Something was very, very wrong. It felt a lot like when I was porting when my body was disconnected from my mind, or like the one time I had to reset after being technically dead. My body was still there, but for some reason, my system wasn’t working right. I carefully started tracing myself and comparing it to my last blueprint, which I had taken right after my workout and meditation session in the tunnel.

Nope, I wasn’t asleep. This wasn’t a bad dream. There was something flowing through my bloodstream, interrupting my nervous system. It wasn’t doing any damage, but it was a very powerful… My autonomic systems were still going, I was still breathing, and my heart was still beating.

Yep, I had been hit with a toxin, probably inside of the last 20 minutes. My brain was fairly well protected, chemically, but whatever hit me had caught me while I was asleep, and it had slowed down my waking process. I’d been hovering half-asleep for the whole time, a sort of sleep paralysis enhanced by what felt like ACP or possibly an offshoot powerful enough to affect Alphas but unlikely to kill off humans.

Fortunately, because of the advancements I had made to my nervous system, resetting that alone was fairly easy. I had traced and blueprinted the entire chemical portion, and the electrical portion was almost completely unaffected… that was one of the reasons ACP was favored among old-school veterinarians, because it only had mild psychotropic effects, leaving the brain’s chemistry only slightly affected. It was what you dosed an Alpha with when you wanted them to wake up ready to answer questions or assist you, and I wondered if this was actually supposed to be a set-up for some kind of teamwork survival training.

Yeah, there was a set of rules for hostage situations, we knew them, they knew them, nothing mysterious.

First rule, Don’t ever let a bad guy lead you someplace if he has the drop on you. That almost always means he’s trying to take you someplace where he has a bigger advantage to eliminate or silence you. Well, based on the vibrations I felt as my nervous system slowly reset, the first rule was already a wash, it felt like I was in some kind of small flying transport.

The second rule, try to notice any landmarks, whether sight, sound, smell, or even taste. I was working on that. If it WAS a training scenario, there would have to be an opportunity to escape or communicate at some point… if it wasn’t, well, I was confident that I would think of something, I always did.

The third rule is escape. If this was NOT some kind of scenario set up for teamwork, it was a kidnapping. Kidnappers were a threat to your life. By definition. If someone was threatening your life, that meant they chose to intend to do so.

It was a minor point, but an important one. Kidnappers, if things went wrong, intended to MURDER you. Therefore there is a strong moral argument for doing unto them before they can do unto you… Hell, it’s almost a moral mandate, because if they are willing to kidnap and murder you, they would be willing to do it to others, and my father always said that all it takes for evil to thrive is for good and just men to do nothing.

Of course, he also said that if you cut a board too short you could always stretch it, but if you cut it too long there was nothing you could do, and that men’s mistake wasn’t giving women the vote, it was teaching them to speak, so I took some of his advice with a grain of salt as big as my head.

But good advice or not, I was still trying to mentally prepare myself to kill someone if I had to. End their life. Destroy their entire history and potential. Maybe I had a sociopathic streak, but the idea didn’t bother me that much. Mostly I was worried about the trope that ‘killing changes a man’ that old Hollywood used to push.

It didn’t help that I felt pretty damned good. I’d memorized the short pamphlet and destroyed the storage medium it came on. Disintegrated it, actually. I didn’t buy into the idea that people could remember every single moment of their lives perfectly without a superpower, since human memory didn’t work that way, but blueprinting? That was not the same thing as memory. The Pamphlet was only sixty pages, and even though I couldn’t make head or tail of the writing, I had blueprinted every page, including the cover.

Blueprinting was NOT like memory, not at all. I couldn’t ‘recall’ anything about a blueprint, but what I could, and did, was to study it the same way someone could a physical object. It was like a copy of the file was in my head that I could re-read at my leisure. If I wanted to have a blueprint’s facts as part of my own core knowledge, I had to commit it to memory the same way anyone else did.

And boy, were the diagrams on energy flow ever so interesting and worth properly memorizing. Rushing wouldn’t help me right here, and obviously, I couldn’t move to meditate to digest or try to apply what I had learned, so I lay down to allow my nerves to slowly reset. Not too quickly, or my body’s jerks would alert my captors, which might mean my adventure would end prematurely.

Bob had been right. A lot of the diagrams had been designed to invoke energy through dance and having six arms available. It looked like eight limbs were some sort of magical number that allowed the Serenoids an unprecedented amount of control over external energy… a lot of the symbols were clearly directly related to the shapes of certain energies.

