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The moment the van left the ground, Ethan kicked open the car door and jumped.
At highway speed, exiting a moving vehicle was suicide for a normal person. For someone whose cellular structure had been rebuilt by the Super Soldier Serum, it was a roll and a jog.
He hit the asphalt, absorbed the impact through his knees and palms, and came up running. Behind him, Bumblebee read the situation instantly.
The yellow sports car launched itself off the road.
Not with wheels. With momentum. The vehicle left the pavement at an angle, caught air, and in the space between ground and sky, transformed. Panels split, limbs extended, the cockpit compressed, and by the time the chassis was three meters off the asphalt, the car was gone and the five-meter robot was airborne, arms outstretched.
Three hostages were tumbling through the air, screaming, limbs flailing, approximately four seconds from hitting the pavement at a speed that would end them.
Bumblebee snagged all three. One arm, two arm, chest. He pulled them against his torso, curled his massive frame around their bodies, and the instant his feet touched the road, he transformed again. Five meters of robot collapsed back into a sports car in a single fluid motion.
Three seconds. The entire sequence. Mid-air catch, landing, transformation. Three seconds.
The hostages, who had been hurtling toward death at terminal velocity one moment, found themselves sitting in the back seat of a yellow sports car the next, seat belts somehow engaged, completely unharmed, hearts hammering so hard they could taste it.
In the surveillance helicopters overhead, the tracking crews stared at their monitors and said nothing for a very long time.
What did we just watch? A car turned into a robot in mid-air, caught three people, landed, and turned back into a car. In three seconds.
Even movies wouldn't film something this ridiculous.
The assassins didn't get the same treatment.
Ethan had no interest in saving people who'd come to kill him. The five shooters hit the pavement like discarded luggage. Three died on impact. The remaining two survived, barely, broken bones and internal bleeding leaving them crumpled on the asphalt in spreading pools of red.
Ethan felt nothing. These were people who'd accepted money to murder him on live television. The fact that two of them were still breathing was more mercy than they deserved.
The assassin leader lay on his back, coughing blood, eyes tracking the sky. His squad of twenty was gone. Most captured at the hotel. The rest dead on this road. Only he and one other remained alive, and his companion's breathing was the ragged, wet sound of someone who wouldn't last without a hospital.
He turned his head. Three meters away, a 3D-printed pistol lay on the asphalt. It must have been flung from someone's hand during the crash.
Three meters. He could crawl that far. If the kid wasn't paying attention. If he could just get his fingers around the grip, one shot was all he needed. Forget the reward. Forget escape. Just one shot at the bastard who'd done this.
He began to drag himself forward. Elbows and knees, blood trailing behind him on the road.
Two meters.
One meter.
A chunk of van debris whistled past his ear and hit the pistol with the force of a thrown bowling ball. The 3D-printed weapon, already fragile by design, exploded into fragments. The debris embedded itself in the asphalt six inches beyond.
The assassin looked up.
Ethan stood over him, relaxed, hands in his pockets. His expression wasn't angry. Wasn't triumphant. Just… indifferent. The way someone looks at a problem they've already solved.
"Don't."
The word was conversational. Almost bored.
"Next time, it won't be the gun."
The assassin closed his eyes. There was nothing left to do.
Ethan exhaled. He needed to leave at least one alive for Graves, or the old man would lecture him for an hour about intelligence value and the importance of interrogation in building a prosecutable case.
Bureau vehicles arrived within minutes. The surviving assassins were loaded onto stretchers and taken into custody. The hostages were extracted from Bumblebee's back seat in a state of shock so profound that the paramedics initially couldn't determine whether they were injured or simply catatonic.
The scene was cleared. The road was blocked. And the footage — captured by surveillance helicopters, traffic cameras, and every bystander with a phone — was already online.
Ethan Mercer's name was trending again. But this time, it shared the spotlight with another.
*BUMBLEBEE.*
-----
Eight thousand miles east, President Elias Kane turned off the screen.
The assassination had failed. He'd expected that possibility. What he hadn't expected was the manner of failure.
A five-meter robot that could transform into a car. That could catch bullets. That could launch into the air, rescue hostages, and land in a different form. That could grow a single mechanical arm while driving and flip a van like a toy.
