Move Aside! 2
The young man was clearly irritated and wanted to give the driver a piece of his mind, but when he saw the little girl, he blushed and suddenly sped up, quickly pulling ahead of the car.
The father and daughter stared with their mouths wide open at the departing figure, whose legs were moving so fast they saw only mere aftershadows.
After a long while, the man mumbled under his breath, "I'm going thirty-five. What does he mean a snail?"
When he finally arrived at school, Ace checked the time and saw he'd only taken eight minutes to arrive. At some point, he realized he was running too fast for the sidewalk and risked heavily injuring a pedestrian, so he switched to the road. This was his first experience on the road as he didn't have a license, so it shocked him to see so many drivers blatantly disregarding the rules.
He even had to shout at some of them to move aside as they were moving too slowly. He didn't think much of it however, and sauntered through the school gate, passing beneath the cherry blossoms falling at the entrance.
There were still almost fifty minutes before class started, so the school grounds were virtually empty. It was as silent as a cemetery, with the exception of the guard and the school janitor, who were glued to a phone screen as if they were watching the World Cup.
"It's got to be fake, right?" said the janitor, shaking his head. "Some AI-edited video. They're all over MyTube these days."
The guard nodded, sending his belly fat into a jiggle. "It's from our local independent news guy, though. It says here he was on his way to work when he saw this young man running by him. You think he'd ruin his reputation and post this type of thing? Maybe the countdown gave him superpowers and stuff."
"Don't be stupid," the janitor responded. "Everyone with the countdown disappeared without a trace. No one knows what happened to them."
"No, look, here's a video posted five minutes ago of a mother saying her son came back. So maybe this person came back with super speed or something?" responded the guard.
But the janitor seemed unconvinced. He refused to believe that a human could run faster than a car. The video even showed the young man signaling and overtaking other cars, as if it was all a joke. He reached for his coffee again, but his hand froze midair.
"This person seems familiar. He looks rather young," continued the fat guard. "Maybe he's a student at—"
But before the guard could finish, he felt a hand grab him and shake him. Following the janitor's pointing finger, the guard choked and felt like his heart had risen in his throat, threatening to exit his body.
A young man dressed in all black had just walked through the school gate, and they could see waves of hot air billowing from his body. The guard immediately recognized him as the same young man he'd encountered a few days earlier. Only now did he connect the two faces and realize the young man was the same one in the video.
The student looked confused at his phone for a minute, then looked around and began to approach the two of them as soon as he spotted them.
The guard instantly began to sweat, and he felt the janitor's presence vanish long before the young man reached him.
"Excuse me, do you have a phone charger by any chance? I haven't charged my phone in two days and need battery urgently. I hope you can accommodate me."
The guard listlessly pointed towards his small guardhouse, and the young man spotted a phone charger on the desk inside. Seeing him walk in, the guard quickly returned his eyes to the screen and viewed the video again to confirm it was indeed the same person.
Over time, in his sidebar, multiple news channels on MyTube began covering the video, some even providing proof that it wasn't AI-generated or edited, finally confirming to the guard that the video was real.
Despite his fear, the guard angled his phone towards the young man sitting inside the guardhouse and silently snapped a photo. He instantly went to his personal MyTube account, a channel named The Highschool Commissar, and posted the picture with the caption, "I have detected a superhuman in my jurisdiction! Spread the word!". His subscriber base instantly blew his post to the top of the local news charts, and soon, the whole Gold Dragon City subsection of MyTube was aware of who the young man in the video was.
Soon after, in a large bunker in an incredibly secure location on the outskirts of Gold Dragon City, a cleanly dressed secretary clacked her high heels in a hurried pace. She was holding a phone playing a video of a young man running, and she had a panicked look on her face.
She passed by every colleague without glancing at them, stopping only when she reached a door inscribed with large, powerful letters: "Gold Dragon Party Secretary Office."
The letters and the weight behind them made her choke on the words she had prepared, but she felt she possessed a good reason to enter. Thousands of people were reported to have had the countdown before disappearing two days ago, and that was only the reported cases. If each of them had gained the ability to outrun a car, she didn't dare imagine the impact on the stability of Gold Dragon City or the nation as a whole. She began sweating when he realized there were probably millions of them throughout the nation. Their city needed to get ahead of the problem.
After three knocks on the door, a powerful voice signaled her to enter. She could feel the vibration from that voice shake her viscera, and she was unable to grasp the power behind the person holding such a voice.
Inside the room, a meeting was underway between about twenty figures, men and women, all dressed in official black uniforms with various medals adorning their chests. A large man with a short haircut sat at the head of the table, harrumphing and making the whole room tremble.
"Secretary Mina, you are interrupting an important meeting. I hope you—"
"It can't wait."
The secretary gulped audibly from anxiety but steeled herself despite being the focus of a dozen powerful party members. She knew all the cadres drilling their eyes into her could ruin her life with a snap of their fingers, but she held her head high. She felt emboldened by her sense of duty feeling like a lioness about to protect her pride at the moment.
She clacked her heels until she was beside the leader, performed a hasty bow, and presented him with the video. The man's expression started off infuriated as this meeting was extremely important, but the more he saw of the video, the more his face shifted, turning grave.
Before he could ask the secretary, as if reading his mind, he spoke ahead of him, "It's been verified by multiple party-approved news stations. It's not AI, sir."
The man began tapping the table with his large finger, a small tremor shaking the room with each gentle tap. His mind seemed to churn continuously, and no one in the room dared to speak. He looked towards Secretary Mina and said with a heavy tone, "Contact General Alexander. Organize a meeting urgently!"
General Alexander was the most powerful figure in Gold Dragon City, commanding fear and respect even among the Central Committee in the capital. They all knew that calling on General Alexander carried a heavy cost, but if the Party Secretary said he was needed, then the situation was severe.
They all wondered why the need for the general, and as if he read their minds, the Party Secretary said, "The Party's authority is in grave danger. We need to be swift and decisive, lest we invite ruin to our country. Only the Party is allowed to wield that kind of power. No one else!"