Chapter 3: The Price
The afternoon sun was doing its best to be pleasant, but Akira wasn't having it. He was currently lying on his bed, his body sprawled out like a starfish that had given up on the ocean. His eyes were glued to his phone, his thumb rhythmically flicking upward as he scrolled through Reelgram.
Flick. A cat playing a piano. Flick. A guy trying to eat a ghost pepper and regretting his entire lineage. Flick. A "Life Coach" telling him to wake up at 4:00 AM to grind.
"If I wake up at 4:00 AM, the only thing I'm grinding is my teeth," Akira muttered to the empty room.
He paused on a video of a bodybuilder lifting a small car. "What should I do today?" he asked himself. He stared at the ceiling for a solid three minutes, the silence of the house weighing down on him. Then, with the intensity of a man deciding the fate of the nation, he sighed.
"Nothing. I shall do absolutely nothing. It is my destiny."
Of course, destiny had other plans. Five minutes later, the boredom became physically painful. Akira stood up, tossed his phone onto the pillow, and marched out of the house.
He walked down the street, head tilted back, staring at the vast, blue canvas of the sky. "Superpowers," he whispered. "Imagine that. I'd be Akira the Unstoppable. I'd fly to school, though I'd probably still be late just for the dramatic entrance. Laser beams from the eyes? Useful for making instant toast. Super strength? I'd finally be able to open that jar of pickles my mom bought last week. Transonic speed? I could go to Japan for lunch and be back before the teacher notices I'm gone."
A beat-up sedan rattled past him, coughing out a cloud of black exhaust that smelled like burning rubber and broken dreams. Akira coughed, waving the smoke away.
"Who am I kidding?" he grumbled, his shoulders slumping. "My dream will never come true. There are no superpowers. No magic. Just physics, taxes, and that weird smell coming from Kenji's locker. Life is just a series of boring events separated by snacks."
Seeking some semblance of peace, he turned toward the outskirts of town. The forest was thick, the air cooler beneath the canopy of ancient oaks. He wandered aimlessly, his feet crunching on dry leaves, until he stumbled upon something that shouldn't have been there.
Tucked behind a curtain of overgrown vines was the mouth of a hidden cave. It breathed out a cold, metallic scent that made the hair on Akira's neck stand up.
"I've lived here my whole life," Akira whispered, his curiosity finally winning over his laziness. "I've never seen that before."
The Forbidden Relic
The interior of the cave was unlike anything Akira had ever imagined. The walls weren't just damp stone; they were etched with glowing blue veins of Ki-conductive ore. And there, at the very center, hovering in a shaft of unnatural light, was The Ring.
It was a band of solid, pulsating gold. It didn't just sit there; it hummed. It vibrated with the frequency of a dying star. Akira felt a pull in his chest—his Pin Points, though still dormant, were screaming in the presence of such concentrated power.
"Just a touch," Akira whispered, reaching out. "Just to see if it's real."
"STOP."
The voice didn't come from a throat; it sounded like two tectonic plates grinding together. Akira spun around, his heart hammering against his ribs.
Emerging from the shadows was a nightmare in black armor. Tank stood seven feet tall, his visor glowing with a predatory red light. Behind him, a squad of cold, metallic soldiers marched in perfect, terrifying unison. These weren't men in suits; they were high-grade combat androids.
"There it is," Tank rumbled, ignoring Akira as if he were a bug on a windshield. "The Ring of the Mantra. Step away from it, you worthless trash."
Akira didn't need to be told twice. He bolted. He dove through the vines, his lungs burning as he scrambled behind a massive, centuries-old oak tree a few yards from the cave entrance.
Inside the cave, Tank's heavy footsteps echoed. "Finally," the giant whispered. He reached out and snatched the golden ring from the air. The moment his fingers closed around it, a shockwave of dark energy rippled outward, snapping the nearby stalactites. Tank threw his head back and laughed—a sound of pure, unadulterated ego.
"With this, the Sovereign won't just reward me. They'll fear me."
Tank turned and marched out of the cave, his soldiers following like shadows. He stopped ten feet from the tree where Akira was hiding. He didn't turn his head, but his visor flickered.
