“What are you going to do to me?”
Shetty hugged her own arms and stared at the armored figure standing in the dark office.
Then a familiar sound.
Sharp, even footsteps in heels, coming down the hallway outside.
Shetty looked toward the door.
In the corridor light, a familiar silhouette walked through.
Gold hair loose around her shoulders, backlit and glowing.
“Cate?”
One of her best students.
One of the ones she had always been particularly proud of.
Mental control ability.
Shetty watched Cate step over the bodies of the security personnel on the floor and come to stand beside the armored figure, bullet marks covering the wall behind them both.
A bitter, understanding smile crossed Shetty’s face.
She understood what Los had meant a moment ago.
“Cate.” Her voice went hard.
“How could you do this?
I’m the Dean of this school.
I’ve always treated you well.
This is a complete betrayal.”
“Mrs.
Shetty.
It’s exactly because you’ve been good to me that I asked Los to do it this way.”
Cate shook her head, and her voice was earnest.
In the pale moonlight coming through the window, Cate in her white dress looked genuinely beautiful, like something that belonged in a painting.
She walked to Shetty and wrapped her arms around her in a gentle embrace.
“Trust me.
This is for your own good.”
Cate’s voice, warm and soft against her ear, used the same register Shetty herself had spent years using on students.
The same comforting tone.
The same hollow promise of something better ahead.
Those luminous eyes reflected the moonlight and held something in them, a faint and unsettling gleam that turned what had looked like a small white flower into something else entirely.
The mind-manipulation ability activated.
Cate began rewriting Indira Shetty’s memories.
“Some of the security team didn’t die.
Just knocked out by the sonic blast.
Get their memories too.”
Los said it as he crossed to the office window, opened it, fired the hand and foot thrusters, and flew out of the building.
This had always been the plan for this stage.
Take down the Dean and the security personnel, then have Cate rewrite their memories and plant a standing loyalty to Los.
None of this was anything a person of good conscience would do.
Los had never intended to be a hero.
Some of Injustice Superman’s more authoritarian thinking had always struck him as practical, and he had never spent much time being troubled by it.
For people who ran a facility conducting continuous human experiments on students, Los felt no guilt whatsoever about having their minds rewritten.
The Dean and part of the security force were now under control.
What was left was the underground facility.
Los turned this over as the armor’s internal network tracked every security camera on campus, watching for complications. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
The takeover had come together quickly, and the finished suit hadn’t had a real test flight before tonight.
He was not entirely smooth in the controls as he navigated the armor toward the underground facility, engines pushing him across the campus night sky, white exhaust trailing behind him.
He was approaching the athletic field.
The ground came up fast.
From fifty meters up, a sudden powerful pull yanked him out of the sky.
He hit the soccer field like a piece of falling debris, plowing through the grass and churning up a wide furrow of torn turf.
He was covered in dirt.
Los shook the spinning out of his head and pushed himself up out of the crater.
That had not been a control failure.
Something on the field below him had generated a strong magnetic pull just as he came within range.
He looked up.
A metal wheelchair rolled toward him through the dark.
In the low field lighting, the figure in the wheelchair had a natural camouflage in the darkness, but the eyes were visible.
Burning with something long-held and concentrated.
“You’re inside the metal armor, aren’t you, Los.”
Anderson’s voice was low and flat.
He raised both hands.
Before Los could get to his feet, the magnetic force closed around him from every direction simultaneously and lifted him off the ground.
His metal-covered arms locked against his thighs.
He hung in the air three meters up like something caught in an invisible grip, unable to generate any useful counterforce.
The wheelchair rolled closer.
Anderson kept his hands raised, controlling the armor through the magnetic field.
His voice had gone rough.
“Do you know what these last few days in the hospital have been like?
Both legs amputated.
I’m disabled for the rest of my life.”
Los looked at the young man in the chair, the empty space below his hips, and said evenly: “That was your choice.
When you decide to destroy someone, you accept the possibility they destroy you first.”
He paused.
“That day, I just happened to be the one who won.”
“Shut up.”
Anderson contracted his hands sharply.
The magnetic force surged and the titanium alloy around Los groaned under the compression.
“You won that one.
So what?
Tonight I win.”
The expression on his face had gone into something ugly.
“You love planting explosives, don’t you?
Did you plant any out here on the field?”
Anderson had made his decision.
He was going to crush the armor and everything inside it.
“No explosives on the field.
Just…”
Los let the sentence hang, then asked: “Do you know what I’ve been waiting for?”
“Waiting for what?” Anderson’s chest went cold.
He was certain he had control of the situation.
Los was encased in metal with no room to move.
But something was making his heart pound in a way that felt wrong.
“I’ve been waiting for the bullet to fly.”
The words had barely landed.
Anderson saw something, at the edge of the residential building behind Los, just visible in the dark.
The faint glint of a lens.
In the next instant, a round crossed the space between them in a straight line from behind Los’s feet to Anderson’s face.
Anderson’s eyes went wide.
On pure survival instinct he threw everything he had at the bullet with his magnetic ability.
It didn’t move.
No deflection.
No slowing.
Not by a fraction.
It hit him between the eyes.
Blood spread across the metal wheelchair.
The magnetic hold released.
Los dropped and landed.
He looked at Anderson quietly.
“That round was non-metallic.”
He said it without any particular heat.
Los had not converted the campus grounds to explosive material.
But he had positioned several remotely operated weapons at strategic points around the school, and some of the rounds loaded in them were non-metallic from the start.
Those had been prepared specifically for Anderson.
If Anderson had not gone for a killing move tonight, Los might have left him breathing, had Cate rewrite his memory, and put him to use as another managed piece at the school.
But the moment Anderson moved to kill him, the outcome was already set.
Maybe Anderson had started as a young student who just wanted to come out on top in a school ranking.
But sometimes that was how things went.
One mistake led to the next and you ran out of road.
“Coming at me,” Los said, “was your biggest mistake.”
He turned, fired the engines, lifted off from the torn grass, and headed for the underground facility.
The entire campus network was under his control.
The surveillance feeds were running through his system.
The remote weapons were in place.
That was why he had said it.
Whose ground this is has not been settled yet.
With the force of what Stark’s knowledge base could build, Godolkin University was about to fall.
Vought International headquarters.
Late night.
The intelligence monitoring department.
“Something’s wrong.”
The analyst on night duty stared at her screen.
The signal indicator for Godolkin University was blank.
She flagged it immediately: “We’ve lost contact with Godolkin.
Should we send someone to check?”