Bullets screamed.
Sol's face was drained of color. He shoved the researcher away on instinct and vanished.
[Spatial Shift Experience +1]
Space twisted—just a flicker—and he reappeared a couple of meters to the side.
Bang. Bang.
Rounds chewed into the dirt and asphalt where he had been standing a heartbeat earlier, throwing up chips and dust. The sharp scent of gunpowder rushed into his nose.
Cold sweat broke out along his spine.
This wasn't a movie. Not a game. Not some patriotic drama where the hero shrugged off a few bullets and kept running.
Get hit a few times here, and he'd be on the ground screaming, bleeding out. Helpless.
He didn't have that luxury.
He couldn't waste energy, but he couldn't stand still either.
He blinked again.
[Spatial Shift Experience +1]
[Spatial Shift Experience +1]
[Spatial Shift Experience +1]
Short hops, no flash, no trail. Just tiny distortions swallowed by the night as he stutter-stepped closer to the car, using darkness and confusion as his cover.
A few meters. Then a few more.
He landed beside the driver's door, lungs burning. His hand closed around the remote key, and he hit the unlock button.
The car chirped softly.
Sol yanked the door open and threw himself into the driver's seat.
The world exploded.
Bang, bang, bang—
Glass detonated beside his head in a spray of shards. Metal rang with impacts. The air itself felt like it was tearing.
"Fuck!"
Pain flared white-hot in his left arm. He grabbed it with his right hand, fingers coming away slick and warm.
A clean bullet hole showed through the torn fabric, blood already pouring down to his elbow.
His vision swam.
For a terrifying second, the edges of the world went dark, tunneling inward.
He forced his eyes open, teeth grinding.
Later. You can fall apart later.
He jammed the key into the ignition with shaking fingers, twisted hard, and slammed his foot down on the accelerator.
The car lurched forward, tires squealing on cracked pavement as it shot down the road, engine screaming in protest.
More muzzle flashes bloomed behind him.
He didn't look back.
Instead, he dragged every remaining scrap of energy into focus, shaping it desperately around the driver's side window.
[Echo Shield Experience +1]
The space around him rippled—just a subtle shimmer, like heat distortion. It wrapped the side of the car in a thin, invisible film.
Whoosh—
Bullets tore through the air, a deadly hail aimed straight at his head and chest. But as they crossed that shimmering layer, they didn't punch through glass or flesh.
They vanished.
To an outside eye, they simply disappeared. No sparks. No ricochet. No impact.
Inside the shield, Sol felt something strange.
A hollow tug. A sense of tiny, dense objects entering a pocket of nothingness and coming apart, fragment by fragment. Metal disintegrating into dust, then into less than dust, until only their kinetic energy remained.
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Those forces gathered.
They condensed into a cluster of blue energy in the warped space beside him, crackling quietly on a level his eyes couldn't see—but his power could feel.
He knew, with sudden, sharp certainty, that he could throw it back.
Reflect it all.
He could picture it—turning the stolen force into a reverse barrage, ripping down the line of gunmen.
Not now.
At this speed, with his hands white-knuckled on the wheel and his vision swimming from blood loss, he couldn't afford even a split-second of distraction or to waste any more energy.
One bad swerve and he'd slam into a ditch, or a rock, or a tree.
So he held it.
Focused on the road.
On the pain in his arm. On not letting the car drift off into darkness.
The vehicle roared onward, eating up distance with no traffic to slow it.
---
"Damn it!"
Back at the gate, Captain Ken's face turned an ugly shade as he watched the black car rocket away, tail lights shrinking into the night.
No one escaped from this base.
Not on his watch.
Anger surged hot and violent through his veins.
"Go!" he snapped. "Chase him! We are not letting that kid get away!"
By the time the chase order left his mouth, Sol was already a dark streak far down the road.
Ken grit his teeth, eyes tracking the retreating headlights until they dipped and vanished behind a rise.
Outside, in the fleeing car, Sol squinted at the navigation screen glowing on the dashboard. He nudged the wheel, aligning with the route to the nearest city.
Sweat soaked his forehead. His grip trembled.
If not for raw survival instinct—and the fact that the road ahead was blessedly empty—he would have crashed already.
Back at the base entrance, Ken barked again, voice harsh.
"Move it! Get a car and go after him before we lose him!"
