The elevator descended with a smooth, silent hum, a stark contrast to the chaos erupting in the lobby above. Ravi stood perfectly still in the center of the mirrored car, his reflection staring back at him from all sides—a dozen emotionless boys in black uniforms, all waiting. He wasn't breathing heavily. His heart rate was as steady as a metronome. This wasn't a battle for him; it was a task, like tidying a messy room.
A calm, feminine voice spoke, not in the elevator, but directly inside his head. It was Ayla, her voice a faint, tinny whisper. She had found a way to tap into the residual energy of the crushed radio, using it as a micro-transceiver.
"Ravi? Can you hear me? I'm piggybacking on their comms frequency. It's unstable, I don't know how long it will last."
"Loud and clear," Ravi subvocalized, his lips barely moving.
"Okay, good. The elevator is about to open into Sublevel 1. It's a security checkpoint. At least a dozen guards, heavily armed. I can't disable the sensors here, they're on an independent power grid. They'll see you coming."
"It doesn't matter," Ravi said.
The elevator slowed, a soft chime indicating its arrival. The doors slid open.
Just as Ayla had predicted, a full squad of twelve elite Pale Hand guards stood waiting in a semi-circle. They were clad in light body armor and armed with advanced magnetic assault rifles, all of which were leveled directly at the elevator doors. They were prepared. They were focused.
And it made no difference at all.
The moment the doors were open wide enough for a person to step through, Ravi moved. He was a black streak of motion, a living shadow that flowed out of the elevator.
The guards opened fire. The corridor lit up with a blinding barrage of muzzle flashes, the air filled with the deafening chatter of weapons fire. The steel walls of the elevator were perforated in a millisecond, shredded into a work of lethal modern art.
But the target was no longer there.
Before the first shell casing could even hit the polished floor, Ravi was already among them. He didn't use his Divine Dismantling; that was for threats. These were merely obstacles.
His hand chopped the side of one guard's neck, who collapsed instantly. He spun, his leg sweeping out and breaking the legs of two more guards with a single, sickening crunch. He snatched a rifle from a fourth, reversed it, and used the butt of the weapon to shatter the helmets and jaws of three others in a fluid, brutal ballet of violence. Each movement was precise, economical, and devastating. No wasted energy. No killing blows. Just incapacitation, swift and absolute.
The entire exchange took four seconds.
When it was over, Ravi stood in the center of a corridor filled with the groaning, broken bodies of twelve elite soldiers. He hadn't even been touched. He dropped the rifle he'd used, the clatter of its fall the only sound in the sudden silence.
"Ravi! What happened? I heard gunfire! Report!" Ayla's voice was frantic in his mind.
"The welcoming committee was dealt with," Ravi said, stepping over a twitching body and proceeding down the corridor. "Where to next?"
There was a moment of stunned silence on the other end. "...Dealt with? All twelve of them? Okay… okay, focus, Ayla. The next junction is two hundred meters ahead. There are two paths. Left leads to the barracks, right leads to the maintenance tunnels. The schematics say the tunnels are the fastest route to Sublevel 2."
"Understood," Ravi said, his pace never faltering.
In the throne room of Sublevel 3, Silas watched the corridor feed on his main screen, his sneer replaced by a frown of irritation. The twelve guards had been a triviality, an alarm system. But the way they had been dispatched was anything but. The asset's speed and efficiency were unsettling.
"He's faster than the last recording," Silas noted. He turned his gaze to a smaller screen showing a simple biometric reading. It was a feed from his first Echo, the speed specialist, codenamed 'Quicksilver'. His heart rate was calm, steady. He was in position. "Let's see how he handles a true enhancement."
Ravi reached the junction. The corridor ahead was long, straight, and eerily empty. White fluorescent lights hummed overhead, casting sterile, shadowless light on the polished gray floor.
"This is it," Ayla's voice whispered. "The tunnels are to your right, but… I'm getting a weird energy reading from the corridor in front of you. It's faint, but it feels… unstable. Be careful."
