Super

65. a weapon in the wrong hands

The good news was that Irene wasn't hard to find.

The bad news? She already had half the group captive.

Jeonghan pressed against the side of the wall, hissing in alarm when the flames caught at his sleeve. The fire should have been easy enough to deal with, but being an ice elemental, he found the flames even more harmful. They seemed to affect him like he was dry tinder. That's what Jeonghan had been reduced to after leaving Irene's side: one human ice box, extra flammable.

It had been hard to stand up to Irene, which was the whole reason he had even put up with her for so long. In the beginning, months ago, the project she had promised and the goals she had set had been so pristine, so inviting. Jeonghan had thought he had a shot at the world again, a chance to do something right and fix all his past wrongs. That had changed soon, however, though it had taken him more than just one meeting with the Supers to understand.

He had been birthed in a lab. Jeonghan was barely human—he was perfectly made, a bionic life form developed from a strand of humanity. After escaping the brutal experimentation and realizing that his makers hadn't even left him an identity to navigate the world with, he'd quickly come to terms with how alien he was to humans. He was an experiment, a thing, whose very existence was only a subject for ethical debates. No one had ever asked him how he had liked being thrown in the trash like a faulty prototype.

Of course, he hadn't meant to kill anyone. But it was true—he was faulty. An unstable lab result gone wrong. And therefore, he had quickly spun out of control, and had managed to demolish an entire base full of people.

It had taken him a while to accept the fact that he had only done what he was created for—destruction. He was a weapon in a never-ending war, and running away from it wouldn't help his case. The fact that Irene had weaponized him again for her means was proof enough of that. He was a hidden knife in the wrong hands.

But that didn't mean he couldn't change hands.

"Did you really assume you could outrun me so easily, little superhero?" Irene's voice boomed from the room, making Jeonghan snap to attention.

It had taken him a while to find the entrance to her dimension after having his mind frozen by her powers—he had stayed in a blank void, watching everything but being unable to move as if he had been trapped in his own mind. Jeonghan had only begun to think that he'd stay trapped there forever when she'd jumped into this dimension and broken the link stopping him from moving.

After that, it had only been a matter of finding the entrance and jumping in himself. Jeonghan still wasn't sure how to navigate the mansion, but he had helped create it, no matter how small his role to play in its construction. But all that seemed to be of no use, since Irene had found and trapped the Supers, using her mindless bots, who had once been normal humans, to hold them witness to her destruction.

He had never felt pity before—most emotions being alien to him—but looking at the fractured light in Irene's eyes, he felt it now.

One of the serum-injected humans, a hooded man, stood before her now, holding a struggling Taeyong in place. Jeonghan had had a hard time memorizing the names of the other Supers, but this one was recognizable because of the vibrant color of his hair. It reminded him of carbon monoxide fumes from the lab he'd grown in, a bright blue shade.

The others were held in similar grips, by what Jeonghan assumed were curtain drapes. Seeing non-living decoration items animated would have been a bizarre sight if he hadn't known about Taehyung's animating powers. As a consequence of those, the empty area didn't look empty—the windows were dark, but the curtains held the boys in place as Irene stood dead center, watching Taeyong struggle against the hooded figure without success.