"Axel? Axel?"​ 

     Once again, Valtair woke Axel out of a deep, drug induced sleep. 

     Only, this time Axel didn't fight it or wonder about it. 

     He was to become the Silver Scorpion again! Yes! 

​     "I am ready," he found himself saying out loud. 

     And then he felt himself being lifted out of his bed where he spent every moment of his life when he wasn't the Silver Scorpion, lifted by nothing, by no one, by a force he felt no need to understand. His blankets fell away from him to the bed as he floated through empty air towards a window that seemed to open all by itself as Axel neared it. Once out the window, Axel saw one of Valtair's airships floating silently over the apartment building where Axel and his mother lived. Axel rose up to meet it. The bottom of the airship opened to allow Axel entrance. The second he was inside the airship, Axel felt himself being outfitted in the glittering silver armor that made him the Silver Scorpion. Now he was no longer paralyzed. Now he had the same freedom of movement as anyone else. 

​     In fact, with his special armor on, he was more powerful than just about anyone on planet Earth. 

​     He emerged from Valtair's airship five minutes later as the tall, glittering Silver Scorpion. He stretched even though he didn't need to and couldn't really feel it. It just felt so damned good to be able to move again. 

      And then he fell away from the airship to fly away on his own accord. 

     "Where am I headed?" he asked Valtair through a com-link. "What do you require of me today?" He felt ready, ready to be powerful again, ready to smash again. 

​     "You're on your way to a very fancy party," came the reply, "and the woman giving the party plans to become the richest and most powerful woman in the world by selling technologies that we provided for her. And now she wants to renege on her part of the bargain. She must be destroyed, Alacran. That party must be disrupted in the most melodramatic and violent way possible in front of the entire world as an example of what happens to those who oppose us."

​     "You don't think I'll have to...have to kill anybody, do you?"

     "There's a distinct possibility of exactly that, yes."

​     Oh. Murder. The thought of that took the wind out of Axel's sails as he headed for the brand spanking new fifty story building at the center of downtown Seatrailia that was the center of Montcrief Technologies. In his entire life, Axel had never thought that one day he might actually kill somebody, might take another human being's life. And yet, if he wanted to remain powerful...if he wanted to leave his bed ever again...He decided not to think about it anymore. This woman who'd double crossed Valtair and those behind Valtair...She probably had it coming. 

​     It rested at the very pit of him, though, this notion that he was about to become a killer that very night. But not a cold-blooded killer. He never would be able to just do it. Even the mere idea of it made Axel's soul heavy.

     Yet on he flew. 

CONTINUE