217 Powerful Demonstration
217 Powerful Demonstration
The preparations were complete.
I sat strapped into the backseat of the vessel, fully suited, porcelain mask secured, and tarot cards nested within the lining of my suit like a second skeleton. The gauntlet on my left arm rested heavy and reassuring against my forearm, its surface alive with faint guiding lines and inert displays. It wasn’t a weapon. It was a conduit through which George would speak to me, calculate for me, and correct me if I drifted a fraction too far off course.
Around me, the astronauts moved with quiet efficiency.
They were George’s people. They were mundane to their cores, unpowered, rigorously trained, and paid well enough not to ask questions. They did their jobs while pretending I wasn’t there, though their eyes betrayed them from time to time. Curiosity. Unease. The faint disbelief that this was real, and… that today, of all days, they were ferrying a supervillain into orbit.
One of them approached me with a harness in hand.
“I’ll secure you and do a final check,” he said, voice professional, and carefully neutral.
“Do as you please,” I replied.
He tightened the restraints, checked the locks, tugged twice at the harness to ensure it would hold even if everything else failed. When he finished, he hesitated. The pause was brief, but I noticed it.
“We were told not to speak,” he said, almost apologetically. “But I have to ask. You’ll be… fine? Without a proper EVA suit?”
I turned my masked face slightly toward him.
“I won’t be here for long,” I said. “This is just transportation.”
That answer did not reassure him. He nodded anyway and stepped away.
People would probably ask what I was thinking, riding a rocket into space.
I had done something similar before, though not like this. High-altitude insertion had always been my preference: aircraft, stratospheric drops, George whispering numbers into my ear while I folded the sky beneath my feet and landed exactly where I intended. Precision through terror. Terror through inevitability.
This time, the target lay on another continent.
As much as I wanted to return to Lockworld and close that chapter decisively, this came first. The underworld could not be negotiated with. It had to be seized. Broken publicly. Its major players erased so thoroughly that fear would do half my work for me.
If the world needed reminding and if it needed a spectacle to recalibrate its sense of safety, then so be it and I’d play my part well.
The crew called out their final checks.
The countdown began.
When the engines ignited, the entire vessel shook as if reality itself objected. The acceleration pressed me back into my seat, a deep, bone-heavy force that reminded me this was not teleportation, not phasing, not the clean abstraction of portals.
This was physics.
Seconds stretched. The roar deepened. The vibration became constant and omnipresent. I felt it through the suit, through my ribs, and through the places where flesh met machine. And then, gradually, something changed.
The weight shifted.
It took me a moment to recognize the sensation. It was not weightlessness yet, but the unmistakable feeling of leaving Earth behind. Gravity loosened its grip, not all at once, but reluctantly, as if offended.
I had crossed worlds before. I had stepped between realities as easily as crossing a threshold. But this was different. This was departure in the most literal sense, clawing free from the well of a planet that had no intention of letting go.
Minutes passed in relentless propulsion.
When the engines finally cut, the sudden quiet was deafening. The crew moved immediately, hands flying over instruments as they aligned the vessel for orbit, adjusting trajectory according to George’s parameters. I could hear him in my ear now, calm and precise, his voice threading through the controlled chaos.
“How does it feel?” he asked.
I watched the curve of the planet through the viewport, blue and vast and indifferent.
“Novel,” I said at last. “Far more than I expected.”
George exhaled audibly through the earpiece. “This isn’t like dropping you out of the back of a cargo plane,” he said. “The scale here is… much bigger. GPS won’t be one hundred percent accurate. I’ll guide you, but you’ll have to make micro-corrections on the fly.”
“I trust you with my life,” I replied without hesitation. “You’ll do perfectly well.”
He snorted despite himself. “I’m basically guiding a super missile from orbit. But… that has precedent, so it’s feasible.”
One of the crew finally broke protocol. He turned in his seat and looked back at me, eyes wide with disbelief.
“So… what’s next?”
“I leave,” I said.
I phased down through the seat, through the hull, through layers of metal and insulation as if they weren’t there.
And then I was falling into space.
There was no air. My lungs burned instinctively, body screaming for oxygen, but I shut that down immediately with Biokinesis dulling the panic, muting the pain, and overriding reflex with cold control. I didn’t need to breathe for a while. Pain was optional. Biology was negotiable.
Stars stretched endlessly around me as the Earth curved below, massive and serene.
With a thought, the tarot cards embedded in my suit responded. Telekinetic force pulled at the planet beneath me, not enough to fight gravity, but only to guide myself into its grasp. I began to fall in earnest.
Atmospheric entry loomed.
