In an inconspicuous motel room, everything seemed unchanging, as if even the ending of the world would not have any impact on the monotonous atmosphere that it possessed. A small amount of light began filtering through the open window, and the chilly morning air signaled the slow start to the day.
The digital clock radiated an ominous glow, suffusing the dusty air with a garish crimson color. The seconds on display gently ticked away, creating a scene that seemed like it would never change.
But when the red numbers showed six o’clock, a loud thud resounded in the room. A pile of raw meat suddenly collapsed from midair onto the floor, causing the whole building to shake violently as if it might collapse in the very next moment.
"Ugh!"
A groan came from beneath the mountain of meat, and slowly a figure emerged, gasping for air as it tried to escape the massive weight trapping it.
With great difficulty, Ace managed to pull himself out, his face contorting with disgust at the slick sensation all over his body. He began to retch, feeling as if his stomach would finally be free of the meat he’d gorged on yesterday, which he still hadn't managed to digest.
Determined not to waste even an ounce of the wolf meat, Ace clenched his abdominal muscles and quickly headed for the bathroom. He took his black jeans, covered in spots of brown and green and slick with meat juices, and stuffed them into the washing machine before jumping into the shower.
Unlike other times, he had no time to enjoy the warm water that usually felt like the caress of a long-lost lover. He rinsed himself of all the grime and sweat he'd accumulated and left the shower in record time.
He put on another set of black hoodie, T-shirt, and jeans, and without even drying his hair, went back to the bedroom. His breath was taken away once his eyes caught sight of the mountain of meat. His previous disgust was now replaced by a look of reverence, as he realized the power the meat could gift to him.
He didn’t know how he’d managed it, but he had placed an entire two thousand pounds of meat on his shoulders. he meticulously placed piece after piece on his back, and eventually, the pile of meat had reached such heights. He had felt like he was about to die, but he managed to stand for an entire ten breaths before the countdown elapsed. His legs had given out as soon as he caught a whiff of his moldy motel room, and he believed himself lucky that his neck hadn't snapped under all that weight.
Thinking of the magical power of this meat, one question took hold of his mind: if he could eat this entire pile of meat, how strong would he become?
A shiver traveled down his spine, and he didn’t dare imagine it further. His reverie was broken by the morning sun as it finally managed to disperse the clouds and began casting rays of sunlight into his room.
Seeing the sun begin to bake the meat, Ace panicked and realized he had no way to preserve it. He ran to a counter in a corner of his room and vaulted over it, landing with a thud behind. He dropped into a squat and yanked open a small fridge about the size of a large box. He grabbed all the various vegetables and meats inside and shoved them onto the floor.
He then sprinted towards the pile of meat being pelted by sunlight and grabbed a huge chunk, just large enough to fit into the fridge. He stuffed the fridge as hard as he could, but when he tried to close it, the door wouldn't shut all the way. He looked around the room, picked up a pair of rusted dumbbells that he had stolen from a scrapyard, and pressed them hard against the door.
Eventually, the forty-pound dumbbells managed to overpower the tightly packed meat, and Ace sighed in relief. But when he looked at the small dent he’d made in the mountain of meat, his heart began to bleed, imagining all the gains he was leaving on the table.
He closed the curtains to stifle the sunlight and went to his laptop to search for a cheap way to conserve the meat. A quick search told him that besides adding a lot of salt, there was nothing he could do on such short notice. But he didn’t know how the meat would react to salt and didn’t dare risk ruining it. He knew he needed a large freezer.
Ace pursed his lips, thinking of his empty pockets. He was out of cash after buying the gun and needed a way to get more, quickly. He looked up how long raw meat lasted without refrigeration and knew he didn’t have long. Luckily, it was early spring, and his region was pretty cold, giving him some respite.
His mind instantly went to Norman, thinking that he’d probably know a way. But he didn’t even know if Norman was alive, and if he was, would he want to help? He looked at the time and realized it was Monday, and school would start in less than an hour, so he decided to go and see if Norman would show up.
Just before leaving, he grabbed a handful of wolf meat and placed it in a plastic bag. Outside, he began a light jog towards his school. After a few hundred feet, he decided to test his improved stamina and legs, wanting to see how much his body had improved after having digested the wolf meat for over twelve hours.
