Late at night.
Godolkin University.
The students had gone to their dorms and the lights were out.
One by one, fully armed security personnel emerged through an underground door onto the dark athletic field, moving in silence.
Automatic weapons.
Sonic devices.
Reinforced helmets.
They formed a tactical column with the efficiency of people who had done this many times before, and moved toward the lit windows of the main teaching building.
Inside the main building, in the Dean’s office.
Indira Shetty stared at the young man who had risen from his chair and turned to face the campus night through the window.
Something had changed in him.
The easy, warm manner he had walked in with was gone.
What stood in its place was something more controlled and more dangerous, with a cold, assessing confidence underneath.
This wasn’t right.
She abandoned any pretense of composure, crouched under her desk, and pressed the emergency contact button for Vought HQ again.
Nothing came back.
Just as Los had said.
The external signal was cut.
Taking over a school required more than having the physical strength to dominate its campus.
There was another critical piece: the outside world, and the student body inside, could not find out what was happening.
The moment Vought detected anything, or the students woke up and started talking, the whole operation was finished.
So Los had waited for nightfall, waited for curfew to empty the campus, and had come to the Dean’s office under the cover of her own invitation to cut the signal from inside the building.
Dense footsteps in the corridor outside.
The security team was here.
Shetty straightened, and some of her composure came back.
Godolkin’s security personnel were not ordinary guards.
Their weapons, their training, their equipment, all of it was specifically designed to subdue and contain superpowered students.
Golden Boy’s brother Sam, who was strong enough to be the most heavily guarded subject in the facility, was just prey to them.
She was still settling herself with that thought when she saw Los reach up and undo the buttons of his outer jacket.
A thread of white light pushed out through the fabric beneath.
Embedded in the center of his chest: a metallic energy core, blazing.
What he had been building in the dorm for the past week.
The office door was kicked open.
Eight armed personnel came through in formation, weapons up, sweeping the room.
They all stopped.
Across from Dean Shetty, standing in front of the desk.
Jet-black armor, thin and precise and modern, was sealing itself across the surface of his body in pieces, fitting perfectly to every contour.
A complete suit taking shape.
At its center, the chest core blazed like white daylight.
Panels locked together with mechanical precision.
Cold light along the limbs, cold light at the eyes.
Clean metal curves with almost no visible seams.
Shetty pressed her back against the wall.
“Take him down.”
The order had barely left her mouth.
Eight weapons discharged almost simultaneously.
The combined fire crossed the room in a wall of steel and converged on the armored figure.
Conventional weapons for a superpowered target.
They weren’t holding back.
Supes were generally hard to kill.
Los didn’t step aside.
There was no reason to.
Crack.
Clang.
Sparks scattered everywhere.
Every round that hit the titanium alloy armor deflected or flattened.
Spent, deformed bullets rained across the floor.
The combined momentum of the incoming fire made it difficult to move forward.
That was all it did.
“Suppressing fire.
My turn now.”
Los raised both hands before they could reload.
At the center of each armored palm, two points of white light came on.
Two energy blasts cut across the office.
In almost the same instant, two of the armed personnel at ten meters were hit cleanly.
Weapons and bodies both.
The body armor did nothing.
The heat of the energy burned straight through.
The remaining personnel froze.
On normal operations they could handle superpowered experimental subjects without much difficulty.
They had the equipment to back them up.
But an automatic rifle held against what he was firing from his palms was a spear held against a modern military.
There was no comparison.
The engine on the back of the armor ignited with a hard thrust, and Los covered the distance in a low-angle dive, driving into the formation before they could reorganize.
One armored hand closed on a rifle.
The other pinned what appeared to be the team leader against the wall.
Framed certificates fell from the wall around them.
The wall surface cracked under the pressure.
The team leader kept firing, the muzzle jammed against Los’s armored chest, trigger locked back.
Rounds went everywhere.
The magazine ran dry.
The armor held.
Trapped in the wall and struggling to breathe, the team leader forced the word out: “Sonic weapons.”
They were already ahead of him.
The moment the rifles had proved useless, the rest of the team had activated their sonic devices.
A single sonic unit was usually enough to incapacitate a student with physical enhancement.
It converged on Los from every direction.
The sound built and the metal sang.
The glass chandelier above them shattered first, raining fragments, and the office dropped into darkness.
From the moment the fight had started, Shetty had taken cover under the desk.
Even from ten meters away, with both hands over her head, the sonic convergence felt like it was splitting her skull open.
It ran for ten full seconds, then cut out.
Everything went quiet.
The wrecked office lay in darkness and silence.
The fight was over.
Obviously.
Shetty exhaled and pushed herself up using the desk edge.
The school had suppressed a student rebellion, as it had done before.
The relief came into her face.
It was still there when she got to her feet, and then it wasn’t.
One figure was standing in the dark office.
The only one still standing.
Energy light leaked from the eye lenses and looked back at her calmly.
Like a mechanical god.
“That’s not possible.” Her voice was unsteady.
She had spent years in this position, managing superpowered students through psychology and institutional leverage.
It was a long time since anything had made her feel genuinely afraid.
Now the fear was moving through her visibly.
She was shaking.
“You knew we had sonic weapons on hand,” Los said, looking down at the personnel scattered across the floor.
He pressed his foot through the closest sonic device.
“Did you actually think I hadn’t built the armor to handle them?”
Shetty pushed down the fear and tried: “Los.
Let’s talk this through.
We can sit down.
Whatever you want, I’m open to discussing it.”
Los shook his head.
“There’s nothing to discuss.
I want this school.
It’s going to be my territory.”
“Even if you kill me,” Shetty said, trying to find a foothold, “you can’t become the administrator here.
Everything in this building belongs to Vought.”
“A lesson from your own playbook.”
Los’s tone was light.
He looked at the Dean with something almost like amusement.
“You enjoy working people, don’t you.
Treating students like pieces you can move around a board.
Have you ever considered spending the rest of your life as someone else’s piece?”