“…because today is the last time you’ll ever see the light of day.”
The Grizzly’s sentence resonated through the devastated classroom—heavy and cruel.
Inside my armor, I was literally petrified.
The sour, sickening taste of the vomit I had just choked back burned the back of my throat.
The air I breathed was choked with plaster dust, but above all, with the metallic, nauseating smell of fresh blood coating the floor and my own chest piece.
The smooth, white mask, meant to shield me from the outside world, was closing in on me like a coffin.
I was a prisoner of my own terror.
Facing me, death was no longer an abstract concept.
It was a mountain of muscle, flesh, and madness breathing just a few feet away.
Grizzly took a step forward.
A repulsive sound of grinding cartilage and realigning bones shattered the silence.
It was his mutation.
Before my horrified eyes, his lower jaw elongated slightly with a sinister pop, stretching his skin to the absolute limit.
His teeth thickened, sharpening into yellowish fangs.
His pupils dilated until they swallowed the irises completely, taking on the amber, inhuman, and ruthless glare of a wild predator.
The glare of a rabid bear.
He stopped, turned his head toward the teacher’s corpse, and then let his gaze slide toward the back of the room.
“Mmmh…” he murmured with a mockingly preoccupied, almost obscene air, scratching his deformed chin.
“Maybe I should have started with a kid. The staging would have been even better. Nobody really gives a damn about a grownup reduced to mush, but a child… now that, that brings tears in front of the cameras.”
A twisted grin stretched his jowls.
His predatory gaze locked precisely on the group of shrieking children.
He was looking at Lily.
The electric shock was instantaneous.
The pure terror freezing my limbs shattered, swept away by a visceral, protective instinct.
That was my little sister.
No. You won’t touch her.
I lunged forward awkwardly to block his path, interposing my entire body.
I raised an arm in a gesture I intended to be authoritative.
“Stop right there!” I screamed.
The suit’s vocal filter translated my sentence into a terrifying roar worthy of a lord of hell.
But the illusion stopped there.
Grizzly practically vanished from my field of vision.
His colossal mass shifted with a speed that defied the laws of physics.
Before I could even blink or the symbiote had time to compensate for my lag, he was on me.
BAM.
A colossal punch drove into my white abdomen.
The armor’s organic matter reacted flawlessly: it hardened instantly, keeping the fist from impaling me clean through.
But physics is a bitch.
The armor absorbed the penetration, but it couldn’t cancel out the blow’s monstrous kinetic energy.
I took the equivalent of a cannonball shot at point-blank range.
The air left my lungs in a pathetic, muffled groan.
My feet left the ground and I was projected backward with unheard-of violence.
I crashed onto my back, pinned to the floor, sliding for six feet.
My chest was a furnace.
I felt like my internal organs had just been run through a blender.
Doubled over in pain, panting, spitting blood inside my helmet, the cruel reality had just caught up to me: the gap between a true trained Super and a terrified civilian in a cosplay was an abyssal chasm.
Grizzly burst into a heavy, gravelly laugh, advancing toward me.
“Wow,” he chuckled, amused by my weakness.
“You’re really clumsy, aren’t you, boy? Came all the way to the slaughterhouse by yourself without even knowing how to fight. Don’t worry, I’ll put an end to your little misery.”
He raised his two immense fists, joining them above his head like a blacksmith’s mallet.
He was going to crush my skull, break the white membrane, and reduce me to mush on the school floor.
My mind blinded by the pain, I knew I couldn’t parry that.
I didn’t know how to block, or how to duck.
I only had one option left: the brute force of the thing serving as my second skin.
Launch.
Propelled by the symbiote’s insane power, I didn’t stand up.
I bounded forward from the ground, head-first, like a missile.
The dome of my armored skull slammed violently into Grizzly’s muscular stomach.
Under the impact’s force, he gasped.
Without giving him a second of respite, I activated the suit’s anti-gravity toward the sky at maximum capacity.
Amidst the redoubled shrieks of terror from the kids below, we both took off like a rocket.
Caught off guard, Grizzly was lifted from the ground.
But the beast wouldn’t let go.
During our meteoric ascent toward the ceiling, instead of trying to break free, he wrapped his massive legs around my waist and rained his enormous fists down on my back.
The blows fell with the frequency and force of a jackhammer. Get faster updates on g.com.
The armor absorbed the shocks, but every strike threatened to dislocate my spine.
I screamed in pain, channeling every ounce of energy into maintaining our upward course.
CRASH.
We slammed into the classroom ceiling dead-on.
The reinforced concrete, the plaster tiles, the tangle of electrical wires and pipes exploded in a spray of rubble and sparks.
We broke violently into the upper floor—into what looked like the main administrative office.
Our kinetic momentum was so monstrous that we didn’t stop at the floorboards: we shot through the room like a bullet, violently slamming into the second level’s ceiling.
Gravity finally reclaimed its rights.
We fell back down heavily, in a racket of shattered glass, splintered wood, and crumpled sheet metal, landing right in the middle of heavy mahogany desks and administrative files scattered like confetti.
The impact knocked the wind out of me for the second time.
I rolled onto my side, miserable, coughing hard enough to rip my throat out, clutching my bruised ribs.
My vision blurry, I tried to push myself up onto my elbows.
The dust was settling in the ruined office.
A few yards away from me, a fluid motion caught my eye.
Grizzly was getting back onto his feet.
He wasn’t stumbling up.
He was drawing himself up with the chilling agility of a large predator.
His face was covered in gashes and blood from the concrete shards and torn wires, but that mask of gore only heightened his nightmarish appearance.
He wiped his cheek with the back of his hand.
He didn’t wince.
He smiled.
A blissful, manic smile.
He was literally thrilled with the situation.
His amber eyes shone with a psychopathic excitement.
“Well now, boy…” he breathed, his voice vibrating with a sickening rush of adrenaline.
“You’re outdoing yourself here. This is starting to get fun.”
From the floor, sprawled amidst the splinters and dust, utter despair crushed my heart.
I had just struck this creature with the kinetic force of a truck.
I had just forced him vertically through a reinforced concrete floor.
And the guy was smiling.
Grizzly wasn’t just a criminal with a power.
He was death incarnate.
And staring at him, my breath short, I had absolutely no idea how I was going to survive the next sixty seconds.