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 , calculate for , and correct if I drifted a fraction too far off course.
Around , 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 ti to ti. 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 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 sothing 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 ti, the target lay on another continent.
As much as I wanted to return to Lockworld and close that chapter decisively, this ca 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 .
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 back into my seat, a deep, bone-heavy force that reminded this was not teleportation, not phasing, not the clean abstraction of portals.
This was physics.
Seconds stretched. The roar deepened. The vibration beca constant and omnipresent. I felt it through the suit, through my ribs, and through the places where flesh t machine. And then, gradually, sothing changed.
The weight shifted.
It took a mont 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 imdiately, hands flying over instrunts as they aligned the vessel for orbit, adjusting trajectory according to George’s paraters. 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 , eyes wide with disbelief.
“So… what’s next?”
“I leave,” I said.
I phased down through the seat, through the hull, through layers of tal 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 imdiately 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 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 , not enough to fight gravity, but only to guide myself into its grasp. I began to fall in earnest.
Atmospheric entry lood.
With Intangibility at sixteen, I trusted my body to survive what would have annihilated anything else. Still, pressure mounted. Friction scread across my senses even as my form phased just enough to let it pass through rather than tear apart.
The gauntlet flickered alive, numbers and vectors spiraling wildly across its surface. Too high. Too fast. Margins collapsing and reforming in real ti.
At intervals, I triggered Chronokinesis with brief and surgical cuts to montum. Ti shuddered around , my velocity dying for fractions of a second before gravity reclaid it. Again. And again. Controlled falling.
The city erged beneath , 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 blood 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 chid 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 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 invisible to their awareness.
I phased through the palace roof without sound.
Chronokinesis flared at my boots, freezing midair as I hovered above a grand circular chamber. Below 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 ti 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 rcy. Grit your teeth. Fight back. Hope tomorrow cos.”
My mask tilted downward, shadow swallowing my features.
“Because today, I’ve co to impart an important lesson about the new world order.”
The leadership of Monarchy shared the sa 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 ticulously grood goatee and a crown-like circlet embedded with psychic conduits. The mont his eyes locked onto , his composure shattered.
“Eclipse!” he scread, 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 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 .”
Sloth broke first.
He looked no older than fifteen, small-frad, 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 imdiately.
Six minds snapped into alignnt, psychic pressure surging toward 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 greter 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 instead of sticking.
Their combined assault broke like a wave against bedrock.
Lust staggered, clutching his face.
Blood stread 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 scread. “Nothing else is working, so use them!”
I recognized the technique imdiately.
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 mont, 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 ntal power. Their dark skin carried the weight of ancient lineage, descendants of a dynasty that had thrived during the Dark Ages.
And sowhere along the way, fear had curdled into supremacy.
According to SRC archives, their origin traced back to a Seer, soone who had glimpsed a future of enslavent, 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 beca entitlent.
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 .
“If mind control won’t work,” he growled, “then we rely on brute force.”
“That’s right.”
The voice ca from behind .
I turned just in ti to see Pride. He was alive, scorched but very much functional. His eyes burned with venom.
“You won’t catch off-guard a second ti.”
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 ters 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. “Assu we don’t know the scale of his powers. Co at him with everything.”
Gluttony shifted uneasily, round face creasing as sweat beaded along his brow.
“Then what do we do now?” he complained. “Soone tell 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 , probably hoping it had so effect and would play a role to deter .
“Negotiate.”
Wrath snarled, but Greed ignored him and looked directly at .
“Is there a compromise we can reach?”
It was smart.
Buying ti. Re-centering the room. Giving their minds sothing 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 asured.
“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 the truth.
She ant 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 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 .”
My voice echoed through the chamber, heavy and final.
“I am the dark sun. All of the world’s evils orbit . 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 cos next.”
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