Chapter One

The mid-afternoon sun roasted the pavement of Tokyo, Japan. The intersection of two streets had a collection of bodies both young and old, waiting eagerly for the signal to change. Cars drove by, occasionally interrupted by the crush of human bodies pushing through. One boy, a fourteen-year-old, paid no attention to the mass of people. Walking this way to his after-school cram session gave him time to listen to music. The crowd and traffic didn't cramp together tight enough to rile him, mostly because this street stood a ways away from busier, main-street intersections. Haruki Kawakatsu, an inch above average height and a handful of pounds under average weight, stood largely unnoticed. He made for a fairly uninteresting Japanese teenager.

About the only exception had to be his deep blue hair. Kids and teachers alike had given him grief about it as far back as the second grade. His parents had little idea what to make of it themselves. Unlike most Japanese youth, who dyed their hair for rebellion's sake or for whatever phase they went through, his hair color proved to be natural. On more than one occasion the school had told him to dye his hair black. He'd done so. Given enough time, however, the blue always showed up. High school had decided not to raise a ruckus over it. It was one of the few times his doctor's words were listened to.

Right now, he had a cram session to go to, and he didn't feel like being late. The intersection went quiet-ish as the car drove through, leaving a traffic-free break. His phone chose that moment to disconnect from his Bluetooth earbuds, which immediately stopped the song that was playing.

Crap, he thought, looking down and swiping angrily through settings menus, not during Enter Sandman.

He loved listening to Metallica while walking. The guitar solo halfway through the first track of the Black Album had to be the worst place to disconnect. He scarcely noticed as the signal changed and the sea of bodies evaporated like summer puddle water. Never mind, he felt; he'd catch the next signal.

“…up!”

The sound, muffled by the earbuds, as well as the speaking of the pre-recorded voice, droning on about how it was “searching for devices,” managed to cut through the quiet. A faint buzzing noise accompanied it. He ignored all of it. The batteries on his earbuds were still good, so why had it disconnected? He tried turning Bluetooth off and on again.

“Look up!”

He raised his head at the continued shouting. Across the street, against the wall of a bank building, a man was shouting something. The crowd had scattered. He saw the man pointing a finger. Haruki's head turned in the direction of the pointed finger.

The sound of the droning had gotten louder.

A box truck had left the road and had bounded onto the shoulder, its driver slumped over the wheel, a pained grimace on his face.

Haruki had enough time to screw his face into a look of horror.

Everything vanished from view. Sound became a grinding incessance ripping at his ears like a chainsaw at a knotted log. After a loud bang and an endless moment of roaring and a horn blaring, everything went as silent as a graveyard at midnight. Liquid dripping and bits of glass tinkling briefly interrupted each deadly silent moment.

A screaming pain jarred him awake and his eyes flew open.

Before anything else, he saw his entire field of vision black save for a thin sliver of light that peered in through a slit above his head. “What?” he tried to say. Instead, it came out as a gurgling noise with a pathetic wheeze as he felt a pain like hell itself burrowing through his body. Blood mixed with saliva poured from his mouth. He couldn't move his head, and that proved to be positive, because if he could, he'd see his chest had been crushed and his jaw shattered. He ceased to be a person so much as a human-shaped mass of excruciation. Eyes moved left and right, and he saw a flesh-toned snake with odd bony protrusions and red stripes on both sides of him.

Wait, he thought.

His eyes went wide as the realization hit him.

Those weren't snakes. Those were his arms, bones shattered into fragments and bent and twisted in half a dozen directions arms hadn't been made to bend in. The bones stuck out of his skin, and blood had caked his wrecked limbs.

Once his eyes adjusted to the light, he could see the crumpled front grill of the truck up against his body. Brick and broken concrete piled all around him. He'd been flattened by the truck against the wall of a building.

I'm going to die…

The realization hit him. Instead of grief, his body’s overwhelming pain response prevented him from going numb or feeling much of anything else. He couldn't even scream through his mangled jaw and smashed chest. What really struck him as odd, however, was the warmth he felt. It reminded him of a fire.

Fire, he thought, as the warmth began to fill him like a basin prepared for the bath.

