The tears stained Amanda's sleeve. She sniffled and took a deep breath, her eyes were red, "We're so proud of you honey! It feels like just yesterday you started school."
The second year was about to end. Alex's bedroom seemed slightly cramped with all three of them in there. He didn't mind the closeness.
"It's university mom, not school." He replied.
Both of his parents were trying, and failing, to stifle back tears. The two of them had come up to open his grades from the final semester of second year. The results were a dazzling row of A*'s as usual. He would've seen then in a week's time anyways when he returned home for the summer, but they'd insisted that they come up to open his results with him. They were good at making up excuses to come visit. He was always happy to see them.
Jack proudly rubbed his son's shoulders, "Celebratory dinner! Call Taylor, see if she's free!"
Alex and Taylor had been dating for more than a year. They'd spent the whole of last summer apart as she travelled the world with her family. The return to first semester had also meant the welcome return to dates and sleepovers.
The wallet of Taylor's parents had seemingly been emptied out by their grand summer holiday last year. Since she was no longer hopping between countries, this summer Alex's parents had insisted that she come to stay with them at the family cabin. He was excited to show her the hundreds of baby photos of him that decorated the hallways.
Alex dialed Taylor's number.
"Hey, what's up?"
Before he had the chance to speak, Amanda eagerly snatched the phone out of his hands, "Hey honey! It's Amanda and Jack! Are you free this evening for dinner, we've got to celebrate your guys' results!"
"Duh! I'll meet you on the corner of city street! Alex knows where I mean! Can't wait to see you two!" Taylor answered happily.
Amanda cheerily said goodbye and blew a kiss into the phone, "See you soon honey!"
The phone beeped as the call ended. Alex accepted his phone back with a somewhat stunned expression. The only role he'd had in the conversation was dialing Taylor's number.
The restaurant wasn't busy. They got a table easily without needing a reservation. Amanda walked arm-in-arm with Taylor the entire way over and only reluctantly let go when they were led to their seats. It seemed a challenge for her to sit next to her husband instead of her kind and smart hopeful future daughter-in-law.
The food didn't take long to arrive. The portion on Alex's plate was several times that of anyone else's. No one at the table was surprised by how much he could eat. Not having to be constantly afraid that they might accidentally let slip about his powers was a welcome change for Taylor and his parents.
Bang!
The explosion was deafening. The restaurant's windows shattered from the blast instantly. The nearby customers screamed and frantically hid under the tables. Many of them were bleeding. The shattered windows had sent fragments of glass hurtling across the restaurant. A long-pointed object had pierced into the fire-hydrant outside the restaurant. Water gushed upwards.
Alex stared out the window. His expression was devoid of any emotion, "Stay here! Don't move."
Jack, Amanda and Taylor hadn't been able to process what was happening. They'd still been holding their forks and chatting happily when suddenly a deafening bang went off outside the restaurant. There was no time to react, everything happened too fast. Their plates and meals were scattered across the floor. In an instant their table was flipped to face the explosion. There were dozens of glass shards embedded in the wood.
Amanda desperately wanted to speak, to say something to her son. The words were trapped in her throat.
She struggled desperately to force her lips to move, "Alex-"
He never heard her. The door slammed shut behind him. All she saw of her son was a blur. She looked down slowly at the table. With a trembling hand she reached out to one of the shards of glass. The edge was razor-sharp, a thin red-line bloomed on her finger at the gentlest touch.
She turned her head to the table closest to the window. What she saw made her stomach feel sick. The family who'd been sat there were slumped in their chairs. Their eyes were lifeless. The flying shards had snuffed out their lives in an instant, all they would've heard was an explosion before the darkness took them.
Tears streamed down Amanda's cheeks. She looked out the broken windows into the street. Thick clouds of dust made it impossible to see more than a few meters.
She held both hands to her face. The colour drained from her cheeks. Her fingers trembled violently, "Alex."
The streets were chaos. Car horns blared loudly and dozens of overlapping voices screamed out for help. Alex ran faster than he ever had, the world blurred around him. His footsteps cracked against the earth like machine-gun fire. The force was too much for the ground to bear, the pavement fractured with every step.
The sound of gunshots guided him. The numbness in his eyes was being rapidly swallowed up by something dark and murderous. He didn't stop to check on the people screaming. His desire to help others was part of what motivated him to apply to do medicine. That desire was forgotten. All he could think about was neutrailising whatever had threatened his family's safety.
