Part 3 — Escape .Chapter 3
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"Be careful."
Gwen's voice carried across the warehouse without urgency, the tone of someone who had said it enough times that it had become less a warning and more a ritual. She didn't look up from her textbook.
Chromastone and Kevin faced each other across the open floor, the lamplight from Gwen's corner throwing long shadows toward the far wall. Neither of them moved. The stillness had the particular quality of two people each waiting for the other to commit first, reading the weight distribution, the angle of the shoulders, the small tells that preceded action.
Then they both moved at once.
They crossed the distance fast, fists connecting with a impact that echoed off the concrete walls. They pulled back and came again, and this time Kevin shifted — a feint, his weight going one way while his other hand morphed, the rock plates consolidating rapidly into the flat dense head of a hammer. He ducked under Chromastone's outstretched arm and swung upward.
The hammer connected with Chromastone's jaw and launched him backward. He hit the floor, slid, and was back on his feet before the dust settled — just in time to see Kevin already airborne, a flying kick aimed at his chest.
Chromastone sidestepped. As Kevin passed him, he brought a backhand across Kevin's back with enough force to send him through a crate, the wood exploding outward on impact.
Chromastone looked down at his own hands for a moment. The speed of the sidestep had surprised even him.
A crate flew towards him.
He threw himself sideways into a crouch, landed clean, and looked up to find Kevin already in the air above him, both hands locked together overhead, dropping with the full weight of rock-coated mass behind them.
No time to move.
Chromastone crossed his forearms over his head and took the impact. The sound it produced was enormous in the enclosed space, a concussive crack that rattled the high windows. He absorbed the force through his braced arms and then drove them apart explosively, shoving Kevin back across the floor.
He didn't wait. He came in low, closed the distance, and drove an uppercut into Kevin's jaw.
Kevin left the ground, corrected himself mid-air with the practiced instinct of someone who had been hit hard enough times to stop being surprised by it, and landed in a crouch. He looked across at Chromastone, who was still standing.
"You're holding back."
"I don't know this form yet. I'm not going to do permanent damage testing it."
"You won't figure out what he can do that way." Kevin straightened up, rolling one shoulder. "Stop overthinking it. I can take it."
Chromastone looked at him for a moment, then nodded once.
They came at each other again, no more measured exchanges — full commitment this time, both of them working at the ceiling of what they had. Chromastone's reach was longer in this form, which should have been an advantage, but the unfamiliar geometry of the limbs meant he misjudged distance repeatedly, throwing combinations that connected with air while Kevin slipped inside them and made him pay for the misses.
A gut punch from Chromastone caught Kevin clean and sent him skidding backward across the floor.
Kevin hit the wall, pushed off it, and his hands changed again — the rock plates at the fingers drawing together and reforming into narrow, dense cylinders, the shape of a gatling configuration. He opened fire.
The needles came fast, stone-composite projectiles launched from the absorbed material, and the first volley forced Chromastone into motion immediately. He moved laterally across the warehouse floor, using the crates for broken cover, the needles punching into concrete and wood behind him as he ran.
Kevin had learned this application late, and it had come with a significant limitation — every projectile fired was drawn from the armor itself, which meant sustained use ate through his own protection. He'd worked around it eventually. As long as some part of him maintained contact with an absorbable surface, he could replenish the material as fast as he spent it. His back foot stayed in contact with the floor and he drew steadily upward through the sole of his shoe, feeding the loss.
Chromastone moved and thought simultaneously.
Range capability. Did this form have any? Now was the moment to find out, because Kevin wasn't going to run out of floor to stand on and the needles weren't going to stop. Losing here meant Kevin would hold it over him for a week at minimum, which was its own category of motivation.
He reached inward, the same way he'd gone looking in Big Chill when the intangibility had surfaced by accident — he'd been trying for the ice breath, pushed too hard in the wrong direction, and fallen through the floor of the warehouse they'd been using that month before he understood what had happened. He'd learned from that. Reaching inward meant not forcing a specific result, just looking for what was already there.
He found it almost immediately.
Something warm, deep in the crystal structure of the body. Not heat exactly — energy, stored and waiting, the reserve low the way a battery gets after sitting unused for a long time. It was there though. Enough.
He stopped running.
He turned, planted his feet, and let the energy move from wherever it lived outward through the body, into the arms, into the hands. His palms began to glow — not one color but several cycling through each other, ultraviolet light building between his fingers.
