Jayden sat cross-legged on the scorched floor, the ten-grand phone glowing in his hands. His electrical field made the screen flicker occasionally, but the shielding held. Worth every penny.
First things first—money.
His main accounts were fucked. Luther Cross Industries would have forensic accountants monitoring every transaction by now. His Ameritrade account, his forex positions, even his Robinhood meme stock portfolio—all of it might as well have his father's shadow tendrils wrapped around it.
But Jayden hadn't made fifty million by being stupid.
He opened a encrypted app disguised as a calculator. Punch in the right sequence, and it revealed his real portfolio. Fourteen different crypto wallets spread across seven blockchains. Anonymous, untraceable, beautiful.
Bitcoin. Ethereum. Monero for the really shady shit. Even some meme coins that had printed harder than they should have. Total value: roughly twelve million, give or take market volatility.
The offshore accounts were trickier. Cayman Islands, Swiss numbered accounts, a shell company in Delaware that owned another shell company in Panama. Old-school tax evasion meets new-school money laundering.
Another eight million parked there, but accessing it meant leaving digital footprints.
He needed cash. Real, physical, untraceable cash.
Jayden pulled up an encrypted messaging app—Signal on steroids, built for the underground economy. His contacts list read like a crime syndicate's wet dream. Arms dealers, crypto whales, money launderers, people who could get you anything for the right price.
He selected "Mozart"—real name unknown, specialized in converting digital assets to physical currency. No questions asked, thirty percent fee. Highway robbery, but anonymity was expensive.
**JLC**: *Need physical. 500K. Clean bills.*
**Mozart**: *Heard you got powered up. Congrats. Also, fuck off. Too hot.*
**JLC**: *1M. Take your cut.*
**Mozart**: *...location?*
**JLC**: *Working on it. 2 hours.*
**Mozart**: *Westminster and 8th. Parking structure, level 3. Black van. Come alone or deal's off.*
Jayden closed the app, then opened another. This one looked like a fitness tracker but connected to underground information networks. In a world where knowledge was power and everyone had powers, information brokers made fortunes.
He searched for what he needed: unregistered gates.
The official story was that all dimensional rifts were catalogued, monitored, regulated. The government's Interdimensional Transit Authority supposedly tracked every gate from Level 1 training rifts to Level 200+ catastrophe zones.
But the official story was bullshit.
Low-level gates—the Level 1-10 variety that spawned weak monsters and shit loot—popped up constantly.
The ITA couldn't track them all. Some lasted hours, some days. The underground racing scene he'd funded had actually started because racers would use abandoned gates as hideouts. The natural Genesis Energy disruption made electronic surveillance impossible.
The phone displayed seventeen potential sites within fifty miles. Most were probably closed by now, but three showed recent activity on the underground networks.
One caught his eye: Level 5 gate in the Angeles National Forest. Abandoned after a failed government survey. Too low-value to guard, too remote to matter. Perfect for someone who needed to practice without turning LA into a Tesla coil.
Plus, gates had another benefit he'd only recently learned about from his research. The dense Genesis Energy inside accelerated power development. Like altitude training for athletes, but for superhumans.
Spend a week in a Level 5 gate, come out having grown more than a month of normal training.
If he was going to survive this—survive his family, the government, the vultures circling—he needed to get stronger. Fast.
But first, clothes that weren't held together by hope and static electricity.
Jayden stood, pocketing the phone carefully. The cash from the safe made his pockets bulge, but he'd need every dollar. He pulled on the least destroyed jacket from his office closet—a black bomber that only had minor scorch marks.
7:02 AM. The city would be waking up properly now. More eyes, more cameras, more chances of being spotted. But he couldn't wait for nightfall. Shadow daddy would be here long before then.
He needed to move. Westminster and 8th by 9 AM to get his cash. Then supplies, then disappear into the forest to figure out how to be a god without destroying everything he touched.
The phone buzzed. Not the secure one—the burner. Another message from Rico:
*They're coming. 30 minutes max. Run.*
Thirty minutes. Fuck.
Jayden deleted the message, then fried the burner with a controlled burst. No traces. No trails.
He walked to the window, looking out at the city that had become a maze of threats overnight. Somewhere out there, Mozart was prepping his cash. Somewhere else, a forgotten gate waited in the forest. And somewhere much too close, his father's shadows were reaching for him.
Time to see if all that practice paid off.
Jayden Luther Cross, seventeen years old and worth more than most corporations, prepared to run for his life.
With any luck, he'd only destroy a few city blocks in the process.