The evening air tasted different when Ethan stepped out of the cab—colder, thinner, almost metallic. Maybe it was just the new neighborhood. Or maybe it was the faint aftershock of Forge's power still humming beneath his skin like a dormant engine.
The Kane home, although new, still glowed warmly from the inside. A sharp contrast to the mansion he had just left—where alarms screamed, mutants fought drones, and a boy in the corner quietly rewrote the rules of possibility.
He opened the front door.
His mother looked up from unpacking a box labeled kitchen, "You're back! How was your day?"
His father paused midway through assembling a bookshelf. "You weren't out causing trouble, were you?"
Ethan smiled—gentle, soft, perfectly human. "Just hanging out with Amy and Paige. Last free day before school starts up again."
His mother brightened. "That's good. You need to spend time with friends. You can't holed up in your room all day."
If she knew the truth—that he had taken two strands of Omega-level mutant DNA and copied the power of an intuitive super-inventor—she would probably drop the box. Or faint. Or ask if he had eaten lunch yet. A mother's thoughts were out of reach for him.
"Dinner will be ready in an hour," she added. "Go clean yourself up and get settled, sweetie."
He nodded and walked upstairs.
The moment Ethan closed his bedroom door behind him, the mask slipped. His smile flattened into something quieter, sharper. First, he placed the two hair samples in a safe location before he sat at his desk and opened his backpack.
Inside lay the phone he used.
Something inside him twitched. A compulsion. A whisper of logic so refined it felt like instinct. Like it was whispering, 'Take it apart. Rebuild it. Improve it.'
His fingers moved before he consciously decided. He unscrewed the casing, popped components free, and reorganized the internal layout like someone rearranging a sentence to find hidden meaning. Ten minutes later, he had soldered new pathways, swapped older circuit alignments for new optimized alignments, and created a device noticeably faster and more efficient. Although soldering required him to open the windows and let the scent out.
He set the finished phone down.
A faint thrill prickled at the edges of his mind.
He leaned back in his chair. 'Tomorrow,' he thought, 'after school… I'll need to visit a hardware store. Microprocessors, custom casings, conductive polymers. I need a more modern phone, something worthy of high-level engineering.'
His mind pivoted seamlessly to the next task.
He opened his laptop, the glow lighting the room in a cold blue wash. His fingers flew across the keyboard as he recreated from memory the Techno-Organic Virus files he saw deep in the X-Mansion network.
Ethan didn't notice when the sun dipped below the window. He didn't notice when the glow of his monitor became the only light in the room.
What he noticed—what he felt—was the way Forge's ability snapped awake behind his eyes like a new organ learning to flex.
Lines of alien machine-code pulsed on the screen, and something in him leaned forward—not physically, but mentally, like a tuning fork resonating at the exact frequency of the data.
A viral sequence spiraled across the monitor.
And Ethan saw—not a virus—but an interface.
It was a skeleton waiting for a body.
It was like a language waiting to be spoken.
He grabbed a pencil, the motion automatic, and drew a curve across a blank sheet of paper. No hesitation, no correction. Another line branched off, then six more, forming a lattice more complex than any machine diagram human engineers used.
It wasn't his design.
It wasn't the virus's design.
It was the place between them.
Sage's perfect recall presented data. Forge's intuition rearranged and improved it. Finally, Ethan's will chose the direction.
He kept drawing.
A strand of machine-DNA twisted wrong. His hand corrected it before the thought formed.
Another pattern collapsed under scrutiny. His pencil redirected the tension.
Conversion matrices adapted too aggressively, and instinctively he added a resonance buffer made of—
He froze.
His hand had written a word, Mysterium.
A special metal from the Marvel comic universe that could:
– withstand blows that warped adamantium
– channel electricity without losing a single joule
– nullify magical interference like a priest slapping a curse out of the air
– immune to precognition abilities like Spider Sense
Currently, it was impossible to get on Earth. The only place Ethan knew of in the current point in time to get some was the White Hot Room.
'Well, if I install the Phoenix Host ability, I would eventually be able to get it, but I would rather not waste my S-Rank slot on something I can get later.'
But Forge's gift didn't care about logistics.
Ethan stared at the sketched framework—a hybrid web of techno-organic muscle threaded with microscopic Mysterium filaments.
