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The agents in the corridor saw their target and raised their weapons.
Ethan didn't flinch. He tightened his grip on Callister's collar by about thirty percent. Enough to communicate the relevant information without words.
"Easy, everyone." His voice carried down the corridor, calm and conversational. "You wouldn't want your boss to die in the line of duty because someone got trigger-happy."
Callister, feeling the grip compress his windpipe from comfortable to concerning, made the executive decision to stay alive.
"PUT THE GUNS DOWN! NOW!"
"Do you WANT me to die in this hallway?!"
The agents hesitated. Looked at each other. Then, one by one, lowered their muzzles.
"Smart choice." Ethan moved forward, dragging Callister with him. "Since nobody's going to shoot, you can all watch me leave."
He pushed through the formation toward the elevator at the end of the corridor. The agents parted around him like water around a stone, weapons lowered, faces tight, every one of them doing the math on whether any shot they could take would end the situation before the kid snapped their boss's neck.
The math didn't work. They stayed still.
The elevator was an external unit, glass-walled, attached to the building's facade. Through the panoramic windows, Ethan could see the ground floor far below. Empty. No personnel visible. Just a large, oddly shaped transport truck parked at the building's base.
He stepped into the elevator, hauling Callister with him, and pulled out his phone.
The armor's tracking signal was moving. Slowly. Heading away from the building on a ground-level route.
They'd loaded the Mark Two onto the truck. They were taking it somewhere else.
"Give up, Mr. Mercer." Callister's voice was strained but regaining some of its composure. "Your armor is on that transport vehicle, heading to a secure facility. By the time you reach the ground floor, it'll be kilometers away."
"You have no armor. No weapons. No exit."
"Surrender is your only option."
As if to punctuate the point, the elevator shuddered and stopped.
Someone had cut the power. The car hung motionless between floors, roughly ten stories up.
Through the glass walls, Ethan watched the transport truck pulling away from the building. His armor was on it. Every second that passed was another hundred meters of distance.
"They reacted fast," Ethan muttered.
Callister, sensing the shift in momentum, straightened up despite the pain in his hand.
"Mr. Mercer, you must understand that holding me hostage won't get you out of this building. I'm not valuable enough to trade for someone like you."
"Even if you held the President himself, the Aurelian Republic would not let the most important collection of military technologies on the planet walk out the door."
Ethan said nothing.
Callister pressed harder.
"But here's what I can offer. Stay in the Aurelian Republic. Work with us. Contribute your talents to a nation that will give you everything you could ever want."
"Resources. Facilities. Funding. Freedom to research anything you choose."
"And in return for your cooperation, we can put today's... unpleasantness behind us entirely."
In the live broadcast, the Valorian audience exploded.
"This man has absolutely no shame!"
"Thrown away every pretense! Just openly recruiting a Valorian national on global television!"
"This is what 'freedom and equality' looks like? Kidnapping and extortion?"
"Professor Mercer is trapped. Even with the serum, he can't fight his way out of a building full of armed agents without the armor."
"I have an IQ of 180 and I can't see how he gets out of this."
"The person above needs to stop lying about their IQ."
While the live broadcast mourned, Ethan was looking at the ceiling of the elevator car.
Steel panel. Riveted. Industrial grade. Designed to support maintenance workers and equipment loads.
He reached up, gripped the edge of the panel, and pulled.
The steel screamed.
Rivets popped like buttons off a shirt. The metal buckled, folded, and then tore free in Ethan's hands, a ragged sheet of industrial steel roughly the size of a door, separated from the elevator's ceiling by raw grip strength.
Callister stared.
The live broadcast stared.
"He just ripped a STEEL PANEL off the ceiling with his BARE HANDS!"
"The serum. This is the serum. That technology isn't just as important as the armor — it might be MORE important."
"If this were deployed across a military, the implications are—"
"Is he building a shield? What for?"
Callister, watching this display of impossible strength from three feet away, felt two things simultaneously: terror at what the kid could do to him, and greed at what the kid's knowledge was worth.
Three technologies. Reactor. Armor. Serum. All in one teenager's head. If the Aurelian Republic could acquire even one of them, the global balance of power would shift. All three? The word "superpower" would need a new definition.
But the next thing Ethan did killed every thought in Callister's mind except one.
Ethan hefted the steel plate, angled it beneath him like a surfboard, and looked at the panoramic glass wall of the elevator.
Ten stories up. The ground below was concrete and asphalt.
"Watch closely, Mr. Secretary." Ethan grinned. "I'm about to do something fun."
He drove the steel plate through the tempered glass.
The wall shattered outward in a cascade of fragments that caught the light like a waterfall of broken diamonds. Cold air rushed into the elevator car.
And Ethan Mercer, holding a torn sheet of industrial steel beneath his feet, stepped off the edge.
Ten stories of empty air.
"NO!"
Callister lunged for the opening, clutching the broken frame with his good hand, staring down at the falling figure.
His political career flashed before his eyes. The President's reaction. The technologies, lost. Three revolutionary inventions, smeared across a parking lot because the kid chose death over cooperation.
In the live broadcast, the reaction was immediate and devastating.
"He jumped."
"No. No, no, no."
"Professor Mercer would rather die than help them."
"In order to keep the secrets safe, he chose—"
"A hero. A real hero. The country should honor him as a martyr."
"Seconded."
At the Bureau headquarters, Director Graves watched the screen and felt something inside him break.
The kid had jumped. Rather than let the Aurelian Republic have his knowledge, he'd thrown himself off a building. Eighteen years old. The most brilliant mind in Valorian history. And Graves's failure — the Bureau's failure — had put him in a position where dying was the better option.
Fu Guotai, you claim to serve the Republic, and in the end you lost a once-in-a-generation genius.
This mistake alone is enough to condemn you for the rest of your life.
He was already composing his resignation letter in his head when the broadcast changed.
CLANG.
The steel plate hit the ground first.
The impact was enormous. The plate buckled on contact, absorbing a fraction of the kinetic energy before pancaking against the asphalt. Sparks flew. A crater formed.
And the figure that landed on top of it stumbled, rolled, and lay still.
"Wait—"
"Did his finger just move?"
"You're seeing things. That's ten stories. Nobody survives ten stories."
"It moved again! Look!"
"HOLY—"
Ethan Mercer stood up.
Slowly. Painfully. Not the casual way he'd stood up in the crater after the missile strike. This hurt. Jumping ten stories, even with the serum, even with the steel plate absorbing some of the impact, subjected his body to forces that would have killed any baseline human three times over.
But the serum had done what it was designed to do. Enhanced muscle density absorbed the shock. Reinforced bone structure held under the impact. The damage was limited to surface scrapes and bruises that were already beginning to heal faster than they should have.
He rolled his shoulders. Flexed his hands. Checked his legs.
Everything worked.
A slight improvement to various functions of the human body.
That was how he'd described the serum on social media. A slight improvement.
He'd just survived a ten-story fall and was standing on his own two feet.
In the elevator, ten stories up, Defense Secretary Andrew Callister pressed his face against the broken glass and stared at the teenager who was brushing dust off his clothes on the ground below.
His eyes were wide enough to show white all around the iris.
He remembered the social media post. The one that had made him laugh. The one where a seventeen-year-old had promised to "slightly enhance various functions of the human body."
Slight?
SLIGHT?!
"What the fuck."
The words came out involuntarily, in a voice that was not the voice of a Defense Secretary but the voice of a man whose understanding of reality had just been invalidated.
"God must be joking with me."
And then he saw what Ethan was walking toward.