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Chapter 2: Let The Show Begin II
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[Information] has plenty of uses, including awakening powers... Such as Cyberpathy, what shall help him escape today.
He walked towards the door. As he approached, the door's control panel, a solid sheet of light with no visible mechanisms, flickered from red to green. With a soft, pneumatic hiss, the door slid open.
The two guards outside spun around, their reactions comically sluggish.
To Adam, the world seemed to be moving through syrup.
This was his oldest curse, the Slowness he could inflict upon others.
It wasn't that time was slowing; it was that he was depriving them of their speed, their quickness of nerve and limb, even thinking speed.
He envied it, and so he took it.
He moved with an economy of motion born of a thousand rehearsals in his mind.
His hand closed over the guard's rifle, and before the latter could react, he turned in his grip.
A blast of blue energy took the second guard in the chest, throwing him back against the wall in a crackle of dying neurons.
The first guard, his face a mask of slow-motion shock, tried to bring his own weapon to bear.
A sharp, precise kick to the back of the knee, and the man crumpled.
Then a brutal chop to the neck. Adam pulled out the man's knife, and with a slice, the guard joined his partner in silent oblivion.
He stood over them, the pulse rifle feeling alien in his hand. Hydra's misunderstanding had been his only shield.
Time is only a facet of his Envy, and even his slow has more to it than it seems.
He took a few steps forward, leaving the white room far behind. The corridor stretched before him, a maw of concrete and steel.
For the first time in over a decade, he was outside his cell on his own accord.
The air tasted different. It tasted of blood, ozone, and something else, something almost forgotten.
It tasted of chance.
Today, he'd either die or escape. No in between.
Even if death has to come by his own hands. All better than going back to hell.
The unblinking eye of the camera mounted high in the corner of the sterile white hallway should have seen it all.
It should have triggered a blaring, red-lit, panic-inducing alarm the moment his first move began.
Yet, no such thing took place.
Adam allowed himself a fraction of a second to glance up at the lens.
They were always watching. Human eyes, bored, caffeine-fueled, monitoring a hundred different feeds in a dimly lit security room.
But they weren't seeing him. They were seeing a perfect, seamless loop he had crafted for them; a ten-second clip of an empty, peaceful hallway, playing on a repeat they would never question.
They were watching a ghost, a memory, while the present unfolded violently just outside their perceived reality.
The question was, how? How did a prisoner, a lab rat, have such intimate control over a Hydra facility's nervous system?
Adam would have loved to attribute it to his mutant power, the one they had codenamed 'Envy.'
It was a part of him, a twisted manifestation of his deepest, most painful yearning.
But no. Envy, in its raw, initial form, had been a pathetic, guttering candle flame of an ability.
It was the [Information] that changed everything. Whatever it was, a cheat, a system, a godsend, a conspiracy, it's still the thing that gave him a second chance.
Second chance... In hell.
He believed it was the [Information] that had pulled him from his previous life and thrown him into this meat grinder.
He, who craved autonomy above all else, wielded a power that stripped it from others.
But he didn't care. If anything, he considers it their fault.
He considers himself to be in the territory of being sane, but a breeze might push him to the other side.
After all, they had messed with his head too much. Oh, how they had messed with it.
He remembered it all, every excruciating second. Being strapped to the cold steel chair, the leather restraints biting into his wrists and ankles.
The halo-like frame screwed directly into his skull, holding his head perfectly, terrifyingly still.
There were no anesthetics for these procedures. Dr. Pryce insisted on "baseline neural responses."
He was wide awake, fully conscious, as they peeled back a section of his scalp and drilled a tiny, precise hole in his cranium.
He could hear the high-pitched whine of the drill, feel the vibration resonate through his entire skeleton.
He could smell the faint, acrid scent of his own burning bone. Then came the probes, micro-filaments of chilled metal, inserted into the grey matter that was him.
They would stimulate a cluster of neurons and ask him to use his power.
They would measure the bio-electrical surge, map the pathways, all while monitoring his vocal responses to the pain.
"Subject is displaying a seven-point-three percent increase in theta wave activity concurrent with power manifestation."
Pryce would note, his voice calm, clinical, as if commenting on the weather, not on the violation of a human mind.
"Administer a mild electro-shock to the amygdala. Let's see how fear impacts the energy output."
Adam would scream, a raw, ragged sound that tore at his throat.
The brain may not have pain receptors, but Hydra have plenty of ways to make one experience pain.
They were trying to find the source of his power, to hardwire a control mechanism, to turn him into a weapon that would heel at a command.
It was from that unimaginable, soul-shattering pain that Recoil had been born. A power that made freedom self-punishing.
It was a curse of pure, defensive spite. Any aggressive or forceful action a cursed person took against Adam would rebound in a variety of ways, depending on the action.
