Chapter 1: Another Crazy Boy from Manchester

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"Sum E_in = Sum E_out."

The Wilmslow research facility was a war zone.

Caelum Industries, a global pioneer in advanced bio-technologies and synthetic engineering, had spent years promising progress. 

But behind their reinforced glass walls, they played god. Dark rumors already followed them as rogue military contractors. 

Now, one of their creations had broken its leash.

ROAR!!!

A twenty-foot mutated lizard tore through the concrete security barrier. Gray-green hide, calcified ridges, and eyes burning with chemically induced rage—it was a living engine of destruction.

"Fall back! Establish a perimeter!"

A blast of freezing energy erupted from the left flank. The afternoon air turned to instant frost, anchoring the beast's scaly legs to the cracked asphalt.

Frostnite stepped forward, her boots crunching over the fresh ice.

Unlike corporate heroes, her tactical gear was sleek, dark, and built for speed. She raised a gloved hand to her helmet.

Pshhh—!

The outer transparent visor flipped upward with a sharp mechanical hiss, venting a dense cloud of freezing exhaust. Underneath, her deep-blue internal visor glowed steadily.

"Its hide is too thick," Frostnite reported through her comms. "My cryo-blasts are only slowing it down. I need a heavy strike on center mass!"

"On it."

Beside her, two other senior heroes moved into position—one in a heavy insect-like exoskeleton, the other a blurred kinetic streak. No names were announced. They were working professionals.

The speedster vanished into a blur, drawing the beast's attention with rapid kinetic bursts, while the armored hero prepped a heavy energy cannon at the flank.

˚⊱✿—✦✦✦—✿⊰˚

Meanwhile, four stories up on the rooftop of St. Jude's International High Academic, Kyle was experiencing a completely different category of nightmare.

He had to be dead. That was the only logical explanation.

When the massive, monochrome snake lunged, he braced for the searing pain of fangs tearing into his throat. Instead, the universe buckled sideways.

The creature didn't bite him. It swallowed him whole.

Its jaws opened impossibly wide—a yawning void divided between matte black and pristine white. Before Kyle could scream, the immense, twin-colored form surged forward, engulfing his entire body. The world collapsed into a suffocating vacuum of pitch-black pressure.

But he wasn't being digested.

Inside the creature's belly, the living entity began to change.

With terrifying precision, its massive body compressed inward, mapping his frame like a blueprint. It pressed tightly against every surface—his skin, his clothes, his face. Where it touched, it didn’t just cover. It merged.

The fabric of his hoodie and shirt flattened against his skin, folding away into nothingness at a molecular level. His glasses went next, the frames compressing flush against his face before disappearing entirely beneath the seamless, living layer.

Kyle looked down at his hands.

His clothes were gone. In their place was the snake's own hide, split evenly down the middle—stark white dominating his right side, deep matte black consuming his left. Right where the two opposing shades clashed at the center of his chest, a sharp, angular 'V' insignia anchored the suit like a blade.

Across the surface, precise interlocking lines formed a tight grid of geometric scales. They were subtle, shimmering only when the light caught them at an angle.

He touched his face. The creature's head had molded into a smooth mask over his own. Dead center on his forehead sat the emblem of dual balance. 

Milky white lenses masked his eyes, but the most unsettling detail was below.The jaw plates formed a jagged, razor-edged outline. A viciously wide grin. Something with too many teeth.

"Calm down, little prince. Your erratic pulse is disrupting our synchronization."

Kyle launched himself three feet into the air, landing with an unnaturally soft thud on the concrete.

The voice hadn't come from the rooftop. It arrived directly inside his skull—female, melodious, and freezing cold, carrying a subtle hiss underneath.

"Who said that?!" Kyle yelled.

On his face, the vicious grin of the mask distorted, the scales around the mouth shifting awkwardly to translate his panic. At the same time, his milky white lenses narrowed sharply in shock."

"Am I losing my mind? The stress finally broke me. I'm having an academic breakdown."

"Idiot. Keep panicking, and your organs will collapse," the voice hissed directly against his brain. "My name is Viper. A Co-Bios asset. Right now, you are my host—we share a single life."

"A parasite?!"Kyle clawed at his shoulder, his nails scraping uselessly against the slick, seamless hide. There was no edge. No seam. Nothing to rip away.

No, no, no! This is a nightmare!

"Absolutely not! Reject! Abort mission! I have straight 9s to maintain! My scholarship does not cover sharing my skin with an alien reptile!"

"I am a Co-Bios, you idiot! Just like I already told you!"

Her voice turned instantly frigid inside his mind.

"An advanced evolutionary anchor. Let me make the parameters of our arrangement perfectly clear to your small human brain."

