Magical Marvel: The Rise of Arthur Hayes

January 1988 arrived with a bitter cold that gripped London in its icy embrace. The Hayes family, however, remained warm and content behind the solid walls of their manor on the outskirts of the city. The evening had begun with a deceptive normalcy, a gentle rhythm of domesticity that had become their comfortable routine over the years.

Dinner had been a quiet affair, filled with the gentle clinking of cutlery and the murmur of polite conversation. Arthur's mother, Sarah, chatted animatedly about her day and the amusing antics of her students at Imperial College. His father, Richard, discussed the fluctuating stock market, casually mentioning a particularly shrewd investment Arthur had "suggested" that was about to pay off handsomely.

"The tech sector jumped exactly as you predicted," Richard said, shooting his son a look that mixed pride with puzzlement. "I still don't know how you do it, Arthur. Some of our clients are calling you a little oracle."

Arthur shrugged, feigning modesty while carefully steering the conversation away from his uncanny financial insights. "Just reading patterns, Father. Anyone could do it if they paid attention."

Sarah laughed, reaching over to ruffle his hair—a gesture he tolerated only from her. "Not everyone has your brain, sweetheart. You're special."

If only they knew how special, Arthur thought, but kept the observation to himself.

After dinner, they moved to the conservatory, a glass-paneled room bathed in the soft, golden light of the setting sun. Tea was served—Earl Grey for his parents, a herbal infusion for Arthur—accompanied by delicate pastries his mother had picked up from a patisserie in the city. They sat in comfortable silence, the only sounds the gentle rustle of leaves in the manicured garden outside and the distant chirping of early evening birds.

Arthur, despite his habitually detached demeanor, felt a flicker of warmth in his chest, a quiet appreciation for this moment of tranquility. His parents, for all their mundane concerns and lack of understanding of his true nature, were good people. They loved him unconditionally, supported his unusual intellect without question, and provided him with a comfortable, stable life. In the lottery of rebirth, he couldn't have asked for better guardians.

Then, the world shattered.

—

It started with a sound that ripped through the peaceful evening like fabric tearing—sharp and abrupt. Glass breaking. Not the gentle tinkling of a dropped teacup, but the violent, explosive sound of a windowpane being brutally smashed inward.

Before they could react, before they could even fully register the sound, the conservatory doors burst open with a splintering crash. Wood and glass flew inward like deadly shrapnel. Five men stormed through the opening, their movements precise and coordinated. They wore black tactical gear, faces obscured by balaclavas, each carrying modified submachine guns—military-grade weapons not typically available to common criminals.

Professional hit squad, Arthur's mind supplied clinically, even as adrenaline flooded his system. This was no random home invasion.

"Richard Hayes?" the lead intruder demanded, his accent American with a faint Southern drawl.

Arthur's father rose slowly from his chair, instinctively positioning himself between the armed men and his family. "I'm Hayes," he said, his voice remarkably steady despite the situation. "Whatever you want, my wife and son have nothing to do with this."

The leader tilted his head slightly. "That's where you're wrong."

Then the night erupted in gunfire and screams.

Richard Hayes lunged toward his wife and son, attempting to shield them with his body. He managed two steps before the bullets struck him. Three impacts to the chest. One to the neck. He crumpled to the floor, his expression one of confused disbelief rather than pain, blood spreading across his white shirt in a rapidly expanding crimson stain.

"RICHARD!" Sarah screamed, launching herself from her chair toward her fallen husband.

Arthur tried to move, to grab his mother, to pull her down behind the heavy stone table, but his reactions were too slow. The second gunman pivoted smoothly and fired a short burst. Sarah Hayes jerked violently as the bullets tore through her, then collapsed across her husband's body, her outstretched hand still reaching toward her son.

Something struck Arthur hard from behind—a glancing blow from a bullet, or perhaps a piece of the shattered table. He went down, hitting the stone terrace with enough force to momentarily stun him. A sharp pain lanced through his temple as his head connected with the flagstones. Warm blood trickled down his face, blurring his vision.

"Check the kid," the leader ordered, approaching the bodies of Arthur's parents. "Make it clean."

Arthur lay still, the world spinning around him. He could see his parents' bodies just meters away, his father's eyes staring sightlessly at the darkening sky, his mother's hand still reaching toward him.

They're dead. My parents are dead.

The thought entered his mind with strange clarity. Not his first parents, from before his rebirth. These parents. The ones who had raised him for ten years. Who had loved him, supported him, nurtured his ambitions. Who had been unwitting pawns in his grand strategies, yet had somehow become genuinely important to him despite his determination to maintain emotional distance.

