The summer sun hung heavy over the endless green of Meadow's Reach, casting long shadows from the lone oak that stood sentinel on the hill. Through the tall, whispering grass, a blur of motion cut a chaotic path. It was not the wind. It was a boy.
His name was Blitz, and he moved as if the air itself parted for him. He was a symphony of controlled chaos, a leap that defied gravity, a pivot on a blade of grass, a sprint that chewed up the earth. His focus was absolute, fixed on the mechanical aberrations clanking through the wildflowers. They were things of ugly purpose, all gleaming steel and whirring joints, stomping methodically and scorching the vibrant green with each plasma burst they fired harmlessly into the air. They didn't belong here. They defiled the quiet.
With a grunt of effort, Blitz launched himself from a mossy stone. He didn't just jump; he ascended, hanging for a moment in the golden light before driving his heel down onto the cranial unit of a spider-like drone. The metal shell crumpled with a satisfying shriek of dying gears. He landed in a crouch, barely stirring the clover. Another machine, a rolling sphere with a single red eye, swiveled towards him. A pulse of energy lanced out, searing the earth where Blitz had been a nanosecond before. He was already behind it, his fingers finding a seam in its armor. With a wrench fueled by raw, surprising strength, he pried a panel loose, and the sphere sparked, listed, and died.
Panting slightly, not from fatigue but from adrenaline, he straightened up. That's when he saw it, etched into the inner casing of the ruined sphere: a symbol. It was clean, professional, utterly at odds with the destructive hardware. A simple, cheerful circle, two dots for eyes, and a wide, upturned curve for a mouth. A smiling man. It was almost friendly, if it weren't for the context. A cold curiosity pricked at him. This was no accident; this was a signature.
Miles away, buried deep beneath the unassuming hills of the city's outskirts, the air was cool, sterile, and hummed with the sound of servers. Dr. Victor Circuit did not bask in sunlight. He basked in the phosphorescent glow of a hundred monitors, each one a window into his mechanical children. The smiling-face logos weren't just branding; they were cunningly disguised ocular lenses, feeding him a panoramic feast of data from the field.
He sipped synthetic tea, a slight smile playing on his own lips, a refined, intellectual echo of his symbol. The Meadow's Reach experiment was proceeding within acceptable parameters. Or so he thought.
An alert chimed, soft, insistent. One of his Arachnid-class units went offline. Then another. Then a Sentinel Sphere. His smile faltered. His fingers, long and precise, danced across a crystalline keyboard, pulling up diagnostics. No system errors. No environmental anomalies. The feeds simply... went dark.
"Anomalous interference," he muttered, his voice a cultured baritone. He began frantically cycling through the surviving feeds. Grass. Sky. More grass. The serene, stupid beauty of nature. Then, on Screen #47, the feed from a damaged Harvester unit—he saw movement. Not an animal. A human shape, small and fast. He zoomed in.
The image stabilized on a face, flushed and smudged with dirt, looking not at the robot, but directly into its logo, directly into him. Piercing eyes, fierce and too-old for the youthful face they belonged to, locked onto the hidden camera with unnerving awareness. For a single, startling second, Dr. Circuit and the boy stared at each other across the digital void. Then the boy grinned, a flash of defiant white and vanished in a rush of blurred pixels. The feed died.
Dr. Circuit leaned back in his ergonomic throne, steepling his fingers. The sterile silence of his lab felt suddenly oppressive.
"Really?" he said to the empty room, the word dripping with incredulous disdain. "This is the source of the cascade failure? One little feral boy?" He let out a long, weary sigh that carried the weight of a profound nuisance. "I suppose elegance must sometimes give way to practical demonstration."
His hand hovered over a large, red-enameled switch, then slammed it down.
Blitz wiped his brow, the strange symbol burning in his mind. He needed to get back, to tell someone. As he turned to leave the field, a new sound cut through the natural chorus, a deep, electric thrum that vibrated in his teeth.
