Adrenaline Rush: Vengeance

By J. C. Butcher

The world is dying. In an alternate universe where the British-founded Itherian empire is the worlds dominating power, anyone not of pure Itherian blood is shunned and forced to live in poverty-stricken mega-cities called Shenis that only exist to provide power and comfort to the wealthy Plessy cities. All of which is enforced by the Govenrments super-soldier program, known as: Valkyrie.

Vincent Faust the Third, a child-billionaire of Itherian blood whos the heir to the Technological-security mega-giant T.R.U.S.T has his life turned upside-down when his uncle Salvador incites a corporate-takeover and assassinates his father and mother, forcing the young boy to flee into the cold, harsh Sheni streets. After struggling to survive with his little brother in such a strange new world, Vincent meets Chris, a member of an anti-government mercenary organization known as TFA who takes him under his wing and trains him to gain the power needed to take on an empire.

With the government hunting him, and his old life gone, Vincents first chapter begins with vengeance against an oppressive regime and the family that betrayed him but will he survive long enough to even see the beginning of the coming war?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781479755646

J. C. Butcher

My name is Josh Butcher, and ever since I was seven I loved writing. From writing little short-stories based off of video-games to poetry here and there, my work has always varied depending on my mood. I am currently a high-school student at Greencastle Antrim High School and am happy doing anything that has anything to do with writing. I send my time hanging out with my friends and family, helping teach little kids at an after-school program and making money here-and-there watching dogs around my neighborhood. All in all, I’m just a kid at heart and love goofing around with whoever will put up with me at the time. I try my best to place myself into my writing and make it immersive for anyone who cracks open my book and delves into the world of my imagination.

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Copyright © 2013 by J.C. Butcher.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2012922157

ISBN:   Hardcover   978-1-4797-5563-9

   Softcover   978-1-4797-5562-2

   Ebook   978-1-4797-5564-6

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

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without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the

product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance

to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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Contents

Introduction

Chapter One:   Free-fall

Chapter Two:   Rendezvous

Chapter Three:   The Dream

Chapter Four:   Every Rose has Its Thorns

Chapter Five:   Jailbreak

Chapter Six:   The Oracle

Chapter Seven:   Induction

Chapter Eight:   Battlefront

Chapter Nine:   The Truth

Chapter Ten:   Calamity

Chapter Eleven:   Vengeance

Chapter Twelve:   Free-fall?

Introduction

Many have asked me what my story is about… Justice… equality… salvation… all of these are mere assumptions. My story is one of vengeance, not only for myself, but also for the dying world I live in. The world is sick, ridden with inequality and destitution on an unimaginable scale. My fight for reformation coupled with my own personal vendettas… that is my story. It all began during one solitary event that completely changed the face of the earth and everything thereafter… The Destruction of Brittan. On November 5, 1769, Franz Vermillion Belmonte the First began his revolution against the Crown and by August 3, 1772, he personally beheaded King George III using his own claymore and then sat himself upon the throne of England. Under the Belmonte banner, England, or Itheria as he renamed it, flourished immensely. Any opponent of the authoritative regime would quickly succumb to the might of the totalitarian war machine. Franz quickly showed his true colors, as he showed his malice toward the residents of any country that was not his own. As the ideal of power and wealth seeped into the mind of young Franz, it slowly corrupted his veins and mingled with his blood. He oppressively taxed any residents of any country that he conquered, especially the new Itherian colonists who occupied the continent of America.

The oppressed colonists finally decided to fight back against Franz and form a country entirely of their own on December 7, 1786, when a local militia and a riotous mob drove soldiers out of the city of Boston. Franz, taking this as a personal sign of disobedience, decided to teach the colonists of America a lesson the only way he knew how, by using brute force. After a long, arduous, and bloody civil war, the Empire of Itheria finally obliterated the resistance and Franz set his eyes on the rest of America as his next goal of conquest.

Throughout history, Franz and his successors slowly conquered most of the Americas and inducted them into the Itherian Empire. The Empire grew and flourished under the Belmonte Royal Family, who ruled over the country with an iron fist. In 1819, the Belmonte Family officially moved to the continent of America to set up a palace there as a main base of operations, and in 1821, America was officially renamed to New Itheria. For the centuries that followed, industrialization exploded in New Itheria, innovation and technology on an unknown scale erupted in the minds of Itherian scientists and geneticists. One researcher in particular, a man by the name of Nikola Tesla, created a weapon that would forever change the face of the battlefield. That weapon just so happened to be the Teleforce particle-beam weaponry that is so prevalent in our society today. With energy weapons on the rise, Tesla forever changed the way wars would be fought from then on…

However, even with his ingenious design, he, nor anyone else, could have even compared to what Isaac Thane created, or what it would become in the future. In 1973, Isaac was a renowned geneticist and deeply studied brain manipulation and neural stimulation. His deep fascination with human potential with super-natural abilities is what led to Project Valkyrie or otherwise known as what became the catalyst for Generation X. Project Valkyrie came into effect when Emperor Harold Belmonte commissioned the young Isaac to create the perfect biological soldier, allowing him unlimited resources and funds to make it happen. To put it lightly, it wasn’t an easy task; it took Isaac years of mutagen combinations, failed experiments, frustration, and doubt before he finally came up with the perfect cellular combination that became to be known as IEG7663, codename Ichor. The aerosol gas was designed to be inhaled at a very early age, thus easily making this procedure one of Isaac’s most dangerous. If this formula didn’t work, Isaac’s career would be shut down, and ultimately, a lot of tragedies could be avoided. But, to the contrary, the formula worked with few casualties, and thusly, the Humanis Suporis was born… we were born. Since the name Humanis Suporis didn’t seem to fit soldiers of our stature, Thane as a joke called our kind The Reapers, for we would become weapons of mass destruction much like the mythical Grim Reaper himself.