Dead, because of something he didn't understand.

A shadow fell across him as one of the gunmen approached, weapon trained on Arthur's prone form. Through the haze of pain and shock, Arthur could see the man's cold eyes through the opening in his balaclava. The gunman raised his weapon, adjusting his aim for a headshot.

"Nothing personal, kid," he said flatly.

Something broke inside Arthur Hayes.

Not his body—though the pain was intense. Not his mind—which remained analytically aware even in extremis. Something deeper. A barrier. A dam. A wall between himself and an energy he had sought but never found.

Until now.

It began as a pressure behind his eyes, a building force that seemed to originate from his very core. The air around him grew heavy, charged with potential like the moment before lightning strikes. The flagstones beneath him began to vibrate. The wine glasses on the shattered table sang a high, crystalline note that cut through the ringing in his ears.

The gunman hesitated, his eyes widening as he registered that something was very wrong.

"What the—" he began.

Arthur screamed. Not in fear or pain, but in rage. Pure, incandescent rage that transcended his carefully constructed self-control. The sound seemed to come from somewhere beyond his physical form, infused with power that should not have been possible.

The pressure inside him released all at once, erupting outward in a wave of raw, uncontrolled force.

The air shimmered, then vibrated, then seemed to thicken, becoming heavy and oppressive. Objects in the conservatory began to tremble, then rattle, then lift off the ground. Teacups, pastries, magazines, even the heavy wicker furniture—all of it levitating, swirling in a chaotic vortex around Arthur like debris caught in a tornado.

The gunman closest to Arthur took the brunt of the assault. A serving fork pierced his throat with impossible velocity. Dozens of glass shards embedded themselves in his face and chest like crystalline buckshot. He dropped without firing a shot, blood spraying from severed arteries.

The others reacted with professional speed, turning their weapons toward this new, impossible threat. But they were too slow. The leader caught a heavy crystal decanter in the center of his forehead with enough force to shatter his frontal bone. Two others were lifted off their feet and slammed against the stone wall of the house with bone-shattering impact, impaled by a hail of improvised projectiles—butter knives, broken chair legs, garden tools.

The fifth man managed to fire a short burst before a silver letter opener—a graduation gift to Sarah Hayes from her parents—drove through his right eye and into his brain. His bullets went wide, shattering a decorative planter instead of hitting their target.

In less than ten seconds, five trained killers lay dead or dying on the Hayes family conservatory floor.

The unnatural wind died as suddenly as it had arisen. Objects that had been caught in the telekinetic maelstrom clattered to the ground. An eerie silence followed, broken only by Arthur's ragged breathing and the gurgling last breaths of one of the attackers.

Arthur remained on the ground, trembling uncontrollably, blood running freely from his nose and ears. The pressure in his head had subsided, but in its place was a bone-deep exhaustion unlike anything he had ever experienced. Every muscle ached as though he had run a marathon. His vision swam, darkness encroaching at the edges.

With tremendous effort, he dragged himself toward his parents' bodies. Some irrational part of him still hoped they might be alive, might respond to his touch. But as he reached them, reality reasserted itself. Richard Hayes stared at nothing, his expression forever frozen in that last moment of confused alarm. Sarah's body was draped protectively over her husband, her back torn open by the bullets that had killed her.

"Mother," Arthur whispered, his voice cracking. "Father."

He reached out a shaking hand to touch their cooling skin, and something unexpected happened. Arthur Hayes—who had prided himself on his emotional control, who had always maintained a degree of detachment from these people he considered temporary guardians—began to cry.

Not the calculated tears of a child manipulating adults. Not the performance of grief he had prepared for various contingencies. Real tears, wrenched from some place inside him he hadn't known existed. Heavy sobs that shook his slender frame as he collapsed between the bodies of the two people who had loved him unconditionally.

In that moment, all his plans, all his calculations, all his careful preparations seemed meaningless. He was simply a child who had lost his parents to violence he didn't fully understand.

How long he remained there, he couldn't say. Minutes, perhaps. The gathering darkness of evening deepened to true night. Blood—his own and that of the attackers—cooled on the flagstones. His tears eventually subsided, replaced by a hollow numbness that seemed to spread from his chest outward.

Then came a series of sharp cracking sounds from various points around the property—sounds Arthur had never heard in reality but instantly recognized from descriptions in books he'd read in his previous life. The crack of someone apparating.