Centurion- Dark Genesis

by Christofer Nigro

  CENTURION

  Dark Genesis

  Christofer Nigro

  Cover Art: rizkynugraha

  https://www.fiverr.com/rizkynugraha

  Special thanks to Gordon Long and Matt Hickman for their adept editing chores and advice; and to David MacDowell Blue and Elden Ardiente (https://ldnrdnt.com/ & rdnt.arts@yahoo.com.au) for helping me put the finishing touches to the cover.

  © 2018 Wild Hunt Press. All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, who can be reached at the following email address: WildHuntPress@gmail.com. All events depicted in this work are fictional, and any resemblance to real individuals and events are coincidental or with non-malicious satirical intent.

  Table of Contents

  Dedications

  Part 1: Power, at Last

  Chapter 1: Everybody Hates Benny

  Chapter 2: Escalation

  Chapter 3: Cosmic Intervention and Warped Perceptions

  Interlude: The Valis Institute

  Chapter 4: No Train, No Gain

  Chapter 5: No One Messes with Benny

  Chapter 6: Turmoil is the Worst Kind of ‘Moil

  Chapter 7: The Point of No Return

  Chapter 8: It All Hits the Fan

  Part 2: The Long, Hard Road Begins

  Chapter 9: Consequences Are a Bitch

  Chapter 10: Basic Training is Also a Bitch

  Chapter 11: If the Costume Fits…

  Chapter 12: Picking Up the Pieces

  Chapter 13: First Night Out

  Chapter 14: Year of the Cat

  Chapter 15: Centurion vs. Niña Gata

  Chapter 16: Back to School

  Chapter 17: Light Stings… All Over the World!

  Chapter 18: Something Tragic This Way Comes

  Chapter 19: More Consequences Are a Bigger Bitch

  Chapter 20: When Gods Wage War in Da ‘Hood…

  Chapter 21: There Goes the Neighborhood… Literally

  Chapter 22: The Final Throwdown

  Epilogue: Loose Ends and Foreboding Futures

  THE WARP EVENT

  About the Author

  Dedications

  This novel is dedicated to my grandmother, Gertrude “Trudie” Nigro, for loving me as much as anyone possibly could despite our various disagreements over the years; to the memory of my grandfather, Thomas J. Nigro, for being a father figure throughout my life and the remainder of his after I came into this world despite all of our differences; and mother Patricia Nigro and my uncle, Thomas F. Nigro, for putting up with me my entire life and helping me whenever they could; and to the memory of my aunt, Concetta “Connie” Denisco, for always supporting me and believing in me; and to the memory of my Uncle Pete and Aunt Marie for likewise always supporting me and seeing the good in me.

  … To the memory of my friend Dennis MacMillan Jr., for teaching me what it’s like to be courageous in the face of the greatest adversity of them all; to my many other friends who honored me by seeing positive qualities in me; and my many colleagues in the creative arts for helping me fulfill my lifelong dream of putting my ideas to paper (particularly Jean-Marc Lofficier for giving me my first big break).

  … And to the many creative minds, past and present, who helped forge the super-hero genre from its dramatic beginnings to its gradual ascension from the fringe of cultural acceptability to the mainstream over the past 80 years… with special thanks to Jerry Siegal, Joe Schuster, Bill Finger, Bob Kane, William Moulton Marston, Otto Binder, Gardner Fox, Jack Kirby, Joe Simon, Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, Alan Moore, Mark Gruenwald, Frank Miller, Mark Millar, Paul Levitz, John Ostrander, Geoff Johns, and many others too numerous to mention for their bold vision and the lifelong inspiration they provided to me and so many others for several generations.

  Part 1: Power, at Last

  Chapter 1: Everybody Hates Benny

  Benny Lonero was nervously walking down the corridor on the second floor of Buffalo Historical High School. His plainly average looks were further marred by a slight case of acne and a moping expression as he strode down one of the brightly decorated corridors of this small but respected institution of secondary education.

