I followed Howard out of the hospital to eat the fruits of my tale, which I didn't try very hard to make up.
In the tale I told Howard, I explained the curses so well that he is willing to do anything to prevent such a race from ever appearing again. Or pretends to be.
Howard got into a taxi and immediately asked the driver to take him to the city center.
"Howard, let's go to your house first. Someone touching my blood could have unexpected consequences."
"Okay."
Howard then gave the driver an address card and asked him to take us there.
When we got to the land where Howard's house was supposed to be, we looked briefly at the remains of the building.
Howard said he wrote it off as a debt. He told Jarvis, who ran up to us, to stop everyone for a while.
The people who were trying to clean up the explosives, and the deadly poisons from the ruins of the house complained, but they walked away from the ruins without saying anything.
"Can you feel where your blood is?"
"Yes. By the way, if there is nothing you need here, I can get rid of everything."
Howard looked at me and the ruins of the house for a moment and then replied to me.
"Actually, the purpose of this procedure was to save what was left of the lab, but if you have a way to destroy everything, you can use it. The things here aren't worth that much when you consider the possibility that a man working here could accidentally activate an explosive and lose his life."
After Howard gave me a nod, I extended my hand forward in the shape of a weapon and then lowered it back down. If I were to reveal my abilities now, it would be inconvenient to hide them again when so many people could see them.
After thinking about it for a while, I put my hand forward like a gun again and fired a blue.
People trying to protect themselves from things like radiation with white clothes looked at me in amazement, some even screamed in fear. Their overreaction was not that extreme, considering that in this era superpowered people are not everywhere.
Blue stayed in the air after flying towards the center of the ruins. Unlike before, I wanted this to be controlled and not to suck everything in, so I raised my right hand and made a seal.
I was about to continue what I was doing when I felt someone grab my clothes from my back and I turned around.
I turned around to see Howard holding me and hiding behind me and Jarvis running away with his heels digging into his ass.
"Don't look at me like that, the last time I saw this blue ball I almost died."
"That's not why I'm looking. I'm surprised you were smart enough to put me between you and the blue and hold on to me instead of running away."
"I'm the greatest mind of this century, Michael."
"That's right."
As soon as I ignored Howard and completed the technique, the pieces of the house lifted off the ground and floated towards the blue, shrinking and being absorbed into the blue as they approached it. In just a few seconds, even though all my cursed energy was gone, there was only a crater where the house used to stand.
"Where did it all go?"
"Compressed to atomic size. So you could say it has disappeared."
Knowing that there is a different life going on in this world under the atom, I was careful not to compress everything down to the quantum dimension.
"It seems like you can really control it."
"I told you."
"Anyway, let's go without further delay, I still have some questions."
With Howard taking the lead, we got back in the taxi and headed straight for the blood sample, which was still heading out of town.
After a couple of hours of driving, we finally got close to the blood sample when we reached a place two towns away.
After stopping in front of a small wooden shack built on the side of the road, an armed man came out of the shack and asked us what we were doing on his property.
I thought we had arrived at a hydra sanctuary until Howard stepped forward and identified himself, but it turned out to be one of the military's secret facilities.
The man took us into a cabin, through a secret underpass, and then to the most important man in this secret facility. Fortunately, with Howard's persuasion, the general agreed to give us the blood. Of course, the curses and so on were still a secret between the two of us.
After we got the blood here, I destroyed it directly and we set off back to New York.
That's where the real trouble started. A man with the rank of colonel laughed at Howard's request and ignored him. When I stepped in and asked them to give me my blood back, I got the same response.
After a while, I went outside and talked to Howard about the pros and cons of getting my blood back in a show of force.
When Howard and I went to a restaurant and had dinner together, we agreed on a plan, since I could now separate my blood from the cursed energy, I would first steal their blood samples by brute force and then give them new blood samples that were free of the cursed energy.
And when it came time to execute the plan, I asked Howard to find me a sword, which he couldn't, and so we went back to the military base. Howard went to his area, the labs, and hammered a katana for me with his own hands.
Then we went back to the colonel's office as planned and asked for the blood samples again. When the colonel said he wouldn't give them to me, I told him that if he didn't give them to me, I would take all the samples myself.
"Hahaha, so you're saying that a man like you, poisoned by the hands of a woman, will go through all my soldiers and steal blood samples."
Before I could answer the colonel, I sensitized my senses and felt my blood. I guessed that the time left for my blood to mutate with the cursed energy was only a few hours.
"What do you think if I can walk out of this door and steal my blood samples without killing anyone like I said I would."
The colonel laughed out loud for a while, then wiped away his fake tears, leaned over the table, and approached me.
"If you really can do that when I've warned all the soldiers in advance, I'll think you're the future of America, and that lowly beings like us should be watching you and improving ourselves... You overestimate yourself, Michael. I've heard you're a good fighter and I've heard what you've done before, but the lab rats say you're just an ordinary healthy human being. And this is a fucking military base. One word from me and you'll be shot full of holes as soon as you walk out that door."
"Then do it."
"What?"
"Notify your men. And don't let them hold back Colonel, or I'll get bored."
The colonel looked at me for a while and started laughing again.
"Hahahaha did you hear that Howard? This guy thinks he's Superman. hahahahah"
The Colonel continued to laugh for a while, but when he saw that the men sitting across from him continued to watch him seriously, his laughter gradually diminished and finally, he reached for the phone on his desk, described Michael's vision to the people, and ordered them to kill him.
The only thing the Colonel saw after that call was Michael's back as he ran out the door at lightning speed with a flaming sword in his hand.