"There you are... little dog."
Tank raised a hand. Without a word, a blast of absolute-zero ice erupted from his palm. The oak tree didn't just break; it shattered into a million frozen splinters. Akira screamed, rolling out of the way just as the frost crept toward his boots.
"Kill him," Tank said, his voice bored. He didn't even stay to watch. He engaged his thrusters, blasting into the sky and leaving a trail of scorched ozone behind.
"Wait! No!" Akira scrambled to his feet, but he was surrounded. Twelve robots, their eyes glowing with a clinical red light, closed in.
The Breaking
The first blow came from a robot to his left. It was a mechanical fist that moved faster than Akira could see. It slammed into his stomach, lifting him off the ground. Akira felt the air leave his lungs in a sickening wheeze.
He fell, but he wasn't allowed to hit the ground. Another robot grabbed his arm. There was a sickening CRACK—the sound of a dry branch snapping in winter. Akira's scream was cut short as a metal boot smashed into his jaw.
"Target status: Vital signs declining," the robot droned.
They weren't just killing him; they were dismantling him. They took turns with calculated, surgical brutality. A heavy metallic hand gripped Akira's left leg. He felt the pressure build, the bone groaning under the weight of hydraulic pistons. Then came the explosion of white-hot pain as his femur shattered.
Akira lay in the dirt, his vision swimming in a sea of red. His left arm hung at a wrong angle. Both his legs were useless heaps of meat and broken bone. Every breath he took felt like he was inhaling broken glass as his fractured ribs punctured his lungs.
Is this it? he thought, his consciousness fading. No superpowers. No laser beams. Just a cold forest floor and the sound of machines.
The robots circled him, their central processors deciding on the final blow. One robot stepped forward, its foot hovering over Akira's skull. It began to put its full weight down, intending to crush his head like a grape.
I don't want to die...
Deep inside Akira's body, something shifted. The 365 Pin Points—the gates that had been locked since his birth—didn't just open. They burst.
The Awakening: Divine Wrath
It started as a spark in his solar plexus. Then, it became a sun.
A pillar of pure, molten gold light erupted from Akira's broken body, throwing the robots back. The shockwave was so powerful that the trees for fifty yards were stripped of their leaves instantly.
Akira stood up.
His bones didn't just heal; they fused back together with Ki-reinforced density. His eyes, once a normal brown, were now glowing like twin stars. A golden aura, thick as armor, swirled around him, humming with the sound of a thousand mantras.
The robots, programmed only for combat, lunged forward again.
Akira didn't move. He simply raised a single, trembling finger.
"Erase."
A beam of light, no wider than a pencil but brighter than the sun, shot from his fingertip. It struck the lead robot in the chest. There was no explosion, no fire—only silence as the machine was instantly vaporized into atomic dust. The beam continued, slicing through three more robots behind it, leaving nothing but glowing molten tracks in the dirt.
The remaining robots swarmed him from all sides. Akira spun, his movements a blur of transonic speed. He caught a robot's punch with one hand, and with a slight squeeze, the reinforced titanium crumbled like wet paper. He ripped the machine's head off and tossed it into another, the impact causing both to detonate in a ball of blue electricity.
He was a whirlwind of gold. He moved through the machines not like a boy fighting, but like a god cleaning a messy room. Every strike sent a shockwave of Ki through the forest. Within seconds, the clearing was a graveyard of twisted metal and sparking wires.
As the last robot fell, the golden aura flickered. The sheer strain of forcing Pin Points open without a teacher was too much. Akira's eyes rolled back, and he slumped into the dirt, unconscious, his body steaming from the heat of the awakening.
High above, miles away, Tank stopped in mid-air. He clutched the Golden Ring, his visor flashing erratically.
"That signature..." Tank whispered, his voice trembling for the first time. "That wasn't a human."
He turned his thrusters to full power, banking hard to return to the forest. He had to know. He had to see what kind of monster he had just accidentally created.
As Tank sped back toward the clearing, Akira lay silent in the ruins of the machines, the Golden Ring's twin awakening in the dark.
[End of Chapter 3]