Chapter 4: Judgment Night

Chapter 4: Judgment Night

Leo’s dorm room was a cramped cave illuminated by a single source of light: the laptop on his desk. The glow cast long, dancing shadows on the walls, outlining the faces of the three conspirators huddled around it. The air was stale with the scent of cold coffee and palpable tension. On the screen, a grainy, high-contrast, black-and-white image showed Professor Finch’s front lawn.

The view was from a low angle, cleverly concealed within a decorative garden rock Leo had hollowed out and fitted with a night-vision webcam. It was a cheap, temperamental piece of hardware, and the image occasionally flickered, but the feed was steady enough. In the center of the frame, their creation stood silhouetted against the suburban darkness. The Titan. It looked less like a mailbox and more like a chunk of the night that had solidified.

“Anything?” Wrench whispered, for the tenth time in as many minutes. He was perched on the edge of Leo’s bed, his big frame coiled like a spring, nervously cracking his knuckles.

“Just crickets and a suspicious-looking garden gnome,” Elara replied, her voice a low murmur. She sat in Leo’s desk chair, leaning forward, her eyes locked on the screen. Her usual sharp wit was honed to a razor's edge by anticipation.

Leo stood behind her, his hand resting on the back of the chair, his gaze flicking between the screen and the timestamp in the corner. 2:17 AM. It had been hours. Doubt, cold and slick, was beginning to creep into his thoughts. What if Chad had been bluffing? What if he’d gotten bored and found some other, simpler property to destroy?

“He’ll come,” Leo said, as much to convince himself as the others. “His ego won’t let him leave it alone. He saw it. He mocked it. He has to prove he can break it.”

As if summoned by Leo’s words, a new sound bled through the laptop’s tinny speakers. It was faint at first, a low thrumming that vibrated beneath the chirping of the crickets. Then it grew, resolving itself into the arrogant, bass-heavy rumble of a custom exhaust.

Wrench stopped cracking his knuckles. Elara went completely still.

Two brilliant white orbs cut through the darkness on screen, sweeping across the Finch’s lawn as the vehicle turned the corner. The cherry-red pickup truck, looking like a monster in the monochromatic feed, pulled to a stop directly across the street. The engine cut out, plunging the scene back into an expectant silence.

No one in the dorm room breathed.

The truck door opened, and a figure emerged. Even in the grainy resolution, there was no mistaking the confident swagger of Chadwick Remington III. He was wearing a dark hoodie, but he moved with the entitlement of a king surveying his domain. He popped the trunk, and the camera caught the glint of something long and polished. An aluminum baseball bat.

“Showtime,” Wrench breathed, his voice a low growl of satisfaction.

Chad strolled across the empty street, the bat swinging lazily in his hand. He approached the mailbox with a theatrical slowness, like a predator toying with its food. He walked a full circle around it, tapping it lightly once or twice. The sound that came through the speakers was a dull, unsatisfying tink. It was nothing like the hollow clang of sheet metal he was used to.

He paused, a flicker of what might have been confusion crossing his features. He seemed to be reassessing the bizarre, angular structure. Leo’s heart hammered against his ribs. This was it. The test of their design, their materials, their nerve.

Chad backed up a few steps, planting his feet in a classic batter’s stance. He spat on the ground. He hefted the bat, taking a few practice swings, the whoosh of the aluminum cutting through the night air. The arrogance was back, tenfold. This wasn’t just vandalism; it was a performance.

Leo’s eyes were glued to the screen. He saw the muscles in Chad’s back and shoulders tense under the hoodie. He saw the beginning of the swing, a smooth, powerful arc honed by years of casual, unearned athletic prowess.

Then came the moment of impact.

It wasn't the sound they had expected. It was louder. Deeper. It wasn’t a clang; it was a BOOM. A deafening, structural roar, like a church bell struck with a battering ram, a sound that seemed to shake the very foundations of the quiet suburban street. It was the sound of an irresistible force meeting an immovable object.

But there was a second sound, almost simultaneous. A sharp, violent CRACK that was not metal, but something organic giving way.

On the screen, the bat, which should have dented the mailbox, seemed to fold. The top half of the aluminum shaft shattered, sending a piece flying off into the darkness. The recoil was instantaneous and brutal. Chad was thrown backward, the remnants of the bat ripped from his grasp. He let out a raw, guttural scream of agony that was abruptly cut off as he stumbled and fell hard onto the asphalt.

The Titan hadn't moved. It hadn't vibrated. It stood exactly as it had a moment before, a silent, monolithic judge. A tiny, bright scratch, barely visible on the camera, was the only evidence it had been touched at all.

Leo’s secret mechanism had worked better than he’d ever dared to hope. The impact hadn't just been absorbed by the solid steel post and the quarter-inch plate. The force had triggered the spring-loaded internal plate, which had slammed forward against the inside of the housing at the exact moment of impact. It hadn’t just resisted the blow; it had punched back with Newtonian certainty. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Leo and Elara had just weaponized physics.

In the dorm room, the silence was absolute, broken only by Chad’s pained whimpers coming from the laptop.

“My hand… oh god, my hand!” his voice cried out, thin and reedy.

He scrambled to his feet, clutching his right wrist, his entire body trembling. He stared at the mailbox with a look of pure, uncomprehending terror, as if it were some supernatural entity. He backed away, stumbling over the curb, and practically fell into his truck. The engine roared to life, and the cherry-red pickup tore off down the street, its taillights disappearing into the night.

The lawn was quiet again. The shattered remains of the baseball bat lay on the pavement. And the mailbox stood, perfectly still, perfectly intact. Unscathed.

Wrench let out a long, slow breath he seemed to have been holding for an eternity. “Holy… shit.”

Elara leaned back in the chair, her face pale in the laptop’s glow, but a slow, triumphant smile was spreading across her lips. “Plausible deniability,” she whispered, the words filled with a fierce, vindicated pride. “It’s just a structurally reinforced, avant-garde mailbox.”

Leo felt a dizzying wave of relief and something darker, colder. It was the grim satisfaction of a plan perfectly executed. The bully hadn't just been stopped; he had been broken against the very thing he’d tried to destroy. They hadn't just built a mailbox. They had forged a consequence.

He reached over and clicked a button, saving the last five minutes of the video feed to a secure, encrypted folder. The evidence. Their weapon for the next phase of the war.

Justice, he thought, staring at the unmoving image of the Titan on his screen, wasn't always clean. Sometimes, it was delivered with the dull, resonant thud of three hundred pounds of solid steel and righteous indignation. And tonight, it had been served, loud and clear.