Before anything, he should figure out how to control his powers. Right?
Jayden shifted in his meditation pose, the concrete beneath him still warm from electrical discharge. What powers did he have exactly? What were their parameters? But testing them out here in the open would be like sending up a fucking flare. One more surge and every sensor in LA would triangulate his position. Heroes, villains, government spooks—they'd all come running to see what was lighting up their boards.
The best course of action was to learn control. Here. Now. In this graveyard of melted circuits and broken dreams.
First things first: in the hospital, he'd noticed the pattern. His powers erupted based on emotional spikes and stray thoughts. When Dr. Chen had mentioned his parents, rage had detonated three monitors into smoking plastic. When escape crossed his mind, his body had already moved—thought and action collapsing into one violent moment.
Panic doubled his output. Fear tripled it.
Time to apply the fundamentals that had turned him from trust fund brat into a market predator.
Trading had taught him to become a beautiful liar. Emotions were cancer in the markets. Joy over a winning position made you hold too long, riding it straight into the ground. Fear made you bail early, leaving money on the table. So he'd learned to kill every tell, murder every emotion before it could betray him.
Heart rate, micro-expressions, the fucking way he breathed—all of it locked behind seventeen years of practice.
He could lie to anyone. The mighty Luther Cross family who saw him as genetic waste. The underground that thought he was just another rich kid playing with daddy's money. Even his own traitorous heart.
Should've made this simple.
Except...
Jayden closed his eyes and really *felt* the storm inside him. His heart wasn't beating—it was *hammering*. Two hundred BPM at rest, each contraction firing Genesis Energy through arteries that had become superconducting highways.
Blood screamed through his veins like Formula One cars on a track made of lightning.
Every muscle fiber vibrated at frequencies that made his edges blur, reality unsure where Jayden ended and the energy field began. His neurons didn't fire in patterns anymore—they fucking *exploded* in cascades that made thought and action simultaneous.
He'd think about moving and find himself already moved, the decision arriving after the fact like a late dinner guest.
His emotions weren't quick—they were *instant*. Rage flashed through him like napalm. Joy sparked and died between heartbeats.
Fear, lust, hatred—all of them hitting with sledgehammer force and hummingbird duration.
The Genesis Energy made it catastrophically worse. He could feel it flooding every cell, his body a sponge in an ocean of power. The Den sat close enough to a minor gate that the air itself tasted electric.
Each breath was another hit of pure, uncut Energy, and his cells were junkies screaming for more.
Normal people felt emotion, processed it, reacted.
Jayden felt-processed-reacted in one quantum instant, too fast for conscious intervention. His body had become a creature of pure impulse.
"Fuck," he snarled, and blue lightning escaped with the profanity, scorching new patterns in the walls.
New approach.
Master the body first. Chain the flesh before trying to cage the mind.
He focused on breathing, trying to find rhythm in the chaos. In... his lungs filled so fast the air cracked. Out... the exhale came like a gunshot.
Smaller. Start with a finger.
Jayden raised his right index finger, willing it to move left to right at human speed. Basic. Kindergarten shit.
The finger teleported across his vision, leaving a trail of blue afterimages.
"Motherfucker."
Again. This time tracking the Genesis Energy flow, trying to throttle it like a valve on a fire hose.
The finger moved... marginally slower. Still faster than human eyes could track, but progress. Lightning crawled along his hand but stayed leashed.
He stood—or tried to. Legs designed for walking pushed with speedster force, launching him into the ceiling hard enough to punch through industrial plaster. He crashed back down in a rain of debris and profanity.
The curse came with massive discharge, but Jayden caught something interesting. The explosion went mostly outward. His clothes—already more ash than fabric—survived what melted a steel beam ten feet away. The phone in his pocket, cracked and dying, endured a surge that would've EMP'd a city block.
Same phenomenon from the hospital. He'd fried a transformer from across the street, but his phone had clung to life until he'd channeled power directly into it. His body generated some kind of field. A bubble where physics played by different rules.
Useful.
Jayden stood again, this time pulling Energy inward before moving. Still too much force, but horizontal instead of vertical. He slammed into the wall, cracking concrete but not painting it with his organs.
Progress.
He pushed off, attempting the impossible—walking. Each step was war against his own nervous system. His body screamed to be *there* already, to collapse the distance between desire and destination. He fought it with everything seventeen years of emotional suppression had taught him.
Step. Concrete spiderwebbed under impact, but he didn't teleport.
Step. Lightning traced his path like a loyal dog, staying close.
Step. Genesis Energy howled to escape, to find the nearest conductor and ride it to freedom. He caged it with pure will.
Step. Almost normal. Almost human.
Then frustration flickered—just a spark of "why is this so fucking hard"—and his control shattered. He blurred through the room, through the door, down the stairs, and into a support pillar with enough force to fold steel like origami.
"FUCK THIS!"
The scream came with apocalyptic discharge. Every electronic device in a three-block radius died simultaneously. Car alarms choked mid-scream. Street lights exploded in tinkling rain. Somewhere distant, a transformer went supernova with a sound like God clearing his throat.
Jayden slumped against the bent pillar, electricity crawling over him like luminous parasites.
This was going to be a bitch.
Trading had given him years to build control. Years to construct the mental architecture that kept emotion from poisoning judgment. Years to perfect the art of lying to his own soul.
He had minutes now. Maybe hours. Every second uncontrolled was a countdown to discovery. To the Luther Cross family learning their "cripple" had become something beyond their Platinum Grade dreams. To the government deciding he was too dangerous for freedom.
But maybe he was attacking this wrong.
In the markets, you didn't fight momentum. You rode it. Found the flow and moved with it, not against it. Fighting the trend was how fortunes became food stamps.
What if instead of slowing down to match the world, he sped his perception up to match his body?
Jayden closed his eyes, but this time embraced the acceleration. Let his consciousness sync with his cells.
The world... stopped.
Not stopped—slowed to the consistency of honey. Dust motes hung like tiny planets. Distant sirens stretched into whale song. His own breathing became the tide.
In this dilated reality, his movements felt natural. He raised his hand and watched it glide through crystallized air at what felt normal to him, knowing it was invisible to anyone else.
Step. In slow-motion world, controlled. Precise.
Another. Then another.
He was walking. Sort of. To any observer, he'd be a smear of motion and ozone. But to him, locked in accelerated time, he was finally moving with intent instead of impulse.
Not perfect. Maintaining this focus was like juggling chainsaws while solving differential equations. But it was a start.
Master the body. Check. Mostly.
Next: emotions and thoughts.
That was going to be the real motherfucker.
Because unlike his body, which he could trick with time dilation, his emotions moved at powers' speed. Trying to control them was like trying to perform surgery on lightning.
But he had to try.
Because somewhere out there, the world was waiting to see what Jayden Luther Cross had become. The broken Luther. The family embarrassment. The cripple who'd spent seventeen years in the shadow of gods.
Well, he had something to show them now.
The question was whether there'd be anything left standing when he did.
Jayden smiled in his slowed world, electricity painting his teeth blue.
Time to find out.
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Guys, let's make the first chapters be learning powers and first dungeon exploring before we smash the hell out of the hero world.