With Intangibility at sixteen, I trusted my body to survive what would have annihilated anything else. Still, pressure mounted. Friction screamed across my senses even as my form phased just enough to let it pass through me rather than tear me apart.
The gauntlet flickered alive, numbers and vectors spiraling wildly across its surface. Too high. Too fast. Margins collapsing and reforming in real time.
At intervals, I triggered Chronokinesis with brief and surgical cuts to momentum. Time shuddered around me, my velocity dying for fractions of a second before gravity reclaimed it. Again. And again. Controlled falling.
The city emerged beneath me, lights glittering like veins of gold and white. A sprawl of arrogance and excess. At its heart was a palace. It was vast, ostentatious, and unmistakable.
Perfect.
My psychic senses reached outward as I descended. Minds bloomed into awareness. It was sharp, powerful, and disciplined. Seven of them, gathered together, their thoughts brushing against one another in patterns of authority and indulgence.
They were the leadership of the organization I intended to hurt tonight.
I accelerated, adding the tarot cards’ pull to my descent. The gauntlet chimed once with confirmation.
Right place.
I disengaged it, letting the device phase away into the air, trusting my own senses now. Psychic threads brushed past me with telepaths, empaths, and watchers layered atop watchers, but I slid beneath them all, folding my presence inward. Empathy mastery, Intangibility, and practiced deceit rendered me invisible to their awareness.
I phased through the palace roof without sound.
Chronokinesis flared at my boots, freezing me midair as I hovered above a grand circular chamber. Below me stood seven figures around a round table, each radiating power, pride etched into the architecture itself.
I looked down at them unndeterred as I spread my arms.
“The Monarchy’s fate now tilts at a balance,” I declared, my voice echoing through the chamber like a verdict. “Pride. Envy. Greed. Gluttony. Sloth. Wrath. Lust.”
Seven minds snapped upward in shock.
“A time of change is on the horizon,” I continued. “Upon the setting of the Eclipse, the gaze of ruin has now fallen upon you.”
I let the silence stretch, heavy and suffocating.
“Pray. Beg for mercy. Grit your teeth. Fight back. Hope tomorrow comes.”
My mask tilted downward, shadow swallowing my features.
“Because today, I’ve come to impart an important lesson about the new world order.”
The leadership of Monarchy shared the same unmistakable traits with dark skin like polished obsidian and unnaturally pure blue eyes that glowed faintly with psychic resonance. Their clothing was fashioned after ancient royalty: layered robes, gold-threaded collars, and sigils stitched with ceremonial precision. They didn’t look like politicians or warlords.
They looked like a dynasty.
Pride stood first.
An old man with a meticulously groomed goatee and a crown-like circlet embedded with psychic conduits. The moment his eyes locked onto me, his composure shattered.
“Eclipse!” he screamed, voice cracking with rage and disbelief. “How dare you—”
I didn’t let him finish.
I released a full-powered Electrokinesis burst, amplifying it through the charge lattice embedded in my porcelain mask. The discharge detonated point-blank, ripping through the telekinetic forcefield he threw up in desperation.
“Too slow.”
His attempt to layer telepathy and hypnosis on top of the barrier to project mind control on me fizzled uselessly against my defenses. Technique was there. Experience, too.
But the gap between us was absolute.
Pride was blasted backward, body convulsing once before slamming into the marble wall. Smoke curled from his charred form as he slid down, lifeless before he hit the floor.
“Give it up,” I said calmly, hovering above them. “Your psychic powers are useless against me.”
Sloth broke first.
He looked no older than fifteen, small-framed, wide-eyed, dressed in silken whites that contrasted cruelly with the panic on his face.
“Join forces!” he cried out desperately. “All of you, now! Get rid of him!”
They listened.
I felt it immediately.
Six minds snapped into alignment, psychic pressure surging toward me in unison. Mind control. Overwrite. Domination. Their rhythms overlapped, layered and reinforced. It was a well-practiced formation.
It sent a tingle up my spine.
That was all.
I matched them instinctively.
Empathy synchronized with their emotional frequency, absorbing and neutralizing affective intrusion. Telepathy countered logic with logic, parsing intent faster than they could refine it. Enhancer locked my self-mastery in place, endowing megreter focus. Biokinesis stabilized balance and internal feedback loops. Electrokinesis shielded my nervous system, preventing forced signal hijacking. Intangibility added an extra layer of resistance, letting hostile impulses slide through me instead of sticking.
Their combined assault broke like a wave against bedrock.
Lust staggered, clutching his face.
Blood streamed from his eyes as he hissed through clenched teeth, “I’m putting in the most effort here, it’s my specialization, but… why isn’t it working?!”
Envy snarled beside him, long hair whipping as psychic backlash split her focus. Blood ran from her nose as she turned on the others.
