Derek didn't recognize the feeling at first.
That was what unsettled him most.
It crept in quietly, without guilt or panic, without the internal alarms he had trained himself to trust. It arrived in fragments—sensations rather than thoughts. A tightening in his chest when he closed his eyes. The faint echo of pressure in his palms. The remembered resistance of bone and muscle beneath decisive force.
He had killed before the country club. He had understood death intellectually, statistically, impersonally. But this was different.
This had been intimate.
Every night since the gala, his dreams replayed the moment with merciless clarity. The ambient noise collapsing into silence. The instant when choice became action. The way his heartbeat surged, not with fear, but with focus. Dopamine and adrenaline flooding his system in a way that made the world feel sharp—edges defined, distractions stripped away.
He woke each time with his jaw clenched and his pulse racing.
And beneath it all, buried under layers of discipline and denial, was a truth he could no longer avoid.
He had enjoyed it.
The realization didn't horrify him.
That was worse.
Derek understood enough about himself to know this was not rational. It didn't fit the careful architecture of his life, the controlled escalation of power, the avoidance of unnecessary exposure. Acting on this impulse carried risks—legal, reputational, existential.
Yet the thought persisted.
He needed to feel it again.
Project Wraith had never been intended for this.
On paper, it was defensive. A proof of concept. A technological exercise. A contingency. Its existence was compartmentalized even within his own operations—no engineers, no manufacturing hubs, no paper trail beyond materials acquisitions obscured through assumed identities.
It was a secret that reminded him who he was capable of being.
And now it was calling to him.
He moved methodically, almost ritualistically.
The powered Wraith suit was packed into the trunk of his car beneath mundane items—gym bags, spare clothing, innocuous clutter. He drove through the city without haste, obeying traffic laws, blending into the endless flow of Los Angeles nightlife.
The first warehouse was empty, silent except for the echo of his footsteps. He switched vehicles.
The second warehouse smelled faintly of oil and dust. Another switch.
By the time he reached the third location, the city felt distant, unreal. Here, he shed the final layers of his civilian identity.
The suit unfolded around him like a second skin.
Dark, matte black, designed to swallow light rather than reflect it. The material looked almost organic, layered graphene woven with something denser beneath—something that felt wrong to touch, as if it resisted categorization. Subtle red indicators pulsed to life along the seams, faint as embers beneath ash.
The helmet sealed with a soft mechanical whisper.
The world transformed.
Thermal vision bloomed into existence, heat signatures painting reality in gradients of intent. Structural overlays highlighted stress points, pathways, obstructions. The Beowulf battery hummed—a quiet, reassuring presence—feeding power into systems that responded instantly to his thoughts.
He threw on a black trench coat, obscuring the suit's outline, mounted the sports bike, and rode out into the night.
His destination had been chosen with cold precision.
The Seventh Sons.
A name that appeared in reports, watchlists, classified briefings. Domestic terrorists cloaked in pseudo-patriotism and hate. White supremacists and secessionists whose crimes had stacked up for nearly a decade—kidnappings, assaults, disappearances quietly filed away under "ongoing investigations."
Derek knew the question already circulating in certain circles.
Why hadn't the government acted?
He arrived at 10:30 p.m. on the dot.
The compound squatted in the darkness like a wound in the landscape—fences, watchtowers, floodlights cutting through the night. At least fifty heat signatures moved within. Armed. Alert.
He also saw something else.
A cluster of colder shapes beyond the perimeter. Hidden. Watching.
Federal surveillance.
They saw him too. He felt it—not through sensors, but through instinct. Eyes tracking an anomaly that didn't belong in their operational parameters.
He didn't care.
Derek dismounted, removed the trench coat, and stepped forward.
He deliberately tripped the motion sensor.
Alarms screamed to life.
Floodlights snapped toward him. Shouts erupted. Boots thundered. Weapons were raised.
He stood still.
Unarmed.
For a heartbeat, confusion rippled through the compound.
Then someone laughed.
The first shots cracked the night open.
Bullets struck the Wraith suit and died.
The sound was wrong—not the sharp impact of penetration, but a dull, absorbed thud, like rain hitting stone. Rounds flattened, fragmented, deflected. The suit dispersed the force in ways that defied intuition.
Derek walked forward.
The psychological impact was immediate and devastating.
Men who had spent years believing in the authority of their weapons watched them fail. Assault rifles emptied into a figure that did not slow. Snipers fired from elevated positions, their rounds vanishing into darkness without effect. A machine gun roared—and achieved nothing.
Panic spread faster than gunfire.
Derek moved among them like an inevitability.
The powered suit amplified his strength fivefold, but more importantly, it refined it. Every movement was precise, economical. He didn't strike to kill. He struck to end resistance—to break confidence, to shatter the illusion of control.
He disarmed attackers with effortless violence, tearing weapons from hands, crushing them into useless metal. He sent men sprawling with blows that knocked the breath from their lungs and the certainty from their minds. Bones fractured. Joints failed. Bodies collapsed.
The suit absorbed everything they gave it.
To them, he became something else entirely.
A myth.
A consequence.
Their screams shifted from rage to terror. Orders dissolved into incoherent shouting. Some tried to flee. Others froze, staring as their world logic collapsed around them.
Derek felt it again.
The surge.
The clarity.
The intoxicating calm that followed absolute dominance.
For the first time since the gala, the noise in his head stopped.
He moved through the compound until no one remained standing. Men lay groaning, unconscious, broken—but alive. He left them within inches of their lives, not out of mercy, but intent.
He wanted them to remember.
When it was over, Derek stood amid the wreckage, chest rising slowly, the suit humming softly around him.
From the shadows beyond the perimeter, unseen eyes watched in stunned silence.
They would have questions.
They would have reports.
They would have footage that no one would know how to classify.
Derek turned away before they could act.
He mounted the bike and disappeared into the night.
As the distance grew between him and the compound, one thought settled into place with terrifying certainty.
This wasn't an aberration.
This wasn't a lapse.
It was the beginning of something he had been carefully avoiding acknowledging.
And now that he had crossed the line—
He wasn't sure he wanted to go back.