235 Assassination Attempt
235 Assassination Attempt
I couldn’t breathe.
The tendril had punched straight through my abdomen, right where my appendix used to be, and pain bloomed outward in a cold, suffocating wave. My vision swam as sweat broke out across my skin. Something was flowing through the tendril and into me, like liquid code being injected straight into my nervous system. I tried to phase, reflex screaming at me to escape, but my power simply… stalled.
Despite my ratings, despite everything I’d become, my system was being overwhelmed. Whatever it was pumping into me had been engineered for one purpose alone: to counter me. To dismantle Eclipse.
“Amelia,” the copycat said softly, his voice intimate in a way that made my stomach twist even more than the wound. “I missed you, darling. Can you die for me?”
Before I could even process the words, Abner moved. He dashed forward without hesitation, and Amelia followed a heartbeat later. Her crimson wings flared wide, then snapped forward like a storm of spears, feathers hardened into killing edges as she drove them straight through the copycat’s chest.
They passed through him.
Still, not all of her attack was wasted. A sharper eye would have caught it. Several feathers had ricocheted upward, slicing through something unseen. A cable screamed as it snapped, and the elevator beneath us lurched violently, dropping a floor with a metallic howl.
The sudden shift dragged the tendril taut. It tried to pull me with it, yanking my body toward the widening crevice where the elevator had slipped away. Pain exploded anew as the connection strained.
Abner was already there. He hooked an arm under my armpit and hauled me back with everything he had.
“Keegan!” Abner shouted.
Keegan had been in the hallway, absurdly enough, staring at his phone like the world wasn’t coming apart. The moment he saw us, his expression changed, focus snapping into place as he rushed over.
“Stomp on the elevator,” Abner barked.
Keegan didn’t hesitate. He brought his foot down with superhuman force. The impact thundered through the shaft, and the elevator plunged several floors down, metal shrieking as it fell.
The tendril snapped.
I staggered and tore the remaining length out of myself, blackened blood spilling onto the floor as I did. The substance inside me burned, corrosive and wrong, crawling through my veins like it was alive.
“Boss, what happened?” Keegan asked, peering down into the shaft below.
“We’re under attack,” I rasped.
Abner was already trying to stop the bleeding, putting pressure over the wound. “Hey, you will be fine, my lord,” he said, though his voice betrayed him. “All of this is going away…”
I tried to tap my smartwatch. Nothing. No signal. No George.
He’d gone silent around the time word of Amelia’s arrival reached the Company. That wasn’t a coincidence.
I coughed, black blood splattering onto the floor. This was bad.
“We are under attack,” I said again, forcing my voice steady. “Assume George is missing.”
Abner froze for half a second, then nodded sharply.
“Abner,” I continued, “I leave things to you.”
I pushed myself upright, legs shaking as I fought to stay standing. My body should have been able to purge whatever was inside me, but it would take time. Time I wasn’t sure we had.
“My lord, you should rest!” Abner protested.
I shook my head. “Keegan, find Nicole. Tell her to stay with Ron. I can’t let anyone hurt her or my son. Do you hear me?”
“Copy that,” Keegan said immediately, already turning to run.
I faced Abner again, forcing clarity through the pain. “Go to the security teams. Don’t hold back. Be active, even if it means containment and full defense. Whatever the hell this is, we stop it here.”
My smartwatch was still dead. No signal. No George.
I locked eyes with Abner. “Go.”
“Yes, my lord,” he answered, and then he was gone, sprinting down the hallway as the building around us descended into chaos.
“Huff… huff… Shit…”
My breathing turned ragged, each inhale scraping like sandpaper through my lungs. Even with biokinesis reinforcing my organs and enhancer ratings compensating where they could, I was failing to purge whatever had been injected into me. It clung stubbornly to my system. Worse, my intangibility lagged, flickering in and out like a dying signal.
I leaned against the glass window, leaving a faint smear of blood where my shoulder touched. No matter how I framed it, this had been an assassination attempt. Judging by how overheated and unstable I felt, it might as well have succeeded already.
