The first drone sat on my desk for three days while I figured out what came next.
It worked. It flew. I could see through its camera, control its movements, use it as an extension of myself. But it was a proof of concept, not a weapon. The camera was grainy. The battery lasted fifteen minutes. It had no arms, no weapons, no way to interact with the world beyond looking at it.
I needed more.
I spent those three days buried in my laptop, researching. My enhanced cognition meant I could process information at ridiculous speeds—I was reading technical papers on drone design, watching engineering lectures at double speed, cross-referencing specs from a dozen different military and commercial drones.
I pulled schematics from everything I could find. The MQ-9 Reaper, a Predator drone, a dozen different consumer models. I wasn't going to build a copy of any of them—I was looking for ideas. Motor configurations, aerodynamic principles, weapon mounting systems, camera gimbals.
The design that emerged in my head was a hybrid. Small—about the size of a large crow—with four arms extending from a central core. Each arm would hold a motor and propeller, like a standard quadcopter, but the core would be packed with electronics. A high-resolution camera on a stabilized gimbal. A speaker for communication. Manipulator arms that could fold up against the body during flight. And weapons.
The weapons were the tricky part.
I needed something small enough to fit on a drone this size, but powerful enough to matter. I spent a day researching micro-automatic weapons—machine pistols, submachine guns, the kind of things special forces used for close-quarters work. The FN P90 was too big. The MP7 was too long. I needed something I could mount four of on a drone the size of a bird.
I found what I was looking for in a forgotten corner of the internet. A company that made drone-mounted weapon systems for military and law enforcement. Small, lightweight, fully automatic. Four of them could be mounted on a single drone, each with its own magazine, all controlled through a single interface.
The price made me choke.
Eighty thousand dollars. For one set of four guns, plus ammunition, plus the mounting hardware.
I didn't have eighty thousand dollars. I had about eighteen left after the first round of drone building.
But I didn't need eighty thousand dollars. I needed a receipt.
---
The next week was a blur of activity.
First, I needed money. Real money, cash money, the kind that would let me buy the things I needed without raising questions. I went back to the FreeTrade app, but this time I was smarter about it. I didn't sell phones and laptops. I sold things that people wanted but couldn't easily trace.
I recreated high-end gaming PCs from receipts I found at electronics stores. I recreated professional cameras, studio monitors, musical instruments. I sold them to buyers in different parts of the city, always meeting in public places, always using a different name and appearance.
Over six days, I made ninety thousand dollars.
It was exhausting. Every sale was a risk. Every new face could be someone asking questions I didn't want to answer. But the money piled up, and by the end of the week, I had enough to make the next step.
I also started collecting receipts from everywhere. Dumpsters behind electronics stores, recycling bins at office buildings, trash cans at the airport. Anywhere there might be receipts for valuable components. I grabbed everything—receipts for motors, cameras, batteries, processors, memory chips. I had a shoebox full of them by the end of the week, each one a potential part I could create without paying a cent.
---
Finding the guns took another two days.
I couldn't just walk into a store and buy what I needed. I had to find the people who sold this kind of equipment, the ones who didn't ask questions. It took hours of searching through forums and chat rooms, using a VPN and a burner phone, learning the language, finding the contacts.
I eventually found a group that specialized in "security equipment." A phone call, a meeting arranged, a warehouse on the edge of the industrial district.
I went at night. I brought a bag with twenty thousand dollars in cash, my heart pounding the whole way. The place was dark, the windows blacked out, the door reinforced steel. A man let me in—big, bald, with a scar across his cheek that looked like someone had tried to cut his face off.
"What do you want?" His voice was flat, professional.
"I need four drone-mounted automatic weapons. The kind the military uses for surveillance ops. And ammunition. Enough for sustained engagement."
He looked at me for a long moment. I was fifteen, skinny, wearing a hoodie that was too big for me. I didn't look like a buyer. I didn't look like anything.
"You got the money?"
I opened the bag. Twenty thousand in hundreds.
He didn't smile, but something in his face shifted. "Follow me."
He led me through a maze of crates and shelves, past boxes of things I didn't want to look at too closely. At the back, he opened a metal case and pulled out four small, black modules. Each one was about the size of a soda can, with a short barrel and a mounting bracket.
"These are custom. 9mm, fully automatic, five hundred rounds per minute. Each one comes with a hundred-round magazine. Weight's under two pounds each. They're designed to mount on drones up to a certain size. You got a drone that can carry four of these?"
