The flash wasn't a hero's light. It was the white-hot glare of a dying star, a blinding burst of radiation that felt like it was stripping the marrow from Leo's bones.
He didn't "turn into" something else. He was rewritten.
Leo's scream caught in his throat, muffled by the sudden, violent expansion of his lungs. He felt his ribcage crack and reset, widening to accommodate a furnace of energy that shouldn't exist in a carbon-based body. His skin didn't just change color; it hardened into jagged plates of charcoal-colored obsidian, a volcanic armor that felt both impossibly heavy and terrifyingly powerful.
His blood didn't just heat up—it turned into liquid magnesium.
[TRANSFORMATION: SPECIES 017 - PYRON-STABILIZER]
[CODENAME: CINDER]
[STABILITY: CRITICAL - SYNC RATE AT 1.2%]
[WARNING: NEURAL OVERLOAD DETECTED. BIOLOGY IS RESISTING.]
Leo hit the ground, but he didn't feel the sand. He felt the vibration of the earth. His senses had shifted. He could hear the hum of the electricity in the Vanguard's weapons from fifty yards away. He could see the heat signatures of the soldiers, their hearts glowing like small, panicked embers in a world of cold blue.
The 104-degree Nevada sun now felt like a freezing winter breeze compared to the core temperature raging inside his chest. He looked at his hands—or what used to be his hands. They were now massive, three-fingered claws of black rock, with white-hot fire leaking through the cracks of his "skin" like magma through a tectonic fault.
"Target has transformed!" a Vanguard soldier yelled, his voice cracking with pure, unadulterated terror. "Open fire! Incendiary rounds! Aim for the core!"
The world slowed down. Leo saw the muzzle flashes of the assault rifles, but the bullets didn't feel like metal. They felt like raindrops hitting a hot stove.
Ping. Ping. Sizzle. The lead vaporized before it even touched the obsidian surface of his chest. He stood in the center of the crater, a titan of stone and flame, while a hail of gunfire washed over him like harmless spray.
"Stop!" Leo tried to shout.
But his voice wasn't human. It was a low, guttural roar, a sound like grinding tectonic plates mixed with the roar of a forest fire. The sheer sonic pressure of his voice sent a wave of heat rippling across the crater, turning the sand into liquid glass instantly.
Instinct—cold, ancient, and alien—took over. It wasn't Leo's mind controlling the body; it was the DNA of Species 017 reacting to a threat. He didn't throw a fireball. He didn't do something as simple as "shoot flame." He reached out a hand, and instead of pushing energy out, he pulled.
He was a heat sink.
In a heartbeat, Leo absorbed every joule of thermal energy in a thirty-foot radius. The temperature in the crater plummeted from a hundred degrees to forty below zero in less than a second. The Vanguard soldiers gasped as their goggles frosted over. Their breath turned to ice crystals in the air. Their weapons, suddenly brittle from the flash-freeze, jammed or shattered in their hands.
"He's... he's draining the environment!" Commander Sterling's voice crackled over the tactical net, sharp with disbelief. "Fall back! Don't let him—"
Leo didn't give them a chance to retreat. He thrust his hands forward, releasing the stolen energy in a concentrated beam of white-hot plasma.
The shockwave was deafening. The beam sliced through the air, melting the front of a black APC as if it were made of wax. One of the VTOL dropships, caught in the thermal updraft, spun out of control, its high-tech turbine engines seizing as the air around them turned to fire.
Leo stared at his burning hands, a terrifying realization dawning on him through the haze of alien adrenaline. He wasn't a hero in a suit. He wasn't Ben 10. He was a walking extinction event. The Aegis was the only thing keeping his atoms from flying apart in the "Dead Zone" of Earth's atmosphere.
[WARNING: NEURAL STRAIN REACHING THRESHOLD.]
[SYNC RATE DROPPING. REVERSION IN 120 SECONDS.]
The pain hit then—a sharp, stabbing sensation at the base of his skull where the filaments of the Omnitrix were woven into his spine. The device was feeding on his stamina, and he was running dry. His vision flickered. The obsidian plates on his arms began to flake away, glowing red as they lost their structural integrity.
"No, no, no," Leo wheezed, the fire in his throat choking him as his human lungs began to fight for space. "Not yet. I'm not safe!"
From the edge of the smoke and the wreckage of the APC, a girl appeared. She didn't wear the tactical black of the Vanguard. She wore a simple, dust-covered jacket, but her eyes were a glowing, iridescent blue that shimmered with an unnatural light.
"If you don't turn it off now," she shouted, her voice cutting through the roar of the burning engines, "the Aegis will burn your heart to ash. You're over-syncing, Leo Vance!"
Leo turned his massive, flaming head toward her. "Who... are... you?"
"The person who's going to keep your DNA from being scattered across the solar system," she snapped. She held up a small, triangular device that hummed with a frequency that made the Omnitrix on Leo's wrist vibrate. "Your signature is spiking. The Hollow will hear you from three light-years away if you don't shut it down!"
Leo looked back at the ridge. A second wave of Vanguard recovery teams was crested the hill. This time, they weren't carrying rifles. They were pushing a massive, wheeled cannon—a Cryo-Containment Array.
"They want the watch," Leo roared, his voice cracking as the obsidian skin on his face began to peel, revealing the raw, red human skin underneath.
"They want the Archive," Sarah corrected, her blue eyes flashing. "And they'll kill the host to get it. Run, Leo! North! Into the canyon!"
The first blast from the Cryo-Cannon hit Leo's shoulder. It didn't hurt; it was worse. It sapped the energy right out of his core. The fire in his chest dimmed. The obsidian plates turned a dull, brittle gray.
[SYNC TIMEOUT IN 10... 9... 8...]
Leo didn't wait. He turned and sprinted toward the canyon walls, each step shaking the earth, even as he felt himself shrinking. His height dropped. The fire receded. The terrifying power of Cinder was being sucked back into the cold, charcoal metal of the cuff on his wrist.
He hit the mouth of the canyon just as the light died.
With a sickening squelch of shifting bone and muscle, Leo Vance tumbled into the shadows of the rocks, human again, naked, shivering, and completely exhausted.
He looked down at his wrist. The Omnitrix was glowing a dull, angry red.
[RECHARGING: 0.1%]
Leo looked up into the blue eyes of the stranger. "What... what did that thing call me?"
Sarah knelt beside him, throwing a thermal blanket over his trembling shoulders. "A host, Leo. To them, you're just a biological hard drive. And the Vanguard is coming to format you."
In the distance, the sirens of the recovery teams began to wail, echoing off the canyon walls. The hunt had officially begun.
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Next Chapter: The Price of Power.