The glass below me exploded outward in a thunderous crash. A familiar figure was hurled through the window, tumbling into open air before arresting himself mid-fall. The copycat. A heartbeat later, Amelia followed, her wings flaring as she launched herself after him.
I tracked their clash through my psychic senses, because my eyes couldn’t keep up. Amelia was moving at a speed that would have made even the most vaunted speedsters question their life choices. She struck like a meteor, pivoted like a dancer, and adjusted mid-motion with terrifying precision. Even so, the feedback told me the truth I didn’t want to admit.
She wasn’t doing much damage.
That made sense. The copycat’s intangibility rivaled mine, maybe even surpassed it in raw application. Blunt force and piercing attacks meant little when your opponent could decide what existed to them.
Then I felt it. His attention shifted.
His gaze locked onto me from midair, cold and intent, and I knew I’d been noticed again. Amelia was no longer the priority. I was.
I clenched my jaw. I thought I could phase now. Not perfectly, but enough. I pushed myself upright, preparing to step forward and rejoin the fight, consequences be damned.
A firm hand closed around my shoulder.
I turned and saw Silver standing there, her expression uncharacteristically serious. “Nicole sent me,” she said evenly. “There’s no need to push yourself.”
There was every need. I opened my mouth to argue, but Silver was already moving. She pulled me aside just as a pale tendril speared through the glass where my head had been a moment earlier. The copycat burst through the window in a storm of shards, landing with predatory grace.
He looked down at me, my own face twisted with malice and anticipation under the mask. “Nighty-night!”
Before he could take another step, something massive slammed into the open elevator shaft from outside. The entire structure groaned as an enormous serpent coiled into view, scales shimmering before it twisted and reshaped itself mid-motion.
Amelia.
She snapped back into her winged form, dodging a barrage of tendrils that lashed out to skewer her, feathers scattering like crimson knives as she forced the copycat’s attention back onto herself.
“Let’s go,” Silver shouted, urgency bleeding through her composure. “We are of no use here!”
She slung my arm over her shoulder and half-dragged, half-carried me down the corridor. Running from a fight like this scraped hard against my pride. Still, pride didn’t keep you alive, and right now I was more liability than asset.
The building’s sound system crackled to life, Abner’s voice cutting through the chaos with practiced authority.
“This is not a drill. Scenario 1-13 is in effect. Dangerous capes have been sighted on floors thirteen to fifteen. Employees below the mentioned floors are advised to evacuate immediately. All others are instructed to find a hiding place and avoid areas of active commotion. Trained personnel will escort you to designated panic rooms. This is not a drill. Scenario 1-3 is in effect…”
The announcement echoed through the building two more times.
Even though it was late, edging past midnight, the place was still crawling with people. A lot of them were leadership, analysts, coordinators, the kind who lived on overtime because the last few weeks had been relentless. Evacuation took time when panic had to fight routine.
“S-Stop,” I gasped, gripping Silver’s sleeve as my breathing grew harsher by the second. My chest burned, every inhale shallow and sharp. “Shit.”
Silver halted immediately, bracing me. “What’s the problem?”
“It hurts,” I said, my voice barely holding together.
She helped me lean against the wall, and the moment my weight settled, my knees nearly buckled. Onyx appeared a heartbeat later, eyes sharp and alert. “What happened? I heard a distress call from you, Silver—” She stopped mid-sentence and looked at me properly. “Oh. Nicole is not gonna like that.”
I pulled my hoodie up with trembling hands and exposed my abdomen. What had once looked like fine cracks in porcelain skin, faint and almost cosmetic, had spread into deep fractures. Something moved beneath them. Slithering shapes pressed against the gaps, and from inside, faint whispers layered over one another, overlapping and wrong. I tried to do what I always did, stretching skin with biokinesis, smoothing it over with psychic reinforcement, but nothing responded. The cracks refused to close.
“Stop poking it, Silver,” I muttered as she leaned in too close.
“I’m just checking,” she replied defensively. “I’m a psychic construct, remember?”
“Does it hurt?” Onyx asked, her usual bravado stripped away.
“Yeah,” I said honestly. “Badly.”
