Samuel stared at the door for another ten seconds, then sighed and forced himself to look away.
Before jumping in with both feet, he needed to make sure his armor was up to standard and fit comfortably.
He walked over to the table, picked up the second and last wooden block, and placed it on his open, upturned palm.
“Well, here goes nothing.”
Last time, he had adjusted the vector so it went slightly upward to avoid tearing off his hand.
This time, he aimed it straight forward.
If the vector shield failed, he had a good chance of breaking a couple of fingers and getting a serious burn.
But Samuel didn’t care.
That feeling of absolute protection loomed over his subconscious, projecting a false sense of invincibility onto his mind.
A simple function, composed without any difficulty, pressed into the geometric figure resting on his hand.
A sharp sound shot through the room, like someone hitting a thin copper sheet with a plastic bottle.
The block shattered in his hand, and multiple wooden needles bit into the stone ceiling.
“Well.” Samuel looked up, slightly stunned, as sawdust and other wooden debris rained down on him a second later.
“I need to calibrate this.”
What happened?
Oh, the vector shield had more than fulfilled its purpose.
After the block began to move, the pseudo-AI program determined the toy’s vector was a threat, then rotated its direction 180 degrees, pointing it straight at Samuel’s body.
But before the block could cover even a micron of space, the program immediately identified its new vector as a threat and rotated it again.
The newly minted esper couldn’t even say how many cycles the resulting algorithm went through.
It only stopped when the wooden base couldn’t handle the intense, rapid back-and-forth vibration and simply shattered.
With a pretty loud pop, the harmless child’s toy turned into a kind of explosive with shrapnel.
Those fragments, in turn, ricocheted off the vector shield and flew into the only place the AI’s analysis algorithms deemed the “safest” for the user.
The ceiling.
“Well,” Samuel said, a little embarrassed, as he fully grasped what had happened.
“At least I know the vector shield works.”
Though it wasn’t necessarily one hundred percent effective.
He still needed to test its protection against unexpected attacks he didn’t see himself, as well as its effectiveness against phenomena with distorted physical laws.
Quirks.
And he could only test that one way.
Samuel took a determined step toward the metal door and placed his palm on it.
He decided to postpone calibrating the shield for now.
A second of thought gave him an interesting idea.
What happened with the wooden block had inspired him a little, and he came up with a new, quieter way to get through this obstacle.
A slight mental strain, a couple of moments for calculations, and a simple equation flowed from his Personal Reality into the slightly rusty surface of the metal door.
Constant random changes of direction at an extremely high frequency.
He set a high amplitude by pouring a fair amount of energy into amplifying the vectors.
First, the door began to shake.
Then the floor vibrated slightly.
Dust started falling from the ceiling, harmlessly flowing around the invisible, unaided eye dome of the vector shield.
The metal hinges crumbled.
Samuel took a tentative step forward, pushing the door and making a couple of minor changes to the formula so that the correlation point of the vectors moved with him like the central array of a fixed system.
The floor shook even harder as the rectangle of metal, driven by an irresistible force, slid out into the hallway.
To avoid making even more noise, Samuel raised his hand, lifting the still finely vibrating door with it.
“Excellent,” he said, looking around with childlike delight.
He had kicked up a lot of dust and made quite a bit of noise, but it was still better than blowing the door away with a single, precise, directed vector.
He turned off the vibration formula, carefully leaned the now useless door against the opposite wall of the hallway, and looked around with a much more thoughtful gaze.
He barely managed to suppress a mocking snort.
There wasn’t a single security camera in the short, poorly lit corridor.
“You guys are so careless and inattentive,” Samuel grinned from ear to ear (missing a few baby teeth).
***
“What the hell?” a strangely dressed man raised his eyebrows, watching the coffee in his cup vibrate slightly.
“An earthquake?” answered a feral-looking man sitting opposite him.
“Feral” was an understatement.
His long red hair resembled a lion’s mane and clearly grew past his neck, forming a small hump on his back where his tight t-shirt fit snugly.
His facial features also barely resembled a human’s.
A slightly elongated, animal-like nose, round eyes almost entirely filled with black pupils, and an upper lip slightly protruding from his fangs created a somewhat repulsive impression.
