Immaculate white.
Royal gold.
Those colors had absolutely no business being here.
Not in the middle of this foul mush.
Not carved into raw meat.
The stench hit Owen a second after the sight did.
It wasn’t just blood; it was a heavy, acidic reek the putrid exhalation of death contaminating the ambient air.
That scrap of uniform belonged to Hope.
Either that, or to some poor idiot who had come up with the worst cosplay idea in human history.
In either case, the spectacle instantly short-circuited his brain’s neural pathways.
Owen didn’t utter a single heroic line.
He didn’t even swear.
He spun around, dropped to all fours on the damp asphalt, and violently heaved up his entire lunch.
The acid burned his throat, mixing with the filthy rainwater.
His chest contracted painfully.
Panic—the real, unadulterated kind—had just moved into his skull, and it had no intention of leaving.
His internal monologue exploded into a thousand alarm signals.
I’m in Northbridge.
The worst district in this godforsaken city.
The asshole of the world, where cops only venture out in armored vehicles.
A cold sweat broke out on his forehead.
If whatever was capable of tearing Earth’s greatest hero into butcher’s scraps was still lurking nearby, a sixty-kilo asthmatic high schooler wouldn’t last a millisecond.
He had to get the hell out of here.
Right now.
Owen wiped his mouth with a trembling sleeve, his eyes bloodshot.
He tried to draw a deep breath, but the smell of copper made his stomach churn all over again.
“Sorry, man…” he stammered toward the pile of flesh, his voice cracking from the shivers.
“You were great on TV. Seriously. Please don’t haunt my room, I’m already low on space.”
A pathetic attempt at rationalization.
A coping mechanism.
His hands shook so violently he almost dropped his cell phone as he pulled it from his pocket.
Sweaty fingers unlocked the screen.
The faint blue glow of the device illuminated the dark alley, casting bleak, dancing shadows against the graffiti-covered brick walls.
He started typing the emergency number for the S.R.B.
His only option.
If they dispatched a cleanup crew, he might just make it out alive.
But right as he was about to press the call button, the beam of light from his screen swept over a corner of the pool of blood.
His gaze locked.
Owen narrowed his eyes, almost forgetting to breathe.
In the center of the carnage, a piece of white fabric stood out.
It was shaped like a full mask—smooth, devoid of any human features.
But there was an anomaly.
An anomaly that screamed in the middle of this butchery: despite the ocean of blood surrounding it, the mask was perfectly clean.
A surgical white.
Too clean.
Then, the fabric twitched.
Owen held his breath.
It wasn’t an effect of the rain.
The mask had just lifted slightly, before sinking back down.
Ba-bum.
A heartbeat.
Slow.
Steady.
Like a waking heart.
An hallucination, he thought immediately.
It’s the shock.
Or the toxic fumes from the factory next door.
Driven by a morbid curiosity—that human flaw that compels bystanders to stare at car crashes—Owen took one more step.
Just one.
It was one step too far.
Without a sound, without the slightest warning, the white fabric coiled like a steel spring.
It launched itself out of the pool of blood, cutting through the air with the speed of an apex predator.
The impact was brutally violent.
The mask slammed dead into Owen’s face, throwing him backward hard.
His phone slipped from his hands and bounced onto the ground, its screen facing the sky, lighting the scene from below like a low-budget horror movie.
Owen opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came out.
The material wasn’t latex.
It was a warm, living, terrifying texture.
It gripped his skin with insane strength, instantly blocking his nostrils and forcing its way down his open throat.
Panicking, Owen dug his nails into the fabric to tear it off, but his fingers only met a slimy substance that refused to yield.
Then, the spreading began.
Thousands of white, organic filaments sprouted from the edges of the mask.
Like spiders on steroids, they crawled down his neck, crept under the collar of his jacket, and wrapped around his thin arms.
Owen thrashed on his back, suffocating from his onset of asthma and a primal dread.
The filaments bored through his clothes, binding directly to his flesh.
The world vanished.
He was plunged into absolute, freezing darkness.
He wasn’t putting on a suit.
He was being swallowed alive.
As Owen convulsed on the concrete, a prisoner of his blind and mute cocoon, a sharp metallic screech shattered the silence of the night.
At the entrance of the alley, three massive silhouettes cut through the light of the streetlamp.
A fat, cruel laugh echoed between the walls of Northbridge.
“We know you’re in there, Frey! We saw your footprints in the mud, you little shit!”
Sam Kodd’s voice.
Accompanied by his usual two goons.
They had finally tracked him down.
It was at that exact moment, as air refused to reach my lungs, that the loop finally closed in my shattered brain.
The stench of vomit, the freezing cold, the absolute certainty of losing control… everything aligned with an almost poetic irony.
“Well. Okay. I am literally dying in a disgusting alleyway.”
That thought, which had flashed through my mind at the very beginning like an absurd flash-forward, was no longer a guess: it was my present.
A prisoner of my own flesh, smothered by the shroud of a dead god right in front of three illiterate bullies, I only had one certainty left: if this white-and-gold parasite didn’t let me breathe in the next few seconds, being late for curfew would be the least of my damn worries.
Beneath the white membrane that now covered his entire face, Owen was struck by a flash of pure terror.
The irony of the situation was almost comical.
He wanted to scream.
He wanted to beg Sam and his brutes to come closer, to help him, to tear him away from this organic monster eating his skin.
Help me!
Please, help me!
But the symbiote reacted to the vibrations of the outside voices.
In a fraction of a second, the white matter solidified.
It became as hard as steel.
Owen’s body froze instantly, completely paralyzed, his muscles refusing to obey his own commands.
Before he could understand what was happening to him, an invisible, external force took control of his nervous system.
With a mechanical violence that threatened to dislocate his kneecaps and vertebrae, the suit forced him to snap upright.
His joints popped in the gloom.
Owen no longer controlled anything.
His body naturally adopted a straight, abnormally rigid, imposing posture.
The posture of a predator.
Under the stunned eyes of Sam Kodd, who had just stopped dead in his tracks, the transformed high schooler slowly turned his masked face perfectly white and devoid of expression toward his tormentors.