Dulcinea Lace stared at me across the sticky table, her mercenary brain rapidly calculating the sheer, suicidal audacity of my business model. I had just casually suggested hiring a speedster to run corporate espionage against a billionaire pharmaceutical mafia.
She opened her mouth to name her undoubtedly exorbitant price.
She never got the chance.
A deafening, mechanical klaxon suddenly shrieked through the subterranean gloom of The Faraday. The heavy, amber emergency lights bolted to the acoustic ceiling began to strobe, casting jagged, frantic shadows across the vinyl booths.
The low, oppressive hum of the bar's electromagnetic dampening field didn't drop, but the reinforced iron doors at the entrance violently shuddered. It sounded like a handful of gravel had just been thrown against the thick metal.
Then, the sound magnified. It went from a handful of gravel to a relentless, deafening hailstorm of sharp, chitinous *clattering*.
The massive, heavily scarred bartender reached under the counter and pulled out a kinetic-dampening scattergun the size of my leg. He slammed a heavy energy cell into the receiver.
"Breach!" the bartender roared, his voice carrying over the blaring klaxons. "Class-D swarm! We've got a localized tear directly above the service elevator! All stable Egos, gear up! Guild bounties apply!"
The entire bar instantly mobilized. The cynical, relaxed posture of the criminal underbelly vanished, replaced by cold, mercenary efficiency. Heavy trench coats were thrown aside. Smugglers and private contractors racked the slides of exotic, highly illegal weaponry.
Dulci didn't hesitate. She was on her feet in a fraction of a second. She reached down, slapped a sequence on her thigh rig, and her matte-black aerogel suit physically tightened, locking into combat mode.
"Class-D?" I asked, remaining perfectly seated in the booth, my voice a flat drone of absolute, unbothered curiosity. I looked up at the ceiling as the clattering intensified. "I assume that means they are smaller than the buses."
"Dezonic Wasps," Dulci shouted over the alarms, pulling her tinted tactical goggles down over her eyes. "They're locusts, Doc! They don't have the thermal plasma of the big dogs, but they travel in swarms of tens of thousands! Their mandibles vibrate at a frequency that chews through reinforced concrete, and they strip skin, flesh and anything else to the bone in under four seconds!"
*Oh, excellent,* my Alter muttered, materializing in the pristine office of my mind, vigorously brushing an imaginary piece of lint off his cashmere lapel. *We survived the apex predator only to be threatened by an aggressive cloud of interdimensional mosquitoes.*
"Stay in the cage, Doc!" Dulci ordered, her yellow kinetic aura already sparking faintly against the bar's dampening field, eager to be let off the leash. "The Faraday shield will keep them from eating the foundation. Only stable Egos are going out. If you don't manifest an aura, you can't push them off you. You're just meat!"
She didn't wait for my acknowledgment. She pivoted on her heel and blurred toward the heavy iron doors, joining a dozen other heavily armed mercenaries stacking up for the breach.
I sat in the booth alone, listening to the horrifying, insectoid screeching echoing down the elevator shaft.
"Well," I said to myself, reaching into my pocket for my cigarettes. "This seems like an excellent time to catch up on some paperwork."
*Absolutely not,* my Alter snapped, his voice ringing with sudden, defensive authority.
"Excuse me?" I thought back, manually adjusting my apathy shield.
*We are not cowering in a basement while the hired help exterminates the vermin,* my Alter lectured, pacing the floorboards of my subconscious. *You just offered her a job as our chief of espionage. If we stay down here hiding behind a bartender, our corporate branding will be irreparably damaged. We must establish market dominance.*
"Market dominance?" I scoffed internally. "You just found out you're a rookie who punched a multiversal runt! You want to go out there and get us eaten by a cloud of psychic bees just to prove a point?!"
*I am a geometric Authority,* my Alter hissed, deeply, profoundly offended by the reminder of his bruised ego. *I require a growing phase, yes. But I refuse to be outshined by a Class-C speedster in a dive bar! Put me in the driver's seat, Helian. I need to calibrate my kinetic yield on a dispersed target.*
I closed my eyes. I was exhausted. I was sweating in a bespoke suit. But the terrifying reality of Sector Four was that my Alter was actually right. If I was going to be the man who cured Egos and defied the Armsterwhite Syndicate, I couldn't be a ghost in a bunker. I had to be a god on the street.
"If you ruin this suit," I whispered, standing up from the sticky booth, "I am permanently locking you in the mental basement."
I walked toward the heavy iron doors.
The mercenaries had already forced the primary airlock open. They were pouring into the service elevator shaft, riding the heavy platform up to the street level.
I stepped into the elevator just as the grated doors began to close.
Dulci, vibrating with yellow kinetic energy, looked over her shoulder and saw my deadpan face. "Doc! What the hell are you doing?! I told you to stay in the cage! You're a shrink!"