He began to sprint, soon feeling the wind howling in his ears like he’d opened the window in a moving car. He didn’t know how fast he was moving, but he knew the distance between his motel and the school was five miles. He figured he would run as fast as he could and then check the time to calculate his average speed.
Gold Dragon City was one of the few second-tier cities in the country, large and wealthy enough to be compared with the Big Ten. Although not quite on the same level, it wasn’t far off, and the city followed some of the same rules as the ten first-tier cities.
One of these self-imposed rules was that school had to start at seven in the morning, non-negotiable. If a school, whether private or public, wished to keep its doors open in the first-tier cities, it needed to accommodate in this aspect. Experts believed that if children woke up early and finished school early, they would have more time to socialize in the afternoon, increasing their odds of growing up healthy, making their chances of becoming social recluses lower.
Gold Dragon City, aspiring to climb to first-tier status, followed this rule as well.
A man in his forties was driving his daughter to school, preoccupied with today's plan at his job, when his daughter interrupted him, making him frown. Despite being annoyed, he still indulged his daughter’s random questions and gave a patient and kind smile.
“Daddy, if a man is running as fast as our car in a thirty-mile zone, does that mean he is running at thirty miles an hour?”
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
The dad rolled his eyes but began thinking of how to answer, knowing it was in his daughter’s best interest to foster her curiosity.
“Well, yes, but there is no human alive that can run that fast. So—”
“Really?” the little girl interrupted, frowning. She then pointed out the window, “Then why is that man running just as fast as we are?”
The man sighed, amused, and momentarily took his eyes off the road, “Baby, there is no way—cough!”
The man spilled his coffee and nearly dropped the cup in his lap. His eyes widened in shock when he saw a young man, not older than eighteen, running side by side with his car, even seemingly going faster at times.
The young man was running on the side lane, acting like he was another member of the traffic, signaling with his hands at times to switch lanes and overtake other cars.
At some point, he reached his own car and signaled that he wished to overtake, but the man was too shocked to move aside. The signaling hand became increasingly animated at his lack of response, and the man's subconscious took control of his catatonic mind and moved his car to the side.
When the young man reached his car's window, he waved for the man to lower it. The man complied, and a loud voice boomed, making him tremble with fright.
“Oi! If you're going to cosplay as a snail in a fifty-mile zone, move to the second lane!”
The young man was clearly irritated and wanted to give the driver a piece of his mind, but when he saw the little girl, he blushed and suddenly sped up, quickly pulling ahead of the car.
The father and daughter stared with their mouths wide open at the departing figure, whose legs were moving so fast they saw only mere aftershadows.
After a long while, the man mumbled under his breath, “I'm going thirty-five. What does he mean a snail?”
When he finally arrived at school, Ace checked the time and saw he’d only taken eight minutes to arrive. At some point, he realized he was running too fast for the sidewalk and risked heavily injuring a pedestrian, so he switched to the road. This was his first experience on the road as he didn't have a license, so it shocked him to see so many drivers blatantly disregarding the rules.
He even had to shout at some of them to move aside as they were moving too slowly. He didn’t think much of it however, and sauntered through the school gate, passing beneath the cherry blossoms falling at the entrance.
There were still almost fifty minutes before class started, so the school grounds were virtually empty. It was as silent as a cemetery, with the exception of the guard and the school janitor, who were glued to a phone screen as if they were watching the World Cup.
“It’s got to be fake, right?” said the janitor, shaking his head. “Some AI-edited video. They’re all over MyTube these days.”
The guard nodded, sending his belly fat into a jiggle. “It’s from our local independent news guy, though. It says here he was on his way to work when he saw this young man running by him. You think he’d ruin his reputation and post this type of thing? Maybe the countdown gave him superpowers and stuff.”
“Don’t be stupid,” the janitor responded. “Everyone with the countdown disappeared without a trace. No one knows what happened to them.”
“No, look, here’s a video posted five minutes ago of a mother saying her son came back. So maybe this person came back with super speed or something?” responded the guard.
But the janitor seemed unconvinced. He refused to believe that a human could run faster than a car. The video even showed the young man signaling and overtaking other cars, as if it was all a joke. He reached for his coffee again, but his hand froze midair.
