The gigantic, three-dimensional holographic track spun with a hissing, neon-blue light through the arena air, as the deadly loops and vertical walls of the underground circuit manifested like glowing veins above the spectators’ heads. The thousands of beast-humans in the stands collectively held their breath, mesmerized by the resurrected technology that had set the heart of the slums ablaze once again after five years. The spiritual pressure at the starting line climbed to a breaking point. Brody’s silver figure glitched so extremely that the air around him began to ripple like water, while the pitch-black sulfur smoke from Desmodus’s claws turned the asphalt beneath his feet into a viscous, boiling mass. Beat stood motionless in the center, his gaze locked on the first turn, while the blue lightning from his rajin volt anting danced over his arms with loud cracks.
Suddenly, the torn, anarchist compression fabric around Beat’s torso began to shake strangely. The tight, pitch-black canvas bands he had wrapped around his left side began to bounce wildly, as if a mechanical malfunction were occurring beneath his clothes. With a loud, energetic beep, a metal head unexpectedly popped out from under the ragged edges. Blitz wormed his way out with a brute, acrobatic jerk, shook the excess machine oil from his armor plates with a loud, rattling sound, and landed with a bold, proud thud right on Beat’s shoulder. The mechanical companion widened his optical lenses toward the racers, shot a bright blue spark across his own miniature antenna, and let out a challenging, sonic beep that echoed through the arena’s microphones.
The entire starting line fell deathly silent for a fraction of a second. The Pandava twins stared with wide eyes at the small mechanical creature, after which the sheer absurdity of the situation shattered the heavy, murderous tension in one blow.
Karan Pandava slapped his flat hand against his knee and burst into a booming, deep laugh that rolled across the track. “Hahaha! Will you look at that! The thunder hunter brought his own toolbox to the front!”
Even the ice-cold, arrogant look on Brody’s face softened for a moment. A wide, amused grin appeared on his glitching face as he emptied his glass with a smooth movement. “So a trick card up your sleeve after all, Beto? You were hiding a walking battery under those rags of yours. I’m starting to like you more every second, man.”
“WOAH! A MINI-LIGHTNING BUDDY!” Shrimpyy launched himself into the air with a hysterical jump, his underground detonations sending small shockwaves across the asphalt. The demonic crustacean began to clap his massive claws wildly in the air, causing the sound to crack through the arena like rapid-fire gunshots. “Look at him go! He matches your anting! This is straight-up gold, Beto! That vibe of yours is the hardest shit I’ve seen in a long time!”
Desmodus shook his massive, ash-gray head, though the purple veins in his neck began to glow slightly less intensely due to the sudden burst of humor. “Nice show for the stands, lightning boy,” the half-hellspawn grumbled with a deep, raw laugh that rumbled from the depths of his chest. “But that piece of junk of yours will melt just as fast as the rest once I open up my acceleration.”
In the front rows of the stands, the revelation of the small companion triggered a shockwave of pure, anarchist pride. The brute Speed Demons and the heavily battered Speed Pirates raised their mechanical arms and heavy mugs into the air. They began to ram against the steel railings in unison until the entire construction vibrated with respect.
“MY GUY!” roared a gigantic Speed Pirate with a deep scar over his mechanical eye, slamming his fist toward Beat. “That’s the spirit of the underground! Screw the rules, bring your own army!”
“Show them how we grind in the slums, Beto!” screamed a vibrating Speed Demon, whose blueish afterimages pulled the air behind him into a psychedelic haze. “Show those rich bastards up there what kind of hearts we have down here!”
They were radical bandits and ruthless thieves, but in their veins flowed a pure, righteous morality for the common cause. The sincerity and brute originality of Beat had captured them in one stroke.
