The corruption of Supercub
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The building looked abandoned from the outside. Boarded windows, graffiti layered thick enough to blur into texture, a loading dock with its shutter rusted halfway down. The kind of place the city had stopped seeing years ago.
Supercub landed silently in the alley beside it and let his boots settle on cracked asphalt. His cape folded against his back as he crouched low, scanning the structure. Weeks of cross-referencing movement patterns, tracking supply runs, mapping the gaps between what was visible and what was hidden — all of it pointed here. Evan was inside this building.
Nick had told Mike. Mike had shut it down — too dangerous, not enough information, the same careful tone he used every time Nick brought him something new. For weeks Nick had been building a picture of the operation: its structure, its patterns, the man who ran it. Every time he brought findings to Mike, Mike found a reason to wait. He framed it as protection. It felt like a leash.
He inhaled slowly, letting his enhanced senses read the building. Warm air pushing outward through the ventilation — occupied space below street level. A faint chemical edge beneath it that he recognized from his time in that chair: cigar smoke, processed through industrial filtration, thinned but present.
He was in the right place.
He moved along the east wall, found a basement window bricked over badly, mortar crumbling at the edges. He pressed his palm flat and pushed. The bricks folded inward with a soft grinding sound. He caught them before they hit the floor.
Inside, a utility corridor. Fluorescent tubes buzzing at intervals. Pipes along the ceiling. Clean concrete, recently swept. Everything maintained. Everything deliberate.
He passed a room with the door ajar — empty, but recently occupied. A cot. A steel chair. Leather straps coiled on a shelf. His stomach tightened and he kept moving.
The corridor opened into a wider space. Voices ahead, low and conversational. Two, maybe three. He waited, counting breaths, until they moved away.
Evan stood at the far end of the next corridor, alone, facing away. Massive through the shoulders now, thick-necked, the sleeveless black shirt stretched tight across a back that had doubled in width. The leather harness sat across his upper body in a rigid X, straps meeting at a metal ring between his shoulder blades.
He stood the way all the harnessed men stood — balanced, still, weight evenly distributed, like someone waiting for a command that hadn’t arrived yet.
Nick moved into the corridor, fast and low. Grab Evan. Fly out. He closed the distance in seconds, caught Evan’s shoulder, and turned him around.
The face was different — fuller, heavier, the jaw thickened and framed by a dense beard that hadn’t been there before. His eyes were the same brown, but the expression behind them had flattened into something settled and patient.
Then — a flicker. Evan’s brow creased. His mouth moved, just slightly, shaping something that might have been Nick’s name before the expression flattened again.
Nick’s grip on Evan’s shoulder loosened.
He should have lifted them both through the ceiling. He knew that. But he could see, in that half-second before the expression flattened, the friend he had come here to find.
“Evan,” Nick said softly. “It’s me.”
Evan blinked. His eyes moved across Nick’s face with something that might have been recognition, or might have been the echo of a reflex the harness hadn’t fully suppressed.
Nick knew better. He had spent weeks mapping the operation, understanding how the harnesses worked. He knew that the man standing in front of him was operating under a system designed to make rescue look unnecessary.
“I’m going to get you out,” Nick said quietly. “I just need you to—”
The first blow came from behind and to the left. A fist against his kidney, driving the air from his lungs. Nick spun, already swinging, and his elbow connected with someone’s jaw hard enough to send the man sprawling into the opposite wall.
Two more filled the corridor. Big. Harnessed. Moving with coordinated efficiency.
Nick fought. He broke one man’s grip and threw him into the ceiling hard enough to crack the pipes. He caught a second by the harness strap and slammed him to the concrete floor. But the corridor was narrow, more came from the junction behind him, and Evan stood motionless at the end of the hall, watching with that same flat patience.
Arms locked around his chest from behind. He strained against the pile of bodies and for a moment held them — muscles screaming, power fighting for every inch. Then something cold clamped around his left wrist.
The effect was immediate. Strength drained from his limbs like water through an open faucet. His vision blurred and the arms that had been throwing men into walls went slack.
A blow to the back of his head. The corridor tilted sideways.
Nick woke to cold concrete against his back and chains pulling his wrist above his head.
The overhead light buzzed. His ankles were free but it didn’t matter — the wristband hummed faintly against his skin, suppressing everything the transformation had given him.
He tested the chains. They held. His body felt heavy and slow, answering at half-speed, the power beneath his muscles muted to an ache.
This was somewhere else. The air was different — thicker, warmer, sealed off from the city above. The concrete was newer. The chains were heavier. They had moved him while he was out, taken him somewhere deeper, somewhere Mike would never think to look.
Nick hung there, breathing hard, and understood exactly what he had done.