“This person seems familiar. He looks rather young,” continued the fat guard. “Maybe he’s a student at—”
But before the guard could finish, he felt a hand grab him and shake him. Following the janitor’s pointing finger, the guard choked and felt like his heart had risen in his throat, threatening to exit his body.
A young man dressed in all black had just walked through the school gate, and they could see waves of hot air billowing from his body. The guard immediately recognized him as the same young man he’d encountered a few days earlier. Only now did he connect the two faces and realize the young man was the same one in the video.
The student looked confused at his phone for a minute, then looked around and began to approach the two of them as soon as he spotted them.
The guard instantly began to sweat, and he felt the janitor’s presence vanish long before the young man reached him.
“Excuse me, do you have a phone charger by any chance? I haven’t charged my phone in two days and need battery urgently. I hope you can accommodate me.”
The guard listlessly pointed towards his small guardhouse, and the young man spotted a phone charger on the desk inside. Seeing him walk in, the guard quickly returned his eyes to the screen and viewed the video again to confirm it was indeed the same person.
Over time, in his sidebar, multiple news channels on MyTube began covering the video, some even providing proof that it wasn’t AI-generated or edited, finally confirming to the guard that the video was real.
Despite his fear, the guard angled his phone towards the young man sitting inside the guardhouse and silently snapped a photo. He instantly went to his personal MyTube account, a channel named The Highschool Commissar, and posted the picture with the caption, "I have detected a superhuman in my jurisdiction! Spread the word!". His subscriber base instantly blew his post to the top of the local news charts, and soon, the whole Gold Dragon City subsection of MyTube was aware of who the young man in the video was.
Soon after, in a large bunker in an incredibly secure location on the outskirts of Gold Dragon City, a cleanly dressed secretary clacked her high heels in a hurried pace. She was holding a phone playing a video of a young man running, and she had a panicked look on her face.
She passed by every colleague without glancing at them, stopping only when she reached a door inscribed with large, powerful letters: “Gold Dragon Party Secretary Office.”
The letters and the weight behind them made her choke on the words she had prepared, but she felt she possessed a good reason to enter. Thousands of people were reported to have had the countdown before disappearing two days ago, and that was only the reported cases. If each of them had gained the ability to outrun a car, she didn’t dare imagine the impact on the stability of Gold Dragon City or the nation as a whole. She began sweating when he realized there were probably millions of them throughout the nation. Their city needed to get ahead of the problem.
After three knocks on the door, a powerful voice signaled her to enter. She could feel the vibration from that voice shake her viscera, and she was unable to grasp the power behind the person holding such a voice.
Inside the room, a meeting was underway between about twenty figures, men and women, all dressed in official black uniforms with various medals adorning their chests. A large man with a short haircut sat at the head of the table, harrumphing and making the whole room tremble.
“Secretary Mina, you are interrupting an important meeting. I hope you—”
“It can’t wait.”
The secretary gulped audibly from anxiety but steeled herself despite being the focus of a dozen powerful party members. She knew all the cadres drilling their eyes into her could ruin her life with a snap of their fingers, but she held her head high. She felt emboldened by her sense of duty feeling like a lioness about to protect her pride at the moment.
She clacked her heels until she was beside the leader, performed a hasty bow, and presented him with the video. The man's expression started off infuriated as this meeting was extremely important, but the more he saw of the video, the more his face shifted, turning grave.
Before he could ask the secretary, as if reading his mind, he spoke ahead of him, “It’s been verified by multiple party-approved news stations. It’s not AI, sir.”
The man began tapping the table with his large finger, a small tremor shaking the room with each gentle tap. His mind seemed to churn continuously, and no one in the room dared to speak. He looked towards Secretary Mina and said with a heavy tone, “Contact General Alexander. Organize a meeting urgently!”
General Alexander was the most powerful figure in Gold Dragon City, commanding fear and respect even among the Central Committee in the capital. They all knew that calling on General Alexander carried a heavy cost, but if the Party Secretary said he was needed, then the situation was severe.
They all wondered why the need for the general, and as if he read their minds, the Party Secretary said, “The Party’s authority is in grave danger. We need to be swift and decisive, lest we invite ruin to our country. Only the Party is allowed to wield that kind of power. No one else!”