Chapter 5: The Weapon Discharged
Chapter 5: The Weapon Discharged
From the darkness of the parking lot, a heavy, armored transport vehicle tore through the gravel, its reinforced grill aimed directly at the diner's exposed front. It wasn't stopping. They were going to ram the building to secure the asset.
"Prime!" Claire screamed, pointing at the oncoming headlights.
The old man looked at the truck, then down at the magnetic cuffs suppressing his arms. The cuffs were drawing power directly from his core, causing the silver cylinder to sputter and turn a dangerous, volatile crimson.
"Claire, behind the grill!" Prime shouted, his face contorting with immense strain. "Hold on to the gas lines!"
He stopped resisting the guards holding him. Instead, he leaned into their weight, drawing upon the absolute limit of the siphon's capacity. He absorbed the sheer friction of his own cells fighting the magnetic restraints. The air around him began to warp with heat haze.
The transport truck crashed through the threshold, its heavy tires tearing through the checkered linoleum floor, heading straight for him at forty miles per hour.
At the exact millisecond of impact, Prime didn't dodge. He brought his locked, cuffed hands upward, meeting the reinforced steel bumper with his bare palms.
The collision didn't crush him.
The entire momentum of the three-ton vehicle—the roaring engine, the spinning tires, the kinetic force of the speed—was instantly halted, sucked entirely into the silver cylinder in a deafening, vacuum-like pop. The crimson glow turned a pure, blinding white.
The magnetic cuffs shattered into molten slag under the sheer overload of energy.
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Prime stood entirely uninjured in front of the dead, stopped truck. He looked up at the terrified driver through the cracked windshield, his hands humming with raw, unstable power.
With a final, effortless flick of his wrists, Prime released a fraction of the stored energy back into the vehicle's frame. The transport truck was lifted cleanly off the ground, thrown backward out of the diner, and flipped repeatedly across the gravel lot, smashing into the rows of parked motorcycles like a bowling ball through pins.
