Clack.
Clack.
Clack.
Heavy footsteps echoed through the empty street, splashing into puddles with every step.
The rhythm was sluggish, leisurely, devoid of any sense of urgency.
Ryan Quinn tucked his neck into his collar.
The rain was a nuisance.
Even with his collar up, water still found its way down his neck.
He held his phone to his ear, listening to the voice on the other end, but his eyes were already locked on the figure approaching from the far end of the street.
It was a person in a grey-white suit, the hood wet from the rain and clinging to their head.
They were also on the phone.
The two stared at each other through the curtain of rain, each holding a phone to their ear.
“A dancing partner,” Ryan Quinn said into his phone, his voice lazy and trailing off at the end.
“But a troublesome guy seems to have shown up on my end…
go to sleep first, we’ll talk later.” He hung up and pocketed the phone.
His movements were slow.
However, beneath the shadow of his hood, his eyes glowed with a faint dark-red light, fixed on the person opposite him without a hint of tension.
The figure across from him flickered.
Their entire body underwent a phase shift, blinking out of space for a moment before returning to the original spot.
Ryan Quinn let out a yawn.
“There is a suspicious person near where Jimmy went missing,” Ava said into her comms headset, her voice sounding distant then near.
Her gaze never left Ryan Quinn.
“Young, lean build, but with abnormal muscle density.
Low body temperature—my scanner is detecting an unknown high-energy biological signal.
Not an ordinary human.” “Ah…” Ryan Quinn scratched the back of his head, rain dripping from his fingertips.
“That scanner of yours is pretty impressive.
Can I take a look?
My low body temperature might just be from the rain.” Ava didn’t reply.
Her body turned ethereal again, and a second later, she materialized two meters to Ryan Quinn’s front-left.
“Who are you?” Ryan Quinn tilted his head as if seriously considering the question, then shrugged.
“Just a very sleepy high schooler.” Ava flickered again, appearing a meter to Ryan Quinn’s right this time.
Raindrops passed right through her translucent body and hit the ground.
“Where is Jimmy?” “Oh, that bald guy.” Ryan Quinn shoved his hands back into his pockets and leaned against a wall.
“He’s…
how should I put this?
He’s gone.
Are you his friend?
Then I should apologize; I might have been a bit rude.” Silence fell.
Rain poured between them, half the drops passing through Ava’s body to hit the ground behind her.
The streetlamp overhead hummed with an electric buzz, the light flickering.
Scanners projected jumping numbers onto her goggles.
Energy readings continued to climb, and the biological markers remained unrecognizable.
Ava’s flickering frequency accelerated.
“The energy fluctuations inside you—I’ve never seen anything like them.
You aren’t human.” Ryan Quinn blinked.
“Have you ever asked yourself that same question?” Ava moved.
Her body phased out completely, and a slight energy ripple swept past Ryan Quinn’s side.
A split second later, Ava materialized behind him.
A blast of quantum energy erupted from her palm, accompanied by a humming phase-noise, slamming toward the center of Ryan Quinn’s back.
Ryan Quinn sighed.
His turn looked loose and sluggish, but his right arm was already covered in black-red biomass armor by the time he faced her.
The quantum impact hit the armor’s surface with a muffled thud.
The force sent Ryan Quinn back a step, his soles carving two streaks through the puddles.
“A sneak attack…” He looked down at the point of impact on his armor.
“Close call, close call.” Ava didn’t stop.
Her body went translucent again, her arms passing through his armored defense.
In her semi-solid state, she released quantum energy directly into Ryan Quinn’s chest.
Ryan Quinn felt a sharp sting—the quantum energy was disrupting the stable structure of the Blacklight Virus at the molecular level.
He looked down at his chest, then up at Ava, and frowned slightly.
“That kind of tickles.” Black biomass surged from beneath his skin, its density increasing sharply to wall off the quantum interference frequency.
Ava saw it—the black, writhing things.
The data on her goggles went wild: unknown biological tissue, high-energy reaction, rapid proliferation.
“Your body—the molecular structure is dynamically reorganizing.” “Yeah, I guess so.” Ryan Quinn cracked his neck twice.
“It’s a troublesome constitution.
I have to control it every day, otherwise I’d explode the toothpaste tube just trying to squeeze it.” As the words left his mouth, Ryan Quinn reached out with his right hand.
Black-red tendrils erupted from his palm, but they didn’t go for Ava directly.
The tendrils exploded in mid-air, splitting into countless threads finer than hair, weaving a web five meters in diameter that enclosed everything around them.
The surface of the threads released a faint bio-electric signal, beginning to scan Ava’s quantum state frequency.
Ava tried to phase through the web of tendrils.
But one tendril touched her—through frequency resonance.
Sensing her quantum energy signature in her phased state, the tendril instantaneously adjusted its own molecular structure to match her frequency and burrowed into her translucent body.
“What—” Ava instinctively snapped back to a solid state, but the tendril had already locked onto her quantum frequency and followed her back into reality.
The black-red threads coiled around her arms and shoulders, then climbed up her neck, finding the gaps in her suit to burrow beneath her skin.