  He carried a small duffel bag filled with a few required texts, various writing utensils, and two 32-bit flash drives that stored several of his completed assignments in digital format. During that hallway strut to his first class of the day, several strong emotions pervaded his psyche with the intensity of super-heated plasma. These ranged from a deep envy of the popularity and attractiveness of the athletes amongst the male student body, to the unrequited love and/or lust he felt for several of his female peers.

  Having recently started his sophomore year in high school, he dreaded having to awaken so early every morning on weekdays. He knew doing so would entail spending eight hours per day in a setting where he was disliked by the vast majority of its small student population. His low status on the social totem pole caused him to be marked as the target of sadistic emotional and physical abuse by his fellow students.

  This effect on his psyche wasn’t helped by his constant stress over the fact that he had to struggle just to maintain a level of passable grades. He found it absolutely humiliating that his academic performance was so much lower than that of several fellow students whom he simultaneously admired and envied. This was the case despite his writing skills, and an intelligent mind that simply wasn’t suited to the specific learning methodology imposed on students by the schooling system.

  Like many individuals in his specific predicament, Benny’s thoughts continuously wavered between a desire to take cruel vengeance on those ‘higher-up’s’ who routinely reminded him of his lowly status, and an equally strong desire to share their exalted position on the social hierarchy. Of course, both conflicting desires were but fanciful daydreams to him. He often prayed to the ‘powers that be’ in the universe to grant him a radical change, some opportunity for elevation above the station that fate seemed to have cruelly thrust him within.

  These daydreams and mental pleas would abruptly end when a teacher reminded him that he wasn’t paying attention to their lecture, or a fellow student launched a spitball at him, etc. Gotta love sweet reality, he would silently remind himself as the real world demanded his acknowledgement once more.

  As Benny began his daily routine in this dreaded institution by tinkering with his combination lock, his attention was drawn to a conversation that was taking place two lockers away. The participants were a tall athletic boy named Jeff Wolfe from Buffalo’s North Side, and a girl he wasn’t too familiar with, a brunette of average height but exquisite looks named Leah Stanton. Benny turned his head in the direction of his two peers as they talked and laughed about Leah’s planned birthday party, which she was hoping Jeff would attend. A few seconds later, Leah turned around and found herself making eye contact with Benny.

  Just as Benny noted to himself how attractive Leah was, the shapely girl uttered the first words she ever spoke to him, which came in an eruption of extreme anger and hatred that startled even a seasoned target of such antipathy like Benny.

  “What the hell are you looking at, faggot?” she said with no small amount of fury in her voice.

  “Geez, why do you have to be so hostile? I wasn’t doing any harm…” Benny replied, only to be abruptly cut off by Leah’s next verbal onslaught.

  “You were looking at me, and that�
�s a lot of harm, you little douche bag!” she spat in his face.

  “So, you’re acting like this just because I looked at you?” Benny asked with a confused expression.

  “I think he wants you, Leah!” Jeff yammered sarcastically. “He was admiring your merchandise; I saw him doing it. You’re so damn hot, you just converted the fag! Ohh yeah!”

  Leah began yelling a series of choice expletives at Benny. Then, after being spurred on by Jeff, she rushed towards the thinnish boy and shoved him hard, making a point to painfully dig her long fingernails into his chest as she did so.

  “Don’t you ever let me catch you near me again!” she screamed at Benny as he backed away in both shame and further confusion. “I’ll kick your ass all over the hallway!”

  “If you wanna do that, Leah, then you’ll have to get in line,” Jeff noted with a grin. “Go get him before the daily line forms! You’ll probably make horse manure out of him! But if he takes a swing back at you, I’ll step in and put his head through that locker. Because where I come from, a guy doesn’t hit a lady.”

  Unfortunately for Benny, another unfriendly participant was about to enter the fray. Mickey Judge, a talented hockey player and friend to Jeff and Leah, overheard the conflagration from his locker across the corridor. Within seconds, he was at the pretty young woman’s side.

