22: The Rooftop Arena

The wind howled a mournful song across the top of the Oni Group tower. It was a desolate, artificial peak, a hundred stories above the silent streets, littered with the machinery of a modern skyscraper: massive air conditioning units, communication arrays, and vents that exhaled the building's warm, processed breath. The full moon was a stark, luminous spotlight, bathing the entire scene in an ethereal, silver-white glow.

Kyle stood in the center of the rooftop, his back to the city's glittering expanse. He was a mountain of a man, clad in simple black cargo pants and combat boots, his torso bare and crisscrossed with a roadmap of old scars. Even from a distance, Jack could feel the raw, untamed power radiating from him, a palpable aura of violence that seemed to warp the very air.

"You came," Kyle's voice was a low growl, deeper and more gravelly than a normal human's. It carried effortlessly over the wind. "I was beginning to think your new family had made you soft."

Jack stepped out of the stairwell access door, letting it close with a heavy, metallic thud that echoed like a gong. He moved with a liquid grace that belied his own formidable frame, his silver-alloy combat suit gleaming faintly under the moonlight.

"Just admiring the view," Jack replied, his tone deceptively casual. His eyes, however, were anything but. They were scanning, analyzing, processing. The rooftop. The placement of the equipment. Kyle's stance. And the source of the anomalous energy Aria had detected. He saw it now. A faint, sickly green luminescence pulsed from the center of Kyle’s chest, visible even through his skin, like a cancerous star. It was a deep, rhythmic throb that seemed to sync with his heartbeat.

"It's a beautiful city," Kyle said, turning to face him. A cruel smile twisted his lips. His eyes glowed with a faint, predatory light. "It deserves a king. A real one. Not a stray who got lucky."

The transformation began. It was a horrific, yet fascinating spectacle of biology gone wild. Bones cracked and reset with sickeningly loud pops. Muscles swelled and contorted, tearing through skin that instantly healed into a tougher, leathery hide. Dark fur sprouted across his body, and his face elongated into a bestial snout, lips peeling back to reveal dagger-like fangs. Within seconds, the man was gone, replaced by a monster. It was a werewolf, yes, but larger, more brutally proportioned than anything Jack had ever seen. It stood nearly nine feet tall, a horrifying fusion of man and wolf, radiating an almost visible heat.

This was the complete beast form, far beyond the partial transformations Jack had mastered. This was raw, unadulterated power.

With a roar that shattered a nearby pane of reinforced glass, Kyle charged. He wasn't a fighter; he was a force of nature, a freight train of muscle and fury. Jack had anticipated the charge in his simulations. He sidestepped, letting the behemoth thunder past, the wind of its passage tugging at him.

But the simulation hadn't prepared him for what came next.

As Kyle roared past, a thick steel maintenance railing tore itself from its moorings on the edge of the roof. It flew through the air, not as if thrown, but as if guided by an unseen hand, and slammed into Jack's side with the force of a battering ram.

Pain exploded in his ribs. He was thrown across the rooftop, skidding on the rough concrete before crashing into a massive HVAC unit. The air was driven from his lungs in a ragged gasp. The silver-alloy suit had absorbed the worst of the impact, but he could feel the sharp agony of at least two cracked ribs.

He looked up, gasping for breath, his mind reeling. He can control metal.

Kyle laughed, a guttural, inhuman sound. He stood amidst a swirl of metallic debris—loose screws, discarded pipes, steel plates pried from the floor. They orbited him slowly, like a macabre solar system. The green glow in his chest was brighter now, pulsing with malignant energy.

"Surprised?" Kyle growled, his voice a distorted mockery of human speech. "Found a little gift. A rock that fell from the sky. It gave me... an edge."

The anomalous energy source. It was a meteorite core, lodged in his body, granting him some crude, unstable form of ferromagnetism. Jack's tactical rehearsals, his carefully analyzed strategies, were suddenly obsolete. He was facing an opponent whose core ability he had no data on.

This was no longer a duel. It was a desperate struggle for survival.

From a mobile command vehicle parked several blocks away, Catherine watched the scene unfold on a high-definition drone feed, her face a pale, stoic mask. Beside her, Aria's fingers flew across a holographic keyboard, data streams scrolling past her eyes.

"His biometric signs are off the charts," Aria reported, her voice tight with tension. "And I'm picking up a massive electromagnetic field originating from his position. It's interfering with the drone's guidance systems."