In his mind, a vision overcame his conscious awareness. He found himself zooming through the inky blackness of space, before a single, white-hot point off in the distance appeared and began to approach at unimaginable speeds. In no time at all, the single point became an all-encompassing ball of heat, brighter than the sun, brighter than any sun. His eyes could not help but be drawn in by impossible heat, impossible light, and impossible power. This ball of fire was the source of fire. It spread its warmth out in tendrils from its core, and those tendrils snaked through space, becoming less visible as they travelled light-years in moments. Little by little, they touched planets, and the heat gave rise to life.

That's it, he decided, I'm losing my mind.

The only hint of rationality in his mind took over. The answer must be that he had gone insane at the moment of death and was hallucinating. One of the tendrils of heat from the ball of fire touched a planet that seemed like some Greek idea of Hades, though the planet’s inhabitants seemed normal, in behavior if not appearance. The planet had boiling rivers of lava and lakes like cauldrons, in which humanoid beings, whose skin had the appearance of volcanic obsidian with red, magma-like vein lines, luxuriated.

Before he could continue to marvel at these beings, whatever this vision was pulled his attention back to the all-encompassing ball of flame. It sent a single, large pulse of white-hot flame his way.

His eyes shot open as he felt his jaw snap back into place, bones repaired and skin reknit without scarring. A faint whine, like scraping on a chalkboard, filled his ears and confused him, until it stopped and he realized he could move his head. When the truth revealed itself, he found himself too stunned to question it.

“My chest is fixed,” he whispered, realizing he could talk without pain and his ribs were no longer powder.

Several loud pops like the crack of a starting pistol sounded. It turned out to be the sound of his bones snapping back into place.

Deciding not to question the impossibility of the situation, he pressed his hands against the ruined front of the truck and pushed. Unfortunately, reality reasserted itself at this point, and he couldn't budge the vehicle. “Come on, fire!” he prayed the hallucination wasn't one.

He shoved. The vehicle did not move. Once again, he pleaded with an impossible vision of fire in space for a miracle that made no sense. He groaned and shoved a third time. Nothing happened.

Slamming his eyes shut, he pictured the fire's tendrils filling him with flame. The muscles in his arms tensed as he imagined the heat filling them. A single, almighty shout echoed from his lungs as he shoved.

The tires let out a horrid screech as the truck sailed across the pavement and its rear crashed into the wall of a parking garage across the street.

Sunlight filled the open air around him as the daylight entered the now-open space. He took a breath and stared. His outstretched arms stood in front of him, caked in drying blood but otherwise unblemished.

He wondered if he had imagined all of this nonsense.

His hands flexed into fists at his command and out into open palms again.

Shaking his head, he tried to take a step but felt something gripping his right leg tight. “What in the…?” When he looked down, he saw a piece of rebar sticking up at a forty-five degree angle straight through his right calf. Without thinking, he wrapped his right fist around it and pulled, yanking it free from the concrete with a loud snap. It pulled completely through his leg, and the wound holes spurted blood but sealed almost instantly.

His mouth hung open as he stepped out of the crater the truck had made in the wall. His bare feet touched pavement, and he had to remember the impact had torn his shoes free. There seemed to be no sound in the air. The intersection seemed oddly vacant. Only the wrecked truck sat, its crumpled front end exposed, its rear end partially embedded in the wall of the opposing building where he'd shoved it…somehow. The driver sat slumped over the steering wheel.

“The driver!” Haruki exclaimed, his sense of duty punching through his bewilderment.

A few short steps and a light bound and he mounted the truck. A tug on the door handle broke it off with a loud snap, and he discarded it. Nervous fingers poked at the broken glass, crumpling it without so much as a blemish. Haruki stared in disbelief as the harmless indentation corrected itself at once with no blood or puncture of the skin. This emboldened him to place both hands on the bottom of the window frame of the driver door, glass crushing harmlessly under his grip. He braced himself with his right foot and placed his left foot against the cab frame. Arm and leg muscles yanked with everything he had, and…

He found himself thrown onto his back.

The driver side door had snapped off with a horrific metallic pop. With almost no resistance, his foot shove had launched him backwards. The tremendous force he'd imparted into the door with his pull shot it like a cannonball. He flipped over onto his belly and stared wide-eyed at the door, speared into the wall of the building parallel to the truck.

