absolutely did not want this.”
The roaring fire rapidly spread from the burning filing cabinet directly to the huge cork pinboard right beside it.
The Wall of Weird…
long years of Chloe’s careful, massive research…
instantly began to violently burn at its crowded edges, the hundreds of photographs and neat clippings rapidly curling black and smoking.
Chloe backed terrified against the opposite wall.
Her frantic breath came in very short, panicked gasps, the highly acrid black smoke already aggressively stinging her watering eyes.
She tightly gripped the metal tape dispenser totally white-knuckled, her sharp mind rapidly racing through non-existent exit strategies.
If he steps one inch closer, I throw this right at his face and dive straight for his knees.
She was completely terrified, but buried deep beneath the raw fear was a highly hard, stubborn, unbreakable core of total defiance.
She definitely wasn’t just going to stand there and let him brutally burn her alive.
The Hallway
He violently felt it right before he actually heard it.
The massive heat surge directly from Walt’s hands…
a huge bloom of completely uncontrolled pyrokinetic energy that violently radiated outward exactly like a blinding flare in the absolute dark…
hit Alex’s highly tuned magical senses exactly like a screaming alarm.
He was completely alone in the silent hallway right outside the humanities wing, quietly on his way completely back from a quiet hour at the secret storage unit, when the massive signature detonated violently across his wide awareness.
Here.
The exact same loud word.
The exact same massive pull.
Alex was moving incredibly fast right before the conscious decision ever fully formed.
He did absolutely not run.
Running heavily in the empty school hallway after hours would definitely make loud noise.
He rapidly walked fast…
completely controlled, totally quiet, smoothly covering the distance in precisely thirty seconds.
He stopped perfectly outside the closed door.
He smoothly extended his magical senses straight through the heavy wood.
He could clearly feel the massive heat violently radiating…
the highly chaotic, totally self-amplifying, roaring heat of entirely uncontrolled pyrokinesis, looking absolutely nothing at all like a normal, natural fire.
And high above that massive heat, two human presences…
one terrifyingly burning, one completely pressed hard against a wall in an absolute panic.
Chloe.
Alex coldly assessed the highly volatile situation in a mere fraction of a single second.
Violently kicking the heavy door open and casually walking in would completely expose him.
Exposing himself was absolutely not an option…
absolutely not while Walt was clearly still alive and completely capable of loudly testifying to exactly what he had impossibly seen.
But terrified Chloe had maybe ten total seconds before the small room rapidly became a literal death trap.
Alex calmly pressed his back entirely against the cold wall right beside the door.
He definitely didn’t panic.
In his violent past lives, he had been a master Auror.
He had successfully been the Sorcerer Supreme.
His fragile current body might currently only hold the small magical reserves of a tiny second-year Hogwarts student, but massive raw power was definitely the highly blunt instrument of a foolish amateur.
Incredible experience was a surgical scalpel.
He definitely didn’t need to instantly conjure an entire ocean to brutally stop a small fire.
He just desperately needed to instantly break the deranged coach’s concentration and completely eliminate the immediate, burning threat.
Alex calmly closed his eyes, perfectly visualizing the entire space completely beyond the thick wood based purely on the bright heat signatures.
He leveled his right hand directly toward the narrow crack fully beneath the door, and slowly raised his left hand pointing directly toward the red fire alarm pull-station twenty feet right down the quiet corridor.
He flawlessly executed two complex spells simultaneously with total, silent, cold precision.
Through the tiny, narrow gap completely under the door, he violently released a highly compressed, totally localized shockwave of pure kinetic force…
a rapidly, sharply focused variant of a heavy banishing charm.
It exploded aggressively upward directly into the small office exactly like an invisible, concussive bomb.
The massive blast cleanly hit Walt Arnold completely square in his broad chest, instantly lifting the heavy grown man totally off his feet and violently hurling him straight backward directly into a heavy row of wooden desks.
The sudden, incredibly violent displacement of the air instantly created a massive momentary vacuum perfectly within the confined, tiny space, totally starving the roaring fire of all vital oxygen and instantly, entirely snuffing out the blazing flames totally on the filing cabinet and the ruined Wall of Weird.
A literal split second later, Alex’s left hand violently clenched directly into a tight fist.
Down the silent hall, the thick glass of the red fire alarm instantly shattered totally inward, and the small red lever violently slammed down exactly as if aggressively pulled by a frantic, invisible hand.
The incredibly piercing, completely deafening shriek of the entire school’s massive alarm system instantly, aggressively flooded the quiet corridor.
Inside the dark office, Walt was groaning loudly on the floor, deeply disoriented and frantically gasping just to refill his crushed lungs, the magical fire completely gone.
Chloe instantly dropped her heavy makeshift weapon, staring in completely bewildered, terrified shock directly at the black spot where the roaring flames had definitely been a mere second ago, and then directly at the massive coach now totally sprawled on the ground.
The smart decision to rapidly evacuate had successfully been made perfectly for them.
Alex was completely already moving.
He definitely didn’t need to stay and closely check his work…
he absolutely knew the deep math of the complex spellcraft had been entirely perfect.
He quickly slipped completely away safely into the dark shadows of the long humanities wing at a perfectly, casually ordinary pace, incredibly long before the wooden Torch office door finally burst totally open.
He smoothly turned a corner, casually found a bathroom, and quietly checked his completely calm reflection entirely in the mirror.
Totally unremarkable.
Perfectly calm.
Absolutely no clear sign of any exertion.
The massive kinetic strike had been absolutely, ruthlessly efficient, barely costing him a tiny fraction of his energy.
It was a completely clean, totally untraceable extraction.
And Chloe was safely alive.