  “Is Lonero causing you trouble, Leah?” Mickey asked with a sneer on his face.

  “Yea, he is!” she responded, still enraged. “That faggot was looking at me like he wanted to jump me! I’m gonna kick his ass if he ever gets near me again!”

  Mickey walked over to Benny, grabbed the shorter boy by the lapel of his shirt, and slammed him against one of the locker doors. That caused a loud clanging sound which reverberated down the corridor.

  “You stay away from her, you got that, asswipe?” he ordered the greatly humiliated young man as his long right index finger stabbed into the bridge of Benny’s nose.

  “Dude, I don’t even know her,” Benny pleaded in his defense. “I didn’t say anything to her! She was talking to Jeff near my locker, and I just turned and looked. I didn’t do or say anything…”

  Benny’s plea was suddenly cut short as he practically had the wind knocked out of him when the much bigger and stronger Mickey slammed him hard against the locker again.

  “I don’t give a shit, you faggot!” Mickey screamed in Benny’s face. “She hates you, something I can totally relate to! Every time I see your little punk ass I hope you give me one good excuse to…”

  Mickey’s attention was then distracted by the sound of Jeff’s voice exclaiming, “What are you looking at?”

  Another person had clearly entered the vicinity, and not someone whom Jeff and Mickey were friendly with. Both Benny and Mickey turned their heads to see Jeff approaching a very tall, corpulent boy with glasses. This turned out to be Craig Minkel, another frequent target of popular ire, who was practically Benny’s only friend at the school. He was, predictably, a fellow social outcast whom virtually no one other than Benny was willing to befriend. And vice versa, of course.

  “Did you come to help your partner-in-buggery?” Jeff asked Craig with a combination of sarcasm and hostility.

  Following that half-hearted question, Jeff pushed the tall rotund boy into one of the lockers. The impact nearly knocked his glasses off.

  “I have no idea what’s going on here,” Craig stated matter-of-factly. “I just came to my locker and saw you and your clique buddies assaulting my friend again. And probably for no reason at all, as usual.”

  “Someone like him exists; do we need any other reason?” Jeff replied with further hostility.

  “Yeah, I think you do,” Craig said bluntly. “Because if that’s all it takes for you to hate someone, you should disband the hockey team and start a Neo-Nazi club in its place.”

  “Ohhhhh, the king of stomach rolls just pwned you, dude!” Mickey sardonically mocked Jeff, attempting to spur on the impending beating he was hoping to see Craig receive. “You should open up a can of ‘whup ass’ on Stinkel Minkel for that!”

  “Thank you for the cute nickname,” Craig said with a forced fake grin.

  “Why don’t you shut up, you’re so stupid!” Leah verbally pelted the tall social outcast.

  “No more stupid than that stuffed bra of yours,” Craig retorted with a snigger.

  Without hesitation, Jeff punched Craig hard in the stomach, causing him to exhale in agony as he slumped halfway to the floor. Shouting another series of expletives, Leah rushed towards Craig and began pummeling him furiously. Jeff stood in front of the melee to intimidate their target into making no attempt to defend himself.

  “Kill him, Leah!” he shouted. “Tear his fat ass up! Woohoo, you go, girl!”

  Yelling an obscenity at his tormenters, Benny attempted to break free of Mickey’s grip to run and seek the aid of a teacher. He struggled briefly with the larger boy, who soon overpowered him and slammed him against two locker doors. Benny wailed in pain as a metal handle bit into his left kidney area. Mickey then kneed his target in the groin, sending Benny down to the floor.

  While on his knees with his hands covering his throbbing testes, Benny looked Mickey directly in the eyes and told him, “You just went too far.”

  Upon hearing that, Mickey lifted the shorter boy off the floor by his shirt and slammed him against the lockers yet again. “So, what are you going to do about it? Go all Columbine on us?”

  His face filled with pain and humiliation, Benny fought past the agony to affect a rare moment of direct eye contact with the taller boy. Then he said, “Keep this up and maybe I will.”

