Deep within the mountain's synthetic heart, Dr. Victor Circuit's sanctum was a cathedral of quiet efficiency. The only sounds were the liquid hum of coolant, the faint chirp of data-streams, and the rhythmic tap of his stylus against a glass tablet. The Meadow's Reach incident was a minor, if irritating, anomaly in his grand calculations. The boy, Blitz, was a variable to be isolated and solved for, not a crisis.
An alert chimed, a different, more urgent tone reserved for his Aethelgard project. A holographic sphere flickered to life above his central console, resolving into the sleek, impassive face-plate of an A-7 Enforcer unit.
"Master. Priority report from Quadrant 7-B, the Moonshadow foothills."
Circuit didn't look up from his schematics. "Proceed."
"Three of the targeted energy signatures have been located. They are consolidated and in the possession of two organic subjects: a juvenile male and a juvenile female. Our retrieval unit made contact."
"Excellent. Initiate standard apprehension protocol and return the artifacts to—"
"The protocol failed," the robot interjected, its synthesized voice devoid of inflection. "Unit A-7 Gamma was destroyed in the conflict."
Circuit's stylus froze. He slowly lifted his head. "Destroyed? By whom? Local authorities? A rival syndicate?"
"Negative. The destruction was performed by the juvenile male subject. Visual data transfer commencing."
A grainy, first-person feed from Gamma's final moments played above the console. Circuit watched the car swerve, saw the passenger door fly open. He saw a blur of motion, a shockwave of deflected plasma fire, and then a brutal, almost casual dismantling of a machine engineered to withstand small-arms fire. The feed ended with a dizzying spin towards the sky before cutting to static.
Dr. Circuit's jaw tightened. Another one? First the speedster in the city, now a brute-force phenom in the hinterlands? His clean, mechanical vision for the future was being smudged by these unpredictable, biological errors.
The console then displayed enhanced stills of the two subjects pulled from the footage. The boy was muscular, wild-haired, his expression one of open astonishment rather than malice. Circuit dismissed him for a moment, his gaze shifting to the girl clinging to the car, her face a mask of fear and calculation.
His eyes narrowed. There was something in the arch of her brow, the sharp set of her grey eyes...
He snapped his fingers. The main monitor wall shifted, pulling up a decade-old news article from a scientific journal, "Prominent Astrophysicist Dr. Alistair Kensington and Wife Perish in Lab Fire; Daughter, 8, Sole Survivor." The accompanying photo showed a solemn, sharp-eyed little girl at a funeral, clutching a stuffed rabbit.
Dr. Circuit's gaze darted between the grieving child and the teenage girl in the surveillance still. The years had sharpened her features, hardened her expression, but the resemblance was undeniable.
A slow, cold smile spread across Victor Circuit's face. The frustration melted away, replaced by crystalline, contemptuous understanding.
"Now I must deal with a boy with super-density and a random girl," he murmured to himself. Then he chuckled, a dry, rustling sound. "Wait. She's not random at all. This is Dr. Kensington's little girl. Elara." He leaned back, steepling his fingers. "Hahaha! Of course. She's chasing her father's fairy tales. She's just a defenseless orphan playing treasure hunter who got lucky." He said the word as if it were a vulgarity. "She's no scientist. She's a sentiment-driven scavenger. I can deal with her myself."
The super-strong boy was a complication, but a straightforward one, a problem of applied force. The girl, however, represented a more personal intrusion. The late Dr. Kensington had been a peer, a dreamer whose theories on celestial energy resonance had been laughably esoteric. Apparently, he'd left a map for his daughter. Circuit's smile turned predatory. He would enjoy taking the artifacts from her. It would be a lesson in the superiority of logic over legacy.
But first, he needed to clean up his original mess. His monitors switched feeds, cycling through hundreds of camera viewpoints from across the city, traffic lenses, security feeds, the smiling logos on his own dormant machines. He found the one he was looking for: a blur of motion resolving periodically into the form of the boy, Blitz, a blue streak dismantling a construction-bot in the shipyards with relentless, cheerful efficiency.
