One day ago.
Ryan had locked himself inside the abandoned workshop beneath the old railway line—a place forgotten by the city and ignored by satellites. Rusted tools lined the walls, half-broken machines lay scattered like corpses of an earlier industrial age, and the air smelled of oil, dust, and something faintly metallic that never left his lungs.
This was where he began.
Not with weapons.Not with anger.But with memory.
Ryan sat cross-legged on the cold concrete floor, eyes shut, breathing slow and measured. He forced himself to replay everything—every moment his body had betrayed the laws of biology, every second when pain had ceased to matter.
The blue.
It always started with the blue.
His eyes—once ordinary, once human—had burned into something else entirely. A color too sharp, too alive. When they turned blue, the world slowed. Bullets became predictable arcs instead of death sentences. Bone and muscle obeyed commands they were never meant to receive. Wounds that should have killed him stitched themselves back together as if reality itself was apologizing.
He opened his eyes and grabbed a notebook, its pages already filled with jagged handwriting.
Observed abilities:
Superhuman speed.Superhuman strength.Accelerated regeneration.Heightened perception.Predictive combat awareness.
Then he paused.
The pen hovered.
Conditions:Activation only under extreme physical trauma or life-threatening stress.No voluntary control.No manual awakening.Requires external trigger—pain, damage, near death.
Ryan clenched his jaw.
That was the problem.
Power that only appeared when he was already dying wasn't a blessing. It was a gamble. And gambles got people killed.
He turned the page and wrote in capital letters:
SOLUTION: ARMOR.
Not armor in the traditional sense. He didn't want to become a walking tank. He needed something that would survive—something that could adapt, regenerate, and hide him.
That was when he thought of Avom.
Avom wasn't supposed to exist.
When the meteor hit decades ago, most of what it left behind was destruction—burned earth, warped metals, radiation anomalies governments still refused to acknowledge. But deep beneath the impact zone, scientists had found something else.
A metal that healed.
Avom was born from burned meteor fragments fused with terrestrial alloys under impossible pressure. It didn't just resist damage—it remembered its structure. Tear it apart, and it would rebuild itself. Break one component, and nearby fragments would shift to compensate.
Living metal.
Ryan had stolen only a small amount years ago, during a forgotten black-site raid. Back then, he didn't know why he took it.
Now he did.
For hours, then days, he worked. Forged. Failed. Rebuilt. Avom resisted being shaped—it didn't like being controlled. He had to convince it, guide it, allow it to become what it wanted to be.
The suit wasn't bulky. It was sleek. Close to the body. Plates layered like muscle fibers rather than steel slabs. The helmet concealed his face completely—no heat signature, no facial mapping, no identity.
If someone hunted him, they wouldn't find Ryan.
They'd find a ghost.
And if his powers activated…The suit would survive it.
Now. Present time.
The lecture hall was quiet.
Too quiet.
Ryan sat beside Meera, half-listening to the professor drone on about economic reconstruction theories that had failed decades ago. He watched the clock instead. Something had felt wrong all morning—like the air itself was waiting.
Meera leaned toward him. "You okay? You've been staring at nothing for ten minutes."
"I'm fine," Ryan said automatically.
He wasn't.
The moment came without warning.
The doors exploded inward.
Wood shattered. Metal hinges screamed. A student stumbled inside, face soaked in blood, eyes wide with madness.
"They're outside!" he screamed. "They're killing everyone—"
Before he could finish, something dragged him backward.
The doors slammed shut.
Screams followed.
Panic erupted instantly. Chairs scraped, people ran, some froze in place. The professor tried to shout for calm, but his voice drowned beneath terror.
Meera grabbed Ryan's arm. "What is happening?"
Ryan was already standing.
This wasn't random.
This wasn't a riot.
He felt it in his bones.
T.A.S.C.
Outside, the corridor echoed with inhuman sounds—wet impacts, bone snapping, voices cut short. Something heavy slammed against the walls. The floor trembled.
A girl near the door tried to open it.
Blood seeped through the cracks before she touched the handle.
Someone smashed through the wall.
Not a monster.
A human.
Or something that used to be.
The subject's body was wrong—muscles overgrown, veins glowing faintly green beneath translucent skin, eyes empty and unfocused. He grabbed a student and tore him apart like paper.
People screamed.
Meera ran.
She didn't make it far.
She tripped, crashing hard against the floor.
Ryan's heart slammed into his ribs.
If she dies, Norton disappears.
He didn't think anymore.
He moved.
In a blur, Ryan activated the suit. Avom flowed across his body like liquid shadow, sealing him inside the armor in less than a second. The mask snapped into place.
Gasps filled the room.
Before anyone could process what they were seeing, Ryan lifted Meera effortlessly and ran.
Gunfire echoed as he fired controlled bursts—not to kill, but to distract. The bullets barely slowed the subject. It roared, unfazed.
The guns were useless.
He knew that now.
Ryan slid into the nearest washroom and locked Meera inside a stall. "Stay here," he said firmly. "No sound. No matter what you hear."
She stared at him, shaking. "Your eyes—"
"They're not important."
But she had seen them.
Even through the mask.
A flicker of blue.
Ryan turned and ran back into hell.
The hallway was chaos. Bodies. Blood. Broken walls. At least three subjects rampaged freely, tearing through students like prey.
He was faster. Smarter.
But not stronger.
One caught him mid-run and slammed him through a door. Bones cracked. Pain exploded across his chest.
Still nothing.
No blue.
He staggered upright, coughing blood.
Think.
He noticed the lights.
The power grid.
An idea sparked.
Ryan fired at the ceiling, shattering the lights, then sprinted toward the main transformer. He took another hit—something tore through his side—but he pushed forward and slammed into the control panel, ripping cables free.
The university plunged into darkness.
Screams echoed blindly.
In the dark, Ryan moved.
Silently.
The subjects froze.
They could feel him—but they couldn't see him.
Something was wrong.
They swung wildly, missing every strike. Ryan used their confusion, cutting tendons, collapsing joints, crippling rather than killing.
But then—
Green light flared.
Their eyes shifted.
Night vision.
They roared in unison.
And attacked.
Ryan was thrown across the hall, armor cracking, blood filling his mouth. One foot crushed his leg. Another subject lifted him by the throat.
His vision blurred.
Still no blue.
Wake up, he begged silently.
Nothing.
A figure appeared between him and death.
A girl.
She hadn't been there a second ago.
She stood casually, untouched by the chaos, eyes glowing faintly silver. She looked at Ryan with open disappointment.
"You are such a disappointment," she said calmly. "You know that?"
The subjects froze.
The world seemed to hold its breath.
Ryan stared at her as darkness crept in.
"Who… are you?" he whispered.
She smiled.
"That," she said, raising her hand as reality bent around her, "is something you're not ready to know."
And then—
Everything went white.