Considering the state of the city, I guess it was a bad time to mention that a team of people in white lab coats had passed me a briefcase with a new supersuit inside of it as I made my way out of the SDU headquarters. I slipped out before anyone could ask too many questions, and the people who had seen me seemingly didn’t know who I was as I shot out an exhaust vent and right over the airfield, briefcase in hand. Was it wrong that I felt buzzed right now, crouched on top of some towering building, the briefcase at my feet, myself on my knees, and my new gear in my hands? Yeah, I knew that I was supposed to be dealing with the Kaiju right now, but look at this thing.

Up until now, I had been putting my costumes together with any tensile material I could afford that month, plus whatever Lucas kept in his closet from his Shrike days. Learning how to sew had been a really tedious chore, and learning how to limit myself to make sure I didn’t destroy my gear every time I used my powers for longer than a few hours had also been a pain in the ass. But this, right now, in my hands, was something I couldn’t even believe was happening. A new suit, for free, just because someone wants me to be a superhero. I didn’t have to pay it off, either. I wasn’t going to have to fight some turf war to keep it, or keep up my rank to advance my gear.

This new suit was mine, just because Overseer Two—his name, not mine—had told a few people on his team to bring me my welcoming gift. Did I feel like a kid at Christmas? Yes, yes I really did, and it was almost ironic, because mom actually got me super-suit pajamas for my tenth birthday that totally weren’t the reason that blue and red were now my predominant colors now. I didn’t have the time to keep staring at it, though. Didn’t have the time to waste feeling the soft but tensile fabric in my fingers, or breathe in the fresh spandex and tug at the seams to see if they would tear under pressure. I was excited, and also busy, but I was already slipping out of my old costume, making sure to fold the tattered, sweaty, sooty thing and place it back inside the briefcase.

I was gonna keep it around, just because mom hadn’t sewn it back together for me to throw it in the trash the first chance I got. But my time in hell hadn’t done the old gear any favors, either.

But Gods above, the new gear felt so damned good on my body. It wasn’t too different from my old design, judging by what I saw in a skyscraper window. Lighter shades of red along my arms and blue on my torso, plus the golden lightning bolt on my chest seemed to glow whenever I used my power. How freaking cool was that? Strips of yellow lined the seams and the parts that connected the red and blue sections along my sides and down my thighs, which also glowed when I used my powers. The suit felt so much cooler to be in (literally and figuratively, don’t blame me, I rarely got gifts), and a lot more breathable. I felt like I could move, actually move without worrying that I would rip it. It extended where it needed to, and hugged every part of my body the way I really needed my old gear to do sometimes but just couldn’t because it was weak.

A part of me, if I was free, would have stood around in my room and stared at the mirror, turning and twisting and trying to convince myself that it really was me wearing this thing now.

Soon, and Gods, I really hope it’s soon. One way to a hero’s heart was through their gear.

I’d just have to get used to the red cape billowing behind me, which was…something.

The people in lab coats had winked and left a note in the briefcase about the cape, something along the lines of: “It’s nothing special, just something you deserve. Don’t destroy it too fast, the taxpayers won’t like that much.” I didn’t know what that meant, and capes were…fine, I guessed, ‘cause dad had one anyway, but after stashing the briefcase near a few of my backpacks, I figured it was something I would have to learn about later. For now? I had a billionaire to piss off.

But first, there was a weird thing going on with the city, at least, more weird than usual.

New Olympus reeked of sewage, seafood, moss and honey. Even all the way up here, hovering above skyscrapers and spike-like antennas, the breeze carried the stenches up to my nose and forced them down my throat. The Kaiju market where we found Cedric had smelt almost exactly the same. Now the entire city was one giant slab of repugnance that my nose seemingly couldn’t get rid of. Mix in the smells of sweat and burning food, a sewage system built decades ago and trash strewn all over alleyways and left to rot, then this wasn’t a good time for me, either.

I thanked the Gods I wasn’t doing this during the day, with the sun making everything simmer. Whatever. My powers would fluctuate as long as I was still a teenager, that much I knew. My sense of smell and sight, hearing and taste were just as good as they had ever been, and if I wanted to get information on the people turning into Kaiju, then, for once in my life, I would actually have to be a little less Olympia and a lot more Shrike and actively use them instead of passively ignoring them. Sneaking around wasn’t my usual thing, I rarely ever had to go around sniffing out clues and hiding from the bad guys. Go figure, if you strangled a supervillain long enough, they were willing to tell you everything about themselves. Tonight was different. Cassie Blackwood couldn’t be touched, the Overseer had made that very, very clear. It hadn’t been an order, just some advice, and I knew how the humans would react if I so much as pushed her.