"I'll make one."I sarcastically
He shrugged. "Not my problem. You want them?"
"I want a receipt."
He stared at me. "What?"
"A receipt. A sales receipt. Itemized, with the date, the price, and a description of the items."
He laughed. It was a short, ugly sound. "You think I keep receipts? You think I want a paper trail for this shit?"
"I'm not leaving without one." I kept my voice steady, even though my hands wanted to shake. "I'll pay extra. Whatever you want. But I need a receipt."
He looked at me for a long, uncomfortable moment. Then he laughed again, softer this time. "You're a weird kid, you know that?"
"Five hundred extra."
"One thousand."
"Done."
He pulled out a battered receipt book from a drawer—the kind that makes carbon copies—and wrote out what I asked for. Four drone-mounted automatic weapons. One thousand rounds of 9mm ammunition. Mounting hardware. Total price: twenty-one thousand dollars.
He handed me the receipt. I handed him the cash.
"Pleasure doing business," he said, not meaning it.
I put the guns and the receipt in my bag and walked out into the night. My hands were shaking now, but I was grinning.
---
Back in my apartment, I made copies of the receipt. Ten copies, each one perfect, each one capable of recreating the weapons through Contractual Reclamation.
I used one copy to create the four guns and the ammunition. They appeared on my floor in a neat stack, cold metal and black polymer, magazines loaded, safety catches engaged.
I looked at them for a long moment. These were real weapons. They could kill people. And I was going to put them on drones and fly them over a city full of superheroes.
The thought should have scared me. Maybe it did, a little. But mostly it felt like power. Like the first real step toward being something more than a skinny kid in a cheap apartment.
I put the original receipt in my safe—a fireproof lockbox I'd recreated from a hardware store receipt—and went back to work.
---
The next two weeks were a haze of building, failing, and building again.
I had the schematics for the new drone worked out. The frame would be carbon fiber, like the first one, but smaller and more compact. The arms would fold in for storage, extending out during flight. The central core would house the flight controller, the battery, the weapons control system, and the manipulator arms.
The manipulator arms were a nightmare.
I found a receipt for a surgical robot arm—one of those hyper-precise things they use for minimally invasive surgery. The receipt was in a bin outside a medical supply company. I used it to create one, then spent three days taking it apart, studying it, figuring out how to miniaturize it.
The final version was less than six inches long, with three joints and a gripping claw at the end. It could lift up to two pounds, enough to grab small objects, open doors, manipulate tools. Two of them mounted on the drone, folding up against its body when not in use.
I built the first one by hand, using components I'd recreated from receipts. It took me four tries to get the joints to move smoothly. The first version seized up when I tried to bend it past ninety degrees. The second was too weak to lift anything. The third had wiring that shorted out when I tested it. The fourth worked.
I made copies of that one. Ten copies. Enough for ten drones.
---
The flight system was easier. I had the design from the first drone, but I scaled it up. Better motors, bigger propellers, a more powerful battery. I found receipts for high-end drone racing components in a dumpster behind a hobby shop—the kind of parts people use to build drones that can hit a hundred miles an hour. I recreated them, studied them, incorporated what I learned.
The camera was a breakthrough. I found a receipt for a professional cinema camera—one of those forty-thousand-dollar Red cameras—in a bin behind a film studio. I used it to create one, then disassembled it. The sensor was incredible, the optics were perfect. I couldn't fit the whole camera into the drone, but I could use the sensor and the lens. I built a custom camera module around them, with a three-axis gimbal for stabilization.
The result was a camera that could see in 4K, with zoom capabilities that let me read a license plate from five hundred feet away. Through the Puppet Manipulation connection, the image was crisp, clear, almost like being there.
---
The speaker was simple. A high-end Bluetooth speaker from a receipt I found in a Best Buy trash can. I stripped it down, kept the driver and the amplifier, mounted it in the drone's core. It could play any sound I wanted—voice, music, anything. Good for communication. Good for distractions.
---
Weapons integration took the longest.
The guns were designed to mount on drones, but not this drone. I had to design custom mounting points, reinforce the frame to handle the recoil, figure out how to trigger the guns remotely. The trigger mechanism was a solenoid—a small electromagnetic switch—that I wired into the flight controller. When I sent the command through the Cursed Energy connection, the solenoid would activate, pulling the trigger. Four guns, four solenoids, all controlled through the same interface.
