I tend to do this thing where I start the sequel before I finish the first part.
So yeah. This isn't really continuing until I finish Unyielding, or at least not getting to the BBRae parts.
Herman Estevez had been attending Murakami High for just over three months, and hardly anyone had noticed him. Just the way he liked it. He hated attention, and he already got enough of it as a mid-year transfer student. He stayed away from sports, clubs, and cliques; he pulled average grades in everything, and generally kept to himself. By all accounts, he was just your average 16-year-old junior, and he wouldn't have it any other way. But today was going to ruin it for sure.
Third Period: Physical Education. Two teams, twenty-five kids each. Ten giant red rubber balls. Jocks polished their knuckles. Nerds quaked in fear. Herman sighed.
The whistle blew, and red blurs flew through the air. Some collided. Others were dodged or caught by the more dexterous students. Herman started moving, staying toward the back of the crowd. No use being a stationary target. Running across the field, he snuck a glance at the other team. Nobody had aimed for him yet, but the crowd was thinning; there were considerably more nerds than jocks on his side. It was going to happen sooner or later.
"Hey, look out!"
He sidestepped before he saw who was yelling at him. The other guy- well, girl- wasn't so lucky. She tried to stop and overbalanced, falling forward. Herman's hand reached out to grab her before she could break her face, and he pulled her back to a standing position.
One look in her eyes was all it took to send his mind into overdrive. His head buzzed, his legs started shaking, and goosebumps ran up and down his arms and legs. A noxious taste and smell assaulted him, and he felt violently ill even though he knew they were only in his mind. The sensation disoriented him, and she had to speak for him to snap to himself again.
"Thanks for helping me up, but you can let me-"
Though still reacting to the assault on his senses, Herman caught a whiff of something else, and his arms shoved her, then his neck leaned back. Two red balls flew past the pair at head level, both inches from striking true.
The girl glared at him, not sure what to think about what just happened. He took the time to study her face before he moved again. Long, bushy blond hair. Blue eyes. Skinny as a twig. Whatever was the problem with this one escaped him, but his danger sense didn't lie: something big was going to go down very soon, and she was its target. He'd have to keep an eye on her.
His thoughts were interrupted when his body twisted, and a ball whizzed by, so close that his loose T-shirt fluttered in its wind. He barely took two steps before he threw himself forward and rolled to avoid another ball that was sent his way. He glanced at the opposing team. Three big guys had him in their sights, glaring menacingly, weapons at the ready.
His body leaned sideways, almost nonchalantly, to evade the first throw. When the second one came, he cartwheeled out of the way. He'd barely returned to standing position when he leapt into a backflip to let the third pass harmlessly under him. When he thought he was in the clear, he suddenly jumped and spun horizontally in midair to avoid two more shots that came from across the field. He landed in a crouch that turned into a handspring when another ball narrowly missed him and knocked out the guy behind him.
There was a lull in the fire; all ten balls were on his side. Everyone- his team, the other team, even the coach- was looking at him, mouths agape. Herman looked around. Only he, the blonde girl, and one guy remained on his side, while the other team had them outnumbered two to one. He picked up the ball closest to him and threw it. It didn't hit the girl he was aiming at, but the guy behind her wasn't paying attention and took a hit to the chest.
That restarted the game in earnest.
It was not a different Herman Estevez that entered the cafeteria at lunch. It was his company.
As in, he actually had company.
Small, scrawny teenagers gathered around him, seeing his actions in dodgeball as some sort of stand against the tyranny of the high school clique system, instead of the uncontrolled display of metahuman ability it was. They were chattering and babbling and he was very, very confused. While his senses weren't exactly enhanced, they were still highly active, and his attention would flit from speaker to speaker at every syllable spoken. For this reason, he usually ate lunch in the nurse's office (his mother had written in about a "medical condition") instead of the noisy lunchroom. But the noxious danger odor he smelled on the blonde Girl- Tara Markov, he'd later learned- had returned with a vengeance. Whatever was going down was going down soon.