So I would just have to sneak into Blackwood Pharma and see for myself.

Which would have been a lot easier if I wasn’t a mix of primary colors.

But come on, I wasn’t going to let that stop me. We were trained to be powerful, to be agile, to be better, and even though I didn’t really like the assholes up in the stars, I believed them.

Some scanner wasn’t going to be the end of my night, and neither was a security camera.

The Blackwoods had made a name for themselves, say, about a few hundred years ago by selling the medical services they stole from other practitioners overseas, and that was just about as much as I knew them for. They were, what the humans called, old money—really, really old money, and their headquarters, Blackwood Pharmaceuticals, made it seem like they didn’t know what old meant. It was just one in the slew of grand megacorporations sitting on the waterfront, looking out onto the ocean that spanned into the horizon, and to their left, was my dad’s statue, and to their right, were the people in Lower Olympus they extorted for their cash. The building was a shard of glass, quite literally looking like one, that reached into the sky. It glinted in the moonlight, caught by so many of the other bright artificial lights around it. The campus surrounding it was huge, spanning at least three blocks, shoving the other skyscrapers away from it as if it didn’t want to be touched. With their name engraved in the slab of concrete at its entrance, it looked…normal.

Almost boring.

The flag snapped in the wind, right alongside the family’s owl crest and golden crown wreath. I was up in the clouds, which had blown a little lower tonight, making the air chilly. Arms folded and hovering, I watched men and women in suits and coats walk in and out of the building, holding tablets and briefcase, handbags and phones. Normal people doing normal things, heading home from work or maybe to a bar after a long day. Just don’t mind the large armored trucks with the Damage Control logo stamped onto the side in red, or the armed guards who circled the main gate and watched over video feeds they frequently flicked through. This place was a freaking fortress, and those human-Kaiju people were somewhere inside of it. The old me (a few weeks ago, me) would have knocked on Cassie’s office window and shattered it to invite myself in.

I still wanted to do that, just to see the look on her face and hear what she had to say. Could you imagine the scream she would make? Oh, and the interviews she would have for weeks after.

Instead, I waited for a while, watching as two more Damage Control trucks came in through a separate gate that the workers left from. This gate was bulkier, required a passcode, hand print, and retinal scan from the driver to enter. My guess was that there were Kaiju in the backs of those trucks, judging by the sour looks the guards had on their faces as the trucks went into the compound and quickly vanished. Simply vanished. I had to wait an extra ten minutes for another trio of armored vans to come back, and…there, they were disappearing into a hidden parking lot that presumably went straight underneath the building. Not so hidden, just out toward the waters so you couldn’t see it from the front. Another gate would open, the trucks would go in, and it would slide shut, obscuring my view of them in a heartbeat. An underground passage to somewhere hidden? Made sense, I figured. You wouldn’t want your half-Kaiju screaming and screeching near the finance and marketing offices. Alright, Ry, time to figure out how to get inside of this place.

I didn’t have that many options other than to do what I usually did and demand answers, but tonight had to be different. The Blackwoods already had a problem with me, for whatever reason, so pissing them off some more wouldn’t help. Sneak in somehow. Maybe follow the trucks that went down the hidden ramp so fast that the guards wouldn’t see it on their radars? That might work, and I didn’t see why it wouldn’t work. I had moved that fast before, had done it when Adam first appeared and nearly killed Knuckles. Now I just had to figure out how I did that. I’d been panicked, spooked by this feeling of something insanely powerful rocketing our way, carving through the sky similar to the way dad used to, like a bullet. When I flew, people knew about it.

When Adam and dad flew, they cut through the sky, just like the rest of my people do.

If I tried flying in there at anything slower than I had that day fighting Adam, then they would feel the gust of wind, and hell, maybe I might kill a few of them if I wasn’t careful about it.

