Chapter 123 F*cked [Thirdhand]

I was pissed. Fucking pissed!

The Tenfold Keep was supposed to be a fortress. It was our sanctuary, and base of quiet control… and yet here it was, exposed like a corpse under a spotlight. Every alarm, every vibration in the steel walls was a slap to my pride.

The SRC had come!

Like… What the fuck!?

I wasn’t a stranger to their kind, especially SRC special forces with too much funding and not enough fear. The kind that could look a telekinetic in the eye and still pull the trigger. Tough bastards. I could handle maybe fifty of them on a good day, maybe seventy if my nerves didn’t fry from the null-field interference. But there were hundreds back there, and that was suicide.

I wasn’t suicidal. Just angry.

The risk wasn’t theoretical. A single nullifier bullet could strip me bare, take away the field, the lift, and the fine control that kept me alive. And this wasn’t just any SRC division. This was the Null Legion. Their ammo sang a psychic, dead tone that made my skull itch just thinking about it. They were nightmares built for people like me… psychics, telekinetics, empaths, telepaths, and anyone who bent the world with their minds instead of bullets.

And yet… none of that scared me half as much as Ning.

I’d seen what he did out there.

He shrugged off a whole rod of nullifier metal and just brushed it aside like it was a piece of paper. That kind of resistance shouldn’t even be possible for someone like him. Even a Class-Telekinetic would have their neurons fried under that much anti-psi exposure. But he just walked through it, calm and cold.

Maybe that was what being the second-in-command of the Ten meant. Maybe that’s what being Lightning meant. I’d served under him long enough to know better than to test the boundaries of what he was capable of. Still, seeing it reminded me of something ugly: the pecking order in the Ten wasn’t built on trust… it was built on survival.

“And I am going to survive.”

I reached the elevator doors, the only one that connected all levels of the Keep. The others were sealed, emergency-locked by our own systems. My heart was still pounding with psychic static. I slammed my palm against the button panel again and again, the surface denting under the impact of invisible force.

Nothing.

“I am sorry,” a voice said over the internal speakers, smooth and genderless. “But the elevator’s out of service.”

“What the fuck do you mean?!” I shouted. My voice echoed down the empty corridor, the reinforced walls trembling faintly. Then something in that tone hit me wrong. That voice… it wasn’t ours. It wasn’t from the Ten’s automated system, nor from any of our network AIs.

My muscles tensed. Every finger-brain along the ridged lump that was my head-hand began to pulse and twitch, their neural activity overlapping in frantic, silent conversation. My mutation wasn’t just for show… each of those fingers was a sensory node, a living neuron cluster that let me feel the world in more ways than five senses could describe.

Through that network, I reached out. The air trembled under the touch of my telekinesis. With my telekinesis, I could hear through vibrations, taste chemical traces in the atmosphere, and smell gun oil two rooms away.

That wasn’t the building’s voice. Someone had hijacked the line.

“Who are you?” I asked, eyes narrowing.

“The name’s Bunny.”

Then came the storm.

I didn’t hear gunfire. Instead, I felt it. The air warped, fractured, and screamed. A torrent of nullifier bullets ripped through the corridor, a sonic wall of metal shrieking through space where I’d stood a heartbeat before.

I dove, every muscle in my body coiling under the push of my mind. My legs blurred as I slammed telekinetic force through my limbs, launching myself sideways. The bullets tore through where I had been, cracking the marble, slicing through the wall panels like butter.

I hit the ground in a roll, debris raining around me. My telekinesis flared out, invisible hands clutching the air, redirecting fragments of debris mid-fall. I used them, spun them, turned broken concrete, steel, and glass into a makeshift screen. Dust and smoke thickened, and I forced the air to swirl, to act as both cover and static interference.

More bullets screamed, the null energy making my field flicker like a bad signal. It felt like someone was stabbing pins into my brain one at a time.

I gritted my teeth and slid behind the reception desk, slamming my back against it. My breath came hard, adrenaline and psychic strain feeding off each other. The desk was sturdy, old-fashioned, real metal. It would hold for a few seconds. I pressed my head-hand against the floor. The fingers pulsed. The air shifted.

Then I let my telekinetic senses spread outward, searching for who just shot me.

Oh shit!

The air rippled, and something formed right in front of me. It was Eclipse. His black suit, his porcelain mask, that cold, detached posture… all of it solidifying from the dust like a ghost sculpted out of light. My heart spiked for half a second before my brain caught up.

