Super Gene

Fang strained against his bonds but failed. His wrists and ankles dug into zipwire, cutting into his human skin and even drawing blood as he gritted his teeth to try to escape. Despite everything, he was just human. No matter what he did, he couldn't go beyond his natural limits to escape.

"Looks like you're out for the count, Mr. Fang," said one of the suited men.

A man who was particularly larger than the others. More expensive suit. More expensive shades. Scars on his knuckles, across his brows, telling of a life lived more dangerously and bolder than the underlings surrounding him.

Fang pushed against his bonds, rocking the chair back and forth and causing the dozen or so men surrounding him to react, their hands reaching to their firearms in surprise.

"All of you are still scared of me," said Fang through gritted teeth. He directed his next sentence to the larger suited man, the one who headed the gang that had captured him. "Especially you, Scarskin."

Scarskin.

One of the prominent villains in Chinatown. His Alter Gene could protrude blades and claws from every point of his skin, rendering his body resistant to projectiles and nearly immune to close combat. Scarskin was the head of the Xie gang, renowned for keeping an iron-grip on quite a few territories in the vast expanse of Chinatown.

"With you like this," said Scarskin, jutting his bearded chin at Fang's bound body. "I fear nothing."

"Bet you don't, you bald fuck," spat Fang.

Scarskin shook his head, his annoying bald dome flashing under the fluorescent lighting of the basement.

"End him," he commented.

Fang took in a breath.

He had spent years as a vigilante, gaining knowledge in various martial arts and gadgets to compensate for his lack of powers. He thought he had been careful today, tracking a gang that had no confirmed powers, but he had been wrong. His target had been Scarskin: he had wanted to capture the criminal leader and send him to jail, but things had gone awry.

Scarskin had shown that he was an Alterhuman, manifesting his indestructible bone spikes and armor that had defended against all of Fang's firearms and martial arts.

Was this how it would all end?

Throughout a year of success, hundreds of raids and hunts that had put away many criminals, one single miscalculation would do him in?

Fang had always tried to make up for the fact that he had no powers. His research had always been on point, always targeting Alterhumans that he had the capability to take down with regular means and technology. Just the past week, for example, he had toppled a drug ring headed by an Alterhuman that had the ability to protect himself with plated skin by flooding his system with neurotoxic gases.

This time, though, Fang had not known Scarskin had activated an Alter gene, leading him into this deadly predicament. He had fought his way through swaths of suited goons, using his expert martial arts knowledge and state-of-the-art gadgets to subdue them. But when he got to Scarskin, there was nothing his human body could do to fight against the enhanced Alterhuman.

He cursed his powerlessness, but even as he wailed against the heavens, if they even existed, he knew there was nothing he could truly do.

He had been born as he was – without the Alter gene and without power, and he had known this.

So that was why when the men in suits poured gasoline all around him, he merely closed his eyes. He accepted his death – he had tried the best he could without any special powers, and he had come rather far. In a little more than a year, almost everyone in Chinatown knew of his existence as the gold-caped crusader vigilante that took criminals down without any mercy.

Perhaps he should have been happy that he had been so successful. His name had spread on the local news as a kind of small-town hero, a crusader that hunted outside the boundary of the law, threading the needle through the cloth of corruption and bribery to put down criminal kingpins that many thought were untouchable under court.

When Scarskin left with the suited men, he scratched a match alight and dropped it on the floor. The liquid gasoline caught on fire, the fiery bright oranges and whites of hungry blazes circling all around Fang, crawling up the chair, up his body, up the walls around him.

Fang cried out. Not in pain, not even against not himself, but at fate for granting him such a limited hand - a lack of powers and luck for him to truly pursue his dreams of ridding this world of evil.

When the match caught with the running gasoline drenched all around him, Fang closed his eyes and let the bright burst of the ensuing fireball consume him.

But he did not die.

The building he was in – a decrepit office building in the outskirts of Chinatown long since

abandoned and used as a front for storing illegal drugs, burned down like dry tinder within a few hours. Despite the blaze, no firemen came, no police came - that was the influence that Scarskin had. His money had bought out the police to such an extent that nobody would bother to check the fire for Fang's body.

And, to be fair, there wasn't much of a body to scavenge. Just a blackened, charred skeleton that poked through the grimy, dark ashes of the burnt down office building.

And it was this that a strange individual loomed upon during the height of night, when silence reigned supreme. Amidst the cold ashes and the pungent smell of burnt wood, a pale figure stood out in stark contrast, her ornate, snowy orbs billowing in the breeze like strands of ice.

Fang was, by all purposes, dead. His consciousness had long fled from his body when his brain melted under heat and fire. But when that woman came close, towards his lonesome bones, he could...

Feel.

He felt alive. Existing. He had no brain with which to think, no eyes with which to see, but he knew through some instinctive feeling that he had returned to life. Some higher form of consciousness, the soul, perhaps, had come back to his bones, and it was through that he could feel what this woman said to him,

"A fine specimen you are," she said, her steely white eyes peering at Fang's corpse. "And a waste that you lived without knowing your power. You are far more than what you believed yourself to be. You hold power within. An ancient, primordial power that has the power to turn this broken world upside down."

A pause.

"The power of a dragon, of immortality, of majesty long since forgotten. Arise, my dragon, rise and take hold of your destiny once more."

And with her command, the ashen bones of his corpse regained life, sinews and flesh regrowing and re-attaching his broken body apart.

But something else happened. Some part of him that had always remained dormant, the a gene much like that the Alterhumans possessed, awakened. A gene that told not of superheroes, but of an ancient, mystical force.

The Dragon Gene. Fang strained against his bonds but failed. His wrists and ankles dug into zipwire, cutting into his human skin and even drawing blood as he gritted his teeth to try to escape. Despite everything, he was just human. No matter what he did, he couldn't go beyond his natural limits to escape.