"Got you!"
At the last possible second, Oliver lunged across the deck, his large hand clamping onto Thomas's forearm like a vice. He yanked him forward, hauling him over the edge of the railing and onto the floor of the vehicle.
Thomas didn't think; he simply reacted. He felt a peculiar, electric sensation through his limbs—a surge of raw, unrefined strength that allowed him to scramble up and throw himself into the front seat.
"Huff... huff... that was far too close!" Oliver gasped, collapsing into the driver's seat beside him, his chest heaving.
"What the heck happened? You nearly became the shortest-lived superhero in history! Oh, wait... don't tell me... was it a Qi manifestation already?!"
Oliver sat there, panting, eyes wide with a mix of fear and wonder. He looked as if he expected Thomas to start glowing or floating.
Thomas, however, was in a state of profound shock that had nothing to do with magic. His heart was hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird—a physical sensation so intense it was almost painful. His mind was racing to catch up with a concept he had only read about in textbooks.
So... this is what the survival instinct feels like? For the first time in his entire existence, he had experienced the primal urge to live.
It wasn't a choice; it was a roar from the very depths of his new, youthful body. He felt as if he were ready to do anything—fight anyone, pay any price—just to keep breathing.
The "nothingness" he had carried for decades had been burned away in that one moment of falling.
He barely heard Oliver's frantic questions.
"It must have been the Qi manifestation that startled you," Oliver said, regaining his composure and leaning in to inspect Thomas's skin. He looked as if he were searching for a physical mark or a glowing aura. "Though... you look totally normal to me now. Just a bit pale."
"I just got scared," Thomas lied, his voice sounding higher and more resonant than it should. He didn't know what a 'Qi manifestation' was, but the term intrigued his detective's mind. "I didn't realise... how high up we were."
He looked at his hands—his young, strong, unscarred hands. He wasn't just in a new world; he was in a new body. And for a man who was supposed to die by morning, that was the most dangerous superpower of all.
Qi. The word echoed in Thomas's mind like a distant bell. It was a concept he was intimately familiar with back on Earth—or rather, the Earth he remembered.
In his desperate, years-long quest to "fix" his broken mind, he had trekked through the mist-shrouded mountains of the East, visiting monasteries and hidden dojos where the presence of Qi was treated as an absolute law of nature.
He had trained under masters who spoke of internal energy with the same reverence a physicist spoke of gravity. He had even mastered one of their most ancient techniques, though back then, it had felt like little more than a sophisticated form of breath control and mental focus.
"Oh, you gave me a real fright for a second there," Oliver sighed, his chest heaving as he slumped back into the driver's seat.
He wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead and offered a shaky thumbs-up. "But like the old saying goes: having a Qi manifestation before the formal test is a curse, but having it right after is a legendary blessing."
"Indeed," Thomas replied, his voice sounding hollow. He had no idea what a 'formal test' entailed, or why the timing of this 'manifestation' was so critical, but he knew how to play a role.
As a detective, he had spent years undercover, blending into environments where he didn't belong. Playing along with Oliver was simply a matter of survival.
"Don't you worry, son. You just pray to the heavens that you'll be blessed with plenty of scars and wounds after the formal test is done," Oliver continued, his eyes sparkling with a localized madness. "And who knows? Our first superhero may end up being a real big shot in the capital one day! Hahahaha!"
Thomas stared at him in a long, uncomfortable silence. He was now reasonably certain that Oliver had more than a few loose screws in his head.
In what logical world was the accumulation of scars and wounds a thing to be prayed for? It defied every instinct of self-preservation Thomas had just discovered.
"He's a complete weirdo," Thomas noted privately, his detective's mind filing Oliver away under 'Unreliable Source.' "Actually, everyone here is. It's a collective psychosis. A masterpiece of a dream world."
He turned his attention to the cabin they were sitting in. The deck was a rugged, rectangular space featuring four seats in the front row. He glanced over his shoulder and saw seven more rows stretching back, each with the same utilitarian seating.
It felt like a rudimentary, primitive version of a minibus—a vehicle designed by someone who had heard a description of a bus but had never actually seen one.
In front of Oliver was a steering wheel of gargantuan proportions. It was a massive ring of iron and wood that required both of the man's large hands to manipulate.
It was easily larger than the steering wheels of the heaviest industrial trucks Thomas had seen on Wall Street.
But it was the dashboard that truly baffled him. There were no gear shifts, no pedals that he could see, and no traditional ignition.
Instead, a chaotic array of copper switches, ivory buttons, and brass meters cluttered the console. Oliver was a blur of motion, his hands dancing across the controls with the practised ease of a veteran pilot.
He flipped switches, pressed sequences of buttons, and occasionally leaned forward to rap his knuckles against a stuck meter to jar the needle back into place.
The complexity of the startup sequence changed Thomas's perspective of the "ugly behemoth." Driving Becky wasn't like driving a bus; it was like cold-starting an antique fighter plane.