"I am an out-of-network consultant," I corrected her smoothly, my voice lacking any inflection over the deafening hum of the rising elevator. "And I consider pest control to be a landlord's responsibility."
The elevator breached the surface, hitting the street level of the industrial district.
The heavy iron grates of the service elevator slammed open, and we stepped out of the Faraday cage's dampening field and straight into a nightmare.
The sky above the industrial block was torn wide open. A jagged, bleeding red laceration hung in the air, vomiting a literal black cloud of clicking, screeching horrors into the grey afternoon.
The Dezonic Wasps were the size of footballs. They possessed thick, charcoal-grey chitinous armor, four vibrating, translucent wings, and massive, razor-sharp mandibles that dripped with highly corrosive, yellow acid. There were thousands of them, swarming the street, diving like kamikaze pilots at anything that possessed a thermal signature.
The mercenaries from the bar opened fire. The air filled with the deafening roar of kinetic scatterguns and the blinding flash of thermal Egos.
*Whoosh*
Dulci vanished. A yellow streak zipped across the asphalt, creating a localized sonic boom. She was moving so fast the wasps couldn't track her, using her vibro-knife to slice dozens of the creatures out of the air in a matter of seconds.
But there were simply too many of them. A dense, shrieking cloud of the acid-dripping horrors banked sharply in the air, their multifaceted eyes locking onto my stationary figure standing casually by the elevator shaft.
*My turn,* the Alter commanded from the back of my mind, his voice dripping with pure, untested hubris.
I didn't fight him. I manually dropped the heavy lead blanket of my apathy, unlocked the mental vault, and stepped backward into the passenger seat of my own mind.
The switch was instantaneous.
The chronic ache in my spine vanished. My posture snapped into flawless, immaculate alignment. And erupting from my skin, completely unhindered by the dampening field of the bar, was the blinding, surgical-white aura of absolute Authority.
*Let us evaluate the physics of a dispersed biological threat,* my Alter said aloud, smoothing his hands down the front of the bespoke, ten-thousand-credit silk waistcoat.
The cloud of Dezonic Wasps shrieked, a hundred of them diving directly at my face.
My Alter didn't flinch. He casually raised my right hand, adjusted his cuff, and snapped my fingers, expecting the same crushing, localized gravity well that had flattened the runt in the alley.
The blinding white aura flared outward like a wall of glass.
Three of the wasps hit the telekinetic barrier and crumpled, dropping to the asphalt.
The other ninety-seven smashed into the shield with the kinetic force of a freight train.
My Alter's arrogant smirk instantly vanished.
The physical feedback of the impact slammed into my nervous system. I felt my ribcage groan under the sheer, unexpected pressure. My Italian leather oxfords lost traction on the wet asphalt, and my physical body was violently shoved backward three feet, my heels dragging across the concrete.
The pristine, surgical-white aura didn't hold. It spider-webbed with jagged, glowing cracks.
"What is this?!" my Alter gasped aloud, genuine panic bleeding into his Beverly Hills drawl. He threw both hands forward, bracing against the invisible barrier as the swarm pressed relentlessly against it, their corrosive mandibles gnawing at his telekinetic projection.
*You're a Class-D, you idiot! Can't you realize!* I screamed from the passenger seat of our shared mind, watching the structural integrity of his Ego buckle. *You thought you were a god because you stepped on a starved puppy! This is a real swarm! You don't have the output!*
*I am the geometric authority!* my Alter roared defensively, his mental voice vibrating with absolute desperation. He pushed harder, his metaphysical muscles straining to their absolute limits. The white light flared brighter, but it was fragile. It was thin.
The swarm surged. Another wave of fifty screeching wasps dive-bombed the faltering shield.
*CRACK.*
The right side of the telekinetic barrier shattered.
Two of the football-sized horrors broke through the perimeter. One slammed directly into my chest, knocking the breath out of my lungs. Its razor-sharp mandibles clamped down on my shoulder.
The sound of tearing fabric was accompanied by the agonizing, burning hiss of yellow acid.
"Ah!" my Alter cried out, physically staggering backward.
He managed to manifest a localized kinetic burst, violently throwing the bug off my shoulder and crushing it against the brick wall of the alley, but the damage was done. The left sleeve of the bespoke, spun-silk suit jacket was completely shredded, the expensive fabric melting into the flesh of my shoulder.
*The suit!* my Alter shrieked in our mind, staring in absolute, unadulterated horror at the ruined tailoring. *They are destroying the bespoke weave! This is Italian silk!*
*They are trying to eat our face, you raging narcissist!* I yelled, watching the primary shield crack further under the weight of the screaming swarm. *Drop the Ego! Put me back in the driver's seat! Let me throw the apathy shield up and go void! If we don't glow, they won't swarm us!*
*If you go void, you are still made of meat!* my Alter argued, his arms shaking violently as he tried to hold the failing barrier against the pressing weight of a hundred acidic mandibles. *They hunt by thermal output! Your apathy won't stop their teeth! We have to fight them!*
I looked through our shared eyes at the mass of writhing, clicking horrors. The white aura was flickering wildly. He was completely redlining his Class-D output. He was pure, unadulterated confidence, but confidence was hollow. It was brittle glass. It shattered under applied, relentless pressure.