No heat signature. No psychic weight. No breath.

The Eclipse before me was not real.

I flicked my wrist, sending a telekinetic pulse like a snapping whip. The image shattered instantly, a hollow silhouette breaking apart into pixels and glassy motes that fizzled into the air. A hologram. No… It was hardlight.

“Clever bastard…” I muttered.

So that was it. Bunny wasn’t just a name. It was a damn machine, a drone with some kind of advanced projection tech. It wasn’t just hiding itself; it was generating full, tangible constructs. Invisibility through active light manipulation. If it could pull that off, then I wasn’t fighting a man and a bike… I was fighting two linked systems, both feeding off one another’s sensors.

It was two against one.

“Annoying,” I growled. My voice echoed, tinny against the fractured walls. “Eclipse, if you are a fucking man, show yourself!”

That was when I felt him.

The hairs along my arm prickled. There was a shift in pressure behind me, the faint distortion of displaced air, and the ghost of a mind skimming the edge of my senses. He moved like a phantom, fast and silent.

I spun, too late, as Eclipse was right there. I could almost feel his arms closing around me, a mimicry of a human embrace, except there was nothing gentle in it, only the cold certainty of death.

“Fucking die!” he snarled.

Instinct overrode thought. My left hand flared with life. The lumped muscles and twitching brain-clusters along its fingers in my head pulsed like a living organ, feeding my telekinesis raw data, angles, trajectories, and density shifts. I unleashed everything.

A wave of force erupted outward, invisible but heavy as a freight train. The counter desk exploded into shrapnel, debris spinning through the air like a blizzard of knives. My telekinetic grip swept wide, adjusting on the fly, shifting densities, and altering pressure to find the sweet spot where Eclipse’s intangibility broke down just enough for impact.

It hit.

He was caught in mid-phase, body half-solid, half-intangible, when the wave crushed him and the debris together against the far wall. The impact cracked concrete and sent a spiderweb of fractures crawling across the ceiling.

“Got you,” I hissed. “I fuckin got you!”

I thought it was over when something moved at my flank. I jumped, propelling myself upward with a kinetic burst, twisting mid-air. My telekinesis grabbed onto the ceiling, anchoring me there. The world flipped upside down, dust raining past me like snow. From my vantage point, I saw the thing charging… It was not a person, but a bike.

It roared beneath me, metallic and predatory.

“Would you please detach yourself from the ceiling?”

I recognized the voice.

It was Bunny!

I slammed my telekinesis down. The invisible force pinned Bunny mid-motion, flipping it over and driving it into the floor with a metallic scream. The impact cratered the tile and hurled the bike into the nearest wall, where it crashed, sparks flaring.

Something small and metallic glinted in the smoke. Then another. Then dozens.

A series of cards, thin, gleaming projectiles, shot toward me from every angle, slicing through the air in synchronized arcs. I snapped my telekinesis outward, forming a rotating barrier field. The cards hit and deflected, spinning away harmlessly, embedding themselves in the walls, desks, and even the ceiling beside me.

When the last one clattered to the floor, I looked down.

Eclipse was standing by the elevator doors. His head tilted, mask catching the reflection of burning debris. He hadn’t even moved. At least, seemingly so. That projector technology was being a pain in the ass.

“Bunny, would you please open the elevator doors?” Eclipse asked, voice casual as if ordering tea.

A smooth synthetic answer came over the speakers. “Copy that.”

The elevator sighed open behind him like a mouth parting to swallow us whole. Eclipse didn’t move. He raised his hands as if conducting an orchestra and then, with that same lazy theatricality, added, “Come now, let’s make this game just a bit fairer, shall we? If you manage to get past me, I’ll let you go.”

I scoffed. “There’s no such thing as a fair game, but I’m willing to play.”

I dropped from the ceiling and landed with force, my palms flat against tile that suddenly felt like glass. I flexed my telekinesis, sending tendrils of force out to pry at him, to find the seams in his intangibility. The fingers in my head-hand pulsed, a staccato of tiny brains computing vectors and densities so fast my vision hiccupped.

Nothing. My telekinetic pushes slid off him like rain on oil. There wasn’t even the satisfying feedback of resistance; it was like trying to shove a shadow and feeling only air. I couldn’t tell if Eclipse was straining or smiling. He made even his immobility look effortless.