The ultimate visual escalation at the starting line had to come now. With a slow, provocative stride, a female beast-human bandit stepped onto the asphalt. She was a purebred panther-humanoid, blessed with a bizarre, breathtaking hourglass figure packed tight into shiny, pitch-black latex adorned with silver zippers and anarchist studs. Her long, velvet-like tail swished impatiently back and forth along her hips. In her heavily tattooed arms, she carried a ridiculously large, heavy metal sign with the countdown on it with playful ease. She looked at the four racers with a predatory, razor-sharp gaze, gave Beat a meaningful wink, and slammed the massive sign upright into the asphalt with a brute thud.
Arjan Pandava saw the tension reaching the boiling point, flashed around, and roared with wild, bulging veins in his neck toward the starting blocks: “HE WANTS IT ALL, NOW BREAK YOUR CAPACITY AND SHOW THEM WHO WE ARE!!”
Karan Pandava jumped synchronously right beside his brother, his own voice amplified by the arena’s spiritual pressure as he addressed the entire mob: “Nice companion Beto, worthy of a true bandit… but companion or not, you aren’t winning here tonight anyway! The asphalt knows no mercy!”
That was the starting signal for a total, visual transformation. The racers all flipped out in their own brute ways. Desmodus’s purple veins nearly exploded through his skin; his entire body swelled and turned into a pulsing, ash-gray inferno radiating pure hellspawn heat. Brody’s figure didn’t just glitch anymore; the reality around him literally tore into silver shards, as if his entire bike were turning into a liquid, intangible mirror. Shrimpyy’s deep-sea blue armor plates shifted into an overheated mode, with successive sonic booms beginning to crush the asphalt beneath his feet into rubble. Beat clenched his fists so hard his bones cracked, while his gaze changed into that of a hunting god.
The panther woman began the countdown, slamming the board. The big sign ticked down. 3… 2… 1…
With a brute, theatrical sweep, she waved the board.
The circuit exploded. A deafening blast of accelerating speed tore the arena apart. A horrifying wall of burning rubber, acrid sulfur, and the heavy, mixed scent of spiritual fire filled the entire space in a fraction of a second. The immense, kinetic air pressure of the starting monsters was so destructive that the panther lady lost her balance completely. She staggered backward and threatened to slam into the asphalt at high speed, but before she even touched the ground, Beat flashed forward with inhuman reflexes. In a fluid, gallant motion, he grabbed her by the waist and instantly helped her stand perfectly upright.
The beast-humans in the stands and the Pandava twins stared, dumbfounded, at the scene. “YO BETO, START RUNNING! YOU’RE LOSING FOR SURE RIGHT NOW!!” Karan and Arjan roared in unison, eyes wide across the track.
But before they could even finish their sentence, Beat laughed the warning away. The quartet of racers was already meters away, but Beat only now leaped into the void with immense, elastic force. While he hovered meters high in the air with Blitz firmly clamped to his shoulder, he opened his lungs and roared a possessed, legendary command across the arena: “CHENKOVV!!!”
At that exact moment, he was struck in mid-air by a brute, leaden-purple lightning bolt that seemed to come straight out of nowhere. The impact resonated instantly with a terrifying, electric cobalt-blue current that exploded around him like a wild network. The transformation was legendary. Blitz fused with Beat’s energy in a fraction of a second due to the brute discharge; the little mechanical companion wrapped himself around Beat’s neck and shoulders like a living, glowing scarf of pure metal and cobalt-blue electricity. Pure, flashing energy gushed off them both with hissing violence.
Beat looked down at the track from the air, his eyes glowing like two cobalt-blue stars, and shouted with a voice that cut to the bone: “No barrier holds back the thunder! Watch the underground closely, because you won’t even be able to keep up with my shadow!”
With a deafening sonic boom, he shot forward. He literally began to flash through reality. As he hammered over the asphalt with insane speed, the agreements and goals he had set for himself shot through his mind like razor-sharp flashes. His own thoughts began to race in the overridden adrenaline: Mmh, no music here… and I have to make sure this brute power doesn’t break me prematurely… how hard could it be? As he laughed that thought away with a wild, arrogant grin, loud, terrifying cracks and fissures began to appear in the air behind his heels. Physical reality simply couldn’t handle his pace.
