Olympus

Chapter 39

Every beep from the equipment resounded heavily through the room, almost as if it was heralding the end of the world; and it might as well be to Megan.

Nothing had gone right since the beginning of that day. Nothing had gone right since the beginning of that mission. Nothing had gone right perhaps even longer before that; and she feared the culmination of it all was soon to come in a catastrophe that neither her nor Olympus – or even the world for that matter – would be able to withstand.

Another beep and she looked to Ricardo who was now bent down in front of the equipment with his brows furrowed as he concentrated all that he had in trying to figure it out before the worst they all feared happened. 

"Can you shut down the self-destruction?" she asked.

"I'm afraid not, Megan." He ran his hands through his hair in a frustrated motion for the umpteenth time in that moment. "I'm locked out of the system and nothing I do is meeting any response." He swiped his hand over the glass panel and gave it two more taps as if to change the reality, but all he got in response was the beeps seeming to get louder.

"How long do we have?" she asked again.

"I don't kno-"

"Thirty minutes," Jay cut into Ricardo's response from behind.

"How can you tell?" the latter asked, the surprised expression on his face understandable as nothing on the equipment or around it gave an indication to that effect.

"The energy readings," Jay replied and stepped forward to put his hand over the equipment which responded with some light red waves swimming around it to connect with the outstretched hand. "Everything in the equipment, both material and technology is degrading into an entropic energy that's steadily building over time. The critical point of that buildup is thirty minutes later so I figured that's when it will explode."

"Can we defuse it?" Adolf asked.

Even before Jay's negative response, Megan had already sensed it would be a no. From the start till now, she hadn't seen a wire or anything else that pointed to the equipment's operation apart from the one open to them; and judging from how unfavorable Ricardo's intervention of the nanites had turned out, she figured any other tampering would be even more so.

"What if I zoom it out of here?" Kei offered. "I'm sure I can find somewhere deserted to dump this bugger long before it bothered us."

"Actually, you can't," Jay replied, his face set in a neutral expression even as his voice took on a matter-of-fact tone that stopped whatever counterpoint she wanted to make.

"Like I said," he added, "every part of the equipment is what is building up the entropy. Moving it, jarring it, vibrating it, especially at your speed level, I honestly don't know what effects that will have."

"We can move the people in the building then. Clear the area before the explosion," Adolf said.

"That would mean exposing ourselves and Olympus's involvement in all these," Megan replied. "The Director would never allow us to do that and frankly, I'm not willing to risk it either.

"Plus, even with yours and Kei's powers, it would take time to evacuate everyone in this building, not to mention the surrounding buildings and environment; and we still don't know the radius the explosion will cover." She looked to Jay in hope for a response to the last statement but the shake of his head told her there wasn't any to give at that time.

"So, not this, not that. What then, Meg?" Kei stretched out her hand in frustrated annoyance.

Megan sighed and leaned against the wall to the side. The group was at its wits end. She was their leader and she was supposed to have the answer, or at least the way forward to the answer; but she didn't. Worse, she could have sworn she felt the room grow hot around her.

Is this the culmination you feared, Megan? She asked herself.

Adolf and Kei tried throwing in a few more suggestions but when Ricardo shut them down – logically, Megan had to admit – things threatened to take a physical turn.

However, just as the argument turned heated, Jay said, "Guys, I think we already have a solution we're all failing to consider."

"And what would that be?" Megan asked, her curiosity piqued.

"Well," he shrugged almost casually, "we let it blow."

***

Megan didn't know how long the silence around her lasted, but it must have been quite a while cos when she snapped back to the present, it certainly felt like a lifetime later.

The group had gone to a stunned stop. Even the beeps from the equipment didn't seem that loud now that they were all concentrated on the teenager standing next to it with a business expression on his face like he hadn't just dropped the world's most shocking sentence in that situation.

"Jay, I'm sorry if I misheard," Kei broke the silence, quirking an eyebrow as she spoke, "but you seemed to have said something along the lines of "we let it blow"."

"Exactly what I said," he reaffirmed.

"Are you insane?!" she screamed. "I mean, you of all people should know why allowing the equipment to explode is such a terrible idea."

"Listen to my plan first..."

Apparently, Jay's thought was that since the explosion was the only part of the coming event that they could guarantee, they might as well make full preparation for it. An explosion at the end of day was just the release of energy. He could wait at the critical point and capture the entropic energy from the equipment just as it exploded, thus saving the day.

"But you've never done anything like this before," Kei reminded him. "You're going to kill yourself and take us all with you."

"It's a good plan."

"It's a mad plan. Meg, tell him it's a mad plan."

But Megan's face when Kei turned to face her wasn't that of agreement. In truth, she had been seriously considering the plan since Jay laid it out.

"You're all insane." The teenage speedster stormed off to the side as she muttered under her breath what Megan was very sure were curse words in Japanese.

"Jay, are you sure this plan will work?" she asked him after Kei left.

"No," he replied, she feeling his most genuine honesty in that moment.

"Do we have time to come up with a better option for ourselves?"

He looked at the equipment and then back at her. "No," he replied again.

Megan closed her eyes and sighed. Everything had been crashing one on top of the other since she took charge of the Supermen group, and the culmination of it all really was at hand. If she was to get out of it, and get the kids out, and get all the innocent people in that area out of it, she would have to bet on every saint and spirit available to her at that moment.

"Fine," she said after a while, looking at the face of each person in the room so that they could get a clear read of her thoughts and she theirs, "let's let it blow."