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"You're telling me the Oscorp CEO wants to see me right now?"
"I'm afraid so, Commander. You said to arrange the meeting as soon as possible, so when I submitted the request, I indicated any time would work. Mr. Osborn's secretary just confirmed — he has a twenty-minute window before a flight to Washington. After that, he won't be back in New York for a month."
It was nearly five in the afternoon. Oscorp Tower was on the other side of Manhattan. In traffic, that was a thirty-minute drive on a good day. And Kade had just crawled out of a sewer — he smelled like something that had died inside something else that had also died.
No time for deliberation.
Kade sprinted home. He showered in the ninety-second combat wash he'd perfected during his years in the military — water on, soap everywhere, rinse, done. Threw on clean clothes. Ran downstairs.
Blitz was already waiting at the curb. Whatever else could be said about the SUV's personality, he was reliable when it counted.
Kade threw himself into the driver's seat and grabbed the wheel — not to steer, but out of habit. Blitz did the driving.
"Oscorp Tower. We have about fifteen minutes."
"Relax, Commander. Sit back and enjoy the show."
The engine roared. The tires screamed. The seat slammed into Kade's spine as Blitz launched from zero to a hundred kilometers per hour in what felt like one and a half seconds.
Music filled the cabin — but not the electronic dance beats Kade expected. A thundering guitar riff exploded from the speakers, followed by a voice that sounded like it was gargling gravel and whiskey.
AC/DC. "Thunderstruck."
Except Blitz had remixed it. The verses were intact, but between every chorus he'd spliced in air horn blasts and what sounded like a didgeridoo solo that absolutely did not exist in the original recording.
"Blitz, what the hell is this?"
"I call it the Outback Combat Mix, Commander! It's my own arrangement!"
"It's a crime against music is what it is."
But there was no time to argue, because the first red light was two hundred meters ahead and closing fast. At Blitz's current speed, they'd reach the intersection in seconds. The traffic was backed up in both lanes — a solid wall of cars stretching through the light.
"Blitz, we can't stop. Find a way through."
"Absolutely, Commander. Have you ever heard of a little maneuver I invented?"
"Is it called the Cyclone Charge Tornado Spin?" Violet interjected.
"No! It's my original technique — the Lateral Passage. Watch and learn!"
A sharp jolt rocked the left side of the SUV — like hitting a curb at exactly the right angle, at exactly the right speed. The left wheels lifted off the pavement. The vehicle tilted, hanging at a forty-five-degree angle, balanced entirely on its right-side tires.
And kept going.
From the outside, it looked like an SUV had spontaneously decided to stand on two wheels and thread itself through a gap between two lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic at a hundred and fifty kilometers an hour.
Two-wheel driving was a stunt-show trick — something performed under controlled conditions by professionals with safety rigs and ambulances on standby. Nobody in human history had been insane enough to use it to skip a red light in Manhattan.
Blitz wasn't human.
The gap between the two lanes of stopped cars was impossibly narrow — far too tight for any vehicle to pass through upright. On two wheels, tilted sideways, Blitz threaded the needle with centimeters to spare on either side. Mirrors folded in. Speed never dropped.
The Guinness record for two-wheel driving was somewhere around a hundred and eighty clicks. Blitz was pushing a hundred and fifty — and the distance he covered on two wheels blew past any recorded record within the first five seconds.
Kade, pressed against the tilted cabin wall by gravity, watched dozens of slack-jawed drivers flash past the windows.
Blitz reached the head of the queue just as the light turned green. The SUV dropped back onto all four wheels with a bounce that nearly sent Kade through the roof.
"Outstanding!" Kade said, and meant it. "Blitz, you beautiful maniac."
"Ha! Beat that, Cyclone whatever-it-was!"
"Fine," Violet conceded. "That was... adequate. But your music library is still a disaster. Have you considered Hatsune Miku? Or perhaps some classic anime openings —"
Blitz cut her off by switching tracks. The cabin filled with a soaring, triumphant chorus — "Born to Be Wild" by Steppenwolf, except Blitz had layered in a full brass section and what sounded like a stadium crowd chanting along.
Violet gave up. This wasn't a generation gap. This was an irreconcilable cultural divide — a weeb intelligence officer and an Australian muscle car playing chicken over the aux cable.
Kade, for his part, was fairly sure he'd heard this song in a movie once but couldn't place which one.
The rest of the drive was smooth. Violet, accepting defeat on the music front, redirected her energy into something useful: hijacking every traffic camera between Hell's Kitchen and Oscorp Tower, mapping real-time traffic flow, and calculating green-light intervals down to the second. She fed the optimal route directly to Blitz.
Clear roads. Minimal stops. Blitz pushed two hundred on the straightaways, weaving between lanes with a precision that would have made a Formula 1 driver weep.
At the Oscorp Tower parking garage, Blitz executed a ninety-degree drift that was — and there was no other word for it — beautiful. Four tires locked, the SUV slid sideways into a parking space with surgical accuracy, leaving four perfect arcs of rubber on the concrete.
Kade stepped out and checked his watch. Five minutes early.
He straightened his slightly wrinkled shirt, ran a hand through his hair, and walked toward the lobby.
The drift had not gone unnoticed. Half the parking garage was staring. Oscorp Tower was the kind of place where people in tailored suits discussed stock indices and government fiscal reports, and opening your own car door was considered slightly beneath you.
A man arriving in an unmanned SUV that had just performed a Hollywood stunt in the parking structure did not fit the aesthetic.
Kade made it to the front entrance before a security guard stepped into his path.
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