Help! I Do Not Want to Guide a Disaster

The moment those words left Xinyuan’s mouth, the glass pod completely shattered, exploding outward and raining shards onto the floor.

"No..." Doctor Bai Qinian staggered backward, her tablet slipping from numb fingers. "Increase the Guiding Energy output! Right now!"

The scientists scrambled in a panic, slamming their fingers onto the control panels. But one by one, the terminals began to implode, firing off showers of sparks that sent them stumbling away in panic.

Xinyuan was vibrating with pure, unfiltered rage.

His father. Bai Qinian.

They had stood there watching him rot inside a tank, manipulating his memories, forcing him to watch Wenzhi’s death over and over again.

His eyes burned a terrifying crimson.

Grief and fury collided inside him until nothing else existed.

Even beneath layers of restraints, black mist burst from his body, flooding the laboratory like a living storm. Alarms screamed. The lights overhead flickered as the entire facility began to shake.

"We have to get out!" one scientist screamed. "The Guiding Energy isn’t working!"

"What do you mean it isn’t working?!" Shao Guying roared.

His eyes remained locked on Xinyuan.

Those suppression restraints had been designed specifically for Disaster-Class Espers.

Yet Xinyuan was tearing the room apart through sheer force of will.

Another bank of machines exploded.

The remaining researchers completely lost their nerve, abandoning their stations and sprinting toward the exits.

"I..." Bai Qinian whispered, backing away. "I don’t understand. The Guiding Energy should be suppressing him... It’s Lin Wenzhi’s energy. It was designed specifically to hold him back."

"Does that look like he’s being subdued to you?!" Shao Guying snapped, his jaw locked tight.

He glared up at his son, who was now focusing his entire might into snapping the metal restraints. For the first time, a flicker of genuine fear surfaced in Guying’s eyes.

"My life’s work will not be destroyed," he growled. "If he loses control and destroys everything instead of closing the Rifts..."

His eyes snapped back to Bai Qinian. "I’ll kill you first."

Bai Qinian swallowed hard. "...Maybe it’s because of his rank."

The words tumbled out before she could stop them.

"Lin Wenzhi was suddenly an S-Rank Guide... What if he evolved before he died? If that’s true..."

Her voice trembled. "...then the extracted Guiding Energy isn’t enough anymore."

From the corner of the laboratory came an exasperated voice.

"Hey." Liye glared at all of them from inside her reinforced restraint jacket. "I’m still in the room."

Shao Guying’s eyes twitched. "...Why are you telling me this now?"

Bai Qinian stepped back as Shao Guying lunged toward her, looking utterly insane with fury. "I..."

"Why wasn’t this possibility accounted for before today?" His voice was terrifyingly calm.

"I... it was only a theory..."

Shao Guying raised his hand to cut her off, but in a horrific second, his entire right arm disappeared.

There wasn’t even a warning.

One second it was there. The next, blood exploded across Bai Qinian’s face.

Shao Guying stared blankly at the empty space where his arm had been. Only then did the pain arrive and his scream echoed throughout the laboratory.

Liye froze. The Mind-Control Esper froze.

Their eyes slowly shifted toward the center of the room.

Xinyuan had twisted pieces of reinforced metal dangled from his bleeding wrists. His pupils had shrunk into tiny pinpricks of murderous intent. "He’s not dead."

"This cannot be happening..." Bai Qinian scrambled backward until her spine slammed against the concrete wall.

Shao Guying collapsed into his own blood, clutching the ruined stump where his arm had once been.

"Oh, shit..." The Mind-Control Esper sprinted toward Liye, quickly unlocking the suppression bands before tearing away the restraint jacket.

Liye sucked in a deep breath. "Thanks."

Xinyuan stepped out of the ruined pod.

Black mist poured after him like starving wolves. It rushed toward Bai Qinian, wrapping around her torso before lifting her effortlessly into the air.

She kicked wildly. "No! Please!"

"He’s not dead." Xinyuan walked slowly toward his father. "Why would you make me think he is dead?"

His voice was quiet... Too quiet. "Why would you show me that? ....Why?"

He stopped in front of Shao Guying, towering over him. "Why do you always hurt me?"

"Xinyuan..." Shao Guying croaked through blood. "Listen to me... you’re my son... I only wanted to—"

"You are insignificant to me." Xinyuan’s voice cracked with hatred. "Just as I have always been insignificant to you."

A violent psychic shockwave exploded from his body.

The concrete walls split. Steel support beams screamed and the laboratory floor buckled beneath them.

Shao Guying coughed, blood spilling down his chin. "I... was going... to fix the world..."