Kevin saw him stop and adjusted his aim.
Chromastone raised both hands and released it.
The beam that left his palms was wide and brilliant, ultraviolet light concentrated into a solid impact, and it crossed the warehouse in no time at all and hit Kevin center-mass. The sound of it was sharp and loud. Kevin left his feet, traveled backward through the air, and went through the wall.
Not past a crate. Through the wall. A hole opened in the warehouse siding where he'd been standing.
Chromastone lowered his hands and stared at his palms.
A moment passed.
Kevin came back through the hole he'd made, stepping over the broken material at the base of it. His armor was gone, fully depleted. He pressed one hand to his sternum with the expression of a man taking stock of internal damage.
"Even through the armor," he said, "I felt that."
"Sorry."
"Don't be." He dropped his hand. "Good shot."
The green light washed over Chromastone from the faceplate outward, and when it faded Ben was standing in the middle of the warehouse floor in his jacket and jeans, he picks up the bandage from the create he had place it and set to work.
Kevin was quiet for a moment, then said "huh" in the tone of someone who has just remembered something. "Didn't the Omnitrix used to talk to you? That AI thing, whenever you activated it."
Ben considered. "Yeah. I haven't heard it in a while actually."
"Maybe the tutorial's over."
"Maybe."
Gwen's voice came from her corner, flat and unhappy. "Great. Just great."
Ben looked over. "What?"
She gestured at the warehouse around them — the broken crates, the scattered debris, the fresh hole in the wall through which the evening air was now moving freely.
Kevin surveyed the damage with the detached assessment of someone who had caused most of it. "We might have overdone it slightly."
Ben turned to Gwen. "Are you going to train tonight? You should, you don't know when — "
"No."
The word came out with a finality that closed the subject immediately. She was already packing her books back into her bag, not looking at either of them.
"Gwen — "
"My abilities are dangerous, Ben. Last time I used them I almost killed both of you. That's not something I'm willing to risk again."
Kevin said nothing. The memory moved across his face briefly, an involuntary thing, and he looked away.
It had started after the surgery. In the weeks following Gwen's recovery, she'd described it as a strangeness she couldn't locate — a feeling of being altered in some way she didn't have language for yet. Ben and Kevin had assumed it was the aftermath of trauma, the body readjusting after something serious, and hadn't pushed it.
Then she told them she could feel what people were feeling. Not guess — feel, as a direct sensory input, continuous and unavoidable. Every person near her carried an emotional signal she received whether she wanted to or not. They hadn't believed her at first. She'd demonstrated by sitting in the school cafeteria with her eyes closed and naming the emotional state of students she couldn't see, moving through them one by one without error.
They'd believed her after that.
Ben had eventually convinced her to try going further — to reach for whatever was underneath the passive perception and see what she found. It had taken weeks of persuasion, and she'd agreed reluctantly, and what happened when she finally tried had ended the conversation about her training for a long time.
Her eyes had gone pink. The energy had started moving immediately, pulling inward from everything around her — the floor, the walls, the air, the soil beneath the building. And then from Ben and Kevin, directly. It had felt like something being drawn out through the skin, a forceful extraction of something that wasn't meant to leave. They'd both gone to their knees. Gwen had stopped it through sheer will, and the effort of stopping had been visible on her face in a way that neither of them had forgotten.
She hadn't spoken for a week afterward.
Nobody knew what she was, or what had happened to her on that operating table when her heart had stopped and then started again. Nobody had asked. It felt like the kind of question that, once asked aloud, couldn't be taken back.
"My abilities could hurt someone too," Ben said, keeping his voice level. "So could Kevin's. That's why we train."
Gwen slung her bag over her shoulder and looked at him. She didn't answer, which was its own kind of answer.
Ben's phone alarm sounded from his jacket pocket. He pulled it out. 6:00 PM.
"I have to go." He moved toward the window, but then remember the hole Kevin made. "Tell Uncle Frank and Aunt Natalie I'll be home late."
"Where are you going?" Gwen asked.
"Project meeting."eventually chosing to go out the window, because he was already there, he got a leg over the sill. "Biology."
And dropped into the evening outside and was gone.
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Author's Note:
Gwen's abilities in the source material follow a fairly clean arc , the Anodite heritage surfaces, it's difficult but ultimately manageable, and she grows into it. That's a satisfying story. This version wanted to ask a harder question.
What if the power wasn't clean? What if there are serious side effects from her abilities.