Catherine's knuckles were white where she gripped the edge of the console. Every roar, every sickening crunch of metal on the drone's microphone, felt like a physical blow. She saw Jack struggle to his feet, saw the dent in his suit, the way he favored his left side. Her heart clenched with a pain so fierce it stole her breath. But she did not cry. She did not panic. She compartmentalized the fear, locking it away behind a wall of cold, hard logic. She was the commander now.

"Analyze it, Aria," she commanded, her voice perfectly level. "Analyze the energy field. Find its frequency, its pattern, its weaknesses. Use every bit of processing power we have. Find the source."

On the rooftop, the battle had become a deadly ballet. Jack was on the defensive, his military combat skills and preternatural agility the only things keeping him alive. He weaved and dodged through a storm of flying metal. A length of rebar shot past his head like a spear, embedding itself deep into the concrete wall behind him. A heavy steel panel flew up to act as a shield, blocking his path of retreat.

Kyle was toying with him, enjoying his newfound power. He wasn't just trying to kill Jack; he was trying to humiliate him, to crush him under the weight of his own city's steel.

"You hide behind your money and your technology!" Kyle roared, flinging a cluster of sharp-edged ventilation fans at Jack. "But at our core, we are beasts! And my beast is stronger than yours!"

Jack ducked under the spinning blades, rolling and coming up on one knee. His mind was racing, processing, adapting. The meteorite. It was powerful, but his control was crude, brutish. There was no finesse. And then, he noticed something. The metal didn't move with uniform speed. Lighter objects were faster, but heavier ones were slower, almost sluggish. And his suit... Kyle hadn't tried to control his suit directly. Why?

The answer clicked into place. Silver. The alloy was primarily silver, a diamagnetic metal. It was weakly repelled by magnetic fields, not attracted. It wasn't immune, but it created interference, a sort of "static" that made precise control difficult for Kyle.

This was his opening.

Kyle ripped a massive conduit pipe from the wall and swung it like a club. Jack didn't retreat. He charged forward, into the attack. As the pipe swung down, he dodged under it, his hand lashing out to grab the rebar spear still embedded in the wall from earlier. He wrenched it free.

He was now armed.

"My turn," Jack gritted out, the pain in his ribs a searing fire.

Kyle roared in frustration and pulled at the very rooftop beneath them. A half-dozen long, thick steel reinforcement bars tore through the concrete, rising like the grasping fingers of a buried giant. They shot towards Jack from all directions, a cage of steel meant to impale him.

Jack moved. He used the silver suit's inherent interference to his advantage. As the bars closed in, he didn't just dodge them; he parried them, using the rebar in his hand to deflect and redirect. He batted one bar aside, sending it spinning into another. He used his own body as a fulcrum, letting another bar skim past his suit, the magnetic repulsion giving it an unpredictable wobble that threw off Kyle's control.

He was a matador, and the steel bars were the horns of a raging bull.

Finally, he saw his chance. Kyle, enraged, focused all his power on a single, massive steel I-beam, lifting it high into the air to bring it crashing down and crush Jack entirely. It was his ultimate attack, requiring all of his concentration.

In that moment of total focus, Jack acted. He wasn't aiming for Kyle. He vaulted off a piece of rubble, using the last of his strength to hurl the rebar spear in his hand. It flew straight and true, not at Kyle's body, but at the massive electrical transformer unit at the edge of the roof.

The rebar pierced the transformer's casing. For a split second, nothing happened. Then, with a deafening crack, the transformer exploded. A massive, uncontrolled electromagnetic pulse erupted outwards, a wave of pure energy.

The effect on Kyle was instantaneous and catastrophic. The raw EMP wave slammed into the meteorite core in his chest. His control over the metal vanished. The I-beam, suspended a hundred feet in the air, simply fell, crashing onto the rooftop with a deafening boom that shook the entire building. The small pieces of metal orbiting Kyle dropped to the ground with a harmless clatter.

Kyle screamed—a sound of pure agony as the EMP overloaded the alien rock in his body. The green light in his chest flared violently, flickering like a dying bulb.

"Warning, Alpha!" Aria's voice screamed in his ear, frantic and laced with static from the EMP blast. "The energy source is destabilizing! His heartbeat is accelerating exponentially! The feedback loop is critical! He's going to detonate! The whole damn building is going to go with him!"

A red timer appeared in the corner of Jack's vision, projected by his contact lens display.

TIME TO DETONATION: 3:00... 2:59... 2:58...

He was standing on a bomb, and the fuse was lit.