It was almost as though their multiple limbs allowed their dance to actively manipulate those symbols like they didn’t have a set one or two affinities the way humans did, but that their dances allowed them to tap into a huge variety of affinities. In essence, what they lost in the natural ability to connect to a dao, they gained by an innate connection to a sort of magical ability that required the use of eight limbs… divine or profane symmetry that seemed to embrace the language of dao itself.

Okay, point to myself for purple poetic delving. Anyway, they appeared to be masters of external energy use, meaning what they lacked in sheer power, they made up for in versatility. More importantly, a lot of the diagrams clearly showed their internal energy distribution, and while it was true some of it wouldn’t be able to be applied to a creature like me, some of it was VERY exciting and showed concepts, like 3-dimensional rotation, that I had never even considered.

As feeling returned to my limbs, I could tell a few things. I was lying down on my side on a moving surface, what felt like a flier or hover based on the subtle shifts and slow shudders from minor turbulence rather than the rhythmic pounding of wheels or treads rolling over the pavement.

The smell of ionized electronics and lubricant implied that it was probably a light drone carrier for repair or possibly mail delivery. A delivery hover? That meant two or at most three people. I could hear a steady hum and dull distant roar of fanjets through an imperfect sound seal, so yes, a hover. That meant we were on the ground, and limited the possible distance that I could have been taken.

No, I didn’t have a ‘unique set of skills for dealing with kidnappings’, or anything like that, it’s just that anyone who’s ever ridden in them can pretty easily tell the difference between a small flier, a hover, and a true ground vehicle from sounds and vibrations alone. Could you feel the difference between being on a boat compared to a haywagon? Sort of like that.

I felt a pair of heavy bracers around my forearms, holding my wrists crossed behind my back. I recognized them as quantum nullifiers, like prisons use to keep alpha prisoners from simply using their powers to kill everyone and escape, that were electromagnetically sealed together in their ‘lockdown’ mode.

Nullifiers were terrifying. They blocked off the connection between your energy node and the ether with some kind of powerful scrambler. I had the plans for several different kinds memorized, but that didn’t mean I actually understood how they worked, although I had an idea.

But my energy node wasn’t connected to the ether. I didn’t pull my power from someplace that could be blocked off by a scrambled barrier like most alphas. For perhaps the first time ever, my absolutely limited power supply was an actual advantage, because quantum nullifiers would force most alpha power levels to drop to near zero in a matter of seconds, but me? They were mostly an inconvenience because it would take me a few seconds to break the power streams in the electromagnets so I could get my hands under me and lift myself off the floor of the truck.

I had some sort of hood over my head. Not a full silence hood, but it definitely blocked my eyesight and seemed to have some sort of clasp under my chin. That was...concerning, but after a few moments I realized that I could easily scan it because, like the nullifiers, the whole hood was close to my skin and well within the range of my blueprinting ability.

The hood was made of woven titanium, and seemed to be a piece of alpha armor… it didn’t block hearing or breathing, but the bulletproof glass visor was blacked out by the simple, and slightly smelly, expedient of it having been recently painted with silver spray paint on the interior. That meant unprofessional, and the nullifier bracelets were of a design that I was totally unfamiliar with, foreign maybe?

I was also wearing something that felt a lot like light alpha armor. The grain wasn’t pleasant against my skin, and it wasn’t very good stuff, made of woven Kevlar and Cosprene fibers, but it WOULD make me look like an unconscious alpha after a fight rather than a prisoner.

So in my opinion I had three choices.

The first choice was to try and dash out of there. I could absolutely leave the nullifiers and probably the hood behind, but then I would be unmasked displaying at least class four abilities. Traffic cameras, dashcams, and idle bored would know exactly who I was inside of a few hours and a pretty good idea of what my powers were too.

If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

And it relied on the hovertruck NOT being airtight. I could dash through smallish cracks, but I had never even TRIED to move through a totally solid surface before. Theoretically, it was possible to slide between the molecules, but look what happened to Buckaroo Banzai! I was not scared enough to experiment in a way that could wind up with me halfway bonded into a steel wall, with a potential fusion event depending on my luck.

My second option was to break free, kill or disable everyone in the truck, and try to take control before the thing crashed. From what I could hear there were three people breathing in the truck around me, one of whom was the driver. Since I wasn’t quite ready to go on a murderous rampage, especially with no information, and I thought they expected me to still be unconscious, I put that one on the back burner.