He didn't have the density to crush them.
*You're too light,* I realized, a sudden, desperate tactical theory forming in the dark recesses of my mind. *Your Ego is pure arrogance. It's hot, but it has no mass.*
*I am doing my best!* my Alter shouted, a drop of real, physical sweat rolling down my temple as another wasp bit through the fading shield, slicing a shallow gash across my forearm. The white cuff of my shirt stained crimson.
*You need weight,* I commanded from the passenger seat. *You need gravity. Stop fighting me. Open the valve.*
*What are you doing?!* *I'm giving you the basement,* I said.
I didn't try to take the wheel. I stayed in the passenger seat. But instead of hiding behind my apathy, I actively opened the heavy, lead-lined vault of my own clinical depression, my exhaustion, and my profound, suffocating cynicism, and I funneled it directly into the Alter's radiant Ego.
The synthesis was violently nauseating.
It was like pouring wet cement into a jet engine. My Alter gasped as the sheer, crushing weight of my psychological burden slammed into his pristine architecture.
The blinding, fragile white aura surrounding my body instantly shifted.
The surgical white darkened, bleeding into a heavy, dense, slate-grey. The flickering light stopped looking like glass and started behaving like liquid lead. The physical air pressure around my body didn't just push outward—it sank.
*My god,* the Alter whispered in our mind, feeling the fundamental shift in our kinetic output. *The density. It's... it's unbearable.*
*That's just Tuesday for me,* I thought back grimly. *Now push.*
My Alter stopped bracing himself against the swarm. He didn't snap his fingers this time. He simply planted his ruined, scuffed oxfords firmly into the asphalt, let out a raw, guttural roar, and shoved both hands downward.
*BANG!*
The slate-grey aura slammed into the ground, expanding outward in a fifty-foot radius.
It was a true gravity well. Not born of arrogance, but of absolute, crushing despair. The kinetic weight of the area instantly multiplied by ten.
The swarm of Dezonic Wasps above me shrieked in sudden, mechanical panic. Their rapidly vibrating wings couldn't generate enough lift to combat the sudden, immense gravitational pull.
It rained interdimensional bugs.
Over two hundred of the massive, football-sized insects were dragged violently out of the air. They slammed into the asphalt around me with heavy, sickening *crunches*. The sheer density of the grey aura pressed them flat against the concrete. Their chitinous armor cracked and popped like bubble wrap under a steamroller, highly corrosive yellow acid pooling harmlessly into the gutters.
I stood in the center of the massacre, gasping for air, the heavy slate-grey aura slowly retracting back into my skin.
Every single muscle in my body was screaming in agony. The burn on my shoulder was radiating a hot, throbbing pain, and my lungs felt like they were filled with wet sand. We had survived, but it wasn't a clean, god-like victory. It was a brutal, desperate, ugly street fight.
My Alter didn't offer a smug quip. He was completely silent, reeling from the sheer, suffocating weight of the apathy he had just been forced to metabolize. He finally understood exactly how heavy the world was for me.
We had broken through the threshold. The integration of his authority and my void had artificially forced a structural evolution in our cognitive output.
Across the street, the remaining swarm had been thinned out enough for the heavily armed mercenaries to mop up the stragglers with their scatterguns.
Dulci skidded to a halt a few yards away, her combat boots burning twin trails of smoking rubber into the pavement. Her yellow kinetic aura flickered wildly as she stared at the circle of crushed, pulverized insect carcasses surrounding me.
She looked at my heaving chest. She looked at the blood dripping down my forearm, and the completely shredded, acid-burned remnants of my ten-thousand-credit bespoke suit.
"Doc?" Dulci yelled over the screeching of the dying swarm, her voice laced with a mixture of absolute shock and newfound, genuine respect. "What the hell was that? I thought you were a blank! Your aura just went from white to lead-grey!"
My Alter slowly turned my head. The arrogant smirk was gone, replaced by a grim, exhausted scowl that belonged entirely to me.
"I am a consultant, Ms. Lace," my Alter rasped, his voice lacking any of its prior Beverly Hills polish. He reached up with a trembling hand and ripped the remaining, acid-eaten sleeve off the suit jacket, tossing the ruined silk onto the asphalt.
"And I strongly suggest," my Alter continued, staring at the shredded fabric, "that whoever summoned that tear has a very robust insurance policy. Because I am going to bill them for the tailoring."