By the time Braun regained consciousness, the sun was already high in the sky illuminating the entirety of Nuwesca City. Cars drove past an abandoned building with grimy walls and broken windows, unaware of the strange scenery hidden on a room somewhere on the third floor.
Half of the room was covered by glimmering silver threads punctured onto the walls, each connected to Braun’s fingertips. They held his body in a stasis motion, helping him kneel on the ground without falling forward or backward.
He abruptly opened his eyes, pupils dilated and glowing dimly with a green light. For a moment, he was at a lost, unsure as to why he was in some strange room with arms hanging to the sides, attached to mysterious threads of seemingly mystical origins.
Fortunately, he soon remembered everything and felt his heart palpitate—although he was muddleheaded, his instincts for survival made him realize how close he is to fucking everything up right now.
The organization, through whatever means, can somehow detect supernatural activity within the city and locate the source of whatever super is using their abilities. Although their radar might be imperfect considering Theo was safe after all this while, it doesn’t necessarily mean Braun was as lucky as that aspiring hero.
As soon as he realized that there were threads on his fingers, he hurriedly recalled back that feeling before he fell unconscious and willed his power to activate. Strange sensations appeared around his forearms and fingers, like some strange prickly needles were stabbing into his hands.
The silvery threads, influenced by Braun’s power, began to move and squirm as if they had come to life. They detached themselves from the walls and shifted around, with Braun’s rough control slowly getting finer as time passed.
Then, with a nudge of his finger, they reentered his fingertips one by one. It was a strange feeling, like some worms crawling into some tiny hole in his skin, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. It was just a bit foreign, and somewhat even familiar, without any pain of the sort.
Where did the threads even go? Did they meld with my skin, forming some sort of raw material like keratin? Or did they merge with my muscles? Braun wondered as he stared at his hands in amazement.
However, this wasn’t the time to dilly-dally. As of right now, there was a bloody corpse on the table beside him, with rugs of blood, and plenty of evidence to reveal a gruesome crime.
Smacking his lips, Braun approached the adolescent teen’s corpse, a smile dancing on his face. He opened his mouth wide to reveal strangely sharp teeth, his jaw unhinged like a monstrous beast, and with one bite, dug into the delicious meal.
…
Lighting up a flame and discarding the rugs he used to soak the blood, he took a deep breath and inspected the changes in his body.
He flexed his legs, feeling the great strength pumping through his veins. Then, he observed his arms, the limbs which had received the most enhancement. His forearms, especially, felt extraordinary.
Grabbing at a random rusty metal pipe in a nearby room, he grabbed it tightly and bent it with ease, showcasing monstrous arm strength.
“Besides the ability to create and control threads that would appear from my fingertips, the crystal also gave me a great increase in strength. If before, my body was at the peak of humanity, then I’m already breaching into the realm of superhumans, with my arm strength capable of bending metal like its rubber.”
Braun assessed and threw the bent metal pipe aside, and returned to the room where the rugs burned. After a little while, they transformed into ashes which he blew into a cloud of dust, destroying the last bits of evidence of the crime he committed last night.
Now done with his tracks, Braun hurriedly bid farewell to the abandoned building, his steps light and fleeting.
While he may have been lucky today and somehow escaped the organization’s detection, he wasn’t willing to gamble and spend more time inside the building. Rather than doing that, he’d much preferably return to his apartment and wait for things to cool down before attempting any more strange shenanigans.
…
A day soon passed, and Braun stood at the periphery of the city while driving a decently priced black car. Taking one last look at the city, he drove to the outside of the city with green flames burning on his palms.
The engines roared to life, and the car drove at extreme speeds. The distance between him and the city grew increasingly vast, and Braun soon found himself parked on a roadside with vast green plains and a couple of mountains in the distance.
Locking the door to his car, Braun chucked the keys into his pockets and began to run off into the distant mountains. His figure appeared like a shadowy blur, with grass and dirt flying off from his steps.
After running for ten straight minutes, he found himself a nice little cave near the mountains and dived deep into it, with a flashlight turned on to illuminate the dark path ahead.
Finding himself a nice little open spot, he grabbed a large rock to sit on as a makeshift stool and rested the flashlight to the side to light up the shadowy cave.
Now that he was alone, far away from any city and human life, he could finally test out his superpower.
He raised his arm, his eyes glowing green, and he watched intently as threads began to form at the tips of his fingers like tiny hairs growing at a rapid pace. They gleamed with a silvery allure, and upon touching it, felt the similar cold metallic texture of a metallic material.
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Surprisingly cold considering it formed from a human’s body which is naturally hot. The creation of material itself is a high-energy process since this is quite literally formed from nothing, but who am I to question it?
Braun shrugged his shoulders and continued to observe as he tested out his threads.
The way his powers functioned, how they worked, they didn’t matter for now. What he needed to do was process his gains and assimilate the threads completely, mastering them to their utmost limits.
And to do so, he needed to roughly assess just how strong his abilities were.
He did numerous tests such as lifting rocks at varying distances ranging from 1 meter, 5 meters, and 10 meters, or cutting through stronger and more durable materials like the boulders in the cave, steel rods, or even diamonds.
He had prepared a lot since yesterday to make sure his tests were as in-depth as possible as he could make them, and slowly figured out the details of his abilities.
For the number of threads he could currently make, he could approximately create and control one hundred threads in total, but this number continuously increased and he had already formed over 125 threads since he started experimenting with his threads.
