Chapter 8: The God and the Machete
The darkness in the containment cell was absolute. It was not a natural darkness; It was the total absence of light, designed to break the psyche, to induce madness. The floor was made of cold metal, slippery from condensation. On top of it, fifteen-year-old Jonathan sat cross-legged.
I wasn't meditating. His "Flipped Training" was over. Their peaceful rebellion had failed. Now, he was listening.
With his eyes closed, his world became sound. He heard the low-frequency hum of the main generator, three floors below. He could hear the rhythmic drip of a leaky pipe in the hallway outside. And I heard the patrols.
A two-man team. Rubber-soled boots, almost silent, but the man on the right was dragging his left foot—a weight of 0.5 kilos more in that step. 302 seconds per round. 28 seconds of total silence as they passed through the sealed corridor outside their cell. I was counting the seconds.
It had been 290 seconds since the last patrol. The silence was twelve seconds longer than normal.
Then, he heard it.
The sound of heavy boots. Too much. Not two, but at least six. It wasn't a patrol. It was the transfer team. They were the men who came to package the product.
It was now or never.
Jonathan opened his eyes in total darkness. His gaze was fixed on the location of the electronic lock on the door. He saw no steel. He saw "seams." In his mind, he saw the flow of energy. And he saw the ruling. The flaw he had felt, more than seen, when he was thrown into this box: a microscopic voltage fluctuation, an undiagnosed energy tick that occurred exactly every 15 seconds. It was a seizure in the system, a 0.2-second error. A faint heartbeat in the prison armor.
He heard the high-pitched beep of a keycard being swiped out.
Now!
At the exact instant when his instincts told him that the fault was occurring, Jonathan, who had quietly approached the door, knocked on the panel from the inside. It was not a brute force blow to break the metal; It was a perfectly synchronized palm vibration, tuned with millisecond precision to strike the mechanism at the heart of his seizure.
The conflicting energy pulse was too much for the system. There was a loud BZZZT! and a sharp smell of burnt ozone. The lock failed. The door, designed to fail and open in the event of a power surge, opened with a pneumatic whistle.
The six transfer guards, about to enter, backed away in surprise.
At the same instant, the complex's main alarm came to life, its howls echoing off the cement walls, bathing the gray hallway in a flashing, howling red light.
There was no pause. There was no hesitation.
Before the first guard could even raise his gas rifle, Jonathan was already upon them. He was unarmed, but that didn't matter. His killer instinct, suppressed during twelve years of "Reverse Training," was now in charge.
His hand, hardened by years of hitting cement walls in confinement, shot out like a knife, striking the leader's solar plexus. At the same time, his other hand grabbed the second guard's wrist and twisted it. A dry, sickly click was heard as the radio broke. A third movement, a slap of the hand to the throat of the guard on the right, crushed his windpipe.
Two guards fell to the ground choking and one screaming, all before the second alarm siren had time to sound.
…..
Jonathan moved. It was a liquid shadow flowing through the red strobe light of the alarms. He ran through the gray corridors that had been his prison for twelve years, but now, for the first time, he moved by choice.
"CONTAINMENT ALERT! SUBJECT SEVEN HAS ESCAPED FROM THE CRYOGENIC BLOCK! LETHAL CONTAINMENT AUTHORIZED!"
The impersonal voice boomed over the loudspeakers, but to Jonathan it was just white noise.
He came to a major intersection. To his left, marked with a severe military stencil, was the reinforced door of the Main Arsenal. Inside, he knew there were assault rifles, submachine guns, carbon-fiber combat knives, and Kevlar vests.
His instinct, now a clear, cold roar in his mind, told him to go there. Logical. Efficient. Take body armor. Take an FN P90 rifle—high rate, good penetration. Take two combat knives for close work. Estimated time to assemble: 14 seconds..
He stopped in his tracks. The momentum of his career made him drift slightly on the polished floor.
He looked at the door of the armory. Those were his weapons. The weapons that had been forced into his hands. The weapons of the Orphanage. The tools of their slavery.
His rebellion was not just about escaping. It was rejecting everything they represented.
Jonathan turned to the door of the arsenal, and in an act of pure, youthful defiance, spat on the floor in front of her.
He turned right. Toward the metal service doors that led to the outdoor courtyard.
He hit the panic bar and the doors slammed open, revealing the chaotic night. The icy air hit him, a welcome relief from the stale air of the complex. The courtyard was lit by blinding searchlights. The snow was falling hard.
CRACK!
A sniper shot rang out. The bullet hit the door frame where his head had been a millisecond ago.
But the Jonathan who crossed the yard was no longer the child who practiced "Flipped Training." It was the Master releasing his potential. It moved like a ghost, using the flickering of searchlights and falling snow as cover. His innate ability for stealth made him untraceable. The snipers were shooting where he was, not where he was going to be.
He ran across the open courtyard, bullets whistling around him, and came to the gardener's tool shed. The door was secured with an industrial padlock.
He ignored the lock. He grabbed the handle and the wooden door with both hands and pulled. With a creak of torn wood and creaking metal, he ripped the door off its hinges.
The smell of damp earth, machine oil, and fertilizer filled his lungs. His eyes scanned the darkness. He saw axes, shovels, even a chainsaw. Logical weapons.
