Chapter Two: Epic Escape
[February 27, 2014 – 12:01 A.M. | Dormitory Sector, HYDRA Facility Theta-9, Eastern Europe]
The lights never truly went out in Theta-9. They only dimmed until the walls forgot they were supposed to shine.
I sat upright in bed, heartbeat syncing with the hum in the floor—forty-seven seconds between camera sweeps, sixteen seconds of darkness. The kind of pattern that used to be math and had become instinct. Across the room, Ava sat cross-legged on her bunk, eyes glowing faintly amber. Sparks pulsed between her fingers like tiny heartbeats.
"Ready to ruin someone's career, Professor?" she whispered.
"As soon as Mina's loop kicks in," I said.
The ceiling lights blinked once—Mina's signal. It was time.
We moved in silence that had nothing to do with fear. Tyrese laced his boots with a calm only mountains understood. Caleb tightened his gloves. Sienna leaned close to the youngest orphans, whispering something soft that smelled like soil and sunlight. Mina's nanites shimmered faintly as she linked our comms through static.
Jason stood near the vent, crackling with restrained electricity. "On your word."
I looked over them all—sixteen shapes carved by nightmare and science. "We end it tonight," I said.
Ava grinned, small and defiant. "Let's make it loud."
[February 27, 2014 – 12:14 A.M. | Power Regulation Chamber]
The hallways vibrated before we reached the door. Jason's overload had already begun—currents whining through the walls like a living storm.
"Surge in ten," he said, voice low but steady.
Mina's fingers blurred over her wrist display. "Rerouting sensors now. You'll have ninety seconds of blind grid. Make them count."
The door to the chamber slid open, and Jason stepped inside. The air shimmered blue. His silhouette fractured into arcs of lightning, veins glowing through skin like neon rivers. He gritted his teeth. "Feeding it back…"
The lights across the compound stuttered once, twice—then died. The silence after electricity dies is a special kind of holy.
"Grid's offline," Mina confirmed. "Ava, go!"
Ava thrust her palms forward. Fire erupted down the corridor, blooming orange and white. The shockwave kicked dust and heat against our faces. Sprinklers hissed overhead—steam replaced shadow.
"Nice touch," Tyrese muttered.
"Had to make it look accidental," she said, smirking.
The first alarms screamed, slicing through the facility's skeleton. Doors slammed. Red emergency lights blinked to life.
"Move!" I barked. "Split teams—just like we practiced!"
We scattered—three vectors through chaos.
[February 27, 2014 – 12:20 A.M. | Sector Omega – Containment Wing]
The sirens twisted the air into panic. Nadia blurred past me, a streak of blue light carving a path through guards before they could aim.
"Left hall clear!" she shouted, words overlapping themselves from the Doppler shift of her own speed.
Tyrese hit the next door like a sledgehammer. Metal screamed, folded, surrendered. He laughed once, deep and booming. "They built this place for me!"
Tariq followed, gravity bending in waves around him, dragging guards off their feet as if the floor had turned magnetic.
Eli roared and leapt—claws flashing, wild eyes burning gold—and dropped three men before they even fired.
Everywhere, the world tilted toward freedom.
Marcus flickered in and out of sight, whispering through walls, marking safe corridors. "Left passage clean. Right's a kill zone. Follow my echo."
Noah's duplicates multiplied ahead, darting around corners, shouting false orders in perfect mimicry of HYDRA accents. Their confusion became our cover.
We were ghosts, fire, thunder, and speed in one breath.
[February 27, 2014 – 12:31 A.M. | Lower Research Wing – Omnitrix Core Chamber]
The door to the core chamber loomed ahead—steel embossed with the Hydra sigil. It glowed under backup power, humming like a throat before a scream.
Mina interfaced with the lock, nanite tendrils threading into the port. "Encrypted six layers deep," she muttered. "Cute."
"Can you open it?" I asked.
"Please," she said, rolling her eyes. "I've broken gods harder than this."
The door hissed open.
The chamber beyond looked exactly as I remembered: a cathedral built to worship science and call it salvation. The Omnitrix fragments hung in midair, shards of living crystal orbiting a heart of green fire. The song in my head returned, louder now—words made of gravity and light.
Dr. Krüger stood at the console. Her coat was unbuttoned, her eyes bright with obsession. "Subject Zero-One," she said, voice too calm. "You've come home."
"No," I said. "I came to end it."
"You misunderstand." She stepped forward, eyes gleaming. "You are it. The culmination. The bridge. The others—drafts of the final design. You can't destroy what you are."
Ava's fire burned hotter behind me. "Watch us."
Krüger gestured, and turrets unfolded from the walls. They spat plasma before she finished blinking. Caleb threw himself in front of us, crystalline body refracting the bolts into a storm of light. The beams hit the ceiling, exploding in a shower of molten glass.
I charged forward, grabbing Krüger's wrist before she could reach the failsafe. My hand glowed with molten amber. "You had a choice," I told her. "You made the wrong one."
She stared at me with something like awe. "You think you're free, James? You think the song stops with you?"
"Watch me prove it."
I shoved her aside as Mina finished her hack. The containment rings cracked open, releasing the core in a wave of heat and green light. It pulsed—alive, desperate. The shards started converging.
"It's repairing itself," Mina breathed. "It's using us as a blueprint!"
"Then we break the pattern," I said.
[February 27, 2014 – 12:35 A.M. | Omnitrix Core Chamber]
Energy filled the room until sound became pressure. The Omnitrix fragments hovered inches from merging, their glow pulsing in rhythm with our heartbeats. The hybrid DNA in every one of us sang back like tuning forks.