The nausea finally won. I doubled over and vomited thick, black blood onto the floor, my vision swimming as cold seeped deeper into my bones. I forced myself to lift my wrist, trying to activate my smartwatch, and that was when I noticed it wasn’t the right one. This was my everyday unit, not the one synced to the SRC’s inner network.
“I n-need to contact Guesswork,” I stammered, teeth chattering. “C-Can someone fetch me m-my smartwatch…”
Everything felt wrong. Too cold. Too distant. Like my body was no longer fully mine.
“I’ll be right back,” Silver said, and vanished without waiting for a response.
Onyx crouched in front of me, her expression tight. “Come on. We can’t stay here like this.”
I could hear it then, the violence in the distance. Explosions, metal tearing, concrete screaming under stress. The copycat was pushing forward, and even Amelia couldn’t hold him indefinitely.
I tried to stand on my own and failed. With a grimace, I forced myself onto Onyx’s back, fingers digging into her jacket as she steadied me. It took more effort than it should have, but eventually I managed to cling on.
She bolted down the corridor. We reached another elevator, and Onyx slammed a sequence of codes into the panel with practiced speed before punching in the basement level.
The doors slid shut.
Only Nicole and I knew the complete code to that place, so the moment the elevator descended, dread coiled tighter around my chest. “We can’t go there,” I said through clenched teeth, forcing the words past the pain.
Onyx shook her head hard. “No. That’s the best place for you.”
“Nicole and Ron are there,” I snapped, panic bleeding into anger. “And this copycat is after me.”
She didn’t slow down. “Listen to me. George rigged that place with every safeguard and security mechanism he could get his hands on. Tech from the best minds across the world. It’s your best chance, Nick.”
“I only need that SRC smartwatch,” I insisted. “Once I have it, I’ll be fine.”
The elevator rumbled as it continued downward, metal groaning under stress. Above us, something roared, followed by the shriek of tearing steel. “We need to go,” I said, my voice tight.
Onyx made the decision for us. She slammed her fist into the panel and forced the doors open onto the current floor. The timing was perfect and horrifying all at once. Something massive crashed onto the elevator car behind us, sending it plummeting with a thunderous roar. Through the smoke and debris, I caught a glimpse of Amelia in a tiger-like chimera form, straddling the copycat, her claws biting into him. If she was channeling those old nullifier-rated traits through her current source, she was buying us precious seconds.
Onyx didn’t waste them. She hoisted me higher and ran. “How’s Silver?” I asked, my vision blurring at the edges.
“On her way,” Onyx replied.
We found Silver on the stairwell, her expression pale and shaken. “Here!” she called, holding out the watch.
Onyx helped me sit on the steps as I strapped it onto my wrist. The biometric scan activated immediately, lines of data flickering across the display. I looked up at Silver. “What got you so rattled?”
She hesitated, lips pressed thin.
“Tell me,” I said.
“There are bombs scattered throughout the building,” she admitted quietly. “Abner has a team working on them now.”
I tried to stand, adrenaline spiking despite the pain, but Onyx shoved me back down with surprising force. “Calm down. What are you thinking? Can you even do anything right now? You’re hurt, Nick. Worse than we’ve ever seen. Do this one thing for us. Survive. Whatever’s inside you, it looks bad.”
I shouted back, the fear finally boiling over. “Then what about Nicole? What about Ron?”
Silver stepped in quickly. “They’re in a secured area. No amount of nukes is getting through those defenses. For now, focus on that injury, okay?”
I slumped back against the wall, fury and helplessness twisting together in my chest. After everything with the SRC’s inner circle, after all the growth and the bloodshed, I had thought I was untouchable. The strongest cape in this world, reduced to this by an ambush.
“Fine,” I said at last, my voice hoarse. “Just watch out for Nicole and Ron for me.”
Onyx scoffed softly. “Who do you think we are?”
Silver added, with quiet conviction, “We’re Ron’s mother too.”
I nodded, then activated the watch and opened a channel. “Guesswork, there’s an emergency. Get your researchers ready and prepare a stasis room for me. My condition’s accelerated—”
“I understand,” Guesswork cut in immediately.
A portal tore open beside us, and Guesswork stepped through without hesitation. He looked at the three of them and then at me. “I will handle it from here, ladies.”