Time stopped.
My blood froze in my veins.
With bugging eyes, I stared at my shattered phone on the hallway’s cold linoleum.
The word “HOSTAGE” and the name of my little sister’s school burned through the screen.
My brain short-circuited.
With a frantic motion, I scooped the phone up.
I wasn’t even aware of my own body anymore.
“Owen?” Maya repeated, her furrowed brow marking genuine surprise.
“What’s wrong?”
I looked at her.
My face must have been as white as a corpse just hauled out of the river.
I was utterly incapable of articulating a rational explanation.
“Gotta go…” I stammered, looking like a damned soul.
“Absolute emergency!”
I spun on my heels and bolted down the hallway at breakneck speed, shoving two students out of the way without so much as an apology.
Maya stood there, apple juice box in hand.
It was probably the first time she had ever seen me with an expression of such unadulterated terror.
She froze for a second, almost worried, trying to analyze the situation.
Then, her legendary nonchalance took back the wheel.
She shrugged.
“Absolute emergency with a face like that?” she muttered to herself.
“He just has a sudden, explosive need to take a crap.”
She waved off my departure, unlocked her phone, and slumped back onto her radiator to resume her game.
I sprinted toward the school’s exit doors as if the flames of hell were licking at my heels.
The moment I cleared the gates, my asthma hit me dead-on.
My sedentary teenage lungs burned agonizingly with every intake of air, but adrenaline—pure and lifesaving—masked the pain.
Panic annihilated everything else.
Lily’s primary school was miles away, on the other side of the Northbridge highway loop.
As I ran down the sidewalk, losing my breath, I tapped frantically on my cracked screen and dialed my mom.
Bip…
Bip…
Bip…
The sound drilled into my eardrums.
Come on, pick up.
Please, pick up.
“You have reached the voicemail of Elena Frey…”
I hung up, cursing out loud.
Of course.
She had just finished a grueling night shift at the ER.
She wouldn’t see the news for hours.
A chilling realization struck my stomach, stealing my breath.
There was no one else.
I was my little sister’s only line of defense.
Inside my backpack, the curse awoke.
The mask began to thrash and vibrate with insane intensity against my back, like a rabid animal locked in a cage.
The symbiote sensed my stress spike, my absolute dread.
It felt the call of blood.
For the first time in my life, I didn’t want to run away.
I ducked into a filthy little alleyway just behind the school’s sports complex.
I violently threw my bag to the ground.
The zipper burst halfway open.
The white mask pulsed softly in the shadows.
I fell to my knees, panting, tears of panic blurring my vision.
I plunged my hands into the bag and grabbed it with both palms.
I swallowed my fear, closed my eyes, and slammed it voluntarily onto my face.
The deployment was brutally violent.
A wave of viscous cold exploded from my skull to engulf my neck, my torso, my arms, and my legs.
The white-and-gold filaments wrapped around my limbs with a terrifying, organic sucking sound, shredding my clothes, covering my human weakness.
The transformation took a mere two seconds.
The asthmatic, miserable, terrified high schooler vanished from the face of the earth.
In his place, the divine entity—smooth and silent—drew itself up to its full height in the shadows of the alley.
The parasite was ready to rumble.
The exact microsecond the armor sealed, I felt a visceral, electric impulse take control of my legs.
The symbiote identified the distance to the target.
The organic machine wanted to flex my knees to the absolute limit, ready to uncoil like a titanic spring and launch me into the air at Mach 1.
I screamed internally, fighting the program with every ounce of my human soul.
No way in hell!
I had zero flight control.
None.
I had almost embedded myself in a glass roof two nights ago.
If I launched blindly at eighty miles per hour over the city, I’d smash into a building, break my neck, or miss my target by three miles.
And if I croaked on a rooftop, Lily wouldn’t have a brother anymore.
I forced my legs to lock and stay grounded.
My golden boots crushed the asphalt under the conflicting pressure.
I needed a vehicle.
My gaze—its sharpness now multiplied by the mask’s interface—swept the street at the exit of the alley.
It locked instantly onto a small municipal parking lot.
My choice fell on the very first available ride: a cruiser bike, painted a faded pastel pink, thoroughly rusted, and equipped with a wrinkled wicker basket up front.
In a fraction of a second, I was beside it.
The bike was secured by a heavy, hardened steel U-lock.
I raised an armored finger.
With a simple flick generating an absurd amount of breaking force, the steel lock exploded into pieces with a resounding CLANG.
I didn’t have time to worry about my dignity.
I mounted the pink bike.
The frame was far too small for me, forcing my knees into a less-than-flattering angle.
The armor’s majestic white cape fell pathetically over the rear rack.
I placed my imposing golden boots onto the cheap plastic pedals, and I pushed.
The suit did what it did best.
It amplified my muscular movement by roughly 10,000%.
At the very first stomp on the pedal, the rear tire screeched with the wail of a dying beast, instantly kicking up a pungent cloud of burnt rubber smoke onto the asphalt.
The bike was catapulted forward.
On the main avenue leading to the Northbridge suburbs, traffic was completely paralyzed by distant police roadblocks.
Mr. François, fifty and looking tired, tapped nervously on the steering wheel of his sedan, trapped in the gridlock, half-listening to the radio crackle out the news of the hostage situation.
Suddenly, a shrill whistling tore through the air.
François turned his head toward his rearview mirror.
Something was approaching.
Something inconceivably fast.
SWOOSH.
A monumental displacement of air rattled the chassis of his car.
François’s eyes widened, his jaw dropping, refusing to believe what his retina had just printed.
It was a white and gold shape.
Sublime.
Terrifying.
An entity worthy of mythological frescoes, whose aura commanded absolute respect.
And this implacable god… was pedaling a pink cruiser bike with a basket at over eighty miles per hour.
The image was as epic as it was utterly ridiculous.
The Super’s legs blurred into absolute invisibility to the naked eye, turning the crankset into a circular mist.
The bike approached the tight gap between a delivery van and François’s sedan.
Without slowing down, the white entity locked the rear wheel, throwing the rusted bike into a flawless, controlled slide—a text-book, Tokyo Drift-style maneuver—skimming past the bumpers in a shower of sparks before shooting straight toward the horizon, the cape fluttering majestically behind the wicker basket.
François blinked, stared at the empty road, and slowly turned off his radio.
“I really need to quit coffee,” he muttered into the silence of his car.