The recoil was a problem. Firing one gun was manageable. Firing all four at once, on a drone this small, would send it spinning. I programmed the flight controller to compensate—brief bursts only, with the motors adjusting in real-time to maintain stability.
I tested it in an abandoned warehouse on the edge of town. The first test shot sent the drone into the wall. The second test was better—the drone held steady for a two-round burst before drifting. By the fifth test, I had the settings dialed in. The drone could fire all four guns simultaneously in controlled bursts without losing stability.
It was loud. It was terrifying. It was exactly what I needed.
---
I built twelve more drones over the next ten days.
Each one took about six hours of work, once I had the process down. I used Contractual Reclamation to create components in bulk—motors, cameras, guns, ammunition, everything. I had the original receipts for everything, safely hidden in my lockbox, and I used copies to create the parts I needed.
The cost was astronomical. Even with the receipts I'd scavenged from bins, I was spending thousands of dollars a day on components I couldn't find copies for. Specialized wiring, custom circuit boards, the high-end battery cells that gave the drones an hour of flight time. I went through money like it was nothing.
By the time I finished the twelfth drone, I had spent almost all of it.
I had nineteen thousand dollars left. Enough to live on for a while, but not enough for the next phase of my plan.
It was worth it. I had thirteen drones now. Each one was a weapon, a surveillance platform, an extension of my will. And I was getting better at controlling them.
---
The cognitive enhancement from Puppet Manipulation had been working in the background for weeks now, but it was only when I started controlling multiple drones that I felt it really click.
I started with two. It was like juggling—my brain had to hold two separate streams of sensory input, two separate sets of commands, two separate perspectives. It was hard at first. I'd lose track of one while focusing on the other, crash a drone because I was paying attention to the wrong camera feed.
But it got easier. Fast.
Within a few days, I could control five drones at once without thinking about it. Their camera feeds merged into a single coherent picture in my mind, like having a dozen eyes all looking in different directions. I could fly them in formation, send them on separate patrol routes, coordinate their movements without missing a beat.
By the time I finished the twelfth drone, I could control all thirteen simultaneously.
The experience was... overwhelming, at first. Thirteen camera feeds, thirteen sets of sensor data, thirteen positions in space, all flowing into my brain at once. But the modification I'd made to Puppet Manipulation—the cognitive enhancement—was designed for exactly this. My brain adapted. It learned to process the information in parallel, to treat the drones as extensions of my own body rather than separate entities to be managed.
I could fly them across the city while sitting in my apartment. I could see through their eyes, hear through their microphones, speak through their speakers. I could send one to watch the Grayson house, another to patrol the docks, a third to hover over the downtown area, all at the same time.
I was becoming something more than human. Not a superhero—something different. Something with a thousand eyes and a thousand hands, watching everything, waiting for the moment when I would need to act.
---
Two days after the first drone was built, there was a knock on my apartment door.
I was sitting on the floor, surrounded by drone parts and tools, a half-built frame in my hands. Through the drone hovering outside my window, I could see who it was before I even got up.
A woman. Mid-forties, professional clothes, a tablet in her hand. She looked annoyed.
I opened the door, wiping grease off my hands. "Can I help you?"
"Ren Akiyama?" She checked her tablet. "I'm Mrs. Patterson. I'm the attendance officer for your school district. You haven't been to school in three weeks. Your teachers haven't heard from you. Your emergency contacts are all outdated. I'm here to find out why."
I stared at her for a moment. School. I'd completely forgotten about school.
"I've been sick," I said. It was the first thing that came to mind.
She looked me up and down. I was pale, thin, with dark circles under my eyes. It was convincing enough. "Have you seen a doctor?"
"No. I couldn't afford it."
Her expression softened, just a little. "Your attendance record was spotty before, but you've missed almost a month now. If you don't return soon, we'll have to involve child protective services."
Child protective services. That was the last thing I needed. An investigation, a social worker poking around my apartment, questions about where my money came from, what I was doing with my time.
"I'll come back," I said quickly. "I'm feeling better now. I'll be there tomorrow."
She gave me a long look. "Tomorrow's Saturday."
"Monday. I'll be there Monday."
She nodded slowly, making a note on her tablet. "I'll let the school know. But Ren—if you don't show up, there will be consequences. You understand?"
"I understand."
She left. I closed the door, leaned against it, and let out a long breath.