“Use the batteries!” she screamed. “Nothing else is working, so use them!”
I recognized the technique immediately.
Royal had used it once.
Psychic batteries referred to ordinary people, slaves, or livestock. Minds forcibly linked and burned like fuel, their neural activity chained together to brute-force impossible feats.
Disgust rose in my throat. For a moment, I could almost taste blood.
Then my Biokinesis smoothed it away.
Monarchy wasn’t just an organization. It was seven families bound by blood, tradition, and inherited psychic potency. Their pure blue eyes spoke of generations refining mental power. Their dark skin carried the weight of ancient lineage, descendants of a dynasty that had thrived during the Dark Ages.
And somewhere along the way, fear had curdled into supremacy.
According to SRC archives, their origin traced back to a Seer, someone who had glimpsed a future of enslavement, exploitation, and marginalization. In response, he gathered psychics, and used future knowledge to accelerate their growth to ensure survival.
At first, it had been resistance.
Then it became entitlement.
Superiority complexes festered. Bloodlines were worshipped. Outsiders were reduced to tools. What began as protection calcified into ideology, one the SRC classified with an otherworld term: Nazi supremacy. A belief system rooted in fear, twisted into racism, antisemitism, and ultranationalism, justified by power.
I looked down at them as their formation faltered, their unity cracking under strain.
Was this it?
I tilted my head slightly.
“Is that all you have?”
Wrath stepped forward.
He was bald, massive, built like a living siege engine, muscles corded beneath ceremonial armor that looked more symbolic than practical. His jaw tightened as he glared up at me.
“If mind control won’t work,” he growled, “then we rely on brute force.”
“That’s right.”
The voice came from behind me.
I turned just in time to see Pride. He was alive, scorched but very much functional. His eyes burned with venom.
“You won’t catch me off-guard a second time.”
He swung.
His fists carved a wide arc through the air, wrapped in a dense layer of tactile telekinesis. It wasn’t a simple barrier around him. It was folded inward, compressed and tuned with empathic feedback, granting it frightening precision. The kind of construct designed specifically to counter intangibility-class capes, locking onto intent rather than matter.
Clever.
On paper, it should have worked.
On paper, Pride and I were not separated by an ocean of power.
His arm passed through my torso.
No resistance. No impact.
A tarot card slid free from inside my suit, phasing out a heartbeat later and snapping toward him like a guided blade. However, Pride suddenly vanished as space rippled.
Sloth reappeared several meters away, dragging Pride with him, both of them skidding across the marble floor. Sloth’s breathing was ragged, his face pale with strain.
“Be careful,” he snapped at the others. “Assume we don’t know the scale of his powers. Come at him with everything.”
Gluttony shifted uneasily, round face creasing as sweat beaded along his brow.
“Then what do we do now?” he complained. “Someone tell me there’s a strategy!”
“There is,” Greed said smoothly.
She stepped forward, white hair cascading down her shoulders, eyes sharp and calculating even through the psychic pressure weighing on them all as they continued to force there power on me, probably hoping it had some effect and would play a role to deter me.
“Negotiate.”
Wrath snarled, but Greed ignored him and looked directly at me.
“Is there a compromise we can reach?”
It was smart.
Buying time. Re-centering the room. Giving their minds something other than fear to cling to.
I felt their telepathic network flare again, whispering frantically among themselves. I let my awareness drift, eavesdropping without effort.
“How did a psychic like this grow without us noticing?”
“We should negotiate—this is unwinnable.”
“No, we can’t bend, not to him—”
“If we stall, maybe—”
Greed’s voice cut through their internal chaos as she spoke aloud, eloquent and measured.
“We have resources,” she said. “Vast ones. Networks, wealth, influence, techniques refined over centuries. And your power,” she inclined her head slightly, genuine admiration bleeding through despite herself, “is without equal. There is room here for mutual benefit.”
My Empathy told me the truth.
She meant it.
Unfortunately for her, that made no difference.
I shook my head slowly.
“This isn’t a negotiation,” I said. “It’s a demonstration.”
Their psychic network stuttered.
“I’m here to make the underworld take me seriously. To remind every faction, every syndicate, and every hidden empire that the era of complacency is over.”
I spread my arms, hovering above their round table like a dark halo.
“There is a new world order coming. And at its center is me.”
My voice echoed through the chamber, heavy and final.
“I am the dark sun. All of the world’s evils orbit me. I am its master.”
I looked at each of them in turn.
“And everyone else is my servant.”
Monarchy was an organization built on manipulation, bloodlines, and monopolizing a single class of cape. They were the apex of the psychic class, however right now, each of them felt suddenly very small.
“Your kind has no place in what comes next.”