Kyle choked on his breath, his hand instinctively gripping his own arm where the skin felt unnaturally tight.

"I require a host to survive in this atmosphere," she continued, her tone dripping with condescension. "You require my protection. It’s that simple."

Then, the temperature in his veins seemed to drop.

"Try to forcibly remove me? Or mess with our biological synchronization? The rejection process will kill us both. 

Suddenly, the mask's eyes shot wide open in pure terror.

"Kill us?!" Kyle's voice cracked. 

"I'm not ready to die! I haven't even finished my Additional Maths homework!"

"You're welcome," Viper said flatly. "We cooperate, or we die. Got it?"

Kyle stood very still for exactly three seconds.

"Okay. Wow. That's extremely extreme," he muttered. The mask's lenses instantly widened back to normal as he forced himself to calm down. "Let's not do that. I'm very attached to being alive."

"Good. Then listen," Viper said.

Her tone snapped back to its smooth, clipped cadence. 

"A massive kinetic rupture has occurred nearby. A volatile biological entity is currently destabilizing local infrastructure."

She paused, as if analyzing the data in real-time.

"The distance is less than half a mile from this building. The air out there is completely saturated with adrenaline and structural chaos."

Suddenly, a sharp, low rattle rippled through the suit’s living scales

"It is the ideal environment to calibrate our synchronized combat capabilities. Go there."

"Go toward the giant explosion?" Kyle recoiled. "That's where the professionals go! I am an ordinary person who is very good at science!"

"Do you not wish to be noticed, Kyle 'Zee' Han De La Cruz Martinez?" 

Viper's voice dropped to a quieter register. Precise. Deliberate. Echoing directly against his skull.

Kyle stopped arguing.

His milky white lenses blinked in sheer dumbfounded shock.

"I can read your residual thoughts, my dear Sovereign," she cooed, her voice a feather-light whisper before she suddenly snapped. "H-Hold on! Are you fantasizing about yours truly right now?!"

"'Yours truly'...?"

"S-Shut up! Dare to harbor such unseemly delusions, and I shall rip your very entrails out!"

"W-What?! No way! Not a chance, ya daft monster!"

"Now. Listen to me." Her tone dropped, turning dangerously sweet. "You’re tired of being a laughingstock for idiots. You want that cold female specimen from this morning to look at you and see a man—not some helpless charity case. You want to prove that you're just as much of a genius as she is, don't you?"

Her words sank into his mind like a slow-acting poison.

Mocked by lesser minds... A clumsy charity case...

Haunted by the echo, he found no escape. The weight of daily humiliations, paired with a burning urge to shatter that girl's icy stare, began to reshape his very core.

Denial was useless. Every pathetic secret he guarded had just been brutally stripped bare.

All this time, I've been... a loser.

His lenses went still, reflecting the distant fires like two dead moons. The vicious grin on his face no longer looked like an accident—it looked like a hope.

"I am offering you power," Viper continued, her tone dripping with temptation. "I am offering you an audience. All you have to do... is move."

Time seemed to freeze as her words hung in the air.

That's right...

He thought about the laughter in the courtyard. The way Yve had turned her back on him like he was furniture. The constant, grinding reality of being the invisible kid from the working-class side of town, sitting in the same rooms as people who would never once question whether they belonged there.

Then, in his mind's eye, he saw it.

A figure in a sleek monochrome suit. A street-level hero. An unexpected variable in a battle everyone expected to go exactly one way.

People wouldn't laugh at that. They would look up.

"How? Interested?" Viper continued. "You should—"

"Shut up, you ugly thing."

"D-Did you just call—!"

"Heh. An audience, huh? Fufufu. Alright, shut up and watch... let me show you how my math plays out in real life!"

BZZT.

Violet sparks crackled violently through the air, wrapping around his frame like snapping whips. Through his facepiece, the mask translated his smirking lips, stretching the predatory grin wider.

He was, as a personal rule, extremely easy to persuade when the offer involved being the center of attention.

"Alright, snaky," Kyle laughed, cracking his knuckles. "You want a test drive? Let's give them a show."

His lenses narrowed sharply behind the visor. "As long as you don't betray me."

"Of course not."

"Then, how do we get down? I don't have wings."

"We don't need wings," she replied. 

Instinctual knowledge suddenly flooded through him—not like remembering something, but like a door opening into a room that had always been there."

"Wait, what?"

"You heard me well."

"Then?"

"We adapt."

"Hmph. I see."

Without thinking about it hard enough to talk himself out of it, Kyle ran straight for the edge of the roof and vaulted over the balustrade.

"AAAAAAAHHHHHHH—"

The ground was accelerating toward him at 9.8 meters per second squared, and his professional debut was approximately three seconds from ending as a very colorful stain on St. Jude's pristine courtyard.