I sighed through my teeth, the wind bitter against my cheeks. Only one way to find out if you can do it, Ry, and that’s by actually doing it. Or else I’d be stuck in their basement with a bunch of their soldiers surrounding me and nowhere else to go. They’d call it a city-wide crisis.

Fuck it, they had a few billion in the bank to fix up the place if I missed the entrance.

And the night wasn’t getting any warmer, or the people in my city any safer.

I still couldn’t believe this all was for a human I barely knew, but…why not, you know?

It took an entire hour for the next convoy to drive toward the gate and get halted. The guards had a process of scanning the trucks, checking whatever cargo was inside of it, then they would get to the men and women driving them and start asking questions and casually chat as they did their biometrics. So, all in all, it was about a five minute stop worth of a gap. In that time, I remained on top of the opposing skyscraper of some media conglomerate, its neon signs coating me in hues of reds and pinks. I was crouched in the dark, watching them, waiting, but I was trying to gather as much electricity as I could, as much heat and energy as I could from the air itself. Nobody had ever properly explained where my powers came from, but that didn’t matter. The first truck hissed as it let off its breaks. The other guard who had been checking the first truck raised his fist, and then the gate began to move. Shit. My cape snapped in the wind just over my shoulder. I shut my eyes and slowed my breathing, listening to their tires on the asphalt and the grinding of their gears. A little more, Ry. Closer to the entrance. Not enough charge running through my veins.

But who knew when the next trucks would come, or if they would even have Kaiju at all?

So I positioned myself, angling toward the entrance facing the waters.

Waited. Waited. Not yet, they were close, but not yet.

Now.

The instance I pounced forward, the world seized up. The gravel underneath my boots hung suspended, the birds I startled froze mid-air, but the gap in the gate wasn’t big enough yet.

It took me seconds to reach the leading truck, then milliseconds to get up to the gate.

I swore, turned my body, sliding through a gap just large enough for me if I held my breath and twisted myself around. The momentum carried me through, shooting me down a tunnel that carried on deep, deep into the earth. Orange light bulbs lined the ceiling. Cameras dotted the walls. Then a shard of pain raked through my entire body, down my spine, like someone had reached into my neck and tried ripping each vertebrate right out of my body. My muscles jerked, spasmed. I bit down on my tongue, forced myself to keep going fast enough that the cameras couldn’t swivel and the guards who patrolled certain checkpoints didn’t see me until, finally, I came to the end of the tunnel. It opened up into a large parking lot, each space marked with numbers and yellow lines, guards and large white containers that had to be mechanically forced onto the end of each truck.

I would have paused right there, skidding to a halt, and watched as they opened the trucks to really check if there were half-human Kaiju sealed inside them, if I had the ability to stop how I wanted. My speed vanished all too quickly, disappearing like someone had turned off a valve. I stumbled, gasping quietly, and quickly hid behind a line of empty trucks. My lungs burned, trying their damndest to rip their way out of my chest. Breathe. Breathe, Ry, breathe. The last of my powers spat from my fingertips like sparks, then dimmed, trickling onto the concrete and dying. Shit. My powers. After saving Knuckles, they’d all but gone. Same position, same problem. I heard a few of the guards ask questions, and heard two sets of boots knocking against the floor.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

I had my back against the truck, sweat gleaming on my brow. Closer, louder footsteps.

They turned the corner, checking around the truck, and I made very sure to get comfortable underneath it. I watched their feet, listened to them mutter about being damn sure they had heard something back here. My fingers dug deeper into the metal, and I swallowed air, fought my lungs and the urge I had to pant and gasp for oxygen. Three soldiers walked around the trucks, talking into their comms, and finally, they stopped walking, stopped talking. My lungs only swelled more. And then one of them got on their knees, flashlight in hand as they searched underneath it. I shut my eyes, praying my cape would stay in place, making sure—very, very sure—that my fingers dug deeper into the undercarriage so much that I was half sure that the thing would rip off in my hands.

The flashlight’s small white beam slid across the floor right underneath me. I held my breath, trying not to allow the sweat dripping off the bridge of my nose to get any lower, but…

A noise, a shrieking sound that only a Kaiju could make, tore through the air. The soldiers swore and ran back to the other side of the large loading area, but I wouldn’t take any chances. I waited there, clinging to the grimy undercarriage, listening to the sounds of high pressure darts pinch into something fleshy, then a long, lasting silence filled the air. You could almost hear the soldiers breathe with relief, or maybe it was a little bit of anger that the thing that slumped onto the ground hard enough to make the truck shudder was their responsibility. I couldn’t get a good look at it here, and I wasn’t going to give it a shot. My luck had worn thin (if I’d even owned any to begin with), so I made sure the soldiers had offloaded the truck before hitting the floor with a gasp.

