Plaster dust swirled in the classroom—thick and suffocating, dancing inside the sunbeams that pierced through the gaping hole in the wall.
I stumbled to my feet, my ears ringing.
Inside my airtight helmet, pain radiated through the center of my face with untold violence.
The sixty-mile-per-hour impact had won the battle against my biology.
My nose was undeniably broken.
I could feel warm, sticky blood pooling over my lips and chin, trapped beneath the smooth, immaculate surface of the mask.
It was suffocating, but the adrenaline kept me upright.
I scanned the room, my magnified vision cutting easily through the cloud of debris.
A score of ten-year-old children were huddled at the very back of the classroom, pressed against one another like a flock of terrified sparrows.
My heart skipped a beat before restarting at a full gallop.
Amidst the lowered heads, I recognized two familiar pigtails and wide eyes staring back in sheer horror.
Lily.
She was alive.
Whole.
A relief so monumental washed over me that it made me dizzy.
Then, I looked down, and my relief evaporated, making room for panic.
I had literally embedded an adult male into the center of the blackboard.
The body was half-buried under concrete rubble, arms dangling at an odd angle.
Holy shit, I killed a teacher! my brain screamed.
I’m a murderer!
Mom is going to skin me alive before the cops even arrest me!
I took half a step forward, my breath short.
Through the dust, I noticed the thick body armor, the heavy-caliber tactical webbing, the military assault rifle dropped on the floor, and the black ski mask covering the face of the embedded victim.
Ah, no.
Phew.
It was just a heavily armed terrorist.
My purity remained untarnished.
My morals were safe.
I raised both hands—their white-and-gold polymer gleaming despite the grime—in a gesture I hoped would look as soothing as possible.
I turned toward the back of the class to reassure my sister and her classmates.
“Don’t worry, kids!” I tried to say in my caring teenage voice.
“I’m here to help you!”
But the mask’s filter wasn’t engineered for nursery rhymes.
It transformed my words into a deep, ténébreux, and absolutely demonic rumble that rattled the remaining windowpanes.
The effect was immediate and disastrous.
Instead of calming down, the entire classroom—Lily included—burst into terrified shieks, convinced that the game’s final boss had just spawned to devour them. The source of this chapter is novelping(.)com.
I was about to take a shameful step back when the sound of grinding stone drew my attention.
The debris from the blackboard was shifting.
The captor wasn’t dead.
With terrifying ease, the masked man shoved aside a hundred-pound block of reinforced concrete as if it were a mere feather pillow.
He extricated himself from the crater and drew himself up to his full height, dusting the rubble off his shoulders with a grunt.
Looking barely annoyed, he distantly rubbed the back of his neck.
He muttered in a gravelly voice, half-ignoring me, “Damn it, Zenith… This entrance wasn’t part of the plan. You threw out my vertebra with your bullshit…”
He popped his neck with a sharp click and finally looked up.
He stopped dead.
His gaze locked onto my white armor, my cape fluttering in the wind, my faceless mask.
“Wait…” he let out, genuinely confused.
“Who the hell are you? What kind of botched Hope cosplay is this?”
He narrowed his eyes beneath his ski mask, inspecting me from head to toe.
“Are you a rookie? You’re heavily ahead of schedule, kid.”
My brain was running on empty.
Who was Zenith?
What rookie was he talking about?
I had absolutely no idea.
I was terrified, blood hammering against my temples, but my big-brother instinct left me no choice.
I took a sidestep to physically interpose myself, erecting a barrier between this unpredictable mountain of muscle and the corner of the room where Lily was hiding.
I threw myself into a defensive stance, fists raised, awkwardly copying a boxer’s guard I had seen on TV.
The captor remained silent for two seconds.
Then, he exploded into laughter.
It wasn’t an amused laugh.
It was a fat, deep laugh that resonated from the bottom of his chest.
A predator’s laugh.
He had just analyzed my trembling posture.
He understood instantly that I was no S.R.B. professional.
“No, you’re shitting me…” he chuckled, shaking his head.
“You actually think you’re a hero? Look at how you stand. You’re just a suburban vigilante. A piece-of-shit in tights with an ego too big for his own good.”
At that exact moment, a muffled sound rose near the terrorist’s heavy boots.
It was the classroom teacher.
The poor man, cowering under his wrecked desk, had just let out an uncontrollable whimper of terror.
The captor’s gaze dropped to the teacher.
The amusement vanished from his voice, replaced by a deadly coldness.
“Gotta get into the mood…” he sighed, like an assembly line worker starting his shift.
“When it’s too soft, I get bored. Well, since Zenith is late and I haven’t gotten to have any fun yet…” The source of this chapter is g.com.
Before my brain could even formulate the command to move, before the ultra-responsive suit could even activate, the monster leaned down.
With a single massive hand, he grabbed the teacher’s skull.
And he squeezed.
SQUELCH.
The sound was indescribably obscene.
A wet abomination.
Under the phenomenal pressure of the captor’s fingers, the cranium instantly gave way with the revolting ease of a piece of overripe fruit crushed in a fist.
A scarlet spray mixed with gray matter and bone shards exploded into the air.
The blood gushed with unheard-of violence, splattering across the gutted wall, the open notebooks on the floor, and drenching my immaculate white armor in large, bright red droplets.
The teacher’s decapitated body collapsed onto the linoleum like a ragdoll whose strings had been cut, leaving a sudden, horribly sticky, deathly silence.
Reality hit my mind at ten thousand miles per hour.
This wasn’t a comic book.
This wasn’t a schoolyard duel with Sam Kodd to defend my ego.
This wasn’t a spat between friends or a viral video on the internet.
This was the real world of Supers.
An open-air slaughterhouse.
A ruthless bloodbath where human lives were nothing but fragile pouches of meat exploded out of pure boredom.
Terror struck me down—total, absolute, paralyzing.
A sudden wave of nausea twisted my guts.
My stomach contracted violently.
If I threw up right now inside this sealed helmet, I was going to choke.
My legs lost all their strength.
I was unable to bear my own weight and that of my own ignorance.
I fell heavily to my knees in the chalk dust, my breath short, my gaze locked in horror on the teacher’s mutilated corpse a few feet away from me.
The captor ran a gloved hand over his own face to wipe away the blood that had splattered him, ripping off his ski mask in the process.
He revealed a ruined face, stitched together with thick, pale scars.
A sickly grin stretched his thin lips, exposing yellowed teeth, and his eyes were bloodshot with a wild fury.
Beneath his skin, the muscles of his neck and shoulders began to pulse and swell abnormally, tearing the collar of his tactical fatigues.
His metahuman power was activating at full capacity.
He took a heavy step in my direction, crushing a piece of chalk beneath his boot.
The floor shook slightly.
“Ah, I forgot my manners, boy,” he declared, advancing toward my kneeling, psychologically broken body.
“They call me Grizzly.”
He cracked his knuckles.
The sound echoed like muffled gunshots.
“Let’s play a little game, you and me. Take a good look at the view… because today is the last time you’ll ever see the light of day.”