He ignored them.
His eyes were fixed on him. Hanging on the back wall, almost forgotten, was a cane machete. It was long, heavy, and covered in a layer of reddish-brown rust. It was a working weapon, dirty and unbalanced.
It was perfect.
Jonathan ripped it off the wall. He felt the terrible weight in his hand. The wooden handle was chipped. It was a terrible weapon.
And it was his.
This would not be a clinical operation with their sterile weapons. This would be carnage. This was his declaration of rebellion. This massacre would not be the work of a soldier. It would be the birth of the God of the Machete.
…..
Jonathan stepped out of the tool shed, the rusty machete hanging loosely beside him.
The instant his feet touched the snow in the courtyard, the world exploded into white light. Blinding searchlights mounted on the guard towers were turned on, turning the night into a raw, artificial day. The snow was falling hard, creating a swirling white vortex that disoriented the eye.
Through the glow, he saw the silhouettes.
An entire containment squad, twenty men, had formed a perfect circle around him. They were dressed in black Kevlar riot gear, protected by transparent ballistic shields and armed with automatic rifles. They were the hammer of the Orphanage, designed to crush any insurgency.
A metallic and amplified voice resounded from an observation tower above him.
"SUBJECT SEVEN!" It was the voice of "Cicatriz". "YOU ARE CONTAINED! DROP THE GUN AND SURRENDER NOW!"
Jonathan stopped in the center of the courtyard, in the eye of the storm.
He slowly raised his head. The snow was melting on his face. The mask of charismatic innocence he had worn for twelve years fell off of him. Nothing was left. Neither anger, nor fear. Just an emptiness, a calm so deep and cold that it was unnatural.
He closed his eyes.
The whisper in his head, the voice he had spent his whole life repressing, the voice that told him how to kill, was no longer a whisper. It became a roar.
Twenty objectives. Armor: Kevlar, Tier IIIA. Ineffective against high-speed cuts in joints. Shields: Polycarbonate. Breakable with a focused percussion hit. Threat: Moderate. Efficiency: Low.
For the first time in his life, Jonathan stopped fighting that voice. He stopped building dams. He stopped investing his energy in not killing.
He opened his eyes.
And he "let go" of control.
The air in the courtyard changed instantly. The wind seemed to stop. The temperature, already below zero, seemed to plummet ten degrees more. The experienced guards, veterans of brutal conflicts, felt it. It was a sudden pressure on her breasts, a primal fear that had no logical source. The prey instinct screaming that the alpha predator had stopped playing.
The nearest guard, a 130-pound man, instinctively took a step back.
They saw the fifteen-year-old boy lift the rusty machete, and for the first time, they saw the "God of the Machete."
...
The terror of the guards was momentary. Replaced by years of indoctrination.
"FIRE!", the roar of "Cicatriz" distorted by the loudspeaker was the spark.
The courtyard exploded in an inferno of flashes and thunder. The twenty automatic rifles opened fire, spitting hundreds of bullets into a metal storm aimed at the center of the circle. The snow around Jonathan vaporized into clouds of instant vapor.
But Jonathan was no longer there.
He did not dodge the bullets. He moved between them. For the snipers in the towers, it was as if it had dissolved. His innate ability for stealth merged with his Master speed. He slid through the firing patterns, taking advantage of the shooters' milliseconds of recalculation.
And as he moved, something inside him, the power he had kept chained for fifteen years, was unleashed. Su Touki, his true aura, instinctively awakened by his killing intent for the first time, flowed from his body. It didn't explode outward like a shield; It was channeled, dark and heavy, down his arm and into the weapon he had chosen.
The rusty machete began to vibrate, emitting a low, unnatural hum. The rust didn't go away, but the blade now glowed with a pale and oppressive aura.
The first guard saw it coming. A burly man who screamed and raised his Kevlar shield.
The machete struck.
There was no coup. There was no resistance.
The machete, now imbued with Jonathan's concentrated Touki, did not stop. He cut the ballistic shield as if it were a dead letter. He cut the man's kevlar helmet. He cut the Kevlar vest. He slashed the man behind him, splitting him in two from shoulder to hip.
The scene turned into a surgical massacre.
A guard to his right attempted to fire his rifle at point-blank range. Jonathan did not dodge. He simply turned his machete. The rusty, empowered blade cut the rifle's barrel in half, and without losing momentum, continued the bow, decapitating the shooter.
Two guards attacked from the flanks. He didn't turn around. His instincts took over. His left arm shot backwards, hitting one guard's throat with his knuckles, as his machete stabbed back into the other's chest.
It wasn't frantic. It was efficient. It was a ballet of death. Every movement had a purpose. Every death was instantaneous. He was the assassination genius on full display.
In less than thirty seconds, silence reigned. The only sound was the howling of the alarm and the dripping of blood on the snow.
Jonathan stopped in the center of the courtyard, surrounded by mutilated bodies. He breathed deeply, steam coming from his mouth and the hot blade of his machete. The snow fell softly, dyeing red at his feet.
Slowly, he looked up. His cold eyes, devoid of all innocence, found the window of the observation tower where he knew "Scar" was watching, paralyzed with horror.
The weapon had been released.