Ravi stopped. He looked down the long, empty hallway. His senses, far more acute than any scanner, felt it too. A subtle distortion in the air. A vibration just at the edge of hearing.
"One of them is here," Ravi stated.
"Who?" A voice answered, not from his comm, but from everywhere at once. It was smug, arrogant, and echoed unnaturally. "Looking for me?"
A figure flickered into existence at the far end of the hall. A man in a form-fitting gray bodysuit, with silver cybernetic lines tracing the muscles of his arms and legs. This was Quicksilver.
"They told me you were fast," the Echo taunted, a cruel grin spreading across his face. "Let me show you what real speed looks like."
In the space between one heartbeat and the next, Quicksilver vanished. He didn't run. He was simply gone.
A second later, Ravi felt a presence behind him. A blade of high-frequency energy sliced through the air, aimed directly at his neck.
Ravi didn't turn. He simply tilted his head to the side, and the energy blade missed by a millimeter, carving a deep, glowing gash in the wall beside him.
"Impressive reflexes," Quicksilver's voice echoed, this time from Ravi's left. Another attack came, a jab aimed at his ribs.
Ravi took a half-step back, the blow whiffing past him. He still hadn't turned.
"Ravi, he's too fast!" Ayla cried out. "My sensors can't even track him! He's moving in short, localized temporal bursts! He's literally teleporting!"
Quicksilver appeared in front of him now, laughing. "You see? You can't even touch me! I am a god of speed! While you're still deciding to move, I've already struck you a thousand times!"
To prove his point, he became a gray blur, circling Ravi at impossible speeds. A dozen afterimages surrounded Ravi, each one launching a phantom strike. It was a disorienting, overwhelming assault designed to shatter an opponent's senses and morale before landing the killing blow.
Ravi remained at the center of the storm, perfectly still. He closed his eyes.
"You are mistaken," Ravi said, his voice calm and clear, cutting through the noise.
"Mistaken about what?!" Quicksilver mocked, his true form materializing behind Ravi for the final, decisive strike, his energy blade raised high. "That I'm a god?"
"No," Ravi said, his eyes snapping open. They were glowing with a faint, crimson light.
"You're mistaken that you are the one who is moving fast."
Ravi's arm shot out, not forward or backward, but directly to his side. His fingers clenched into a fist, grabbing a fistful of empty air.
Or what should have been empty air.
Quicksilver's attack froze mid-swing. His eyes widened in shock and disbelief. He was no longer behind Ravi. He was caught, his neck trapped firmly in Ravi's unyielding grip. Ravi hadn't moved to intercept him. He had simply reached out to the exact point in space-time where he knew Quicksilver would be.
He hadn't been tracking the Echo's movements. He had perceived the Echo's entire path—past, present, and future—as a single, static line. To him, the man hadn't been teleporting around the room; he'd simply been scribbling in place.
"Wha—How!?" Quicksilver choked out, his vaunted speed completely neutralized. Panic flooded his face as he stared into Ravi's cold, glowing eyes. "My speed… it's absolute!"
"There are no absolutes," Ravi said, his voice a low, terrifying rumble. "There are only bigger systems. Your speed is a cheap trick, a localized anomaly. I am a universal constant."
He tightened his grip.
There was no struggle. There was no resistance. Just the sickening, final sound of vertebrae and cybernetics crushing into irreparable scrap.
CRUNCH.
Ravi let the body drop to the floor. The first Echo was silenced.
He looked at the corpse for a moment, then at the glowing gash in the wall.
"He scratched the paint," he murmured, a hint of genuine annoyance in his voice. He then turned and walked towards the maintenance tunnel on the right, as if nothing had happened.
"Ravi…?" Ayla's voice was a whisper of pure, unadulterated awe. "What… what did you just do?"
"I took out the trash," Ravi replied. "What's next?"