“Maybe,” the feral man’s companion began to say, but he was cut off by a suddenly opened door.
“Leo!” a short, bearded man burst in, wearing a construction hard hat and an orange suit that looked something like a builder’s uniform.
“This ain’t no earthquake, stone in my shoe!”
“Huh?”
“Don’t look at me like that, sand on your sheet! Something happened in the brat’s cell, dust in your nostrils!”
“Shove your own dust, freak,” the feral man answered automatically.
“Wait a minute… That little louse? Heroes?”
“He didn’t cause a magnitude 4.1 earthquake himself, coal in my oven!” the dwarf shouted expressively.
Leo couldn’t disagree with his “comrade.” The brat was too weak and couldn’t even move a stool.
The guy trusted the dwarf’s feelings.
After all, it was thanks to his Quirk that this underground complex was built, and he could track what was happening inside it to some extent.
“I hate to interrupt, but if that’s true, we need to hurry,” a third man in the room said quietly.
“Shit!” the dwarf clutched his heart, even forgetting to add his usual nonsensical phrase at the end of his sentence.
“Gravel in your ears and a hammer on an anvil!” he immediately compensated double.
“Chameleon! At least warn us you’re here, pickaxe on my belt!”
Indeed.
Despite his flashy costume and ridiculously extravagant appearance, this lanky guy could instantly disappear from sight, even if everyone around was looking right at him.
His Quirk allowed him to become transparent, and his character and temperament actively helped him with that.
His companions, as a rule, naturally tended to forget about his presence.
“Don’t get so worked up, Gaster,” the dwarf’s companion answered so quietly that you reflexively wanted to ask him to repeat it.
The only sign of his departure was the door creaking slightly behind Gaster.
“That guy is creepy, stone in my shoe!”
“You’re repeating yourself,” Leo muttered, considering himself the most level-headed of the three.
He was about to lean back in his chair and finish his mug of coffee (it was a liter mug, perfectly matching the man’s considerable size) when his animal instincts simply rebelled.
And it wasn’t the fury of anticipation from an impending fight that an uninvited group of heroes might have caused.
It was an animalistic fear, reeking of sticky horror.
***
“Where are we going with Piglet? A big, big secret!”
A child cheerfully hummed a simple tune under his breath as he walked through the seemingly endless corridors of the underground base.
He carefully examined his surroundings, looking into every branch, but constantly tried to keep to the left wall.
He had heard that’s what you do to avoid getting lost in a labyrinth.
And this was, without a doubt, a labyrinth.
The idea of a quiet, unnoticed escape didn’t seem as appealing as it had in the first few minutes.
It would have been much easier to create a wave of noise that would have made everyone’s ears ring, then just walk toward the direction the enemies were coming from.
But no, Samuel was being cautious.
He was going to be smart.
Plus, it seemed he had chosen the wrong wall to follow.
The fragmentary memories of the body he had taken over didn’t have anything resembling the place he had wandered into.
“I’m hungry…” Samuel looked at the stone wall of the tunnel with a predatory gaze.
No, he didn’t want to eat it.
He was thinking about whether he could just execute his noisy plan right now.
A good hit to the wall would definitely make a lot of noise.
But there was a non-zero chance that such a trick might cause a cave-in.
That wouldn’t hurt him (in theory), but getting out from under the rubble would be even more of a pain than navigating the labyrinth.
‘I wonder if I set a vertical vector for myself and just fly up through the ceiling, would it work?’ He shifted his hungry gaze from the wall to the ceiling.
‘And if it did work, what exactly would happen?’
Theoretically, he could calculate the outcome of such an adventure if he had the information.
How many meters of earth were above him?
What was its density (judging by what he had seen, they had done a good job, compacting the soil almost to the consistency of stone)?
How effective would the vector shield be in such a suicidal, er, breakthrough attempt?
“What are you doing here?” a cold, rustling voice came from right behind Samuel.
He spun around and stared at a person in what looked like a parrot cosplay, or maybe a very flamboyant LGBTQ fan (at that thought, Samuel took a couple of steps back, just in case).
But when he realized who he was looking at, his expression instantly shifted from wary and surprised to hungry.
“Well, well. Breakfast has arrived.”
The chilling whisper sent a wave of fearful goosebumps down Chameleon’s back.