Shawn decided to play cat and mouse with it.
"Let's go somewhere with more space," he said. "I don't want to fight in front of my own hideout."
And the brute followed him like a puppy, all the way to the parking lot. This world is clearly on Shawn's side; the great lumbering thing could not close the distance on one skinny young man even once.
Shawn used his spatial rupture on it. The cut did not do much. The skin had thickened, and the only result was that the brute got angrier and came at him harder — so Shawn went on teasing, asking whether the muscleman had genuinely forgotten how to speak like a human being.
"The professor has no taste at all," he added, strolling backwards. "None."
Feeble as the jokes were, they worked. The rage climbed. And then, unexpectedly, the brute stopped dead.
Shawn stopped too. Something was wrong with it.
And then the thing was standing behind him — behind him, having crossed that distance in no time at all — and instead of striking, it stood there and growled.
Liam, watching through the camera in its throat, was delighted.
"Who would have thought that an emotional outburst could trigger morphological evolution?" He told Ren to write down every detail, every single one. His laughter alarmed her more than the readouts did.
The brute had become a more terrible version of itself. It looked less like a man now than like something reconstructed out of a museum hall, and with that shape it came at Shawn like a comet.
Even so, our incredible hero came away from it with a scratch, and the monster stopped after a single blow, as patiently as a dog called to heel.
Shawn decided to make it angrier.
"Is that all he's capable of? A few extra bones came up and he thinks he's turned into a hedgehog."
The strange little jokes worked, and yet the thing still did not attack. It stood obediently where it was and listened to Shawn chatter at it.
"So Liam says who to bite, and he bites. Isn't that the behaviour of a stupid dog?"
Anger: one thousand seven hundred.
The brute growled, and stayed standing, and Liam was extremely pleased with all of it. "Excellent. The emotional outburst has passed the critical threshold and bone density has risen by five percent. This patient is a genuine find. He is doing real service to the research. Let him get angrier — I want to see the absolute limits."
Anger, it turned out, was making it stronger. It arched like a porcupine and fired its spines, and they came off it in every direction at a furious speed.
Naturally, no force in this world is capable of defeating our special hero, who dodged every thorn.
Negative emotion collection has reached the threshold of thirty thousand. Artificial evolution unlocked: spatial rupture — annihilation.
Shawn did not even bother to read what it did. He simply used it.
What happened is not entirely clear. Something happened, and when it was over Shawn had killed another human being.
He took the camera out of the ruin of its throat, turned it around, and spoke into the lens.
"Your test subject isn't pulling its weight. Next time send me something that can actually fight back."
This only amused the mad professor further.
A couple of minutes later an unfamiliar voice spoke behind him, and someone applauded. Shawn turned round sharply and found a stranger standing there.
His name was Steven, and in fifty degrees of heat he was wearing full formal dress without a mark of sweat on him.
"A truly impressive battle," he said. "This may be an era of despair, but it is also destined to be the era of the rise of gods. Such precision. Such destructive power." He looked Shawn over with frank appreciation. "You are not one of the defective products that madman Liam has been turning out."
"So he's an accomplice of his."
"No. Quite the opposite. I'm here to stop him from causing trouble. I sent you that anonymous message — the one telling you to stay away from the professor."
"Where did he get my number?"
Steven held out a card. "The Ark faction has an extensive intelligence network. Finding a person is a trivial matter." He represented the Ark, he said, and he had come to invite Shawn, and to offer him true evolution.
In this life, Shawn noted, the awakened were surfacing far earlier than they had in the last one.
"We do it differently from Liam," Steven went on. "He burns away the life force and mutates the flesh. We offer comprehensive enhancement that preserves both sanity and humanity."
Shawn had never possessed the second of those to begin with.
Everything then had to be explained to him again from the start. The Ark: an organisation dedicated to finding the awakened. They believed the world stood on the threshold of a great revolution, and that only the true elite would board the ark of the new era. They would help Shawn become stronger — not through ugly mutations, but along a real path to divinity.
"It's a cult," Shawn said.
He cut the card into pieces in mid-air. Then, with his lip pushed out and his hands not quite steady, he declared that he despised anyone who tried to dictate to him how he should live. He worked alone. He needed no instructions from anybody. And he certainly did not need to join their little ark faction.
"In a world that is coming apart," Steven said, "living wild may keep you alive temporarily. It will not last." He turned to go. "I'll spare you the trouble of the argument. When you finally understand the limits of one man's power, come and find me."
And having finished speaking, he simply was not there any more.
Steven had looked entirely calm throughout. He had nevertheless left behind a very large deposit of negative emotion points, and Shawn, having collected them, decided that it was time to deal with the professor.
This is a man who takes revenge for the smallest things. And Liam had tried to take hold of him and turn him into a laboratory animal. Our touchy Shawn was never going to forgive that.
So, with his lip still pushed out in resentment, he went to settle the score.