While Braun may not have any sort of comparison for his progress, he knew that his ability’s speed of growth was quite fast, and that was due to the fact he had access to zenithral power.
He sent his consciousness into some sort of metaphysical space, and as he ‘opened his eyes’, he saw a shimmering crystal hovering in some dark void, rotating around a strange green flame that burned brightly.
As if the crystal was a plant receiving sunlight from the sun, it absorbed the light stemming from the green flame, causing its crystalline structure to shift and glimmer. At a barely noticeable pace, Braun saw the crystal’s size grow by a couple of millimeters after a minute.
Besides the increase in the number of threads, his threads also grew stronger, more durable, and sharper after the crystal increased in size.
With a casual wave of his hand, he could lift a boulder half the size of his body with relative ease, and crush it into chunks by clenching his fists. Not only that, but the sharpness of each thread was incomparably sharp, with one thread capable of cutting through boulders like paper.
For metal, it was at first like cutting through a rock with a knife, but after augmenting his threads with a burst of green flames, it became possible, albeit with sight difficulty.
As for the defense of his threads, they were a lot more durable than steel and could resist snapping in half even after enduring the weight of a human-sized boulder.
Overall, he concluded that:
One, they were sharper than any normal blade under normal circumstances, and when augmented, could cut through metal just like his wooden katana, while also needing a lot less zenithral power to do so.
Two, the threads were strong, and could lift up over a hundred kilograms with ease. If he augmented the threads with his green flame, they could lift even a human-sized boulder with slight difficulty.
Three, the threads were durable. Just like how spider webs can withstand more than a normal bulletproof vest, their ‘metallic variant’ could naturally resist a lot more, and was probably one of its strongest points besides its incomparable sharpness.
Fourth, and most important of all, was how fine his control over his threads could get.
While at first, he was fumbling around and felt like he was moving a lump of some strange formless limbs, by the time he finished experimenting, he was already controlling over thirty threads like individual hands.
Tiny pebbles floated around him, moving around like he had some sort of telekinesis. With a nudge in his mind, the pebbles were cut in half, falling to the ground with resounding thuds.
The control aspect is probably the best thing I could have gotten out of this ability. Braun smiled.
While any other person might have focused more on the sharpness, strength, and durability aspect of this ability, Braun instead rejoiced in the control. It was like having his hands become a hundred hands, with each thread being a potential extra limb that was capable of doing anything his hands could do.
Imagine having a hundred hands, each being tens of meters long, with each hand capable of severing a human head as if it were cutting butter.
Not only that, but they were threads, not some limited hand. They were essentially ‘formless’ and could do a lot more than some nimble, dexterous fingers.
This opened up a lot of possibilities for Braun, causing the threads to become far more than just some sharp sword.
Perhaps I can control people like puppets, wield over a hundred guns, or even create constructs like a giant hand or a gargantuan pillar.
There was one downside to this control aspect of his ability though, it was an extremely hard skill to master. If it were any other human, they might only have rudimentary control over the threads, and would take them years to just control thirty threads like individual limbs, but Braun was different.
His biggest ‘talent’, the most monstrous part about him wasn’t his great strength, his ruthless heart, or his regenerative body, it was his learning speed.
In just a day, he became a relatively skilled artist. In just a couple of days, he became a skilled guitarist. In just two weeks, he became an expert at coding and technology, having gained control over hundreds of cameras and even hacked into a satellite.
He was a genius in learning, nay, a monster at learning.
To become the best at everything, one doesn’t need a strong body, a genius-level intellect, or some superpower, it is to have the capability to learn at monstrous speeds.
Braun smiled, the threads dancing on top of his palms to form a miniature array of planets surrounding a giant sphere—a miniature solar system.
As if envisioning the far future where he had the cosmos underneath his grasp, Braun clenched his fist and murmured, “To become the best at everything… Heh, that’s the literal opposite of being mediocre at everything.”
Green light flickered in his eyes as he walked out of the cave, returning to the vast open field where a starry night sky greeted his view.
He took a deep breath, enjoying the pleasant fresh air of nature, with his arm stretched out towards the brilliant moon bathing the land in a luminescent glow.
“Shoot for the moon, and land among the stars. I strove for greatness and excellence, with a hatred for mediocrity, but constantly met roadblocks. Others achieved what I worked hard for in just mere days, leaving me in the dust.”
“I compared. I envied. I hated. I was in despair. I felt helpless.”
“I was an average man competing against the geniuses of the heavens. I lacked money, I lacked talent, I lacked probably everything besides my intellect to fight on the same equal grounds as them.”
“However, thanks to some mysterious figure that granted me the power to write my own story, I was reborn anew and forged my path to greatness.”
“To you, oh dear mystery.” Braun flashed a toothy grin, his vision seemingly piercing through the endless darkness that covered the cosmos, where a figure stared back at him across space-time. “Thank you, for giving me this opportunity.”
“And to that…” His eyes completely changed color, burning bright with green flames. “I’ll set out for greatness.”
“I’m not doing this for you, nor for some petty revenge to quench my hatred against the unfairness of reality. No.”
“I’m doing this for myself, to fulfill the unattainable dream of some stubborn mortal man!”
Declaring to the heavens his unbreakable oath, Braun slammed his fist against his heart, causing green flames to explode out of his chest. His grin widened and his eyes brightened.
Inside his heart, inside his soul, a green flame flickered brightly, illuminating the dark void.
“I am Freidrich Braun! The one that will grab destiny by the reigns and reach the pinnacle of heaven and earth!”