  “Oohhh really, rainbow-boy?” Mickey retorted with a grin that sent a sensation of icy fear throughout Benny’s battered body. “Let’s just see you get a gun or some other weapon in through the metal detectors and the security check at the front door in the morning. In fact, now that I heard you say that, you can bet I’m gonna talk to Ned and have his security boys strip search you every morning. I hear they’re really thorough in their searches. I bet you’ll actually enjoy that, huh?”

  “I bet you’d enjoy watching, otherwise you wouldn’t ask your security crew buddies to do it,” Benny snapped back. “How much will you pay them for the cam footage of my search? They’ll probably charge you extra for the several extreme close-up shots you’ll be demanding.”

  Mickey responded by kicking Benny in the side of his upper torso, causing him to grunt in pain. The tall, well-regarded champion of bantam league hockey then raised his fist in preparation for pounding the side of his target’s face.

  Just then, however, the familiar voice of mathematics teacher Dean Zach was heard inquiring,

  “What’s going on over here?”

  As the popular students ceased their respective barrages and turned to face an angry-looking Mr. Zach, Leah spoke up first.

  “Lonero was bothering me, and these guys were just defending me,” she explained with barely contained fury. “And then his friend stepped in and started with us.”

  “You know that’s a bunch of bull,” Craig lamented as he forced himself back to his feet, still not fully recovered from Leah’s relentless assault on him.

  “It’s enough bull crap to fill the Augean Stables beyond even Hercules’ capacity to clean it,” Benny metaphorically remarked while continuing to wince in pain. “I wasn’t doing anything to her, I was just standing at my locker to get my stuff, and she came over to Jeff and started talking to him right near me…”

  Leah then cunningly interjected, “Lonero was ogling my body, and that other perv friend of his made a comment about my bra. That’s when Jeff slugged him. He doesn’t like seeing a girl getting harassed like that.”

  “But he loves encouraging you ‘girls’ to dish out harassment of your own kind to the low-ranking beta students every day, right?” Benny said. “And let’s not start about your fondness for homophobic zingers…”

  “You just shut up and don’t ever talk to
me!” Leah yelled in response. Jeff then put his arm around her in a protective manner, and she rested her head on his shoulder.

  “Okay, I’ll take care of this,” Mr. Zach said. “You guys go to your next classes, and Mr. Minkel, you head down to the office. I’ll deal with you down there later.”

  The balding, usually avuncular teacher then turned to Benny, who was now inching back to his feet. “Mr. Lonero, please come with me. You and I are going to have a little chat.”

  “Oh c’mon, I can’t believe this!” Benny exclaimed. He shot a distinctly malicious glare at his tormenters while Craig huffed off to the office to face the not-so-tender mercies of Principal Wilson.

  Mr. Zach pulled Benny aside and put a meaty hand on his left shoulder, a look of concern and disappointment marking his ever-distinguished countenance.

  “First of all, are you okay?” the tall bespectacled math teacher asked the boy.

  “No, I’m not okay,” Benny decreed. “Those creeps pick on us every day. I’m gonna kill them!”

  “Stop that, Benny, now! You’re better than that, and you know it. I’ve heard from Mrs. Metcalfe that you have potential with your writing, so don’t blow it.”

  “I’m sick of this, Mr. Zach. Sick of seeing those idiots do whatever they please, with nothing remotely resembling consequences. I never hear a single teacher suggest that they need to visit the guidance counselor’s office for one of those embarrassing ‘evaluations,’ like they do with me. As if the way they act is considered ‘normal’ or ‘acceptable.’

  “But noooo, the school loves sending the less popular students like yours truly for these ‘evaluations.’ I guess a lack of popularity counts as a sickness in their eyes, while savage behavior and intolerance is just ‘kids being kids’.”

  Mr. Zach’s grip on Benny’s shoulder tightened, grave concern filling the hazel eyes behind his thick bifocals.