"Contact the vertical surface, you screaming fool!" Viper's voice cut through his panic like a blade.

Instinct fired before thought could catch up. As his body dropped past the glass facade of the science building, Kyle twisted mid-air and drove his feet directly into the window pane.

Thud.

He didn't bounce. He didn't shatter the glass. He stuck.

It wasn't magic—it felt mechanical, physical, a concentrated surface tension generated through the suit's scale-grid pulling against the glass at a molecular level, binding him to the wall with a precision that his brain had absolutely no framework for. The energy gathered at his soles like pressure finding a valve.

Kyle stopped screaming. He was standing completely horizontal, perpendicular to the ground, staring down at the empty courtyard four floors below.

"...Whoa."

He shifted his weight experimentally. His boot gripped the glass with a clean, organic click. He took one step. Then another. Then he started jogging, moving sideways along the building's exterior wall like gravity was simply a setting he had switched off.

"Do not stop. Maintain momentum," Viper instructed, her voice shifting into the precise, clipped tone of a navigation system that had very little patience for sightseeing. "The target is moving west. Accelerate."

Kyle let out a laugh that had no business being as delighted as it was.

He broke into a full sprint across the brickwork, transitioned from glass to concrete without losing a beat, felt his movements shift from the usual clumsy-Kyle framework into something fluid and serpentine and entirely not his own muscle memory. 

When he hit the building's edge, he launched off it with everything he had, cleared a gap to the next roof in a clean arc, and landed in a rolling transition that absorbed the impact completely.

"I am a genius!" Kyle announced to absolutely no one as he tore through the Wilmslow back streets, sprinting vertically up the side of a public building and leaping between a line of streetlights like they were stepping stones. "I am the king of Manchester! Watch out, world, the—"

"Brace," Viper said flatly.

Kyle vaulted over a final concrete barrier and flew into the smoke-choked intersection.

The battle below was in its final phase.

The senior heroes had successfully cornered the mutated Caelum lizard against a collapsed building. 

The speedster circled it in a disorienting vortex of kinetic force while the armored hero prepared a heavy-gauge binding net.

Frostnite stood directly in front of the creature, her blue visor blazing as she channeled a massive concentrated stream of cryo-fluid toward its jaw.

The news drones were already up. Cameras rolling.

This was the moment.

Kyle extended both arms wide, hit a dynamic mid-air silhouette against the black smoke—one side white, one side black, the jagged grin of the mask cutting through the haze — and opened his mouth.

"Fear not, citizens! THE HERO HAS ARRIVED—"

WHACK!!!

He didn't see it coming.

The giant lizard, irritated by the speedster's circling, had blindly whipped its tail backward to clear the immediate area. The heavy calcified mass connected with Kyle mid-sentence, squarely, with the enthusiasm of a freight train that had no idea he was there.

The grand entrance died in his throat.

Kyle was launched across the intersection like a poorly aimed projectile, punched clean through a canvas storefront awning, detonated a neat stack of empty plastic crates, and came to rest embedded face-up in a pile of uncollected garbage bags in the side alley. His vision went completely white.

For sixty full seconds, Kyle Martinez ceased to exist as a conscious entity.

When his eyes opened beneath the mask, the world was rotating at an angle it had no business rotating at. His ribs felt like they had been restructured by someone who had never seen a human torso before. His skull was running a consistent, rhythmic agonizing pulse that he was fairly certain was not normal.

"Ow."

Kyle blinked at the gray sky. 

A piece of lettuce clung to his mask. 

His optics flickered weakly. Covered in trash, the vicious grin looked flat-out ridiculous

"Did anyone get the license plate on that lizard?"

"You are a monumental embarrassment."

Viper's voice arrived with the flat, exhausted quality of someone who had expected very little and had still been disappointed. 

"I gave you the reflexes of an apex predator. You allowed yourself to be swatted out of the air like a housefly."

"You didn't mention the tail!"

The mask's jaw wobbled pathetically with every word.

"A navigation warning would have been useful, Viper. Like a GPS. Tail incoming, merge left. Basic feature."

He dragged himself upright and peered from the alley mouth back into the intersection.

The battle was over.

The senior heroes hadn't paused. Frostnite had completed her cryo-containment, encasing the mutant lizard in a solid reinforced block of ice the size of a transit van. The armored hero was already coordinating with Caelum's recovery team at the perimeter. The speedster was doing a sweep of the surrounding buildings for civilian casualties.

Frostnite walked to the intersection's edge, her outer visor clicking back down over the blue one with a soft hiss of vented steam. She glanced toward the wreckage of the plastic crates. Then at the empty alleyway.

"Did any of you catch what that was?" she asked, turning her helmet toward the speedster. "Some kid in a monochrome suit just dropped into the splash zone."

