“Yeah.” Lance said. “I mean, we weren’t exactly—” He cleared his throat. “But you always backed my weird ideas when everyone else thought I was crazy.”
“Because they worked. Always did.”
Under the table, Lance’s fingers drummed against his thigh. “Are you... done dealing with—”
“Pretty much. Can’t even go back to the office. Just... everything’s still there. Emily’s stupid succulent probably dried up by now.”
“Yeah.”
“They locked the doors so fast we didn’t even—” Alex stopped, jaw tight. “Still see them at their desks sometimes. Muscle memory, you know?”
“I’m sorry.”
Lance stared at the sticky menu, his eyes glazing over the familiar options. The diner’s ambient chatter washed over him, a comforting white noise that failed to drown out the chaos in his mind.
“We should order,” Alex said flatly.
Blinking.
Lance looked up at his friend, noting the dark circles under Alex’s eyes and the slight tremor in his hands as he clutched his coffee mug.
“Sorry, just... distracted.”
“Makes two of us.” Alex said. “Can’t remember the last time I slept.”
The waitress approached, her pen poised expectantly. Lance ordered without thinking, his usual breakfast a reflex at this point. As she walked away, he turned back to Alex.
“How are you holding up?” Lance asked, though he already knew the answer.
Alex’s shoulders sagged. “I’m… I’m barely keeping it together. Every time I close my eyes, I see...” He trailed off, his gaze distant.
Lance nodded, understanding all too well. The weight of recent events pressed down on both of them, an invisible burden they couldn’t shake. He debated whether to share his own struggles, to let Alex know he wasn’t alone in his suffering.
“I get it,” he said finally. “I haven’t exactly been a poster child for mental health lately either.”
Alex’s eyebrows shot up. “You? Mr. Perfect-and-in-control? Never thought I’d hear you admit to struggling with anything.”
Lance let out a bitter laugh. “Appearances can be deceiving. Just because I look like I have it together doesn’t mean I’m not...” He paused, searching for the right words. “...falling apart inside.”
The admission hung between them, heavy and raw. Alex leaned forward, his expression somewhere between concern and relief. “What’s going on, man?”
Lance’s fork scraped against the ceramic plate with a screech that made nearby diners wince as the words rushed out unbidden: “I can’t sleep. Started having nightmares. And I’m afraid they’ll get worse, that this’ll never end.”
Alex listened intently, his own troubles momentarily forgotten. “Jesus, Lance. I had no idea.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve gotten pretty good at putting on a brave face.” He rubbed his temples, feeling the familiar pressure building behind his eyes. “But the truth is, I’m scared shitless most of the time.”
Their food arrived, steaming plates piled high with greasy comfort. Neither man touched their meal, too engrossed in the conversation.
“Have you talked to anyone about this?” Alex asked. “Like, professionally?”
Lance shook his head, absently picking at a napkin. “Tried group therapy for a while. Made it worse.”
And I killed two people because I couldn’t control it, but he didn’t reveal that part to his former boss.
Alex watched the sunny-side-up egg bleed across his plate, yolk seeping into the untouched hash browns. “Yeah. Therapy’s a joke. They act like breathing exercises will fix everything.”
Actually, they do help with arma regulation, the fact stood unspoken. Dr. Patel’s techniques had gotten him through some rough patches. But Alex’s struggles were different. No point bringing it up.
“Yeah.” Lance leaned back, gaze fixed on a water stain above their booth.
The ceiling fan clicked with the same steady rhythm as the one that had hung above Lance’s cubicle at Qualtech, back when debugging payment systems was the scariest thing in his life.
“You know what’s weird?” Alex stared into his coffee. “I can’t delete their email threads.”
Lance played with the drop of condensation sliding down his water glass. God, I haven’t even checked my work email since everything happened.
“I should archive them at least. But each time I try...”
“I know.”
“Emily had just finished the API documentation. Dave was halfway through refactoring the payment module. Mike...” Alex’s voice caught. “Mike left a pull request open.”
A police siren wailed past Betty’s. Lance tracked the flashing lights, wondering if another arma-enhanced idiot had snapped.
At least my nightmares have faces I can hate, Lance thought. His are just... empty chairs.
“Found myself reviewing Mike’s code yesterday.” Alex pushed his eggs around. “Left comments and everything. Took me twenty minutes to remember.”
He needs permission to break. To shatter. To rage. The words built inside Lance like static before a storm, crackling behind his teeth until they finally exploded:
Empty desks haunt him—terminals still logged in, tickets left open, coffee cups gathering dust. He waters their plants, saves memes they’ll never see, reads documentation that trails into silence. Their stories settle in his bones. Their absence drowns him.