Jason's voice crackled through the comm. "Whatever you're doing, the surge readings are insane."
"We're at the core," I replied. "I need your frequency data—fast."
"Sending you a harmonic disruptor pattern. It'll destabilize the resonance without blowing half the planet."
Mina caught the feed instantly, uploading the signal through her nanites. "Ready to inject on your mark."
"Tariq," I called. "I need a gravity shell around this room—contain the blast."
"On it," he said, voice strained. The floor groaned as invisible weight clamped down. Even the air grew heavy.
Lena slipped through the wall, frost spreading from her feet. "Too hot in here," she murmured. "Let me help." The temperature dropped, stabilizing the pressure.
Ava looked at me, eyes fierce. "You sure about this?"
"No," I said. "But that's never stopped us."
I placed my hand against the core. For an instant, every genome inside me—Galvan logic, Prypiatosian fire, Tetramand strength, Kineceleran speed—screamed in harmony. I channeled it all outward, one pulse aimed straight through the heart of the machine.
"Now!" I shouted.
Mina triggered the disruptor. The core flashed white, green, then black—light folding inward, gravity stuttering, time tasting like ozone.
Then it exploded.
The shockwave tore through the facility, vaporizing consoles and data cores. The blast slammed into Tariq's barrier and bent around us, devouring the HYDRA insignia off the walls. Krüger was gone before she could scream. The room fell silent except for the ringing in my skull.
When the light faded, nothing remained of the Omnitrix but dust and the memory of its song.
[February 27, 2014 – 12:41 A.M. | Surface Access Shaft – Upper Compound]
Smoke and green light poured from cracks in the ceiling. The facility was dying, one generator at a time.
"Everyone move!" Tyrese's voice boomed through the hall. He carried two injured scientists over his shoulders—not for mercy, but because leaving bodies slowed escape.
Sienna released a cloud of golden spores, filling the air with oxygen. "Breathe through this! It'll counter the fumes!"
Priya swooped down from a vent, wings unfurled and wet with condensation. "Surface path's clear! North exit, three kilometers through the forest!"
Riley surged water through the pipes, flooding fires that tried to cut us off. The steam painted the corridors in silver mist.
"Go, go, go!" I yelled. "Stay tight!"
We reached the hangar just as the second explosion tore through the lower decks. Tariq's gravity fields folded collapsing walls into themselves, clearing a path through rubble. Nadia zipped ahead, disabling the final door lock.
Outside, snow blasted against our faces. The night air hit like a baptism. We stumbled into the open, sixteen figures against a field of ice.
Behind us, Theta-9 imploded. The mountain groaned and swallowed itself, a plume of green-white fire clawing at the sky before collapsing into darkness.
Ava turned back, flames dancing at her fingertips. "That's for everyone they buried under those walls."
No one spoke. We didn't need to.
[February 27, 2014 – 1:07 A.M. | Abandoned Rail Tunnel, Eastern Europe]
We found shelter inside an old freight tunnel carved through the mountain. The air was cold and tasted of rust. Water dripped from unseen cracks, rhythmic, grounding.
Mina's nanites glowed faintly as she repaired a comm unit scavenged from the ruins. "HYDRA's frequencies are in chaos," she said. "Theta-9 is officially offline."
Jason leaned against the wall, electricity fading from his skin. "They'll send search teams. We have hours, maybe less."
Tyrese dropped to sit beside him, wiping blood from his knuckles. "Then we move west. No one's stopping now."
Priya unrolled a map, fingers tracing coastal lines. "There's an old HYDRA airstrip near the Baltic. If it's still functional, we can hijack transport. From there—across the Atlantic."
"America," Ava said softly, as if the word itself was fragile.
"United States," I corrected, almost smiling. "They built HYDRA's skeleton there too. Maybe it's time someone cracked it from the inside."
Lena wrapped her arms around herself, frost curling from her fingertips. "And if they find us before we cross?"
"Then they'll learn what they made," I said.
[February 27, 2014 – 1:30 A.M. | Underground Tunnel – Moving West]
We left the mountain behind, our shadows stretching long against the tunnel's dim light. The hum of distant wind filled the silence between our breaths.
Each step forward felt like a question asked of the universe: what now?
Ava walked beside me, flame flickering gently at her palm for warmth. "We actually did it," she whispered.
"Barely," I said. "But barely counts."
Ahead, Priya's wings brushed the tunnel ceiling, throwing soft reflections over wet stone. Behind us, Tyrese carried Noah, who had passed out after too many duplicates. Riley's water streams hovered like guardian spirits along the walls.
We were bruised, hungry, half-frozen—and alive.
I looked back once. The mountain was a smear of ash under the stars, the last remnant of the place that made us what we were.
Freedom wasn't a clean feeling. It was raw, jagged, too bright in the lungs. But it was real.
We weren't running anymore. We were heading toward the world that made them—and this time, we'd be ready.
[Epilogue – 1:42 A.M.]
Sleep found us in shifts as we walked, an exhausted march toward an uncertain horizon. Every heartbeat was borrowed time; every breath, a rebellion.
I thought of The Rob—his absurd umbrella and impossible calm. Think in circles, he'd said. And maybe that was what this was: a circle that began in a lab and widened until it touched the stars.
The world above didn't know sixteen angry superpowered teenagers were walking its tunnels tonight.
But it would.
Soon.