Chapter 81: chap 2
Earlier,
The moment Jayden had been blasted through the concrete walls of the facility, crashing violently into the central reactor room, he didn’t waste a single millisecond recovering. He knew exactly what was coming for him.
The Turbo Twins were legendary within the EVA, and their reputation wasn’t built on exaggeration.
Thanks to the partial lupine form, Jayden’s current speed stat allowed him to move at an astonishing Mach 3. But the twins were a different breed of threat entirely.
As the two sapphire streaks of light detonated through the freshly made holes in the wall, Jayden’s tactical mind recalled the tech articles published by the EVA just months prior. The authority had proudly announced a breakthrough in military-grade exo-engineering: a prototype speedster suit that is powered by an organic kinetic catalyst.
That catalyst was a Sapphire Sonic Crystal.
Before receiving the suits, Theo and Thea had a baseline speed of Mach 3. However, the specialized arc-reactor casing embedded directly into the chest region of Theo’s suit housed the rare crystal, granting him an instantaneous, constant 100% amplification to his velocity. Alone, Theo could clock a terrifying Mach 6.
But this wasn’t the craziest part.
Apparently, the twins possessed a unique biological skill known popularly as; Resonant Velocity.
Whenever they operated within a specific spatial radius of one another, their individual speed signatures automatically synchronized to match the highest active unit’s velocity. Furthermore, the spatial resonance generated a localized kinetic feedback loop, granting both siblings an additional 50% speed boost based on their original baseline capabilities.
This implied that since Theo had a current velocity of Mach 6... thanks to the suit, his sister would be able to run at Mach 6 too. As long as they were together. But due to the feedback amplification that also got activated whenever they were in proximity, their original speed would then be increased by 50%. Which means that currently, the twins Total Operational Velocity was Mach 7.5.
They weren’t just faster than Jayden; they were more than double his speed.
The air in the cavernous reactor room warped violently. Before Jayden could fully stand, a barrage of near-invisible kinetic strikes began hammering his frame. Blue light trails cracked across the room as Theo and Thea blurred past him, turning the space into an absolute blender of supersonic friction. Every punch they landed felt like a tank shell detonating against his body. His accelerated healing factor worked overtime, stitching his broken bones and bruised tissue back together as fast as they could tear it open.
Jayden was being overwhelmed. But he couldn’t outrun them. He had to outsmart them.
Predicting their circular trajectory based on the displacement of dust, Jayden waited for the exact microsecond their paths crossed behind a massive auxiliary turbine.
Then, he triggered a fire explosion directly beneath his own boots, instantly superheating the air and creating an immediate vacuum displacement that disrupted the atmospheric pressure.
The sudden loss of air density caused Thea’s foot orientation to slip by a fraction of a millimeter. It was all the window Jayden needed.
Using his telekinesis, he targeted the shattered concrete debris on the floor, lifting a dense cloud of jagged rebar and stone directly into her incoming path. Moving at Mach 7.5, Thea couldn’t adjust her course in time. She plowed straight into the levitating debris field. The impact tore through her leg armor, throwing her off balance and causing her to slide violently across the floor.
As she skidded, Jayden blurred forward, his claws extending. He intercepted her before she could recover, driving his talons deep into her exposed shoulder and instantly injecting a heavy, paralyzing dose of his poison. Thea let out a choked, agonized gasp, her blue energy violently sputtering out as the black, veined corruption rapidly spread across her skin, locking her nervous system into a state of agonizing paralysis.
"Thea!" Theo’s voice echoed in a panicked, supersonic screech.
Fueled by pure rage, Theo redirected his entire kinetic output, aiming a fatal, high-speed strike directly at Jayden’s skull.
Jayden didn’t dodge. He gathered his telekinetic reserves into a single, concentrated, outward-expanding shockwave and slammed it forward like an invisible battering ram. The kinetic wave met Theo mid-sprint.
The sheer opposing force didn’t stop him, but it deflected his trajectory, launching him high into the air toward the vaulted ceiling.
Jayden exploded upward, meeting the speedster mid-flight. His larger, augmented lupine hand clamped like an iron vise around Theo’s throat, completely crushing his vocal cords and silencing his scream. With a brutal downward motion, Jayden hurled the speedster back toward the earth, slamming him into the solid concrete floor with enough force to create a crater.