The original Reapers were a lot different back then than the ones in today’s society. The originals were only supposed to have heightened senses, faster reaction times, and the ability to obtain muscle mass five times faster and easier than the normal human. However, no one, not even Thane himself, could have expected the rate at which these humans evolved with their abilities. What started out as slightly enhanced humans slowly transformed into something… greater. Eventually, our kind grew to not only have inhuman senses and reaction times, but we discovered that each of us had our own innate abilities just waiting to be unleashed. Suddenly, out of the blue, men and women with abilities began to pop up out of nowhere doing anything from picking up trucks to throwing fire out of their hands and even to making tornadoes appear at will.

As Thane saw the destructive nature of his creations he quickly became distressed. His employer, however, was elated at the process of the evolution of his super-soldiers, and demanded Isaac to create more. Isaac wished to wash his hands off the entire project and shredded every last piece of evidence even remotely related to Project Valkyrie or the Ichor formula. ParadoX (A private Itherian military sector that resides outside the laws of the Crown) attempted in vain to dissuade Isaac before he destroyed the records of what he had created, forcing them to eliminate the brilliant scientist and start over from scratch. Isaac’s work, however, was already coursing through the veins of a rising generation. Mankind was now pioneering a new age of enlightenment, an age where the vastness of human potential can finally be explored, and in the Empire’s case, exploited.

My story truly begins many, many years later when I was born… the year is 2016, 13 years after the Separation of Unequals Act of 2003, which forced all of the Plebeians (a common name for anyone not of perfect Itherian blood, which were anyone who did not have the privilege of having an English, French, or German heritage) into the slums (called Lowtowns or Shenis) while the pompous Itherians resided in the prosperous cleaner establishments (known as Hightowns or Plessies). I was the third Vincent Faust in my family heritage, my father being the second and his father before him being the first. My grandfather, Vincent Faust the First, was the legendary founder and president of the TRUST security industry empire. TRUST (an acronym for The Reigning Utopia in Security Technology) dominated the world of technological advances in the late 1980s onward, and still to this day is the dominant leader in technological sales, and I was the heir to it all.

I was born into the upper-class society as a pure-blood Itherian and gained even more renown as a Faust (a name rumored to have close ties with the royal family predating the British Revolution). However, for all my prestige and wealth, I was not blind to the suffering of the Plebeians living in the Shenis only a couple miles away from my family mansion. I felt their pain, their anguish, their suffering, every day on my way to my private school. I could feel every tear they shed in their loneliness and poverty, and decided at an early age that I was to make a difference for them someday, and with that pact, I began my career as a criminal.

Few people knew of my gift, and even fewer acknowledged its very existence. I, however, discovered it at a very early age, for you see, I had the ability labeled Telekinesis, although for a small child that only meant that I could pick things up and set them down with my mind without even touching them. You see, what was a well hidden secret in my family was that my Grandfather once worked for ParadoX, and was inducted into the Valkyrie project at an early age. After service, he married one Olga Yvell, and with her created his son, Vincent the Second, who inherited a portion of his father’s abilities. My father then grew and married a Clarissa Valderbon, who unknowingly also had Ichor blood inside of her. When they consummated and created me, I was born with the complete Ichor blood of both my parents, giving me a vast well of power inside of me, a power I could barely control.

My parents first realized my potential when I was a small boy and had a toy taken away from me. I cried as any witless child would do when an object of their desire was stripped from them, except when I extended my hand in outrage, the toy flew from my father’s hand, like an invisible force ripped it from his hand and placed it into my hand. As I gurgled and smiled with childish glee I will always remember the look of absolute horror my parents gave me as they realized what I truly was; it is one of the many scenes my mind will never forget, and you will later find out the others.

But back to the matter at hand, after practicing my abilities on various objects ranging from books to plates, I decided it was time to help the poor men and women living in the Sheni near my home. Every day I would go out to the market and use my telekinesis to move various foods from their stalls into containers I hid around the marketplace, and after I was done I would take the food to the border between the Plessy and the Sheni where poor men and women would beg earnestly for food and drink. They smiled upon me, and soon began calling me Angioletto, which was Italian for Little Angel. Meanwhile, behind the scenes my uncle, Salvador Faust, plotted to usurp the company of TRUST from my father’s possession. Ever since he was little, my uncle hated my father. All the attention and affection my father received from his father made my uncle burn with envy and animosity. He always acted nice toward me and my brother, Felix, but I always knew there was something not quite right about him. My suspicions came to fruition when my entire world changed right before my eyes.

