Chapter 131 Bone & Thunder [John Wolfe]

When I decided to hunt Eclipse and try to right the wrongs I’d helped make, I didn’t imagine the ledger would read like this. I’d put men to sleep for less. In front of me now stood something other’s visions had only hinted at, a force that made every “heavy hitter” I’d ever met look like fireflies. Seeing it in the flesh was a different kind of terror.

“Dodge,” Eclipse cried, phasing into the floor with haste.

Light answered with a charge of hostility that tasted like ozone on my teeth. His empathic threads slammed into me as if someone tried to yank my heart out by the root. I reacted the only way I knew how: I pulled, hard, with telekinesis, while I bit the stimulant pill hiding in my tooth. It was a nasty little pharmaco-ritual I’d sworn never to use again; it raised power potency at the cost of years. I am an old man, and I’d run my accounts long enough to know that this was worth it.

In the end…

Even heightened and strung to a crazy edge, I couldn’t follow him. Light became a seam of white and noise and he was through me before the thought could clench. Bone screamed. I tasted copper. My left arm was gone in a clean, brutal motion, ripped as if a hand had cut through meat with a flirt of wind.

I wrapped my telekinesis around the bloody stump like a bandage and cinched it tight. The drug in my system gave my muscles the memory of youth for a few seconds with tactile telekinesis. I’d trained for years with smaller things: tightening screws with thought, bending a coin without touching it. Now I had to perform a miracle with half my life left in me.

My mind narrowed until it was a pin. Using empathy to assist my aim and telekinetic force as the anchor, I forced Light into his physical shape.

Most telekinetics could shove or lift. I could do more than that. Empathic telekinesis let me sense intent and thread force around thought itself. As long as something could think no matter the density, I could find the seams where thought became action and tug. This was telekinesis on a level most were unable to replicate: to force form onto a phenomenon.

In the same breath, this ability was what allowed me to pierce through invulnerability, intangibility, invisibility, and even stranger powers that allowed one to hide from a different dimension.

Light’s lightning shivered in the air. Under the pressure of my will, he was forced to become solid once more. Where there had been only white heat and flicker, muscle and skin manifested. He stood there, naked in the sudden air, vulnerable. The flesh was still crackling with static, but it held.

I heard his breath and the tiny intake that meant surprise.

Finally, Eclipse sprang.

He came from behind Light and grabbed him, arm around the chest, the other hand sliding up to the back of the neck. “Gotcha,” he said, and folded him into a hug.

The seams in Eclipse’s suit brightened: I saw the little glints, the crumpled lines where C4 and explosives had been taped to fabric and stitched into seams, the way his fedora’s brim was laced with tiny charges.

The explosives detonated.

The world became a single thunderclap, and the rain of it was hot. I don’t remember the chorus that followed, just a pressure that smelled of copper and a pulse that threw my chest forward. Pain cut through the left side of my face where glass bit me, and the taste of blood came back as if it had never left. The old drug in my system skittered my nerves into survival reflexes and I rolled, telekinesis catching debris and throwing a shield of teeth and tile between me and the worst of it.

When the explosion subsided, there was only one man still standing.

Eclipse.

His fedora was gone. His porcelain mask was cracked in two, dangling on one side of his jaw. His suit was torn, peppered with holes, soaked in blood and smoke. He was drenched in gore, with chunks of flesh, and smears of blood that used to belong to Light. The smell of ozone and burnt meat clung to the air like a fog.

For a moment, I thought it was over.

Then, I saw movement. A twitch in the pile of red mist and sizzling debris.

“Behind you!” I screamed.

Eclipse bit down on the tooth-pill I gave him earlier, that little power stimulant I just used. He didn’t hesitate, didn’t question. The veins on his neck pulsed with the chemical rush as his body shimmered, and just in time.

A storm erupted from behind him.

Electricity tore across the ground, bursting outward like a living thing. The place where Eclipse had just stood turned into molten glass, but he had already gone intangible, phasing into the ground as the lightning burst passed through him harmlessly.

From the storm, Light reformed.

It wasn’t regeneration as much as it was reassembly. Tendrils of lightning pulled his scattered pieces back together, flesh knitting around them in violent flashes. His body was remade in seconds, skin re-growing over charred bone, his eyes flickering with that unnatural blue-white glare.

Such incredible power…

If this was truly the kind of man the future had to offer, one that was sent back to the past just to “prepare” for whatever was coming, then what kind of apocalypse were he supposed to be preparing for?

Or maybe, I thought grimly, he wasn’t from the future at all. Maybe he was just insane. Superpower psychosis wasn’t rare among the high-raters. The human mind was never built to hold that much godhood in it.

But even so, I couldn’t shake that feeling of dread.

Guesswork once said Light’s estimated rating was fifteen. Fifteen. That alone was enough to make the world government flinch. And from what I’d seen, that was no exaggeration. He could fly. He was faster than thought. His electrokinesis was more refined than any recorded case. He was also a Shifter, his body could turn into lightning, giving him intangibility, speed, and near-invulnerability.

Light lunged, one moment he was meters away, and the next his hand was already gripping Eclipse’s shoulder. His other arm sparked, building into a death blow.