I lay there, breathing in fine dust, eyes shut and sweat trickling into my eyes. My powers wouldn’t be back for about another forty minutes, or maybe an hour. Slightly stronger, maybe slightly faster, didn’t know how bullet proof, but I figured how bullet proof I was didn’t matter if I was going to be trapped underneath this building with armed guards and Damage Control, too.

But I had to get going, so that’s what I did as I pulled myself out from the truck’s belly and crouched beside its large, rugged rear tire. I couldn’t spot any cameras here, maybe on purpose, maybe because Cassie didn’t want any of those super geniuses living in their moms’ basements to stumble upon something she didn’t want the world to see. Or I just can’t see the cameras and she’s watching me right now, crouched here like some idiot. I would like to think the latter. I would like to hope for the latter as I worked my way down the line and closer to the large main loading bay.

Past strapped down and empty steel cages. Passed wooden crates marked caution.

They were taking the half-Kaiju through a door just as large as the gaping entrance of any warehouse at the docks. Standing in front of it, it dwarfed me by several dozen feet high and across. It had sealed shut as soon as they had left, having attached the metal containers onto rails that, by my educated guess, shuttled it through the door and into the main building. Nobody was down here except me and those voices I heard whispering in my head, telling me to hurry, telling me that something terrible was happening behind the door. “Can’t you hear them screaming?” they hissed. “Listen, listen to their voices.” Gods, I hated being able to hear them, because all they were doing was making my heart thump harder against my chest and my nerves simmer more in my gut. I didn’t know what the voices knew, but I did know that I had to get inside somehow.

I placed my hand on the warm, reinforced black steel. I tested it, pushing against it slightly. It didn’t move, didn’t groan. This was several inches worth of metal sitting dead in front of me.

Glancing at the biometrics scanner far to my right, then back at the door, I sighed.

I knew one way to get in, one way that would alert the guards that someone was here, but what other option did I have? I could heat up my body, maybe try to melt it, but who knew how long that would take me? Punching my way through this thing would just be asking for it, too.

“Stand there longer, more of them perish; your sacrifice to this world, a waste.”

I also didn’t like hearing the voices shit talking me.

Before I could raise my fist, the entirety of my body shuddered involuntarily. I glanced behind me, then strained to listen to the tunnel for the sound of trucks. Nothing. Then: “It’s taken long enough, but I’m sure you can hear me now. Cassie’s done a number on signals down there.”

I spun, but saw nobody. Invisibility? Of course, Ry. It would mean she had someone watching over this place almost all the time, making it easy for her guards to pick anything up.

But the last I checked, the Blackwoods would rather do guard duty themselves than hire a superhuman to do it for them. I glanced at my suit, at the seamless fingerless gloves that attached to the forearms, and the symbol on my chest. It hadn’t been a voice, per-say, but more like…a feeling.

“Olympia?” my suit said again, and once more, not a voice, but a feeling on my skin, like the entire thing was pulsating in a very, very minute way. “God, we spent so much on this freaking suit, and this piece of shit isn’t working properly. She’s blind, we’ll have to either send someone down there to give her backup, or let her work. Put Redline on standby. What? No, I don’t fucking care that he’s in Dublin right now! Get him on the phone and tell him to put on his running shoes.”

“I…can hear you?” I whispered. Of all the weird and wonderful things I’d seen this summer, I figured that talking to my own costume was just the beginning of what a build up of several unchecked concussions was doing to my head. “Unless I’m talking to myself right now.”

“Oh,” it said. I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman I was hearing (feeling?). “Thank God. That’s great news. Redline’s a hassle nobody ever wants to deal with. How clear can you hear me right now? No breaking or voice catching, I hope?” I answered yes reluctantly. “Fantastic. Now, judging by the suit’s tracker, you’re about five hundred feet underneath their three lower level basements, which puts you…there. Okay, the good news is that nobody except Damage Control is gonna find you if this goes tits up, and the bad news is that you’re standing there when a few dozen more of their trucks are on their way, so I’ll advise you to get going really, really soon.”