With no time to worry about such things, he climbed back on the truck and examined the driver. His seatbelt had gotten damaged by the crash. Haruki wrapped a left hand around the seat belt mechanism and pulled, ripping it free as though he'd plucked a dandelion. Ignoring the seemingly impossible, he draped the man's left arm around his upper back and placed an arm under the man's knees and supported his back and gingerly removed him from the truck.

As he climbed out, he marveled at the fact that a grown man overweight and a whole head taller felt as light as a loaf of bread in his arms.

“Where is everyone?” he thought out loud, looking around.

The eerie silence remained. No one was coming to help.

Oh well, he decided. The time had come to act, not to hesitate and hope someone else would. He knew a hospital a few blocks from here, he hoped the man would hold out until then. He also prayed to what or whoever was responsible that the impossible string of events didn't suddenly end. Putting one foot in front of the other, he dashed on, hoping that he could save the man's life.

The hospital emerged in almost an instant.

What!

The shock of seeing blocks and blocks of roads pass in his mind like fast-forward on a movie startled him like a wasp sting. In what seemed a single instant, he'd appeared in front of the hospital. An unused gurney sat by the emergency room entrance. Now, it was just a matter of finding the right help.

The automatic sliding door didn't move.

“Forget it!” he shouted, placing the nail of his toe in between the doors and sliding the door open. A quick shove opened the other door, and he wheeled the gurney into the emergency room. Everyone seemed frozen in place. The world looked like a paused movie.

He came up to the triage station. “Hello?” He waved his hands in front of the nurse, paused like all the others. “What is going on?”

It was then that he saw a fly frozen mid-flight to his left, and he closed his eyes. Please, he thought, hoping he'd figured out what this impossible feat meant, normal speed! Normal!

Sound collided with his ears as the cacophony of noises assaulted his eardrums.

“Aaahh!”

A nurse shouted in fear as a blood-drenched boy seemed to materialize out of thin air in front of her desk. “Help!” Haruki shouted.

He gestured, and it was then that her eyes drifted to the man, badly injured and shouting in pain as he writhed on the gurney. “Right!” She shot to her feet and motioned to colleagues. “Right away!”

Doctors and nurses came running at the pandemonium that followed. The truck driver disappeared into an examination room, and Haruki found himself stripped naked and stared at in another. Nurses threw all sense of shame to the wind and peeled the shredded wreckage of his clothes off him and examined every crevice of him.

“I don't believe it,” one said, walking around him.

“We need x-rays to confirm,” another one spoke.

“All this blood and I don't see a single wound,” cried another.

“The only scar I see is old,” spoke a fourth.

“Yeah,” Haruki uttered, trying to keep from going insane at the sheer roller coaster of impossible events that'd transpired. “I got that when I was eight. Cut my left leg pretty bad.”

Before he knew it, he found himself on a towel on a gurney being wheeled into radiology. They did every x-ray possible, followed by a series of MRI scans. In the meantime, he got brought into a room with a shower and was given a gown and some soap. He washed himself from head to toe, using up half the bottle. The water ran red with his blood.

With the adrenaline dying down, and time to think, he felt the dam break.

He clamped his teeth shut to prevent screaming as he collapsed to his knees and laid there in a curled up position under the hot water. None of this was possible. All of this was insane.

There are rumors of superheroes, he knew, but nothing confirmed.

The Japanese and American governments both made fun of the possibility that the unlikely events that transpired in the Middle East had been the work of supernatural powers. In fact, America had even released a video showing off the latest in aircraft technology. The fact was, only tabloid newspapers and the overactive imagination of sixth-graders believed in superheroes.

Besides, he had the jagged scar on his left thigh to remind him of the time he'd climbed onto a chair to get a toy off the top shelf and had gotten a shard of glass for his trouble.

A shaking hand reached up and turned off the water. As he crouched, naked in the hospital shower, he felt he had to take stock. One fact he remembered hearing pertained to reading in a dream or hallucination. Specifically, he knew, one couldn't read in a dream.

Yet, the string hung down from a plastic handle on the wall that had a note below it. “Pull in case of emergency,” it read.

Nervous fingers clutched at the handrail screwed into the wall and pulled him to a standing position.

