With the situation resolved Arden could finally ask about the meteor sighting in California.
Arden stepped off the empty highway. The world moved normally cars passed, wind blew but not for him. He slowed his own motion, the seconds of everyone else stretched. Time obeyed motion. The less he gave, the more it slowed.
He stopped at the edge of a forgotten facility carved into the hills, its signs half-buried by sand and salt. He didn't need to check the map. The anomaly sang through his senses like static in water subtle, warped. Someone had twisted space too far, torn something underneath.
That's when Annie Walker arrived.
Eighty-four, steel in her spine. She hadn't worn the Sheild badge in decades, but the when she handed him the file felt like old habits. Inside, a summary: a boy, no older than fifteen, taken by A.I.M. the Centipede Program's new project. A Glowing green rock found Powers manifesting as extreme cryokinesis.
Project intent: stabilize the super soldier serum. Flaw: the serum burned too hot, combusting its hosts. The boy's ability to consume heat turned him into their unwilling failsafe.
But they couldn't replicate it.
So they tortured him anyway.
"They think the rock gave him this gift," Annie said, her voice gravel. "Fell out of the sky 3 weeks ago. They don't know what it is, just that it changed him."
Arden tilted his head. His eyes caught the glow and refracted something older, something deeper his true form trying to emerge as he hovered near stillness.
He made his way inside, slow and silent. Every step a decision. The more he moved, the more the world would try to catch up. So he kept it to a crawl. The guards didn't even register him. One blinked and Arden was already past him, still mid-step.
Bullet fire came when it always did too late. Arden stood still just a moment longer. Time around him thickened. The air felt like molasses. The bullets hung mid-flight, their copper bodies trembling in false momentum. He turned slightly, watched them pass inches from his face. Then walked through.
Sublevel three was darker. Colder. And the cold wasn't mechanical.
The boy lay strapped to a surgical slab, pale skin laced with frost. Tubes pulled at his veins, machines scanned his vitals in frenzied loops. Above him, a chunk of green crystal floated in a reinforced dome. It pulsed faintly with radiation. Memory looking at the stone it was indeed what he feared a rock that should not be here a piece of kryptonite from the DC universe.
The boy turned his head slowly as Arden approached. His eyes were sunken, but alert.
"You're not one of them," he said groggily.
"No," Arden replied.
"You here to take me somewhere worse?"
Arden didn't answer at first. Instead, he let his fingers hover over the control panel. With a twitch of motion, time snapped back the restraints they buckled, twisted, cracked without a sound.
The boy inhaled, a sharp breath turning to fog.
"They said I'm the key. But I don't even know what I opened. All this pain for what?"
"They lied," Arden said simply. "They always lie when they don't understand."
The boy sat up, wincing. "Why are you helping me?"
Arden stood completely still for one long second. The machines stopped blinking. The ceiling lights dimmed, stretched.
"Because you're frozen in a moment you didn't choose."
He offered a hand.
"Let's move forward."
The boy looked over at Arden as his skin began to Fall away and a purple figure took his place made from Crystal so it would seem.
The world stood still The alarm blaring suddenly became drawn out like a drunk sailor.
Holding on to the boys wrist Arden walked slowly through the compound in out the front door with the kryptonite in hand.
-
They still whispered her name in underground bunkers, in syndicate dens from Moscow to Macau. Red Death. A name soaked in dread. But most hadn't seen her face. If they had, they might've hesitated she didn't look like death. She looked like a woman in her early thirties. Composed. Elegant. Almost calm.
But she wasn't thirty-two. She was fifty-one.
Kintari don't wear time the way humans do. They move forward so fast, time can't keep up. She became Kintari, a being of endless velocity.
Now she was their chosen.
And the Russians had called her in.
It wasn't for politics. It wasn't even for money. It was because a boy just fifteen had been taken from a lab after surviving something he shouldn't have. Rumors of a green meteor. Cryokinetic bursts. AIM's Centipede Program trying to force his gift into a bottle and burn their failures alive. They'd lost him.
She stood at the edge of a cracked rooftop overlooking the torn facility in the California hills, the last echo of Arden's presence still quivering through the fabric of motion. The boy was with him now. That much was certain.
Cassie didn't need eyes on them. She could feel where they were.
She ran a hand across the sleek red mask at her side and slipped it on. The last time she'd needed it was in Prague when she erased a billionaire mid-conference without anyone noticing. Only problem was who lived there hopped up on enough blood he stood against her.
Now?
She vanished.
