eo Mercer woke to a world unmade.
It wasn't the blaring of his alarm clock that pulled him from sleep, but the individual vibrations of its speaker cone - each oscillation a distinct, painful hammer against his eardrums. He could hear the frantic skittering of a cockroach in the wall three apartments over, the drip of a faulty faucet five stories down as if it were leaking right beside his bed, and the low, groaning hum of the city's electrical grid - a sound he never knew existed until it felt like it was vibrating through his very bones.
He clamped his hands over his ears, but the gesture was useless. The assault was internal. His vision was no better. The pre-dawn gloom of his bedroom was illuminated with impossible clarity. He could see the individual fibers of his bedsheets, the microscopic scratches on his nightstand, the dust motes dancing in a sunbeam that hadn't even properly risen yet. Each particle was a distinct, complex shape tumbling through the air.
"What the hell?" he muttered, and his own voice was a deafening rumble in his head.
He stumbled from bed, and his body moved with an unfamiliar, liquid grace that felt both alien and terrifyingly right. His legs, which usually felt the pleasant heaviness of sleep, were now coiled springs of energy. He took a step towards the bathroom and covered the distance in a blink, his balance perfect, his footing silent on the creaky floorboards that now screamed like dying animals under his weight.
In the bathroom, he braced himself against the sink, his head bowed, trying to breathe through the sensory hurricane. He looked up into the mirror. His own face stared back, pale and wide-eyed, but it was the details that horrified him. He could see the individual pores on his nose, the tiny capillaries in his sclera, the faint, almost imperceptible scar on his chin from a childhood fall. He stared, trying to find the familiar, blurry edges of his morning reflection, but there were none.
And then his vision shifted.
The surface of the mirror, his own skin, the wall behind him - they all flickered, dissolving into a ghostly grey transparency. For a heart-stopping second, he was staring at the skeletal structure of his own skull, the hollow orbits of his eyes, the perfect, terrifying architecture of his teeth. Beyond his own body, he saw the wooden studs within the wall, the snaking, copper veins of plumbing, the bundled wires carrying currents of power.
He cried out, stumbling back from the sink, his shoulder connecting with the doorjamb. The sound was a sickening crunch of splintering wood. He felt no pain, only a jarring impact. He looked at the doorframe, saw the deep, fist-sized crater he had left in the solid pine. Panic, cold and absolute, seized him.
He fled the bathroom, his mind racing, a frantic animal in a cage of its own flesh. He needed water, something normal, something to ground him in a reality that was rapidly disintegrating. In the kitchen, his hand shook as he reached for the stainless-steel faucet. His fingers, moving with that same unnerving precision, closed around the cool, polished lever.
It wasn't that he turned it too hard. It was that the solid metal melted under his touch. It wasn't heat; it was pure, undiluted force. The handle deformed inward, bending like soft clay, the internal mechanism shattering with a series of tiny, pathetic pings. Water, now uncontrollable, sprayed from the ruined fixture, a cold mist soaking his pajamas.
He stared, dumbfounded, at the twisted metal in his hand. This wasn't him. This couldn't be him.
A fly buzzed near the refrigerator, its droning hum a drill bit boring directly into his prefrontal cortex. The sound was maddening, an apex of irrelevance in the cacophony that was consuming him. A spike of pure, unadulterated frustration, born of terror and a desperate need for quiet, lanced through him.
"SHUT UP!" he roared in the silence of his mind.
A searing, pressurized heat ignited behind his eyes. There was no pain, only a sensation of immense potential energy violently released. Two thin, incandescent beams of crimson light erupted from his pupils, crossing the kitchen in a nanosecond.
They missed the fly.
They sheared through the door of his refrigerator with a sizzling CRACK, vaporizing plastic, metal, and the leftover Chinese food inside. They continued, unimpeded, through the back of the appliance and into the wall behind it, punching two neat, molten holes through drywall and insulation, leaving the reek of ozone, melted steel, and scorched wiring.