He started blocking out the background noise, a bit at a time, sniffing the air and smelling past whatever this place called "food," searching for the odor that only he could detect. It was some conglomerate of citrus, molten steel, concrete, and blood. But mostly blood.
Finally, he came to the table where Tara sat. He invited himself to sit down, and the crowd of nerds, apparently taken aback by the sight of females of the species, dispersed.
"That's weird," Herman muttered. He turned to the girls, pointing. "Tara Markov, right?"
She nodded. She pointed to her left, at a freckled redhead with green eyes, then to her right, at the Black girl with blue eyes and a ponytail. "That's Emily, and Alex."
"Hi. I... wanted to talk to you about what happened in P.E."
Emily crossed her arms. "Here to apologize?"
That caught Herman off guard. "For...?"
"Protip: watch where you put your hands. You totally copped a feel." Tara remarked, indignant.
Herman put a hand to his mouth. "Ooh, sorry. Total accident." His eyes moved from Tara's forehead to her chest, then back up, in half a second. "Though to be fair, it's not like there's much of a feel to cop there." Oh, damn.
Another drawback of enhanced reflexes: a nonexistent mind-to-mouth filter.
Tara's eyes narrowed, and her hand moved to smack him, but caught only air.
"Okay," Herman said, backtracking, "I didn't really mean that. I mean... well, yeah, I did, but I shouldn't have said it."
"You can leave now,"
"No, I can't. I-I have something to say."
"I don't want to hear it."
"It's something important," Herman insisted, grabbing her hands instinctively. He started to shiver again, and he could feel something stabbing him in the gut. She stared into his eyes, and he caught a strange, faraway look in them, before they focused again.
He released her hands, and looked to her two friends. "Look Alex, Emily... We need to talk. Alone."
He got up, and Tara followed. They headed out the back entrance to the cafeteria and into an empty hallway.
"Okay, what is it you have to tell me?"
"First of all... this never leaves the hallway," he said, reaching into his wallet and handing her a gold card.
She gasped when she read it. It came from the New York City Bureau of Metahuman Affairs. It had Herman's picture, full name, Date of Birth, and Processing Number.
On the back, it listed his abilities:
Precognition, Minor
Enhanced Reflexes (Major)
Enhanced Senses (Minor)
"What... what is this?" She asked.
"When I touched you, I sensed that you were in danger. And it's happening really, really soon, I can smell it in the air. You have to get out of here, Tara, before-"
Before he could finish the sentence, his arms wrapped around Tara's waist and his legs propelled them away from the wall of lockers, just as a concrete fist smashed through at head height. A massive red-eyed concrete monolith burst through the wall, roaring loudly enough to alert the students in the cafeteria.
"... It's too late," Herman finished.
And it certainly was.
Herman grabbed Tara and ran away from the monster and toward the cafeteria, but stopped in his tracks as the doors opened.
Herman had seen a lot of things. New York City had, at a whopping 18%, the greatest Metahuman density in North America, and the second greatest in the world, next to Tokyo (20%). So when Cinderblock punched through the wall, it hardly phased him.
What did, was that ninjas, of all things, dressed in Black and orange, sidled in through the cafeteria entrance to the hallway, one wielding a katana, the other a set of blades that Herman couldn't even place. They looked like what you'd get if you bisected a circle and brought the halves together again, but so that the edges went past their original positions.
"Please tell me they're here to fight that thing," Tara said, in a tone that indicated that she knew otherwise.
"Nope," Herman responded. So that's where the smell of citrus came in, I guess. All that's missing is the blood.
"Hey, Tara?"
"Yeah?"
"Between the ninjas and the giant concrete guy, which would you rather try to outrun?"
"Concrete guy."
"Thought so. Also, I'm sorry in advance."
"For wha-AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH"
Herman grabbed Tara and turned, spinning twice and finally letting her down on the ground, to slide directly between Cinderblock's feet, headfirst as if she were playing baseball. She got herself together and began to book it, and the stone giant quickly gave chase in a lumbering run.
Herman was totally going to get noticed now.
Here it is. The first part of something.
Yes, the girl is Terra. No, she doesn't remember the Titans, although she absolutely loves the movie.