I shook my head, saving my questions for another time. The grumble of engines and the squeal of tires against the floor echoed down the passage at the end of the loading bay. I looked back at the thick metal door, flexed my fingers, made a fist and hit it as hard as I could, just to test it out. The good news was that I had enough strength to leave a dent in it, but the bad news was that I only made a knuckle-shaped dent in it. Not enough, not anywhere near enough. I shook out my hand, and the skin on my hand had split, leaving blood on my fingers. Dull pain was working itself deep into my bones, and fuck, did I forget how much it hurt. And over my shoulder, the trucks were getting closer, their engines louder. The final groan of a gate rolling aside shrieked through the tunnel, made much, much louder by the gaping exit. I had minutes, maybe five, to get this right.

The only problem was that I didn’t know what I was getting right.

“What do I do?” I hissed. “I’m kinda out of options here.”

My suit hummed, which felt…weird. “Guessing with the pressure spike I just saw, you tried to hit it and nothing happened. How long until your powers come back? Better be soon, kid.”

“Forty minutes, maybe thirty by now.”

“Fuck,” it muttered, pausing before it spoke again. “All right, shit, how’s about you—”

I hit the door again, making an even deeper dent. The engine pitches rose, their deep grumbles echoing. Again and again, clamping my jaw shut to stop myself from groaning as my knuckles split and more blood spat onto the floor and the door and my suit. Then it gave. Buckled. I got my hands onto the edge of the tiny gap and forced my fingers through, put my foot on the frame and pulled. Was it stupid? Was I scared of getting caught and having to fight people who had otherwise done nothing wrong except do their jobs? The snapping, shattering, and crumbling of metal in my hands, and the painful, burning strain of my shoulders and back and arms was an answer enough. It would have been easier with my powers, as easy as opening any door, or I could have tried simply waiting for another convoy and gone flying right past them in a blink of an eye. Hell, I could have tried keeping up my speed and shot right through the gap before they closed it!

Every idea is great in hindsight, and even better before the blaring red alarms go off.

The strips of orange lighting blinked off, then came back blood red just as soon as I had shoved the door wide enough for me to slip through. The first truck came to a halt, the guard that lept out of it catching only the faintest glimpse as I vanished beyond it. I ran and ran like hell, faster, at least, than any normal human, meaning I was far out of his line of sight before he could get a good look at me. I followed the tracks they put the containers on until I came to a space so big I was sure the Golden Guild could fit inside of it ten times over. I stopped, panting, looking around. The normal lights were gone, and the scarlet emergency lights were blinking and flashing, but the alarm was off and so was the shrieking noise that had been burrowing into my eardrums.

“Ha!” my suit said, as I hid behind a table, trying to catch my breath and listen for the sound of guards pursuing me. “Atta girl! They woulda loved you in the Eighties, tell you what.”

“Would you stop talking?” I snapped quietly. What was this place? Drenched in red light, I could barely make out anything, but I had to move, keep hiding, keep looking for what they were doing with the Kaiju. No guards right now, maybe because they’d been alerted by the siren? Gods, I didn’t know. Just didn’t know. They could be anywhere. This place was huge enough not for me to see them until they saw me first. “Unless you want me to get caught and cause a State panic.”

“Oh, don’t worry ‘bout that,” it said. “Only you can hear me, and maybe a few dogs and bats. Did you know your skin is so sensitive that you can hear through it? Sh–um–Special Agent Freeman told us all about it. You probably don’t think too much about how impressive that is, but when you’re deep under water, or high up in the air, your body changes to accommodate that. You adapt as you go. Train hard enough and you could probably start sensing someone’s presence even before they’re close to you just by feeling the air change around you. God, kid, by the time you’re thirty, you could probably sense tremors and earthquakes, tsunamis and hurricanes even before they’ve arrived! You’re more than just two fists, a few feet, and some bared teeth, you know.”

Thanks for the biology lesson. “That’s really great, and I love the kick you’re getting out of this, but I’m stuck in this godsdamned building and would really like some help right about now.”

Silence, then: “I’ve done what I can, bought you at least ten minutes, but they’re gonna find out soon enough that the alarm wasn’t for someone leaving their toast in for a little too long.”