He filled the doorway the way he filled every space — shoulders, chest, the solid weight of his belly, all of it radiating the dense physicality that compressed the air around him. The black latex shirt caught the overhead light. The harness straps sat precisely across his chest, the silver BB badge glinting. A cigar burned between his fingers.
His purple eyes moved over Nick with open, unhurried assessment.
He closed the door behind him, crossed the cell, and stood close enough that Nick could smell the smoke and something underneath it — warm and organic, carrying the same weight as his voice.
“You came for the friend,” Bill said. Even, conversational.
“You put three of my men down in that hallway. Four, maybe.” Bill took a slow drag on the cigar. “That’s real power. I haven’t seen someone move like that in a long time.”
He exhaled. The smoke drifted between them.
“And you spent all of it trying to reach a man who doesn’t know your name anymore.”
Nick’s jaw tightened. “He recognized—”
“Muscle memory.” Bill’s tone carried no cruelty. He said it the way someone corrects a factual error. “The body remembers. It doesn’t mean the person is deciding anything.”
Nick pulled against the chains. The wristband pulsed and his arms went heavy.
Bill watched the effort with something close to appreciation. “I admire your determination.” He nodded toward Nick’s wrist. “The wristband suppresses your powers. Everything your transformation gave you — the strength, the durability, the flight — it’s all still in there. You just can’t reach any of it.” He paused. “So pull all you want.”
Nick pulled. The chains held. The wristband hummed.
Bill watched him for a long moment. Then he took a final drag on his cigar and set it aside on the concrete ledge. The gesture was deliberate — unhurried, precise, the way a man clears a workspace before beginning something that requires his full attention.
“You were given something remarkable,” Bill said. “That body. That power. And you have no idea what it’s actually for.” He stepped closer. “I do.”
His purple eyes held Nick’s from close enough that Nick could see the faint dark aura shifting around him.
“I’m going to make you what you were supposed to be,” Bill said.
Nick opened his mouth to answer. Nothing came.
What came was thick, dark, and alive. It poured from his lips in a slow, heavy stream — down his chin, down his chest, dripping from the glossy surface of his latex shirt to the concrete floor. It pooled between them, catching the overhead light like oil, and gathered itself with deliberate purpose.
Then it moved toward Nick.
Nick kicked at it, tried to scrape it off against the concrete. The substance held firm and kept climbing.
The substance reached his red boots first, swallowing the bright leather in a slow wave of black. Then it climbed above them.
The first sensation was pressure — firm, encompassing, warm against his calves. It found the surface of his suit and pressed into it. The blue fabric with its yellow accent stripes didn’t tear or peel away. It absorbed. Color leached from the material, blue fading to grey, yellow dimming to black. The suit’s surface hardened as it changed, stiffening from flexible fabric to something glossy and rigid against his skin.
But the suit wasn’t the only thing changing. Beneath it, warmth seeped through the fabric and into his skin — slow, deliberate, settling into the muscle of his calves like heat from a compress. The substance was inside him too, working inward through his pores at the same time it changed his suit from the outside.
The sound it made was faint and specific. A soft, wet creak — latex stretching under pressure.
“Get it off me,” Nick said. His voice was steady. Controlled. “Whatever this is, it won’t work.”
“You can feel it,” Bill said, watching Nick’s face. “No point pretending.”
“He’ll find me,” Nick said. “Superbear will come for me and he will tear this place apart.”
Bill said nothing to that. He didn’t need to.
Nick could feel every inch. His calves, his shins, the curve of his knees — sealed beneath the new material, every contour traced and tightened. His suit didn’t disappear. It became something else.
“Your body knows what strength feels like,” Bill said. He stood with his arms at his sides, patient. “It learned that the day you became this. I’m not giving you anything foreign. I’m speaking a language you already understand.”
The substance reached Nick’s thighs. His muscles tightened beneath it and he felt them respond — swelling subtly, density increasing, the corruption feeding what was already there from both sides. Outside, the black latex tightened around the growth with a faint squeak. Inside, the warmth pushed deeper into the muscle, threading through him.
“It’s — warm,” Nick said, and hated himself for saying it. “What is this? What’s it doing to my legs?”
He hated that it felt good. He hated that his body leaned into it the way a cold muscle leans into heat.
“What are you—” Nick started, but the substance crossed his waist and the words dissolved. The warmth concentrated between his legs — sudden, intense, impossible to ignore. His breath hitched. His hips shifted involuntarily against the pressure and he bit down on the sound that tried to follow.
The red belt darkened, the gold C buckle tarnishing to black as it was swallowed. His cape darkened at the edges, the change creeping upward, red turning to black, the fabric growing heavier.
The substance climbed his stomach. His abdominal muscles clenched and a groan escaped him before he could stop it. His shoulders broadened as the corruption spread across his chest, the red cape clasps at his shoulders turning black. His pecs swelled beneath the suit as it sealed over them — thicker, heavier, pushing against the black latex until it creaked and tightened around the new mass. Every nerve responded. The warmth was immediate and undeniable — his body recognized power in whatever form it arrived, and this form spoke the same language his transformation had spoken.