Beat ran so inhumanely fast that he phased right through the bodies of Desmodus and Shrimpyy with a hissing sound. He slammed past them like a living power surge, nearly blowing the two top speedsters off the track with the kinetic gust. The arena went completely insane. The cheering of the thousands of beast-humans swelled to an earthquake as Beat zoomed by like a blue meteor.
In the blink of an eye, he reached Brody’s ice-cold zone. Beat shot past the light-like, demonic silver apparition of Brody with such brute speed that time seemed to slow down for them both. In that fraction of a second, they had pure, intense eye contact. To Brody, it looked as if Beto wasn’t even running, but dancing phase-shifted through the murderous race-track, as if the circuit were a simple playground. That pure, godlike dominance immediately ignited something of deep respect and rivalry in Brody and Shrimpyy. Only Desmodus was still driving ahead with a murderous glare.
Beat accelerated one more step and shot right past Desmodus’s smoldering flank until a shrill, mechanical alarm suddenly began to blare through the entire arena. BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!
Every hundred meters of the track, glowing, floating crystals suddenly appeared from the ground. Beat didn’t have a clue at first, but he kept running on pure intuition and held his breath as he raced right beside a floating crystal. He threw a quick glance over his shoulder. To his astonishment, he saw Desmodus smash one of the crystals with his heavy claw. Instantly, the energy of that crystal transformed into a series of sticky, pitch-black slime balls that were launched across the asphalt, causing Brody behind him to start slipping wildly.
Oh, so that’s how we’re playing it, Beat thought with a wide grin. It was pure arcade chaos down here. He reached out and tapped the floating crystal next to him.
The impact was bizarre. Suddenly, he received a brute, external boost and flew forward like a possessed rocket. Beat began to scream with pure adrenaline as he cut through the turns like a cobalt-blue electrical flash, with Blitz plastered against him like a possessed scarf due to the pure, G-force-heavy speed. They shot through everything; the victory was within reach.
Until the shadow suddenly fell over him again. With a terrifying, impossible acceleration, Desmodus suddenly shot past him again. The half-hellspawn looked to the side and let out a brute, sadistic laugh that cut through the wind: “HAHAHA! And what do you think of this, lightning boy?!”
With a quick swing, Desmodus threw a glowing, visually escalating projectile straight at Beat’s face: a mutated, spiritual turtle that grew larger at a bizarre pace in the air and was covered in razor-sharp spikes. The projectile spun at high speed straight toward his visor. An absolute, sizzling cliffhanger unfolded the moment the turtle was about to hit Beat fatally.
But it didn’t hit him.
For the very first time in his entire adventure, Beat fell into pure, uncut panic. And because of that panic, his reawakened form reacted even faster than light. His spiritual pathways flashed so extremely over-driven that the time around him merely stood still. Everything froze. The firebombs in the background stopped in the air, the screaming faces in the stands stiffened, and the razor-sharp turtle hung motionless a millimeter from his nose.
Beat stood there, breathing in the absolute silence of the frozen time, and wondered in pure bewilderment what this power in God’s name was. He looked over at the frozen mechanical lenses of Blitz. With a razor-sharp, coordinated movement, Beat grabbed the turtle out of the air, maneuvered dexterously around it together with Blitz, and turned the deadly projectile around completely with a calm swing in the air, ready to return the chaos the moment time began to flow again.
But the absolute silence didn’t remain pure.
Straight through the frozen reality, something terrifying began to resonate. It didn’t come from the arena, not from the racers, and not from the enemy projectiles. It came from deep within the core of his own being. While he stood motionless in the void, a loud, terrifyingly hard and dry cracking suddenly sounded from his own bones and spiritual pathways. It was the sound of his own body beginning to protest and tear under the immense, overridden pressure of this inhuman acceleration, as if the brute strength of his reawakened form were breaking his physical shell alive.