Xinyuan burst into a loud, empty laugh. "...Who the hell do you think you are?"

His eyes bored into his father. "Because you think you have it all, you believe you get to decide how this world should be saved?"

He turned toward Bai Qinian.

The black mist tightened around her ribs.

She screamed.

Crunch.

The sound echoed sickeningly through the room. Her ribs collapsed beneath the pressure.

With a casual flick of his fingers, Xinyuan hurled her across the laboratory.

She crashed through three workstations before slamming into the far wall.

She never got back up.

Xinyuan stood motionless, listening to the fading rhythm of two heartbeats.

One belonged to Bai Qinian. The other... Shao Guying.

His fingers twitched.

Two sharp cracks echoed through the destroyed laboratory and both bodies went limp.

Dead.

Xinyuan’s head snapped toward the corner.

His crimson gaze locked onto Liye and the Mind-Control Esper.

Liye didn’t wait. Her own mist erupted around them, swallowing both women whole and they vanished.

Left alone in the wreckage, the manic adrenaline suddenly drained from Xinyuan’s body. The crimson in his eyes slowly faded, returning to their warm, deep brown.

His knees buckled, and he collapsed backward into the pile of shattered glass. He scrambled away blindly, completely numb to the sharp shards cutting deep into his palms and tearing through the soles of his feet.

He slid against a broken steel pillar and just.... sat there with tears streaming down his face.

"He can’t be dead..." His voice trembled.

"He can’t..." He buried his bloodied face in his shaking hands.

"It has to be a nightmare." His breathing broke. "Please...Just let me wake up."

But the bond remained empty.

Nothing changed.

The horrific realization triggered a massive psychic breakdown, his being destabilizing. The ground beneath him began to crack, and the dark mist around his body rose, swirling into a fierce, suffocating vortex.

Regret. He had so many goddamn regrets. He should have slaughtered his father the second he had the chance. He should have ripped Bai Qinian’s throat out back at the CEA headquarters.

"If I had just killed them all from the start, none of this would have happened..." he muttered to himself, a dark, twisted scowl settling onto his features. "Why do I always hold back? And now he’s gone... he’s completely gone. I can’t feel him anywhere."

Xinyuan stared blankly ahead, his eyes completely losing their light. "I should have just destroyed everything. Every. Single. Thing."

The dark mist responded to his despair, exploding from his body in a massive, catastrophic shockwave that ripped straight through the concrete ceiling of the underground lab, completely collapsing the facility before tearing into the surface world above.

Deep, jagged fissures splintered across the terrain for miles like a broken spiderweb as thick, black mist spewed from the soil like a volcano.

Concrete and massive boulders shattered apart, drifting into the dark sky.

Overhead, the shadows twisted into howling hurricanes, swallowing everything in their path until the winter air itself seemed to freeze solid under the pressure.

Not too far away, a caravan of trucks was speeding toward the facility, but the convoy slammed to a halt as the earth tore open ahead of them.

Before the lead drivers could even shift into reverse, one of the trucks was lifted clean off the ground, sucked into the hurricane and smashed to pieces.

Jiang Zhaohe, gripping the steering wheel of the second truck, stared through the cracked windshield in sheer shock. "Oh, no. Xinyuan."

"Shao Xinyuan?" The Esper riding shotgun panicked, his eyes wide as the truck rattled. "Does this mean the underground lab got wiped out? Everyone’s dead?!"

Zhaohe didn’t answer. She threw the truck into reverse, the tires screeching as she desperately tried to steer them away from the expanding collapse.

In the back of the transport cabin, Wang Chenxi was bound tightly, his wrists heavy under the weight of the ability-suppression bands. He stared out the rear window, watching the dark miasma swallow the skyline as chunks of concrete and massive boulders defied gravity, floating effortlessly into the air.

"What did you do?" Chenxi growled.

Zhaohe ignored him, her knuckles turning white as she fought the shaking steering wheel.

"Is it even worth it?!" Chenxi shouted over the roaring wind, leaning forward as much as his restraints allowed. "Look outside! We are all going to fucking die!"

"I didn’t know it would trigger this, okay?" Zhaohe snapped back, her composure cracking. "They had the extraction entirely locked down! None of this was supposed to happen."

Chenxi’s eyes narrowed into slits as he caught her gaze in the rearview mirror. "What did you do to Wenzhi?"

Zhaohe flicked her eyes up to the mirror, glaring back at him with a cold, tense silence. She didn’t say a word. She ripped her gaze away and slammed her foot down on the gas, focusing entirely on driving them out of the path of the storm.

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