Location: Abandoned Subway Station, Line 04 (Flooded Sector)
Time: 02:14 AM
The sound of retching echoed off the tiled walls.
Kazuki Tanaka was on his hands and knees in three inches of stagnant, oily water. He coughed, spitting up bile and saliva. His ribs throbbed with a dull, sickening heat.
"Stand up," Rina said.
She stood five feet away, holding a length of solid oak—a bokken. She wasn't glowing. She wasn't floating. She was just a woman in baggy cargo pants and a tank top, sweating in the humid underground air.
Kazuki wiped his mouth with the back of a trembling hand. He wasn't wearing the Mark II armor. He was wearing a soaked grey t-shirt and gym shorts. Without the suit's hydraulic support, his body felt heavy. His legs, conditioned for Mach-speed bursts, felt clumsy in the mud.
"I... I didn't see it," Kazuki wheezed, forcing himself to stand.
"Because you were looking," Rina replied. She didn't offer him a hand. "Your eyes are slow, Kazuki. Light takes 0.000003 seconds to travel a kilometer. By the time the image hits your retina and your brain processes it, the event is already over. You are living in the past."
She stepped forward. The water didn't splash. She moved through it like oil.
"Again."
Kazuki raised his fists. He tried to engage his Synaptic Acceleration—the biological ability to see the world in slow motion.
The room slowed. Rina's movement became a crawl.
He saw her shoulder dip. He saw her hip rotate. She's swinging for my head, he analyzed.
He ducked left.
CRACK.
The oak sword slammed into his right thigh.
The pain was instant and blinding. It wasn't a "fighting spirit" pain; it was the kind of biological shock that shuts a leg down. Kazuki collapsed, splashing into the muck.
"How?!" Kazuki yelled, clutching his leg. "I dodged! I saw you swing high!"
"I lied," Rina said calmly.
Kenji was sitting on the rusted hood of a subway car derailed twenty meters away. He was peeling an orange with a combat knife.
"You reacted to a feint, kid," Kenji called out. "You're trusting the input. But the input can be hacked."
Rina lowered the sword. "The Mark II suit is a crutch. It processes data for you. It draws red lines on your HUD showing you where to go. But out there?" She pointed to the ceiling, toward the city above. "General Malvorn doesn't give you red lines. He will feed you false data until you run into a wall at Mach 2."
She tapped her temple.
"You need to stop thinking. Speed is noise. The faster you go, the louder the world gets. You need to find the Zero State."
"And what is that?" Kazuki gritted out, forcing his numb leg to take weight.
"Silence," Rina said. "The moment before the movement. Don't watch my sword. Feel the displacement of the air. Feel the intent."
She tossed the wooden sword aside. It clattered loudly on the concrete platform.
She pulled a strip of black cloth from her pocket.
"Blindfold," she ordered.
"You're kidding," Kazuki spat. "I can barely dodge you with my eyes open."
"Then you will bleed until you learn," Rina said, cold as ice. "Put it on."
04:45 AM
The training was brutal. It wasn't a montage. It was two hours of failure.
Kazuki was covered in bruises. His lip was split. His left eye was swelling shut.
He stood in the darkness, the blindfold tight against his face.
All he could hear was the drip, drip, drip of condensation falling from the ceiling.
His heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird. Calm down, he told himself. Listen.
He heard the water shift.
Swish.
To his left.
Kazuki didn't think. He didn't calculate. He just let his body fall backward.
A fist comprised of compressed air passed inches from his nose. Rina's punch.
He felt the wind of it. It smelled like sweat and ozone.
"Better," Rina's voice whispered from the dark.
For the first time all night, Kazuki didn't feel fear. He felt a strange, cold clarity. The pain in his leg faded into background noise. He was a radio tuning into a frequency nobody else could hear.
BEEP. BEEP. BEEP.
The sound cut through the silence like a gunshot.
Kazuki ripped off the blindfold.
His discarded pile of clothes was flashing red. The comms unit.
"Kazuki!" Aeva's voice was distorted, frantic. "Seismic alert! We have a localized impact event on the South Bay Bridge."
Kazuki scrambled to the pile, his wet feet slapping on the concrete. He grabbed the earpiece. "Is it the Helix?"
"I don't know," Aeva said. "But the thermal signature is massive. It's... it's just standing there. Waiting. Traffic is stopped. People are trapped."
Kazuki looked at the heavy metal suitcase sitting on the platform bench. The Mark II.
He looked at Rina.
"Don't," Rina warned. Her chest was heaving slightly from the exertion. "You aren't finished. You found the Zero State for one second. If you go now, you'll lose it."
"There are people on that bridge," Kazuki said, his voice hard.
"You will break," Kenji said from the train car. He didn't look up from his knife. "Whoever landed on that bridge didn't do it by accident. They want you to come to them. It's a trap, False God."
"I don't care," Kazuki said.
He slammed his hand onto the suitcase biometric scanner.
HISS.
The case unfolded. Mechanical arms whirred, snapping plates of blue and silver alloy onto his bruised body. The suit tightened, locking his injuries behind layers of graphene and ceramic.
The HUD flickered to life.
[SYSTEM ONLINE. BATTERY: 92%.]
The pain disappeared, replaced by the numbing rush of synthetic adrenaline. He felt powerful again. He felt fast.
"I'll be back," Kazuki said.
BOOM.
The air inside the subway station detonated.
Water geysered up from the tracks as Kazuki broke the sound barrier instantly. The pressure wave knocked Rina's hair back and shattered the remaining fluorescent lights.
Darkness returned to the station.
Kenji hopped down from the train car, landing softly in the water. He sighed.
"He's going to try to punch it," Kenji muttered.
"Yes," Rina said, staring at the tunnel where the blue lightning had vanished. "And he is going to learn that physics doesn't care about heroism."
The South Bay Bridge — 04:58 AM
The scene was chaotic.
Cars were stopped in a gridlock. Smoke rose from a crater in the center of the suspension bridge. The wind was howling, whipping rain against the windshields of terrified drivers.
Standing in the center of the crater was a man.
He was huge—nearly seven feet tall. He wore no helmet, just heavy, industrial cargo pants and a thick grey vest that looked like it was made of tank tread.
His skin was pale, mapped with veins that glowed a soft, dangerous orange.
Feedback (Titus Kaine).
He wasn't attacking anyone. He was just standing there, arms crossed, waiting.
A blue streak tore down the highway, weaving between the stopped cars. The sonic boom shook the suspension cables.
Kazuki skidded to a halt fifty meters away. The asphalt smoked under his heels.
"Get off the bridge!" Kazuki amplified his voice through the suit's speakers.
Titus turned slowly. He smiled. It wasn't a villain's smile. It was the smile of a worker about to start a shift.
"There he is," Titus rumbled. His voice was deep, vibrating the metal deck of the bridge. "The Runner."
Kazuki scanned him.
[THREAT ANALYSIS: UNKNOWN. NO WEAPONS DETECTED.]
"Last warning," Kazuki shouted, charging his gauntlets. The blue electricity crackled violently. "Surrender."
Titus spread his arms wide. He tapped his own chest.
"Come on then, little battery. Hit me."
Kazuki narrowed his eyes behind the visor. He's slow. He's wide open.
Kazuki vanished.
He moved at Mach 2. He closed the fifty-meter gap in the blink of an eye.
He wound up a right hook, putting the full momentum of his speed into the strike. A punch that could pulverize concrete.
IMPACT.