“Sometimes I open my phone to text Emily about a bug fix.” Alex’s coffee had gone cold. “Just for a second, you know?”
Christ, maybe I’m not as broken as I thought. The napkin in front of Lance was now a small mountain of white confetti.
“The worst part?” Alex’s voice dropped. “Sometimes I think I see new commits from them. Like they’re still...”
Grief. Here. Now.
“I know they’re not real. The commits. But I check anyway.”
Raw. Bleeding. Fresh.
“Every single time.”
The Samsung droned about recovery statistics. Lance thought about his own ghosts—how each one had earned their haunting. His trauma had purpose. Direction. Alex’s loss was an endless git merge with no resolution.
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“Dave used to correct my variable naming.” Alex’s laugh scraped like metal on concrete. “Drove me crazy. Now I...” He stared at something beyond the diner’s walls. “Now I write sloppy code just hoping he’ll...”
The morning sun caught Alex’s face, highlighting shadows that hadn’t been there three weeks ago.
Lance stood, his hand finding Alex’s shoulder. “I know someone. She helped me figure some things out.”
Alex traced a finger through the spilled yolk. “Another therapist?”
“Yeah. At least it’s something. You need to talk to someone.”
“Your group therapist?”
“She is.”
“Thought you said that made it worse.”
Lance’s palm tapped once on Alex’s shoulder.
The touch transmitted the raw grief radiating from his friend like heat waves, and Neural Dominion pulsed through his system like an unwanted reflex. One gentle push with Emotional Resonance could ease that pain, smooth those ragged edges of loss—or at least that’s what he imagined it would do.
He only had a fraction of the monster’s power, a bargain-bin version of the original ability, but even that seemed too dangerous. The tiny muscles in his palm contracted, power building—then he yanked his hand away as if burned, and said “Different situation. Might work for you.”
He’d be no better than Rick, violating someone’s mind, no matter how good the intention.
“I’ll think about it.” Alex pulled out his wallet.
Lance reached for his own. “I got this.”
“No way. Got paid an extra week after shutdown. Besides, I still owe you from the Node.js debacle.”
True enough, he conceded silently, but this feels wrong.
“Fine.” Lance slipped his wallet back. “But I’m talking to her tomorrow. Getting you synced up.”
That conversation had haunted him for the rest of the day. Unable to sit still with his thoughts, he’d spent the afternoon experimenting with Energy Cycling, letting his power flow through his muscles like a circuit board stress test. The idea had come to him while watching Alex destroy his hash browns—if grief cycled endlessly in someone’s mind, maybe arma could do the same within tissue.
He’d started small, routing his energy in careful patterns, then gradually increased the complexity until his legs hummed with contained power. By sunset, he’d managed to create a feedback loop using Morphoplasm as insulation, like Diego’s compressed nerve but controlled—then tomorrow executed before Lance could debug his thoughts.
This morning’s session had proven the theory. His jumps had gained height and stability, though his landing still needed work. His stats had also been climbing steadily across the board since incorporating this new technique. Six hours of daily practice was finally paying off as he pushed his abilities to their limits.
These brutal training sessions filled the void left by his old life, gave him purpose beyond endless NARS statistics and dodging BioNova’s increasingly aggressive voicemails. Besides, developing his abilities felt more productive than watching the world reshape itself on his phone screen. Instead, he preferred to watch his own world reshape through his system display:
Name: Lance Lawthorn (1st Evolution)
Energy Alignment: Nullifier
Evolution Progress:
└─First Evolution Achieved
└──Body primed for advanced energy regulation
└─Second Evolution Progress:
└──Stage 2: Neural-muscular synchronization achieved
└──Evolution threshold: 65%
Power: 5.0 (+1.3)
Energy: 5.0 (+1.4)
Speed: 5.0 (+2.1)
Defense: 5.0 (+1.2)
Mind: 5.0 (+2.0)
Control: 5.0 (+1.1)
Energy Framework
Core Power
└─[Appropriation (Alpha II)]
- Modes
└─[Redistribution]
└─[Dark Resonance]
└─[Neural Purge]
- Essence Powers
└─[Adaptive Limbs (Alpha I)]
└──[Mode: Saltatorial (50%)]
└───[Submode: Aerial Mastery]
└─[Morphoplasm (Alpha I)]
└──[Mode: Solidify (29%)]
└─[Neural Dominion (Alpha I)]
└──[Mode: Emotional Resonance (1%)]
Energy Mastery
└─[Pain Nullification (Emergent)]
└─[Energy Classification (Emergent)]
└─[Energy Cycling (Emergent)]
Enhancements
└─Power: Tier 2
└─Energy: Tier 2
└─Speed: Tier 3
└─Defense: Tier 2
└─Mind: Tier 3
└─Control: Tier 2
Lance studied the system interface hovering in his vision, still marveling at how natural it felt to process the information streaming before him. Just weeks ago, these messages would have looked like an especially convoluted programming language—all nested functions and hierarchical structures that would have taken him hours to debug. Now, with his Mind enhancement pushing well past what Dr. Patel had called “peak human performance,” he parsed the data streams instinctively.
