John buried his face in Leon’s lab coat and gave a muffled “mm.”
Leon thought he’d successfully soothed the little monster, but what he didn’t see was that from the angle Leon couldn’t catch, John’s eyes had turned strangely deep.
Leon couldn’t be injected with Compound V, and Leon couldn’t learn magic.
But there had to be a way.
Since the world out there held so many wondrous powers, there had to be one that needed no talent, carried no danger, and could give Leon the ability to protect himself too.
When he grew up, when he pushed open this door and walked out, he would bring that kind of power back, even if he had to seize it by force, he would seize it and put it into Leon’s hands.
“All right, heavy topics end here.”
Leon patted John’s shoulder, stood up, and to shift the kid’s attention, he pulled a brand-new NES controller out from under the TV cabinet.
“To celebrate you learning something new today, let’s do something lighter.
That round of Super Mario yesterday, you didn’t even clear the first level.
You dare to challenge your mentor again today?”
John’s attention was indeed pulled away.
He looked at the little pixel man on the screen with the red hat and the mustache, and his will to win was instantly fired up.
“That was because I wasn’t familiar with the rules yesterday.
Today I absolutely will not let him fall into that pit again.”
John walked over, picked up the other controller, sat cross-legged on the carpet with practiced ease, and his hands flew across the buttons.
A few minutes later.
Along with the classic death jingle blaring from the TV, the Mario on the screen plunged headfirst into the bottomless pit once again.
John stared at the “GAME OVER” on the screen, his eyes going wide in disbelief.
“This is impossible!
My hand speed was clearly fast enough!”
He looked at the plastic controller in his hands, almost losing it, nearly crushing it to pieces.
“Hahaha, this is what we call game rules.
Mario’s jumps have momentum.
Fast hands don’t let you break the laws of physics.”
Leon leaned back against the sofa, doubled over laughing.
“In real life you can launch into the sky with one jump, but in the game, you’ve got to play by Mario’s rules like everyone else.
Come on, pay your tuition, it’s my turn this round.”
In the surveillance room.
Stan Edgar cut the audio feed, a faintly amused smile at the corner of his mouth.
“What an interesting conversation.”
Edgar watched the two playing the game on the screen.
“The boy has actually started thinking about how to give Leon superpowers.”
“Should we put a stop to this idea?
If Leon really did gain power and slipped out of our control…” Madelyn sounded worried.
“For an ordinary person to gain power in this world, it’s hardly that easy.
Even the simplest of those foreign arts has an absurdly high barrier to entry.”
Edgar shook his head dismissively.
“Still, this obsession of the boy’s can be put to use.”
Edgar narrowed his eyes, a cold plan taking shape in his mind.
“From now on, if we need the boy to do some extremely dangerous dirty work, or something that goes against that laughable ‘principle of justice’ of his, we’ll tell him the reward for that mission is a wondrous item that can extend an ordinary person’s life or let them protect themselves.”
Madelyn sucked in a cold breath.
This amounted to fastening an invisible leash around the boy’s neck, one made out of Leon’s safety.
“Do you understand, Madelyn?”
Edgar turned and walked toward the door.
“Emotion always works better than chains.”
After his promotion to senior supervisor, the quality of Leon’s life took a leap of an entirely different order.
He now had his own office with a panoramic one-way glass floor, right above the Sector B training ground.
Every morning, Logistics delivered freshly ground Geisha coffee and just-baked croissants right on schedule, and even his eternal, never-changing lab coat had been replaced by a slim-fit suit hand-tailored by an Italian.
Right now, Leon was sitting in the wide leather office chair, leafing through the top-secret files on the terminal that only high-level clearance could access.
The more he read, the more his heart pounded with alarm.
In one blurry photo, several dark figures riding broomsticks floated above the British Museum, with an invisible protective dome below them.
In another piece of footage, a group of onmyoji from Japan in garish outfits, with strangely shaped yokai floating behind them.
“This world really is one hell of a chaotic stew.”
Vought really did look a little short on confidence in the face of these genuinely supernatural powers.
Compound V could mass-produce superhumans, but the ceiling was too low, and the abilities were random and uncontrollable.
No wonder that old fox Stan Edgar had piled all his chips on John.
Leon turned his head and looked at the transparent glass beneath his feet.
In the training ground below, a brand-new “fine-grained power control” test was underway.
A military pitching machine had been modified into a launcher, firing glass marbles at random into the arena at fifty meters per second.
Six-year-old John, in a custom black training suit, stood in the center of the field.
He didn’t dodge, and he didn’t use heat vision.
Instead, his hands left streak after streak of afterimages in the air.
Each time an afterimage flashed past, another intact glass marble appeared between his fingers.
“A hundred and twenty marbles, all caught.
No cracks on the marble surfaces, force control perfect.”
The technician’s voice in the surveillance room was trembling.
This wasn’t only a display of speed and strength, it was a terrifying level of neural reaction and muscle control.
Just then, the office door was pushed open.
Madelyn walked in on her high heels, and behind her came a young white man in a flashy skintight battle suit, with a mohawk, looking about seventeen or eighteen.
The young man was chewing gum, wearing the arrogant expression of someone who thought he was the best in the world.
“Supervisor Leon, good morning.” Madelyn’s attitude was now politer by an order of magnitude than before.
“Morning, Madelyn.
And this is?” Leon sized up the young man.
“‘Sparkler,’ a new recruit just promoted up from the youth training camp last month.”
Madelyn introduced him.
“His ability is releasing high-voltage electrical current, and his potential is currently rated A-class in the company’s internal ranking.
PR plans to debut him in the second half of the year, as a rising star of the New York patrol team.”
Sparkler unceremoniously pulled out the chair across from Leon and sat down, propped both legs up on the desk, and blew a pink bubble.