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Looking into Ethan's calm eyes, Callister felt a chill run through him that had nothing to do with the air conditioning.
This kid wasn't bluffing. Whatever he'd done to those agents, he was ready to do it again.
He snapped back to reality a second later. Whatever the kid had done to those agents, Callister was still the Defense Secretary of the Aurelian Republic, and there were hundreds of armed operatives in this building. One phone call.
His hand went for his pocket.
Ethan picked up a pen from the conference table.
The Super Soldier Serum's enhancement wasn't limited to brute strength and raw speed. It extended to precision. Motor control. The fine-grained neuromuscular calibration that turned a general physical upgrade into something far more dangerous: the ability to put any object, traveling at any speed, exactly where you wanted it.
The pen left Ethan's hand.
It crossed the conference room at a velocity that made it blur.
Callister screamed.
The pen punched through the center of his right palm, clean through the flesh and bone, and continued into the phone in his grip with enough residual force to embed itself in the device's circuitry.
Hand and phone, destroyed in one throw.
The agents. The Whitfield brothers. Every person in the room stared at the hole in Callister's hand, at the pen protruding from the ruined phone, and the mathematics of what had just happened rewired their understanding of the situation.
A pen. Thrown with enough force and accuracy to pierce a human hand and disable an electronic device. From a standing position. Without a wind-up.
Nobody moved. Nobody reached for a weapon. Nobody spoke.
Because there were still a lot of pens on that table.
Ethan smiled apologetically.
"Sorry about that, Mr. Callister. But until I've finished handling some personal business, I'd rather not have company."
Callister, clutching his bleeding hand, was sweating through his shirt. For the first time in his career, he hated this conference room. Why were there so many pens? Why was the soundproofing so effective? Why had he been arrogant enough to bring in only four unarmed agents?
But nobody could have predicted that a teenager who'd voluntarily left his armor would still be the most dangerous person in the building.
Ethan turned from Callister and walked toward the Whitfield brothers.
Edgar and Conrad stood at the far end of the conference table, frozen. Edgar's composure, the glacial control he'd maintained through decades of political warfare, had cracked like ice over a river. Conrad was on the floor, having lost the ability to stand the moment the agents hit the wall.
"You committed two crimes."
Ethan's voice was quiet. The kind of quiet that didn't need volume because the room was already silent.
"First, you defiled the dignity that generations of Valorians built with their blood. A founding family selling their country to a foreign power. Your father would have killed you himself if he'd lived to see it."
"Second, you targeted my family."
He stopped in front of Edgar.
"That was the mistake you don't get to walk away from."
Edgar's face twisted. The mask of the composed patriarch, maintained through cabinet meetings and defection negotiations and the striking of a bound prisoner, finally shattered.
"So what if you kill us? You'll still be imprisoned in this country for the rest of your life!"
He grabbed a chair and swung it at Ethan's head with the desperate strength of a man who had nothing left.
Ethan caught the chair with one hand. Pulled it away. Set it down.
Then his hands moved to Edgar's head with a speed that made the motion look gentle.
The crack was brief and final.
Edgar Whitfield, patriarch of the Whitfield political dynasty, traitor to the Republic of Valoria, collapsed to the floor.
Conrad, watching his brother die from three feet away, made a sound that wasn't quite a word and wasn't quite a scream.
"Please — please, I'll — it wasn't my idea — he made me — Zhang — Edgar made me do everything—"
A dark stain spread across the floor beneath him.
Ethan looked at the man who'd stood over Frank Holloway's unconscious body in Graystone Province and said, "Whether my family makes it to the Aurelian Republic depends on how much weight you carry in that boy's heart."
"If you knew it would end like this," Ethan said, "you shouldn't have started."
Conrad's neck broke as cleanly as his brother's.
The live broadcast had been running the entire time.
The Signal Bee, hovering in its corner, had captured every second. The pen throw. The approach. The executions. All of it, transmitted in real time to every screen that was connected to Ryan Calloway's feed.
The reaction was everything you'd expect when a global audience watches a teenager kill two men with his bare hands on live television.
