I arrived two blocks from the school complex in a sharp screech of tortured rubber.
I slammed the cruiser bike’s brakes with such superhuman force that the pads melted instantly against the rim, releasing a pungent stench of burning plastic.
Since the pastel pink bicycle had officially given up the ghost, I carelessly tossed it into a laurel bush, which took on a slouched, smoking appearance.
I pressed myself against the brick wall of a convenience store and peeked around the corner.
The sight turned my blood to ice.
The perimeter was completely locked down.
A wall of flashing blue and red.
Dozens of police cars blocked the access points, snipers were already in position on the surrounding rooftops, and S.R.B. tactical forces, encased in heavy black armor, were establishing a security cordon.
But the worst realization hit me like a punch to the gut: not a single Super was on the scene yet.
The elite were taking their sweet time.
Their agents were probably fixing their hair for the cameras or waiting for marketing approval to intervene.
Meanwhile, Lily’s situation was critical.
Panic gripped my throat.
I didn’t have my phone—shattered on the high school floor.
I had no access to any live video streams from the news networks.
I didn’t know how many hostage-takers were inside, or what kind of weapons they had.
And above all, I didn’t know which classroom my little sister was in.
My brain churned in search of a solution.
If I approached on foot in this stolen suit, the S.R.B. cops would flag me as an Omega-level threat.
They’d riddle me with bullets the second I stepped onto the asphalt, armor or no armor.
I couldn’t go through them.
I had to go over them.
I backed into the darkness of the alley.
I closed my eyes beneath the smooth helmet and took a deep breath, trying to calm the frantic pounding of my heart.
I had to jump.
I bent my knees and pushed off my legs.
A pathetic, twenty-inch hop.
A normal high schooler’s jump in gym class.
I swore silently.
The suit wouldn’t activate if I kept control.
I had to let the parasite take over, surrender the reins of my nervous system to it.
I released my fear, unlocked my muscles, and let the organic machine’s instinct fuse with my big-brother dread.
Instantly, the white matter contracted around my calves and thighs with a wet, sucking sound.
The fibers tightened, building up an absurd amount of kinetic energy, transforming my legs into military-grade hydraulic rams. This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
Second jump.
I launched ten feet in the air and landed heavily, cracking the asphalt.
Third jump.
Thirty feet.
I scraped the edge of the convenience store roof before coming down with the grace of an anvil.
Again.
I had to go higher.
Further.
On the fifth jump, the math went out the window.
The symbiote, finally understanding my absolute sense of urgency, released every ounce of accumulated pressure.
BOUUM!
The alley floor exploded, cratering six feet wide.
I was propelled vertically at an absolutely terrifying speed.
The G-forces crushed my lungs.
I cleared the streetlights, then the roofs of the neighborhood buildings in a single, sharp jolt.
The wind howled against my armor.
In a second, I found myself suspended in mid-air, over three hundred feet above the Northbridge suburbs.
Time seemed to freeze.
Vertigo struck me down.
My stomach leaped into my throat.
The weightlessness of the apex lasted only a moment before gravity reclaimed its rights.
I was going to fall back down.
I was going to splatter in the middle of the cops and end up as a human pancake, divine armor or not.
In a total panic, screaming in terror inside my airtight helmet, I begged the thing glued to my skin: Fly!
Fly, you space tick, or we both die!
The exact microsecond the freefall began, the symbiotic rescue protocol activated.
A silent wave of energy pulsed through the suit.
The anti-gravity kicked in brutally.
My body stabilized in mid-air with a jolt that nearly dislocated my neck.
I was floating.
But a major problem remained: I had no steering wheel, no joystick, no brake pedal.
The parasite had captured my intent and locked onto the target across the neighborhood.
Like a heat-seeking ballistic missile, the armor pivoted horizontally and shot in a straight line toward the school at a staggering speed.
I was a mere passive passenger, completely helpless and terrified inside my own body.
The red-brick school complex rushed toward me like a rifle bullet.
The vision zoomed violently, cutting through the façade: I saw dozens of small silhouettes curled up on the floor, hands over their heads.
And in the middle, an armed man, standing, ranting.
It was the right classroom.
But the suit wasn’t aiming for the window.
KRAKOOM!
The sound of the impact was apocalyptic.
At over sixty miles per hour, my armored body struck the solid brick load-bearing wall dead-on.
A deafening explosion of dust, pulverized red bricks, and plaster tore the classroom apart.
My heroic entry instantly morphed into a physics disaster.
Propelled by my monstrous inertia, I smashed through the masonry, plowed into the classroom’s linoleum floor, and faceplanted hard.
I slid for several yards in a doomsday racket, literally plowing the floor covering with my white polymer chin, taking down school desks in my wake.
But in that absolute chaos, I caught a monumental stroke of luck.
By pulverizing the wall, the massive block of bricks I had shoved forward with my own chest slammed right into the hostage-taker, who had chosen the wrong spot to stand.
The guy was catapulted across the room with the gentleness of a ragdoll and crashed miserably against the blackboard, instantly knocked out cold.
POV of the Fifth-Grade Teacher.
The air in the classroom was choked with chalk dust and plaster.
Mrs. Dubois was trembling in every limb, curled up beneath the teacher’s desk, her arms wrapped around two of her weeping students.
The children shrieked, hands plastered over their ears, terrified by the explosion that had just gutted their classroom.
She blinked, trying to pierce the grayish cloud.
The terrible “Super” who had been threatening their lives seconds ago—the one pointing a gun at them and laughing—now lay unconscious, half-embedded in the debris of chalk and the blackboard eraser.
A heavy silence fell, disturbed only by the children’s sobs.
Then, in the center of the gaping hole in the wall, the dust cleared.
A silhouette took shape.
An armor of blinding white, laced with golden lines, covered in rubble and red dust.
The form rose slowly, almost painfully, planting a knee, then a steel foot onto the debris.
The creature had no face.
Just a smooth, impenetrable surface.
It tilted its head toward the floor and let out a low growl.
(On the inside, high schooler Owen Frey was groaning a pathetic “Ow, my freaking head…”).
But on the outside, the mask’s vocal filter transformed that human complaint into a ténébreux, robotic rumble that rattled the classroom’s remaining windows.
The hostages sat paralyzed, incapable of the slightest movement, their breath stolen by dread.
Eyes wide, they stared at this new monster that had just fallen from the sky.
Was it a savior dropped from the heavens… or a far worse nightmare taking over the shift?