I’m a lone wolf.
Yet the aura of the moon that protrudes through the cloud of smoke doesn’t bring me any comfort. Nothing does. The Syndicate has my location. In hours, there will be an entire squadron of United States military forces ready to fight me again. But next time I won’t be able to make it out alive.
The artificial intelligence will have grown much more adept at countering my attacks by then, and the military itself will come equipped with more drones, more men, and more firepower. In a war with me versus a nearly one-trillion-dollar fighting machine, I will end up dead.
The Chimera Cube can only do so much. This magical white box can only give one so much power. And that thought is scary. The thought that all the explosions that enveloped the sky only moments ago and the thousands of rounds of gunfire that the detector drones intercepted are only the beginning is a thought that makes me want to give up and succumb to the hypothermia.
But I know I can’t do that.
Ending it like that would be a failure. It would mean that they win. And I can’t lose—not this time. Because losing means ending everything. Losing means keeping the legacy of my father buried underneath the rubble in Zion and surrendering the balance of power in the modern world to the whims of the Syndicate.
I have to keep fighting.
I must go to war until the Syndicate is finished, Ai is saved, and everyone who has ever supported the subversion of this technology is five feet under.
And that mission starts with sleep. A deep, restful sleep that can give my body some much-needed rest and allow my mind to regroup and think about my next plan of attack.
That’s why when I command the Chimera Cube to produce warm towels and a shot of the internal-wound-repair liquid, I am not looking to camp out in the middle of the lake till my days meet their end. All I want is to give myself one last burst of energy so that I can fly as far away as possible from where I am and find a temporary resting spot.
So that’s exactly what I do. I rip off the bullet-proof suit and strip down out of all my clothes. The chilly, thin air causes my balls to shrivel and my entire body to shake in the process. Then I douse the warm towels over my face and chest, their hot fabric immediately raising my internal temperature.
In the moment that the hot fabric alleviates my incessant shivering, all my worries about the Syndicate, the future, and my own life melt away. I feel normal. Safe even with the firm raft beneath my feet and the lack of any chaos around me.
Part of me wishes that the sensation could last forever. That the feeling of being alone and being hopeless could be forever dulled by the medicine of a warm, soothing heat that numbs me to everything. But as the fires burning through the dozens of pieces of wreckage start to fade, I know I have to make my move.
They will be back.
And every second wasted is one more second they have to kill me.
At my wish, the Chimera Cube produces me a new pair of clothes. This time I wear a bullet-proof body suit but keep the space around my head free so that I can breathe freely during my search for sanctuary. Then I command the cube to produce a hoverboard, my stomach already turning as I imagine flying through the dark clouds of smoke on top of it.
Although there is a bit of a thrill in riding through the night on top of a flying gadget, I know that I will be a sitting duck for the United States military to find me. It doesn’t matter whether I’m in a jet or if I stay on the raft.
They know exactly where I am.
And that thought scares me.
It causes me to shiver long after the icy feeling leaves my veins and brings me enough anxiety to have my arms shake as I strap my feet into the hoverboard. In just a few moments I am shooting upward into the sky, the smoke and particulates of debris scattered in the air invading my lungs.
I cough, a sharp pain digging into my forehead, but this agony is nothing compared to what I just went through. Without blood spewing out of my body in several dozen locations and thousands of projectiles being shot at me every minute, my mind finally has time to breathe.
And by breathe, I mean that without death trying to barge down my door, all the emotions that I haven’t let myself feel flood my system. The feeling that grips my consciousness is crippling. As I continue to skyrocket upward through the miles of smoke, I can’t help but let tears form in my eyes.
I tell myself that I’m only crying because the smoke is burning my eyeballs, but in reality, the tears that stream down my face are ones of sadness. The strength inside me to stay angry at Jake and livid at the Syndicate is long gone.
All I feel is despair.
Less than five minutes after blasting off from the surface of the lake, my head pokes out from the thick of the smoke, the fresh air comforting to my burning lungs. From up above the mass of darkness, the aftermath of the destruction looks like a volcanic eruption, the plume of ash and smoke towering miles into the sky. Miles beneath the smoke, dozens of bodies and thousands of tons of metal are littered across the once serene mountainsides and lakes.
Yet there is a beauty to the dark nature of the place that enchants me. The moon lights up the dark sky, the light from the stars and reflection of the sun causing my bullet-proof suit to glow. In all directions, hundreds of mountain peaks pierce through the layer of smoke blanketing the land, some with snow-laden peaks and others with short, skinny evergreen trees at their tops. Despite it being summer, the air in this region has a distinct chilling quality that makes my spine tingle as I lean forward, directing the hoverboard to fly over the mountain range.
I have no idea where I am going.
I could be traveling into the heart of North Korea. I could be flying back towards Beijing where the aftermath of the nuclear bomb still lays waste, or I could be flying into Russia. Of course, I could find the answer quite easily by commanding the cube to produce a pair of hologlasses, but my body is disinterested in engaging in any action besides mindlessly flying forward.