"Persistent little gnat," Circuit sighed. He was a busy man. He had a Kensington to intercept and a celestial matrix to complete. He couldn't be bothered with pest control personally.
He opened a secure, encrypted channel. The screen fizzed with static before resolving into darkness, from which two points of light gleamed, reflections in a pair of circular, smoked lenses.
A voice emerged, filtered and devoid of place or emotion. "You have a task."
"Indeed," Circuit replied. "A localized infestation. I'm sending you coordinates and a target profile. A juvenile male, designation 'Blitz.' Exhibits extreme, possibly meta-human, kinetic acceleration capabilities. He is interfering with my municipal asset-reclamation projects."
"Alive?"
"Preferably not. But verification of termination is mandatory. I want the problem removed, not studied. Use whatever means you deem... efficient."
There was a pause, the only sound a faint electronic whisper on the line. "The usual fee. Tripled. For meta-human."
Circuit waved a dismissive hand. "Granted. Just make him go away. I have a more delicate acquisition to oversee."
The connection severed. On the main screen, the image of Blitz froze mid-motion, a red targeting reticule superimposing itself over his chest. Dr. Circuit allowed himself one more glance at the dual feeds: the streaking blue ghost in the city, and the grainy image of Elara Kensington and her mountain-boy guardian fleeing into an old house.
He tapped his console, and a schematic of the Moonshadow foothills replaced the images, a bright path plotting the most likely route from the farmhouse. "Sentiment and strength," he mused, his voice echoing softly in the sterile chamber. "A fragile alloy. Let's see how it holds up under pressure." He began typing, deploying a new wave of units not just to retrieve, but to corral. The hunt was now officially in session, on two fronts, and Dr. Victor Circuit was done delegating the fun parts.
The field was called the Ashen Flats, a misnamed place where geothermal fury met stubborn life. Tall, golden-tuffed grass, evolved to sip moisture from steam vents, swayed in rhythmic waves under a bruised twilight sky. Between these islands of green yawned fissures, glowing with the orange heart-light of the planet, where lava bubbled and popped with thick, lazy gulps. The air smelled of sulfur and damp earth.
Through this treacherous beauty, a blue streak cut a humming path. Blitz wasn't running on the ground so much as skipping across its most solid suggestions, a tussock of grass here, a flat, cooled rock there. The heat from the lava pits washed over him in waves, but he moved too fast to feel more than a pleasant warmth. He was a shadow, a rumor of motion, following the faint, buzzing signature of Circuit's machines he'd detected on the edge of his senses.
Something else prickled at those senses. A different hum. Not mechanical, but a predatory, focused silence that rode above the wind.
He skidded to a halt on a broad, basalt slab, sending a spray of pebbles into a nearby lava flow where they vanished with a hiss. He looked up.
Hovering against the darkening sky was a machine, but unlike Circuit's clanking drones. This was sleek, organic almost, shaped like a manta ray forged from blackened steel. It had no visible weapons, only a smooth, ominous surface. Beneath it, suspended by a thin, almost invisible cable, hung a man clad in form-fitting tactical armor, the same matte black as the flyer. His face was obscured by a helmet with a mirrored visor, reflecting the hellish glow of the landscape below.
A voice, digitally modulated into a flat, genderless monotone, projected from the flyer. "Cease locomotion, Subject Blitz."
Blitz put his hands on his hips, tilting his head. "Huh? Who are you supposed to be? You don't look like that Dr. Circuit. Not fancy enough."
"I am the solution to his problem," the voice intoned. The hitman didn't wait for more banter. The cable retracted with a sharp zip, pulling him up, and the manta-ray craft tilted. With a sudden burst of thrust, it became a black spear aimed directly at Blitz, the hitman's body held forward like a living battering ram.
The intent was clear: a kinetic impact to knock the boy off the rock and into the molten river below.
At the last possible microsecond, Blitz vanished. Not even a blur. He was simply elsewhere. The hitman and his craft shot through empty air, the flyer's edge grazing the basalt. The pilot or the AI, frantically tried to pull up, but the momentum was too great. The sleek machine plunged, nose first, into a wide, bubbling lava pit with a tremendous, fiery splash.