A moan escaped Nick’s throat — low, involuntary, unmistakable. His face flushed. His body was responding to the corruption with something beyond recognition. Something that felt like desire. He could feel arousal building beneath the suit, warm and insistent, his body interpreting the flood of power as pleasure he hadn’t asked for and couldn’t shut off.
“Why does it—” Nick’s voice cracked. His eyes squeezed shut. “Why does it feel so good.”
The bear paw badge on his chest darkened last — the gold hexagon turning black, the paw print still visible but only at certain angles, like a brand beneath the surface.
Bill watched. He said nothing now. Nick’s body was doing the work — responding to the corruption with the same recognition it had given to every good sensation the transformation had ever offered.
Something was happening to his thoughts. Nick tried to picture Mike’s face and the image came back soft, distant, like a photograph left in sunlight too long. He knew the face. He knew he loved it. But the details were harder to hold than they should have been.
The suit crept across his shoulders and down to his biceps where the short sleeves ended — the same cut as before, now tight black latex that squeaked faintly as he flexed against it. His arms were thicker than they had been, the new mass straining against the sleeves.
Below the sleeves, his bare forearms were exposed. But Nick could feel the warmth moving through them anyway — the substance that had been seeping through his skin since his calves, migrating steadily through his body, threading through the muscle beneath his bare skin. He could trace its path by sensation alone.
His red wrist cuffs darkened from the inside out — the color draining as the substance reached them from beneath.
“My name is Nick,” he whispered. “I’m Nick. I’m—”
The thought slipped. He reached for it again.
Nick tried to hold onto the framework he’d built with Mike — consent, care, what power was for. The thoughts were there but they felt thin. The sensation in his body was immediate. The arguments were becoming difficult to reach.
Nick’s resistance had been weakening steadily, each stage costing more than the last. By the time the change reached his neck he had stopped pulling against the chains. By the time it touched his jaw, he was struggling to remember why he had been pulling at all.
The substance crested his jaw. His beard darkened beneath it. The warmth moved behind his eyes — absolute pressure, like a lens being adjusted.
Then — one final moment. Brutal and brief.
Nick surfaced completely. He could feel the suit nearly finished around him, could feel what it had done to his thoughts, could feel the version of himself that would exist in seconds looking back at everything he’d been.
He didn’t fight. He didn’t shout.
Something moved in his chest — instinctive, older than language, reaching outward through the layers of corruption that hadn’t quite sealed. A pulse of bear energy, raw and undirected, sent toward the only frequency he knew as well as his own.
It left him like a breath. Small. Specific. The last thing that was his.
Bill didn’t react. The pulse registered as nothing to him — his framework had no category for what Nick had just done, an act of connection inside a system built on ownership.
The change reached Nick’s eyes. His vision went dark, then returned in a different register. The room looked the same but the meaning of everything in it had shifted.
Nick’s eyes opened. Violet.
The wristband pulsed once against Nick’s skin — then went dark. Whatever it had been suppressing, the corrupted suit now spoke the same language. The wristband couldn’t hold back power that belonged to its own system.
Strength flooded back. More than before. Darker, heavier, roaring through his muscles like something uncaged.
Nick snarled and ripped his arms apart.
The chains exploded. Bolts tore from the concrete, links shattered and scattered across the cell in a burst of violet energy that crackled from his fists and lit the walls. The dead wristband flew off with the debris. The sound was enormous — metal screaming, concrete cracking, the cell itself flinching from what he’d become.
Nick stood in the wreckage, chest heaving, fists clenched, violet light still flickering around his knuckles. He flexed his hands. Everything worked.
He looked at the cell where he had been held. At the chains on the floor.
He had been strong and chosen to stay small. He had been powerful and held himself back, waiting for someone else to tell him it was allowed.
The thought carried no grief. It seemed true.
Bill stood near the door.
Nick looked at him with violet eyes and felt something settle into place — clear and complete.
“Master,” Nick said. The word came easily. It felt like the first honest thing he’d said in months.
Bill crossed the cell. His hand came up to Nick’s jaw — the same grip as before, but the intent behind it had changed. Possessive. Claiming what was already his.
“You’re mine now,” Bill said.
Nick leaned into the grip.
Bill kissed him. Deep and commanding — ownership made physical. Nick answered it without hesitation, his body pressing forward against Bill’s, the black latex of his corrupted suit meeting the black latex of Bill’s shirt with a soft, deliberate sound.
When they separated, Bill’s hand stayed on Nick’s jaw. His purple eyes searched the violet ones.
He found exactly what he expected.
Nick looked at the man he belonged to and felt proud to be his.
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