It was the night of July 16, 2026; I was ten years old at the time. My parents were holding a banquet for my brother Felix’s first birthday. Salvador was invited to the festivities, and little did we all know that this would be the night he would spring his insurrection. During my father’s speech, I noticed Salvador look at the opposite direction of the crowd and give a slight head nod, and as he did, a section of the ceiling above us all exploded with a wave of fire. After the fire dissipated, a man dropped in from the new opening in the ceiling. His name was Claude Worthington, a renowned assassin who descended from the ancient Germans. It was all over in the blink of an eye. As soon as he dropped from the ceiling, he fired three shots, two into my father and one into my mother barely missing my baby brother lying in her arms, but Claude didn’t stop there, for Salvador’s plan was not finished.

It was a miracle that his bullet missed me. As the people fled in terror, a gentleman attending the party bumped into Claude right as he was about to pull the trigger in my direction, causing his arm to jerk to the left as he fired the shot. As he missed, I quickly took the brief opportunity to evade Claude’s erratic shots and grab my still-miraculously-alive baby brother out of my mother’s lifeless arms and escaped out the back entrance of the mansion. I thought on my feet as I tried to keep my brother calm while sprinting away from the bloodshed behind me. The only place I knew where Claude, or anyone else for that matter, wouldn’t search for me was in the slums of the nearby Sheni that I used to steal food for, for to cross the border into the Sheni without a passport in our culture was to abandon your rights as an Itherian and become a Plebeian. As I crossed the border into the dark, poverty-stricken ghetto I came to the realization that there was no going back now, it was run or die, and so I ran.

As I bobbed and weaved through the unfamiliar territory, I quickly came across a few of the people that I used to steal food for. When they saw me, they were horrified, knowing in their hearts the severity of the choice I had made. When they asked me what happened, I told them everything. They took pity on me, and welcomed me into their small little family. As the days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into months, our little family simply did everything it could to survive. I used my abilities to steal food from the market stalls in the Plessy and with that food I fed my new family and my baby brother. It wasn’t long, however, before I got discovered using my powers, but the ones who discovered my abilities would also be the ones to change my life forever.

It all happened during a routine food-swipe gone horribly wrong. I’ll admit, I was the one who messed up; I let out a surge of telekinetic energy that had a little too much power and instead of moving one apple, I accidentally moved the entire pile, alerting the salesman to my presence; he just so happened to have a passport, so if he got his hands on me, he would have probably killed me. Right as he was upon me to the point where I could smell the stench of onions on his breath, I was rescued by a young nomad who went by the name of Chris. Chris was only slightly older than I was at the time; he was around thirteen or fourteen. He saw me and my predicament and immediately took action, he rushed forward and tackled my pursuer, and the two fought for a small time. For a younger fella, Chris sure could pack a punch, because the other guy limped away after five or six minutes. After he was finished, I remember that he smiled at me with that soot-covered face and offered his hand to help me up. I accepted, and from then on, my life changed forever.

Chris was a member of The Fallen Angels (otherwise known as TFA) an antimilitary organization devoted to liberating the Plebeians from the corrupt Itherian regime. I told him of my predicament; I told him everything from how I was an Itherian from birth to even telling him of the gruesome assassination of my father. Chris stared in silence as I told him of my plight and all he did was nod and gaze at me with a sympathetic expression upon his face. After I told him everything, he smiled at me, and told me that I wasn’t alone, that there were others like me with abilities. He told me of The Fallen Angels, the way he described them to me painted the picture of a caring, loving family, a family of Reapers and non-Reapers coinciding amongst one another. The way he depicted it painted a picture of idealism and justice in my head. Ever since I was little, I wanted to make life easier for every man and woman living in the Shenis, and now, I finally had my chance. Chris told me that if I was to join, they would help me control and master my telekinesis and that they would be able to help me take revenge on the man who murdered my parents.

Suddenly as he told me these things, a light flashed in the recesses of my mind. A vision, of lost salvation turning into burning redemption and vengeance, a revelation of my life’s purpose was now shining before me like a glowing sun of hope. If I were to join these revolutionaries, I would be able to avenge the death of my parents, I would find my redemption by purging the evils of the Faust name, and I would be able to help create the ideal world that my infant brother, Felix, deserved. I stared at Chris for a moment, and accepted his offer. And so, I then picked up Felix, waved goodbye to my friends in the ghetto, and followed Chris to the lair of The Fallen Angels, which was a large complex made inside the abandoned underground subway system underneath the Sheni. There I met my new friends: Seth, Andre, Katrina, Gregory, and Rouge. There were many other members of TFA as well, but none had such an impact on me as they did.

Seth was the undisputed leader of my squadron; he was older than the rest of us, at the time of my joining he was about seventeen, he had long silky black hair that slightly brushed past his slim gray eyes. He was very slim, probably due to the lack of food that was given to the Sheni. His skin was also a pale white color. Seth was a quiet man, but his presence simply commanded the attention of the room he was in. He didn’t speak because he didn’t need to speak, and when he did talk, people obeyed without question. He had two abilities, one was close-range teleportation, and