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The staff and patients of St. John's Hospital watched the parking lot through their windows with the collective expression of people who were genuinely unsure whether they needed medical attention or the scene outside did.
"Did I just see that correctly?"
"That young man swung someone twenty meters through the air?"
A nurse standing nearby said nothing. The look on her face said everything.
"Is this a movie? Are they filming something?"
"No cameras. No crew. And nobody warned us they'd be turning the hospital parking lot into an action set."
"Then how do you explain what I'm looking at?"
Ethan's mood was excellent.
That swing had been deeply satisfying in a way he hadn't anticipated. The signpost, the follow-through, the trajectory of the agent sailing across the parking lot and into the car hood. No wonder people enjoyed baseball. This was the same principle, just with significantly higher stakes and a considerably heavier bat.
He kept these thoughts strictly internal. Saying them out loud would have been poor form.
But the clock was ticking. The helicopter's rotors were accelerating. Ground crew was opening the truck's cargo doors. Every second spent enjoying the moment was a second the armor got closer to being airborne.
He moved.
The remaining agents, having watched their colleague become a human projectile, had reorganized. Three-man teams, back to back, covering all angles. No blind spots. Coordinated fields of fire. Professional, disciplined, and terrified.
Tranquilizer darts filled the air.
Ethan dodged. His enhanced visual processing tracked each dart's trajectory, his reaction time turned what should have been a wall of needles into a sequence of individual threats, each one avoidable with a shift of weight or a turn of the shoulder.
But the coordinated fire was pushing him back. Buying time. Exactly what Callister needed.
So Ethan changed tactics.
He shifted his grip on the signpost. Forehand to reverse. The close-combat weapon became a javelin.
He planted his back foot, rotated his hips, and threw.
The signpost left his hand with a sound like a whip crack. The aerodynamics were terrible — a bent steel rod with chunks of concrete still attached wasn't designed for flight — but at this velocity, aerodynamics were irrelevant. The rod traveled in a straight line because the force behind it was too great for air resistance to matter.
It punched through the first three-man team without slowing.
Then the second.
Then embedded itself in a concrete wall thirty meters beyond, sunk a foot deep, wisps of heat rising from the friction.
Six agents. Down. In one throw.
The remaining agents looked at the steel rod protruding from the wall, at the bodies of their colleagues, and felt something they'd been trained to suppress but couldn't: raw, animal fear.
This wasn't combat. This wasn't a tactical engagement with an adversary operating within understood parameters. This was a natural disaster shaped like a teenager.
In his command post, Callister watched the feed and felt the situation sliding.
Twenty agents. Trained. Armed. Positioned between the kid and the helicopter. And they were crumbling.
He made a decision.
The walkie-talkie felt heavier than usual.
"All units. Weapons free. Live ammunition authorized."
A pause that lasted one heartbeat.
"You do NOT let that kid reach the armor. By any means necessary."
The agents on the ground heard the order. Their hands moved from tranquilizer guns to the sidearms on their hips. Real weapons. Real bullets. The calculus had changed. Callister had decided that a dead Ethan Mercer, while a catastrophic loss of potential technology, was preferable to a living Ethan Mercer who escaped with all three inventions intact.
Ethan saw the shift. The body language changed. The weapon profiles changed. The intent changed.
Callister's given up on taking me alive.
His reaction time saved him.
In the time it took the first agent to clear his holster, Ethan was already at the line of pursuit vehicles. He gripped the edge of a car door, planted his foot against the frame, and pulled.
The door came off the car with a shriek of tearing metal, hinges ripping free, wiring snapping. A slab of bulletproof steel and reinforced glass, roughly the size of a dining table.
He raised it in front of his body just as the first volley hit.
The impacts were brutal. Each bullet transferred its kinetic energy through the door and into Ethan's arms. For a normal person, the cumulative force would have been lethal. The vibration alone would have shattered bones, dislocated joints, turned muscle into pulp.
Ethan held.
Enhanced muscle density absorbed the recoil. Reinforced bone structure transmitted the force without breaking. The car door, designed to stop bullets, did its job. And the man behind it, designed by a serum that exceeded every parameter of human biology, did his.
He pushed forward.
Step by step, through a hail of gunfire, the car door ringing like a bell with every impact, Ethan advanced on the remaining agents.
The sight broke something in their confidence. A man walking through sustained automatic fire, protected by a car door he'd torn off with his bare hands, advancing with the measured inevitability of something that couldn't be stopped.
"Don't your wrists get tired?" Ethan muttered behind the door.
The moment the firing paused — reloading, even done in shifts, created gaps — Ethan surged from behind the shield.
He took hits. Several bullets found their mark on his exposed limbs and torso. The impacts stung. Some drew blood. But the enhanced muscle density that the serum had built into every fiber of his body did what it was designed to do: the bullets penetrated the outer tissue and stopped. Flattened against muscle so dense it functioned as biological armor.
Painful. Not lethal. Unless the caliber was large enough to overwhelm the density, or the bullet found an unprotected vital point like the eyes or temple.
Under the disbelieving stares of agents who'd just watched their bullets fail to drop a target, Ethan crouched low.
He gripped the car door. Pivoted. And threw it.
Not like the javelin. This was a discus. The door spun horizontally, a massive rotating slab of bulletproof steel, covering a swath of the parking lot that was impossible to dodge entirely.
Agents scattered. Some made it. Several didn't. The door clipped them as it passed, and the force of even a glancing blow from a spinning car door propelled by a super soldier was enough to break ribs, dislocate shoulders, and end any further participation in the fight.
The ones who'd dived clear were still on the ground when Ethan reached them. He didn't give them time to recover. Low, fast, closing distance the way a predator closes distance: not with aggression but with inevitability.
Three minutes.
Twenty agents. Every one of them down. Some unconscious. Some injured. Some staring at the sky with the blank expression of people whose worldview had been restructured more violently than their bodies.
The price Ethan paid: several bullet wounds of varying depth across his arms and torso. Blood on his clothes. Pain that the serum was already beginning to manage, the enhanced healing working in real time to close what it could and stabilize what it couldn't.
But he wasn't looking at his wounds.
He was looking at the helicopter.
The rotors were at full speed. The skids had left the ground. The aircraft was rising — two meters, three meters, the cargo bay door still open, the Mark Two visible inside.
In his command post, Callister watched the helicopter clear the helipad and felt the tension drain from his body.
The kid was incredible. The fight had been unlike anything Callister had witnessed in thirty years of military service. Twenty trained agents, armed with live ammunition, defeated in three minutes by a single unarmed teenager.
If that kid had appeared on a real battlefield with proper weapons and time to prepare, Callister had no doubt he could have dismantled an entire company without taking meaningful damage.
But none of that mattered now. The helicopter was airborne. The armor was leaving. And without the armor, Ethan Mercer was a super soldier stranded on foreign soil with no way home.
Callister was already calculating his promotion trajectory. Vice President seemed conservative. With three technologies to offer the President — reactor, armor, serum — the path to the highest office in the Republic was wide open.
Then the Signal Bee's camera caught something that stopped the promotion fantasy mid-sentence.
On the ground, Ethan was moving.
Not running away. Not collapsing. Not surrendering.
He was running toward the helicopter.
And then he jumped.
Not a normal jump. A vertical leap powered by legs that could sprint at sixty kilometers per hour and survive ten-story falls. A jump that carried a human body upward with enough velocity to close the gap between the ground and a helicopter that was already five meters in the air and climbing.
Ethan's hands caught the edge of the open cargo bay door.
His fingers closed on the metal.
And held.