Before Theo could even attempt to channel his speed to escape, Jayden dropped his heavy knee directly onto the speedster’s chest. Then with a cold, systematic brutality, Jayden raised his fist and brought it down repeatedly into Theo’s left leg.
CRACK. CRACK. CRACK.
The armor plating of the suit buckled, and the bone beneath shattered into dozens of jagged fragments, completely destroying the limb’s structural integrity. Theo’s eyes rolled back in sheer, unadulterated agony, a silent scream tearing from his ruined throat.
Jayden didn’t look at his face. His eyes were locked onto the glowing, circular blue core in the center of the suit.
He drove his clawed fingers directly into the metallic chest plate, tearing through the alloy wiring and protective casing with raw, unmitigated strength. Sparks erupted violently, singeing his mask as he wrapped his fist around the internal power source. With a sharp, powerful wrench, Jayden ripped the Sapphire Sonic Crystal completely out of the harness, taking away the suit’s power source.
The suit’s blue lights died instantly, plunging Theo into total darkness and helplessness.
It was at that exact moment that the concrete debris shifted at the entrance, and Jenny walked into the room.
........
Jayden stood in the center of his dark, quiet bedroom, the balcony doors shut tight behind him. He deactivated his partial lupine form. His muscles contracted, his skeletal structure snapped back to its human dimensions, and his breathing slowly normalized. He pulled the black mask from his face, tossing it onto his desk.
He reached into his inventory and pulled out the prize of the night.
The S-Rank Sapphire Sonic Crystal.
The crystalline stone sat in the palm of his hand, casting a brilliant, ethereal light-blue aura across the walls of his room. It thrummed with a dense, rhythmic kinetic pulse, like the heartbeat of a primordial beast.
Jayden stared at it, his brow furrowing as a realization began to take shape in his mind. Sapphire Sonics were virtually extinct, creatures of myth that were incredibly rare to find. The EVA shouldn’t have had access to a specimen to harvest a core of this magnitude. Even he still wondered how he was so lucky to have encountered Skye.
Then, a thought occurred to him.
He remembered the fragmented, agonizing memories he had seen from Skye when he bonded with her; images of the EVA invading her home. They had attacked and possibly killed her mother, while she had escaped.
That’s when it clicked.
This wasn’t an engineered military asset. This was the stolen heart of Skye’s mother, ripped from her corpse to power a weapon for the government’s elite lapdogs.
A cold, heavy disgust settled deep in Jayden’s chest. He tightened his grip on the crystal, feeling its immense power vibrating against his knuckles.
"I’ll keep it safe," he thought, his jaw tightening. "When Skye returns, I will give this to her. It belongs to her, not their machinery."
With a mental command, he stored the crystal back safely into his inventory, watching the blue light vanish into the digital void.
Left in the dark, Jayden walked over to his mirror, staring at his reflection. His suit was a mess, singed by laser fire, and stained with the dark, oxidized blood of the twenty-four agents he had slaughtered in the courtyard.
He waited for the guilt. He waited for the sudden, crushing weight of remorse that a normal human was supposed to feel after taking a life.
Nothing came.
Instead, all he felt was a lingering, electric rush of adrenaline. His pulse was steady, his mind completely clear. The EVA had drawn the battle lines the moment they destroyed his past and threatened his future. They weren’t just an opposing faction; they were a systemic disease. And he had sworn an oath to himself that he would never show mercy to them.
He could spare the lives of desperate or broken people, street thugs, and even the syndicate pioneers who were merely fighting for survival in the underworld.
But anyone who wore the crest of the EVA? Anyone who signed up to enforce their tyrannical peace and stood in his path?
They were good as dead.
He would show them no mercy.
Then his thoughts drifted back to Jenny.
He had seen her analytical prowess firsthand tonight, and it was deeply unsettling. She had deduced a highly convincing profile of his abilities and identity within minutes of observation. She hadn’t even engaged him in physical combat yet, but the sheer volume of latent energy he had sensed radiating from her when her squad fell was immense. And just before the twins interrupted their standoff, Jayden had accessed her info.