Chapter 53: Chapter fifty-two

Present day.

 

The man in the chair closed his eyes and entered his mind palace. Ethan was pulling back his fist to strike him again, angry at his last comment, but that was back in the real world. Unimportant.

The man walked through the corridors of his mind, passing room after room, each containing a wealth of knowledge and expertise on a different subject. He ignored all of them, and proceeded to a door that opened onto a long staircase leading down. Normally, when he entered his mind palace, he appeared in the room he wanted immediately. But this was different, this was a journey he had to take for himself.

He descended the stairs into darkness. Spiders crawled on walls of stone and a blown-out light hung impotently from the ceiling. The man’s eyes adjusted to the darkness easily; it was all in his mind after all. So, when he reached the room, he had a clear view of an empty basement. Bare concrete stretched from wall to wall. The only adornment was a black sledgehammer, leaning in one corner of the room.

Some rooms in the man’s mind palace were tools for remembering and retrieving information. Some were for enabling the right mindset or engaging the right muscle memory. This room was different. The basement wasn’t a room for remembering, it was a room for forgetting.

And buried beneath the concrete was something the man needed.

He hefted the black hammer and brought it down in the centre of the room, a spiderweb of cracks running through the floor. It was slow going; the concrete was thick and the hammer was heavy. But the man had all the time in the world; all of this happening at the speed of thought. So the man laboured, swinging the hammer until something shone through the broken concrete.

The man dropped to his knees, scraping the concrete aside and retrieving a small, silver box. What the man needed was within. Nothing so simple as a fact or piece of information. To anyone watching the man, it was something they may not have even known he had buried. But to him it was something precious. Something irreplaceable.

It was his identity. It was his soul. It was his name.

He opened the box and found a blank white mask staring back at him.

 

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Oblivion opened his eyes. A punch was being swung at him, but the time for taking punches was over.

He caught the fist inches from his face.

Ethan was dumbstruck, not understanding how his captive could have gotten free from the chair. It wasn’t his fault, the body manipulation and escape techniques taught by the program weren’t exactly something he could have come up against before, let alone the variants on them that Oblivion had discovered for himself over the years. Ethan realized too late he should call for help, and Oblivion caught him with a punch to the throat as he drew the breath to do so.

Oblivion got to his feet, ignoring the injuries he had suffered. They hurt, but the pain was unimportant and easy to separate from his thoughts. He broke Ethan’s neck as an afterthought

469

From their perspective, the Program had captured him, and they would be wanting to eliminate him. But, it was clear from The Wraith’s involvement that they had known about him for some time now, and that they wanted intel on who he was working with before they killed him. Therefore, rather than simply blowing up the building he was in, they would send a team to inspect the information his captor had obtained and either rendition or execute him depending on its veracity.

That team would be their best, which for the Program meant superheroes. The Wraith was probably dead by now, and if she wasn’t, she would be soon. That left three superheroes. Smythe wouldn’t want to take any chances. He would want to ensure Oblivion was dead or thoroughly contained. Which meant he would send all three, believing that would be enough to subdue or execute Oblivion.

But that was Smythe’s problem. He underestimated his opponents.

Oblivion would need to find a good room to fight in.

But first, he thought, eying Ethan’s body. I need some pants.

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