And this was what the kid had built in the few weeks since returning from the Aurelian Republic.
Kane stared at the dark screen and felt, for the first time in his political career, the cold weight of strategic inadequacy.
Ethan Mercer was not slowing down. Every month, every week, the gap between what this teenager could build and what the rest of the world could match grew wider. The reactor had been alarming. The armor had been terrifying. The serum had been unprecedented. The Transformer was something else entirely.
"We can't wait any longer." His voice was quiet. Controlled. The voice of a man making a decision he'd been postponing. "Before long, Valoria will be untouchable. And it'll be because of one kid."
-----
The day after the press conference, the internet did what the internet does.
Nexus Computing — the largest technology company on the planet, whose CEO had publicly stated that "true artificial intelligence is impossible in this era" — found every single one of its social media accounts overrun by Ethan's fans.
"Nexus CEO, come out and apologize!"
"Somebody once called Professor Mercer an attention-seeker. That somebody is now an authority in the field of being wrong."
"I suggest Professor Mercer start his own tech company and compete with Nexus directly. Let the world see what Valorian innovation actually looks like."
"They claimed AI was impossible. Then a teenager built one that roasts reporters on live television. Delete your account."
Ethan scrolled through the comments on his phone, sitting at the Holloway kitchen table with a cup of coffee that had gone cold an hour ago.
Start a company.
The fans were being flippant, but the logic was sound. As the System's technologies grew more complex, Ethan's resource needs were scaling beyond what favors and government partnerships could provide. He needed infrastructure. Manufacturing capacity. A legal entity that could hold patents, negotiate contracts, and interface with the commercial world.
He couldn't keep borrowing labs from Graves and scrounging equipment through Frank's old contacts. Not at the level he was operating at now.
A company would solve multiple problems simultaneously. Revenue from commercializable technology would fund his research. Corporate structure would give him legal protections. A business entity with employees and contracts and government partnerships would anchor him in the institutional landscape in a way that made it much harder for anyone to simply take what he'd built.
And he already had something in mind. Not the reactor, not the armor, not the serum, not the Transformer. Those were too sensitive, too dangerous, too strategically significant for the open market.
But there were other things in the System's catalog. Lower-tier technologies. Commercial applications that could generate revenue without destabilizing the global order.
He picked up his phone and called Graves.
"Director. I want to start a company."
Silence on the other end. Then, carefully:
"I'm listening."
"The technologies I've developed so far are all too high-level for commercial use. I know that. But I have ideas for commercial products that could generate significant revenue while keeping the sensitive stuff locked down."
More silence. Graves was thinking. Ethan could almost hear the gears turning.
Graves's concern was obvious: every piece of technology Ethan had created was, in one way or another, a strategic asset. Releasing any of it commercially — even a derivative, even a watered-down version — carried risks. But the alternative was worse. Ethan operating independently, unfunded, borrowing labs and begging for resources, was a vulnerability in itself. A company gave the government a framework. Something they could monitor, regulate, and partner with.
"If you can convince me that what you're planning won't compromise national security," Graves said, "then do it."
"I'll have a detailed proposal on your desk in three days."
"Fine. And Ethan?"
"Yeah?"
"The assassination attempt. You planned that, didn't you? You knew about the shooters before the event started."
A pause.
"You let them in on purpose. So the attempt would happen on camera."
Another pause.
"You're welcome, Director. Now the whole world knows that President Kane is willing to pay Valorian citizens to commit murder on live television. That's worth more than catching five guys with plastic guns."
The line went quiet. Then Graves's voice came back, tired and grudgingly impressed.
"Three days, Ethan. I want that proposal."
He hung up.
Within the hour, the Chancellor's secure line rang. Graves picked up.
"Well?" Chancellor Thayer's voice was as measured as ever. "What's the boy planning now?"
"A company. Commercial technology venture. He says he'll have a proposal in three days."
"And you believe him?"
Graves hesitated. Then, with the weary honesty of a man who'd stopped being surprised a long time ago:
"Chancellor, I've watched that kid invent nuclear fusion, build powered armor, create a biological super-serum, and construct a sentient robot from scratch. All before his nineteenth birthday."
A beat.
"Compared to that, starting a company feels almost disappointingly normal."