"Probably a stray enthusiast. Trying to get footage for his WeGram," the speedster said, shaking his head. "Stupid kids. One of these days they're going to get themselves killed."

"He's gone now anyway," the armored hero noted. "No trace. Let's get the report to Elias before the Caelum suits arrive to clean up their own mess."

Inside the alley, Kyle pressed his back against the cold brick wall and stayed very still.

Behind the visor, his lenses narrowed into tight, hurt slits as the words hit him

The burning in his chest wasn't entirely from the ribs.

He hadn't been a hero. He had been a prop. A minor piece of unidentified debris that three working professionals had glanced at, categorized as irrelevant, and immediately forgotten.

"They think I'm a joke," Kyle said quietly, looking down at his hands.

"Because at present, you are one," Viper replied. No cruelty in it. Just fact, delivered clean. "I am terminating this operational trial. Your physical frame is exhausted and my energy reserves are insufficient to maintain full synchronization. We are withdrawing."

"Wait— how do I take this—"

Then, the suit reacted—even before he could finish his question.

Sssh—shrr—clack-clack-clack!

With a sharp rattle, the geometric scales shifted. Each plate folded inward, flowing from his limbs back toward his core like a snake slithering into hiding.

The mask retreated last, splitting open and sinking beneath his hairline and jaw. The constricting pressure vanished, leaving only bare skin and the familiar, slightly crooked line of his glasses.

His hoodie was back. His white shirt and navy uniform trousers were back. The clothes had been there the whole time, apparently—compressed to nothing, waiting.

Kyle stood in the garbage-scented alley in his regular clothes, slightly dusty, significantly bruised, and very thoroughly humbled.

The Co-Bios was still there. He couldn't see it, couldn't feel it exactly, but it was present the way a held breath is present—quiet, contained, waiting.

He straightened up, checked that no news crew was covering this particular alley, and slipped out onto the back street.

˚⊱✿—✦✦✦—✿⊰˚

Getting back to St. Jude's without anyone noticing he'd left during lockdown turned out to be considerably easier than expected—the entire school was still in the tail end of the emergency protocol, students being released back to afternoon classes in staggered groups, staff too preoccupied with headcounts and incident documentation to scrutinize a single Year 10 student quietly rejoining the stream from the direction of the toilets.

Kyle retrieved his backpack from the rooftop—a trip he made with the practiced nonchalance of someone who definitely hadn't just been launched into a garbage pile by a twenty-foot experimental lizard—sat through the final two periods of the day with his ribs quietly disagreeing with every breath, and caught the Northern service from Wilmslow station back to Stockport at half past four.

He said nothing on the train. The St. Jude's students in pressed blazers who had silently judged his outfit that morning were on the same service. None of them had any idea.

By the time Kyle made it back to the terraced house on Didsbury Road, the sun was dropping behind the Stockport rooflines, painting the brick a dull bruised orange.

He slipped through the front door quietly, offering Aunt Maria a quick, plausible story about staying late to use the school library for an astronomy project. She was fixed to the kitchen television, watching the live broadcast from the Caelum incident site—the frozen lizard, the recovery crews, the Pro Heroes giving brief statements to the press. She didn't notice the faint dust on his uniform trousers or the careful way he was holding his left side.

He went upstairs. Locked the door. Stood in the middle of his cramped, star-chart-covered room and didn't move for a moment.

The vintage telescope stood in the corner. The cold glass of the lens caught the last of the evening light.

Kyle dropped his backpack on the floor and lowered himself onto his bed slowly, which his ribs appreciated. He stared at the cracked ceiling plaster and let the silence settle around him.

After a while, he raised his right hand and held it up against the pale window light.

"Viper."

No response.

"Hey. Snaky. Still in there? Are we still—synchronized, or whatever you called it?"

Silence. The room stayed still. No sharp feminine voice behind his thoughts. No scale-grid rising from his skin. No movement at all.

But his ribs hurt in a way that no hallucination could produce. And somewhere in the muscle memory of his legs lived the exact physical sensation of running perpendicular to gravity across a glass window pane four stories up.

Kyle let his hand fall back onto the mattress.

He was still just Kyle "Zee" Han De La Cruz Martinez. Scholarship student. Clumsy. Perpetually late. The boy with the name that took three lines on an attendance sheet, from the working-class side of the Cheshire border, who had spent his lunch break getting hit by a lizard tail and landing in someone else's recycling.

Meanwhile, beneath his skin, quiet and cold and patient, something alien was resting.

Waiting for the next reason to wake up.

"What the hell am I supposed to do now?!" Kyle shouted into the empty room. "I'm still meant for that lavish life in Deansgate... aren't I, Divinity?!"

The universe didn't answer.

Not yet.