Invincible (4)

"What the fuck?!" Danny shoots straight up, pushing himself off the pile of garbage on the floor and against the wall. He stumbles into the rain and he nearly falls over the empty beer bottles on the ground, clattering before his feet.

He places his hand on the other wall of the alley as his already damp clothes got even wetter. He clutched his neck, pushing down as hard as he can but he can't feel a pulse.

"You're lost, aren't you?" A young boy wearing a pitch-black hoodie is sitting on crates of alcohol at the end of the alleyway. Sitting beside him was an old man in a sophisticated suit holding an umbrella, sheltering him from the rain.

"Who are you?" Danny stumbles as he's caught off guard by the boy's presence, picking up an empty glass bottle from the ground out of intuition.

The boy chuckles before tilting his hooded face-up, "You look like you could use some help." He showed his face but it was obscured by a surgical mask covering his mouth and nose. He wore pitch-black sunglasses that completely covered his eyes.

"I don't need help!" Danny grabs the top of the bottle with both of his hands and raises it like a bat. "And if you want to take my money, take all of it! I don't have a single penny to my name!"

"Money is just an illusion, don't you know?" The little boy jumps down from the crate of alcohol, the insides rattling. As his feet touched the cold wet ground, water splashed from the sides of his feet. The water splashed onto the old man's boots. "You almost died, Vale nearly killed you."

"How do you know Vale?" Danny looked at the child with a suspicious look on his face. Suddenly, a glimpse of darkness blitzed past his face, pushing his hair back and to the side.

"That is my Omnishell, Doctor Foster." The old man appears behind Danny, holding an umbrella to shelter him from the rain. He was not an old man, instead having a full metal face without any facial features, just a blank metal wall. He wore a bowler's hat with a suit and leather shoes. He held an umbrella in his right hand, sheltering Danny from the rain. "My name is Jay K, but you can call me JK."

"Not another one of you maverick fucks." Danny lowers his weapon and sighs. "I've had enough, I'm leaving!" Danny turns around and starts walking, into the open exposed sky.

"I wouldn't advise you to do that." JK taps his foot on the puddle of water underneath his feet. As Danny walked out of Doctor Foster's umbrella, he followed suit and made sure that Danny was always underneath the umbrella, not a single drop of water landed on him.

He looked at the Omnishell and decided to continue walking, but Doctor Foster continued and walked with Danny, keeping him sheltered.

Danny starts walking faster and Doctor Foster starts walking backwards faster too. Danny starts to run and Doctor Foster matches his exact pace, making sure the top of his head is always aligned with the umbrella. "Cut it out!" Danny smashes the bottle on Doctor Foster's head, causing the bottle to break and shatter into a thousand fragments.

The individual fragments land on the ground, creating a splash of water as it lands in the puddle.

"Doctor Foster has given you a second chance at life." JK was holding his own mini umbrella, keeping himself dry. "You entered Pneumatose, a state your body enters whenever your body disassociates and starts rejecting itself. It's extremely common among Omnishell pilots." JK looks up and stares Danny in the eyes. "You went fourteen minutes and twelve seconds without oxygen, your heart had completely shut itself off and you were already dead."

"I what?' Danny looks back at JK with a shocked expression on his face, dropping the glass bottle on the floor.

"So I decided to take some creative liberties." JK nervously chuckles as his voice sounds guilty. "I may or may not have replaced your heart with the battery of an Omnishell." JK looks away awkwardly as he tries to look away from Danny.

Danny doesn't even compute what JK is saying, it's all jargon for him. "You did what?"

"So you're technically an Omnishell now." JK whistles.

"Why would you do that?!" Danny doesn't even know what to say. He looks down at his bare exposed chest and sees the quickly thrown-together stitches that ran down his chest, dried blood all over his abdomen. "No fucking way."

"You're special." JK turns back and looks at Danny. "You don't have the guts and technique to be a Pilot, but you have something not many have."

"Is that supposed to make me feel better? Thanks for removing my heart by the way, if I didn't mention." Danny said sarcastically.

"You're welcome." JK smiles visibly through his surgical mask. "You would've suffered for a long time."

"Great!" Danny paces around as Doctor Foster follows him, continuing to shelter him from the rain. "Well I guess normalcy is out of the picture now, I've got a fucking battery stuck inside my chest, might as well die, right?" Danny turns and looks at JK.

"Danny, you've got something not many have." JK pulls down his mask and reveals his mouth. It was small but the skin around his lips had been completely peeled off, stitches keeping his lips attached to his face. "You're resistant to Pneumatose. Completely."

"Wait what?" Danny doesn't even register JK's face, instead focusing on what he just said. Danny has an even more confused look on his face. "Didn't you say I was about to die because I entered this Pneumatonathing?"

"Well yes, but even when your heart stopped supplying blood to your brain, it remained alive, it was thriving. What would normally cause a human to die in a matter of seconds, you lived for 14 minutes." JK covers his mouth with the surgical mask, tucking it behind his sunglasses. "Kid, you're fucking invincible."