Option three was to wait around like a good little unconscious lump of meat and hope to be rescued, absorbing as much information about what was actually going on as possible. Not a tremendously appealing idea, and it felt a bit too passive.

After a few minutes, I decided to combine all three. I would wait and see, try to get as much information as possible hopefully about who and why I was being intentionally misplaced, and then eventually dash or disintegrate my bonds. I’d decide on the killing part later, but if they had hurt the girls getting to me, that option would definitely be on the table.

Yeah, me, weak-ass power thinking about getting vengeance if they ‘hurt’ the class four and five girls that could beat me like a pinata with their hands tied behind their back. How pathetic was that? Me big strong caveman, beat chest and protect women wearing power armor from dangerous raccoons!

That didn’t stop me though. They were becoming my friends, and friends cared about other friends getting hurt.

“Coming up on the interchange,” a male voice mumbled quietly from the front. “Deacon, prop up his highness so casual scans show him sitting up next to you. Baelfire? Get ready. If anything goes wrong, if it looks like the checkpoint defenders are going to inspect, and burn everything. Witnesses, defenders, whatever… half mile radius is scorched. No witnesses.”

Okay, that made plan four the best one. A pyro, quite possibly a powerful one. His Highness? What the hell was that about? I felt hands dragging me up to a sitting position, and let my head loll forward as someone tried to maneuver me into a decent sitting position leaning against the metal inside the wall of the truck.

Okay, I admit it, I was enjoying flopping forward bonelessly as I heard a female voice cussing and trying to hold me steady. She clearly wasn’t particularly possessed of any kind of alpha might or physical enhancement, and I won’t hesitate to admit that my bone density and mass were a LOT higher than my already-large size would suggest.

“Stop fucking around, Deacon,” a female voice said angrily.

“He’s a lot heavier than I thought he was. I’m not used to handling unconscious people. You want to do it?” a second female voice, Deacon, I guess, whined.

“Duct tape his helmet to the shelf.”

After the ripping of tape and the feel of my helmet getting taped into place, I still tried to make sure that my ‘unconscious’ posture looked as unnatural as possible. Sleeping people unconsciously adjust to make sure they are still comfortably asleep, but people who are knocked out or dead just tend to dead-muscle and sometimes their natural muscle tension makes their limbs settle in odd positions.

I didn’t want to attract attention if there was an IR scan, though, because… well… if this Baelfire chick was nasty enough, all that raising a ruckus would do would be getting a lot of people killed. In fact, I decided to sort of modify plan four, because even pretending to be unconscious or unwilling stood a very good chance of getting people killed. I wasn’t a hero, but that didn’t mean I needed to be an asshole.

“Excuse me,” I said quietly.

“What the fuck?” I heard the voice in front of me, sounding startled, Baelfire, I guess? I felt a quick flash of heat on my front, but Deacon’s hiss made it stop.

“You are awake? Dammit. Enhanced physique. I should have guessed even ACP wouldn’t hold you down long.” The male voice said.

I sighed, “Look. I am fine with cooperating if you have to cross some inspection checkpoint, and I had my fun flopping around while Deacon was trying to prop me up. You have very delicate hands, by the way, Deacon… I wish I could have felt them under different circumstances, but I really don’t want Baelfire here to roast however many people might be there if they get suspicious.”

“I mean, if she does it she does it, It will be her killing them, not me, but she sounds like she hasn’t murdered anyone in a while and is antsy about it, so I will cooperate and keep my mouth shut until we get to someplace more private where I can properly deal with you.”

“Don’t you mean where we can properly deal with you? You are not in exactly the position to be making threats. I don’t know if you noticed, but toxin resistance or not, you have a set of electro-locked quantum nullifiers. Right now you might as well be a normal guy instead of an Alpha."

I shrugged a little as I felt the duct tape being ripped off the helmet. “Whatever makes you feel better.”

I heard Deacon’s voice. “Please accept our sincere apologies on behalf of the Maxwell group and Adrian Maxwell for this rather… abrupt introduction. None of your friends were harmed when we made our extraction, but the BSA was making it absolutely clear that you were being held as an incommunicado virtual prison at the Kellar academy, so we needed to… take steps to ensure your freedom to make your own decisions.”