“What about the guy who saw me?” I asked, creeping out from behind the crate I was hiding behind. Nothing around me, my eyes slowly adjusting. Time to start searching for answers.

“Considering him, then you’ve got about five minutes tops.”

“You’re no help at all, you know that?”

“Do you suggest I make it easier for the door you broke to slide right open?”

“Keep up the great work,” I muttered.

I let myself stand upright a little bit more as I slowly worked my way through the room. Fluorescent lights hung from the ceiling on chains, swaying slightly as something made the ground shudder. Tables full of documents that made no sense to me (medical records, I guessed, and reports on something called Ambrosia Phase One littered desks and floors and were pinned up on walls), as well as computers that were password and biometrics protected. The thing talking to me from my suit couldn’t help with that. Cassie had made very sure that nobody other than the people who worked here could get into that information. The computers were chunky and old, fat and took up entire desks. From before I came to earth, I guessed. Boxy things. I decided to take pictures with my phone instead of papers and documents, not really knowing what I was doing, having to describe them to my suit and follow whatever it was that he said was important to them.

But I hadn’t come here for research papers that didn’t make sense to me, most of which were locked in said computers. The boys and girls at the SDU could figure out what Ambrosia Phase One was. The pictures of the documents were for them. The diagrams and detailed medical breakdowns of whatever Ambrosia was would be for them to study and understand and tell me about it later. I had come for something else, for the glass cages that were deep inside the room.

And I stood, frozen, in front of dozens upon dozens of rows of them at the back. It didn’t take long for me to get lost in a maze of them, and it took even shorter for me to want to puke, too.

Each was smaller than my room. Every single one was fixed with a hole for a toilet, a pipe for a shower, but that didn’t matter, because the first one… the first person I saw, was half-dead.

They lay on the floor of the glass cage, breathing in the misty fumes of whatever was being pumped inside of the glass cage through a grate. I stepped closer, a ball of cold disgust in my gut.

They look like Amy, was my first thought, but Amy had at least looked human. The person in the cage barely had skin, just tongues of mottled black flesh attached to their body by writhing black tendrils. Those tendrils were moving, curling, slithering along the floor and grasping at the glass walls. I took another step past a cautioned black and yellow line, put my hand on the glass, tried to knock, but nothing. The tentacles recoiled, but the body remained flat on the floor. Fuck, were they even alive? I asked that question countless times, looking at more of the same: people in cages, some thin, some fat, but every single one of them with green or black or purple or red slimy tendrils spilling out of at least one orifice. Their backs, their chests, some right out of their heads.

Then, at the back, was the largest cage of them all. About the size of five cages pushed together, and hell, there were about ten people in this thing. At least, there used to be ten people.

All I could make out was a melding of flesh and tentacles and bones and organs. A pile of steaming innards and eyeballs and teeth and mouths, and, oh, Gods, I turned, put my hand to my mouth, and tried not to puke when one of the eyes locked on me, followed by several dozen more.

People weren’t turning into Kaiju, that would have been less horrific.

They were turning into this.

“Pictures,” my suit whispered, even quiet to me. “You need to take pictures.”

And I did, I had to, because these were normal people, weren’t they? Not bad people, not supervillains. I didn’t know that, didn’t want to figure it out. Why did I have to? Look at them, their joints held by tentacles and heads attached by stringy muscles. Some of the cages had medical equipment inside of them, but not the kind that kept someone alive. Some of these cages, these people who sprouted tentacles and worm-filled mouths and large, gaping wounds with those godsawful little maggots burrowing around their papery pale tissue, were being cut up and forced apart, too. One woman had her arm dangling from the same suspension cables you would have in any hospital if you broke a bone, except the worms were trying to yank the flesh of her shoulder and upper arm back together, but were too far apart. She was groaning, moaning, a mask on her face that I was more than sure wasn’t just pumping oxygen into her lungs, but something else.

The hue of crimson lighting suddenly snapped to white, and the sound of an elevator dinged not too far away. I backed away as the half-Kaiju began mewling and shrieking, some trying to shrink away from lights so bright they burned away any remnants of the shadows. I swore, crouched, then took one powerful lunge upward to hide high up in the rafters above me.

And then tried my damndest not to curse the same as my mom did when she walked out of the elevator.