Unheroic Life of a Certain Cape

223 Fall of the Box

The truth was, the operation had begun two hours ago.

By the time the Warden realized something was wrong, the Box was already dead and the reports he received had been the result of George’s deception.

Every prisoner had been set free. Every lock that mattered was gone. Every contingency he believed in had either been turned against him or quietly erased. For that, I had George to thank. When it came to technological warfare, George was a natural counter to almost everything the SRC liked to believe was untouchable.

I’d expected resistance. Emergency protocols. Layered failsafes. Something dramatic.

Instead, we caught the Warden completely off guard.

Through the porcelain mask, my vision fed me a dozen overlays at once from schematics, heat signatures, and frantic biometric spikes. The Warden was pacing like a caged animal inside the control room, slamming his hands against reinforced doors that no longer answered to him.

“Eclipse!” he screamed, his voice cracking through the facility’s hijacked speakers. “Let me out of here!”

George had taken over everything.

Not just the surveillance. Not just the power grid. The Box’s internal nervous system from its permissions, redundancies, and AI frameworks. They were all his now. Guesswork had helped too, lingering on the sidelines like a smug consultant, pointing out blind spots and internal systems with unsettling accuracy. He’d framed it as reducing competition within the SRC. Apparently, the other departments had been looking down on him as an arrogant upstart.

I didn’t care.

Useful was useful.

With George covering my footprint, I’d been sneaking through the Box for days. There was nothing holding me back. No alarms that mattered. No eyes that could see me unless I wanted them to. I stole files, copied research, plugged in USBs loaded with tailored malware, and most importantly, planted electrokinetic bombs inside the clones.

The irony wasn’t lost on me.

The Warden had surrounded himself with copies of himself, convinced that sameness meant loyalty. Well, they all died in the end, unaware how it happened.

“ECLIPSE!” he shouted again. “TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT TO KNOW! LET’S NEGOTIATE!”

I almost laughed.

He wasn’t a fighter. Not really. He had enormous power, but it was bureaucratic, academic, and abstract. Buttons, systems, permissions. Take those away, and what was left was just an office worker with a god complex.

“There’s no need to negotiate,” I said calmly, my voice echoing through speakers he could no longer shut off. “I’ve already decided what I want to do with you.”

I tilted my head slightly, as if considering him through the cameras.

“But first,” I continued, “how about we play a game?”

He went silent.

“Guess where I am.”

From his perspective, the camera feed showed sky.

I adjusted the angle upward.

Black steel filled the screen. Harsh lines. Reinforced plating etched with symbols and seams only someone intimate with the Box would recognize.

The Warden’s breath hitched.

“T-That’s…” he stammered.

I finished it for him.

“The Box,” I said. “More specifically—”

I stepped closer to the edge, boots scraping against metal that had never known an intruder.

“The rooftop of the Box.”

What was I thinking, talking to him like this?

I knew the answer even as the thought crossed my mind. It was for the sake of demonstration. Theatrics. Presentation mattered. Power that wasn’t seen might as well not exist.

One might ask who my audience was, and what exactly I hoped to accomplish.

If I needed witnesses, I already had them. Below me, prisoners were pouring out of the Box in waves. They were running, phasing, teleporting, crawling, and flying. Whatever means they had, they were using it. The facility sat in an open expanse by design. Every one of them would see what I was about to do.

But they weren’t my real audience.

Right now, someone higher was watching. The top of the SRC. If not all of them, then at least one figure perched at the peak of that hierarchy, staring at a screen, realizing too late that the Box was no longer theirs.

That was who this was for.

As for my goal, fear was only part of it.

Fear, yes. Spread it across the cape world, heroes and villains alike. What I was about to do would be remembered. A feat that would crawl its way into whispered stories and classified briefings, something that would make even the confident hesitate.

But fear alone wasn’t enough.

I wanted to establish something permanent. To carve it into the collective consciousness.

I wasn’t just dangerous.

I was inevitable.

The Monarchy had been a statement, but they were still only one organization. Old blood. Old ideology. The Box was different. To the world, it wasn’t just a facility. More than that, it was a symbol. It was the ultimate threat and punishment, where monsters went to disappear.

And symbols mattered.

“What are you planning?” the Warden demanded, his voice cracking through the speakers.

I didn’t answer right away.

I crouched at the edge of the rooftop and pressed my gloved hand against the cold steel beneath me. I could feel layer upon layer of special alloys, composites engineered to resist reality warping, psychic intrusion, brute force, even partial dimensional shear. An enormous structure. A literal box, existing between arrogance and paranoia.

George’s voice came through my earpiece, steady but tight. “This is going to take a lot out of you. I’ve got the rest of the Godslayers on standby in case something goes wrong. Amelia’s been informed too… about two hours ago.”

I exhaled slowly.

It wasn’t permission he was talking about. It was a warning. Or maybe a courtesy. Amelia would hate this. Sinking an entire superpowered prison wasn’t exactly aligned with her vision of the future.

“I know,” I replied. “Keep watching the systems.”

I closed my fingers.

Slowly, the world began to tremble.

At first it was subtle, just a low vibration traveling through the metal, a hum that resonated deep in the structure’s bones. Then the ground answered. The Box groaned, a sound like a wounded animal trying to remember how to scream.

I expanded my Intangibility outward, not just around myself, but around the facility as a whole. Layered it with telekinesis, anchored it with empathy and spatial intuition. The impossible sensation of something massive becoming less real.

The structure began to descend, phasing through matter.

The Box started sinking into the earth, its lower sections vanishing first as if the ground itself had decided to swallow it whole.