I nodded slowly, “So that’s why you have me in a black-out helmet, a set of nullifiers, and pumped me full of animal tranks? And why nameless here…” I nodded my voice in the driver’s direction, “told the pyro there to burn off any innocent bystanders, wall guards, tourists, or any other possible witnesses. To set me free. Apology not accepted. I will not cause problems for now, out of a desire to prevent unnecessary deaths, but you might as well toss me out of the door because I won’t cut deals with mass murderers, kidnappers, and psychopaths.”

The male voice at the front sighed deeply. “It appears we have made a poor impression on our guest. We are past the border, and there seems to be little sense in keeping him blinded unless you’d rather keep the helmet to preserve your identity."

I shrugged, “The only enemies I am worried about right now drugged me and snatched me naked out of my bed somehow in the middle of a protected underground complex. If you did it without hurting anyone, I applaud your talents despite wanting you dead for daring to threaten to murder innocents.” I said, glaring at Baelfire, since Deacon’s apology implied that they didn’t want me dead.

“Since you already know my identity, then I don’t see how protecting it is going to help much.” After a moment, the chin strap was removed and Deacon, a small and slender, french-looking brunette with a doll-like face, half-mask, and skintight costume of a gauzy, pale blue, and pixie cut, removed the helmet. Beside her was another woman, but this one was clearly wearing combat armor, black with red edging, and a full-face mask that looked like something out of a transforming robot cartoon.

“Oh, he’s a pretty boy,” Baelfire remarked threateningly. “I think you should let me put a few marks on that beautiful face. That way he wouldn’t be so pretty anymore.”

I chuckled, “Hey, you got the threatening thing down pretty well. Tell you what. I’ll happily let you burn me if you don’t mind if I take off your arms and legs. I will heal, will you? If you are worried, I might just take your fingers instead. After all, you don’t need them to burn things, right?”

Did I think I could defeat her? Of course not, but I was a master of getting away from exactly her type. Pyros were not as sought-after on teams, and thus I had helped several of them get good rep, including that dick-bag Hotshot. With my newly improved energy pool, I might even be able to shut down the heat from her abilities, at least for a while… and a Pyro with no heat was just a nasty woman with a flame fetish. No, I refused to be impressed or intimidated.

Baelfire just stared at me for some reason. After a few minutes, her faceless mask shook slightly, “You honestly believe that, don’t you? Your infrared didn’t waver in the slightest, you honestly believe that if I tried to burn you, you could take off my limbs and not be harmed, even wearing a nullifier. Are you insane?”

I looked at her in shock, “Isn’t everyone that puts on a costume and a mask and goes out to kill or die for whatever stupid adrenaline junkie reason they can think of? I love the mask, though. It really pulls off the whole faceless evil vibe. You could make a mint as a professional PR villain, especially since even with the armor it’s clear you have an underwear model body and porn star tits.”

As Baelfire just turned away, Deacon looked at me in confusion, “Are you trying to make her angry? The last guy that made a pass at her got both of his hands burned off.”

I shrugged, “I am not making a pass. I’d sooner fuck a nuclear reactor. Just pointing out reality. As alphas, our definition of insane is pretty far out there. If Baelfire here tries to burn me, I can guarantee you with utmost confidence I would get better and I’d take away a body part or two as a souvenir. I wouldn’t do it for revenge, or out of fear or pain, I’d do it to remind her next time not to fuck with what she doesn’t understand.”

I smiled at Deacon, “The same applies to you, and nameless behind the wheel who is apparently running this operation. As a personal favor, I would rather you not make me clean blood out of my teeth or give you colon cancer, both are unpleasant and painful ways to die.”

The guy behind the wheel, a heavyweight type wearing a tied mask and ballcap, shook his head. “Jesus. Class sixes. You guys really do consider yourselves gods, don’t you?”

I smiled a little, and tugged my wrists from in front of me, interrupting the electromagnets that held them locked and disintegrating the slender locking mechanisms that held them closed. I could probably have just cranked the bolts open instead, but it would have been a lot less impressive than snapping the bands and dropping them onto the floor. Besides, they were blueprinted now. If I needed them, I could just create a copy, they weren’t made of particularly unusual or expensive materials.

“Aren’t we?” I asked as the bands clattered on the metal floor of the truck. “How about we go talk with this Adrian guy, and I can decide whether or not to kill him for hiring murderous thugs to come after me.”

If there was one thing I was good at, it was monologuing and projecting confidence, even if the only thing I was confident about was having a decent chance to escape.