Chapter 201: 202 | A Prison of Thirteen
The entity wasn’t just targeting my drain. It was targeting everything connected to me. Every ability I’d copied. Every channel I’d opened. Every woman whose Essentia lived inside my body alongside my own.
If it got through my defenses it would get to them too.
No.
Absolutely not.
I felt something shift inside my chest. Not the drain. Something deeper. Something that had been asleep since I woke up in this body and started playing a game I hadn’t asked to join.
The original Rome D’Angelo had been a failure. A womanizer. A waste of potential and family resources. But he’d also been an Angelo. And Angelos did not go quietly.
I opened the drain.
Not all the way. Not the full channel. Just a crack. A thread. Enough to taste what was coming through before it overwhelmed me completely.
The entity’s Essentia hit my tongue and this time I didn’t flinch.
Empty. Cold. Sterile. The taste of nothing pretending to be something. But underneath that nothing, buried so deep I almost missed it, there was a pattern. A structure. The thirteen abilities weren’t random. They’d been assembled according to a specific design. Spatial manipulation for mobility. Kinetic absorption for defense. Thermal generation. Gravity manipulation. And at the core, at the very center of the lattice, something I recognized.
A drain.
Not like mine. Cruder. Weaker. A pale imitation built from scraps and stolen research. But unmistakably a drain-type ability shoved into this container alongside twelve others.
Someone had tried to build a copy of me.
Or a counter to me.
Or both.
The realization hit like a punch to the chest. My father. The laboratory. Dr. Morita. The blood samples with anomalous signatures. The three-month timeline. Someone had taken data from my blood work and used it to construct this thing specifically to hunt me down.
And whoever had done it didn’t fully understand what they were dealing with.
Because the drain at the center of this entity’s lattice was reaching for mine with desperate hunger. Not to consume me. To CONNECT. To find another of its kind. To escape the prison of competing abilities that had been forced into a body never meant to contain them.
The original drain inside this thing was suffering.
I pushed back through the connection. Not attacking. Reaching. The way I’d reached for Mera the first time we touched. The way I’d reached for Cheon in that storage room. The way I’d reached for Noel an hour ago with pho getting cold on her desk.
WHAT ARE YOU.
The response came not in words but in images. Fragments. A laboratory. White walls. Cold tables. Straps on arms and legs. Needles and monitors and a man in a white coat with kind eyes and a gentle voice saying "this won’t hurt for long."
Pain.
So much pain.
Thirteen sources of agony converging on a single point of consciousness that had once been human. Once been someone. Once had a name and a face and a life before they became this.
WHO DID THIS TO YOU.
Another fragment. A conference room. Expensive chairs. A man sitting at the head of the table with cold eyes and white hair and a face I saw every time I looked in a mirror.
My father.
Vito D’Angelo.
The connection snapped shut. The entity stumbled backward. The hum changed pitch, becoming erratic, discordant, like a radio caught between stations.
"Rome." Mera was beside me. When had she moved? "Rome your eyes. The circles. They’re glowing."
I could feel it. The three concentric rings in my irises burning with absorbed Essentia. Not from the entity. From the backlash of the connection. From whatever had passed between us in that brief moment of contact.
The entity made a sound. Not the mechanical voice from before. Something rawer. Older. A moan of pain that came from somewhere deep inside the empty prison of its existence.
"Help."
One word. Human. Desperate.
"Please."
The mechanical voice returned. Harsher now. Overriding whatever fragment of consciousness had managed to surface.
"ERROR. Emotional interference detected. Purging non-essential processes. Resuming acquisition protocol."
The entity lunged.
Mera’s portal opened between us. Amber light. Dark space. The stepping disc swallowed the entity’s reaching arm and spat it out ten meters to our left, buying us a second and a half of breathing room.
"We need to move NOW." Mera grabbed my arm. Her fingers were hot against my skin. Her eyes were wild. "Whatever you just did pissed it off."
"I know what it is." The words tumbled out as we ran. Cheon flanking my other side. Noel’s body over Mera’s shoulder in a fireman’s carry because apparently Mera had decided unconscious teammates counted as acceptable portal cargo. "Someone built it. From stolen ability templates. There’s a person inside. Or what’s left of one."
"A person." Cheon’s voice was flat. "That thing is a person."
"Was. Is. I don’t know." We cleared the edge of the courtyard. The athletic complex loomed ahead, its reinforced walls promising safety that probably wouldn’t last. "The drain at its core. It’s suffering. The other abilities are crushing it. Whoever designed this thing didn’t understand how drain-type Essentia works. They thought they could just shove it in alongside everything else and it would integrate."
"And it didn’t."
"Drain doesn’t integrate. It DOMINATES. It’s trying to absorb the other twelve abilities but they’re too strong. Too many. So it’s stuck in a loop. Hungry but unable to eat. Reaching for other drains because that’s the only thing it understands how to connect with."
Behind us the entity recovered from Mera’s redirect. I heard the hum intensify. Felt the pressure against my sealed channels redouble.
"So what do we do?" Mera’s breath was coming harder. The portal had cost her. "If it’s after your specific ability type then running just delays the inevitable."
She was right. Of course she was right. Mera was always right about the practical things. The things that mattered when survival was on the line.
I could run. I could hide. I could let campus security establish their perimeter and wait for NEA emergency response and hope that whatever heroes showed up could put this thing down before it found me again.
Or I could do something incredibly stupid.
