Hidden Potential: Nibiru Rising: Book 1

by Chad Kunego

“Dude! Where’ve you been! I thought for sure you were a pancake or something.”

  Rick smiled, walking over where Tim was making serious inroads on a lumberjack special. Taking a seat next to him at the counter, he gave his friend the once over.

  “Glad to see you’re okay.”

  Tim held his arms out to the side, giving himself an exaggerated once-over.

  “The dude always comes out on top.”

  Rick laughed while the other man continued.

  “Bro, have you been using wrinkle cream along with that hair stuff? I swear, you look like you’ve got younger or something.”

  “Nah, just a change in my diet,” he said, changing the conversation.

  “So, any idea what you’re going to do, seeing as how we don’t have a job now?”

  The serious look that crossed the younger man’s face caught him off guard.

  “Nah. Something’ll come up, though. I’m just glad nobody got seriously hurt.”

  Tim paused. A thoughtful expression crossed his face before he spoke again.

  “Now that I think about it, I heard a wild story about what you did after I got out. Some real superhero type stuff,” he said, lowering his voice.

  “Are you, you know, an alien or something?”

  Lowering his voice as well, he leaned in conspiratorially.

  “Nope, but I’m not exactly normal, either.”

  “Duuuude, that’s awesome. I promise I’ll keep your secret. I bet it’s amazing being able to save people and stuff. I just wish I coulda done more to help back there,” he said, trailing off.

  “Tim,” he said with a serious tone in his voice, “not everyone can do the stuff I can. I know you helped get people out of the building before they got hurt. That makes you a superhero in my book.”

  Rick felt a warm feeling flow through him as his friend’s smile beamed back at him.

  “Thanks Rick. That means a lot coming from you.”

  The sudden seriousness in the other man’s voice caught him off guard.

  “I’m just glad I was able to do what I could.”

  “That’s all anyone can ever do.”

  Tim finished up his food, throwing several bills on the counter.

  “Lunch is on me, dude. See you around.”

  Rick nodded thoughtfully before responding.

  “Yeah Tim, see ya around.”

  §§§§§§§§§§§§

  Rick left the diner a short time later. The conversation he’d had with Tim kept going through his mind.

  Is it my responsibility to do the things others can’t?

  He absently wandered the city he’d saved earlier that day, looking at the people hurrying about, unaware that they’d almost been vaporized only a few hours ago.

  Would they have been in danger if I wasn’t here, or are they only here because of me?

  A familiar tug on his senses caused him to look up. Without knowing it, he’d wandered over to where he used to work. In the distance, a quarantine had been set up. It blocked the area off, keeping people from accidentally getting hurt by the rupture in the fabric of space. They probably weren’t aware the effects of the tear extended this far away.

  Changing course, he headed directly toward the quarantined area. As he approached, he noticed someone rushing toward him.

  “I’m sorry sir, but you’re going to need to leave. It’s dangerous to be in the area.”

  “That’s okay, I’ll risk it,” he said, brushing past without breaking stride.

  He felt a hand clamp down on his shoulder from the other side. Glancing over, he noticed a much larger person had come over as well and was currently squeezing his shoulder. From the pressure, he could tell the person had, at the least, had some form of enhanced strength.

  “Sir, for your own safety, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

  He nodded again, letting the other man’s hand slide off of his shoulder by eliminating all the friction between the man’s hand and his shoulder.

  “What the…?” he heard behind him as he approached the rupture. Before, he really had to focus to see it. With his newly enhanced senses, it now shined like a black star. He sensed the man attempting to grab him again, but before he could close his grip, Rick turned the air around him solid, freezing him in place. As an afterthought, he diverted energy flowing toward the rift. He then gently pushed everyone backward using a solid air shield.

  “Don’t worry, I shouldn’t be too long. I’m just going to be over here for a bit. Might want to stand back though.”

  Approaching the rift, he could feel people pounding on the shield he’d erected. Turning back toward them, he channeled his power to amplify his voice slightly.

  “You might want to call your boss. They’ll vouch for me.”

  Turning back toward the rift, he caused the air shield to block out all incoming sound. A idea suddenly occurred to him, prompting another adjustment to the shield. Now it was blocking out nearly all forms of energy besides light. He felt a sudden tug at his aura within seconds of the flow of kinetic energy being severed.

  Looking back at the tear, he started focusing all his attention on it. He lost track of time while he probed and examined it, trying to determine how it worked. At one point, he tried pushing his awareness into the void, but after a few minutes, he determined there wasn’t anything on the other side that he could sense. It just felt like nothingness on the other side. After a while, he noticed that the rift appeared smaller since he’d cut off the flow of kinetic energy.

