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Bonus Chapter
Kade stepped outside to find a gleaming SUV parked directly in front of the building, horn blasting on a loop — except now it wasn't random honking anymore. Blitz had switched to playing "We Will Rock You" through his horn at a volume that could shatter fillings.
Mrs. Cardenas, who'd been screaming obscenities thirty seconds ago, went quiet. Then she started clapping along from her window.
Within a minute, half the street had come out to watch. People were singing. Clapping the rhythm. A group of teenagers started stomping on the pavement. The whole block had turned into an impromptu Queen concert, and Blitz — an unmanned SUV with no visible driver — was conducting it through his horn.
Kade walked up to the vehicle with the expression of a man seriously reconsidering his life choices.
He opened the rear door, unloaded a crate of military binoculars, then carefully tucked the two new Energy Activators into the trunk. Safer in Blitz than sitting on a shelf in a basement with a broken window.
He slammed the door. Hard. Like the car had personally wronged him.
"Commander, sir! I was just trying to build goodwill with your neighbors!" Blitz protested through the AllSpark link.
"An unmanned SUV blasting music outside my apartment does not build goodwill."
"But they loved it! Did you hear the singing? That was communal bonding, Commander. I fostered communal bonding."
Kade briefly considered whether he could return Blitz for a refund. Or dismantle him. Or at least trade him in for a less embarrassing model. Stage 1 allowed three Cybertronian units — if one of those slots was occupied by a robot whose primary contribution was noise complaints, maybe it could be freed up for something useful.
Blitz, sensing the hostility, executed two rapid drifts and fled toward Stark Tower at speed. Tony's lab had the best motor oil, precision gears, and someone who actually appreciated Blitz's company. In the days he'd spent assisting Tony's research, Blitz had developed what he described as "a refined palate for premium lubricants." He also claimed he'd put on weight.
Back in the basement. Door locked. Kade took one of the binoculars from the crate and pushed AllSpark energy into it.
The optics device shifted, panels folding, lenses flattening, housing compressing. The transformation was intricate — nano-level material conversion reshaping every component. When it finished, the binoculars had become...
A pair of black-framed glasses.
Kade stared at them for several seconds.
"I look like Clark Kent."
He put them on.
Nothing at first. Just the world through a pair of plain lenses. Then the overlay activated, and the basement exploded into light.
"Holy—"
Numbers. Everywhere. Colors, vectors, data strings — cascading across his field of vision like a digital aurora. For a moment it was overwhelming, like staring into a kaleidoscope made of pure information.
"Holy shit."
Then he got control of it. The display responded to his thoughts — dimming, filtering, organizing itself into clean layers that he could push forward or suppress at will.
He pulled his apartment keys from his pocket and focused.
Every serration on the key was measured — angle, depth, width. The overlay tagged the material composition, surface temperature, visual distance, and color spectrum. When he focused harder, the image zoomed — magnifying the key thirty times over until every scratch and nick on the metal surface was visible.
He blinked. The display switched to black and white — an X-ray mode that stripped away surfaces and showed structural outlines. The key became a wireframe sketch floating in the dark.
He blinked again. Color blocks in red, green, and blue — thermal imaging. The key glowed faintly warm where his fingers had been holding it.
"This is incredible."
The applications were staggering. Auto-adjusting zoom alone would be revolutionary — goodbye to every vision problem on Earth. The X-ray function could detect concealed weapons, hidden compartments, structural weaknesses. Thermal would pick up body heat through walls, track footprints, spot traps before they triggered.
Kade spent several minutes panning around the basement, testing modes, grinning like a kid with a new toy. Then he looked down at the floor.
And stopped.
Faint marks on the concrete. Barely visible — impossible to see with the naked eye. He switched to thermal.
There. Footprints. Not visible as prints — no mud, no dirt. But the thermal overlay showed micro-variations in floor temperature: spots that were fractionally cooler than the surrounding concrete. The shape was unmistakable.
"Water on his feet," Kade murmured. "The liquid's long gone, but the evaporative cooling left a temperature signature."
The thief's trail. Already fading — another few minutes and the temperature differential would vanish entirely, even from the Optics.
Kade moved.
He followed the prints out through the broken window and into the alley behind the building. The trail led down a narrow side street — mercifully empty, no foot traffic to contaminate the readings. Left turn. Right turn. Another left. A hundred meters of zigzagging through Hell's Kitchen's back passages.
Then the trail went cold.
Kade looked up. He'd followed the prints to what passed for a communal garbage dump — a dead-end lot between abandoned buildings, piled with refuse, stinking of rot. Puddles of filthy water covered the ground. In this mess, thermal footprints were meaningless — everything was the same temperature, the same chaos.
He switched to X-ray.
Black and white. Wireframes. The garbage piles were clean — nothing hidden in the trash. The walls of the surrounding buildings showed nothing unusual. Normal structures, normal materials.
Then his gaze crossed a manhole cover in the center of the lot.
The Optics flagged an anomaly. Beneath the cover — underneath, not on top — there was a lock. A padlock, securing the cover from the inside.
That made zero sense. If you were worried about someone stealing a manhole cover, you locked it from above. Locking it from below meant it could only be opened from inside the sewer. Someone had sealed this entrance specifically to prevent access from the surface.
"Hell's Kitchen," Kade said. "Never boring."
The X-ray's penetration maxed out at about a meter of solid material. He could see the lock, the cover, and a short section of the drainage shaft below — but nothing beyond that. Whatever was down there was deeper than the Optics could reach.
Kade extended his right arm. Silver-gray plates rippled out from the bracelet, encasing his hand and forearm in the Sensory Gauntlet. He hooked two fingers through the manhole cover's drainage slot and pulled.
Metal shrieked. The padlock's shackle snapped like a twig. The cover came free in a shower of rust and grime.
A smell hit him that nearly sent his dinner back up.
"Right." He looked down into the darkness. "I really hope Stark Industries covers dry cleaning."
He dropped into the sewer.