Act V – Chapter 15 " I'm sorry"
The next day
One of Don Javier's casinos called his private line directly.
"Hm, what is it? Cough, cough…" Javier growled as he picked up.
On the other end, the manager's voice was shaking.
"W–we've been massacred here, sir. You have to leave. Now!"
"Massacred?" Javier repeated. "How many victims, so I can send my condolences to the families?"
Silence.
A long silence.
"Zero, sir," the man finally answered. "We're all more or less seriously injured… but… zero dead."
Don Javier froze.
His foot began tapping frantically against the floor.
"How many of you were there?" he asked, his voice suddenly dry.
"Around fifty. Maybe a bit more…"
Javier hung up without replying.
Fifty wounded.
Zero dead.
As surprising as it might seem, he had already seen this.
A signature. A way of striking that felt like a punishment…
His phone vibrated again.
Other messages poured in, this time in a cascade, coming from different warehouses.
It's chaos here.
Run.
It was no longer a rumor.
It was only a matter of time before she reached him.
"She's coming for her brother… Where is Leo?" Javier asked, his head in his hand.
"He hasn't come back from New York, sir," Gregorio replied.
A guard rushed in.
"The guards at the hotel entrance have been neutralized, sir!"
"Show me the footage," Javier ordered.
On the screen, surveillance cameras cycled through views.
A luxurious lobby. Guards on the ground, unconscious.
Then, in one corner, something floating.
Silver hair, eyes an impossible azure blue,
a long, large black case on her back… that sixteen‑year‑old girl…
Had no name.
"Fuck, it's her…" Don Javier breathed.
He sank into his chair. He knew that this time, he wouldn't be able to escape.
A bluish crackle snapped through the air.
He jumped.
Above his head, Gwen had just materialized, balanced on the back of his chair. She landed smoothly behind him.
"Jesus, you scared me," Javier blurted, hand over his heart.
Gwen's eyes lingered on him for a second.
Without a word, she leaned forward and looked at the frozen images on the screen: the neutralized guards, the silver hair, the small but terrifying silhouette.
She said nothing.
Her features stayed closed, but something flickered in her gaze, a brief pain quickly buried.
Then she vanished in a flash.
She was already there.
The hotel lobby was silent, littered with groaning bodies. Men were still breathing, but not getting back up. Some tried to move and failed.
Gwen crossed the room, hands in her pockets, as if she were just taking a walk.
Farther away, near the glass doors, a silhouette stood in the middle of the chaos.
Short‑cut silver hair.
Azure eyes shining like two blades of ice.
The young girl lifted her head. Her gaze lit up when she saw Gwen approaching.
All at once, from the top of her 1.61 meters, she ran toward her.
To hug her.
Gwen didn't move.
The mute girl's arms wrapped around her, holding tight, as if she had found someone she thought she'd lost.
Gwen, her eyes still cold, slowly raised a hand.
She stroked the girl's head, her fingers sliding through the silver strands.
"You've grown," Gwen murmured.
A small shiver ran through the girl's shoulder. She straightened slightly, eyes shining.
"This short haircut suits you," Gwen added.
The girl nodded, a faint smile forming on her lips. She stayed clinging to Gwen.
"You're here for Leo, aren't you?" Gwen asked softly.
The azure eyes sparkled.
A second nod.
"Come with me," Gwen said.
The two of them left the hotel.
They walked down the street side by side.
"Have you visited the city?" Gwen asked.
The young girl shook her head.
Gwen put on a neutral expression.
"Then let's do this properly."
They spent some time together.
Gwen bought her ice cream.
The mute girl tasted it, a bit hesitant at first, then her eyes lit up.
They ate cotton candy that stuck to their fingers.
Gwen made her try several restaurants, showed her alleyways, signs, lights.
The young girl laughed, smiled, sometimes gently tugging on Gwen's sleeve to show her something. She was living this moment as a reunion.
Gwen, meanwhile, was living it as something else.
As a last moment.
She watched every smile, every happy look, like someone engraving in their memory the face of someone they know is destined for the worst.
They sat at a table at the end of the day, with a salt shaker in the middle.
The silver‑haired girl took the small shaker, turned it over on the table.
With her finger, she traced a simple word in the salt:
"LEO?"
Gwen stayed silent for a second.
Her throat tightened. Her fingers tapped the edge of the table once.
Then she answered:
"I'll take you to him."
She called over a henchman posted nearby,
who escorted them into a black car.
They drove for a long time.
The city lights vanished in the rearview mirror, replaced by the darkness of the desert. Sand, a straight road, an immense sky.