A red streak of movement shot across broken corridors before sound could follow. The path Arden had taken vibrated faintly he'd slowed everything around him to a crawl. She burst through that drag like a bullet through fog.
Then she saw him.
Arden stood beside the boy, who clutched something wrapped in cloth something glowing faintly green. The hallway stretched behind them like a dream paused halfway.
'it couldn't be is that kryptonite?'
Cassie stepped forward accelerated beyond let her presence fill the space like pressure in a submarine. Arden turned with a motion barely perceptible.
"You waited long enough," he said, voice steady.
"You're meddling in matters beyond your control Chronobit," Cassie replied. Her tone was calm but carried the threat of a sprint just waiting to happen.
"I'm giving him a moment," Arden nodded toward the boy, who looked between them like prey in the space between gods.
"That moment doesn't belong to you," she said.
"It doesn't belong to them either."
Cassie tilted her head. "Then maybe it belongs to me."
There was no war cry. No signal. The Kintari didn't start fights. They arrived at conclusions and in the breath between one blink and the next Red Death moved.
Cassie was already there before the doors even finished opening.
To the cameras, nothing happened. Just a flicker between frames. But to Arden, she hit like a red comet momentum incarnate. Her blade caught the edge of his jacket, sparks flying, and then He shifted.
Not by stepping. Not by dodging.
He simply let himself still in motion. And with it, the world.
Cassie stumbled as the hallway bent into syrup. Any other opponent would've frozen. But she wasn't other opponents. Kintari didn't slow. Kintari didn't stop.
"You can't ghost me with your little slow-mo tricks," she said, circling him with a blur only he could track. "I'm faster than time."
Arden didn't speak. He watched. Calculated. The boy was behind him now, semi-conscious, but breathing. Arden knelt just slightly, just enough to guide him to the ground every movement considered, deliberate, a surgeon's rhythm.
Cassie struck again.
It was like fighting lightning. But Arden wasn't trying to win with power. He wasn't trying to beat her.
He was trying to outlast her.
He rolled his shoulder and turned, barely an inch of movement, but it restructured the entire sequence. A moment she thought she had became a miss. A lunge became a stumble. His control of time wasn't a weapon it was a shield. A mirror. A counter to raw velocity.
"You know what they call you, right?" she said between strikes, voice bouncing off the walls like gunfire. "A ghost. A myth. A rumor."
Cassie grinned. "Then let's make this one hell of a legend."
Arden didn't run.
That would've given Cassie everything she wanted momentum, pursuit, the chase.
Instead, he slowed.
His breath thinned. His fingers curled just slightly. His spine aligned not rigid, but flowing. It wasn't movement in the traditional sense. It was motion bled into stillness. An ancient discipline he had mastered long before becoming a Chronobit.
And then The world caved in around him.
From the outside, it looked like he vanished.
To Cassie, it was something else entirely. Her eyes tracked motion on levels no human could follow. Her speed made her a god among the sluggish but what she saw in that instant broke pattern. Arden didn't just disappear.
He unfolded.
He manipulated the very tempo of his flesh, dilating every microgesture until it built into a chain of perfect synchronization. He wasn't faster than her he was slower than the world to the point the world broke trying to keep up.
Cassie skidded to a halt, boots scraping against reinforced steel. The air had shifted.
He was gone. And yet every camera in the compound shorted out in sequence, flickering like dominoes.
She pivoted down the main corridor. Already too late.
The boy was gone. The kryptonite, gone. And the facility's front gate was swinging open as if brushed by a gentle breeze.
Cassie stood alone in the aftermath, her scarf settling around her neck like a crimson shadow. The Red Death had never failed a mark.
Until now.
She let out a breath, sharp and annoyed.
"That wasn't just time-dilation," she muttered. "That was art."
A flicker of respect tugged at her expression. The Kintari didn't often admire their rivals but this wasn't speed for speed's sake.
This was control so precise it outpaced chaos itself.
She smiled bitterly.
"Not bad for a kid."
Then she vanished again, leaving only wind in her place.
-
Several blocks away Arden stood collapsed next to the boy. He had expended himself beyond measure slowing down every motion of his body to such an extent was not recommended.
This method was frowned upon in Chronobit culture as it focused less on time dilation and more on body control. Slowing down every aspect of your body to such an extent that the time dilation didn't matter as much as the physical did.
The boy didn't know what to do he just knew that this man saved his life and he be damned if he go back to that lab and this man who had everything for him was sent back with him.