EVE POV
The world slowed to a crawl. It wasn't just a feeling; it was the physics of Vance's Absolute Luminance hitting the parking lot like a tidal wave of liquid diamond. To any normal person, the air would have felt like solid lead, freezing their muscles and shattering their will until they were nothing but statues in a gallery of ice.
But I wasn't normal. And neither was Adam. We were the Old Man's masterpieces—walking, breathing contradictions built to survive the impossible.
"Now!" the Old Man roared. I could see him through the shimmering haze, his own Golden Impulse flaring just enough to create a small pocket of heat around the sedan. "The internal switch! Give him the energy he wasn't born with!"
I felt the shift before I even understood the command. It was like reaching into a furnace and pulling out a handful of frost. Under the Old Man's guidance, we did the one thing no Impulse user was ever supposed to survive: we inverted our cores. We pulled the energy we had been submerged in for months—the "nurture" energy—and forced it into our "nature" cores.
Vance, still gliding on his high-and-mighty light-bridge, frowned behind his visor. I could practically hear his sensors screaming. "What is this? Their cores... they're inverting!"
He was right to be scared. Adam, the Dark-born, didn't fight the freezing white light with shadows. That would have been too easy for a Sentinel to predict. Instead, he drew upon the Divine Light Impulse he had bathed in back in the lab. His eyes, normally those abyssal pits that made people want to look away, suddenly flared with a light so pure it made Vance's "cold" light look like dirty slush. He stood up in the middle of the "Flash-Freeze" as if the weight of the air meant absolutely nothing.
On the other side, I stopped trying to be fast. I stopped trying to be a "Light-born" girl playing with shadows. I reached into the deepest marrow of my bones and pulled out the Black Impulse—the raw, volatile vacuum that had been my only companion in the tube. A shroud of absolute void erupted around me, devouring Vance's white light as if it were a mid-afternoon snack.
"Rampage," the Old Man whispered.
Adam moved first. He didn't use a Dark-born's heavy, crushing strike; he moved with the instantaneous velocity of Light. He was a streak of gold that appeared in front of Vance's light-bridge in a fraction of a heartbeat.
"You said I had the footwork of a toddler," Adam said. His voice didn't just carry; it rang with a divine, terrifying resonance that made the glass in the nearby storefronts vibrate.
He didn't punch. He didn't even wind up. He simply reached out and touched the edge of Vance's Prismatic Aegis with a single finger. Instead of the energy refracting or feeding the shield, Adam's "Sanctified" Light synced with the shield's frequency and shattered it like cheap, fragile glass. The backwash of the explosion sent Vance reeling, his visor flickering as his brain failed to process a Dark-born using Light so perfectly.
"Impossible!" Vance gasped, his hand shaking as he leveled his gun.
He fired a flurry of rounds—white-hot tracers meant to paralyze. But before they could even get close to Adam, I was there. I felt the shadows curling around my limbs, making me feel heavy and light all at once. I reached out a hand made of pure, oily shadow and caught the bullets right out of the air.
I was standing on the side of a parked SUV as if gravity was just a suggestion I had decided to ignore. My body was half-shrouded in Black Impulse, but my movements were fluid, graceful—the movements of a Light-born girl finally finding her rhythm.
"My turn, Pajamas," I hissed, my voice dripping with the teenage sarcasm I knew drove the Old Man crazy.
I didn't just throw the bullets back. That would have been boring. I crushed them in my palm, infusing the lead with the Black Impulse until they hummed with a gravitational pull. Then, I flicked them. They weren't just projectiles anymore; they were miniature black holes. As they flew past Vance, they didn't just hit him—they tore the white tactical coat right off his shoulders and pulled his light-bridge apart from the sheer force of the vacuum.
Vance plummeted. He tried to manifest a platform, but the air around him was a chaotic mess of our combined auras—a "Hybrid Zone" where his pure Light Impulse couldn't gain a foothold. It was like trying to start a fire in a hurricane.
He hit the asphalt hard, the sound of his armor cracking echoing through the valet circle. Before he could even think about recovering, Adam was standing over him, his hand glowing with a golden-white halo. I landed right behind him, my fingers crackling with purple-black lightning, the dark energy itching to finish what we started.
"You talked about biological ethics," Adam said, his voice calm, yet the pavement beneath Vance began to liquefy from the sheer pressure of his presence. "But you forgot the first rule of the laboratory."
I leaned in close to Vance's ear, making sure he could see the predatory grin on my face. "Don't poke the things in the jars."
The power was surging through me, a dark, intoxicating rush. I wanted to see what happened if I let the vacuum go completely. I wanted to see if I could make this Sentinel disappear into nothingness.
"Enough," the Old Man called out from the car.
"But Father—" I started, my eyes glowing with the hunger for the kill. I could feel the impulse energy vibrating in my throat, desperate to be let loose.
"I said enough," he repeated. His Golden Impulse hummed with a sudden, sharp authority that made both of us flinch. "He is a Sentinel. If he dies, the Council sends a legion. If he lives to report that he was beaten by two 'brats,' he'll be too embarrassed to tell them exactly what happened. Efficiency, kids. Not cruelty."
Adam immediately powered down. The light vanished, his eyes returning to that calm, dark state, and he stepped back with a polite nod. I hesitated, my Black Impulse flickering like a dying candle, my heart still racing with the thrill of the hunt. I let out a long, disappointed sigh and dissipated the energy, feeling the cold air of the city rush back in to fill the void.
Vance lay on the ground, his visor shattered to reveal eyes wide with a mixture of horror and awe. He had come here to arrest "subjects," but he was looking at something else entirely. He was looking at the future, and it terrified him.
We climbed back into the car, the leather seats feeling surprisingly normal after the chaos. Adam took the driver's seat again, his hands steady on the wheel as if he hadn't just shattered a high-tier shield with a touch. I sprawled across the back seat, immediately pulling out a small mirror from my new bag to check my reflection.
"Did I get blood on the suit?" I asked, smoothing out the slate-gray silk. "I really like this coat."
"No," Adam replied, shifting the car into gear. "Just dust. And maybe a little singe on the hem."
"Ugh, whatever," I muttered, sinking into the cushions. "This silk is hard to clean, but I think the 'shadow-shroud' protected it."
As we drove over the remains of the Glacial Shards, leaving a stunned Sentinel and a ruined valet circle in our wake, the Old Man looked at us in the rearview mirror. He looked tired, but there was something else in his eyes—a flicker of pride buried under layers of worry.
"Jorgen City is compromised," he said, tapping a new set of coordinates into the GPS. "We go to the coast. We need a place where the air is thick enough to hide your scent."
"Can we stop for burgers first?" I asked, already back on my phone to see if the video of the street performer had any new comments. "All that 'rampage' stuff made me hungry. My core is literally growling."
The Old Man looked at the carnage in the side mirror—the cracked pavement, the smoking SUV, the Sentinel struggling to sit up—and then he looked at me.
"Fine," he sighed, sounding every bit like the exhausted father he was pretending to be. "But stay in the car. I'll go to the drive-thru. We've caused enough 'wonder' for one day."
I smiled to myself, watching the city lights begin to blur as Adam accelerated. The lab was a lifetime ago. The world was big, messy, and full of people who thought they could control us. They were wrong.