Three abilities stolen. Each one transforming him in ways he still struggled to understand. Saltatorial from Diego, letting him leap buildings like some twisted parkour enthusiast. Morphoplasm from Tar, giving him control over that strange black substance that still made his skin crawl. And Neural Dominion... his brain skittered past that particular ability, still unable to reconcile how he’d ripped the ability from Rick’s dying mind.
His enhancement numbers made him pause. Every stat now exceeded what should have been humanly possible—a fact that would have fascinated him if he weren’t so disturbed by it. His Speed enhancement had grown the most, pushing +2.1 thanks to countless hours spent bouncing around the city like a human pinball. Mind wasn’t far behind at +2.0, though that particular enhancement felt more like a curse than a blessing. What good was enhanced cognitive processing when he couldn’t figure out how to help a friend process his grief?
He almost laughed at the irony—all these precisely measured attributes, yet nowhere in the system readout was there a stat for emotional intelligence. No metric for empathy or understanding. His evolution progress showed “neural-muscular synchronization achieved,” but he felt increasingly out of sync with his own humanity. Maybe that’s what the system meant by “Body primed for advanced energy regulation.” Learning to regulate everything except the emotions that really mattered.
The mid-morning sun traced his stats in golden light until he closed the system display while settling onto a frost-covered bench beside the pond where he watched his breath form clouds above the ducks waddling across patches of ice near the shore.
The crunch of boots on frozen grass announced Elena’s arrival. She settled beside him, pulling her coat tighter.
“How is she?” Lance asked.
“As well as can be expected. The nightmares are getting less frequent.”
“Define less frequent.”
“Three times a night instead of hourly.”
A muscle jumped in his jaw. “And during the day?”
“I’m working with her. She’s processing the trauma. Sometimes she’ll be fine for hours, then something triggers a memory...”
“Of what he made her do,” Lance finished.
“She told me about the gym incident.”
“That wasn’t her fault.”
“No. It wasn’t yours either.”
Neither spoke for several heartbeats. The silence was only broken by the occasional quack from the pond.
“The Enhanced Development Agency won’t stop calling.”
Lance’s fingers curled against his thighs. “So that’s who you’ve been meeting with.”
“Agent Garvin is... persistent. She showed up at my office yesterday.”
“You can’t give them our files.”
“They’re saying withholding information about enhanced individuals is aiding domestic terrorism.”
“That’s bullshit and you know it.”
“They’re threatening to revoke my license, Lance. To press charges. They want as many arma users identified and registered before the new military branch launches.”
“What new military—” he stopped himself. “Never mind. I don’t want to know. Just don’t give them the files.”
“The Emergent Threats Act supersedes—”
“I don’t care what act they’re hiding behind. Those people trusted you. We trusted you.”
Elena’s hands trembled slightly as she adjusted her scarf. “What would you have me do?”
“The same thing you’ve always done. Protect your patients.”
“Even if it means losing everything I’ve worked for?”
“Especially then.”
A duck took flight, wings beating against the cold air.
“How’s the new medication working for Vicky?”
“Better. The dissociative episodes are less intense.”
Lance gave a measured nod. “Good. That’s... good.”
“I can’t keep ignoring them forever.”
“Yes, you can. Focus on helping Vicky heal. That’s what matters right now.”
“And what about you? You seem almost as lost as she is.”
“I’m fine.”
“The bags under your eyes tell a different story.”
“Really? We’re doing this now?”
“You refuse every time I offer to help.”
“Because I don’t need help.”
Her mouth tightened at the corners. “Well, since you clearly don’t want my professional opinion, why did you really ask me here? It wasn’t just to check on Vicky.”
“No. I need your help with someone else.”
“Another enhanced individual?”
“No. Just... someone who’s lost too much.”