He turned a corner. A violent gust of wind blew behind him and caused the branches of the trees lining the street to whip about madly.
The centre of the chaos was revealed. A police officer hid behind an overturned police-car. The blood of his colleague who'd still been inside when the explosion went off seeped out through the mangled door.
It had taken less than three seconds for Alex to arrive. A hat he'd snatched from the restaurant was pulled low over his face. It was a feeble attempt to hide his identity, but he didn't care. The GDA would already be on their way. He would deal with the fall-out of his actions when the time came. All that mattered was that his family's safety was protected.
The supervillain was mid-monologue. The veins in his temple squirmed crazily and his eyes were glossed over and unfocused. Long and jagged bony spines ripped their way out of his back. Blood spurted out from the torn skin. The man showed no reaction to the pain that the deformation must've been causing.
"He has come! He has come to show us all the way! His spines are more beautiful than you could ever imagine! Brothers and sisters we must welcome him with a feast! A red feast for the almighty!"
His speech was interrupted suddenly. A fist moving at the speed of a car on the highway crashed into the side of his head. His jaw exploded. Bone and flesh flew across the street and splattered across the brickwork of the nearest shop.
The swirling dusty air washed across the veins and artieries in the man's neck. The grey matter that had been inside his skull only a splitsecond ago now dribbled slowly down the brickwork behind him.
The man's legs should've collapsed. He no longer had a brain to coordinate his limbs. Somehow he stayed standing. He swayed drunkenly. Blood should've been spraying high into the air from the exposed arteries in his neck. An unseen and dark force silently sealed over the wounds.
Alex smelled a scent he recognised. Sulfur.
His eyes narrowed. One punch hadn't been enough. He rotated with his hips and slammed his fist into the man's stomach. His hand emerged out the other side. The blood and organs felt hot and slimy to the touch. The man's internal organs shredded from the impact.
Alex spread out his fingers. The bones in his hand squirmed and elongated suddenly. He ripped his mutated hand out from the man's stomach. His elongated fingers dragged with them the man's heart and most of his ribcage. A lung slapped wetly to the floor.
The demonic force throbbed furiously. The man's ruined body began to squirm. Bone and flesh grew wildly. The demonic force wasn't acting to heal the man, it was twisting his body into a new and greater form.
"How dare you interrupt the almighty's welcome! He sees your insolence and speaks to me to deliver his righteousness!" The man's voice was shrill and distorted far beyond anything the human voice-box could produce. His throat was a wriggling and pulsating mass of dark-red flesh.
The bony spines on the man's back shook and burst free from his body. They drew impossible arcs in the air and flew back towards the insolent human who had descecrated the almighty's welcome.
The bone-white spines were like spears. They shot through the air so quickly that the bits of flesh that were stuck to them were pulled away by the wind.
Alex's murderous intent grew thicker. The possessed man had survived two punches. The first spear slammed into the concrete, embedded itself as if the ground were made of butter. Several others followed after it in lightning-like succession.
The spears didn't even managed to leave a small cut on Alex's skin. While they were still flying through the air, he had appeared behind the man. The bloodshot eye that had grown in the centre of the man's chest widened and the pupil span hurriedly to follow the desecrater's movement.
"Fuck off back to hell." The words were spoken in a state of five times accelerated-motion. The demon possessing the man's body was savagely torn in two before it had the chance to make them out.
Alex held the demon's torn body, one half in each hand. The dark-red flesh and bloodshot eye squirmed desperately in an attempt to regenerate. He slammed the deformed torso into the earth. Then, he grabbed each of the demon's cloven hooves and tugged hard. The furry legs were ripped apart from the pelvis where they joined. He brought both twisted femurs down on his knee. The mangled limbs were discarded indifferently.
He pulled the torso from the cracked earth. The man's broken ribs pierced through the trembling eye in his chest. Alex's expression returned to the same apathy he'd displayed in the restaurant. He watched coldly as the eye trembled for the last time. The man's dark red skin stilled. The demoninc force that hummed in the air vanished. The fatal damage to its host in the earthly realm had banished it back to hell.
Alex pulled the cap tighter over his face. The murderous rage in his heart gradually begun to lift. He stared up into the cloudless sky. He could hear the faint sound of a helicopter's blades spinning in the distance.
