Grizzly’s gigantic fist tore downward toward my skull, blocking out the gray sun, carrying with it a promise of annihilation.
But at that exact microsecond, the physics of my world shattered.
Adrenaline saturated my brain with such sheer violence that time literally seemed to stop.
The fatal trajectory of the fist froze mere inches from my visor.
The sound of the wind, the distant screams, the sirens… everything vanished.
An absolute, cotton-like white silence enveloped the courtyard.
Within this suspended fraction of a second, my mind spun far beyond its limits.
It fractured, devoured by panic.
Thought disassembled itself into nothing but a looping error code.
Die.
He’s going to die.
Death.
Die.
So young?
Me?
I’m scared.
FEAR.
DIE.
DEATH.
DUST.
THE END.
The end?
Really?
Here, on this cold tarmac?
I haven’t even been able to do anything yet.
And Lily.
Alone.
Terrified in that classroom upstairs.
Left to the monsters.
MY SISTER.
DEATH.
THE END.
DESTRUCTION.
LILY.
DEATH.
LILY.
LILY.
DEATH.
DEATH.
DEATH.
DEATH.
LILY.
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LILY.
LILY.
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DEATH.
Faced with the imminent destruction of its host, and fed by this spike of raw terror, the parasite sleeping beneath my skin woke up completely.
The entity ceased to be a mere garment.
My human consciousness—weak and panicked—was violently relegated to the passenger seat.
Fear was crushed by the armor fusing with my last coherent thought.
DIE DEATH DEATH.
DEATH DEATH DIE.
THE END.
NO.
I DON’T WANT TO.
REFUSAL.
REFUSAL.
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REFUSAL.
RESCUE.
SAVE.
SAVE LILY.
SISTER.
SAVE.
My mind disconnected, I raised my left arm.
The one whose radius and ulna had just been shattered.
Time snapped back into gear.
Grizzly’s fist slammed into my open palm.
The impact generated a shockwave that swept away the courtyard’s dust and cracked the asphalt beneath our weight.
But I hadn’t moved a single millimeter.
My fractured arm, held in place by the titanic rigidity of the white polymer, stopped the monster’s strike dead.
Grizzly’s amber eyes widened in total shock.
His manic grin faltered.
He understood instantly that it was no longer a terrified kid looking back at him.
The white armor’s posture had shifted radically.
It had slouched, tensed.
It had become animalistic.
Predatory.
It had just woken up.
The entity took absolute control.
I lunged forward at lightning speed, grabbing the giant’s torso.
The power deployed by the armor was so insane that the courtyard floor exploded beneath our feet.
We both took flight, shooting back up through the void in reverse.
CRASHHHHH.
We shattered the upstairs window all over again, crashing back into the middle of the office.
The fury was blind.
Inside the mask, I was screaming at the top of my lungs—a blood-curdling roar that had nothing human left in it.
IT MUST SAVE LILY.
IT REFUSES TO DIE.
Grizzly tried to defend himself, to parry the storm of blows raining down on him.
But he felt immediately that something was profoundly wrong.
The white armor’s strikes had become infinitely heavier, faster, more destructive.
It was no longer holding back to preserve the fragile body of its host inside: it was using one hundred percent of its murderous strength.
Once.
Twice.
Ten times.
The violence was unheard of.
I grabbed him by the throat and slammed his skull against the only wall still standing.
The wall exploded under the impact.
The bear collapsed heavily onto the debris-strewn floor.
No more fat laughs.
No more cynical mockery.
No more theater for the cameras.
Just the absolute silence of defeat.
But it wasn’t enough.
The entity throbbed with a murderous ecstasy.
It had to destroy the threat permanently.
Eradicate it to ensure the host—and by extension, Lily—were in absolute safety.
The armor’s right arm drew back, building up a terrifying kinetic energy, ready to bring down a fatal blow that would reduce the mercenary’s head to mush.
In the momentum of my own strike, my gaze caught a large shard of the broken window, resting vertically against an overturned piece of furniture.
I saw my reflection.
The “hero’s” immaculate white armor was covered in splatters of scarlet blood.
My posture was that of a butcher.
I was a bloodthirsty monster on the verge of executing a downed man.
The shock was total.
That reflection wasn’t me.
Stop!
Terrified by what I was about to commit, I fought with every ounce of my soul to take back the reins of my own body.
I forced that thing to step back.
At the very last tenth of a second, I reined in the strike’s lethal force.
My fist came down, yes, but I controlled the power of the impact.
The blow struck Grizzly’s skull with the exact force needed to turn off his nervous system without killing him.
The monster spasmed and sank permanently into unconsciousness, his head bloody, but his chest rising faintly with the rhythm of his remaining breath.
I hadn’t killed him.
I had won, and I had kept my soul.
The exact second the fight ended, the adrenaline loop closed with sheer brutality.
All the limits of my biology hit me dead-on.
The blinding agony of my fractured arm, the fire in my ribs, the atrocious migraine spliting my battered skull.
The armor became nothing but a heavy weight on my shoulders.
I stumbled, feeling my legs give out, threatening to slip into unconsciousness right next to my victim.
Suddenly, a crashing racket rose from the ground floor.
“S.R.B.! SECURE THE PERIMETER!”
I heard heavy doors being kicked open, the sound of tactical boots invading the hallways.
The breach teams were coming in.
If the nation’s elite found me here, collapsed, wearing the stolen suit of the greatest missing hero and standing over a bloody mercenary, my life expectancy would be measured in seconds.
The S.R.B.’s script hadn’t planned for my presence.
I was going to be the perfect scapegoat.
I had to run.
Drawing from the very last spark of energy the parasite was willing to grant me, I lunged toward the broken window.
I vaulted onto the ledge and pushed off my legs with unheard-of strength.
I took flight, tearing through the cold air, and vanished into the thick, gray clouds of the Northbridge sky, leaving far behind me the nightmare, the blood, and the shattered illusion of my childhood world.