Four years.
That's how long the silence had lasted. Four years of hiding in plain sight, a ghost in a city of millions. My name is Cade Rex. I'm twelve years old, and my world is the space between shadows.
The first explosion tore through Tuesday afternoon like a punch to the chest.
I was on a rooftop, watching the city breathe—the steady rhythm of traffic, the distant hum of life. Then the financial district erupted. Not just one blast, but a cascade of them, marching up LexCorp Tower in a series of orange flowers blooming against glass and steel.
Chaos didn't just unfold—it unraveled. The world fractured into a million screaming pieces.
KOBRA. The name clicked in my mind, pulled from a discarded newspaper. But this was different. Bigger. The figure at the center of the devastation wasn't in simple armor. He was a living storm of chrome and energy, wielding technology that warped reality itself. He called himself Chronos, and he was pulling the city apart at the seams.
Time stuttered. Gravity failed. Cars floated upward, their alarms wailing a discordant symphony. People screamed, trapped in pockets of inverted physics.
Run, every instinct screamed. Hide.
But then I saw them. Not just one person in danger, but dozens. Hundreds. A web of catastrophe, and every strand was a life.
The first was easy—a construction worker sliding off a platform that was now vertical. I moved as Cade, just a fast kid, grabbing his harness and pulling him to a stable girder.
The second was a mother and child, trapped under floating debris. I shifted just enough—scales rippling along my arms, strength flooding my limbs—to lift the wreckage and push them clear.
The third, fourth, fifth... they blurred together. A businessman clinging to a floating taxi. A group of tourists trapped in a bubble of slowed time. A firefighter whose ladder was bending in impossible ways.
I became a rhythm—a streak of motion through the disintegrating cityscape. Leap, catch, push, pull. I wasn't fighting Chronos. I was dancing around the edges of his chaos, catching the pieces as they fell.
My body became a instrument of salvation. The raptor's agility let me leap between floating cars like stepping stones. The T-Rex's strength let me catch falling concrete like it was nothing. My claws found purchase on glass walls when there was no other handhold. My tail, once a mark of shame, became a perfect counterbalance as I ran along twisting steel beams.
The glow in my eyes wasn't from rage—it was from focus. The world narrowed to trajectories and solutions. A living equation of motion and need.
"Look out!" I yelled, shoving a policeman away from a falling sign. He stared at my scaled face, my glowing eyes, but the fear in his eyes was for the danger, not me.
"Thank you," a woman whispered as I set her down gently on a stable rooftop.
This wasn't about revealing myself. It was about being what this city needed right now. Not a weapon. Not a monster. A shield.
The climax came when Chronos unleashed his masterstroke—a temporal wave that began dissolving a skyscraper from the bottom up. The whole structure groaned, glass shivering into dust, people screaming from windows hundreds of feet up.
They were going to fall. All of them.
Time didn't just slow—it bent. My vision sharpened until I could see every crack spreading through the building, every person in every window. My mind calculated trajectories, wind resistance, catching points.
I didn't have a plan. I had instinct.
I launched myself into the air, not away from the collapsing tower, but toward it. My transformation completed mid-leap—a full hybrid now, powerful and terrible and exactly what this moment demanded.
I hit the building running, my claws finding purchase where none existed. I became a rescue machine—grabbing people from windows, tossing them to safer adjacent buildings, using my own body as a bridge across collapsing gaps.
One after another after another. A blur of saving. A symphony of survival.
When the last person was clear and the tower finished its slow-motion collapse into dust, I stood panting in the ruins, covered in concrete powder, my green eyes casting beams of light through the settling cloud.
The silence was deafening. Then the applause started. Not cheers—applause. Like I'd performed a miracle instead of revealed my nightmare.
Chronos was gone, vanished in the chaos. But he'd left his mark on me. He'd made me show this city—and myself—what I really was.
As I melted back into the alleys, I saw it again—that familiar silhouette against the sun. The Bio-Ship, uncloaked for just a moment. Acknowledging. Watching.
I didn't run this time. I just looked up at the ship, my glow slowly fading, and gave a single, tired nod.
The quiet life was over. But maybe, just maybe, a louder one was beginning.