Grizzly didn’t even leave me time to formulate a thought, let alone sketch a movement of retreat.
Scarcely had I turned my head toward him when the monster lunged with the brutal ferocity of a starving predator.
The fight was no fight at all.
It was a one-sided slaughter, an absolute humiliation of human biology before a genetic anomaly.
He dealt me a first punch.
Then a second.
Then ten.
The strikes rained down with the heaviness of an anvil and the speed of a machine gun.
I was lifted from the ground and battered from one end of the office to the other like a miserable ragdoll.
I didn’t even have the room to breathe.
Grizzly seized the collar of my suit with an iron grip.
With a grunt of playful effort, he raised me from the floor and literally exploded my skull against a heavy desk of solid oak, which flew into shards under the impact.
Without releasing his hold, he dragged me across the room and embedded me into a row of metal lockers that buckled in a deafening racket.
The tornado of violence culminated when he threw me head-first against the concrete of the load-bearing wall.
Plaster and cement dust rose in a thick cloud, blending into the extreme brutality of the moment.
Inside the immaculate suit, it was pure hell.
The white membrane held, refusing to tear, but it transformed me into a human shaker.
I was bathing in my own sweat and in the warm blood pouring in a continuous stream from my broken nose and split lips.
The sticky liquid was pooling at the bottom of the mask.
I half-choked with every breath, blinded by tears of pure pain, my skull ringing like a church bell struck by lightning.
In an ultimate survival reflex, pathetic and desperate, I saw Grizzly’s massive shadow fall over me once more.
I raised both arms in a cross to parry yet another downward strike.
The monster’s fist struck my forearms.
The suit’s polymer absorbed the external shock; it did not bend.
But the flesh, muscles, and bones of Owen Frey inside were not made of magic.
The energy tore straight through the armor.
CRAC.
The sound was sinister, sickening.
A white, blinding agony pierced my nervous system.
My forearm had just fractured clean under the pressure.
I let out an atrocious shriek of pain, my voice cracked by the blood in my throat.
Capitalizing on the opening, Grizzly didn’t stop.
He seized my torso with both hands, planted his feet into the debris-strewn floor, and hurled me with all his might across the room.
I took flight.
Time seemed to slow down for the space of a second.
My horizontally propelled body pulverized the office’s large glass partition in an explosion of shattered glass and twisted metal.
Weightlessness claimed me briefly, before I crashed two stories below.
I struck the asphalt of the small, enclosed courtyard at the rear of the school with violent force.
The impact chased whatever air remained in my lungs.
I lay there, splayed across the cold tarmac, unable to move a single muscle.
Above me, Grizzly’s massive silhouette stepped over the shattered window frame.
He jumped in turn.
He landed heavily a few yards away from me, bending his knees.
The courtyard’s asphalt cracked into a spiderweb beneath the weight of his reception.
When he drew himself up, he still wore that same manic grin, his amber, bear-like eyes dilated with enthusiasm.
He wasn’t even sweating.
He was having the time of his life.
I was at my absolute limit.
I couldn’t even feel my face anymore, numbed by successive concussions.
My legs refused to respond.
My survival instinct screamed inside my mind to run, to crawl, to hide, but my broken body had completely abandoned me.
I painfully turned my head to the side, my cheek pressed against the tarmac.
Through the courtyard gates, beyond the trees, I could see the blue and red reflections of emergency lights spinning across the surrounding building fronts.
I knew the S.R.B. and the police encircled the building.
The complex was locked down.
Dozens of heavily armed men were stationed behind their vehicles.
There had to be snipers trained on us from the adjacent roofs.
The courtyard was wide open to the sky.
They saw us.
They saw everything.
Gathering the very last thread of strength left in me, my voice trembling, drowned in blood and tears of helplessness, I whispered toward the invisible rooftops:
“Help me…”
The silence that followed was the most terrifying thing in my short life.
Nothing happened.
No gunshot tore through the air to bring down the monster advancing on me.
No siren drew closer.
No order was bellowed through a megaphone.
The forces of law and order, the nation’s elite supposed to protect the innocent, remained frozen in the shadows.
Motionless.
A thunderous, fat, and gravelly laugh shattered the deathly silence hanging over the courtyard.
Grizzly approached with slow steps, his heavy boots hammering the tarmac.
Possessing the hyper-developed hearing of a predator, he had perfectly caught my pathetic whisper.
He stopped at my height and squatted, resting a elbow on his massive knee.
His mutated face, still split by that sadistic grin, moved close to mine.
“You really think someone’s coming, boy?” he chuckled, shaking his head, genuinely amused by my naivety.
“You still haven’t figured out what you’ve stepped into, have you?”
I tried to pull my head back, but my neck, broken by the strain, refused to obey.
I could only endure his fetid breath and his amber stare.
“Let’s say the S.R.B. snipers or some hero agency have the tip of their rifle trained on my temple right this second… They won’t intervene. And you know why?” His grin widened, revealing blackened gums.
“Because this world is far more rotten than the pages of your little comic books. I had dreams of justice too, once. But life very quickly took care of straightening me out.”
He sighed, almost nostalgic, before dropping the plot bomb that would permanently shatter my reality.
“Everything you see on TV—the big smiles, the eleventh-hour rescues, the capes flying in the wind… it’s a goddamn hoax. The heroes? Mere actors managed by marketing departments with millions of dollars. And us, the famous ‘villains’? We’re just their foils. Their high-end sparring partners.”
He placed an enormous, callous hand on my battered chest piece, tapping the white material the way one taps the hood of a used car.
“I have a contract today. Zenith’s agency cut me a hell of a check to come here, spill some blood, and slaughter a few brats. The plan is to terrorize the country, get the entire nation weeping, and drive the ratings to an absolute fever pitch. Then, when the pressure is perfect, that moron Zenith will arrive to ‘neutralize’ me heroically in front of the world’s cameras. The tragedy will catapult him straight into the prestigious S-Rank, his agency will rake in the endorsement deals, and I’ll go spend a little VIP stint in prison with a bank account bursting at the seams. It’s business, kid. Everything is scripted.”
Sprawled on the asphalt, my body dislocated, drowning in my own blood and tears of pain, my brain refused to process this monstrosity.
My mind short-circuited.
The words looped endlessly.
A contract.
Slaughtering brats.
Everything is scripted.
The idols of this world… the “Supers” the entire country admired, paid monsters to kill innocent children in primary schools, solely to boost their own careers?
Heroism was nothing but a cheap advertising campaign built upon corpses?
My world, already fractured by the symbiote’s arrival, had just collapsed pure and simple.
There was nothing left.
No justice.
No hope.
Seeing that my gaze was emptying behind the visor of my helmet, Grizzly grew bored.
He rose slowly, popping his massive vertebrae, and stretched his neck.
The sadistic amusement left his eyes, replaced by a cold, mechanical professionalism.
“Come on, don’t worry,” he concluded in an almost reassuring tone.
“I’ll finish up quickly with you so I can get back to work upstairs. The kids aren’t going to slaughter themselves. Besides, that idiot Zenith shouldn’t be long now; I need to be in position for the camera.”
Grizzly clenched his colossal fist, his knuckles gleaming beneath the afternoon’s gray sun, and raised it high into the sky, ready to bring it down with the force of a forge hammer to crush my skull once and for all.