Mod Superhero

Chapter 7.29 - Tobias

The Vault was half-memory, half-prison, constantly reshaping itself through

Today, his "door" was a sagging gate set into a chain-link fence, barbed wire curled along the top like grasping fingers. Yesterday it had been the splintered entrance of a condemned tenement. Sometimes it was a warped basement door, sweating with mildew, the kind he used to slip through during the war. Always a threshold. Always waiting.

He knew, in some rational corner of himself, that this was the Vault's doing—magician's spells weaving around his own fractured thoughts. Maybe deliberate cruelty. Maybe just the suppression wards bleeding his power back onto him, feeding him his past on a loop. Whatever the reason, the result was the same: the memories never left.

When he stepped forward, the world shifted. The cell folded inside out, and suddenly he was back where he didn't want to be.

The Second Civil War.

The roar of a crowd swallowed him whole. Tobias found himself standing on a cracked stairwell, or maybe a flatbed truck, or maybe the courthouse steps—it was never the same stage twice, but the crowd never changed. A sea of faces pressed close, their voices rising in chants that rattled his bones. Placards bobbed above them like waves: NO CHAINS. FREEDOM FOR ALL CAPES. The air stank of smoke, acrid and raw, drifting from trash fires smoldering in the gutters.

And his throat was vibrating. His words boomed out before he even realized he was speaking. Freedom. Equality. Justice. Vague promises, broad enough to fit inside anyone who wanted to believe them. His power made the words boom, every syllable slamming into the air like a hammer blow, reverberating off broken windows and brick walls until the whole block shook.

The crowd loved it. They drank his words like water. Some raised fists. Some wept openly. All of them leaned closer, as though his voice alone could keep them standing.

But Tobias felt the tremor in his own hands, the tentative panic in his chest. He hadn't wanted this. Not the stage. Not the spotlight.

The nights that mattered more to him—the ones in back rooms, just him and three close friends, whispering about a better world. Small rooms. Quiet arguments. Conviction that grew like a candle flame, steady and private. That was where he belonged.

His voice made him something else. A figurehead. An orator. A banner hoisted against his will.

The older Tobias—the prisoner watching himself now—felt the thought like a knife: They thought your words were fire, but you were always just trying not to stammer.

He blinked, and the memory cracked. The stage dissolved beneath his feet. The chanting warped into sirens, into screams.

Now he was running.

The streets were chaos, lit by the orange flicker of burning storefronts. His boots hammered against broken asphalt, lungs clawing for air. Bodies slammed into him from both sides as people surged through narrow alleys, trying to disappear into numbers. The air tasted like melted plastic and fear.

Sirens rose and fell, but louder than that were the sounds of powers unleashed. A shriek of air as a kinetic blast tore through a barricade, the crunch of stone as a wall exploded outward, the metallic crack of restraints snapping shut. He saw people hurled across the street like dolls, limbs flailing before they hit and didn't rise again.

Summit recruits dropped from rooftops, too fast to follow. Their costumes were still too clean, their movements too crisp—children playing at war, except the damage they did was real. A girl just ahead of him vanished into a shimmer of blue light and reappeared shackled, gagged, face white with terror.