The silence that followed was absolute, broken only by the hiss of spraying water and the frantic, thunderous drum of his own heart.
Leo stood frozen, his breath caught in his throat. He slowly raised a trembling hand to his face. His eyes were cool. Normal. He looked at the destruction—the bent faucet, the scarred refrigerator, the smoking holes in the wall that revealed the building's skeletal framework.
This was him.
A new wave of input hit him, but this one was different. It wasn't noise; it was data. As he stared at the exposed, scorched wiring in the wall, his reeling mind, which had been a ship tossed in a hurricane, suddenly found a gyroscope. The chaos didn't cease, but it was… cataloged. He looked at the colored wires—red, black, green, copper—and without ever having studied the subject beyond changing a light switch, he understood. He saw the circuit path, the voltage, the amperage, the load capacity. He knew, with absolute certainty, how to rewire it, what gauge of wire to use, how to patch the wall with a perfect, seamless finish.
The panic was still there, a wild thing caged in his ribs, but now it was being observed, analyzed, and suppressed by this new, cold, crystalline consciousness rising within him. He had powers. Impossible, world-shattering powers. And his mind—his beautiful, ordinary, graphic-designer mind—was being forcibly upgraded into something else to handle them. It was as if a door in his consciousness had blown open, and behind it was not a room, but a universe of information—the fundamental source code of reality itself. His Superbrain wasn't just calculating; it was parsing the Lexicon Prime, reading the base language of physics, chemistry, and energy that underpinned everything.
He had to get a grip. He had to understand. He walked back to his living room, each step measured, and sat on his couch. The frame groaned ominously under his weight. He closed his eyes, and began to build a fortress in his mind. He imagined dials, filters, firewalls. His new intellect latched onto the task with terrifying, impersonal efficiency. The roar of the city faded to a distant hum. The microscopic texture of the air blurred. He could still access the data if he focused, but the crushing, overwhelming flood was receding, being managed.
When he opened his eyes, the world was still impossibly sharp, but it was no longer agonizing. It was… manageable.
He looked at his hands—hands that could bend steel and shoot lasers. He looked at the ruined kitchen.
A single, coherent thought finally broke through the shock, a thought that was both a question and an answer.
The world just got very, very small. And I just got very, very large.
The silence felt fragile, a thin veneer over the chaos still simmering beneath his skin. Leo remained on the couch, his breathing slowly returning to something resembling normal, though the sound of his own heartbeat was still a relentless drum in his ears. He could hear the couple in the apartment below arguing about finances, the specific, crisp rustle of dollar bills as one of them waved them in the air. He could hear the gentle, sleeping breaths of the elderly woman next door. It was too much. He focused, and with a mental command that felt like turning a dial, the sounds receded to a manageable background murmur.
Okay, he thought, the word crisp and clear in the new, ordered space of his mind. Okay. This is real.
He stood, moving with deliberate slowness to the kitchen. He stared at the ruined faucet, the water still spraying in a fine, wasteful mist. He reached out, not with his hand, but with his mind, envisioning the flow of water. He willed the molecules to slow, to stop. The spray faltered, the individual droplets hanging in the air for a moment like scattered diamonds before pattering to the floor. He had stopped the water at its source within the pipe. A simple, impossible act of control. He was not just strong; he was speaking a command to the Lexicon Prime, and reality was obeying.
A wild, incredulous laugh bubbled up in his throat. He stifled it. This wasn't a joyride. This was a crisis.
His eyes fell on a paring knife lying in the sink, its blade stained with the ghost of last night's onions. A terrible, compelling curiosity seized him. He picked it up. The metal felt cool and insignificant in his palm. He pressed the tip against the flesh of his other forearm, just hard enough to normally draw a pinprick of blood.
He felt pressure, but no pain. He pushed harder. The thin, cheap steel of the blade began to warp, bending backwards against his unyielding skin. He pressed until the tip snapped off with a soft ping, clattering into the sink. He stared at the unmarked skin on his arm, then at the ruined knife. Invulnerability. Confirmed.
