Sone walked through the city, his gaze intense, without his usual spark of energy.
The excessive power had left some internal damage in his brain, leaving him with only a few emotions.
Suddenly a figure stepped out of an alley. He wore a dark shirt and pants of the same color, and he had yellow eyes and black gloves.
"You must be Sone, right?" the man asked.
Sone felt a sudden urge to hit him. He didn't understand why, and without a second thought he threw a punch at the man's face.
The man barely dodged it, dropping onto the highway, his eyes locking onto Sone's.
Sone appeared behind him in an instant and drove one of his spines through him. The man's abdomen was pierced, but it began to regenerate. He gritted his teeth and drove an elbow into Sone's side, forcing him back.
"What the hell is wrong with you? I came to kill you, but it looks like... are you some kind of sadist?" the man said, his voice tight.
"Just die," Sone answered, his voice cold.
The man fell silent, crossed his arms, and fired a blast of energy straight at Sone's chest.
Sone let it hit him. A huge cloud of dust rose, but he walked out with only a few scratches. His yellow aura flared, and his transformation forced itself on automatically, turning him into Super Sone.
"Hey, that was supposed to go until the fi—" the man began, but he never finished.
Sone appeared in front of him and landed a punch to his jaw that launched him into the sky.
Sone leapt after him and caught up fast, unleashing a volley of spines. The man threw up a shield, but the spines drove deep into it. The man was forced hard toward the ground. Sone stopped firing and launched himself in ball form.
Sone hit the ground and bounced straight back up, still in ball form, slamming into the man's leg with an overwhelming charge of energy.
The man's leg was torn off. The limb spun through the air, and blood splattered across Sone's body.
"AAAAAH!" the man screamed, his voice full of agony.
Sone left his ball form and stared at him. Without thinking, he pushed his transformation to 110%.
The man looked down, and pure terror took hold of him. Sone curled into a ball, and his spines turned into razor-sharp blades.
Sone launched himself at eight times the speed of light and tore brutally through the man, who barely managed a gasp before he died.
A dark scene unfolded: Sone drilling through the man's stomach in ball form, the man driven backward in the process.
A heavy rain began to fall. The man dropped to the ground without a sign of life, his body opened from abdomen to chest, no organ left visible. He had died before he could use his healing ability, though it would have cost him a great deal of energy.
Sone skidded across the ground and left his ball form. He got to his feet, turned his head, and his gaze fell on the man he had killed.
His hand rose on instinct and fired a continuous beam that disintegrated the body. Sone froze, staring at his hand in disbelief. He had killed without being fully in control, and he didn't understand why he had done it.
His hands went to his head and gripped it. He shook it violently, trying to make sense of what had happened, his breathing growing more ragged, but then a vision appeared before him.
A dark scene: he stood on top of a building, and a man aimed a gun at his back. A shot rang out, but in that moment he had turned and thrown a spine that pierced the man and killed him instantly.
Sone slammed his head against the ground to shut that scene out of his mind, breathing deeply.
*Murderer... Murderer, murderer, murderer, murderer...* A voice began to sound in his head, repeating the same word over and over without stopping.
"AAAAAH!" Sone screamed, his eyes trembling uncontrollably.
At that moment his transformation vanished, and he passed out from the drain of energy and the transformation's lingering instability.
His gaze dimmed. The only sound was the rain falling.
There was a brief silence before the sound of footsteps echoed. The scientist arrived at the scene and scanned the man's body, stealing data on his regeneration.
*I'll try to give this regeneration power to the heroes without the need for potions,* the scientist thought.
He turned and approached the unconscious Sone, pulled out a button, and pressed it. A drone swooped in and transformed into a gurney with car wheels, a vehicle.
The drone extended robotic hands, lifted Sone's body onto the gurney, closed its door, and set off toward the laboratory.
The sound of the rain stopped abruptly, a sign that something was happening in the meantime.
Inside Sone's head, he was sitting on a bench, and beside him sat his Super side in physical form.
Sone sighed, noticing the blood-streaked walls, a reflection of his wounded brain.
He shut his eyes tight, remembering his own words: *I'll keep fighting because I'm a hero.*
He had just killed without knowing why the man had come or who he was. Defeating him had been right, but not in such a merciless way.
"Don't feel guilty. It's necessary to kill people this powerful so they don't cause problems in the future," the Super presence said.
Sone turned his gaze to the presence sitting beside him, and the bloodied walls cracked further. He grabbed the presence by the throat and erased it with a single thought. His hand was left empty, and he lowered it slowly.
He breathed deeply, and suddenly a light struck his face. His eyes snapped wide open. Beside him stood Max, the scientist, holding a syringe with a single greenish drop still in it.
"I healed you, but I also managed to gather data on the body's regeneration using nothing but your own energy," the scientist explained, his voice calm and even. "Right now I'm researching whether I can give that ability to the rest of you."
Sone nodded, feeling his brain completely healed, but then he heard noises. He walked down the hallway. In one of the special rooms, Kiro and Worh were training under a specific gravity.
The hybrid was wearing brown shorts and one of Worh's oversized shirts. She sat on one of the benches, her ears twitching at every sound. Her eyes lit up when she saw Sone, and she patted the empty space beside her.
Sone walked over and sat down.
"How did it go?" the girl asked, curious.
"Fine, I think... Though I felt awful a few moments ago," Sone said.
The hybrid nodded and looked down, swinging her legs up and down calmly. Sone put a hand to his chin.
*I have to learn to control it, get more stability, and master this transformation before I go insane,* Sone thought, his gaze fixed on a blank spot on the wall.
Eduin watched him from the shadows, sharing the same thought in silence without knowing it. His Berserk 1 form was far too unstable and drained too much energy.
Meanwhile, the scientist sat in his bottle room, combining the data he had collected with human DNA and searching for the right formula.
A point of greenish energy wrapped around a microorganism. The scientist noticed and dripped a little healing potion onto the DNA and the microorganism.
An uncontrolled reaction swallowed them both. A small explosion went off and faded, leaving behind a new cell.
The scientist smiled to himself and took out other cells and tissues to combine with his experiment. A few hours later, he walked up to Eduin and injected his new invention, a bright green liquid, into his arm.
The effect was instant. The new cells replaced the old ones, though not the most important ones, a balance.
Eduin felt strange at first, but then he was led into a room. As he stepped in, a weapon fired at his abdomen and left a small reddish mark. The scientist told him to try to recover. Eduin felt something odd, but he concentrated his energy on the wound. His regeneration erased the mark. The experiment had worked, and now they could have that ability.
Max smiled and went back to the bottle room to prepare more syringes, duplicating the liquid so he could inject the other protagonists.
The scientist took a sheet of paper and wrote:
*New ability discovered: "Regeneration without the need to drink their healing potions."*