The superhuman medical area was on a floor they had not taken me to yet. It was not like a normal infirmary with white stretchers and people telling you to breathe deeply.

This looked half hospital, half laboratory, and half place where if someone shouted “containment failed” I was not going to ask anything before running.

There were reinforced stretchers, thick doors with blue lights, transparent glass with warning symbols, technicians reviewing floating screens, and doctors wearing gloves with small metal plates on their fingers.

The altered man was lying on a stretcher with straps on his arms, legs, and chest. He did not look so dangerous now.

Without the uncontrolled strength, without the muscles tense as if something was pushing him from inside, he was just a sweaty, pale guy with his mouth half open.

That was the worst part. On the street he looked like a threat. Here he looked like someone who had made a bad decision and paid for it with his body.

Sarah Murphy was waiting for us in front of an analysis table with three screens turned on and a cup of coffee that had surely lost hope of being drunk hot.

She had her blonde hair tied in a ponytail, her glasses a little low on her nose, and that expression of a woman who could congratulate you, scold you, and calculate how much money you were worth in the same sentence.

As soon as we entered, she raised her gaze toward us. Her eyes went first to Nora, then to Vanessa, and finally stayed on me a second longer than necessary. Great.

I loved it when intelligent people looked at me as if I were a folder without a password.

“Initial report” Sarah said, touching the main screen with two fingers.

The mission video appeared from a nearby security camera. The altered man breaking the ground. Nora raising a barrier. Vanessa getting civilians out of the way.

Me marking a route with fire. Everything looked much cleaner on screen than when you were in the middle of the dust, the screams, and the possibility that a stranger’s arm would send you straight to meet your ancestors.

Nora crossed her arms while watching the recording. “Stop there” she said. Sarah paused right at the moment when I had pointed at the man’s chest.

The image froze with my hand extended, a low line of fire beside me, and my face of someone trying to look professional while inside I was reading an alert that no one else could see.

Nora tilted her head. Vanessa did not say anything, but I felt her gaze on the back of my neck even before turning around. That woman could be invisible and still make you feel watched.

“The sensors marked the energy peak two seconds later” Nora said. “Oliver pointed it out before.”

Sarah did not answer immediately.

She only enlarged the image and then opened another window with the data from Nora’s watch sensors, the area cameras, and the preliminary medical record.

Three lines shot up at once, but the mark of my movement appeared before all of them. If that had been a race, I had beaten New Kroy’s technical team without even signing up. Very nice. Very dangerous.

Sarah turned toward me calmly. That calm of hers was worse than a shout. “Explain to me how you knew that the critical point was in the chest.”

The question fell without accusation, but with weight.

Vanessa stayed quiet. Nora smiled slightly, not as mockery, but as someone waiting to see if I was going to improvise well or if I was going to set myself on fire alone.

And I, luckily, was no longer the same nervous idiot who would have stammered an excuse about instinct, luck, and maybe a blessing from the goddess of my problems.

I breathed slowly, looked at the screen, and answered as if I had thought about it from the beginning. “I did not know for sure. I bet on it.”

Sarah raised an eyebrow. I pointed at the video.

“His arms were receiving strength, but they did not move as if the power was born there. Every time he tried to change direction, the torso moved first. The pressure came from the center. If we attacked the arms, we were only going to fight the symptom. If we controlled the chest, maybe we would cut off the problem.”

The lie was not completely a lie. That was the advantage of lying with part of the truth. The Fireman System had given me the alert, yes, but I had also seen enough for the explanation not to sound like cheap magic.

Nora let out a small laugh through her nose. “That was a pretty good read for someone who not long ago was learning not to raise a line of fire too much.”

“I also learned not to let them smash me against a wall” I answered. “Motivation speeds up growth.”

Vanessa looked at me sideways and for the first time since we entered I noticed something similar to a minimal smile on her lips.

Sarah did not smile. Sarah stored my answer somewhere dangerous in her head. “Acceptable” she said at last. She did not say believable. She did not say sufficient. She said acceptable, which in Sarah language meant: I cannot prove you are lying, but do not think I am going to forget it.

Then she touched another screen and the scan of the altered man appeared in red and blue. In the center of his chest there was an irregular stain, like a small dirty sun buried under the skin.

“The preliminary analysis shows an artificial energy concentration in the thorax. It does not match a natural mutation, nor normal power overuse. Something forced his ability from inside.”

The doctor in charge, a thin man with dark circles and the face of someone who had seen too many superhuman stupidities, approached with a tablet.

“His registered gift was low-level increased strength. Nothing dangerous. He could carry weight above average, maybe bend a thin bar with effort, but not break concrete or resist a containment discharge.”

He passed a finger across the screen and showed a more detailed image. “We found microscopic metallic residues around the chest. It is not a legal implant. It is not medical equipment. It is not authorized training technology from any registered agency in the city.”

Nora stopped smiling.

Vanessa pressed her lips together.

I looked at the image and felt a strange discomfort in my chest. It was not heat or pain, just that unpleasant feeling that a door was opening in a hallway where I did not want to enter.

“Did they put something in him?” I asked.

The doctor nodded. “Or they inserted it, or he accepted it without understanding what it was. We still do not know which of the two options is worse.”

Sarah crossed her arms under her chest and the office seemed to get colder without anyone touching the air conditioning.

“The man has no important records. Small debts, unstable job, two rejected applications for agency training, an evaluation where they classified him as a minor gift with no commercial potential.”

That last part hit me harder than I expected. Minor gift with no commercial potential. What an elegant phrase to tell someone that even their power was not worth money.

I knew that language. Not with powers, but with miserable contracts, with bosses who looked at you as replaceable, with small rooms where you counted coins and pretended that surviving was a strategy.

I looked at the unconscious man again and for the first time I did not see him as a mission problem. I saw him as a warning.

If someone had offered to make me strong when I was still the bear from Animal Stars, when I had no System, no agency, and no Sarah calculating my market value, maybe I would have listened too much as well.

“This is not staying as an isolated incident” Sarah said. Her voice cut through my thoughts. “Nora, I want a comparison with records of physical alterations from the last three months. Vanessa, check reports from zones where people have talked about sudden power increases, strange fights, or disappearances after temporary jobs. Oliver…”

She made a pause and looked at me again.

It was always a good sign when Sarah said your name as if she was deciding whether you were a resource, a problem, or both.

“You are going to write a complete report of what you saw in the field. Without decorations. Without heroic phrases. I want details of movement, reaction, and anything that seemed out of place to you.”

I nodded. “Of course. Should I also include the part where I almost became street decoration?”

Sarah looked at me over her glasses. “Only if it provides useful data.”

Nora laughed. Vanessa shook her head, but this time she did not seem annoyed.

Sarah turned off the main screens and left only the image of the altered superhuman’s chest turned on. The red stain was still there, small, ugly, and too important.

“From now on we are going to look for patterns. If there are more cases like this in New Kroy, I want to find them before someone else ends up breaking from the inside in the middle of a street.”

No one answered immediately.

It was not necessary. Everyone understood that this was bigger than an improvised mission. Bigger than a desperate man with borrowed strength. Bigger than my small lie about combat intuition.

While we left the medical area, I felt Vanessa walking close to me, Nora looking at me as if I were an exercise she wanted to solve, and Sarah already turning my name into a note inside a report that would probably have too many pages.

And for the first time since I entered New Kroy, I had the clear feeling that the city was not only full of heroes and villains. It was also full of people selling answers to those who were too desperate to ask the price.