Throw a punch, and your own wrist might snap. Fire a gun, and the recoil could shatter your shoulder. It was his subconscious screaming, 'If you hurt me, you will feel it too!'
He knew it was useless in the grand scheme of his captivity. Using Recoil on a surgeon just meant they'd strap him down tighter.
It would only make the Hydra lunatics more fascinated, more determined to break him.
The only reason they hadn't dissected his brain entirely was their fear of damaging his more esoteric, time-related potential.
That and the fact that they needed him stable until their precious "space fracture" project was complete.
But Recoil, like his other base curses, wasn't enough for escape. Hydra wasn't an enemy you could simply punch your way through.
Without the [Information], he would have been just another forgotten name on a specimen jar.
It was the Cyberpathy trait that had been his true key.
Bored, desperate, and trapped in his featureless cell, he had done the only thing he could: he funneled all of his [Information] into the [Information Trait] section.
The result was a silent, internal explosion. Cyberpathy.
It wasn't true technomancy; he couldn't just wave a hand and command machines.
He had to hack them, but it felt like second nature. It was an innate, intuitive understanding of the digital soul of any mechanical system.
He could see the code, the electrical pathways, the logic, and the flaws, as clearly as others saw words on a page.
Furthermore, he could communicate with machines remotely. He can feel them and reach out to them.
Through this newfound sense, he had begun his patient, meticulous infiltration.
He couldn't assault the main servers directly; the digital fortifications were too strong, and he lacked the knowledge to infiltrate something of that scale.
So, he started with the periphery.
The surveillance system was first, then the personal laptops of the technicians, and the tablets of the guards.
All he needed was proximity or sight, a momentary connection, and his consciousness could slip through, leaving no trace, building his control pixel by pixel.
While Hydra kept him a prisoner in a room devoid of stimulus, he had used their own devices to build a university of escape.
He read everything: advanced cryptography, network architecture, programming languages.
He absorbed it all, and with each byte of knowledge, he felt the 'Cyberpathy' tag in his mind solidify.
It was as if he needed the necessary knowledge to use Cyberpathy to its highest potential.
It was this confluence of circumstances that allowed him to now walk the hallways of the Hydra facility as if he were its master.
But he was not arrogant. He was a ghost, yes, but a ghost in a house full of snakes.
Still, he couldn't hope to stay silent for long due to guard patrols, or rather, they already know, after all, the gun blast was very loud.
He still, however, had the initiative. The surveillance systems were his eyes, not theirs.
And soon enough, he was found, three guards in full tactical gear, their rifles snapping up. They didn't shout a warning. Their orders were clear: incapacitate, not kill.
No, it's more accurate to say that he found them first and took cover by the corner, waiting for them to get close before he showed himself.
Adam's eyes, cold and focused, locked onto the lead guard.
"Slow," He whispered.
It was as if an invisible, viscous syrup had flooded the space around the three men.
Their movements, once sharp and professional, became dreamlike, dragging through thick mud.
Simultaneously, Adam wrapped himself in another curse. "Fade." His presence diminished, not into invisibility, but into insignificance.
He became a blur in their peripheral vision, a shadow they instinctively dismissed, a target their slowed minds struggled to prioritize.
But he wasn't done. This was where his true innovation came into play. The Prime Curse.
Normally, when he cursed someone with Slow, he simply deprived them of a portion of their speed.
It was a zero-sum game for him; he didn't gain what they lost. But [Information] had unlocked a new variable.
He could now apply what he calls a 'Prime' version. The speed he stole, he kept. It's limited to one, but it's more than enough.
He focused on the lead guard, the one who looked to be the most dangerous of the three. "Slow. Prime."
The effect was instantaneous and profound. He gained speed, about 30% of the guard's speed.
The world around him seemed to decelerate further, not just because of their curse, but because his own perception and reflexes had been catapulted to a higher plane.
His brain, now operating at an accelerated rate, processed information in a torrent.
He could see the individual muscles in the guards' faces twitch in delayed reaction, track the minute adjustments of their balance.
He moved.
To the cursed guards, he was a phantom of gore and motion. He didn't so much dodge their punches as he simply wasn't there by the time their fists arrived.
He flowed between them. They may be armored, but his knife still found itself in his eyes, then in his brain.
A knife-hand to the throat, crushing the windpipe. A wrenching twist that snapped a neck with a sound like a dry branch breaking.
The fight was less a battle and more a brutal, surgical dissection. Blood sprayed in languid, beautiful arcs across the white walls.
Bodies crumpled in slow, graceful collapses.
[Ohhh, Gore. Spiritual successor to the Punisher]
[Ahh, I missed that shit]
[Yeah, we psychos, violence is the only way to our hearts]