A new kind of fear, cold and profound, trickled down his spine. What was he? A bomb? A god? A freak? He'd heard rumors, of course. Whispers on dark web forums about a black-market Catalyst Serum that could unlock metahuman abilities in people, creating unstable, often dangerous "Catalyzed" individuals. But this felt different. Deeper. He hadn't been injected with anything. This was… endogenous. This was him, fundamentally rewritten.
His stomach rumbled, a startlingly normal sound in the midst of the surreal. He was ravenous. He moved to the shattered refrigerator, the smell of spoiled food and ozone sharp in his nostrils. He grabbed a carton of milk, but his grip, still uncalibrated, was too much. The cardboard and plastic carton exploded in his hand, drenching him in sour milk.
Frustration flared, hot and immediate. He needed to eat. He needed to be normal, just for a minute. He looked at a banana on the counter. He focused, and the fruit levitated, peeling itself with a graceful, telekinetic precision that was utterly at odds with the brute force he'd displayed moments before. He guided the peeled banana to his mouth and took a bite. The simple act of eating, achieved through such impossible means, felt both triumphant and deeply wrong.
His enhanced hearing, even dialed down, picked up a new sound from the street below. A sharp cry of fear, followed by the guttural demands of a mugger. "Wallet! Now! Don't make me use this!"
The sounds were a bucket of cold water on his swirling thoughts. His own existential crisis suddenly seemed like a luxury. Someone was in real, immediate danger. The old Leo Mercer, the graphic designer, would have frozen, maybe called 911. The new Leo… the new Leo was already moving.
He didn't think. He acted.
He was at his window in a blur, looking down at the scene five stories below. A young woman was backed against a wall, a hooded man holding a knife to her throat. The details were excruciatingly clear to Leo's enhanced vision: the terrified gleam of a tear tracking through her mascara, the cheap, rust-specked blade of the knife, the frantic pulse in the mugger's neck.
Rage, clean and sharp, cut through his confusion. This was evil. Simple, mundane evil. And he had the power to stop it.
But how? He couldn't just fly down there—the thought was still too absurd, too terrifying. He looked around his apartment, his eyes landing on a single ball bearing from a long-discarded furniture set. It was small, heavy, innocuous.
He picked it up. He focused on the mugger's hand, the one holding the knife. He didn't know if he could do this, but the Superbrain presented the calculation: trajectory, velocity, wind resistance. It was a simple physics problem. He drew his arm back and threw the bearing not with his muscles, but with his mind.
It was like firing a bullet from a railgun.
The bearing crossed the distance between his window and the street in a fraction of a second, invisible to the naked eye. It struck the mugger's wrist with a sickening, audible crack. The man screamed, a high-pitched shriek of shock and pain, as the knife clattered to the pavement, his hand bending at an impossible angle.
The woman stared, stunned, as her attacker clutched his shattered wrist, stumbling back and then fleeing down the alley, his cries fading into the city's hum.
Leo stood at the window, the ball bearing now a distant, insignificant object on the street below. He watched the woman sink to her knees, sobbing in relief. He had done that. Without leaving his apartment, without being seen, he had saved her.
The power coursed through him, no longer just a source of terror, but of purpose. The fear was still there, a cold knot in his stomach, but it was now intertwined with a fierce, burning certainty.
He looked at his reflection in the dark glass of the window. He didn't see a frightened man anymore. He saw a weapon. He saw a shield.
He saw the beginning of something.
He turned from the window, his gaze sweeping over the wreckage of his old life—the broken faucet, the scarred wall, the shattered refrigerator. It was all a cocoon. Leo Mercer, the graphic designer, was gone.
He didn't know what he was becoming. But he knew, with a clarity that was both exhilarating and terrifying, that his life would never be the same again. The world had cracks in it, fractures of injustice and suffering he had been blind to before. And he now had the power to fill them.
He had awoken.