  Hmmm… I wonder what would happen if I encased it in a smaller field?

  Focusing his energy, it took him several tries to encapsulate the rift. Actually touching it with a shield just caused it to rupture violently, but if he kept the field a few inches away from the actual tear, he could maintain it easily enough.

  For lack of a better description, he could sense what felt like a strong vacuum forming on the inside of the shield as it pulled in all the remaining energy left in the slight amount of space left between the shield and rift. Without warning, the pressure started ramping up significantly, the result of the rift exhausting all the remaining energy within the minuscule space.

  Now it was straining against his artificial enclosure, unrelenting in its attempt to pull in more energy. The rift was noticeably smaller, but it felt like his containment field was becoming an artificial event horizon around a black hole. Sweat started soaking through his clothes while he struggled to maintain the field around the rupture. Unconsciously, the outer shield he’d formed to keep everyone away started to shrink as he devoted more and more mental effort to keeping the rift from being able to feed itself.

  Since he’d started, the rift had shrunk to about half its original size, but the smaller it became, the more powerful it felt. The strain keeping the shell from cracking was beginning to remind him of his most recent battle.

  I wonder if you can have an inter-dimensional volcano?

  He could feel his body starting to shrink again from the energy he was expending. With a sudden realization, he dropped his outer shield. The sudden flow of kinetic energy washed over him, restoring his power levels, and allowing him to strengthen the field containing the rift.

  After what felt like an eternity, the pressure suddenly disappeared with a popping sound. He gave it a few more minutes before tentatively relaxing his mental hold on the energy shield he’d created.

  After detecting no more sensation of energy being pulled toward the area, he dropped the shield completely. Air rushed into the void, the moisture instantly freezing from exposure to near absolute zero, a result of having all the available energy sucked away before the rift collapsed. A split-second later, the globe of ice fell, striking the ground, fracturing into thousands of ice shards that immediately evaporated.

  With a satisfied nod, he turned around. Startled, he realized Kaitlyn and most of her team had arrived while he’d been focused on destroying the rift. Whether it was to watch him or to keep people safe,
he wasn’t sure. Looking at everyone surrounding him, he realized something. Out of everyone there, with all their tremendous and varied powers, only he had the abilities capable of cleaning up the mess his brother had left behind.

  Catching Kaitlyn’s eyes, she nodded at him slightly, a small smile tugging at the corner of her lips. Thunderclap, on the other hand, was more expressive in his approval. Striding forward, the giant man scooped him up like a toy.

  “Not only can he create volcanoes, he doth break the laws of the nature world, sealing up unnatural phenomena. Like a boss. Verily, I say, I’m going to miss this guy!”

  Setting him back down, he slapped him hard on the back in a jovial nature. Rick deflected most of the energy down toward the ground where little poofs of dust sprung up around his feet.

  “Did you see that Kat? He crushed that void out of existence!”

  Kaitlyn nodded again before approaching.

  “Yeah Thunderclap, we saw it. It was more exciting when he shut down that tower though. More lighting and stuff. Not sure what we would have done if he hadn’t been there,” she said, casting Rick a meaningful look before finishing.

  “There’s just no telling what might have happened.”

  Making a snap decision, Rick stepped forward, extending his hand toward Kaitlyn. She cocked her head to the side slightly, her eyes opening a bit wider. After a slight pause, she reached out, grasping his. Shaking her hand lightly, he gestured with his head toward where the void had previously existed.

  “I’ve been giving it some thought. Since I’m functionally immortal, I guess I’ve got plenty of time to see the world. I think I’ll stick around for a bit until we’re sure stuff like that doesn’t happen again. But only as a consultant though…” he added as an afterthought.

  “Sounds reasonable. I have to admit though, we like to treat our consultants well. Some might even say very well…” she added, a smile growing across her face.

  “I think I like the sound of that. So what’s next?”

  “Well, when you’re ready, we’ll get you back to base and meet everyone. Also need to sign some paperwork and stuff.”

  “Let’s try keepin' that to a minimum if you don't mind… One of the reasons I left was because I was sick of paperwork.”

  Laughing, she playfully swatted at him.

  “Great. Creates volcanoes without blinking, but is afraid of doing some paperwork.”

  Waving at them as he headed back home, he yelled over his shoulder.

  “Hey, paper cuts really sting…”

  He smiled to himself, sensing her shaking her head at his back while he walked away.

  Let’s see what surprises this next chapter of my life holds for me. Gotta be more exciting than factory work…

  Afterward

  Chad’s notes - Hidden Potential (3/28/18)

  I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you for taking a chance on this book, thank you for reading it, and I’m hoping you enjoyed it enough that you kept going, reading the afterward as well.