“Hmmm… I felt a little breeze,” he said, as if amused by a moth. “Is that you?”

The Tenfold Keep wasn’t the outside world. There were no trees to hurl, no soil to whip into jagged spears. The walls here ate force and spat out echoes; the reinforced composite had been layered both with special technology and top-class mundane engineering to frustrate telekinesis. The floor’s debris was light, pulverized under the weight of our scuffle. It was not enough mass to become the blunt instruments I loved to sculpt.

Fine. I had other tools.

I let my telekinesis thin into a scalpel. The fingers in my head-hand twitched like a nervous choir as I plucked at the edges of broken things. I harvested shards: a fingernail of polymer from a shattered comms panel, a sliver of ventilation grille, a curled wafer of ceiling tile, and a strip of metal torn from a safety rail. They were all weightless on their own, useless alone. I let them hover, slow as breathing, and then I sharpened them.

There was an art to it. My power wasn’t just about moving things; it was about changing how they meant to move. I spun microcurrents across edges, used torsion to pull molecular burrs into a single razor line, and tightened ceramic shards until they sang at a high pitch. The little brains in my fingers hummed, calculating shear stress and angle of approach, adjusting for phase variance in phase-capable targets. Each fragment became a threat.

They hung in the air around me like a halo of teeth.

Eclipse watched, hands still raised, mask reflecting their glint. He looked almost bored.

I drew a breath and let a grin split the tension under my skull. “You really should stop underestimating things that cut,” I said, voice low enough that the words felt like oil poured into gears. “Now, die!”

The debris spiraled in elegant chaos under my command with splinters, shards, and razored bits of steel all converging and diverging around Eclipse like a metallic storm. Each flick of my head-hand sent another wave, designed not to harm, but to wear him down. Power fatigue… that was the plan. Everyone, no matter how strong, had limits, and Eclipse’s intangibility couldn’t be infinite.

At least, that’s what I kept telling myself.

The problem was, he wasn’t even sweating.

He stood there, calm, composed, and arms loosely at his sides, like he was watching fireworks instead of deflecting death. Every shard that passed through him dissolved into air, my kinetic energy simply gone. The readings through my telekinetic senses came back strange as the density of his intangibility fluctuated unpredictably, slipping from solid to permeable to something… alien.

I hated it. I hated him!

Still, the idea of close combat never crossed my mind. That’d be suicide. Even with my telekinetically reinforced body, even with muscle fibers wired tighter than kevlar rope and bones coated in psychic pressure… I wasn’t an idiot. All it would take was a single touch. One graze. And Eclipse would rip through me like paper.

He could phase a hand into my chest, pull out my heart, and still make a joke while holding it. I’d heard him do that once. I didn’t want to experience it for myself.

“This is boring me already to death,” he said, voice flat, almost tired. “How about we mix it up?”

From under his jacket, he pulled out something that made no sense… a paintball gun.

“What the hell is that supposed to—”

He fired.

To anyone else, it would’ve been a harmless plastic pellet, barely worth flinching over. But to me, with my heightened telekinetic senses tuned to the vibrations of matter itself, it was a shrieking anomaly. The paintball’s density and internal frequency vibrated wrong. The scent was metallic, the taste acrid in the air. Even before it touched me, I knew it wasn’t a toy. It was a result of a superpower.

I reacted instantly. My telekinesis unfolded into a field, scanning its composition, unraveling its trajectory atom by atom. Before it could make contact with my skin, I crushed it midair, bursting it outward into harmless droplets.

The fluid hissed when it hit the ground, burning faint scorch marks into the composite tile.

“Cute,” I muttered, though my pulse spiked. “You almost got me there, you bastard.”

Eclipse just smirked. “Almost.”

That was when the sound hit… ‘whirr-click.’

I’d forgotten about the damn bike.

Before I could react, a grappling hook shot out from the side of it, the pointed metal piercing my leg, right through bone. I felt the shock of the cold, biting pulse of nullifier metal.

Every nerve in my leg went white-hot.

My telekinesis faltered instantly, cut short like a wire snapped in two. The air around me collapsed, the floating debris crashing uselessly to the floor. My senses dimmed; the head-hand’s twitching spasms slowed. The null-field bit deep, gnawing through the psychic feedback loop that made me strong.

"Fuck.”