From behind the crest of the hill, it rose: a vehicle, sleek and venomous, hovering on jets of crackling blue energy. Mounted on its front was a massive, rotary buzz saw, its teeth a spinning blur of hungry silver. In the cockpit, visible behind a tinted canopy, was a man in an immaculate grey suit, his hair swept back, his expression one of cold, academic irritation.
The vehicle touched down, crushing a swath of wildflowers. The canopy slid open with a hiss. Dr. Victor Circuit did not step out; he descended, as if alighting from a stage.
Blitz didn't flinch. He stood his ground, tilting his head. "Well," the boy said, his voice clear and carrying over the idling thrum of the saw. "That explains the logo. Let me guess, you're that Circuit guy who's been littering the place with this junk, right?"
A faint, patronizing smile touched the doctor's lips. "Indeed. Dr. Victor Circuit. And such beautiful craftsmanship it is, if I do say so myself." He gestured languidly at his war machine. "Now, you must be the little... groundskeeper... who's been vandalizing my property."
"In the flesh," Blitz shot back, his body coiled like a spring.
"Charming," Circuit said, his smile vanishing. "Well, since you have such a profound affinity for wrecking things, allow me to offer a new subject for your talents. How about I wreck you instead!"
He didn't shout. He stated. And then he moved. A joystick twitched. The buzz saw arm whined and lashed out in a vicious horizontal arc, a silver cyclone meant to cleave Blitz in two.
It met only air.
The saw screamed through empty space, tearing up turf. Dr. Circuit's eyes widened. "What? Where did he—?!"
"Neat trick, Circuit!" The voice came from beside him, just outside the cockpit. Blitz stood there, as if he'd teleported. A shimmer of heat haze danced around his form. "But I've got a neat trick of my own."
Blitz's eyes began to glow. Not with reflection, but with an inner light, a crackling, volatile energy the color of a storm-washed sky. The air around him prickled with ozone.
He moved.
To Dr. Circuit, the world became a hurricane of blue light and concussive force. It wasn't a series of attacks; it was a single, continuous, overwhelming onslaught. Blitz was everywhere at once, a shattering kick against the rear thruster housing, a blurred fist hammering the canopy, cracking the reinforced glass, a spin-kick that bent the buzz saw's mounting arm with a deafening shriek of metal. The vehicle rocked and sparked, alarms blaring inside the cockpit. Circuit was thrown against his harness, his monitor-filled world dissolving into static and warning glyphs. He caught flashes on his external cameras, a streak of light, a grinning face, a glowing afterimage.
Impossible, his rational mind screamed. The kinetic energy alone... the G-forces... a human body cannot...
But the shuddering, failing console before him was proof it could. This was no ordinary boy. This was a variable. An anomaly. And Dr. Victor Circuit hated anomalies.
With a snarl of pure frustration, he slammed his palms on the emergency retreat sequence. The damaged thrusters flared, sputtering, lifting the scarred machine erratically into the air. "This is not over, child!" he barked, the words clipped and sharp with rage, before his vehicle lurched sideways and shot back over the hill, trailing smoke.
Blitz skidded to a halt, the glow fading from his eyes, his breath coming in steady clouds. He watched the retreating smear of blue against the sky.
"Hahaha! Yeah, you better run!" he called after it, pumping a fist. But the triumph was short-lived. The grin slowly melted from his face as he looked at the scarred field, the scattered, sparking wreckage bearing that cheerful, smiling symbol.
This was far from over. He could feel it in his bones, in the humming energy that still tingled in his veins. If one man with a buzz saw was just the beginning, what else was out there?
Without another moment's hesitation, Blitz took a deep breath, his form seeming to blur at the edges. Then he was gone, leaving only a gust of wind that bent the grass and a faint, sonic crack that rolled across Meadow's Reach like a distant thunderclap. He was already moving at the speed of sound, hunting for the next echo of the Smiling Man's work.
ns216.73.216.10da2
and then Add to home screen.