From the second the explosion went off in the restaurant, he hadn't planned to run from the scene. The incident had demonstrated just how fragile an ordinary person was in an extraordinary world. The glass shards embedded in the table opened his eyes to how naieve he'd been. The safety of his loved ones wasn't something that could be left to chance. If he hadn't flipped the table, Taylor's throat would've been shredded by a shard the size of his fist. Whether Jack and Amanda would've survived depended entirely on how quickly medical support had arrived to stem the bleeding.
He'd saved his parents and girlfriend once before. Those times had been different. He'd felt in control. The only reason the danger wasn't instantly eliminated was so that he could keep his powers secret.
The explosion had upturned his worldview completely. He needed protection for his loved ones. He couldn't always be there to save them. Someone else had to be there to watch over them.
The helicopter roared past the edge of a high-rise building. The response team inside descended on long ropes. Their weapons were drawn before they hit the ground. The barrels were pointed at Alex.
The response was within his expectations. He raised his hands slowly into the air.
"I won't hurt anyone." He said steadily.
The guns remained trained on him. The masks of every GDA response team agent were fitted with ventilation systems, HUD's and cameras. The two dozen agents quietly surrounded the target in circular formation. The cameras captured every angle.
The video feed of an unknown individual standing in a ruined city street bounced between dozens of servers. Barely a second after the response team landed, the feed popped up on a computer in a secret facility beneath the Pentagon.
"Sir, you should see this." Donald turned his head and addressed his boss.
Cecil Stedman groaned, "Donald I told you, I don't need to be briefed on every little-"
The director of the GDA paused. He stared at the screen. The dismembered corpse of a demon at the individual's feet made him swallow back the rest of his sentence. The bleeding eye in the demon corpse was well known to him. It belonged to a faction of devil-worshippers who believed in a being they referred to only as "The Almighty". Their records showed that the cult had been active for hundreds of years.
"Bring up the kill. Slow it down." Cecil rested his hand on the back of Donald's chair. He sipped his coffee, his eyes didn't leave the screen.
Donald tapped at his keyboard. The video feed flickered and swapped to surveilance footage from security cameras in that area. The thick dust and flying shards of glass obscured or destroyed the majority of cameras. Fortunately one remained intact.
Cecil watched the unknown individual arrive at the scene in a blur of high-speed movement. The analysis software clocked the figure to be moving at one hundred and nine miles an hour. That kind of speed would require a Guardian's intervention if things turned violent.
The fight between the unknown individual and the demon was one-sided from the beginning.
Cecil inhaled sharply as he watched the demon's lower body be torn in two, "That's one hell of a grip strength."
"Tell the response team to lower their weapons. With that kind of speed he'll run the second he sees their fingers twitch on the trigger. They're only putting themselves at risk." Cecil instructed. His fingers drummed against his coffee cup.
Donald relayed the instruction to the response team. The video feed showed the agents lowering their weapons. The team leader slowly walked closer to the unknown individual.
"We need him away from populated areas. Good or evil I don't care, he can't stay in the city. Tell the agents to take him in the helicopter to the nearest facility. I'll meet them there." Cecil declared.
Something in the air shimmered. Then in an instant Cecil was gone. All he left behind was a gust of wind that ruffled the papers on Donald's desk.
"The director would like to speak to you. Please accompany us to a secure location." The response team leader repeated the order that had been fed into her earpiece.
She gestured towards the helicopter. The vehicle was still hovering a few hundred feet above. In the cockpit, the pilot recieved the order to descend. He obeyed without hesistancy and the chopper dropped lower.
Alex didn't like the idea of following the agent to an unknown location. The densely populated area prevented the GDA from sending down a hail of missiles to his location. He hadn't exhibited any aggression towards the GDA agents and he knew that they'd have already dug up his identity and tracked him to the restaurant. So long as they were the righteous and trustworthy organization they claimed to be, he had no reason to be afraid.
His jaw clenched. He decided to obey the agent's instruction. He wanted a cooperative relationship with the GDA. The request to move to a secondary location was a test of his attitude towards them. If he had nothing to hide, there was no reason for him to refuse the request.
He walked in step with the agent to the helicopter. He was sure that there were other parties listening in and watching his behaviour.
Just before he stepped into the cabin of the helicopter he turned to face the GDA agent directly. He said loudly, "I only want peace!"
He hoped that whoever else was watching heard him.