Eventually, Gwen said:
"Stop here."
The car came to a halt.
The henchman stayed behind the wheel. Gwen and the silver‑haired girl got out.
The car drove away.
There was nothing around.
Nothing but the wind sweeping the dust.
The silver‑haired, azure‑eyed girl looked puzzled. She looked at Gwen, then at the empty horizon.
Gwen inhaled, then spoke in a voice soft but hard.
"How long are you going to pretend you don't understand?" she asked. "You're the smartest of us. That's your ability."
The mute girl lowered her head.
A sad look crossed her features.
She knew.
She lifted her eyes slowly, just in time to see Gwen shifting, taking a fighting stance. Shoulders low, hands relaxed, but her whole body taut.
The young girl tightened her grip on the handle of the large case she'd been carrying from the start.
She set it down in front of her.
Then, mustering her courage, she raised her arm, pointed at Gwen… then pointed at herself.
Her lips moved, letting out a rare word.
"Friend," she said.
The word was carried away by the wind, but Gwen heard it.
A flash of melancholy crossed her gaze.
"Yes. But I can't let you take him," she replied.
She shifted her stance.
In an instant, she hurled a blade toward the silver‑haired girl, the air around them charging with electricity.
A drone was flying nearby, sent from the hotel.
Don Javier watched the footage, tense, cold sweat running down his back.
"We agree we trained Gwen as much as we possibly could, right?" he muttered.
"Only God knows," Gregorio replied.
On the monitor, the fight began.
It was too fast.
To the human eye, it was nothing but a surge of lightning, dust, smoke, and sparks.
"What the hell is that?!" Javier exclaimed. "Is she winning or losing?"
"I see the same thing as you, sir," Gregorio replied, helpless.
For five long minutes, the drone captured nothing but a storm.
Flashes of light, silver streaks, shapes crossing, colliding, vanishing.
Then suddenly, a violent bolt and a massive shockwave exploded.
A ring of dust rose up, swallowing the drone.
The image cut to black.
"Fuck, we lost the feed," Javier growled. "Get a car ready. We're going there."
Out in the desert, there was now a winner… and a loser.
Let's rewind a bit and slow time down.
Gwen threw a knife at the silver‑haired girl.
The blade sliced through the air, but the girl knocked it away with the flat of her case without even thinking about it.
An instant later, Gwen appeared exactly where the knife had been deflected.
She didn't give her opponent time to react. Her hand slid to her back, grabbed something heavy. She pulled out a long cord with a series of thin knives attached at regular intervals.
She spun it once above her head, then flung it toward the mute girl.
The cord opened like a snake, a curtain of blades hissing toward the girl's body.
The silver‑haired girl arched backward.
With an almost unreal acrobatic move, she flipped back, planted one hand on the ground, twisted, stood up again, and deflected each segment of the chain with precise blows of her case.
Launched by her last push, she landed once more, balanced on her large black case.
In a fraction of a second, she lifted her leg and stomped down brutally on the case.
The trunk jumped, the latch snapped.
The shock released a katana in its scabbard, which sprang out.
She caught it mid‑air, smooth and precise.
A shiver, ancient and instinctive, ran through Gwen nonetheless: that feeling of facing something at the top of the food chain. Humanity's natural predator.
She ignored it.
She yanked on the cords linking the knives and the other blades already thrown, redirecting them like a puppeteer. She spun on herself in an almost graceful move, sending the knives flying all around them.
At first glance, it looked like a useless dance.
In reality, she was scattering teleportation points everywhere.
The mute girl lunged at her to attack.
Gwen vanished in a flash.
The girl remained focused.
She now stood in the middle of a web of strings and knives, embedded or hanging in the air. Her azure eyes flicked from one to another, trying to anticipate.
But Gwen was too fast.
She moved between the knives' positions so quickly that the girl felt surrounded by afterimages.
The mute girl's thighs, sides, and arms began to show marks.
Even though she guarded each time, she was a fraction of a second behind, the blows kept landing:
an impact on her ribs, another on her jaw, a cut across her back.
"You can't win!" Gwen shouted. "I've trained for four long years!"
The mute girl remained calm.
Far too calm for someone cornered.
Just as Gwen was about to attack her left flank, sure of her angle, the sword's scabbard appeared in front of her face.
She had no time to react.
The blow caught her full in the face.
The world flipped upside down. She was hurled backward, sand scraping her back, before she managed to pull herself together and dematerialize into lightning again to avoid being chained to the ground.
She reappeared farther away, panting, cheeks burning.
Then she resumed her lightning‑quick jumps, refusing to get pinned. Between two teleports, she observed.