Blitz reappeared at the pit's edge, watching. "Whoops."
For a long moment, nothing. Then, with a slow, volcanic heave, the craft began to rise. The black armor was scorched, dripping with globs of cooling rock, but utterly intact. It was heat-shielded, engineered for extremes. It hovered, sluggish now, lava sloughing off its wings. The hitman still hung beneath, his own armor smoking but functional.
The mirrored visor fixed on Blitz. The modulated voice crackled, losing some of its cool. "Impossible. Bio-readings indicate no pre-motion tension. How—"
Blitz just grinned. "You're kinda slow, you know that?"
Enraged, the hitman detached. Small jets on his boots and back flared, and he became a projectile himself, rocketing across the short distance, powered gauntlets aimed to crush. He saw Blitz's form solidify, saw the cocky smile. He put everything into the punch.
His fist passed through afterimage.
Blitz was no longer just fast. He was a phantom. To the hitman, the world became a disorienting strobe light. A flash of blue to the left, a shattering impact on his shoulder actuator. A flicker above, a heel drop that dented his helmet and sent sonar pings screaming through his skull. A ripple of movement behind, a double-handed hammer blow to the small of his back that cracked his armor's power cell housing.
He spun, fired grapple lines, unleashed a sonic scrambler, deployed a net of high-tensile micro-filament. Every tool, every counter-measure was a heartbeat too late, aimed at where Blitz had been, not where he was. The attacks came from all angles, a percussive symphony of destruction played on his armor. He wasn't fighting a boy; he was being dismantled by a force of nature.
Finally, with a spinning kick that glowed with friction-heat, Blitz connected with the flyer's central thruster. There was a catastrophic whine, a burst of blue flame, and the craft listed sideways, its systems failing. It dropped like a stone, hitting the solid ground with a crumpling crash, this time for good.
The hitman landed hard on his knees beside its wreckage. His armor was a shell of dents and sparking seams. With trembling, gauntleted hands, he reached up and released the catch on his helmet. It fell back with a thud, revealing a man in his forties, pale, sweat-soaked, with the desperate eyes of a predator who suddenly realized he was prey.
He didn't try to stand. He dropped forward, onto his hands and knees in the ash, bowing his head.
"Please," he gasped, the raw, unfiltered terror thick in his voice. "Please don't hurt me! I was hired! Just a contract! Dr. Circuit, he paid me to take you out! I'm just following orders!"
Blitz walked over, the glow fading from his limbs. He looked down at the groveling man, his head cocked in genuine confusion. The anger of the fight was gone, replaced by a sort of pragmatic disappointment. "Orders are stupid if they tell you to fight someone you can't beat," he said, not unkindly. He shrugged. "Fine. Run along. But hey," he added, pointing a finger, "next time? Don't accept money from mad scientists. It's bad for your health."
Before the hitman could even process the reprieve, the air compressed with a BOOM. A shockwave of wind knocked him onto his side. When his vision cleared, the boy was gone. Only a faint, dissipating trail of shimmering air pointed towards the distant city lights.
Alone in the Ashen Flats with the gurgling lava and his ruined machine, the hitman let out a shaky breath that turned into a hollow laugh. He stared at the spot where Blitz had stood. "Just following orders," he whispered again to the uncaring night. Then, the adrenaline spent, the sheer psychic whiplash of the encounter overwhelmed him. His eyes rolled back, and he slumped into the ash in a dead faint, the glow of the lava painting his still form in dancing, nightmarish light.
Far away, in his sterile lab, Dr. Circuit received a brief, automated alert: Contractor Unit "Wraith" Offline. Mission: Failure. Target Status: Active.
He didn't sigh this time. He simply deleted the notification and turned his full attention to the screens tracking the farmhouse in the foothills. A faint, irritable tic had developed near his eye. The pest was proving remarkably resistant. It was time to stop playing and secure the prize that actually mattered.11Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡHYbDdR56HK
and then Add to home screen.