Ethan woke before his alarm, leaving him three hours before school.
For a moment, he lay perfectly still, staring at the faint early-morning light bleeding across his ceiling. It felt… different today. Like his thoughts had already begun without him—like his mind was a machine that had kept working through the night, refining, optimizing, rearranging.
He sat up slowly, rubbing a hand across his eyes.
Then the ideas struck.
Not as thoughts—thoughts he could usually control, redirect, delay.
No.
These came as inspirations that turned into blueprints before he noticed.
Full structures. Systems. Devices. Entire architectures, unfolding in his mind like blooming fractals, perfectly formed and demanding to be written down before they evaporated.
He moved without thinking, grabbing his sketchbook and a mechanical pencil.
The first thing his hand drew was the internal lattice of his hybrid nanotech–techno-organic organism. No hesitation, no revision. Clean strokes. Efficient interlocking framework.
Then his hand moved again, drawing a large oval structure—fluid walls, bio-reactive metal, a tri-ring energy channel around it.
A techno-organic womb.
A gestation chamber that could grow a living organism the same way Weapon X incubated healing tissue in nutrient tanks… except Ethan's design was alive. Adaptive. Reactive. Capable of generating internal environmental simulations.
If built correctly, it could gestate:
– symbiote offspring
– artificial lifeforms
– techno-organic hybrids
– human offspring
Or something else entirely.
"A good first design, but I'll have to improve it before Sarah Kinney arrives in New York," he muttered under his breath, but his hand refused to stop.
Next came another construct—this one geometric, impossibly so. A cube that folded into a sphere that folded into a thin layered spiral. His mind supplied its purpose before he asked.
A pocket-dimension generator.
Not a true one—he wasn't rewriting space-time. But a localized micro-dimensional fold capable of storing layered materials or toolsets. Like Forge's collapsible tech, but vastly larger in a warehouse form and more stable.
He stared at the sketch.
He didn't remember deciding to draw it.
Forge's power just kept nudging him forward, each design slotting into a framework his brain hadn't even acknowledged consciously yet.
Ethan exhaled slowly and closed the notebook.
For now.
He reached for his phone.
A notification blinked on his throwaway device—one of the unregistered lines only he had access to. The code packet had arrived thirty seconds ago. Yuri Watanabe's latest raid summaries.
He tapped the screen.
Hood Networks:
Site #1 seized. 28 arrests.
Site #2 – weapons cache confiscated.
Site #3 – human trafficking hub destroyed.
Three hits.
Coordinated. Clean. Efficient.
Yuri had always been terrifyingly competent when she wanted to be. A woman pushed by principle, sharpened by disillusionment.
Exactly the kind of person Ethan liked nudging in the correct direction.
A small light blinked on the router beside him, signaling the upload of the next file. Ethan selected the final package—a warehouse the Hood used as his logistical backbone. Not flashy, but essential.
He wrote a single line of text:
"If you want to cut the head off a crime syndicate, you start by breaking its spine. –ShadowStitch"
He hit send.
Two seconds later, the message auto-erased.
He locked the phone, turned it off, removed the battery, and tossed it onto the bed, leaning back in his chair with a small smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.
'The Hood probably woke today believing himself untouchable. He wouldn't feel that way by sundown. Anyway, now I have to get ready for school.'
Across the city, in an underground vault lit by amber fluorescents and stale air, Madame Masque stared at the latest report projected across her desk.
Three red icons marked the locations of Hood-owned properties that had fallen.
Masque's fingers curled slowly around the edge of her mask.
"Three in one morning," she murmured. "Ridiculous."
One of her analysts—a nervous tech with too-thick glasses—cleared his throat. "Ma'am… whoever is targeting our organization… they're not improvising. They know our infrastructure in a detailed manner. They even know the distribution schedules, so all the raids happen when the facilities were full of money, drugs, and guns."
Masque's golden mask dipped slightly toward him.
"Who hit the facilities?" she said quietly, "Were they Maggia? HYDRA? Fisk?"
"NYPD?"
Masque turned her head.
"Meaning we are being taken down by the clueless police department," she said. "No, that can't be. Whoever is doing this, did it methodically. Precisely. And with intent."
Her gloved fingers tapped the desk.
"And Hood doesn't realize it yet."
She did.
She felt it.
The shift in power. The cracks in the walls. The structure she helped stabilize was trembling beneath her heels.
She wasn't stupid.
She knew what a sinking empire looked like.
She also knew when to step off the ship.
Her thoughts flickered—briefly—to Luc Moreau.
The phantom man. The French ghost. The voice dripping charm and danger. The one she couldn't trace, couldn't predict, couldn't read.
A man who managed to invade secure databases, alter federal-level French intelligence archives, and leave behind digital fingerprints that laughed at her attempts to follow them.
A man who had said, "I offer you something the Hood never could, ma chère. Purpose. Power. Legacy"
Masque clenched her jaw.
She hated, admired, feared him all at once.
And for the first time… she considered the possibility that she might eventually need him.
Back in his room, Ethan, after getting ready, still had two hours before school started, so he cracked his knuckles and opened the next file on his laptop.
Ethan had about eight weeks to finish the groundwork for:
– his gestation chamber
– his techno-organic biomass
– his neural anchor
– his psychological buffer
– his pocket-dimensional storage
– his version of the Endo Syn Armor
– and finally his new symbiote
Eight weeks to transform from a clever, dangerous boy… into something capable of surviving what was to come.
This wasn't just because Forge's powers were active.
No—this was because of the Octessence, the ancient gods. The Exemplars were basically superpowered humans. They were difficult to deal with, some more so than others, but Ethan already knew who they were when they'd appear and their abilities, so he could survive the oncoming onslaught one way or another.
The real challenge would be to benefit from this disaster. The eight cosmic avatars, when awakened, would become a force of natural disasters on a global scale. Meaning there would be seven superpowered individuals on Juggernaut's level of power available to be recruited. Of course, Ethan understood the chances of recruiting all seven were unrealistic, but if he could get two or more to join him, then he could start preparing for the Secret War.
Forge's mutation pulsed again, urging him to recalculate the womb's internal support structures.
He obeyed without thinking.
He was refining the artificial womb model now.
He added:
– a bioelectric circulatory loop
– an adaptive nutrient matrix
– psychic resonance shielding (very important if he wanted certain telepathic components to gestate properly)
– a hypertime glide system to reduce external observation risk
– a system to repair and mitigate damage in the subject's DNA
His pencil scratched across paper as he added annotations.
That was the thing about Forge's ability—when it took hold, it didn't feel like inspiration.
It felt like inevitability.
A solution for problems he hadn't even considered presented itself without thought, not the other way around.
Ethan double-checked the circulatory pattern. It wasn't just a mechanical system. It was an organ.
Living hardware.
Synthetic biology.