The mute girl wasn't moving anymore.
She stood in the center of the knife web, perfectly still, katana still sheathed, azure eyes calm, like someone standing at the heart of a storm, waiting.
Gwen attacked from above this time.
She teleported above her, blade ready, aiming at the back of her neck. The distance was perfect: close enough to cut.
The blade brushed the skin.
It started to break the surface, slightly.
Then Gwen took another brutal hit in the liver.
She was folded in two, thrown to the ground, rolling in the sand, bile rising.
Then she started vomiting to the side, the force of the blow twisting her insides.
When she got back to her feet, staggering, she realized the girl hadn't even moved her head.
She had only moved her arm.
How? Gwen thought.
Then she replayed the image of her own blade, stopped a millimeter from slicing.
The answer hit her.
Touch.
The mute girl had figured something out: Gwen surpassed her in overall speed, in movement and in initiative; trying to beat her on that field was pointless.
She had also understood something else: even if Gwen turned into lightning, her attack motions remained human at the moment of rematerialization.
And in that infinitesimal time where Gwen became tangible again, raised her arm, brought down her blade… the girl surpassed her in everything. Reflexes, strength, precision, and execution speed.
Stopping an attack at skin's edge was nothing to her.
As Gwen struggled to stand back up, she knew that at that moment, she had just lost her only advantage.
"Are you going to keep that katana in its sheath?" she asked, spitting a bit of blood. "You could have cut me in half."
Their eyes met.
"Take me seriously," Gwen went on, her voice trembling but defiant. "Fight seriously. Like at the Battle of Los Angeles. Stop underestimating me. I'm not the same anymore."
She clenched her teeth.
"We're ending this now."
She reset her stance.
The mute girl prepared too.
Gwen vanished.
This time, she dematerialized into her phone in an inner pocket. The small device fell toward the ground, empty, while she shot off elsewhere in lightning form.
In the blink of an eye, she reappeared in downtown Las Vegas.
No one noticed her presence — it was too brief. She simply placed her hands on the asphalt in the middle of an alley.
She absorbed.
Electricity from the streetlights, billboards, underground cables surged into her body. A sudden outage plunged the surrounding blocks into darkness.
Then she disappeared again.
She rematerialized in the desert before her phone hit the ground, catching it on the way as if nothing had happened.
The mute girl charged at her, katana still sheathed.
Gwen stepped back, set her hands behind her.
Her fingers trembled slightly.
Both palms filled with high‑voltage electricity, an intense blue light forming around them.
She thrust her arms forward.
"It's over," she whispered.
Lightning crashed down on the mute girl.
A pillar of light struck her full on.
The blast sent sand flying in every direction. The girl's silhouette vanished in the light, her eyes rolled back, smoke rising.
Gwen exhaled, out of breath, her arms still outstretched.
"I'm sorry…" she whispered.
The body seemed on the verge of collapsing.
That's when it happened.
The strange signal Gwen had felt earlier,
that pressure, that visceral alarm,
erupted.
Every sense in her screamed one thing: run.
"How can you survive that?" she blurted, incredulous.
The girl's azure eyes rolled back into place in their sockets.
Then the color changed.
Her silver hair darkened to ebony, strand after strand, as if ink were pouring over her head.
Her eyes shifted from azure blue to a deep red.
If her unusual appearance had made her look like an angel until now, in that instant she looked like the devil's child.
Weakened, Gwen grabbed the strings attached to her knives, yanked with all her strength.
The blades scattered in the sand all shot toward the girl.
This isn't normal… Gwen thought, panicking. Her power isn't supposed to be tied to her intelligence? What the hell is this? Does she have another ability? Is that even possible?!
The knives came in from all sides, forming a cloud of steel.
The mute girl with red eyes and black hair clapped her hands.
The sound was like thunder.
A titanic shockwave rippled outward in concentric circles.
The knives instantly lost all their momentum, dropping harmlessly into the sand.
Hit full‑force by the blast, Gwen was thrown into the air like a dry leaf.
The desert sand rippled, drawing waves of impact radiating from the strike point.
The distant drone was ripped out of the sky and smashed into the ground by the shockwave.
The desert fell quiet again.
Then Gwen fell.
Hard.
She hit the ground with a brutal crack. Her arm bent at an impossible angle, a rib snapped in her chest. A piercing scream escaped her despite herself.
"What… what are you exactly?" she gasped. "Why are you so different from us? How can you have two abilities…?"
The mute girl walked forward calmly, retrieving her katana from its scabbard,
the sheath planted in the sand.
