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….
"Stay back! I won't be taken! BANG! BANG!.." and everything went quiet.
Journalists, despite police attempts to dissuade them, managed to point the camera at the house, and it became visible how the guardians of order were breaking down the doors.
A second, another, and the camera caught some exhausted person in the opened corridor, limply slumped in a wheelchair.
A neat hole in the forehead clearly showed that the unknown person was definitely dead, and the scar around the temple showed that the colonel's words about the brain and "treatment" were far from drunken delirium.
A few minutes later, cunning reporters reported that Stryker himself was found nearby, a body with the back of the head completely blown off lay in the middle of a trashed room. In his hands was a blood-soaked revolver.
With that, Rice turned off the TV, uninterested in watching the TV crews retell the news for another round. He was much more concerned with completely different questions.
"So what do you think?" the woman who barged into his office asked.
"Some kind of nonsense," the doctor frowned. "It'll do for the average person, but those in the know… I knew William pretty well; he was a pain in the ass, of course, but… he never drank like that, let alone anything more."
"And what could it be then?" inquired the one named Kimura.
"I think…" the scientist strained his considerable intellect, "for public opinion, just the suicide of a crazy mutant-hater, but for more enlightened people, the staged nature of all this… spectacle will raise no doubts. The question arises, why? A warning? A preemptive strike?"
"A little bit of everything," an unfamiliar voice sounded from behind and to his right. "But mainly I was interested in the secret of adamantium, and the rest came as a pleasant bonus."
"What?" Rice tried to turn around, but suddenly something pricked him in the neck, and his body was painfully paralyzed, though without turning off his consciousness.
A moment, a rustle, and Kimura falls nearby, awkwardly trying to group herself and put her hands out, like a naughty cat thrown off a cupboard by its owner.
"What 'what'?" a young-looking man appearing in his field of vision asked curiously, unceremoniously driving the woman's head into the floor with a kick.
And the phrase "drove into the floor" was by no means a figure of speech, the tiled concrete cracked and caved in about five centimeters, causing even the bulletproof Kimura to go quiet.
"Guys, you decided you could do anything. The dissatisfied public, represented by me, decided in response that you are superfluous in this world."
"You have no idea what you've gotten yourself into, kid," it was hard to speak, but the thing injected into him completely paralyzed only below the neck.
"Oh," the stranger grimaced, "just don't give me these cheap clichés about 'you don't know who stands behind us,' 'it's all for the greater good,' 'Gott mit uns,' 'Heil Hydra' and other babble. Believe me, I know much more about the structure of the universe than you."
The young mutant, and this type could be no one else, bent down and easily jerked Kimura to her knees by her hair, then thoughtfully tilted his head to the side.
"Look at that, actually alive… It's good to be tough," he summarized with a smirk and placed his right hand on the woman's temple.
"Hmm… So that's how it is. Just corrupt scum with a bunch of complexes and childhood traumas that developed into a simply magnificent bouquet of mental deviations. Nothing valuable… but at least I'll see how this thing works."
With these words, the brunet pulled out a "pipette" vaguely familiar to Rice and dripped some clear liquid under the upper vertebra on the neck of Kimura, who hadn't yet come to her senses.
Upon contact with the skin, the liquid hissed and was absorbed almost instantly.
"So, what to order?.. Oh, right!" releasing the woman, the mutant snapped his fingers and smiled. "Go and drown yourself in the nearest sink."
The mercenary mechanically straightened up, turned around, and went to the bathroom adjoining the doctor's office.
And he, to his great horror, was able to watch the woman plug the sink drain, busily fill it with water, then stick her head in it and… remain standing until she lost consciousness from asphyxiation.
Even then, her body simply slumped and fell forward, but her head remained underwater.
"Not bad," the mutant stated, thoughtfully stroking his chin. "Well, now let's deal with you, Doc! Let's play a game! I'll be like a priest, and you'll be like a parishioner at confession. Unburden your soul, so to speak. Otherwise, I'll have to climb into your brains later, dig through that slop, but this way, with fresh associations, I'll get through faster, and you might remain in your right mind, unlike poor Will. Come on, you don't want to upset me, do you?"
….
As expected, cracking this bastard open wasn't the hard part, sifting through the word-vomit he spewed my way?
That was the real headache.
Sadists who strut around like they're untouchable gods always fold fast once it clicks: no more god-mode, and the boot's about to stomp their fingers. And here? Oh, we had the full package.
The Stryker setup I'd staged? Perfect bait, gave the mutant-rights crowd a megaphone on the Hill, shut up the loudmouth haters, and made the insiders who knew the score sweat bullets.
Plus, another "voluntary suicide" from one of their victims? That's motivational gold for spilling guts. I'd still have to crack his skull open mentally, but at least I'd trimmed the bullshit first…
Alas, the harmony didn't last. Our little heart-to-heart got a sour twist of deception. Rice started polishing turds and skipping chapters, even after I'd gutted Kimura's memories like a fresh kill…
Time to wrap it up. I slapped a palm to his temple.
Telepaths might see it different, but for me, rifling through someone else's head's like prime seating at an IMAX binge, full 3D dive, surround sound, and yeah, my own damn remote.
That last bit's the lifesaver: fast-forward the fluff, menu-jump to the meaty bits, mute the ugly.
Otherwise? It's first-person cinema of their whole sorry life, tick-tock precise. Folks' memories fade like old Polaroids, whole chunks go sepia-toned, but crank the focus, and you can sharpen 'em razor-sharp.
Takes juice from a mentalist's bag of tricks, though. Not that you need to; big moments or takeaways?
Nobody shelves those in the "autopilot drudgery" bin that barely etches into long-term. Still, that line about your life flashing before your eyes?
Spot-on here. I can spool through decades while the real world blinks twice. And the reels for a hitwoman called Kimura and a lab-rat named Zander Rice?
They were…
A straight-up shitshow.
….
Bonus Chapter on every 500 power stones;
If you want to read ahead by 20+ chapters from here you can visit my Patre-on.
[P] [A] [T] [R] [E] [O] [N]
[email protected]/Yggdrasil_Loki