A few minutes later, two vehicles shot out through the gate, engines howling as they sped in the direction Sol had gone.
"Faster!" Ken growled at the driver. "Catch him!"
Wind whipped past the open window as they accelerated, but the dark line of road ahead stayed empty.
The car Sol drove was long gone.
Ken's expression hardened, then shifted—rage battling with calculation.
If they pushed too hard… if they stormed into the city, guns blazing after a "mutant kid," there would be questions. Cameras. Civilians. Attention.
Attention the base didn't want.
He swallowed his pride.
"Maintain speed," he ordered tightly. "No wild stunts. We're not making a scene."
They drove on, but the tail lights they were chasing never reappeared. The car Sol had taken eventually vanished entirely at the horizon.
Ken stared, jaw tight, as distance and darkness swallowed the last trace of their fugitive.
Gunfire had done nothing.
He spat a curse under his breath.
"I'll get you," he muttered. "Don't think you're safe just because you crawled out of here."
Escape from the base didn't mean freedom.
It meant a manhunt.
Orders would go out. A warrant would be issued for Subject No. 28 who was a criminal already. Every enforcer in the area would be told to watch for a young, broke, injured kid with nowhere to go, of course with a picture of how he looks, and how he looks now from what the security cameras captured.
Ken didn't believe someone like that could disappear for long.
A day. Two at most.
Then they'd drag him back.
And when they did, Ken promised himself that the freak would learn the true meaning of misery.
The thought twisted his mouth into a slow, cruel smile.
Later, near the city's slum district, their headlights swept past a black sedan half-jammed off the side of the road, one door hanging slightly open.
They stopped.
The car was empty.
No sign of the boy.
They searched the area, flashlights cutting through the shadows, but found nothing—just trash, crumbling walls, and the distant noise of the city.
After a while, Ken turned back.
"Return to base," he said curtly, climbing into the vehicle. "Others keep looking."
The engines rumbled to life again, and the night swallowed them too.
---
Research Base.
Inside an office.
"What did you just say? You let a test subject escape?"
The voice was low but edged with steel.
Behind a wide desk sat a middle-aged man in a black-and-white suit, hair carefully slicked back. His nameplate read: Alexander.
His frown deepened as he studied the man standing stiffly before him.
Captain Ken forced a strained smile.
"Sir, just give me a little time," he said quickly. "I guarantee I'll bring Subject No. 28 back."
Alexander watched him for a moment longer, then exhaled through his nose, some of the sharpness in his gaze fading.
"I hope so," he said.
His interest, however, had already cooled.
In his mind, Subject No. 28 was just another subject. One more line in a long list.
He picked up a freshly printed stack of documents from his desk and began to flip through them absently.
Reports. Charts. Early analysis.
Details on Subject No. 28's performance, including data from the incident not long ago.
Two new abilities were underlined.
New Abilities:
— The target is suspected of having a teleportation-type movement ability, capable of short-range teleportation through thought.
— Can emit black energy spheres with significant destructive power, suspected to have a disintegrating effect, upper limits of destructive capacity unknown, further testing required…
In a short time, the research base had observed and cataloged what they'd seen Sol do.
If Echo Shield had been more obvious—if it had lit the night like a dome or flared visibly instead of quietly warping space—perhaps it would have been logged too.
But it hadn't. And so it was invisible on paper as well.
Alexander skimmed the numbers. The distance of Spatial Shift. The damage radius of the dark energy. He clicked his tongue softly.
"What a pity," he murmured. "A failure, after all."
He shook his head.
Subject No. 28 was supposed to be something special. A forced merge of genetic material from two of the most dangerous ability users alive—Brainwave and The Professor.
On paper, the result should have been extraordinary.
Reality had been… underwhelming.
An initial ability to absorb sunlight and release only a weak push? That had been a massive disappointment. They'd almost abandoned the project right then.
Even now, with this so-called second awakening, the abilities listed didn't impress him.
Teleportation that only moved the user a meter or two.
Barely good for walking through walls.
Black energy spheres that destroy anything in their path, yes—but in scope and impact on a human body, their effects could be mirrored with conventional firearms.
Bullets could kill too.
"Send a few armed men, and such a mutant could be put down easily," Alexander thought, flipping the report closed.
He placed the documents aside, already turning his attention to the next stack on his desk, to the next experiment in a line that never seemed to end.