School. I was going back to school. Which meant I was going to be in the same building as Mark Grayson. The same building where, in about a year, everything would change.
I needed to get my affairs in order before then.
---
The emancipation process started the same day.
I'd been researching it for weeks. In this state, minors could be emancipated if they could prove they were financially independent and capable of making their own decisions. It was a long, complicated process, usually requiring a lawyer. And lawyers cost money.
But there were lawyers who specialized in this kind of work. Lawyers who worked fast, asked few questions, and charged a flat fee. I found one on a legal services website—a woman named Karen Hayes who advertised "expedited emancipation services" for "qualified minors."
I called her from a burner phone. We met in a coffee shop across town, away from my apartment, away from anywhere I might be recognized.
She was older than I expected, maybe sixty, with grey hair and sharp eyes. She looked at me like she was appraising a piece of property.
"You're fifteen," she said. "No parents. No guardians. Living alone in an apartment you pay for with cash. You want me to make you legally independent."
"Yes."
"You have money?"
"I have twelve thousand dollars. Cash. Your website said that's your fixed rate for this type of work."
She nodded slowly. "It is. But I need to know—where does the money come from?"
"I'm an entrepreneur. I buy and sell electronics. I can show you bank statements if you want."I lied calmly
She looked at me for a long moment, then nodded again. "Okay. Here's how this normally works. I file the paperwork. You provide proof of income, proof of residence, proof that you can support yourself. I argue to the court that you're mature enough to make your own decisions. Three weeks, maybe less. You get your emancipation, you get a credit card, you get the legal status of an adult."
"And if someone asks questions? About where I live, how I support myself?"
She smiled. It wasn't a nice smile. "That's why you pay me twelve thousand dollars. I make sure the right people see the right documents. No one asks questions."
I handed her an envelope full of cash. She counted it without looking away from me, then tucked it into her briefcase.
"I'll be in touch," she said. "Don't do anything stupid in the meantime."
---
Finding the new apartment took another two days.
I needed a place that was bigger, cleaner, more secure. A place where I could set up my workshop without worrying about neighbors complaining about the noise. A place that didn't ask questions about a fifteen-year-old paying rent in cash.
I found it in a building on the east side of town. Four stories, brick facade, the kind of place that had been renovated recently but still had character. The landlord was an older man named Mr. Chen who managed the building himself. He showed me a two-bedroom unit on the top floor—living room, kitchen, bathroom, two bedrooms, plenty of space.
"How old are you?" he asked, looking at me over his glasses.
"Seventeen," I lied. "My parents moved overseas. They're letting me stay here on my own."
He looked at me for a moment, then shrugged. "Eight thousand a month. First and last up front. Cash only. No pets. No parties. No questions."
I handed him sixteen thousand dollars in hundreds. He gave me a key and a receipt.
I moved in that night.
It took three trips. I used my drones to scout the route first, making sure no one was watching. I moved the lockbox first—the original receipts, the printer receipt copies, the remaining cash. Then my clothes, my laptop, the tools and components I'd accumulated. Finally, the drones themselves, thirteen of them, packed in foam-lined cases I'd recreated from a photography store receipt.
I set up the new printer in the second bedroom, along with a workstation that would have made any engineer jealous. The drones went on shelves along the wall, each one in its own cradle, connected to charging cables.
When I was done, I stood in the middle of the new living room and looked around. It was bare—no furniture except the desk and chair I'd brought from the old apartment, no decorations, no personal touches. But it was clean. It was quiet. It was mine.
I pulled out my phone and looked at the calendar. Monday. Two days away. I was going back to school.
I walked to the closet and pulled out the new clothes I'd bought—jeans, t-shirts, a jacket, shoes that actually fit. I laid them out on the bed, trying to remember the last time I'd worn anything that wasn't worn thin or covered in grease.
Tomorrow, I'd go shopping for a bag. Something simple, something that wouldn't draw attention.
Monday, I'd walk into school like I'd never left. I'd sit in classes I'd already learned more about than any teacher could teach me. I'd be in the same building as Mark Grayson, the future Invincible, the center of a story I knew better than my own past.
And I'd watch. I'd learn. I'd weponize.
I reached out with my Cursed Energy, feeling the connection to my drones. Thirteen pairs of eyes, scattered across the city. Through them, I could see everything. The streets below, the people walking home, the distant glow of the downtown skyline. All of it, flowing into my mind like water into a cup.
I closed my eyes
I was ready.