Not armor.
Not parasite.
Not Klyntar.
Something else.
Something better.
His fingers tingled.
He closed his eyes and using the line of code—instinctual, elegant. A simulation window appeared in his mind and filled itself, as though his mind was simply keeping up with a plan his creative brain had already finished, redone, and altered again endlessly.
A kernel of nanites formed on the digital model. Then—
They moved.
The lattice they formed was beautiful in the way a storm is beautiful: structured chaos, perfect in motion.
The nanites rippled, changing shape, folding into armor plating, dissolving into liquid metal, then re-solidifying into a fine mesh that flexed like skin.
But the virus-model tried to override their autonomy.
Ethan's jaw tensed.
"No, it didn't work. Its viral nature is too dominant," he whispered.
He highlighted the corrupted directive—consume, replace, overwrite—and erased it.
His mind rewrote the function:
synchronize, reinforce, improve, evolve
The simulation relaunched.
Nanites threaded into the viral matrix.
The viral matrix accepted the connection.
For the first time, machine and organic did not fight. They merged into a structure that looked—
Alive.
Purposeful.
A techno-organic nervous system capable of not only everything that the Endo Sym Armor and Klyntar were capable of, but more:
– forming armor
– dissolving into mist
– reshaping into weapons
– conducting energy
– buffering psionic overload
– negating magical residue
– amplifying neural intent
– Free from the Klyntar hivemind
Ethan didn't write all these functions.
Some appeared, auto-generated, as though the evolving system was describing itself.
Forge's gift hummed in the back of his skull.
He opened his eyes, clicked open a new sheet, and let his mind move.
The neural bridge he thought of before now appeared as a diagram inside his mind—no severed instinct loops, no predatory shortcuts.
Two equal halves sharing signals.
He didn't label the first node "Host."
He labeled it Anchor.
And the second node?
He hesitated.
Then wrote:
Symbiote
(Partner-class)
He underlined partner.
A second document opened without him realizing he'd hit a key.
The model expanded—showing layers of internal architecture:
– a bioelectric circulatory ring feeding energy back into the organism
– a secondary micro-reactor shaped like a crystal seed
– adaptive armor shells stored as memory-states
– a harmonic buffer to stabilize emotional spikes
– a psionic dampener shaped like a tuning fork made of Mysterium
– a genetic imprint core that flickered with strange, soft light in the simulation
Ethan inhaled slowly.
If he pulled this off, then it wouldn't be a Klyntar.
Not anymore.
It would be a whole new species.
One designed to grow without hunger, fight without being infected by negative emotions or madness, and bond without fear.
Quiet, he leaned back, watching the simulation pulse like a heartbeat.
The lattice brightened, as if responding to attention.
A laugh—small, disbelieving—escaped him.
"Not bad," he murmured.
His hand drifted over the page again, sketching future variations, instinct guiding the lines before thought caught up.
Smaller symbiotes with specialized functions.
Larger ones built for shielding or heavy lifting.
A network that cooperated like neurons firing across distance.
A family—engineered, not born.
His pen slowed, then stopped.
Forge's gift quieted.
Sage's calculations eased into background hum.
But the designs remained.
A living symbiote blueprint that only he could've built.
A creature of both organic and metallic cells and thought and evolution.
A creature that would belong to no god, no empire, no hivemind.
Only to itself with access to a unique hivemind that was for sharing data alone.
And—if he built it right—
to him.
Ethan leaned back in his chair.
His brain felt alive. Electric as new idea just kept popping in his mind.
Forge's power hummed like a tuning fork resonating inside his skull.
And yet…
He sensed only the edge of what was possible.
"F-rank, what a bargain," he murmured. "I'm barely scratching the surface of what this can do. I was right about the synergy between Sage and Forge's powers."
A shadow of hunger glinted in his eyes.
The Exemplars would awaken in two months.
Mystical titans.
Parasitic avatars of ancient cosmic entities.
And Ethan was preparing to meet them, survive, and benefit from the Octessence.
He saved the files.
Closed the laptop and packed away the design drawings.
And for a moment, in the stillness of his new room, he whispered, "Thank you, Forge."
Ethan had always seen the door to get what he needed, but thanks to Forge, he could now walk through.
Ethan intended to build the entire fortress behind it.