"Professor Mercer just — did he just—"
"Those traitors got exactly what they deserved!"
"Justice! Vermin who sell out their country deserve nothing less!"
"Don't celebrate yet. He's still inside the Aurelian Republic's Department of Defense. How is he getting OUT?"
That question sobered everyone instantly.
In the conference room, Ethan took a breath. Then another.
The Whitfield brothers were dead. Frank was safe. Two of the three objectives for this trip were complete.
The third: getting home.
There was a ready-made solution standing three feet away, clutching a bleeding hand and looking at Ethan like a rabbit looks at a wolf.
Callister saw the gaze shift toward him, and the blood drained from his face so fast it was visible.
"You — you can't—"
"Don't worry, Mr. Callister. I'm not going to kill you."
"You're going to help me leave."
Before Callister could formulate a response, he tried one more play.
"Even if — even if you take me hostage, my subordinates are already on their way. Your Signal Bee has been broadcasting everything. They know exactly what happened in here."
"And your armor." His voice steadied slightly as he found leverage. "My people are moving it right now. By the time you reach the roof, it'll be gone."
Ethan's phone buzzed in his pocket. Confirmation: someone was indeed relocating the Mark Two from the rooftop landing zone.
For a moment, he was still.
Callister, mistaking the pause for hesitation, pressed his advantage.
"Surrender, Mr. Mercer. You have no way out."
"My agents outside this door are fully armed. You may be fast, but can you dodge bullets?"
"Sit down. Let's talk. The Aurelian Republic will offer you treatment that—"
Ethan moved.
The remaining two agents in the conference room had been standing with the rigid alertness of men who'd watched their colleagues get destroyed and were trying very hard not to be next.
They weren't fast enough.
Ethan closed the distance to the first one and drove a fist into his abdomen with precisely enough force to shut down his nervous system without killing him. The agent folded and hit the floor.
The second agent reacted. Training kicked in. He shifted his weight, raised his guard, started a counterattack.
Ethan caught his arm, pivoted, and lifted.
Two hundred and twenty pounds of trained operative, raised off the ground with one hand, held overhead for a single second that communicated everything words couldn't, and then hurled across the room into the far wall.
The impact shook the floor.
Callister, watching a man get thrown like a piece of furniture by a teenager who weighed fifty pounds less, finally understood something that had been eluding him since the beginning of this meeting.
He was not in control. He had never been in control. From the moment Ethan Mercer had landed on his rooftop, everything that had happened had been according to the kid's plan, not his.
Ethan walked to Callister, gripped the back of his collar, and pulled him to his feet.
"Let's go, Mr. Secretary. You're going to walk me out of this building."
Outside the conference room, dozens of fully armed agents lined the corridor.
They'd heard the screams. They'd seen the Signal Bee footage on their own devices. They knew their boss was in there with a superhuman who'd just killed two people and disabled four elite operatives in under a minute.
They didn't breach. Because their direct superior was still inside, and the last thing anyone wanted was to be responsible for getting the Defense Secretary killed.
They waited. Weapons raised. Eyes on the door.
Then the door exploded outward.
Not opened. Not pushed. Kicked off its hinges with a force that sent the reinforced steel slab spinning into the corridor like a giant playing card. The agents closest to the door were knocked flat by the impact.
The smoke cleared.
Ethan Mercer walked out of the conference room holding Defense Secretary Andrew Callister by the collar, the man's bleeding hand hanging at his side, his face the specific shade of grey that comes from understanding that your life is no longer in your own hands.
The corridor was packed. Wall to wall. Armed agents. Automatic weapons. Body armor. The full response of a Department of Defense branch that had just watched its most secure conference room get dismantled by a single person.
Ethan surveyed the corridor. Counted the agents. Noted the weapons. Calculated angles and distances with a mind that was running faster and cleaner than it ever had before the serum.
Then he looked at Callister, dangling from his grip like a scarecrow, and smiled.
"Mr. Secretary, your subordinates are truly enthusiastic."