I rocket around the Fracture, leaping from place to place. I rip the road apart to use as ammunition in an endless rush to just be a little bit faster. I’m so limited by the fragility of the world around me.

  I can only lunge so fast before I’ll start bringing down entire buildings. As is, this road is fucked. I’ve scooped out a dozen craters and blown out all the shopfronts alongside the road.

  Uh, I hope that won’t be a problem.

  As I crush the final ant of the most recent pulse under my boot, grinding it into the now gravel road, the Fracture heaves. Four more ants come out in formation and these ones are even larger than the ones before. They’re at least twice the size and easily three times the weight of the earlier ones.

  Their heads are huge, blocky looking things. Their mandibles look like jagged, twisted rebar. The tops of their heads would be at chest height for a human. For me? They barely come up to my waist. These are clearly soldier ants. After they clear the Fracture, one more follows, and it towers over them.

  The Queen.

  She’s the size of an SUV, with a massive, clear abdomen. Her shell is gray, pitted concrete, and her joints are spiked with jagged pieces of rebar. She looks like someone tore down a skyscraper and built an ant from the pieces left over. Her abdomen and compound eyes even look like they’re made of glass.

  Her spiky insectoid head whips around to me and she hisses. The soldier ants angle their heads down and charge me, clearly intending to knock me down.

  I’m so fucking sick of you.

  I take three big steps forward, pull my fist back, and hammer into the first one’s blocky, concrete head. Its head explodes into a shower of dust and viscera with a boom. I grab a second one by its blocky head and abdomen, and tear it in half.

  A heavy stomp on the third one’s thorax leaves it broken in two. The fourth one rams into me, fast enough to easily crush a regular person. I don’t even budge.

  My fist hammers into its mid section. It breaks in half and twitches for a second before dying. The queen screeches and then lunges at me, one jagged metal leg racing for my chest.

  Faster than the other ones.

  I sway and twist to one side, letting the lance-like limb whiff past me, before stepping up and grabbing it with one hand. Bracing the other on the squirming bug, I rip it off. In retaliation, her brutal mandibles latch onto my left shoulder and try to crush it.

  I bat her head aside, and then ram her own leg through her skull. She drops like a rock. I stomp on what’s left, and it bursts like a melon dropped from a four story building.

  The Fracture shudders with the queen’s death, and rapidly turns itself… inside out? With a hum, the Fracture is gone, the only evidence of its existence the battlefield left behind. Once it’s gone, I take off, going east towards Lieutenant Jang’s position.

  I’m still tied into the radio net, and over the several minutes holding the Fracture back took, the situation across Seoul has only gotten more desperate. The only good news was that I was wrong in that all of the twelve Fractures rupturing. Two more have yet to rupture, one deep in Downtown Seoul, and one next to the Cheong Wa Dae, South Korea’s equivalent to the White House.

  It doesn’t help. Of the ten ruptured Fractures, four are pouring out ants and those are quickly over running any defensive positions. Their durability is just enough to keep rifles from easily taking them down, and their numbers making it hard for the few heavy machine guns to keep them at bay.

  The other Fractures are spewing an eclectic mix of monsters. There are wolves made of trash, dog-sized spiders made from stained glass, and jellyfish made from balloons. There’s even zombies made from rotting garbage.

  They’re all as dangerous as they are varied. They’re quickly overrunning defensive points and reinforcements are slow to respond.

  I’m still too fucking slow.

  I can only go so fast. Despite my strength, the fragility of the road is really what’s hindering my movement. If I go too fast, I won’t be able to take the turns without causing significant damage. Enough to stop a military vehicle? Not a chance. But certainly enough to seriously slow a civilian evacuation.

  Even at this rate it’ll take me several minutes to get to Jang. I have one idea, though. It’s probably a shitty one, but if today wasn’t a day for shitty ideas, I have no idea what would be.

  “Captain Hwang, are you there? It’s me, Ryans!” I call out over the radio. “Captain Hwang, are you there? Come in!”

  Her voice is staticky from all the electromagnetic noise of one of the largest cities in the world, but I’m easily able to clean it up.

  “Ryans, how are you on this channel? This is an encrypted military frequ—”

  “No time for that! Captain, I can make it to Lieutenant Jang faster, but I’ll have to completely destroy a road and probably shatter windows up and down a street. Should I do it?”

  “What?”

  “Captain, right now it’s gonna take me six minutes to get there! I can make it in forty five seconds if you’re okay with a road torn up and a bunch of windows blown out.”

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  “Uh, hold one, Ryans.”

  After a few seconds, an older man comes on the line.

  “This General Cho. Am I speaking to Seth Ryans?”

  “Yes!”

  “Captain Hwang says you can make it to a position currently being overrun faster if we’re willing to accept collateral damage.”

  “Yes!”

  “Civilian collateral damage?”

  “W-what? No! But, uh, let me check!”

  I quickly look around, noting cameras around me and then tear through CCTV footage from stores. I hack into cars, buses, even into helicopters. I scan a few news station internet streams, too. I pull literal terabytes of data in just ten seconds. Combined with deep multi-spectrum scans of the area, I confirm there’s no one nearby.

  “No one nearby!”

  “You’re sure? That was awfully fast.”

