DR. KWAME
The world slowed to a crawl. Vance's Absolute Luminance hit the parking lot like a tidal wave of liquid diamond. To any normal person, the air would have felt like solid lead, freezing their muscles and shattering their will.
But Adam and Eve weren't normal. They were walking contradictions.
"Now!" I roared, my Golden Impulse flaring just enough to create a small pocket of heat around the sedan. "The internal switch! Give him the energy he wasn't born with!"
In the center of the blinding white light, two figures began to glow with a terrifying, sickly radiance.
Vance, still gliding on his light-bridge, frowned behind his visor. His sensors were screaming. "What is this? Their cores... they're inverted!"
He was right. Under my guidance, the boys did the one thing no Impulse user had ever survived. They pulled the energy they had been submerged in—the "nurture" energy—and forced it into their "nature" cores.
Adam, the Dark-born, didn't fight the freezing white light with shadows. Instead, he drew upon the Divine Light Impulse he had bathed in for eight months. His eyes, normally abyssal, suddenly flared with a light so pure it made Vance's "cold" light look gray. He stood up in the middle of the "Flash-Freeze" as if the weight of the air meant nothing.
On the other side, Eve, the Light-born, stopped trying to be fast. He pulled the Black Impulse from the deepest marrow of his bones. A shroud of absolute vacuum erupted around him, devouring Vance's white light as if it were nothing but a snack.
"Rampage," I whispered.
Adam moved first. He didn't use a dark-born's strike; he moved with the instantaneous velocity of Light. He appeared in front of Vance's light-bridge in a fraction of a second.
"You said I had the footwork of a toddler," Adam said, his voice ringing with a divine, terrifying resonance.
He didn't punch. He simply touched the edge of Vance's Prismatic Aegis. Instead of the energy refracting, Adam's "Sanctified" Light synced with the shield's frequency and shattered it like cheap glass. The backwash of the explosion sent Vance reeling, his visor flickering as it failed to process a Dark-born using Light so perfectly.
"Impossible!" Vance gasped, leveling his gun.
He fired a flurry of rounds, but before they could reach Adam, a hand made of pure, oily shadow caught the bullets out of the air.
Eve was there, standing on the side of a parked car as if gravity were merely a suggestion. His body was half-shrouded in Black Impulse, but his movements were fluid, graceful—the movements of a Light-born.
"My turn, Pajamas," Eve hissed.
Eve didn't just throw the bullets back. He crushed them in his palm, infusing the lead with Black Impulse, and flicked them. They weren't just projectiles anymore; they were miniature black holes. As they flew past Vance, they tore the white tactical coat from his shoulders and pulled the light-bridge apart from the sheer gravitational force.
Vance plummeted toward the asphalt. He tried to manifest a platform, but the air around him was a chaotic mess of Divine Light and Black Void—a "Hybrid Zone" where his pure Light Impulse couldn't gain a foothold.
He hit the ground hard. Before he could recover, Adam was standing over him, his hand glowing with a golden-white halo. At the same time, Eve landed behind him, his fingers crackling with purple-black lightning.
"You talked about biological ethics," Adam said, his voice calm, yet the pavement beneath Vance began to liquefy from the pressure. "But you forgot the first rule of the laboratory."
Eve leaned in close to Vance's ear, the boy's grin wide and predatory. "Don't poke the things in the jars."
"Enough," I called out from the car. "We're leaving."
"But Father—" Eve started, his eyes glowing with the hunger for a finishing blow.
"I said enough," I repeated, my Golden Impulse humming with an authority that made both boys flinch. "He is a Sentinel. If he dies, the Council sends a legion. If he lives to report that he was beaten by two 'brats,' he'll be too embarrassed to tell them exactly what happened. Efficiency, boys. Not cruelty."
Adam immediately powered down, his eyes returning to their calm, dark state. Eve hesitated, his Black Impulse flickering for a moment longer before he let out a disappointed sigh and dissipated the energy.
Vance lay on the ground, his visor shattered, staring up at them with a mixture of horror and awe. He had come to arrest "subjects," but he was looking at gods.
The boys climbed back into the car. Adam took the driver's seat, his hands steady as if he hadn't just shattered a high-tier shield with a finger. Eve sprawled in the back, checking his reflection in the window.
"Did I get blood on the suit?" Eve asked.
"No," Adam replied, shifting the car into gear. "Just dust."
"Good," Eve muttered. "This silk is hard to clean."
As we drove over the remains of the Glacial Shards, leaving a stunned Sentinel and a ruined valet circle behind, I looked at the two of them in the rearview mirror. They were breathing in sync, their pulses steady. The experiment hadn't just succeeded; it had surpassed my wildest nightmares.
"Jorgen City is compromised," I said, looking at the map. "We go to the coast. We need a place where the air is thick enough to hide your scent."
"Can we stop for burgers first?" Eve asked, already back on his phone. "All that 'rampage' stuff made me hungry."
I looked at the carnage in the side mirror, then back at my son.
"Fine," I sighed. "But stay in the car. I'll go to the drive-thru."