  Just to let you in on a little secret, this series almost never came to be. In fact, this book you just finished reading almost didn’t come into existence, either. A little backstory might be in order.

  I was working on a completely different series back in 2015/16. In 2016, after months of negotiations and stuff, the union I belong to decided to go on strike from the company we worked for. That strike lasted nearly 2 1/2 months, putting my family significantly behind on our bills since I’m the only breadwinner in the family, which is something I wouldn’t ever want to change honestly. My wife absolutely loves being a housewife.

  Anyway, because of getting so far behind on our bills, when one of our dogs got significantly sicker, we had to make some hard choices which eventually culminated in having a furry member of our family having to be put to sleep. Her kidneys were failing, she wasn’t eating or drinking, so she was just slowly wasting away. Making the painful decision, we took her to the vet only a couple days before my birthday in August.

  I fully admit it, I was a mess after that. I languished in a funk up until the middle of October, where I woke up from a dream with a completely new series to write. That November, I did NaNoWriMo in an effort to get my mind off the loss of our beloved pet.

  The book you hold in front of you was that book.

  2017 wasn’t any better. In July, while in the middle of writing the first draft of book 2, we were unfortunate enough to be located in the path of a freak flash flood, filling our basement with nearly five and a half feet of water in the space of two hours, destroying our furnace, hot water heater, circuit breaker box, and wiring for our water pump. That’s not counting all the stuff we had stored down there being a complete loss as well.

  We still haven’t been able to replace the furnace (we still have heat from space heaters, so we didn’t freeze), and only managed to replace the water heater in January, 2018.

  So why bring all this up?

  Because you, dear reader, is evidence that finishing this book was worth all the struggles I had to go through in order to complete it, all the costs involved in the creation of it.

  The fact that you enjoyed it enough to keep reading the afterward tells me it was worth it, that the dream I had was good enough that you enjoyed reading it. For that, I’ll be forever in your debt.

  As I mentioned, I wrote the first draft for books one through three before I started working on doing revisions. In other words, I’m already doing revisions on book two before I even released this book. The intention is to try and release book two within six weeks of releasing this book. I have the same plan for book three. So if everything goes as planned, the first three books in the series should be out no later than the end of June, with the hope being I’ll have them out by the ends of April and May.

  Where the series goes from there depends entirely upon you, my readers. If you show me you like the series and want me to continue, then leave a review. That’s the main way to show your love for the book since Amazon rewards books that have lots of reviews by promoting them more. The more reviews, the more they promote. The more Amazon promotes, the more sales. More sales, the higher the rank. And finally, the higher the rank, the more reviews and sales, starting the cycle all over again.

  If you, my readers, show enough interest in the series, then I’ll be more than happy to focus on it, pushing out more books a year at an accelerated pace. As a FYI, I already have a basic outline for books four and five. I also have a good idea where the series is going from books six onward. So no worries about running out of ideas.

  On the other hand, I have a lot of other plans for series in the works, so if I don’t see strong interest in this series, while I won’t abandon it since I love the characters and storyline I have developed, financially speaking, I’ll have to move on to other series. Meaning, I might only get to release one book a year or so for this series.

  But honestly speaking, I’d like to stick with this one for the foreseeable future. I’m as excited to see where it goes as you are. When I said I have the next two books outlined, what you need to understand is I do a mix of both plotting and winging it by the seat of my pants. I normally plot out the first third of the book and have a strong idea of what the ending will entail, but for a majority of the book, I just write what comes to me, so I’m just as surprised by developments as you are.

  So help me out here by letting me know you like the series and want me to continue by leaving a review. If you want to stay up to date on developments, then visit the Nibiru Rising Facebook page at:

  https://www.facebook.com/NibiruRisingSeries/

  If you want to find out more of what I’m doing as a writer, or you just want to say hi, then you can catch up with me on Facebook at:

  https://www.facebook.com/ChadKunego/

  And finally, if you want to visit me on the web and sign up for my newsletter, where you’ll get advanced updates on what I’m doing (I promise not to flood your inbox with junk), chances to be a be
ta reader, and other assorted cool stuff, you can find me on the web at:

  www.ChadKunego.com

  I hope to see you there. I’m also always looking for chance to chat with my readers. While I might not respond to an email too quickly, I do check my inbox at least once a day and I will respond to you, just give me a day or so. And as always, thank you for joining me on Rick, Kaitlyn, and the rest of the gangs journey. Have a wonder day and I hope to hear from you soon.

  With more gratitude than I can ever say,

  Chad

  If you liked this book, you can leave a review on amazon @: Hopefully by the time you see this, you won’t see it because I’ll have the link available :)