  I shove a report of what I did at the command station he’s currently standing next to do. Between all the data and scans, I fill the entire command station’s storage drive. All twenty terabytes, and that’s with downscaled scans. I hijack the command station’s speakers.

  “Look, check my work. It’ll take you four hours and a team of fifty, and everyone will be dead by then. Or trust me and let me do this!”

  General Cho looks at the camera on the command station for a second. He puts down the radio.

  “We’ll talk about this later.”

  “Sure, yeah, anything!”

  He nods slowly.

  “Do it.”

  I crouch, almost kneeling before launching myself into the air. I explode upwards, breaking the sound barrier ten feet above the ground.

  I hammer a crater covering the entire four lane road, sixty feet in either direction. It goes fifteen feet deep and snaps a water main in half. I shatter every window for a mile in every direction. I rocket high up in the air, up and up and up, reaching nearly a thousand feet before I start arcing back down.

  I can’t help but laugh at the pleasure of being so high up. The view is incredible. The late afternoon sun dipping low towards the Yellow Sea is breath-taking. I wish I had more time to revel in it, but I don’t.

  Instead I turn my attention to my landing zone. I can see Lieutenant Jang and the few survivors of his squad in a desperate scramble for just a second more. I watch from eight hundred feet up as another soldier dies screaming, ripped in half by four ants.

  Too fucking slow.

  I scream over the radio as I rocket towards the ground.

  “JANG! TAKE COVER!”

  He leaps and crawls under the nearest APC and the few survivors quickly follow him. An ant goes to crawl under with them, and receives a flurry of rounds to the mouth, dropping dead. Before any more can chase the soldiers, I hit the ground at a quarter of the speed of sound, slamming into the road with the power of a bomb.

  I hammer a forty foot wide, ten foot deep crater into the middle of a horde of ants. Most of them are simply vaporized by the shockwave. I grab a piece of rubble and throw it through another ant.

  I take off running in the direction of Jang, crushing ants that get in my way without even slowing. The horde splits, most going for me but still a few dozen charge Jang.

  The shockwave of my landing flipped the APC over, but it kept them alive, at least. Now, though, they have their backs against the vehicle and have nowhere to go.

  “Climb! Climb!”

  He orders his squad to climb up the flipped vehicle, the ants closing in right behind them. One member slips, and Jang turns away from the horde to boost him up.

  Just a little faster!

  I accelerate, my boots digging deeper into the road. Scrapes turn into gouges, then turn into holes. My heavy boots crunch into potholes-to-be and fling more rubble behind me in a fan. The last four members of Jang’s squad let loose with what little ammo they have left, and Jang frantically scrambles up the flipped APC, horde nipping at his ankles.

  Despite all my speed, my frantic pace through the city and the craters I’m punching into roads and buildings, I’m. Still. Too. Fucking. Slow.

  One ant, climbing on its compatriots, bites down on Jang’s left leg, and its weight rips him off the side of the APC. He falls into the horde, screaming. It’s cut short by a ghastly crunch.

  “NO!”

  My deep voice, so different from how it used to be, echoes and reverberates off the buildings. The fury in my chest had been a raging inferno, a deep, suffocating heat. I wanted to make them suffer. Now, though? Now it’s cold, the fury turning from a ranting, screaming rage into a frozen flame. No, now it’s simple. Cold, logical. I’m going to kill these things. I’m going to kill every single one of them.

  This anger, fury beyond words? This deep permafrost filling my mind? It feels good. I’d revel in it, but I have killing to do.

  I finally make it to the four soldiers, desperately firing down on ants climbing the APC. They’ve had to resort to their sidearms, completely out of ammo for their rifles.

  I wade into the horde ants like an avalanche. Ants crack and crunch underneath my boots and I rip them apart with my bare hands. I put my back to the APC, and the horde charges again. They meet a gory end, one I’m more than happy to give them.

  One bites my ankle, mandibles locking around my boot. A short stomp ends its worthless existence. The Fracture pulses again, and soldier ants step through, exact copies of the ones I pasted just minutes ago.

  Good, I could use more things to kill.

  I stomp forward, and one particularly stupid ant launches itself at me from the back of another. I back hand it so hard it pops into a goopy sludge. Another repeats the failed attack, and I spike that one into the ground with such force it leaves a crater filled with liquified bug.

  By the time I make it to the soldier ants advancing in lock-step formation, the horde has been destroyed, and the four remaining soldiers look at me in awe.

  Or maybe in fear.

  I’m covered in yellow gore and black, powdered asphalt. Before today, this would have disgusted me. I’d be running for the nearest shower or even a hose had I been this covered in muck, grime, and generally disgusting things. Now it doesn’t matter.

  I hammer a fist through one soldier ant and beat a second to death with the corpse of its sibling. One rams me, and I pick it up and slam it onto the road. Once, twice, three times, and a forth leaving it broken in a crater I dug with its mutilated corpse.

  I pick the last one up and rip its head off. The queen launches forward, intent on spearing me through the chest. My arms blur, and I grab its head, wrenching it painfully, but not killing it.

  I yank its head down, and meet it with a brutal knee. The head explodes in a shower of viscera, the queen slumps to the ground.

  The desperate screams of soldiers still fill the radio net, and I take off running for the next Fracture.

  The ice in my chest only grows colder.

  I love it.