The first sensation was the pain.
It wasn't the sharp, clean pain of the sealing fan. This was a deep, cellular ache, a volcanic hum in my marrow, as if my blood had been replaced with liquid electricity and ground glass. Velocity-9. Hunter Zolomon's curse was now mine. It coursed through me, a toxic, glorious fuel, whispering promises of impossible speed and a slow, certain death.
I stood on the gravel rooftop, the city's neon glow painting the night in streaks of chemical pink and bile green. This wasn't Gotham. It had none of the Gothic weight. This was a placeholder city, a generic sprawl in some forgotten corner of the Infinite Universe. My testing ground.
I focused on the hum. Go.
The world slurred.
One moment I was at the north edge of the roof. The next, I was at the south, gravel spraying from under my boots. There was no sense of movement, only a disorienting repositioning. I stumbled, the kinetic aftershock rattling my teeth. I hadn't run. I had... translated.
A laugh, raw and startled, tore from my throat. It echoed, alone in the skyline.
I tried again, aiming for the rooftop access door. This time, I leaned into the pain, let it burn. My vision sharpened, the world grinding to a halt. Dust motes hung in the air like frozen stars. A pigeon was a statue mid-flap. I walked between frozen raindrops. Time perception. This was Zoom's true power—not just speed, but stealing time itself.
My suit formed around me in a cascade of black leather and crackling, deep-blue lightning. It was armor and identity, smelling of ozone and violence. I felt faster just wearing it.
The next hour was a blur of terrifying discovery. I learned that running down the side of a building felt like falling in slow motion. I learned that a punch, delivered at this velocity, didn't just break a brick wall—it pulverized a section of it into dust. I also learned the price: a gnawing fatigue, a tightening in my chest after every sustained sprint. The serum was a countdown clock, and I was the clockwork.
I was perched on a gargoyle-less ledge, watching the frozen traffic patterns below, when I saw it.
A block over, in the mouth of a grimy alley, the air was sick. It shimmered like a heat haze, but it rippled with colors that didn't belong—neon magenta and void black. A vertical, tear-shaped wound in reality. The edges bled a silent, staticky hum that resonated with the dark matter in my cells.
My first dungeon.
I blurred into the alley. Up close, the tear was a window. Through it, I saw a different night. The architecture was off—sharper, more angular, with holographic ads flickering in a language I instinctively understood. Night City. A replica.
The notification appeared in my mind, not as a sound, but as a cold, etched fact:
Incursion Detected: Urban Zone (Cyberpunk 2077).
Anomaly: Cyberpsycho Incident.
Objective: Neutralize All Hostiles.
Reward: Sovereign's Right (Claim Shadows).
No tutorial. No explanations. Just a hunting license.
I stepped through. The sensation was like pushing through a wall of cold gel. The sounds of my generic city vanished, replaced by the distant wail of sirens, the thrum of bass from a nearby club, and the frantic screams from around the corner.
I rounded it. The scene was a masterpiece of curated violence. A man—or what was left of one—was fused with chrome. One of his arms was a mounted rotary cannon, spinning with a deadly whine. His other hand was a giant industrial claw, pinning a screaming civilian to a wall. Two others, just as chromed-up but with monowire and mantis blades, were closing in. Cyberpsychos.
Time slowed to a crawl. The spinning barrels of the cannon became a barely moving grill. The civilians' screams deepened into a drone.
I had my lightning. I could call down a storm. But that wasn't the test. The test was the speed.
I moved.
To the frozen world, I was a ghost. A smear of blue light. I walked up to the first psycho, the one with monowire. My hand, sheathed in a crude mimicry of the Chidori I'd seen a thousand times, crackled with unstable white lightning. I placed it on his chest plate. In real-time, it would have been a thunderous impact. In my stolen moment, it was just contact.
I let time snap back.
BANG-CRACK.
The sound was a single, horrific unit. The psycho didn't fly back. He disintegrated from the chest out in a shower of molten chrome, organics, and shattered synth-flesh. The shockwave blew out windows down the alley.
Before the first body hit the ground, I was already pivoting. The second psycho, with mantis blades, was mid-lunge. I didn't dodge. I stepped inside his guard, grabbed the wrist of his blade-arm, and pushed with my speed. His own momentum, multiplied a thousandfold, tore the arm from its socket and sent it spiraling into the night. A flick of my hand, and a bolt of pure lightning from my fingertips seared a hole through his forehead.
The big one, the cannon, finally reacted. He dropped the civilian and the barrels began to spin up in earnest, a building roar.
Fear. A spike of it. Sharp and cold. I was fast, but was I faster than a hypersonic stream of mass-reactive rounds?
The fear triggered something deeper. In the core of my being, in a place the speed couldn't touch, I felt a stirring. A vast, red eye, slit-pupiled and full of infinite malice, blinked open in the darkness of my soul. A low, earth-shaking growl vibrated through my bones. Kurama. He tasted my fear. He liked it.
No. Not now.
I clenched my will, forcing the fear down, picturing a cage around that bestial presence. The eye watched me, unblinking, before slowly closing. A warning.
The cannon was at full whine. The psycho screamed, a sound of pure machine rage.
I didn't give him the shot. I created a time remnant.
The process was less thought, more instinct—a wrenching sideways step in time. There was a dizzying split, and then there were two of me. The original and the remnant, a pale, silent echo from a micro-second in the future. We moved in perfect, silent unison.
The psycho fired. A torrent of fire filled the alley.
My remnant blurred forward, taking the full brunt of the shells, dissolving into blue static and temporal backlash. But in the split-second of distraction he provided, I, the original, was already behind the giant.
I didn't use lightning. I simply placed both hands on the small of his back, where his human spine met the chrome reinforcement.
And I pushed.
At that speed, air becomes a wall. I shoved him through that wall. He didn't run. He was launched like a missile, a sonic boom cracking the alley walls, as he vaporized down the length of the street in a tunnel of shattered asphalt and plasma, before dissolving into a distant, shimmering explosion.
Silence, ringing and absolute, settled over the alley. The two surviving civilians were catatonic with shock.
The dungeon shimmered. The notification returned.
Incursion Cleared.
Sovereign's Right Invoked.
I felt a new pull, a vacuum in reality. From the spot where the first psycho fell, a wisp of black smoke coalesced. It thickened, took form, and knelt before me. A perfect shadowy replica of the chromed killer, but its eyes were pools of calm, blue light. Utterly loyal. My first soldier.
A similar shadow rose from the remains of the mantis-blade psycho.
The power, cold and potent, flowed into me. Not just strength, but authority. I could feel them, extensions of my will, waiting in a silent, dark dimension I now owned.
I dismissed the shadows with a thought. They melted back into nothingness, ready to be called.
I walked back through the tear in reality. It sealed behind me with a soft pop, leaving only a grimy, normal alley in a generic city.
Back on my rooftop, the hum of Velocity-9 in my veins felt different. It wasn't just power now. It was a tool. A key. The pain was still there, a constant, gnawing reminder of the death sentence in my blood. The Beast was still there, sleeping fitfully, tethered by my fraying control.
But now, I had an army.
I looked out at the infinite, indifferent cityscape. Somewhere out there in the multiverse, a Crisis was brewing. Monitors and Anti-Monitors were playing their games.
Let them. I had dungeons to raid, shadows to collect, and a fatal flaw to cure.
The first chapter of my reign was written in lightning, chrome, and blood.
And it was only the beginning.
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