I am becoming the same beast that the very landscape beneath me is. A rock-like structure that takes hits and keeps on persisting no matter what happens. Nothing more than a machine, programmed to kill and latch on to this cube like it’s my life blood.
But when I stare down at the destruction beneath me, I am reminded of the truth. This landscape will be permanently scarred after today. The water will be full of toxins and heavy metals, any animals that drink from it on a fast track to cancer, brain damage, and an early death. The trees and plants that line the mountainsides are all but destroyed near the epicenter of the fighting. The ones that haven’t been crushed in the explosions or burned in the fires are surrounded in tons of wreckage.
It will take millions of years for this landscape to fully repair the damage done today, and even when that happens, the bodies and metal will still be decaying on the bottom of the lake. I am no different.
The Chimera Cube can fix me up and make the machines that form my body perform at their maximum capabilities within seconds. But it can’t heal my mind.
It can’t heal the deep wound that has slashed through my heart. My one blood brother, my one true friend, is gone. And it hurts almost more to know that he betrayed me than if he had died. The thought is almost impossible for me to fathom, and even though it happened quite a while ago, for the first time, the adrenaline isn’t pumping through my system at a million miles per hour.
For the first time, I am feeling the sadness over what happened, and I’m not sure it will ever leave me. I have nothing left. This cube is all I have.
And they are going to take it away from me.
This war will never end.
Chapter 14
A faint buzzing noise wakes me.
At least, I think it’s a faint buzzing noise, but after a few moments it becomes clear that the sound akin to hundreds of bees furiously zipping about in a hive is actually hundreds of people yelling and screaming.
No. C’mon. I shoot up in bed and glance at the bare wooden walls of the log cabin I am in. E
verything appears to be normal. In fact, everything is left the exact same way it was when I went to bed in the first place.
After a few hours of flying above the mountain range, I finally saw the dim lights of a rural village nestled in a valley. The village is covered in tall pine trees with a small stream running through the center of it. When I landed in the center of the village with narrow, gravel pathways leading throughout the small cornucopia of log homes, I felt like I had entered some fantasy world.
Torches are on the sides of the street with large plumes of fire exuding out of them, and each home has their windows painted in beautiful splashes of color that include shades of red, purple, orange, and green. At the center of the town is a large statue made of silver that has a woman depicted holding her arms out wide, staring at the edge of a mountaintop several thousand feet above her.
Instantly upon arriving here, I felt safe—like this would be the perfect spot for me to rest up for the night and plan for tomorrow. So that’s exactly what I did. I knocked on one of the doors with a heap of diamonds in my hands and asked the people if I could spend the night. They didn’t speak any English, but after using our translators, I found out they all live in Russia and work at a silver mine nearby.
This town has been here for hundreds of years, a place that travelers frequently barter with the people and rest before they have to make a fifty-mile trek through a steep mountain range full of deadly cliffs and bears and mountain lions looking to eat the flesh of anyone in their sight. The people that I choose to spend the night with seem nice enough, and they even give me my own bed in a guest bedroom of their house, saying that they frequently use it to host travelers like me. Of course, I don’t tell them that I am the world’s most wanted man and that just me being in their house could result in all of them ending up dead. Instead, I tell them I am a pilgrim seeking to go on a spiritual journey throughout the mountains.
They seem to buy it for the time being.
And that gives me enough time to plan out the next steps in my plan to retrieve Ai and destroy the Syndicate. Trying to take out a secret organization even with the power of the Chimera Cube is nearly impossible. But after a few hours of analyzing a few ideas, I think I have the perfect plan. I will recruit people from all over China to join me in storming what is left of Beijing, and from the ashes I will rebuild that city overnight to be a massive metropolis.
With control of China, I can then move to try to battle the United States, and after that destroy the Syndicate for good. The plan seems great, albeit a bit hard to pull off on the surface. But as I spring up on the bed and the reality of my morning hits me, I realize that my plan won’t ever come true.
They are here for me.
But it’s not the group of people that is normally after me. When I pull the sheets off me and stare outside of the small window in the corner of the room, I am shocked at what I find. Hundreds of people are outside the house, and with every second more join the fray. They are all screaming and chanting, doing everything they can to try and claw their way into the house, but to no avail.
Out of precaution, I commanded the Chimera Cube to form a force field around the house just in case the Syndicate decided to sneak up on me while I was sleeping. I certainly don’t regret making that decision, but I never expected that I’d wake up to this.
People are speaking a range of different tongues, some yelling in Korean, some Mandarin, and others speak in Russian. And although I am fluent in neither of those languages, from their body language alone I can tell that they aren’t friendly.
They have come to kill me.
“What’s going on?” The head of the household, an old man with a curly mustache and bushy eyebrows, bursts into my room with the translating device in his hand. He looks just as confused as I am, but unlike me, he has no clue about what could be happening.
The people in this house are one of the last families that has refused to connect to the Internet, their knowledge of everything that happened with the Chimera Conspiracy and the madness in China all picked up by rumors floating throughout their village.