Ava let out a howl as quantum energy exploded from within her, trying to shatter the tendrils.
Some were vibrated apart—but the fragments converged again in mid-air, adjusting their molecular structure based on the energy she released and burrowing back in.
The tendrils spread through her body, growing as they divided.
The quantum energy inside Ava began to spiral out of control.
Her switching between solid and phased states became faster and faster, until the naked eye could only see a blurred, flickering humanoid shape.
The tendrils pinned her between the two states, neither letting her fully phase to escape nor allowing her to fully solidify to resist.
Ryan Quinn stood his ground, right hand extended, tendrils flowing continuously from his palm toward Ava.
He tilted his head as he watched the scene, looking rather uninterested.
“To be honest, I didn’t really want to do this,” Ryan Quinn’s voice was flat.
“But that phasing ability of yours is annoying.
If I let you go, I’d just have to chase you down again later.
It’s tiring just thinking about it.” Ava’s movements slowed.
The tendrils covered most of her face and were spreading to the back of her head.
Her right hand made one last attempt to press the quantum energy trigger on her palm, but her fingers dissolved into a cloud of quantum mist before they could touch the button.
Her body began to collapse.
Her skin disintegrated amidst the quantum flickering, her muscles dissolved, and her skeleton shattered under the impact of the two-state imbalance.
The black-red tendrils wrapped and compressed every bit of decomposing matter, absorbing it all—not even letting the quantum energy particles floating in the air escape.
Then, everything went quiet.
The tendrils retracted into Ryan Quinn’s palm.
Rain fell back to the ground, splashing once more.
Ryan Quinn lowered his hand and stood in silence for a moment.
The quantum energy in his body was being dismantled and analyzed by the Blacklight Virus, integrated into his cells bit by bit.
It was a strange sensation—suddenly there was a new option for how his cells bonded; they could be tight, or they could be so loose they almost didn’t exist.
He could sense the vibration frequency of air molecules and feel the boundary between his body and space becoming blurred.
“Oh.” Ryan Quinn looked down at his hand, which was slowly becoming translucent in the rain.
“Phasing?
Did I just become Alex-Obito?
Damned phasing dogs…
but I like it.
Heh heh.” A flood of memory fragments suddenly rushed into his mind—Ava’s life.
A little blonde girl sitting in the corner of a lab, the light from a quantum tunnel hitting her face, the screams of her parents, and then the sensation of her molecules tearing apart.
A white room in the Red Room, the voice of Dreykov saying, “We will help you.” The episodes happening every day, each one breaking down her molecular bonds a little more.
Ryan Quinn rubbed his temples.
His expression remained lazy, but his gaze darkened slightly.
“Dreykov…
the Red Room.” He clicked his tongue.
“This is the Marvel Cinematic Universe, huh?
What a pain.
These power dynamics are the biggest headache.
But I guess knowing is better than not knowing.” Ryan Quinn let out a breath that rose as a white mist.
He then noticed a comms headset lying on the ground, its red indicator light flashing.
An anxious male voice came through: “Hello?
Hello?
Are you okay?
Are you there?” Ryan Quinn crouched down and picked up the headset.
He looked at it and sighed.
“Still have to act…” His body began to change—the quantum state and the Blacklight Virus worked in tandem.
His facial bones shifted slightly, his hair darkened, and his body contours were reshaped.
A few seconds later, Ryan Quinn had transformed into Ava, simulating even that slight flickering instability perfectly.
“I’m fine,” Ryan Quinn spoke, his voice possessing that phase-shifted quality of sounding near and far.
He intentionally added a touch of exhaustion.
Bullseye breathed a sigh of relief.
“Thank God.
What happened with Jimmy?” “Ambushed by the Red Room,” Ryan Quinn said lazily.
He almost forgot to maintain Ava’s tired tone and quickly corrected himself.
“It wasn’t an order from Dreykov himself…
one of his squads went rogue.
Jimmy and his men were cleaned out, and the goods were taken.
Honestly, these messes are the most exhausting part.” Bullseye was silent for a moment.
“Are you sure you want to tell me this?” “Yeah, pass it on to Mr.
Kingpin.” Ryan Quinn’s voice sounded bored and indifferent.
“My loyalty is to Dreykov personally; the Red Room means nothing to me.
Anyway, I’m tired.
That’s all.” Ryan Quinn ripped off the headset and crushed it into pieces between his hands.
Then he stood up, shoved his hands into his pockets, and turned into the rain.
Every three steps, he phased.
The rain passed through his body when he was phased and hit his shoulders when he was solid.
Ryan Quinn tucked in his neck—he’d been out in the rain so long his hair was soaked.
Recalling the call he had hung up earlier, he pulled out his phone to check the time.
“It’s so late…
still have school tomorrow.” Ryan Quinn yawned.
“What a pain.” Ryan Quinn’s figure receded into the rain, his pace sluggish.
But if anyone could have seen his eyes in the moment he phased—within those dark-red pupils was the reflection of a rainy New York night.