After a long moment, he stepped onto a shower mat emblazoned with the hospital logo.

“You alright in there?” a mature female voice called out.

“Yes!” he shouted, snapping back to reality.

His hands hastened to dry him off with the large towel and he found himself in the hospital gown and slippers in no time. He pushed the door open.

The nurse gave him a once-over. “The doctor will be in shortly,” she explained, going back to typing at the computer. “Your wallet was still in one pocket which survived, somehow. We've contacted your parents and they're on their way.”

“My parents!” he exclaimed, heart still jackhammering in his chest. “Right!”

“Good news is,” the nurse explained, “doesn’t seem to be any reason to keep you.”

She finished typing and left the room. As he sat, staring at the bustle of the hospital outside his room, he stared at his clean hands. These hands ripped a steel door clean off and carried a man almost weightlessly, he thought.

“Kawakatsu-san,” an elderly voice stated, authority weighing heavy in the timbre.

“Yes?” Haruki uttered, sitting straight in his bed and arms flat at his side.

“Calm down,” the doctor said, giving him a look hinting at puzzlement. “We've looked you over with every scan we've got, and there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with you. No scratches, no blemishes, nothing new.”

“Right,” Haruki agreed.

“So,” the doctor asked, “how'd you get all that blood on you?”

“I don't really know,” Haruki said. It really wasn't a lie.

At that moment, his parents barged in. Shinichiro Kawakatsu and his wife Rumika, two early forties working-class parents, had pained looks of terror on their faces as they stepped in. Upon seeing their son, clad in hospital gown and apparently unbothered, relief washed over them. The calm that came over them continued as they both embraced their son tightly, not a word being said for a long moment. A long pause hung in the air before they pulled away and stern admonishment took the place of calm. “Haruki!” his mother cried. “You gave us such a fright!”

His father assumed a folded arms posture, nodding twice. “I heard you saved a man’s life,” he noted. “I’m glad, and proud of you, but you need to consider yourself once in a while.”

The doctor approached, showing them the scans. “The good news is the blood on your son must not have been his own, because he had no visible wounds on him.”

“Every scan came up clean?”

The doctor turned to Shinichiro’s question. He nodded. “MRIs, X-rays, nothing turned up anything."

“So,” Rumika cut in, “he can come home?”

“There’s no reason to keep him,” the doctor pointed out, “if he doesn’t have anything wrong with him.”’

Haruki himself just absentmindedly took the clothes bag offered by his parents, went into the bathroom, and changed. Five minutes later, he exited the hospital room with new clothes. The whole ordeal seemed beyond surreal to him. He had no context for any of it. Rumors of superheroes existing were just that: rumors. No evidence existed and of all the ideas floating around, none of them struck him as a decent contender for the truth. Somehow, though, reality had asserted itself. He had powers. Maybe the mother of all hallucinations was happening, but right now, all he could do was go along with it. Off the top of his head, he could think of a hundred different tests he could run to see if he was off his rocker.

As the trio headed out of the hospital, towards the parking lot, a pair of men approached. One wore decades of wrinkles on his face and an authoritative air about him. The other, a taller man in his thirties, walked lockstep with long black hair. They had black and white formal suits on and gave off a foreboding sense that Haruki could’ve picked up on from miles away.

Before a word could be said, the elderly man held out his hand and the younger man put a tablet computer in his grasp. He flipped it over and tapped the screen.

Haruki gasped.

“Who are you?” Shinichiro said, giving suspicious looks to the men who’d stepped up.

The elderly man said nothing, merely tapped the screen, and Haruki felt his blood turn to ice as security camera footage from the building parallel to the intersection played on-screen. Haruki’s parents watched in utter confusion and horror as their son was shown getting hit by a truck then emerging bloodied, before removing a grown man with no effort and vanishing into thin air.

Haruki recognized it as when he’d run to the hospital.

Super speed, as well as durability, regeneration, and strength. The elderly man gave a knowing grin as he saw the look of dawning realization on the kid’s face.

“Kensuke Masukawa,” the elderly man introduced. “This is my subordinate, Matomaru Royama.” He handed the tablet back and extended a hand. “We’re from the Japanese government. Let’s go somewhere private and talk.”