Inside, alarms howled in confused agony.

“W-What’s happening?!” the Warden shouted. “N-no—this isn’t an earthquake! Eclipse! Let me out! LET ME OUT!”

I cut the connection to the Warden and shut his voice out completely.

There was no room for distraction now.

Even with my monstrously high rating, phasing something on this scale was not clean. Not elegant. It was brute force layered with precision, will grinding against reality until one of us gave way.

Blood pooled at the corner of my lips. I tasted iron as a migraine flared behind my eyes, sharp and nauseating. My stomach twisted unpleasantly, my body protesting in a dozen subtle systems at once. Breathing became difficult, like my lungs were lagging a half-second behind my intent.

I sucked in air anyway.

Just a bit more.

Far off in the distance, I spotted a helicopter hovering at a cautious range, its camera trained squarely on me and the sinking horizon. I’d instructed George to bring a camera crew, to make sure this moment didn’t disappear into rumor and classified files. Multiple outlets. Multiple angles. Let the world argue later whether it was real.

Right now, they would see!

I dug deeper.

I pushed my Intangibility further down, threading it through the Box’s foundations, its internal hollows, its layered redundancies. Then I poured power into it not just to let it sink, but to force it deeper, to deny it the chance to resurface, and to anchor its grave.

My vision blurred. My hands shook.

I gave everything I had left.

When I finally let go, the sensation hit all at once. Air rushed back into my lungs like I’d been drowning. My legs gave out and I dropped to one knee, one hand braced against the ground as I focused on not blacking out.

Then it came.

A deep, thunderous boom reverberated through the earth.

The ground cracked beneath me, fractures racing outward as a low-magnitude earthquake rippled through the region. It was inevitable, sinking a structure the size of the Box, riddled with massive hollow spaces, meant either collapse or displacement. The earth chose both.

I stayed where I was, breathing slowly, counting heartbeats.

After a few long seconds, the tremors faded. Dust settled. The world stilled.

I pushed myself upright, forcing my spine straight, my posture steady. Even exhausted, even half-dead on my feet, I refused to look anything but composed.

The helicopter lingered for a moment longer.

Then it turned and vanished into the distance.

Good.

A blur snapped into existence beside me, pressure shifting as the air screamed briefly in protest. I turned my head just as he fully materialized.

Blond hair. Wind-worn stubble. That familiar crooked posture that never quite relaxed.

Chad.

Windbreaker.

“You don’t have to thank me,” I said before he could speak.

He snorted, rubbing the back of his neck. “I waited for you lot,” he complained. “But you sure took your time…”

His gaze drifted to the cracked ground, to the emptiness where the Box had been.

Then he looked back at me.

Something unreadable crossed his face.

“You sure grew stronger,” he said quietly. “I can’t even call you human anymore.”

George’s voice crackled softly through my earpiece. “I’ve taken care of the invitations. The capes who escaped and fit our criteria have been contacted via a drone. Company recruitment is underway.”

“Good,” I muttered. “Thanks, George.”

I tried to take a step forward.

My leg buckled.

The world tilted, gravity suddenly remembering I existed. Before I could hit the ground, a hand clamped onto my shoulder and yanked me upright.

Chad steadied me with an annoyed huff. “Easy there, bossman. You just sank the most infamous prison in existence. Try not to faceplant right after.”

“Tch,” I said, forcing my weight back onto my feet. “Shut it. You’re making me cringe.”

He grinned anyway.

An engine rumbled nearby. A black van rolled up through the settling dust and stopped just in front of us. The side door slid open a crack.

Abner leaned out from the driver’s seat, eyes practically glowing. “My lord! Splendid performance! Truly historic!”

I gave him a look. “You’re laying it on thick.”

From the passenger seat, Jacob waved lazily. “We should hurry. This place is going to get crowded real soon.”

Diane had already slid the side door fully open. “Get in,” she said briskly. “You look like you’re about to pass out.”

Keegan was perched on the roof of the van, crouched like a gargoyle. He glanced toward the cracked horizon. “Heads up. A few prisoners are coming this way.”

Sure enough, three figures emerged from the dust, moving cautiously. They were still wearing orange. It was prison-issued, torn and dirty, like Chad’s prison uniform.

Keegan dropped from the roof in a blur, landing between us and them. “That’s close enough,” he called out.

They stopped.

I turned slightly toward Chad. “You recognize them?”

He squinted, then nodded. “Yeah. The one in front, Redscale. Lizard-type cape. Tough bastard, formerly a gang boss in one of the City-States.”

Redscale stepped forward just enough to be seen clearly. Scales the color of rust crawled up his neck and jaw, his pupils narrow slits. He swallowed, eyes flicking between me, the van, and the crater where the Box used to be.

“Can we hitch a ride?” he asked carefully. “We don’t plan to cause trouble.”

I could feel the fear, sharp and raw. Awe mixed with terror, like standing too close to a wildfire. I straightened, ignoring the ache screaming through my body. This moment mattered.

“A new era of capedom is upon us,” I said, my voice steady despite everything. “The old systems are gone. The Box is gone. The rules that kept you chained are finished.”

Their attention locked onto me.

“If you join my Company,” I continued, “I can promise you a place in that new world. Not as cattle. Not as experiments. But as assets with purpose.”

They exchanged glances. Hope flared, clumsy and barely contained.

Redscale lowered his head slightly, a gesture that was unmistakably submissive. “We’re willing to work for you,” he said. “All of us.”

I nodded once.

“Then get in the van,” I said. “And don’t make me regret it.”