But they know the name Samuel Bennet. And it only takes a few seconds of the crowd angrily chanting it for everyone in this home to realize that I am Samuel Bennet. I am the most wanted man in the world.
“I’m not sure, I just woke up,” I say, being careful to keep my head away from the window so that the crowd isn’t driven into even more of a frenzy when they see me. Every few seconds there is at least one person who thinks they are strong enough to break through the force field. Upon their attempts they smash into the electric exterior, their bodies fly off it and knock over dozens of people like a bowling ball.
I have to hold back a chuckle at seeing the madness of the people trying to break through the force field but continuously failing. The head of the household, whose name is Victor, does not find it funny. He shoots me a cold glare in return to my words, not buying a bit of what I’m saying.
“You have five seconds to explain yourself, or I’ll make sure the only thing that leaves this house is your dead body.” Victor grits his teeth and pulls a knife out of his pocket. For a laid-back dude with long, curly hair and a short, plump body, he sure doesn’t play around. Behind him, the rest of his family looks on from behind the door frame, his three young daughters all hiding behind the legs of their mother, who is taller than Victor and looks even more intimidating.
“Okay.” I hold up my hands, not wanting to have to kill these people. I try and think of a believable enough lie that will help me get out of this, but it’s not even worth wasting the mental energy on trying to figure out an explanation for this madness.
I have no clue what is happening. All I know is that by the second the crowd grows larger and their screams increase in volume. Some have weapons raised, ready to tear down the log cabin, while others are raiding the surrounding homes to see if I’m in there. This village was a fantasy land only hours ago.
Now it’s in the middle of a war zone.
And suddenly everything clicks. I reach for my backpack, unzipping it after placing my finger on the scanner.
“What are you doing?” He rears the knife behind his head, readying to stab me in the heart with it.
“Leaving,” I say, holding up the translating device to my mouth as I pull my hologlasses out of the bag and strap the bag around my shoulders. “You guys don’t deserve to be caught in the middle of this. I should have never come here in the first place.”
“What are you talking about?” He lowers the knife. His fear that I sent all these people here fades away as he looks at the rays of morning sun shining down brightly on the crowd.
“I’m not a traveler.” I sigh, glancing at the beige carpet that lines the floor. “I’m not passing through this town as a stop on my spiritual journey. I have people that are after me, powerful people, and I don’t know what to do.”
“Why would anyone be after you?” he questions, more suspicion in his tone than alarm. It is probably not the first time a shady figure has passed through this town. But I’m not shady. I’m a bomb waiting to explode on anyone and everything around me.
“This is why.” I put my hologlasses over my eyes and quickly swipe to access the world news feed automatically embedded into each device. At the top of the feed is the number-one news story for the day. I motion outward with my arm to project a holograph of the article in the middle of the room. It has already had hundreds of millions of impressions, with a picture of my face and the Chimera Cube being shared millions of times on social media.
My hunch was confirmed.
The Syndicate shared my location with the world. They shared with the world how anyone who finds me and can take this cube from my hands will be the richest person in history. They left an open invitation for everyone to kill me. I don’t just have the military after me or even the Syndicate.
I will soon have billions of people who all want me dead.
There’s nowhere I can go where I wil
l be safe.
There’s nowhere to hide.
The first sentence of the article is a link to the tracking application the Syndicate embedded into my bloodstream, making my real-time location easily accessible to anyone with a device that can connect to the Internet. They used the ultimate weapon to combat me.
They shared with the world the weapon in my hands. That I have a secret technology that will make its owners the most powerful people on Earth. And that alone is enough of a hook to send the entire world into a massive scavenger hunt for me. It’s why hundreds of people have shown up outside of this house in a span of minutes, and within hours military forces from all over the world and thousands more people in the region will be surrounding this house.
“Get out of this house!” Victor erupts, raising the serrated edge of the knife once again. He barely needs to skim the article to know the danger that I pose to him and his family.
“Okay.” I throw my hologlasses back into the backpack and slip on the new pair of sneakers that I commanded the cube to produce for me.
“Now!” he yells, his body ready to lunge forward and stab me, yet he is hesitant to do so. He has no clue what I’m capable of. He has no clue that I can destroy this entire village in a matter of seconds.
I obey his command, not wanting to make this man any angrier than he already is, and keep my head down as I walk out the front door. Everyone in the house hastily backs up as I walk through the main living area, one of the young girls, no older than seven, crying at the sight of me.
These people must think I’m a monster.
Everyone does.
This entire world hates me.
And when I step outside and the full force of their screams hit me, I can’t help but feel as if this is the end. At least a dozen people are shocked by the exterior of the force field as I walk onto the gravel pathway in front of the home. The mass of people has swarmed the entire village, turning the place upside down in pursuit of the cube.
When they finally get to see me in the flesh, the madness reaches a new intensity. People start throwing knives, rocks, and all sorts of other materials at me. Well, they try to throw them at me, but instead they all end up ricocheting off the exterior of the force field and hitting people in the crowd.
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