Terrified, Gwen tried to grab another knife with her one good arm. Her fingers closed around the hilt.
The moment she pulled it out, the mute girl finally drew her katana.
One of her eyes flipped back to azure blue.
The other stayed red.
She struck a single blow.
A few centimeters from Gwen.
Reality seemed to warp, split into a thin, invisible slice, then snap back into place.
A second later, with a slight delay, the ground behind Gwen split open.
A clean, perfectly straight line carved through the desert for five hundred meters, slicing rocks, dunes, anything in its path.
Gwen remained frozen.
"Y–you… cut… space…?" she stammered.
A flash came back to her.
The Battle of Los Angeles.
That girl in a wheelchair, blind, who bent space itself.
Zoe.
"That's Zoe's ability…" Gwen said, blood running cold.
The mute girl pointed the tip of her blade a few centimeters from Gwen's chin.
Gwen swallowed.
"I surrender," she said.
Gwen panted, barely conscious, clutching her broken arm.
Every breath tore a burning pain through her chest.
She let herself fall backward, back against the still‑warm desert sand. The sky spun above her, blurry, warped by the pain.
A few meters away, the mute girl sheathed her katana.
Her hair, which had been jet‑black just moments earlier, slowly regained its silver shade. Her eyes, too, let go of the red, becoming once more two calm, deep azure lakes.
She put the katana back in the black case and snapped the locks shut.
Then she lifted it one‑handed, resting it on her shoulder as if it weighed nothing.
On the ground, Gwen cried out in a broken voice:
"Wait…!"
The wind blew, carrying her words away.
The girl stopped. She did not turn around.
Her silver hair drifted gently in the breeze.
"Look at us," Gwen called, her voice shaking. "We're anomalies."
She dragged in a breath.
"Leo is human."
The mute girl stood motionless, her back to her.
"You split the desert," Gwen continued. "You fought in the Battle of Los Angeles. You saw how helpless he was."
Images resurfaced: Leo, covered in blood, eyes wide with helplessness, trying to shield people caught in the battle.
"I know he's like a big brother to you…" Gwen said. "But he's human. And he wouldn't last two seconds against any one of us."
She gritted her teeth, tears stinging her eyes.
"You can't tie him to all this. He's not responsible for what William Campbell did to us…"
Sand swirled around them, lifted by eddies of dry wind.
"Please, go," Gwen asked. "Let him live as a human… and die as a human."
She swallowed.
"I'll always be by his side to protect him. But I know your quest is bigger. You can't drag him into it. We… we're false gods, built out of one man's madness. Please… leave."
A long silence followed.
The mute girl stood there, back turned, case on her shoulder.
Then, without her making a move, a tear slid down her cheek.
The sand rose softly around her, pushed by a melancholic wind.
When it settled, she was gone.
Shortly after, cars sped onto the scene, revealing the traces of the fight: craters, knives buried in the ground, torn‑up sand, and that massive scar cutting through the landscape for hundreds of meters.
Gwen lay alone in the middle of the desert.
Doors slammed.
Men in black suits rushed toward her.
"There!" one of them shouted.
Two mobsters set down a stretcher, carefully lifted her, and began to load her onto it.
"Stop," a voice said behind them.
Emilio Javier was walking forward, hands in the pockets of his coat, face closed. Gregorio followed a few steps behind.
Gwen groaned, clutching her broken arm.
"Don't move, señorita," one of the men said, trying to support her head.
"Leave her," Javier said, without raising his voice.
Emilio leaned slightly toward Gwen.
"I lost…" she whispered, tears in her eyes.
She raised her good arm to hide her face.
"I lost again. I'm too weak… Even after four years…"
Javier stayed silent for a moment.
His gaze lingered briefly on her twisted arm, her ragged breathing, the blood at the corner of her lips. Then he straightened a little, eyes drawn to the desert.
His gaze followed the gigantic gash splitting the ground for five hundred meters.
"Believe me…" he said in a lower voice, almost to himself. "You are far from weak."
He clenched his jaw.
"This isn't a question of weakness," he added, voice harder.
He nodded to the men.
"Take her to the hospital. Ours. I want the best people on her. If anyone makes a mistake… you know."
The men nodded, serious. They lifted the stretcher again.
Emilio stayed back for a moment, hands in his pockets, staring at the cut in the desert and the landscape warped by this duel.
"We're going home," he said to Gregorio.
Behind them, the desert kept the imprint of something that went beyond even the mafia. But now that their best deterrent was out of commission for a while, it wasn't the superhumans that sent a chill down his spine… it was the war his son had started.
To be continued.