“Listen, officer.
I’m a busy man.
I’ve got a talk show to tape this afternoon.
You dragged me out of bed at the crack of dawn down into this basement just so I could watch some little brat catch glass balls?”
Leon looked at the pair of mud-caked tactical boots on his desk and frowned slightly.
“Madelyn, you didn’t bring him here to invite me out for tea, did you?”
“President Edgar’s orders.” Madelyn handed over a file.
“John’s static test data has maxed out.
We need a dynamic, real-combat evaluation.
Not only to assess his power, but to assess the ’emotional control’ you’ve been teaching him.”
Leon understood.
They wanted to find John a sparring partner, to see whether he could keep his head when facing an opponent with superpowers, especially the kind with a mouth on him who got under your skin.
“You sure you want to send him in?”
Leon glanced at Sparkler, who was still blowing bubbles, and his tone was earnest.
“This kid looks pretty young.
If he ends up crippled, that’s going to be hard to explain to PR, isn’t it?”
Sparkler popped his bubble with a snap, and his face darkened.
“Hey, deskbound paper pusher, you got the picture here?
I can release a hundred thousand volts of high-voltage current in an instant!
You want me to spar with some kid who still wets the bed?
I’m scared I’ll slip up and fry the kid into a strip of bacon!”
Leon sighed.
There was never any reasoning with a fool determined to die.
“Fine.”
Leon pressed the comm button on his desk.
“John, stop for a minute.
A new friend wants to play a game with you.”
A few minutes later, the isolation door to the training field opened.
Sparkler rolled his neck and swaggered in.
John was just lining up the last few glass marbles in a neat row on the metal tray.
Seeing the man come in, he stopped what he was doing, his deep blue eyes sizing the stranger up and down.
“You’re not wearing a white coat, and you’re not carrying a weapon.” John’s voice was clear and calm.
“Are you a bad guy, or a tester?”
“I’m your daddy, you little runt.”
Sparkler sneered, then clapped his hands together hard, two blinding blue arcs crackling in his palms.
“Listen, I don’t care whose bastard kid you are.
If you start crying from the pain in a minute, don’t say big brother didn’t warn you.”
John ignored the taunt.
Instead he raised his head, looking toward Leon behind the glass of the second-floor control room.
Leon spoke through the microphone.
“John, this is a combat simulation. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
Your opponent has superpowers.
Remember who you are, and remember the rules I taught you.
Pull your punches.”
“Understood, Leon.”
Hearing Leon’s command, John drew his gaze back at once and stood up perfectly straight.
Then he worked to adjust the muscles of his face, producing a sunny, radiant, utterly flawless “hero’s smile.”
That smile, set on his exquisite little face, would have melted any ordinary person on the outside.
But in this atmosphere, with a fight about to break out, it carried a hair-raising, eerie quality.
The smile unnerved Sparkler, and for no reason it set him seething.
“Quit the spooky act!”
He roared and shoved both hands forward.
A thick blue bolt of lightning, like a frenzied python, crossed the dozen-odd meters in an instant and struck John full on the body!
A blast.
The blinding electric light swallowed the small figure in an instant, the high-voltage current ripping through the air with an ear-splitting crack.
In the surveillance room, Madelyn clenched her fists without thinking.
But when the light faded, the scene inside the training field made everyone hold their breath.
John was still standing where he’d been, and the standard smile on his face hadn’t shifted by a single millimeter of arc.
Aside from a few fine sparks of static crackling over the surface of his black training suit, he was completely unharmed.
A hundred thousand volts of high-voltage current seemed, to him, no different from a light breeze.
“This…
how is this possible?!”
Sparkler’s eyes went wide, and he backed up a step as if he’d seen a ghost.
“You don’t play by the rules.”
John kept that unsettling smile, speaking slowly.
“The other person wasn’t ready yet, and you attacked all of a sudden.
That’s a sneak attack.
A sneak attack is what a bad guy does.”
Before he’d finished speaking, John’s figure vanished from the spot.
Sparkler didn’t even have time to make out the movement.
He saw a blur, and the blond little devil was already standing right in front of him.
“Die!” Terror and panic mixing together, Sparkler instinctively tried to discharge all the electricity in his body.
But the moment he raised his hand, John’s soft little hand had already come to rest gently on his wrist.
“Leon says a hero has to keep up appearances, can’t make things all bloody.”
John stared straight into Sparkler’s eyes, his tone soft as if telling a bedtime story.
“Besides, you’ve got to be on TV.”
A sharp crack.
No tearing, no blood and flesh flying.
John only gave his wrist a light flick, and a terrifying, precise force erupted in an instant.
A dense series of bursting sounds ran up Sparkler’s right arm.
His ulna and radius, wrapped inside the muscle, were snapped apart inch by inch! You are reading on novelping.com, the official source.
“Aaaaagh!!!”
Sparkler let out a wretched howl, the pain dropping him to his knees.
But John’s movement didn’t stop.
He kept that perfect smile, reached out with his other hand, grabbed Sparkler by his flashy collar, and tossed him through the air offhandedly, like flinging away a torn sack.
A thud.
Sparkler arced through the air and slammed hard into the alloy wall at the edge of the training field, knocked out cold on impact, sliding down the wall and leaving a ghastly streak of blood.
The whole fight had lasted less than ten seconds.
A dead silence returned to the training field.
John turned around and lifted his head toward Leon on the second floor.
The standard smile on his face vanished in an instant, replaced by the eager look of a child waiting to be praised.
“Leon, did I do it right?”
John’s voice carried clearly through the microphone into the office.
“I didn’t use heat vision, and I didn’t tear his hand off.
I controlled the force to exactly the level that would snap his bones.”
John explained his logic in earnest.
“And I didn’t break his legs.
You said he has to be on TV this afternoon.
A broken arm he can cover up with clothes, but with broken legs he couldn’t walk out on stage.
I’m being considerate, right?”
In the office.
Madelyn felt her back already soaked through with cold sweat.
Looking down at that innocent little face, for the first time she understood deeply what President Edgar had meant by “a live volcano wrapped in pretty turf.”
The kid’s logic was flawless, airtight, and matched every single rule Leon had taught him to perfection.
But the coldness and cruelty in his bones grew wild and unchecked in the gaps between those rules.
The hand holding Leon’s coffee cup went a little stiff.
He took a deep breath and pressed the comm button.
“…Very well done, John.
Your force control is textbook-level, and you really did take PR’s difficulties into account.
Tonight we can add an extra plate of fried chicken nuggets.”
Hearing Leon’s praise, John gave an excited little hop in place, then walked obediently off to the side.
He even thoughtfully picked up a rag, ready to wipe off the bloodstain Sparkler had left on the wall.
“Supervisor, your teaching results are…
truly impressive.”
Madelyn swallowed, a trace of real awe entering the look she gave Leon.
“You flatter me, Madelyn.”
Leon set down his coffee cup, outwardly steady as a rock, but inside he was screaming like a madman.
Considerate?
You call shattering a man’s bones into a comminuted fracture being considerate?!
It seemed that, after setting up “rules” for this kid, he was going to have to find a way to teach him what human empathy actually was.
The road ahead is long and far, and raising this little terror is going to be the death of me.