I reacted before thinking. My empathic telekinesis lashed out, pulling at his emotional field, giving weight to his body where there shouldn’t be any. It threw him back a step. Not far, but enough to give Eclipse breathing room.

Then the sky cracked open.

From the top of the Tenfold Keep, an energy projectile streaked down like a comet, Bunny’s shot. The beam hit the ground where Light had stood, splitting the concrete open.

But Light wasn’t there anymore. He didn’t teleport. He just moved too fast. His body dissolved into lightning and reappeared behind me in a blink.

I barely had time to see the reflection in Eclipse’s cracked mask before Light’s hand clamped around my throat.

“Got you,” he hissed, voice distorting with electricity.

The air burned around me. My skin started to blister. I could feel my heartbeat in my ears, the pain traveling like static down my spine—

Then something snapped.

A grappling hook shot from above and stabbed straight into Light’s chest. The claws sank deep, locking into his ribcage before retracting violently.

Light snarled as the line yanked him upward, dragging his crackling body into the air. Sparks scattered across the room as he was pulled through the dust and debris, hauled all the way up to the tenth floor.

That was where Bunny supposed to be.

Eclipse turned to me, his mask half broken, eyes cold and sharp through the crack.

“Let’s leave this to Bunny,” he said, his voice calm in the chaos. “We’re done here.”

Before I could argue, he grabbed me by the shoulder. The world folded around us, then we phased through solid ground, plunging through the earth. Darkness swallowed us. When we reappeared, we were a distance away from the Tenfold Keep.

We were on an empty highway.

Eclipse was breathing harshly beside me, his body shaking like an engine about to fall apart. The stimulant drug was still doing its work, forcing his metabolism and powers into overdrive. He gagged, fell to his knees, and began to puke his guts out onto the cracked asphalt.

I crouched beside him, rubbing his back. “Easy, easy… you’re alright,” I said quietly. “Just take a deep breath.”

A shockwave tore through the air.

A powerful explosion resounded in the distance, followed by a column of fire that split the sky. The wind that followed it carried dust, smoke, and heat all the way to us, whipping against our faces . The Tenfold Keep was collapsing in flames.

Eclipse wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve and looked up, squinting through the haze. “Bunny has a self-destruct function built into the bike,” he muttered hoarsely. “Specifically the super bike… Hopefully, that took Light out.”

“You have my condolences,” I said, watching the distant blaze. “He was your close friend, wasn’t he?”

Eclipse shook his head faintly. “He should be alive,” he replied. “Bunny’s… got a unique constitution.”

I frowned at that. From what I knew, Bunny wasn’t exactly human in the traditional sense. Instead, he was some kind of digitalized mind, a living consciousness split between man and machine. A strange mutation, even by SRC standards. But that wasn’t what truly unsettled me.

It was everything else.

The SRC’s silence. Their passivity. This entire operation from the lack of proper support and the deliberate withholding of information all reeked of something rotten and buried.

When I thought about the Ten’s long and tangled relationship with the SRC, the picture started forming itself. We were never meant to succeed here. This was a purge, a quiet way to erase a liability. They didn’t know the extent of my knowledge, after all. They didn’t know what I’d seen, what I’d recorded over the years.

No wonder I got excluded later in my career, when I merely expressed my curiosity about the Witch. Still, they’d given me the chance to act, which was what made it strange. If they were doing this to protect there relationship to the Ten, there was a better way to do it. For example, assassinate me, and disband the task force.

“It’s a miracle we survived,” I muttered under my breath, staring at the orange bloom in the distance. “So, what do you think of getting a drink, Eclipse? I think we deserve it.”

“Huh?” I heard Eclipse say faintly.

I turned to look at him and froze. He was running toward me. His mask cracked further with every stride, his eyes wide with something I didn’t recognize at first. He was shouting something. I couldn’t hear him. My ears rang like bells.

Then I felt it.

Pain.

It came all at once, blooming across my body like wildfire. My knees buckled. I fell, hard. The asphalt scraped against my palms, but I couldn’t even feel it through the burn.

When I looked down, my hands were blackened and charred. Smoke rose from my skin.

My vision blurred. The wind against my face felt like knives. My eyes burned, every time I blinked. I tried to draw breath, but the air came in ragged gasps, tasting of iron and ozone.

Through the haze, I saw him.

Light.

Skinless. Bloody. A walking nerve made of sparks and rage. Electricity danced along his body, hissing through the air, illuminating the night in brief flashes. His eyes glowed faintly behind the current, wild and cold.

He stepped toward me, each movement cracking the ground with static discharge.

I gagged and spat chunks of blood.

“I–ifh hurfz…”

It hurts.

That was all I could manage.

My lungs seized. My tongue was ash. The sound that came out of me wasn’t a scream. Instead, it was a rasp and a pathetic gurgle that barely reached my own ears.

Everything went quiet.

The wind stopped. The world dimmed.

As my body gave up, my thoughts drifted. It was brief, fragmented, and absurdly human. At least it’s over, I thought. No more missions. No more conspiracies. No more watching people die for causes they don’t understand.

Relief washed over me like cool rain.

Belatedly, I felt regret. I could’ve done better. I should’ve retired when I had the chance. Maybe, in another life, I could’ve gone out with a smile instead of a whisper.

The world faded to black and… I didn’t fight it.